Absolute Fiction

Years later, his father’s parents long dead, he stood on the same bridge, watching the same river. The creek everyone had called it back then. That was before the side-porch was screened in, before the chickens were sold or killed, their trim yellow coop dragged away behind a farmer’s tractor. The whitewashed pump still cranked water into a washtub. Green glass soda bottles and striped watermelons bobbed like toy seabeasts. Picnic and card tables clustered near the house. As the day progressed, they multiplied across the lawns, spreading in a landscape of hamburgers and cold salads, red Jello islands. Old people, unknown names, wiry country folk. Aged, shadowy, the siblings and friends of his grandparents. For their bones, comfortable chairs were carried from the house, footstools and lap rugs. He would watch from a distance, study their faces, the wooden canes, straw hats, a high-backed wicker wheelchair. One Sunday a woman appeared with an ear trumpet that curled from her head like a long-throated flower. Sometimes his father would pluck him from a game of kickball or badminton and make him stand before a smiling couple. Sweaty, red-faced, afraid of their benevolent gaze, wanting to run. This is my boy his father would say. Or This is my son. Or This is the youngest, the only boy. But no, he corrected himself, staring at the river. Not those words, not a description that exact from his father.

He walked down the road from the first bridge, part of his grandparents’ property, to the second. Abandoned, wild with red sumac, an old mill sat lost, dead with boarded-window silence. In the days of family picnics, a stroll to the farther bridge had been a treat, an adventure. The restless children would recruit an adult for the trip, usually Uncle Guy. Unmarried, childless. An adult but still living at home with his parents, working the railroad with his father. He was every kid’s favorite uncle, the leader of games, arbitrator of disputes. In the fall, he would take them to the far bridge to visit the mill, drink cider that the owner drew from casks with wooden spigots.

Coming to the old house that day, the first time in fifteen years or more, he had waited for his father to ask him how he felt or to reproach him for the long absence. But his father, still tall in his seventies, stiff behind the wheel of his old Mercedes, spoke instead of the house, of repairs it needed, about the new dead end. The rupture between him and his three children was something he never discussed. Not with anyone, Ed was sure. They broke away one after the other. Ginnie first, the oldest, then the middle child, Nance, a few years later. And finally he, the only son, Ed, the last to go. As if leaving behind the father’s clan were some rite of passage that none of them could escape.

Today, the distance between the two bridges seemed barely twenty strides. Coming to the pavement’s end, he saw that the road had been closed off on the bridge’s far side. A fallen tree slanted across the road. A trash can lid was nailed to the peeling trunk. In sloppy letters, black-painted: “No Outlet.” Closing the bridge had diverted the flow of water. In the high seasons, when he was a boy, the river had been a torrent, white-falling ten feet down rocks beneath the mill’s overhang. Now not a ripple broke the silence, only insect drone. Prisoners’ fingers, grass spikes poked through the bridge floor of metal gridwork. He knelt down to pull loose a piece of grass. The road itself had narrowed, scrubby trees growing inward from both sides. Severed from the county route that ran to Port Blake, his grandparents’ road connected only a half-dozen homes. The town supervisor wanted to stop plowing the old road in the coming winter, said that the last residents could pool their money for a contractor. But his Aunt Lucille felt bad for her neighbors that spring when she opened her parents’ home for the summer. One day after she flew in from Hawaii and discovered the closed road, she had made a visit to the supervisor at his home. She knew her family name still meant something in Port Blake.

On any summer day when his grandparents’ many offspring gathered at the house, the kids and teenagers hear a call they think only they can hear. Wherever they are, they stop and break away from games of freeze-tag and statues. Reaching a throng, they run to the closer bridge. Then they divide, run to opposite sides, hug the rails and shout as a car squeezes past their waving arms. But if the old timbers shake, a train is coming. The kids line up on the side facing the New York Central line. Down the river, beyond a sharp bend, a narrow tunnel of space through the woods. Rectangles in rust-dull shades, speeding black and green with names like Lackawana, Bethlehem, Erie, Youngstown. The children wait for a wave from the man riding the caboose, cheer if they get it, boo if the train dies away with no greeting. Who’s riding the caboose that day? they would demand, marching back to the house. Uncle Guy would always know.

