by Richard Ford
He had flown up to see his father on family business. The estate. The changed will. How his mother, the spurned wife, was being looked after. His father had maintained a diligence, but now wished unexpectedly for a hearing. He was tall and bright-eyed and smooth-faced. Spirited and utterly deceptive. He had been a judge, a king of Comus. Was a grandee. “There’s entirely too much self-congratulation in the world now, just for doing what you’re supposed to do,” his father had said and stepped to the curving bay window, the leaded panes separating red from green from yellow from blue. He stood looking down into the leafy street as if something in it interested him. “I no longer experience self-congratulation,” he said. “Nothing’s worth being proud of. You must guard against it. It’s not the worst human flaw, but it is the most self-deluding and painful.”
“Yes,” Sandy said. “I will. I understand.” He thought he did.
Which was the last subject they’d talked about. His father was a man of large pronouncements and hard lessons boisterously learned. This was all the hearing he wished for. Later, he’d realized his father was only thinking about seeing after his abandoned wife, for which he wanted no particular recognition. It was all quite irrelevant. Though for an instant, when he’d thought he understood, it had seemed his father had been talking about some question or act of great consequence. It hadn’t been true.
He’d recall this conversation at the most unexpected moments, as now, when he might’ve expected to entertain other, onward thoughts—the dinner he was soon to have. His wife, with whom he would have it. The anticipated, colorful, meticulously rehearsed affairs of her day. This last hour—this barely-achieved time with Barbara—would not be rehearsed. There had been little or no consequence or outcomes to think about. Nothing had been harmed, no one disappointed. He would simply not see her again. Which by itself conferred a small—what was it? Possibly like a trust, but not quite. As his father had said, we have little to pride ourselves in. Which argued for nothing in particular, yet would allow a seamless carrying forward into the evening now, and the countless evenings that remained.
Happy
Happy Kamper called on Friday to tell them Mick Riordan had died, and she was driving west, but could she come up tonight and drink a toast or two or three to the old warrior’s memory, maybe cry a bit on Tommy Thompson’s shoulder.
The Thompsons were entertaining the Jacobson-Parrs for dinner and a stay-over, and Tommy had gone up to Camden for big lamb chops and summer corn and beefsteaks, and had a case of Montrachet already in. All were looking forward to a beach fire. It was their annual, the sacrament of closing down summer in Maine. Sam and Esther, who were in Cape Neddick, would be flying to Islamorada before Columbus Day.
Tommy, of course, had immediately said, “Yes. Absolutely. This is terrible,” without looking at Janice. They’d all six been a gang in the ’90s, when Tommy and Esther Parr were having the most of it as novelists, and Janice and Sam were keeping things afloat running the gallery to mammoth success, which was why the Thompsons had a year-round house in Maine and a flat in rue Froidevaux. No one really worked anymore—except Esther Parr. Tommy Thompson had had his couple of good-if-modest runs with novels, but never liked working that much.
Mick Riordan had been their editor—Esther’s and Tommy’s—for the best of their palmy years. An Irishman, whose father had been a famous Dublin imagist of the Twenties, Mick had set forth from Trinity, published one comic novel, written for the literary pages, worked in the radio, had begun to establish his own stylish signature, was about to get married to a Roscommon girl he’d studied with, but then just decided New York was the future. He was big, fleshy, softly handsome, with a head of unruly hair—like his father—and pale blue eyes. He brought a witty-jokey, confiding, non-confrontational brio to his relations with higher-ups, and liked to drink, liked women. He boasted that he almost shared a name with the famous O’Riordan communist. Eventually he took a job with his father’s connections at Berensen & Webb and intended—as many did—to work only until his second novel launched him toward celebrity and the vaunted American writing life that was so much larger than little Dublin’s.
