MY GRANDMOTHER—MY MOTHER’S MOTHER—had been a flirt. Before she died she sat me down and told me her life’s story, by which she meant her love life’s story. So there would be some record. So someone could smile, nod approvingly, and finally applaud. I was to write it all down, and I assured her I would. There was even a way I could quantify her success. Did I know what a Kodak party was? My grandmother had been a Gibson girl, that had been her style of dress, with long flowing skirts, ruffled blouses, a cameo brooch at her throat, and a pompadour wave in her luxuriant auburn hair. Back then, she said, the Kodak company had begun to manufacture their Brownie cameras, and they made so many of them, they could afford to sell them cheap, so cheap, in fact, that a young man of ordinary means could afford to buy one and invite a young lady of his choice out for an afternoon of picture taking in the country. An afternoon because that was when the light was right—remember, there were no flashbulbs back then—and out in the country because that was where the most scenic pictures could be taken. My grandmother, whose Christian name was Grace, chose a snapshot from a stack she kept in what looked like a jewelry box and handed it to me. A slender, tall, and very attractive young woman hung out by one arm from a windmill and allowed the wind to blow her skirt, blouse, and upswept hair. Behind her stretched the countryside. Grace, the young woman swinging out from the windmill, had been on a Kodak party, and here was the proof. In the picture her mouth was open, as though she was savoring the breeze, and with her free hand she was waving, presumably to her date, the picture taker, to indicate what a fine time she was having. The Kodak party ended when the roll of film had been shot and the light had faded. At that point it was customary for the young man to present the Brownie camera to the young woman, as a memento of the occasion, but it was equally customary for the young man to keep the roll of film. When he’d had it developed, he could use the snapshots as bait for a second date, which, depending on the young woman’s curiosity and her vanity, she could accept or not. My grandmother told me she collected Brownie cameras back then and invited me to imagine her bedroom at home and her dorm room at school crowded with black boxes. Add them up and I could give a number to it all.
She thought of those cameras the night she met my grandfather, a preacher twenty years her senior that she and a girlfriend had gone to hear. He was something of a celebrity. He helped organize First Christian Churches, and he traveled a three-state area of the South preaching inaugural sermons. That night—it was a Saturday night and his was the only show in town—he was preaching a sermon from Saint Paul on the sanctifying power of marriage: “For the unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, the unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband: else were your children unclean; but now they are holy.” The girlfriend Grace had come with kept tittering under her breath, He’s looking at you! Oooh, he’s looking straight at you! Grace, in her Gibson Girl attire and with her hair thrown up in a bouffant wave, tried to hush her friend, and she tried letting her eyes stray to the stained glass windows, where the early evening light lit up a depiction of Joseph and his coat of many colors, but the preacher with his eyes as black as onyx kept calling her back. Grace claimed she realized then what it was she liked about the picture taking. It was that moment when her admirer had to lower his eyes if he was going to locate her in the viewfinder; it was the sensation of being admired and admired, then left alone on that stage of one. Those Kodak cameras that she had hoarded were taking their revenge. Her flirtatious girlhood was about to come to an end.
The scene at the church door, when the preacher took her slender hand in his broad, Bible-gripping one and said what he had to say, was anticlimactic. He said, loud enough for the girlfriend to hear, and certain prominent citizens of the town as well: Young lady, I am going to marry you. With so many witnesses present, if he hadn’t married her it might have been construed as a breach of promise. But Grace believed all had been determined the first time she’d strolled out into the countryside, climbed up a windmill, and then swung out so that the sun and the breeze could catch her blouse and hair and light up her smile. Click. And he really was the most handsome man in the world.
Would I remember all that?
Because of their age difference I was the only grandchild my grandfather would live to see. He would, I was told, wave me off quickly, afraid that too prolonged an exposure to his cadaverous state might mark me for life. I had no memory of him, cadaverous or otherwise, so I took my grandmother at her word. He’d been the most handsome man in the world.
My grandmother gave him four daughters, collectively known as the Pritchard girls. My mother was the first. Esther, a biblical name that my grandmother was led to believe meant “morning star,” and a beautiful morning star at that. My grandmother didn’t have it in her to be a disciplinarian, and my grandfather was frequently away preaching those inaugural sermons, so it fell to my mother to be my grandfather’s proxy at home. To her kid sisters she preached the straight and narrow—but with a provocative wink and mischievous grin. Ruth, the exiled, the faithful, was the next-born. She had a sweet, unmarred voice and, along with a girlfriend, sang love songs on the radio. When the war came she married a sailor, and when the war was over her sailor husband took a job with an oil company that had him transferred over the map for most of his working life. His wife, never a troublemaker, utterly compliant, faithfully followed. The third of the Pritchard girls, Lily, a flower of a girl, was a preacher’s daughter in reverse and made enough trouble for all her sisters combined. She joined the WACs and served as part of the mail detail in the reconquered Philippines, surely sorting letters to some soldiers no longer among the living. Demobilized in San Diego, she took a year to get back East, a year’s worth of vacation days she claimed she’d saved up, and arrived home raw-boned and with a booming laugh. Lily kept the current flowing in the Pritchard family, and the fourth daughter, after which Grace, known to all by then as Mama Grace, told her husband she had tried to give him that son he wanted, tried and tried, and was finally forced to admit defeat, was my aunt Rosalyn, a rose that faithfully bloomed each year and never stopped giving off the most winning of scents. Born laughing, but unlike Lily’s laugh, which could knock you down, or Ruth’s laugh, which was like a mild breeze, or my mother Esther’s laugh, which sized up a scene as she happily prepared to take it on, Rosalyn’s laugh rose out of the goodness of her nature, pure and simple, self-replenishing and available to all—until it wasn’t anymore. Until it stopped and everything around her turned grim.
There were many photographs, countless if you included the snapshots, but there were formal family photographs, too, and in them my grandfather sat erect in a high-backed chair, with a lean, aquiline face, a full head of still black hair and, yes, very dark eyes. My grandmother stood, matronly and a bit dazed, at his shoulder. She seemed stranger to me than the grandfather I had no memory of. Her daughters were artfully positioned around her. None of them was smiling. These would be happy—happily engaged—women, but they all looked as if they had their minds elsewhere and were standing sentinel duty until the photographer dismissed them.
Scroll formal family photographs back through your head and there comes a moment when something needs to be done. You can’t just stand there as stricken-seeming as the subjects of the photographs themselves. You can’t call out, “And action,” as a film director might, for the actors are all dead. Take a stack of those photographs in your hands and, riffling through, you might bring them to a flickering sort of life, nothing more. If screen porches weren’t a thing of the past and taletellers so far flung, you might gather in the evenings on screen porches and tell old tales until the figures rose before you. Or to be up to date you could transfer all the family photographs onto some sort of smart phone—an irreversible transfer, a click away from cyberspace—and then to outsmart it you could throw that phone into the deepest lake you could find, or the one closest at hand. You could sit there and watch it sink, wait for the bass or the pickerel to rise. Listen for the farewell wail of the loon.
I held Walter off as long as I could, and when I couldn’t any longer I played dumb.
So what did she want? Walter said.
I’m sorry?
What did your aunt Rosalyn call you down there to do?
You’ll have to forgive me, Walter.
For what, Jim? A memory lapse? A failure of nerve?