He threw his cigarette into the weeds and turned back. Over the first bridge, up the road a quarter-mile, into the driveway. Toss the cigarette pack in his father’s car, remove the lighter from his shirt pocket. The old house sat far back from the road, acres of green on three sides, sea of grass sweeping up a low hill, breaking against the stolid yellow walls. Beyond it, hiding a wire fence made by the railroad, the line of a high boxhedge, parallel with the tracks. He glanced where the chicken house had stood, crossed the lawn, through the kitchen door. You expect places from your childhood to seem smaller than you remember, but even when he was a boy the hammered tin kitchen ceiling seemed too close. He ducked his head as he crossed the rooms, resisting the Alice in Wonderland sensation. The others were gathered on the porch. No drinks or ashtrays or plates of food scattered about. Only his two aunts, his father, and his Uncle Ralph, sharing the glider with his second wife. Port Blake’s annual Erie Canal Days had just ended. His aunts had stories to tell.

“Here you are,” his Aunt Ada said, smiling at him as he paused in the doorway. “Looking at the creek? It’s so low this year. Wish it looked better for your first time back in years. What a draught we’re having, all over the state.”

“Knee-high by the Fourth of July, that’s what the sweet corn should be.” His Uncle Ralph nodding, a broad smile with large, straight teeth. A navy blue knit shirt open at the throat, the V of a clean white T-shirt. Blue polyester trousers, white socks, black shoes. “Stopped to look at old man Doane’s fields today, my way over here. Barely a foot high. Won’t be worth buying.”

“When did they close off the road just past the mill bridge?” He crossed the empty spaces among them, pulled a ladderback chair closer to the group.

Around him the screens rose twelve feet high, clamped securely in white frames freshly painted. A gaggle of locals maintained the house, plumbers, electricians, jacks-of-all-trades. Lucille deployed them from Hawaii, faxed orders to the Port Blake post office, countermanded them with express mail. “Town Council condemned it last year,” she said. “Easiest thing to do was close the road at that end. Funny how everyone always thought it was our bridge that would fall down, but it keeps holding together. The other bridge certainly seemed sturdier, being metal and all, but I guess the grid work is all corroded. You didn’t walk on it, did you? They should have blocked it off this side, too.” Lucille, past seventy, but the family’s baby. Shorts and sandals, her white legs bare, knees level with her chin as she perched on the foot of a chaise lounge. The only woman among his father’s five sisters to make a career. When his grandparents’ home had flourished, she would swoop in without warning, surprise them with slide shows of Spain, Leningrad, Nepal. Now she endured a digesive system turned into mush by radium treatments for cancer. But never a word of sickness from her, no fears of death.

His father remarked about the metal foundry in Weedsport that had made the bridge floor. The owner had died the summer before, just past his one-hundredth birthday. “Dick Mallet his name was. He came out here sometimes, Sundays, in the old days, with his wife. Five kids. Dad worked at that foundry for a few years.”

“Six kids,” Ada corrected, “but one died last year.” Which one? How did it happen? His elders talked, spinning sparse webs of family friends aged or dead, of relatives whose names had floated through his youth detached from faces and bodies. But one name, Jeanette Mallet, halted the flow of associations. Long dead, but Ralph had almost married her, fresh out of high school. Lucille and Ada looked away from Leslie, Ralph’s second wife, almost the same age as Ralph’s oldest daughter. The only sibling ever divorced, Ralph had started a second family with her, fathered three more children a generation younger than his first six.

“But doesn’t it bother you to drive the long way around to get to Port Blake?” He didn’t care about the answer, only wanted to draw attention from Ralph. No one ever referred to Ralph’s divorce, not even by using Ralph and “marriage” in the same sentence. Not even when they talked about Ralph’s first batch of children. He wondered if the six cousins he hadn’t seen in years felt any anger over having their mother’s memory expunged by their father’s people.

