Refiner's Fire (10 page)

Sister Bernadine wanted the adopted child to be Roman Catholic. Otherwise, she feared that Livingston, despite his changed name, would somehow coax it into Judaism. The only trouble was that most of the foundlings were of indeterminate religion. Sister Bernadine rejoiced, as the glorious Papal Seal made it crystal clear in her mind that this child was sent by higher powers to be the solution for the Livingston problem. Outside the wrought-iron porch of the Foundling Hospital a horse attached to a milkwagon whinnied in delight.

L
IVINGSTON HAD
decided that any child was acceptable, and to please his wife he had agreed to go to the Foundling Hospital. There were so many orphans and DP children that it was no problem to claim one. She refused, however, to walk down a ward and pick out a baby as if it were a can of Brussels sprouts, so she sent her husband to do it. He didn't mind things like that. In fact, he minded very little and was of a strange, quiet disposition.

When their house had been burglarized while they were in Yellowstone staying at one of those huge log-and-beam lodges, Mrs. Livingston had cried and fallen to her knees. Mr. Livingston looked around at walls denuded of Impressionist paintings and at a safe with its empty mouth hanging open, and went immediately to the phonograph to play a jumpy record. Then he danced around Mrs. Livingston, who was sobbing on her knees in the middle of the floor where a thick and colorful Persian carpet had been, and sang a song he made up as he slapped his hands together: “They didn't take the air, they didn't take the trees. They took the honey, babe, but not the bees.”

They began to drink champagne and dance around the empty room in dances of the twenties, which were the dances they had danced at dances when they were young. Once, Mrs. Livingston remembered that they had just lost all their movable possessions, and a tear fell from her eye, descending from ledge to ledge, from high angular cheek to delicate wrist before it stained the dark oak darker. But then her husband held her face in his hands and said: “Don't worry. It'll be fine. Nothings lost. We're alive.” She had not been privileged, as had he, to have been in a war for many years and to have seen men blown apart and ripped up by bullets. So he held her to him and remembered those times only a few years gone, and then they danced until the afternoon sun came 'round and struck the porch, and they lay on the lawn in their traveling clothes, only to awaken into a cool pleasant evening. They cooked some steaks on an open fire, and the emptiness of the house made them feel younger and wilder.

Livingston arrived at the hospital by taxi. It was very hot in the city, and Park Avenue was like an Alabama meadow—sheep grazed on the mall as a publicity stunt for a charity ball, but the effect was pastoral and hypnotic. He bolted up the stairs and into Sister Bernadine's office, feeling rather uneasy at the sight of the several dozen crucifixes which covered the walls with sinuous tendons. After Sister Bernadine's saccharine greeting and Livingston's tortured smile, they got down to business. A nun wheeled Marshall in on a room service cart. Since he was used to the finest hotels, Livingston felt his appetite stir, and then chastised himself. Sister Bernadine smiled, revealing a mouth as wide as the Holland Tunnel. Livingston eyed the baby sprawled on the service cart. It looked like a little white gorilla. He turned to Sister Bernadine. She again smiled enormously, exposing a row of teeth like a large horseshoe of uneven piano keys. Livingston was expressionless. Sister Bernadine
widened
her smile and said, “Isn't he beautiful?”

Livingston looked again at the baby, who, as if he could understand the proceedings, returned his stare with suspicion and hostility. “Beautiful?” He wanted to leave. “Yes, I guess it is beautiful. I guess we'll take it. It's healthy and all that, isn't it, certified, all right in the reflexes?”

“Oh yes,” said Sister Bernadine, “he's very smart for his age. He has a touch of pneumonia and his spine is a little bent, but he'll be all right. You see, he must have been premature. He's so tiny.”

“Where does he come from?”

“He's French
(Vive la France! as
they say), from Marseilles; we suspect from a very good family killed in the war. Tragedy.”

“What's his name?” asked Livingston, beginning to like the little thing, which was clearly suffering and hot with fever.

“It doesn't really matter. You can adopt him and he'll take your name.”

“I want him to have his own name. I think he'll want it that way. What is his name?”

“Pearl.”

“Pearl?” said Livingston. “I thought it was a boy.” He peered at Marshall. “It is a boy, by God, don't you know that, Sister Bernadine?”

Sister Bernadine blushed deeply. Her heart beat like a jackhammer. “It is a boy. Yes, it is a boy. A boy, a boy. His name is Marshall Pearl.”

“What the hell kind of name is that for a French aristocrat? Anyway, it sounds Jewish to me.”