It was going to be a fishing story.
In which you never wet a line.
You’re right. Not in the lake where it counted.
We could take the canoe out on this one.
We could.
Catch a pickerel or two. Or I could go get the bottle.
I’ve had enough bourbon to last me for a year. Anyway, I thought we finished it.
A second bottle.
And after the second there’d be a third? You weren’t planning to ply me with liquor?
Walter gave out a thumping laugh, to add to the other weekend sounds we heard from over the water. Up the lake things were stirring. Voices, dog barks, sawing, hammering, digging sounds, motor-free sounds of manual labor, doors opened to be closed, a child, a grandchild out in the water, snatches of recorded music turned up to be turned down, not yet a live cellist next door. People pulling in and pulling out in their cars, loading and unloading, and down at our end of the lake Walter and I sat there in front of what WPA workers had or had not wrought. I let out breath as quietly as though we were hunters lying in wait. Then I laughed, humbly, as though acknowledging the everlasting absence of game.
My aunt, I said, the youngest, was going to be the first to die.
You mean Rosalyn, don’t you?
Youngest of the Pritchard girls. Yes.
And your favorite.
I loved them all. I was fond of them all. If we had world enough and time, I would tell you all their stories, but … yes, Rosalyn.
And you said she called you down there to ask a favor. She “called on you” I believe were your exact words.
You have a keen memory, Walter.
In my profession …
Well, you also have your lapses. Sometimes at the poker table the camaraderie gets the best of you, you know. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but things can get a bit too chummy for your own good.
So you pay a bit for the chumminess, that’s all right. Like tipping the dealer a chip from your winnings. The poker table’s not a court of law. So it wasn’t just to say goodbye.
Goodbye? You mean because of her illness? No, no, she wouldn’t talk about that. She knew what was eating away at her—I assume she did. I had only seen her once since the week Big Howie fell over dead outside their kitchen door, it had been …
You’re counting the years?
Yes, six or seven. But my mother kept me informed. The business was unraveling. Those offshore plants had become independent businesses of their own, which is the way it was supposed to work and the way Howie—Little Howie—had set it all up. The offshore plants serve a sort of apprenticeship to the imperial power, then when they’ve learned the trade and the imperial power begins to weaken, they’re equipped to strike out on their own. But in the Whalens’ hometown it was … messy. It all fragmented, little plants, niche apparel, exercise outfits, unisex stuff, children’s clothes. The meat and potato days were done. Head-to-foot clothing, twenty-four hours a day, that was over.
And the money?
No, there was money.
And houses, lake houses, seaside houses, boathouses, bass boats and speedboats and cabin cruisers and … black Cadillacs?
There was money and there was property, Walter. Little Howie had known what was coming, and so had Big Howie. Rosalyn was the soul of generosity, but she was no fool. The Whalen fortune was not enlarging, but it was enormous enough already. Little Howie had put aside his millions for Laurie and their children, and Rosalyn had made sure her granddaughters, Ellie’s daughters, would be set for life the day they turned eighteen. That wasn’t the problem.
Money wasn’t?
Well, it’s always a problem, especially if you’ve got so much you don’t know what to do with it.
I wouldn’t know.
If at the end it’s a load you can’t get out from under, not entirely, so just when you want to shuck it all off and rise up like Big Howie, you stumble and fall down. Maybe the curse comes then.
An embarrassment of riches?
Or an affliction.
You haven’t mentioned Ellie, have you?
No, not yet.
Only that her marriage had fallen apart and she’d taken to drink.
“Taken to drink” has such an old-fashioned ring to it, doesn’t it, Walter? Almost comforting, as if you were snuggling up to a bottle. As if you’d “taken a shine” to it.
I’ll say this once, Walter said, even though I think I’ve said it before. In spite of me prodding you maybe a little more than I should—after all, cross-examination is part of my trade too—don’t talk about this if you don’t want to.
I paused. I said to myself: That’s a friend willing to let you off the hook. That’s what friends do. Then I let out a breath I hadn’t been aware I was holding. If I don’t talk about it, I said, what else are we going to do? Go canoeing, go swimming, go fishing, or go sightseeing? Go find some more WPA artifacts? Start with that little bridge down at the end of the lake?
No, Walter said, rising above my tone, which was a mix of sarcasm and entreaty, I’d drive us over to Lake George. The Sagamore? Have you seen it? Magnificent! A great crescent-shaped affair, every window with a lake view, right out of The Great Gatsby. You haven’t seen it, have you?
Safe to say, not a WPA project. Or maybe that’s where the workers bunked while they built this sweet little place.
Unlikely. I wouldn’t be surprised if FDR and Eleanor stayed there, though.
Making a youthful effort, Walter hoisted himself up out of his chair. We could have lunch there, mahogany fixtures, sterling silver, Prince Albert china, white tablecloths under the chandeliers.
Back before we were born, you say?
Back before Eleanor was born—and almost before FDR.
And how’s their chili?
Jim, maybe we should play some gin rummy. It wouldn’t hurt you to win a hand or two.
Sit down, Walter, I said.
It took him a moment. He turned away from me and looked out over the water. I wondered how long this piece of property had been in his family. Had he himself been a boy here, and in bringing me here for this long secluded weekend did he risk giving something of that boyhood up? I didn’t know about Walter. I didn’t know if he’d dived off that dock, splashed in this lake, hooted and hollered and made so much noise his father had to come out and shake some sense into him. If he’d scared off the fish or if he’d paddled out there and silently lured them back into the fold. He hadn’t said. He’d taken a little pickerel off the hook for me, but I had done all the talking and he had patiently, more than patiently, eagerly and even complicitously, heard me out.
Get away for a long weekend, he’d said. Do a little fishing and drinking and card playing, in the quietest and most secluded place on the map. My ex-wife Elaine had smiled as if the notion—a couple of guys, a cabin in the Adirondacks, drinking and card playing at all of that—was inspired. You two should, she said, as if she knew something I didn’t, which she undoubtedly did, many things. We didn’t end our marriage, not really, we ended our cohabitation. We each needed periods to look inside, take stock and discover what was worth passing on, and then we made dates. We made love, too, not without passion but in a certain commemorative spirit, you could say with a commemorative passion, but which could come with a real hunger attached. You can commemorate the past more passionately than you’d lived it. It seemed contradictory, but in our case it was true, and I think we got the divorce just to get the state out of the way, with all its side issues and annoying impositions. Then at last things stood out clearly. Divorced, and an unobstructed avenue opened between us.
Elaine and I had met in Walter and Molly’s backyard, on their patio, where we’d been invited to supper, and after supper, with a conversational current sufficiently alive, our hosts had disappeared into the house with dirty dishes and not come back out, as if Elaine and I were prize livestock, somewhat past its prime, who’d needed a little prodding, a little pep talk, before we’d been left penned to breed. It was so obvious it was touching, and it’s tempting to say to please our friends we’d paired up on the spot. At least we’d both understood that that was what the evening was designed to accomplish. Just before we divorced, we’d had Walter and Molly over to dinner and broken the news of what we were going to do. Unpenned, but eternally grateful, we insisted, to our friends. I was still grateful. I loved Elaine. I depended on her. She scared me a little, the access she had to me, that we had to each other. And, surely, we must have reasoned without speaking the words that access like that could not be available on a twenty-four-hour basis. To save it, to assure it, we would have to portion it out in moderate doses and make it last. Something like that must have gone through our minds. The joy of seeing her and then the joy of knowing that that joy was renewable, that it was a joy that might even be outdone, improved upon, as long as we did not do it to death. Something like that.