Which never came close to occurring. There wouldn’t be a second novel or a pretense even at a smattering of stories. Editing was dumb easy, he realized. So much easier to bring along talent than wield it. Plus, he took enthusiastically to the publishing life—the clubs, the newest restaurants, the drinks parties, the late dinners with the fancy writer pals. It wasn’t the Duke and weekend shoots and ocean swims and the Abbey and suppers at someone’s country place, lasting past dawn. But New York was where everything that mattered began. Ireland was where it ended. Americans were intellectually constipated, couldn’t maintain a decent conversation—forget about a tune—didn’t drink enough, took everything too literally, and rarely, genuinely laughed. But it was authentic and accepting. A friendly, quick-witted, good-looking paddy stood out and could achieve tolerable placement, even if the placement were only semi-literary from the standpoint of achievement. In a short time, he’d married someone else, produced two quick children, moved to Bronxville, bought a house on Broad Ave. And that was it. Life could conceivably go on this way forever—take the train in late and come home later, reading on the weekends, take the girls wherever they needed taking until they got older, and accompany Marilyn to the Adirondacks in the summers, where her family had a compound on a lake. There was, admittedly, a mild sensation of being a bystander to life. But it was America. Everybody was a bystander. Nobody, he felt, was much full-on about anything.
By 1970, he was forty, his kids were old teenagers, he’d gotten divorced—having met Bobbi Kamper (Happy) at a weekend art party in Vermont (she was a sculptor). He’d taken a flyer with her to Cabo San Lucas. And that was it for marriage. He now lived on the Upper West Side. Bobbi lived in the Village, where her husband had died at a young age. Mick was now burnishing a colorful reputation for turning so-so literary novels into causes célèbres. He relished the company of writers old and young, liked smoking Camels, liked drinking at the Grammy and the White Horse, Raoul’s and the Oak Bar. Liked jazz, liked the Hamptons and the North Shore, had bought himself a small lobsterman’s house by the ocean in Beck’s Harbor, Maine, where he retreated for a month each August, “to read.” “I feel as if I’ve come a long ways,” Mick Riordan said, then “yet not to have journeyed so very far.” It was a complete and self-chosen life, far from the tall, shadowy brick mansion in Ballsbridge, where his father had held forth (both his parents were decades gone). It was almost, Mick often said, that he was only half-Irish, had come away with the best bits and none of the old crap-de-loo.
He and Bobbi kept separate accommodations. She owned lurchers, which he didn’t like and made no secret about. She had achieved, in the ’80s and ’90s, a reputation for large, kinetic, solar-powered, outdoor metal and glass “installations” that mimicked the wheeling of the constellations and “troped” different directions in different seasons. Many people in Bucks County and Connecticut and Taos owned a Happy Kamper. Her work re-framed the natural world, especially the ocean, in mysterious and revealing ways. People felt they were “changed” just being around them. Sam Jacobson represented her in the gallery, and for a spell she was on everyone’s lips and magazine covers, sat for profiles in Interview, Vanity Fair, and Der Spiegel. Was seen photographed with her lurchers on the Morrissey estate and in Paris and Moscow. She adopted a uniform—large, blue-tinted aviators (for a congenital eyelid condition she didn’t have), Birkenstocks, and bright-colored skinny jeans (yellow, pink, green). She weighed slightly more than a hundred and was tiny and fragile and dour, which contributed an interesting dimension to her name—Happy. Her father, a beloved cantor in a Reform congregation in Riverdale, had given her her name as a child even though, as he said, “she was usually anything but.” She had gone to Sarah Lawrence, “with all the other neurotics,” Mick Riordan frequently said deep in his cups. His and Happy’s union, he said—upon getting older
—was a mariage de convenance without the marriage and with little of the convenance. They fought. They made up. They took long driving trips. They drank to extremes. They were famous for un-pretty rows in expensive dining rooms, which everyone, including Tommy and Janice and the Jacobson-Parrs, had been onlookers for and regretted. Happy began going away to Taos to sculpt, leaving Mick to fend (she was fifteen years younger). Mick, as time passed, went to half-time at Berensen & Webb. He sold the Maine house when his daughters no longer visited, and bought a smaller stone cottage in Watch Hill, from near which he could get the train. He began to spend more time “in the country,” amusing himself painting miniature Jack Yeats-ish oils and playing canasta with the older writers who lived in the neighborhood, and going into the city only when he had to—staying with friends who had extra beds. He took on “three stone” and began, by his own admission, to resemble Brendan Behan in late life, if he’d made late life. There were rumors of some lung troubles he was ignoring.
