Rough Cider

FOUR

Things started to link up. With a jolt! The Old Bailey, May 1945. The Donovan murder trial. I’d been a witness. The papers had described me as “a pale eleven-year-old in a gray flannel suit who had to be repeatedly asked by the judge to speak up.” Because I was a child, my evidence had to be given in the form of an unsworn statement, and the judge had asked most of the questions. In his wig and scarlet robe, hunched forward to catch my words, black, shaggy eyebrows peaking in anticipation, that judge still haunts my dreams. You can push an experience like that to the back of your memory, block it out with a million happier events, but believe me, it will not be forgotten.

The connection with Alice Ashenfelter was not so clear. The man on trial had been an American, it was true, a GI serving in Somerset when I was evacuated there. I knew him. But his name was Donovan. Private Duke Donovan.

As if she were reading my thoughts, she explained, “My mother married a second time when I was still a baby. His name was Ashenfelter. They changed my name at the same time. That’s who I am in the records and on my ED and all the documentation: Alice, daughter of Henry Ashenfelter.”

“And he isn’t your father? You’re certain of this?”

“I have proof.”

I didn’t respond. I was trying to trace something of Duke Donovan in her features. I remembered him vividly. You see, I loved that man. Maybe there was something in the set of Alice Ashenfelter’s mouth, the way her jawline curved, but it was far from conclusive. She hadn’t convinced me yet.

She was uneasy at being scrutinized so minutely, because she filled the silence with more explanation. “I didn’t know any of this until recently. I thought I was just like all the other kids, with eyeglasses and a brace on my teeth and a mommy and daddy who had fights. When I say daddy, I mean Ashenfelter, okay? Looking back, I don’t think he ever loved me like a real father. One night they had a terrific scene over some woman he was seeing, and the next morning Ashenfelter quit. He upped and left us. I was eight years old. After that he never asked to see me or sent me a birthday card. When the divorce came through, my mother told me to forget him.” She gave a quick, ironic laugh. “But we still kept his stupid name.”

“He was one for the ladies, then?”

“You bet. The last we heard, he’d married again and gone to England.”

“And your mother?”

“Mom was through with men. She devoted herself to me. She wanted to compensate for what had happened, I guess. She bought me beautiful clothes, sent me to riding school, took me on vacations to Cape Cod. We were real close in those days.”

She paused. I was supposed to draw out the next stage in the story. Obviously the mother-daughter idyll hadn’t lasted. Instead I asked, “What’s her name?”

“My mom?”

I nodded. My memory functions on names. Ashenfelter was already fixed forever, but I needed something more evocative than “Mom.”

“You mean, her given name?”

“Yes.”

She hesitated. “If I tell you, would you use my given name sometimes? It helps my confidence.”

I grinned at the notion that after breaking into my house, stripping, and occupying my bed, she was short of confidence. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

“It’s Alice.”

“I know.”

“Hers was Eleanor. Everyone called her Elly.”

I noted the past tense.

She picked up the thread. “Like I was saying, she was turned right off men by Ashenfelter. I remember on Cape Cod, we used to have fun sitting outside a beach cafe sipping Coke and watching the guys. We tore them into small pieces. We sure hated men.”

“How old were you?”

“Maybe nine.”

“And soon, boys were taking an interest in you.”

She placed her forefinger on the bridge of her glasses and hitched them higher up her nose to stare at me through them.

“You know what Am going to say, don’t you?”

“You and Elly fell out?”

“Right. The teenage rebellion. Preteen, and not just rebellion, full-scale hostilities, if you want it straight. The guys tried to date me, she got tough, and I blew my stack. Neither of us were quitters. She tried locking me in, hiding my clothes, whaling my ass off, all that stuff. But my hormones were always going to win out in the end, and of course they did. Don’t get me wrong-I didn’t get into any kind of trouble. I just got it established that I could go on dates whenever I wanted.”

“And how did she react?”

“Badly.”

“In what way?”

“Alcohol. Sometimes when I came in, I had to put her to bed. She had a couple of bad falls. One time she broke her leg, but it didn’t stop her.” Nervously she put her thumb to her mouth and pressed it against her teeth. “I’m going to cut this short. Last fall I started in college, living away from home. One morning in February I was called to the dean’s office. Mom had been in an automobile accident. She’d driven off a straight stretch of highway into a tree.”

“The drinking

“The autopsy confirmed it.”

We observed a moment’s silence.

I asked, “Did she ever tell you that Ashenfelter wasn’t your natural father?”

