FOUR
These have been the secrets I kept.
Old man in a dry season.
Boy in a tattered hat.
And the man in the stained white coat, monstrous hunter of nameless things.
The one who blessed me, the one who cursed me.
Who raised me upon his shoulders that I, the dark tide of his making, might carry him down.
Remember me, he said. When all else has been forgotten.
A small fortune was mine afterward. I was all he had and all else he had came to me.
Where did I go? Up and down, to and fro. I wandered the earth, the indispensable companion companionless. I fled the States, ended up on the Continent in time for the monster that digested thirty-seven million souls in its fiery gut. After the war, I bought a little house on the southern coast of France. I hired a local girl to cook and clean. She was young and pretty, and I may have been in love with her.
In the warm summer afternoons we would go for walks on the beach. I liked the ocean. From the shore you could see the edge of the world.
“Let me ask you, Aimée. It is it round or is it a plate?”
And she would laugh at me, slipping her arm through mine. She thought I was joking.
And I was happy for a time.
Her father had died at Verdun. Her lover at the Somme. She met someone new, and when he proposed, she asked if I would give her away. I agreed, though I was heartbroken. I did not hire another girl after she left. I packed up the house and returned to the States.
I ended up back in New York for a time. I still had my apartment there. I wrote some. I drank more. I wandered the streets. Where the old opera house had stood there was now a bank. A different kind of society. A different breed of hunters. Monstrumology was dead, but all of us are, and always will be, monstrumologists. In the afternoons you could usually find me in the park, just another lonely man on a bench among pigeons. I was still caught, you see, inside the glass jar, within the amber eye. You are my memory, he had told me night after sleepless night. And that was what I became: the immortal sack, Judecca’s ice.
The twenties ended with a great crash, and one day I picked up the paper to read about a man who had jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge after losing his entire fortune. His name was Nathaniel Bates. The notice included the particulars of the memorial service.
I was an accomplished hunter and tracker, and was sure she hadn’t seen me, but after her father was laid in the earth she spotted me beneath a sycamore tree. Years had gone by, she was no longer young, but the blue of her eyes was undiluted, pure all the way down.
“William James Henry,” she said. “I don’t think you’ve aged a day.”
“There is something I must tell you,” I said.
There was a tall, broad-shouldered man watching us from the grave site. He was frowning.
“Is that your husband?” I asked Lilly.
“The latest one. Promise you won’t punch him or eviscerate him or feed him to anything.”
“Oh, I’m done with that. I haven’t killed anyone for a very long time.”
“You sound almost wistful about it.”
“I am not a monster, Lilly.”
“No, more like a ghost. Frightening but impotent. What is it?”
“What is what?”
“What you’ve come to tell me.”
“Oh. Never mind. It doesn’t really matter.”
“After nearly forty years, it must a little.”
It was a lovely spring day. Cloudless. Cool. The leaves of the sycamore tree a startled green. The man was still frowning at us from the grave site, but he had not moved.
“What’s his name? Your latest husband.”
She told me. “James?” I asked, thinking she had left out his last name. “Like the philosopher?”
“No, but James is his middle name.”
“Ah. His parents must have admired the brothers.”
“Brothers?”
“His brother was a novelist.”
“Whose brother?”
“The philosopher’s.”
She laughed, and still the sound was like coins tossed upon a silver tray.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s have a drink.”
Her laughter stopped. “Now?”
“We’ll celebrate your father’s life.”
“I can’t go with you now.”
“Later, then. Tonight.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? He won’t mind.” Nodding toward the frowning man. “I’m harmless; you said so yourself. The impotent ghost.”
She turned her head away. Her profile was lovely beneath the sycamore tree.
“I don’t understand why you’ve come,” she murmured, raising her face to the sky. Its blue paled against the blue of her eyes.
“I wanted to tell you something.”
“Then why won’t you tell me and go away?”
I pulled the old photograph from my pocket. She saw it, and suddenly she was happy again.
“Wherever did you get that?”
“You gave it to me. Don’t you remember?”
She shook her head. “Look how round I was.”
“That’s just baby fat. You said—do you remember what you said?—for when I got lonely.”
“Did I?” And she laughed again.
“And for luck.” I slipped the photo back into my pocket. I feared she might try to take it from me.
“Did it work?” she asked. “Has it brought you luck?”
“I’m never without it,” I answered, meaning the picture. “Is he a good man? Is he kind to you?”
“He loves me,” she said.
“If he ever wrongs you, come to me and I will take care of it.”
She shook her head. “I know how you take care of things.”
“I am glad to see you, Lilly. I was afraid you might be . . . gone.”
“Why would you be afraid of that?”
“I have . . . an illness.”
“You’re sick?”
“An affliction. It can be passed on by even the most chaste of kisses.”
“And that’s what you wanted to tell me?”
I nodded. She said, “I’m fine. Perfectly fine.”
Her husband was waving at us. I noticed; she did not.
I said, “I like him. He has a good face: not particularly handsome, but noble. And I like his name very much. A philosopher-writer. A writer-philosopher.”