FRANKIE SAT IN THE BACKSEAT as they drove to the Fourth of July Tea in the old station wagon. Perched there, looking at her parents’ heads from behind, she was suddenly remembering exactly how this had felt when she was young. Alfie and Sylvia were talking about which of the summer people had arrived, and as she listened to the familiar names, the quickly sketched updates, she could have been ten, or fourteen.
Though she was feeling fully her age, thinking about her father. She and he had walked together down to Liz and Clark’s house this morning. It had been her mother’s suggestion—that Alfie show Frankie the project, the house Clark and Liz would move into eventually—Clark had been building it himself piecemeal over the last two years.
She had the sense that her mother was getting rid of Alfie, and maybe of her, too, though she felt less sure of that. But either way, Sylvia seemed to want to be alone. She had clearly been upset about something from the time Frankie came downstairs.
She and Alfie had hiked down through the meadow instead of using the road, because Frankie wanted to look at the pond along the way.
The dock was still pulled up on the rocks. Several slats were missing. As they walked around the pond’s edge, the frogs jumped from the bank into the water, a steady plop, plop, plop that preceded them. There were sweeps of algal growth visible under the water. Frankie saw a turtle’s head break the pond’s surface. A snapper? she wondered. Time would tell.
They mounted the hillock beyond the pond, stepping carefully through the low-growing wild blueberries and the thorny, arching blackberry canes. As they reached the top, the vista below opened up.
“There ’tis,” Alfie said. In the meadow below was the small, simple house—a cottage, really—shingled in wood that still looked raw, a wide unscreened porch on the uphill side facing them.
They started down toward it. “It’s almost done, isn’t it?” Frankie asked.
“You’ll see,” Alfie said.
Frankie followed him through the overgrown meadow, holding her palms out on either side to brush her fingertips along the tops of the grasses and blossoms. Bees hung in some of them. The ground was uneven, and Frankie felt a jolt in her body with each step.
The area around the house was gravel and dirt. They crossed it and stepped together onto the porch. There was no door—a piece of plywood had been hammered into place where it would have been. Alfie stood back while Frankie peered in through a window, framing her face with her hands. Though it was dim inside, she could see that there were no finished interior walls, just the vertical studs announcing where they’d be. Foil-backed insulation lined the house’s outer walls like silvery wallpaper, and some of the windows were in place. The openings for others, like the doorway, were boarded over. There was a table in what seemed to be the kitchen area, chairs set around it.
Frankie said something pleasant, noncommittal: It looks like it’ll be very nice.
Alfie didn’t answer, so she turned to look at him. He’d taken a step back off the porch onto the packed dirt. He was looking at the house, his eyes squinted, a slightly puzzled frown on his face.
“Don’t you think, Dad?”
He turned to her. “This is … I believe this is Liz’s house,” he said, dubiously. And then, more certainly: “Yes. I think it is.”
She had said yes, stunned. She wasn’t sure what else to say to him. Was it a joke of some sort? Was she supposed to offer something witty in response? She had no idea.
But he turned then and started back up the rise. Frankie followed him, up the hill, down through the berry patch, and around the pond, then up again, across the meadow. She could see her mother on the porch, waiting.
They didn’t speak until they got back home. As they opened the screen door, Alfie said to Sylvia, “We’ve had the house viewing. What’s our next assignment?” and they both laughed, to Frankie’s amazement.
Had she misunderstood his lapse at Liz’s house? She thought she must have.
Now her parents’ car was steadily mounting the hill behind the town, and at the last turn, the Mountain House Inn came into view, a looming white frame building that looked across the valley to the tallest of the local peaks, their tops rising bare and rocky above the tree line. This was where the tea was held every year.
They parked at the edge of the wide, semicircular driveway cut into the rising lawn, behind a long string of other parked cars. Frankie looked up at the hotel as they got out of the car. There was a deep porch across the entire front span of the ground floor. Above the porch roof, on the second floor, there was a row of evenly spaced windows with dark green shutters. Several of these had fallen off, and the ones that were left sagged at the sides of the windows. There was a third floor above that with a line of smaller dormer windows.
