XXVIII

It was raining again when he woke up once in the night. The sky seemed brighter Sunday morning; fledgling redbirds in a nest by the door squealing at a pitch just inside the range of hearing, a fine engraver’s line. But it faded out into a spraying rain even while, opening the paper for news of Ike, he read FORMER FREDERICKSVILLE PHYSICIAN DIES IN BOSTON.

He turned away from it to the gray outdoors, and a gray brief sense of time passing. Then came back to it and read the paragraph; eight or ten lines as if for the eight or ten people in town who had ever heard the name Izlar. He ought to go to the funeral, wanted to, but he couldn’t really spare two or three days’ attention from what he had come to think of as “the Wednesday-at-ten-thirty matter,” cryptic even to himself.

Of course it could be managed. Boston this afternoon, funeral (most likely) tomorrow, back on Tuesday. But there were facts and figures to be studied, alternatives weighed, decisions reached: accept their price and sell? hold to his price and probably not sell? And if he sold could he get back on the path he was on before he lost his way? Too late to seek a newer world? Or not too late?—as the man dead in Boston believed. Or made-believe.

He was at the telephone looking up the airport number when the phone rang. He had hardly heard the voice since “Did I get a likeness, Owen?” but he knew it at the first word. “Hello, Leonard.” Had Owen read about George Izlar? “Where’s the funeral to be, Owen?”

“You mean when? Tomorrow, I suppose,” Leonard already probably a little drunk.

“Where, Owen? Jim Bondy just stopped by, seemed to think he might be buried here.”

Owen said he certainly thought Boston, Margaret buried there, and Leonard after a wait said reluctantly, Yes, he guessed so. “I was rather hoping Dexter might be in town, I’d like to see Dexter.” “Oh, I’d think he’d be buried in Boston, Leonard. He’d want to be buried by his wife.” “I guess so.” Owen said he was going up this afternoon, but it was of no interest to Leonard who mumbled “I guess so” again, accepting it, and in a minute or two was gone, Owen laying down the phone and telling himself at least they could be glad Leonard wouldn’t be talking to Dexter, nothing to be gained for anybody by that. And the phone ringing under his hand as if Leonard were coming back for something he had left behind.

When he answered it was almost as though Leonard had passed Dexter on the doorstep. “Mr. Woodruff, this is Dexter Izlar,” in a slightly Western voice that Owen wouldn’t have recognized, as he probably wouldn’t have recognized Dexter, it had been so many years since that foggy gray Thanksgiving and Dexter over by bus from Fort Benning, a friendly thin black-haired Infantry Corporal with his mother’s eyes.

In effect, what Dexter said was that Jim Bondy knew what he was talking about; George wanted to be buried in Fredericksville, had left a note. “It seems Father bought a cemetery lot there at one time. Five Springs Cemetery?”

Owen wanted to ask him “When?” When had George decided not to be buried in Boston?—not curiosity but interest in a friend, who had talked so much and never talked of that—but it wasn’t a question for now. If ever. “Yes, there’s a cemetery at Five Springs. It’s out in the country, you know.” He was about to say his “father” had always had a fondness for Five Springs, but Dexter was into other matters: he was arriving tomorrow noon by train, had made arrangements for a simple funeral later in the day; he wanted Owen to know, “and any other friend of Father’s,” though the only one he could remember George speaking of was a Negro named Jim Bondy and he didn’t know how to reach him.

“I can call him for you.”

“There was someone else too, at the moment I can’t think of his name, a painter.” And there might be other friends; doctors students, patients; perhaps there could be a mention of the funeral in the paper, where and when? Owen said he would call the papers and make sure.

He asked Dexter to stay with them—inconvenient, with hospital responsibilities, but not adding much to the inconvenience of the funeral itself—but Dexter said his fiancée would be with him and he had made reservations at the hotel; they would be leaving next morning, a busy time for him, college-entrance papers coming up and finals. “We’ll be at the Oglethorpe,” the name lingering with Owen after they hung up: George in the “Presidential Suite” to accommodate the throngs celebrating his home-coming, lying out on a bed in the empty rooms and waving at the open window and magnolias in the grounds. “She loved those flowers, said she might never have smelled them but for marrying me. The most wonderful woman that ever lived.…”

If he could have prevented Dexter’s coming he would have done it, would have made the flight to Boston to prevent it; still, he had come and gone without incident that other time, why not again?—taking with him this time (or having it sent) the painting Owen could see from the telephone that was now his, To G & M Izlar, for a Happy Marriage on the back of it, Leonard’s long-ago “Pears” that was such a link between all of them. He wondered if it puzzled Dexter that his father had chosen to be buried so far away—

Louisa said, “What were all the phone calls?” and he told her, summed it up; handed her the paper.

She was dressed for golf after the hospital, if the rain held off (and probably if it didn’t). She read the few lines without comment except “Why does everything always happen at once!”—never one of her favorite people, with his large indifference to “pulls,” “slices,” “spins,” and the rest of it.

He said he was sorry Dexter was coming and she said, misunderstanding, “He’ll only be here for a day, they will. ‘Fiancée’? I thought Dexter was married.”

“Divorced,” not sure, but he thought he remembered “divorce,” that time in Boston, only George and Margaret then, Dexter in the West somewhere; “she was no good, well out of it” (mother speaking), or something like that, George in his bow tie, thin teacup in his doctor’s fingers like a butterfly.

“Flowers, I suppose,” Louisa said. “And we probably ought to do something for them, have them to dinner? Maybe just have them by for drinks after the funeral. Have Leonard.”

His “Skip Leonard” came out sharper than he meant and he tacked on, “I don’t think he goes out of the house.” She said, All right, she’d make the children get a sitter and come (Pete and Nan were “children”). “I can’t go to the train, with Mary and everything; I don’t think it matters, do you?” She said from the kitchen door with a short laugh, “George always manages to arrive at the wrong time,” and he had to nod agreement.

It was raining again Monday when, refused permission to see Ike, he visited daughter and grandson instead, and still raining when he drove on to the station—to the depot (“Union Depot” to lots of people, “deppo” to some). And “depot” at heart to him, a depository, a cache, a coal-smudged storehouse of Arrivals and Departures that plotted lifelines if you knew how to join them: to the Island, to Sudbury School, to Twelfth Street and pictures; George and Margaret to Boston, Ike and Jim Bondy home from Sharon, Trooper Leonard off to “The Border,” and twenty-five years later, Private Izlar bound for Alabama. Owen arriving for a father’s funeral, and now Dexter.

The first thing he seemed to see was the hearse; drawn up beyond the far end of the shed where the baggage car would stop, the undertaker’s young men cheerily in the front seat, cigarette smoke seeping out and vanishing in the mist-rain. Almost nobody in the shed itself, a porter with a cigar working a handtrunk out of a niche, a blue-shirted cleaner with a brush on a pole swabbing the windows of a day coach on a siding, a hatless old man peering nosily into a red-and-green Express van who he thought for a second was Leonard but wasn’t.

