The Major's Daughter (32 page)

She heard George's voice, doubtless singing the praises of the most recent improvements. Streetlights turned on, sewer in place, speed limits set, local school with a promise to put a new wing on the east side of the building . . . she could do the spiel as well as he could. He had sold five houses; five waited. He was now putting in feelers over at an industrial park he and an investment group had turned up, a potential golf course he was calling Shady Ridge. Houses sitting on adjoining golf courses, he prophesized, would end up being the coming thing.

Polly came in before the others.

“There's my girl!” he said, opening his hands along the lines of his pants like a singer finishing a ballad. “I told them you would have a witches' brew waiting. . . . How are you, darling?”

He came and kissed her cheek. She handed him a Scotch glass.

“Do the honors, would you, Polly? I need to check on the baby. Who are the new candidates?”

“The Blonds? That's what George calls them behind their backs. Mr. and Mrs. Blond. He's just been transferred in . . . from California, sat out the war with a herniated disk or broken hip or something. She's a Miss something or other. A beauty queen.”

“Are they interested?”

Polly began shuffling glasses and nodded.

“George thinks tonight will put them over. He's counting on you.”

“Of course he is.”

“Sell the woman and the man will follow. Isn't that the motto?”

“Fix the drinks, Polly, and let me run upstairs.”

Louisa, a heavy black woman with one eye pushed down so that it was nearly closed, met her on the upstairs landing. She carried a dirty diaper in a gray pail. She walked softly and put one of her fingers to her lips to signal
shhhhh
. Hazel, baby Hazel, was asleep.

“She went down?” Estelle asked, hiding her irritation at the baby going so early to sleep. Sleep made the sitting job easy for Louisa and the following morning difficult for Estelle.

“Just like a little lamb,” Louisa said. “Hardly stayed awake while I changed her britches.”

“That's precious.”

“She's a
good
baby, ma'am,” Louisa said, emphasizing the good in a way, Estelle reflected, no mother could resist.

“I'm glad you think so, Louisa.”

“No thinking about it. She just is, that's all. Sleep like that, that means she was born with a clear conscience.”

“Really?” Estelle asked, intrigued with this little sample of folk wisdom despite the sound of the guests coming in downstairs.

“Oh, yes, that means she is not guilty over Cain's original sin. Not at all.”

“Wasn't it Adam and Eve's disobedience that was the original sin?”

“Oh, I always believed that they didn't like it in that nasty old garden. Going around with hardly a stitch of clothes . . . why, you tell me if you would like that! No woman would. One way or the other, your little Hazel is as empty as a cup when it comes to guilt, I'm saying. She be a good sleeper all her life.”

“That's a blessing.”

“Sure it is. Now let me take care of this here, and I'll come back in and sit with her.”

Estelle nodded. She tiptoed in and hovered over Hazel's crib for a moment. She really was a darling child, with red highlights in her downy hair and blue eyes that contained half of the world's wisdom at least. Wise eyes, everyone said, and it was true. Hazel lay on her belly, her tiny fists curled in fierce blocks at her side. Estelle bent down and kissed her.
A baby
, she thought
. A tiny infant lives in my house and belongs to me and I am responsible for her welfare.
It was absolutely extraordinary to consider. She touched Hazel's fingers and counted them. The baby's breath came out in little pants, like a small creature, a puppy, perhaps, and Estelle leaned farther into the crib to feel the child's breath against her cheek. How strange life could be. She did not much care one way or the other about George—oh, she did, she did, she reminded herself, except he felt like a family servant, a clever gardener who came in at times to check the plants and then disappeared—but she was mad about her child. It terrified her to think how much she loved Hazel. Her teeth sometimes gritted when she held her, so passionate was her feeling for the lovely little infant. She kissed the crown of Hazel's head and backed slowly out of the room. She wondered, as she went, if all mothers felt such love for their children.

Then she hurried down to join the guests.

“Here she is!” Missy Kent said as Estelle came down the stairs. “The Queen of Persimmon Drive!”

“Hardly a queen!” George said, his hand on a brown drink and his color high. “More like the Empress of Japan. Someone imperial and faultless . . . this is my better half, as you probably surmised. In all her glory.”

