Chapter 3 The Labyrinth

Chapter 3. The Labyrinth

The reader will forgive me, I hope, if I am not reporting Brewer’s narrative word for word. Inevitably the transcript bears the marks of my own style, and is more polished. At the time, Brewer had a different kind of eloquence: tone and face carried a hundred shades of mood, and in particular a wistfulness, which I think a verbatim account would miss. I convey, not necessarily the exact words, but the meaning as best I can.

It was about this time, I think, that he beckoned us to come indoors. The pretext, I think, was something about the chill in the air as evening fell, but it was almost summer and I think he was afraid of eavesdroppers. By this time it was nearly dark: the sky was pale blue, but the trees, already silhouettes.

“I met Mary’s brother Mark and her father at Lionel’s wedding. Old Jacob Graben had a long, unkempt black beard, in the style of his people.  He wore a tall black hat, a black jacket and pants, and a bowtie. He would have had an old-fashioned elegance, except that his pants and jacket were covered with dust, brought with him, no doubt, from the cornfields of southern Illinois, where the Graben family lived.

“I met the two Grabens again, eleven years later, after the murder trial—I’ll tell you about that later—when they stopped by my mother’s house to make a sort of formal confession of having suspected me of Mary’s murder. Old Jacob Graben made a bow and asked my forgiveness. Mark, who was shy in his father’s presence, quietly assented in the apology. The two farmers looked quaint against the backdrop of the town streets. I had recognized Jacob Graben in the audience during the trial by his beard. By then, it was gray.

“Another ten years passed before Mark called me—that would have been in about 1969—to say that his eldest daughter Ruth was enrolling in college here, and—since I was in real estate—could I help her find a place to stay? Though he had said almost nothing at our last meeting, he spoke with evident sincerity of how sorry he was that it had not been repeated, and how good it would be to see me again. He almost forced me to accept a rent well above the market rates, quoting a handsome figure while insisting that ‘something simple would be best’ and that ‘she doesn’t need anything fancy.’ Only with difficulty did I bid him down. He also asked me to ‘keep an eye on her,’ and to ‘help her out if she needs anything.’ He had the groundless worries of a doting father. I took a liking to him and invited their family to dinner when they were in town.

“So all six of them—Mark, his wife Sarah, Ruth and his younger daughter Anna and three sons (the youngest two were a bit unruly, to our amusement and Mark’s embarrassment) came to our house that September. Conversation turned to Mary, and I saw immediately that Mark idolized his sister. Mary was a bittersweet topic, however, and we didn’t want to sadden our two families, so we let it be and left the talking to our wives. It was the first of many visits, as Mark came often to see Ruth. He begged me to come see them at their farm, but for years I never found the time to accept the invitation.

“I think it was the summer of 1976 when I finally paid him a visit.  Eileen and the kids had gone to visit her parents in Missouri for two weeks. Business kept me at home, so that weekend, being by myself, I decided finally to see Mark. He was delighted to get my phone call. The drive took about two hours, first over highways, then along country roads that wound between cows and cornfields, hayfields and  patches of forest. I passed horse-carriages on the road. I passed through a few nonentity towns and then into another one which was my destination. The most prominent building was a church, and across the street from it, a general store. I asked directions to the Graben farm—it was no surprise that the storekeeper knew where they lived—and then walked up and down the main street, looking in wonder at the fifty-odd houses and the five or ten shops, and the small high school, with a track and a sportsfield behind it.

“I thought about the girl on the hillside long ago, and thought to myself with wonder, So this is where she grew up… But the town seemed to have no soul; life was not here, but in the cornfields roundabout. The lush, earthy stillness of those fields wafted into the town and made the buildings seem accidental.

