The Center of Everything

by Jamie Harrison

  Polly and Ned had both loved and been surprised by Sam’s boyness. When Helen arrived, part of Polly’s exhausted brain watched Ned react. He covered her tiny bedroom with posters of color—a Goethe wheel and a Runge ball, shades of blues and greens, yellows and peach and orange—and a beautiful print of the alphabet in ten different scripts. His daughter would not be limited to pink and purple. Her crib mobile was made of sea creatures; her stuffed animals were carnivores. Her pajamas were stripes, her flower prints were bold, her china-headed doll had an indigo dress and delicate hands. When Helen turned three, her presents were six-guns and a cowboy hat and a pirate ship and a plastic saber; for Christmas she’d gotten a tool set and a doctor’s kit. That spring, Ned perched her on a stool over the car engine while he worked on it, and let her demolish the old wind-up alarm with real tools while he cooked Easter dinner. He got Sam to teach Helen to hit a T-ball and play marbles, and he taught Sam to sew and cook. And when he felt bad for taking Sam’s future relatively for granted, he took him alone for the first week of the trip they made to Ireland.

  Ned worked it. He was going to stave off both the modern girl’s and the old girl’s world as long as he could, and either as a result or by nature, Helen, though not a brat, was obedient without being obeisant, figuring out how to handle the inevitable—tasks, unpleasantnesses like doctors and swim lessons or picking up her room—without drama but without full agreement. Her lip already curled. Polly hoped to somehow make enough money to go on a world tour starting with Helen’s thirteenth birthday, some Möbius strip of distraction. Jane’s way of getting Polly through that period had been to have another three children, and Polly wasn’t going to go that route.

  On a camping trip to the Sunlight Basin the year before, Vinnie had watched Helen spin around the campsite, dancing with a plastic tiger.

  “She’s a doll,” said Vinnie.

  “Don’t call her a doll,” snapped Ned. “Maybe a treasure, or a jewel. I don’t want her to be anyone’s fucking doll.”

  It was hard to be a girl. It was hard to be anything.

  Maude asked to eat at home again. She wanted to sit in the yard and study the mountains, which hadn’t changed a bit since her childhood, and she wanted to think of her mother in the garden while she watched Helen in her mud pile. It was so soothing, she said. Dee would be so happy to know this.

  Ned grilled lamb. Polly watched Maude from the kitchen while she made a salad, thinking that they needed to get her to a doctor, because something was going on, beyond being ninety. Then the scene through the window dropped away. The world turned green, as if it were made of water, and she saw a door. Polly ran down the hall and through the map, circling mountains and leaping over rivers, tricked into looking in all the wrong places while something awful was happening that she should prevent, while Dee called to her from downstairs—something was burning, and now everyone was yelling.

  The smoke alarm sounded. Polly gave Ned a big smile as he jerked the oven door open.

  “You’re tired,” he said, throwing pistachio cinders into the alley; Polly had been toasting them for the salad. “It’s been a while. Don’t fret.”

  Liar. Polly shooed magpies away until she was sure they wouldn’t burn their beaks or their feet on the smoking nuts.

  “Where’d you go?” asked Ned.

  “Into the map,” she said. “Rita’s map.”

  After dinner, Sam brought out his family tree again, but Jane and Merle were off with friends, and Maude and Josie and Harry were leaving to visit Harry’s mother, who was just back from seeing a new grandchild. How lovely to have babies born, said Maude to Josie.

  Sam, miffed, pointed to the empty circle above Jane’s name. “Your grandmother can fill that in,” Maude told Sam.

  “Can she?” asked Polly.

  “Of course she can,” said Maude. “Just because she doesn’t talk about it doesn’t mean she doesn’t know.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I believe you know the answer to that question,” said Maude. Harry was helping her to the door, and looked back at Polly, shaking his head in confusion.

