“I know.”
“Neither, strangely, is the graveyard where my mother was buried. You should have heard Hersh. ‘A black graveyard is like a pile of mulch to these people. Just dig it up. Plow it over.’ ”
“If I’d have known,” I said.
“I know,” she said, reaching out to pat my knee. “You would have bought it or something.”
“Right.”
“Do you ever get tired of buying things?”
“I have a foundation,” I said, stupidly.
“I know. I subscribe to the newsletter online.”
I laughed. “See? I didn’t know we did such a thing.”
“It does good things, Hilly. You should be proud.”
“Why don’t you sound sincere?”
“Well, it’s just that I fear that it’s all because of this guilt you have. This guilt you carry around with you.”
“It is. Partly.”
She looked down at her purse. I saw then that she had a trace of dark-blue eye shadow on, which made me happy to see. “Do you know what it is I have to give you?”
“I have an idea.”
She took the box from her purse. “You can take it now. But I want you to know that I didn’t know what was in it for a very long time. Far after you came to see me in Hove.”
“OK.”
I took it from her. The sheen on it had long since faded. I opened the lid. Inside was a stash of papers, so many of them, all folded into impossibly tiny squares, the paper thin like tissues, the pile of it like so much origami.
“What is this?” I asked.
“Open them all later,” she said.
“Are these letters?” I said.
“Later, Hilly.”
The papers were so delicate as to be translucent, and it took me a while to remember what this was: tracing paper, the form of mimeograph that my father had used for so long.
“If I were you, I’d close it before it all blows away. Hersh would be so angry that we came all the way out here, only to lose them.”
I could see, through one of the top papers, what I thought was the pillar on the center of the W in the Wise & Ashley logo.
“Are these the Brooklyn Pages?”
“I don’t know what that is, Hilly. But they are papers. I know that much.”
“Have you read them?” I asked.
“Yes. I didn’t for ages. And then I did. It seemed wrong of me to pry.”
“And?”
“Well,” she said. “I came here to give them to you. If you want to read them, you can. But, Hilly?”
“Yes.”
“Please close the box, sweetheart. I haven’t let anything happen to those letters in fifty-five years. It’s very windy.”
I closed the box. It made a clapping sound.
“Your guilt,” Savannah began. “It’s always been misplaced. I’m sure I’m not the first person to tell you that.” And then, pulling the blanket up to her nose, the wool muffling her voice, she said, “I’m very cold, Hilly. Do you think you could take me back?”
I realize I’m required here to explain how I felt being with her again (suddenly uneasy), or to negotiate whatever curiosity I had about the stash of so much paper that had lived inside that jewelry box for the past half century, or even to give some summary of what that many years do to two people having suffered between them murder and racial violence and sickness and all the attending guilt that adheres itself to those things. But I felt none of that. I felt, pushing her, walking behind her, adjusting her blanket so that she didn’t get too cold, a sense that I was, as they say, in the moment, a concept that up until that point I’d never truly believed to be a genuine state of being but rather just some gibberish cooked up by New Age healers and television evangelists. But for an instant, maybe more than an instant, something had lifted from me as I walked back along the boardwalk, toward my family, all of them toweling off on the dry, hot sand. We’d put the box on Savannah’s lap, and as we moved back to the house, she kept both of her hands covering the top of it. Maybe I felt this way because I knew that soon there’d be no more secrets. Maybe I felt this way because she was here with me, and she’d met my daughters, seen what I’d left Iowa for that day, seen what I’d done with myself.
This isn’t to say that Savannah felt the same way. Bound to the chair—her legs occasionally reaching down as we rested at the end of the last wooden plank, to tap at the board or to give us a well-meaning but ineffective little push with her toes—she made me stop halfway to the house.
“Hilly,” she said, her voice rising. “Hilly?”
“What is it?”
“Where was it? Where?”
“Where was what?”
“His house? My uncle’s apartment. I can’t remember. It all looks so different.”
I frowned and then pointed out, off the beach a little, to a spot hovering in the air somewhat ahead of us. “I think over there.”
“You think?”
She craned in her chair to look back at me. I moved around to the front of her chair, crouching now. “There,” I said, pointing at a wake-swirl on the surface of the water, an agitated spot of whiteness that looked as if it were dish soap poured into the sea. “Right there. That dot of white.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“It’s just washed out?”
“Hurricanes,” I said. “Gloria. And then, especially, Bob. Bob killed us. Half the beach just fell off that day.”
“That’s terrible,” she said. “That it’s just gone. Just like that.”
“It was gone before that,” I said. “My parents had it torn down. For years they had this awful glass thing. I knocked it down as soon I moved back.”
“Right,” she said, tears in her eyes. “But at least the ground was still there. At least if he had come back, you know, if he had just come back one day to do another painting, he’d have recognized it. Now, it’s just all different.”
