It was more than laughter—it was almost thunder. Wilkie hesitated in the hallway until the roar died down. When he could only hear Jim Hillsinger’s low voice speaking, he walked into the dining room where the Hillsinger nuclear family, plus Diana, was finishing their lunch at the massive oak table. Hillsinger was at the head, facing him, and continued to tell the joke:
“‘I don’t know,’ the waitress said. ‘I’ve never caught a rabbit myself.’”
There was another shout of laughter—even Diana laughed, which was rare. The children were nearly hyperventilating.
“Wilkie!” Hillsinger said, not waiting for the noise to fall away. “How was your ride?”
“Incredibly dangerous,” Wilkie said.
“I’m afraid we started without you,” Lila said.
She asked Susan to set another place.
“I could hear you all the way out by the barn,” Wilkie said.
“This man,” Lila said, pointing at her husband, “has been saying absolutely shocking things to the children.”
Faux-disciplinarian was one of the recurring characters that Lila played from time to time, though neither Jim nor the children seemed to take it very seriously. Wilkie knew Lila’s moods well enough to tell that she was delighted.
It struck Lila that Wilkie was about to see something different—her family in full-on carnival mode. She was not sure that was a good thing. From time to time and entirely without warning, Jim would launch into these states of exception, where the normal rules were suspended for hours or days, or longer: he would hold court, as he was doing now, assessing fines to be paid in jumping-jacks, impersonating forgetful elephants, serving ice cream for breakfast, pulling the children out of school to go on trips, to caves full of stalactites or a tunnel hidden under some Civil War mansion. Lila never knew how long the festival would last—nor, she thought, did Jim. Once it took hold, the children would vibrate with expectation because nearly every minute held some preposterous surprise—until Jim’s chaotic energy ebbed away, or work intervened. Then the family abruptly went back to their normal, nonhilarious life. The transitions in and out were hardest on James, who cared the most about rules.
Today there was no preamble at all—Jim had simply started telling racy jokes there in the middle of lunch. James ignored him rather aggressively at first, eating four eggs-in-a-baskets and asking for more while his father was talking. However, once James saw Catta transfixed by the story, he began to listen, and then he committed entirely when he realized that the joke, which was long, was traveling far outside the normal decorum of the Hill House. Jim was never happy with small triumphs, so of course he launched immediately into a second one, about the waitress and three French soldiers. The sudden change caused madness in the children: tears streamed down Catta’s face and James rocked back in his ancient side chair, laughing uncontrollably, until he fell back and the chair smashed to pieces on the floor. Catta laughed so hard that he began to choke. Some combination of Catta’s laughing and coughing made James laugh harder still, and then the loving butterfly that was Isa wanted so much to laugh along with her brothers, to be a part of their outlandish game, that she threw up her arms in fellowship, spilling an entire glass of cold milk into her lap. It made her shriek, which threw the boys into such primeval hysterics again, that for a moment Isa thought she was the luckiest girl in the world, to have inspired such a riot. This had happened just before Wilkie walked in.
Lila’s eyes rested on her husband as Wilkie outlined the comic history of his fear of horses, including the terror unleashed by his slow ride on the beach on a ten-year-old horse named Maple. Jim glanced at her and covered her hand with his. His expression, Lila thought, said, look around you—we have done all this. It was familiar—it was perfect—and as the children’s laughter swelled and broke, she thought about the architecture of this moment—how none of it could have been predicted at their chance meeting by the fountain in Philadelphia so many years ago. How fate had intervened.
“James,” Lila said, “finish your asparagus.”
28
March 1960
Harlem, New York City
Since leaving her school in Harlem, Hannah Quick had worked part-time as the secretary to a local patroness of left-leaning causes. Her days were engaged but boring, consisting primarily of sending money to various Civil Rights groups in Southern states. From time to time she ran into friends or acquaintances from the school, and among the scattered gossip was the odd fact that Bobby Sheppard, a sometime substitute teacher at the school, had recently disappeared. He had missed an entire week of a planned substitute engagement, all the while being unreachable at home. People had been worried. Sheppard was also a cartoonist for a local weekly, and it was assumed that something journalistic had pulled him out of town on short notice, but the paper’s staff had no idea where he was either. And then Bobby Sheppard had turned up in East Berlin, as a defector.
Apparently he thought someone was after him, the colleague had said.
He was slightly touched, Hannah had said.
Two days later, Hannah was at home with the girls, now two and four years old. When Billy came home, she was roasting a chicken.
There are two men downstairs, Billy said when he walked in the door. They want to speak with you.
Who are they?
The FBI, Billy said. They want to talk about Bobby Sheppard.
The men from the FBI were almost excessively polite. Only one of them spoke, and that one said several times how good the chicken smelled. She invited them both to stay for dinner, but they declined. Hannah said the truth: she knew Bobby Sheppard only in passing, as a substitute teacher at her school. They had an occasional chat in the teachers’ lounge. She knew his cartoons in the Lennox Weekly. That was all.
They asked Billy if he had ever met Bobby Sheppard.
No, he said.
Would you be surprised, the FBI man said, to learn that Bobby Sheppard had defected to East Germany?
I was told that by an acquaintance last week, Hannah said.
Which acquaintance? the FBI man said.
She told them. If they were here talking to Hannah, then she was relatively sure that every teacher at the school would be on their list, too.
Among Sheppard’s papers, the FBI man said, handing her a piece of paper, was this sketch from the faculty lounge at the school. You are in it, along with a number of others.
Is this meant to be me? Hannah said as she looked at the sketch.
The names are there in the caption, the FBI man said. It’s notable that the other teachers pictured were all removed from work under suspicion of subversive activity. Do you know anything about that?