He could fly there in a few hours-Vienna was farther-not the end of the world. He wouldn’t have to cross the barbed wires and guard dogs in the movies of his youth. Just show a passport, with its harmless new name, and join the line of German tourists waiting for the bus. In and out. See where Kafka lived. Wenceslas Square, which wasn’t a square but a long street. He knew because he’d seen the Soviet tanks on television last year, lined up against the students.
What would they say to each other? Where did you go that night? How was it arranged? Why didn’t-? But what was the point? Everything he wanted to know, that drew him, was further away than Prague, back irretrievably on 2nd Street. That was where they still lived, in some dream of the past. It was what he couldn’t tell Molly, because he hadn’t known it then himself. He was afraid of ghosts. They were too fragile. If you disturbed them, they vanished. If he saw a nice old man living with a Czech wife somewhere west of Vienna, his father would be gone for good.
The house was quiet; even vigilant Mrs Caudhill in the ground-floor flat had gone to bed. It was an ugly Victorian redbrick, one of four whose bay windows stuck out like prows in a row of modest Regency terrace houses, and he’d been lucky to find it. A room at the top back, “overlooking the garden,” which turned out to be a birdbath and a clump of rhododendrons that never bloomed. When he opened his door and switched on the desk lamp, still tiptoeing from the climb up the dim stairs, he could see everything in a glance: a bookcase of boards and bricks with a record player in the middle, a daybed and a cast-off easy chair, a desk with typewriter and stacks of index cards, an electric fire in front of the bricked-up fireplace. He flicked the fire on, rubbing his hands. It was always cold in England, and they put the water pipes outside the houses, where they could freeze.
He sat down, still in his suit, then got up to make some tea on the gas ring. It was only when he went over to look out the window that he realized he was pacing, jittery and caged. He wouldn’t sleep. Anxiety had sopped up the alcohol, leaving his mind too sharp to rest. He thought of rolling a joint, but that would run the risk of an unwelcome thought floating in, and he didn’t want to think. Everyone smoked in Vietnam because it was surreal and then you couldn’t tell the difference. Now he needed to do something, crossword puzzles or solitaire, to keep his attention on the immediate.
The kettle whistle startled him and he hurried to make the tea. Why now? He sat back down in front of the electric fire, counted the orange bars, and sipped from the mug. He could will himself to be calm. Read something. As long as he didn’t think. Then he glanced out the window and saw the top branches of the leafless tree and 2nd Street came flooding back, racing through his body until he actually felt memory, a tingle in his fingers on the cup. Everything he’d pushed away at Jules. Scene after scene. Had she thought he was indifferent? That it wasn’t still there, just waiting? Welles and his stupid gavel, rattling ashtrays for the cameras. The swarm of hats outside the window, drinking coffee. His mother all dressed up for the charities benefit. The pearls flung backward on the dented car roof.
He stopped. That was the other thing. She’d left her apartment, checked into the Mayflower, and jumped. That was all. A girl at Garfinkel’s. But before that, what? Discussion groups about capitalism? Saving the world from fascism? What had made her come forward, unraveling her lethal thread? What did the committee know, anyway? His father’s judges. One of them, it turned out, had been a member of the Klan, convinced the Communists were organizing Negroes. It was there in the index cards. He glanced over at the desk. Indifferent? Then why the stacks of cards for Wiseman, the trail back? Larry had known instinctively that the research was a pose. He was studying the mechanics of history to find out something else. Had his father gone there that night, a last stop at the hotel? And now the one person who could tell him had sent a message and he sat with a mug of tea, too afraid to ask.
The room was warm enough for him to change now, and he went over to the closet to put his jacket away. He could read something until he fell asleep. Trollope, maybe, who’d probably seen houses like this going up and thought they were handsome. But his hand fell on an omnibus Stevenson, and there was memory again, Kidnapped in the club chair. He took it out anyway, a gesture of refusing to be intimidated, and threw it on the bed. He’d never read Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, just seen the movie, and that seemed safe enough. Then he realized, with a sighing irony, that he wasn’t going to escape it. Who was that, after all, but his father, one person, then another? Except that Dr. Jekyll couldn’t help himself, once he’d taken the medicine.