What do you say to this? To the way she just started to cry? What can you say? I wondered for a moment if she wasn’t becoming delusional, if the illness that had crippled her body hadn’t also crippled her mind. I stood up from my crouch and kept pushing. Eliza came running up to us, dripping wet, salt on her skin, grinning, golden. Then, a moment later, Hershel came out onto the patio, drunk by now, his ego inflated surely, his sport coat off, a vest beneath it. He whistled, out of joy, I hope, at the water and the birds and the waves. A moment after that, Charles took off running up the beach, toward us. Apparently this was the first time he’d ever been in the ocean. “It’s so salty,” he was yelling just as Savannah was telling me, with a note of sheepishness in her voice, “He’s from Iowa, remember. We’re not hicks. We’re just landlocked.”
An hour later they were all gone.
When I said goodbye to Savannah, we were alone at the edge of the driveway, the car running. I think we both knew that this was it for us. I was holding her up with both of my hands, in a position not unlike a very tentative slow dance.
“Can we see the spot from here where you found him?” she asked me.
“Lem?”
“Can you? When you caught him?”
I pointed to the taller of the two dunes out on the beach.
“Right there?” she asked.
“In between the hills.”
“I kept that painting, you know.” Then she smiled. “Oh, you know. You saw it. I forgot.”
I smiled at the thought of the painting. “He was… how do I say this?”
“Not the very best painter,” she said, laughing.
“Right,” I said, nodding.
“Quite awful, in fact.” She was laughing easily now.
“Terrible!”
“So terrible!” Now I was laughing, but she had stopped and was pointing.
“So that’s where it was?”
“In between,” I said.
“The night I came looking for you.”
“An hour before that.”
“I was so stupid to drive by myself.”
“I know.”
“Anything could have happened to me.”
“I was irresistible. What could you do?”
“Oh please,” she said, laughing. Then, turning the chair around with her toes: “I have cancer, Hilly. In case you wanted to know.”
“You didn’t have to tell me.”
“It’s slow moving. Some rare form. I don’t even have to take chemotherapy. Just a pill.”
“I’m glad for that.”
“If I didn’t tell you, I just know you’d show up at my door or something, demanding to find out.”
“No,” I said, laughing.
“Yes.” She made a show of looking at her watch. “Probably in a day or two. That seems to be your habit. You’d want to buy me a hospital or something.”
“Are you getting good treatment?” I asked.
“Please stop trying to take care of me. I can take care of myself. I have always been able to take care of myself. I’m not helpless.”
“I never said—”
“Even when you were a boy you believed I was helpless.”
I shook my head.
She nodded and reached to touch my cheek. “Do you remember me then? When you first saw me?” she asked.
“You were beautiful.”
“I couldn’t have been. I had nothing.”
“You had a Band-Aid on your knee.”
“See? How could I have been beautiful?”
“Even with nothing you were beautiful,” I said.
“Give me a kiss,” she said. “Before I leave.”
“A real kiss?”
She shook her head. I saw her eyes flicker. “Damn, Hilly. On the cheek. On the cheek.”
I kissed her. “Goodbye, Savannah.”
“Goodbye, Hilly,” she said. “This is forever, probably.”
“Don’t say that.”
She winked. “Goodbye forever, Hilly. Be good, now.”
Nine
Two days later, my father had the cast on his leg removed by an orthopedist he had flown in from Boston to Bluepoint especially for the task. The orthopedists at the hospital here at Broad Neck were, of course, up to the task, one man’s cast being just as easy to remove as anybody else’s, a saw in Cape Cod functioning the same way as one in Beacon Hill, and their sullen, embarrassed faces should have made my father feel foolish. But eight months of pain and immobility and constant checkups, eight months filled with the daily humiliations of his helplessness, of having his every move, his every whim, his every bodily function, attended to by a team of young men—all of this had worn on him. So he flew in his doctor. The guy’s name was Billings, and he milked the affair, booking the President’s Suite at the hotel, charging everything to the firm, and generally strutting around Cape Cod like some long-lost Kennedy brother. This happened on a Friday, a date that had been circled on my father’s wall calendar for a month. The circle represented the last step in his recovery, the bit of plaster that ran from his ankle to his knee the very last piece of the plane crash that had put Arthur Wise back in the news. Doctors told him that his body was as good as it ever was going to be. My father was to have a limp, left as a final insult, until the day he died, very much like the fake limp evident on some of the extant news reels from the early 1950s. His nervous tic had become a real handicap.
He’d asked me to take him to the hospital that morning, changing his plans at the last moment. Eliza had been primed to drive him, and she woke early to do the job. Instead, my father came to find me in my study, hopping awkwardly into the room. “It’s at goddamned Broad Neck,” he said, sweat on his brow. “And… you know… that’s where Bob goddamned died. You’re not doing anything important, are you?”
Now we sat in the same waiting room where I’d waited that day for his helicopter to land. This made both of us uneasy. “You’d think they’d give us a different room, at least.”
“This is a tiny hospital,” I said. “There is no other room. This is it.”
“A fucking lounge or something.”
“There’s no lounge. This is a hospital. Not an airport.”
