CHAPTER NINETEEN

1991

I stood in front of the bedroom window, looking down at the river. The light had all but disappeared; on the far bank, the black shapes of trees brushed the sky. At the gallery, Francesca would just now be closing up, setting the alarm, leaving my collection waiting quietly in the dark.

As the glimmer of a ghost boat slipped through the fog, the image of my wife came to me, sitting in the living room, preparing herself for whatever sort of mood I would bring home with me. I thought about calling her, letting her know that I planned on staying here for a few days, a few weeks; it no longer mattered what I said, she’d know what I meant. But the idea of having to listen to her break down because of something I had done was just too much.

I took off my wedding band and put it on the nightstand, telling myself I didn’t deserve to wear it. Part of me had wanted to kiss Jane. I hated myself for that, and yet it had just seemed so much easier to give what wasn’t expected. Susan had always expected so much. I had been so grateful for the way she came to me.

Feeling a sudden chill, I took another sip of scotch, assuring myself I could go out and get another bottle as soon as I was finished. But the liquor didn’t numb me. It merely traced an icy burn down my throat, making me shiver. Half stumbling, I wandered toward the linen closet to root around for a blanket. The shelves were cluttered with tarnished silver and half-empty boxes full of things that had belonged to Susan’s uncle. The very sight of all that junk still packed away here annoyed me, certainly more than it should have.

Pulling a quilt off the top shelf with an unnecessary amount of vigor, I hit a box full of letters knocking it to the floor. Douglas’s envelopes spilled out over the rag rug, and I had a mind to burn all that trash. Susan saved obsessively. She could never let go of anything. We had left Nebraska behind and come here without knowing anyone—like reversed pioneers, we had often joked. Yet she had always clung so desperately to every memento.

I remembered her standing in the barn reading her uncle’s words, her eyes brimming with tears. It had seemed so gratuitously dramatic to want to mail his old boyfriend those letters. I had been so relieved when she agreed not to do it. Jamming the envelopes back into the box, however, I noticed one that had actually gone through the mail and was addressed to Susan herself. I sat down right there in the hall, leaned my back against the wall, and opened it:

October 3, 1982

Dear Ms. Bowman:

You are so kind to send me Douglas’s letter, though yours has taken some time finding me as I am now based in Atlanta working for the airlines. So, to answer your question, yes, you did the right thing. As you say, love is not so easy to find, and it is nice to know that someone you once cared about actually remembers. I, in fact, did not know Douglas was sick. To hear he was no longer with us hit me quite hard. When I read his letter, I was sitting in the lounge of the Baton Rouge airport and I found myself right there in public, praying hard he had made his peace.

You ask why I think your uncle did not mail this letter and I’ll tell it to you simply: He couldn’t come to terms with who he was. It seems that I was the part of him that would always remain a secret. In the end I don’t believe he ever told anyone but your mother. So to answer your question, yes, I did meet her once. She was living in New York, working for an artist. She took the train up to Port Saugus to spend the night. I remember her wearing a bright red sweater and a scarf wrapped around her head. It wasn’t an outfit any woman could have pulled off, but she certainly got away with it. Your mother tried out recipes on us, burned everything, and stumbled around the kitchen in her heels. We drank quite a lot and lay on our backs looking at the stars. I’m afraid I can’t remember much of what we talked about, but I’m sure she must have mentioned you.

You say that difficult times have caused you to question your own importance to those you love. Well, I wouldn’t question too much. No doubt you are a remarkable person.

Respectfully,

Michael Downs

Feeling shamed and selfish, I started down to the end of the hall, still holding the letter, and studied the family portrait that Jane had painted. Hank and Mary sat on the bench by the front door, and Susan and I stood beside them with the house in the background. I searched my wife’s expression for a hint of all the things she’d been looking for, because surely an artist would sense what I could not. But Susan seemed unworried, absorbed. Her eyes were full of kindness and her arms were wrapped around the children’s shoulders so naturally, as if reaching out was something she had never had to try to master. The colors were beautiful, ethereal, almost Renaissance in their conviction. I was the one who looked more ghostly than the others, my features just a little less certain.

