Love All: A Novel

by Wright, Callie

  “I don’t know how much your mother told you,” Hugh began. Teddy waited. “There was an accident at the school.”

  “Was it the school’s fault?” asked Teddy.

  “No,” said Hugh, glad to be able to answer something honestly and emphatically. “There’s no foundation for a lawsuit.”

  “Then why’d you need to go over to the woman’s house in the middle of the day?” asked Teddy.

  A jab, words meant to stun Hugh, to pin him in place. Hugh had never seen this side of his son. But Teddy was right: Hugh hadn’t needed to go to Caroline’s house today, and yet he hadn’t been able to stay away. He thought back to the night he’d met Anne, to the relief he’d felt, as if he’d been drifting for years and had finally found a buoy. Anne’s faith in Hugh had lifted him up, galvanized him, but the mirror of her faith had been distrust—nothing less than all of him would do, which was more than Hugh, and maybe more than anyone, could give. It seemed to Hugh that for twenty years now Anne had been waiting for him to fatally disappoint her, and Hugh wondered if, when she found out what he’d done that day—as she inevitably would—she might not process this final transgression as a kind of relief.

  “It’s complicated,” said Hugh.

  “Sounds it,” said Teddy. He began to shake more cereal into his bowl and Hugh thought, I’ll take you to the mall this weekend and get you some vitamins and powders. We’ll get you to college somehow. But Teddy wouldn’t even look at him.

  Hugh hadn’t meant for this to get so out of hand so quickly. He and Anne had a lot to work out before Hugh could talk openly to Teddy. And there was still the matter of the lawsuit to settle—Hugh felt his stomach drop at the prospect of losing Seedlings—complicated by the fact that Teddy had glimpsed him with Caroline. It could have been worse—the nipple, the running inside hand in hand—but that was just it: How had Teddy, normally deaf and blind to anyone’s existence but his own, intuited from twenty yards that Hugh was committing an act of indecency? Yale-bound Dave Blunt hadn’t discerned anything untoward in Hugh’s hand-kiss—though probably Dave hadn’t recognized Hugh. Still, hadn’t thousands of innings as spectator, father, and number-one fan earned Hugh the benefit of Teddy’s doubt?

  “About what happened today,” said Hugh. “You should’ve talked to me first.”

  Teddy stopped chewing. “I know what I saw.”

  “Tie goes to the runner, Teddy. You should’ve come to me.”

  “Why? What would you’ve said? I saw you kiss a woman.”

  “Her hand,” Hugh corrected.

  “You kissed her!” said Teddy.

  Wrong. After the hand, before the nipple, she’d rested her chin on Hugh’s head for a matter of minutes. He’d been thinking that her front porch needed painting and that he could do it for her this summer. Her skin had felt warm against his.

  Hugh tried to put himself in Teddy’s place. What did his son need? His father, of course. The best thing that could happen to Teddy right now would be to discover that he’d been wrong.

  “Look,” said Hugh, “I probably shouldn’t have kissed her hand, but I was pretty overwhelmed by the lawsuit. Anyway, your mom’s taking care of that now.”

  “She’s over there?”

  Hugh’s stomach lurched, his throat nearly closing off. He checked his watch and nodded.

  Teddy set his cereal bowl in the sink, soggy wheat squares floating in a pond of sugary milk. For a moment he was quiet, then he said:

  “I don’t believe you. Sorry, but I don’t.”

  Teddy turned his back to Hugh, demonstrably sloughing off childhood, that unrepeatable quality of youth—trust in your parents—gone the way of Teddy’s gapped baby teeth, his halting first steps, his lellow for yellow, his Dada bye bye. Hugh felt the sensation not as pain but as loss, a severed umbilicus, a collapse of the continuum linking Hugh to George and their parents, then back to Teddy and Julia—only now Hugh was the father—and of all the breaches it would be this that his son remembered: middle of the workday, Teddy’s father in the driveway, a woman who was not his mother, and who really gave a fuck if it was only her hand?

  How had Hugh thought he could explain this?

  He heard himself say he needed to sit down, then he was sitting down, nestled on the floor between the oven and the island.

  “What’s going on?”

  Julia.

