Darwinia

“Just the thought of it makes me shiver. Partisans are only people, after all.”

“Dear girl. But I suppose Dr. Vale would be out of business if women weren’t inclined to the romantic point of view. Isn’t that so?”

Vale performed his best and most unctuous smile. “Women are better able to see the infinite. Or less afraid of it.”

“There!” The congressman’s daughter blushed happily. “The infinite, Richard.”

Vale wished he could show her the infinite. It would burn her pretty eyes to cinders, he thought. It would peel the flesh from her skull.

After dinner the men retired to the library with brandies and Vale was left with the women. There was considerable talk of nephews in the military and their lapses of communication, of husbands keeping late hours at the State Department. Vale felt a certain resonance in these omens but couldn’t fathom their final significance. War? War with England? War with Japan? Neither seemed plausible… but Washington since Wilson’s death was a mossbound well, dark and easily poisoned.

Pressed for wisdom, Vale confined himself to drawing-room prophecies. Lost cats and errant children; the terrors of yellow fever, polio, influenza. His visions were benign and hardly supernatural. Private questions could be handled at his business address, and, in fact, his clientele had increased considerably in the two months since his first encounter with Eleanor. He was well on his way to becoming Father Confessor to a generation of aging heiresses. He kept careful notes.

The evening dragged on and showed no signs of becoming especially productive: not much to feed his diary tonight, Vale thought. Still, this was where he needed to be. Not just to bolster his income, though that was certainly a welcome side effect. He was following a deeper instinct, perhaps not quite his own. His god wanted him here.

And one does what a god wants, because that is the nature of a god, Vale thought: to be obeyed. That above all.

As he was leaving, Eleanor steered a clearly quite drunken man toward him. “Dr. Vale? This is Professor Randall, you were introduced, weren’t you?”

Vale shook hands with the white-haired venerable. Among Eleanor’s collection of academics and civil-service nonentities, which one was this? Randall, ah, something at the Natural History Museum, a curator of… could it be paleontology? That orphaned science.

“See him to his automobile,” Eleanor said, “won’t you? Eugene, go with Dr. Vale. A walk around the grounds might clear your head.”

The night air smelled of blossoms and dew, at least when the professor was downwind. Vale looked at his companion more carefully, imagined he saw pale structures under the surface of Randall’s body. Coral growths of age (parchment skin, arthritic knuckles) obscured the buried soul. If paleontologists possessed souls.

“Finch is mad,” Randall muttered, continuing some abandoned conversation, “if he thinks… if he thinks he can prove…”

“There’s nothing to prove tonight, sir.”

Randall shook his head and squinted at Vale, seeing him perhaps for the first time. “You. Ah. You’re the fortune-teller, yes?”

“In a way.”

“See the future, do you?”

“Through a glass,” Vale said. “Darkly.”

“The future of the world?”

“More or less.”

“We talk about Europe,” Randall said. “Europe, the Sodom so corrupt it was cast into the refiner’s fire. And so we pluck out the seeds of Europeanism wherever we find them, whatever that means. Gross hypocrisy, of course. A political fad. Do you want to see Europe?” He swept his hand at the white-columned Sanders-Moss estate. “Here it is! The court at Versailles. It might as well be.”

The stars were vivid in the spring sky. Lately Vale had begun to perceive a kind of depth in starry skies, a layering or recession that made him think of forests and meadows, of tangled thickets in which predatory animals lurked. As above, so below.

“This Creator men like Finch drone on about,” Randall said. “One wants to believe, of course. But there are no fingerprints on a fossil. Washed off, I suppose, in the Flood.”

Obviously Randall shouldn’t be saying any of this. The climate of opinion had shifted since the Miracle and men like Randall were themselves a kind of living fossil — wooly mammoths trapped in an ice age. Of course Randall, a collector of bones, could hardly know that Vale was a collector of indiscretions.

Who would pay to know what Randall thought of Preston Finch? And in what currency, and when?

“I’m sorry,” Randall said. “This could hardly interest you.”

“On the contrary,” Vale said, walking with his prey into the dewy night. “It interests me a great deal.”

Chapter Five