Under the Poppy (53 page)

—as something strikes the window, a ball of soot, soil, something to draw his eye: to a figure on the roof across, for a moment he thinks it is Istvan, and his heart hammers. But no, the figure is too thin, and ragged as a beggar-boy—

—as another clot strikes the window, and the figure waves, waves so fiercely he nearly falls, then rights himself and stands waiting, hand to his mouth—

—because it is, yes, Benjamin: and Rupert puts his own hand, palm up, against the glass, Jesu what game is this, now? as Benjamin sees that he is seen, and waves more fiercely still.
Where is my son
?—this time he does laugh, a short dry cough like a chained dog’s bark, as Benjamin makes some gesture he cannot understand, waves once more and then is gone, shinning down a pipe as swift and reckless as the boy he is, still is, and where has he been that his father seeks him so?

Rupert takes a hard breath, he takes his hand from the glass, he stares out the window; he waits. The guards laugh and grumble; the kitchen maid brings the day’s bread, takes away the slops. The sun wavers, and begins to fall. The roof is empty. Rupert waits.

The carriage wheels make a comforting sound; strange to travel in a carriage again, after walking for so many days, like a vagrant, like the poets whose work he has loved into memory: chanting lines to himself while he wobbled, half-drunk, half-frozen, past horses in the fields, the muddy lanes, the crumbling brickwork, trickling smoke in grubby inns—
To see the world in a swallow of wine/To see God’s face in the barkeep’s scowl/To see while blind
—as he has tried to blind himself, those long days and nights; the nights were the worst of it, filled with memories of the bed, the warmth of the bed, the warmth of his master beside him…. He had never imagined there could be so much pain.

And it has changed him, the pain, he saw that at once in Helmut’s eyes: his flurried welcome, rushing for barber’s tools, for maids and water, for clothing suitable to a meeting with the old man, who is
Much grieved, my lord,
said Helmut; Helmut has never called him so before, “my lord.” He has vowed never to go back to Chatiens, ever, until the old man is dead, but as it happens the old man is here, at the club, with the heavy port-wine drapes, and lost hours sifted up like dust in the corners…. The old man had seemed livelier back at Chatiens, if fairly gray around the gills: waving around the stolen poetry—that measly, filthy, hand-wringing tutor—and hissing of punishment and “disgrace,” but in the next moment insisting that the marriage would take place directly, to Christobel Guyon, no need to delay beyond Your own intransigence: staring at him as he stared at the painting on the easel, the pretty woman at the well, the creeping thing in the dark behind her—like the old man’s hand, so repulsively cold and damp, creeping across the desk to fasten on his own.

You are the flower of the stock, you are my heir, Benjamin. And a man such as my grandfather was, born for command. Why do you seek to ruin all that I would give you?

Ruin?
Did he laugh, then? He cannot remember, past the glaze of whiskey, the ache in his chest, the empty place where the key had hung, the key stripped from him by Rupert—about whom he tried to speak, through the whiskey and the ache: Yes, very well, he will marry Christobel Guyon. But he will have, he must have passion, must find some way to be again with the one he loves—

—as that cold hand rose again, to strike him hard across the face, very hard, a blow that brought water to his eyes and
You will be the master of Chatiens,
the old man said,
you are de Metz. Never speak so again.

Now, in the carriage, the de Metz carriage with the crest upon the doors, Benjamin puts his head back against the seat, he quotes aloud, “Is love a sea? Yes. Is love a sky? Yes.” He is a monster, the old man. Belle has always said so, well, Belle is right. And a monster makes monsters. Perhaps he stinks of ruin, too, and that is why his
Maître
prefers M. Dieudonne…. He understands ruin, now, has learned it in these past few weeks, a lifetime in which he thought to wander forever, whyever go back? To what? Instead he had the road, and the bottle, he drank and he fucked and was beaten, once, by a pair of toughs, mad because they could not rob him, because he had nothing to steal. What perfect freedom…. They did not know he had already been robbed of everything, except a kind of silence inside, the silent, howling shadow of the pain.