The chances were Leonard hadn’t come out in the rain and wasn’t coming, being Leonard, and half ill; and possibly not knowing the funeral was to be in Fredericksville after all, not a paper reader. And if Owen had it his way, not finding out until late enough tomorrow to have the plane for Boston in the air, or for Denver, or wherever Dexter and his girl were going. Leonard hadn’t even been on hand at the little gathering to present the “Caravaggio,” in the gallery for a moment with a grumpy “Hello there” to check the level of the frame with the new plate on it, then gone (refusing any part in George’s affairs, any part in forgiveness, which George after his visit would probably have foreseen)—the train coming in now, almost “OT” as the bulletin board had chalked it, backing in as it had in all the store of Arrivals, already concerned with Departure, sides gleaming this time like a rubber raincoat, Pullman rolling heavily past the hearse as though to show Dexter he had got there.

A few people collected and followed after the car-steps, none of them Leonard; or anyone else he knew, George’s home-coming this time even less “like Grand Central Station” than the other one. Not even Jim Bondy this time, whom he had thought of calling but hadn’t, remembering a year ago.—And the train was in, with a sound of unshouldering a bag of scrap iron.

Dexter was a surprise to him. He supposed he had unconsciously prepared himself for the Dexter of that Thanksgiving, corporal-stripes on his sleeves; he wasn’t expecting a man with hair going gray at the temples, cut short in a boarding-school manner but graying. Then he noticed the bent left arm and began to think there was something of Margaret in his face and he was satisfied it was Dexter; something of the schoolmaster too, he thought, the slightly antiquarian look of a dealer in old questions and answers who might find it sometimes a bother to be exemplary. He was quickly to the ground and holding back a hand (the other one) to a woman who might have been ten years younger, kissing her at the bottom of the steps as if he had come to the train to meet her: “So glad to see you!” with an easygoing liveliness, nothing morose about either of them, here to dispose of an outgrown parent (the attitude Pete would have had toward him—would have).

Dexter didn’t seem to expect anyone to be at the station and he gazed at Owen, mystified, when Owen called his name. Then he said, “Mr. Woodruff?” not sure, the years having rained on the just and the unjust. Then after a handshake, quickly, “Jo, this is Owen. ‘Owen’ is what you always were at our house, Mr. Woodruff,” giving Owen a smile that wasn’t Margaret’s but one even more familiar, that sent him back to Boston and George in The Thoughtery and “You’re getting to look more and more like your father, Owen, as one does.”

He mumbled of course to call him Owen, but he was trying to place the Leonard that the smile brought to him, a Leonard of about Dexter’s age, and also arriving with his hand held out-turning away from the taxi at the steps of the School. And Leonard of today too, allowing for differences; that might obscure the likeness for everyone else (but maybe Jim Bondy) unless the two were side by side. And even then perhaps not worth noting; often strangers slightly resembled one another. The girl said her name was Joanna but she answered to Jo. “Or Anna,” nearly the same height as Dexter, brown hair (neither of them with a hat), a rather attractive self-possessed mouth.

He was telling them he had his car outside, would take them to the hotel when they were ready, when a voice said behind him that he knew wasn’t Leonard’s but that startled him in just being a voice addressing Dexter, “Mr. Izlar, I reckon you don’t know me”—the words revealing him as the voice should have done, almost exactly the words to George from the door of the Presidential Suite—“I’m Jim Bondy,” black hat in his hand, black tie, stiff white collar that his grandchildren must have laughed at, a brief country smile that somehow had George’s death in it.

Dexter seemed pleased, presented him to Jo as “an old friend of Father’s.” Jim said he just wanted to say how-do-you-do, to offer his sympathy; if he could do anything at all Mr. Woodruff knew where to find him—at the church, he was living with his grandson, the Reverend James. If they would excuse him now he would go up ahead and see if he could help with the Doctor.

As he passed Owen he said, “I’d like to speak to you before you leave, Mr. Woodruff,” and walked on, the porter loading their suitcases and rolling them away on his cart while a young man with a clipboard was locating “Mr. Izlar” and then saying to him, “I have your rental, Mr. Izlar.”

Dexter explained; Owen wouldn’t need to take them to the hotel. He told Jo to wait in the car, he didn’t know how long “this” would take, and followed Jim.

Owen stood a minute with her by the empty coaches looking after him, the shed almost empty too, post-train from pre-train, the conductor walking off in a gray hat and all but unrecognizable. She said, “He loved his father though he hardly ever saw him,” then suddenly, “I’m going with him, he’s been through a lot. I don’t think the Shaw connection understood Dr. Izlar’s wanting to come here. Dexter said, ‘I don’t care why, if that’s what he wants that’s it,’” walking off in front of him along the dripping cars—then stopping at the sight of Jim Bondy and the undertaker’s men dragging out the cheap brown shipping case and with the help of a man smoking a corncob pipe lifting it down to a wet baggage truck. As they hauled it off she said, “This may be a great thing for Dexter,” turning away as if through with it, a very different positive outlook from his own negative one, a view up the tracks ahead for her, for them.

She said he ought to get out of teaching, maybe he would now. “He’s a musician. He’s got something, my husband thinks, who should know—ex-husband, I should say. They played his Trio for Woodwinds last winter, some people from the Seattle Symphony.…”

He hardly heard her for watching the truck on its iron wheels hammering over the boards, over a pair of rails and then another pair, the baggage-hand pulling, Jim and one of the undertaker’s men pushing, the other one opening the end of the hearse, and all four of them sliding the case part way into the door, halfway in, then with a concerted shove, all the way, and it was done and the door closed—as the big gun had been loaded at Fort Sumter once and the breechblock closed, Leonard and Margaret in the wind on the parapet, shoulders touching.

He said he would call them at the hotel and they drove off in a polished Chevrolet to the rental office, the young man and his clipboard leaning over from the back seat to show the way with his ballpoint pen; he was trying to remember where he had parked his car when Jim’s low-range voice said, “Mr. Woodruff?”

They sat on a rubbed bench in the waiting room, hand-rubbed, clothes-rubbed, smooth as glass; he was in no mood to talk about Ike, if that was what Jim wanted—desk loaded with unanswered mail, Wednesday coming closer with each scimitar swing of the pendulum on the old clock opposite the ticket window, with each fist-thump of the agent on his antique ticket-dater; and possible freedom coming closer if he dared to take it, no obstacles now. Except the reinforced doubt of himself. And the never-ending responsibilities moving in like pieces attacking a king—

“… went by to see him this morning, thought he ought to know about the funeral, he’s not much for reading the paper, you know—”

“Who’s not, Jim?”

“Mr. Leonard. The first thing he said was, ‘Is Dexter coming?’”

