act one

With a woman,
always make good use of a secret

honoré de balzac

Night and the lake and a distant blurred cry in the silence: John Foster Dulles opened the big cottage front door and caught himself in the simple hall mirror for a moment. He listened, ­stock-­still. There was only quiet from above, from the bedrooms under the long eaves, the quiet of a sleeping ­house.
Outside, the trees stood guard, the last of their foliage filigreed by moonlight. His shoes scraped on the polished floorboards. At ­twenty-­four, he was practiced at late night entries; he and his brother Allen had often snuck back into the house after a stolen dip in the lake, ­bollock-­naked, dripping and smirking, creeping up the staircase, thieves in the dark, their shoes in their ­fingers.

Foster listened again, willing a clue from the ­stillness.

This fall of 1911, Foster’s last year of law school, had been altogether a troubled season, with low leaden clouds and the strong Lake Ontario waves full of storm wind crossing from the Canadian steppe, reaching over the dock’s smooth woodwork for the rough ­creek-­stone stairs above: there was something occult in this November’s unseasonable weather. The rain was relentless and the nights were restless and tropical and close, more June than Thanksgiving eve. Nature seemed out of ­kilter–­even the horses in the Reaveys’ stable up Old Lake Road slept poorly, pawing and kicking at their ­stalls.

The neighboring farmers reckoned something foul was afoot tonight. So said Sully, the ­chain-­smoking fisherman who rowed John Foster from Duck Island, where he’d spent the day cramming for the fall exams then fishing by dark, toward the Dulleses’ ­lantern-­lit pier, Sully’s cigarette glowing orange as he breathed. The farmers had killed a pair of deformed calves born that night, Sully reported. They’d burnt the remains, in silence, leaning on their pitchforks, thoughtful, the greasy smoke a veil over the moon as Sully and Foster had rowed past the ­pyre.

There it was ­again.

At first Foster thought he’d heard the cry of a lynx or one of the nameless wild cats that roamed in packs in the dunes, living off the gulls, but this was different, and keener, closer to ­home.

Foster slipped back outside and listened to the hush of the shore breeze in the pines. Then came the crackle of breaking brush, the snap of scrub beneath boots moving fast. There were two paths to the open green behind the cottage where they’d played croquet and the women took tea during the long summer ­afternoons–­but only one led from the Old Lake Road. That path produced a flailing figure sprinting down its narrow dirt length, up from the thornbush hollow, as if pursued by the hounds of ­hell.

Allen clutched his plaid shirt in his hand, his chores shirt, flying like a flag as he ran, ­bare-­chested, his legs pumping as fast as they could, gasps of terror thudding out of him with each ­breath.

From behind him came a wailing. For a moment Foster thought Allen had been set after by a bear, but the crash of big boots behind Allen belonged not to a bear but to big Mack Reavey, damn near as big as a bear, yelling ­curses.

Allen broke into the open, sparing a glance backwards only when he reached the relative safety of Foster, a roadblock in the middle of the sloping lawn. “Oh, hell, Foster,” Allen wheezed, his chest moving like a bellows, “I’m done for!” Allen stared at the hulking shape of a very angry Mack, who, secure in his moral and physical superiority to his quarry, slowed to a rolling walk. Behind Mack, a slim white shape floated in the brush, the source, Foster knew with sudden certainty, of the feline cries. He instinctively placed himself between Allen and Mack Reavey, the town’s cooper, who had arms big as Allen’s legs and a fierce grin on him as he came into the moonlight, a grin that looked a lot like ­murder.

Eleanor had awoken at the first of the cries, blinking herself awake in the attic bedroom beneath the bare rafters. She’d pressed the lenses of her deep spectacles against the windowpane above her headboard, searching the night ­shapes.

She slipped out from under her comforter and wrapped herself in the gray cardigan stowed at the foot of her bed. She fitted her moccasins, then stepped lightly to the head of the stairs, past her parents’ closed bedroom door, straining to hear ­more.