She shook her head.

“In that case, how…?”

“I’m coming to that. I had to go through her papers to see if she made a will. She kept everything like that in an ebony needlework box that once belonged to her grandmother. I found a sealed envelope in there. When I opened it, there was just a marriage certificate, some press clippings, and a few old letters sent by Forces’ Mail. I glanced at the certificate and saw something unbelievable. My mother, Eleanor Louisa Beech, had gotten married in New York City, April 5, 1943, to a guy by the name of Duke Donovan! It really knocked me out. I mean, I was born the following February, for God’s sake!”

She appealed to me with wide eyes, as if she had just made the discovery afresh. I muttered something inaudible, wanting to move on to other things. I’sm uncomfortable with raw emotion.

“You think that was bad!” she said, inventing dialogue for me. “I took a look at the press clippings next, and they were really bizarre. Something about a trial in England. ‘The Skull in the Cider.’ Creepy. I didn’t know why she kept them. I was about to put them aside when I noticed a name: ‘Private Donovan, the accused.’ Can you imagine how I felt? Jesus, one minute I found a new daddy and the next he was on a murder rap.”

I smiled. Insensitive. I suppose I was as keyed up as she was, in my way.

Anyway, it didn’t upset her. She looked at me with a glazed expression and then unexpectedly smiled back and said, “Do you mind if I call you Theo?”

I answered flatly, “You just have.”

“Thanks. Well, I did plenty of thinking during the week of the funeral. I was very confused. I had one giant identity crisis. Either my daddy had been hanged for murder or I was Ashenfelter’s love child. Someone had obviously faked my records. I could understand my mom doing a thing like that to give me a clean start, but I figured she ought to have let me know when I was old enough to understand. Theo, she never even hinted at the possibility.”

“But you said you have proof.”

“Right. It was in the letters I found with the other things. I didn’t open them right off. I was scared. After the funeral I took them back to college. They waited on the shelf beside the clock, staring at me for over a week. I was extremely depressed, and I couldn’t take much more. Then one morning I came back from a wonderful lecture on William Wordsworth that lifted my spirits. The sun was shining and I went straight to the shelf and opened the first letter. I want you to read it, Theo. Would you hand me my pants?”

Her clothes were folded over the back of the chair I was sitting in. I passed the jeans to her. She took her wallet from the back pocket and extracted a ragged envelope, which she held out to me.

I hesitated.

She said, “Please.”

I took it from her and withdrew the letter. My own inner feelings were in turmoil. As I mentioned, I loved the man who had written it, loved him as a lonely child loves an adult who understands and offers support. I wanted to tap that source of strength again. His words-even to someone else-would be like a contact. But it was also a contact with a nightmare.

He had written in pencil on coarse, war-economy note-paper.

Elly, my dearest,

Another halt for the convoy, another chance to pen a few words to my sweet wife and our baby, trusting that somehow, sometime, you’ll read them. As ever, I’m not permitted to say where we are, except someplace in Europe, “On the road to victory” is, I guess, a description that won’t land me in trouble. I’m also at liberty to tell you that I still haven’t been wounded, thank God. Weary, so weary, but not wounded. I’m going to make it, baby, don’t you ever doubt it.

Enough about me. Can little Alice say “Daddy” yet? I guess that’s asking too much. There are kids here, would you believe? In the firing zone some kid in a bombed-out ruin asked me for gum. I always carry some. What’ll we do together, the three of us, when I’ m back? How’s about a picnic in Central Park? Coney Island? And someday I want to take you both to Washington, show you the White House.

Stay brave, my darling. This comes with all the love in the world and kisses for you both.

Your own Duke

I folded it and handed it back. To be frank, it hadn’t touched me as I had expected. It was a simple, dignified message from man to wife, and I had no part in that area of his life. Actually, it wasn’t disappointing to feel uninvolved. It was a relief.

She was saying, “Beautiful, isn’t it? I don’t care what he did; that’s a beautiful letter and he was my daddy.”

I nodded, sensing that this was a significant moment. I had to be convincing now. Underhandedly, I slipped into her idiom. “Alice, you’re so right. It’s a wonderful souvenir to have. He obviously loved you and your mother above everything else. That’s something to remember all your life. Why not leave it at that?”

It was a poor try, I don’t mind admitting. She showed how little she regarded it by leaning forward and asking, “How do you remember him, Theo? What was he really like?”

