by Holly LeCraw
I wasn’t principled enough to resist his offer, but, more important, I couldn’t resist Hugh. As we spoke and I tried not to eat all the saltines, and the waiter quietly brought him fresh drinks, I realized in my dumb seventeen-year-old way that he was following a script in his head with immense, heartbreaking care. Old courtesy, old order.
“Maybe you should slow down?” I said, when the fourth drink was set in front of him. With just the two of us, and the clairvoyant waiter, I couldn’t help counting as the glasses appeared and disappeared.
He smiled sadly, as though I had just stumbled on a great, inevitable, adult truth that he had wanted to keep from me for as long as possible. Before him his water glass brimmed full, untouched. He didn’t seem any more or less inebriated than usual. “Son,” he said (he’d asked long before if he could call me that, and of course I’d said yes), “don’t worry about me. Fruitless endeavor. You worry about yourself, now. Eat up. Have another cracker.” He handed me the linen-lined silver tray. “There’s a couple you missed there.” And then he said, “Charlie, I love your mother, and so I love you. Simple as that. You didn’t do a thing to deserve it, but that doesn’t negate it. It just is.”
So I got into Harvard, which I had assumed I wouldn’t, even with Hugh’s help. When it was too late, I was ambivalent. Suddenly I had grand ideas of independence. And of course I was also scared. I took Hugh at his word and worried about myself, decided I’d been well behaved for long enough, kicked and screamed a little, slammed a few doors, was briefly, theatrically moody—and have regretted it ever since. I never told him thank you. Then, several weeks before my high-school graduation, on a day he’d actually made it into his office, he got a stomachache so painful that he took himself to the emergency room, thinking he might have appendicitis. It turned out his organs were shutting down, one by one. He was gone in three days. I hadn’t known people really could literally drink themselves to death, but they can.
Near the end of our lunch that day, he’d said to me, “Charlie, you need to know something.” His face had suddenly sagged, as though he’d been holding his breath through the entire meal and was finally letting it go. “I have known exactly who I was, who I am, my entire life.” He waved vaguely around at the dining room, the black waiters in their white coats, the city outside that was his. The wave nearly threw him off balance. “And it hasn’t done me a damn bit of good.” His right hand made a fist, and then, driven more by gravity than passion, came down heavily, muffled on the thick tablecloth. His silverware rattled faintly. “Remember that, Charles Garrett. Son of no one. Count your blessings.”
I WENT TO HARVARD, on my dead stepfather’s recommendation, and on his dime. I could not have felt more like a fraud.
In his honor, I did as well as I could, which was not well enough, and drank very little.
And then, all of a sudden, graduation was approaching. And, surrounded as I was by seething ambition, I began looking for jobs, although I had no idea about that larger thing, a career. Nevertheless, I’d do it on my own. I didn’t involve my mother or, God forbid, the Satterthwaites, although once again what I said or didn’t say turned out not to matter.
IN EARLY MAY, that year that I was twenty-two and graduating from college and deciding where in the world to go, my mother, Anita, was at Hugh’s parents’ for Sunday dinner. After Hugh died, the family was more often there, on a Sunday, than at the club—even by then, when he’d been gone for four years.
In the town where my mother grew up, there had not been a single house like the Satterthwaites’, or like the one she now lived in. She’d been raised by her grandparents, who believed in hell; if they were still living, they surely believed she was going there. She didn’t know her father’s name. As it was every Sunday, at the Satterthwaites’, she believed her job was to not let on to these facts, and not to forget them herself.
She’d escaped to the empty formal living room. At times, she needed a moment. Everyone forgave her these moments. The Satterthwaites loved her, as they liked to love most people, but were a little intimidated. This was not, by the way, an uncommon reaction to my mother.
