1966
Leonard “Lenny” Sikorsky picked the yellow note off the front desk register: L, please get 308 ready by four, he managed to decipher—his father’s meticulous, tortured script almost painful to look at. It was a reminder that the Fellmans were arriving that afternoon. An unnecessary reminder, as he had been anticipating the return of Rachel Fellman, and Rachel Fellman’s breasts, for several months. At that very moment, the Fellman family—Dr. Fellman, and Mrs. Fellman, and Rachel Fellman and her breasts—were all riding the Hudson Line up from Manhattan and would be sheltered that night by the Neversink’s new slate roof. Len had expended quite a bit of emotional and sexual energy thinking about Rachel and her breasts since the last time she’d been there, when he’d kissed her and touched them at night by the pool as it glowed a soft green, like the marquee for a porno theater he’d seen the year before on a trip down to New York with a couple of friends, local guys. They’d stayed in a Times Square flophouse and the marquee had flashed all night outside their window, as though to remind them of all the easy city trim they’d talked big about scoring on the drive down and hadn’t, instead sitting in a shy little line at McSorley’s, drinking their tourists’ steins of bitter. Birds on a wire, some joker had laughed in their direction. The name of the movie had been Brigitte in Paris. Brigitte in Paris, over and over.
He’d snuck in to see it the next evening, having spent the day moping around midtown in a hungover funk and finally ditching the other two in the hotel room with a twelver of Old Milwaukee. Buying the ticket felt like a criminal act, and he’d been amazed no sirens sounded when he pushed through the red theater door. The place was small, dark, and smelt of bleach. The film, when it clattered and whirred to life, told the tale of a young American woman on vacation getting fucked by a series of Frenchmen—you could tell they were French because they wore striped shirts and, in one case, a beret. Len found himself bored, and realized he’d much preferred the buildup (thinking about seeing it, peeling away from his friends, skulking around Times Square, buying the ticket, and the four minutes of plot before Brigitte’s clothes came off) to the fucking itself, the flickering pricks circling the juddering cunt.
Rachel’s cunt—he fingered the dirty word naughtily, having only recently been exposed to it in a bootleg Lenny Bruce album—would also be arriving with her and her breasts. But this was too much to expect or even contemplate while manning reception. He had to think of other things, anything but Rachel. Oh God. A family of four pushed through the front door and approached the front desk, but Len remained seated—having determined it was better to seem rude than expose the grotesque bulge in his slacks. He greeted them, signed them into the guest registry, swiveled in his chair to grab their key (fortunately a first-floor room, hanging within reach), said if there was anything he could do to make their stay more comfortable to just call down. Hopefully by that point, he’d be able to stand again.
He ran through his standard mental list of unsexy thoughts, but each time Rachel inserted herself: standing bored in left field, there was Rachel playing third in front of him, naked; picturing his grandmother, recently deceased, wrapped in a ratty shawl, there was Rachel smiling in her place. Finally, he resorted to thinking about reports of the latest vanished child, though these abductions had simply become part of the background here over the course of his young life.
Not that young: twenty-three years, which should have been enough time to outgrow this sort of adolescent nonsense. He’d recently attended the wedding of one of the Times Square trio, and sometime, perhaps not too long from now, he would be expected to assume the daily management of the hotel. He needed to grow up.
But growing up here in Liberty, especially under the auspices of the Neversink and the great Jeanie Sikorsky, was part of the reason he hadn’t grown up, hadn’t seen Times Square until he was twenty-one, was capable of stirring his own member by thinking dirty words. He was not only a rube, but a pampered, sheltered rube, a provincial scion. The Hotel Neversink was its own little kingdom, quaint and wholesome and lagging some fifteen years behind the culture of an area that was itself already ten years behind. The great capitalized happenings of the decade—San Francisco and Dylan and the Beatles, and the ongoing military intervention in Vietnam—were like words you heard spoken through the hotel’s walls. You could make them out but they were muffled and vague, meaningless. Apparently there was a sexual revolution under way, but not around here, not that Len could see. Here, it was matrons in one-piece swimsuits and generous portions of rich Eastern European food that put you to sleep by eight o’clock. There were lots of children, so presumably sex was being had by the guests, or had been at some point, but it was difficult, not to mention somewhat unpleasant, to imagine, not that he didn’t try.
