“What’s it you do now?” Billy asked. “Newspapers, right?”
“Right.”
“So, what? You own a few?”
I chuckled. “No, Billy. I write for one.”
He was still confused. “Um, you write for one that you own?”
I’d installed Lauren in a hotel room two blocks over. Her father had been arrested before I left town, and without anyone to look after her, a family-court judge in Cedar Rapids had sent to her live with her aunt in Connecticut. She’d gotten what she wanted without having to run away. I’d reserved her the penthouse. By that point, I thought she deserved it. She’d never seen a room so big, a view so commanding (The buildings are right here! Look, Hilly! I can see straight into that guy’s apartment!), or a bathroom that had both a bathtub and a shower, separate from each other. When I came back from the bank that night, I left a note for Lauren with the concierge. In it were instructions to access the trust fund that I’d set up for her. There was two hundred thousand on deposit, enough for college and grad school and her PhD and whatever else she wanted. Five years later, I’d drive down from Boston to see her graduate from Yale. She’d do the student part of the commencement speech, shaking hands with Vice President Mondale before winking at me and sitting down.
“Don’t open it,” I told the clerk, a girl as young as Lauren, her blue eye shadow nearly blinding me. “Just bring it up to her. There’s a note for her inside.”
“Anything else?” she asked.
“I need somebody to drive me to Iowa,” I said. “I’d do it. But I’m drunk. Can you arrange that?”
Nine
When I showed up at Savannah’s house, ringing the bell at an even later hour than I had the last time, I didn’t have Lauren to serve as my decoy. Instead, I had the photograph she’d stolen from Savannah’s office. I’d dug it out of my bag before I’d left Chicago, held it in my hands on the limousine ride from the Loop, out of the city, out across the flatlands, through Joliet, out over the Mississippi, into Iowa on Route 80. Here was Hove at three in the morning: the moon had vanished somewhere in Illinois, replaced by some dim hint above the dark fields, useless on the streets that led from the highway to Savannah’s front porch.
When she opened the door, I held up the picture, this picture that I’d been staring at for hours. In it, I’m looking off, away from the sea, away from where Charles had been standing, away from the catwalk staircase where Lem and my father had stood and argued. Savannah, though, is looking right at the lens. Maybe she’d become used to having her picture taken at the moment her father had lifted his camera, the moment the shutter snapped. There is something tired in her expression. Tired of him. Tired of Cape Cod.
She blinked at me. She was panicked. I realized then that she’d been expecting to find soldiers at the door with news about her husband. They were the only others who felt it necessary to come knocking so late.
“Hilly?” She breathed my name out in relief, her hand on her chest. “Hilly, what are you doing here?”
“I came back.”
“I see that.”
“From Chicago.”
“It’s the middle—”
“I brought you this.” The picture flopped as I tried to hold it upright. Again, that blue stamp on the back side flashed at me. Stockton. “It’s you. And it’s me.”
“Are you drunk?”
“Maybe.” I straightened myself and brought my thumb and forefinger together, as if ready to pinch some salt. “A little. Not much. Kind of.”
“Hilly.” She stepped out onto the porch, looked left and right.
“She’s gone,” I said. “Lauren’s in Chicago. She’s fine. We took care of her.”
“We?”
“The Wise family. She’s all set.”
“Oh Christ.”
I took a step toward her. “I came back.”
“Hilly?” she asked, taking the picture from me. “Did you steal this?”
“Lauren did,” I said. “She stole it and she tracked me down with it. Smart girl.”
“I thought it was lost.” She looked at it for a moment and pressed it—pressed me—to her chest.
“She said you had it in your office. All this time.”
“What did you come back for, Hilly?”
“I took a limousine,” I said.
“Not how, Hilly. Why?”
“I drank most of the way. Like father, like son. Funny—if you pay enough, they give you the fancy limo with the full liquor cabinet. It definitely makes the drive go by a little faster.”
“Hilly.”
“I was all set to go home,” I said, reaching into my jacket and removing a United Airlines ticket. “All set.”
She looked out beyond me. Then, with a pitying frown, she took my arm. “Come inside,” she said. “Pam’s asleep. Keep it down.”
The house was quiet, the arm of the sofa strewn with newspapers, a light on in the kitchen. A mug sat on the counter, filled halfway with tea. Beside that, a half-eaten biscuit. She took me inside, her hand still on my arm. At the sink, she filled me a glass of water from the faucet. “Best water in America right there,” she said, a claim that I disagreed with after drinking it. She laughed quietly, her hand over her face. “Oh, you’re too easy to mess with right now.”
I held up the glass. “This is gross.”
“Something’s wrong with our well,” she said. “Who knows what.”
“I’ll buy you a new well,” I said.
“Oh really?”
“I’ll buy your whole town a new well.”
“That’s sweet of you.”
“We’ll get you the best water in America.”
“Will we, now.”
“Sure. How much could a new well cost? Where do they have the best water? We’ll get it, and we’ll do it up right. We’ll get water from Tahiti. You and me.”
