BY SEVEN-THIRTY MY FATHER hadn’t come home, so we sat down to dinner without him. My mother didn’t touch hers. She kept very still, her hands folded in her lap, her cranberry-colored dress crowded with the Twelve Days of Christmas—lords-a-leaping, maids-a-milking, geese-a-laying, the works. The saddest thing of all was that my father would miss her in that dress. Now and again, with a swish of silk, she’d step away from the breakfast-room table to stare down the telephone on the kitchen wall, returning silent and stricken, her eyes fixed on the back of his chair. When my sister, Margot, and I had cleaned our plates, she told us to take the dog outside.
It was Christmas Eve and white beyond the dreams of Irving Berlin. I was eight years old, Margot was six, and I’d stop at nothing to make her laugh. Before dinner we’d made a snowman in the backyard, and now, to amuse her, I endowed him with breasts—massive breasts—so that he became a she, and when her breasts got so heavy they dropped to the ground, I reinforced them with wire croquet wickets and wooden stakes whose rounded tops protruded like nipples. As the breasts grew bigger and bigger, my sister laughed and laughed until Trixie ran around us, barking, churning up a muddy circle in the snow.
“Stop it, Lionel,” my mother called from the back door. “You’re making her wild.” Coming closer, she saw what I’d done and went back into the house. She emerged carrying a broom. With the glare of the porch lights behind her, she swung hard at those gravity-defying breasts, and I could almost feel the shock run up her arms when she made contact with the wood and wire within; I could see it in her face and her body. She let go of the broom and tore at the breasts with her bare hands. She closed her fists around the stakes, drew them out like daggers, and let them fall at her feet. Breathing hard, she looked at me and said, “You make me sick.”
When she was back inside, I set about repairing the damage, but the fun had gone out of it. It had become a chore. Soon headlights swept over us. “He’s here,” my sister said, and followed Trixie into the garage attached to the back of the house. I stood still, waiting, until I heard the rise and fall of my mother’s shouting through two layers of window glass. I returned my attention to the snowwoman.
After a while, my father came out in his shirtsleeves with Trixie close behind. “Your mother’s upset,” he said in his sad, reasonable voice.
“She’s upset with you.” I wouldn’t look at him.
“I’d like you to stop that now. Would you please cut it out?”
I continued restoring the breasts in my workmanlike way.
“You know what night this is, don’t you?” he asked. “You know who’s watching?”
I knew there was no Santa Claus, but I didn’t want my father to know I knew—this seemed somehow important to me—so I stepped away from the snowwoman. He looked her up and down and shook his head. “For Christ’s sake, fix that, will you?” Then he turned around and went back to the house.
The snow had stopped. The only sound was Trixie’s heavy, humid panting as she watched and waited for what I’d do next. I dug into the snowwoman and tossed the snow behind me. Trixie caught it in her mouth, gnashing her teeth in the air. Our big, old house loomed in the dark.
We’d moved in at the end of August, and my mother, my sister, and I hated the house, each for our own reasons. I hated its oldness. On Long Island our home had been built just for us, whereas this one had been constructed before the First World War. Innumerable strangers had lived in it; some might even have died in it. In my new school, our third-grade teacher, Sister Alexandra, taught us that in the course of a single day, the human body lost almost a million skin cells, that over a year we each shed more than eight pounds of dead skin. “And where do you think it all goes?” She ran a fingertip across the desktop. “Dust,” she said and offered it to the air. “Here’s a little bit of all of us.” I imagined a blizzard of past lives drifting through the rooms. Only my father, who traveled often on business and spent the least amount of time there, loved the house.
My woolen gloves were wet and heavy, and I dropped them on the ground. Trixie retrieved the left one, brought it to her hiding place under the evergreens planted along the foundation, and tore it to shreds. I scooped snow from the snowwoman’s ravaged torso, packed it dense and smooth, and pelted the side of the house. The icy air seared my lungs, and my hands felt raw, but the solid slap of snowballs against brick was pleasing, and I hurled them harder and higher, until I heard the splash of breaking glass. The back door opened, and my father stepped out onto the porch. He gazed past me up at the lighted window of his bedroom, where my mother appeared in her bathrobe, staring down at him. When the light went out, he said to me, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” He didn’t sound angry.
I stayed out there as long as I could stand it and then went straight to bed without saying good night. When my father checked in on me later, I pretended to be asleep.