“Before you go any further, he’s not planning on coming to the cemetery, is he?”

“That’s what I want to talk to you about. He wanted me to bring him to the train, don’t have a car any more. I told him it was a rainy day, the train might be late, the Doctor would have to be attended to, another time would be better. I told him the young man might not be on the train anyhow and he said, ‘Not come to his father’s funeral!’ with that laugh of his, you know how he does.” “What else did he say?” “Well, Mr. Woodruff, he taps the bottle, you know. I don’t know how much, I’ve never seen him in liquor—”

“What did he say?”

“He said he’d like to see Dexter.—I can understand that. After all, I would too, just to see how he looks, how he’s grown up, how he sounds,” breaking off for two or three swings of the pendulum then going on as if shifting into another gear, “Mr. Woodruff, you know all this, such a good friend of the Doctor’s and Miss Margaret’s.” He glanced at Owen as much as to ask if he needed to be more explicit, Owen wondering if it might not be better to pretend he didn’t see the question. It was a matter he had never actually put into words even to himself, hardly into a thought until yesterday—except on the day he had learned it (and the one other time of Dexter’s visit, Corporal Dexter—not much resemblance then, or else it was disguised in the soldier). He settled for silence as he sometimes did in business, letting the other man talk, watched the ticket agent in his cage as Jim went on with a smile, “I remember one Saturday in town, the only time I can think of Mamma ever mentioned my daddy, a man drove by in a new buckboard and Mamma said, ‘There went your pappy, Jim.’ I didn’t get to see but the back of his head.—You know what I’m talking about, Mr. Woodruff?”

Owen didn’t answer that either. He found himself counting the bolts that anchored the segregating brass pipe to the floor, as if one could disentangle Bondys and Woodruffs and Izlars. He was glad Leonard hadn’t come, but would it have made any difference? It was hardly conceivable that, even a little drunk, he would have opened up the past; there wouldn’t have been time, for one good reason. But when Jim said, “He wants to come to the cemetery,” it seemed to put it on a different plane.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea.” “No sir.” “Besides, he doesn’t have a car.”

“That’s what he said; said he didn’t have any way to get to the Springs and would I take him with me? I didn’t know what to say, Mr. Woodruff. I said the funeral wouldn’t be a good time to talk to the young man, he’d probably be here several days—if he came at all. He said (I could tell he’d had a little), ‘What’s the matter with you, Jim, are you taking me or not?’ he gets kind of mean sometimes, you know. I said, ‘Yes sir, of course we’d be happy to take you.’ I said my grandson the preacher was taking me and we’d take him too.”

Owen was tempted to say what-the-hell! Leave it alone; what difference did it make to him? Or difference to Dexter for that matter? the cemetery hardly more propitious for a talk than the train shed. And yet—a slightly drunk Leonard, looking like a tramp, conspicuous in what would be such a small group, offering nothing but the discord of his presence, and the possible discord of what you couldn’t be sure he might not say.

When Jim said, “Maybe you could persuade him not to come,” he realized he had been thinking the same thing. If he offered to take Leonard himself he could go down there with a bottle and let the time slip by until neither of them got to the funeral; except that an explanation to Dexter would be called for. He said, “Jim, suppose you just ‘forgot’ him. He’s probably fuzzy about it all anyhow.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do him that way, Mr. Woodruff. I said we’d be there.” “Yes, but sometimes—” “I said we’d pick him up at three-thirty. The funeral’s at four.”

Owen wondered if he could tell him all three of them had better stay away. He said, “Suppose you didn’t get there either, Jim? Picked him up and ran out of gas, or something?”

“Oh, I’d like to pay my respects to the Doctor. I was looking to have young Jim say a prayer over the Doctor, if it was agreeable to everybody.”

The reminder of the grandson suggested another possibility. If Jim came with Owen and the grandson picked up Leonard, picked him up a little late. “Maybe he could think the funeral was at four-thirty. Or maybe he wouldn’t mind taking a wrong turn somewhere, not knowing the road very well?” Owen told him the service would be short (thinking as he said it there might be no service at all-Dexter of the Godless generation wanted a simple funeral); if the grandson could delay getting there half an hour Dexter might well have left. “We’d wait behind, Jim, you and I. You could go back with him, I’d take Leonard with me,” Jim gazing over the tops of the benches, not saying no but thinking it.

Owen tried to keep him from saying it by going on to ask if he thought the preacher would mind doing that. “I’m not so much worried, Jim, over what Leonard might say to Dexter; not the time or place; wouldn’t have the chance. But it would be easier on everybody if he wasn’t there, the young lady wondering what sort of people she’s marrying into—”

“He sort or favors Mr. Leonard, don’t he?”

(And the young lady possibly wondering about that too? No, not possibly. Just conscious of the discord.) “You hate to go back on what you told him, but—”

“I’m thinking Jim wouldn’t be in time to hold the prayer.” “No, but—we’ll do what’s right.” “Maybe I could say a few words over the Doctor?”

Owen said, “Certainly, certainly!” Anything to wind this up, mired to the hubcaps in petty obligations. He pushed himself to his feet with the damp umbrella, took a step or two away among the back-to-back benches, all empty, no trains for an hour. The answer to the question he wanted to ask wouldn’t change anything—except in the way old Major’s snapping a rubber band round a pack of letters seemed to change them, finish with them. “When did the Doctor buy this cemetery lot?”

And Jim couldn’t answer it. “Last time he was here he talked about the Springs. I was going to drive him out there, and then, well, we had our little misapprehension.”

And he didn’t know any more than before. Except that George hadn’t said everything that was on his mind. Hadn’t said, above all, why, which was what Owen really wanted to know. Just a homeward turn? A casting out of make-believes worn down too thin? A let-me-explain, but not in words? Hand Leonard his son, Dexter his father? And his mother too? Hand Dexter himself, free at last of make-believes—or free to substitute his own?

Oh, why concern himself with Dexter and his fathers! Trying, in effect, to keep him from discovering where his inclinations might have come from. And presuming a good bit in doing so? Even though the discovery could bring no liberation, Dexter with his undisguised joy at sonship being shed discovering all at once that it wasn’t. Aside from any other reason, he wanted no part in Dexter’s recapture; there was too much of a mirrored likeness in it: a young man down to bury his father; a young man unresolved between what he had and what he wanted, whose name might as well have been Owen Woodruff? (And each becoming more like his father every day, “as one does”?)—And something more too: his irrational annoyance with Dexter reminded him of Ike annoyed with Jim Bondy in the old days, with Jim Bondy’s needing to be saved, getting himself into a spot where there was nothing you could do but save him, or try to. If you were a Woodruffdog.