  “Maybe he fainted,” said Teddy, standing back.

  Julia galloped away, made a ruckus, and returned with a glass of water. She handed Hugh a sleeve of Ritz crackers, then opened a jar of peanut butter and dipped in a steak knife.

  Soon Hugh was up at the counter on Teddy’s bar stool, with Julia stationed at his side.

  “I’ll stay with you,” Julia volunteered.

  “No,” said Hugh.

  “’Night,” said Teddy.

  Hugh tried to touch him, reach for his arm, pat him on the back, but his son was already swinging around the newel on the back banister and propelling himself up the stairs.

  “Is Teddy in trouble?” asked Julia. “Is he grounded?”

  Hugh closed his eyes. He was fragile, sick from the rolling hills of mania. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, hadn’t slept in days.

  “Is this about the baseball card? Why’d Teddy throw it in the lake?”

  “Julia—”

  “Forget it,” she said. “You never tell me anything.”

  Hugh opened his eyes. “What don’t I tell you?”

  “You asked my coach to give me the exhibition match.”

  That. It was so far down on Hugh’s list of problems, it took a Herculean effort to attain the proper level of gravity when he said, “You’re good at tennis, you like tennis, but I know it’s not always easy for you to ask for things.”

  “Well, now I’m playing Carl tomorrow, and if I lose, I’m officially off the team.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Hugh. I’m sorry and I’m sorry. “I’ll call Coach Klawson.” There was no chance he’d be expanding the school, anyway.

  “No, don’t. It’s better this way. At least Carl’s speaking to me.” Then, “Did you really kiss that woman?”

  Hugh started to say her hand, then paused, measuring his next words against all future knowledge, the possibility that Julia would soon know everything. Anne would be home any minute; there was no telling where this night was headed.

  “Can you do me a favor?” asked Hugh.

  Julia shrugged, nodded. His only comfort: he was her favorite.

  “Can you go to bed?”

  Julia slid off her stool. “First I have to go to Carl’s.”

  “Now?” Hugh frowned. “It’s a little late.”

  “It can’t wait,” she said. “You know that book The Sex Cure?”

  Everyone’s favorite cocktail-party scandal, Cooperstown’s Peyton Place. The recently retired Father French, who had baptized both of Hugh’s children, kept an annotated copy in his living room, proudly noting the location of the book’s Episcopal church on French Street.

  “Yes,” said Hugh warily.

  “I was kind of inspired by it.”

  Uh-oh, thought Hugh.

  From what he understood, the fallout from the novel had been sizable. He seemed to recall that on one Halloween night a drunken mob spray-painted the author’s house with threats, running her out of town.

  Hugh thought of his own scandal, rippling now from Cooperstown to Cherry Valley at the speed of his wife’s car. Recklessness. Not just with his school but his livelihood, not just with his marriage but his kids. Hugh had dropped them off in the carpool lane of family crisis, and it occurred to him that he, too, could be run out of town.

  “Some things in the book were true,” said Julia.

  “I’m pretty sure nothing in the book was true,” said Hugh.

  Julia seemed to consider this. “Well, the thing I wrote about Carl was.”

  Hugh braced his head in his hands, pressing his temples. “When you say wrote…”

  Julia
gestured expansively to the night, and Hugh thought he knew what she meant. The truth was out there, and nothing would ever again be the same. Anne knew; Mrs. Baxter probably knew. Teddy knew enough, and Bob would guess the rest. Julia was too busy creating her own scandal to bother yet with her father’s, but eventually, she, too, would know.

  It had only been two weeks since he’d met Caroline, and yet after only two weeks in 1974, Hugh had already decided to move in with Anne—maybe he was the kind of guy who just knew. Hugh pictured Caroline slipping gracefully into his life, their life, tiny enough to be suspended above it until he’d pulled her in and pulled her in again. She had brought with her a depth of feeling that had eluded Hugh for years. It was a great unkindness he was doing to his family, but Teddy and Julia weren’t babies anymore. With a mother like Anne, his children would survive utterly; she would will them into adulthood; she would bend rivers to lift them up from the dead.