“Following the shopkeeper’s instructions, I turned off onto a gravel road, and my tires raised clouds of dust—the same dust, I suppose, that I had seen on Old Mr. Graben’s jacket twenty-eight years before. I was driving through tall cornfields now, and sometimes I saw men working in the fields in the distinctive dress—straw hats, overalls, long beards—that was customary for men of some German Anabaptist sect that had fled from persecution in Europe in the 19^th century. I hear that the schools there taught in German until World War I. By the time I turned down a long driveway to the Graben farmhouse, stormclouds were gathering in the sky.

“It was a white two-story house with chimneys on both ends, and a covered porch. Before I had stopped my car, Mark leaped out of the door with a great grin of greeting, and gave me a muscular handshake. He grabbed my suitcase, and led me inside, where a country feast was waiting for me: roast turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, corn on the cob, and fresh rolls. Sarah set the table while Mark put my suitcases away and called his father. Old Jacob Graben, who must have been over seventy by that time, came down the stairs, slowly and deliberately. His beard had finally matured into a magnificent snow-white cataract, as regal, in its way, as a lion’s mane. He seemed to carry with him a vast dignity of years, to evoke an ungrudging awe in his son and daughter-in-law. They were not uncomfortable in his presence; rather, they beamed with pride. Even the two youngest boys, still living at home and now seated at table, now tall and tan and strong from hard labor, seemed to love and admire their grandfather, as if not knowing what else to do.

“Though he obviously admired Old Jacob Graben, and emulated his goodness, the clean-shaven son subtly differed from his grave father, who seemed almost to have stepped out of another century.  I knew already that Mark had been forbidden to go to college because of the episode I am about to recount, which deepened old Mr. Graben’s conviction that all the kingdoms of this world belonged to the devil. The old man had been against Ruth’s aspiration to go to college (Mark, the doting father, could refuse her nothing) and Anna had spared them a quarrel by not showing the inclination. Yet Mark had lived in that house all his life, except for a few weeks when he was sixteen, and he, Sarah, and old Jacob Graben, and various combinations of Mark and Sarah’s children, had lived under the same roof peaceably for an impressive twenty-seven years.

“I sensed at once that Mary was not a suitable topic of conversation at the old man’s table. He had no reason to be ashamed of his lost daughter, as far as he knew, but she was a grief and a mystery, and grief and mystery were interruptions to the stern, strict joy in Christ which was the only way he knew how to live.

“Fortunately, the weather gave us plenty to talk about. A rain started falling just after we began the meal so violent that we were amazed at it, clattering so loudly on the roof that we had to raise our voices to be heard. It had been a dry enough summer to make the two old farmers fear for their crop, and they watched with excitement and tentative relief as the torrents fell—tentative because they feared hail. There were majestic bolts of lightning and terrible smashes of thunder. Also, there was the food—never have I tasted such delicious home cooking! Sarah was a plain woman but I saw now that Mark was a lucky man to have her. For dessert she brought out a fruit cobbler, every bite of it a mouth-watering masterpiece. I praised the food with such abandon that I think I made her blush.

“After dinner, the rain stopped, the sun broke through the clouds in the western sky, and Mark and Jacob went out to the patio to look over the grateful cornfields, the dusty leaves now green again and glistening with rainwater-in-sunshine. Sarah, after clearing the table, joined her husband, putting her arms around his waist and her head on his shoulder. The old man sat in his rocking chair. The boys came out, too. And as the six of us stood there, looking out over the cornfields, there appeared, above the line of trees on the other side of the field, against the angry gray clouds that still filled the eastern sky, the vast shimmering arc of a rainbow.