My parents’ door was shut when my sister and I woke the next morning. She padded down the stairs ahead of me. Turning the corner into the living room, she cried, “Trixie ate the baby Jesus!” Under the Christmas tree, the nativity scene was in disarray.
“No, she didn’t.” I fetched the mangled Christ child, still wet with saliva, from in front of the fireplace. “She just chewed him up, is all.”
“Smart dog.”
“What’s so smart about that?” I was distracted. Something was off about the scene, some asymmetrical something.
“Other dogs would eat a wise man or a shepherd,” she said. “They’re bigger.” She wrapped her arms around the dog’s neck. “But you picked the baby Jesus, didn’t you?” Then glancing up at me, she asked, “How did she know?”
Colored lights sizzled on the tree. My Christmas stocking hung flaccid and empty from the mantel beside the cornucopia of my sister’s, and suddenly I understood what was wrong. They’d given me no presents, nothing. I remembered the snowwoman, the shattered window, my father’s sad face, and I felt like throwing up, though mostly I felt embarrassed.
Margot knelt before her pile of presents. More than anything, she’d wanted an Etch A Sketch. She already knew the size, shape, and weight of the box and moved from package to package until she located the right one and began to unwrap it. Without a word, I went to the foyer, put on my boots and corduroy coat, and walked out into the morning and away from that hateful house. With the mutilated Jesus pressed into my palm, I bore this colossal injustice like a cross and might have walked all the way to Calvary had the sidewalks been shoveled and I not been wearing pajamas. At the end of our block, I turned around and went back.
Inside, the house was silent but for Andy Williams singing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” From the foyer, I could see my father stretched across the living room floor, his head cradled in my mother’s lap, drawing ragged breaths through bared teeth. I stepped into the room.
My mother’s face was a mask of anger, a leopard’s face. “Laugh now,” she said. Then, casting a panicked glance at my sleety boots, she shouted, “For God’s sake, take those off!”
I sank to the carpet beside my sister and did as I was told. Fingers fiddling with the knobs on her Etch A Sketch, Margot said, “Daddy says he can’t breathe.” The gray screen displayed a tangle of fine black scribble, and I sensed that whatever was happening here was my fault.
My father tried to speak. I scooted closer.
“Change that,” he said.
“Change what?” I was trying not to cry.
“That.” He gestured toward the stereo.
“Oh, what does it matter?” my mother said.
“This—” he took a great gulp of air and swiped his hand at Andy Williams. “This can’t be the music I die to.” The word jolted through me.
“Turn it off,” my mother said.
“No.” My father slapped the carpet. “I said change it.” Then he looked up at me and said, “ ‘Nessun dorma.’ ”
“In English,” my mother wailed, but I knew what he meant, and he knew that I knew. I went to the turntable and replaced The Andy Williams Christmas Album with Favorite Italian Tenor Arias. On the third drop of the tone arm, my father raised his hand.
“There,” he said, “leave it,” and the aria began. Evenly, the singer sang the phrase “Nessun dorma,” then he sang it again. The tenor went on, his voice building, rising on a tide of music, rising and rising and then breaking, tragic and ecstatic.
My mother got up to phone for an ambulance, and my father called me to him. “Closer,” he whispered. “I don’t want your sister to hear.” He hadn’t yet shaved but smelled of lime aftershave. Trixie lay beside him. I smoothed her fur with the flat of my hand, not to calm her so much as to calm myself. “Upstairs. My bedroom. The walk-in closet.”
“What am I looking for?” I didn’t want to stop petting Trixie; it was all that kept me from crying.
“You’ll see.” He nudged me. “Go.”
The music swelled, spreading through the house, following me up the carpeted staircase, licking at my heels. It was strange to be inside their bedroom—we weren’t supposed to go in there—and as soon as I entered the closet, I saw the presents, wrapped in paper patterned like my mother’s dress, with tags that read, TO LIONEL, FROM SANTA. Across the room, through the intact window, I saw the jagged hole my snowball had punched through the lower-left corner of the storm window, a many-pointed star against the morning. Relieved I hadn’t broken both windows and let the winter in, I loaded my arms with packages and carried them down to the living room, where my mother was back on the floor with my father. She held herself with the tragic dignity of the president’s widow, back straight, eyes downcast, lashes like wet black petals. One hand played in my father’s hair, the other clenched in a fist, tight as a grenade.