“Some place you could get a decent drink.”
“Seriously?”
“All over Europe,” he said. “A man can get a drink in a good hospital all over Europe. Totally respectable. Totally, one-hundred-percent legit way to pass the time.”
“You want me to call out for a flask?”
He blew me off. “They’d probably arrest me,” he said. “It’s probably against some government regulation to drink in a private hospital between eight and nine in the morning.”
Beside me there was a cubbyholed sort of ladder bolted to the wall and slotted with brightly colored pamphlets. I flipped through them—Someone I Love Is Sick, What Do I Do?; Abdominal Tumors Explained; Migraines: Is It in My Head?—hoping to find something applicable to my father. Perhaps a pamphlet with suggestions on how to deal with an all-encompassing, gnawing, mushrooming cynicism.
“Look at that goofy plaque,” he said, pointing at the wall where Robert’s name was engraved in bronze. “Goddamned saint.”
“Why don’t you read a magazine?”
“I’m in half the magazines,” he said. “If I wanted to see pictures of me looking like shit, I’d look in the mirror.”
“Why don’t we go outside and get you a smoke?”
“Also probably against some goddamned rule.”
“How about we play cards to pass the time?”
“I would fucking crush you to pieces.”
Billings, we’d been told, was on his way over, and every few minutes we heard his name intoned over the intercom. Nurses hurried back and forth in the hall. Some other patients began to fill up the waiting area, most everyone glaring at us, some with more discretion than others.
“I used to love hospitals,” my father said. “I’d sit in places like this for days to find a client.”
“So this should be a fun memory for you.”
“That was when I was young. Nobody I knew had been sick yet. Or died. I was such an arrogant prick.”
“What’s changed?” I asked.
“Very funny, Hilly.”
“They let you smoke and drink back in the hospital in New Haven?”
“Every minute, if you liked. They gave out ashtrays.”
He rapped his fingers against the hard, yellowed plaster of his cast. Across from us a teenage boy surreptitiously took our photograph with his telephone, a fact my father was oblivious to.
“So,” he said, “you finally got that girlfriend of yours to come give you a visit.”
“Girlfriend?”
“Miss Ewing.”
“Savannah’s last name is Stockton.”
“I was surprised to see you got her out here. I didn’t dare tell the kids the whole story.”
“I noticed. I appreciate the discretion.”
“I saw she basically took off once she got a gander at how you’d aged.”
I smiled. Again, Billings’s name came across the loudspeakers.
“What was wrong with her, anyhow?” he asked. “She sick or something?”
“Cancer.”
“Christ.”
I nodded. “Apparently it’s not the kind that kills you.”
“Oh,” my father said. “Well, that’s good.”
“I think so.”
“She has a young boy.”
“Seventeen.”
“I was basically the same age when my mother died,” he said. “She died right after you were born. But she met you. She squeezed your little foot.” He stopped. I’d never heard any of this before. “Then I was off at war when my father died. It’s terrible to lose your parents when you’re young.”
I thought of my girls, and my wife, and I knew that my father was thinking of them, too. “Your girls seem fine, though.”
“It’s nice that they have their husbands.”
“All except the ba
by,” he said, speaking of Eliza. Her name was Elizabeth, but rather than call her Beth, which my father had advocated, we’d gone with Eliza, which he thought sounded absurd, taken altogether: Eliza Wise. Still, it was nice to hear him say that she was the baby. Of course, to me she was the baby. That never changes.
“She seems good, though,” he said. “Did she tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“That I gave her money.”
I leaned my head back. “No.”
“I’m going to do it for all the kids. But I did it for her first. She’s been so kind to me. For no reason.”
“She’s your granddaughter. That’s a fine reason.”
“Flowers twice a week. Pastries. Various gadgets. At first I found it cloying. Because I thought she was after something. If you want money from me, I’d just as soon you ask me. But then I realized that she was just doing it because she wanted to.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“Certainly doesn’t get that from me.”
“How much money did you give her?”
“Oh, not much.”
“How much.”
“Thirty.”
“Thirty thousand?”
He shook his head. He loved this. “No. Thirty thousand. Are you kidding me? You can’t get anything for thirty thousand. A goddamned Korean car costs more than thirty thousand now.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“She’s my blood,” he said.
“I’ll make her give it back to you,” I said.
“Now why would you do that?” he asked.
I didn’t have a good answer for him or, rather, an answer he hadn’t heard me give him before—that too much money made you idle, rotted you, took away your ability to dream. He laughed. “Figures you’d get all lathered up. It’s hers now. If she doesn’t want it, I’d rather she bury it on the beach. I can’t take it with me.”
“You’re not dying. Just because Robert died doesn’t mean you’re dying.”
“Let her start a foundation,” he said, ignoring me. “I already know she doesn’t want the money for herself. All of your kids are like that. Amazingly. They all have churches for hearts.”
“Still.”
“Still nothing. Fuck still.”
“Do her sisters know?”
“Probably. You know girls. Gossip is practically one of their food groups.”
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