He himself was not a virgin, though that was a matter of considerable parsing, a sexual exegesis he had conducted since the event, almost two years earlier. He had been down at the Liberty Lounge, a place verboten by the Sikorsky elders and therefore irresistible, with one of the Times Square friends and two girls. The girls were from some other upstate hamlet, in for the weekend for a reason he had forgotten immediately upon hearing it. A cousin’s wedding, a great-uncle’s funeral. He’d lied about who he was, both to protect the family name and to avoid possible antisemitic frigidity. There had been lots of beer and poorly played pool, and then they were back at his friend’s apartment, a little second-floor place off the main drag, above a consignment store. They had shared one more beer and listened to a record; then the friend had peeled off with the prettier of the two, leaving Len and the girl—the Girl, as he thought of her now, since, to his great ongoing embarrassment, he could not remember her name—alone.
She was a big girl, tall and with a look of having been attached by her big toe to an air pump and inflated. Even her hair was large—auburn curls that gathered in piles like the leaves Michael raked together on the front lawn of the hotel. She laughed a great deal at Len’s lame stories and jokes, exposing a set of teeth as white and wholesome as jugs of milk in a grocery-store aisle, but there was a brittleness to her manner that made him uneasy. He sensed she was overcoming her uncertainty about this evening with a kind of forced jollity, and though he wanted desperately to lose his cherry, he also wanted to tell her hey, it’s all right. We can just sit here and play records.
But then she was undressing, had her blouse off, was on him, heavy and white and soft. Dion’s voice issued from the turntable, slightly warped and drunkenly under speed. I open up my shirt and show ’em Rosie on my chest. She smelled of yeast and chemical lemon—she had mentioned something about cleaning houses for a summer living—and had her hand down his pants, rubbing him with great zest as though assailing an especially tenacious patch of shower mold. Still, her technique was effective, and for a moment she looked down at her handiwork with something like surprise before returning to her rubbing, her buffing. A clotted heat rose up his body as she lay back, pulled her skirt up around her midsection and pulled her underwear down, far enough. That it was finally happening, and with a redheaded shiksa at that, was nearly unbelievable, as were the two words she spoke in a hoarse voice, her first sincere sentiment of the evening.
“I’m wet.”
He was hard, he was ready. But his pants were wrapped around his legs like a tourniquet, and he could not seem to pull them off. With a brutal yank, they finally released their grip, but detaching them had detached him from the proceedings. For a moment, he seemed to be looking on at this messy tableau with his mother. She cast a sideways look of familiar, leveling disappointment, and it was as though a twanging wire taut inside of him had suddenly been snipped.
He felt himself soften as he plunged toward the girl with a desperation at horrible odds with desire. With his pants still garroting his calves he lowered himself, and she maneuvered him in, approximately. As she did, his thoughts turned toward the time—though, probably, it had been in his mind all night—this had happened before, with a friend from yeshiva school named Rita Meyer, a fun, friendly, somewhat naughty girl whom he probably should have married, who’d gotten naked with him one night in room 324 during a high school dance held at the Neversink. He’d lain helplessly in bed, his pale penis beached on the shore of his leg like a mollusk. Rita had feigned sleep, little reproving snores that mimicked the disgust he felt for himself, for ruining what could have been such a frolic, their young, naked bodies instead withdrawn to each side of the bed in a parody of old marriage.
The redhead bucked and sighed, and it was over. He courteously excused himself and walked home in the late autumn wind, desolate and determined not to think about what had just happened, only to spend the next eighteen months dwelling on it. He uncontrollably dwelt on the shame, an affectionate regret toward that big girl and her forgotten name. But also: Did it count? Like the old rebbe who stayed for weekend retreats, drinking tea in the sunroom, engaged in endless obscurantist debate over one minor Talmudic detail or another, what his father scornfully called pilpul—he’d settled on yes, a technical, qualified yes. A momentary breach. Though he wasn’t sure. Irritating to now be unable to rid himself of an erection, to have to surreptitiously tuck it up into his waistband as he rose. He had to go prepare the Fellmans’ suite as his mother had asked. He pushed the cart in front of him, feeling indecent as he passed grandmothers and children, nodding good morning, hello.
