Wherever That Great Heart May Be
Part 2
"Returned at last, eh Donald? With what result?"
Donald told him that it was cold in the flat, that Captain Flanagan appeared tired, but that he declined any help. Wimpole frowned as he listened, then brought his hands together like a man shaping rough facts.
"His Confederate pride, I suppose. One of Mosby's men down in the valley. Saw hard things there I gather. Soldier of fortune afterwards, man without a country. He was in the Pacific for a time. They fight surprisingly often those islanders. Everyone thinks of them as idyllic, but those palm trees are literally coated with blood."
"Was he a general?" Donald asked.
"General? God's more like it--all that strength. Warriors worshipped him. At least until our British cousins took it into their heads to stop the fighting. After that? China, Russia for a spell. He's waiting on Sullivan Street for the next war."
"There was a girl," Donald said, all but blushing.
Wimpole looked at him as suspiciously as a Sunday-school teacher. "The princess? She's a Maori, do you know the word? New Zealander, the handsomest people on earth." He glanced away for a moment--his forehead tightened the way it did when he was pondering a difficult case. "She's here then, too? That makes it more complicated . . . . Here, tell you what, Donald. We'll leave them alone for the time being. Captain Flanagan is a proud man. I think it best if we leave him be. . . . Now, off with you, and get some sleep. There's a ship from Valparaiso coming in on the morning tide and I want you on hand to meet her."
Donald went down the stairs, bracing himself for Mr. Bem. He was on the bottom step this time, prancing in the cold, his coat collar pulled up over his face like a visor.
"Well, have you the rent. I didn't think so. Phony Flanagan at it again. A bounty jumper, did he tell you that? Enlisted with the Virginians for a bonus, then deserted and did the same on the Federal side. Out west after that. Killed a woman in California just for the thrill. A lynch mob was hard on his heels and he had to flee across the Sierras during a blizzard. So he's broke then? No pity there. And that whore? Does he still have that yellow whore he found out in Frisco? A fine thing Mr. Wimpole is doing sending a boy to associate with whores."
He sniggered into his coat sleeve, then cuffed Donald's ear so he would listen. "He won't get away with this. You go back there tomorrow and tell him no more of his sordid tricks, understand?"
Donald couldn't sleep that night; at dawn, he raced to the ship, tore through his business with her, then ran as fast as he could to Sullivan Street. A thaw had set in, the snow was melting, and the gutters and drains were alive with bright, gurgling sound.
It was much as the first time. Again, the shy climbing of the stairs. Again, the unlocked door. Again, the exotic richness of the scent, the damp of the room, the candle and the dark. This time the mat was empty, and it was a moment before Donald made the two of them out in the corner by the wash basin. Flanagan had his cape thrown back over his shoulders halfway down his arms; behind him, the girl was soaping his back with a large sponge. He didn't seem to be enjoying this--he winced every time she touched him, and cursed in a whisper that was too low for Donald to hear.
"I've come again," Donald said, feeling foolish. "I've come to . . . to see if anything can be done."
There was a quick movement at the edge of the candlelight--in a moment Flanagan's cape was back over his shoulders and the girl had stepped around so she stood immediately to his left. Her arm, what little Donald could see of it, seemed wrapped around his waist, but the effect was less tender than forced.
"You're not needed here," Flanagan said.
"Mr. Bem--"
"Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow."
He said these words with peculiar emphasis--precisely, as if wanting to make sure Donald heard. The girl, too. While she didn't say anything, her look, her way of holding herself, seemed intended to convey a message across the room. There was coyness in it--again, the mocking tilt of her head, the parted lips--but that couldn't be right, because there was desperation in it, too--the helpless, beseeching quality of her smallness against his strength.
The truth was, Donald didn't know what to think. Remembering what Mr. Wimpole had told him, he could see in Flanagan the proud, exiled hero of a thousand adventures--how savage warriors could have found his strength worthy of worship. Seeing the girl, seeing the alert way she held herself, her high cheekbones, the dark intensity of her stare, he could picture her as the descendant of a noble race, bearer of their secrets, heir to their throne. Then, not a second later, he thought of what Mr. Bem had told him, and it was as if their features had turned over. He could see the beaten fleshiness of Flanagan's jowls, his listlessness, the bottle of wine lying empty by his feet--these things, and a sluttish quality to the girl he hadn't noticed before, how tightly she pressed against him, the looseness of her robe, the high, teasing arch of her hips there beneath.
Could both Wimpole and Bem be right? It was a new thought to him, and it was much later before he could put it into words, but this was the moment he first began to sense it--that opposite stories could be true, not in a literal way, but by the complicated light and dark intertwining in which most truth resides.
"Out and be damned with you!" Flanagan yelled.
He lashed out his leg--the wine bottle went shattering apart. Frightened, Donald was turning to go when there was a sudden motion on the curved line where the girl's hip nestled against Flanagan's leg; whether Flanagan himself had initiated the movement or the girl, it was impossible to say. They separated--their adjacent arms swung up in an oddly formal synchronization--and in the brief gap where Flanagan's sleeve pulled away from the girl's, Donald caught a glimpse of a smooth metal chain binding them together.