“Only adds a few miles,” Lucille answered. “And the road’d gotten so rutted past the mill bridge that most everybody went the long way even before they closed the bridge. Now it’s like having a private road, just so long as Sam Tyler keeps the county plowing it all winter.”

“But the road seems so narrow now. The trees are grown right to the edge of the pavement. It’s like a jungle around the mill.” But Lucille and Ralph only shook their heads. His father sighed.

Ada smoothed over the crease. “Lucille’s been to Tokyo just like you. You’re the only one, I swear, to take after her, running all around the world. Everyone else has stuck to upstate like glue.” Three of her siblings dead, but Ada, the eldest, still tolerant, kind. A swarm of locusts, Kapozi sarcoma clawed at her legs from ankles to knees. Rust-brown, dust-dry patches aching to be peeled away. Her nylon stockings, their clash against her ravaged skin, made the blight seem even more painful. Did she wear them because they kept the flesh from spilling apart? He swallowed hard, Ada’s cancer shouting at him as loudly as Lucille’s kept its silence. He thought of a character in a Williams play who said she couldn’t keep her finger off a sore. He thought of Ada alone at night, nursing her carnivorous plague. He thought of flesh pulling in bloody strands from bone. A shudder caught him, the August air gone cold.

On most Sundays in the old days, Ada would ride to the country home with him, his father, and his sisters. His father behind oversized steering wheels of smooth, hard plastic with finger grooves. The perfect family riding together through years of Buicks and Chevrolets, except the woman sitting in front was Ada, his aunt, not his mother. His father’s black hair, Ada’s neat blonde upsweep, opposite ends of bench seats, back when only sports cars for teenagers had bucket seats. When they drive home, she sits in the back, his small body, then Nance’s, sliding upon her, heads burrowed into her shoulders and lap. Ginnie far away at the end of the long seat, already separate, slumping against the hard door in the dark. For thirty miles, he would grope through waking dreams, begin counting bars of light rolling over the hump in the floor and up the back of the front seat. Fifty bars, sometimes a hundred, before they finally reach the streetlights of Skaneatles. When he left home for college, his connection to Ada all but died. He glanced at her legs again, felt a pang for all the missing years. But the drive to abandon his father’s family had overwhelmed him slowly, as it had his two sisters before him. The night that Ginnie told everyone in the house to go to hell, the series of ruptures began. Decades passed before his sisters, halting, unsure, began their separate paths back.

“Tell us about living in Tokyo, Eddie. We’re all so glad you got out of … where was it? Kuwait? Yes, it sounded so dangerous. And I love your postcards from Japan.”

“And that gorgeous flowered silk kimono.” Lucille strident, hard-lipped. “Most beautiful thing Ada’s ever owned, that’s for sure.”

“Kimono?” Ralph laughed, nudging his wife. “On Ada?”

“I don’t remember getting too old for something new, Ralph. And I’ve had a decent dress or two in my day, Lucille.” Ada huffed, but her tone was playful. Trying to straighten up in her chair, she pushed back against her hunch. “I love my kimono. I leave it hanging out so I can look at it.”

He watched Ada’s face. The bright daylight picked out the black flecks in her hazel eyes. When she was younger, the kids would order her to show them those spots, make her bend over or pick them up for a better view. She would laugh, remove her glasses, open her eyes so wide the irises were surrounded by white, tell them all that only she and Siamese cats had eyes with tiny tongues of flame.

“So tell us, what’s it like, Tokyo?” she asked again.

Describe Tokyo? In a house on a road closed off because metal bridges rot? Describe Tokyo on the porch of his grandparents’ house? But he found topics. Getting immobilized by the crush of bodies in subway cars. Theaters where everyone drinks beer and chain-smokes. But only the apples that cost ten dollars each struck chords in his audience. “Ten of our dollars?” Ada asked. Ralph whistled. Lucille, worldly, nodded.