Had I told Elaine my short-haired dog story? Walter had wanted to know. Well, why hadn’t I? But he had not persisted. And who’s to say the story was not apocryphal? Why wasn’t there a snapshot of the dead dog, the dead snake, and the miraculously spared little boy? Had no one had a Brownie camera during an outing in the country like that? Two pairs of lovers and no Brownie camera?
Sit down, Walter, I said.
When I drove up that drive to the Whalen house, I told him, with no Howies left, with little Ellie grown up and gone, and with my aunt wasting away, it would be hard to express the desolation of the scene, even though if you had been with me you might have been charmed. It was a summer day, with the heat in the pines, the sort of still, scented heat that makes you believe summer will never end. In the patches of sunlight, pine needles lay orange on the ground, which was a reddish clay with glinting specks of mica, and the birdsong at that midday hour was a subdued, multi-throated warbling overshot by the long strident caw of jays. The immediate area around the house had always been kept kudzu-free by a succession of gardeners, and that was still the case. Rosalyn did not meet me at the door. A black woman named May did, who had been with the family for years and was the daughter of the man named Johnny who had been the groom for Little Howie’s ponies and horses, back when there’d only been a prince and no princess. It was May who told me, You sure are welcome, you sure are, then showed me to the sunroom, air-conditioned now, where Phil Hodge and I had once sat with Little Howie, and where Big Howie had later spread out a map to show us where the fish were biting and where we could and could not go. At that same table and under overarching plants that had grown as the family had diminished, Rosalyn sat waiting for me. From her vantage point she would have seen me driving up and surely would have known the desolation I had felt. Favorite nephews and favorite aunts had a special bond. She did not get up. She said, Jimmy, Jimmy, and emptied out what was left of her laughter, as I leaned in to kiss her cheek, which was drawn but not yet slack. She was ill, but not incapacitated. She could have gotten up and met me at the door. But she pulled me in, all the way in. This had been a fishing family, and since she was all that was left of it, there would be a tradition to uphold—
Ellie was left, don’t forget her, Walter reminded me. And according to her father, she was catching fish right out of the cradle.
I haven’t forgotten Ellie, I said. I mean of the family before then. Before Ellie.
Before you were run out of town for terrifying her with your beard, you mean.
Or traumatizing her, I said.
One or both, Walter said, otherwise you wouldn’t have been down there then, would you? You wouldn’t have been “called on.”
That point is very well taken, I told Walter, who was once again engaged. But not so that he couldn’t have been lured away. Had some up-the-lake neighbors paddled down to socialize, Walter would have socialized. He had a capacity, a remarkable capacity, which meant in a court of law he could make a good show of defending anybody.
You could see it all in Rosalyn’s eyes, I said. They had always been a bright blue, a translucent, northern lake blue. I assume there were cataracts that needed to be removed and she saw no point in it. The blue was gray now. More accurately, her eyes were a tarnished steel color, and the longer you looked into them, the more you realized they were fixed on one entrenched idea.
Reading the expressions in eyes doesn’t always get you closer to the truth, Walter reminded me. But you already know that, Jim.
Maybe not in court, I said, but what happened in that sunroom is essential if this story is going to make sense, and that look in her eyes was part of it. Shall I go on?
Shall I bring the bottle out? Walter said, in part to lighten the tone, but he meant it.
Not yet, I said.
I hadn’t seen Ellie since she divorced her husband. Scott was his name. They’d had their fights, but no more than a lot of other couples I’d known with two young kids to care for and egos to trim, and they’d been blessedly free of money worries, except the worry of what to do with so much. Ellie had gotten tall. Height in the family would harken back to Mama Grace and her preacher husband James Pritchard, the grandfather I’d been named for, but Ellie was so late coming to the last of the Pritchard girls that that particular lineage might have seemed more legendary than real. Tall and, unlike her grandmother, thin. She’d passed through a stage when if her chin had not been quite so prominent she would have been considered lovely. The broad and unlined forehead, the high cheekbones, the high and elegantly bridged nose. And then the eyes, in the right light a rich mix of amber and honey and maybe even a tigerish yellow, golden eyes, or greenish eyes with a certain golden cast, large and almond-shaped and, as they used to say, tempting to dwell in for a while.
Walter chuckled. If I could read his thoughts, he was asking himself when was the last time any man could be said to dwell in a woman’s eyes and not be laughed out of town. And if he could read mine, he might have understood he was being asked to believe there were still a few places, little retrograde pockets down south, for instance, where that sort of thing went on.
The Pritchard girls were all known for their beauty—even Lily, as rough-cut as she might have appeared to be—and Ellie was one of them. Her chin, though, was weathered-looking enough that I could imagine her out in a fishing boat with her father or in a cornfield on a cold morning waiting for the dogs to flush out pheasant and quail. Big Howie, whose own chin was puffy, boyish and cleft, had left his mark on his daughter there. She’d been a daddy’s girl for a period of her life and taken it on the chin.
Walter’s chuckle betrayed a certain impatience, I thought.
The thing about Ellie, I told Walter, is that she was a shade away from being a lot things. A shade less hungry for whatever it was she imagined she didn’t have and I could even see her as a nun. Those eyes with that golden light looking heavenward or cast down.
Which would make her a big daddy’s girl, Walter took his liberty. The biggest daddy of all. More to the point, what drink had Ellie taken to? Bourbon? Had her daddy left his mark on her there?
As I recall it was scotch and not bourbon. And maybe in the summer, like the rest of us, gin and tonics. But …
But?
That hard drinking that wasted her away and left her crawling for her life only came later, if you’ll permit me to go on. Should I go on?
It’s your call, Jim.
Up over the armrests of our Adirondack chairs we sat looking at each other for a moment. Walter had astute eyes, never idle, the brows unruly little arcs of wiry gray hair like the hair on his head. He was on alert, always on alert, but rarely on attack, and then the injustice had to be grave, an insult to one of the few things that all humans should want to hold dear. I had nothing but good things to say about Walter Kidman. Go with him, Elaine had advised. I felt a surge of something rising up in me, some strong mix of feelings made one. I felt sorry for, of all things, this little lake, on which canoers had begun to paddle as though on an early evening stroll. I remembered that look in the eye of the pickerel I’d caught as Walter removed the hook. It said you’re out of place. It said we don’t fish the jumps up here. A moment’s wildness is no excuse. That’s not who we are.
I nodded to Walter and continued, It was that look in my aunt’s eye, and it was the look that was no longer there. The laughing look I’d known her by was gone, and what had replaced it was as hard as old steel. She said, Jimmy, I have something I want you to do, it’s a favor, and the lilt that had gone out of her voice as much as said she would never again be piling things so abundantly in my arms. She needed a man’s favor now, from a family’s firstborn. I won’t say Ellie has fallen in love, she went on. I don’t believe she has. But I will say that she has fallen under the spell of this man she works with … And I, of course, knew nothing about Ellie working, since my mother had not informed me about that, which was a curious lapse because news of anything that Ellie Whalen publicly did in her small town, such as taking a job, would have spread along the family hotline and quickly reached my mother, even though she lived a state away.