“That’s not all,” my father said, rising to his feet. “That can’t be all. Fetch the rest.” It took me two more trips up the stairs. “Now, open them.” I unwrapped the smallest one first: a waterproof, shockproof Timex wristwatch with a Twist-o-Flex band. My father sat in his armchair by the window. “Go on.” He watched with an almost cannibalistic intensity as I unwrapped the next present and the next and the next—a junior deluxe chemistry set, the Aurora Thunderjet 500 HO slot car track, the works of Franklin W. Dixon—but I took no pleasure in it, and by the last package, the ambulance had arrived. My father met the paramedics at the door, and though Christmas Mass still lay ahead of us, he welcomed them inside for Belgian waffles made on the waffle iron my mother hadn’t yet unwrapped.
Thirty-two years later, my wife and I bought our own brick house, a round-shouldered colonial outside Boston even older than the one I’d grown up in. Though it was a stretch for us and needed lots of work, Jane portrayed it as a shared adventure, and I gave in. For her, a child of divorce, the house represented a triumph over the chaos of her youth, whereas all I could feel was a suffocating sense of responsibility; all I could see was a never-ending plague of peeling paint, dripping faucets, buckling shingles, and rotting railings, whose repair fell mostly to Jane. When I was growing up, my father had spared me such chores, performing them himself while I watched from a safe distance. He believed that a man who couldn’t replace a sash cord couldn’t be a real man, and in time, Jane too came to see my neglect of our house as a kind of betrayal.
It was the night before Halloween, and though it was past their bedtime, I’d promised our girls, Caroline and Vanessa, that we could carve jack-o’-lanterns. As I plunged the knife into the second pumpkin, the whole house went dark. Jane was still at work, and I had no idea what to do, so I called our friend Martin, who arrived within minutes. We’ve known Martin and Claire since Caroline and their daughter, Julia, attended preschool together. A dozen years older than I, Martin was a professor of political science and as handy around the house as my father.
Flashlight in hand, Martin explained to the three of us how electricity works. “It flows through a pair of wires called a circuit, and each circuit is protected by a circuit breaker. Old houses like yours often have fuses instead.” He went on, chanting the words into the dark like a psalm, like one of my father’s arias, lyrical, rhapsodic, incomprehensible. He disappeared into the basement; my daughters and I stayed at the kitchen table.
When the lights clicked on, Vanessa, who was five then and has always been afraid of masks and makeup and any manner of disguise, said, “I hate Halloween.” Caroline, who’s six years older than her sister and has never been afraid of anything, asked why. “ ’Cause it’s about death,” Vanessa said, and I laughed to hear her little voice wrapped around that big word. The laugh was still in my throat when my sister phoned to tell me that our father had been taken to the hospital. She recited the litany of symptoms: the chest pains and nausea, the burning sensation in the upper abdomen, the sense of impending doom.
“Impending doom?” The knife was in my hand. One jack-o’-lantern wore a raggedy gash where its grin belonged; the other had no mouth at all. Between them sat a blue mixing bowl brimming with pulp and seeds and stringy membrane. “Dad said that—impending doom?”
“What does it matter what he said?”
“What if it was just something he ate?”
“Come on, Lionel. This is classic heart attack stuff.”
Once Martin was gone and Jane was home and the girls were in bed, I called the airlines and packed my suitcase. Before driving me to Logan the next morning, Jane zipped a sober-looking suit into a black vinyl garment bag and laid it across the backseat. I could still feel the slime between my fingers and the pumpkin flesh under my nails.
As I waited to board the flight from Boston to Chicago, there was an announcement that it would be delayed on account of a malfunctioning toilet in the plane’s rear lavatory, but when at last we boarded, the guy in the seat next to mine leaned in close and said, “Toilet, my ass.”
“Sorry?”
“The delay. That was no busted john. Guy died in here.”
“Died?” I said. “In the bathroom?”
“Not in the bathroom—in here. On the red-eye from L.A. Heart attack, stroke, whatever. Girl at the counter told me. Took ’em that long to haul him out of here and clean up the mess.”
I thought of the pumpkin guts sloshing in the blue bowl and of my father, my poor father. It was Halloween, and flight attendants roamed the aisles in witch hats, their faces painted ghoulishly. Vanessa was right: It was about death, all about death, and there was nothing cute about it. On a yellow legal pad, I scribbled notes toward my father’s obituary but found that I could barely trace the outline of his public life; his private life, his real life, remained an even darker mystery.
