“This all yours?” the boy asked as they came near.
“It is,” I said.
“Wow. All of it?”
“Not all of it,” I said. “But most of it.”
The boy had let go of his mother now, and while Savannah kept plodding forward, one slow step after another, Hershel had his attention fixed on the three steps ahead of them. Stairs, his expression seemed to be saying, no one told me there’d be stairs.
She had her head down, as if the dirt threatened to rise up to trip her. Each step came impossibly slowly, an act of bargaining between her brain and her legs. She was wrapped in heavy clothing made from bright, colored fabrics, a purple sash across her chest, an orange stripe from her one shoulder to the other. Her hair was cropped short to her temples, dyed black, her neck loaded down with pendants and amulets and charms. The same was true of her wrists, the small bones there decorated by dozens of ringed gold bangles that clinked and shifted as she gripped her husband’s hand. They worked in unison, like they were navigating a balance beam. When she wanted to, she brought both of their hands up into the air, each step studied, considered, carefully placed. And then, when she felt it necessary, she took Hershel’s hand near to the side of her own thigh, as if to push down on it. All the while, I realized, he’d been whispering to her: Step, there you go, step, there you go.
By now the boy had wandered off slightly, moving from the walkway onto the wet ground so that he could see the water. I heard him whisper to himself, a light, impressed, unironic sentence that ended, clearly, with the word damn. Then he slipped his tiny black telephone from his pocket and began to take pictures of the shore, shifting his position a little after every shot so that later, I guessed, he could paste them all together. Funny how even now, when there’s no shutter to open and no light to pour onto a strip of film, all of these devices should keep the sound of the camera intact as a memory: the click and roll and whisk and clap.
“Hilly,” Savannah said, still looking down, her long, knitted purse swinging around from her back to her front, “is there some way we could get into your house without managing these stairs?”
“No,” I said. “If I’d known…”
“That’s fine, Hilly. It’s just that this might take most of the six hours we’ve allotted for you.” She said this sternly, her focus still largely directed at the ground but the skin near the corners of her eyes crinkled—not at me, I realized, but at Hershel.
“I have some people inside who could help you,” I offered.
“Help me how?”
“They could lift you.”
Hershel looked up at me with a certain anger on his face. But the idea made her laugh.
“Lift me?” she said. “Do you keep people on staff to lift you up the stairs?”
“Nobody is lifting you, sweetie.” To me, Hershel’s tone was harsher: “Nobody’s lifting my goddamned wife up any stairs. Got it?”
She let go of his hand now, as if to scold him with it, and then, without his help, she lost her balance. To right herself, she put her palm flat against his chest. “Oh, stop it. Just stop it right now. We talked about this. Calm down. Right now. Like I’d let somebody lift me.”
Hershel shook his head. He couldn’t look at me. Savannah, however, turned to me and then moved to survey the view. Her lips pursed, and she closed her eyes.
“It’s completely different,” she said, turning back. She pointed out to the water. “The beach. The whole shape of it.”
“Erosion,” I mustered.
Charles had come back to the walkway. “Damn,” he said loudly to me. “That’s all I gotta say. Damn.”
“Hilly Wise,” I said, shaking his hand.
“I know who you are,” he said. “I saw you on the news.”
Hershel stepped between us. He was still a big man, each of his shoulders larger than my chest. His chin had a point to it, as if it, on its own, were a weapon that could harm me.
“How’re we gonna do this?” he asked me, his voice dropped low. He had a hint of coffee on his breath, and beneath each of his eyes he had evidence of the stress this visit had caused.
“How do you mean?”
“The steps?”
“What do you usually do?”
“Usually we’re at home. Usually we have ramps. Usually we don’t travel all this way to do something like this.”
“Oh, Hersh,” Savannah said. “I wanted to come. Stop being such a drag.”
We took her up each step slowly, deliberately: her son on one side, her grim husband on the other, and me, walking backward up the three tall steps of my house, my hands outstretched and lightly grabbing hers. It took a few minutes to do this, and the whole time she glanced up at me with a series of alternately brave and pitiful and lovely and sad expressions. They said, in short: I’m here, I’m sick, it’s awful, but I came. And, although I might have been imagining it, there was one last expression, right when we’d gotten her through the front door, when, rather sheepishly, she batted her eyes at me as if to say, Do you still like what you see here? Nobody sees me in here anymore. Do you?
Because the entire family was either living with me for the summer or up at the Broad Neck and generally close by, I’d had to tell them what was happening. Or at least tell them something. My father had been the one to spill to my daughters and to all of the boys the secret behind all of this, which he did in his typical fashion. “Oh, her? She’s the black girl Hilly was obsessed with, isn’t she? You don’t know about her? She’s coming? Let’s hope he doesn’t get his heart broken again.” Of course, my father didn’t tell my kids the whole story. This was our history, our shared secret. How could we have explained this whole story? Especially to Sammy? How could he tell her how I’d waffled that moment at the gate, how I’d considered staying in Iowa?