And all was silence, too, when he stepped into the club, the eager hush of scandal, which the man from the Golden Calf had warned him to expect:
You’re quite the talk these days, Monsieur,
with that dry little shrug, as if nothing known could surprise him. If the man had been surprised to see Benjamin appear at his back door, dirty and in rags, he kept that to himself, sharing instead, with a chunk of bread and cheese, the infamous tale of what had befallen M. Bok,
which business you might have a thought for, yes, Monsieur? Why not wait here, have a glass of something, while I call for M. Dieudonne?

But he had no wish to see M. Dieudonne, who if he were a better lover might have taken better care, and prevented this outrageous kind of harm. Instead, when the man stepped out, he took himself to the tannery streets, to clamber up, up, up, yet found no way inside, no chimney-sweep trapdoor as sometimes one can see, no fire ladder or catwalk, nothing. At least, then, let his master know that he was there….

And once that was accomplished, the rest became easy: starting with the town house, the garden stairs to the hallway to the old chapel where Belle stood staring at an altar full of roses, white roses massed as if for a funeral, cigarette burning heedless in her hand:
For whom do you pray, Belle?
He had thought to make her smile, he can always make her smile; instead her knees collapsed, she nearly fell.

It was Belle who told him where the old man was, who spoke to Helmut while he was being shaved and dressed, who said to him in Helmut’s hearing
Do as you think best, Benny, and it will be so.
So when he walked into the room at the club, the old man lying on a red-padded chaise, shirt undone, smelling of some disgusting poultice, he did exactly as he thought was best, with the quiet confidence of a man in a dream, a figure in a poem, it all might well be a poem, might it not? A short and tragic epic, by a poet who dies young.

And still the poem continues, each verse leading on to the last: as the carriage halts, now, in this dreary street, before this nondescript building, as he presents the document he carries to the policeman at the desk: waiting through the thrum and consternation, the nervous constable who calls another, more nervous constable, all of them murmuring over the document, the signature on the document, a signature that is itself a key: until the last series of murmurs, from an unhappy little man in a large and braided coat, like an actor badly costumed on the stage. At last the doors open, his master emerges, to be conducted into the carriage—

—where Benjamin instantly sheds his gloves, tears them off, to touch Rupert’s damaged face, brush one finger beneath his eye—“This is bad”—trace the lines of his mouth, each in his own silence until “What happened, here?” Rupert asks him, very quietly. “They couldn’t free me fast enough.”

“I freed you,” says Benjamin. His face is cold, bright-eyed, in agony. “I am the master, now…. I could give you straightaway back to them, you know. Or to my father. My father loathes you.”

“Your father asked me where you were.”

“No one could find me,” with a proud little flash. “I did not mean to be found.” Of all the things he says this night, this is what Rupert will remember, that lonely pride, the boy in the hideaway tree. “When I left Chatiens, I thought, Why not get drunk? There are many shitful little taverns in the countryside, every shitful little town has one. I believe I drank at them all. Until I was jailed, for drunkenness. I paid my fine with my boots, isn’t that a joke? And walked out of jail in my stockings…. We were both in jail, Maître. And I was in hell…. You left me.”

“Yes.”

Benjamin takes up Rupert’s hands, to kiss them, slowly, caught between his own; on his right hand he wears a ring, a rose-gold intaglio ring, carven with a Greek warrior. “I have a berth on a ship to Greece, for both of us. I was to tell you, that day—That key. It was not my fault,
Maître
.”

“No. I know that. But you should have told me.”