“And just then I caught a glimpse of the old man’s face. Are there certain moments when you can look in someone’s eyes and their whole soul is open to you? I thought so that evening. You know what the Bible says about rainbows? Once, when all mankind was wicked, God regretted that he made man, and decided to flood the earth to destroy it. There was only one righteous man, Noah, whom God commanded to build an ark and put on it two of every living creature. It rained for forty days and flooded the whole world and Noah sailed on that lonely abyss, but finally the waters subsided and dry land appeared again. And at that time God first put a rainbow in the heavens, as a sign of His promise that he would never again flood the earth. I suppose the old man believed the story quite literally, but it was also a parable about his people. At a time when all mankind was wicked they had discovered the gospel of peace, in the Holy Book which the wicked Church had hidden from the people to protect its own authority. Like Noah, they had built their ark—their communities in Christ—and endured the floods of persecution. They had been driven for generations across the lonely abyss of this world, as one prince after another was incited by jealous worldly clerics to smother the unbearable light of the gospel. In one realm after another, they had been persecuted and driven out, packing a few belongings at best, or bringing only their families, dreaming of a place where the land was fertile, where war and persecution were far away, where they could live the way of God without fear. At last, here in the rich soils of southern Illinois, they had found it. And as old Jacob Graben looked at that rainbow in the last, golden years of his life, the joy and gratitude that shone in his eyes were not only his but that of all the generations whose dreams they had bequeathed to him and which now, at last, were fulfilled, in those tall rain-blessed cornfields, the bounty of God. He knew God’s bounty, and his soul was full of praise. And he knew, too, that when the next flood came, when the tiny ark of his soul set sail upon the last abyss, the dark waters of death, that the Lord would be with him, and would guy him to the blessed harbors where man is an exile no more.

“It was in the next dusk and dawn that I heard the tale of Mark’s and Mary’s childhood together, told to me in the very furrows and fields and forests around that old farmhouse where they had spent it.

“It was the 1930s, and beyond the fences, all was ominous. In the cities, there were the breadlines and the unemployed; overseas, terrible shadows were spreading over the earth. The children couldn’t have understood the news directly, but they understood the grim note in their elders’ voices as they discussed strange events and faraway places. They saw the vagabonds who passed through in jalopies in search of work. Old Jacob Graben hired some of them, less because he needed the help than because they did. After encephalitis took his wife—Mark was five when his mother died—Graben ran his farm as a charity ward, and sometimes let five destitute farmhands sleep under his roof, always pretending that he was doing it solely for profit, for as the Bible says: ‘when you give alms, let not your left hand know what your right hand doeth.’ Mark and Mary did not know their father was generous. They were afraid of the strangers, and tried to stay out of the house.

“From what Mark said, it seems that Graben paid hardly any attention to his children in those years. Perhaps they reminded him of his wife, and his grief at losing her, so that he could not take pleasure in their company without sadness. Or perhaps the pleasure he took in his lovely little daughter was so intense that it seemed sinful, in the midst of those bleak times, that stricken land, that benighted world. He knew Mary was a precocious and trustworthy child who did not need looking after, and could take care of her brother. And he was a careworn and busy man. So he left them to their own devices. And they would spend whole days on end in the fields and forests, rising at dawn in summertime and returning in darkness beneath a lustrous moon, laughing and running, chasing each other through the furrows beneath arched canopies of corn leaves, venturing with quiet awe into the shady sanctum of the forest, climbing trees, knowing every brook and bird’s nest, as if there were no people on earth but the two of them, and the characters in Mary’s tales.

“Conceited and malcontented children like to invent worlds because they think they can make better ones than the real one. Give them the slightest encouragement, and they will tell you tedious tales for hours. Mary was a meek and grateful child, and would have been content with the world as it was, but she had a practical reason to become a fantasist. She had a little boy to take care of, a little boy who ought to have had a mother to love him but did not, a boy who was afraid of the strange men in their house and even of his own father, a boy who was sometimes brought to tears by boredom and loneliness. And so she began to weave tales to entertain him, and she had a gift for it. She filled the furrows and the fields and the forests with gnomes and giants and goblins, with swords and sages and sorcerers, with kingdoms and knights and adventures, with magic pools and trap doors and spells, with trees bearing fruits sacred and sweet and strange, with dancing princesses and bulbous dragons. For Mary, though she knew she had made the new world and could unmake it, though she knew its humble purpose of averting Mark’s tears, the ceaseless labor of creation made her half believe in it.  For his part, Mark was too young to know the plausible from the implausible, to know what fits the rules of the world we inhabit from what cannot be believed; for him, the tales were real. Mary had to be careful, lest her stories give him nightmares.