When we landed at O’Hare, I rented a car and drove deep into the suburbs. The hospital was new and ungainly, a high-tech purgatory grown up out of a cornfield. I took an elevator to the cardiac care unit, but when I stepped into the room whose number my sister had given me, I found a stranger in the bed. He pressed a button and a nurse appeared. “Can I help you?”
“Detweiler,” I said and pointed to the whiteboard on the wall behind her, where traces of my father’s name, partially erased, hovered over her shoulder. “Richard Detweiler?” It was hard to breathe. “My father?”
“Mr. Detweiler’s gone,” she said and turned to scrub the ghost of his name with the heel of her hand. I leaned against the wall and started to cry. “Oh, no,” she said. “He left on his own. Mr. Detweiler’s fine. Really.” She brought her face close to mine and whispered, “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, but it might have been something he ate.”
Traveling west, away from the hospital and toward the big, old house I grew up in, I felt lightened, reprieved, immortal. Compared to the occluded streets back East, the roads here were straight and wide, and in my mind’s eye I pictured the red rent-a-car as a robust little corpuscle pumping unimpeded through a network of veins and arteries and into the healthy heart of my history. In a couple of weeks, I’d turn forty. I was home.
When I pulled into the driveway, my father was standing at the top of a ladder set up high against the house. A stack of storm windows leaned against an oak tree. The bottom of the ladder was planted among the evergreens where our dog, Trixie, used to hide and where her ashes were now buried. High above it all, my father appeared embarrassed.
I called up to him, “You think this is the best time to be doing this?”
“It’s late.” He wouldn’t look at me. “Tomorrow’s already November.”
“But it’s so warm. Wouldn’t you rather—”
“The women are inside,” he said. “You should let your mother know you’re here.”
I found her talking with my sister at the breakfast-room table, filling orange and black paper bags with peanut butter cups, Mounds bars, and Snickers and stapling them shut. Margot was in the thick of a divorce—her husband wanted out of their childless marriage in order to marry his pregnant girlfriend—and as soon as she saw me, she went silent. I stood in the doorway and said, “Trick or treat.”
Like our father on the ladder, my sister wouldn’t look me in the eye. She seemed to be holding her breath, hiding in plain sight, and when I bent to kiss her she said, “What was I supposed to do?”
“Did I reproach you? You were being a good daughter, a good sister.”
“But I made you come such a long way,” she said, warmer now. “And for what?”
“Consider it a sort of dress rehearsal.”
“A dress rehearsal?” my mother said.
“For the real thing.”
The dent of her smile disappeared.
“Go help your father,” she said. “For God’s sake, the man just got out of the hospital.”
So I asked him how I might help, and he told me to go upstairs and unlatch the screens. Though this was a ritual we’d performed every spring and fall until I moved East, time hadn’t abated the sense of trespass I felt on entering their bedroom. This was a place of secrets, of heated words and shouts. Once, when I was fifteen and Margot hadn’t yet turned thirteen, we found ourselves standing together outside their door, heads bowed. She said, “You know it’s about a woman, don’t you?” I nodded stupidly. Later, when the coast was clear, I snuck into their bedroom and rummaged through their nightstands seeking confirmation of The Woman’s existence. My father’s nightstand housed a small library of travel guides and foreign phrase books, though he never left the continental United States; my mother’s contained a cache of the sexual self-help classics of the 1970s—The Sensuous Woman, The Joy of Sex, Any Woman Can. I found it all so achingly hopeful and sad that I called off the search then and there.
A shadow moved behind the window shade, my father’s silhouette cast by the Indian summer afternoon. Still giddy with a sense of reprieve, I decided that the time had come to settle the question of The Woman. I raised the shade as if opening a confessional window, but as soon as I saw his naked, frightened face through the wire mesh, my courage fell away. As an ex-altar boy, I knew that the latticed screen of the confessional was designed to hide the priest’s face as well as the penitent’s, and as a practicing lawyer, I’d learned that the first rule of cross-examination was never to ask a question you didn’t already know the answer to. So I slipped the hook from the eyelet, butted the bottom of the screen with my fist, and moved on to the next window.
