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Going back to Washington was like going home. Although I had only spent a summer and a few other short lived visits there, the memories had been intense enough to push aside other places where I had spent more time. I still remember the sense of awe I felt the first time I saw the Pentagon and the Washington Monument. I was in the back of Dewey's van coming up to meet Stokely my second year of Duke. We were chatting away, when all of a sudden I stopped in mid-sentence. This was just after Watergate, and the cynicism towards the powerful had only just begun to take hold in a national consciousness burned by Vietnam and the assassinations of its leaders. I was still easily impressed by the trappings. Now I am more impressed by the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam slab. Somehow they can still inspire a spine tingling awe for the accomplishments and fates of individuals caught up in a vision of their own creation.
This time I had an experience which gave me the same sour taste you get when you read in the paper that some two bit baseball player has renegotiated as a free agent for $5 million or 35,000 people were killed by handguns in a single year or some politician indicted for embezzling has been reelected in a landslide.
I had a Haitian taxi driver in from Dulles. Not surprisingly given his origins, he had little time for politicians and was unimpressed by Washington. We spoke in french. He quoted Rousseau: Entre les paroles et l'action il y a quinze kilomètres et dix ans." (Between words and action there are fifteen kilometers and ten years.) He had a good sense of humour, and without going into the gory details of his life, I think he needed one.
We were sitting in line at the toll booth on the freeway when abruptly we heard loudspeakers behind us saying "Get out of the way!" My cab driver, who was in the midst of paying the toll, was waved on by the toll collector in a gruff voice. "Forget it pal, pull aside." He hurriedly went through and pulled over on the apron. A motorcade then came blowing through the toll booth at 40 miles an hour. A phalanx of motorcycles led three escort cars and three stretch limos with darkened glass, followed by the same sequence of vehicles--a power sandwich moving through the capital's digestive tract at high speed.
There was a cop standing over to the side. I asked him out the window.
"Who was that?", expecting at least a Vice President or Senator.
He looked bored. "I dunno. Some candidate."
A candidate. Not even an elected official of the world's greatest democracy. I'm sure Mussolini or Papa Doc Duvalier would not have been disappointed with such a hermetically sealed delivery, isolated from the teeming masses yearning to breathe free.
The mass of gargantuan buildings on the way into town suddenly looked less impressive to me.
I decided that in spite of being in the center of the nation's political life, I would refrain from discussing politics. Luckily Stokely was not coming, though I always appreciated his candor. In the hospital the afternoon of their visit, somehow we had blundered onto the subject, taboo in the atmosphere of political correctness where paradoxically it was incorrect to discuss anything having to do with politics. Stokely had referred to the new President as a lying sack of shit, and he and Tess had had a slanging match which got vicious while I watched from the sidelines. Eventually I had to intervene by changing the subject.
Tess was a committed idealist, partly because it was her nature and partly because she had actually been witness to an unpleasant alternative during her stay in Sri Lanka with a Tamil family. There she had seen people's heads beaten in for their political beliefs. She took it personally, whereas Stokely was more cynical and less sensitive.
The Aunts' mansion in Georgetown was isolated from the political hubbub of the capital, tucked away across the dividing line of Rock Creek Park. The taxi came up Massachussetts Avenue to Dupont Circle, and then went on P Street towards the enclave of Georgetown. The numbers of the streets started to climb along with the house prices. Washington's street system was astoundingly logical and simple. This was perhaps because the man who designed it was named l'Enfant. The grid was like a kindergarten class agenda--the alphabet going from South to North, the numbers from East to West, and the names of States running diagonally. When I lived there I used to think that it represented America perfectly, a great big overgrown kid fascinated by its playthings and the great outdoors.
As we passed over Rock Creek, the memories of the summer I spent with Stokely came flooding back. There to the left was Rose Park where I used to go after work for tennis and basketball. Further along was the corner store at 28th and P where I bought croissants that would make a Frenchman proud.
The townhouses in Georgetown reeked of wealth. In a city that was eighty per cent black, Stokely used to say that the letters NW of the northwest quarter of the city stood for Nobody but Whites. Noone was too politically correct then, and especially not Stoke.
On 29th Street we turned up towards Dumbarton Oaks, and my Haitian friend deposited me outside the front door of 1819 Q Street.