  Hugh told Julia to forget her trip to Carl’s and go to bed, then wiped down the counter, loaded Teddy’s cereal bowl into the dishwasher, and returned the peanut butter to the pantry. In the hallway outside his bedroom, he took a sheet and blanket from the linen closet, then went back downstairs to make up his bed.

  He sat on the couch in the dark in the den without laying out the sheet and stared at the moonlight through the skylights. The Seedlings School was in his wife’s hands now. Hugh was asking her to defend him when she no doubt wanted to crucify him, and as much as Anne disliked gossip, she might easily decide this was his problem, not theirs. Seedlings should’ve had a head teacher on yard duty, and Graham should not have been standing on the monkey bars; but head teachers took breaks, and kids tested the boundaries of their secure worlds, and Hugh, whose job it was to take care of the children, had not failed: this time when a boy had fallen, Hugh had reached out his hand. Now he seemed to be floating, flying north. Knowing how bad it would look if he was asleep when Anne came home, he did not lie down. Instead, he dove straight into that phantasmagoric pool of memory where the possibility always existed of discovering one more word, a forgotten smile, a blue-sky day, and the sound of his brother’s voice saying, Come on, come on, his running feet just ahead of Hugh’s, flattening the dew-heavy grass with prints that stretched out for all time, a path to follow.

  10

  Anne was not normally a timid driver, but the magnitude of her mission coupled with the undeniable elevation of her blood alcohol level left her crawling along at the speed limit, tracking the centerline through squinted eyes. A fine mist clung to the windshield, and her wipers swished by at regular intervals until that proved to be too soporific, then on came the radio and down went the windows—she did not want to end up in a ditch.

  In order to remain awake, Anne focused on the pending negligence claim. From what Anne understood about the accident, if Mr. Pennington decided to go through with his suit, the court would likely grant judgment for the Seedlings School before trial: New York Civil Practice Law and Rules section 3212. Even if the teachers hadn’t been the paragon of supervision—what had Hugh said about assistants on yard duty?—they hadn’t caused the accident. Kids climbed, kids fell—it didn’t matter whether a teacher was watching or not—and no proximate cause meant no case.

  As these facts marched logically across Anne’s mind, the unlikelihood of Caroline testifying came into stark relief. Anne wasn’t the only one who stood to lose something here. Recalling Hugh’s reference to Caroline’s twelve steps, Anne could assume Caroline’s suitability as a caregiver had already been called into question in a courtroom setting. The last thing she’d want would be to revisit that particular locale.

  There was a way in which this could be easy, then. Anne had the advantage of anonymity; Caroline didn’t know what she looked like. Anne could introduce herself as Seedlings’ lawyer, bullet-point the risks of a trial to Caroline’s custody agreement, threaten her with deposition under oath, and advise Caroline against participation in any court proceedings. What personal connection to Hugh Obermeyer? Anne could use a pseudonym, perhaps Joanie Cole.

  If Anne’s mother had ever dreamed of confronting her father’s mistresses, she’d made a great secret of it. In a town of only two thousand people, Joanie must have known some of them personally, or at least well enough to say hello. Had she ever been tempted to tip her hand, a little I know that you know that I know? Not from what Anne could tell, but in this way Anne was nothing like her mother. She was paid a six-figure salary for her pugilistic spirit and had no qualms about stepping into the ring.

  Anne merged onto Route 166 and wound toward the village of Cherry Valley, past the hair salon where she brought Julia every couple of months, easing to a stop at the traffic light. It was after eleven o’clock; hers was the only car at the intersection. Across the street, a gas station beckoned with its dual-access points, an excellent place to make a U-turn, but Anne wasn’t tempted. When the light turned green, she drove on, reading mailbox numbers and finally stopping at the long driveway of a white house, where the downstairs lights were still on.

  It was the very vantage point Teddy would’ve had, a clear shot—no curves in the driveway, no obstructing telephone poles or trees. Even in the dark, Anne could see straight to the house. She collapsed her headlights and turned into the driveway, missing the grooved tire tracks by six inches. The car jostled over the muddy earth, rocking left and right until she braked and killed the ignition, just behind a green Subaru.