In the dozen years since that Halloween, my parents had, between them, been hospitalized at least a dozen times, including an actual heart attack, a ministroke, and a tumble down the stairs. They were both eighty-two now and still living in that big, old house, but my sister and I had convinced them to sell the place and move into an assisted-living facility. When I flew out to discuss what needed to be done, I arrived to find a scatter of storm windows propped up one to a tree in the backyard. These were less than half of the ground-floor windows—either my father had run out of strength, or my mother had put her foot down—but they seemed a sort of offering to me, a gift. Welcome home.
The four of us were gathered around the breakfast-room table, seated in the same places we’d occupied for as long as I could remember, when my father announced that they’d changed their minds; they’d decided to “stay put for the time being.” I could tell this wasn’t news to Margot and felt betrayed.
“Lionel disapproves?” my mother said, her wide mouth smiling her small smile. “Lionel’s displeased?”
“I didn’t say a word.” But of course I was displeased.
“You don’t have to say anything,” my mother said. “It’s written all over your face.”
“I think you’re making a mistake, is all.” My eyes were on my sister, who was writing on a yellow legal pad with a purple felt-tipped pen. Since her divorce, she’d gone to law school and joined a practice specializing in so-called family law. “A big one. Now’s the time to act, to make your move—while you still have the luxury of time.” But even to myself I sounded like a television commercial, and when Margot finally met my gaze, I asked, “Are you going to help me out here, or have you gone mute?” She tilted the pad of paper so that only I could see it. In big block letters, she’d printed, SOMEBODY PLEASE SHOOT ME!!!
“Now, now,” my father said. His voice had become wispy, and he could see that I heard it. “I know I sound bad,” he said, “but I don’t feel bad—at least not as bad as I sound.”
I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. “Not that this hasn’t been perfectly delightful,” I said, “but some things need doing, whether you stay here or not.”
“Such as?” my mother asked.
“I’ll start with the rest of the storm windows.” I’d come there to be useful, and now I needed to channel that energy elsewhere. “It’s like a mausoleum in here.”
“But it’s still cold at night,” my mother said.
“If you think I’m going to haul myself back out here in a week or two just to—”
“Are you really that anxious to put us away? Can’t you wait just a little longer? Maybe we can do you the favor of dropping dead and spare you the bother.”
“Enough already,” Margot said. “Go do what you’ve got to do before you give us all an ulcer.”
I went down to the basement, my father close behind, docent on my tour through the museum of my childhood. Between a paneled wall and a Ping-Pong table stood a group of tall Mayflower movers’ cartons, yet to be unpacked after half a century. It was like the end of Citizen Kane: stacks of board games, yellow canisters of petrified Play-Doh, tubes of Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs, my sister’s Spirograph and Etch A Sketch and Easy-Bake Oven, a broken one-armed bandit and a scuffed, white plastic Stetson whose band read, “All the Way with LBJ.”
“Boy, oh boy, I don’t envy you having to get rid of all this stuff,” my father said. I’d heard this before. As if for the first time, he led me past the enormous cast-iron furnace into what was once the coal room, where the screens and storm windows were stored. I carried the screens upstairs two at a time. A fine layer of dust, a little bit of all of us, had settled on their top edges.
While my father went from room to room, unfastening the inside catches on the storm windows, I fetched the long extension ladder from the garage, planted its feet among the evergreens, and drew the rope through the pulley, hand over hand, the sound of metal scraping metal, until the top touched the bricks above my parents’ bedroom window. I climbed the ladder like the mast of a ship and saw shoals of snow still banked along the edges of the driveway and the shadows of the shrubbery, the leafy curve of the earth. After what seemed a very long time, my father came out of the house and took his position below, squinting up at me. I lifted the big storm window out of its frame, but after carrying the flimsy screens, my muscles weren’t prepared for its sudden weight, and it slipped from my grasp and plunged down through the April air, a guillotine of wood and glass.
My heart seized. I looked down. My father stood at the bottom of the ladder, unfazed. The window lay intact across the tops of the evergreens. He looked at me, then at the window, then back up the ladder, and then he laughed, and I laughed to hear him laugh.
By the time I reached the ground, we’d both stopped laughing, and to divert attention from the fact that I’d nearly killed him, I held forth on how insane it was to perform this high-wire act year after year; how he should have the storm windows converted, replaced, modernized; how this improvement would make the house that much more marketable. “Or do I sound too anxious to put you away?”
