Chapter 12: August
They brought Hannah up to the sickroom alone, in the end β not out of strategy, but because August Whitmore, who was eighty-eight years old and dying by inches in a bed that faced the window, had asked for her by the only name he had for her.
"Samuel's girl," he had said to Mrs. Adey. "Alone. The others can have what's left of me afterward. She gets the first of it. I've owed her family the first of things for fifty years."
The room smelled of medicine and cedar and the faint metallic ghost of the oxygen machine, which sighed in the corner like a tired animal. The curtains were drawn against the afternoon, but a blade of light came through them and lay across the counterpane, and in that light August Whitmore seemed to Hannah less like a patriarch than like a coastline β something enormous worn down to its essentials by weather. His hands on the coverlet were all bone and blue vein. His eyes, when they opened, were the Whitmore eyes she had seen in the photograph and in Peter's face and, she now understood, in her own mirror: pale, gray-green, set deep, as if looking cost something and they had decided long ago to pay it anyway.
"Sit," he said. "Where I can see you. The chair on the left. Beatrice sits on the right and cries, and I cannot have crying. Not for this."
Hannah sat. From below, distantly, she could hear the house doing its holding of breath.
"You have his chin," August said. "And Laura's eyes β Beatrice told me, and Beatrice does not deal in comfort, she deals in inventory. She says the girl has Laura's eyes. I never saw Laura. That is one of the items on the list." His breath worked. "There is a list, you understand. Fifty years of items. Your grandfather dead a year and I am only now permitted to read it aloud, because I am dying and dying men are forgiven their honesty. It is the last privilege of the position."
"I'm not here to forgive you, sir," Hannah said. "I didn't know you existed until my grandfather was dying. You're a name in a letter to me."
"Then hear it as a name in a letter," August said, "and not as your great-uncle. It may be easier. It won't be easier for me, but β " a ghost of something crossed his face that might once have been wit, "β I have had fifty years of easier. Look where it has kept me." He turned his head on the pillow, slowly, like a man turning a heavy key. "Your grandfather wrote to this house once. In 1976. Did Beatrice give you the letter?"
"She did."
"She kept it from me for fifty years to protect her marriage," August said. "I have known that for β oh β eleven days, and I find I cannot even be angry properly. She protected the marriage. The marriage she made with the brother of the man she loved, in the house of the man who ran. It needed protecting. It was made of such breakable things." His hand moved on the coverlet, restless. "But her letter is not the deepest drawer in this house, Hannah Hart. Mine is."
She waited.
"In 1981," August said, "I hired a detective."
The oxygen machine sighed. Somewhere downstairs a door closed with the particular softness of a house that has been told to be quiet around death.
"I had been married to Beatrice for five years. Peter was six. Clara was a baby. And I woke one night β I remember it was raining, it rained in this story more than any weather has a right to β and I thought: if he is alive, he is forty-one, and he is somewhere being alive without us, and I cannot stand not knowing whether the not-knowing is a grave or a door. So I hired a man. A discreet man, from Boston, the kind who finds people who owe money. I told myself it was for the estate. There was always an estate to hide behind in this house. The estate has been our family's favorite curtain for a hundred years."
"And he found him," Hannah said.
"He found him in nineteen days." August's voice went thin with the old astonishment of it. "Nineteen days, for what this family had failed to do in six years of pretending to grieve. Sam Hart, of a village on the Maine coast. Fisherman. Married β the detective stood in a churchyard and watched him come out of a christening with a woman laughing on his arm. A daughter, two years old. Laura." He closed his eyes. "There were photographs. There was an address. There was a telephone number, which I never dialed, and I want that on whatever record this is. I never dialed it. I sat with it for a month like a man sitting with a loaded β no. Like a man sitting with a door. And in the end I did the only thing in my whole life I am not ashamed of, and the thing I have been most punished for: I let him be. I paid the detective. I put the report in my desk. And I went back to my wife β his bride β and my children β his heirs β and I let my brother live his life in peace, in Maine, as Sam Hart, for forty-four more years. He died last year in his own bed, in his own name, with his granddaughter holding his hand. I know that last part from Beatrice's letter-keeping and from you. I count it as the return on my investment."
"Why are you telling me?" Hannah asked.
"Because I took everything else of his," August said, and now the tears came, not dramatically, just the slow leak of a very old vessel. "His bride. His name β I am the Whitmore the world knows, and he is a footnote with a question mark. His inheritance, his house, his mother, who died calling for him in a room I was sitting in, lying to her with my face. I took all of it, by standing still and letting it be taken. The only thing I ever gave him was his peace, and I gave it in secret, so it cost me nothing anyone could see. And now his granddaughter comes out of the fog with his key in her hand β " the old hand lifted, an inch, fell back, "β and the one thing I have left to give him is the truth, told to her, in this room, before the laboratory tells it to everyone. So. Samuel Whitmore lived. I knew. For forty-five years, I knew, and I chose. When they all come in here with their report and their percentages, child, I want you to already know the only fact that matters: your grandfather was not abandoned by this house. He was released by it. Once by a boy at a gate, and once by a coward at a desk, and I have never decided which of us he would thank."
"He thanked the boy," Hannah said quietly. "It's in the letter. 'The boy who opened the gate.' But I think β " she leaned forward, and took the blue, weightless hand in both of hers, and felt him startle like a bird, "β I think he sensed the other one too. He wrote about a mercy he couldn't name. He said he felt watched over, once, and then never again, and he chose to believe it was God. It was you, August. He knew somebody let him go on purpose. He just never learned your name for it."
August Whitmore wept then, openly, the way the very old weep, without defense and without sound, his hand tightening on hers with a strength that surprised them both.
"Read the rest of the report to me sometime," he whispered. "No. Burn it. No β " He collected himself with an effort that shook the bed. "Keep it. Let it be found. Let them all know the worst and the best of me in the same document; it is more honesty than this family usually manages in a generation." His eyes fixed on her, sudden and clear. "And when the results come, Hannah Hart β whatever paper they bring into this room β you will find I have believed you since the moment Silas telephoned and said the girl at the gate has his key and his chin. A laboratory can confirm a fact. It cannot do what you have already done, which is to walk out of the fog and make an old man say his brother's name. Now go down and eat something. Dying is hungry work for the audience. And send Beatrice up. She sits on the right. She has earned the right side of this bed for fifty years, and I intend to tell her so before the light goes."