“Her masterpiece was the Labyrinth. In her tales, the Labyrinth was a great maze of twisted corridors, all with arched roofs and walled with stone pillars, so large it had never been fully explored, and filled with an endless inventory of the strange and magical—there was always room for fresh improvisations—and the scene for innumerable quests. The form of the Labyrinth, of course, was that of the cornfields—the leaves were the arches, the stalks the pillars—and Mark and Mary could run up and down them and feel exquisite fear and sublime wonder at what they discovered, or did battle with, there.  Each was the other’s only companion. The two children spoke almost to no one else during the summertime, and Mark missed Mary bitterly when she started to go to school. Then Mark began to go to school, but the closeness that had been forged in Mary’s fairyland, and amidst the delight and danger of the Labyrinth, never faded. Mark didn’t tire of Mary’s tales, even as they passed grade after grade, and the war began, and he grew to be taller than she was.

“When Mary went to college, Mark lost a best friend, almost a mother. The house grew quiet and desolate. Most of the farmhands were gone now, to the war or the munitions factories, all but one old half-crippled giant, John Kearney, who helped with lifting hay bales in the barn and handling big equipment. Mark had never been close to his father, so he began to spend his time with Kearney, working on the equipment. John Kearney soon made him into something of a handyman, and in the summer of 1947, he started making good money installing air conditioners and doing other odd jobs, first for the neighbors, then all over the county. It was his way of getting out of the house.

“The next year he began to fall in with the youngest son of the pastor, child of his father’s old age, who went by the strange, romantic name of Francis Tristan. He was a ne’er-do-well. A troublemaker at school, he was sent by his father to a boarding school near Chicago, renowned for its strong discipline. The school made him more able to simulate good behavior for advantage, but well-versed in forms of corruption of which innocent Anabaptist farmers of southern Illinois knew nothing. Mark became his disciple as he had been Mary’s. In secret corners, he tasted his first wine, and heard dark, glamorous tales of Chicago.

“A gangland murder had taken place there twenty years before. A guy in debt to the Mob thought he could hide out in the country. He was found early one morning in a car parked in front of the church, the car windows shattered, his shirt front drenched with blood, a bullet through his chest. ‘Chicago’ was where the ghostly gunman had come from and disappeared to. Yet now Francis Tristan began to tell Mark tales of the very streets and clubs that Capone had haunted. Mark shuddered, but feigned interest for fear of disappointing his friend, and had soon convinced himself to dream of the glamor of Chicago.

“Francis Tristan was a bloodsucker, borrowing from everyone he knew, relying on his charm and easy manners to make new friends to replace those he lost to unpaid debts. Maybe he deserves to be pitied. I never discovered what end he met with. It was probably a bad one. He was already almost desperate, in debt to dangerous men, hiding out in a hometown he hated, beneath the roof of a father who repented of begetting him and with whom he never spoke, longing for the lights of Chicago where he was at home, where he was, in his way, almost a prodigy of social climbing, though a doomed one, full of mad hopes in spite of his situation—and only twenty or twenty-one, almost a boy. To get back to Chicago he needed money, and the gullible Mark now had some of that, thanks to his handyman jobs. For his friend’s sake, Mark lied to his father for the first time in his life. He said that Francis Tristan’s cousin in Indiana was building a barn, and he and Francis Tristan wanted to go help.

