The Final Judgment Read online

  On one side was a gradual hill; the other sloped to a rushing creek. The street itself was blacktop now, not gravel, but little else had changed. Caroline took the tree-lined road past white wooden homes from the 1800s, built when the area throve; the spired but austere church where town meetings were held; the yellow one-floor library that, from the sign in front, still kept eccentric hours at the whim of the librarian; the Masonic Hall, its wood frame dingy now, atop a knoll set back from the street. Less out of enthusiasm than from social necessity, Channing Masters had joined the lodge; Caroline still remembered her mother’s satirical imaginings of secret Masonic rituals, complete with antlers and women’s dresses and blood oaths against non-Masons. Channing had suffered this in silence.

  There was only one new structure—a mobile home—and little sign of commerce. The general store was boarded up now, its gas pump closed; Caroline imagined a convenience store and gas station on some more heavily traveled road.

  Where the street curved, abruptly crossing a bridge over the creek, she turned back. A faint air of depression hung above the town.

  Caroline returned to the room, called Brett, and asked her to go sailing on Lake Winnipesaukee. She was somehow not surprised when Brett said yes.

  The air was warm, breezy; Brett handled the tiller of the rented catboat easily, hair curling in the wind. Sailing seemed to change her. On the drive to Winnipesaukee she had been withdrawn. Now there was color in her face, a brightness to her eyes, and her movements were practiced yet instinctive. It was as though, like Caroline herself, physical action freed some part of her. There was a sensual quality Caroline had not seen in her.

  With the Vineyard house sold when Brett was an infant, Caroline knew, Channing would have taught his granddaughter to sail on Winnipesaukee. She seemed to know each inlet on the span of blue, to gaze at the forested hills around them with deep familiarity. Caroline guessed that the memories were good; when a sudden gust buffeted the sails, shooting a spray of water over Brett as she tacked, she grinned into the sunlight with sudden, surprising pleasure. Caroline decided to let her sail as long as she wished.

  It was not until close to two, after three hours on the water, that Brett and Caroline moored near Woodsman’s Cove.

  The air was humid now, the sun hot; Caroline drank from a can. “Cheap, watery American beer,” she said. “Perfect for a day like this.”

  They sat across from each other in the stern, gazing out at the water and the hills as the boat rocked fitfully at anchor. Holding her own can of beer, Brett tried to smile. But she seemed to have returned to the realm of fact, and tragedy; there was something muted but alert about her. Caroline waited for her to choose the moment.

  “How was it with the prosecutor?” Brett asked at length.

  Caroline considered her answer. “He’s short two things. Both critical. He can’t tie the knife to you or, more important, come up with a reason for you to kill your boyfriend.”

  “There isn’t any,” Brett said simply.

  To Caroline, she looked fragile again. “Would you have gone to California with him?” she asked.

  There was a flicker in Brett’s eyes. And then, to Caroline’s surprise, she said evenly, “I don’t think I would have.”

  “Was something wrong?”

  “Something big.” Brett looked at her directly now. “Sometimes it was like I never knew what James was thinking, or planning. He grew up protecting himself—he wasn’t used to being close. I could understand that. But it’s not a way to live.”

  Then why did you care for him? Caroline began to ask. But this was not a lawyer’s question. She realized that Brett was studying her with new attentiveness.

  “Why did you leave?” Brett asked. “Because no one ever talks about it.” She paused a moment, as if fearing to be tactless, then added, “Not about you, and not about your mother.”

  Caroline smiled faintly. “How very New England.”

  “How very repressed,” Brett said flatly. “Until you were all over our television, I hadn’t heard your name for years. And then there was Grandfather in his room, watching you run that trial and not saying a word to anyone. And my mother, tight-lipped and short-tempered.”

  Caroline’s shrug was meant to be dismissive. “Sometimes silence is only that. And absence, only absence.”

  Brett’s expression did not waver. “It’s not silence, Aunt Caroline. It’s something more. For Granddad and my mother.”

