Rain mists on the windshield. Kendra cradles the phone in her lap. A mother emerges from the bookstore, trailed by two little girls. They are all three wearing yellow raincoats and holding black umbrellas over their heads. The mother is carrying a shopping bag, heavy with new books. They proceed in a row, in order of age, tallest to shortest, one behind the other like ducks. Kendra puts the girls somewhere around ten and six, the mother in her middle thirties. School has just let out. Three doors down, they disappear into the bakery where, in another week, Kendra will place an order for her husband’s cake. She dials Dean’s direct line on her cell.
“Sweetheart,” he says.
“I’ve got everything settled with the band.”
Dean is sitting at his desk with his feet propped up. He didn’t realize there was anything left to be settled. His office is in a brownstone on Conti Street, windows overlooking Cathedral Square. Rugs selected by his wife, photos of his son. The sign over the front door reads Walker and Bolling, Attorneys at Law. It’s embellished with scales of justice designed to look like an anchor or an anchor that resembles scales of justice, depending on your perspective. They specialize in maritime cases, insurance claims relating to ships and cargo, civil matters between ship owners. Dean is almost never called upon to go to trial. They have three associates, four secretaries, two paralegals, and a runner who doubles as the IT guy.
“That’s good news,” he says.
The rain has already blown over on his side of the bay. On her side, the rain keeps sifting down.
“Everything else all right?” Dean says.
“Everything’s fine. I just thought you’d like to know.”
He drops his feet to the floor, drifts over to the window. The dome of the basilica rises up above the oaks—beautiful, but Dean has always thought it looks mislaid, too Eastern, not of this place. A homeless man dozes on a park bench in the square.
“Tell you what,” he says, “why don’t I take us out tonight? We haven’t been to Felix’s in a while. We’ll have turtle soup.”
“I don’t like turtle soup.”
“Of course not. You’ll have the bisque.”
“I do like bisque,” she says.
Kendra can remember her first date with Dean as clearly as last night. It’s the long stretch in between that’s sometimes difficult to fathom. His friend Louis was married to her friend Mona, and Louis and Mona contrived to fix them up. You have so much in common, they said. Kendra was less than a year removed from Sweet Briar, working as a teller at a bank. Dean was one of forty associates at a big law firm. He had too much to drink at dinner. Kendra lost the keys to her apartment. Each apartment had a small, wrought-iron balcony and Dean proposed that he would climb up the outside of the building and let them in through the unlocked balcony doors.
“You’re not serious,” she said.
“I am indeed.”
“You’ll break your neck.”
“It’s not that high.”
“But you’re half drunk.”
“When I’m half drunk,” he said, “I’m twice the man.”
It was at that moment, Kendra thinks, that she began to love him. He handed her his sport coat and commenced to climb, inching his way up the rain gutter, swinging his legs over the railing of the first balcony, then the next, like he had scaled at least one tall building every day of his life, that night leading inexplicably, inexorably to this night on the wharf, darkness hovering over the water like mist over a meadow. Moths plink against the overhead, mesmerizing Popcorn. For a moment, he has forgotten the tennis ball lodged between his teeth.
“Thomas called,” she says.
“Let me guess: he wants someone to write a check.”
“He asked if he could bring a date to your party.”
“White girl?” Dean says.
“You hush.”
He laughs softly at his own bad joke.
“What’d you tell him?”
“I told him I would speak to you.”
“I think it’s fine,” Dean says. “What’s this girl’s name?”
And so on through the particulars of the phone call. The overhead bulb has a peculiar, insulating effect. Shadows stretch and lean in the oblong of its radiance, minnows flicking to the surface where light brushes the water. Beyond it, the bay is a pure dark slate. The universe ceases to exist.