But the sharpness in Ada’s face dulled in the noon sunlight, her question left unanswered. Ralph turned from his wife, stared at the floor. Even Lucille’s hard edges caught the blur of sudden vagueness. Howard, his father, began resetting his watch. Only Ralph’s wife continued talking, her head bent close to Ralph’s ear. He watched them each in turn, wondering what they heard that he missed. Then he remembered.

Their approach always a thrum through the floorboards, a grumbling glissando. Silver and black cylinders, the passenger trains spring upon the house like jungle cats. Pearl-strung freight trains crash into the mind with rattling teacups, tilting photographs. When the house was filled with families, children faces’ pressed against all the windows when trains passed, watching closely. Later he would whisper with his cousins about how they could jump on a train someday, real hobos, ride it far away from their parents. But only he would follow the trains’ disappearing trails.

Once he had turned from a window to see what the adults did while the house shook. His grandparents in their matched wing chairs separated by a table with the lamp Lucille brought from Germany. Other adults scattered about, some seated, others standing. Ada in the archway between two rooms, long before osteoporosis turned her into a hunchback. Lucille and Ralph at the dining room table, papers spread before them. Uncle Guy in the antique rocking chair, the room’s terror and pride because hands could get trapped between the wooden base and rocker. Still ungreyed, Guy’s thick hair swept up in a brown wave, his eyes bright blue. Next to him, the tall large-hipped woman he would never marry. What was her name? Years after Guy’s death, he had asked Ada why Guy remained a bachelor. For a moment, he thought she might tell him what he suspected. Her benign smile faded, her bright eyes darkened. But then he felt the distant roaring through his chair, an envoy to silence. Her answer died with the oncoming train.

Passing trains delete moments, disrupt connections. For him, for everyone on the screened porch in the buried house at the edge of drapery lawns, a space of green memory, void of time-chased crowds from long ago. Rumbling boxcars swayed, disconnected from the family’s limping survivors by a tall hedge and leaning picket fence. From where he sat, he saw only their roofs, but slowly, straining to catch the black borders separating cars, one day he began counting. And never stopped. Had his compulsion begun with train cars? The entire time he was in Tokyo, he never discovered a Japanese word that translated “phobia.” Stopping on sidewalks to scan skyscrapers top to bottom, counting the floors. Halting mid-step to count the steps of an escalator as they sank into the floor. Something about Tokyo had made the drive stronger. One day he counted all the tiles on the wall of a public restroom before he could stop.

In his teens, watching from the window in the upstairs hall, he had counted to the fifteenth car when someone grabbed his arm, jerked him into Uncle Guy’s bedroom. That summer, she came with his cousin Nina, one of Ralph’s girls, to his grandparents’ home. His sisters would go off with her and Nina, a crowd of younger girls trailing them down to the bridge. No boys wanted. She hit the door shut with her hip, pushed him down on Guy’s bed. As she climbed him, before her mouth covered his, Guy’s narrow, well-cleaned room came at him in angles and dashes. A crucifix above the bed, a Big Ben alarm clock on the table. Three photographs. Guy with Ralph and Howard, three brothers at war. Army fatigues and cloth caps, a snub-nosed fighter plane behind them. Next to that, in a thick wooden frame on the high-topped dresser, Guy’s lady friend in a flowered sundress, waving. On the wall above, where one would expect a mirror, Guy’s parents when they were young.

When she slipped her hand beneath the waistband of his trousers, he rolled over, pushed her down. She laughed up at him, the sound swallowed by the roaring train, her hand still in his pants. He pulled her sweater up, reached for the top buttons on a white blouse with a purple school insignia. As his hand slid over the texture of her bra, she poked her hand through his shorts. Caught in her hard grip, he rolled to one side. Gasping in the fumbling pressure of her hand, he saw another photograph, almost hidden on the lowest shelf of a table in the narrow space between the bed and the wall. A man sitting cross-legged, shoulders straight and square. One hand down by heavy boot soles, the other raised to his head in a two-fingered salute.

