He nodded. “Two and a half.” He leaned forward on the edge of the coffee table. “Your mother torpedoed any attempts at a social life. I couldn’t see it at the time—we were so overwhelmed with work and having a baby and then a newborn and all the labor-intensive stages of, well, having a child. So I’m not even sure I noticed how cut off we were until that night. I taught in Worcester back then, at Holy Cross. My commute was a bear, and your mother sure wasn’t going to socialize in Worcester. But when I’d suggest going out with her coworkers, fellow faculty and such, she’d say, ‘So-and-so secretly hates women,’ or ‘So-and-so is just so pretentious,’ or, the nuclear option, ‘So-and-so looks at Rachel funny.’”
“Me?”
He nodded. “How was I going to respond to that?”
“She used to do the same thing with my friends,” Rachel said. “All these backhanded slights, you know? ‘Jennifer seems nice . . . for someone with her insecurities.’ Or ‘Chloe could be so pretty but why does she dress that way? Does she know the message she’s sending?’” Rachel rolled her eyes at it now, but she could feel the stab of it just below her rib cage to realize how many friendships her mother had shamed her out of.
Jeremy said, “Sometimes she’d actually make plans with another couple or a group of coworkers and we’d be all set to go. And then, right at the last minute, it would fall through. The sitter’s car broke down, Elizabeth felt ill, you looked like you were coming down with something—‘Doesn’t she feel hot, JJ?’—the other couple called to cancel, even though I couldn’t recall hearing the phone ring. The excuses always seemed perfectly reasonable in the moment. It was only over time, in the rearview, that I saw how they piled up. Either way, we had no friends.”
“So this night she disappeared?”
“She came back at dawn,” he said. “She’d been beaten.” He looked at the floor. “And worse. All the visible injuries were to her body, not her face. But she’d been raped and battered.”
“By who?”
He met her eyes. “There’s the question. She’d been to the police, though. Had pictures taken. She consented to a rape kit.” He sucked a wet breath to the back of his throat. “She told the police she wouldn’t identify her attacker. Not then anyway. But once she came home and told me, she assured me that if I didn’t come to my senses and admit the truth, she—”
“Wait a minute,” Rachel said, “what truth?”
“That I’d impregnated her.”
“But you hadn’t.”
“Right.”
“So . . .”
“So she insisted I say I had. She said the only way we could be together was if I was wholly honest with her and stopped lying about fathering you. I said, ‘Elizabeth, I’ll tell the world I’m Rachel’s father. I’ll sign all documents to that effect. If we divorce, I’ll pay child support until she’s eighteen. But what I won’t do, what I can’t do, what it is categorically insane to ask me to do is to claim to you, her mother, that I planted the seed. That’s too much to ask of anyone.’”
“And what did she say to that?” Rachel asked, even though she had a pretty good idea.
“She asked me why I insisted on lying. She asked me what sickness was in me that I would try to make her seem as if she were being unreasonable about something so crucial. She asked me to admit that I was trying to make her look as if she were insane.” He pressed his palms together, as if in prayer, and his voice grew very soft, almost a whisper. “The game, as I understood it, was that she could never believe I loved her unless I agreed to abide by an unreasonable contract. The unreasonable aspect of the demand was the point. That was her deal breaker—meet me there in the cave of my own insanity or meet me nowhere.”
“And you chose nowhere.”
“I chose the truth.” He leaned back on the table. “And my sanity.”
Rachel felt a bitter smile tug the corners of her mouth. “She didn’t like that, did she?”
“She told me if I was determined to live a life of cowardice and lies, then I could never see you again. If I left that house, I was leaving your life forever.”
“And you left.”
“And I left.”
“And never attempted contact?”
He shook his head. “That was her checkmate, in the end.” He leaned forward. Placed his palms softly on her kneecaps. “If I ever tried to make contact, your mother told me, she’d tell the police that I was the man who’d raped her.”