  Perhaps, Caroline thought, Brett was puzzling through her own relationship to this family, looking to Caroline for clues. She smiled briefly. “First you can drop the ‘Aunt Caroline’—it sounds like some menopausal dowager in a dreadful Broadway musical. ‘Caroline’ will do just fine. About our family, I suppose the best real answer is that I wanted to be independent and was absolutely certain that leaving was the only way. How anyone else felt about that I could only guess: I was twenty-two then and—apparently unlike you—didn’t give the feelings of others a great deal of thought.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I spent a year on Martha’s Vineyard.” Caroline made her tone casual, disinterested. “Then I went to San Francisco, enrolled in law school, and stayed. That’s all there is.”

  “But why San Francisco? Had you ever been there?”

  Caroline shook her head. “It just sounded pretty, and it seemed the farthest I could go.”

  “How did you get by?”

  “I worked. And my mother had left me a little money. From a life insurance policy.”

  Brett studied her for a time, as if torn between curiosity and her sense of Caroline’s reticence. Softly, she said, “I’ve never even seen a picture of your mother.”

  Caroline smiled slightly. “That’s hardly surprising. She’s been dead for thirty years.” She paused, disliking her own tone. More gently, she continued: “She was small and dark and very pretty. To a child, quite exotic.”

  Brett seemed to hesitate, perhaps at the look on Caroline’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said at last. “But you’re both this family mystery. All I know about your mother is that she was French and died in an accident.”

  Caroline was briefly quiet. But she found it easier to talk about her mother than herself. “French,” Caroline amended, “and Jewish. That was the first accident, and the one that made all the difference to her.”

  It was night; Caroline was nine or ten. Her mother had come to say good night. Surprised and pleased, Caroline had asked her to invent a story: lightly, with mock exasperation, Nicole had answered, “But I have no stories tonight.”

  She had been drinking, Caroline knew. She could tell from her breath, her levity of mood, an ever so slight increase in the difficulty of pronouncing English. Emboldened, Caroline answered, “Then tell me about your family. Your parents and brother.”

  All Caroline knew for certain was that they were dead. But in the darkness of her bedroom, Caroline felt her mother’s silence like a weight on her own chest. Nicole was utterly still.

  “Do you really wish to hear, Caroline?”

  Her mother’s voice was very clear now; the change of mood somehow frightened Caroline. But she could not refuse.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I do.”

  The room was quiet. “We lived in Paris,” Nicole said at last. “My father taught law at the university. My mother stayed home with my brother Bernard and me.” A pause, then a tone of irony. “I remember thinking that she spoke French rather strangely—she was Russian, not a citizen, and came to France in her teens. But at the time, my only feeling was a child’s embarrassment.

  “She was Jewish, as was my father. But his family was deeply French. Yes, we went to synagogue, observed the holidays, but otherwise I did not feel much different from the children of his faculty friends. Oh, a little different, perhaps—but certainly not threatened.” She paused, inquiring softly, “You understand about being Jewish, don’t you, Caroline? What happened during the war?”

  She nodded. Something beneat
h her mother’s question made Caroline reach for her hand.

  Her mother did not seem to notice. “When the Germans invaded,” she said quietly, “I was fifteen, and Bernard was twelve. Marshal Pétain became the head of a French puppet government. And I began to know what it was to be Jewish. By the time I was seventeen, I was wearing a Star of David. Under race laws passed not by Germans but by our fellow French.

  “My father protested the laws as immoral. When he lost his job at the university, a few friends telephoned to express their sympathy. No one came to call.

  “We never saw any of them again.”

  Caroline tried to imagine her mother isolated, her own family—Channing, Nicole, and Betty—ostracized. “What did you do?” she asked.

  “My father sold our home and possessions, and we moved to an apartment in the Jewish quarter of Paris. My sharpest memory is of our parents at the table in that darkened room—my father, small and mustached and alert; my brother as dark and bright-eyed as my father. Only my mother seemed gaunt and lost—she was Russian, after all. She had seen it all before.