“… to the hospital, but ‘No Visitors’ on his door so I didn’t go in. Paper says, ‘No clews,’ Mr. Woodruff, but you know in my day this kind of thing went another way round. Something like this happen, they wouldn’t bother about ‘clews’. Get the right man if you see him but don’t come back without somebody.” “Maybe the world’s improving.—I’ll see you later, three-thirty at your church.” “White man lose the wheel, Mr. Woodruff, who drives the car?” “See you later, Jim.” … Not raining now, but not enough drop in temperature to mean the rain was over, soggy purple clusters of crape-myrtle flowers drooping in the Station Park—the Depot Park.

He phoned the hotel from the office and asked for Mr. Izlar (almost saying “Doctor”); Joanna said Dexter was downstairs talking to someone and he said, “Not Leonard!” before he could catch himself.

“A Mr. Oakes, or something. The minister at Five Springs. I suppose he wants to have a little do of some sort.”

Owen gave her the invitation to come by after the funeral, told her Louisa was taking Mary and the baby home today or would have called herself (an apparently negligible nicety, Jo accepting at once). He said, “Rooms all right?” the plural not deliberate, but reminding him of his aging generation when she said, “Oh, a beautiful room looking out over the city. You can smell magnolias through the window.”

He said, Yes, he remembered you could.

2

There was a car in the churchyard when he and Jim arrived, a hard-used sedan with back-country mud on the wheels that might as well have been labeled “Preacher,” the church square and white and solid at the road crossing where he had left it a lifetime ago—locked up tight during the week and on most Sundays to allow Mr. Bisson and his buggy to visit his other pulpits (“Service on the Second Sunday”), the roads black now but pink then and white, the pink clay to Clearwater Station and the white sand to the bathhouse, George’s “Wooden O”; and to the house of grandparents at Five Springs, Owen in the carriage seat with Charlie and the ladies behind, Virginia and her new friend from Boston, wheels hissing in the sand like crickets. Not much of anything left except behind his eyes, the colony of houses burned, all but one and it shrunken to half its size; but the church the same, half-size but the same, and the graveyard and the smell of cedars, which wasn’t the wood smell of a cedar chest but a green living leaf-smell. He nearly said to the young man who came down the steps under an umbrella, “You’re looking well, Mr. Bisson, you haven’t changed at all.”

“Oakes,” the man said; “‘Preacher Oakes,’” palm along his shining side hair before putting it out to greet them and invite them in “out of the rain,” though it was hardly raining. He said he had offered the church for a burial service but the son seemed to want only a graveside; he thought Mr. Izlar wouldn’t object however if Ezra tolled. “The church has a kindly feeling for the Doctor. I never knew him but he called me on the phone one day, just about a year ago; said he would like to buy a plot in the cemetery. I told him we’d never sold a grave plot yet. He said, ‘You mean it’s reserved for your congregation?” and I said, ‘No sir, anybody wants to be buried there is welcome.’ He sent the church five hundred dollars, very generous of him—here they are now, excuse me!” turning away to signal for the bell then walking over the white sand to greet the pathetic (or absurd) cortege of hearse and rented car. Jim took off his hat and Owen, prompted, reached for his, the bell beginning to toll now and Dexter in a minute frowning up at the little cupola and the iron sounds and intervals full of diminishing iron waves then going on with Joanna to the gate as if deciding to let Mr. Oakes handle it his way, it was his graveyard.

They stood beside the pink-and-lavender grave while Mr. Oakes read on and on from his Bible, one of the gravediggers holding the umbrella over the pages against the drip of the trees, Dexter, Jo, Owen, Jim, and the undertaker’s young men in the background with a certain modesty—not much more of an assemblage than at the Presidential Suite, and two of them the same; not magnolia scent this time but cedar confined by the damp as if under a tent. And as then (though with a different explanation), no Leonard.

He stole a glance at his watch as Oakes turned a tissue page; it was about four-twenty. He thought in five minutes it would be all over; Oakes would be holding his own umbrella and the gravedigger would have his familiar shovel in hand that was now standing conveniently at a slant in the purple-pink mound; the bell would probably bong again in iron pulses and they could go (a reminder to Dexter that Louisa was expecting them would hurry it along). He and Jim didn’t really need to wait, the grandson would take Leonard back; ask Oakes to explain—who had explained the burial at Five Springs so easily (up to a point: when it had been arranged, not why), closing the Bible now in the middle of a verse and reciting the rest to the clear drops hanging on the needles.

As he lowered his hand from a prayer and accepted his umbrella Jim moved a little this way and that, cleared his throat and said with the pensive slowness of someone searching in a basket of tomatoes for the ones he wanted, “Excuse me, Reverend and Mr. Dexter,—with my people if you need to speak a few words at a time like this—you are welcome to speak,” waiting to see, and Oakes waiting, and Dexter puzzled but nodding. “I worked for the Doctor—from the time I left the Congressman—almost to the time Doctor and Miss Margaret and this young man moved away to Boston. He was a good man. And a good friend to me.—We had a falling out once—but I don’t believe he let the sun go down on his wrath, as he used to say, and I sure don’t want it to go down on mine. I told him once about a funeral the Congressman told me about. The preacher—old Dr. Enos Clark, the Congressman said—said something about ‘marks’ and ‘scars,’ I told the Doctor. And the Doctor smiled on one side, you know how he did, and gave me the whole verse. And I’ve never forgotten it.—‘My marks and scars I carry with me—’” pausing to glance aside at the car drawing up behind the hearse and Leonard getting out. “‘My marks and scars—and scars—my marks and scars—’ I have forgotten it. Must be getting old. But he was a good man.—Amen.”

Leonard came in the wire gate as Oakes was shaking hands with Dexter and “Mrs. Izlar.” He was in an old seersucker jacket that had shrunk in the sleeves and in the coat length but was fresh from the laundry, starched and ironed, and probably uncomfortable; he had had a new haircut and shave and his hair was brushed down in a way that reminded Owen of a boy being sent off to Sunday School; his cotton necktie must have dated from about the time of the jacket. Owen thought he seemed steady enough; what faltering there was might come from age or his lameness as easily as from liquor, limping in soundlessly over the wet sand with a sort of blanket gesture of apology to everybody for being late (young Jim behind him making helpless signals to his grandfather). He seemed hardly conscious of anyone but Dexter, glancing at Owen as if they had never met and taking up a stand at one side against a cedar; he kept looking at Dexter’s face, not in a continuous stare but in repeated brief ones as though he couldn’t keep his eyes away. He waited there until Dexter and Jo were moving off from the half-filled grave, the bell pounding again and the grandson mumbling to Jim, then walked up to Dexter and said easily, “Dexter, I’m Leonard Woodruff.”

