Local Knowledge

by Liza Gyllenhaal

  I know these weren’t the happiest of occasions for Paul. He worked hard to keep his temper, while Dandridge did his best to provoke him into losing it. With the upturn in the economy and his sense of self-worth rising along with it, Paul had begun to invest in a small way, establishing an account with Brent Longhauser at the Charles Schwab office in Northridge. God only knows how Dandridge ferreted out this information, but he began to take sadistic pleasure in poking fun at “high-rolling” Paul and his “Wall Street cronies.” Though Paul didn’t advertise it, neither did he hide the fact that he was impressed by and supported Clinton, despite Paul’s dyed-in-the-wool Republican upbringing. Dandridge took this evolution in his son’s thinking and attitudes as direct criticism of his own politics. He saw everything Paul did and said strictly in terms of how it correlated with his own ideas. Every difference was another affront.

  “So now they’re saying your friend Mr. Foster committed suicide,” Dandridge told Paul as the women started to clear off the tables after the annual Alden picnic. I was pleased to see that Bob had actually thought to invite Kathy Finn to join us; he’d been seeing her off and on for the last two years and I think we were all hoping that this might be the beginning of something more permanent between them. Kathy was heavyset and rosy-cheeked with wavy dark hair and an easily wounded gaze; I felt she looked to me for support when it came to Bob and the family, and I enjoyed the fact she so obviously courted my good opinion.

  “Vincent Foster is actually not my friend, Dad. And why do you sound so dubious? You can’t really be buying into that bull that the administration had him knocked off because he knew too much.”

  “Let me tell you, son, I would not be surprised by anything those people in the White House do. They’re a bunch of cold-blooded politicians, pure and simple. And she’s the worst of them, as far as I’m concerned. You know she made the Foster fella come up to Washington with her. Everybody knows they were having some kind of—”

  “Where do you get this garbage from?” Paul asked, pushing back his chair. “I mean it’s one thing to disagree with a man’s ideas, it’s another to smear his reputation for the hell of it.”

  “No, you’re not listening to me,” Dandridge insisted, his voice rising. “I was talking about her. Though I wouldn’t put anything past him. After that what’s-her-name Flowers woman. Oh boy! Let me tell you …”

  It had gone on like that until, pleading bedtime for Rachel, we were able to slip away. Now, with our daughter dozing between us, we gloried in the quiet calm of the long summer evening as the hammock rocked gently back and forth.

  “Did you get a chance to talk to Kathy at all?” I asked him in a low voice. “I think she’d be really good for Bob.”

  “No, I didn’t. She kind of clams up around me. But I’m glad you like her. It would be good for Bob to have somebody over there who’s totally on his side. I don’t know how he stands it day after day.”

  “But your dad doesn’t go at him the way he does you. Though sometimes I think Bob would prefer it if he got a little bit more attention from him—good or bad. No, unless it’s something to do with the business, your dad just ignores him most of the time; that’s got to be galling in its own way.”

  “You don’t miss a whole lot, do you, Mad?” he said, and then he reached over and took my hand. Our loosely clasped fingers rested gently on Rachel’s stomach. I knew something was coming. Paul rarely compliments me outright like that. He doesn’t need to; he knows I know how he feels. No, this was his way of preparing me.

  “Sometimes I do,” I said.

  “You know I’ve stayed in touch with Luke,” he said. He hadn’t told me outright and I hadn’t asked, but he’d left enough clues around for me over the years. I was the one who paid the household bills, and I checked every item over carefully. I’d never asked him about the long-distance calls to a 315 area code. Nor did I question him too closely about his hunting trips upstate with Ethan. But I’d sensed the truth without being consciously forced to accept the facts. I knew because I understood who Paul was, how he still shouldered responsibility for Luke’s mistakes, how his loyalties and loves were the subterranean riverbed that fed his being.

  “I guess so,” I said, looking up through the dark leafy ceiling above us. I knew he was watching me, trying to read something in the still silhouette of my upturned face.

