Ollie's Cloud (15 page)

Chapter 14

Mrs. Chadwick paces the dimly lit office, afraid to sit for fear of contact with the evidence of Reginald’s sins against nature, sickened by the imagined cries of fragile boys and the images of their tear-streaked faces—oh God, Ollie and Augustus, and so many others. Her breaths are purposely shallow, as if the air itself may be tainted by the evil vapors emanating from this vile man of the cloth.

A portrait of Christ weeping tears of blood chills her; surely Christ had been witness to Reginald’s repeated crimes, and surely He had cried tears of blood at the atrocities committed in His name by His servant.

Voices! She can hear the faint voice of Reginald approaching the office door; he is speaking to someone, unlatching the door, stepping in with a fresh-faced young boy of about twelve, his flabby arm grotesquely cupped around the boy’s shoulders.

“I am so anxious to show you the manuscript, Harold,” the priest says, barely getting the words out before gasping in terror at the apparition standing before him. “My good lady,” he says, holding his hand to his chest after a moment of recovery. “You startled me, Emily. A man my age… we are lucky that my heart did not explode in my chest. Is there something I can do for you?”

Mrs. Chadwick steps from the shadows and a streak of light crosses her face. “Indeed there is, Reginald,” she says calmly. “Perhaps you can show both of us your manuscript. I’m very interested in it—as was my son, Augustus, and my grandson Oliver.”

The old priest’s cheeks, flushed with anticipation upon entering the room, now blanch. “Harold,” he says to the boy, “I have some business to attend to if you don’t mind. The manuscript will wait. Off with you now!”

Confused, the boy turns and walks out the door with just a brief pause to turn his head and catch a last glimpse of the old witch who had startled Reginald.

Reginald’s knees are quaking and he sets down his heavy frame on a frail chair that creaks beneath his weight. The moment he had seen Mrs. Chadwick’s face he had known the purpose of her visit. He begins to speak, but the words bunch in his lying mouth. “Emily, I—I don’t know what you think…”

Mrs. Chadwick’s unblinking eyes scorch his face. “I know everything, Reginald. I know more than you can remember.”

How can this bent wisp of a woman frighten him so? His gut rumbles and his head throbs.
Those venomous eyes!
His hand begins to tremble; he can’t control it. Perspiration beads on his forehead and his mouth becomes dry and cottony.

“Honestly, Reginald, did you think I would never find out? Surely you knew this moment would come. As you thought about the inevitability of it, what did you imagine you would say?”

“Emily, please…”

“You betrayed your God, Reginald. And you betrayed your church. And Charterhouse. And my son and grandson, Reginald—and how many others?”

“I’ve prayed for forgiveness, Emily. I’m so weak—but I believe that God in his boundless mercy has forgiven me.”

“How nice for you. And were you also going to ask forgiveness for raping this new boy? Maybe you could ask God’s forgiveness in advance.”

“I pray for the strength to resist my carnal desires, you must believe me.”

“I don’t really care if God has forgiven you or not. Reginald,” Mrs. Chadwick says coldly. “I want you to pay very close attention to what I am going to say. Can you do that?”

Like a small child chastised by his mother, Reginald nods yes.

“You betrayed
me
, Reginald. First with Augustus, after you led me to believe that you would look after his best interests. And then, so many years later, with Oliver. How could you look me in the eye and do it a
second time
? Oh, Reginald—you have disappointed me so.” She walks to the door and sighs deeply. “I thought I would be angrier than this.”

Reginald shifts his body to see her standing in the open doorway and his spirits lift; perhaps he is getting off easy.

“Still, you deserve punishment,” Mrs. Chadwick says. “God may forgive you, Reginald, but I do not. In one week the
Times
will tell your story for everyone to read. You will be famous at last!” She smiles and then squints her eyes. “Unless…”

The word hangs in space as she closes the door.

Unless
.

Reginald cannot stand, cannot think, cannot even breathe. This is the executioner’s axe. He may go to prison, and he knows the dismal fate of child molesters in English jails. Even worse… he could never bear the public humiliation. He has been utterly, completely undone by Mrs. Chadwick.

Unless.