Wait he tried to tell the girl. But the train fractured words in his mouth. He felt her squeeze again before he thrust himself away. For a moment, they lay facing each other, his outstretched arms holding her back. Panting, her eyes mocking him, the train’s hard shudders seeped into the walls and floors, fading. Squirming away from her, he reached for the picture. Blond curls flying in a wind beneath a G.I. cap. Dog-tags hanging against a bare lanky chest, smooth and hairless. A smile so honest a cheap war-time camera froze it forever. In one corner, letters half-covered by the black matting, an inscription. “See you soon, pal. Milan, July 1949. Timmy.”

“We didn’t get here until after dark because of the trouble I had renting the car at the airport.” The train gone, Lucille’s sharp voice cut through his thoughts. “And what do we find but the outside floodlight isn’t on. So up the sidewalk we go across the lawn. I always used to keep a penlight on my keychain, need to get a new one. That sidewalk is so long in the pitch dark. And that big crack near the apple tree. Got to get that mason back here to feather over those ridges. I’m carrying both our suitcases in one hand, dragging Ada behind me with the other, trying not to hit the crack.” Her voice dropped, although Ada was in the kitchen, fixing lunch. “She just can’t walk that far anymore, you know. Not between the cancer and having her spine bent over almost double. She swears that if it gets any worse she’ll be staring at the ground the rest of her life. People will have to lie flat on the ground to talk to her face-to-face.”

“Aunt Ada’s cancer—” He spoke quickly, but his father ended it. What happened to the big safety light? he wanted to know. Those mercury lamps never burn out. Important to have that working, the house empty most of the year and all. It was working okay one night not more than a week ago, Ralph assured them. Drove by to check on the place after a potluck at the fire hall. Ralph’s wife nodded. She clearly recalled the light burning that night, same as always.

Opening the door, peering into the hall, sinners quick-stepping down the hallway in opposite directions. After the roll on his uncle’s bed, he sat on the floor next to Uncle Guy in the rocker. Stealing glances downward, he thought something had changed between his legs, that some trace remained visible to others. Was she upstairs in the big corner bedroom, laughing with his girl cousins? His sisters? Waiting through the silence of two more trains, listening to the adult talk, bored with Mitch Miller on television. But his uncle suddenly seemed new, different. The youngest except Lucille, the closest of all the siblings to their parents, best friend to all his nieces and nephews. But for Ed, Guy changed that night. As if that hand on my penis woke me up to all the oddness, he thought. Before that day, the facts of Guy’s life seemed ordinary. The boy-like bachelor with a spartan bedroom in his parents’ home. Coming home at night with his father from the railroad. The twin metal lunchboxes sitting by the cookie jar every night until his father died. Then Guy’s lunchbox sat alone until long after his mother was also dead, until Guy had cancer and stopped working. But after that girl had pulled him onto Guy’s bed that day, after he saw the photograph of handsome blond Timmy, Ed realized that being unmarried was never normal for a man beyond a certain age. In his grandparents’ house, Guy’s status went unremarked, ignored through some coded silence. At that time, Guy was only a few years older than Ed was now.

On the screened-in porch, in the twilight of life for his father’s family, he remembered Guy’s face that night. The girl and Timmy’s picture ended the gliding summers of simple, friendly Guy. And Guy’s courtship with the cheerful woman became strange, occluded. She wore knee-length dresses with large flowers, chased children all around the lawns, white slip flying. The only adult woman who would let the kids pull her into sweaty outdoor games. She had been there one day years before he found Guy’s picture of Timmy, the day that Ginnie, his oldest sister, told aunts, uncles, grandparents to go to hell. Staring through a window into the dark, the reflection of her face barred by a night train’s speeding yellow lights, she said Go to hell into the glass. But she intended it for everyone in the house. Clumped on the loveseat in the downstairs parlor, he saw her hard-fixed jaw, her narrow lips. He drew his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them. Don’t do it Ginnie, he said, shaking with cold sweat, banging his head against the carved wood overarching the loveseat’s heart-shaped back. In the dining room, across the kitchen, out to the lawns, tables waiting to have their heavy flannel cloths removed, the whole world of his father’s family moved beyond his sight, behind his sister’s back, that summer night. It might have been any day in the country. But it was his first at Port Blake after his mother died. His family’s first visit after five weeks of waking paralyzed into long, silent days.