Rosalyn continued, I need you to find out what you can about him, what his intentions are, and Ellie’s, and then—
I stopped her. Ellie’s working? I said. She’s taken a job? Doing what, Rosalyn?
It’s not really a job, Jimmy. It’s more volunteer work through the church.
She hasn’t fallen under the spell of a preacher, has she, Rosalyn? and I couldn’t suppress a smile. History’s not repeating itself in that way, is it?
She knew immediately what I was referring to, and she chose not to return the smile. That told me everything, that my aunt Rosalyn would disregard the sweetness of an old story surfacing two generations removed to lovingly tie another knot in the family history.
It’s an organization, she said, it’s run through the church, it’s for poor children, so they’ll have something to do, some place to get away to, some … activity, you know … She was struggling, she wasn’t seeing it clearly.
So it’s a charity, I said. Ellie and this man are working together for a church-sponsored charity, maybe something reaching out to orphans, and this man—
I’d stepped in, and she reacted to my tone. Her favorite nephew, I must have sounded to her like some solicitous do-gooder willing to take the time to lead a feeble old lady through the mists in her mind.
The mists quickly cleared. She was a Whalen, after all.
He’s twice her age, Jimmy, she said. Divorced with four children, still living with their father but pretty much grown. He hasn’t been in town long. No profession anyone knows about. I suppose his profession is charity, and I suppose he believes charity begins at home.
Have you seen him? I asked my aunt.
I have, she said, with that old steel heavy in her eyes, something implacable there. He looks like a toad.
Rosalyn said that? Walter said.
She did.
You know the image I have of her? I’m lying there where your friend Phil Hodge lay, and you did too as a boy, and she’s standing at the end of the bed with that tray of shaving instruments in her arms. She has this confused look on her face, caught in crosscurrents. It’s sad and it’s sweet. And she called him a toad?
She did, I said.
Her mind’s made up, then, Walter said. She doesn’t need you to enlighten her. She needs you as an enforcer. Or is she hinting that the toad’s a prince in disguise and with one kiss from Ellie—
No, she wasn’t hinting that. She was all but stating that the man was a fortune hunter, and if she was hinting anything, it was that Ellie had fallen under the spell of a father substitute, but I don’t think so. I don’t think that even subconsciously Rosalyn thought that Ellie looked at this man and saw Big Howie. She would never have called Big Howie a toad.
Mister Toad has a name?
Leland.
Leland …?
Oldham.
Oldham? Old ham? Sure? You’re sure Rosalyn didn’t make that one up?
No, he was real, all right, and there were four young Oldhams needing to be fed and clothed and sent out into the world. What Rosalyn didn’t know, I told Walter, was where the children’s mother had gotten to, and neither, it seemed, did anyone in town. If Leland Oldham’s stock in trade was giving disadvantaged children a break, it only stood to reason he’d start with his own.
A toad, I repeated to Rosalyn. Then I asked her, Does he have any other distinguishing characteristic, in case I see him around town?
I don’t want you to see him, Jimmy, Rosalyn immediately made clear. I want you to go see Ellie. But not at home, I want you to take her out somewhere for lunch—
And I will, I assured my aunt, but just in case. Then it occurred to me and I stopped, not sure what if anything would be stirred up, to lighten or darken her mood, by evoking old times. For instance, I said to my aunt Rosalyn, is Leland Oldham clean-shaven?
The laugh she gave me then, Walter, said it all.
So you asked her that, in her weakened condition, and she laughed it off, water long gone under the bridge?
It was this pale, fond, sad, grateful little laugh, as if she didn’t expect to have another one and at least could be grateful for that.
Poor Rosalyn. I can’t get her out of my mind holding that tray, standing there—stranded there—at the foot of your bed.
She said, Jimmy, I’ve forgotten what you call it, that little tuft of hair at the end of the chin.
A goatee, Rosalyn?
That’s it. He has this little goatee, mostly gray hairs, the silliest little thing. Not like that beard you used to have. That was a man’s beard. My father had one like that.
I’ve seen dozens of photographs of my grandfather James Pritchard, I assured Walter, and he was clean-shaven in every one of them.
You think she was losing it, then?
No, I think Leland Oldham had a scraggly little goatee, which she despised. I think she revered her father and she still loved me, and to save some space in her mind she put the two of us together as a way of saying sorry for when Big Howie had run Phil Hodge and me out of town. And in that saved space I think she knew exactly what her options were and what she wanted me to do. And she even knew the legal term for it—remember, this was some time ago, in a little town down south.
Go right ahead.
The term Rosalyn was thinking of was “prenuptial,” and if you couldn’t talk Ellie out of falling under the matrimonial spell of this man, you were to talk her into preserving her share of the family fortune.
Which was enormous, a pipeline coming directly from her father. You’re good, Walter. With or without hindsight.
Like I told you, I feel for Rosalyn. Anyone living in Big Howie’s shadow all that time, who lived to pile things into other people’s arms …
She did not believe her daughter was in love with this toad of a man. The Pritchard girls, beautiful women all, did not fall in love with toads. But she knew her daughter was vulnerable, perhaps not that she had begun to drink as much as she had—which would be a drop compared to what she would eventually consume—but vulnerable and divorced and perhaps assuaging the pain and loss just a bit through drink, the taste for which, after all, also ran in the family. And would I get her away and talk to her and demystify her and, if she insisted on marrying the man, who was more my age, not hers, would I get her to sign what Rosalyn had, yes, come to understand was a prenuptial agreement that would protect her inheritance from Leland Oldham and his four children, with ambitions of their own, and allow her, Ellie’s mother and my favorite aunt, to die in peace?
She did not say this last, she did not plead to be left to die in peace, but it was the backdrop for everything she did say. She had taken her reading of Mr. Oldham and knew him to be unscrupulous, a demon of a man with or without the goatee, and knew with a fatalistic foreboding that he would strip her daughter of everything and allow her to die a pauper. Rosalyn could provide for Ellie’s two daughters in such a way that Mr. Oldham could not get at it, or so she thought, but her own daughter was trophy game, and if I could not stop the marriage, I could stop a hemorrhaging of riches, which Rosalyn was convinced would be tantamount to a hemorrhaging of her daughter’s lifeblood. I had been spared by the heroic intervention of a Boston bulldog named Bing, and would I, the firstborn to the first of the Pritchard girls, repay the debt and save the life of little Ellie, the last-born to the last of those girls?
I drew a long breath and slowly let it out.
Walter said, She didn’t say that part about Bing and the rattlesnake, did she? There’s no final accounting for that story, is there, no firsthand authentication, I mean?
I drew another breath. Closed and opened my eyes and let them drift over the water. Such a peaceful afternoon on this lovely little lake, with the neighbors setting out in their canoes for what amounted to their early evening walk, their promenade, their paseo, and it came back to me, Little Howie watching those festive wheels turning within wheels in his little Latin American town. Bella something. He would soon step into a church and offer his thanks to the virgin overseeing it all.
I said to Walter, What she said was for me to stop it, however I could. Stop it with no questions asked. And then I added, I think you can bring that bottle out now.