*   *   *

That summer, before Jane had painted us, I was restless and angry all the time. I had received a phone call from some horrible talk show—A Current Affair—asking me to be a guest on one of their episodes about survivors. I had never really considered myself to be one. “No, thank you, I’m not interested,” I had said to the insistent and overly sympathetic woman on the other end of the line. She was so smooth and polished. Her tone outraged me. And yet I was still too shocked to sound anything but polite. When I hung up the telephone, I wondered how they had found me and who was to blame. I didn’t tell Susan. I just wanted to forget it, and yet I couldn’t let myself. How could they have seen it as their right to intrude? Suddenly, everyone was an intruder. It felt like my family was telling secrets. It felt like things were being shoved down my throat.

Spring rain had made the water high, and the spot where the children were usually allowed to swim was declared off limits. They couldn’t sit still. Most of the time Susan was there, to take Hank to tennis or golf lessons and Mary to the stables so she could ride Jane’s horse Mistletoe or help muck out the stall. After these outings, my wife and seven-year-old daughter would return with the smell of hay and leather and dung caught in their clothes, sharing secretive smiles.

When Susan wasn’t there, the children moped around the house complaining about the heat. They wanted to be taken to the public pool, but I had things to do and a lot on my mind. I had made a big sale—a flawless paper-thin Flemish cucumber-colored cup—to the Corning Glass Museum, but summer had slowed everything down and Port Saugus was rather far off the beaten path for major collectors or acquisitions experts from the better-known museums. I was starting to realize that our situation here couldn’t be permanent. Sooner or later, we’d have to leave this house where Susan had said she wanted to raise our children.

When she barged into the barn one afternoon to tell me she had decided to ask Jane to paint a family portrait, I pulled out a stack of books and pretended to be absorbed. “What do you think?” my wife said, her face glowing with the idea: the four of us and the dogs in front of the house where our lives together had really begun.

“I think I don’t have time to do it just now,” I answered, without looking up from a book on ancient bronzes. I guess I was already dreading the idea of telling her we would have to leave.

Susan brushed her hand along the windowsill and frowned at the dust on the tips of her fingers, which annoyed me. “What do you have to do, Lowe?”

I spoke of all the arranging and rearranging that would have to be done in order to get this portrait right; I just couldn’t bear the thought. We weren’t that kind of family anyway. We didn’t look comfortable enough to be preserved for posterity. Maybe no family did anymore. But Susan just stared at me, smiling as if I was crazy.

“Jane paints from photographs. It’s not like we have to sit still for five days.”

“Don’t we have a photograph?”

“I want her to take it because we don’t have a recent one,” she said. “And it’s important. She’ll get the composition right. It’ll be something worth holding on to, don’t you think?”

In the end I gave in because I knew Susan would quietly persist.

*   *   *

The day of the photo, Susan had spent the morning arranging flowers, grooming the dogs, and dressing the children. But when Jane arrived early, my wife still wasn’t ready. She couldn’t find Mary. I helped Jane set up the camera and then took her into the barn to see my objects. She moved with such grace and ease and seemed to notice all the effort I had put into redoing this place, from the floors to the track lighting to the fluted columns I had found in an old stone yard near Balmville, things Susan never took note of.

Through the open window I could smell the grass, just mowed that morning. Susan was by the side of the house, holding the pruning shears and calling for our daughter. The telephone rang and she went to answer it, after which I could hear her soft, restrained laughter and then the dull snap of branches as she began to clip the hedge, the telephone nestled between cheek and shoulder.

“So what do you think?” I said finally, turning away from the window. Jane ran her finger along the edge of a crack in a marble bust of Athena as if she were, by the mere act of touching, stitching that ancient face back together.

“Like a random scoot,” she said, her eyes full of something that resembled excitement.