The welcome at his grandparents’ house that day, even from Guy, held him and Ginnie and Nance at bay, blocked them from pestering the adults in their usual way. Just a few words drove them outside, set them eating at the children’s table, pushed them down to the bridge, into games, away from adults. His father was expected to behave like an adult, to join his siblings and parents in forgetting about the dead woman. But the children were too young. Only Guy’s friend sought them out that day. In a lemon yellow dress, she plucked them away from the other children, herded them into her big convertible, drove them to town for milkshakes. On a dirt road, they stopped to watch a herd of pigs in a field. Ed sat with the woman in the front, listening to her rapid chatter. In the back, Ginnie and Nance sat like bookends. When the woman turned?Is your favorite pig here, Ginnie? The black and white one with only one ear??Ginnie looked at the big red cup in her hand. Abruptly, raising her eyes to the woman in the sundress, she flung her milkshake over the door. He watched it sail between two strands of barbed wire. The plastic cup burst, the strawberry liquid making a splat in the muddy grass. Slowly, the woman turned to face the windshield, started the car, her smile tightening into a hard crease. As they pulled away from the field, the pigs’ tiny feet fought for space around the pink circle, their sleek, hard barrels rolling against each other, sides heaving.

Dusk fell as they returned, the house a lighted island on its dark hill. Ginnie marched ahead, left him and Nance to dawdle up the sidewalk with Guy’s girlfriend. When Ed came through the kitchen door, he saw Ginnie walk straight through the house. His mouth went dry as he followed, the taste of chocolate slick on his lips. Suddenly sick, he thought of sharp pig tongues picking milkshake drops from manure-mixed mud. For a moment, Ginnie stood alone in the center of the living room, turning in place, searching. He saw Ginnie look first at Lucille, then at Ada. His grandmother’s pale wrinkled face, white under the German lamp’s harsh glare, concerned. She began to rise, but then his grandfather’s baritone voice rang through the room. The bay windows on the new Penn Central cabooses are stupid, just plain stupid. A rock gets thrown up from the rails and those windows will be smashed sure as jack-squat. Ralph and Guy laughed, nodded their head. Ada, her eyes still fixed on Ginnie, a quick glance at her mother, slowly sat down again, as though the weight of her father’s voice pushed her down. Ed’s father looked once at Ginnie, still a lonely figure in the room’s center, stranded by the grown-up talk of men, the women’s silence. Then his father turned away from Ginnie, joined his brothers and father, laughing.

He bolted through the living room, into the short hall leading to the parlor. Looking back once, he saw Ginnie jabbing her fists at Ada, his aunt trying to catch hold of the girl’s thin wrists, his grandmother rising, clutching the girl from behind. Whatever Ginnie shouted, it included My mother, my mother. Why don’t you ask where she is? A shrill train whistle startled the people filling the room’s many chairs and couches. As the room began roaring, heads turned down, away from each other, from Ginnie punching at Ada. In the darkened parlor, he threw himself onto the loveseat, wishing the noise would never stop, that the whistle would shriek so long no one would remember what Ginnie had said. Then she appeared in the hall connecting the two rooms. Red-faced, breathless, she put her hands against the window frame and shook it, shouting. Far away, at the end of a tunnel, Ada watched, standing by her chair. For a moment, he saw her face askew, saw her gangly body twist in indecision. Then she sat down again, whispered to her mother. Go to hell, Ginnie yelled. Go to hell, go to hell.