  Where to begin a story? Polly had hauled her childhood along through life without examination. She’d relied on it being there if she needed to find it, but she disliked navel-gazing, even before she needed to pretend her head felt just fine. Biographies bored her, and she connected most bouts of self-examination with depression.

  But the past had become much more interesting since the accident, once she worried she was losing the ability to bring it back, once she caught herself having the urge to make things up. She needed to find a balance between what she’d remembered, what she’d imagined, what she’d forgotten to consider, and what had been knocked out of her when she bounced on the pavement. And it started with Jane’s blue lovely eyes—no one else in the family had those eyes—and Jane’s invisible mother.

  Understanding Asta, over time: Polly’s first version was a soft-featured girl on Jane’s bedside table, a dead girl who was darker and older than Evie in the paired portraits of Polly’s childhood. Both were laughing, both were dead in accidents, both still made people cry decades later. The second version of Asta, after they left New York for Michigan: understanding that Jane never knew her mother, couldn’t remember her, and felt that Dee, who’d raised her, was her real mother. The third, as a teenager on a trip to Livingston: understanding that Asta died when her car went off the road and into the river when Jane was not quite two. And as a teenager, the fourth and central question: Who was Jane’s father? An openly out-of-wedlock baby in 1939 was no average thing. Polly asked for years and was dismissed.

  The fifth, this last week: that Asta hadn’t been alone, and the sixth, that she’d drowned. The seventh, yesterday: The man was drunk, survived, and left Asta to die.

  The eighth was Polly understanding that she might already know the end of the story.

  Ned was on the phone, pacing in the garden. Polly knew he was talking to Drake, and she guessed it was about Graham. She was offended that he kept the conversation private, that everyone kept secrets from her. She got the kids to bed and tried to order her thoughts by sorting Drake’s backlog of manuscripts, listening for Harry’s car and the return of Maude. She missed hearing it, somehow, and it was almost nine before she smelled tobacco and looked outside to see Maude and Harry smoking surreptitious cigarettes in the garden, while Helen was back to her golem game in the corner. Ned and Sam were reading on the front porch, a stealth location to avoid a Maude inquisition.

  “Don’t tell Josie,” said Harry, handing Maude the ashtray.

  “Will you tell me the truth, Maude?” asked Polly.

  Maude looked at the moon, looked at Harry, asked for a titch of sherry, asked for another cigarette, and spoke.

  Asta fell in love with a college man (there was an archaic phrase, thought Polly, and Maude delivered it with sarcasm) at a weekend party in Providence, and for a few months the world was a lovely place. A good-looking, rich, intelligent boy. He proposed and Asta brought him home that summer, but that fall, after she found out she was pregnant, he stopped answering his phone. When she took the train to Providence to see him, he cried and blamed his parents for backing out of the engagement, then got drunk and called her a slut in front of his fraternity brothers. A proctor led her out of the dormitory. Asta went back to Bryn Mawr and stayed in her room for a week, until a friend talked to the school authorities. She bolted from Philadelphia for New York and Papa found her two weeks later in a hotel.

  By then it was too late to do anything about the pregnancy and he brought Asta home, all of them moving around town with a distinct lack of shame that people came to admire. Dee gave a baby shower, and everyone came. People loved Asta and people hated to see her wronged. Jane was born, and things were more or less fine until the man reappeared.

  The ninth version of the story: The boy Asta was with when she died in the river had been Jane’s father. Though he abandoned Asta when he learned she was
pregnant, he returned two years later to see her—no one knew why, or why she’d agreed—while Dee and Papa were visiting Maude in California. He knocked on the door of the house, this house, ignored the baby that Asta handed to Odile and Inge as she left, and took her off for a drive in a green Ford. The next morning, she was found drowned in the car in the river, and the boy was gone.

