by D. W. Buffa
And then she turned and shouted with the others, her eyes sparkling and alive, cheering for the next great new beginning for the city that lived not just all around you but inside you, part of who you were. I stood there, watching all of them chanting, knowing as well as I had ever known anything that Joanna would never leave.
It was one of the last times I saw her, in the middle of September, before I left to go back to school, that Mr. Van Renaessler explained, or tried to explain—because he was, after all, only guessing—the relationship between Joanna and Thomas Browning. They were, as Browning had told me that evening I first met her, old friends, connected through certain family ties. That was the phrase he used: “certain family ties.” he said it with the thoughtful precision of someone who, when he had to, could be very careful in his speech.
It was a bright, clean day, one of those days that seem to carry with them something of fall and summer both. Joanna was helping her mother with something and at his suggestion we had gone across the street, wandering for a while in the park until we found an empty bench.
“The families were never friends, never as close as that. It was business, mainly. For Stern, of course—the old man—that was his whole life, that company of his. The only reason he talked to us—maybe the only reason he talked to anyone—was that we had something he needed. In the years when things did not go well—he needed a source of money. That’s why he came to us— because of the bank. A lot of banks went under back then, but there was never any danger of that for us. Whatever we loaned him, Stern always paid it back, right on time if not earlier. But I must say, he did it with as much ill grace as I’ve ever seen.”
Mr. Van Renaessler wrinkled his nose. A moment later, he emitted a slight chuckle.
“In all the years he did business with us, first with my father, then with me, he never once said thank you. We carried him through the Depression. Without us, all those plants of his would have closed—and never once could he bring himself to thank us for what we had done. We got our money back. He seemed to think we ought to have thanked him. And who knows? Perhaps we should have. It took more than money,” he said, quick to acknowledge merit where he saw it, even, or perhaps especially, in someone it was plain he could barely tolerate. “It took a kind of ruthless genius to keep something going that was that big, that complex, with hundreds of thousands of people doing hundreds of thousands of things.”
Mr. Van Renaessler sniffed the air. He pulled his far shoulder forward and grasped one hand with the other. As he stared down at the bench, the lines in his forehead deepened.
“I want to be very careful about the way I say this. Thomas Browning is as fine, and as intelligent, a young man as I’ve ever known. But he’s all wrong for my daughter.” He studied me for a moment with a strange intensity, as if he were searching for an answer to a question he knew he could not ask. “There is a point at which a father can’t get involved in his daughter’s life. That doesn’t mean, you understand, that he isn’t—it just means he has to wrestle with things alone and never to any real purpose, because, in the end, all he can do is hope that things turn out for the best.” He paused, and with as kind a smile as I have ever seen, said with a sadness that surprised and touched me, “I understand that next spring, when you finish Harvard, you won’t be coming back.”
I started to mumble something, and I think if he had not stopped me I would have changed my mind about what I was planning to do.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re right to do what you think you have to. It’s the only way to live. Believe me: If I haven’t learned anything else in my life, I’ve learned that. You’d be the best thing that could happen to her for the same reason Thomas would be the worst.
“They’ve known each other since they were children. Joanna couldn’t have been more than eight or nine when Stern started bringing his grandson with him when he made his trips to New York. Thomas has two fine parents, but you wouldn’t have known he had any from the way that old man took over his life. Thomas didn’t have a childhood—perhaps he’s told you some of that himself—but you had to see it to believe it: the way Stern took away all the spontaneity, all the life, and burdened him with a sense of responsibility that men my age would find too much to bear. He had no friends; he did not go to school—he had nothing but private tutors until the day he left for Princeton; he did not know how to talk to anyone who wasn’t dressed in a suit. That’s why from I think the first time he saw her, Joanna became the one person with whom he thought he could ever be himself.
“It’s gone on for years now. They’re like brother and sister; except, of course, they’re not. Whenever he has a problem, whenever something has gone wrong, he turns to her because she’s the only one he trusts. And that’s what worries me: They’re too close—and they’re not close enough. When she’s with you, Joanna is natural and alive; around Thomas it’s as if she thinks she has to protect him not only from the world, but also in some sense from himself. There’s something else. Something I really should not say. He has spent so much time trying to get away from his grandfather’s influence, trying to be something different than what the old man wanted him to be, that sometimes I think that underneath all his outward charm he has become, not what Zachary Stern wanted, but what Zachary Stern was: a man driven to do something no one has done before.”
The sun had sunk below the horizon. There was a chill in the air. Joanna’s father stood up, buttoned his gray cardigan sweater and plunged his hands deep into his pants pockets. In the distance, a child cried out as she tumbled down a grass embankment into her mother’s arms.
“When the old man died two weeks ago, the first call Thomas made was to Joanna. He’s coming here next week. Did you know?”
Joanna had not told me.