She and her parents started up the sloping lawn toward the porch, where, Frankie knew, there would be tables with punch and cookies and tea sandwiches set out. But within the first ten paces or so, they were ensnared in a conversation with Gregory Hinton and his wife. Dr. Hinton, as Frankie still thought of him, was some big mucky-muck at the National Institutes of Health, a hearty, white-haired man. His wife, Louise, was a good friend of Frankie’s mother.
In Frankie’s parents’ generation up here there were many distinguished, important people. Poets, bishops, explorers of the human genome, presidents of this college or that. When Frankie was young, she had assumed that her father belonged in this company. She had realized only very slowly that he didn’t, that his tenured position at what she finally understood was a third-rate college was not even in the same category of success. And in her own generation, almost no one had the kind of prominence some of the parents had. Hardly anyone even seemed to want it. They were all more self-invented, less allied with all those important institutions. Like her, she supposed.
Dr. Hinton and his wife were asking her about her life, her doings. How amazing! they said. Still in Africa all by yourself! How fascinating that must be! Frankie was aware of the pleasure she was taking in being thought of as a girl, a pretty young girl, again. They asked about Liz, and she got the treatment, too, in absentia—they couldn’t believe she could have children as old as five and four and two.
After a few minutes, when the Hintons had turned their enthusiasm onto Alfie and Sylvia, Frankie extricated herself and went directly to the porch for a glass of punch, remembering on her way that Liz had often brought a little flask of rum in her purse to spike it with when they were in high school, when, for a while, Frankie had had the pleasure of thinking of herself as one of the wild Rowley girls.
The punch was pink, as ever, with circles of sliced oranges and lemons floating on its surface. Frankie served herself with the long, curved ladle and then went to the railing and drank. Standing there with her cup, she surveyed the scene. If you blurred your eyes, she thought, it could have been her childhood, an impressionistic Sunday-best gathering of parents and children on the grass—smears and dabs of color for the women, the men more drab. In her clear view, she couldn’t immediately recognize anyone in the sixty or seventy people clustered on the lawn or standing on the porch near her.
She moved over to one of the tables covered with platters of cookies and little sandwiches. There was an old woman there, loading up a plate with at least one of each of the many kinds of cookies laid out—and there were at least a dozen. “An amazing spread,” Frankie said.
“You know what I miss?” the woman said. She was short and plump, with an enormous drooping bosom that took up the entire space between her shoulders and her waist.
Frankie took a cookie herself. “What?” she said.
“Meringues. Ellen Babcock used to make meringues for the tea every year. Oh, how I loved them! Even if they did get gooey by the end of the day.” She popped one of the smaller cookies into her mouth and ate it rapidly, her jaw swiveling. She made a little noise, swallowing, and then she said abruptly, “Now, who are you?”
Frankie told her.
“Oh, yes,” the old woman said. She nodded and nodded. “I knew Sylvia quite well. She used to babysit for us when she was … well, I suppose, in high school. Is she here?”
Frankie pointed out Alfie and Sylvia, still on the lawn, standing in a circle with several others.
“Aha!” the woman said. “With that Rowley fella. Not quite as charming as he thinks he is, that one.”
Frankie was startled speechless, this seemed so indiscreet. She picked up another cookie, just to give herself a few seconds, and then she excused herself, moving away from the old woman and down off the porch. She went to stand near a small group of people who seemed to be close to her in age. When they opened to let her into their circle, she said who she was, and, of course, she did know a couple of them, she recognized them as they said their names and introduced their spouses.
They talked for a while about which of them was staying up and for how long—they must get together!—about their parents, some of whom had died. When several of them broke away to greet other summer friends, Frankie moved on, too. She had a conversation with someone she used to like dancing with, Jay McMahon, a conversation about the music of that time, about her life in Africa, then about his work as an economist in London. He had that slightly off accent of someone who’s lived abroad too long, faintly but definitively British. Frankie knew she, too, had a version of this, and that hers was undoubtedly British also, but the postcolonial version of British. Maybe posttribal, too—a little bit of that clipped, singsong African thing, sometimes she heard it herself.