My father had thought of this, though. The way he’d put it, Savannah was just a girl I’d had a crush on one summer. That was it. A summer fling. After he let that out of the bag, everyone started to tease me. In the week leading up to her visit, there was nobody who didn’t chime in. At one point, Ethan grabbed me by the elbow and offered to take the girls away for the week so that I could have Savannah alone at the house. When I told him that she was arriving with her husband and her son, he offered to distract them. Most of this was innocent, even if, beneath the surface, there was something patronizing about it all. I’d been lonely since Jenny died. Everyone knew it. I had no idea how to be a widower. It was something that carried with it no set of instructions.
When they were all inside the house—young Charles, Hershel, and Savannah—my family was waiting for them, and I introduced everyone. Savannah took everyone’s hand with both of hers, gripping it the way a priest might, meeting their eyes. “You all look so much like your father,” she said when we were finished.
Call it what you want—worlds colliding, universes intersecting; both of these were clichés that Greg used—but the first few minutes were painful to endure. Reunions always are. All the small talk, all the innocent questions. For instance, Eliza asked: “So, what was he like when he was young?” And Savannah, looking to me, some mischief in her eyes, responded, “He was awkward. But very determined to be liked.” My daughters, especially, liked to hear this. Then, Elliot perked up: “Was he cute?” Savannah looked to Hershel, as if apologizing in advance, and then back to Elliot. “He was. Sort of. He was skinny. He needed to eat more. It never made sense to me that someone so rich could be so thin!”
My father wheeled himself into the room at some point during all of this, one of his nurses behind him. He hadn’t been out on the porch when Savannah arrived because I’d asked him not to come. If she’d gotten out of the car and seen him first, then she’d have turned right back around. He arrived with his typical panache, dressed to the hilt.
“You know,” he said, taking her hand, “I never did get to meet you. You met my associate. Robert. But I never had the pleasure.”
She smiled. “I did. He was a nice m
an.”
“He was,” my father said.
“I was so sorry to hear that he passed.”
My father was still holding on to her hand, and then, having realized that she was ill, he seemed to loosen up. “You’re banged up, just like me, huh?”
This made her laugh. “Oh. Well. I didn’t survive a plane crash,” she said.
Charles interrupted. “Wait. Dude. You survived a plane crash?”
“Dude,” my father said. The word sounding particularly refined coming from his mouth. “Indeed I did.”
“What was it like?”
Hershel, clearly having been briefed on my father’s explosive personality, tried to stop this, and I looked to him, shaking my head, hoping to convey to him that we were all at a loss to control my father. If he wanted to talk to you, he would talk to you. And if he wanted to engage your son, who was, for whatever reason, ignorant of all that bound us together, then he would do that, too.
“What was it like?”
My father leaned back in his chair and put both of his hands on his lap. He had yet another watch on his wrist, this one black, with some small blue stones on it. “It was terrifying, son. I realized I was going to die. And then I realized that I really didn’t want to die. And then I had a moment where I realized how terrible I’d been to the people I loved the most. And then, well, I felt bad for another few moments, and then I waited for impact.”
“Did it hurt?”
“Charles,” Hershel said.
My father looked at me for a moment. Then he looked out the living room window, where the crest of Robert’s roof was dappled by the sun. His clotheslines were still out. There were towels still clamped to the line, now stiffened by sea salt. My father had refused to let us remove them. The fence remained half-finished. My father put his hands together. “Of course it hurt. But, in the grand scheme of life, it didn’t hurt that much. So much about life hurts so much more, son.”
Savannah saw that we had one of my father’s spare wheelchairs out in the breezeway, and after looking at it longingly she asked me if I wouldn’t mind taking her out to the water. She did this while we were in the living room, sitting in the blue Florence Knoll chairs my mother had first bought for the place. The group excluded my father, who, after talking some more about his crash, his recovery, ordered his nurses to bring him back upstairs to his office. Thankfully, my children had assumed the task of conversation, Todd and Ethan beginning to debate automobile engines while every few minutes the young Charles made dismissive scoffing noises. And, Rachel and Greg having realized that the Hershel Stockton sitting before us—with his legs crossed at the ankle, drinking a giant martini as if he were gulping water after a tennis match—was in fact the same Hershel Stockton whose book on hermeneutics had apparently caused some implacable fissure between the two of them, one corner of the room became filled with that particular sound of academic pedantry which has always made my stomach uneasy. Flattery, as I knew well, was the easiest way to calm a man’s suspicions, and so when Savannah asked me to take her outside, her husband was far too busy accepting praise to remember how much he distrusted me. As I stood up to get the wheelchair, I caught him saying the following sentence to Rachel: “Solipsism, I suppose I was trying to claim, is the obvious logical byproduct of all this technology. Is there a more clear example of this sort of dualism than in the gadgets we’re all beginning to worship? I mean, I don’t think so, right?”