CHAPTER 12
The driver turned a corner in Georgetown and suddenly we were there, the shabby side entrance to a two-story building of broken mortared bricks and weathered paint-chipped wood. In front, two steps down from street level, the solid door to the restaurant gleamed with a hard black varnish. There was no menu, nothing pasted inside a glass enclosure to tell an interested passerby what was served or at what price; there was no telephone number someone might call. The name itself, five words in French, was enough to give it the impression of a place too expensive to just drop in. Climbing the back wooden stairs, surrounded by the mongrel scent of a dozen different dishes, rapid-fire muffled shouted voices, beaten pots and pans, lent a different perspective to what privilege really meant. The splintered stairs creaked beneath my feet; the hand railing, attached to posts with nails that in a century of weather had rusted and worked themselves loose, wobbled at my touch. Under the broken glass of a dented outdoor lamp, a screen door hung at a crooked angle from a broken hinge. A hand from inside pushed it open. His heavy-knuckled hand still on the door, a Secret Service agent, dressed in a tightly buttoned suit, nodded silently toward another door less than three steps away. Another agent stood next to it, his hands clasped in front of him, his feet spread shoulder width apart. I reached for the doorknob, but his hand was there first. I entered a private dining room, and the door behind me shut.
There were eight small tables in the room, each of them covered with a white linen tablecloth. Only one was set. In the far corner, the light slanted through shutters closed three-quarters tight, across a pair of hands that rested on the table. In the shadows, Joanna sat watching as I came toward her.
“Hello, Joseph Antonelli.”
The teasing laughter in her voice brought me back to what she had been, when I first knew her, that summer in New York, that summer when I almost fell in love with her and maybe really had. She was still quite beautiful, not as she had been before, but with that look that usually comes only with breeding and wealth: that look of youthful beauty that has faded but not disappeared. Her looks had always depended on something subtle, something you did not notice so much when she was young. It was the way she held herself—a little distant,
a little aloof—the easy way she moved; but beyond everything else, it was the way she looked at you: as if she knew everything there was to know about you and liked everything she knew. I sat down at the table with the vague wish that I had never left New York.
Joanna offered me her hand. “I’m afraid I made something of a fool of myself last week. I hope you can forgive me.”
Her voice was more measured, more controlled—the sweet fullness of it was gone; measured, controlled— the way, I tried to remind myself, it had to be when every word that came out of her mouth was taken down, transcribed, given a meaning that if she was not careful might not have been her intent. Her voice was drier, more circumspect; the eager enthusiasm of it had vanished, gone. Measured, controlled, a distant empty echo of something lost; a pale imitation of the voice I had loved and that, for a few brief months, had played over and over again in my young and foolish mind.
“There’s nothing to forgive. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
With her back perfectly straight, she leaned forward, her elbows on the table. Her chin rested lightly on her folded hands. Her eyes glittered with rueful malice.
“A woman my age can be forgiven a lot of things, perhaps even getting a little drunk. But to stumble into a room where you know you’ll find the boy with whom you were once madly, desperately, in love—not only drunk but without makeup—is worse than unforgivable; it’s stupid.” Joanna paused, then added: “But I couldn’t wait to see you. Strange the way we think. All those years, and suddenly I can’t stand to wait another night.”
She reached across the table and squeezed my wrist. A strange, bittersweet smile flickered candle-like over her lips. I covered her hand with my own and smiled back. A door opened behind us. Her hand slipped away. Moving like a shadow, silent and without effort, a waiter brought a bottle of wine, filled our glasses and left.
“You never married, did you?” she asked, watching me over the glass she raised to her mouth. I waited while she drank and, because I knew she knew the answer, waited for what she wanted to say next. “I suppose I’m not surprised, though I don’t quite know why. Maybe it was that girl you told me about—the one you were so much in love with, the one in Oregon, the one you wanted to marry.” She thought a moment. “Jennifer. That was her name, wasn’t it? Jennifer. Whatever happened to her?”
We had not seen each other in years, but however much we had changed, the memory we had of each other had not. It gave us, I think, a sense of safety, a sense that we could talk to each other as if instead of years since our last meeting, only a few days had passed. And so I told her the truth, or as much of it as I could bear. I told her that Jennifer and I were going to get married, and that something had happened and that now she was gone forever, lost in a place no one could find her, trapped inside a mind that had shut off the lights and closed down for good.
“I used to go see her; I don’t anymore. She didn’t know who I was; she never will. It’s one of the reasons I left Portland; one of the reasons I stayed in San Francisco: I don’t feel quite so much guilt.”
Joanna did not ask me to explain. It’s impossible to live past forty and not know what it means to feel guilty about things over which you have no control. It is a fact of existence, as tangible, as real, as hunger or thirst or carnal desire: this vague, troubling suspicion that never quite goes away, that there must have been something we could have done to change things, something we were too stupid or too selfish, too caught up in our own ambitions, to find out. And so we try to run away, try to put what distance we can between ourselves and the memory of things that can never be changed at all.
“But you married,” I said, turning us away from things too unbearable to expect, or to want, anyone to share.