  “Throughout 1942 there were roundups. Foreign Jews taken from their homes by French police or German soldiers, herded to detention points, and then shipped away by rail. To where, we never knew.

  “Still I hoped.” Nicole paused. “I idolized my father, you see. If he felt hope, then I did. We were French, after all. And what Father believed was that no government of France—even this one—would abandon its own citizens. If only out of pride.”

  Caroline watched her mother’s face in the moonlit room. It was opaque, unfeeling, as if she were reciting by rote a story of which she had grown tired.

  “When I was eighteen,” she went on, “they sent me to university. As if this act of normality would serve as my protection.

  “In a sense, it did.

  “One night after class, I found my brother Bernard waiting for me. There was to be a roundup of Jews; a former faculty friend of my father’s had heard this and sent word to warn him. So my father asked that I stay with a non-Jewish friend, Catherine.

  “I begged Bernard to come with me. But he had to go back.” Nicole’s tone was quiet with irony. “To let my parents know that he was safe.”

  Without knowing why, Caroline hugged herself.

  Her mother did not see this. She seemed hardly to know that Caroline was there. “I stayed with Catherine that night,” she went on. “But the next morning, I could not keep away.

  “The section in which we lived went back to medieval times—the streets were narrow and dark, cobblestone. I had turned the corner to the street before I saw a uniformed policeman, French, carrying a suitcase in each hand, and crying. I had never seen a policeman cry before. Behind him, with more policemen, were a straggling line of children and adults, dragging their suitcases with them.

  “At the end of the line were my father and mother and brother.

  “I waited for them to pass.

  “My mother never saw me. She looked straight ahead, one hand in Bernard’s, the other in my father’s. Tears ran down her face.

  “As they passed, my father spotted me at the edge of the street.

  “I started to speak, to reach out to him. Quietly, his lips formed the word ‘no’; he stared at me a second longer, to ensure that I obeyed, and then snapped his eyes away.

  “It was then I understood. My mother was not French, and my father would not leave her. Nor would Bernard.

  “I watched until they rounded the corner and disappeared.”

  Nicole’s voice stopped abruptly. In the silent room, Caroline imagined her own parents—Channing and Nicole—vanishing from sight. She found it hard to breathe.

  In a muffled voice, she asked, “What happened to you, Mama?”

  In the darkness, Nicole seemed to shrug.

  “Catherine’s father knew someone,” she finally answered. “I was sent to Le Chambon, in the Cévennes region. There was a tradition of resistance there—many of the farmers were Protestants, and their ancestors had suffered persecution.

  “For the rest of the war I stayed with a farmer family. They were very kind, as were the villagers. But all that time, I dreamed of my parents and Bernard. Wondered how and where they were. Prayed for them in whatever way seemed best.

  “After the war, I returned to Paris.

  “I worked as a translator for the Americans, badgered everyone I could for records of deportations, even rumors of my family.

  “Finally, I learned of them from a kind American legal officer….”

  Her mother stopped abruptly. There were tears in her eyes.

  Frightened, Caroline clasped her hand. “What, Mama?”

  Only then did Nicole look at her. Quite softly, she answered, “Your grandparents died at Auschwitz. As did the boy who would have been your uncle.”

  By instinct, Caroline reached out to hug her. But Nicole stopped her, staring intently into Caroline’s face until her own tears had vanished.

  “You are Jewish, Caroline. There is no government, no person, that can ever really be trusted. Please, remember that.”

  For a long time, Brett said nothing.

  They sat in silence, beers cupped in their hands, unnoticed. Brett seemed to study her. At length, she asked, “How was it that she married Grandfather?”