Both of them acknowledge that Dean’s party has gotten out of hand. They laugh about it over drinks. You add one name to the guest list and suddenly you’ve opened a door, crossed a border, and there are a dozen more you must include. In addition to organizing the party, Kendra has purchased a pair of antique cuff links, a shirt from Burke & Daniels, a box of monogrammed handkerchiefs. Dean folds them into the back pocket of his suits. Kendra appreciates the fact that her husband is so old-fashioned. He has an email account for work but refuses to log on. His secretary’s first job every morning is to survey his inbox, delete the clutter, print the emails that matter. The image of Dean at his desk reading printed emails swells Kendra’s heart. He dictates his responses. His secretary clicks them off into the ether.
And this: he insists on Christmas stockings despite the fact that Thomas is too old. He likes to see them hanging heavy on the hearth. In Kendra’s, he puts a hundred little things—bracelets and exotic liqueurs and vials of spices she will never use. Books filled with pithy inspiration. A watch in a velvet box. One-of-a-kind earrings. A wallet, a slender belt.
And this: her husband is faithful. Of that Kendra has no doubt. He brings home the occasional rumor about his tennis buddies or men he knows from work, his voice thick with disappointment. Marriages pull apart around her. But not hers, never hers.
The alarm clock rouses Dean at six am. He shuts it off and rests a moment on his back, adjusting to the light of a new day, his hand on his wife’s warm hip. When the coffee is ready, he pours a cup and sips it in the driveway while Popcorn does his business, the sky hazy and gray. He showers, leaving enough hair in the drain to make him nervous, though he’s not really going bald. Towel around his waist, Dean wipes steam from the mirror over the sink, his face always a slight surprise in the misted glass, not because he has forgotten how he looks but because his impression of himself never quite matches the image in the mirror. It’s like hearing his own recorded voice, the sound familiar and strange at once. Somehow, the shaving cream on his cheeks makes his features recognizable again. Those are the same eyes that have been staring back at him from mirrors his whole life.
In his closet hang a dozen suits in dry-cleaning bags, his shoes lined up neatly on the floor. He dresses but waits to knot his tie. When Thomas was a boy, Dean would wake his son for school at this point in the ritual, his voice soft but firm, then drink a second cup of coffee on the wharf while Thomas performed his own ablutions. He gathered himself, became himself, in those moments, the view of the bay always the same. Thomas is gone, of course, but habit carries Dean out to the water, a pelican perched so still atop a channel marker it looks more decorative than alive.
This morning, however, this plain Tuesday morning is different. Yes, Kendra will stir before too long to receive his good-bye kiss and yes, a day of briefs and meetings awaits him at the office, but on this morning, Dean joins that dwindling portion of his fellow citizens who participate in the democratic process. He will cast his vote in the gymnasium of a middle school, the parking lot surrounded by campaign signs. The scene puts him in mind of a Polaroid as he steps out of his car, the colors a trace too bright. Two old white women with yellowing bouffants man the tables inside. Dean waits in line behind a black man in a wheelchair with a veteran’s pin on the brim of his ball cap. In a few hours, Kendra will cancel out Dean’s vote but it doesn’t matter. He already suspects that his candidate will come up short. He’ll win Alabama going away but the swing state independents are breaking left, the resigned Midwest shedding its character
at about the same rate that its industries are losing jobs. Even so, he goes through the motions, drawing the curtain aside, pressing the buttons. The old white women wish him well.
Duty done, he steers one-handed west across the bay, low tide exposing islands of mud and marsh grass, cars jostling for position, downtown Mobile revealing itself dead ahead. In five days, it will be official. Dean Walker will have lived for half a century.
Brooke Pitman is not the girl her son will marry. Kendra understands this right away. They arrive on the Friday afternoon before Dean’s party, Thomas honking his horn in the driveway, stirring Popcorn to near mania. There is something vaguely foreign in the shape of her eyes. She’s pretty but only that. Perhaps Kendra is being unfair. Some women don’t come into substance until much later. Brooke, a year older than Thomas, spent the previous semester abroad. With one hand over her heart, she speaks of seeing Titus Andronicus at the Globe. But she is majoring in Communications. She has a tattoo of a four leaf clover on her ankle.