When Jay moved off—to get some food, he said—Frankie talked for a while to a group of people her parents’ age and found out more about their children than she would have from the children themselves, Because their currency is their children, she thought. How accomplished, how far flung. She wondered how her parents were explaining her, the spin they were putting on her own life. Oh, Frankie’s still in Africa, yes. She practically runs the East Africa office now. Or maybe not. She could imagine another version, Sylvia, rolling her eyes, saying something like God knows what she’s up to over there.
She was called upon to explain herself to this group of parents, and she did, not mentioning that she was on leave. That she wasn’t sure when, or even whether, she was going back.
While they were standing there on the sloped lawn, she was suddenly aware that she’d been hearing the thumping of a bass, of drums, of rhythmic music, getting slowly louder. Hip-hop. And now much too loud. She turned. A long, low car was approaching in the circular drive, windows down, music thudding. There were four boys inside—young men, really—their faces turned to the lawn, to the milling summer people in their fancy clothes. Someone in the car must have said something, because they all laughed at once, throwing their heads back, one of them in the rear pounding the back of the driver’s seat.
The music was deafening. Frankie saw that most of the people on the lawn had turned, too, turned to follow the slow cruise of the car along the driveway. It came to the end of the driveway and pulled out onto the dirt road, headed back the way it had come, and the music slowly faded, became mere thudding again, and was gone.
“Ah, youth!” one of the parents in her group said loudly, and several people within earshot laughed.
Just as Frankie was turning away from this group to move up to the porch, thinking that she’d get some more punch, she noticed a man standing a few feet away from her, with a camera. A camera trained on her.
Without thinking, she put her hand up to shield her face. In response, he instantly lowered the camera. He was about her age, with dark, curly hair, a blue work shirt, and jeans. She thought of her mother, of her being offended by those who wore jeans to the tea.
“Sorry,” he said. Then, stepping closer, his voice lowered: “Are you a fugitive from justice?” He had an odd voice—hoarse, scratchy.
“I don’t know why I did that,” Frankie said. “I’m not. A fugitive from justice. Are you … a representative of justice?”
“Nope. I’m a loyal member of the fourth estate,” he said.
“The fourth estate is not the clergy, I’m thinking.”
He shook his head. “Press. Vile, scandalmongering, left wing, elitist, et cetera.” He stepped even closer, his eyes steady on Frankie. “Bud,” he said, holding his hand out.
“Yeah.” Frankie shook hands with him. His grip was a little too firm. He was taller than she was. Quite a tall man, then. She was actually looking up at him, something she wasn’t used to. His face, too, was big, almost doughy, with a pugilist’s chin. His brown eyes were creased at the corners, amused-looking, and his hair, she saw now, was flecked with gray.
“Bud what?”
“Bud Jacobs.”
“I’m Frankie.”
“Frankie?”
“Short for Francesca. My father’s mother was Italian. I’m named after her. Frankie Rowley,” she said. “But I don’t remember you. Are you new in town?”
No, actually, he explained, he’d been here for a couple of years. He’d bought the Pomeroy Union, the local weekly paper. “I’m embedded, as it were. Reporting back on the action”—he smiled—“as it explodes all around me.”
Frankie looked around at the clusters of milling people, some already leaving, but other cars only now pulling up. There was a group of children running back and forth on the porch, screaming. “How would you write up this particular explosion?” she asked.
“Who came, of course. They all like to see their name in the paper. That’s my bread and butter.” He shrugged. “Who was visiting. And I always keep my eye out for the unforeseen event.” He arched his eyebrows. “The spiked punch,” he said dramatically in his whispery voice. “The marijuana-laced brownie. The lovers’ quarrel.” He paused. Then, dramatically: “The knife fight.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Frankie said, smiling at him.
“So, you? What shall I say about you?”
“ ‘Visiting from Kenya, where she does all manner of noble stuff, was Frankie Rowley, the oldest child of Alfie and Sylvia Rowley,’ ba-da, ba-da, ba-da.”
“Kenya!” He was surprised.
But people usually were, and Frankie recognized the familiar pulse of pleasure she felt in his response, and then another quick pulse of something like embarrassment at feeling that yet again. Grow up.
She shrugged. “I’m an aid worker,” she said.
“Aha. And how long have you been doing that?”
“About fifteen years now.”