"Pas mal," he said, giving me a thumbs up and a smile as he drove away.
I rang the bell. I could have actually gone around the side, since I knew where the key was hidden. I thought this might be presumptuous though, so I waited patiently and only rang the bell a polite three times. Finally I heard footsteps, and the door opened.
It was Tess, and she came out to hug me.
"Evan!" she said excitedly, as if she had been waiting there all day.
There are different gradations of hugs. Hers sent a subliminal message, lingering a few extra seconds, enough time to make me aware of her breathing and her closeness.
She smelled like she did at the hospital--Ivory soap, a trace of lavender, and fresh air. Her cheek was warm and dry. I was conscious of the form of her body against my chest.
My own reaction surprised me.
"Tess! It's good to be here," I mumbled, as I held her back from me and we looked each other over.
"You look...so much better!" she exclaimed.
"I'm trying to make a comeback. At least my nose is back to a normal colour and the crutches are gone," I said, remembering how I looked at Thanksgiving. I returned the compliment. "You look great yourself. That bike riding in the mountains does something for you," I added.
She beamed. "Come on up. Everyone's here."
The ground floor of 1819 was more or less unused. Perhaps during Helmut's day the anteroom had been used to receive guests, but now there was a dimly lit entrance hall with two rooms off to the right, one large room to the left, and a room at the end now used as a laundry room and workshop for the gardener. Even on a sunny day it was dark and musty. On the second floor was the living room, dining room, kitchen, and library. As we came up the stairs, we were greeted by the welcoming committee--Stokely and Tess's parents Jeb and Laura, Uncle Johann and his wife Ilse (a genuine German), and Aunt Edith.
After a warm greeting from Jeb and Laura whom I had seen at Christmas, I had a slightly less effusive welcome from the others. Then, as during the whole weekend, I noticed a pall which hovered over the family, undercurrents of negative feelings which swirled uneasily around them in invisible eddies. This had not been the case the previous times I spent with them. My memories had always been of the clinking of glasses and easy going comraderie at oyster roasts at Valhalla. Then of course the Aunts were alive, or at least conscious.
Tess took me up to see Aunt Lillian. She lay on her bed in a room on the third floor, a waxen figure who somehow reminded me of the preserved body of Lenin in his Moscow mausoleum. Helmut's money had allowed the best of medical minds to construct a high tech hospital room, and the steady rhythmic pulsing of the machines carried out a concert for a solitary audience unable to appreciate it.
I decided I wanted to spend as little time as possible in the house. I suggested to Tess that we spend the afternoon going to museums. I had the Air and Space Museum in mind but she had a better idea.
"Why don't we go to the Smithsonian? There at least we can visit old Helmut, in a manner of speaking."
Stokely had told me in the seventh grade that his great grandfather's portrait hung there, but I had never seen it.
On the way over we began talking of her family.
"So it looks like they're jockeying for position." I ventured.
"That is what it seems," she said sadly. "Johann and Edith are aligned against my parents, but I really blame Ilsa. She is the one who wants the money most of all. Everything else is secondary and she could care less about whether or not Valhalla or 1819 stay intact."
She shook her head. "We have been dreading the day that Lillian dies for a long time. When it finally happens I'm afraid that life as we used to know it will be finished."
"No more wavejumping?" I asked half in jest.
She shook her head. "That's the worst case, but it's possible." She sighed.
The thought depressed me.
"Old Helmut would be turning in his grave if he thought that Valhalla would be turned into a development, if he even could imagine what a development was. That's progress for you." Tess was definitely the sort who would be happy if the world had not advanced past the horse and buggy.
The red brick building of the Smithsonian housed the history of those who had helped push the progress that Tess resisted.
She was nonetheless proud of Helmut's accomplishments and had obviously been there many times. She led me straight to his portrait which was housed in the Technology section. Underneath it was his name and the title Pioneer of Data Processing, along with a paragraph about his life.
The portrait showed a man with thick eyebrows and an even thicker moustache. His eyes burned unblinkingly as they had for seventy years, watching mutely as the world changed around him. I tried to imagine the sheer willpower which lay within this man, a drive which had propelled him and others like him to alter the landscape and the direction of his adopted country.
I thought it the right moment to tell Tess of my visit to UBI.
