“Now stop this, both of you,” Harper said. “Elliot, do you 20
Alongside Night
have anything constructive to add?”
“Nothing I haven’t said a million times before.”
“Very well.” Harper noticed—gratefully—Bernard Rothman’s hand was raised. “Yes, Mr. Rothman?”
“I don’t understand any of this, Mr. Harper.”
Before Harper could reply, the video wallscreen activated with its speaker crackling. A petite but imposing woman in her sixties—silver-haired with large, piercing eyes—appeared on the screen. “Excuse me, Mr. Harper.” She spoke with a polyglot European accent. “Is Elliot Vreeland there?”
Elliot raised his head as he heard his name.
“Yes, Dr. Fischer,” Harper answered the screen.
“Would you please have him report to my office immediately?”
“He’s on his way.”
The screen cleared. Mr. Harper waved Elliot to the door with an underhand gesture.
Elliot picked up his books—nodding to Phillip Gross and Marilyn Danforth on his way out—and traced the 45-degree bend around the still-busy school cafeteria on his route to the stairs; the headmaster’s office was on the first floor, a flight down. He wondered what could be important enough for Dr. Fischer to pull him out of class. Perhaps his college applications?
He did not have to wait long before finding out. When Elliot entered the headmaster’s reception area, he found his sister seated inside with Dr. Fischer. Denise Vreeland was sixteen, a year younger than Elliot, with a strong resemblance, only at the moment she looked even younger and extremely vulnerable. Her strawberry-blonde hair was disarrayed; she looked as if she had been crying. Dr. Fischer was sitting next to her—
frowning.
“Denise, what’s wrong? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at school?”
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21
Dr. Fischer stood. “Elliot,” she said softly, “you must leave with your sister immediately.”
“What for?” he asked. “What’s all this about?”
Denise took a sharp intake of breath, looked Elliot straight in the eye, then whispered:
“Daddy’s dead.”
22
Alongside Night
Alongside Night
23
Chapter 2
The New York wind was damply chill as Elliot and Denise Vreeland left Ansonia’s five-story brownstone at 90 Central Park West, but Elliot’s thoughts were not with his surroundings. That his father was not alive seemed impossibly foreign to his entire orientation, to his entire life. Certainly he had expected that Martin Vreeland would die someday—but some day, not when Elliot still needed him.
At once he felt like slapping himself: Was that all he thought of his father? Just someone he “needed”? Somebody to provide him with the material artifacts of life: a bed, binoculars, books, camera, computer, trip to Europe? No. His needs were for things less tangible but nonetheless real. Teaching him to defend himself. Staying up with him one night when he was vomiting. Answering any question openly and intelligently. Or just being the kind of man who took time to teach him viable principles, living them himself without evasion. Even though his father had not been stingy with the free time he had had, there had never been enough of it, so far as Elliot was concerned. During the academic year, Dr. Vreeland had worked a demanding teaching schedule, while his summers—spent with his family at their New Hampshire lodge—
resultantly became his only chance for research, contemplation, and fulfilling publishing commitments. Elliot reflected that the two of them had not been close in the stereotypical father-son sense. They had never gone camping together, played touch football in Central Park, or eaten hot dogs at Shea Stadium. Moreover, his father’s Viennese upbringing had restrained him from any open displays of affection. But Elliot now recalled sharply that, in Boston four years earlier, Dr. Vreeland had been dissatisfied with every 24
Alongside Night
preparatory school to which he had considered sending him. Then, while addressing a monetary symposium in New Orleans, he had met Dr. Fischer and found her adhering to an academic philosophy identical to his own. After returning north and visiting Ansonia, Dr. Vreeland—a department head at Harvard who had not yet won his Nobel Prize—accepted a less rich professorship at Columbia and moved his family to New York.
Elliot found himself taking deep gulps of cold air into his lungs as if they were oxygen-starved. He wondered what the crushing, closed-in sensation was. He wondered if what he felt was what a son was supposed to feel upon learning of his father’s death. He wondered whether he should cry—or why he was not crying—although he felt so physically wrenched apart. He wondered whether he loved his father. He felt helpless even to define the components of such a love. This he knew: he wanted desperately to tell his father that he appreciated what he had been to him.