“Oh! A long time, then,” he said. More surprise.
“Yeah,” she said. “But it seems shorter. And then again, longer, too.”
“Like so much of life,” Bud said. There was a moment of silence, just long enough to make Frankie feel awkward. Then he said, “So. Duration of stay?” He held up an imaginary pad, a nonexistent pen.
“Unclear.”
“Ah. Because?”
“Because … of burnout, let’s say. Brownout, anyway.”
He smiled. “By coincidence, the same reason I’m here.”
“In your case, burnout with …?”
“Oh, with real life, I suppose. At least as a newsperson encounters it.”
Frankie looked around again. One of the parents, a mother, was dealing with the kids on the porch now. You could hear the sharp words springing out of her mouth as she bent toward them: “Never … cannot … Right now!” They stood silent, looking up at her, scared, resentful.
“Little risk of that with this crowd,” Frankie said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Anyway, I’m here to test that notion.”
“And so far?”
“So far, real life knocks from time to time.” He nodded. “Yes, even here.”
“As in?”
“Births. Deaths. Illness.” He shrugged again. He smiled at Frankie. “Zoning often does the trick. There’s nothing like zoning for passion.” He shook his head. “Zoning: real life.”
Frankie laughed.
“A big fire the other night,” he offered. “That was pretty real.”
“Oh, I heard about it.” She thought again about the faraway, mechanical call, the smell of smoke in the dark. “Were you there?”
“Yeah, I went. I have a pager for the fire department calls. Fires, accidents, the proverbial cat in the proverbial tree, the dog fallen through the ice, et cetera. But I missed most of this one. We all did. It was pretty much over, I think, before a call even went in. All the guys could do was try to be sure it didn’t jump to the trees.”
“So, essentially, a bunch of men standing around watching a bonfire.”
“Well, yes. And squirting their hoses on it.” He nodded. “As men will.” A little silence fell again. “It’s sad though,” he said. “It was a fine old house.”
“So they can’t rebuild it?”
“Have you seen it?”
“No.” Frankie shook her head.
“There’s just nothing there. Nothing much. The chimney. A stove. I’m going to head over there after this, to get some daylight photos. If you want to come along, you can take a look.” He made a moue. “A look at what’s not there.”
“I am curious, I confess. I’d like to see it.”
“Okay, it’s a deal. I’ll find you when I’m leaving.” He turned, his hand on his camera again.
“But Bud …”
He stopped, looking back.
“I wonder, would you be willing to drop me off at home afterward?”
“Home,” he said. “Your parents’ home?”
“Yeah. Mine, too, for the moment.”
“That’s right there on Carson Road, too, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Easy enough, then. I’ll be happy to, madam,” he said, bowing his head, then moving away.
Frankie moved, too, back to one of the shifting groups.
By the time she saw Bud coming toward her again, the lawn was even more crowded with people and alive with conversation, and she was experiencing a sweeping sense of exhaustion—she would have gone with him no matter what, she thought, just because he was leaving before her parents were going to. She excused herself to Bud for a moment and went to find them. They were sitting up on the porch, along with several other couples, in the rockers. She bent over her mother’s chair from behind, touching her shoulder, and told her that Bud, this guy—she waved behind herself vaguely—would take her home after they stopped to look at the fire at the Kershaws’. Her mother raised her eyebrows, and Frankie said, “I’m just a zombie at this point. I’ve got to get back as soon as I can.”
“Fine, then,” her mother said. “We’ll be along in a while.”
Frankie and Bud walked down the lawn together, and then along the row of parked cars, until they came to one he gestured at. “Here we are,” he said. It was an old Saab, dented and rusty. He opened the door for her, and she got in, sinking gratefully into the passenger seat. It had an old-car smell. Not unpleasant, but funky. She noted that the fabric was worn away on the driver’s seat and, when he swung himself in behind the wheel, she noted again how tall he was, how large. He started the engine. It made an almost comical amount of noise. She saw a few people at the edge of the lawn turned to watch them as they drove away.
“How did you do?” he said after a moment. She must have looked puzzled, because he explained: “The social whirl. Remembering people.”