“A random scoot?”

“Picking it all up suddenly and heading somewhere unexpected.”

“Ah,” I said. “I know what you mean.” Lately, I felt that my whole life had been a sort of haphazard journey, unplanned, not carefully thought out, scene after scene unfolding in rapid succession while I stood there watching from the wings. I loved Susan. Of course I always had, but when Jane sat down to examine a gold Roman ring, the fan blew her hair across her cheek, and I wanted to catch the blond strands in my hand and tuck them behind her ear.

There was a strange quiet, and I left Jane with the objects for a moment and stepped outside to see where everyone had gone. Susan was no longer by the hedge, and the telephone receiver had been dropped in the grass. I could hear the busy signal humming like an insect. The sun was blinding, the air thick with humidity, as I made my way across the grass and hung up the phone. Then, sensing that something was wrong, I started across the yard, toward the river, through the tall grass.

As I came up over the wall, I saw Susan and Mary. They were in the river, the current rushing around them, and my wife was pulling our daughter toward the shore. By the time I reached them, Susan was already standing in the shallow water, holding our daughter beneath the arms. Mary’s hair strangled her features like a dark vine, but then she started sputtering and coughing, and when the hair fell away from her face I could see her skin was red, her eyes squinting against tears. I wanted to cry with relief. Hank was standing in two feet of water furiously sucking his thumb, tears sliding down his cheeks. “Get back from the river,” I said to him, but he just stood there. “Get back, Hank.”

I went toward them, plunging into the shallow water in my shoes, socks, khakis in an attempt to help, but they were already out of danger. Susan’s wet sundress hugged the ripples of extra weight she had not been able to shed after quitting the cigarettes, and yet I could see the strength of her body beneath it as she carried our daughter, limp and bedraggled, from the current, sat down on the bank, put her arms around her, and held her close. They glittered in the sun like survivors from a shipwreck.

“What happened?” I said, putting my hands in my pockets.

“You almost drowned,” Susan said. “Do you know what that would have done to us?” She shook Mary’s shoulders.

“Can somebody tell me why she was in the water in the first place?” I said.

“You said Jane was going to make us special in the picture,” Mary said to Susan, as if this were explanation enough.

“You broke the rules,” Susan said.

“I wanted to be just done swimming.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

Susan gave me a hard look. “She’s a child.”

“That’s not an excuse. Something might have happened to you too.”

“Well, what choice did I have? What would you have done?”

I had hung up the telephone. I closed my eyes, but I could still see them, my wife and daughter huddled on the shore. I could still see the telephone, and I knew in that moment I was not meant to be a father or a husband; I was, perhaps, not meant to be depended on for anything.

“It’s all right,” Susan said suddenly, as if nothing had happened. “Let’s just get ready for the photo.”

“What are you talking about? Look what almost happened.”

“Things almost happen every day,” she said. “You just go on, Lowell; you pick up and go on.”

“You mean, you do.”

What she did was pick everything up and then pull it apart until nothing was left. I turned on my heels and started off down the edge of the bank, my waterlogged shoes squelching, my pant legs clinging to my itching calves.

“Where are you going?” Susan cried.

I started south, combing the cattails for God knows what. Susan didn’t try to follow. I passed the drawbridge, the lighthouse where a flock of geese spread their wings and hissed, trying to keep me from trampling their nests. I made my way along the bank past a washed-up sandal, broken bottles, tossed-up lures.

People in deck chairs squinted at me in the bright light as I marched across the edge of their properties, as if I were no more than a sun spot, a trick of the eye. Perhaps it was my determination that kept them from inquiring my business, the stoop in the shoulders, the hands in the pockets. I was a gentleman on some sort of an important mission, quickly passing suntanning women in bikinis roasting in coconut oil, barbecues, vegetable gardens, dilapidated docks, clouds of boat fuel, and leftover Fourth of July flags flapping in the breeze. I wiped sweat from my brow and kept on going, and yet with each step my wet shoes rubbed my ankles with a little extra vigor, making the emptiness of my every gesture, the futility of my wandering, more and more apparent.

