the garage was burned.
Once in the library, his father said, "sit in the chair, Gilbert."
It was an Empire piece of dark walnut with a worn black velvet covering and a matching bench. As it was over-sized, he could measure how fast he was growing by how far his feet were from the floor.
Once seated, his father would question him about his latest peccadillo, his gentle professorial voice filled with disappointment.
The lectures always made him keenly aware of his failure to measure up to the standards set by his parents. Because he loved his father without reservation or judgment, each word was more painful than the worst imaginable spanking.
Years later his mother told him that after his father spanked him, he locked the door to the library and drank a great deal of brandy; something he never did.
Remembering, she had smiled sadly. He told me, “I felt like Stalin, Hitler and Attila the Hun all rolled into one. I never want to feel like that again.”
"Where are you now, Father?"
He didn't think about the fact that he was talking aloud and had been ever since he came back from the Middle East. "I could sure use the 'voice' now."
He looked slowly around the room. It was the largest room in the house. It occupied all three stories of the house. The books rose in warm-colored steps from the floor to the trompe l’oeile ceiling.
Two spiraled staircases made a graceful ascent to a balustraded balcony that went halfway round the room. Every bit of space not filled with books was covered with paintings spanning three hundred years and a dozen different schools.
His father and mother traveled widely when they were in their twenties and thirties, his father being one of the youngest professors of American Literature at Yale. From there he went on to teach at the finest universities in Europe. They were both avid collectors, and fortunately, the family money put the world of beautiful things in reach.
At the north end of the room French doors opened on a small, unique garden. His mother wanted it to be like an English country garden in miniature. With only two acres, there wasn't much choice, and Southern California climate wasn’t exactly conducive to the lush landscapes of southern England. She started it right after they came from England where his father had been teaching at Oxford.
The garden was beginning to come back. When he arrived a month before no one had taken care of it for some time, and, unlike England where a little neglect does little harm, the lack of care in the dry California hills nearly ruined it. One of the first things he'd done was to hire a gardener.
Mr. Hozen Nakamichi had been a real find. The leathery old Japanese walked back and forth over every inch of the garden like a hound on the scent. Every few minutes he looked at Gilbert accusatively, muttering God knows what kind of Oriental curses.
Gilbert, feeling unjustifiably guilty, tried to tell him he'd only just arrived, but it hadn't seemed to matter. Finally he stopped inspecting and rumbled belligerently.
"You want fix?"
Gilbert said yes, he did, to please make it as fine as when his mother took care of it. Mr. Nakamichi must have sensed something because his rumble was less menacing.
"Do not worry, Mr. Piers, I fix excellently." Then he smiled in a conspiratorial way; "Verry expensive, have three daughters, two at USC."
One morning, early, Gilbert had been out at the back of the property in the old gazebo, beginning the first moves of a Tai Chi exercise when Mr. Nakamichi appeared through the hedges. Instead of waiting, the old man took his shoes off, joined him and slipped into the movements with the ease of long practice.
They passed through the exercise, encased in the soothing protection of pure activity without thought. When they finished, Nakamichi bowed to Gilbert.
Gilbert invited him to share tea, the green tea of Japan he'd brought to the gazebo earlier. After that the old man was unfailingly polite to his young employer.
On this afternoon it was through the open doors to the garden that his other new friend came an hour earlier. Now she lay stretched along the curved back of the sofa, looking smug and possessive. Probably her real owner, if there were such a thing with a cat, wouldn't let her on the furniture.
She was a British longhair with typical coloring except for two reddish patches on her white cheeks. For no practical reason he called her Rachel.
She wandered in a week before while he'd been going through his mother's correspondence. He didn't realize he was crying. It started without visible memory or stimulus. At first, he got up, walked around, willed it to stop. Visible emotion was dangerous. Then he ignored it and went on doing whatever he was doing. Finally it stopped of its own accord.
That first day the cat jumped up on the desk, sat back on her haunches and talked to him. They looked at each other myopically from a distance of about five inches and then she did a fey thing.
She rose, stepped forward tentatively and licked the tears from his face. Later he told himself it was the salt, but in his heart he knew it wasn't so.
Soon after, he stopped. It was as though contact with the soul that was Rachel, was needed. Since then she came by every afternoon around one thirty, and spent a few hours lazing around, inspecting her new domain.
Once in a while, not often, she jumped into his lap, particularly if he was sitting on the sofa, and permitted him to pay whatever homage she felt due. Mostly she stretched out, as now, along the back of the sofa, possessing all that she surveyed.
Gilbert reached down and picked a book off the floor and opened it to a marked section. He read quietly for a while.
"Listen, Rachel." Now, although he frequently talked aloud, he directed his comments to her.
"You'll recognize this." He turned the book over and read from the cover. "This is from ‘Torture in Brazil'; a report on the use of torture by Brazilian military governments from 1964 to 1979. This section is on a more scientific appreciation of torture." Rachel watched him myopically as he read.
Neither Rachel nor Gilbert noticed the young woman coming across the garden toward the French doors. When she heard the voice, she stopped and listened. She began to get the gist of what he read. Although the voice was quiet and cultured she felt the underlying rage as if it were a physical presence.
She sat unnoticed on an old cast iron bench by the door.
"This is a report on a ‘patient’ Maria Regina Peixoto Pereira, 20, signed by Dr. Ronaldo Mendes de Oliveira Castro on 17 June 1970." Hospitalized in the 1st, (District Hospital of Brasilia), RM 519, coming from DOPS—Department of Political and Social Order—where she had been detained since 29, May 1970.
“- Reason for hospitalization: removed for presenting a confused state and impossibility of locomotion.
- Main complaint: headache and feelings of weakness...
- During her first days of imprisonment, 'Commitment; sorry, Rachel, I added the commitment' she began to feel anguished, suffering panic and fear, accompanied by a migraine headache on the left frontal-lateral side, constantly throbbing. At the same time she noticed difficulties in the movement of her whole body.
- She presented, soon afterwards,