The maid had already turned down the room—one of the three biggest in the hotel—but special touches were expected. Dr. Fellman had performed emergency surgery on his mother when she’d gone down to the city with a burst appendix she’d thought was gas, and he’d also diagnosed Len’s Uncle Joe’s melanoma early on. As such he was treated with the same respect as a visiting sports figure or dignitary. Better than that, actually—the Dutch ambassador to the UN, visiting the Catskills a couple of months earlier, had not received such attention. For instance, a vase of fresh-cut flowers—yellow irises and spires of lilac larkspur—from his mother’s personal garden. A note welcoming them to the hotel, already written by his mother. A selection of blintzes and sweet challah in a glass pastry pan set to warm in the window. A bottle of Latour on ice and a selection of library books handpicked by Henry for a perfect week of summer reading.
Taking a last look at the room, something in him rebelled at its fussiness, and at his own. A breach, not a breach! What did it matter? He went back to the writing table, pulled the ballpoint pen from his pocket, and wrote a note—one sentence, divided into two lines, like a couplet—on the hotel stationery. This he tore off and read in the light streaming in through the window.
I’ve been waiting so long
for you to come back and fuck me.
It was insane, of course, and he began to wad it up. But a combined sense-memory of his strivings with the redhead and Rita, and the little agonies of those failures in memory since, stopped him. He was fussy and timid and polite, had always been so, would become more so with every passing day, month, year. What about the sexual revolution, what about his own wild youth? He feared he was his father’s son—poor Henry Cohen, a student librarian at Stony Brook when he met Jeanie, overmastered by his wife and her family to such an extent that he’d let the children keep the Sikorsky name. Boldness was needed, even if it backfired, even if Rachel was repulsed by his chutzpah and wanted nothing more to do with him. Better that than being a good little boy, nervous and willing but unable. He put the note under Rachel’s pillow, and he knew it would be Rachel’s pillow, because Mr. and Mrs. Fellman always took the master suite, leaving the smaller room, and bed, to Rachel.
As he plumped the pillow, he looked at his reflection in the window. He was just twenty-three, his head thick with woolly brown hair, his arms corded with muscle from cutting firewood, repairing leaks, doing whatever needed doing around the hotel. He had the olive complexion of his father’s Sephardic line, but the blue European eyes of his mother’s father, Asher. Asher, who had died when Len was five—he barely remembered him, but he did remember being led into the sickroom, standing by the deathbed and holding the great man’s hand. Those still-bright eyes had struggled open, and in their pale depths he saw himself. He came from a bold line, he thought; it was his birthright. And also, there was a reasonably good chance she wouldn’t even notice the note. Leave it to fate.
Outside the window, over the headboard of the small bed, the pool was an emerald square flashing in the midday sun like a movie screen. Brigitte in Paris. He checked the room once more and locked the door behind him, satisfied with his work.
Dinner that evening was interminable, with everyone obliged, as usual, to listen to Dr. Fellman’s stories about his work—long, indecipherable tales with a vaguely moral point hovering about them, like an aimless d’var torah that made you feel guilty for half listening if you found other things more interesting, like, say, the leg of the girl sitting beside you. In the longest story, a young man had come to the office complaining of abdominal pains, and in the process of several examinations and an X-ray—this was slowly revealed throughout the fish course—Dr. Fellman determined that the young man had been swallowing bits of his mother’s makeup. He shook his head at this thought, as if it explained something essential about the state of the current generation. Mrs. Fellman didn’t say much, peering darkly over a wineglass at her prattling spouse.
After dinner that evening, Jeanie and Henry squired the Fellmans to a late comedy show, and Len’s older brother, Ezra, home from grad school for a rare visit, vanished as usual, leaving Len with Rachel in what was known as the parlor. Often, in the evening, the parlor was a lively place full of guests drinking tea before bed, talking or playing cards. But the hotel was underbooked this weekend, late in August when people were getting back to work, when New York was finally beginning to release the heat it had trapped over the summer in a million-billion tons of blacktop and glass. Two old men in the corner played euchre, one puffing now and then with what was either excitement or exasperation, it was impossible to tell.