The living room had antique china in niches by the mantel, maps of Civil War–era Atlanta on the wall. In front of her, on the coffee table, magazines were carefully fanned, no doubt by Bobo’s maid, Willie Mae, who was Rosetta’s sister. My mother’s fingers twitched because she wanted a cigarette, but her smoking was the only thing the Satterthwaites frowned upon, and since she agreed with them, her hand didn’t go to her pocket, and she didn’t get up and go outside to some isolated grassy corner. Instead, she picked up the magazine at the top of the fan, which was an alumni magazine from a place called Abbott. Hugh hadn’t gone there; he had gone to a day school in Atlanta, the place I was also sent. Anita didn’t know a thing about this other school.
When she opened the magazine, she saw green rolling fields and white buildings, a chapel of gray stone—foreign but familiar, like scenes from a picture book or travel guide, peopled with teenagers as white toothed and smooth browed as the Satterthwaites. She was always encountering things like this magazine in the Satterthwaites’ houses. They were documents in a language in which she would never be fluent. She didn’t know how ordinary, in its own way, Abbott was.
It was around then that Bobo came in and sat with a companionable sigh in the wing chair across from my mother. “That Nicky had three pieces of pie,” she said. “Two apple and one pecan. It’s Willie Mae’s pecan pie and you know how it’s so rich. I told him he would get a stomachache, but then I just let him.”
Anita said she didn’t mind. She long ago accepted that here, Nicky would be spoiled. He reminded them too much of Hugh.
“That’s where Big Hugh went to boarding school,” Bobo said. “Way up north. Don’t ask him about it or he’ll start talking and he won’t stop. He wanted Little Hugh to go there but I said no, there was no need, because by then we had good schools right here in Atlanta. I just didn’t want him to go so far away. There was no need.”
Anita knew it was small of her, but she didn’t look up right away. The expression on Bobo’s face would be the bleak, brave, moist-eyed look she got when she mentioned Hugh. Whom Anita also mourned, but didn’t miss. She steeled herself, turned another magazine page to stall.
And there was Preston Bankhead.
He was in robes and a collar. That was not a surprise to her. Neither was this: he stood with a lovely blond wife and three blond sons, the only word for whom was strapping. They were all radiantly healthy and solid. With the green hills in the background, the well-cared-for northern trees, the pure air.
“I know it’s a wonderful school,” Bobo was saying. “It’s just so far away. But not far from Charlie, I suppose. How is Charlie? How is he doing, Anita? He’s a senior, isn’t he? Is he looking for a job yet? How is that wonderful boy doing?”
The blond boys in the picture have a great deal that I do not. But once again the way is clear for my mother, and she can make sure I get what I deserve.
Six
May graduating: I see it over and over. Boys in navy blazers, girls in white dresses, processing. In my memory the line is endless. The girls and their wreaths of white flowers.
I was standing right along the path where they walked after the ceremony, everyone grinning, the boys high-fiving me, and some of the girls too, but I was waiting for May. When she walked by me and her eyes landed on mine it was as though she’d spoken my name aloud.
In the milling about afterward we found each other—but is that true? I was looking for her, and then there she was. She had a lot on her mind; she was eighteen years old. I doubt she was looking for me.
The flowers were a cloud around her face. Snow in her hair. “You look beautiful.” I said it. There was a division, before and after, and now it was after. Now she had graduated. She knew it, that was the look, we were in perfect agreement.
Except now she wouldn’t meet my eye. “Have you smelled this stuff?” she demande
d, pointing to the flowers. “It’s baby’s breath. But who knew that baby’s breath smells like old cheese? Smell it!” And she leaned forward so the wreath was touching my nose.
Possibly she was right. But I couldn’t smell a thing. Or see, or hear. I was frozen.
She sensed it; she froze too. The air around us twined and thickened and I didn’t want to move and didn’t but then I did. “You’re right,” I said, stepping back. “Camembert. Roquefort.”
“Crazy, right?”
“Miss Bankhead?”
And finally she looked. “Yes?”
“Write me a letter every now and then.”
“I plan to,” she said.