She smiled a bit uneasily and pointed at a small, unframed picture wedged into the woodwork of her cabinet. It was her husband.
“Oh, right,” I said. “I keep forgetting.”
“Conveniently.”
“Right. Conveniently.”
“Well, perhaps you shouldn’t.” She crossed her arms against her chest. She was wearing a black knit cardigan and sweatpants.
“You said that you waited for me,” I started.
She looked down. “I did.”
“I was looking for you.”
She looked up again at her husband’s picture. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“But it’s true.”
She smiled. “It’s true. But it doesn’t mean anything now. I just missed having someone here with me.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Why do you want to know about him?”
“Tell me.”
“Hershel,” she said. “His name is Hershel.”
“Hershel Stockton,” I said. “He’s younger than you, isn’t he?” I leaned in toward the small picture. He was in his uniform, his cap on. “He looks it. What is he, twenty-one? Look at you! He’s almost half your age!”
She smirked. “You’re aging me.”
“Still. It’s a big difference,” I said.
She took the picture. “He’s an academic,” she said. “Or I guess I should say that he wants to be an academic. He’s not suited for being a soldier.”
“The draft get him?”
“He tried to defer it as long as he could.”
“What would he say if he knew I was here?”
She scoffed. “What the hell do you think he would say?”
“How did you meet him?”
“Let’s not talk about this. Let’s get you to bed so that in the morning you can go back home.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not tired.”
“Why do you want to know how I met him? What’s the point?”
“Because I do. I want to know these things about you.”
“Oh, Hilly,” she said, placing Hershel back into the fold in the wood
of the cabinet door.
“Tell me.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Please.” I sat down on one of her stools.
“Marching,” she said. “How’s that? I met him marching.”
“Marching where?”
“You’re getting on my last nerve, Hilly.”
“Indulge me.” I took out my wallet. For the first time in my life, it was stuffed with cash. “I’ll pay you.”
“My God, you are awful.”
“Hideous. Terribly hideous. I know.”
“In Washington,” she said. “I met Hersh at a march in Washington. A protest.”
“Against the war? Or for civil rights?”
“For jobs.”
“I didn’t know you’d done that.”
She threw up her hands as if to say, What, in fact, do you really know about me anyway? She went on: “We weren’t the people with the ideas. We were the people in the background of the pictures. The people behind the people with ideas. Once”—she laughed into her hand—“once, the side of my shoulder made it into a photograph of Dr. King that ran in Life magazine. You probably saw it. It’s a rather famous photograph. Maybe you knew it was me.”
“Your shoulder? How would I have known it was your shoulder?”
“See?” she said. “It’s late. I’m talking nonsense.”
“I thought about you, too. I waited for you, too.”
“Now you’re talking nonsense.”
“I was at a lot of those marches,” I said, which was an exaggeration. I had been to four marches, all of them long after Johnson had signed into law the Voting Rights Act, all of them small, shabby, disorganized things.
She uncrossed her arms. “There were always a lot of these Jewish boys who came down to march. To help. Always these skinny boys in these dark glasses.”
“I never did that,” I said.
“I always looked to see if any of them was you.”
“You did?”
“I thought maybe you’d seen the picture and you just came down to help.”
“The picture of your shoulder?”
She laughed. “It’s crazy, right?”
By now she had turned away from me and was looking out the window at the soy field, lit by a solitary lawn light. This last confession of hers had been made without one glance in my direction, as if she couldn’t bear to divulge it while having me looking back at her.
I kissed her when she turned around. She startled, pushed me away.
“What?” I asked. “No?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. She’d whispered it.
“Really? No?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She locked her hands around my waist but waited a moment before she did this, as if asking for my permission.
“Well? No or yes. Which is it?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes?”
“Oh fuck. No. No. No.” She shut her eyes. “What am I saying?”
“Why? Say yes.”
“I want to say yes.”
“Then do it.”
“I can’t.”
“Why?”
“Why?” She laughed. “You idiot. You know why.”
“It’s not so impossible anymore. You and me.”
“It’s not much better.”
“But it’s not impossible. People do it.”
“People do all sorts of things that others find unnatural.”
“I thought being unnatural was in fashion now.”
“Not in Iowa.”
“Come back to Massachusetts.”
“I’ll never go back there,” she said. Although she’d said this so sternly, her hands were still around me. I thought I felt her tighten her grip.
“How about maybe?” I asked. “At least say maybe.”
“Now you’re just begging.”
“So what.”
“Don’t beg. That’s so unappealing.”
“What is this? Showing up at your house at three in the morning, drunk. Is that not unappealing?”
“Although it probably says something awful about me, I actually find this kind of appealing. In a desperate way.”
“I’m desperate?”
“Slightly. But you’ve always been slightly desperate.”
“When was I desperate?”
“You were desperate when you were young. It seems to be a cycle, Hilly.”
“What if you’re with the wrong person?” I asked. “What if this young guy you’re with is wrong for you?”
