The first to go had been Alice Matthews and her immensely dignified driver, bound north to Petersburg—a two-hour drive. Because Hutch had known it might unnerve Alice to see the picture unexpectedly, he’d taken down his childhood drawing that Wade insisted on bringing from New York—the landscape Hutch had drawn on a day’s sketching trip with Alice near Goshen, Virginia nearly fifty years back. When he’d known for sure that Alice would come for Wade’s service, he’d wrapped the picture; and now he carried it under his arm as he guided Alice’s careful steps downhill to her car.
Neither one of them spoke till Alice was seated by Herc, the driver who’d napped through most of the blistering day. Her eyes went to Hutch, and she actually smiled to guarantee the truth of her words. “It won’t get worse than this, old friend. They haven’t got anything worse in their quiver.” For years, she’d referred to fate as they.
Hutch bent to kiss her upturned forehead. “I sure to God hope not.”
And for an instant Alice’s certainty broke. It made her eyes crouch—Hutch saw the fear—but then she literally waved it off. “I was right the first time. Start living again.”
Hutch agreed. “Yes ma’m.” He opened a back door and laid the drawing in the midst of the seat. “A bolt from the past.” he said.
Alice said “Oh no—”
But Hutch had shut the door and faced her again. “It’s a pleasant surprise, from our best old days.” When Alice looked back, he said “Don’t open it—not till you’re home. Let it be a surprise.”
She looked confused for the first time yet. “It can’t be anything valuable, darling. I’m too old for that.”
“You’re younger than me—in heart anyhow. If it makes you enjoy it any better though, put my name on the back. I’ll collect it someday if you quit first.”
“What is it? Don’t surprise me.”
Hutch could somehow not tell her. “Oh”—he suddenly remembered the instant he’d finished the last branch and leaf of the scene, the last pencil stroke and the title he’d thought of in his green grandiosity—“it’s nothing but the meaning of things!” He laughed a little and said it quietly.
Alice showed no sign of recognition but she managed to smile. “Then I thank you. I was short on the meaning. I’ll write yon tomorrow.” Her gloved right hand made one short wave; she rolled up her window and the car moved off. She made no effort to mime through the glass, but she turned as she left and watched Hutch standing alone in the yard. Never more than alone was all she could think as long as she saw him. But another thought came to her clearly as the car took the first curve and Hutch disappeared. Another soul I won’t see again. Again she was right; she’d quit by Christmas, asleep in her own bed, no pain or awareness.
THE last to leave was Maitland Moses, a little drunk but quiet and polite (he and Cam had argued last week and were split at present, though Cam had sat alone today at the back of the chapel and bowed to Hutch). Hutch also walked with Mait out to the terrace; and in the full dark, Mait suddenly took him in a long embrace.
Mait’s earlier threat to court the plague still troubled Hutch. So when they were separate again, he said “You owe me a solemn vow.”
Mait was already looking away, hut he said “I know what it is.”
“Swear to live—or at least try—or don’t come back here. I can’t take this again.”
Mait said “But isn’t that radically stingy?”
“May very well be; but Son, I’m as earnest as a fractured skull.” Hutch was almost sure that would reach Mait now, in the live quick flesh, whether Hutch ever saw him again or not.
But Mait took a long look toward the dark south above the trees. Then he turned and managed to see Hutch’s eyes. “I’ll have to let you know about that—”
“Again, I’m earnest.”
“—And again Hutch, I really can’t be your son. One father has all but killed me already.”
Oddly Hutch was too tired to take it amiss. He even grinned.
So Maitland finally had the nerve to say “You’re scared and sad. I understand why. You sidelined yourself so long ago you’ve forgot how it feels to have a live body and need to use it.” Surprised by his force, Mait gave a slight stage-idiot chuckle.
“I can’t tell you how wrong you are.” Then Hutch turned silently toward the house, no word of goodbye.
Mait took the refusal and went his way.
FROM outside, through the living room window, Hutch could see only one thing—Raven Bondurant stretched on his stomach, in his new linen suit, asleep on the couch in a deep exhaustion as pure as the night. Hutch tried to think This child knows the last riddle and answer. But it felt staged and false, like a poet in a movie receiving his lines from birdsong and clouds. So he moved on toward the actual child. With Ivory’s permission, he’d wake the boy and maybe show him pictures of Wade’s own youth, which felt like a thousand years ago.
When he opened the door though, Ann stood in the entrance, taking down the black hat she’d worn in the chapel. She was plainly readying to leave. When Hutch looked puzzled, she said “I’ve got every glass and dish clean. Ivory has offered to clear up the rest. I need to leave.”
“You need to leave, or you think I want you gone—which one?” Hutch had no immediate preference of an answer.
Ann managed to smile. “A good deal of both.”
“Then you’re at least one-half mistaken. We need to sit down with Ivory here and settle this question about Wade’s ashes.”
Ann’s whole face tightened. “That’s immaterial to me—believe it.”
Hutch agreed. “I believe it. I also know you’ll live years longer. Time may come when you change your mind and want Wade nearer at hand than coastal Long Island.”
