Mystery

“That’s why you visited me in the hospital,” Tom said. Feelings too strong to be recognized froze him to the moonlit grass. He felt as if his body were being pulled in different directions, as though ice and fire had been poured into his head.

“I love you,” the old man said. “I’m very proud of you, and I love you, but I know I don’t deserve your love. I’m a rotten father.”

Tom stepped toward him, and von Heilitz somehow crossed the ground between them without seeming to move. The old man tentatively put his arms around Tom, and Tom stood rigid for a second. Then something broke inside him—a layer like a shelf of rock he had lived with all his life without ever recognizing—and he began to sob. The sob seemed to come from beneath the shelf of rock, from a place that had been untouched all his life. He put his arms around von Heilitz, and felt an unbelievable lightness and vividness of being, as if the world had come streaming into him.

“Well, at least I told you,” the old man said. “Did I botch it?”

“Yeah, you talked too much,” Tom said.

“I had a lot to say!”

Tom laughed, and tears ran down his face and dampened the shoulder of von Heilitz’s coat. “I guess you did.”

“It’s going to take both of us a while to adjust to this,” von Heilitz said. “And I want you to know that I think Victor Pasmore probably did his best—he certainly didn’t want you to grow up like me. He tried to give you what he thought was a normal boyhood.”

Tom pulled back and looked at the old man’s face. It no longer looked masklike, but utterly familiar.

“He did a pretty good job, actually, given the circumstances. It couldn’t have been easy for him.”

The world had changed completely while remaining the same: the difference was that now he could understand, or at least begin to understand, details of his life that had been inexplicable except as proof of his oddness and unsuitability.

“Oh, if you think you made a botch of it—” Tom said.

“Let’s go inside,” von Heilitz said.

Less than an hour later Tom was back in the lodge alone, waiting. When Lamont von Heilitz had learned that Tom wanted to return to the lodge to meet Sarah Spence, he had reluctantly let him go, with the promise that he would be waiting outside at one. Mrs. Truehart had gone to bed, and he and the old man had talked in soft voices about themselves, reliving their history. The conversation about Jeanine Thielman and Anton Goetz would have to wait, von Heilitz said, there were too many details to iron out, too many pieces of information to dovetail—there was a lot of it he still did not understand, and understanding would take more time than they had. “We have at least five hours in the air,” he told Tom. “Tim Truehart is flying us to Minneapolis, where we get our plane to Mill Walk. There’ll be time. When we land at David Redwing field, we should have everything worked out.”

“Just tell me the name,” Tom had pleaded.

Von Heilitz smiled and walked him to the door. “I want you to tell me the name.”

So, too restless to sit down, too nervous about Jerry Hasek to turn on any lights, Tom waited for Sarah, hoping that she had not already tried to find him at the lodge. In the end, he slipped outside and waited behind an oak tree set back from the track between her lodge and his.

He heard the sound of her feet landing softly on the beaten earth, but did not come out from behind the tree until he saw her white shirt glimmer in the darkness. Her face and arms, already tanned, looked very dark against the shirt and the darker blond of her hair. She was walking quickly, and by the time he stepped out on the track she was nearly abreast of him.

“Oh!”

“It’s me,” he said softly.

“You scared me.” She came nearer, seeming to sift through the darkness, and touched the front of his shirt.

“You scared me too. I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

“My double life takes up a lot of time—I had to go to the White Bear with Buddy and watch him get drunk.”

Tom remembered Buddy rubbing her back, and her own hand resting on Buddy’s. “I wish you didn’t have to have this double life of yours.”

She stepped closer to him. “You seem so jumpy. Is it about me, or this afternoon? You shouldn’t be insecure about me, Tom, and I think Jerry and his friends ran off. Ralph couldn’t find them after dinner.”

“Nappy got arrested,” Tom said. “Maybe they did take off. But it probably isn’t that. I’m going back to Mill Walk tonight. A lot of stuff is happening, and I just found out—well, I just learned something very important about myself. I feel kind of overloaded.”

“Tonight? How soon tonight?”

“In about an hour.”

She looked at him steadily. “Then let’s go inside.”

She put her arm around his waist, and together they began walking toward the almost invisible lodge. “How are you getting back? There aren’t any planes at night.”

“We’re going to Minneapolis,” he said.

“We?”

“Me and someone else. The Chief of Police has a little plane, and he’s taking us there.”

She tilted her head and looked up at him as they walked along.