A YEAR OR SO EARLIER, B.J.—Booker Junior—had taken up the drums, directly over my head. I kept my mouth shut, though, because Booker ran a tight ship, and I didn’t want any complaint of mine to spell the end of B.J.’s musical career. Who knew where music might take him? Then he started a band. They moved up to the attic, but still, every Saturday afternoon, sometimes into the night, the entire house shook, not always in a discernible time signature.
But then the solution appeared. Booker was promoted to head of facilities, and a faculty house opened up for them on campus. They’d sell their house and Angela would help me find a new, quiet one of my own. “Early spring,” she said. “You hit it exactly right, Charlie.”
At first she showed me houses in Abbottsford proper, the historic district, but buying there seemed so audacious. Yes, I loved the Lowells’, the Bankheads’, but could I claim such a spot? No, I thought, so we kept going. We headed northwest, where Abbottsford dwindled to a dinky strip mall, a garden center, a hardware store that serviced snow-blowers, a last service station, and then the county highway turned straight and fast.
We spent a couple of Saturdays this way. I found out she and Booker had met at U Mass. They were each the first in their families to go to college. “Booker’s family wasn’t too happy when we said we were raising the kids Jewish,” she said. “And my family wasn’t happy about him being the wrong color.” She glanced at me and I realized it would be okay to laugh, and so I did, with her. “And that’s why we like it out here in the country, away from the in-laws,” she said, in her city Bahston voice.
I told her the money for the house came from Hugh. “I don’t really feel like it’s mine.”
“But he must have wanted you to have it.”
“I suppose.”
“So we just have to find the perfect house, then, don’t we.” Puhfect.
One Saturday afternoon I went outside to wait for her and found Zack in the driveway, shooting baskets. I lowered the goal for him all the way so he could dunk, and then I put it back up at B.J. and Cassie’s height so they wouldn’t get mad, and picked him up so he could dunk that way. This was our routine. But he wasn’t smiling and cheering like he normally did, and when Angela came out he took the basketball and went and sat on the front steps and didn’t look at me.
I went and sat down next to him. “I’m looking for a house with your mom,” I said. “She’s really good at finding houses.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Your new house is really cool. Have you seen it?” No answer. “Hey, Zackie Bear. Want to come with us today? Will you help me pick out a house?”
A very slow nod. Angela rolled her eyes but looked pleased. “He’s not happy,” she said. “He does not like change.”
“I know how he feels,” I said.
We were still looking outside town, going farther and farther down that highway, and I was beginning to worry there was nothing to find. That day, as we drove around looking at ranch houses, exposed in the country way on large windy lots, worry gave way to bleakness. I had no idea what I was looking for. Plus, early spring depressed me. The trees were still leafless and the bare ground brown but the light was higher, intrusive, dragging us awake, out of hibernation. I liked hibernation. Midwinter spring is its own season. But it was also the first weekend that the local dairy bar was open. “Let’s get ice cream,” I said. “My treat.”
I got rum raisin and Zack got vanilla with jimmies, and I sat down next to him on the bench attached to the picnic table. “I think I should just get another apartment,” I said. “What do you think, Zackie? Little place in town. Little bachelor pad. It’ll be hip. It’ll be a happening place.”
“I thought you wanted a house,” he said.
“Well, we can’t find one.”
“I liked the one with the pool.”
It had been a sagging above-ground pool. “That was pretty spiffy,” I said. “I think I’ll keep looking, though.”
What I didn’t say was that I wasn’t sure I should stay in Abbottsford at all, even though my mother was in favor of the house plan. “You’ll have room for us to visit,” she said. “You seem happy, Charlie. You seem to have nice friends. Don’t come back here on our account. I’ll take care of Big Hugh and Bobo. Nicky’s fine. He’s fine.”
But I was looking for signs and portents. If there was no house, my way would be clear: I wasn’t meant to stay; Abbott had been a way station.
Angela was going through papers in the car. Then she got out and came and sat on the bench with us. The dairy bar was close to the road, and cars whooshed by. “There’s one last place,” she said. “It’s way too big for you. And it needs a ton of work. But who knows,” and her face settled into the vatic calm that I have since learned is the special province of talented real estate agents.
