CHAPTER NINE

1991

I spent the whole drive upstate trying not to think about the safe-deposit box or my family, just imagining myself relaxing with a drink and a good book, listening to the sound of the cool gray river which ran by the house. I hadn’t been there in ages.

Zipping up the New York State Thruway, I tried to smile though there wasn’t anyone to see. But that key to the safe-deposit box burned a hole in my pocket, and I couldn’t get comfortable. My wife had made the whole thing into a terrible burden.

I took back roads through Dutchess County, drawing out the day as raindrops spattered the windshield and yellow leaves spun down onto the wet road. I flew through Balmville and Ulster Park, feeling like I’d never look back, but before I knew it I found myself standing in the basement of the First National Bank, holding the key in my hand and staring at the bronze door of deposit box 342.

“You know, I’m not really sure there’s anything inside,” I said to the attendant.

“It’s your box—you should know,” the attendant said.

“In fact, I don’t even remember ever having been here before. It could be the wrong key.”

“Well, your signature checks out, so—” He turned his key in the first lock.

“Listen—um, could you step back just a bit?” I said, but the attendant just loomed there, unnerving me considerably, as I took the brass key between my fingers and pressed it into the brass lock. I almost hoped my key wouldn’t fit. But it clicked in the lock and turned easily.

After a moment’s hesitation, I reached in. My fingers stumbled over something. I felt my heart lurch as I drew out a container the size of a shoebox. There it was, heavy in my hands, the cardboard so old and cracked I thought it might break. I didn’t want to know what was inside, but I remembered holding that box one day long ago. And for some strange reason, it hit me right then, standing in the basement vault of that goddamn bank: I really was leaving Susan. I had no intention of ever going back.

My fingers shook as I paid the bill, signed an order to end the rental, and tucked the box under my coat to hide it from the rain.

*   *   *

Driving toward Port Saugus with the box on the seat beside me, I tried to come up with a plan for the gallery. Francesca needed to be called. I’d have to trust her to pack things up. I could run my business from the country, until I came up with a better plan. A little anxious, despite the soothing rhythm of my windshield wipers, the only thing I wanted was a glass of bourbon. I’d drink as much as I could keep down, and there would be no one to tell me to stop. The rain shaded the road in charcoal and saturated the first fall leaves with color. So this was freedom, this gray meandering through silent oaks and maples.

At an approaching intersection, a hitchhiker wearing a plastic bag as a raincoat held up a smeared sign that said UTICA, and I wondered for a moment what made him so desperate to get there. I thought of picking him up and delivering him far beyond his destination, of driving and driving until we were far from anyone who remembered our names. In some strange city where all lost men eventually turned up, I would simply hand him the box, say, “All yours, chief,” clap him on the back, and speed away into the fog. I wouldn’t ever have to look inside that box if I didn’t want to.

When I paused for the stoplight, the hitchhiker stepped off the curb and put out his thumb. I rolled down my window to be polite, and he bent over, leaning his elbow inside. He was no more than a boy, my son’s age perhaps, yet he seemed to lack the energy of anything approximating youth. I could smell nicotine on him, and the mustiness of damp, unwashed clothing.

“You goin’ my way?” he said.

“Unfortunately, I’m not,” I said, feeling his gaze passing over the box. “But I thought I might be able to deposit you at a more promising intersection.”

“What’s that s-supposed to mean?”

“Well, it doesn’t look very promising around here. There’s not much traffic, son.”

“If you haven’t noticed, nothing’s very promising around here.” He took his elbow off the window and glared at me as if I were responsible for this. Something about him unnerved me. His eyes looked restless.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said. “Anyway, good luck to you.” And I put my foot on the gas, leaving him scowling on the empty road in the glow of the blinking stoplight.

I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling he had inspired. I imagined a macabre scene from one of those movies Hank watched, a moment where I opened the box to find a bone, a human hand secreted away, unnoticed for years. I remembered a trip we’d taken when I was a boy, so my father could see the Inca ruins at Ingapirca. Terrible rainstorms had plagued us and we never got to the site, but one afternoon when my mother was resting in the hotel room, my father had taken me to a museum full of shrunken heads on sticks. I’d begged and begged and finally he had bought me a curio head with real hair and eyelashes, nestled in a balsa-wood coffin with a string through its nose. Back at home, the head had scared me, and one night my mother had made a great ceremony of gathering us together in the living room, taking it by the neck, and tossing it into the fire. I allowed myself to remember her face; she was laughing in the firelight, but I could not manage to summon up how it was she sounded.