Ha! Walter cheered and, ten years my junior, shot out of his chair with a youthful bound. We were drinking Jim Beam, with the Beam men from the eighteenth century on pictured on the label. It was a steady stream of Beam blood, father to son, winding up with one nephew. But Walter took his time coming back with the bottle and glasses. Perhaps he’d visited the bathroom, or up in the seclusion of the cabin had received a call, or, conceivably, had made one, in violation of an agreement we only tacitly had, and while he was gone I watched the canoe tied to his dock rocking invitingly on other canoers’ small waves. One couple paddled close enough to realize it was a stranger sitting in one of Walter Kidman’s chairs, and their greetings were restricted to nods. Still, I might have paddled out. There weren’t that many canoes on the lake, but I could have found a way to get lost among them, and the story I had to tell could have sunk to a whisper and been borne away on the first call of a loon. Or a loon might have dived with it and left it deep down below before coming up to call again. The lakes up here, unlike the man-made ones down south, which had flooded farms and crossroad towns, cemeteries, church steeples and windmills, were mostly glacially formed, tolerable for pickerel but less so for bass, cold and probably too deep for loons to dive to the bottom. But if things did make it down there, they stayed. Last, nonswimming members of the Ice Age might still lie down there while canoes, with a sort of civil inconsequence, passed high overhead. Ice Age malefactors might. Ice Age opportunists out to deprive orphaned young women of their fortunes might lie at those icy depths. I was about to push up, I was gathering the strength to go canoeing, when Walter returned offering apologies. Nature, not his wife, had indeed called.
He poured our drinks, one on his armrest, one on mine, and we clinked glasses. The toast had been, simply, Salud. But the clink of the glasses carried well in this unsultry air and, in what I took to be an unprecedented occurrence, Walter’s next-door neighbor, the cellist, Byron Wainwright, in that moment stepped around the bushes blocking Walter’s dock from his and appeared before us.
He’d come to offer his apologies. He’d been rude the evening before, we’d caught him, he claimed, at what he called a delicate moment during his recital, and cued by the clinking of our glasses had come to ask if he could join us in that drink now.
He said, his words, I didn’t mean to be a crank, it was just that damned Bach.
He had a long face, a long neck, and folds beneath his eyes. He wore very baggy pants—I couldn’t be sure they weren’t pajamas—and he stood in such a flat-footed way, it was a mystery how he’d sneaked up on us. The truth was, without his cello he looked bereft.
In spite of his touted neighborliness, Walter seemed taken entirely by surprise, and I stepped in to tell Byron Wainwright that I’d enjoyed his serenade and had begun to wonder why all lakes didn’t come accompanied by the sound of a cello, it was such—the word I chose was “evening”—it was such an evening-sounding sound.
Byron Wainwright might have flinched, but without a bow in his hand all his movements seemed jittery and abrupt. I might have qualified what I’d said, I might have added morning and afternoon to evening, hence a twenty-four-hour sound, but Wainwright played at five p.m. for a reason, and it was Walter who rose out of the chair he’d just settled back into and invited his neighbor to occupy it while he went up to the cabin for another glass, more ice, and one of the wicker chairs from the screen porch.
I had not meant to suggest that Byron Wainwright had entered the evening of his life, but I had no idea how sensitive this man was, or how cranky he could be, and when Walter’s neighbor didn’t move to occupy the vacated chair, I had to resist an urge to rise and stand beside him until Walter returned. Wainwright, I felt sure, had ignored the invitation to sit in Walter’s chair because once down into its slanting trough he’d have to wonder if, unassisted, he could ever get out. Entering the evening of your life, you did not sit in Adirondack chairs, even though the Adirondacks was where you happened to be. Or in its foothills. You did not go begging your neighbor or your neighbor’s guest to help you get upright again. You sat on your stool and played your cello, and when the time came to rise, you used your instrument, if necessary, to pole yourself up. And when your cello had suffered enough abuse, you married again, a younger woman, and humbled yourself before her. Or before your children, you learned how to sweet-talk them. Grandchildren. Here, have a piece of candy. Help the old man up and I’ll play you a pretty tune.
I found myself staring holes into Bryon Wainwright, just beneath his bony, dewlapped chin. Our eyes didn’t meet, but he surely felt the force of my stare with no way to know that once someone like Leland Oldham had gotten into my mind, it was impossible to get him out, although no toad of a man could be said to have a bony chin. Toads were chinless. They made croaking sounds, they didn’t play a cello every evening at five. They lived in filth, in bogs, not overlooking crystal clear lakes. They ate flies, they ate bugs, overate and enlarged.
Before Walter could return, Byron Wainwright, without excusing himself, had disappeared back behind his bushes. But Byron Wainwright was not the toad. He was a lonely, ill-adapted man who was visited by penitent impulses he couldn’t sustain, who worked it all out through his instrument and gave his neighbors in the canoeing stage of their lives something to look forward to each evening. And I told Walter, when he did return with another glass and ice and a crackling wicker chair under his arm, that Byron Wainwright had left as mysteriously as he’d appeared and to my regret I’d done nothing to stop him. As his proxy I had let Walter down, and I expected him to show some disappointment. But, with the wicker chair still under his arm and Wainwright’s glass in his free hand, he instructed me to bring the bottle and the other glasses and get up to the cabin fast before the music began and Ellie and this Oldham fellow and my dear aunt and the story I’d begun to tell got drowned out and we’d have to start all over again.
The mistake I’d made, I explained to Walter once we reached the safety of the screen porch, was agreeing to meet Ellie in town and not somewhere a safe distance away. I’d likewise made the mistake of allowing Rosalyn to put a phone into my hand, perhaps because the past, the play of the past, had a way of charming me out of my right mind, and I remembered Big Howie, at that same table, placing a live phone in my hand so that I could call my mother and she and he could lock horns. Ellie had been a four-year-old then, a sporting little girl wide-eyed before the spectacle of her father and her uncle-aged cousin going head to head. I hadn’t seen or talked to Ellie in years. She had not been told her mother had sent for me. But somehow Rosalyn knew her daughter was home that day with time on her hands, and once I had her on the phone, I told my cousin that as chance would have it I was passing through town. Ellie wasn’t out of her twenties yet, but already you could hear a trace of a liquor slur in her voice and, when she laughed, a certain hoarseness and hollowness that went deep. Jim … Cousin Jim … she repeated my name, professing delight which I chose not to doubt. Isn’t this wonderful, Jim! How long’s it been? No, I don’t want to know. Jim, I’m so happy you’re here! What do you mean you’re just passing through town? Not if I have anything to say about it, you’re not!
I glanced at my aunt, who could not have been privy to what her daughter had been saying, but at just that moment Rosalyn gave me an imperative little nod, and I made the mistake that would undo my efforts and dash my aunt’s hopes. I said it was true, unfortunately I was just passing through town, but I had time for lunch so why didn’t Ellie meet me somewhere and why didn’t she choose the place. I glanced at Rosalyn and she nodded, so it was both of our mistakes. Oh, Jim, oh, Jim, Ellie moaned, the girls are with their father today, and they’ll want to see you, too, it’s so cruel you’re in such demand, but if that’s the way it has to be … and she named the place, an old columned home on the outskirts of town, there before the Whalens had arrived, antebellum I assumed, where a nice breeze always blew under some old oaks, and why didn’t we meet there if my schedule was so busy and that was all I had time for. I looked at Rosalyn, mouthed the name of the restaurant—the Chambers House—and she nodded, so it was both our faults.