Chapter 15

The corpse lies on the stone floor of the madrisih’s courtyard, peaceful and still. Jalal crouches over it sadly, stretches out a warm hand to feel the coldness and tautness of its skin, and tries to imagine this heap of spent flesh as his father. No, this is not ‘Abdu’llah; the lifeless husk at his feet is merely the shell that once contained his father, a useless snakeskin now shed and left behind. The real ‘Abdu’llah, the soul of the great and loving father, is now free of its physical constraints, and Jalal can almost feel its presence in the warm breeze that tenderly ruffles his hair, and in the laughter of the mulberry leaves rustling overhead.

Though he knows in his bones the triviality of death in the cosmic scheme of eternal spiritual evolution, he is suddenly convulsed with emotion and begins spiraling downward into a despair of loss and loneliness. His tears flow, hot stinging tears, moistening ‘Abdu’llah’s dusty cloak and releasing an emotion that Jalal believed he had overcome.

Anger
.

He is angry that after so long a separation, and such a hard journey, his father had died before reuniting with his son. He is angry that he, Jalal, had been deprived of one last embrace, one last chance to see his father alive.

Assaf stands over Jalal, watching. “He came here to see you.”

“I know.”

“Not just to Mashhad,” Assaf explains. “Your father came to the
madrisih
to see you.”

Jalal looks up and wipes his eyes with the ample sleeves of his tunic. “No, he didn’t come here. He never made it.”

“Oh, yes he did. I followed him here.”

Jalal stands, confused. “I’m sure he wasn’t here.”

“Listen to me. Earlier today I left your father alone for a time. He was sleeping, and when I looked in on him again he was gone. Having lost him—well, you can see what a dilemma it created for me. If he died, I would not know where he was, and so I would not be able to deliver his body to you as he had wished. So I ran out of the house, guessing that he might be trying to make his way here.”

“But you said that you found him in the burial grounds on the way here.”

“In the burial grounds, yes… but not on the way here. I arrived at the madrisih just as your father was entering. It was not hard to distinguish him with that bandaged arm. I waited outside and finally he came out. He was smiling, but staggering. I wanted to go to him and offer my help, but it seemed wrong. Instead I followed him to the burial ground, and that’s where I found him. At first I thought he had just gone to sleep, so I approached to find out. But then it was clear that, that he…”

Jalal steps back and sighs. “I don’t understand at all. If he came to the madrisih, why didn’t he see me? After such a long journey…”

At first Assaf doesn’t know what to say, but then, concluding that the damage already had been done, he turns to Jalal and says, “He was so proud of you he didn’t want anything to distract you.”

The weight of this pronouncement pulls Jalal unsteadily to the ground where he sits, bracing himself with stiff arms and hands planted on the cold floor. He mentally plays out the scene the way it must have unfolded; his father hiding in the shadows, capturing one last glimpse of his son…

“Assaf—” Jalal says, “thank you for bringing my father to me..”

Assaf kneels beside ‘Abdu’llah. “I only knew your father for a short time, but he reminded me of my own father, who was also killed by the Turkoman. Here, I have something else for you.” Assaf holds out ‘Abdu’llah’s coin purse and a letter.

Jalal takes these objects, these last two mementos of his father, and feels his whole body cramping into a ball of pain. Fighting back tears, he opens the pouch, which contains a quantity of tumans, then reads the letter. “I will honor his wishes,” he says, putting the letter down. “But tell me—you could have kept the letter and the money, there’s quite a lot here. Most Persians would have seen their own good fortune in such a circumstance.”

Sensing that he should leave Jalal alone with his father, Assaf silently turns to leave.

“Assaf, wait!” Jalal rises and approaches the young man. He opens his father’s pouch, plucks out several coins, then hands the pouch to Assaf. “It will cost me nothing to have my father buried near the mosque, and I need very little for myself. My family in Bushruyih is well off. Take the rest, my friend. Consider it a gift from my father to his last companion.”

For the first time the two of them stand facing each other, eye to eye. Assaf sees something in the face of Jalal, something that both stirs and calms him. Something swirling in the boy’s dark eyes, like a universe of kindness and compassion and… and fearlessness. These eyes, these deep and unblinking eyes, so gentle but so heartbreakingly, breathtakingly lucid, like a window to the soul, glisten in the purple twilight and reflect an infinity of emotions.

Assaf shivers then drops to his knees without taking the pouch. He feels as if his soul has danced with the soul of Jalal. Looking up, all he can think of to say is, “Your father spoke of the Qa’im, saying that you… that you…”

“That I am expecting Him soon, yes.”

Jalal touches Assaf’s shoulder with a hand cooled by the stone floor.