“Go easy on your mother,” he said. “The woman’s had to put up with a lot of nonsense over the years.” This seemed to me a strange accusation, strange and unfair, until I realized he was talking about his own nonsense, the Sixth Commandment, The Woman. He was inviting me, however obliquely, to draw him out. His confession was something I’d waited a lifetime to hear, and now I found myself terrified at the prospect. “You know, we’re not so different, you and me,” he added. “Not as different as you think.” He watched my face with a look of acute expectancy, sipping the air through parted lips, seeking any sign of encouragement.
It was my move—all I had to do was ask—but a sudden shyness had overtaken me, and I shifted my attention to the nearest available prop. The storm window was of a long-antiquated design, divided into quadrants whose glass, by force of time and gravity, poured thicker toward the bottom. I pointed this out and said, “You know, it’s liquid.”
“What is?” he asked, mildly annoyed. “Glass? But it’s not. It’s not liquid or solid. It’s—” His fingers moved over the lower-left quadrant, while his eyes continued to search my face. “It’s something in between.” His expression softened. “Some things are like that.”
I recalled a visit to the glassworks of Murano with Jane and the girls ten years earlier, and I’d begun to describe it to my father when I remembered the kernel of regret at its center, the disgrace I’d crossed an ocean to escape, but this wasn’t the story I wanted to tell there among the evergreens. Suffice it to say that there was a woman in it and that I’d behaved badly, and though Jane had forgiven me, dismissing the affair as the classic male hedge against death, I knew even then that there was no such thing. When the glassblower stepped away from the furnace, twirling a dollop of molten fire at the end of his long metal pole, I felt my heart twisting there, my guilt. With a pair of primitive pliers, he worked at the orange-yellow hive—prodding, pinching, pulling—until it assumed the form of a horse frozen in mid-gallop, and though I mentioned neither my heart nor my guilt to my father, without these my story was hardly a story. He listened politely, but I saw that he’d grown bored and sad. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he wanted to be heard, to tell his own story, share his own shame. But shame, like prayer, is a solitary pursuit. I steered the conversation back to the here and now of converting the storm windows, how this would save energy and lower his heating bills.
“I couldn’t if I wanted to.” His tone had turned resigned and distant. I knew I’d disappointed him. “The house has been declared a historic building. They won’t let you change a thing, not even the color of the shutters. It’s against the law. Imagine that.”
He took his hand off the quarter-pane, and I noticed that its glass was thicker, clearer, of a different consistency than the other three, and it occurred to me that this was the one I’d broken half a century ago, its replacement. “That’s from the night Santa Claus didn’t come,” I blurted out. He regarded me without expression. “You know,” I insisted, and as I recounted the events of that evening and the following morning—my mother’s party dress, the snowwoman, “Nessun dorma”—the muscles in his face twitched, and he swallowed.
“Sorry,” he said, “but I don’t remember any of that.”
“Oh, come on, Dad.” I was embarrassed by the edge of desperation in my voice, and I smoothed my fingers over the feathery evergreens to calm myself. “It was operatic. I mean, an ambulance came, for Christ’s sake.”
But the moment had passed; the confessional window slid shut.
“I remember the dress,” he said, pressing his hand flat against the newer pane. “A partridge in a pear tree—well, that you don’t forget. But the rest?” He smiled. “No, that was somebody else’s life, not mine.”
Year after year, we’ve declined my parents’ invitation to celebrate Thanksgiving with them in the big, old house, opting instead to spend the holiday weekend on Nantucket with Martin, Claire, and Julia. It’s the closest thing we have to an actual family tradition. Though modest as traditions go, these long, late autumn weekends make me inordinately happy, in part because I love these friends, but more, I think, because I love that Quaker island, which I’ve seen only at its least temperate. I find that I am happiest on islands, perhaps because I was born on one, and because, consciously or not, my daughters leave their catalog of grievances behind on the mainland, and for the space of three days, we revert to the same trio that used to carve jack-o’-lanterns at the kitchen table.