“I’ve got him all in here, for good.” With one hand, she ringed her throat lightly. “I made him, Hutch.”
“You did. With some help.” But then he could smile too. He reached to take her hat. “Please stay. We need you.”
So while Ann heard him avoid the claim that he alone needed her for anything tonight, she let him hang the hat back up.
Together they paused to look in at Raven, still skewed and drowned. Till now they hadn’t been near him without some other adult.
In her lowest voice Ann said “Who’s he look like to you?”
Hutch waited. “His mother.”
“Even better,” Ann whispered. “His mother and Wyatt.”
It chilled Hutch to feel the words in his mouth, but he let them out at normal volume. “And maybe Wade.”
Ann faced Hutch. “You don’t think there’s any chance of that?”
Hutch thought he detected the trace of a hint that Ann had made her own discovery, or had she been told some new fact by Ivory? He wouldn’t press to know. “I’ve given up hunting for answers long since.”
Ann took that as though it were all she needed. Then they went on to Ivory.
4
IVORY had made surprising progress in the minutes since Ann first tried to leave. The kitchen was almost alarmingly clean—blank stretches of space, the cactuses watered and draining in the sink. Who could ever bear to eat here again? As the Mayfields entered, Ivory smiled to acknowledge that Ann was back. “Oh good. How about I make some fresh coffee?”
Ann said “Not for me, thanks.”
But Hutch said “A gallon—and strong as tar.”
Ivory stopped an instant to let the order pass. Then she chose to curtsey to Hutch and say “Yassuh, Mr. Rhett.”
In a quick recovery he said “Much obliged, Miss Scarlett—oh yes” and bowed from the waist.
Ivory turned to grinding coffee beans.
Hutch joined Ann at the bare table, both vacant eyed.
And soon Ivory sat in the one free chair, at the head, slightly dim (she was farthest from the hanging lamp).
At last Hutch said “Let’s agree on the ashes.”
When Ivory tucked her chin and kept silent, Ann told her “I’ve tried to back out of this. Wade knew I
loved him like shade in August. Anywhere those ashes go is fine by me; they’re not mine at all.” She took a long breath. “They’re not Wade either.”
Ivory said “I feel very much the same way—not that I claim I shared him with you or mattered anywhere near as much through the years as you. But no, Wade’s gone for me and mine.”
Hutch waited through a lengthy silence. Then, not quite thinking that Ann might hear his words as insane, he risked a new tack. “Wade’s either gone or he’s napping in there on the couch this minute, not ten years old.” When Ivory and Ann both looked mystified, Hutch pointed behind him toward the living room. “Maybe Raven Bondurant is half Wade anyhow, the only part left. At some odd angles, he helps me feel that Wade’s not all gone.”
Whatever she thought, Ann’s face held its own. Nothing on Earth could amaze her tonight.
But for the first time in either Hutch or Ann’s presence, Ivory flushed; and her eyes sought her own long hands laid before her. So far as she knew, Ann still hadn’t read the note Wade left; but she faced both Hutch and Ann and finally said “Both of you—understand this, if nothing more. There was a time, way back, when I loved Wade and thought he loved me—in every sense of the word, I mean. That didn’t turn out to last in our lives, but we stayed close friends, and he always mattered seriously. From here on, though, I make no claim whatever, now or doomsday, on Wade or his leavings or either of you. Neither will my son, who liked him too. You’ve been kinder than I had any right to hope for; but don’t give me and my son a thought when you make your plans, not a single thought from here on out. We’re taken care of and I’m a strong soul, my mother’s real child—I’ll get us through, young Raven and I.”
Though Ann still knew nothing of Wade’s message to her and Hutchins, she’d sensed from the moment she saw Raven’s eyes and heard his name that the boy leaned her way somehow in space, not a visible tilt or the trace of a plea to her or to anyone in sight but something unbroken and strong nonetheless. What Raven cast her way—and she knew it was cast unconsciously—was more like a net or an unseen globe with a powerful draw all round his body, a draw that pulled at her mind and the stump of her love for Wade. Ann was too sad and tired to feel more than faintly warmed, warmed from a distance as if by a lantern set on a raft in the midst of a broad river she stood beside. She faced Hutch wondering what to ask—had his mind broken slightly, and what could he mean, and why more wrangling now about ashes?
Before Ann could speak, Hutch said “All right, can we do this then—the three of us and Raven? I’ll call Straw and Emily so they know we’re coming—I warned them we might; they said whatever we wanted would work. We’ll leave after breakfast tomorrow morning, drive up there, pay our respects to Grainger and spread Wade out where he said he should be when he still knew clearly.” He looked to Ann and then Ivory. “Agreed?”
Ann said “I’ll be ready.”
Ivory said “Whatever you believe is right—and you know I think that’s the better plan—but let me just say one more thing now: Wade was in his right mind to the last, I very much believe. He phoned me, the night Jimmy Boat got here.”
Nobody, not even Jimmy, had known that. Still Hutch heard it calmly. “Anything we should know, from what he said?”