  “He’s getting out Friday on early release. I want to go up there and bring him home.”

  I thought I had a few more years before this happened, but I’d always known that the day would come. I wasn’t ready, I never could be, but I felt better prepared to face him than in the past. I was married now, a mother. I had earned a place in the world. I no longer really doubted that I deserved Paul’s love. And now Luke would be forced to see how well I’d done with what I’d been given. In our own modest way, we were making a go of things. I guess that a part of me actually imagined Luke would be envious of the careful little life we were building: our two used cars, the new slipcovers on the living room couch, the MacIntosh computer with its Internet connection that Paul had set up in the guest bedroom. To me, these things signified security, stability—everything one could hope for in this world.

  What I’d forgotten was that Luke had always lived outside the parameters of a normal, settled life. He’d never known familial love, or seemed to understand its value. He was an emotional nomad, rootless. When I think back on it, I realize that one of my biggest mistakes has always been to judge Luke through the prism of my own needs and wants. And not to be able to foresee that, like me, he could change over time—or, perhaps more to the point, time could change him.

  I’d gone to a lot of trouble over dinner. I’d marinated some expensive strip steaks. Made my pineapple cheesecake, a favorite of Paul’s. I’d covered the dinged-up dining room table in a dark blue and pink-flowered cloth and arranged fresh candles and a vase of cosmos and Shasta daisies as a center-piece. Rachel, who loved to help me around the house, carefully folded the cotton napkins I’d ironed into rectangles and aligned them next to the forks. She was going through her pink stage at that point and demanded to be dressed entirely in that color, which meant her wearing battered ballet slippers that shed sequins all over the house. But I was grateful for her excited, girlish company. We didn’t entertain often, as most of our celebrations were with Paul’s family at the farm, and I probably would have felt nervous in any case. I so longed to have our household seem effortlessly perfect. And it was going to be Luke who would be sitting down in that small, cluttered parlor, who would be meeting my slightly chubby, eager daughter for the first time, who would be looking me and my life over again with that cool, skeptical gaze.

  “They’re here!” Rachel cried, jumping off the window seat, where she’d been sitting for the last half hour. I watched the two men climb out of the pickup truck and walk around to the steps leading up to the front walk: my tall, broad-shouldered husband with his easy, loping stride and the slight, pale man who seemed to glide along next to him like a shadow, as if hoping not to be seen. We never use the front entrance, and I was touched that Paul was doing so now. He must have known that this formality would please me; it struck me how much he, too, wanted this dinner to be a success, the start of a new beginning for us all. I’m such a coward. I wasn’t ready after all. I slipped away into the kitchen and let Rachel be the one to greet them.

  “No? Really?” I heard Luke saying, as I ran my hands up and down my aproned hips. “I could have sworn you were a fairy princess. Yes, you are. I can tell by your silvery wings.”

  “I don’t have wings!” Rachel cried, already captivated. “And I’m not a fairy princess. I’m a fairy queen.”

  “I do apologize,” Luke said, turning to face me as I walked down the hall. “Maddie. Hello. Thank you for having me.” Neither one of us knew what to do. I think Luke was leaning forward to kiss my cheek and I was reaching up to give him a hug, but somehow both gestures lost their momentum and we ended up doing the most ridi
culous thing: we shook hands. Paul, no doubt sensing our discomfort, proceeded to make matters worse by saying, “How about a beer, Luke?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Oh, shit!” Paul said, hitting his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “I’m sorry. I totally forgot.”

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Luke said with his old downturning smile. “It’s not like I’m going to lose my sobriety because you offered me a drink. I’ve been straight too long for that now.”

  “How about some iced tea then?” I asked. “Or lemonade?”

