CHAPTER FOUR

Willie looked elegant and as outdoorsy as a cigarette commercial in a green and white hounds tooth-check jacket over a trendy Norwegian sweater with a long, trailing green woolen scarf that he called his Cratchit. He wore a Tyrolean hat at a jaunty angle and extra-long, narrow hiker’s knickerbockers and high-laced moccasin boots. They walked up the sloping road toward the funicular plaza and Willie identified buildings as they went. They strolled past the Park Hotel to the Palace, and he turned them into the building to show her part of the West automobile collection. “I started it in 1923,” Willie said, “then he saw it and made me sell it to him. He gave me his watch collection—as though that could make it all up. However, it is an unusual watch collection—watches of only people who have appeared on the covers of Time.”

The main hall of the Palace was seventy by forty feet. Nine twenty-two-feet-high pink marble pillars supported the ceiling, six large paintings were hung over deep-bellied Louis XVI commodes under massive Lobmayr chandeliers. Three automobiles relaxed like lazy cats on Persian rugs. A white Dusenberg stretched out in the foreground. Beyond that was a highly polished, robin’s-egg-blue Dobles steamer, and beyond that a rich Lincoln-green 1907 Compound. “Except for the mechanics and polishers, every guest on every floor of this hotel, and on nine floors sunk into the ground, is a vintage automobile.”

They walked along the path to a reproduction of a dark brown, wooden eighteenth-century tavern, where Willie put them both aboard a Vespa that he rode along an ascending left-hand fork in the path, past a small, exquisitely beautiful church, then upward into the forest. “We’ll take the Hammetschwand lift to the top of the mountain,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s the finest view in the central Adirondacks, just as the real thing is one of the finest views in Switzerland.”

The shaft of the lift was enclosed in glass. It was illuminated at night, Willie explained, and looked like a pillar of golden fire when seen from the pier on the opposite side of the lake, six miles away. “The Hammetschwand lift at the real Bürgenstock is the fastest elevator in Europe. This is a precise duplicate of the one Herr Frey built when he was outraged to hear that Adolf Hitler’s elevator at Garmisch was said to be the fastest anywhere.” They got off the Vespa and into the elevator car. “It’s straight up now for six hundred and thirty feet to the mountaintop, which puts us at about twenty-one hundred feet above the lake. And the fall on this side of the mountain is as straight down as the sides of two and a half Empire State buildings, one on top of the other.”

The view was breath-taking. Below them, along the mountain ridge that was the high, narrow spine of land between the emptiness above the lake itself and the soft, green valley mantled with snow on the other side, balanced the buildings of the Bürgenstock. They sipped icy cold Dezaley wine at a tiny replica of the souvenir stand and café that rested on the Swiss Tritten Alp, and Willie showed Mayra the footpaths by which one could descend to the the ridge without taking the towering lift. Willie looked at his watch and said they must go down soon to join the others at the entrance to the church for Christmas services, which, as Mr. West performed them, meant instant slumber for all.

The concierge of the Grand Hotel leaned across and wrapped Mr. West warmly in the beaver robe. He closed the door, and the heavy Rolls glided silently for two hundred yards down the hill, where, at the end of the road, the driver turned the car around. Walt could look downward at the helicopter’s landing pad at the foot of a long escalator stairway. Walt and his father had not spoken to each other beyond their greeting in the hall of the hotel. When the car stopped they could hear the sound of the chopper and their eyes followed it down. Walt stood on the brow of the hill in the clear sunshine, deep in snow, and watched Dan get out of the plane.

Dan was wearing a black homburg, a white silk scarf and a black overcoat with satin-faced lapels over a dinner jacket and black tie. His face was a high color. He glided up the escalator, talking as he came. “Where’s your wife?”

“Willie took her out on a special morning tour.”

“How is you-know-who behaving?”

“Fine. He’s right here.”

“You look great, kid.”

“You look pretty fit yourself.”

“Don’t believe it. I flew in straight from an all-night party at Rockrimmon. I’m not exactly dressed for a Christmas day lunch.” They embraced, then Dan leaned into the car and shook hands with his father. “It’s a long climb,” he said, grinning. “Can’t we get a high-speed escalator?” Mr. West took up a dictaphone from inside the arm rest and spoke into it. “Investigate high-speed escalators,” he ordered into it. The driver packed them in under the beaver robe. Dan smelled of the very best bourbon. Mr. West said, “What does State have to say about Roncalli?”