He said this to the Blonds. Estelle was forced to introduce herself, an event that happened sometimes when George was selling hard and forgot names.

“I'm Estelle . . . and you're?”

“The Emersons. Pat and Patty,” the male Blond said.

“Not really?” Estelle asked, genuinely incredulous. “You're having me on.”

“We confess,” the woman said.
Patty
, Estelle reminded herself. “It's really quite ludicrous. We're aware of it, but those are our names.”

“How cute!” Estelle said, accepting a drink from Polly. It was Scotch over rocks, and she swirled it for a moment to bleed the ice. “Well, here's how, Pat and Patty. Welcome aboard.”

“They were looking for property,” George said, “and Kiley French put them in touch with me. How about that? They may be settlers out here with us on the great frontier.”

“Everyone's moving into George's orbit,” Missy Kent said, drinking something faintly orange. “We might as well turn in all our house keys and surrender.”

“It seems like a lovely location,” Patty said.

“Not yet it isn't,” George piped up. “It's a promise of what it will be. That's how I like to phrase it. But you give it five years and the house prices will double. The war's ending and people are going to be spilling out of the cities, you mark my word. Now, you may be transferred away in a year or two, but this house . . . I'm telling you, buying on this end, buying cheap and selling dear, that's the way the two-step goes.”

Estelle took another drink. She admitted a dread fascination in watching George rope in customers. The Emersons, for instance, looked like perfectly nice people. They smiled and took a second round from Polly, and she imagined they had a solid life together. They reminded her of draft horses, or a matched pair of andirons, anything put together side by side to manage a job. George was right about their blondness; it was a disarming glimmer, a shiny gleam as if they had come out of the packing material much more recently than anyone else she had met. As she studied them, she guessed they were not sure what to make of George. He enthused an infectious combination of bonhomie and shark salesman, and one had to smile as he chewed on one's leg.

“Won't you move over to the fire?” Estelle asked, feeling the lovely swell of alcohol pushing the day away.

“We should go soon,” Missy Kent said, though she led the group to the hearth. “They're doing a roast beef and they always run out.”

“It's damnable the way they do that,” Polly said, “as if they wanted to tempt us by what we can't have.”

“Still, it's a good club,” George told the Emersons. “You can't find a better brand of people. All the right sorts, honestly. The Duck has been an institution around here for, geez, I hardly know. I can't remember when we didn't have the Duck.”

“‘Going to the Duck' is the euphemism for getting drunk,” Polly said, his eyes bright and watery with his first drinks. “At least usually it is.”

“We're making it sound scandalous, but really it's quite a welcoming place. The kids have birthday parties there . . . and the pool in the summer,” Missy said, “is really heavenly. A lot of the moms live on those lounge chairs all summer long.”

“And the kids play together,” Polly said. “It's all one lovely conspiracy.”

It was interesting, Estelle realized, to hear their lives explained to newcomers. What wasn't mentioned, of course, was the difficulty of getting into the Duck in the first place. One had to be sponsored, then vetted, then interviewed, and so on. A financial checkup, too, she imagined, although she had been a member through her family so long that she could not really recall those specific details. But one did not simply walk through the door and pull up a barstool at the men's grill. Not at all. The golf course was in demand and the greens' fees stiff, and George, she knew, would flash everything in front of the Emersons as if they merely had to acquire a house on Persimmon Drive to make it all happen. That was his special selling technique.

Then it was time to go. Polly drained off his glass after calling bottoms up. The others followed suit. George lifted a fire screen in front of the spitting pine scraps while Estelle called up the stairs softly to Louisa that they were going now. Louisa appeared at the top of the stairs and nodded and whispered down that Hazel was still asleep like an angel. Estelle promised they wouldn't be too late.

In the car on the way to the Duck, George said he thought the Blonds were ready to bite.

“Another triumph,” Estelle said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

“Dinner should close them. I hope they have enough of that damn roast beef tonight. I need to talk to the manager, what's his name?”

“Steve,” Estelle said.

