A child answered the telephone. Said in this sweet little voice, “Sommer residence.” Portia’s kid, how about that, I remember thinking. How the generations do roll on. It struck me that it was pretty late for a small child to be answering the telephone, until I realized San Francisco was in a different time zone. “Is Emily home?” I asked.
“Mama? No, she’s out to dinner with Papa.”
Yes, indeed. I was surprised. When I didn’t respond the child said, “My sister is babysitting me.”
“Portia?”
“You want to talk to my sister?” he asked.
“No, thank you,” I said.
“Okay. You want to hear a joke?”
“Sure,” I said, still struggling to process the fact that Emily’d had another baby. “But first tell me what your name is.”
The kid said, “My name is Steve. Here’s my joke. Do you know the difference between an elephant and an aspirin?”
I heard a rush of footsteps then, and a young woman’s voice said, “There you are, Stevie! You’re supposed to be in bed. Who are you talking to?”
“Some man,” Stevie said.
I heard a rustling sound then, Portia wrestling the receiver from the kid. “Hello?” she said. “Hello?”
Of course I didn’t say anything. I hung up. And no, I never called again, although I do believe I still have Emily’s address and telephone number on a slip of paper in my wallet. I can’t tell you for sure about that since I can’t remember the last time I put my wallet in my pocket. I never go anyplace where I would need it, you see.
I do not harbor any resentment toward Emily. No, not anymore.
Sure, for a few years I thought I hated her for the way she let me go. Treated me like a servant she was sick of fooling with. Paid me off and sent me packing. For a good long while I brooded about it more than I should have. Kept picking apart my memories of her, replaying the snooty comments she made now and again. Her assessment, for example, of Mary Louise. “Very pretty, but really nothing special.” Harsh, yes, indeed, and unfair. Mary Louise didn’t have the firmest grasp on history or geography, but she was unfailingly good-natured and a hell of a dancer, which is more than you can say for lots of folks.
But so much happened after I left Nevada that my anger eventually petered out. I believe I let go of the last of it when I donated what was left in my tip jar to a scholarship program for needy premedical students at Ole Miss. After Emily’s money was gone I have never felt so free. With time I even came around to feeling grateful that woman cut me loose. If we’d married, I might not have bothered with medical school or, heck, even finished college. I might have ended up just another orangutan in a tuxedo, driving around San Francisco in a limousine my rich wife gave me for my birthday. If Emily had fallen into the habit of jettisoning husbands who didn’t suit her, I could have ended up her second husband of six. A leathery fake cowboy sitting at the end of some bar in Reno, on the lookout for my next millionairess.
So that’s my story. I hope some of it is useful. It has been an honor and a pleasure talking to you. Good luck with your book. No, no, I’m not trying to run you off, but I don’t want to keep you. There’s probably someplace else you need to be.
Sure, I’d be delighted to take a look at a couple of other interesting things you dug up. It’s not like I have any pressing appointments I need to get to. I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you remind of myself when I was younger. Willing to stop and chat with all the lonely old coots living in this very nursing home. It was no trouble for me whatsoever when I was still practicing, dropping by after I’d finished my rounds. I didn’t have a family to rush home to like the other doctors did. Most of the inmates here were ladies, so laying the charm on them was almost like the old days back in Reno. They loved having somebody to listen to their stories, and I never minded hearing the same ones repeated a few dozen times over. That’s how fairy tales got passed down through the generations before they were written, isn’t it? Also Homer’s Odyssey and what have you. Oral tradition, they call that. If those ladies’ same old stories don’t get told and retold, like as not they’d be forgotten.
Let’s see what you’ve got there. A letter? Sure, I can read it for myself, if you hand me my glass. What do you know? This looks like Emily’s handwriting.
Because it is? I see.
Dearest Steve—
Oh. This Steve, is it that Steve? The Stevie I talked to as a little boy? You got the photograph from him. Ah.
Dearest Steve, If you are reading this, I am dead.