Rachel tried to get her head around it. Would her mother have gone to those lengths to drive Jeremy James—or anyone for that matter—from her life? That would be beyond the pale even for Elizabeth, wouldn’t it? But then Rachel recalled the fates of others who’d run afoul of Elizabeth Childs during her childhood. There’d been a dean whom Elizabeth had ever so gradually poisoned the faculty against; a fellow psych professor whose contract was not renewed; a janitor who was fired; an employee at the town bakery who was let go. All these people and a couple more had crossed Elizabeth Childs—or she believed they had—and her retaliation was heartless and calculated. Her mother, she knew all too well, had thought at all times in tactical terms.
“Do you think she was raped?” she asked Jeremy.
He shook his head. “I think she had sex with me and then she either paid or coerced someone into beating her up. I’ve had years to think about it and that’s the scenario I find likeliest.”
“Because you wouldn’t live a lie within your own home?”
He nodded. “And because I’d seen the depths of her own insanity. And that she could never forgive.”
Rachel kept twirling it in her head, over and over. Eventually she admitted to the man who should have been her father, “When I think of her—and I think of her too much—I sometimes wonder if she was evil.”
Jeremy shook his head. “No. She wasn’t. She was just the most profoundly damaged human being I’ve ever met. And she was relentlessly hostile if crossed, I’ll give you that. But there was great love in her heart.”
Rachel laughed. “For who?”
He gave her a look of dark befuddlement. “For you, Rachel. For you.”
5
ON LUMINISM
After she met the man she’d mistakenly believed to be her father, a surprising thing happened—she and Jeremy James became friends. There wasn’t much tentative about it; they dove in, more like long-lost siblings than a sixty-three-year-old man and a twenty-eight-year-old woman who turned out not to be related.
When Elizabeth Childs died, Jeremy and his family had been in Normandy, where Jeremy had used his sabbatical to research a subject that had long fascinated him—the possible link between luminism and expressionism. Now, as his academic career was winding down and retirement loomed, Jeremy was trying to write his book on luminism, an American style of landscape painting often confused with impressionism. As Jeremy explained it to Rachel, who knew less than zero about art, luminism grew out of the Hudson River School. It was Jeremy’s belief that the two schools shared a link, even if prevailing theory—dogma actually, Jeremy would scoff—held that the two schools had developed independently of each other in the late 1800s on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
A man named Colum Jasper Whitstone, Jeremy told her, had worked as an apprentice to two of the most famous luminists—George Caleb Bingham and Albert Bierstadt—but vanished in 1863 along with a large sum of money from the Western Union office where he was employed. Neither the money nor Colum Jasper Whitstone was ever heard of again in the Americas. But the diary of Madame de Fontaine, a wealthy widow and arts patron in Normandy, twice made mention of a Callum Whitestone in the summer of 1865, referring to him as a gentleman from America with good manners, refined tastes, and a cloudy heritage. When Jeremy first told Rachel this his eyes were lit like a birthday child’s and his baritone voice grew several octaves lighter. “Monet and Boudin painted the Normandy coast the same year. They would set up every day, just down the street from Madame de Fontaine’s summer cottage.”
Jeremy believed these two giants of impressionism had crossed paths with Colum Jasper Whitstone, that Whitstone was, in fact, the missing link between American luminism and French impressionism. All he had to do was prove it. Rachel pitched in with research, aware of the irony that she and her not-father were searching for a man who’d vanished into the dust and void of a hundred and fifty years when together they couldn’t identify the man who’d fathered Rachel a little over thirty years before.
Jeremy often visited her apartment during research trips to the MFA, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Boston Public Library. She’d departed the Globe for TV by then and had moved in with Sebastian, a producer at Channel 6. Sometimes Sebastian was there and would join them for dinner or drinks, but mostly he was working or on his boat.
“You’re such an attractive couple,” Jeremy said one night at her apartment, and the word attractive left his mouth sounding unattractive. He had developed an ability to say all the right things about Sebastian—taking note of his intelligence, his dry wit, his good looks, his air of competency—without sounding like he meant any of them.