“Right . . . I can never remember his name. I wonder why not. I must block it. Anyway, I'll say, Steve old boy, let's stop being chintzy with the roast beef. If there's one thing you can't go cheap on at a club like the Duck . . .”

“That would be roast beef,” Estelle couldn't help herself from saying.

“One of those kinds of evenings, is that right?” George asked, looking over as he navigated up the long, treelined driveway to the Duck.

“We always have one of those evenings, George. It's our fate.”

“Be better if you worked with me instead of against me.”

“I always work with you, George. I just don't always like that I work with you.”

“You're too clever for me by half,” George said, and yanked the car into a slot under a chestnut tree. “Anyway, see if you can keep that Patty interested. She's the one who will make the decision. She wants to start a family.”

“Do I get a commission?”

He leaned over quickly and kissed her cheek. Then he popped out of the door and came around the car—the Queen of Persimmon Drive, the Duke of the Duck Pond.

Chapter Twenty-three

A
s the German prisoners found their way to seats in the temporary theater, Major Brennan nodded to Lieutenant Peters. Every guard had been alerted; all hands had been summoned. Lieutenant Peters had seen to that, issuing the order. It was the same order, as it happened, that they had employed to announce Hitler's suicide in the last days of April 1945. They had reported his death and the subsequent immolation of his body factually and without passion. There was a trick to handling such things, and Major Brennan believed in frankness.
Lance the wound,
he had told Lieutenant Peters and others after receiving news about Hitler's death only weeks before. It served no purpose to deny or underplay these events. The worry over how the German men would react to the death of the Führer had been misplaced. If anything, the men appeared relieved, glad to have the end of the war so clearly marked. Hitler's abiding fascination had been dispelled in a single five-minute span as Major Brennan had read calmly an account of his last hours, including Hitler's marriage and breakfast reception with Eva Braun. The men had filed out after a few questions. Surely the conversations had continued in the barracks late into the night, but there had been no obvious repercussion, no attendant protest.

Tonight, however, might prove to be different. When Major Brennan stepped onto the front porch of the mess hall, the German men came promptly to their feet. The Germans, Major Brennan marveled, never failed in that regard: while an American assembly might begin in a lazy, distracted manner, with men climbing to their feet in ragged order, the Germans, as always, stood rigidly alert, obviously prepared to grant a senior officer their full attention. Under other circumstances, it might almost have been humorous, but tonight Major Brennan merely made a motion with his hand and asked that the men be seated.

The men sat. A wind pushed the makeshift movie screen that had been suspended from the front porch of the mess hall. Major Brennan heard it flap behind him. He waited a moment to make sure the men had settled. Then he turned to Collie and asked if she was ready.

“Yes, Papa,” she answered.

He started once, opening his mouth to begin, but then stopped. How did one start on such a topic? He braced his shoulders back and took a deep breath.

“In the past few months,” he said in a loud voice, “we have heard reports about prisoner-of-war camps in Germany and Poland.”

He waited while Collie translated.

“Many of these stories have been met with skepticism, because, I think, we did not wish to believe the truth of what had transpired. Gradually, however, the nature of these camps has begun to astonish the civilized world. Our eyes see, but our minds cannot accept the evidence of our sight.”

He waited again for Collie to translate.

“Tonight, we have a film record of what these camps have kept hidden for several years. The film has been provided by the State Department of the United States. Copies of the film have been made and distributed throughout the United States and across all corners of Europe.”

Collie translated. Her voice, he marveled, was steady and strong. He saw the German prisoners nod at her words.

“You may ask yourself, why am I being shown such a film? The war is coming to a close. It is time to shut the door to such memories. But it is the position of the State Department, and of the United States of America, that German prisoners should be shown evidence of the horrors the Fatherland visited on the peoples of Europe. We do this not to shame you but to bring to light the full depravity sanctioned by the leaders of your nation. This is of the darkest character. This is the ultimate expression of human cruelty.”