Dexter must already have guessed it for he didn’t seem surprised; he put out a hand to “Mr. Woodruff” and said he appreciated his coming. He took Jo’s arm and introduced them and Leonard gave her the peculiar synthesizing look he had of seeming to see a woman as both one and many. Owen heard him say as he followed the three toward the remaining cars (the hearse had rolled away with a seemly decorum that changed to a zooming crescendo once on the blacktop) that Dexter resembled his mother, going on into something about the time Dexter stopped in to see him during the War. “I was painting Beethoven’s Seventh, I think.” Dexter said, “Mozart, wasn’t it?” and Leonard said with absurd glee, “I believe it was!”

If he had been drinking it didn’t show, gracious, composed, on his best behavior, wanting to give a good impression (for the only time Owen could remember). Owen’s apprehensiveness for such a meeting seemed so uncalled for he wondered if he wouldn’t invite Leonard to join them all at home; he could truthfully say Louisa would like to see him—almost the only one in Owen’s world she felt an interest in. He was considering whether to interrupt them and ask him now or wait until he and Leonard were in the car when he heard Dexter saying, “Yes, I’d like to.”

Leonard said, “He had a plaque made. In Memory of Margaret Shaw Izlar.”

“I’d like to see it very much. When would suit you best? We’re leaving in the morning.”

Leonard gave them, first Dexter then Jo, the smile that had hardly aged since the Island, since “Draw something, Uncle Leonard” and “Draw him something, Len” and “You’d better not let him!” He said, “Now?”

Dexter glanced at Jo, thought a second and nodded. He said, “Come ride with us. We’ll take you back and stop in for a while,” turning to Owen and explaining then going on to shake hands with everybody in a polite appreciation of their being there and returning to give Leonard a hand-on-the-shoulder steer toward the car—three little movements that Owen thought made an oddly summarizing review of Dexter’s backgrounds, a Western heartiness in the hand on Leonard’s shoulder, New England in the handshake for each, a Southernness in the warmth of his thanking them. And, for Owen, carrying on into other legacies in his taking Oakes aside and, George-like, giving him what was probably a contribution for the church then, at the car, handing Joanna in with a Leonard-like assist from behind.

Whether or not Leonard had planned the little upset the result was, not just a word or two with Dexter but a visit he could shape as he pleased. It crossed Owen’s mind to invite himself quickly to join them; his being in the room would be a restraint—George mumbling out of the years his “Woodruffs make fine retrievers” and making him wonder if Joanna’s being there wouldn’t be restraint enough. If, indeed, there was anything to restrain. Why should Leonard have any further purpose than a sentimental but understandable wish to be with Dexter, hear him speak, hear how life was with him, receive some of the vitality and blind hope that were in the very presence of someone so much younger, create a memory that would fill the studio like the smell of his varnish spray. What would he gain from doing more? Even if he had twisted things into making himself believe George and Margaret had somehow used him badly you couldn’t square accounts with the dead by handing your bill to the living. And even supposing Leonard, drunk, should try to, how much difference would it make to Dexter if it were all laid out before him?—if he found that his trip to bury one father had exhumed another, freed himself of one only to be grappled by a second? Owen couldn’t guess; too many refractive years between them bending the image.

He watched the curve in the highway after they disappeared then returned and shook hands with Oakes and the two Jims, the bell silent now and the only sound over their words the businesslike pounding of the shovel-backs.

“… and every time Jim took a wrong turn, Mr. Woodruff, Mr. Leonard set him straight.” He couldn’t help smiling at Jim’s distress; he said it was all right, meaning both what had happened and what probably would now.

When they didn’t appear for “drinks after the funeral” he phoned the hotel room, got no answer, tried again about nine o’clock and gave it up.

3

He was going through the first mail, or trying to, eyes lifting repeatedly over his glasses to the opaque panels that separated him from the outer office, from the “people” his father had been referring to in a letter to him once on Twelfth Street in the midst of paints and brushes (not the same “people,” except two, but in the same category): Peter was tired; “I sometimes think of getting out but what would happen to all these people who’ve been with me so long?”—Well, the years had rolled on from a time when you could worry about such things, pre-Security, pre-Washington; that was a day when a customer from the country might stop in to marvel at the adding machine. You couldn’t operate a business just to provide employment; or, if Peter almost had toward the end, Owen wasn’t Peter. It would have to be “severance pay” (not in Peter’s vocabulary) and God-bless-you, if the deal went through—if he let it go through; he needed more time, he hadn’t been able to put his mind on it, think it out. Wednesday was no longer next week, which he proved to himself by lifting a sheet of his calendar and studying “bank 10:30”—

A button on his phone lighted up and Dexter’s slightly Western voice said, abandoning an effort at how-do-you-do and at trying to reply to Owen’s “called you last night but your room didn’t answer,” “I wonder if I could stop in and talk to you, Owen. Something has come up and I really—er—” hesitating, or running out of words, or out of finished thoughts.

Owen gave him directions to the studio and Dexter ended quickly with “I’ll be right down.”

He told Mrs. Green (who would have no trouble finding another job, if a new boss was fool enough to let her go) he would deal with the rest of the mail when he came back—“Half an hour, probably, if not I’ll call you”—got his hat and umbrella and left by his private door; he took a short cut through parking lots that had been cotton warehouses in Peter’s day and in five minutes was breathing the varnish-oil-turpentine perfume of The Paintery. He was making some coffee when Dexter knocked.

It was a strange meeting for Owen, strange in having Dexter there in the chair where both his fathers had sat, and strange in the combination of what Dexter said and didn’t say, surprisingly outspoken and then, when Owen had adjusted to that, surprisingly laconic, apparently with no aversion to saying certain things that Owen couldn’t imagine himself saying (whether from a different level of reticence in the generations or only in their two make-ups), and avoiding other things, or seeming to, in a way that left Owen unsure but that Dexter wasn’t aware of them; very much in earnest the whole time, once close to tears, left hand in a pocket or in his lap or hooked in his belt, disguising the handicap until you wouldn’t have known it existed.

His face was so unsmiling when he entered that Owen wondered, almost at the same instant, what Leonard had done or said and what he himself was going to do or say if Dexter had come for comfirmation (denial, more likely) of uncertainties Leonard had planted. He went straight to what he wanted to talk about as if he had been thinking half the night: “Leonard!” he said with a twist of his mouth that was nearly a smile, George Izlar’s smile, or a hint of it because he was serious in an instant. “Who is this man? What sort of man is he? I don’t know just what to make of Leonard,” not hurried, taking his time, but on the subject.

Owen wanted to say Leonard was a very fine painter who grazed on disillusion like a horse in pasture, but Dexter went on at once, “He’s really quite lame, isn’t he? I guess I’m conscious of that kind of thing,” lifting the arm, bending it carelessly and straightening it to three-quarters. “He asked us down, you know, to see Father’s little plaque to Mother; Father’d never told me.”

“The ‘Caravaggio,’ yes.”