Assaf places his own hand over it and holds it there. He cannot steer his gaze away from Jalal’s eyes.

“Me too,” he says, trembling at the boy’s touch. “Me too.”

Chapter 16

During these winter months Ollie has learned many things, but chief among them is the ability to distinguish between eighty-eight kinds of mud, for London is the “sucking mud-hole of the universe,” as Herbert Eaton so delicately understates it. First there is the rich palette of hues, from cast-iron black and dark chocolate to chestnut brown, chalk-grey, and a kind of putrid green like freshly digested hay; and then there are the pungent aromas emanating from the ooze, a stinking sour stench perhaps, or a molasses-sweet perfume, or maybe the acidy scent of soupy leaves moldering in the muck. But the most telling characteristics of London mud are the look-and-feel of it, which can be swirling, puckering, pasty, cracked, or crumbling; rigid, ribbed, and troweled, or juicy, slimy, and bubbling; flaking and chipping, or slurpy and sticky.

The roads to the Surrey Theatre are overrun with gummy mud this evening and the carriage containing Ollie, Herbert and Anne drifts from side to side as the horses with slipping hooves and steaming backs pull the clogged wooden wheels through the clotting sludge. “Damn mud!” Herbert exclaims. “It’ll overtake us before long, I swear—turn us all into fossils! They’ll find our damn bones ten thousand years from now and some archaeologist will conclude that we were either on our way to the theatre or the garbage pit.”

“You know I don’t like it when you curse, Herbert,” Anne says gently.

Herbert sighs and looks out the window at the sea of mud, his complaints now stuck in his throat and his mood not a bit cheerier for all of Anne’s patient words. He grunts, as if to register one last protest, and Anne lets the malformed expletive pass unremarked.

Despite the bleak mud and the spitting snow, Ollie is ebullient, for his wish has come true. He has coerced his mother and his stepfather-to-be into attending the theatre with him on the spectacular evening that Mons. Gouffé, the Man-Monkey, will climb the walls and swing from the balconies in amazing feats of dexterity. He presses his body against his mother’s, feels her warmth, and with a tender burrowing gesture urges her arm to wrap around him, containing him for a moment in a different world quite apart from London—a dry and sun-drenched world of sand and stallions where mud is not a liability but is baked into houses, and mulberry leaves shade your eyes from the luminous sky.

At last they arrive at the Surrey; Ollie notices the horses snorting and their chests heaving from the effort of plowing the roads with the gummed-up carriage. The three of them step from the carriage and Anne pulls a hood over her head, protecting her hair from the hard and stinging flakes of snow. Herbert expertly guides them through the maze of vehicles, past the smell of wet horses and leather, around the sink holes of mud, and into the theatre where a loud, piercing voice calls out, “Ollie, over here!” It is Thomas Dibdin the Surrey’s pencil-thin manager.

Ollie waves excitedly at Dibdin, then takes his mother by the hand and begins to lead her toward the voice. They push through the crowd until they reach Dibdin.

“Ollie, my good fellow, isn’t William with you this evening?” Dibdin asks.

“Not tonight. But I brought my mother, like I said I might.”

Anne pulls down her hood and shakes her head, loosening her hair and revealing her face.

Dibdin turns to Anne and, try as he might, cannot hide his astonishment at her voluptuous beauty. “My dear boy, I had heard that your mother was a beautiful woman, but nothing could have prepared me for—”

Herbert doesn’t like the way Thomas Dibdin is visually devouring his fiancée and so he extends a hand, pretending to accidentally bump the man with the points of his fingers. “Excuse me, sir. I am Herbert Eaton of the London Times, Anne’s fiancé.”

Dibdin takes the hand and mumbles a “Very good to meet you sir,” with barely a glance in Herbert’s direction.

“Oliver has mentioned you, sir,” Herbert continues, “and I want to thank you for the courtesy and friendship you have shown him over these past weeks.”

Dibdin glances at Herbert with a slight nod of acknowledgement, but turns back reverently to the glorious Anne. With the tip of his tongue, Dibdin wets his lips tentatively, instinctively, before speaking in a cracked voice: “My dear, if you should ever choose to have a career in the theatre, I do hope that you will consult with me first. I must say that you have a kind of charisma, a presence that is quite astonishing.”

Anne is dazzled by the man’s attention and flattery. For the first time in months she is speechless and just a little embarrassed.