No, no, I’m fine. Like I said, I figured Emily was more than likely gone now, since she had a decade on me. Not that I really minded the difference in our ages, but she couldn’t seem to let that go. Women tend to outlive men, generally speaking. That’s why this nursing home, like most, is chockablock with widows. Also why I always congratulated the wisdom of my female patients who married younger husbands, although of course I was prejudiced on that count. Now, where was I?
If you are reading this, I am dead.
It’s almost funny, isn’t it, Emily reaching out from beyond the grave to have a final word with her son. Some women find out they don’t care much for motherhood, but others seem to live for nothing else. So I’m not a bit surprised Emily would have a hard time letting go. I’m happy for her, really I am. Not for being dead, of course, but for managing to have another child. I know how she wanted that. When did she pass? Uh huh. Long enough ago for her headstone to be carved, not long enough for grass to roll a blanket over her grave.
I would have liked to see her one more time, if only from afar. In fact, the last big trip I took was to San Francisco. Oh, years ago now. I confess I sat on a bench across the way from the townhouse at the address Directory Assistance gave me for a good long while, wondering if that was the same house Emily had grown up in, curious if we’d recognize each other anymore if she happened to walk out its front door. Nope, nobody, not a soul, not while I sat there. It was a nice old place, carefully maintained, fancy neighborhood, killer views of the bay. Yes, I remember the address. Yes, that’s the very one. You’ve seen it, have you? I agree. It’s not any bigger than mine here in Whistler, but like the real estate agents say, location location location.
Yes, yes, I’ll finish reading the letter. You’re right. I am stalling. I’m not sure I’m ready yet to know how Emily’s story ended. But also of course I can hardly wait.
You are a wonderful, loving, thoughtful boy and I am so lucky and so proud to be your mother. I know Archer felt the same way about you, dear, every day of his life.
Are my hands shaking? Well, I’m not surprised. You had me going there for a minute. Nothing, nothing. Forget about it. I’ll keep reading. Tell me how you know Steve? All right, fine. Have it your way. I’ll hold my questions to the end.
But one more before I go on. Have you met Portia, too? She must be up in her sixties now. Hard to imagine her as anything but a kid. A stockbroker, you say, in San Francisco. She must have had a hard row to hoe, breaking into that line of work as a woman. I don’t doubt she’s good at it. Even at thirteen she knew how to hold her cards close to her chest, that one, which I imagine is a useful talent when you’re trading stocks. Did she marry? No, I don’t doubt she had plenty of offers but I can see how she might not be interested after having a front-row seat to her parent’s marriage. I only ask because it strikes me how much Emily would have enjoyed having grandchildren. Stevie had kids? Well, that’s nice. I wouldn’t have minded having grandchildren myself. Too bad I skipped that necessary intermediate step, having children.
I’d like to take all the credit for you turning out to be the sort of man you’ve become, but in fairness I should share credit for that with your father.
The older we get, the more good we can see in people. That is a fact. Even a cheating, patronizing mooch like Archer. He’s passed, too? Please forgive me. It’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, even when they deserve it.
I don’t know how
to say this, other than to come right out and say it. You don’t look a thing like Archer, but you do look very much like a young man I loved once.
Oh.
As you grew up I saw that sweet man’s face in yours more and more. His name—
No, I’m quite all right. No, don’t ring the nurse. I’m fine. I have no intention of keeling over now. No, I don’t want you to read the rest of it for me. Better I see this with my own eyes.
His name was Howard Stovall Bennett III. Ward. He gave me the wedding band I wore all your life. Archer and I were on the road to divorce when I met him. Ward and I planned to marry, but in the end I decided, for your sister’s sake, I had to stay with Archer. He never seemed to notice I had on a different ring. Imagine. But of course you can imagine. You know how he was. Not one for noticing much of anything that wasn’t Archer.
She wore it all those years. Well, well. What do you know.
To be honest, I stole that ring from Ward. It had been his mother’s, so it was selfish of me to do that. But I wanted to carry something of him with me always, little suspecting when I left that I was carrying something even more precious. You.
Yes, a glass of water would be appreciated. Thank you.
I hope you can forgive me for keeping this from you, Steve. Now that everyone this information would hurt is dead, I think it only fair you should know.
