Keeping Time: A Novel

by Mcglynn, Stacey

  Elisabeth, looking around her office. Her eyes sliding over the dull, light-blue walls, shelves of books, photos, and objects that covered far too many years to remember. Everything was the same, depressingly so—except the piles of tax returns, the to-do list, and the inbox. They had all gotten higher and more backed up.

  Looking at the tax return on her computer screen with all its blank lines, Form 6258. An open file full of spreadsheets on her desk. Resisting the urge to X out of the tax return and log on to PuppyFinder.com just for a minute, just to get a peek at Saint Bernard puppies or English mastiffs or schnauzers. Anything would be fine. Anything would be better than Form 6258 with all those blank lines stubbornly waiting to be filled in.

  Her thoughts were six hours away—on the mountains and Hulda, who was still on the mountain. She had spoken to Captain Miller a little while ago. The search was still on, the unit smaller. Volunteers had diminished to a handful of stalwart souls. He was surprised that Hulda still had not turned up. He thought she must be deep in the woods. He promised Elisabeth that they wouldn’t stop until she was found.

  Elisabeth, wishing she were back there on the mountain with the fresh clean air—so clean that it sparkled in the sunlight—and the clear mountain lakes and the vigorously running rivers of water cascading over smooth, colossal white rocks. The beauty of healthy nature.

  Feeling sad that Daisy was going. Elisabeth, sighing, resting her chin on the inverted cup of her hand, her elbow leaning on her desk. Wishing she was back in New Hampshire. Wishing she was home. Wishing Daisy was staying longer. Wishing that they were all going back to Liverpool with her. Wishing herself anywhere but there. Resisting the urge to go on PuppyFinder.com.

  Logging on to eBay 0T">Storming o

  FORTY-SIX

  DENNIS, SITTING IN ONE OF the blue seats in a waiting room at the airport. Looking tired, haggard. Relieved to see Daisy. Saying, first words out of his mouth, “It’s a good thing you didn’t sell your house.”

  Introductions. Dennis, thanking Ann many times over, saying he hoped he hadn’t put her out.

  The Belt Parkway on the car ride home. Slow but steady. Ann, calling Elisabeth.

  Elisabeth, at her desk. Plodding through the tax return. Three lines were filled in on Form 6258. Ann, on the phone, telling her that Daisy canceled her flight. Telling her why.

  Elisabeth, listening, getting the news. Hanging up. Feeling left out. Thinking about what she had just learned: Daisy was staying longer, and Dennis was here, a cousin, a new houseguest.

  Elisabeth, trying like mad to concentrate on issues of taxation so she could get out of there at a reasonable hour. She wanted to be there when Cousin Dennis got to her house.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  PLANS IN PLACE. There would be a wedding. That very weekend. The very next day. It was going to be an eight-minute ceremony at thny. Asking Den

  FORTY-EIGHT

  A FATHER AND DAUGHTER on their way to Long Island. The ride from New Hampshire, long, spotted with traffic. Frequent stops at restrooms extended the trip. Extending the time devoted to talk. An unprecedented delivery of mind-boggling information.

  A crack in the past. Finally, long-held secrets slowly seeping out. Meeting the air. The father coming clean with his grown daughter, spilling facts at last that predated her birth. Hidden ever after. Until today. His mouth, moving. He could feel it. Words squeezing out. He could hear them, but it felt as if he were relating events in somebody else’s life rather his own. Secrets so long tucked away, so long unshared, they had lost their meaning.

  The father telling her of a horrible accident. A restaurant fire that changed everything—a name, a plan. More than one life.

  Revealing another secret—that, like her, he, too, had played the piano.

  His daughter’s face tightening over the steering wheel, listening intently. Hearing that it was not only his left hand that had been crushed in the restaurant fire but also his dreams. He had been a child prodigy. He had won countless competitions, prestigious awards, and a gift—a silver watch inscribed by Arthur Rubinstein.

  Catherine, learning this: that from his early childhood his life plan had been set, without question, for he was a prodigy. Wheels on tracks. In steady motion forward.

  But then, the interruptions: The war. The army. The years away.

  Including high points: England. Fellow soldiers. A grand piano where he had least expected to find one, and the young woman whose piano it was.

  The be too far.

