Boulder, Colorado, February 1987
“Did I tell you I’m on the committee for Thursday evening’s speech?” Amy asked.
“Which speech?” Henri replied. “There are usually six speeches you can choose from. My goodness, everybody comes to Boulder.”
The boy’s young voice interrupted. “Not everybody, Maman. Presque tout le monde.”
In the small, comfortable apartment, Henrietta looked over at her sixteen-year-old son. Her vision blurred. She was seeing Reuben Castle. That’s how old Reuben was—sixteen—when she first laid eyes on him at the Memorial Union in Grand Forks, in 1966. They were both freshmen at the University of North Dakota. But no—Reuben had been older than Justin now was, surely? She closed her eyes to do the arithmetic.
—Reuben was born in August 1948.
—Therefore, in September 1966 he was eighteen years old. Not sixteen, Justin’s age.
“Justin, I have told you not to speak in French except when we are alone.”
Amy interceded. “Oh, come on, Henrietta. It’s good for me when he speaks in French. And what he said wasn’t very difficult to understand.”
“That’s right, Mrs. Parrish.” Justin got up from his chair and pulled from the bookcase his watercolor set. He wiped off the brush before continuing. “But it was difficult to understand why Maman said that everybody comes to Boulder. Do you know, Mrs. Parrish, about the three men in the train who passed the cow? The brown cow?”
Amy reconciled herself to hearing again what the students had been told in Mr. Edwards’s trigonometry class at school. She smiled at Henri over her coffee cup—she understood. She too had a teenage boy.
“No, tell me about the cow, Justin.”
“Well, when they passed the cow, the economist said, ‘It appears that the cows in Ireland are brown.’ The mathematician said, ‘No, John, all you are able to say is that some of the cows in Ireland are brown.’”
Justin paused, permitting his mother’s guest, the lively middle-aged woman, head of the special-collections division of the Chinook Library, to absorb the lesson thus far. Then he dipped his hand into his pocket and brought out a pair of glasses.
Donning them, he arched his eyebrows and spoke in deep, authoritative tones: “‘No, Rudolph’—this is the logician speaking, Mrs. Parrish—‘you are entitled to say only this, We know that in Ireland there is at least one cow, of which at least one side is brown.’”
Justin broke into a smile of boyish pleasure. “You like that, Mrs. Parrish?”
She replied, teasingly, “Je l’aime beaucoup, Justin.”
He went back to his watercolors. “I’ve got to go to the paint store soon, Maman.”
“Well, you know where it is, Justin. On your bicycle it will take you…not more than twelve minutes.”
“Oh. I thought you might want to drive me.”
“No. What you thought was: There is a driver. There is a car. So I can be driven to the store. Me, I thought: There is a bicycle and a store, and only one brown cow who has a driver’s license.”
“Mrs. Parrish,” Justin turned to her, a little indignantly, “your Allan has a driver’s license, and he’s only three months older than I am.”
“Justin, I am not here as a family broker on the question of a driver’s license.”
Henrietta broke in, addressing a few words in French to her son. To Amy she said that she wanted to wait for the doctor’s analysis of Justin’s eye problems—“He only started wearing glasses a month ago.”
“And I don’t really need them, Maman. Only when I’m looking in dictionaries, that kind of thing. Not when I’d be driving a car.”
Amy Parrish accepted another cup of coffee and returned to the subject of the evening speech. “It’s sponsored by the Boulder Democratic Caucus. Come to think of it, Henrietta, I don’t even know whether you’re a Democrat! I simply assumed you were. Everybody who’s educated is.”
From Justin: “President Reagan is not a Democrat, and he’s educated.”
Amy thought to be cautious. “Well, there are two views on that subject, Justin. But Henrietta, dear, I’m trying to find out whether you’d like to come with me to the talk. Obviously you don’t have to contribute anything.”
“Who’s the speaker?”
“Senator Reuben Castle. North Dakota. He’s supposed to be very good.”
“Supposed to be.…How many people is that, Mrs. Parrish, when you’re supposed to be good? Like one thousand think you’re good? Like one million?”
Henrietta Durban rose from her chair. Amy noticed that her face was pale. “You all right, Henri?”
“I’ll be right back.”
She was gone five minutes. When she came back her color had returned, and she took up the conversation where they had left off.
“Where are you sitting, Amy?”
“Thursday night? I’m on the committee, so I can sit wherever I want. Would you like to sit onstage? There’ll be a lot of people onstage, including our mayor and our governor—at least, the governor promised to come.”
“I have a lot to do. If I go, I’ll probably get there late. I’d better sit in the back.”
“Can I go too?” Justin asked.
“Yes,” his mother said. “You can come with me.”
When, soon after her father’s death, Henrietta Leborcier Durban accepted the offer from the University of Colorado library, she and her son, just turned fifteen, settled into an apartment near the campus. No one, not even Amy Parrish, her superior at the library, questioned her closely on her marriage or on the circumstances of the death in Vietnam of her husband, Lieutenant Durban. Henrietta didn’t bring up the subject; nor did Justin, who had been told as a little boy that his father had died in military service, and that this was why he was fatherless.