2011

He began helping Alice with her CP exercises. This had been one of Aisha’s jobs, he knew, and before Aisha, her mother’s. She would lie on a roll-up mat in her bedroom and close her eyes and concentrate while Sandy flexed her leg, stretched her wrist forward and back, provided resistance for this or that muscle. He would touch her as gently as he could, trying his best to do a good job, keep a buoyant manner even though he knew he was hurting her. There was something about it, something about the touching and the trust and the pain and the vulnerability of it all, that was more intimate than the other intimacy.

She showed him what she called her “retard bicycle,” which was this adult tricycle that was supposed to be part of her exercise program back when she was a teenager. She’d ridden it exactly once, she said, and it had sat in the carriage house ever since. Sandy had wheeled it out into the daylight, and over her protests—it was just too uncool, she said, it was a fat lady’s bike—hosed it down and set it in the sun to dry. And then he went back into the carriage house and got out Tom’s old racer, oiled the chains and derailleurs: hey?

At first she’d only ride up and down the driveway, but in time he coaxed her out onto the sidewalk along Bellevue, and then down Coggeshall. She had a hitching way of pedaling—good leg, bad leg—and went so slowly Sandy had to keep circling back to her. All the same they made it down to the Forty Steps once, once to the Redwood Library, and then, for her chef d’oeuvre, the three miles out to the Brenton Point breakwater, where they had a picnic on the lawn with the ocean in the distance, the salt smell of the air and the screaming gulls, and a dozen colorful kites overhead like fireworks.

On their way back he told her that he loved her. It had just come out of him, unbidden, unplanned. He had been circling back to her on his bike, swooping around behind her tricycle, and there they were, the astonishing words. He circled back again, and then again, and each time he said it—“I love you!”—she had this little smile on her face like “Well, of course you do!” After the third time he took off down Bellevue as fast as he could go, feeling the burn in his muscles, the wind in his face—amazed at himself, and stupidly happy, and stunned all at once.

It was a few days afterwards that something happened, or rather, something was revealed. Something Sandy wasn’t quite sure how to take. They had gone—the three of them, Aisha too—to Cardines Field for a baseball game, sitting in the old wooden grandstand under the lights with the sun going down, and the bush-league loudspeaker, and the moths, and the swallows dive-bombing the outfield, and the players’ girlfriends down along the first row. Sometime around the fifth inning Sandy went to the men’s room and when he came out Aisha was there. She made it look like she was coming out of the bathroom herself, but she wasn’t. She stood before him in that pose former lovers have: arms folded across the chest, head cocked in a question, body there but no longer available. “I see you’re developing a killer instinct after all,” she said, and she gave him this sardonic, meaningful smile.

“Whatever you think it is,” he found himself answering, “it isn’t.”

“Good” was all she said.

“I love her.”

“Good,” she said again. “That will make things easier.” And before he could respond she turned and began walking toward the exit. “Enjoy yourself,” she called over her shoulder.

But that wasn’t the thing that happened, the thing that was revealed. That was back in the grandstand after another inning or two. He and Alice had barely spoken, just a kind of summery contentment between them, the sky over the third-base line darkening to purple. Aisha had left her sweater for Alice and Alice put it on now against the chill, tried to pull the cuffs down, made a wry face at Sandy over its being too small for her.

“She’s such a shrimp,” she said and, when Sandy merely smiled in response, cocked her head a little as if debating something with herself, and then added: “She’s my heir, you know.”

He allowed himself a little quizzical look, but inside he felt a stirring, as though something that had been vague and uncertain before, something he had only barely been aware of, was on the verge of announcing itself.

“What?” he said.

She turned back to the field, watched a batter strike out, and then started in on how she had a list of things she had to do at least once every summer. Every summer she had to tell the docents at Touro Synagogue they were immoral for never mentioning the slave trade, and she had to go to the Historical Society to see the cowrie shells that had been found in the Selwyn-Lyman House, and have dinner with the cherubs in Da Silva’s sitting room, and sit quietly in the Quaker Meetinghouse, and go into Henry James’s Funeral Home, and out at the Burial Ground say a prayer over the slave gravestones. And every summer she had to thank Aisha for saving her life.

“Those are the coordinates of my being,” she said. “You might want to know them.”