“It’ll be dark soon,” I said. Behind us, they’d put out the Closed sign.
“Well, it’s not much farther. And it’s empty. The owner died.”
“He died?” Zack said.
“A while ago. Don’t worry, sweetie. He was very old. He was ninety-two,” she said to me. “It’s been in the same family for a zillion years.” Yeahs.
We left the dairy bar and drove another couple of miles. The sun was lowering fast. The landscape grew hillier, hovering in anticipation. Finally we made a left turn, west off the highway. At first it was just another road, with more ranch houses, but then the suburban feel died away along with the pavement, the road narrowed, and then there on the right was the last big aluminum mailbox, with the smaller plastic newspaper box beneath. No house was visible from the road. “Hmm. Mysterious. What do you think, Zack?” I said.
No answer.
The gravel driveway bumped slightly downhill through thick trees, where it was already dusk. We rattled along the ruts for a minute or so and then the driveway flattened and we shot into open pasture; an eighth-mile ahead of us, on a little hill, silhouetted against the sunset, was the house, long and white. On its hill, although there were low, gnarled apple trees to the side and in back, the house was completely exposed. The tree branches, still bare, were black against the sky, rose fading to deep blue, stars already appearing.
It was a clapboard farmhouse, Federalish, with tall windows and a porch with columns, a thoroughly New England mishmash that, even so, struck me as a little southern. The house looked like a true destination. A place you’d be relieved, over and over, to reach. We pulled into the half circle of pea gravel by the front steps and got out. Zack stood close to me. I said, once again, “What do you think?” and this time he nodded. He climbed the steps with me, and we looked around at the porch and then turned to face the woods, the meadow beyond. “I think maybe you’re right,” I said. “I think maybe this is the one.”
Eventually I realized what my earlier misgivings about owning a house had been: that somehow I did not deserve certainty. For years afterward, as I drove down the driveway, I’d sometimes let myself imagine that the house wasn’t really there, that I’d made it up. Then I’d turn the last corner out of the overarching trees, and there it was. In its sudden space of air and light.
THE LETTERS WEREN’T FREQUENT but they were regular. She sometimes wrote in purple pen. They were often fat letters. When one arrived in my box I would let it sit for a while. An hour or so. I’d look at i
t and hold it. Then finally open it.
They were always chatty, sometimes a little coy. Perky as the minutes of a student-council meeting, and I would think, Just stop. She would mention parties and dances but not boys. She signed them Yours. Maybe she meant to be old-fashioned, or formal; maybe not.
THE SECOND YEAR, when the letters dropped off, I felt deep contempt for myself and my surprise. I heard she was going abroad for her junior year, to Paris, which would make no difference in my life whatsoever, other than her letters, if she ever wrote again, having foreign stamps.
She came home for the summer, but I didn’t see her until the week before she left, when I drove her to Abbott Pond, and she went skinny-dipping in front of me.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER MAY went to France, Preston, who had a chronic cough that had gotten worse and who’d begun losing weight, learned he had melanoma. There were two different moles he’d been ignoring—he’d always tanned, never burned, that’s what he said, absolving himself. But the cancer had spread. There was little to be done.
Divya told me the details. She’d heard them, in turn, from Win— Win, of all people. Preston had gone alone to his appointment, gotten his test results, gone home, sat with it for an hour, and then called Win Lowell. It was the oddest thing I’d ever heard. And yet not. Preston was in a situation; Win was a fixer. It was possible that Preston thought of him as the only worthy comrade left at Abbott, since most of the old guard—Strickler Yates, Larry Saltonstall, the legendary hockey coach, and Fred Hueffer, the previous head—had left by then. Win became the liaison, at least temporarily, the mediator between this abrupt hand of fate and the rest of Preston’s ordered world; he was the one who, like some kind of glorified servant, had called May in France, and then handed the phone to Preston.