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Page 39.

Marianne realized she must be careful not to exceed the intellectual capacity of these simple, brainwashed people. She shook her head. “Politics meant nothing to her. She was just a very kind elderly woman full of stories. Anyway, this French count and his wife came looking for furs and other rich things, and Auntie gave me to them because they lacked a daughter. They came to adopt a little boy, but he proved to be feeble-minded. They didn’t want to leave empty handed, so they settled for me.” What more to tell them? Marianne fell silent, thinking of her life—a story of dire poverty one day, great wealth the next—adopted, living in a chateau in Alsace or a mansion in Paris or a palace in Provence. Her new family also owned a chalet in Davos; bungalow in Cannes, factories in Marseille, other industrial interests in Madrid, Turin, Vienna, and even Canada. But she always wanted to know who her real father was, and that hunger tormented her all these years. Knowing the jealousy it might raise, she glossed over her wealth.

“I’ll bet they settled for a girl, but you made them happy,” Gino said.

“You have three strapping sons,” Catherine said. “You accomplished something there.” You hoore, was the uncoupled and unspoken caboose of her sentence. Marianne could taste her aunt’s New England Puritan (even though Catholic) disapproval, but she was used to being smeared in the press day by day. She had endured it for many years. It was a passing cloud, like weather. “Well,” Catherine said, reflecting on the unspoken tale of infamous Cinderella wealth without any particular feeling for history or for the visitor’s sufferings, the loss of her mother, any of it. Marianne did not hold it against her. She had known many persons of narrower experience in her time, and sometimes they even managed to quarry more richness out of a small life than some worldlier persons managed to extract over many time zones and exotically named seas or far locales. “We weren’t exactly well off. My brother—your father, if it’s true what you claim—managed to scrimp and save and put himself through two years at Connecticut Teachers’ College. It was the Depression, you know. He loved engineering. There were no jobs before the war, but he managed to get something in a clock factory down along the Quinnipiac River. The factory burned down years ago now, I forget, when, Gino?”

Gino’s hands twitched dutifully. “Oh, I’d say 1975 at the latest.”

“Gino says 1975,” Catherine told Marianne as though people did not hear Gino when he spoke—although Gino had built an impressive business with those big hands and preoccupied eyes.

Marianne nodded from her seat beside Frankie in the front. “With so many years gone by, so much evidence is washed away.”

“Washed away by time,” Frankie said.

“We all get washed away,” Catherine said, and Gino nodded, giving a twitch of the hands, tapping bent fingers together, as if playing a chord on some invisible tiny accordion.

“I would like to know what kind of man he was. Or is. And where he is.”

Catherine looked at her oddly. “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him since right after the war. He came out to visit with a woman he said he had married. Nice looking young gal, I can’t remember her name or even what she looked like. Something fishy about the whole thing, but I could never put my finger on it.” If Catherine was a liar, she was good at it, Marianne thought.

“Did you and your brother have a disagreement?”

Catherine shrugged. “We always fought, but all siblings do. No, it was something else. I never figured it out. He had something to hide. Didn’t he, Gino?”

Gino nodded, gave that steepled-fingertips twitch.

“Gino agrees. There was so much going on during the war.” Catherine shook her head. “I don’t think we ever knew the half of it.”

“I’d appreciate anything you can tell me.”

Catherine said: “We were all sworn to secrecy. We knew he was in Africa for a while, then in London, and finally in San Francisco. My mom and I, rest her soul, we were the only ones who knew, and we were told he could be killed if anyone found out he was doing important work for the Government, so we kept our mouths shut. That’s all I know.”

Nothing but secrets, Marianne thought, and you are still keeping your mouth shut. How well they must have hidden it all these years. So many dark secrets had been born in that vast modern Iliad called World War II.

Catherine made a wry mouth, thinking dreamily of her memories. “He was always a strong, handsome boy. The girls really liked him.”

“Good looking,” Gino said—nod, twitch, and all.

“A handsome man,” Catherine said.

They drove slowly downhill through narrow streets. “This is where the factory was where Uncle Tim worked as a boy, the clock place,” Frankie said, pulling up on a licorice-colored pad of wet asphalt edged with trash and weeds. “A bunch of family members were lucky enough to get jobs there during the Depression and then after World War II.”

A pea-soup East River flowed past. Raindrops pelted glassy spaces amid lacy foam circles on the river surface. In the hills huddled tight little New England houses waiting for the winter cold. The houses looked as if they were shivering behind their black windows and lace curtains. Along the river street were spots of color, where a dry cleaner and a liquor store and a check cashing place and a few other businesses advertised, colorful neon in the drabness of rain.

Catherine said: “I sometimes took the trolley down here with Tim and Sally. She was his big high school fling, Sally Levesque, nice looking redhead with pale skin and healthy lungs, if you know what I mean. Sweet girl, really, but all the other girls were jealous of her.”

“Does she still live around here?”

“Sally?” Catherine shook her head and made a condolent mmm sound. “Poor Sally. She and Tim stopped writing to each when he was in London during the war. She ended up marrying a cop from West Haven and having a couple of kids, and last I heard she died of breast cancer in a rest home over in Branford. Isn’t that right, Gino?”

“Right. Breasts,” Gino said, nodding. His eyes looked sad at the irony. Instead of twitching, he sketched elegant loops in the air with his hands from his chest to his belly.

“Timmy always had something against his home town,” Catherine said. “He took off when the war took him away, and I don’t think he ever looked back. Me and the other kids kind of resented it, to be honest, but then he was the smart one, the educated one, and it was hard to think he wasn’t looking down on us a little bit.” She softened. “We were four of us girls, including my mother, and now I am the only one left. We were sworn to lifelong secrecy, and we knew exactly nothing to start with. We’ve kept our mouths shut all these years. I hope you find him, hon. Drop me a line if you do.” A tear rolled down her cheek. “I might just want to visit him if he’s still alive someplace. Tell him I won’t ask any questions.”