Still he kept a guarded smile. He was trying to figure out his own reaction. Why so struck? Why did he feel as if some suspicion had been confirmed?

“Does she know that?” he asked finally.

“Does she know about the coordinates of my being?”

“Does she know she’s your heir?”

She kept looking straight ahead, watching the game, enjoying the drama. “Yes,” she said finally.

“You told her?”

“Yes.”

“Does Margo know?”

At that, she turned to him, looked him over. “No,” she said. “Nor Tom.” And then, as if she meant to lay out the ground between them: “I’ve got bequests for a lot of things. The Redwood Library, the Whitehorne Museum, Vassar, the Restoration Foundation. But as long as I’m single and childless, the house, and a trust to keep it up—that goes to Aisha.”

He pursed his lips, nodded. Was he being imprudent? Was he open to misapprehension?

“She saved my life,” he heard her say again. “Twice. At college and then that night. Me and Isolde and our Liebestod.”

At which he had enough sense to take her hand, hold it in his lap, and when the seventh-inning stretch came put his arm around her while the crowd sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.”

But afterwards—after he’d brought Alice home, kissed her under the porte cochere—he couldn’t escape the suspicion that he had caught Aisha out, that a curtain had been pulled aside and he’d seen something he hadn’t been meant to see. It had left him with an impression, something that made him so restless that when he got back to the asphalt-shingled nightmare he couldn’t settle and so had headed off down Thames Street to where the people were.

Okay, Aisha was Alice’s heir, but so what? How was that anything more than just another extravagance of Alice’s, another grand gesture? Yes, Aisha had seen fit to withhold the information from him, but what was she supposed to say? Hey, I’m in line to inherit a ten-million-dollar house? It was no business of his. Bad form, really, if she had let him know. Evil to him who thinks evil, Sandifer.

And yet, and yet. He remembered something Aisha had told him about that night, the night of the suicide attempt. This was when she was telling him the whole story, how she’d heard the music, come out of her room, found Alice. Tom had been in New York, she said, but Margo had been home. And here was the thing, she had said with a penetrating look: Tom and Margo’s bedroom was closer to the alcove, and yet it had been she, Aisha, on the other side of the house, who had awoken and wondered what the heck? and had gone out, down the hall, and around the corner and found Alice on the wicker couch, blood everywhere. Was Margo that heavy a sleeper? she’d asked Sandy, and she let the implication hang in the air between them.

And now, as long as he was thinking evil, he might turn that implication back on Aisha. That night—morning, really—after the Champions Ball when Alice had come to her and told her what had happened in the cemetery, why had she up and left for Brooklyn a couple of hours later? Knowing what she knew about Alice, did she think it was safe to leave her alone? No worry of an encore performance of Tristan?

Single and childless, Alice had said. And he understood suddenly something that had happened a couple of days ago. They had gone out to Bailey’s Beach—the three of them plus Margo, Aisha, Tom, and a couple of Tom’s clients—had spent the afternoon there, and afterwards walked back to Windermere along the Cliff Walk. Tom had been sort of needling Sandy the whole afternoon. Didn’t Sandy really belong on Reject’s Beach? he’d asked with his smile, Reject’s being the public beach adjacent to exclusive Bailey’s. When there was more of the same up on the Cliff Walk—this time Tom telling his clients the story of the heiress Doris Duke running the car over her upstart chauffeur, name of Sandy, he believed—Alice had stopped walking, turned a withering look on her brother, and then, in front of everybody, had asked Sandy did he have a condom? Margo had rolled her eyes, said something about Alice being off her medication, eh?

“I believe the well-appointed gentleman always has a condom about his person,” Alice had said. “Wallet?”

It was one of her drama queen moments. There was nothing for it but to play along. So Sandy had fished out a condom and Alice had taken it with her good hand and frisbeed it out over the cliff down toward the water, as if to say to them all: Get it?

He hadn’t gotten it, but now he saw what she had meant. She was staking a claim. A claim to him, to Windermere, to the future, to this new world of Mr. and Mrs. Sandy Alison and their twenty kids. And what did Tom and Margo think of that? And Aisha, in line for Windermere and its trust fund if Alice remained single and childless—what did she think of that?