  And then, the derailment: the restaurant fire. The loss of his parents. The loss of musical precision in his hand. The obliteration of his plans. The sinking of certainties long held. The overwhelming grief. The breach. The crippling silence. And the loss of his love.

  The revised future, no longer including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, concert halls worldwide, fame and fortune, and his treasured soul mate. The revised future, a new name, Higgins, and the White Mountain National Forest road crew, and, in his later years, a Mount Washington cog train driver.

  Telling Catherine now of his enduring will to pass the torch to her, his only child, over the opposition of his now deceased wife. This fierce determination had divided the marriage, creating an irrevocable chasm. His now deceased wife cried constantly that all his money went in only one direction. She resented his single-minded desire to offer their daughter the opportunity for a life he might once have had.

  And now, speaking of it at last. Telling Catherine all.

  Catherine, listening, bowled over. Lips trembling, trembling hands pouring sweat onto the nonporous grooves of the steering wheel. Sideways glances at her father while forcing her eyes to keep on the road. Asking him where the watch was and why she had never seen it. Admitting that she would love to, not knowing that that very afternoon she would.

  Asking him why he had never told her that he had played the piano, that he was a prodigy. Asking him how he could have kept it quiet all those years that he sat through her lessons during her childhood and teenage years, maintaining his unrelenting, intense focus on her making it to Juilliard. How was it possible that he had never said a word?

  Her father’s face tightening. His voice becoming defensive. Saying he had wanted no pity, that that book was closed, never to be reopened. It had all been taken from him. He would never play the piano again. That was that, the way it was. He would never accept pity. He had changed his name, taking his mother’s maiden name, Higgins. He had moved to the remote north woods of New Hampshire, to the small cabin he still lived in today.

  Catherine, asking again about the watch. Learning that he had left it overseas and was glad he did. He had never regretted that decision, leaving it with the woman he had loved like light itself. Her name was Daisy.

  Catherine, asking why Daisy never came.

  Her father, shaking his head. Saying that she never responded to the urgent telegrams he had sent, six of them. There was never a word back. That long, painful silence still visible in his face. Saying that the silence was so unlike her, that he had had to assume she decided that because of the accident he no longer had anything to offer her. She must have been too afraid to give up her home, her family, and her country for such uncertainty. He was defending her still, saying it was understandable.

  He had not yet learned, although he would later that afternoon, that while Daisy had watched the mail delivery like a hawk, her mother had obtained—and presumably destroyed—the telegrams.

  The revelation coming to light at last: Daisy’s mother’s best friend worked in the telegraph office.

  Catherine, her head buzzing, asking why he was telling her all this now. Did it have something to do with this trip, this car ride that he had ask# Huldae closeed her to make? Was it why he had insisted on personally delivering the information about the old woman on the mountain? And why he had told Captain Miller that he would take care of it?

  Her father, nodding. “Remember the boy? The one who asked for Michael Baker?” At the time it had th
rown him for a loop and rendered him speechless. A question out of nowhere, totally unexpected. A name he hadn’t heard in almost sixty years.

  Catherine, nodding.

  Her father’s voice shaky, saying it was possible that with the boy was someone he thought he would never see again. It was possible that he had seen Daisy there at the base of the mountain. It was possible she was here in America, in New York.

  Catherine, silent now. Taking it all in. The news was staggeringly big. The Connecticut miles passing outside the car while inside the car, inside her head, she was thinking about love, which she had been doing more and more lately. A pang, a sharp awareness growing increasingly sharper. The ties holding her career, hitherto bound so tightly that no air could escape, were somehow loosening, creating an opening, making room for something other than music. Catherine, fifty years old, known in concert halls throughout the world, only lately beginning to wonder if she would ever find love that was able to fit snugly into the opening.

  She did not yet know that before the day was through she would be presented with a possibility. In the backyard of the house to which they were heading. That there, later today, she would find what could be a start. In the form of an Englishman coming out of a bad marriage. An expert in seventeenth-century arts and artifacts, a bestselling book in his past. And, possibly, because of her, a follow-up in his future.

  THE FINAL TEN MINUTES of the trip. Confusion over directions. The father, reading out loud from the paper. The daughter, making a series of wrong turns. Tension rising in the car.