"Whatever happened to that stuff of Helmut's we found in the safety deposit box in Richmond?" I asked.
She looked startled. "You mean in college? Didn't we tell you?" she asked.
I shook my head. "If you did I forgot."
"Well, Stokely had the documents framed and presented to Lillian and Mary the following Christmas. We also gave them the jewelry and the watch, but Aunt Mary insisted that we keep them. Stokely kept the watch, though it was stolen from his house a couple of years ago. I still have the necklace and the ring. They belonged to Lillian and Mary's mother, but they said that would rather that I have it. As for the documents...I think that they kept all that stuff in the fourth floor room--Helmut's shrine. We can look when we go back this evening. Why?"
I told her about the Shareholder's Agreement that I had seen in the company exhibit at UBI, and the fact that the date was five weeks before my birthday. Tess was not the kind of person to be interested in financial matters, and didn't immediately catch on to the significance of this fact.
"So maybe the one we found was a different draft," she suggested.
"Then why would Helmut suddenly own 25% if he had already sold off his entire shareholding five weeks before?" I asked what seemed to me to be glaringly obvious.
She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. Are you sure of the year on the one we found?"
"I thought of that," I answered. "That is what I have to check...when we get back."
"Sure," she said, seemingly unconcerned.
The conversation moved onto other things. Quite naturally, we began to reminisce about Valhalla experiences. She told me a story I had never heard about Aunt Lillian. It reconfirmed what I already knew of the strong-willed but slightly peculiar woman.
Apparently when Stokely and Tess were teenagers they were helping the two ladies prepare a meal in the the Winter House. The receep called for sauteeing oysters in butter and placing them on squares of toast with lemon and fresh parsley. Stokely was in charge of heating the butter, but true to form he got distracted and left it on too long in the skillet. The black smoke which filled the kitchen finally got his attention. Aunt Mary became quite distraught, holding her hand to her head and saying what a catastrophe it was. Aunt Lillian, furrowing her brow in thought, suddenly raised her hand to quiet the brouhaha that was about to develop between Tess and Stokely and to calm her sister. She announced: "Wait a minute. I believe I remember a receep which calls for burnt butter." The old woman then flipped through her loose-leaf notebook of collected recipes, nodded her head, and ordered Stokely to pour the blackened butter into a bowl and place it in the refrigerator while she supervised, a mediator always in control.
I laughed. This was not quite like saving a yoghurt container, but it spoke volumes about a different generation. When she died, an institution and a way of life would be lost. Though she had had the luxury of not having to worry about money in her lifetime, in her lexicon there was no room for a fast buck or a wasted penny. The world could do with a few more like her.
Tess and I continued to wander around the Smithsonian for a while. We then strolled on the Mall, doing the entire loop from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Eventually we ended up in a Vietnamese restaurant in Georgetown, where we continued to talk over nems and Thai beer.
The whole day we had tiptoed around the subject of Lydia. I could tell that Tess had wanted to bring her up several times, but had veered off at the last moment. It seemed to me that in a barely perceptible way the calculus between us had changed, and we were both reluctant to confront the possible change in our emotions. All through our lives the timing had never seemed right.
Finally Tess asked in an innocuous way.
"How are you doing?"
I knew exactly what she meant.
"Six months is a short time, and yet it seems an eternity," I answered truthfully. "I think I have come to terms with being alone. I feel...I don't know, I guess guilty is the best word. There have been days when I don't think of Lydia and I think that maybe I will pull out of this tailspin. Then for no real reason I'll go for days thinking of nothing but the life we've lost and pretending to myself that somehow magically it will reappear. Then I'll change again. I'm confused." I looked at Tess who was nodding her head, and I was struck that not for the first time, I looked at her and saw two faces--one of my friend, and one of a woman. I know that the two should be one in the same, but life is never that simple.
"You know, Evan," she began. "I don't have much personal experience to go by, but it seems only natural what you feel. It's too soon to...let her go."
I could tell that she was measuring each word with care, hoping to spoon out advice without spilling too much of her own emotions.
"Nor should you," she continued, "let her go, I mean. But life goes on, or will go on, if you want it to. And one day you'll wake up and you'll just decide to build again. I'm sure of it."
She reached over and patted my hand.
As we strolled back to 29th Street from Wisconsin Avenue, we linked arms. The flowers were out and the night was mild enough to allow a leisurely pace. For the first time since the accident, I felt like a whole person.
