Redemption - Leon Uris [300]
“In Egypt, till he got news of his wife, he was a shyte of major proportions. What can I say? But he turned into very much of a human being. Chris was funny with all his Brit crap. He found out something the hard way about the loyalty and love men can give each other.”
“Chris? Jeremy told me he had changed to an all-right fellow, but…”
“What about that wife of his?”
“She’s living a middling life in Canada. I can’t fault her for leaving, but she’s not worth the bother.”
“I’m going to tell you something you might not believe, but it’s true. Chris also realized why she left him, and he never once wished her ill.”
“Are you telling me the truth, Rory?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s hard to believe,” she said softly.
“I know. But seeing both those lads grow into fine men was a revelation to me, and the experience of them has been important to my own life. It told me I could also rise above my own sorrows.”
“And I can as well?” she asked.
“You’re going to find the reasons that will make the rest of your way worth the while.”
Sir Frederick Weed was wheeled out to the veranda a short distance away. His chair was set so he could look down the slope of the hills and see the stacks of Weed Ship & Iron. His nurse took up a magazine beside him.
“My father is nearly totally paralyzed. He cannot speak, but he hears and comprehends everything. His mind is as keen as it ever was. We’ve worked out a language by blinking his eyes and some small movement of a couple of fingers. Come, let’s meet him. He’ll enjoy your rowdy stories, if you have any.”
“I’m afraid I do.”
They made to the veranda, where she greeted her father with a kiss and set his lap robe straight, then took a chair in front of him.
“Freddie, this is Rory Landers. You know him from Chris and Jeremy’s letters.”
Rory could detect a smile through Weed’s watery eyes.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, sir,” Rory said.
“Rory is going to visit for a while. He’s going to tell us all about his year with the boys.”
Weed blinked.
“He said that you’re most welcome.”
When Caroline and Rory had retired from the veranda, she turned and watched her father for ever so long. “He just sits there, day after day, looking down at the empire he created. He is trying to will his grandsons back to life and himself to the man he once was. He refuses to accept that those things are gone. He fights to no avail, wondering why his willpower can’t remake the past.”
“Is there anything I can do or say to help him?”
“Yes.”
“What is that?”
“It will have to wait, but there is something we both need to know. Now, how about letting you have a stretch and a cleanup before dinner.”
She took him up the great winding stairs in the foyer and down a hall with walls filled with paintings and indentations holding statuary. She opened the door to Jeremy’s apartment.
“Are you sure you want me to stay in there?”
“Jeremy would be livid if I put you up anywhere else. And Rory, this is not going to end up a sad experience.”
“I know that.”
As he entered the room, Caroline took his arm and turned him around to her. “Are we going to be able to get their bodies back?”
Rory shook his head.
“Why?”
“Please don’t.”
“I must know. I have to put it to rest.”
“There are…thousands of unidentifiable skeletons…thousands and thousands, ours and the Turks. They’re all bleached white and lie in piles…everywhere…. Is that what you wanted to know earlier, for your father and yourself?”
“No,” she said. “It is something quite different.”
There was joy in Rathweed Hall in the next days as Rory recounted the boisterous scene in Cairo. It was right to tell these two. They could now have Chris and Jeremy’s happy days to be part of the memory. You could fair feel the old man laughing inside him.
But what was it they really wanted to know? It seemed that would have to come later, when fuller trust had been built.
Rory was sketchy about his own past. He did speak of Georgia and his hope he would find her, but nothing was said of Calvin Norman. For the most part he stuck to his Landers story, that