Leo’s graduation went off as well as could have been expected under the circumstances. Leo’s experiences in his final term at St. Anthony’s lent a certain hollow ring to the ceremony, which was followed, inevitably, by a hideous Fansler family luncheon. All the Fanslers were present, but Kate was at least able to become comfortably sozzled on champagne, an escape the graduation ceremony itself had not offered.
Leo had moved back to his father’s house. As Reed and Kate finally bid goodbye to the assembled Fanslers, Leo thanked them for “everything,” as though, Reed remarked, they had taken him for the afternoon to the zoo. They decided to walk down the Avenue.
“I haven’t yet told you the final ironies,” Reed said. “Finlay and Ricardo will doubtless both go to Harvard, one year late. There was never any doubt about Finlay; he is, as Leo kept telling us, a genius. And Max wrote such a moving letter on behalf of the Ricardo boy that Harvard has agreed to consider him most seriously. Max, no doubt, felt he had to keep on the good side of the family. The one who suffered in a sharp way was Leo: the headmaster stopped saying hello to him in the hall. I think Leo minded that.”
“Crackthorne minded it, too,” Kate said. Reed raised an interrogative eyebrow. “You know,” Kate told him, “the young teacher who was writing a dissertation on the World War I generation; he who used to make the basketball games bearable. He’s leaving St. Anthony’s. I had a note from him. He said he’s had enough expediency and sophistication to last him a lifetime.”
“Kate, are you ever sorry you haven’t been a parent for more than one year?”
“Nonsense. That’s exactly the right amount of parenthood. Though, if I had to choose the year again, I would pick one with fewer events and crises. As Lady Bracknell observed in other connections, the crises this spring were considerably above the average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.”
“You are all right, then. I always feel better when you quote Oscar Wilde. I’ve been a bit concerned about the possible aftereffects of being chased through a dark wood by a homicidal maniac.”
“The habit of exaggeration is catching, I see. You know, Reed, I shall always wonder about Max. And when I am at the cabin, I shall always see him standing there, looking across the uncut meadow.”
“We all live with ghosts,” Reed said. “For me, at least, there will always be the ghost of Leo, not yet eighteen.”
But the roster of ghosts was not complete. Some weeks later, after Kate and Reed had returned from a vacation abroad, an envelope was delivered from the Wallingford.
“To Kate from Tate,” Sparrow had written. “Which is to say, not our official selves. This photograph turned up among Cecily’s papers; I suspect Max meant to use it in the biography. I ought not, of course, to have had a copy made or to have sent it to anybody.”
In the photograph, three girls posed for the camera, laughing, arms around each other’s waists. On the back of the picture was written: “Tupe, Hutchins, Whitmore. Oxford, 1920.”
The girls stood on a lawn, probably at Somerville, in the open sunlight. One could imagine, behind them, the dreaming spires.