Tess's parents were watching television when we came back to 1819. The others had gone out for the evening. We sat talking to them for a while. I always liked Jeb. A tall powerful man, he gave the impression of being confused while still inspiring confidence, as though he were the mad captain of a ship whose eccentricities were the only reason the ship stayed on course. He had a good sense of humour and always seemed to be able to see the funny side of life. His wife Laura had the Hoeflinger genes. She was a strong willed woman--both physically and mentally very fit, with a commanding presence and a quick wit. She came from a long tradition of people who had been in charge, and she guided her family forward with a steady hand on the tiller, though I am sure that in private Jeb had more influence than publicly he seemed to show.
Like most parents who have seen their children's friends grow to adulthood, they treated the two of us with a mixture of easy familiarity and a slightly patronising tone, as if they were slow to realise that we were now fully grown adults. In my twenties this attitude which I saw in my parents and others of their generation grated on me. When I reached forty I found myself doing the same thing. I came to realise that it represented a frustrated and futile attempt to hold onto the next nearest memories to youth, those of early adulthood. With Tess's parents' generation, early adulthood meant getting married and having kids. Our generation postponed this rite of passage. We continued to pretend that we were still the free wheeling college rock and rollers whose youth culture was largely intact, the proof being that teenagers still listened to Springsteen or Pink Floyd. Their generation talked down to us because they had crossed the line into adulthood early and emphatically. Our generation talks down because we have deluded ourselves into believing we have never crossed the threshold of adulthood, and therefore we are like seniors instructing underclassmen. Both are different sides to the same coin, attitudes which evolve with the passage of time.
In spite of being made to feel like a teenager again, I really liked the Haynes as a couple and as individuals. In talking with them I came to understand better how Stokely and Tess had turned out as they did. It seemed as though the genes had crossed the gender line. Stokely had inherited his mother's stubborn streak, whereas Tess was a little more like her father, resolute but with the hard edges rubbed off.
When the others came in, we stayed only a few minutes more before making our excuses and going up to bed. They had put us on the fourth floor, in separate bedrooms, of course.
The house had not changed since the summer I stayed there. The bathrooms were still like those in England with hand held showers that required gymnastics in the bathtub.
I was towelling off my hair when Tess knocked at the door. As a concession to the family, I had packed both pajamas and bathrobe, two accessories I hardly ever used at home.
Tess was in a long flannel nightgown, the kind with a high collar that in a pinch could have been worn in public.
"Evan," she whispered.
I didn't know what to expect. A proposition, perhaps.
"Don't you want to see Helmut's room?" she asked.
So much for expectations. "Sure," I replied enthusiastically. I thought she had forgotten.
We tiptoed across the hall, an unnecessary precaution since the others were all on the second floor and Aunt Lillian one floor beneath us would not have heard us if we were elephants dancing the polka. Helmut's old office had an old fashioned light fixture with a round brass switch that was spring loaded and made a very loud and satisfying click as we turned it on. The light bulb threw a harsh light on the dust which covered the desk and the file cabinets. On the walls were various framed pictures and documents, now yellow with age. One looked slightly whiter than the others.
I recognized it immediately as being the Shareholder's Agreement from the Richmond Savings and Trust.
"Le voilà," I announced in a loud whisper.
We both moved over and looked at the framed document in unison, like schoolchildren admiring a museum painting up close.
The date was clearly written across the top of the document. I had not been mistaken. There in black and white was my birthday, and the year was 1916.
"Whoa, boy!" I whistled under my breath. Ever since the meeting at UBI, I had been thinking about the implications of finding out that the Aunt's document was written in the same year as the one I had seen in the exhibit.
"Do you know what this means, Tess?" I asked.
"No, what?" She still looked confused.
"Things in life are never quite so straightforward," I started, "but if this document is genuine, this means that your family still owns 25% of UBI. Try sleeping on that thought," I added, perhaps a bit too melodramatically.
When I finally did fall asleep that evening, the last thought I had was the view of Tess's slack-jawed look of surprise as I told her this. Her eyes were just beginning to comprehend the enormity of what I had said, a few words which, if true, would blast apart a world around her family that was already slowly crumbling.