Life—and it seemed very suddenly—was this now. And little more. Plans were smaller plans, or not plans. Trips were envisioned, then put off. Friends were invited to Watch Hill, but somehow postponed. Happy drove up to see Mick in her vintage Willys—sometimes on his birthday—always without the dogs, never for long, staying with sculptor friends in Mystic. Mick had simply but noticeably gotten old—was the general take—although he remained attractive company and liked guests, though there was no room in his cottage. He played speed Scrabble with anybody and was good at all games, drank martinis and watched the BBC on telly. And though he didn’t enjoy driving anymore, he liked to be taken on rides through the little seasonal seaside towns up and down the coast. Weekapaug. Quonochontaug. Charleston Beach. More like England than Ireland. The publisher was keeping him emblematically on at a reduced retainer—“My valedictory” Mick called it. It was understood his poet father had left him fixed enough to get out of life with dignity and money left. He remained “pleasingly, at least partly, viable,” in his words, was still half-handsome with the extra weight that worked a hardship on his knees. His hair stayed. People who were close to him—Tommy and Jan less than Esther and Sam—felt he was all right (though they also felt Happy might look in on him a bit more than she did). Other people not so close knew of Mick Riordan, thought perhaps he was deceased, or returned to Ireland—which was never in the plan. He’d long before become a citizen and cherished it. “Ireland,” Mick said, “was a feature of the prior millennium, having lost all sense of historical moment—which the U.S. had never bothered with in the first place.”
And then he’d died. A week ago he’d had a “small stroke” that had left one side of him “tingly” but still workable. He was able to call Happy in New York and impart this news. No extra doctoring seemed required. Mick was not keen on doctors. Happy couldn’t get away on the day he called, but three days later did—driving up with the dogs in the Willys. It was early September. Mick was on the front porch when she drove in—up and gimping with a cane and a bloody mary. He’d made “real” pimento cheese—a great favorite. (People shopped for him.) The lurchers were put into the fenced back yard where they restrained themselves to merely digging. Mick seemed not exactly fine but also not quite right. “He tilted when he walked and didn’t have his usual hue,” Happy told the Thompsons and the Jacobson-Parrs. She announced to Mick she’d be taking him up to RIH, the next morning, to which Mick temporized. Her cantor father had died of stroke, and she knew these typically arrived in twos and threes. No saying how many Mick had experienced already. She’d called people at Brown. It was arranged for him to check in.
Happy went to the farmers’ market in Westerly to shop for dinner, brought back swordfish, his favorite butter lettuce, and haricots verts. Mick would make vinaigrette. At six they had their “real drinks”—martinis—and talked about a novel he’d been sent for his mature opinion—which pleased him. He helped dry the lettuce, sitting at the kitchen table with his second drink. He grew quiet, as if engaged by his chores. Happy paid no extra attention; things didn’t seem that dire. “I’ve begun to make a plan for . . .” Mick said, then fell silent. She glanced at him from the sink. It was eight. Dazzling light still burnished the ocean. She could hear the dogs’ collars jingling as they inspected the hollyhocks. Mick, she said, seemed to be sleeping sitting up. He’d always nodded off with a couple of pops. She could let him doze in his chair and wake him when the fish was poached. She turned on some music, felt the cool evening sift in through the windows. Chet Baker. Johnny Hartman. Mick’s preferences. “My one and only love . . .” For some reason she said his name, though the fish wasn’t quite ready. She told Tommy she suddenly knew perfectly well he was dead, his hand on top of the lettuce. And dead he was. “Peacefully,” Happy said. As if the plan he’d begun to make were to die. Just seventy-three years old. Everyone thought he was older. She said she didn’t cry right away. Mostly just called the daughters to come.
TOMMY THOMPSON WENT BACK INTO TOWN AND BOUGHT TWO MORE lamb chops and more tomatoes and ears of corn to shave off the way Janice liked it. He bought a bottle of gin for Happy’s arrival and some olives. He and Janice had backed off spirits time ago, and Sam and Esther were already teetotalers. “Like the Fitzgerald story,” Esther had said. The one in Paris with the little daughter the main character’s never going to get back because of drink and the mean sister. No one could remember its title, though everyone loved it. Esther even remembered a line. “He wasn’t young anymore, with lots of nice thoughts and dreams to have by himself.” “Served him right,” Esther added, though she admired Fitzgerald, even if he was a complete crumb and nobody read him now, and women hated him. Sam said he’d thought the line was Hemingway’s.