“He asked me to talk like Wyatt, a last time. Since I was a child, I could imitate Wyatt and fool everybody. I played jokes on him and Wade to the last.”
Ann said “Did you do it again when he asked you?”
Ivory said “Oh yes, I called his full name the way Wyatt would when he got home at night. ‘Raven Wade Mayfield, show your fine face.’” Her voice had easily become Wyatt’s voice.
It shook Hutch. He said “Can Wyatt bear this?” as though Wyatt stood in the doorway, assaulted and bracing to answer.
Ann said “Bear what?”
Hutch said entirely seriously “Us talking like this.”
Ivory said “No question. He’s got all of Wade now—but I told you that. That was Wyatt’s only plan, from the week they met.” Her face was pained for the instant it took to make the last concession.
Hutch covered her hands with his own.
Ivory met his eyes to thank him, then withdrew her right hand and held it to Ann.
When Ann had again closed a circuit among them, Hutch could withdraw. He stood and moved toward the inside door, meaning to check on young Raven’s nap; then find Wade’s letter and pass it to Ann, out of Ivory’s sight, before Ann left for her own house. She’d said again just now that she was going and he hadn’t objected. With Ivory and Raven here (Hutch had persuaded them to move from the inn), there was no spare bed, unless Ann wanted to sleep in Wade’s room—the bed he died in or a pallet on the floor.
Hutch couldn’t offer her that, not yet; and for all the help they’d given each other in the past few weeks, he couldn’t yet want to fold Ann back into his own life for good—not before they’d managed a drastic coming to terms with all her own years of grievance and want, and his own cooled bitterness: his ingrained distance. She’d need to make her own choice on that, then to tell him somehow and let him decide what he could take and whether he could learn to stand in closer. For all the margin of space around him, by his own lights, Hutch had never abandoned anyone yet, not anyone who mattered in his life; he didn’t plan to start this late.
But he quickly thought of a fresh exception. Young Mait Moses. I’ve turned him out. And as Hutch reached the door of the living room, with Raven snoring lightly beyond him, he saw Mait’s face in his mind this evening, trailing his hellbent body downhill. I’ll phone him later; Mait’s too good to lose. Then Hutch walked silently over to Raven, got down on one knee beside the boy’s head and held the palm of his hand a half inch above the damp hair. Though Hutch couldn’t know it, some form of the same cloud of force that had drawn at Ann was reaching for him. Hutch brushed his chin to the warm whorled ear and told himself This child knows me somehow. He’s trusting me here.
The child’s rest, though, was fabulously deep—way past fear or hope or any plain dream. At its lowest ebb, still Raven’s mind could know that it and all his body was safe as any child alive, banked with care like a fast horse with roses.
Hutch knew he mustn’t turn strange here. No plans for this child. His mother’s leaving and he’s going with her. So he rose and went to find the letter that Wade had written for his parents to read. In the two weeks since Hutch had first read it, he’d felt a conscious low-grade shame, withholding it from Ann—her name after all was in the address as plainly as his. Why had he waited? Part meanness no doubt but also maybe the fear that Ann might have plunged off on some errand of her own and pressed on Ivory for hard details, or even flown to New York and tracked down the child and blundered into some innocent harm. No way to hide it another hour though.
Before Hutch had taken two more steps, he knew—he all but knew for a certainty—that the letter was not just the last news from Wade but was also maybe the main truth he’d left them: a last open door. This story may not be ending yet. No way he could keep the news from Ann beyond tonight, and no wish to keep it.
5
IVORY and Raven had been in their room, asleep, since ten o’clock that evening. Hutch had managed to stay awake till midnight, listing the names of guests while he recalled them and reading all the sonnets of Shakespeare. He hadn’t read straight through the whole cycle—a hundred and fifty-four poems as mysterious as any ever written—since his years in Oxford when he’d sometimes drive the forty-odd miles between his college and Shakespeare’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon just to stand on the bridge there or poke through the streets and silently think through a speech from the plays or a few of the sonnets. He’d known a handful by heart since the ninth grade; they’d clung to his mind with the hooks of young memory.
Even here when he’d read to the end of them all, and the clock said quarter past midnight, Hutch shut both the book and his eyes and lay still to run through the bristling power of
They that have power to
hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show….
And
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
His light was out though before he recalled, and found he still knew, the whole of the poem that—forty years ago—had seemed the flag of his care for Strawson.
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought all naked will bestow it,
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee,
Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me.
Now in the dark of his house. Hutch lay and let tall waves of amazed thanks and charred loss pour freely through him—thanks for the plentiful love he’d got, through the length of his life, from sane other souls and harsh regret for his monstrous failures to take and honor every gift of flesh and pleasure, trust and pardon, that was offered his way. The failures came to him as they always did, stark separate faces—Straw’s, Rob’s, Ann’s, Grainger’s, Wyatt’s, Wade’s. Before he could check the hurtling speed of his runaway guilt, Hutch had run through dozens of students, friends, loves, all the lost names of lives he’d skimped or cheated on. Waste, grim waste in the teeth of plenty. He was almost asleep when the bedside phone rang; he caught it at once. “Yes?”
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