The Keeper of the Walls Page 20

  “Yes. I’m sorry to intrude on you. But—”

  To prevent him from mentioning yesterday, she began a breathless monologue. “Just a nightshirt for Kira, and a sailor outfit for Nicky. You don’t know my children—they’re so cute. I’ll have to ask Zelle to bring them in—”

  “Lily,” he interrupted. “I couldn’t sleep last night. I didn’t understand. What’s wrong? I came to tell you that if you need someone to talk to. . . I’m here. I don’t want you to feel alone, Lily. Please forgive me for coming here—but I simply had to. As your friend, who cares.”

  She was weeping, her hands laced before her face. He put an arm around her. “Lily—you must tell me what’s troubling you. Maybe I can help.”

  She lifted her face from her hands, and looked at him. Maybe he was right. She’d always felt that she could trust him. Long ago, she’d voiced all her intimate thoughts to him, all her hopes and insecurities, and he’d repaid her with his steadfast kindness and understanding. Pushing aside some of the awkwardness of their meeting the previous day, she concentrated instead on her tremendous need for honesty, for coming clean with someone. She needed to unburden herself, to let everything spill out—and providence, it seemed, had just happened to throw Mark back into her life. What better confidant than he?

  “Look,” she said. “It’s a very private thing. I don’t want anybody to know about it. You must swear to me.”

  “I’ll swear anything you like. Of course.”

  “My mother’s . . . Jewish. It’s something she had to hide, when Papa was alive. And now—she knows she has to continue hiding it.”

  “Why?”

  She passed a hand over her wet face. “Because. Claude, Misha. They’d reject her. And—Misha would reject me, too. And . . . our children.”

  Mark was standing next to her, shaking his head in complete disbelief. “It’s incredible. Even in the South—in the United States—no one is that anti-Semitic. I think you and Claire are exaggerating.”

  “I hardly think so. Just these past elections, the Jeunesses Patriotes were beating up members of the Socialist and Communist parties.”

  “That’s a different story.”

  She asked, tentatively: “Do you think so?”

  “Sure. Look, Europe’s in a state of flux. The economy’s improved since Poincaré came back, in ‘26. The French aren’t so afraid of Germany anymore. It looks as though, finally, war reparations will be paid. But there’s a lot of fear of the Russians.”

  “But in L’Action Française, Maurras is perpetually haranguing his readers against the Communists and the Jews.”

  He raised his brows. “You read this garbage?”

  “No,” she admitted. “But Misha does. I’ve glanced at some of the articles.”

  “Well,” he said soothingly, “Maurras is an old fool whose time is past. But perhaps the French are making a mistake, with the Russians. I don’t like the fact that in Germany this man Hitler is growing in strength. There’s a man who’s bad for the Jews. The Russians haven’t been asked to join the League of Nations. And now Germany’s refusing to recognize the Czech and Polish borders. Perhaps more efforts should be made to put away fear of the Reds, to build a wall against the Huns.”

  “But—Briand won the Nobel peace prize. Nobody wants another war—do they?”

  Mark sighed. “I guess not. However—French people aren’t an anti-Semitic bunch, like the czarist Russians. I really don’t believe the rioting in the streets has had anything much to do with anti-Jewish feeling, so much as anticommunism. You and Claire shouldn’t worry.”

  She said, with so much feeling that he was caught aback: “But don’t you understand? Misha and Ivan Vassilievitch are czarist Russians! You must promise me, Mark, never to let anyone know what I’ve told you. It’s just—I had to tell someone.”

  “And I’m glad I just happened to be the one. You mustn’t be afraid, Lily.”

  He came near her, and put his arm around her shoulder. She leaned against him, feeling exhausted. It was this way that Misha first came upon them when he returned home from work. Surprised, he stopped in the shadow of the open door. The scene, somehow, was so intimate. He stared, angry at his own inertia, and waited, anxiousness pressing against his heart. He’d never expected this—Mark MacDonald! All these years.

  “You don’t think so?” she whispered.

  “No. But sooner or later, you’ll have to break the news to Misha.”