Happy had called to announce her ETA for eight. She was just going past Kittery. Two hours away without terrible traffic. Tommy heard in Happy’s voice the telltale throatiness, the resonance and meticulous enunciation that suggested she’d already had a drink. Her “sovereign’s” voice, Mick had called it, “. . . perfect for issuing proclamations.” They could all get to bed early, Tommy thought. Talk of Mick—what there needed to be of it—could happen at breakfast on the deck. Happy could take the “little” bedroom in the guesthouse at the other end from Sam and Esther. The dogs, assuming she had them, could sleep in the car. It was cool enough at night.
By 7:30, the tide had sagged away from the near rocks, enough to lay in the fire pit. Tommy and Sam walked down with shovels and kindling in a paper sack. Tommy’d set driftwood to dry on the seawall for the fire. He and Jan often came down for sunset with a bottle of wine. There were few mosquitoes due to the steady crossing breeze on the point.
He and Sam both dug for a while, then Sam sat on the steps to the beach and smoked a cigarette, something he enjoyed. It was not hard work making a sand pit—which would be pleasingly filled by morning. A loon sat low on the glass sea and called to another loon you would never see but was answering. Voices teetered across the bay from other houses and people’s evenings. Someone was pounding on wood with a hammer. A lobster boat sat motionless a half mile out, its captain tinkering in the engine. Jan and Esther were up in the house cooking, getting ready.
Sam said that Happy had called him in the past month about Mick’s little paintings in the Jack Yeats style. Mick’s father had known all the Yeatses. “They all knew each other in Dublin. All the greats. It’s a tiny island. Only one real city.”
“What did she want you to do?” Tommy asked, assessing the size of the pit.
“Well. Appraise them. For sale. What else? He’s leaving them to her. He knew he’d be picking up the Trib. I’ll get around to it one of these days. They’re quite a few of them.” Sam breathed smoke into the dark air. “I’m having a little procedure on Thursday,” he said. Sam was tall and famously handsome—clever—but had been almost completely idle since college. He’d taken over the business from his father and didn’t much like working. Wished he could sail more. He loved being Esther Parr’s husband. It w
as all he needed. They both came from wealth.
“Are we sharing the details?” Tommy asked, looking out to sea at the lobsterman, bestilled. A lovely, simple life.
“Just that it involves my ass,” Sam said, smoking.
“Okay. Let’s see,” Tommy said, starting to groom the sides of the pit with the flat of the spade, the sand damp and cakey. “Let’s see. A brain tumor. Something cognitive.”
“You missed your calling. You’re wasted writing your shitty books.” Sam flipped his smoke out where the sand was wet.
“Are Mick’s paintings any good?”
“Mick was a capital guy,” Sam said. “But only as good at anything as he had to be. Life wasn’t all that hard for old Mick.”
“In a word,” Tommy said and stood the spade in the sand and admired the pit. “Or in a few words.”
“Or a few words,” Sam said. “Sums us all up. Happy, happy, happy life. Period.”
They began to walk back to the house.
HAPPY ARRIVED IN THE WILLYS A BIT BEYOND EIGHT. EVERYONE KNEW she’d arrived because two great dogs were seen through all the windows careering around the yard off their leashes, smashing the daylilies, knocking aside lawn furniture, then stopping suddenly to dig the grass, throwing up great clods where they’d detected prey to be, and pissing and shitting great clods all their own, before disappearing. Pity the creatures unlucky enough caught unawares.
“Happy’s arrived apparently,” Janice said at the kitchen window, a glass of wine in hand. “Her hounds do declare her.” They all preferred calling her Bobbi; Esther had known her at Pratt when she was Bobbi; pretty, too-thin and insular Roberta Kamper of Fieldston—previously Rachel Kamper of Fieldston. But “Happy” now—to honor the fact that Mick Riordan had just died three days ago and he had called her Happy—not without irony.