By the time I reached Ed Ryer’s house, I was thirsty, and a small group had assembled on the deck for cocktails.

“Is that Lowe Bowman?” someone called out, and I raised my hand in greeting and made my way across the lawn so as not be rude.

“What a surprise,” I said, stepping up onto the wooden deck.

“You’re the surprise.” Peg Ryer laughed, but when she saw my state—perhaps it was the shoes, the mud around the pant cuffs—her smile disappeared. “Did you walk all this way?”

“A lost dog,” I said, feeling a bit more in control.

“A hot dog?” Ed laughed and clapped me on the back, and I forced out an exaggerated chuckle.

“A beagle, actually. I found some paw prints in the mud and started following them, but so far nothing’s turned up.” I spoke evenly, trying not to sound unhinged.

“Beagles. Isn’t that the breed that follows a scent?” Peg said.

I nodded. “I’m about to give up.”

“Then stay for a drink,” Ed said.

“Why not?” I said, throwing up my hands in mock exasperation. “Just one.”

So I drank two, maybe three cocktails at the Ryers’, trying to push away the panic, trying not to think about my family waiting for my return.

It was getting late, and one of their guests offered me a ride home, but I didn’t take it. The sun was setting over the roof, the clouds were streaked a smoldering, humid red. I said goodbye and started back along the bank, but when I had rounded the bend in the river, I doubled back down their neighbor’s driveway, and headed toward town along the road. I had no desire to go home, drunk and broken. I didn’t want to explain what was so impossible to make sense out of: why I had sabotaged the portrait, why the accident with Mary had made me turn away from my family rather than try to protect them. So I headed to town.

I went into Mickey’s and pulled up a stool, and when the bartender asked me what my poison was I ordered a vodka tonic, laughing out loud at my choice. “I’ve always been a bourbon man,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

“There’s a first time for everything,” the bartender said, and perhaps sensing I was in need of spilling some story, moved down the bar to unload the dishwasher.

The place was almost empty. A small woman with sunken cheeks shoved quarters in a Keno machine and smacked her palm against the side when the numbers betrayed her. Two men in stiff baseball caps, millworkers maybe, were starting up a game of pool.

The drink went down easily, so I had another and another until things no longer seemed so bad. My daughter had almost drowned, but she had not drowned. Near tragedy had been averted. What more could I possibly have done? I was aware with this last drink that my own body was failing me. I was a stranger to my actions. My eyes wouldn’t focus, and when I swallowed it went down hard. I had one last drink and then stumbled toward home along the river.

What must have been two hours seems a mere moment in time. The moon was full over the river. I marveled in its symmetry. I watched the translucent clouds bleed into whiteness, thinking of Jane’s paintings guiding me through the clutter as if strings were attached to my legs, and then I fell. I remember knowing how ridiculous it was that my feet would not cooperate, and yet I can’t recall feeling any pain when rocks scraped my knees, drawing deep lines of blood through my pants, or the sensation of bending my wrist back against the step of someone’s pier.

Then I was at Jane’s, knocking on the door and feeling terribly lost. She opened the door a crack, undid the chain, and let me in.

“There you are,” she said softly.

“There you are.” I tripped over the edge of the doormat but managed to catch myself. “I ruined the portrait.”

“Forget about the portrait,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Walking along the river.”

“Does Susan know you’re back?”

“Of course,” I said, annoyed that my wife had somehow found a way to be present in this moment.

“And are you all right?”

“I’m all right.” I followed her gaze down my legs. My khakis were ripped, and I had bled through the fabric. “I could use a drink, though.”

“Maybe water.”

“Maybe not water. Where’s the bourbon? I liked drinking out of those jars.” I sat down on the couch.

She seemed to think about this for a moment, whether it would be easier to appease me or try to send me home.