“Oh. Fine,” she said. “They’re all more or less imprinted on me. I probably couldn’t forget them if I wanted to.”
“So, what we learn from this is that you can go home again?”
“Well, this isn’t quite home, of course.”
“Africa is home.” This was both a statement and a question.
“Mmmh,” she said. “Also not quite.” They were starting down the long, slow series of hills into the town. Bud had the car in low gear, and it whined steadily.
“Where is, then?” he asked.
She was quiet for a moment, feeling the emptiness of her fatigue, and, beyond that, a kind of general emptiness. “Damned if I know,” she said. She looked at him. “Through no particular intention of my own, I seem to have succeeded at making myself a functionally homeless person.”
“Hmm,” he said. “I know that feeling, I think.” The expression on his face seemed gently rueful to Frankie.
After a minute, she asked, “Don’t you feel at home here? You’ve been here, what?”
“Three years now. I’m working on it.” He laughed, quickly. “I’m discovering I feel more at home in the summer, in some ways, with the summer people. But I get what that’s about. They’re transient, and maybe I am, too. Or at least I’m seen that way.”
“Wait a minute—they don’t think of themselves as transient. The summer people. They are permanent summer people.”
“Well, sure.” He smiled over at her and then looked back at the road. “But I think it’s possible that the permanent winter people think of them as transient. In any case, they still think of me that way, I’m pretty sure.”
“Well, if they think of me at all, they probably think of me that way, too.” She lifted her hands. “Why not? I do.”
“But where did you actually grow up?”
“Oh, all over the place. My father, Alfie …” She stopped and looked over at him. “Do you know my parents?”
“I’ve met them. Can’t claim to know them, but I know who they are.”
“Well, anyway, Alfie was making his way in the academic world all through my childhood.” She smiled. “Mostly sideways, it must be said.”
“So, how many places?”
“Five? Six? Something like that. He took a while to find his … niche, as it were.”
“That must have been hard.” When she didn’t answer after a moment, he turned his head to look at her. “Or was it?”
“I don’t know.” And then she was remembering. “Actually, for a while, I think my sister and I thought it was a privilege, we thought it was exciting. Something other kids didn’t get to do. All these fresh starts. Another chance to be a great success at … whatever.”
“That’s a nice spin to put on it. On … transience.”
“Yeah. My mother’s spin, I think. At that time.” Frankie was thinking of her mother’s irritation with her father later, of the sarcasm that had slowly taken over her tone. When had that happened? “At some point, it seems clear, it started to piss her off that he couldn’t make a go of it anywhere. Until finally he sort of did. But early on I remember her—or I think I remember her—as insistent on his valor.” She straightened up and made a fist. “His value. His worth.”
“Hmm,” he said.
After a moment, Frankie said, “Here’s an example: Once I asked her what class we were. We must have been studying something about it in school. Or maybe I read the phrases somewhere. Upper class, middle class. Anyway, she said to me something like, ‘Class has no relevance to our lives.’ ” And then Frankie changed her voice, made it fluty, definitely upper class. “ ‘Your father is an intellectual.’ ”
Even as he laughed, lightly, hoarsely, Frankie felt a vague embarrassment. She had parlayed this anecdote widely in the African world she’d inhabited, where it was risible, fantasy, to imagine you could escape the insistence of history, economics, tribe, race, class. “Anyway,” she said, “right now, I’d settle for anyplace with a bed, I’m so jet-lagged.”
“Oh.” He looked over again. “You just got here.”
“Yeah. Two days ago, in fact.”
“Do you want me just to take you home then? To your parents’?”
“No, I’m interested in this, actually. Curious, I guess.”
“Okay. I’ll be quick. I only need the one good shot. Then I’ll take you home.” He smiled at her. “Or whatever you call it.”
She leaned back. There was a comfortable silence between them as they swung off the paved road onto dirt. At least she felt it as comfortable. She was watching the patchy sunlight moving through the thick trees they were passing as the car mounted the hill. Her window was open. The fresh air was blowing her hair back from her face. She shook her head and thought suddenly of the Muslim girls on the ferry from Lamu.