Turning right onto Flint Rock Road, I pulled into the parking lot of the Duck Goose Diner and put the box in the trunk because I didn’t want to think about it anymore. There weren’t any other cars in the parking lot. Thursday afternoon, and the world was tucked away, hidden from the storm. A blue neon OPEN sign blinked softly in the diner window, and I could make out a solitary individual sitting in its glow, wearing a John Deere hat and quietly eating his meal.

Opening the door of the Duck Goose, I walked up to the register and slapped my hands on the counter. A waitress came out of the kitchen with her hands on her hips and frowned. I wanted those hips to be slim. I wanted her rear to be heart-shaped, her lips to be full; after all, these were my first hours of freedom. But this woman wasn’t much of an inspiration.

“I used to live here,” I told her. “My kids and I used to come here for pie.”

“Right,” she said. “So then you—what, moved down to Westchester so you could take the train to the city?”

I laughed it off. “No, I’m just a poor guy with no place to go.”

The man in the booth coughed loudly and I tried not to look at him. The waitress started wiping down the counter, wearing what I thought might be a smirk.

“So, do you still have that nice fresh-baked apple pie?”

“Only cherry,” she said.

“OK, then.”

“Does that mean you want it?”

“You bet,” I said, getting tired of the whole exchange. I picked up the sports page, just hoping to tune her out. This was precisely the sort of thing my wife couldn’t stand.

The pie was store-bought, one of those sticky-sweet frozen things, but I ate it anyway, even tipped the waitress for good measure. I always tip too much.

On my way out, I passed the pay phone and got the sudden urge to call Hank—tell him how proud I was, that I missed him already. This was the sort of spontaneous expression of feeling people admired. So I went back to the car, got my address book, came back in, and nervously attempted to shove a rather ridiculous amount of change into the phone for my call.

“Henry,” I said, as the waitress eyed me suspiciously from behind the counter, perhaps annoyed that she couldn’t monitor my conversation through the glass door. I turned my back on her. “It’s Dad.”

“Hey, Dad.” I could hear somebody talking in the background, maybe his roommate, maybe a group of new friends.

“How’s school?” I said.

“Fine, I guess.”

“And are you having a good time?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, your old man is in a rather unexpected place at the moment. Want to hazard a guess?”

“Saudi Arabia?”

“Ha. Might as well be. The Duck Goose Diner,” I said. “Remember? Near Port Saugus.”

“No.”

“We used to come here after Little League for fresh apple pie because your mother never cooked.”

He said nothing.

“They don’t have that pie anymore,” I went on. “Guess time leaves no stone unturned. But you loved that pie.”

“Dad?”

“Listen, I could come up tomorrow and take you and some of your new friends out for pizza.”

“It’s not Little League, Dad,” he said. “Where’s Mom?”

“No idea.” Suddenly I felt terribly uncomfortable. Looking over my shoulder, I saw the waitress eyeing me suspiciously, as if I was on the run from the law or had just thrown my wife into the river. “Is this a bad time?” I asked Hank.

“I just saw you.”

“Are you with a girl?”

“Jesus Christ, Dad.”

“Remember not to unveil the ceremonial club too soon, son.”

“There’s this thing on the quad. I’m late.”

“I’m so proud—” I tried to add, but he was gone, and I stood for a moment with the receiver in my hand, not sure what to do next. I wondered suddenly if I’d been any use to my children at all. Now that I’d left Susan, would my children ever want to see me again? How hard could it be for them to say goodbye to someone who had never really been there? Of course, I had been there in certain ways. But then things became more complicated. My business required so much. And now Hank had left home. Soon Mary would, too, and there was no way for Susan and me to go on together in the same hopeful spirit with which our lives had begun. I thought of the apartment, its empty rooms, the thick quiet that had grown between us.