“They boarded a bus and soon they were walking among the looming skyscrapers of Chicago. And then night fell.  Francis Tristan knew his way into the old speakeasies, came up to the bars and greeted old friends, introduced Mark to men and girls, who said ‘nice to meet you’ with an expression he didn’t understand, and the bands began to play, and the spirits flowed, and Mark saw short skirts and heard sugary female voices for the first time, and was in ecstasy and torment, as he exulted in these new worlds to conquer, while he felt the phantom eyes of his deceived father upon him, and his conscience burned him from within. The wild, tantalizing nights turned into aimless days, and into passionate nights again. Francis Tristan had them set up in some apartment, Mark didn’t know whose or how. They got up at noon and cooked lazy meals, and sometimes quarreled. By day, Mark counted his money, and resolved to hold onto what was left of it; by night, amidst the jazz and the dreamlike girls, his resolutions melted away.

“How Francis Tristan insinuated Mark into the role of paymaster for his own debts I don't know.  Mark remembers the words 'Do you vouch for this guy?'; probably a boy as pliable as Mark would have said more than that.  But one day, Francis Tristan was gone. Mark woke up one morning and found he was the only one in the apartment.  He looked around. He waited. In the afternoon, there was a knock at the door; it was one of the wiseguys Francis Tristan had introduced him to, from the bar. He said Mark owed him $150 for the room and he could pay up anytime. When Mark started to resist this request, the wiseguy asked if he was still prepared to cover some other bad debts to 'get Francis Tristan out of trouble'? It could upset some people if he backed out of that. Terrified, he murmured a numb assent. 'We'll count on you for it. Take your time,' said the wiseguy. Mark barely had enough for the bus ticket home.

“Alone again, Mark’s mind raced. It took him a while to decide that he’d been the victim of a scam. But he knew these guys were the Mafia, and he remembered the bad debtor shot dead—even in southern Illinois. What if he told them the whole story? What if he told them they didn’t have the money? How could they hold him to account for Francis Tristan’s debts? But then, who is to say what men with guns may or may not do?

“But they would want him to ask his father for it.

“That idea so horrified him that he made a bolt for it. He packed his suitcase and walked with panic-stricken steps to the bus stop. As he waited in line, he found himself being pulled aside by a brawny, wolfish man, half-bald on his head but not his arms, with a vulgar jocularity in his face. ‘Don’t try this,’ he whispered. ‘We don’t want trouble but we’ll find you if we have to. Just pay up and it’ll be easier for everybody.’

“He didn’t know how they had known when he was trying to get away. Was he being watched all the time? Were their spies everywhere? Suddenly his mind became possessed with suspicions, and every street crawled with conspirators. He let a day pass, and another day, in a torment of confusion, unable to act. And then other people began to knock on his door, people he didn’t know, talking of debts owed them by Francis Tristan, asking if Mark could help. He realized Francis Tristan had spread rumors that his father was rich. He had no idea which of these people to fear, or how much these people hoped to extort from him. As the nightmare deepened, he thought of suicide. But he had one hope—Mary.

“Mark told me the words Mary used to describe the way she felt after she got Mark’s desperate phone call and resolved to get all the money she could—she borrowed from Lionel $100, everything he had—and go to Chicago to try to save her brother: she was entering 'the Labyrinth.’ What the child she was had fabricated now sprung to life as a huge and horrific reality: Chicago, with its mighty towers and mazy corridors and men without souls. The imagination had been a true compass, penetrating to the soul of being, discovering in thought dark necessary truths that were now being revealed in their awesome fullness. But she had turned from author to character, and she could no longer protect Mark from nightmares by spinning out a happy ending. And yet I think part of her believed that it was still possible—it must be possible—for her still to be the author, to dispel the Labyrinth by conjuring a deus ex machina that would set all to rights. For it’s not clear how, in practical terms, she thought she could help. She didn’t have enough to pay Mark’s debts, still less so after the train tickets. Yet what choice did she have. Mark had forbidden her to tell anyone—she had betrayed him even in confessing to Lionel—and what she brought was all she had.

“On the train to Chicago, she saw a familiar face. They had met only a few times. Now, he saw the quiet panic in her face and approached her. When he asked her what business she had in Chicago, she began to cry, and betrayed Mark’s secret again. The man’s name was Peter Marcielo.