I don’t understand, Walter said.
You will.
It was indeed an old house with many small rooms because rooms and people were smaller back then, but with a wide entrance hall running from front to back, and at the back a staircase to the second floor passing diagonally overhead. I arrived before Ellie and was lucky, or unlucky, enough to get a free table at the back of the hall with a direct view up to the front door, which had been left open. There was a screen door to keep out the flies but not the breeze, and it was through that screen door I got my first look at Ellie in these last six or seven years. And it was down that hall, with old family photographs hanging on the walls that I had not even glanced at, one family being enough for me then, that I watched Ellie walk, not unsteadily but somehow still feeling her way, like someone unsure of her mission, until she saw me and broke into a tremulous smile.
We kissed on the cheek, I held her, then held her back, gazed at her and, I suppose, did “dwell in her eyes,” which were easily her most fascinating feature, quite large, or maybe the rest of her face just seemed more drawn than I remembered and her complexion had lost its bloom. Regardless of what stage of her life you placed her in, Ellie did not look well. Of course, her marriage had broken up and her mother was nearing the end. Soon she would be alone and easy pickings for a man like Leland Oldham. In her haste she had misapplied or overapplied her makeup, and the base was flaking, which made her look a little parched. To be sure, women in correspondingly small towns up north did not wear much makeup, certainly not as much pancake base, and I suddenly felt a deep sympathy for this young cousin of mine, one step ahead of some terrible unmasking. She wore a yellow pants suit and a florid blouse, which only made things worse. Except for a tiny locket around her neck, no jewelry, and in that she was right. I didn’t see how jewelry would help.
Before I could speak, she practically shouted out her greeting, as though from one hilltop to the next, another southern characteristic. How are you! Tell me the truth!
I told her I’d settled in up north where things were not as chilly as you were led to believe, but that I was sad to see her mother declining so, and asked her, in a quieter voice, just what the doctors had said.
She lowered her head and shook it, then raised her eyes to mine. First her brother, then her father, and now her mother. Among the vanished I could also include her husband, I suppose. It’s so, so sad, Jim, she said. She won’t go to the hospital. There’re clinics that might make her more comfortable, but she remembers all Howie went through and says she’s not going to drive herself crazy like that. The doctors are the last people she wants to talk to. You’ve seen how she is.
I’ve seen how worried she is, she’s worried about you, I was about to say, but I thought we should eat before I got into that, and that, I told Walter, was another mistake. Walter said he still didn’t understand, and I told him to wait, Ellie and I had to order, we had to be served. She ordered a quiche of some sort, which she only picked at as every so often she half twisted around in her chair to glance up the hall to the front door, where any other restaurant not worried about being quite so old-time would have taken that screen door down, forgone the breeze, and allowed air-conditioning to do the job, but that was not the restaurant that Ellie had chosen and Rosalyn had okayed. We both had iced tea, sweetened, oversweetened, which was another way you knew you were in the South. The waitress came to clear away the plates. There were various pies, which we declined. I leaned in over the table. Ellie kept glancing back up the hall. She’d gotten jittery. She looked weaker in that moment, as if she hadn’t eaten in days.
I know, Walter said.
You do? What do you know?
I know what’s going to happen. I understand.
You’re sure?
Do you want me to tell you?
I gave it a moment’s thought, real thought, considered the consequences, which were not inconsiderable. Walter as narrator would not be one to sidestep an issue. I had heard him work in court. No, don’t do that, I said. Here’s what happened.
I went back to where we’d stopped the conversation when I was on the point of telling Ellie that her mother was worried about her in ways she might not want to admit, and in the presence of her daughter might not want to let show. I understood Ellie had a job now, a commendable job helping disadvantaged children, and that there was a man in her life, an older man with quite a large family, whether a widower or divorced, my aunt Rosalyn didn’t know. I spoke slowly but conversationally, centering my concern on Rosalyn, not Ellie, it was Rosalyn’s last days we were talking about here, it was Ellie’s mother’s quickly declining health that was the issue. And in that context, I risked interjecting what I presented as observations, concerns of my own. I told Ellie that any mother in the best of health might have serious reservations about what Ellie was getting into, a man that old with a family that large and a past that—well, that uncertain. But, I supposed, a mother terribly sick might find she could think of little else. At the end we all feel a need to put our affairs in order, and a mother maybe even more so, especially when she’s worried that her daughter might be making a serious mistake, and at the end there’d be nothing a mother could do. I was not above reproach when I said all this, I knew I was overstating the case, but I also knew there was every chance in the world that Rosalyn had a right to be worried and that finally you had to play the odds. I put what was a blunt question as gently as I could. Did Ellie plan to marry this man?
She turned to look back down the hall to the door and narrowed her eyes as though trying to see through that screen. Then she looked back to me. She’d been such a charming child when I’d first met her, half-hidden behind her mother, looking up at this bearded cousin come down from the North. With those eyes, and all that color in her cheeks. Forget fishing, come catch me! she’d taunted. Let’s play!
I don’t know, Ellie half whispered, her voice hoarse. Maybe. We’ve talked about it. Then she reminded me, You know, I’m a mother, too.
I needed reminding. Members of extended families tend to get fixed in one of their roles, and for me, I had to confess, Ellie Whalen was still a child.
I know you’re a mother, I told her. I’m thinking about the girls, too, I’m thinking about my aunt’s granddaughters. You’re not all she’s worried about.
In a lowered and only halfhearted voice, Ellie said, Mother worries too much.
You’re all she has left, can’t you see why she’d worry, here … at the end?
Make her comfortable, relieve her of her worries while there’s time left, don’t make a mistake you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life—I was on the point of saying all of that. I might have gone on, You’ll pass by her grave and hate yourself for what you denied her at the end. Don’t let that happen, don’t do that to yourself, Ellie. Instead, another question occurred to me, the right question, and it must have brought a scowl to my face. Do you love this man, Ellie? I said. Before she could answer, I persisted: How do you love him, Ellie? How can this be?
People say that faces go blank, but I’d make the distinction. I’d say that faces go vacant, which isn’t the same. Ellie had vacated her face and stationed herself somewhere else, and I found myself peering, looking for the right light and the right angle, and you’ll never guess, Walter, who I thought of then. Do you remember the other Ellie, the spirit waif of Hollywood? In the midst of all that stale and single-minded ambition, the girl I knew who flitted among it all like a hummingbird, little iridescent Ellie. Do you remember her?
I remember, Walter said, and I’m not interested. That was Hollywood. We’re done with that. What did Ellie Whalen say when she came back, when she “reoccupied” her face?
She never fully reoccupied it. She was a little dazed. I might have struck her with a precisely calculated blow. She said she thought that she did. And I said, Love him, Ellie? Really? Not the circumstances, not as a defense against all that’s ganging up on you, but this man, this … Leland Oldham?
And hearing his name spoken amounted to another blow, coming from me, both an outsider and, generationally considered, someone present at the start of it all.
Back when the snake struck, you mean.
Walter, I should never have told you that story.
No, you probably shouldn’t have, but you did. Too late now. So back to the matter at hand. When did Leland Oldham show up?
Did he?
Ellie had to twist around, you didn’t. You were sitting with a direct view of that front door. You would have seen him coming first through the screen, Leland Oldham materializing from behind that black mesh.