*   *   *

Susan inherited the house in Port Saugus from her uncle in 1972. In 1973, after I finished my dissertation on Nero’s Golden Palace and just before Susan had discovered she was pregnant, we moved in. We spent months picking through Douglas’s belongings together, making numerous trips to Goodwill and the dump as Susan’s stomach grew. The puppies got into everything. The roof had to be patched. The plan was to turn the barn into a showroom for the objects I had begun to collect with the money left to me. The floor needed work, and the walls required even more repair. There was a lot to be done, and I stepped up to the plate: I found myself doing things I never thought possible, even pulling them off with flair. I sanded the barn floor myself and painted it a color called London Fog. I turned the baby’s room into a sky by covering it with robin’s-egg blue and cutting foam into the shapes of clouds, which I’d dip in white paint and then stamp on the ceiling. Several times Susan appeared on the threshold looking pleased, laughing when white drops of paint landed in my hair. “It really is a sky,” she said once. “Bird droppings and all.” Later, I admit I lost interest. But in those days I wanted a home different from the one I’d grown up in. More artistic and relaxed, not so grand. I was convinced that an easy, comfortable place could help make things right.

Susan’s uncle Douglas had been in ill health for years, and junk had piled up around the place. Susan went through it frantically, with a sort of crazed energy, as if she’d lost something valuable there long ago. When I noticed this and asked about it, she told me she was trying to discover the person her mysterious uncle had been. She said she’d always imagined so many things about him. But that didn’t explain the urgency. She seemed so driven. I realized it had to do with her mother, whom Susan refused to discuss. All she wanted to talk about was Douglas, who had paid for her education. “Without him,” she always said, “I would have had very little, really. He was close to my mother, but he isolated himself from everything else. It seems like he was hiding here.”

One evening I found martini glasses and champagne flutes as thin as paper tucked up on a top shelf of a cabinet, probably left over from a time when Douglas had entertained. I drove into town for champagne, cleaned out two flutes with my shirttail, and surprised Susan. She had been so happy, like a little girl finally allowed to do something she had always dreamed about. We clinked glasses to what my memory has labeled that winter’s first snow. Then I picked her up and carried her over the threshold the way I’d forgotten to when we were first married. These kinds of things, these little things—conventions, really—have always made my wife unreasonably happy.

As the weeks passed, she continued her furious hunt; in a bureau drawer she found a boxful of unsent letters addressed to a man named Downs in Oxford, Mississippi. I was varnishing the barn floor when she appeared in the doorway holding one. “I need you to stop what you’re doing and listen to this,” she said softly. I turned off the clunking space heater and did what she asked.

“Dear Michael,” she read to me.

“I cannot believe that I find myself this old. A woman comes now every day to bring me my meals. But as soon as she leaves I make my way outside and throw everything into the mulch. It is a long trip; every step feels like a journey, but I use the side of the house for support. Do you remember my view of the river? You always seemed to enjoy it when you came, though I was sure you had seen so many more beautiful places. My trip to Biloxi to see you was special for me—one of the things I will always remember. I barely recognize my own hands as I write these words. They are shaking and almost useless, but they are eager to write, Michael, that I have never stopped thinking of you.”

Susan buried her face in my flannel shirt and started to cry. I held her close, felt the swell of her belly between us, but could not really pretend to be as moved as she was.

“I’ve decided to mail the letters,” she said. “I think Michael Downs would want to have them. Who wouldn’t want a love letter?”

I didn’t know what to say. Susan’s obstetrician had warned me about mood swings. He had told me to be patient. “You’re just upset,” I said. “Go inside and lie down, and I’ll make you some lemon tea.”

“Are you saying I shouldn’t mail it?” My wife pulled away from me.

That seemed so personal and intrusive. “I think it would be best not to get involved,” I said. “He may not have wanted to mail any of them.”

“Maybe he didn’t have any stamps.”

“Sweetheart, please be reasonable. The woman who brought him food would have brought him stamps,” I said, though I suppose, in another way, I wasn’t being reasonable myself. The smell of the varnish was getting to me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the strange things that might have gone on. I have always appreciated a man’s discretion about his personal life. Perhaps Douglas also felt that there were certain things in this world that need not be discussed. Perhaps it was this silence that had kept him alone.