"No, not a chain--I saw at once I was mistaken. It was rattan or hemp, something fibrous. Do you know those Chinese handcuffs they sell in the novelty stores? It was like those, except inconceivably thicker and more binding--it seemed woven of sinew. Neither of them realized I'd seen it, at least I don't think so. By the time I let myself out the door their arms had come down again and they stood as close together as before. . . . I ran down to the street, all but screaming. After the darkness, everything was so startlingly clear."
Flanagan was keeping the girl against her will. The squalor, their closeness on the mat, the cell-like dampness of the room. These should have tipped him off first, and if not these, then Flanagan's gruff manner and the meek posture of the girl. The searching look Donald had caught in her eyes had been meant for him after all--he'd been a fool not to catch it sooner. She was captive and handcuffed and in danger, used God knows how, and it was like the books he had read about beautiful princesses being held captive by evil knights; he had an explanation for it all and so knew at last what role he was meant to play.
In theory. As to method, he had no idea at all. There was no use telling Mr. Wimpole--his disposition was far too sunny to believe stories of slavery. And there was no use telling Mr. Bem--he would only snigger, rub his hands together in delight. Whatever had to be done to rescue the girl, he would have to do on his own.
His plans, when he formed them, were both simple and ludicrous. In the morning he went to a ship chandlery near the docks and bought a sharp rigger's knife, then returned to his rooming house and took a coat from his landlady's closet. That night after work he walked to Sullivan Street and sat on the curb staring up at their window. Once it grew darker--when he was sure Flanagan was asleep--he would tiptoe up the stairs, crawl across the floor to them, cut the handcuffs with the rigger's knife, wrap the girl in the overcoat, and silently, ever so silently, lead her back out the door to safety.
The hardest part of this was the waiting. Their window was lit by a greasy yellow glow, and Donald didn't dare start out until it disappeared. In the meantime, the cold had come back, and it started snowing. A gang of Tammany toughs lurched past on the sidewalk toting a keg of beer, singing and shouting at the top of their lungs. Across the street the immigrant family was singing and shouting, too, even louder, and it was a long time before the voices faded and the lights in the tenement went out.
The light on the top floor was last to darken. Donald waited a few minutes to make sure, then--waving his arms about to restore circulation--walked across the street to the stoop, edged himself through the entrance, and started on tiptoes up the stairs.
He made it to the third floor without anyone stopping him. He pressed the door open, keeping himself to the inside of the sill, then, like a timid swimmer afraid of the water, stepped carefully into the blackness of the room.
At first he thought it was total--that he would have to do his rescuing in the dark. Gradually, though, his eyes adjusted, and he realized there was a milky light filtering in from the gaslight on the street. Where the paleness was thickest, matching it with its own whiteness, was the rattan mat. On its middle, nestled together like light and dark spoons, lay Flanagan and the girl.
In the silence, the only sound was the discordant rhythm of their breathing--the girl's quick and gentle; Flanagan's hoarser, more difficult. Timing his footsteps to its rattle, Donald edged his way clockwise around the room, his back tight against the wall, his hands sweating despite the chill, fear balled in his stomach like a cold, heavy stone.
On his fourth circuit, he finally found the courage to break away and crawl across the floor toward them on his hands and knees. A moment before bumping into it, he saw Flanagan's leg--it was long and log-like and he had to ease himself around to get to the girl. Before, imagining his rescue, he had pictured her as fully awake, waiting there with the handcuffs exposed ready to cut, her eyes warm with gratitude and admiration. Now, coming up to her, he saw something that startled him--that she was sleeping, sleeping soundly; that she didn't have on her silk robe, but that it was pushed down over the arm that joined Flanagan's and the rest of her was naked.
She lay on her back, her free arm under her head as pillow, her legs apart and slightly drawn back. Without the robe, her breasts seemed even larger than they had under it--her nipples were finger-like and brown. Below them, her ribs fell away into a waist as tight and firm as a collar, and below that was the unexpected black richness of her hair.
The suddenness of it, the lushness of what he had always thought of as so tiny, the ready, easy way she lay with her legs outspread. It fascinated and repelled him at the same time, the emotions mixed so tightly it was impossible to say which he felt. He forced himself to look at her again, trying to master his fear, but then there was a press of air on his neck and he tried to roll away from it and a hand was grabbing him hard on the wrist--grabbing him and pulling him sideways and down.
"Not a word!" Flanagan hissed. "Not a word or we're lost!"
The warning was hardly needed--Donald's throat tightened too violently to emit any sound at all. Flanagan forced him down onto the mat near the girl's legs, but not touching them; her arm, wrapped by the robe, moved restlessly, then settled back into its position against Flanagan's side.
Flanagan watched it like a man eyeing a cobra until it stopped; his eyes, when he turned back to Donald, were bloodshot and desperate. "Thank God you've come!" he whispered. "There's no time now. You have to leave immediately."
Donald's arm hurt and he tried twisting away, but Flanagan's fingernails were sunk too deep. He pulled until his lips touched Donald's ear, and the sound came more from their motion than any sound.