Does Portia know this? Ah, sending you to look for me was her idea. To find me, not just for her brother’s sake, but so she could make amends. She suspected all along, you say? Steve came down the chute with that cleft in his little chin. Of course. The Bennett genes are strong.
If you decide to look for Ward and find him still alive, please return his ring. And tell him, too, how sorry I am for the way I ended things. I did what I had to, even though it broke my heart. I thought if Ward hated me it might be easier for him to get over loving me, if in fact he did.
Turns out Emily was quite the actress, after all. She sure had me fooled.
Did I in fact love her? That is the question, isn’t it? The truth is, I don’t know. For years, decades even, I had myself convinced I did. Probably stood in the way of my pursuing likely ladies around here, though a fair number, I’ll admit, chased after me when I was younger, little suspecting I was the kind of man who sat around in my underwear eating ice cream straight from the carton. Imagine the women I might have disappointed if any one or one after another of them had caught me.
There really is no predicting whether the person you marry will be a keeper, is there? Many of the rich ladies at the ranch said they didn’t see the point of husbands, anyway, aside from providing children. If you weren’t adept at choosing a mate, or lucky, one infidel was probably as good as another. That cuts both ways, of course. No guaranteeing anybody, male or female, will pick the ideal person to share their lives with. So why try?
Yes, you’re right, I chickened out. Chose to surround myself with people who made me happy, who I could just as easily abandon at any moment. I stumbled into an excellent ersatz family, at the Flying Leap. Did my best to recreate that back home, here in Whistler. Got comfortable. Made a living. Bought back the ancestral home. For all the good it did me. Do you know, the day before I moved into this facility I stopped by the funeral home to order my headstone and pay for my funeral in advance. Not so much that I thought I was good as dead. No. I knew I might live another twenty years. It was more a come-to-Jesus moment. If I didn’t have folks to take care of me in my senescence, it made sense that there would be no one to make my final arrangements. I wouldn’t end up in an unmarked grave like my poor uncle, but—
But now you’re telling me that I have not just a son, but grandchildren. Descendants to pass my house and all my stories down to. I confess I’d hoped, ever since that phone call—the little boy—the elephant and the aspirin—Steve—
That Portia cooked up the idea of sending someone here armed with a tape recorder? To spare my son’s feelings, in case I turned out to be some cantankerous old fool not interested in acknowledging his own flesh and blood. That way at the very least Steve would get to know me, at least a little.
So before you set out on this thrilling adventure, Portia slipped Miss Pam’s ring on your finger. With your father’s blessings. Steve’s.
Yes, please. Oh yes. Please. Let’s call your father. We have a lot of catching up to do. Let’s call my son. Let’s call Steve.
Acknowledgments
Though I’ve never lived in Nevada, my father did for some unknown amount of time during the 1930s while working as a make-believe cowboy on a dude ranch that catered to the divorce trade. I know few facts about his sojourn there—once I was old enough to be genuinely interested (as in, middle-aged), it was too late to ask him about it. There were a couple of funny stories he used to tell when I was younger, one in particular about a fancy new car given to him by a woman who had taken a particular shine to him. After my father, who wouldn’t be my father for another twenty years yet, drove the car home to Tennessee to show it off, his mother told him to turn right around and return it, saying, “We are not the sort of people who accept automobiles as gifts from rich old ladies.”
I grew up on a farm with horses, a few cows, and upwards of twenty cats at any one time, so I know a thing or two about what living on a farm is like. Not a ranch, I’ll grant you, but I extrapolated. While researching this book, I spent a week in Reno to get a sense, however limited, of the lay of the land. Every day I went to the Nevada Historical Society to dig through their files to see if I could find any mention of my father’s time there. The staff could not have been more welcoming or delighted by my project. Everybody pitched in, particularly Carole Clough and Michael Moore, to help me find any mention of my father. Alas, nothing. I did gather valuable material, though, as well as a hot tip about Newspapers.com, where I could read Reno newspapers of the era on my computer back here in Los Angeles until the cows came home. Which I did. All an enormous help to me in the shaping of my story, sprung of fact but entirely fictional. My narrator, it should be noted, too, has almost nothing in common with my father other than an overabundance of charm and good looks, and being born in a small town in West Tennessee. Whistler, like my narrator, is also entirely fictional, though in my mind located in the same neck of the woods.