  She jerked her head up, her face white and taut, and cried: “No! You know I can’t.”

  “But it’s the only way.”

  “He’ll never know,” she said fervently. “He’d never be able to forgive me this. You don’t know my husband—but I do.”

  “I can’t believe he wouldn’t understand.”

  She pushed Mark away, and stated: “But he wouldn’t. It’s just going to have to be my secret. And now, yours.”

  “If this is what you want.”

  Slowly, Lily put her fingers on Mark’s face, and forced him to look at her. She said: “Mark. For the sake of my children. And ... of the child that hasn’t been born yet. Think a little, Mark. I wouldn’t ever want my children to be rejected.”

  At that moment, Misha, against his better judgment, entered the room. He stood, very white, like a magnificent intruder on a very private scene. Lily’s hands fell from Mark’s face, and she began to tremble. Misha said, matter-of-factly: “Hello, MacDonald. Care for a drink?”

  “It’s all right, your Excellency,” Mark replied, extending his hand. “I just dropped in on Lily ... to see how she was. I have to leave now.”

  “Won’t you stay for dinner? I’m sure Lily would be delighted.”

  “No, thank you. I really must be going.”

  The two men shook hands. Lily stared at them, frozen, her heart thumping. How long had Misha been listening? And he was so pale, so quiet. She’d never seen him like this. When Mark left the room, she realized that she was filled with terror. She stood like a statue, unmoving, no words coming to her. Finally, Misha asked: “Why was he here, Lily?”

  “To drop off a package.”

  “What package? A present, maybe?”

  She shook her head, bewildered. “No. Just some things I’d bought for the children.”

  “And tell me, however did Mark MacDonald happen to have these items in his possession?”

  “I—I had coffee with him, yesterday. And—I forgot the package on the chair of the café.”

  “You had coffee with Mark, yesterday? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  His green eyes were like cold marbles, without feeling. Her mouth fell open. “I—”

  He came up to her then, and stood very close, towering over her. In a still, hard voice, he asked: “And for how many weeks, months, years, have you been meeting Mr. MacDonald?”

  Then he hadn’t heard. He’d only seen them, together. A flood of relief washed over her. She put her hand on Misha’s shoulder, laughed hesitantly. “I’ve never met him. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since before we were married. But yesterday, on the street, we ran into each other. And so we stopped for a quick café express, and I forgot the package.”

  With a vehemence that she didn’t expect, he pushed her savagely away from him. She fell back, caught herself on the back of a chair, stared at him with disbelief and naked fear. “Misha—”

  He grasped her arm, twisted it until she writhed in pain, then let it fall. “You goddamned liar,” he said in a dead voice. “Get out of my sight!”

  Terrified, she ran from the room, blinded by her tears.

  She hadn’t moved since the terrible confrontation in the study. She sat on her bed, silent tears falling and falling over her cheeks, her body shaking. What had gone so wrong? He’d called her a liar. Then, he really believed she’d been . . . with Mark. It didn’t make any sense. He should have known she’d never be unfaithful. He knew her.

  Misha had always been so gentle, so protective. Yet hours ago he’d been brutal and
ugly. He’d been unfair. Lily wanted to run away from the house, to go to the safety of the Ritz, where Claire would be having a quiet dinner with Jacques—

  But she couldn’t leave the house, because her children were there, asleep.

  The doorknob moved, silently, and she sat, mesmerized, staring at it. The door opened. Misha, his eyes bloodshot, entered the room. Instinctively, she recoiled on the bed.

  “It’s all right,” he said, in an unusual, singsong voice, blurred a little by alcohol. And he sat down beside her. “I’m sorry I was rough with you, Lily.”

  She said, blushing: “But I told you the truth. Mark only came here to return a package. Our story ended years ago—and you know I was never really in love with him. He was always . . . just a dear friend.”

  “Relationships change. He’s a clean-cut, attractive young man. Why shouldn’t you have liked him?”

  She stammered: “But—I told you! I never liked him—as a man.”

  “Then why did you ever become engaged?”

  She turned away. “Because Claude told me that you were already married.”