She let go of my waist, turned around. “Don’t say that. I love him, Hilly. I married him.”
“But you told me that you were waiting for me.”
“I was,” she said. “But you didn’t show up.”
“Why didn’t you look for me?”
She took a step back. “It just seemed crazy. Like some crazy hope. It wasn’t real.”
“Obviously it was real.”
“You can sleep on the couch,” she said. “But in the morning—”
“What if I hang around here?” I asked.
“Here? You can’t stay here. I have no room. And I don’t want you to stay here.”
“Not here. In town.”
“My father would kill you.”
“What if your father didn’t kill me?”
“I might kill you.”
“Would you stop me? Would you, I don’t know, visit?”
“Would I visit?”
“Visit for coffee. Or dinner. Would you stop me?”
She thought about this for a long while. “I don’t know,” she said finally. A tiny, devious grin. “Can we talk about this in the morning?”
In the morning, I woke to the telephone. Pam took the call in the kitchen.
“Is Hilly here?” she asked into the phone. “Hilly Wise? I don’t think so. Let me check.”
I sat up as Pam came into the room. “Look at that,” she said, tossing the phone to me, the cord unraveling in the air. “You are here.” I rubbed at my eyes. At the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister, Savannah stood sipping her coffee, smiling at me. She wore a blue-and-white skirt. Her toes were painted alternately in pink and yellow. Behind her, dust was caught without gravity in a slant of sun.
I took the call lying down on the couch. Pam had put Stevie Wonder on the stereo.
“Hello,” I said, cupping the receiver against my ear with the soft butt of my shoulder.
“Hilly, this is your father speaking.”
Instinctively, I sat up and turned so that my back was to Savannah. I checked my watch. It was early in New York, but he was probably at his desk anyway.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I’ve called practically every house in this goddamned country looking for you this morning. But it’s not a complete surprise to find you here.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that you have this number,” I said.
Over the line I heard his cigarette lighter snapping, then a sharp breath. “Right. Well, Billy McKinley called.”
“Of course he did.”
Behind me, Savannah took a step into the kitchen. I turned, one finger up. Give me a sec, I mouthed.
“We had a bet going whether you’d ever come to your senses.”
“My senses, huh,” I said. “What did you bet on?”
“I bet on you, Hilly. I always bet on you. You’re my son.”
Pam had begun to do errands, to dust, to put some dishes away into a big wooden cabinet they had in the living room. She’d carried a few wineglasses out to the cabinet, and then, leaving the doors open, she went back into the kitchen to grab a few more. From the couch I saw, aligned on a high shelf of the cabinet, above a row of dinner plates, above a messy stack of coffee cups, an array of the knitted dolls that Savannah had shown me that evening in Bluepoint. There were three of them—the one that she had made, with its disproportionate limbs and its cockeyed facial expression, and the two that her mother had made, which were
perfect in all the ways that Savannah’s were awkward. Pam put the glasses back into the cabinet, and as she was closing the doors I realized that those three dolls were resting against Lem Dawson’s old jewelry box. The box that I’d seen Savannah take from his apartment that last afternoon.
“Listen, Hilton,” my father said. “I’ve got the girl out at Bluepoint.”
“Who?”
“Ms. Whitcomb,” he said, and because I didn’t immediately answer, he said, “Jenny. I’ve got Jenny out here with me.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“ ’Cause she’s pregnant, Hilly. The girl’s pregnant.”
I closed my eyes. Savannah had sat down beside me now, smiling at me.
“You there?” he asked.
A breath. “I’m here.” Another breath.
“I suggest you come home,” my father said.
“Home,” I said.
“Bluepoint, Hilly. I’ve got Dr. Silver staying with her.”
“Is everything OK?” I asked. “Is she sick?”
“She’s not sick, Hilly. She’s pregnant. I just said that.”
“Why’s the doctor staying with her, then?”
“Because I’m paying him to.”
“Right.”
I heard my father breathing. He breathed a certain way when he was getting things done. “Do you need me to send you a plane?”
“You have your own plane now?”
A tsk. “You need a flight out or not?”
“That’s fine. I can fly like everybody else.”
“Suit yourself.” He was already hanging up. “I’ll expect you tomorrow, Hilly.”
Ten
There were gates now at the entrance to the house in Bluepoint: heavy iron doors that swung, a lock where they met. And in front of it all, a security booth. Inside sat a man on a stool, a small Zenith going, a red thermos on the sill.
I’d arrived late, near nine, my flight out of Chicago delayed because of runway traffic, the taxi from Boston slowed by an accident on the Bourne, the last part of the ride through town hampered by the same driving rain I’d seen in Chicago. My driver was an Algerian man named Hamid. He’d been in the country eight months by then, and for much of the trip I’d had to direct him. This amounted to the most of what he’d seen of America so far, all of it in the dark. When we crossed over Cape Cod Canal, he whistled and grabbed the wheel, whitening his knuckles. “So far down.”
Wise Men: A Novel Page 22