  The father, wondering if it was really possible that it was Daisy he had seen. Could that really have been Daisy? Could it be? Or was it all a dream, a parcel out of an old man’s imagination? An old mind playing tricks on him? An outgrowth of his increasing tendency lately to look back?

  Finding the address. Turning into the driveway. Car doors swinging open. The old man, gulping.

  Stiff legs carrying him up the front walk. Sounds of a party out back drifting over their heads. Father and daughter, relieved that at least it meant someone was home. Both aware of the foolishness of making the trip without first calling, compromising the chances of success.

  A wobbly finger pressing the bell. The old man’s nerves hitting a high note not reached in decades. Feeling like an uncertain schoolboy. His knees, shaking.

  Catherine, seeing the color of his face, taking his arm in her hands. Thinking how strange it was to see him this way. He had always held his emotions in check. Catherine, thinking about this woman, this Daisy, and what she must have meant to him. Hoping this trip wasn’t a mistake, hoping that he would not be crushed again. After all, this Daisy had dumped him once. Catherine, flooded with worry about how risky this was and, despite that, how insistent he had been. Nothing could have stopped him from doing this, from making this journey. Catherine, thinking about the idea of love as she watched him during the long seconds between the sound of the doorbell ringing and the sound of approaching footsteps.

  While h#;shaer father fussed with his hair.

  The door, opening. A hairy nineteen-year-old peering curiously at them. Asking if he could help them. The old man, nodding. Saying he was here to see Daisy. Was she here? He had news of Hulda Kheist.

  The hairy nineteen-year-old, stepping back into the house. Inviting them to do the same. Saying he would go to get Daisy, that he would be right back.

  The old man, a bundle of nerves.

  STEVE, COMING OUT TO DAISY, sitting next to Ann. On lounge chairs, poolside. Steve, telling her that there was someone asking for her at the door, saying he had news of Hulda. Asking just for her.

  Daisy, clumsily pushing herself up off the lounge chair. Steve, lending a hand. Daisy, hurrying across the lawn. Not wanting to disturb the party. Not telling anyone. Up the deck steps, across the deck, past the sliding glass doors, into the house, and across the family room.

  To where two people stood, nervously waiting.

  Daisy’s eyes going straight to Michael. Finding his on hers. Seeing each other across the span of decades. Both taking a moment, a pause, to swallow. To register circumstances. To catch up.

  Then Daisy, slowly advancing. Michael, moving toward her until they stood before each other. A busy silence.

  The old man, breaking it. His voice cracking. “Daisy?”

  Daisy, nodding. Not breathing. Unable to speak. Her mouth open, no language available.

  “I’m Michael Baker.”

  Catherine Higgins’s head spinning. The first Elisabeth and

  time hearing him say it. Staring at her father. Digesting the name. Reconfiguring the man.

  Daisy, looking at him looking at her. Their eyes traveling over each other. Absorbing the present. Matching it to the past. Reading outward emotions, searching deeper for interior ones.

  Both finding in the other what each of them held in themselves. Both thinking the other still beautiful, largely unchanged.

  g, “Still such a handsome man.”

  Michael, marveling that she was just as he remembered her. Still a beauty. Still a little nugget.

  Both looking, delving, retrieving. And both sensing that although they had spent a lifetime oceans away and worlds apart, somehow all along they had been keeping time.

  Seconds slipping by, neither racing to catch them. Locked in a bubble as one.

  Catherine, looking on in silent wonder. Sounds of the wedding party filtering in—splashing, laughing, the calling of children.

  DAISY PHILLIPS

  &

  MICHAEL LEONARD BAKER

  request the honor

  of your presence

  at their wedding,

  July 16, 2006

  at 2 p.m.

  Port Washdent" aid="1HI

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Words cannot fully convey my deep gratitude to my superb agent, Adam Chromy, for his steady guidance and unwavering belief in and enthusiasm for this book. Many thanks as-equiv="Conten

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  STACEY MCGLYNN lives with her husband and three sons on Long Island. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in film. Keeping Time is her first novel.

  READER’S GUIDE

  Please note: In order to provide reading groups with the most informed and thought-provoking questions possible, it is necessary to reveal important aspects of the plot of this novel—as well as the ending. If you have not finished reading Keeping Time, we respectfully suggest that you may want to w her courage i