“Peter Marcielo,” said Brewer abstractedly. “Yes, I’ll need to tell you more about him. You know of him already—the writer of your love letter,” he said, answering the recognition in our eyes.

“When I was in college, a lot of the upperclassmen were veterans going to school under the GI bill. There was an age gap between us and them, and a gap in life experience with men who had faced fire in France or Italy or the South Pacific. I felt a little awe at men who had done what my father had done, who had seen death and conquered Germany and Japan. One of those men was Peter Marcielo.

“But he was not like most GIs. He was Italian-born and spoke with an accent. He had not been an ordinary soldier but had worked in military intelligence; I think he had even been a liaison with the resistance and done covert operations. The stories were shrouded in secrecy and would have meant little to me anyway. Not that I ever knew him well. Though intelligent, he was an indifferent student, indifferent to all that happened under the sun, in daylight. Night was his domain, and he drew to him, like moths to a candle, souls with a streak of romantic self-destruction, men who wanted to waste themselves on drink and women who longed, without knowing it, to be seduced, and drunken and seduced many of them were, or so it was said—for Peter Marcielo had a reputation as a desperado, and it was not wholly false, to judge by a few times that I fell in with them, prowling the streets and the bars until they closed and then returning to Marcielo’s downtown upstairs apartment to go on drinking… And yet, though he had an aura which drew these people to him and he was in the habit of entertaining, he was indifferent to that, too. His passion was the revolution.

“I was told by others that Marcielo came from a noble lineage in southern Italy, from that part of Italy that was formerly the Kingdom of Naples, and long before, the Byzantine empire. Peter himself boasted to me once that they could trace their lineage to Bohemond, the great crusader, and later scions of that house had fought under Don Juan of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto, and later under Napoleon Bonaparte at Lodi, Austerlitz, and Borodino. In 1917, Marcielo’s father and mother had rushed to the banner of the great romantic cause of those times, the Bolshevik Revolution: they became communists, and were driven into exile in 1925, shortly after Mussolini’s rise to power. Born in Naples, Pietro Marcielo, as he must have been called then, spent his childhood moving between Paris and Chicago, until 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out. They arrived in Barcelona in the midst of the revolution, and Peter’s father joined a militia, and his mother became a nurse. Peter was only fourteen then, but he said he found his way to the front lines there. I think it was his father’s death that led to Peter’s returning to America and enrolling in our university in 1939, just before the war began, for some members of his family still had money, and they wanted to set Peter on a different track than his father’s.

“I’ve never quite understood that part of his story. A boy fighting with the guerrillas in northern Spain, has turned two years later into a college freshman in America… Actually, I never wholly trusted either the rumors about Peter, or the bits of his story that I heard from him—and his own utterances must have been the source of the rumors—for it all seemed a bit like a fairy tale or a Byron poem. I could never decide whether he was a hero or a humbug. And yet it might have been true. If it sounds strange that an ardent communist like Peter should have been employed in American military intelligence, I think it’s not. For one thing, he was well qualified, with his fluent Italian and his military experience. His communist allegiance may even have been a credential, since it made him a better liaison with the Italian resistance, who were mostly communists. And anyway, communists had penetrated to high tiers in the State Department then, and he, or his comrades, may have had secret friends in high places. And he was not above working for us, even though we were his enemy and he wanted to pull down the edifice of capitalism and sham democracy down on all our heads, to make way for the revolution. For the time being, we and the revolution’s homeland—Soviet Russia—were allies. As far as I know, he engaged in no treason, but did heroic service in the overthrow of Mussolini.