I said curtly and dismissively, “I was a child then. If you’ve finished your story, All take a shower.”

But she persisted. While I ran the water in the connecting shower room, she argued persuasively (and accurately) that those wartime experiences must have made a lasting impression. How could anyone forget being removed to a strange environment and caught in a tide of events that culminated in murder and a trial at the Old Bailey?

I turned the shower control to lukewarm, which characterized my state of mind. For my own reasons I was extremely reluctant to dredge up the past. Yet I had to admit that Alice Ashenfelter (or Donovan) was entitled to know more about the fatal events of November 1943. Her knowledge of what had happened was fragmentary, gleaned from a few newspaper cuttings. Apparently she wasn’t aware that she could have read detailed accounts of the case in a dozen different sources. The Donovan case was regarded in Britain as a classic of forensic detection. I had two books on the shelf in my living room that I could have given her to read. Murder being more commonplace in America, I suppose she didn’t expect to find her father’s case written up and copiously analyzed by criminologists, pathologists, and policemen.

I stepped out of the shower and reached for a bathrobe. I told her, “I’ll sleep in the spare room. No offense, but there isn’t room for two in that bed”

She said. “But you haven’t told me anything, Theo.”

“Want some coffee? I’ve had enough champagne.”

“Please. I’ll come and help.”

“No need.”

“Could I take a shower, then?”

“Of course.”

I went downstairs and found the two books on the Donovan case and locked them in my desk drawer. Whatever impressions of me you may have formed up to now, I had no wish to cause unnecessary mental suffering to Alice Ashenfelter. I didn’t want her finding a book with a picture of the victim’s shattered skull on the jacket, and a mug shot of her daddy beside it.

I guessed she’d find some excuse to follow me downstairs, and she did. She’d wrapped herself in my dressing gown and tied back her hair with the ribbon she used for her plait. It was slightly damp from the shower.

She said, “I remembered my backpack.”

“It’ll be cold out there.”

She ran out and brought it in. “You know,” she said, “I have a bedroll here. There’s no reason why I should put you out of your bed.”

“Black or white?”

When I’d poured the coffee, I told her I’d found something for her.

She said eagerly, “What is it, a picture of him?”

“No. Just a souvenir. He made it.” I handed her a figure about five inches high, carved from a piece of wood, representing a country policeman with his bicycle. On the base had been whittled out the cryptic words Or I then? If you examined the figure in a detached way, I suppose you might have dismissed the subject as kitsch, while admitting to a robust quality in the workmanship.

She stroked the carving with her fingertips, as if it were a living thing. “He really carved this?”

I nodded.

“And gave it to you as a present? He must have liked you a lot.” She frowned at the lettering on the base. “I don’t understand the meaning of these words.”

“ ‘Or I then?’ Written like that, they have no meaning.”

“A secret message?”

I smiled. “Nothing profound about it. As a kid in Somerset, I used to meet the local bobby sometimes, and he always greeted me with what sounded like those words. It was the dialect, you see. Or I then?’”

She shook her head, still at a loss.

I articulated it for her. “All right, then?”

“I got it.” She nodded, smiling.

As she still seemed somewhat bemused, I explained, “Duke was intrigued by the way Somerset people talked. He used to collect their sayings. Living with a family and going to school with the local children, as I did, I picked up a few examples for him. ‘Or I then?’ was one of them.”

“And this was his way of thanking you? I love it.”

“Keep it, then.”

She reddened and said. “Theo, I couldn’t do that. He made it for you. You kept it all these years.”

“Duke would have liked his baby daughter to have something he made.”

Her response was quick and spontaneous. She came up to me and kissed me on the lips. It pleased me. But if you’re thinking this was the trigger for more steamy sex in Pangbourne, think again. She was still trouble, and I meant to show her the door in the morning. I didn’t want a permanent houseguest. So, after the kiss, I put my hands on her shoulders and moved her gently out of range.

We sipped our coffee silently for a while, seated opposite each other across the kitchen table. She held the figure to her chest, as if it were in need of warmth. After a time, unable to contain herself any longer, she said, “You cared about him, didn’t you, Theo?”

“Yes.”

“He was kind to you?”

“Very.”

“But you testified against him in court?”

I nodded.

After a pause she said in a low voice, “Won’t you tell me what happened?”

I was tired and it was bloody late for a bedtime story, but she was going to draw it out of me before she went, that was certain. In humanity I felt bound to supply her with some sort of account. So it had to be now. I’m not much of a raconteur over breakfast.