She peered out the landing window, through a tendril of fog snaking through the treetops below: she could hear Foster’s dour tenor and the rough, low monosyllables of a voice that sounded like Mack Reavey’s. Caught in a fan of moonlight where the lawn met the pine forest darted a smear of red, white, and blue. Eleanor blinked. Mo Reavey in the woods at midnight? She remembered Mo and the two other girls at the general store that afternoon, their laughing faces crisp as a photograph, a conspiracy of giggles on the front porch, and Mo’s friend Carmel Kelly locking a mocking eye with Eleanor’s own mystified gaze. Eleanor, no slouch at the cruel emotional arithmetic of those girls, smelt ­scandal.

The three ­fifteen-­year-­old girls walked off, still giggling, knowing something Eleanor had no ken of, something powerful and exclusive. Then the girls were gone, heading for Mack’s big whitewashed cooperage, a converted barn where Carmel and the Reavey girls were known to hide in the dusty old loft, wantons reading penny dreadfuls in whispers. Rumor at school had it that you could get a homemade cigarette from Carmel Kelly, fresh from her father’s rolling machine, for a tariff so secret you had to negotiate with Carmel at the fence behind the fish company ­shed.

They’re Catholics, Eleanor reminded herself, they’re different. She moved down the stairs, the planking squeaking under her weight. The front door opened quietly and she stepped along the flower bed smelling of rain and mulch, toward the row of poplars Grandpa Foster had had planted on the windward side of the cottage. Her moccasins left silvery wet footprints in the grass. Ahead of her, moving downhill, toward the lakeshore, Foster and Mack walked together, their voices low against the shore ­breeze.

She saw no one else until a branch in the bramble angled down and the smudge of blue and white became Mo Reavey’s ­peaches-­and-­cream face, a blue ribbon falling from the tangle of her ­hair.

She had a snub nose and quick eyes and the terrified look of a daughter with an irate ox for a father and nowhere left to run. She wiped her nose with a flick of her wrist and sniffled, watching the two men in the ­distance.

“Are you all right?” Eleanor ­inquired.

Mo Reavey sniffed again. “I’m fine. For now. Gonna get a whupping from my pa.” A curious gloss came into her eyes, triumph registering there. “You’re his sister, ain’tcha?”

“Foster’s my brother, yes,” Eleanor acknowledged. “Here, take my handkerchief.”

Mo gave her nose a poke, once in each nostril, and stared at Eleanor over her fist. “Nah. Not that one, the other one.” She had a catlike smile now and Eleanor realized why Foster was gesturing and talking so carefully to Mack Reavey down by the lakeshore. She turned and saw Allen on the back steps of the cottage, his lank legs splayed open, a geometry of ­defeat.

“Yes,” was all Eleanor replied. “You have a sweater, Maureen?”

Mo Reavey was rubbing her knee. “Skint it,” she ­said.

“Take mine,” Eleanor said, and wrapped her cardigan over Mo’s shoulders, thinking, then searching the windows of the cottage for any sign of wakefulness from the others. Only ­stillness.

Mo Reavey held up three cigarettes. “That’s what I got,” she ­said.

“You had a bet with Carmel.”

“She said that brother of yours wouldna come see me ifna I asked.”

“Generally depends on what you ask a person,” Eleanor said, still careful, treating Mo Reavey like the skittish cat she so resembled, waiting for her to ­steady.

“Smarter’n yah brother,” Mo Reavey said. “He’s a fish.” She tugged the sweater tighter around her. “Said I’d show him something he ain’t never seen before and his eyes lit up like the Fourth ’a July. I knew right then Carmel owed me.” She smiled her cunning smile and Eleanor could make out Foster saying “understanding” and Mack backing off, the two of them calmer now, their hands at their ­sides.

Eleanor examined Mo’s face for some sign the girl could be trusted. “You like smokes?”

“Makes me feel like the Queen ’a England. Rich, like.”

Eleanor motioned Mo closer. “You can have all you want, right off Mr. Moxley’s shelf,” Eleanor whispered. “But you can’t tell your father. He wouldn’t approve of a girl smoking, now, would he?”

Mo flinched at the thought of ­it.