Leonard had talked to a young man for a minute and sent him home (“My assistant—if not successor”) then took them back to the new gallery, switched on all the lights; nobody there or, apparently, in the building. “Well, how do you like it?” Dexter read the plate, said it was appropriate, not too big, just right. Leonard said, “The picture, son! Do you like the picture?” Dexter said he was more a music-man than a picture-man but, yes, he liked it very much. “How do you like it, Mr. Woodruff?” “Just call me Leonard. Certainly I like it. Look here, all this,” the back of his hand drifting down one side like a leaf; “it’s first class. That’s the trouble with painting, you can’t let one go if you don’t like it and if you do like it you don’t want to let it go.” “You restored it?” “I did, we all did. I shined it up, George bought it, with old man Trafford’s money, and gave it to Owen’s picture gallery in memory of Margaret because he’d had a falling out with Jim Bondy, the man Ike snatched off the gallows; we’re all in it, like a flock of Temptations after Grünewald’s St. Anthony. Come on to my place, I’ll give you some whisky. You can have instant coffee if you’d rather, but I’m having instant whisky.”

He had wandered round the studio while Leonard and Joanna were getting glasses and ice and a bottle of bourbon from the kitchen; he could tell by the tone of her voice she wanted Leonard to like her—a fine humming note in a word now and then (“I first heard it on a pack trip in the Sierras,” smiling at Owen on the memory). Pictures everywhere. What he had seen sounded to Owen like the sort of work Leonard had been doing a year ago, the edge-of-the-forest hospital water colors, the not-Patricia canvases. “Quite a different sort of picture by the door, Owen,” watching as if for a pre-word response. “Do you know that one?”

“I’m not sure.”

“A woman with a book on her knee. Very attractive. A blue book. ‘Early Leonard,’ he said when I told him I liked it, and when I asked him why he hung it in such a poor light he just laughed and said, ‘Early Leonard,’ but he turned on a lamp by his desk so I could see it better.” He got other things out of closets and stood them about—with one hand, his already half-empty glass in the other. Jo was interested, in the paintings and in the painter; she had studied painting. Dexter left them, moved off to Leonard’s bookshelves. “Bookshelf, rather. You can read a man by the books he reads”; not much of a library, worn sketchbooks by the yard, a few paperbacks of cheap reproductions of Renaissance painters, a few mysteries. “And the blue book,” looking at Owen.

Owen nodded.

“The one in the picture.”

Owen said, Yes, he thought he remembered such a book—wary for no reason he could put his finger on, not from anything in Dexter’s manner, which was matter-of-fact enough.

“It was faded, not the same blue as in the picture but obviously the book.” He stopped and Owen said, Well, yes, it might have been, you grabbed up any old thing of the right shape and color. Dexter said, “It was a copy of Harmonium. And there was a date in it, September 15, 1928. In pencil. Not Mother’s later handwriting, which was smaller, more cramped, but it was her handwriting.” “Well?” “That was the day she took me up to school, went with me from here to get me started, Father couldn’t leave a case. There was a bookshop near the North Station and we were early for the train and went in there and she bought the book.—What do you make of all that, Owen?”

“Make of it? I don’t make anything.” It would have been truer to say he was trying not to.

“Well, I do.”

“How do you mean? Your mother bought a book, wrote the date in it, later gave it away—or lent it, which would amount to the same thing with Leonard.”

Dexter got up and walked across the floor and back again before he said, “Do you think this man hung that picture there on purpose? Where I could see it?”

“Oh, that picture’s been there for years—”

“Asked us down there as if to see the memorial to Mother and then sneaked in this other? A memorial to Mother too!” left hand closing and opening and giving Owen the irrelevant thought that only the upper arm was lame.

“Dexter, you don’t know that picture is of your mother, merely a figure study, completely unrecognizable, the head turned away, as I remember.”

“The book.” The rain had started in again and he gazed out at it for a second. “The book makes everything fit. Things you may not know about, Owen, or maybe you do, it doesn’t matter. Everything fits. And that’s what gives it such a—such an inside-outness. So many things in your life you felt didn’t quite jibe. But couldn’t be sure the fault wasn’t in you, so you adjusted to them. As I’ve adjusted to this arm, and would really go through quite a shock to have it suddenly okay again. I said, “Where’d you get this book, Leonard?’ He said, Oh he’d had it for years (not answering, you see), I said, ‘Since nineteen twenty-eight?’ He understood then that I’d put it together, or some of it, and he said, ‘Your mother lent me that book once years ago. It’s really yours. I’d like for you to have it. Take it.’ I put it back where I found it. He met us at the station in Sudbury, Owen; just by chance, according to him. Said he’d been painting round there, was waiting for a connection to Boston. I remember wondering where his stuff was, I didn’t see any paintbox. He knew we were getting off that train, and there’s only one way he could have known; they were in correspondence. He saw me put the book back, or saw the way I put it back. He said, ‘I wish you’d take it. I always meant to return it.’ I walked away from it. I’ll tell you what all this made me think of, Owen. An earth tremor once in California. I studied composition for a year with a German musician named Gneisholtz in San Francisco, a refugee; I had just left the Army, was a little up in the air. I was standing in the hall where Gneisholtz lived. It wasn’t a real quake, no great damage, but a tremble that left you dizzy for a moment, half nauseated, all right again after a second but wanting to get out-of-doors. Impelled to get out. Both times. We drove round, Jo and I, for—I don’t know how long. I can talk about this, Owen, him and Mother, because it happened years ago and I can say ‘after all’ and ‘what of it?’ I can say to you in a composed frame of mind (not so composed yesterday) that this man and Mother were lovers, had been for years, and that Father knew. And from that a lot of other things open up, besides a readjustment of your feelings about them, your feelings about their feelings, not in the dark now but seeing, re-seeing, your sense now of having been in quite a different place from the one you thought you were in. Our going back to Boston has always puzzled me a little, hardly enough to know I was puzzled; I believe it would clear up if I had the whole story.”

Owen said, “You never get the whole story,” to say something in the sudden pause that almost seemed meant to offer him a few seconds to realize Dexter didn’t have the whole story, or to be convinced he didn’t, if for no other reason than the “Father” he kept repeating. If Leonard had intended to go into that, something had changed his mind, perhaps Joanna’s presence, or perhaps Dexter had left too soon. When Dexter added thoughtfully, “And I don’t want the whole story,” he was not only admitting he didn’t have it but answering the worry in Owen’s mind that he might try to get it, indeed might have come to Owen hoping to get it from him.—Unless his denial that he had it was for his own benefit, his repetition of “Father” a reassurance to himself, a reminder to himself he wasn’t to admit having it.

“I don’t want it. Don’t need it. Except that it does make a difference in how I look at myself. Not how I look at these others, living and dead, but at myself, at who I am, what I might be—become. You understand what I mean? I couldn’t resist a simple chance of finding out more. I talked to Jim Bondy, Owen.”

