ISABELLE DIDN’T UNDERSTAND WHAT was happening. Jarring commotion was everywhere, in the house and on the streets. The servants who had worked for the family for years all said they had never seen Vanessa like this. Martha the housekeeper said something must have happened to Walter Adams because Vanessa kept exclaiming in agitation while talking to her mother on the phone.
Isabelle thought nothing too serious could have happened to Walter because Vanessa didn’t leave the house to see her father. She did, however, disappear upstairs. Sometimes Vanessa didn’t emerge until it was dark outside.
But the most jarring thing was that Finn left the house on Monday morning, October 28, and here it was, Tuesday night, October 29, and no one had seen him. Isabelle knew Vanessa heard from him because she sprinted out of her bedroom when the phone rang. She flew downstairs and tore the receiver off the stand. Isabelle heard how hard Vanessa tried to control her voice on the phone. “Yes, Finn, darling, of course, I hope everything is all right, yes, the girls are fine. Take care of yourself, my love.”
After she hung up the phone, Vanessa called Isabelle upstairs, and in the privacy of her bedroom, stammering as if she were the one learning a foreign language, asked Isabelle to walk across town and “just glance in,” to see if Finn was really at the bank.
“He has an office right in front, from which he greets his customers,” Vanessa said. “But there’s also one in the back where he does actual work. He mustn’t see you, Isabelle, do you understand? Just peek in covertly.”
“Like shpion? You want to shpy?”
“Not spy! Just . . . check. Confirm. Make sure. Oh, you don’t understand,” said Vanessa.
“I understand little bit.” Poor woman, Isabelle thought.
“It’s just not like him not to come home!”
“Maybe bad things happen like radio says.”
With indifference, Vanessa waved off Isabelle’s words. “What possible calamity could happen that he should not come home?” she said. “That he should still be at work at nine at night. The bank closes at five!”
Isabelle tilted her head. She didn’t know. They didn’t have banks where she was from. They had other things in her village that were calamitous.
“Please don’t misunderstand,” Vanessa said. “I trust my husband. But sometimes he likes to have a drink, and it’s against the law, and sometimes he hangs around with some bad elements when he drinks, and I don’t want him to get in trouble. I’m looking out for him.”
“If he drink, won’t you smell?” said Isabelle.
“Yes, yes, but . . .” Vanessa broke off. “Are you going to do it or not?”
“What if he see me?”
“Why would he? Our servants are invisible to him,” Vanessa added. “You could bump into him and he wouldn’t notice.”
Isabelle put on her coat and left through the back gate. The streets weren’t empty, not that Isabelle had been out much at night. By nine, the city of Boston was asleep. But on this Tuesday, there was upheaval in the square. Cars were in the road, people raced down Beacon Street, there was noise, yelling, distant histrionics. Isabelle didn’t want to walk through the park, so she went uphill and around Boston Common. It was a twenty-minute walk, and the night was seasonably brisk, but Isabelle was sweating by the time she got to Winter Street. Adams Bank and Trust was dark. The stores around the bank were closed including a fancy-looking big store called Jordan Marsh. Isabelle did a double take at Jordan Marsh. That’s where her gorgeous silk robe was from.
Isabelle didn’t want Vanessa to be right in her suspicions about Finn. But it didn’t feel to Isabelle that Finn was lying. It felt, judging by the agitation in the streets, that the truth was even less pleasant than a secret drink with some rogues. It felt as if, when Vanessa found out what was really keeping Finn away from home, she’d wish he were drinking.
The bank was terraced by shops on both sides, but there was a narrow alley at the rear service entrance, and that’s where a circumspect Isabelle headed. In the back, there was a small fenced-in yard. Quietly, she opened the wrought-iron gate, walked through, and peeked in the only window with a light on.
Finn was there. Vanessa would be pleased. But he was in a state Isabelle had not seen him in. It was as if he had become a different person.
Isabelle wondered if perhaps this was the real Finn, and the buttoned-up, formal Finn was the pretender. This Finn had his jacket off, his vest off, his tie off, his shirt unbuttoned at the collar, his sleeves rolled up. This Finn smoked three cigarettes in the few minutes Isabelle watched him. He was frantic and manic. He paced his office, smoking and muttering. Every few seconds he ran across the hall to another room and returned with fistfuls of long, ribbon-like paper. He would stub out his cigarette, lean against the corner of the desk and study this paper like a divine scroll, threading it through his fingers, analyzing some invisible facts, facts that were so upsetting he would drop the spool on the floor, where it would fall next to other crumpled-up rolls. He would storm around his desk, light another cigarette, jump up again, and pace. Every ninety seconds or so—however long it took him to smoke one down—he would run across the hall and return with more white ribbon, which he again scrutinized like Moses did the tablets.