“Oh no no no...!” said Sister Bernadine in peals of nervous laughter. Livingston watched the baby punching the air, and assented readily to the adoption.

L
IVINGSTON TOOK
Marshall up the Hudson in a sleeping compartment on the Twentieth Century. He had relatives in the Grand Central stationmaster's office who had arranged this short passage, and for the train to make a special stop in the woods which led from the river to his house. He had called ahead so that Mrs. Livingston could improvise a nursery and the doctor would be there when they arrived. The train left at seven in the evening. Livingston spent his time gazing alternately at the child and at the landscape. They passed the Palisades, and in his mind he saw long red files of British troops climbing to make a surprise assault. They passed the Tappan Zee—wide like an ocean bay—and they passed Croton Bay, where, in a spirit of daring and wild enterprise, the Colonists had pushed rafts of explosives up to the wooden walls of British warships. Livingston always leaped back to the wars. When the baby cried, he quieted it by stroking its forehead with his finger. Marshall grabbed the finger with his little fist, and although he could hardly hold, it seemed to Livingston that this was somehow a valiant act.

When it was beginning to get dark the train entered a curve of the river where forests descended to the shore and thick oaken limbs hung out over the water, in which were great boulders. Later, Marshall would have a rope hanging from one of the limbs onto a rock island that became his own. It was the end of August; the weather was hot and steamy. When the train stopped and Livingston got off with Marshall, black porters leaned out the exits to scan the dark forest. The stop at nowhere reminded them of earlier days on the railroad. Steam came up from the tanks and gaskets. A sweating porter in a blue hat with silver badge asked, “You live here?”

Livingston nodded. “Up a ways on the path. You want to visit, you're welcome to.” He looked at the sick infant in his arms. “I mean that.”

The porter smiled and touched his nose, and then pulled a lever in the vestibule. Steam rose as the brakes released and the train began to move forward slowly. The porter kept his eye on Livingston and little Marshall as the train inched forward with increasing force and speed. The porter himself seemed to draw energy and power from the accustomed momentum, and when he spoke it was as if he were in a preacher's pulpit. Livingston did not doubt the moment. “Chicago...” said the porter. “Chicago and the plains. Some day that child ride on this train all the way to Chicago, an' I'll be his friend.”

The train started down the straight silver-cindered tracks, ticking off the joints in the steel. Livingston was left in the forest with the sickly child in his arms, surrounded by cattails, enormous boulders, pines, oak, and beech. He set out on the darkening paths to the house. In the distance the Twentieth Century sounded its whistle as it rounded the Oscawana Bend.

M
ARSHALL HAD
need of a protector, and Livingston was just the man. First, his name was not really Livingston, but Lischinsky. He had changed his name not because he was an opportunist, and certainly not because he was ashamed of it, since he was neither. Rather, he felt confident in his identity and strongly attached to his history, and it mattered little to him if his name were Russian, Yiddish, German, or English. He rationalized, and perhaps correctly, that the original name of his family must have been some sort of right-to-left Semitic hieroglyph. He did have a Hebrew name given to him at birth, and to that he would hold at the price of his life. As for Lischinsky, he reasoned, the family name had been changed
to
it, so why not change
from
it? He asked his father, a farmer and storekeeper, and his father told him that as long as he remained a Jew he could do anything he wanted—grow a mustache, wear a hat, change his name, invest in porkbellies, speak with a Chinese accent, whatever. He had altered the name for one reason only.

When the family got back to Newark from ten years on a reservation of Spanish-speaking Apaches in Arizona, young Lischinsky was eighteen and wanted to go to Harvard. After all, T.R. had gone there. But there was a quota. He knew that if he took his exams and did even extremely well they might still weed him out because of his blood. So he went to a judge and changed Lischinsky to Livingston, intending to change it back some time, but the new name fit well and he kept it.

He visited a girl he had met in a beer garden in Coney Island. She was a nice girl, who had a splendid body because she belonged to an athletic society and was a championess with the Indian clubs. Either Swedish or German, she had definitely beautiful hair and eyes, and an awesome complexion. He might well have gone to see her anyway, but he was spurred on by her magnificent breasts and by her address, a round even number on Park Avenue. There, she was one of the indentured maids. He asked her to tell the postman that mail addressed to a Mr. Livingston would be received by her. Thus when he applied to Harvard he was not Lischinsky from a Jewish ghetto in Newark but, solely by manipulation of paper, Livingston from Park Avenue. He did so well on the test that he feared drawing attention to himself, and to the amazement of relatives and friends he was admitted. Through a combination of work started on the day he received the miraculous letter, loans, and his father's help, he experienced Harvard as a Livingston might, except that each Friday night he went to synagogue in a poor neighborhood near the South End, where he was able to remember who he was and from where he had come. One of the principles of his life, and of his father's life, and later of Marshall's, was that a man must be free to go wherever he wishes. No place was off limits, and fences, whether of wire or paper or the mind, were for milk cows and chickens.