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Going back to Washington was like going home. Although I had only spent a summer and a few other short lived visits there, the memories had been intense enough to push aside other places where I had spent more time. I still remember the sense of awe I felt the first time I saw the Pentagon and the Washington Monument. I was in the back of Dewey's van coming up to meet Stokely my second year of Duke. We were chatting away, when all of a sudden I stopped in mid-sentence. This was just after Watergate, and the cynicism towards the powerful had only just begun to take hold in a national consciousness burned by Vietnam and the assassinations of its leaders. I was still easily impressed by the trappings. Now I am more impressed by the Lincoln Memorial and the Vietnam slab. Somehow they can still inspire a spine tingling awe for the accomplishments and fates of individuals caught up in a vision of their own creation.
This time I had an experience which gave me the same sour taste you get when you read in the paper that some two bit baseball player has renegotiated as a free agent for $5 million or 35,000 people were killed by handguns in a single year or some politician indicted for embezzling has been reelected in a landslide.
I had a Haitian taxi driver in from Dulles. Not surprisingly given his origins, he had little time for politicians and was unimpressed by Washington. We spoke in french. He quoted Rousseau: Entre les paroles et l'action il y a quinze kilomètres et dix ans." (Between words and action there are fifteen kilometers and ten years.) He had a good sense of humour, and without going into the gory details of his life, I think he needed one.
We were sitting in line at the toll booth on the freeway when abruptly we heard loudspeakers behind us saying "Get out of the way!" My cab driver, who was in the midst of paying the toll, was waved on by the toll collector in a gruff voice. "Forget it pal, pull aside." He hurriedly went through and pulled over on the apron. A motorcade then came blowing through the toll booth at 40 miles an hour. A phalanx of motorcycles led three escort cars and three stretch limos with darkened glass, followed by the same sequence of vehicles--a power sandwich moving through the capital's digestive tract at high speed.
There was a cop standing over to the side. I asked him out the window.
"Who was that?", expecting at least a Vice President or Senator.
He looked bored. "I dunno. Some candidate."
A candidate. Not even an elected official of the world's greatest democracy. I'm sure Mussolini or Papa Doc Duvalier would not have been disappointed with such a hermetically sealed delivery, isolated from the teeming masses yearning to breathe free.
The mass of gargantuan buildings on the way into town suddenly looked less impressive to me.
I decided that in spite of being in the center of the nation's political life, I would refrain from discussing politics. Luckily Stokely was not coming, though I always appreciated his candor. In the hospital the afternoon of their visit, somehow we had blundered onto the subject, taboo in the atmosphere of political correctness where paradoxically it was incorrect to discuss anything having to do with politics. Stokely had referred to the new President as a lying sack of shit, and he and Tess had had a slanging match which got vicious while I watched from the sidelines. Eventually I had to intervene by changing the subject.
Tess was a committed idealist, partly because it was her nature and partly because she had actually been witness to an unpleasant alternative during her stay in Sri Lanka with a Tamil family. There she had seen people's heads beaten in for their political beliefs. She took it personally, whereas Stokely was more cynical and less sensitive.
The Aunts' mansion in Georgetown was isolated from the political hubbub of the capital, tucked away across the dividing line of Rock Creek Park. The taxi came up Massachussetts Avenue to Dupont Circle, and then went on P Street towards the enclave of Georgetown. The numbers of the streets started to climb along with the house prices. Washington's street system was astoundingly logical and simple. This was perhaps because the man who designed it was named l'Enfant. The grid was like a kindergarten class agenda--the alphabet going from South to North, the numbers from East to West, and the names of States running diagonally. When I lived there I used to think that it represented America perfectly, a great big overgrown kid fascinated by its playthings and the great outdoors.
As we passed over Rock Creek, the memories of the summer I spent with Stokely came flooding back. There to the left was Rose Park where I used to go after work for tennis and basketball. Further along was the corner store at 28th and P where I bought croissants that would make a Frenchman proud.
The townhouses in Georgetown reeked of wealth. In a city that was eighty per cent black, Stokely used to say that the letters NW of the northwest quarter of the city stood for Nobody but Whites. Noone was too politically correct then, and especially not Stoke.
On 29th Street we turned up towards Dumbarton Oaks, and my Haitian friend deposited me outside the front door of 1819 Q Street.