“I don’t know what relative’s wishes he was deferring to when he came back to haunt our university, bored and restless, for two years. Nor do I know whether it was to visit a relative or to attend a communist party cell meeting that he was on the train to Chicago where he met Mary. Nor, for that matter, do I have any first-hand knowledge of how Marcielo made a mafia don give orders to let a certain small-time debtor go free. He told Mark only that ‘I knew the don’s nephew during the war, and he owed me a favor.’ I like to imagine what that meeting was like. A client introduced them, I should imagine, some small tradesman who called the don ‘godfather,’ and the don was honored to meet a war hero who had liberated the old country. As Sicily is not far from the Kingdom of Naples, he had, perhaps, heard of Peter’s family. And maybe there really was a nephew in the affair: perhaps the don’s American-born nephews had enlisted, or perhaps his Italian-born nephews had been in the Resistance, and Peter, operating as a spy or a commando, had saved one of them from death. Who knows? A select few only are privy to those councils. The bloodstained hands of the old assassin joined the would-be bloodstained hands of the youthful revolutionary, they shared sentimental tears, and the revolutionary asked the assassin to grant him a boon: spare the prodigal son. The deed might have been done without Mark and Mary ever knowing of it. Scarcely had she arrived when the goon came to the door with a message: ‘Get out. We don’t want you around here anymore.’ But what about the debts? ‘Forget the debts, just get out. We don’t want to see you again.’ Mark was almost ready to believe that Mary had the same magic powers in this Labyrinth as in the Labyrinth at home, but Mary knew better. She asked the wiseguy: why? Why were the debts suddenly forgiven? ‘I guess the old man had a talk with somebody and decided to lay off.’ And then Mary remembered a look of purpose she had seen in Peter’s eyes as he heard her story and she guessed that it was he who had done this for them. They came here—not home, yet, for Mark was determined to tell his father the whole truth now, but did not yet have the courage—and Mark slept in my old dorm-room bed, as Lionel's guest, for three nights while I was looking after my sick mother. Meanwhile, Mary sought Peter, and found him, and demanded to know whether it was he to whom they owed their deliverance. And he confessed.

“She invited him to come home with her to their farm. You must come, she told him, for we owe you so much, and you must let us express our gratitude. So proud Peter consented to be led by meek Mary, and the three of them arrived together at the white farmhouse amidst the golden fields of corn. And Mark looked on those fields with new eyes now. First he had seen through Mary’s eyes, full of the magic of her tales. Later he had seen them through Francis Tristan’s eyes, a desolate and joyless trap, the barren antithesis of the elsewhere that was the only thing worth living for. But now he looked on those fields with something like his father’s eyes: they were wholesome and holy, blessed with bounty and throbbing with the energies of peace, a refuge from a wicked world, a very Canaan. He could have kissed the ground, but instead, when he found his father was not in the house, he ran through the fields until he found him. Ashamed to be taller than his father, he knelt to confess what he had done. Jacob Graben told him that he had done wrong, and betrayed his trust. But he forgave and embraced him.

“Mary and Peter waited in the house, and it was some time before the two men returned. Old Jacob Graben greeted Peter with hostility, and, being dirty from the fields, asked to be excused to change his clothes. Old Jacob Graben had heard of Peter Marcielo twice before. Once his daughter had spoken of a fellow student who had fought in the Spanish Civil War. From this, Graben had deduced that Marcielo was a communist. Now, from the cross that hung around Marcielo’s neck, and from his Italian accent he guessed that Peter was a Catholic. In Jacob Graben’s mind, ultimate evil had taken two malevolent shapes in this world, one emanating from Rome, the other from Moscow. These two kingdoms of darkness were almost alike: monolithic forces that laid claim to total power over man’s mind and body, pursuing their ends with ruthless monomania and violence without limit. Now, in Peter Marcielo, these incompatible evils stood before him fused into one: here was a Catholic and a Communist. He looked at Peter as if he were to blame, as if, indeed, Peter himself were the corrupter of his son. Possibly he had become confused and thought Peter was Mark’s corrupter, for Francis Tristan and Peter Marcielo bore some resemblance to one another in character and demeanor. (No one could learn whether Graben had made this mistake, for after that evening Marcielo was never mentioned in the house again.) Perhaps, in the grief and shock of his son’s betrayal, and bound by the Biblical injunction to forgive the prodigal, his anger could not be sated on a distant object. Whatever the reason, Jacob Graben hated Peter immediately, all the more so because he knew he was in his debt.