It looked to Owen as if he were going to be faced with choosing between an outright lie and corroborating Jim. Though, would it have to be a lie? He didn’t know anything. He said, “You talked to Jim?” as offhand as he could make it sound.

“I figured he knew most about us of anyone.” He had phoned the church and somebody said he might find Jim at the shop. Bondy-Bondy-Bondy, round the corner. “Pressing Club, I think they call it. ‘We work while you sleep.’” It was getting late by then, they were about to close, only two or three people besides Jim, all courteous and polite, getting down off the tables and moving into a back room and leaving him with Jim among the sewing machines and presses and tumbled garments, a laugh coming over the partition: “IBM says he can’t even wear a white shirt, gives him a rash all over his chest.” “That boy!” “Quiet down back there, I’ve got a gentlemen come to see me!”

He hadn’t stayed long. “Nothing to be got out of Jim Bondy. ‘You remember when I was born, Mr. Bondy? Mr. Woodruff was in the Army, wasn’t he?’ ‘Mr. Leonard, yes sir, on The Border if I remember, it’s been so long.’ I thought he might have seen letters from him, Owen. Or to him. ‘No sir, no letters.’ ‘You used to get the mail, put it on the breakfast table.’ ‘That’s right, yes sir.’ Not that it would have proved anything one way or another but to give him a chance to talk—” drifting into a silence which ended, to Owen’s relief, with a little wiggle of his good hand like an orchestra leader at rehearsal signaling enough-of-that.

When he said, “I’m leaving something out,” Owen would have stopped him if he had known how; he had heard enough. “Leaving it out because I don’t like to think of it, but it belongs in,” glancing at the rain against the window and going on almost at once, “I didn’t hurt him. But—offering me the book, and all that—I wasn’t myself, as I wasn’t for a moment after the tremor. I might have hurt him but for this, which is really only half a hand, no strength in it,” stopping then bursting on through, “I just grabbed him—there beside me, offering me my mother’s book—grabbed him by the front of his cheap shirt and shook him and dropped him in a corner of the sofa and left, grabbed Jo and left. I shouldn’t have done it. Jo was fighting mad, calling me names, saying, well, all kinds of things. Among them that I was doing just what I was angry with Leonard for doing (which I hadn’t thought of). Not quite true of course, but close. We aren’t getting married, Owen. I said ‘fiancée’ because it simplified having her along, not primarily to deceive you though it was deceptive. Her husband’s on the music faculty at Radcliffe. No children—”

“I don’t care about all that,” feeling rather put upon.

“She read about Father, phoned me when I got to Boston. I’ve never had such a three days in my life, there’s something erotic about death—”

“Leonard’s been ill, you know,” saying it to interrupt him, the glint in his eyes enough like Leonard to be a twin, Leonard and his “These kids think no more of opening their legs than having a cup of coffee.”

“Ill? No, I didn’t know. But I hate to think of it anyway. I wasn’t angry so much as confused. With trying to put things suddenly on a different basis, trying to get used to such sudden enlightenment, to the suddenness of it as well as the enlightenment. I feel today I really wronged the old bastard. Usually you’re glad enough to end it with a woman but I don’t believe it was that way with him and Mother and I admire that. They hadn’t seen each other, as I put it together, for something like twelve years, then he finds out somehow she’s coming to Sudbury, or she writes him, and there he is. Both of them close to forty-five. Old-fashioned and sentimental and all that. ‘A Great Love’; it makes us laugh. We can’t imagine such a thing with our one-night stands. I feel rather an affection for the old guy today. I’d really like to go down there and apologize—”

“You’re leaving this morning, aren’t you?” hardly able to get it out quickly enough.

“Yes, I don’t have much time.”

“I’ll tell him how you feel. What time’s your plane?” hoping the reminders of leaving would wind all this up. He thought there was even a sort of consanguinity in the attitudes he had toward them: an annoyance at both of them that was almost dislike; a fondness for them and their spontaneity, whether in paint or in the openness of saying all this.

Dexter said he was picking up Jo at the hotel at twelve-thirty, he had arranged to drop the car at the airport. But he didn’t stand up or make any move to go and after a second or two he said, “One other thing.” He said, before he left town—he didn’t know when he would ever be here again—he wanted to order a stone for “Father’s” grave if Owen could tell him where to go (the “Father” again in the delineated, almost determined way).

Owen was getting to his feet even before he started saying he would show him, it would be easier than trying to tell him.

Dexter said, still in his chair, “I’ll tell you what Jo said to me when we left down there,” as if he would never end his telling. “Mad with me, a female stab with the first pointed thing comes to hand—we’ve made up, it’s all right, she was all right by the time I finished talking to Jim Bondy. She said, ‘I wish you could just see yourself standing beside that old man.’ I knew what she was getting set for. I said, ‘That old man went to Texas in the Army a year before I was born—’”

Owen said if they were going to attend to the stone they had better move along or everybody would be going to lunch and Dexter nodded and stood up. He was silent on the stairs and Owen, searching for something to open a change of subject, said he had a picture of Leonard’s that now belonged to Dexter. “It was your mother’s, she asked me to keep it for her. I’ll send it to you at the school.”

“No, don’t do that. I’ll tell you why” (a little like George’s “Leave it there!” to his offer to send it to Boston). It wasn’t clear whether Dexter remembered the picture or not; he should have, had seen it often enough, Margaret might have mentioned it to him. He said no more until they were in his car, perhaps deciding how to say it, because he didn’t come at it directly. “I’ve talked about myself all morning, I might as well go a little further. All this means so much to me. I’m not quite sure what it means but—I think of the way I felt at the prison the day the whisper got round our people had crossed the Rhine. You could feel a new self taking shape in you like something in first daylight. Not that teaching has been such a prison, but I suddenly understand the many times in front of a class when I felt I didn’t belong there. I’d feel I wasn’t a question-and-answer man (answer-and-question man, really, because you plant the answer and then put the question), but I couldn’t say what I was. All I could say was that I wanted to make. I tried medicine because of Father but it wasn’t for me. I thought for a while it might be teaching. But a teacher is too much the interpreter for me, the musician performing someone else’s music. I want to write the music. And I don’t want to write it in between grading papers—I mean to say, Owen, I don’t expect to be at the school much longer. I’d like to give you the picture.” And before Owen could say anything, “Leonard’s a maker. Just an also-ran, I suppose, an also-painted, as it’s turned out, but a maker. It’s not the sight of an artist and his work that’s decided me; I’ve seen plenty of that.” He waited a second then glanced at Owen with a vigilant smile and said, “I wonder what it could be.”

Owen said, “Left. Go on over the tracks. Henry Grant & Son, Memorials. Over there. Henry’ll soon be needing a memorial himself I’m afraid but Son can talk to you,” stringing trivial words together until they stopped (not raining now) and Son appeared—stone dust in his eyebrows and reminding Owen, as always, of The smith a mighty man was he.