"Pas mal," he said, giving me a thumbs up and a smile as he drove away.
I rang the bell. I could have actually gone around the side, since I knew where the key was hidden. I thought this might be presumptuous though, so I waited patiently and only rang the bell a polite three times. Finally I heard footsteps, and the door opened.
It was Tess, and she came out to hug me.
"Evan!" she said excitedly, as if she had been waiting there all day.
There are different gradations of hugs. Hers sent a subliminal message, lingering a few extra seconds, enough time to make me aware of her breathing and her closeness.
She smelled like she did at the hospital--Ivory soap, a trace of lavender, and fresh air. Her cheek was warm and dry. I was conscious of the form of her body against my chest.
My own reaction surprised me.
"Tess! It's good to be here," I mumbled, as I held her back from me and we looked each other over.
"You look...so much better!" she exclaimed.
"I'm trying to make a comeback. At least my nose is back to a normal colour and the crutches are gone," I said, remembering how I looked at Thanksgiving. I returned the compliment. "You look great yourself. That bike riding in the mountains does something for you," I added.
She beamed. "Come on up. Everyone's here."
The ground floor of 1819 was more or less unused. Perhaps during Helmut's day the anteroom had been used to receive guests, but now there was a dimly lit entrance hall with two rooms off to the right, one large room to the left, and a room at the end now used as a laundry room and workshop for the gardener. Even on a sunny day it was dark and musty. On the second floor was the living room, dining room, kitchen, and library. As we came up the stairs, we were greeted by the welcoming committee--Stokely and Tess's parents Jeb and Laura, Uncle Johann and his wife Ilse (a genuine German), and Aunt Edith.
After a warm greeting from Jeb and Laura whom I had seen at Christmas, I had a slightly less effusive welcome from the others. Then, as during the whole weekend, I noticed a pall which hovered over the family, undercurrents of negative feelings which swirled uneasily around them in invisible eddies. This had not been the case the previous times I spent with them. My memories had always been of the clinking of glasses and easy going comraderie at oyster roasts at Valhalla. Then of course the Aunts were alive, or at least conscious.
Tess took me up to see Aunt Lillian. She lay on her bed in a room on the third floor, a waxen figure who somehow reminded me of the preserved body of Lenin in his Moscow mausoleum. Helmut's money had allowed the best of medical minds to construct a high tech hospital room, and the steady rhythmic pulsing of the machines carried out a concert for a solitary audience unable to appreciate it.
I decided I wanted to spend as little time as possible in the house. I suggested to Tess that we spend the afternoon going to museums. I had the Air and Space Museum in mind but she had a better idea.
"Why don't we go to the Smithsonian? There at least we can visit old Helmut, in a manner of speaking."
Stokely had told me in the seventh grade that his great grandfather's portrait hung there, but I had never seen it.
On the way over we began talking of her family.
"So it looks like they're jockeying for position." I ventured.
"That is what it seems," she said sadly. "Johann and Edith are aligned against my parents, but I really blame Ilsa. She is the one who wants the money most of all. Everything else is secondary and she could care less about whether or not Valhalla or 1819 stay intact."
She shook her head. "We have been dreading the day that Lillian dies for a long time. When it finally happens I'm afraid that life as we used to know it will be finished."
"No more wavejumping?" I asked half in jest.
She shook her head. "That's the worst case, but it's possible." She sighed.
The thought depressed me.
"Old Helmut would be turning in his grave if he thought that Valhalla would be turned into a development, if he even could imagine what a development was. That's progress for you." Tess was definitely the sort who would be happy if the world had not advanced past the horse and buggy.
The red brick building of the Smithsonian housed the history of those who had helped push the progress that Tess resisted.
She was nonetheless proud of Helmut's accomplishments and had obviously been there many times. She led me straight to his portrait which was housed in the Technology section. Underneath it was his name and the title Pioneer of Data Processing, along with a paragraph about his life.
The portrait showed a man with thick eyebrows and an even thicker moustache. His eyes burned unblinkingly as they had for seventy years, watching mutely as the world changed around him. I tried to imagine the sheer willpower which lay within this man, a drive which had propelled him and others like him to alter the landscape and the direction of his adopted country.
I thought it the right moment to tell Tess of my visit to UBI.