The phone rang. Finn lunged for it, grabbed it, spoke both animatedly and dejectedly to someone and then, after he replaced the receiver, sat slumped at the desk, not moving.
But something in a deadened Isabelle was moving. Something inside her was churning and roiling. On the surface it felt like the wind of compassion, of sympathy, a recognition of another person’s suffering. But underneath, there were other things, too. Her acute awareness of Finn’s misfortune joined her to him in a way she hadn’t foreseen. The unexpected yet ordinary connection swept away some of the stones from her heart.
Her trance was disturbed by a noise behind her. A man’s voice said, “Isabelle?”
If Isabelle had been a different person, a person who was easily spooked, she might have howled. Not only was she not alone, at night, in the dark, but the man who called out to her knew her name! Her first thought as she turned around wasn’t for herself or her safety. It was for Finn and Vanessa. If there was any kind of trouble, Finn would hear it, and then Isabelle would have to explain what she was doing lurking in the back alley, peeping at him in the dark. And Vanessa might have to explain a few things too.
Her mind racing, she spun to see who addressed her from the darkness.
It was Lucas.
The drunken fool!
“What are you doing here?” he asked. He was inebriated, of course, but he still managed to also be perplexed and flirtatious.
“What you doing here?” asked Isabelle, not hiding her irritation.
“I’m looking out for . . . for Finn,” he said. “You?”
Isabelle opened her mouth to say something asinine and false and then snapped her jaws shut. She didn’t owe this man an explanation in any language.
It suddenly got dark in the garden, and it took Isabelle a moment to realize that Finn had turned off his office lights and left. There was a good chance he was headed home.
“Look what you did,” she said to Lucas. “Now he gone.”
“He went to Lionel’s.” Lucas was slurring his words. “Lionel Morris from CCP. Want me to take you there? It’s not far.”
“No, thank you.”
Lucas came closer with a big smile. Isabelle put up her hands with no smile at all. “Stay way, Lucas.”
“Why you have to be so hard, girly girl?” he said. “Come on, soften up.”
Shoving him away, Isabelle turned and ran. Lucas pursued her. But in what world could a sloshed American man catch a Ukrainian prairie filly?
Not in this world. Before Isabelle crossed the street, Lucas had already stopped giving chase, plaintively calling after her, “Isabelle, come back! Why do you gotta be that way?”
Isabelle didn’t know whether to tell Vanessa about Lucas. She sensed she shouldn’t. The first time she met Vanessa, Isabelle had heard sharp sounds from her directed at Finn, and some of those sounds carried the name Lucas on them. Perhaps he was the scoundrel Vanessa didn’t want Finn drinking with.
“Yes,” she said to Vanessa when she returned home. “He was at office.”
Isabelle told Vanessa what Finn had been doing, how agitated he was. Isabelle didn’t tell Vanessa he had gone to Lionel’s—for how could Isabelle know that?—and obviously she didn’t tell Vanessa what she felt upon seeing Finn with his costume off, his mask off, alone and in despair.
As the troubling week continued, matters were not resolved by one stealth mission. Finn continued to be absent from home, and Vanessa continued to send Isabelle to the bank. Isabelle didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want another run-in with Lucas. She found another alley that led to the bank’s rear yard, which meant another way out for her. Not only was Finn at his desk again, calculating numbers, smoking, talking on the phone, but Lucas was there too, and this time, he barred Isabelle’s exit. A good thing Isabelle had another way out. It was always good to have another way out.
Who was this Lucas, whom Vanessa didn’t like, whom Finn didn’t want to speak to, yet who loitered near Finn at night, indifferent to the cold and to how Finn felt about him?
Isabelle stopped going to the bank every night. She pretended to go, but often she walked around the neighborhood instead, gawking at the townhouses. When she grew cold, she quietly returned home through the back gate, always with the same cheerful report. But she wished she knew English well enough to say to Finn and Vanessa the words her mother had taught her in Ukrainian that went something like, Be sure your heart is brave; you can take much.