Owen asked him if he could borrow his phone and left them in the earth-floored “show room” among the dusty angels and doves and marble books and urns. He leaned his elbow on a stand-up desk in the pocket office and called Mrs. Green; it hadn’t been half an hour but nearly two.

He could see them through the powdered window, in the room then walking back into the yard and the jungel of chains and pulleys and slabs of crated stone, but they seemed to fade out of his eyes as Mrs. Green talked. “I’m glad you called, Mr. Owen. Mr. Pete’s trying to get you, and somebody from the Academy who didn’t leave his name, and a Mr. Bondy has called twice—just a minute, this may be one of them on the other line, hold on, Mr. Owen.”

He waited in a sort of cloud of unformed questions, conscious of a flinching in himself, a shrinking away from the reaching-out vines and tendrils she brought to mind; then she said, “It’s Mr. Bondy and he wants to talk to you. Can he call you at that number?”

He gave her the figures on the dial in front of him, and almost before he could release the phone it rang again and Jim was saying things that sounded half familiar, as if Owen had been saying them to himself without realizing it until now. “The young man found him, I disremember his name. Must have gone early in the night. The doctor said he wasn’t surprised; Mr. Woodruff wouldn’t listen to him. I thought something was wrong when I saw the doctor’s car in front, Dr. Sibley. I just happened—”

“Found him on the sofa, Jim,” not a question so much as a statement saying he understood.

“No sir, in the bedroom. Had his clothes on, lying across the bed.”

His rush of thoughts had the effect of drowning out Jim’s voice, or else it had stopped of itself to wait for an answer. A directive. Which Owen couldn’t supply, for thinking of the instant of tightness in his mind that had forced out “found him on the sofa” and the easing moment of reprieve beginning with Jim’s “No sir”—that wasn’t really a reprieve at all. Because a man died twenty feet from where you attacked him didn’t mean you hadn’t killed him, or died three or four hours after. All of it spelling out Coroner? Police? Investigation? Who could say what? “Let me speak to Dr. Sibley, Jim.”

“Just gone, ain’t been gone five minutes.”

“Did he call the Coroner?” the tightness in his mind again, and then another easing with Jim’s “No sir, called the undertaker, said he’d sign the certificate, patient of his, bring it by his office—”

He asked to speak to the “young man,” talked to him for a minute or two, was about to say the Academy would be responsible for the funeral costs when he remembered Leonard’s pension and changed it to say he would come down there in a little while. He couldn’t think. “I suppose, Mr. Woodruff, we’ll want to close the Gallery for a few days?” “Yes, close the Gallery.” “Mr. Leonard was a wonderful man.” “Yes.” “A wonderful teacher. Mr. Bondy says the funeral may be at Five Springs?” “I don’t know, I don’t know.” All he knew was he felt like cursing Leonard for dying now, as if on purpose to add his bit of confusion to the doubts that had to be unraveled by tomorrow, the boy (Owen couldn’t even remember his name) talking on as interminably as Jim Bondy. As though death had made both of them a little drunk—intoxicant as well as aphrodisiac.

Owen cut him off as soon as he could, none of the words approaching the problem forming immediately before him. Literally before him, Dexter close beyond the window now, hand out to “Son” with a smile that was almost exuberant, a that-takes-care-of-everything smile that fitted into the sense of resolution Owen had felt in him leaving The Paintery, a putting behind him, a turning away from all this that was more pronounced than the everyday looking ahead of a person about to quit one place for another, as if he were quitting one Dexter for another, had made his choice of fathers, whether knowing he had or not.

Help this man escape? The law wouldn’t accuse him but if he knew he would accuse himself, far too sentient not to. At least here and now he would; a month from now and far away he would shrug it off, or appear to. As easily as Leonard with an unwelcome fact. Owen had his address; he could write him next week, next month, pretend he had only heard later, too late to reach him at the hotel or the airport. Assume it wasn’t important to Dexter anyway (how could he assume anything else?)—Why bother to help him? Whom he rather disapproved of, even disliked; self-absorbed, self-sufficient, self-indulgent. Let him be self-accused.

“That’s my address through June, Mr. Grant,” he was saying as Owen came out, adding lightly, “After that?” with a lift of his hands. “But I’ll be in touch with you. And with Mr. Woodruff,” facing Owen with a “Now!” that was like a sigh of liberation.

In the car he said, “I’ve put you to no end of trouble, Owen—”

“Dexter, I’ve been talking to Jim Bondy on the phone—”

“I don’t know how to thank you for all you’ve done, all the listening you’ve had to do,” going on to ask Owen to thank Louisa for the flowers for “Father,” sorry not to have seen her, and on into things Owen didn’t hear for the tracks they were crossing and looking up them forty miles to Sharon Courthouse and thinking the escape which that Woodruff had arranged was not very different from the one this Woodruff could arrange—but couldn’t arrange for himself, another sort of synthesis forming like a cloud from separate clouds: these deaths, these Woodruff deaths (Ike would never leave the hospital), they brought a more recognizable visage to death. Death wasn’t joking.

“… remember a letter from Father when I first went West. He said, ‘So you’ve decided to climb the precipice in search of the next ledge above’; rather overstating it, but you know how he was. I didn’t make it that time, but this time …” the words taking Owen back to George saying some place, “Reason only selects. You have to fall back on pre-reason to find things to select from. Reason tells you to hang on tight to the ledge you’re on; something else says climb the precipice in search—”

Why wasn’t Dexter’s decision an answer for Owen too? Wasn’t Dexter as much as saying, If you want to be an artist it means your pre-reason is telling you you should be?—But Dexter’s was quite another trap. With quite another key. Falling in step with your heritage was quite another thing from—

“Where can I let you off, Owen?” sounding as if he had asked before, waiting while Owen glanced about at where they were then adding, “Studio or office?” Another day it would have made him smile: the question he had really been asking himself most of his life, and answering first one way then the other. When he might have known that asking at all was an answer.

They were shaking hands through the car window when Dexter said, “I interrupted you back there, so full of all this. You were saying something about Jim Bondy.” “Jim Bondy?” “A phone call.” “Oh yes. It was nothing. He just mentioned seeing you last night; reminded him of old times. Good luck to you. Have a good trip.” A good climb—interfering in other people’s lives, George Izlar would have noted, in the best tradition of Ike and Lizzie and God knows what other meddling Woodruffs—

“Telephone, Mr. Peter,” old Kirb, from the office door (mixing the generations, as one did); and as he moved, a voice behind him that he knew but couldn’t place, “Don’t answer it!” the brashness saying “Gobles” even before she looked over her shoulder with a sort of scowling smile and said, “I said Run!” And gone before he could think of a reply. An excuse. If there was an excuse. Beyond, One might, one might—but time will not relent.

end