  Caroline collected her thoughts. “After his first wife died, having your mother, I think he was a little lost. So he left Betty with an aunt and uncle, and joined the Army Judge Advocate General Corps. In postwar Paris, his job was investigating war crimes by Germans for the Nuremberg tribunal.” Caroline finished quietly: “He was the ‘kind officer’ who told my mother about her parents. After learning that, she must have thought New Hampshire sounded quite safe. And my father had fallen in love with her.”

  Brett’s face filled with sympathy. “Do you think she loved him?”

  Caroline gazed past her, at the mountains. “My mother died when I was fourteen,” she said simply. “Too young for me to truly know.”

  Brett’s look remained soft, inquiring. “That must have been terrible for you.”

  More than you will ever guess. “It was hard.” A slight smile. “But then fourteen is a difficult age.”

  Brett was quiet for a time. To Caroline, watching her, it was almost tangible—Brett sorting the missing pieces of her family, wondering what corners of whose hearts she did not yet understand. But Caroline was a stranger to her, and Nicole a marker in a cemetery. Only Channing Masters was real.

  “When she died,” Brett finally asked, “how was it for Grandfather?”

  Caroline grasped the unspoken question: How was it that you could bring yourself to hurt him? As to this, at least, Caroline chose the truth.

  “Oh,” she said quietly, “I’m quite sure it broke his heart.”

  It was perhaps four; the sunlight slanted gently on the blue waters of the lake. Brett had fallen into a moody silence. But Caroline’s story seemed to have distracted her a little from the present. For this much Caroline was grateful.

  “Have you ever been married?” Brett asked.

  Caroline smiled. “Not even once.”

  “Doesn’t that ever get lonely?”

  Caroline considered her. Part of this curiosity must be Brett working out answers for herself: how much, Caroline wondered, does she talk to Betty now? “Not really,” she told Brett. “You get used to being your own companion. Of course, there’s still this idea that single women are supposed to feel barren, literally and figuratively. Especially,” she added with a sardonic twist, “if they compound their misery by being successful.”

  Brett tilted her head. “Then you never wanted children?”

  Caroline shrugged. “As a friend of mine once said, ‘I love my children too much already to give them a mother like me.’” She stopped herself; Brett deserved better. “Perhaps I would have liked that, Brett. But the things that you can’t help, you put out of your mind. It’s better that way.”

  Brett nod
ded, watching her more closely. It was clear she would ask nothing more.

  There was a first coolness in the air, sun dying. Caroline pulled a windbreaker over her shoulders.

  “Once this is over,” she asked, “what will you do?”

  The question seemed to startle Brett. “I don’t know,” she said. “Nothing’s real to me now. Before, I wanted to write. Short stories, novels.”

  It might be good, Caroline thought, to get her talking about a future, something outside James Case. “Why writing?”

  “Because I seem to have talent—at least my teachers think I do. And getting a straight job, like in a company, is nothing I can see right now. Though I’ve thought about getting a master’s so I can teach writing.” Brett’s voice warmed. “Writing seems like the only job where what you think and feel really matters.”

  Caroline nodded. “Have you written much?”

  “A lot.” A small smile. “I always have. Even when I was small I made stories up all the time—imagining people, places, things I’d never seen in life. My dad used to say I didn’t know real from unreal—” Brett glanced quickly at Caroline.

  Caroline pretended not to notice. “How did your parents feel?”

  Brett was quiet for a moment. “About that they were fine—especially Dad. And Granddad always said a writer needed a place—like Faulkner in Yoknapatawpha County. And that I had a place. Right here.”

  “Well,” Caroline said mildly, “it’s certainly convenient. For everyone.”

  Brett smiled a little. “I understood that part of it—wanting me here—all too well. But then my grandfather helped raise me: hiking, or homework, or just talking about books or writing. Most afternoons, when I came home, Granddad would be waiting. To do something, or just to hear about my day.” Her smile faded. “I understand that, still, even if it’s not convenient. It was like I was the one who was left for him.”

  Caroline felt surprise; without warning, Brett could move from ingenuous to acute. “What do you mean?”