When Livingston was a boy his family had moved from the country in New Jersey near the Pennsylvania line to Newark, where the father opened a dairy business which sold the products of all the Jewish dairy farms in the Bucks County-Princeton area; and there were many, including his own, which he consolidated with those of his brothers. But in Newark Mrs. Lischinsky contracted consumption. Chances were that she would die—a lot of people did. A man other than Lischinsky might have seen too many difficulties and been unable to move—his means of livelihood, his children, the fact that they had already come all the way from Russia. But Lischinsky loved his wife and would be damned before he would fail to try and save her. He went to Washington, where for several weeks he made such a nuisance of himself at the Department of the Interior that they gave him a concession to run a general store in one of the driest deserts in the Western Hemisphere. The Apaches got a good deal, for he was an ethical man forever concerned with his wife's fragile condition. His compassion and sensitivity caused him to deal fairly with them, so fairly in fact that after ten years he could not break even, except that his wife was strong and robust and red in the cheeks—and that he deemed a great great profit. There were other benefits as well. His son became fluent in Spanish (although in an obtuse Indian dialect) and learned to ride and shoot expertly, as if by second nature. Since there was little but desert, mountains, and sky, the son spent most of his time in reading (there were no farm chores). So he did not become a rich man, but he gained strong healthy children—beautiful dark-eyed mysterious girls and a son who had the stealth and skills of a young Apache, and who had read through several government libraries.

At Eagle Bay were two quarter horses and a pony, a rack of rifles and pistols, ropes, blankets, and a thousand acres of surrounding forest, although Livingston owned only several and the rest was either state land or undeveloped tracts, the property of churches, syndicates, or the railroad. He had always wanted his son to learn from him not only skills of the intellect, but of the land. As he walked with Marshall's basket, in which rested Marshall himself and the fancy envelopes, he imagined what was to come, and quickened the pace. He passed the stable and began to walk over the rolling lawn toward the house. Lamps burned gently within, and terraces and porches with awnings and vined runners had dark shadow patterns thrown about them. With many windows and cheerful lights, the house was set in the darkness and placidity of a deep green forest, where night birds were beginning to sing and fireflies flashed. Livingston ran across the grass onto the steps of the library terrace. Having heard the train, his wife was standing at the window and she looked at the baby with an inbreathing of love, forgetting her fear that it was not and could never be hers. Husband and wife smiled radiantly at one another through the dark glass, Marshall held safely between them.

M
RS
. L
IVINGSTON
opened the door and let them in. The doctor had just arrived and was starting to come down the long hall which led to the library. When he had been greeted they all mounted the narrow staircase twisting this way and that past landings lined with books and little doors leading to a maze of attics and secret passages. Marshall was fast asleep when the party arrived in his room. It had several windows; some nearly touched the floor, and others nearly touched the ceiling. Before Livingston had converted it, the house had been a huge stable with many odd architectural features. It had about thirty rooms, many of which were tremendous and others of which were closet-sized, and only half of them were in use. Enormous beams braced with cast-iron crossed the top floor. The windows were arched and they swung inward. Those near the ceilings had to be opened with long hardwood staves brass-fitted at the top; their shades were controlled by lengthy cords strung on pulleys, like the rigging of a ship. There were three stories. At ground level, heat was provided from deep pits in which gas was burned, the flames quite terrifying to see through iron grilles flush with the floor. Dogs (three Labradors—Wen del, Douglas, and Leon) dared not approach the hissing chasms of hellfire, and bayed as if at the moon when the thermostats popped and signaled new conflagrations. On the upper stories were vertical registers set in the walls to heat two rooms at once. Except where sex or privacy had dictated several heaters and no view, it was possible to look through the gas-burning apparatus and the flames from one room to another. The house was of brick, with walls three feet thick and a slate roof. There were many fireplaces, enclosed terraces, porches, winding passages, a small motion-picture theater complete with soundproofed projection booth, a chicken coop above the garage, a large workshop and storage area, hay chutes, overhead winching systems, a grandiose formal diningroom, and little places where a child could hide and literally never be found.