I also read every book I could get my hands on about Reno that touched on the divorce industry there. Three were particularly helpful: The Genesis of Reno: The History of the Riverside Hotel and the Virginia Street Bridge (University of Nevada Press) by Jack Harpster; Reno’s Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City (University Press of Kansas) by Alicia Barber; and finally, Is Marriage Necessary: Memoirs of a Reno Judge (Kessinger Legacy Reprints) by George A. Bartlett. Judge Bartlett’s book was the source of two things I cherish that pop up in my narrative: He relayed the story of a divorcée who wanted to shed her husband because, she said, he was “an infidel.” A cheater, in other words, guilty of infidelity. Also, as Judge Bartlett finalized each divorce, he pounded his gavel and declared, “Better luck next time.” I am also grateful to Daniel Rosta of Sundance Books in Reno, who I met while I was in town doing research and has since been kind enough to answer random questions about things like the quality of the sky there on a hot summer afternoon.
I should also thank my mother, a beloved small-town physician, one whose patients wept and rent their clothing when she finally retired. She was from Savannah, Tennessee, and graduated from the University of Tennessee undergraduate and then, sometime in the 1950s, their medical school, in a class that included many men who, like my father, had served in World War II. That’s why I decided my male narrator should be molded by similar experiences. Even though my mother never served in that war in any capacity—she was still in high school—everything I know about doctors and doctoring and the milk of human kindness I learned from her.
I’m indebted also to a documentary I saw just as I was setting out to write this book: Obit. Life on Deadline, about the
obituary writers of the New York Times. Part of that job is anticipating what noteworthy personages might kick off in the near future and then writing a largely complete piece about them to have on hand when that life reached its end. Such guesswork sometimes resulted in pre-mixed obits languishing in their files for many years. The one on file the longest when the documentary was made had been written up for Elinor Smith, a teenaged aviatrix who in 1928 flew her airplane under all four bridges spanning the East River in Manhattan. Though she seemed a likely candidate for an early demise, Ms. Smith lived to be ninety-nine years old. So of course, of course, I had to read her memoir, Aviatrix (Thorndike Press), which led to those of many, many others and an obsession with the women who, like my mother, were some of the best in a field largely dominated by men. The books that were the most helpful to me in creating my aviatrix, Nina, were two memoirs, the terrific West with the Night (Open Road Media) by Beryl Markham—one of the best books I’ve ever read, one I somehow hadn’t gotten to before—and The Spirit of St. Louis (Scribner) by Charles Lindbergh. Also a much more recent work of nonfiction, Fly Girls: How Five Daring Women Defied All Odds and Made Aviation History (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Keith O’Brien.
I’d also like to thank friend of my youth and author James Ledbetter for allowing me to co-opt something so memorably funny he said to me thirty years ago that I still think about often, vis-à-vis the need for a little sleight of hand to keep the magic of romance alive. Ditto all the booksellers and fellow novelists and nice people I knew well or hardly knew at all who put me up in their lovely homes or had parties for me when I traveled across the country in the course of promoting my first novel. Making friends this way is one of the best perks of being published that nobody thinks to tell you about before you discover it for yourself. I am deeply indebted to every one of them whose period-appropriate names I lifted for characters in this book. Once again I’d like to thank my incredibly patient friend Sara Kenney for diligently reading every page of this novel as I wrote it—all three versions. It’s due to the persistence and insight of my brilliant editor Kate Nintzel that the third time proved the charm and my story finally came together. Without my delightful agent Lisa Bankoff no book of mine would have made it to publication. Finally, I’ll always be thankful for my daughter for proving that the delicious little girl she always was would someday grow into an even more delightful adult once she made it past that rough patch we all went through when she was thirteen. My readers who are parents know exactly what I mean by that.
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