Out of the blackness, Walter?
That’s what she’d been waiting for, wasn’t it? That’s what had her so edgy. And your “mistake” was in letting her choose the restaurant, which she could then communicate to Mr. Oldham, who would certainly be keeping tabs. Not that our Ellie wanted him to come barging in. Just to feel secure, she had to know that he knew where she was. It had reached that point.
You’re good, Walter. I never doubted it.
So when did he?
Not before I had a chance to make my case, and Rosalyn’s, to not marry the man, a man old enough to be her father with a family of all but grown children no one knew anything about. I urged Ellie not to do that. She had her own family to consider, and by that I meant her girls. She was vulnerable, she was on the rebound, he was twice her age. If she didn’t see how someone could be wooed and falsely won from behind a front of church-sanctioned good deeds, I did. All sorts of scoundrels had sought the sanction of the church. History was full of them. Leland Oldham—and I paused again on the name—might not be one of them, but there was a modern-day way to be sure, we no longer had to be victims of history repeating itself, and in the most reasonable tone I could manage I began to talk to her about prenuptial agreements, which I presented as commonplace, a modern-day given, in no way indicative of distrust, especially when there was a large and complicated sum of money involved that Ellie, as a tribute to her father and all he’d accomplished, should want to protect. We were so used to thinking of money in the abstract, as figures in a bankbook or on a computer screen, figures that go up and go down, that we forget that it was her father and then her brother who devoted their flesh and blood to that business. Whalen Apparels at one time had been the livelihood of the town, all of us in this family of ours, out to the most remote of the cousins, had thrilled to what her family had accomplished, going right back to World War Two, which we had won partly due to the uniforms and parachutes and pup tents that her father had pitched in to produce. I didn’t want to exaggerate, I said, but Ellie’s inheritance was that history, and her mother would rest so much easier if she knew that her country’s history and her family’s part in it would not be forgotten, that it would be protected, that it would be left intact. So, if she must marry, would Ellie please have a prenuptial contract drawn up, it was simple, it was routine, it was what everybody was doing nowadays, and her mother would be so relieved, it would be such a loving kindness to her there at the end …
Dusk was gathering. You heard not yet the loons but the remaining canoers paddling for home. Walter quietly freshened our drinks. The wicker crackled quietly, not so much in agitation or suspense as in rhythm with our breaths. The tinkling of the ice that had yet to melt struck the cleanest and clearest of notes.
You should have sold encyclopedias, Walter said.
I did.
But you didn’t sell her.
I thought I had.
What made you think so?
She loved her family. But one of the liabilities of being born so late in her parents’ lives was that her family was dying off all around her. She could protect her inheritance, defend it against so much death, or she could let someone else take care of it and suffer the consequences. What she didn’t really understand was that her family wasn’t just her immediate family, it was all of us, it kept reaching out.
So she was debating it, Walter said. She was vacillating. Draw up a prenup and please her mother. With a prenup, even though she married she remained in a Whalen. The town had a Whalen left, a real Whalen, second generation, straight from the patriarch’s loins, and the family fortune remained intact. Rosalyn would no longer be around, but that wouldn’t stop nephews and nieces and more and more distant cousins from making a sort of pilgrimage to an otherwise unremarkable town and holding out their arms.
Walter—
El Dorado—and those golden eyes.
You were right. Leland Oldham did indeed show up, and I saw him first through that screen—
The toad.
He was short, but not squat, pudgy but not really fat and not round. Dark-haired and balding, but through the screen I couldn’t make out the features of his face. I had to take Rosalyn’s word for it that he had a goatee. It must have been very sparse. He wore a sports shirt and pants that might have come from the Whalen plant. He’d arrived at a moment when Ellie was not twisted back around, but there was no doubt Leland Oldham saw me see him. He stood there until …
Until Ellie saw you looking and read the expression on your face.
I was probably squinting to make out what I could. And probably tightening my jaw.
And then she turned around.
And a cloud shadow passed over her face. She seemed to let out a long breath. She risked a glance at me, and I felt for her then. She was like a spoiled child who couldn’t help herself, who knew she was asking for just one more little favor, after which she promised to behave. She did say, I’ll be right back, please don’t go anywhere, with a hoarse flutter in her voice, which she needed to clear and try again, and then she walked up the Chambers House’s main hall to the front door, more steadily than I expected.
And didn’t come back.
Oh, she did. Five minutes later. She wasn’t out there long. Under one of the live oaks, I suppose, which a hundred miles farther south would be hung with tatters of Spanish moss, blowing in the breeze.
With her beau, the toad-man, with that little wisp of Spanish moss hanging off his chin.
She came back, she smiled, she went on, Oh, Jim, it’s so good to see you, so, so good, don’t be such a stranger, practically breaking into song as women down there often do when they have nothing more to say.
Or maybe the toad slipped her something from his flask out under the Spanish moss.
There was no Spanish moss.
Rolling in the kudzu?
Walter—
I’m sorry. I just hate what’s going to happen. I’ve told you. I’m very partial to your aunt.
Ellie came back. The check came, and it came to her. They knew her there. There was no way I was going to be allowed to pay. She paid with large bills, two twenties, one might have been enough, and that did occur to me, that under the oaks Leland Oldham had slipped her the twenties, which she had at hand, that already he was that much in control. I said, Ellie, please think about what we talked about. There’s no reason to marry now, you know that. And if you do marry, there’s certainly no reason not to have a prenuptial agreement drawn up, it’s a mere formality, your father and your brother wouldn’t think twice, in fact they’d be amazed if—
And she cut me off, she interrupted me in the quietest of voices, conversational, as though out of consideration she needed to remind me of something. It may be a formality up north, Jim, she said, but we’re different down here. She smiled. She wasn’t taunting me. She’d been talked to. She’d gotten some coaching outside. Tell me the truth. Isn’t that why you keep coming back to see us? Don’t you like us the way we are?
It was only when we were outside that she named him and identified him as the shadowy man behind the screen. Leland was so sorry he couldn’t come in. He had to run. He’d love to meet you, though. Can’t you stay another day? Then my littlest cousin, pouting, slipped into the little girl. Oh, why can’t you, Jim? I smiled and shook my head. You’re just being a tease, she said. You always liked to tease, especially when you grew that beard.
So you do remember that, I said.
You looked like a man from the mountains.
My beard was trimmed, I said. Mountain men don’t trim their beards.
Now everyone has one. Please come back. Promise me. Please do.
Ellie, I came to see your mother. I forced her to meet my eye. It’s very possible I might not see her again.
She flinched, but recovered. She was brittle but she didn’t break. In fact, I believe she was convinced I owed her something, which I didn’t dispute. How could anyone in our family dispute the fact they were in debt to the Whalens? And I don’t mean for just shirts and pants. She said, I want you to promise me one thing. I’m not saying there’ll be a wedding, but if there is, I want you to promise me you’ll come. You missed my first one, you know.
Well, judging by the outcome, Ellie …, I said, trailing off on a sympathizing note.
Which she picked up on, the sympathizing, that is. She tried to laugh, but the laughter caught in her throat so that, more a sigh of sadness than a laugh, she had to try again. This the daughter of a woman whose laughter rose as cool and clean as a spring from the inner earth that no one in the family thought would ever run dry.