Rachel was, of course, beautiful, more beautiful than he’d remembered. Although sitting next to her at dinner, stealing glances now and then, he’d been overwhelmed not by her beauty but by her herness, her Rachelness; and something else, closer to smell than any other sensory impression, but more like a continuous vibration or ripple passing through clear water, the intimation of a large thing approaching. Her breasts, it had been reconfirmed, really were unbelievable, though her new, shorter haircut obscurely bothered him. He liked her as she’d been when he first saw her, only fifteen and with her long hair wild, tousled from an open window on the car ride over from the station. This memory of first seeing her as she’d stood in reception—he’d been running fresh towels to the natatorium—had already attained a soft golden burnish in his mind, like a daguerreotyped portrait from ye olden tymes. He lived in a state of constant yearning for the last time he saw her, whether it was five months, five days, five minutes. Even when she was there—even when she was sitting by him, laughing, taking sips from a china teacup—he felt a thick-throated sentimentality, an instant nostalgia for every passing moment.
This was, of course, ridiculous, but then he was ridiculous and he knew it. He loved her. Her: the complicated curves and contours of her throat; the mobile, intelligent eyes scanning his; the mouth gathering in a wry half smile. He didn’t want to fuck her—he wanted to marry her, make her happy. Well, he wanted to fuck her, too, but that would happen as a result of the other stuff. One of the old men in the corner laid down three cards and puffed out his cheeks again—Len was like those old men, he realized; he’d always been old, though he’d tried now and then to impersonate a young person. Rachel interrupted this train of thought, saying, “I’m happy to see you.”
“Me too. You have no idea.”
“I have an idea. I’ve thought about you so much since last time. I haven’t stopped.”
At what should have been the best, most perfect moment of his life, Len was seized with a panic, like a cold hand reaching from the depths of his stomach up through his esophagus, squeezing his throat. I’ve been waiting for you to come back and fuck me, he remembered, in a flushed moment of panic. Jesus Christ, what had he been thinking? The note, which he’d somehow forgotten over dinner, had been a mistake, the toxic combination of stifled libido—his bored, questing prick overheated in the stale air of the hotel—and shame at the thought of previous failures. He said, “Me neither.”
“What’s wrong?” She brushed back a strand of tangled bangs from her left eye.
“Nothing. Just work stuff.”
“I thought you were off.”
“I’m never off.” He stood and said, “I’m sorry, it’s just that I remembered something I told my mother I’d do tonight. Will you meet me at the pool later?”
Her complicit smile, a flicker of pink tongue between bared lips, hummed his blood. “Sure. But hurry, I might get tired.”
He smiled back with as much naughtiness as he could muster, then dashed down the hall and up two flights of stairs, rubbing the set of master keys in his pocket like a magical totem that might keep the Fellmans out of the room for the next minute or so. When he ran into Mr. Javits straightening a supply closet across from the Fellmans’ suite, he found the smile had lingered stupidly on his face. Mr. Javits was a fidgety man, the kind who always had to have a project; since his actual job often required very little of him, he liked to “pitch in,” as he called it, relaxing by way of roving the grounds and setting himself to unnecessary tasks with relentless good cheer. He was also a chattering gossip and a meddlesome snoop, apt traits, maybe, given his duties at the hotel—monitoring employee behavior and the moral probity of guests—but nonetheless, Len had never liked him.
“What are you so happy about?” said Mr. Javits.
“Nothing.”
“Where are you going?”
“308. The Fellmans are out, and I remembered that I forgot to grab something from their room.”
“You remembered you forgot, huh?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t forget to remember you forgot, and it’s a good thing you ran into me, because I ran into Mrs. Fellman a little while ago, before she went in.”
“She’s in there?”
“She seemed a little schnockered, said she was going to sleep, and I’d be willing to bet she wouldn’t be so wild about getting woken up, even by such a young, strong, handsome buck such as yourself.”
“Crap.”
Mr. Javits tilted his head. “This thing can’t wait until morning?”
“Not really. Maybe if she’s asleep, I can just duck in.”
“Probably not such a good idea, what with the—you know.”
“The children?” There had been another a few weeks ago, one town over. Another fruitless search party. Len had read about it in the paper.
“Yes.”
Mr. Javits was unusually silent and Len found himself wanting, perversely, to press. “You have any theories on it? I was thinking, what if it was someone here? Like a deliveryman or something, someone who moves around the area a lot?”
“No!” Anger flashed across Mr. Javits’s face, and Len was afraid—he’d never seen the man close to upset, or in any mode other than rambling and fussing. “I’m tired of the talk around here. This kind of speculation is poisonous to the hotel, to the good people who work here. We cannot begin doubting each other, looking over our shoulders, thinking maybe this coworker is a murderer, this friend a monster. Do you understand?”