“‘Mr. Marcielo,’ said Jacob Graben after he had changed his clothes, ‘please inform us of the cost of your services so that we can compensate you for them.’

“‘But you misunderstand me, sir. What I did for your son was not done for money, but out of friendship.’

“‘There can be no friendship between us, Mr. Marcielo. And you are not the kind of man to whom I wish to be in debt. Please tell me what the cost of your services was so that we can repay you, and then I hope there will be no occasion for further relations.’

“Both Graben’s children watched in horror, too stunned for a moment even to object. Then Mary began to plead with him to stop, and explaining that Peter Marcielo had helped them. Marcielo and Jacob Graben stared for a long time. Finally Marcielo said ‘It is impossible to compensate me, for no private eye or detective for hire could have done for your son what I did.’ Graben’s icy stare continued. Finally Marcielo said, ‘If you insist on insulting me, pay me the amount of the debt from which your son was released on my account, and my expenses.’

“‘Will this be enough?’ asked Jacob Graben, and he produced $700 in cash, more than Mary or Mark had ever seen before at one time.

“Marcielo took the money without a word and went out of the house. By this time darkness had fallen. When he was gone, Graben ordered Mary never to speak to him again, and told Mark that his penance would be to repay every penny of the money that they had had to pay to Marcielo for his rescue.

“Mary, sobbing desperately, knew she could not exit from the front door against her father’s will, but there was another way, a window below ground level, where Mary knew how to climb out. She did so now, and ran after Marcielo. She begged forgiveness in tears for her father’s conduct, she told him she had no idea that it would be like this, and begged him to understand how grateful she was that he had saved her brother, even if her father refused his gratitude. And in a few more moments Mary and Peter Marcielo were kissing passionately. And that was the beginning of their love affair, about which I’m not sure that I know much more than you do. Love is always a sort of secret. Each pair of lovers has their own language which the world scarcely understands. And yet I think the best way that I can put it is to say that Mary was drawn once again into the Labyrinth, into a maze of incomprehensible corridors, full of danger and delight, of pleasures and glories undreamt of but also full of new vulnerabilities and perils. Love drew her into its secrets and its secrets within secrets, until she lost sight of the truths without as she madly sought the truth within, not within herself, nor within him, but within he-and-her woven together, like the petals of a rose. That's a good image for it. Think about a rose. Its color is beautiful, its scent is sweet, but its shape is what makes it the queen of flowers. And what is its shape? Imagine entering a rose and wending your way towards its center between the petals. Wouldn’t it be the shape of a labyrinth? I think that Mary went into the labyrinth of love, and never found the center—does anyone find the center, I wonder?—yet she was never able to find her way out of it, either, until it drove her mad. I’m not sure whether that makes any sense or not, but there it is.

“It turned out that Marcielo had not taken the money after all. He had thrust it into one of the window wells, and there Mark found it the next day, and knew whose it was. He told me later: ‘So now I had the money to pay my father back the next day if I wanted to. Of course, I couldn’t do that, or he would suspect. I could have paid the money out to him little by little. But I didn’t want to do that. Whether or not my father had treated Peter Marcielo fairly, I thought that he had treated me fairly. I wanted to take the punishment I deserved, not to take an easy way out. And so I put the money in the bank and didn’t touch it until I had paid back everything to my father with my own earnings.’ And after that, he spent Marcielo’s money on his wedding. He was a reformed man now. He loved the soil like a farmer. He loved their cozy little community. He worked hard and did his duty to God and men.

“Yet he never forgot Peter Marcielo. He never forgot the kindness shown him by this alien being, the Catholic Communist. And because of that, he had kind words for the outside world, too. He had seen its corrupt side, but he had also seen the good in it, too.”