  And that was that? Of course not. Maude and Papa and Dee drove north from California for a day and a night and saw Asta’s body. She had a black eye and a healing split lip from a beating that must have happened earlier in the day, and they found that though she’d suffered a blow to the head, she’d died of drowning. The water wasn’t that deep—the boy fled and left her to die. And so it wasn’t just that he’d caused the accident. Seeing her lovely face after the agony of drowning—Maude said it pushed Papa around a corner, forever. He hired a private detective, but the boy enlisted, shipping out days before the detective reached his parents’ house. Pearl Harbor was timely for him.

  The bats were herding mosquitos again, listening. Harry leaned back in the lawn chair with his eyes closed.

  “Jesus,” he said. “You’d never get over wanting to kill him.”

  “It was her bad luck to have met him, and none of her fault,” said Maude. “Papa and Mother felt that if they’d made other choices, she’d be alive. Maybe if they’d stayed in California, or in Europe, this stuck-up Ivy League brat, this piece of inbred crap, wouldn’t have eaten her up and dropped her like trash.”

  They couldn’t bear to stay near the icy river. They couldn’t run away with Jane to Europe because of the war, and they went down to Tucson and rented a house in the Sam Hughes neighborhood. Papa volunteered on a dig of Hohokam irrigation systems and they took trips to Mexico. He checked with a friend in Washington every few months, hoping the boy would be killed by the Germans, the Japanese, in friendly fire, anything, but he stayed in Paris and never came back, even when his parents died. Maude and her cousins thought of trying to find him after the war, but one of them was always pregnant, and ultimately all of them had too much to lose.

  Jane remembered hummingbirds and beautiful flowers, and like Polly, she remembered train rides across the country. But eventually Papa and Dee connected both Arizona and Montana, places where they’d survived their daughter, with pain, and so they bought the place in Stony Brook and went back and forth to postwar Europe. Papa poured himself into work, teaching half the year and going on digs to all the reachable places ripped open by the war. He wanted to soak into the old world like blood. They still came back to Montana for summers for a few years, but the place was ash to them. Dee turned her back on her garden. After 1960, when her friend Margaret died, they never returned.

  “What was his name?” asked Polly.

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters to me. He was my grandfather.”

  Maude watched her. “Ivor Dewitt. Fancy family. He became an art dealer.”

  “Why didn’t he marry Asta?” asked Polly, who thought she managed to keep her face blank. “She was beautiful, Papa had money.”

  Maude stubbed out her cigarette and rattled her ice cubes. “When he visited us in Montana, after they were engaged, he was quite irritable, and we think he looked around at the town and the house and just thought we were a little too scrubby and mysterious, not up to snuff. Perdita’s patchy family background—who knows? Some people do cruel things for no reason at all.”

  Maude went to bed and Harry drove home. When Jane returned, Polly walked over to the alley house and they talked about whether it might rain for Maude’s float, and if so, what to do—a matinee?

  “Are you all right?” said Jane. “You look odd.”

  “I’m thinking,” said Polly. “Believe it or not.”

  Ned was still hiding on the front porch with a book, a halo of bugs surrounding the wall light. Polly floated around, making a list, cleaning up stray bits, and waved peacefully when he headed upstairs.

  Polly of the blinking mind. The man at the party, the man on the beach—she’d never forgotten him, but she’d been blind to the context, never even talking with Ned about it. Until now, the cause and effect, the why of the bad man—the two bad men—getting into the boat, was what Jane as a student called an onion story, an artichoke story. It confused, and Polly shied away. Now she needed confirmation, but the blinking thought felt red, not green—there was a point to Jane’s willful ignorance. Polly shouldn’t think any memory was true, ever, especially after wine, especially when she was tired. Ivor was one of those turn-of-the-century names that might seem like a one-off, but nothing in the world ever really was, and why would her memory be right about the last name? Maybe it had been Dewar, Dworkin. She’d been eight.

  Still, she saw Papa’s grim face, white against the green hedges of that old estate, water dripping off his clothes. She went down to the dining room table for the photo she’d pulled off the board earlier, an old man rinsing himself with a hose after a swim, grinning at laughing children, the children they’d been. He was so old but so strong, the long muscles on his arms withered but still defined, every motion still sure and coordinated. Had he felt relief when he let the boat go and swam back to shore?