“I know that…. You left me,” again. “Will you not leave with me, now? We can go straightaway to the docks, or to Paris, any place you like. We can go anywhere—”

“Benjamin,” in a whisper, no one has ever said his name so, half caress and half command. “Listen to me—” while the carriage wheels murmur, a patient susurration, as if repeating again and again the last lines of a poem—

—as the carriage turns down one street to the next and the next, approaching the town house with its tall white vases, dressed, tonight, with white roses, one might say profligate with roses, spilling their massed sweetness onto the cold stone steps. Inside the air smells of more roses, and candle wax, of the pottage pies and mutton bread cooling in the kitchens, and spicy punch, rum punch, served in tin cups as if direct from a street seller’s cart. Receiving at the door, Christobel Guyon stands tall and slim as a linden, dressed in a serving maid’s black woolens, a frilled yellow mobcap perched atop her braided hair. She smiles at Isobel beside her, who returns the smile with warmth: she has been nothing but strength, Christobel, and showed nothing but sense when told of Benny’s reappearance, there in the old chapel as abruptly as an answered prayer:
We shall have many days to ask him questions, Madame, and hear all his answers. Ought we not let him come back to us in his own way?

His own way, yes. She has seen nothing of Benny since he left earlier for the town house with Helmut, his gaze detached as a statue’s, though he did tell her he would set things right with M. Bok; she did not ask how he knew of that trouble, she knew he would give no answer. As Javier has reassured her only of his own continuing toil…. But having Benny whole and safely home again—such a joy may yet bring another in its wake. Perhaps she will soon see M. Bok beneath this roof once more, drinking whiskey in the parlor, while Benny plays Chopin.

Both Christobel and her lady’s-maid prevailed upon her to take a bite of food, a glass of wine, and it was well they did so: Isobel feels light-headed still, and unmoored, in her plain black gloves and wimple, threadbare velvet, like a mistress of misrule. M. Dieudonne is already here, in the east parlor’s pantry with his players, whence he will emerge, he has assured her, with a spectacle merry enough to bring a smile to Lazarus at the gates—though we’ll spare the dogs licking at the sores, shall we? Such a dreary detail. Fastidious in his own bright tatters, hair loose across his shoulders, hands wrapped nearly to the fingertips, he showed her the plague mask he will wear, its odd and plunging beak, and the severe little puppet who will Make his debut this very night, tugging a string unseen to make him bow for her, a dark changeling toy with a keyhole heart. I call him Puck, Madame. Do you like him?

She put one finger to the keyhole, then: what a perfect conceit, the heart as lockbox.
Puck, and Feste—you do honor your Shakespeare, don’t you?

Puck is older than Shakespeare, Madame. And his elder brother is Pan,
with a private smile, a smile that showed his teeth, as he bowed her out of the backstage pantry that must, he instructed, be kept quite inviolate: she has put Otilie on that door, who seems glad enough to be there.

Through the chill of the hallway now comes the stream of guests, jolly in their unaccustomed rags. It is not to be a large group, only enough for “Chiaroscuro,” in Javier’s murmur, “a moving frieze.” Swathed up like a mummer, he looks oddly festive; strange, how a mask so often reveals more than it hides. “And I see Helmut has come,” which means her father has as well, removed from the club to lie in state, or nearly so, up in the room he had lately shared with Charlotte, herself uninvited to this evening’s affair; poor Charlotte. Her last letter was as bewildered as a child calling out from inside a locked room: Benjamin had come and gone like a lightning bolt from Chatiens, and his father was very grieved, and so unwell already that to grieve him further seems a shame—but poor Benjamin seemed caught up in his own tumult, will no one tell her what passes in the family? Charlotte, the widow-to-be, surely even she has guessed that outcome. What a mercy there is no child…. Isobel presses Javier’s hand while he passes from her side, Javier so grateful that Benny is safe, nearly as pleased as she herself. And if Helmut is here, does that mean Benny has come as well? As for Isidore, let him stay in splendid isolation; tomorrow, perhaps, she will send for the priest, though one would need to be at least a Pope to shrive that soul. Or perhaps he has repented on his own of his crimes against Benny, whatever wrong he did to send him headlong and away—