They had passed the turnoff to Liz and Clark’s little house in the field and to her parents’ house. About three-quarters of a mile beyond that, they turned in at the Kershaws’ driveway. And then she smelled it. The fire. It was different from the kinder, more melancholic smell of two nights ago. It smelled scorched, and dampness was a part of the odor—something to do with all the water that had been poured on it, no doubt. The driveway was narrow and overhung. The trees on her side almost touched her arm, which rested on the open window’s edge.
After about a hundred feet, they came out into a clearing, a lawn. In the middle of it stood what had been the house. There were a few partially burned trees keeping vigil around it, but it was what was left in the center that Frankie was looking at. Several structural timbers still stood in the sodden rectangle that was the house’s footprint and, recognizably, a refrigerator, a blackened toilet, plus some other charred lumps of what could have been appliances or furniture. Aside from those, it seemed that all that was left was the fieldstone fireplace and the brick chimney above it, which rose straight up, pointing into the blue sky overhead.
They got out of the car. The smell was almost overpowering. Wisps of smoke still rose from the thick ash piled within the border of the stone foundation. The grass around the house was flattened, sodden—footprints visible everywhere.
Bud said, “I’ll just be a few minutes.” He started to move around the site with the camera held in front of his face, first horizontally, then vertically. He squatted, turning his head this way and that, then he stood up, trying for the best shot he could get of the chimney.
Frankie, to her surprise, was feeling almost tearful, swept by some sense of sorrow, of loss—though she couldn’t remember ever having seen the house when it was whole; though it meant nothing to her personally.
What was it then? She supposed the complete obliteration of all that must have been richly personal here, the way in which the meaning of the house, whatever that was to the Kershaws, the Olsens, had been swallowed up in the fire. She thought of her parents’ house, trying to imagine it destroyed in this way, burned up. She wondered if she would feel a sense of dislocation. She had actually been discomfited to some degree, she realized now, just by the little renovation they’d done—the blandness of the guest room they’d made out of their old bedroom upstairs, the startling, somehow naked newness of the fixtures in the enlarged bathroom off the kitchen hallway. She leaned back against the car and felt again a wave of physical exhaustion.
Bud was on the other side of the black hole now, still snapping away. Frankie watched him. It was like a dance, his quick movements, his whole long body turning now this way, now that.
Then suddenly she could tell that he was photographing her again from the other side of the blackened hole. In spite of the impulse she felt to cover her face this time, too, she didn’t, she looked straight at him. After a few more snaps, he moved the camera away from his face, and they stood there for a long moment. Then he called across in his strange voice, “You’ve had enough?”
“I think so,” she said, unsure of exactly what he meant. Enough of trying to stay awake? Of looking at the house? Of looking at him?
He stood still a moment more, and then he started back around the black pit toward her.
——
That night, after an improvised supper, Alfie went to bed first, which gave Frankie permission, too, or so she felt, even though there was still a lingering light outside. Upstairs, she lay in her bed in the darkening room, thinking again about what had seemed like Alfie’s confusion down at Liz’s house, and then the way he’d seemed utterly himself when they’d gotten back home only minutes later. She thought about the tea, about the carful of boys and the discomfort they’d brought. She thought of Bud Jacobs’s face on the opposite side of the burned-out house and the quick sense of sexual possibility she’d felt. That was it, wasn’t it, what had passed between them? Something exciting but too familiar. Apparently the only way she had to respond to a man she liked. Time to learn a few new tricks.
Then she was touching herself idly, thinking of Philip. In quick sequence, images of him in Africa flashed by. His narrow face, white with fatigue under the kerosene lamp over the dining table after a long, fruitless surgery to sew up a boy’s machete wound. Waking in the dark next to him at the call to prayer on Lamu and silently making love. Afterward lying still, hearing the men’s voices in the street below as they greeted one another on the way to the mosque. “Ah, the varieties of religious experience,” Philip had whispered to her.
It seemed like a dream. He seemed like a dream, her time with him a thing she’d invented.
She fell asleep.
In the night, she woke suddenly. At first she thought it was the moon, which fell nearly as bright as a cold, colorless daylight into the room. She’d forgotten to close the curtains.
But then, lying there, she heard it again—the same faint, insistent noise that had waked her the night before. This time she knew instantly what it was.