Last year, though, the girls didn’t come. Julia was spending the weekend at her fiancé’s parents’ house in upstate New York, and then my daughters begged off, claiming that it would be “weird” to go without her, leaving just Martin and Claire and Jane and me. That last Friday, as always, we drove down to Hyannis, took the afternoon ferry across the sound, checked into the bed and breakfast we’ve stayed at for twenty-four years straight, and settled into our rooms, each named for an old whaling vessel. At dusk, the inhabitants gathered at the top of Main Street to light the town Christmas tree, followed by the carol sing, and as always, we were among them, though I was acutely aware of the voices missing from that chorus.
After dinner we returned to the inn. Martin opened the first of two bottles of Malbec he’d brought along. Though he is Jewish—or maybe because he is Jewish—Martin takes almost guilty pleasure in the trappings of Christmas. The holly and the ivy, Alastair Sim’s Scrooge, the carol sing. The four of us were sitting around the glass-topped kitchen table, talking about the origins of Santa Claus, and I somehow got on the subject of my family’s first Christmas in the big, old house. Martin found this funny, and it pleased me to make him laugh (though none of the others was laughing). By the time I got to “Nessun dorma,” he was laughing so hard that he seemed beyond listening. He’s probably the most controlled person I know, but now he was out of control, and it was strange and unnerving to behold.
Finally I said, “It wasn’t that funny.”
“It’s not funny at all,” Jane said. “It’s depressing. Pathetic, really.” But this only made him laugh harder.
“He laughed to humor Lionel, and now he can’t stop himself,” Claire explained. Her eyes were fixed on Martin. “This isn’t the first time this has happened.”
“Maybe he’ll stop if I tell him something really pathetic,” I offered. “Maybe a little tragedy’s just what the doctor ordered.”
“It’s not funny, Lionel,” Claire snapped. Then, realizing how fierce she’d sounded, she added, softer now, but with a terrifying catch in her voice, “The last time this happened, he fainted.”
Martin’s face had become a purple mask, his smile a rictus through which he gasped for breath, and I feared a blood vessel would burst, that he’d suffer a stroke or an aneurysm, that he might literally die laughing, and it would be all my fault. The rest of us sat by helpless, watching and not watching, saying and doing nothing, scared to move. A passerby glimpsing the scene through the window would assume we were torturing him.
At last, his laughter became less breathless and then lifted altogether. He began to breathe normally, and wiping the tears from his cheeks, he apologized. He picked up the bottle and offered to refill our glasses, but something had gone out of the evening. We soon said good night and retired to our respective rooms.
Upstairs, Jane finished unpacking and prepared for bed, but I’d been spooked by Martin’s laughing fit and wanted to talk about it, or at least to try.
“Well, that was close,” I said.
She pulled back the covers on the four-poster bed. “What was?”
“That.” I nodded toward the door. “Martin. Downstairs. I really thought he might—” I couldn’t say it.
“Oh, Lionel.” She came closer and touched my cheek. “No one ever died laughing.” She spoke as to a child afraid of the dark, but with the authority of loss, and I felt even more childish, though no less afraid. I pressed her hand, warm against my face. From the bathroom behind us came the persistent sound of a running toilet. “Do something about that, will you?” Jane said, turning, yawning. “I want to go to sleep, and it’s driving me crazy.”
It was a simple repair—a matter of untangling the chain connecting the lift arm to the tank ball—but by the time I’d finished washing up and brushing my teeth, Jane was asleep. I lay beside her in that old bed where God knows how many others had lain, and I felt Nantucket Sound still roiling under me, along with the sudden notion that death could come smiling, even laughing. Trick or treat.
Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the ancient windowpanes. A car door slammed; a scrabble of voices and shouts rose from the cobblestones. I got out of bed and sat in a rocking chair by the window. Carefully, I raised the shade so as not to wake Jane. The pane was unprotected by a storm window, letting in the night sounds and the cold and the wind. My reflection flickered in the wavery glass—a frightened face, my father’s face—and I looked past it at the night, which, in spite of the old-fashioned streetlamps and the illuminated steeple of the First Congregational Church, felt darker and deeper than before. A dog barked in the distance, and I remembered Trixie running around my snowwoman, her lopsided orbit scarring the lawn for years to come, and I realized, with a pang, that somehow I’d left her out of the story I told downstairs. I sat there thinking of her running and running, her pink tongue flapping, and as I pressed my palm against the cold glass, my cell phone buzzed on top of the dresser. A shock ran through me. I knew without looking who it was and what she would say. Still, I picked it up and whispered, “Hello?” in the dark, and my sister said, “He’s gone.”