  Upstairs, in bed, Ned looked up from a cookbook. In times like these he stuck with nonfiction. “Are you coming soon?”

  “I won’t be long,” said Polly. “I’ll be quiet.”

  “Are you all right?”

  Everyone was asking that; her pride in a poker face was dented. “I’m fine,” said Polly. “I’ll explain later. I promise.”

  Before her accident he might have been impatient. At the computer, tucked on the cramped landing to make way for Maude, Polly wasted time reading about another Ivor—Novello—before she finally searched the New York Times for an obituary. If the Dewitts were that sort of family, that sort of paper might show a trace. Polly watched her shitty dusty curtains blow in the first cool nighttime gust to breach the heat of the landing, the dial-up connection laboring along.

  The screen snapped into focus: Ivor Madison Dewitt, gallery owner and ex-pat, who’d spent his postwar years (after serving in noncombat positions, as the Times somewhat bitchily pointed out) in Paris. Married three times, no children, born 1917, dead August 30, 1968, of drowning, near Stony Brook. No photo, but Polly could see his face, the sand in his open eye.

  Things Polly had seen, without really seeing: the way Papa touched Dee, the way her parents danced, Ivor teasing Rita with a glass, the things on Papa’s desk that didn’t glitter, objects that were subtler but still strange—a small hammer, a ruler, a collection of eyeglasses, a stone bird’s foot, a ribbon with a lock of dark hair, a quote from Hart Crane that he’d copied out in his European hand: Because it is bitter, and it is my heart.

  And one man wading out of the Sound, after two had gone out in a boat. Polly didn’t think he’d asked the people in the kitchen to be quiet when he drove them home. That was their decision.

  She peered around the corner—Ned’s light was on, but he was asleep with the cookbook on his chest.

  The last version of the story of Asta: Papa sidestepped violence for almost thirty years, but when a man offers his throat to you, you fall back to the habit of revenge. You know how to do it; you know you’re good at it. The men in the boat rowed out over the still water, speaking quietly, knowing incrementally what was about to happen. For Ivor Dewitt, disbelief, because why should he have worried about getting into a boat with an ancient academic? Ivor couldn’t have imagined that this old, old man would row them out of sight, knock him into the water with an oar, and hold him under until he drowned.

  Polly typed in Papa’s name, wondering why she’d never done this before, and when she finished reading his obituary, she went to wake Ned. They’d already really known. They just hadn’t understood that the man Papa killed was Jane’s father, Polly’s grandfather.

  16

  The End of the World, 1968

  The afternoon after the
party, after finding the dead man on the beach, while the uncles, unimpressed with the body, were off seeking lobster, and the aunts were on a walk, and Dee and Papa were having a nap, the police arrived and Jane sent Polly upstairs to fetch Papa.

  Papa and Dee always looked serene when they slept. His arm was under her head, and he opened his eyes before Polly could say anything, and put a finger to his lips, and slid away from his wife carefully, so that she didn’t wake. Dee had not been able to get up that morning.

  Downstairs, Jane made Polly stay with her in the kitchen and Papa took the police into the front room. They heard him say that he’d gone with Mr. Dewitt to the beach to talk, after breaking up the argument with his son-in-law. Merle Schuster was a possessive man with a beautiful wife. Papa managed to cool the situation when Mr. Dewitt, seeing the boat, mentioned he’d been a rower in college, and Papa unwisely allowed him to take it, if only to keep the peace. He went out with Mr. Dewitt just long enough to show him a trick or two about how the boat handled, and warn about tides, and to show him where he kept it anchored.

  Maude brought in coffee, and when the police asked if she’d dealt with Mr. Dewitt, she said he’d been a complete boor. But he was an important gallery owner, and helpful for Mrs. Ward’s career. An uninvited, drunken, difficult guest, but nevertheless a guest.