In the end I didn’t even attend my aunt’s funeral, I told Walter. How in the world did Ellie think I’d come see her marry the toad?
What are you saying? Walter was genuinely nonplussed. You attended her son’s funeral and her husband’s, but not hers, your favorite aunt?
I failed her, I said. It was as simple as that.
How can it be that simple? What were you thinking, Jim?
Neither the funeral nor the wedding. Thrift, thrift in absentia, Horatio, which I wasn’t sure Walter would pick up on, lawyers, unlike certain princes, not being prey to thoughts accompanied by their counter-thoughts, otherwise how could they ever argue a case to a conclusion, much less win it? But it didn’t really matter, because it was in that moment that we heard a series of slashing chords coming out of the near darkness, at which point, in answer to Walter’s question, I said, If it isn’t Byron Wainwright trying to play “Rite of Spring” on his cello, I have no idea what it is.
But of course Walter was right. It wasn’t that simple. The family gathered for the funeral, and if I wasn’t the only one missing, I was the one that mattered, and it was talked about. It wasn’t her daughter’s marriage to a man she found loathsome that had tipped my aunt into her grave—for, as in Hamlet, the funeral preceded the marriage by a month—but it was my acknowledged failure to protect her daughter and her daughter’s fortune that brought on her end. I was told my aunt had given up. Not that nature had taken its rapid course, but that she had paved the way for it. I don’t know how that can be said. I’d reported back to her what had been determined and not determined at that lunch, and of course Rosalyn sank in her chair and whatever color was left went out of her cheek, but that’s not the same as my aunt saying, I surrender, you win, Mr. Toad, take it all, the pot’s yours. She thanked me for my efforts, she tried to get me to spend the night, her son’s boyhood twin beds where Phil Hodge and I had slept were still there, perhaps unslept in since then, the room unchanged, a shrine within a shrine, the sheets twenty-five years clean, and I turned her down. Briefly, she tried to hold me there with family gossip, talk of Howie’s children, three of whom had taken their millions, spent it, and scattered over the map. The oldest, Alan, had come and gone and had presently gone again, but she asked me to guess who had come back, in the wake of a failed marriage, and—and that was when I learned what had happened to Howie’s lakefront house, how Laurie Whalen had realized that as long as it was known as her husband’s death house it would never sell, so she took it off the market and in what was regarded as a pique of self-impoverishment tore it down, only to get all her money back by selling off the land as five narrow lakefront lots, cheek by jowl. My aunt told me Laurie had come by to see her, but it was hard on her, on both of them. Lacking Howie, and three of the four children seemingly gone for good, they had little to say to each other. My aunt had an address, a crosstown condo. Why didn’t I spend the night in Howie’s boyhood bed and then the next morning drive over there and see if I could find her? And how could I begin to explain to my aunt that crossing town now would be like Achilles trying to catch up to Zeno’s tortoise, I could run and run and never get there, never catch up to that turtle, never get to Laurie’s condo, halve the distance, halve that and halve it again, that my only recourse was to drive out of town along the route her husband had once traced on a map, Big Howie Whalen, who had wished me and my Yankee friend good luck and sent out a state trooper to see us on our way, and damned if we hadn’t caught fish.
I kissed my aunt. She was slumped in her chair, the steel gone out of her eyes. Her maid May met me at the kitchen door, the same door Big Howie had been trying to reach when he’d collapsed partway up the walk. You come back now, you hear, Miz Ros-lyn be waitin’ for you, which was half true and half false, or perhaps entirely true in that, snakes coming in all shapes and sizes, Rosalyn would be waiting for me to come back and finish what a little Boston bulldog had started. Or did I think life was one long series of handouts? Didn’t I know there was a price to pay?
I stepped outside while Walter prepared a stew whose ingredients he’d brought from home. Byron Wainwright appeared to have played himself into submission and either sat spent on his dock or had gone back up to his house. But I didn’t walk down toward the lake. I walked back up toward the car, passed it, and in the darkness started out along a path leading into the woods. Whether in or out of coverage I didn’t know, but I took maybe twenty-five or thirty paces into the woods, where leaves rustled and the path felt mossy and damp, and stopped when I came to the first widening and I smelled before I could hear or see it a small stream. Then I heard it, on a frequency all its own, water slipping over shards of shale, and the smell was clean, rank and clean, earth and water and stone.
I had coverage and I made the call. The face of the phone cast its alien glow into the surrounding foliage until I put it to my ear. Elaine answered by asking, Where are you, Jim, and I told her, Off by myself, talking to my ex-wife who remains the only woman in my life while our mutual friend Walter Kidman makes supper, and Elaine laughed. Where exactly, she said, and I told her I’d just stepped into a dark wood. She was about to laugh again, but caught it. She had the sort of voice that came through clear on a phone, for which a phone served to filter off all impurities so that you heard the voice’s music, and frequently I’d called her for no more than that, to listen to her speak. She said, How dark, Jim, and I told her my eyes were adjusting, it was all right, as always it was good hearing her voice, and it had been very good spending this time with Walter, whose cooking—and she interrupted me. Jim, why the dark wood? For a moment I didn’t say anything, I let her hear the passing stream, the insects, the breeze in the trees, three orders of nature, wind, water, and a tiny, multitudinous pulsing of life, before answering, Just for some privacy, before we sit down to eat. She caught a second laugh. I could picture her face, she had dark eyes, which when her expression turned serious had a leveling effect, she settled the way a bird settles on a nest, she spread out and then there was work to be done, eggs to hatch, and no humoring her. Are you getting along, you and Walter? I answered, Yes. Fishing? Once. Cards? No. Sightseeing? A half-empty town. Drinking? Yes. Too much? Not so far. Yet you’re passing the time. I’m telling Walter a story, I said. It was never actually a fishing story, even though that’s how it began. Now it’s something else. A story you haven’t told me? No. Yes. A story I haven’t told you. A guy story? Well, that’s also how it began. And you’re worried you can’t keep it up? You don’t want to disappoint our friend? You’ll keep going and keep going and then it will be—what? A shaggy dog story, I said. Elaine said, You know, I’ve heard that expression countless times and never quite been sure what it meant. A story, I said, with no point and an anticlimactic end. A story that arouses large expectations and then abandons them. A joke on the listener, which some listeners never forgive. Actually, Walter brought the expression up. Then he gave me a second chance. Elaine and I held a silence. I held it, then passed it on to her. A dove began to coo overhead, a deep-breasted, chuckling sound. Finally, I concluded, the joke’s on you. Your story goes nowhere. When you have a chance to end it, you don’t. What goes around comes around, and before it’s over your shaggy dog has bitten you in the butt. Walter would never do that, Elaine objected, he’s not going to allow your shaggy dog to bite you in the butt, Jim. Then she didn’t check her laugh, healthy and deeper in her chest than her voice would lead you to expect. What’s he making for supper? Some sort of stew, I believe. Enjoy it, she said. Better go before he rings the supper bell. Before she could hang up, I said, I might call you again, Elaine. Don’t be surprised if I do. There was a long pause as the forest sounds swarmed in, accompanied by the passing of that stream. Then she said, Do you want me to drive over there, Jim? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? That wasn’t what I was trying to tell her, not at all, I really did just want to hear the sound of her voice. But what I ended up saying was, Not yet.