“You’re an artist. You should understand excess,” I said. “I don’t want you to go to any trouble, though. I can get it myself.”

“It isn’t any trouble.” She disappeared into the kitchen.

My head felt thick, my mouth dry, and from the couch I could see the lights of my own house winking as a breeze passed through the leaves. The closeness of it all, that place which had somehow shut me out, only made me more uncomfortable, and there weren’t any curtains so I covered my eyes.

Jane came back in, handed me the bourbon, and sat down on the couch beside me. I thought from the color she might have watered down the liquor, but I drank it up anyway without complaint. “That was nice and light,” I said, slamming down the jar, which missed the table and fell to the floor. “I’ve made a mess of things.”

“That’s all right, Lowell,” she said. “Messes have never bothered me,” and she patted my knee. “We went ahead with the photo anyway. I’ll add you in.” With her touch, it all seemed to hit me at once.

I put my head in my hands and ran the tips of my fingers along my brow and then lay down, putting my head in Jane’s lap. “I’m sorry. You probably think I’m very presumptuous,” I said.

She placed her hand on my shoulder. “I don’t think so at all.”

“I guess I’m drunk,” I said, though I felt as if the liquor were starting to wear off.

I lay there with my eyes closed, trying to think of what to do. I put my hand over my eyes and my shoulders began to shake, and I don’t know how much time passed before someone spoke.

“It’s OK,” she said, but it wasn’t Jane’s voice, and when I looked up my wife was there, crouched by the couch, running her fingers through my thinning hair. She put her arms around me and pulled me to my feet, and helped me out the door. I had to lean against her to keep from stumbling.

“I haven’t any idea what’s wrong with me, Susan.”

“Nothing’s wrong with you,” she said, as we wove our way between the trees. “I understand.” And then she brought me to the safety of our bedroom, which no longer felt safe. She helped me out of my clothes, sat me down on the bed, and cleaned the cuts on my knees.

“I tried,” I said.

“There’s no reason to feel guilty,” my wife said, and at that very moment I must have fallen asleep.

*   *   *

Near morning I woke up sober with a terrible dark feeling. I felt I had to move around, so I went to get a glass of water. When I came back from the bathroom Susan had the light on and was sitting up in bed, rubbing her eyes.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and put my head in my hands, wanting so much to put my head in her lap. It would have been right to tell her how thankful I was, that I loved her just then. She had saved our daughter. She was trying to save me. “I’m a disaster, Susan,” I said. “You should leave me.”

“I’m not ever going to leave you.”

“But you should.”

“No,” she said. “I’d never leave someone I love.”

*   *   *

I read over the old letter Michael Downs had written to my wife, daring myself to imagine what her purpose in writing to him might have been—I want to know if I’m loved, if I’ve ever been loved, and now I’m married to a man who doesn’t have the answer.

Six years after those letters were mailed, Susan’s mother was buried in Greenwich, Connecticut, beside a man with an Italian name to whom she had never been married. Somebody called Thatcher Hurst to let him know. The old man flew from Lincoln all the way to New York the next day, in spite of his bad health. Susan and her father and I had stood like strangers at the periphery of the graveside ceremony. I had shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, feeling out of place, wondering why they had wanted to come. But the two of them had held each other and wept beside her grave, as if they had both lost someone who had really been an important part of their lives. Susan told me later it was the irony that had made her cry: Now that her mother was dead, she would finally know where to find her. But I wasn’t sure if it had been as simple as that. There I’d been, standing beside her, thinking I should do something, but not really doing it. I hadn’t even reached for her hand.

I refolded the letters, tucked them back inside their envelopes, and went downstairs with my drink in my hand. I sat on the couch and put my feet up on the table, feeling dazed. My hands were shaky, as if the absence of my wedding band had somehow thrown off my equilibrium. The fog was thick, the heavy light fading into evening. And though she might never know about it, I finally did what my wife had asked of me. I turned on the lamp, put the shoe box in my lap, and opened the lid.