“Sure, yeah. Sorry.”
“Good.” The usual look of benign inanity reassembled itself on his face. “Okay, Lenny, I have to pitch in with setup for tonight’s show. I’ll see you.”
Mr. Javits walked away, and Len waited, then moved in front of the door, wavering. He knocked lightly, to no response. After a third knock went unanswered, he put the master key in the lock and turned it. “Hello?” he said.
The door sighed open, releasing musty trapped air. He closed the door behind him, pressing his towels—his alibi, however lame—to his chest, and peeked to the left, into the master. Seeing no one, he relaxed—nosy Mr. Javits had probably gone to scrub a toilet when Mrs. Fellman reemerged and went back down to the show. He walked into the guest room, retrieved the note from under the pillow with a sigh of relief, and was turning with it in his hand when someone walked in.
It was a woman. It was Mrs. Fellman. It was Mrs. Fellman naked. Not entirely naked—she still wore her eyeglasses, fogged over from the shower. He expected her to scream, but she just stood there.
“Lenny?” she said. Almost as an afterthought, she raised a forearm over her pendulous breasts and dropped a hand to fig-leaf her crotch, though it was already obscured by a thicket of dark hair. The effect of her nakedness was odd—she looked enough like Rachel to be easily superimposed over the image Len carried of her daughter in his head. She was Rachel accelerated and enlarged—Rachel plus twenty-five years and pounds.
“I was—” Len tried and failed to think what it was he was doing. Cleaning the room? Removing a dirty note some insane person had left behind? “—delivering towels.” He handed one to her from the stack and she wrapped it around herself.
“What?” They looked together at the rectangle of paper in his hand. Mrs. Fellman walked unsteadily across the room, backing Len against the bed. Len held the note to his side, and Mrs. Fellman snatched at it.
“Leonard.” She pressed forward, mashing herself against him, forcing him half-backward onto the mattress. Len held the note behind him, the way he did when playing keepaway with some young visiting cousin. She grabbed again, two, three times, practically lying on top of him. He felt himself stiffen, God help him, and he surrendered the note. She backed away, primly adjusting her glasses to read.
As she did, the pool light outside came on. Under one of the new halogen lamps that Len had bought at great expense for Michael to install sat Rachel in a deck chair. Rachel, and Yogi, the young lifeguard he had instructed to leave her alone, to let her stay past the usual nine o’clock all clear. Watching her, he felt calm, detached from the situation. Ah, Rachel! She brushed her hair back and peered down at a book, probably a preparatory reading for one of her upcoming freshman classes at Vassar. A Vassar girl and him!
But no, it wouldn’t be now, it couldn’t be. Mrs. Fellman lowered the note and said, “Sit down,” though Len was sitting. She perched on the corner of the bed, still looking down at the filthy sentences.
“Do you want to maybe put on some clothes?” said Len.
“I assume this was meant for Rachel?” He couldn’t bring himself to answer, and Mrs. Fellman said, bitterly, “I’ll have to assume, if not, that it was meant for me.”
“Yes,” said Len.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, it’s to Rachel.”
Mrs. Fellman looked at him with her usual expression, as though she were frozen midkvetch. She did complain a lot—about New York in the winter, Israel in the summer, the state of city schools (though Rachel and her older brother had both gone to private yeshivas), an underheated dish in the restaurant, an overfirm cushion, or really anything that crossed her mind—but, despite this, Len had always liked her. He sensed a kindness under the crossness, and found the kvetching playful, somehow girlish, a transparent ploy for attention with the implicit understanding that she wasn’t really upset—unlike his own mother, who, on the rare occasions she complained about something, was to be taken seriously, with the source of displeasure dealt with pronto, in his father’s words.
Mrs. Fellman began to cry.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. It was just a dumb note. A joke. I didn’t mean anything by it, I really like your daughter, and—”
“No, you don’t understand,” she said between sobs, then sobbed harder.
With a sense of great trepidation overwhelmed only by his regret at having upset her like this, he scooted beside her and gingerly patted her back. “What is it?”