He examined a picture of the two of them on Sebastian’s beloved boat. He placed it back on the mantel and gave Rachel a pleasant, distracted smile, as if he were trying to come up with one more positive thing to say about the two of them but had drawn a blank. “He sure works a lot.”
“He does,” she agreed.
“He wants to run the whole station one day, I bet.”
“He wants to run the network,” she said.
He chuckled and carried his glass of wine to the bookshelves, where he zeroed in on a photograph of Rachel and her mother that Rachel had almost forgotten was there. Sebastian, not a fan of the photo or its frame, had crammed it at the end of a row of books, backed into a shadow cast by a copy of History of America in 101 Objects. Jeremy removed it gently and tilted the book so it remained standing. She watched his face turn both dreamy and desolate.
“How old were you in this?”
“Seven,” she said.
“Hence the missing teeth.”
“Mmm-hmm. Sebastian thinks I look like a hobbit in that picture.”
“He said that?”
“He was joking.”
“That’s what we’re calling it?” He carried the photograph back to the couch and sat beside her.
Seven-year-old Rachel, missing both upper front teeth and one lower, had stopped smiling for cameras at the time. Her mother wouldn’t hear of it. Elizabeth found a set of rubber fangs somewhere and used a Sharpie to black out one of the upper teeth and two of the lower. She’d had Ann Marie take a series of pictures of her and Rachel vamping for the camera one drizzly afternoon at the house in South Hadley. In this, the only photograph to survive from that day, Rachel was wrapped in her mother’s arms, both of them beaming their hideous smiles as broadly as possible.
“I’d forgotten just how pretty she was too. My goodness.” Jeremy gave Rachel an ironic smile. “She looks like your boyfriend.”
“Shut up,” Rachel said, but it was unfortunately true. How had she never noticed before? Both Sebastian and her mother looked like Aryan ideals—hair several shades whiter than vanilla, cheekbones as sharp as their jawlines, Arctic eyes, and lips so small and thin they couldn’t help but appear secretive.
“I know men marry their mothers,” Jeremy said, “but this is—”
She nudged an elbow into his paunch. “Enough.”
He laughed and kissed her head and put the photograph back where it belonged. “Do you have more?”
“Pictures?”
He nodded. “I never got to see you grow up.”
She found the shoebox of them in her closet. She dumped them out onto the small kitchen table so that her life took the shape of a messy collage, which seemed all too fitting. Her fifth birthday party; a day at the beach when she was a teenager; semiformal during junior year of high school; in her soccer uniform sometime during middle school; hanging in the basement with Caroline Ford, which would have been when she was eleven because Caroline Ford’s father had been visiting faculty for that one year only; Elizabeth and Ann Marie and Don Klay at a cocktail party by the looks of it; Rachel and Elizabeth the day Rachel graduated from middle school; Elizabeth, Ann Marie, Ann Marie’s first husband, Richard, and Giles Ellison at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and again at a cookout, everyone’s hair a little thinner and a little grayer in the latter; Rachel, the day her braces were removed; two of Elizabeth and half a dozen unidentified friends at a bar. Her mother was quite young, possibly still in her twenties, and Rachel didn’t recognize any of the other people or the bar where they were gathered.
“Who are those people?” she asked Jeremy.
He glanced at it. “No idea.”
“They look like academics.” She picked up the photograph and the one below it, which appeared to have been taken within a minute of the first. “She looks so young, I figured it was taken when she first got to the Berkshires.”
He considered the photo in her right hand, the one in which her mother was caught unaware, her eyes on the bottles behind the bar. “No, I don’t know any of those people. I don’t even know that bar. That’s not in the Berkshires. At least not any place I’ve ever been.” He adjusted his glasses and leaned in. “The Colts.”
“Huh?”
“Look.”
