A Marrow Never Begs

Elspeth

He leaves the stage in the middle of a sentence.

I do not see him go. I see Warren go over the table, scattering silver and roses; I see a man in a plain dark suit leap the dais steps; I see two uniformed officers coming through the gilded doors with their hands on their belts. I see the whole ballroom turn into a single roar, three hundred voices at once, a surge of silk and feathers and white tie sloshing toward the stage and the exits and the phones. A woman is screaming Cordelia's name. Somebody is on his knees by the podium with his arms over his head.

And then I look at the lectern, and Conrad is not at it.

The gold mask lies on the boards. Beside it, the microphone, still live, still hissing faintly, carrying to fourteen thousand strangers the sound of a room that has stopped being a room.

"Elspeth," says Kestrel, at my elbow. His hand is on my arm. "He's gone through the terrace doors."

I do not answer.

I pick up my skirts in both fists, and run.

…

The Sable Court is not tall.

I remember that, as I go. It is a squat, black, heavy building, only fourteen stories, built in the twenties by a man who believed in granite. But it is the ballroom that makes it a crown: the whole top floor given over to a single vast chamber under a dome of glass, ringed on three sides by a terrace of white stone, so that on a clear night the dancers can step out between the waltzes and look down on Fifth Avenue and the black rectangle of the park. I have stood out there. Eight winters ago, in a green velvet dress, with a man in a gold mask holding my hand, and a pen in my glove.

The doors are open.

Cold hits me in the face like a slap. I run through them, out of the heat and the roar and the glitter, into a vast clean blue silence. The terrace is wide, and deserted, and covered in snow. Nobody has swept it. A line of footprints runs from the doors to the balustrade, a man's, dragging a little on the left, and at the end of them, a hundred feet away, with his back to me and his hands on the stone, Conrad stands looking out over the city.

I stop.

My breath goes up in a plume. My feet are numb in their thin slippers. The sound from the ballroom comes muffled through the glass, and above me the dome arches away into the dark, thousands of panes, each rimmed with a thread of snow, like the inside of a frozen lamp.

"Don't come any closer," says Conrad.

His voice is quite calm.

"I won't."

"I don't want them to take me."

"I know."

"I want to say something first." He doesn't turn. He is holding the balustrade with both hands, and the snow is falling on his bare head, on the short, light, stranger's hair, and settling on the shoulders of his coat. "I won't be long. I've said everything else."

"Yes."

"Do you know, I wasn't sure it would work?"

I wait.

"I felt it come. The way I did in the Orchard. I felt the sleep coming up round me like water, and I thought, no. Not tonight. Tonight I want to know what I'm saying." A short laugh. "And then I thought: why not? Why not let it? It's the only time I've ever said the truth without it costing something."

"It cost you."

"Not in the room." He turns his head. "Not while I was saying it. It was only afterward. When the lights came up. When I saw their faces."

He turns round.

The light from the glass dome falls on him, pale and level, and I see his face for the first time in eleven weeks without a mask. It is the stranger's face, the expensive one, the high cheekbones and the narrow nose. But the eyes in it are mine, and they are very tired, and the tears have dried in two white tracks on his cheeks.

"Was it you?" he says.

"Was what me?"

"The voice. On the Saturday. In the Orchard." His mouth shakes. "I thought it was a ghost. I thought it was you, come back, and I went home and told myself I'd gone mad. But it was a tube. There's a brass grille. I saw it, tonight, when I was lying there, in the lamplight. It's set in the wall. Chest height. Someone was singing to me through a pipe."

"Yes."

"You."

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Since the twentieth."

"And the doctor?"

"Knew."

"And the lullaby, and the word?" He is looking at me with an odd, wondering, almost tender expression. "Was it his idea?"

"The word was his. The key was his." I keep my voice level. "The rest was mine."

He nods slowly.

"I see," he says. "I thought it might be."

…

You expect shouting.

I had expected it myself. I had imagined, in the white room, in the long hours of the night, a hundred versions of this scene, and in each one there was a shout in it somewhere. A blow. A flung accusation. A man who stood at the end of a terrace and turned on the woman he had wronged and cried out, You used me.

He doesn't.

He stands in the snow with his hands hanging at his sides and says, quite gently: "That was very clever."

"Yes."

"You must have been so angry."

"I was."

"You hid it very well."

"I had a good teacher."

"Mine, too." He smiles. It is a lopsided, rueful, boyish smile, and it nearly breaks me. "I was always better at the other kind. The kind where you say a lot and mean none of it. I never could do what you did. Sit in a room for weeks with someone you hated and not say."

"I didn't hate you."

"No?"

"I wanted to."

He is silent.