  “And . . . this time?”

  “But, Misha, there is no ‘this time.’ I hadn’t seen him in four years! You must believe me!”

  Now his features set in the same ugly expression that had so frightened her in the study. His green eyes seemed unfocused, his complexion too ruddy. Cords stood out on his neck. He seemed a man unhinged, and the nameless panic of the hunted animal seized Lily, paralyzing her on the bed.

  Leaning forward, his voice rose a pitch, and he cried out: “But I don’t believe you! I heard you! You’re going to have his baby, Liliane. You slept with another man, and now you’re carrying his child, wanting to pass it off as one of mine. Oh, God, God—why did you have to turn into a slut, like all the others? Why you, the only woman I ever loved?”

  Her mouth fell open. In her shock, and disbelief of what she had just heard, she found no words to answer him. And then, to her mounting horror and amazement, she saw him sag against one of the posters of the bed, and, leaning his forehead against his arm, begin to sob.

  Trembling uncontrollably, Lily stared at him, incapable of reacting. This had to be a nightmare. Things like this didn’t happen. She recalled, in vivid images, some of her father’s rages. They had been rainstorms compared to this tempest, which had ravaged her simple life and ripped it to pieces. Misha stood and sobbed, great racking sobs that sounded as savage as his accusing words, each a small sword thrust at their marriage. But she couldn’t, wouldn’t, go to him. There were some things even she couldn’t see forgiving, couldn’t see explaining. How he could have thought, for a split second, that she could have betrayed her vows, betrayed not only him but herself, and then tried to pass off another man’s baby as her husband’s—this was beyond forgiveness! She, who had always refused to hear echoes of gossip about other women in his life, who had loved him more than mother, son, daughter, and God!

  “Yes,” she said, her voice harsh and angry: “I’m going to have another child. But not in this house. I’m going to take Nicky and Kira to my mother’s, tomorrow!”

  Slowly, his large, leonine head raised itself from his arm. There were ugly seams in his cheeks, and a dull flatness to his eyes. Remnants of tears clung absurdly to the pinpricks of his beard. She met his stare with one of her own, defiant now.

  “You aren’t going anywhere with Nicky and Kira,” he simply declared, no emotion at all in his voice.

  “I’ll go where I want to with my children. I’m their mother!”

  “You’re their unfit mother. And I think you’ll see it my way, Lily: whatever you’ve done, you still love them both enough to wish to spare them an ugly scandal. I’ll demolish you, and ruin Mark MacDonald—and you know I can, and will. If you try to leave this house with my son and daughter.”

  She sat on the bed, shaking her head like a puppet: No, no! But no words came out, no cry, not even tears. She simply couldn’t stop the shaking of her head like a mad puppet on a wild, uncontrolled string.

  “And one more thing,” he said to her, swaying a little as he drew himself up to his full height. His pupils had shrunk to the tiniest of points in his irises. “You’ll go with me to a woman tomorrow, to have this pregnancy taken care of. I want to live in a clean house, do you hear me?”

  All at once she found her voice, in a great, resounding shout: “No!”

  He sighed, and pressed weary fingers to the bridge of his nose. “You’ll just have to balance this against the children,” he told her. “Just as we both will have to live with this marriage. For the sake of Nicky, and Kirotchka.”

  He turned the doorknob, and was outside before she could jump off the bed and do something, anything, to stop the nightmare. And so she stood, shivering, in the tasteful bedroom hung with raw silk, that denied, in its quiet decorum, that anything uncivilized had ever threatened the denizens of this household.

  Misha paced the floor, fully dressed, his face flushed with perspiration. On the mantelpiece, the delicate Louis XVI ormolu clock, adorned with carved cupids, sat pitilessly ticking off the minutes of his life, irretrievable minutes that he felt dropping away inside his very body. He pulled at his stiff collar, drew it off, and tossed it down on the bed.