She followed his finger. In the corner of the frame of both photographs, just past the bar, at the entrance to the kind of paneled hallway that usually leads to restrooms, a pennant hung on the wall. Only half of it had made it into the frame, the half with the team logo: a white helmet with a dark blue horseshoe in the center. The Indianapolis Colts logo.
“What was she doing in Indianapolis?” Rachel said.
“The Colts didn’t move to Indy until 1984. Before that, they were in Baltimore. This would have been taken when she was at Johns Hopkins, before you were born.”
She laid the picture in which her mother wasn’t looking at the camera back down on top of the collage and they both peered at the one where the principals looked into the lens.
“Why are we staring at this?” Rachel eventually asked.
“You ever know your mother to be sentimental or nostalgic?”
“No.”
“So why did she keep these two pictures?”
“Good point.”
There were three men and three women, including her mother, in the center of the frame. They’d gathered at one corner of the bar and pulled their stools close together. Big smiles and glassy eyes. The oldest of them was a heavyset man farthest to the left. He looked to be about forty, with muttonchop sideburns, a plaid sport coat, bright blue shirt, and wide knit tie loosened below an unbuttoned collar. Beside him was a woman in a purple turtleneck with her dark hair pulled back in a bun, a nose so small you had to look for it, and barely any chin. Next to her was a thin black woman with a Jheri-curl perm; she wore a white blazer with the collar turned up over a black halter top, a long white cigarette held up by her ear but not yet lit. Her left hand rested on the arm of a trim black man in a tan three-piece suit with thick square glasses and an earnest, forthright gaze. Beside him was a man wearing a white shirt and black tie under a velour zip-front pullover. His brown hair was parted in the middle, blown dry, and feathered along the temples. His green eyes were playful, maybe a bit lascivious. He had his arm around Rachel’s mother, but they all had their arms around each other, huddling close together. Elizabeth Childs sat on the end; she wore a billowy pinstriped blouse with the top three buttons undone, publicly revealing more cleavage than she ever had in Rachel’s lifetime. Her hair, which had always been cut short during her years in the Berkshires, fell almost to her shoulders and was, true to the times, feathered on the sides. But even with the fashion fails common to the era, her mother’s sheer force of self pulled one to her. She stared back from a remove of more than three decades as if she’d known as the picture was being taken that circumstances would one day put
her daughter and a man she’d almost married in the exact position where they now found themselves—searching her face, yet again, for clues to her soul. But in pictures, as in life, those clues were opaque and fruitless. Her smile was both the most brilliant of the six and the only one that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She was smiling because it was expected of her, not because she felt it, an impression underscored in the other photo, which looked to have been taken seconds before or seconds after the posed shot.
Seconds after, Rachel realized, because the tip of the black woman’s cigarette glowed a fresh red in the second photo. Her mother’s smile was gone and she was turning back to the bar, her eyes on the bottles to the right of the cash register. Whiskey bottles, Rachel was mildly surprised to note, not the vodka bottles she would have expected her mother to show an interest in. Her mother was no longer smiling but she looked happier because of it. Her face bore an intensity that Rachel would have characterized as erotically charged had its focus been anything but the bottles of whiskey. It appeared as if her mother had been caught in a reverie, in anticipation of an encounter with whomever she was leaving that bar with or meeting up with afterward.
Or she was just glancing at whiskey bottles and wondering what she’d have for breakfast tomorrow. Rachel realized with no small amount of shame that she was projecting at a nearly unforgivable level because she wanted to find value in photos that had none.
“This is silly.” She went to get the bottle of wine they’d left on the counter.
“What about it is silly?” Jeremy placed both photos side by side.
“I feel like we’re looking for him here.”
“We are looking for him here.”
“It’s two photographs from a night at a bar when she was in grad school.” She refilled their glasses and left the bottle on the table between them. “Nothing more.”
“I lived with your mother for three years. Except for pictures of you, there were no pictures. Not one. I now discover the existence of these two, tucked away somewhere the whole time I lived with her but never to be shared with me. Why? What’s in these pictures on this night that matters? I say it’s your father.”