Outside the wind was steady, the flags up at Broad Neck stiff and pulling inland toward Hyannis. I walked behind her, pushing the chair, the breeze helping me. Although it was August, the immediate, dead heart of summer, she had a chill. Elliot had given her a wool throw to put on her shoulders, and as we got closer to the water, she pulled it up to her chin. Resting on her lap, she had her purse, and inside the purse, I knew, she had Lem’s jewelry box. We went for a good distance in silence, heading north, up the beach, away from Robert’s house. She had big black sunglasses on her face, and every few minutes, as the gulls dove near us, or as the breeze whipped up paper-dry seaweed and tumbled it past, she hummed to herself, either out of the obvious pleasure of being on the water or because she was in pain. I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t ask. I took her out as far as the boardwalk went, the wooden planks being one of the few of my father’s additions that I’d kept. After a few minutes of walking this way, in total silence, we got to the end of the path.
“What? No butlers to carry me?” she asked, teasing.
“I fired everybody fifteen years ago,”
“Don’t you want to know what’s wrong with me?” she asked.
“Not if you don’t want to tell me,” I said.
“Oh, I don’t believe that. You were always so curious.”
“Are you dying?” I asked.
“Not any more than you are,” she said. “Just doing it with a little less style.”
“That’s all I need to know.”
“Really? Here I am, you’re pushing me in a wheelchair, and you’re not curious?”
“My wife died not so long ago,” I said.
She nodded. “I read that.”
“If it’s not terrible to say, I think it would be awful for both of you to die so close together. That would make me especially lonely, I think.”
She shifted beneath her blanket. I had said the wrong thing. I spun around to look back at the house, not because I wanted to but because it meant that I didn’t have to see Savannah’s face if she turned to see mine. What I saw out at the house was two of my sons-in-law taking Charles out to the beach. The boy was taking his shirt off, and then, to much less impressive and much flabbier results, Todd and Ethan were taking their shirts off. Then they all began to walk toward the water.
“Oh, Hilly, please don’t tell me I came here to have you try to woo me back to you.” She sighed and shifted uneasily beneath her blanket. “That would be so… so embarrassing for both of us.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “I didn’t.”
“That’s good.”
“I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s not that it isn’t flattering, Hilly. Crippled women don’t get come-ons very often. You were always very good at buttering me up.”
“It’s not what I meant.”
“Oh,” she said, giggling, “it is. We both know that.”
Far off down the beach, I could hear Charles screaming as the cold water bit at his legs. I turned Savannah’s chair around so she could see.
“We adopted him,” she said. “His mother died in a fire, just like mine did.”
“What do you mean? He looks just like your husband.”
“Hersh is always pleased to hear people say that. But it’s not true. He was a baby. A fireman saved him. There’s a rather famous picture of the rescue.”
We watched them for a while, the three men in the water, and then, a few minutes after that, all my daughters in their black suits running and splashing and shrieking into the surf.
“They’re all so pretty,” she said. “Each one of them is prettier than the next.”
“Certainly not because of me.”
“Self-pity from Hilton Wise? How rare!”
We were talking without looking at each other. I was still behind her chair, my hands on the two grips on either side of her neck. In front of us was the water, the tide far out past the bluff, the damp, marshy ground pocked with sea-smoothed stones and the abandoned shells of hermit crabs and tiny beach snails legging their way to a tide pool.
“Can I ask you something?” I said, crouching to look at her.
“As long as it’s not about you wooing me,” she said; then she giggled again. “Woo. What a word.” Then, singing it, as if to the birds: “Woooo!”
“Washington DC. A few years ago.”
She moaned and then laughed. “Ah! You followed me for so long! I thought you were crazy!”
“You didn’t stop.”
“Because I didn’t want to stop!”
“
But why? I mean, it was innocent.”
“It’s always innocent with you, Hilly. But then something terrible happens. You’re a disaster magnet.”
I stiffened, and she saw it.
“To me, Hilly. To me. Obviously not to your girls. Just—with me, you always appeared in my life, and then something cataclysmic happened. You’re like the flash before the bomb goes off.”
“Did you just compare me to a nuclear bomb, Savannah?”
Another burst of dry laughter. “A little. I’d be a fool if I didn’t believe it a little. I mean, nearly right on cue, I’d gotten this awful diagnosis. Literally fifteen minutes before. And then you just appeared.”
“Oh, come on. That’s a coincidence.”
“I don’t know. Later I laughed about it. But at the moment, it was freaky.”
“What about the note?”
“Well, I shouldn’t have left that. I felt bad about that right away.”
“I still have it.”
“Why am I not surprised to hear that.”
“But why—?”
“You ever wonder why I was in Washington? It’s not like it’s very close to where I live.”
“Business?”
“Business,” she scoffed. “I’m a librarian.”
“Than what?”
She patted her legs. “I was there to see doctors. To get a diagnosis.”
“But—”
“And so the next time you saw me, if you ever did see me, you’d have seen me like this. Which, as you can imagine, wasn’t something I thought I would be able to handle very well.”
I lifted my hands off her chair. “Right.”
“You never think you’ll end up needing someone to do everything for you.”
“You sound like my father.”
She looked at her watch. “I don’t think I’ll be able to stay here very long, Hilly.”
“You’re not having fun?”
“Fun? It’s fine. But it’s all very—I don’t know, heavy. If that makes sense.”
“It does.”
“I showed Chucky the Emerson Oaks today.”
“Oh.”
“It’s not there.”
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