  “Water’s fine,” he said. “I’m off just about everything at this point. Caffeine. Sugar.” And, as it turned out, red meat, white meat, dairy products, refined flour, almost the entire contents of the dinner I’d spent so much time preparing. Not that Luke would have been particularly impressed if he had been able to eat any of it. He seemed in another world to me, subdued, tentative, like someone who has suffered a long, life-threatening illness and is only now beginning to come around. He let Paul do most of the talking and listened without any obvious reaction to my husband’s animated description of how the area was changing, the new people and businesses moving in, the way land values were beginning to escalate. The only thing that seemed to capture—and hold—his attention was Rachel, who insisted on sitting next to him at the head of the table.

  “So what do fairy queens do around here to keep busy?” he asked as I served him a bowl of strawberries and the three of us the cheesecake. Rachel, who in those days was something of a chatterbox around Paul and me, had sat dumb throughout the meal, staring up at Luke like someone bewitched.

  “Fairy things,” she whispered into her cake.

  “What? Like night flying and turning invisible and teaching frogs to dance? That sort of old-fashioned kind of fairy stuff?”

  “Yes!” Rachel laughed. “And making fairy gardens. Do you want to see?”

  “Try and stop me.”

  Paul and I cleared the table while the two of them disappeared into the backyard, where Rachel had spent numerous hours that summer constructing a miniature castle out of twigs, moss, pebbles, and flowers. There was a muddy moat and a drawbridge made of bark, a pasture with a long stick fence, and a tiny flagpole that flew the emblem of the kingdom: a small ridged beech leaf.

  “He’s doing great, don’t you think?” Paul asked, hoping, I guess, that wishing could make it so.

  “He’s lost a lot of weight,” I said.

  “Actually, eating prison food should have put weight on him. I know. But he seems to be clearheaded. Determined.”

  “What’s he planning to do?” I asked, remembering how hard it had been for Paul to get started again.

  “He’s going to fix up the house,” Paul told me, rinsing a plate. “He wants to get it back to where it was.” Mrs. Barnett had died suddenly about two years before this. She’d been institutionalized on and off since Luke was sent away, and had ended up at a state facility that was notoriously badly managed. Some people said that she’d committed suicide, others that she’d simply been given an overdose by mistake. The house, already in disrepair, had begun to fall apart. I’d driven up there earlier in the summer on some odd impulse and saw how the elegant windows had been boarded up. Grass was growing in the mossy patches on the roof.

  “Why? It’s a mess, Paul. It’s going to take real money to get it back into any kind of shape. That, and some practical knowledge about how to go about it. And Luke doesn’t have either. That doesn’t sound like someone who’s particularly clearheaded to me.”

  He was silent, letting what I said sink in. Then I realized what he wasn’t saying.

  “No,” I told him. “Don’t tell me you’re going to help him. Please, don’t tell me that.”

  “Well, yes, I’d like to give him a hand. When I have a free moment from time to time. It’s not such a big deal, really. I’d like to see him get back on his feet again. Wouldn’t you?”

  I watched as Luke and Rachel emerged into the porch light from out of the darkness. She was chattering away at him, all inhibitions cast aside. She was holding his hand. And he was listening, nodding his head. But not with the amused, barely suppressed condescension that most adults would have. He seemed to be taking in what she said, about all the fantastical details of her four-year-old world, with the utmost seriousness and respect.

  “Of course,” I said, because I knew then that I had no choice. I would have to learn who Luke was all over again, understand the ways in which he’d changed. And I’d have to change, too. How else was I going to be able to protect those I loved?

  24

  “Hey, Kath, who’s that usher with the long blond hair?” Leslie Finn, Kathy’s older sister, called from across the vestry at St. Anne’s. It was Kathy and Bob’s wedding day, and Leslie, Nelwyn, Louise, Barb, Rachel, and myself were waiting for the ceremony to get under way. We were dressed in matching apple-green dotted Swiss ankle-length gowns with wide white satin sashes.

  Leslie was standing at the emergency exit, the door propped open, smoking a cigarette. Divorced, rehabbed, remarried, and divorced again, she looked every bit the part of her bad-girl reputation. She’d been living in Springfield since her last divorce, where, according to Kathy, she was “working on her sobriety and collecting unemployment.” The Finn sisters had been raised in what my mother used to call “a broken home,” but where Kathy had emerged seemingly unscathed by the experience, Leslie brandished all the scars of her childhood.