The snow comes down between us in huge slow flakes. Far below, a long way down, a taxi horn sounds, and a siren, faint as a mosquito. The city glitters on the other side of the stone like a spilled jewel box. I can hear, behind me, through the open doors, a man's voice calling, "Mr. Marrow! Mr. Marrow, stay where you are!"

"Els," says Conrad.

"Yes."

"I need to ask you something."

"Ask."

"I've never asked you for anything. Have I?" He frowns, as at a sum. "In seven years. I never once said please. I bought you things. I took you places. I put my hand on yours at the table." His voice cracks. "But I never asked. I thought a Marrow doesn't."

"No."

"It's a stupid rule."

"Yes."

"My father used to say it. A Marrow never begs. He said it when I was six, and fell off the pony, and cried. I wanted to be picked up. He said, Get up. A Marrow doesn't beg." He swallows. "I've been getting up for thirty-six years."

"Conrad."

"I'm asking," he says.

His eyes fill.

"Please."

I do not move.

"Please forgive me."

…

I want to tell you that it is hard.

I want to say that I stood on the snow in the color of wet leaves, with my husband at the edge of the stone and the whole of seven years rising in me like water, and that I wept, and wavered, and weighed it. That there was a moment when I almost said it.

There wasn't.

There was a moment, and it was very short, and in it I saw everything. I saw a candle on a restaurant table, and a hand tapping three beats under the cloth. I saw a man's arm across my chest in the back of a car. I saw a kitchen in a cedar house, and a red-penciled margin, and a woman on a linoleum floor with her cap off. I saw a hairpin and a pencil and a girl with a gray cardigan counting. I saw them all, quite clear, one after another, in a line.

And I saw, at the end of it, a rough kind face with a cigarette behind the ear, saying: Don't make it personal.

"No," I say.

He closes his eyes.

"No, Conrad."

"Yes," he says. "I thought that's what it would be."

"I won't."

"No."

"I'm not going to say it. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not in ten years, or in forty." I can hear my own voice, flat and low and perfectly even, the voice of a woman reading a sum from a ledger. "You are going to want me to. You will want it more than you have ever wanted anything. And I will not give it to you."

"Why not?"

"Because it isn't mine to give."

He opens his eyes.

"It's his," I say. "It belongs to a man in a cardigan who had a wife called Margot and a lake house with a bad board on the porch. And he's dead. And you killed him, Conrad. With a match."

"I know."

"You looked at him, and he was kind to you."

"I know. I know." He puts his hand over his mouth. "God. I know."

"You don't get to be forgiven for that."

"No."

"You get to carry it."

"I can't."

"You can. You'll find you can." I take a step forward. "That's what I've learned in eleven weeks. You can carry almost anything. You just can't put it down."

He stares at me.

And I see, in the snow-light, a slow dreadful understanding come up in his face, like a tide coming into a cellar. It's the understanding of a man who has been standing at the end of a long corridor all his life, thinking there was a door, and has just seen the wall.

"You mean prison," he says.

"I mean Ferris, with a pair of handcuffs, in about forty seconds."

"And then?"

"And then a trial. And a verdict. And a very long time." I hold his gaze. "Warren will be in the next cell. Your mother will be at the back of the court in a black hat. You will have to sit and listen while twelve strangers hear what you did. And you will sleep, I think, in the end. People do."

"Like a child."

"If you're lucky."

"And you?"

"I'll be in the gallery."

"Will you look at me?"

"No."

He nods.

He nods again, slowly, as a man nods who has been told the price of a thing and has done his arithmetic.

"Els," he says. "Do you still have my lighter?"

…

I had forgotten.

It's in the pocket of the gown. A small deep pocket, cut into the seam, which Miriam's friend in the Garment District put there without being asked. I have carried it since the first of January; I have felt its weight against my hip through the whole of this long evening. I reach in, and my fingers close on a thing of brass, cool and worn, with three rings on the lid.

I take it out.

I hold it in my palm, in the snow-light, where he can see.

"It was on the library table," I say. "At Marrow Hall. I don't know how I came to take it."

"I do."

"Do you?"

"I think part of you wanted it." He smiles. "The part that remembered."

I thumb the lid.

It opens with a bright clean click. I know the sound; it is the sound of the fourteenth of October, in the dark, in a kitchen, in the instant before a man's voice said Els. Run. It goes through me like a needle. The wheel turns under my thumb. A flame leaps up, small and yellow and steady, in the cold blue air.

I hold it between us.

His face is lit from below. The eyes are enormous. The gold flicker moves in them, and in the wet on his cheeks, and I see that he is not looking at it with fear. He is looking at it as a man looks, at the end of a long road, at a lit window.

"That's what he saw," says Conrad.

"Yes."