Susan looked up at me with tears on her lashes, her lip quivering, and said, “It’s sad, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know, Susan. If your uncle was throwing away his food, maybe he wanted to die. Maybe this Downs is a no-good sort of fellow. It doesn’t seem worth getting upset about.”

“Don’t you see? My uncle loved this man. There’s an entire life right here in this letter!” She stormed outside and slammed the door. Through the window, I watched her sit down on the back steps of the house, bury the letter in her coat pocket, and light a cigarette. My lovely wife with a pencil in her pulled-back hair. She wanted everyone to have someone; that was her idea of happiness. I felt she was going to somehow hurt the baby by getting upset, so I went out and sat down beside her.

She wiped a tear away with her sleeve, and said, “It looks gray to me.”

“What does?”

“The river.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, touching the edge of her dark wool coat. And then I took her hand and kissed it. “I’ll try not to be so cold.” And I did try. For all those years, I watched my every sentence, trying to convince them all that I had moved forward, that love for me wasn’t connected to a terrible kind of pain.

*   *   *

There was water everywhere that first spring in Port Saugus. We fell asleep at night to the rhythm of raindrops hitting tin pots in the hallway. Often, it wasn’t the storms that woke us but our beagles howling at the thunder, discovering for the first time that they were hounds. It rained constantly, the gray river swelled, and inside Susan our son floated in tranquillity. Hank was born with his thumb in his mouth, and we had no idea about the days, weeks, and months of mind games and bottles of bitters we would go through, trying to get him to stop. His thumb stayed shriveled and soggy for years, leaving its little wet mark like a rabbit print on everything he touched, a reminder of the rain.

It must have been a month before Hank was born, late March, when Susan first brought up what we would tell our child about my parents. I was lying there in the dawn light watching her enormous stomach rise and fall with the deep rhythm of sleep. Behind her through the picture window I could see gray clouds and a fringe of trees on the other side of the river. I had felt separate from every living thing for so long, and at that moment I thought it could all change. I didn’t want to be that way anymore. Sliding up close to Susan, I touched her stomach with the palm of my hand. She opened her eyes slowly and I smiled. “What were you dreaming?” I said.

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“Are you sure?” I ran my finger over the ridge of her distended navel hidden beneath the nightgown. I was glad it was hidden, and yet it stimulated a sort of sexual curiosity in me. There was something so base, so animal about her shape, exaggerated like an ancient, female idol. I wanted to make love to her but was afraid of hurting something.

“Guess what I was doing?” she said, and went on without waiting for me to try. “Attempting subliminal communication with the baby.”

I chuckled. “You make it sound like some sort of space alien.”

“Let’s hope not,” she said, and let out a slow yawn.

“Did you learn anything about it?” I wanted to know.

“No, but I learned something about myself.”

“Did the baby tell you how profoundly odd its father thinks you are?”

She smiled and shook her head. “I was just thinking about coming here and going through all these old things. I mean, the whole time I knew what I was looking for. I knew why it was so important to me.” She stopped for a moment and put both hands on her stomach, and I could see her fingers twitch as the baby kicked. “This whole time I’ve been looking for something of my mother’s,” she said.

“We found pictures. That was nice.”

“I wanted more than that.”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess you did.” I reached out to brush a strand of hair out of her face, but she caught my hand and held it to her chest.

“We’re going to have to do a lot of explaining to this child, Lowell. We’re going to have to make it feel safe.”

“What exactly do you mean?”

“I think you know what I mean.” And of course I did, I just wasn’t sure it warranted a discussion. How was that going to change anything? Before I’d left my parents that last time for boarding school, I had always felt safe in their house. But that feeling had only made the loss more devastating when it came.

“We’ve got years,” I said, sitting up and throwing back the covers and putting my feet on the floor. I just couldn’t imagine how it would ever be possible to explain such incomprehensible things to a child.

“I know it’s difficult, but I think we should start considering it,” she said. “Maybe even talk to someone.”

“I really can’t consider it right now,” I said, with a bit more heat than I had intended. “I have to pick out lighting fixtures, and someone needs to call Dick Cassidy about the drainpipe.”

“Of course,” she said. “It’s overwhelming.”

I stood up and went downstairs to let out the dogs.