  * * *

  The last time Anne had gone over to a woman’s house in the middle of the night to threaten her, she was thirteen years old. Halloween, 1962, while Anne’s parents were downstairs masked in face paint and fake blood, Anne had been curled up in her bedroom with a plate of popcorn balls and her mother’s copy of The Sex Cure. It certainly wasn’t Anne’s first read-through (she’d memorized a handful of lascivious scenes), but her father—who had taken her to see The Blob at the old movie theater on Main Street and therefore could not be said to be categorically protective—had all but hit her mother when Anne confessed to having read it. In the weeks after that incident, Anne had eavesdropped and spied and snooped on her parents, trying to get to the bottom of their tension over the book, but it had always remained just out of her reach.

  Alone in her bedroom, she’d examined the front cover. Elaine Dorian must have written the novel right here in town, at her house on Lake Street, only a few blocks from the Coles’. Anne pictured a desk in a dark study, a ream of paper turned upside down next to a typewriter, the veiled typeface still faintly visible through the onionskin. According to an advertisement on the last page, Mrs. Dorian was also the author of Love Now—Pay Later, Suburbia: Jungle of Sex, and Second-Time Woman. On the back cover: You will be shocked. You may be angry. But you’ll hang on every word.

  Anne, an eighth-grader, had easily picked out many of the town’s characters by their fictional names, which meant that she couldn’t have been the only kid in town coping with the frightening possibility that the affairs and divorces happening in the book were also happening in her own home.

  There had been times when, as a young girl, Anne was ushered into the front seat of her father’s Buick for a ride downtown—to breakfast at the Cooperstown Diner or to a picnic at Lakefront Park. Usually they were met by a new friend of her father’s. Usually these new friends were women. And, yes, they’d paid attention to Anne only as long as her father was watching, but her dad’s fast-paced, convivial domain was so enchantingly different from the quiet, contented life Anne led with her mother that she had been willing to play her part. So what if her father asked her not to mention a Miss Janson or a Miss Pride to her mother? They had all just been sitting on a quilt in the middle of Lakefront Park, and it couldn’t be a real secret if everyone already knew.

  Downstairs, Anne’s father said, “And who do we have here?” Anne pictured an outlaw, a robot, a cowboy holding a cap gun and a pillowcase, a lunch pail, a plastic jack-o’-lantern for whatever treat her parents offer
ed, this happy couple playing along as though all of life were a game. In the last two months, between Nikita Khrushchev and The Sex Cure, near nuclear war had played out at Anne’s kitchen table, and now that Anne had her parents back—loving, considerate, communicative—she would do anything to keep them. Anne didn’t think her family could survive another round from Elaine Dorian. Hadn’t her mother said that the author was working on a sequel?

  Hopped up on sugar and adrenaline, Anne began to fantasize: on Halloween night, any number of devils and demons would be out tricking up the town with shaving cream and eggs, children on the prowl. Every year, the school janitors had to come in early to wash off soap from the first-story windows and rub out words written with pieces of brick on the cement stoop. How easy it would be to blend in with this madness, to slip into the night and reappear ghostlike with a can of spray paint.

  Anne waited until her parents were asleep, then crept to the utility room to get a flashlight and the key to her father’s shed. A little rooting around and she found his new supply of automobile paint and slipped one can into the front pocket of her navy sweatshirt, thinking he’d never miss it.

  The Halloween antics had already died down by the time Anne set off east on Walnut Street, then north on Delaware, zigzagging her way across town. She saw the village patrol car cruising south on Pioneer, heading away from the lake, which meant she had at least fifteen minutes before the police made another lap.

  As she approached the house, Anne was neither nervous nor apprehensive. With her black hair and blue eyes, she looked like a fairy-tale character and was trying to channel one. Her parents needed her help, and Anne could protect them. Superheroes were never caught. They delivered their charges from evil, then woke in their own beds in sole possession of the secret knowledge of their valorous feats.

  Anne found the two-story house at the corner of Lake Street and Hoffman Lane completely dark—either the author was out of town or she had already gone to sleep for the night. Anne crouched beside a shrub near the side door and got out her paint; she shook the can, then removed the top, securing it in her sweatshirt pocket, and began duckwalking the circumference of the house.