She leaned closer, searching my eyes. She was about to speak when the door opened again. A second waiter, older than the first, with gray wire-bent hair and thin, sharp-edged shoulders, entered the room. He never once raised his eyes, never once looked at either one of us, as he served a Caesar salad first to Joanna, then to me. The silence was inscrutable, profound. Joanna watched him until he had finished, and then followed him with her eyes until the door whispered shut behind him. As if the waiter had been a chimera, a figment of her own imagination, and the food had always been there, waiting on her pleasure, she lifted her fork and turned to me with a pleasant smile.
“This is my favorite restaurant,” she announced without enthusiasm. “Not as good as the ones I like in New York.” She took a bite of the salad and with her eyes passed a judgment of partial approval. She took another bite, put down the fork, and gently pushed aside the gold-embossed plate.
“You weren’t surprised I married? Or you weren’t surprised I married Thomas?”
It caught me off guard. I tried to remember what I had thought about it at the time, but all I could really remember was that I had not heard about their marriage until after it happened. I think I must have read about it in the papers.
“You didn’t come to the wedding.” She said it as a simple statement of fact; but from the way she turned her head, looking at me now from a watchful angle, there was more to it than that. “Thomas said you wouldn’t come.” She was still watching me in that intensely interested way. “He didn’t know if it was because of him—or me.”
She was waiting for something: some response, some reply; but I didn’t know what it was.
“Thomas said you wouldn’t come; he said it was better not to invite you: you wouldn’t feel you had to make some excuse.”
Her expression changed. A lost, wistful look settled in her eyes. She stared at me, bravely, in defiance of her own lost control, determined to say what she wanted to say.
“Why couldn’t you have stayed in New York—come back to New York after law school? Why would that have been so bad?”
I wanted to tell her the truth, or what after all the things that had happened seemed like the truth; because, after all, there was nothing to judge it against: no hard, incontrovertible fact—nothing more than the futile thought of what might have been.
“Why couldn’t you have lived in New York?” Her voice echoed quietly in the silence of the room and in the silence of the long journey we had in our separate ways both traveled.
“I wish I had,” I answered honestly, or as honestly as I knew how.
I leaned against the cane-backed chair, gazing down at the carpeted floor. It was as if we had gone through our lives in some parallel fashion: I still had the feeling that she had always been out of my reach, beyond my grasp, a woman who lived in a world I could never really know.
“I thought about it a lot the first few years after that summer. I’d remember what it was like, what it felt like, that summer in New York; and I’d wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t left, if I’d finished law school and gone back to work in that Wall Street firm.” Raising my eyes, I looked at her looking at me, and for a while I remembered how things had been. “I started thinking about it again when I knew I was coming to New York, when I thought I was going to see you.”
I lowered my eyes and bent forward, my arm on the table, trying to think of how to say what I thought was true and wished was not. It was too late; it had always been too late. That was the truth of it. I knew that, and yet, there was something, a kind of second knowledge, a doubt that cast a shadow over the bright shining certainty in which I had once buried the past, a sense that perhaps I had been wrong after all.
“But how would I have ever fit in there?” I asked, glancing up. “I was a kid from Oregon. My father was a doctor, a GP; we were never poor, but we were never rich. You didn’t want to leave New York, not just because you loved the city, but because you owned it, were part of it, had always been a part of it. You were always going to wind up with someone else, someone from your own background and class. I think it was inevitable that it was going to be Thomas Browning. I should have seen it at the time, the way the two of you always looked after each other, that you would end up married to
him.”
With a deft movement of her hand, Joanna wiped away a single tear. She waited with a blank expression while a third waiter led in two others, one of whom removed the salad plates while the other arranged new silverware around new plates. The two left immediately after they had completed their tasks; the third one, with a worried smile, spooned out portions, pausing with an upturned glance to see when he should stop. Joanna would not look at him. She nodded once, briefly; and then, walking backward the first few steps, he was gone. As if she had been holding it all the while, she let out her breath.
“I hate being who I am,” said Joanna with a poisonous glance directed, not at me, but at the world of intruders she could not manage to keep away.
She had not looked at anyone who had come into the room while they were looking at her. I wondered if it was a way she had of protecting herself against the constant violation of prying, eager eyes. She tossed her head back and with a helpless look apologized, not for what she had said, but for the circumstances under which she was forced to live her life. She turned toward the cream-colored shutters on the window a little ahead of where she sat. With a tentative motion, she reached forward, adjusting them to let in more light.
“The weather here is awful,” she said, stealing a glance outside. “Hot, humid, debilitating: It drains you of energy, makes everything slow down. It’s why southerners talk so slow; why they drink so much: The sheer effort of speech brings on the thirst.” She laughed softly and with a certain pleasure at her own affected drawl. The laughter lingered for a while in her eyes and then slowly, reluctantly, faded away.
“I would have married you—if you had asked.” She raised her head to forestall any interruption. “And if you didn’t want to live in New York, I would have gone wherever you wanted. But you never asked me; you never asked me to go with you. So I asked you to come back to New York because that’s where I was, where I lived, where—if you had been there—we could have been the way we had been that summer, that summer in New York.”