She untucked the edge of the towel from over her left breast and moved it up to her eyes, and it came away with a smudge of mascara that had survived the shower. She took a deep breath and said, “Leaving the note for Rachel was foolish, but I don’t mind, Lenny. I’m not stupid, you know. You’re young, you have desires. It’s more that—I’m sorry, you don’t want to hear about this. Why don’t you go?”
“No, you can talk to me.”
“Ach. Harry hasn’t touched me in so long, I couldn’t even tell you. Two years, has it been? And only then when he’d had a little too much wine during Seder, and he went right to sleep afterward. He’s very busy, you know, the big doctor.” On the last word, her voice caught, and she took a few deep breaths. “So I look at this note,” she still held the damn thing in her hand, Len realized, “and it doesn’t make me angry. It makes me jealous. Not of you, Len, but of being wanted like that. And I wonder if I ever will be again.”
“Mrs. Fellman,” he said.
“Diane.”
“Okay,” he began. The familiar was like an unpleasant bite of food in his mouth, hard to chew, hard to swallow. Still, he managed it: “Diane—”
“Wait. And I know my daughter—I know Rachel is beautiful. But I was too, once. I was a great beauty, do you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Do you? I was prom queen at my high school. I was the envy of them all. My neck used to be long—like a swan’s is the cliché, but it’s true. Not this fireplug I have now. I had to literally fight the boys off, Lenny. It seems so recent, and now. Now! Harry going on at the table like that, boring everyone. Oh, we have a nice life, I know I’m lucky, but still.”
Her back heaved twice more under his hand, and she shook her head. “Jealous of my daughter, what could be more ridiculous?”
“Diane, you have no reason to be jealous.”
“The old are always jealous of the young.”
“You shouldn’t be—it’s not that great.” She laughed, spurring him on. “And you’re still beautiful.”
She looked at him, checking, he saw, for sincerity, and finding it, he hoped. Because, at that moment, he meant it. Though he’d never seen her that way—had seen her only as a mother, a figure to be circumvented and appeased, a dark presence behind the bright light of her daughter—he did see it now. He saw her as a woman, a desirable woman, with dark hair and dark eyes that held forty-something years of a life’s secrets, erotic and otherwise. He felt the warm body beneath his hand, beneath the thin, damp fabric of the towel, and he felt the rushing blood of his heart. And in the same instant he saw Rachel, as she would be after twenty years of marriage, a vision of present and future merged into the person of the woman who had given birth to her, Rachel before Rachel, Brigitte in Paris.
If the look on his face had not confirmed his sincerity, the tent in his pants did. Mrs. Fellman looked at it, and he hunched over, mock-casual, with his arms crossed. She briskly pulled his arm away, and as though addressing a very good dog, she patted his crotch fondly—once, twice, three times. “You’re a sweet boy, Lenny. I’m going to sleep.”
She got into the master bed and reached for the bedside light, but Len had already grabbed the note and stuffed it into his back pocket, already fled the room, already moved into the bright hall, the clean, blameless hall still smelling of lemon bleach from the day’s cleaning, already clamored down the stairs, already moved outside, past the locked gate and onto the wet concrete of the pool, where Rachel was just getting up from her chair. Yogi had left; there was no one around.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” she said.
“I wanted to come earlier; I just got stuck on that job.”
“No rest, huh?”
“No.”
They embraced, were kissing, and she felt him against her, and he felt her feel him. He had brought the erection downstairs with him, like a family heirloom being handed down from one generation to the next.
“Come on,” he said, his voice thick with urgency, and led her into the thatched shadows of the newly re-roofed cabana bar.
Afterward, pants rolled to the knee, he sat beside her on the lip of the pool, lightly kicking his bare legs in the cool water. A leaf floated past, tilting up and down on the ripples. She put her hand on his, and he sighed in amazed contentment. There was no question now, no parsing needed. He was a man, finally, his bar mitzvah notwithstanding. He’d performed admirably, and he indulged himself in looking, a little magisterially, at Rachel and the Neversink, the Neversink and Rachel.
How strange, he thought, to have everything you wanted by twenty-three. In a way, perhaps, disappointing. And yet, how great—how great to know this would be your life, to have only to live it. As though in emulation of his soaring spirit, a summer wind blew through, bothering the water, tossing Rachel’s hair, stirring the dark trees that surrounded them, witnesses to their love and to what he would later know to be the happiest moment of his life.