"Whatever happened to that stuff of Helmut's we found in the safety deposit box in Richmond?" I asked.
She looked startled. "You mean in college? Didn't we tell you?" she asked.
I shook my head. "If you did I forgot."
"Well, Stokely had the documents framed and presented to Lillian and Mary the following Christmas. We also gave them the jewelry and the watch, but Aunt Mary insisted that we keep them. Stokely kept the watch, though it was stolen from his house a couple of years ago. I still have the necklace and the ring. They belonged to Lillian and Mary's mother, but they said that would rather that I have it. As for the documents...I think that they kept all that stuff in the fourth floor room--Helmut's shrine. We can look when we go back this evening. Why?"
I told her about the Shareholder's Agreement that I had seen in the company exhibit at UBI, and the fact that the date was five weeks before my birthday. Tess was not the kind of person to be interested in financial matters, and didn't immediately catch on to the significance of this fact.
"So maybe the one we found was a different draft," she suggested.
"Then why would Helmut suddenly own 25% if he had already sold off his entire shareholding five weeks before?" I asked what seemed to me to be glaringly obvious.
She shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. Are you sure of the year on the one we found?"
"I thought of that," I answered. "That is what I have to check...when we get back."
"Sure," she said, seemingly unconcerned.
The conversation moved onto other things. Quite naturally, we began to reminisce about Valhalla experiences. She told me a story I had never heard about Aunt Lillian. It reconfirmed what I already knew of the strong-willed but slightly peculiar woman.
Apparently when Stokely and Tess were teenagers they were helping the two ladies prepare a meal in the the Winter House. The receep called for sauteeing oysters in butter and placing them on squares of toast with lemon and fresh parsley. Stokely was in charge of heating the butter, but true to form he got distracted and left it on too long in the skillet. The black smoke which filled the kitchen finally got his attention. Aunt Mary became quite distraught, holding her hand to her head and saying what a catastrophe it was. Aunt Lillian, furrowing her brow in thought, suddenly raised her hand to quiet the brouhaha that was about to develop between Tess and Stokely and to calm her sister. She announced: "Wait a minute. I believe I remember a receep which calls for burnt butter." The old woman then flipped through her loose-leaf notebook of collected recipes, nodded her head, and ordered Stokely to pour the blackened butter into a bowl and place it in the refrigerator while she supervised, a mediator always in control.
I laughed. This was not quite like saving a yoghurt container, but it spoke volumes about a different generation. When she died, an institution and a way of life would be lost. Though she had had the luxury of not having to worry about money in her lifetime, in her lexicon there was no room for a fast buck or a wasted penny. The world could do with a few more like her.
Tess and I continued to wander around the Smithsonian for a while. We then strolled on the Mall, doing the entire loop from the Capitol to the Washington Monument. Eventually we ended up in a Vietnamese restaurant in Georgetown, where we continued to talk over nems and Thai beer.
The whole day we had tiptoed around the subject of Lydia. I could tell that Tess had wanted to bring her up several times, but had veered off at the last moment. It seemed to me that in a barely perceptible way the calculus between us had changed, and we were both reluctant to confront the possible change in our emotions. All through our lives the timing had never seemed right.
Finally Tess asked in an innocuous way.
"How are you doing?"
I knew exactly what she meant.
"Six months is a short time, and yet it seems an eternity," I answered truthfully. "I think I have come to terms with being alone. I feel...I don't know, I guess guilty is the best word. There have been days when I don't think of Lydia and I think that maybe I will pull out of this tailspin. Then for no real reason I'll go for days thinking of nothing but the life we've lost and pretending to myself that somehow magically it will reappear. Then I'll change again. I'm confused." I looked at Tess who was nodding her head, and I was struck that not for the first time, I looked at her and saw two faces--one of my friend, and one of a woman. I know that the two should be one in the same, but life is never that simple.
"You know, Evan," she began. "I don't have much personal experience to go by, but it seems only natural what you feel. It's too soon to...let her go."
I could tell that she was measuring each word with care, hoping to spoon out advice without spilling too much of her own emotions.
"Nor should you," she continued, "let her go, I mean. But life goes on, or will go on, if you want it to. And one day you'll wake up and you'll just decide to build again. I'm sure of it."
She reached over and patted my hand.