The house is immaculate. Rosie has been over everything with cloth and polish and feather duster. There are new sheets, washed and ironed, on the bed in the guest room. Thomas wants to show Brooke around. They stroll hand in hand along the boardwalk with Popcorn at their heels. To Kendra, Thomas looks self-conscious holding hands but he does not let go. Kendra sets out pecans and grapes and olives so they will have something to snack on when they return. The lamps, the paintings. The burnished wood. Her house is rich in beautiful things but none can compare to the view at this hour.
By the time Dean comes home from work, the three of them are drinking beer and playing Trivial Pursuit. Even drinking beer his wife is elegant. It’s as if she is emitting light. She is almost frightening. The great room shimmers with her presence. She has a bottle in one hand, a game card in the other, slim bracelets dancing on her slim wrist. Thomas slouches easy at the table, Greek letters on his T-shirt. In an act of harmless sedition, he pledged ΣAE last year instead of ΔΚΕ, his father’s fraternity.
“This is Brooke,” he says, and the young woman stands, smoothes her skirt, presents her hand.
“Welcome,” Dean says. “Let me fix a drink.”
“Mrs. Walker is winning,” Brooke says, meaning the game.
Her hand is warm and damp. Dean leaves his briefcase on a church pew, kisses his wife, hugs his son, moves around the counter to the kitchen, Popcorn nosing the back of his knee.
“Speaking of which,” Kendra says, “what did Portuguese explorers christen O Rio Mar in the sixteenth century?”
“Don’t answer,” Thomas says. “This is for a pie piece.”
“She’s killing us,” Brooke says.
The ice, the whiskey. That first sip.
“The Amazon,” Dean says.
Thomas and Brooke groan. Dean lets Popcorn lick an ice cube from his palm. The scene before him fills him up. It’s not contentment exactly and it’s not pride, though those things are mixed in with what he feels. His son needs a haircut but he’s found himself a girl. Maybe she likes it long. Thomas has his mother’s hair, straight and blond and glossy. Dean takes his place at the table beside his wife, slips his arm around her back.
“You’re on my team,” Kendra says.
Later, in bed, Dean holds a biography of Abraham Lincoln open on his lap, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. All that whiskey has made it difficult to focus. Kendra is amending herself with creams and lotions, the bathroom door ajar.
“Well,” he asks her, “what do you think?”
“Keep your voice down.”
Thomas and Brooke are watching a movie in the great room.
“They can’t hear us.”
“Just in case,” she says.
“I like her.”
“She seems nice.”
“She’s very pretty.”
“I suppose.”
Kendra emerges in silk pajamas and sits on the edge of the mattress, her back to Dean, her hair drawn over her right shoulder to be brushed, the rim of her left ear exposed.
“They’re not in love,” she says.
Later still, Kendra hears her son’s door creaking open, his footsteps in the hall, their voices hushed and playful. She scoots closer to Dean, rests her head on his chest. His chest rises and falls. She holds him tight as the world goes spinning off beneath their bed.
This old hotel was built in 1856, forty rooms and a restaurant on the tip of Point Clear, the very place a pendant would dangle from a chain. Eight years later, the Confederates commandeered it for a hospital, their gravestones still visible from the 18th tee. The golf course was added in the twenties, more rooms, swanky cottages, the grand ballroom. It’s said that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a guest in the new wing, though no photos of his stay exist. The Army Air Corps used the hotel as a training base during WWII, those polite boys removing their boots before entering to preserve the hardwood floors, history shining like wax on every surface, in every room and hall, on the brass-railed bar, windows reflecting wavery images of passing figures, walking paths buckled by the roots of oak trees even older than the hotel.
At the first hint of evening, lights flick on inside and out, drawing the hotel out of the gloom, making it glimmer and shine, a great ship, an ocean liner from another time about to embark upon a long voyage across a wide and tranquil sea. Kendra has already made several trips back and forth from house to ballroom checking in with the event staff, the caterer, the band. Everything proceeds apace. It will be Thanksgiving in two weeks. In her slip, blow-drying her hair, it occurs to Kendra that her wedding was only slightly more elaborate. But the party was Dean’s idea. She asked him what he wanted for his birthday and he said food and friends and music, plenty to drink. She’d been thinking of a trip—Rome or Paris, just the two of them. When she emerges from the bathroom, hair warm against her neck, there is Dean humming as he fingers studs into his tuxedo shirt, and her reservations fall away. This party is not a black-tie affair. The other men will be wearing blazers and slacks, shirts open at the collar. Dean pretends he’s sporting his tux ironically but Kendra knows he likes the way it looks.