  “I’m kind of busy now,” Kathy said and sighed, rolling her eyes for my benefit. “Getting ready for my wedding, you know? You’ll have to wait and do your man-hunting at the reception.”

  “Jesus Christ, do you know who that is?” Leslie cried. “That’s what’s-his-name! Luke Barnett. Is he not the sexiest fucking man alive? Is he married?”

  “Leslie, watch your mouth, please,” Kathy said. “We’ve got a little girl present.”

  “And an old lady,” Clara added, as she came up to the two of us. “You look lovely, Kathy.” Clara had been going around the room fiddling and fussing over everyone’s dresses and now tugged loose my white sash and retied it. She’d been so much more welcoming to Kathy than she’d been to me. I told myself that it was because Kathy had converted, but I couldn’t help but be hurt by it anyway. Kathy knew this and did everything she could to make Clara recognize my worth.

  “Thanks to Maddie,” she said now. “She did my makeup.”

  “Not that you needed any,” Clara replied. “Well, I think it’s time we all started to line up. Rachel? Here’s your flower basket. Now, remember to walk very slowly down the aisle, just the way we practiced. Count to three before each step… .”

  It was a long service, and a hot afternoon for early May. I felt my mind drifting as Father Timothy’s voice droned on through the mass. As usual, my thoughts snagged on all the sore subjects and problems in my life. The Anderson nephew had decided to sell the house, now that prices were on their way up, and had offered us first refusal on it. We’d been on the verge of approval from First State Bank for a mortgage, when, without explanation, it fell through. We were applying elsewhere now, but we’d wasted a lot of time in the process, and Paul was still baffled and upset by the setback. He was making a decent salary, we had the necessary ten percent to put down: what had gone wrong? Should I tell him that I learned from a friend who worked at the bank that Harry served on the advisory board? But there was probably no way to prove that he’d blocked our loan, so what was the point of stirring up bad feelings?

  More and more these days, I found myself pushing the past where I felt it belonged—behind me. I hadn’t seen my parents or Harry for six years. The hardware had been taken over by the True Value chain and now, with so much building under way, it seemed to be thriving again. The house where I grew up had been torn down by the new owners and an enormous structure in a quasi-Victorian shingle style, with multiple porches and an actual turret, was being erected in its place. It was disconcerting to
drive by and recognize all the trees and the old stone wall running along the seasonal creek, and then have to see a monstrosity rising in the place of my childhood home.

  “Louise told me that a dentist and his wife from the city are building it as their weekend getaway,” I’d told Paul a few weeks back. “Two people! Rattling around in all those rooms. It’s kind of disgusting, don’t you think? Just a splashy display of wealth—and bad taste.”

  “Well, it’s wealth and bad taste like that that are helping us put food on the table,” Paul reminded me, “and buy a place of our own. These huge places are going up everywhere. Think of it this way: the bigger and more elaborate the house, the more business Polanski gets out of it. Which means the more work for me.”

  But despite the fact that Paul was steadily employed at Polanski Builders, he never allowed himself to relax, or take our well-being for granted. He seemed so easygoing and confident to the outside world, but I knew he worried a lot in secret. I’d sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and see him lying beside me, eyes open, staring at the ceiling. When I’d ask him what was on his mind he’d say his father, who’d recently suffered a series of small strokes, or Bob’s ongoing problems at the dairy, or our being able to make ends meet when we took on the added financial burden of a mortgage. It was always something specific along with, I suspected, a deeper, more amorphous kind of dread. I don’t think he’d ever been able to forgive himself for going astray so early on, and in such a public and damning way. I think he was still trying to make up for that early mistake, though perhaps he didn’t understand that that’s what was driving him so hard. Not wanting to name them, he internalized these feelings, but they were as real and demanding as any sentence handed down. He was still doing time. And a big part of that, of course, was his need to help Luke.