Herbert has had enough of Dibdin. He grabs the bony man by an arm, tightly but not so tight as to be considered rude, and turns the man in the direction of the flowing crowd. “Yes, my good man, if Anne should ever choose the theatre, you will be the first to know. But now, I wonder if you could point me to our seats? That would be good of you.”

Dibdin seems suddenly shaken from a dream. He looks up at Herbert, trying to make sense of the words that were just spoken, and finally does. “Yes, yes, of course, of course. But as a gesture of my fondness for Ollie, I would like to offer you three of the better seats in the theatre. I am the manager, after all.”

With a sense of purpose, Dibdin leads the threesome to a box with a thrilling view of the entire stage and the enormous “pit” in which hundreds of theatre-goers stand to be near the stage. Ollie hopes that Mons. Gouffé, the Man-Monkey, will choose to swing from their balcony perch.

Thomas Dibdin takes his seat in a box opposite the Chadwicks. With his opera glasses trained on Anne, Dibdin settles into what he considers to be the best seat in the house. He has heard about this magnificent harem girl, and her exotic beauty—so hard to believe she is actually
English
!—but he had never imagined such a seductive apparition of heaven’s angels.

The first major piece of the evening begins, a boisterous melodrama of Dibdin’s invention called
The Burning Bridge
, with a plot thick as pudding. Through the opera glasses Dibdin scrutinizes Anne’s response to the performance and is delighted at how her expressive eyes reflect every nuance of her experience. Like an exposed nerve she reacts to every plot twist, every actor’s gesture, every word thrust into the audience. She laughs and playfully shouts her pleasure, gasps and pales visibly at each terrible histrionic tragedy.

At the preposterous conclusion of the piece, a female specter is called upon to rise from a lake, surrounded by a mist. To create this magical illusion, Dibdin has surrounded the ascending figure with a series of lamps behind gauze screens. As this rising cloud of gauzes nears the ceiling, a breeze blows a fold of the specter’s dress across a lamp, igniting it in flame.

Anne’s mouth falls open and her eyes grow wide and round as marbles. For the first time during the performance, Dibdin turns toward the stage and is astonished at the sight of Bertram Davidge, the actor playing the female specter, dangling and flailing about as he sheds his outer garments, revealing that he is in reality a Scotsman with his kilt on, already dressed for the next piece.

Anne howls with laughter and Ollie doubles over, his sides splitting from the hilarity. The Surrey shakes with the loudest laughter and applause of the evening. No one is quite certain if this has been planned or not; after all, it is a melodrama. Perhaps Dibdin is a genius. Or maybe Davidge is an idiot. What does it matter?

Dibdin breathes deeply, convinced at last that the fire has not spread to the rest of the Theater. As he trains his opera glasses again on Anne, he sees the beautiful woman illuminating the entire theatre with her smile and knows that she has been smitten by the theatre.

And so it goes on, this enchanting evening that fills Anne, the storyteller, with boundless amusement and wipes away the fatigue of her endless speaking engagements in countless echoing halls. “I’m so glad you invited us to attend, Ollie,” she says over and over, enthralled by the color and music and drama and humor of it.

Through it all Herbert Eaton sits rigidly in his seat, arms folded, only an occasional smile wrinkling his face, scrutinizing everything with the cold, objective newsman’s eye. Still, he intends to be a good sport about it for the sake of the beautiful Anne, who by the grace of God he has won, and also for Oliver, a gifted boy he has come to like very much. It would be so much easier to endure the evening, though, if it were not for the cloying caricature sitting in the box opposite them, that stick figure Thomas Dibdin who obsessively studies them—or
Anne
, as Herbert suspects—through opera glasses.

As the evening’s pantomime,
Harlequin and Mother Goose
, nears its frantic conclusion, Ollie can feel his heart beginning to pound. The end of the pantomime means that Mons. Gouffé, the Man-Monkey, is about to appear. Ollie grabs his mother’s hand and squeezes so tightly that Anne winces. The audience seems exhausted from laughter as the pantomime finally ends, and the applause, though friendly, seems weak. Ollie begins to wonder how the Man-Monkey will revive the crowd.

The curtain descends and a tympani begins a thunderous announcement of the evening’s finale. Ollie moves to the edge of his seat, nervous with anticipation.

Herbert glances at Dibdin’s box—empty!

Anne trembles slightly, her body vibrating with the beat of the drum.

The audience hushes.