“He’ll make a good Pope, Father.”

“My people say he’s some kind of a liberal.”

The driver got behind the wheel. The car moved sedately up the hill. “De Gaulle was elected with a seventy-eight-point-five percent edge over Communists. Maybe sanity has come back to France.” To Walt their conversation seemed coded, as if they were speaking in some private shorthand. But the timbre of his father’s voice had changed: He no longer sounded like a querulous old man. “There are nine hundred and eighteen computers in use in this country. My companies operate one hundred and seventy of them. There are a hundred and fifty-four computers working in Europe and my people operate sixty-three of those. All those computers and my own sure sense tell me that we’re going to make a real killing in France in the next five or six years, and I don’t want your State Department rocking the boat.” The car stopped at the Grand Hotel. “No, no,” Mr. West said. “We’re going on to the church.”

“Not me, Father,” Walt said, opening the car door. “I’ll look for you at lunchtime, Dan. In the bar?” He shut the door, and the car moved forward as Walt went into the hotel.

“I have my doubts about your brother,” Mr. West said. “An unfrocked priest who marries a nigger and refuses to go to church sounds like a Commie to me.”

“Please,” Dan answered wearily. “No communism. It’s Christmas. Why did you invite them here?”

“He’s my son. I am entitled to curiosity about my son.”

“After thirty years? After my appealing to that curiosity three dozen times in the past fifteen years? Why did you invite them here?”

“Did you invite yourself all the way here just to ask me that?”

“Yes.”

Mr. West shut his eyes. “I am old, Dan,” he said. “I’ll be dead soon. I wanted to make my peace. Maybe I made a terrible mistake with what I did to that boy. I don’t know. I have to find out. I wanted to see him here and in a little while to be able to talk to him. Maybe he has big dreams. He’s young. Why not? Maybe I can help him. That’s what fathers are supposed to be for. That’s why I invited him here at Christmas time. That’s why I’m so confused for one of the few times in my life.”

“I hope that is why you invited him here.”

Mr. West turned the full power of his eyes upon his oldest son. “And if it isn’t? Are you threatening me? Do I hear that in your voice?”

“Yes, Father,” Dan said, regarding at him steadily. “You do. If anything wrong is done to that boy or his wife, you and I will break apart and I will fight you from their side.”

“You are a silly man to volunteer a thing like that, Dan,” his father answered and closed his eyes.

Mayra and Willie and Dan filed into the church with the small congregation of hotel employees. It was a strikingly beautiful church interior, an exact replica of the church at the original Bürgenstock. It was simple beyond simplicity. Hand-carved, painted statues stood in elevated niches. The altar was a multicolored triptych illuminated by the sun. All around was immaculate white plaster upon which the sunlight fell from stained-glass windows on either side and high behind the altar. The congregation seated itself, then folded up its collective mind and tucked it away. Dan went to sleep immediately. Willie sighed and settled himself for shock waves of boredom as Mr. West appeared wearing a long, black robe and moved to a place behind a lectern.

He gazed out fiercely into the blanked faces of his audience and intoned. “On this supreme of all birthdays, let us pray.” He led them in the Lord’s Prayer, then opened the large Bible in front of him. His eyes shone. He spoke only to Mayra, but the other three dozen people had been so turned off by previous sermons that no one was aware of the intensity of the attention he paid to her. What he said was written in the Bible, but he seemed to know the words as though they were his own: “Let her kiss me with the kisses of her mouth, for thy love is better than wine. Draw me, we will run after thee, the king hath brought you into his chambers and we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee. Set me as a coal upon thine arm: for love is as strong as death; jealousy as cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame.”

She felt fear. She heard her mother tell once more about Mary Lou Mayberry, a coffee-bean girl. His eyes glowed above the Bible, and only Willie, excepting Mayra, had come to life with what was happening, following the beam of his master’s eyes to Mayra and connecting it, all of it, backward in time, with Mary Lou Mayberry, with Baby Tolliver and with all of what Rhonda Healey had called “Eddie’s black dagoes.” Mayra could not break her own gaze fixed to West’s. He no longer stood before them as a peculiar old man, but as a bull god. “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it: Make haste, my beloved, and be thou like a roe to a young hart upon mountains of spice.”

Mayra knew she was more alone in the white, white world than she had ever been before.