As we strolled back to 29th Street from Wisconsin Avenue, we linked arms. The flowers were out and the night was mild enough to allow a leisurely pace. For the first time since the accident, I felt like a whole person.
Tess's parents were watching television when we came back to 1819. The others had gone out for the evening. We sat talking to them for a while. I always liked Jeb. A tall powerful man, he gave the impression of being confused while still inspiring confidence, as though he were the mad captain of a ship whose eccentricities were the only reason the ship stayed on course. He had a good sense of humour and always seemed to be able to see the funny side of life. His wife Laura had the Hoeflinger genes. She was a strong willed woman--both physically and mentally very fit, with a commanding presence and a quick wit. She came from a long tradition of people who had been in charge, and she guided her family forward with a steady hand on the tiller, though I am sure that in private Jeb had more influence than publicly he seemed to show.
Like most parents who have seen their children's friends grow to adulthood, they treated the two of us with a mixture of easy familiarity and a slightly patronising tone, as if they were slow to realise that we were now fully grown adults. In my twenties this attitude which I saw in my parents and others of their generation grated on me. When I reached forty I found myself doing the same thing. I came to realise that it represented a frustrated and futile attempt to hold onto the next nearest memories to youth, those of early adulthood. With Tess's parents' generation, early adulthood meant getting married and having kids. Our generation postponed this rite of passage. We continued to pretend that we were still the free wheeling college rock and rollers whose youth culture was largely intact, the proof being that teenagers still listened to Springsteen or Pink Floyd. Their generation talked down to us because they had crossed the line into adulthood early and emphatically. Our generation talks down because we have deluded ourselves into believing we have never crossed the threshold of adulthood, and therefore we are like seniors instructing underclassmen. Both are different sides to the same coin, attitudes which evolve with the passage of time.
In spite of being made to feel like a teenager again, I really liked the Haynes as a couple and as individuals. In talking with them I came to understand better how Stokely and Tess had turned out as they did. It seemed as though the genes had crossed the gender line. Stokely had inherited his mother's stubborn streak, whereas Tess was a little more like her father, resolute but with the hard edges rubbed off.
When the others came in, we stayed only a few minutes more before making our excuses and going up to bed. They had put us on the fourth floor, in separate bedrooms, of course.
The house had not changed since the summer I stayed there. The bathrooms were still like those in England with hand held showers that required gymnastics in the bathtub.
I was towelling off my hair when Tess knocked at the door. As a concession to the family, I had packed both pajamas and bathrobe, two accessories I hardly ever used at home.
Tess was in a long flannel nightgown, the kind with a high collar that in a pinch could have been worn in public.
"Evan," she whispered.
I didn't know what to expect. A proposition, perhaps.
"Don't you want to see Helmut's room?" she asked.
So much for expectations. "Sure," I replied enthusiastically. I thought she had forgotten.
We tiptoed across the hall, an unnecessary precaution since the others were all on the second floor and Aunt Lillian one floor beneath us would not have heard us if we were elephants dancing the polka. Helmut's old office had an old fashioned light fixture with a round brass switch that was spring loaded and made a very loud and satisfying click as we turned it on. The light bulb threw a harsh light on the dust which covered the desk and the file cabinets. On the walls were various framed pictures and documents, now yellow with age. One looked slightly whiter than the others.
I recognized it immediately as being the Shareholder's Agreement from the Richmond Savings and Trust.
"Le voilà," I announced in a loud whisper.
We both moved over and looked at the framed document in unison, like schoolchildren admiring a museum painting up close.
The date was clearly written across the top of the document. I had not been mistaken. There in black and white was my birthday, and the year was 1916.
"Whoa, boy!" I whistled under my breath. Ever since the meeting at UBI, I had been thinking about the implications of finding out that the Aunt's document was written in the same year as the one I had seen in the exhibit.
"Do you know what this means, Tess?" I asked.
"No, what?" She still looked confused.
"Things in life are never quite so straightforward," I started, "but if this document is genuine, this means that your family still owns 25% of UBI. Try sleeping on that thought," I added, perhaps a bit too melodramatically.
When I finally did fall asleep that evening, the last thought I had was the view of Tess's slack-jawed look of surprise as I told her this. Her eyes were just beginning to comprehend the enormity of what I had said, a few words which, if true, would blast apart a world around her family that was already slowly crumbling.
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