Unknown - The Genius

The doctor asks if Mrs. Muller will be coming to visit.

Louis said, “I don’t believe she will.”

Now, lying on the floor of his drawing room to quiet his screaming back, looking up at Bertha—she towers over him, standing behind two armchairs she has pulled together like an embrasure—he says, “The child is dead. The girl is dead, too. They both died in childbirth.”

A MONTH LATER, under the pretext of business travel, Louis goes back to the Home.

“I want to know the name of the father.”

Dr. Christmas’s eyes dart around the room, in search of his missing legal counsel.

Louis says, “My wife doesn’t know I’m here. The least you can do is help me give the boy a proper name.”

After a moment, the doctor goes to a cabinet and takes out a file. He hands Louis a photo of a young man with wild, dark hair; wild, dark eyes.

“His name is Cracke,” says the doctor.

Louis compares features. “A patient.”

“Yes.”

“He doesn’t look defective.”

“He had other problems. Many of them. A troublesome boy.”

Louis puts the photo down. He should be feeling something. Anger, perhaps, or disgust. But he feels nothing, only mild curiosity.

“How did he know my daughter?”

The doctor shifts uncomfortably. “I can’t say. As you’re aware, we segregate the sexes. Sometimes for a concert we bring everyone into the main hall. Presumably, they slipped out together unnoticed.”

Louis frowns. “Do you mean that she went consensually?”

“I would have to think so,” says the doctor. “She asked for him repeatedly.”

Louis says nothing.

“He’s no longer with us.”

Louis is confused. “He’s dead?”

“I ordered him moved.”

“And where is he now?”

“At another home, some miles outside Rochester.”

“Does he know?”

“I don’t imagine so.”

“Are you going to tell him?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Please don’t.”

As he opens the car door for Louis, the doctor smiles unctuously and says, “I hope you don’t find it rude of me to ask how Ruth is. We were all quite fond of her.”

“She’s right as rain,” Louis says.

The doctor offers his hand. Louis declines.

HE HIRES A STAFF OF THREE, overseen by an anvil-jawed Scotswoman named Nancy Greene, a former employee at the Home. She is kind to Ruth, kinder still to the baby; she understands—or seems to understand— when Louis presses upon her the importance of keeping secrets. No good could come of anyone knowing, he tells her, and she seems to agree. He pays her very well.

IN 1940, THE WORLD IS AT WAR. David has entered his first year of formal schooling at the N. M. Priestly Academy, and Bertha has been reelected president of her women’s club, a position to which she devotes increasingly large amounts of time once her son leaves the house on Fifth. The Frankfurt office has been closed since the invasion of Poland, and the Muller Corporation has begun to shift its priorities from international banking to domestic property management, which Louis regards as a more stable arena for investment. His instincts will prove prescient when American GIs begin coming home and the demand for housing skyrockets. But that will not happen for years. At the moment, he is operating on a hunch.

November is wet and cold. The worst storm in a decade comes and goes, leaving Manhattan smelling of earthworms. Louis sits in his office on the fiftieth floor of the Muller Building.

Few people know the number for the phone that rings directly at his desk.

He answers. It is Nancy Greene.

“Sir, she’s very sick.”

He cancels his afternoon meetings. When he arrives at the cottage, he spots a dire sign: Dr. Fetchett’s mud-spattered car.

“I can’t control her fever. She needs to be moved to a hospital.”

Despite their best efforts, the infection rages out of control, and within a week Ruth is dead of pneumonia. Dr. Fetchett attempts to console Louis by telling him that in general, people with her condition have a short life expectancy. That she lived as long as she did—and went as fast—is a kind of blessing.

Louis buries her on the grounds. No clergy are present. The nurses sing a hymn. Mrs. Greene stays inside to mind baby Victor.

20

Ó didn’t talk to Marilyn for several weeks. When I did call, a few days after the new year, I was told by her assistant that she had gone to Paris.

“For how long?”

“I’m not supposed to tell you. I’m not actually supposed to tell you she’s in Paris, either, so you didn’t hear it from me.”

I suppose I didn’t have the right to be angry at her, but I was. I felt as though I was the aggrieved, that she had no right to be hurt; as far as I knew, I had been acting with her permission. I reacted the way I did after my mother’s death, the way I always have whenever I’ve felt, or been made to feel, rightfully ashamed. Narcissism can’t stomach too much guilt. It vomits back up rage. I thought of all the times Marilyn had wronged me— all the gibes I’d taken, the condescension I’d swallowed with a smile. I thought of how she often treated me like arm candy and how she interfered in the running of my business. I thought of her forcing me to kiss her when my head felt like a rock tumbler. To this list of crimes I added others that had nothing to do with me; I labeled her a homewrecker, a vengeful divorcee, a liar, a bully. I erased her kindnesses and inflated her cruelties until she seemed so bad to me, so thoroughly corrupt, that her unwillingness to overlook my tiny indiscretion became the height of hypocrisy. And just as I got through holding her responsible for global warming and the

burst of the dot-com bubble, I reached into my jacket to take out my phone and leave her a voicemail telling her exactly what I thought, and instead of the phone I found a stray price tag that someone at Barneys had forgotten to remove. The upper portion of my outfit had cost Marilyn $895.00, plus 8.375 percent sales tax.

To my surprise, my lengthy apology e-mail brought an equally lengthy reply—in French. Since Marilyn knows I don’t speak French, she had to have sent it knowing I’d need a translation; who knew what kind of mortification she intended to subject me to. I hesitated before calling Nat over.

” ‘Following the death of King Louis XIV, the court returned to Paris from Versailles. Residences were constructed on the Faubourg, displacing the horticultural marshes… .’ ” He scanned down. “There’s something in here about a restaurant… . You know what this is, it’s the history of her hotel. It sounds like she cut-and-pasted it off the website.” He looked at me. “Does that have any meaning to it that I’m missing?”

“It just means fuck off.”

THE SNOWSTORM DELAYED SAMANTHA’S RETURN, and when I talked to her, she urged me to continue without her. I decided to use the time to follow up on the information I’d gotten at the stationery store. For weeks I’d been calling local game rooms and chess and checkers clubs, thinking that Victor might have gone in search of a challenge. The places nearest the Courts were actually in Brooklyn, and without exception they turned out to be full of two-bit academics; anxious teenagers with bad haircuts; dead-eyed prodigies salivating over their victories, or else sitting in chairs too high for them, swinging their feet and clutching electronic clocks as they waited for a worthy opponent. I would tiptoe around, trying to ask if anyone knew a Victor Cracke, small man with a moustache, looked a little like—

“Shhhhhh.”

The second-to-last place on my list was the High Street Chess and Checkers Club, located on Jamaica Avenue. Thursday, the answering machine said, was checkers night, round-robin at seven thirty, five-dollar entry fee, winner take all, soda and chips provided.