"Go to the authorities. The police, the city constables. Tell them Flanagan, Captain Flanagan of the Second Virginia. In bonds, understand? In bonds!"
Donald twisted again, and this time the rigger's knife fell from his pocket onto Flanagan's chest. Flanagan saw it, grabbed for it before Donald, then--with a lifting, plunging motion--pressed it back into Donald's hand.
"No good, understand? A spell--unseverable. I made her love me, thought I could spurn. Auckland, Papua, Shanghai . . ." His eyes slanted toward the fabric at their arms. "A devil, understand? A devil! Go now and fetch help."
It was like the world had turned upside down, upside down and inside out, and Donald felt dizzy in it, ready to obey automatically without thinking. He took a final quick glance at the place their wrists joined--saw the silk robe above the handcuffs, noticed how the tubelike cords of Flanagan's arm seemed merged with the delicate brown sinews of hers--and then Flanagan was shoving him with his free hand, whispering "Go!" and shoving him, and Donald was crawling across the floor again and feeling for the wall and bolting out the door and racing down the stairs toward what seemed, compared to what he had been immersed in, the restorative coldness of the gaslit night air.
"Shivering. Shivering uncontrollably. My shirt soaked through with sweat. My heart, too--pounding away like a piston. I fell on the pavement and lay there puking like someone escaped from drowning. Ran all the way back to my rooming house . . . twenty blocks . . . ripped my clothes off, got under the covers and slept exhausted until noon."
Whether it was the memory of this, the shadow effect of all those years, the hard discipline of telling, my grandfather's voice trailed off here, and he hugged himself as if the chill's intensity still clutched him. It was a long time before either of us said anything. A girl sailed past us on a red scooter; across the avenue, two men were arguing outside a bar. I trusted him to give his stories their proper end, but he just stared out from our bench toward the traffic, until it became too much for me and I felt like the boy lost there in the darkness and I had to break in.
"What happened when you brought the police?"
"The police?" He glanced at me with a weary expression--for a moment, I felt the separation of our years. "In the morning, in the daylight, it was all so . . . so complicated. It was hard separating out the different strands. I thought about going. I remember walking all the way to the precinct house. But it was one thing I couldn't do--expose that mystery to their obtuseness. What crime had been committed? They would have laughed me right out the door.
"You mean you didn't go back?"
Grandfather nodded. "That same afternoon when I finished work. I walked over to Sullivan Street and went up the stairs as calmly as a delivery man bringing the ice. The door was open when I got there, the curtains thrown back. An old Negro woman was mopping up the room. She didn't know about any captain or any princess. She'd come to clean up for the new tenants, and other than that she knew nothing."
My bus approached, but I let it sail past, just as I had ignored the past dozen. In the warmth of the afternoon sun, sitting there beside the man I respected most in the world, in the grip of his story, it would have taken a deliberate act of violence to wrench myself away.
"That Flanagan man," I said. "He must have been lying."
"You think so? Of course there was the chain."
"A perversion. They were playing a game with you."
"A game?" Grandfather tilted his head as if politely considering it. "Ah well, perhaps."
And it was then I realized for Grandfather an answer didn't matter--that for him the important thing was that he could continue to marvel at humanity after eighty long years; still find the world, for all his knowing, an enigma.
"You should have gone to your friend Melville," I said, half as a joke. "He would have been the one to explain what it meant."
My grandfather managed a smile now, and stretched his arms expansively apart, throwing what remained of his chill toward the sun. "You know, it's funny about Mr. Melville. There by the hold, the two of us. He looked at the money I'd handed him, stared at it for a long time, then tossed it back to me like a boy throwing a ball, keeping the key. He opened the hatch, motioned me in after him, and started checking things off on his pad as if nothing had happened. He told me a story over his shoulder while he worked--his voice was deep as a barrel. It was about the frigate United States back in the forties, a mate he knew who would challenge the hands to race him up the mast, how he perched there on the sky-sail like an eagle until one morning off Hatteras . . ."
Grandfather laughed here, caught himself and shook his head with both hands as if bringing it back under control. "So many stories!" he said. "Stories, stories, stories! But never mind them for now. Your bus will be along. Hold my hand for a moment and then you can go."
He took my right hand with his, and held it longer than usual, and stretched with his left toward something I couldn't see, something I could only guess at from the inward look of his eyes, his slow nod of acceptance. His left hand closed, the empty hand closed, and what I think it was taking was the outstretched hands of the strong ones who lived in him so vividly, the men and women he'd known as a boy, the ordinary and famous, the heroes and villains, those whose hands had touched the hands of people who were alive two hundred years ago in the brave splendid exaggeration of America's start.
I can feel the warmth of that hand--now, as I sit here, I can feel my grandfather's curiosity and attention flow as a current up my wrist. I extend that hand and it's as if I can touch him there beside me on the bench, and then I extend my left hand like he did and touch . . . well, my own children are grown now, busy in a shrunken world that cares only for literalness and ascertainable fact. But that's all right. Calloused, bruised, close now to trembling, the hand is there for the grasping, and one day, no matter how difficult and far, a brave heart will take it, the link will be re-established, the current flow on.
Stories! Stories, stories, stories!