When Collie finished translating, Major Brennan raised his hand to indicate to the projectionists to run the film. Major Brennan quickly stepped out of the beam of light that flashed from the roof of the closest barracks. For a moment nothing became visible on the screen except numbers. Then gradually images began moving on the screen. A pile of skeletal bodies lay in a discarded heap, with a bulldozer slowly pushing the bodies toward a mass grave. The pictures moved without narration. Major Brennan watched the diesel smoke coming out of the exhaust vent on top of the bulldozer; it was incomprehensible that such a machine could be employed to maneuver human corpses. The bodies rolled in stiff, reluctant waves, like flaccid bolts of material pushed along an earthen floor. Major Brennan lighted a cigarette and felt his hands trembling.

The rest was a variation on the same theme: ghostly men and women with enormous eyes, malnourished, gasping, their expressions pleading. More bodies, more corpses. The camera occasionally went inside a barracks, the bright lights illuminating crowded bunks of starving people languishing in a boned silence, heads hardly able to turn at the light.
Hibernacula
, Major Brennan thought, watching them. Winter caves for bats.

Major Brennan moved his eyes from the images on the screen to the men watching the film. No one made a sound. The film went on a long time. The wind occasionally pushed the screen back and forth and made the images hard to see. Then the cloth settled again and the horror returned.

“We told you this was happening!” one man finally said, but who it was, or even what portion of the crowd had given voice, Major Brennan couldn't say. Then another said, “No one listened! We told the officers, but no one listened!” Those voices freed the crowd of men to a degree and let them move slightly in their seats. The usual human sounds returned: a scuffed shoe, a cough, a sneeze, a match-strike.

When the film finished, the light flicked off. Major Brennan returned to the small porch. He stood for a moment and then slowly began the words to “Our Father.” The Germans joined him, speaking their own language. “Forgive us our trespasses,” he said, his voice wavering, and “for those who trespass against us.”
When he finished the prayer, he nodded to Lieutenant Peters to dismiss the men. They filed out in silence.

 • • • 

Later that same night, Collie heard August playing the piano. She knew his style immediately. Other people played the piano, some even with greater fluency than he, but none played with his quiet, elegant style. The notes came to her as she locked the office. Her father had gone off after the movie, taking two of the younger officers into Berlin for dinner. The men were being transferred back to Boston the next day. It was a good-bye dinner, strangely juxtaposed with the horrors they had witnessed during the film from the extermination camps. But that was the way with war, Collie reflected. A thousand things happened in a single day.

She did not pretend to go anywhere but the refectory. She found August sitting at the piano in the dimness. It might have been a bit a cliché: the troubled young soldier losing himself on the piano keyboard after observing his countrymen's depravity. But it did not feel that way. He played to find something in the music, not to lose himself, and she stood for a moment in the doorway watching him.

She loved him. That was clear now. It was like loving her hand or face or breath. Inside of her head, she was no longer alone. She did not think only for herself but for them both, for what he might think or need or desire. She imagined she held the same place in his thoughts. When he looked up to see her, she crossed the room quickly and went into his arms. He kissed her. Then the kiss grew and built and she felt his hands on her, everywhere, and she kissed him deeper, deeper, slowly stretching across his lap. She could not resist. What was the point of resisting? She felt his strength and his urgency, and she did not try to stop him but added her own urgency to his. They might have been a fuse burning, she felt, and it was insanity to do this here, to enter this level of wantonness where so many people might surprise them, but it broke on her with quick, sudden snaps.

She nearly drowned. She nearly lost herself entirely, but finally pushed herself away. She took two steps toward the door, then fell back into his arms, kissed him, pushed away again. She did not speak and neither did he. The room was dark except for the outside lights and the only noises she heard were sounds their bodies met sparking together.

She shook her head no when it had all gone too far, then she crawled off him, an animal, a lost, ravaging creature, and his hands trailed after her. She felt his arousal, his determination, but she kissed him again and again, slowly pulling away, slowly easing out of his orbit. She kissed him a hundred times on his neck, his forehead, his hands. Then she turned and nearly ran, her head detached from her body, her blood slinking in warm, flushing currents through her lips, her legs, her groin. She pushed through the door and walked out, relieved, almost, to see a group of prisoners stepping along the boardwalks, the moon, half empty, swinging like a garden gate on the ridge of the Devil's Slide.