Almost thirty years later, his father remarried and widowed again, five years since his second wife died. How often had he heard anyone in his father’s family mention his mother since the night that Ginnie made her break? He knew now that Ginnie escaped the family that night, even though the familial trips continued for years until the day she was old enough to tell her father No, I won’t go there anymore. Before his grandparents died, he never heard his mother’s name from them again, nor from Lucille or Ralph. Perhaps a few times from Ada, in the days of drowsy car rides. Fewer still from his father, only when something happened that made the reference unavoidable. His stepmother, Phyllis, he suddenly realized, probably had spoken his mother’s name before she died more often than his father ever did. He tried to remember what finally made Ginnie stop shouting at the train that night. No adult, he felt sure, came to take her from the window. Safe in a train’s vacuum, they would leave her alone, let her yell out her fury as long as she wanted. Or let it consume her. Certainly he did not go to help her. Too young to feel compassion, too cowardly. Or maybe he already was trained against it. While he hid in the parlor, hating her for tearing the family’s seamlessness, Ginnie shook the window, hollered alone into the dark until she was spent.

“Well, better see how Ada’s getting around in the kitchen.” Lucille hopped up, stood poised, rocking from heel to toe. “Hope she hasn’t fallen over.”

“Must be hard for her to get up and down the stairs to her apartment,” Ed’s father said. Everyone nodded. “But she still has a good sense of humor. Same as she always has.”

“Mary Ann Brighton died in Tennessee last week,” Ralph spoke up. “The Port Blake paper ran an obituary. Good picture of her. Always kept herself up right.”

Surprised, his father shook his head slowly. But Lucille knew, gave a quick nod. “Her sister Loretta mailed me a copy of the obit from the Tennessee paper. Came the day before I left Hawaii. Have to get it laminated when I get home.”

“What killed her?” Ralph’s wife asked. “The Port Blake paper didn’t say.”

“Cancer.” Lucille sighed, looked down at her sandaled feet.

“Mary Ann Brighton?” He looked at their faces, waiting for a clue, but Lucille, Ralph, and his father only stared at him. For the first time that day, he had gained their full attention. “Who was she?” he asked, feeling stupid.

“Who was she?” His father’s disapproving tone. “Your Uncle Guy’s lady friend, of course, until she moved south to live with her mother. You remember her. Always drove a convertible. Wore long scarves and sunglasses when she had the top down. You and Ginnie and Nance were all crazy about her. All the kids were. But you especially, as I remember.”

He nodded, her name a shock as sharp as seeing a friend lost for years. He remembered shouting Mary Ann! in running games, climbing onto her lap in the big car, batting at the flying ends of the scarf wrapped around her hair until she laughed.

“And she was your mother’s best friend, too.” Lucille suddenly sat down again as she spoke. She put a hand to her lower stomach, wincing.

“Really?” The hum of insects beyond the screens seemed to deepen. He felt a swell in his chest. “You mean…?” His inadequacy like a deep note suspended in the air. “You mean my mother … Evelyn?” Had he ever spoken her name before them? The last time he had referred to her in his grandparents’ house, it would have been with “mom” or “mommy.” A pause for their reaction, then, less unsure, “Are you talking about my real mother, I mean. Not Phyllis. Evelyn.”

Lucille nodded once, fist pushed against her stomach. Swallowed a pant, spoke quickly. “Of course I mean Evelyn. Your stepmother never met Mary Ann, not that I know of. Mary Ann was Evelyn’s maid of honor when she married your father. Everybody thought she and Guy would be the next ones to the altar. Your mother and her were the prettiest bride and maid of honor Port Blake ever saw. Mary Ann’s dress was seafoam blue, exact same shade as her eyes. They went to New York City, finally, for the wedding gown. And the bridesmaids’ dresses, I think. Couldn’t find anything they liked in Syracuse or Rochester. Both of them fussy, you know. Fastidious, maybe I should say. Mrs. Vance, your mother’s mother, raised Evelyn to have standards. They had money before the Depression, you know. But not just that. A long place—a long position, back a long ways. Then she married your mother’s father and he made a great deal of money during the Depression. That was when the big house in New York City came in. Mrs. Vance sailed through everything like a great ship. She started her own business, manufactured something, made her own fortune. But when she heard what the doctors said about Evelyn, from that very first second, she changed. Never went back to her old self.”