“I don’t want there to be any question,” he says, “just who’s the man of honor at this shindig.”
With Thomas and Brooke, they open Dean’s presents and drink champagne in the great room, a private moment before the party. Dean makes a fuss over his gifts. Even Brooke has brought him something, an Alabama jersey with the number 50 on both sides, purchased at the campus bookstore.
“It’s nothing,” Brooke says. “A token.”
Her modesty is becoming. Her calves are taut in her high heels. Her youth makes Kendra’s heart race. Thomas beams, already on his third glass.
Then, finally, it’s time to go. Night has fallen. Kendra sends Thomas and Brooke on ahead to greet the early arrivals, headlights even now brushing back the darkness. The valets will have their hands full. More people are coming than Kendra could have guessed. Her husband is that esteemed. His partner, Arthur Bolling, will be present, along with all three of their associates. There will be clients like Walter Willett, who runs a tugboat operation, and A.B. Ransom, who owns a shipbuilding concern. His wife, Muriel, is one of Kendra’s favorites, a perfect Mobile lady. Erik Nooteboom, whose company transports materials all over the world, is winging in from Denmark. Dean provides counsel for his activities in the Gulf. There will be old friends like Diane and Curtis Henley and Jeb and Posey White and Dean’s tennis buddy Paul Saint Clair. Martha and Buddy Bragg accepted the invitation. Their son, Henry, is a fraternity brother of Thomas’s at Alabama. Louis and Mona, who finagled Kendra’s first date with her husband, will be attending, though they are long divorced. Mona will be unescorted. Louis is bringing his new wife. On and on the guest list goes—Isaac and Hannah Yates, Ellen and Charlie Caldwell, Marcus Weems, whose wife is sick with cancer—names mapping the itinerary of their marriage.
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Popcorn shimmies and whines, nuzzling their limp fingers, their clothes. He is aware that something out of the ordinary is afoot. He is right to suspect that he will be left out. “Sorry, boy,” Dean says, easing the door closed, the dog mashing his wet nose against the glass.
Arm in arm, Dean and Kendra make their way along the boardwalk. Their house is only six driveways from the old hotel. The night is crisp enough to mist their breath, moonlight glinting on the bay like broken glass.
“You look beautiful,” Dean says, and Kendra says, “So do you.”
They pass on beneath the oaks, branches draped with moss. Suddenly, Dean is nervous. It’s like the dream in which he enters a courtroom unprepared. He has made a mistake. His tuxedo is absurd. He has no idea what he will say to his guests. There is nothing important left to talk about. A dozen bicycles lean in a rack, waiting for hotel guests to claim them. The flag is lifeless on its pole. There is no wind, no chatter of insects.
At last the famous ballroom emerges from the night, all delicate light and lofty windows, guests already mingling beyond the glass, waiters passing hors d’oeuvres. The voices from inside reach them muted and obscure, another frame sliding forward in Dean’s dream, the one where everyone is speaking a language he cannot understand.
“Wait,” Kendra says, tugging his arm.
“What is it?”
“Just look,” she says. “They’re here for you.”
All those familiar faces. It’s like gazing into the past. Elbow to elbow at the bar, Buddy Bragg and Charlie Caldwell and Isaac Yates wait for their drinks, their wives standing to one side. Paul Saint Clair is talking Alabama football with Curtis Henley. There is only one subject in the fall that could make their faces so intent. Behind them, Thomas and Brooke are laughing at something A.B. Ransom has just said. Decorous Muriel swats her husband’s bicep. The joke must have been unseemly. Thomas’s teeth flash when he laughs, the crooked incisors of his childhood straightened long ago.
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