"I held it just like that. Right at his collar. And he looked at me. He wasn't afraid." His voice is a thread. "He said, Numbers never lie, Conrad. And I didn't understand."

"Do you now?"

"I think so."

"Tell me."

He wets his lips.

"It means that it all adds up," he says. "That whatever you do. However you hide it. In the end it's there on the page. You can't cook a ledger forever. Somebody always comes to read it." He draws a breath. "And it means he wasn't threatening me. He was telling me. He was saying, You'll be found out, son. It isn't me who'll do it. It's the arithmetic."

"Yes."

"He knew he was going to die, and he was still trying to teach me."

"Yes."

"God." Conrad closes his eyes. "What a waste."

I shut the lighter.

The flame goes out. In the sudden dark there is a sharp sweet smell of naphtha, and the cold seems to rush back in. I put out my hand and take his, and open the fingers, and lay the brass thing in his palm.

"Take it," I say.

"Els—"

"It's yours."

He looks down at it.

And I see him understand, in the pale light, in the snow, with the sounds of the police behind him coming nearer, what I have just done. I have not given him the lighter. I have given him back the one thing that I could, and the only thing that ever belonged to him: the weight of what it was.

"Thank you," he says.

I don't answer.

"It's a kind of mercy."

"It isn't."

"It's the only kind I've ever had." He smiles at me, that last lopsided boyish smile, with the snow in his lashes. "Will you sing it?"

I stand perfectly still.

"Just once. Not for the key. Not for the court. For me." He closes his hand over the lighter. "I'd like to hear it with my eyes open."

"No."

"No?"

"No, Conrad."

I hear it come out of me, low and clean and quite without anger. "You've heard it enough. I sang it for you for seven years, in a kitchen, to a man who wouldn't sleep. I sang it through a wall. I sang it in front of fourteen thousand people." I look at him. "It was never yours. It was my mother's. I'll sing it to people who deserve it."

There is a very long silence.

Behind him, across the white stone, the terrace doors burst open.

…

"Marrow!"

It's the plain man in the dark suit, and two uniformed officers, and a number of shapes behind them in the light. The detective's voice rings across the snow, harsh and unexpectedly young. "Conrad Marrow! Police! Stay where you are!"

Conrad does not turn his head.

He is looking at me.

"That's fair," he says, softly.

"Conrad..."

"No. It's fair. It's the fairest thing anyone's said to me." The snow is settling in his hair. "A Marrow doesn't beg, Els. I know that. I've always known it. I'm only sorry it took me this long to find out what it was for."

"What was it for?"

"It's so that when you're refused," says Conrad Marrow, "you don't have to ask twice."

He steps back.

It's one step. It is a small, neat, quiet step, such as a man takes to let another pass in a corridor. His heel meets the stone of the balustrade. His hand comes up, the one with the lighter in it, and he looks at me across the width of the snow with an expression of such gentle, clear, radiant relief that I think, for one terrible instant, that he is going to laugh.

"Tell Mother," he says, "that I got up."

"Conrad!"

The detective is running.

I do not move.

I do not reach for him. I stand on the snow in a dark green gown with my arms at my sides and my left hand, quite of its own accord, tapping on my thigh. Once. Twice. Three times.

Displeased.

I let it tap.

And Conrad Augustin Marrow, forty-two years old, who has been dead for eleven weeks, puts his hand on the cold white stone, and turns, and goes over the edge of the terrace into the lit and glittering dark.

…

I will tell you what I heard.

I heard nothing.

I had expected a cry. I had braced for it with my whole body, as one braces for a blow. But there was no sound at all, only the soft sigh of the snow on the stone, and the far thin note of a siren, and a boy's voice in the doorway behind me crying out, over and over, a single word that I could not make out.

I did not look over the edge.

I want that known. I did not go to the balustrade. I did not see. I have been asked, in two courtrooms, by two kind men, to describe what lay below, and I have said that I cannot; and they have written it down.

I stood on the terrace.

The detective went past me at a run. The uniforms went past. A woman screamed somewhere inside. And over it all, with a gentle persistence that I had not expected, the snow went on falling, big and soft and silent, from the glass dome and the black sky, on the stone and the footprints and the empty place where he had been.

Someone had put a hand on my shoulder.

It was warm, and dry, and very steady.

"Elspeth," said Kestrel, in my ear.

"Don't."

"I am here."

"I know. Don't."

"I am not going to say anything." His arm came round me. "I am only going to stand."

I leaned against him.

I leaned my whole weight, as a tree leans, as a wall does. I shut my eyes. And in the dark behind my lids, with the snow on my face, I began, softly, in a voice that cracked and held, to count.

One.

Two.

Three.

I do not know what I was counting.

I counted until I could stop.