He looked sideways at his father, found him winding his watch, the gold one that the railroad gave to Guy when he quit for good, hit by cancer. He looked up. “Gloves,” he said. “She manufactured expensive gloves.”

“Check on that ham,” Lucille muttered, standing again, “not that I can eat any. But Hawaii’s a good place to be a vegetarian. And lactose- and gluten-intolerant, I guess.” She squared her shoulders, pulled her fist from her stomach. “Ada,” her jaw jutting out, “you upright in that kitchen or crawling around on the linoleum on your hands and knees?” Ralph and his wife laughed. His father still adjusting his watch.

From far back in the kitchen, Ada’s voice. “I am walking in my own accustomed manner, Lucille, thank you for your concern. Could use some help with this food. We don’t all live on boiled greens and corn mush, you know.”

“Whatever happened with Mary Ann and Uncle Guy, anyway?” he asked. Guy and Mary Ann seemed trivial, a substitute for the real issue, but how could he acknowledge the shock of Lucille’s sudden revelations? She used his mother’s name as if no one had pretended to forget it for thirty years.

“Nothing to tell of,” Lucille answered. “Things just don’t work out sometimes. Guy never said anything was wrong. Just told us one day Mary Ann was moving to Tennessee. But they stayed friends. She flew up here three or four times when he was near the end. Drove him to Buffalo once for his treatment, if I remember correct. Maybe she met Phyllis one of those times, come to think of it. You remember, Howard?”

But his father only shook his head, looked down at the grey painted boards, expression blank.

“And what about that friend of Guy’s from the war? The man named Timmy? Wasn’t he here a few times when I was a kid? At Sunday family picnics?” Doubtful of how convincing he sounded, he kept his eyes on Lucille, afraid his father would see the lie.

“‘Timmy?’ What ‘Timmy?’” The family’s historian, Lucille’s voice was sharp.

“Five-twelve is coming. Early today.” His father’s voice like a hammer thrown on the floor.

“You’re a clock, Howard.” Ralph slapped his knee. “Almost as good as Guy. Only Guy knew the number of cars, too, on darn near every train. And the exact number of ties between every crossing point. Great for counting things, Guy was.”

“For counting? You mean he … ?” Ed paused, thinking of a compulsion revisiting a family.

“Tim was just Guy’s buddy in the war, Ed.” His father ignored Ralph’s prattle. “Died on a ship from Italy to France, something wrong with his stomach. Guess you’re still a good one for asking questions, Ed.”

With the first note of a long shrill whistle far down the tracks, Ada appeared in the doorway. Lucille turned her head toward the sound, source still unseen, then sat down again. Under his father’s glare, he felt his face redden. He twisted in his seat, caught by Ada’s lurching maneuvers. One hand on a chair inside the living room, with the other she gripped the knob of the open door. Arms outstretched, she listed, a frigate taking bearing on a high rolling peak. One black-red leg inched toward the step down to the porch. She moved one hand forward, swayed, then groped behind her again for the chair. When the porch floor began to shake, Ed stood up, made to step forward. But Ada laughed, waved a gnarled hand at him. Like a metal cap wrenched from a soda bottle, she twisted her head up so she could look at him directly. She pulled one hand free again, lowered one foot over the step. Her flat slipper landed with an urgent firmness on the bare boards. Grounded, she brought her other leg over, then straightened, balancing with her arms. Looks of admiration from Ralph and his wife. A straight-lipped smile from Lucille. Ada regarded them. Then an extravagant wave with one arm, a vaudeville feint. She tilted her head forward, bent her knees. She bowed, wavering near the door, a smile on her face like it would have been on any day long ago. The locomotive burst upon the house, shaking the hedge into green commotion, blasting white flowers from branches. Screens hummed like fine tuning forks in their white frames. Crossing the porch in two long strides, he put his arms around Ada’s stunted back, bent over to bring his face close to hers. Carefully, he eased her onto the glider’s soft cushion, next to Ralph. He stood up, his long erect body awkward so near her. But he stayed beside her all through the train’s interval, apposite the dark rail lines beyond the edge of his family’s land.