  Never before had he been forced to examine his life with such unforgiving scrutiny. Misha found that tears, unexpected and unwelcome, were swelling his eyes. He’d felt secure with Lily, knowing that with the infinity of her love, she would always shield him, make him the center of her existence without, like Vava, giving him cause to worry that she would leave him when the passions of her tempestuous libido would sway her to a new and more exciting partner. This was why, when he’d come upon her holding Mark’s face, when he’d seen her eyes, so wide and filled with unabashed supplication, he’d felt doubly betrayed. She’d betrayed him once, as his wife; and twice, as the human being in this world he’d come closest to giving the key to his heart’s emotions.

  But I didn’t hear everything, he thought. And afterward, she’d seemed so sincere, so like the Lily he had always known. But all women, when it came to their self-preservation, were born dissemblers. Lily wasn’t stupid. She would have known just how to sound convincing . . . just how to bring him back to her.

  How could he know if Lily had lied?

  He remembered what she’d said, about Mark MacDonald. That she’d agreed to marry him, four years ago, because he, Misha, had disappointed her expectations. That’s what it had amounted to, anyway. His kind, sweet Lily had actually admitted that she’d consciously used a man, another human being. She’d come to a man she hadn’t loved, Mark MacDonald, to soothe her own broken heart, to heal her own wounds. This didn’t say much for Lily, then.

  Or maybe this had also been a lie. He tried to recall the first time he’d taken her, in the prairie near the little chapel, in the Loire valley. She’d behaved exactly like a virgin. But, of course, these last four years he hadn’t been with any virgins, and it was possible she’d fooled him. Maybe she’d loved MacDonald, and left him for reasons of her own. Maybe she’d listened to her father and brother, and decided that she’d have a better life as Princess Brasilova than as Mrs. Mark MacDonald. Still loving Mark.

  And if she’d loved the American novelist, that love might well have carried through into the years of her marriage to him, Misha. He sat down, uttering a sound of anguish as he envisioned them together, meeting time after time in small cafés . . . like yesterday. She must have been terribly agitated to forget her parcel, he thought.

  Anger, outrage, and self-pity constricted his throat, and he could feel the blood vessels stretching. Of course she’d been beside herself. She’d had to tell Mark about the baby! And he had come today. Why? To clear things up? “. . . you’ll have to break the news to Misha.”

  I could still be wrong, he told himself. Maybe this is all circumstantial evidence stacked against her. But he’d seen her face. He’d seen how she had looked at Mark MacDonald: her
whole life in her eyes, pleading. For what?

  Misha hunched over on the bed, his hands falling limply between his legs. He thought: I am a pathetic animal, whimpering pitifully in the night.

  All right, then. He had, after all, no real, tangible proof. She wanted this child. But the question would always remain: Whose child was it? And so he had to ensure that the question would never come up again, that the memory of this traumatic night never be brought out again.

  In his lifetime, many women he’d known had had abortions, carrying his children. He hadn’t felt the least shame for this, as he hadn’t loved them, and had promised them nothing. With Lily, it wasn’t the same. He loved her; she was his wife. And maybe she was also innocent.

  An abortion would profoundly scar her, he realized. She was such a devout Catholic. But what other solution was there, after all? He refused to bring up another man’s son or daughter as his own, granting him or her the same privileges as Kira and Nicky. It was unthinkable.

  Maybe I could forget, he thought. Maybe I could force my mind to reject what I heard tonight, and what I saw. And then this child could be born like the others, and it would be ours, like the others.

  A memory was nagging at him. He remembered now. He’d had a good friend, Grisha Orlov, in Moscow. A law student a few years older than himself. Grisha had been married to a beautiful woman called Katya. Misha had known them both well, and felt welcome in their home. He remembered how deeply they had loved each other.

  And then, one day, the delicate fabric of harmony had come undone. Grisha had received a letter. Anonymous, the way they always were. It said: “Your wife doesn’t love you.” Just those words. And after that, everything between Grisha and Katya had fallen apart.

  She’d denied the implication, laughed it off and then become hysterical in her outrage that he might have believed it. She’d been pregnant. Misha had advised his friend to believe his wife, rather than the nonsense of an anonymous letter. Katya was beautiful: any jealous man might have written this, out of wishful thinking. And Grisha had agreed.