Behind the curtain, Dibdin whispers into the ear of a mysterious figure that seems to be half-man, half-ape. The figure nods, and then the curtain rises with a fanfare. Dibdin walks limberly to the center of the stage. With a voice ten times louder than anyone could imagine being produced by such a frail body, he greets the audience and introduces the featured act.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce this evening a true marvel of the animal kingdom, a creature discovered in the jungle, then captured, tamed and trained to perform such amazing feats that you will not believe your eyes. No mere man could accomplish such astonishing deeds of dexterity, and no ape alone could exhibit such intelligence and skill. But this creature is not a man, and not a monkey; incredibly, he is a blend of the best of both. And so on behalf of the Surrey Theatre, I present to you Mons. Gouffé, the Man-Monkey.”

Suddenly all the lights in the theatre are doused, plunging the audience into darkness. Anne gasps. Ollie grabs his mother’s arm. The tympani rumbles again, building in volume and climaxing with a crash of cymbals. A ring of torches on the stage suddenly bursts into flame and an odd-looking creature the size of a man appears from the shadows and takes its place center-stage. The creature’s head looks like an ape and its body is covered by fur, but its proportions are those of a human. The creature walks with a slight crouch and the crowd murmurs.

“Do you think he’s really half-monkey?” Ollie asks his mother.

“I don’t know, Ollie.”

“Do you think his mother or father was a monkey?”

“Hush now—let’s watch.”

“I think his father.”

The Man-Monkey begins his performance. Two attendants, dressed in safari outfits, create a tower of four empty pint glasses. A small boy, about eight, in gaily-colored Indian vestments, waddles over to the creature who picks him up and places him on one hip the way a mother carries an infant.

Ollie watches carefully as the Man-Monkey places one distinctly human hand on the crown of the top pint glass and, in a gravity-defying move, slowly bends and raises his feet from the floor until his entire body is horizontal to the stage, supported only by the fragile glass tower and one bent arm. The Indian child, now sitting upright on the creature’s hip, raises his arms, urging the audience to applaud.

Ollie is awe-struck as the Man-Monkey performs one miraculous gymnastic feat after another with ropes and poles and columns and swings. He balances weightlessly, strikes impossible poses, leaps and jumps with astounding agility, and lifts incredible weights with his teeth. The crescendo of the performance continues to build and the audience seems more astonished with each act.

The climax—a bewildering display of rapid-fire tumbling and leaps through fiery hoops, followed by a dizzying rope-to-rope swing across the stage and then
way
out over the heads of the mesmerized pit audience—produces roaring applause and shouts of jubilation. Mons. Gouffé, the Man-Monkey, lands softly on the stage and takes a well-deserved bow. The applause continues unabated until the creature suddenly holds up his hands and points toward Ollie’s box.

Ollie shivers.
Is the creature pointing at him?

Suddenly the Man-Monkey bounds to the end of the stage and begins to climb the wall, finding small crevices for his feet and hands. Up the wall he goes, and the crowd first hushes, then collectively gasps as he reaches for a gold-embroidered drapery suspended from the ceiling and pinned to the wall. With one hand, the creature vigorously shakes it loose from the wall, then leaps onto it and swings slowly, breathtakingly, to Ollie’s box. Anne rocks back in her chair, startled. Ollie is so dumbfounded that he can’t move. Herbert stands and steps back. The Man-Monkey catches the molding, hoists himself over a brass railing, and rolls into the box.

Looking up at Anne, Mons. Gouffé says, “Madam, is your name Anne?”

Wide-eyed and pale, Anne nods yes.

“Mr. Dibdin would like you all to join him for wine after the performance. He’ll find you in the lobby”

With that, the Man-Monkey stands to face the appreciative audience with raised hands and then quickly disappears into the corridor.

The mad exiting crush of people like a river current carries Anne, Herbert and Ollie down the corridor, down a crumbling flight of stairs, and into the lobby. The Man-Monkey, though an imposter—Ollie had seen the spirit gum and make-up on Mons. Gouffé’s face as he rolled into the box, and had brushed the fake-fur suit—had exceeded his expectations. A well-done sham could be as interesting and effective as the genuine article, he has discovered.

Their carriage skates through the encrusted mud and begins to rumble over the bridge that connects the south bank of the Thames to the north bank. The snow has stopped but colder air has gripped the city. In the distance, at the far end of the bridge, Ollie can see torches burning and dark figures silhouetted against their glow.