“But you’re not anyone else, are you?” She brushed the dirt from the cellar off her manicured hands and drew the brass bolt on the door.
With those manicured hands, Daphne passed me her pen when, a month later, I signed at the closing.
Not long after we became engaged, Poppy and I planned our retirement. We were walking along the Charles River and passed an elderly couple feeding scraps of bread to a family of ducks.
“You rarely see that as a coeducational activity,” Poppy remarked.
“She’s brainwashed him,” I said, “over years of her excellent duck à l’orange.”
Poppy groaned. “What will I brainwash you into doing by that age?”
“Joining the Peace Corps. Something liberal and in vogue.”
“What I do not want to do,” said Poppy, “is sit around on park benches feeding the birds. You’re not far off about the Peace Corps. If we have children and manage to wean them properly, we could head off to the Congo, or El Salvador, and help build houses for the poor.”
“My young joints quake at the thought of being up to that task forty years from now,” I said.
“We could teach English. Teach reading. You’d be good at that, Percy. You could start libraries in equatorial Africa.”
“Perfect. Me shelving books in the Kalahari Desert. I’m so glad that’s settled.”
Poppy put her arm around my waist. “So now that we know we can agree on the end of the story—and we can’t complain about the beginning, can we?—what’s left to learn about but the middle?”
“The middle is the tricky part,” I said.
“You are too pessimistic,” she said. “The middle is where the filling is, the jam, the custard, the cornmeal stuffing. The scallop inside the bacon.”
We realized that we were hungry, and chilly, so we walked to the Square for lunch. We agreed soup would be just the thing. “We’re already in the middle, you know,” said Poppy. “And look how easy it is.”
“Thus far,” I said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
Two years ago, once I made the decision to retire, I thought about those impetuous plans, the way we’d scoffed at fate by letting them pass our lips. Certainly I had no intention of heading off to equatorial Africa, not even for a vacation. But I had a misguided daughter to care for—that was to be my first challenge—and then I had books to read (a pleasantly never-ending task) and grandchildren to amuse, intimidate, and, for as long as I could manage, entertain. That’s how I saw it, then.
Little did I know that my retirement would very soon involve a sudden, most unwelcome familiarity with courtrooms and judges’ chambers, none the least bit grand or elegant, in niches of the city I’d never visited before and hope never to visit again. In my vital effort to gain the goodwill of countless “officers of the law” and the clerks who give access to such people, I did what my daughters had tried but never succeeded in getting me to do before: I shed my so-called attitude. I spoke the plainest of English. I did not offer humor where none was required. (None was ever required, let me tell you that.) I learned to defer to lawyers and their legalese, and on the rare occasions when they permitted me to speak, I learned to beg through bargaining.
I did none of this without help. Without, to put it properly, counsel. The counsel of, specifically, Anthony Giardini. When I reminded him that I’d learned his reptilian nickname from Douglas, he was quick to point out that in our case he would be taking the role of supplicant, not predator. The goal was to keep Robert out of prison, not to win him a yacht, a country home, or the custody of children. The goal was, in fact, to get him more or less into custody, said Anthony: custody of a nonpenal nature. Robert wasn’t a child, and that was the tough part.
At first, Robert insisted repeatedly that he had never been a “member” of these DOGS, but he had to admit to the judge that he had participated without coercion in their acts of vandalism. His efforts to help the police locate a woman named something like Tabitha Earth Girl led to naught; he’d apparently been to her down-and-out neighborhood only once, after dark. Similarly fruitless were his attempts to find the deserted building in Lothian where they’d prepared for the “major action,” as he referred to the debacle in my backyard.
Robert spent most of a weekend in jail before Trudy posted his exorbitant bond. Insisting she was too distraught and angry to see him yet, she sent me to retrieve him. I followed Anthony to a part of Cambridge that I could never, at gunpoint, find again.
Anthony handled the endless paperwork; I was relieved to stand aside. As soon as Robert and I were alone in my car, I focused on finding my way back to anywhere I recognized. I said nothing for some time, and neither did Robert. Once I was on familiar roads, however, I found that I was as angry as his mother. I shouted, “What in the world could have persuaded you to be a part of it? A part of any of these foolish acts? Please give me something to go on!”
“I was stupid,” he said quietly.
I couldn’t disagree with that. “This boy you trusted, this—where is he?”
“I have no idea, Granddad. They took away my phone, my computer, any way he’d try to get in touch with me.”
“You think he’s doing that. Really.” I tried, but failed, to curb my sarcasm. Anthony would be the one to inform Robert that the police had found several of that boy’s belongings in my cellar; that he had apparently slept there at some point, used my house as his burrow (and the underside of my barn as a storeroom). I had been too upset to inspect the place myself that night. From the lawn, I’d watched the Matlock police, suddenly so self-important, attack my cellar, comb through the rooms in my house. I had stood there, numb, horrified, until it dawned on me that anything implicating that cruel boy would come down on Robert’s head as well.
“I was stupid, stupid, stupid to get involved, but he really believes in what he’s doing, okay? Believes that the only way to change stuff is to take a radical approach. Turn the world upside down to change it.”
“Do you even know who this boy is, other than a cunning sociopath?”
“He’s someone with a very complicated past, but he’s my friend. He is not a sociopath.” Robert’s head lay propped against the car window on his side, as if it were too heavy for his body to support. Periodically, he would have a harsh fit of coughing or wipe his nose on a sleeve. I could have offered him my handkerchief, but I decided to ignore his discomfort.
“A friend chooses your grandfather’s home as a target for mischief?”
“Granddad, it probably wasn’t his idea. Or maybe it was, but it wasn’t about you. I mean, even Turo heard you go on about how Matlock’s become this refuge for the filthy rich, this, like … all those parents at the nursery school—Remember when you went on and on about Jonathan Newcomb, what he did to those fields?”
I pulled the car over and braked. “Are you even sorry? Or should I turn right around and hand you back to those wardens?”
Silence. Would he actually refuse to answer me? Then he wailed. How well I had succeeded in breaking him down.
“God, Granddad, I am so sorry, so sorry, I can’t even tell you how sorry I am. I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”
We were parked by the side of Route 2, in a weedy lot adjoining a long-defunct farmstand, another casualty of suburban wealth and developers’ greed. I could remember buying tomatoes and corn at that farmstand with Poppy. Robert cried against the window, openly, loudly.
“Grandson,” I said quietly, though I was still angry. “I understand what drew you in. I admit that when it was just fodder for the local media, I found it all amusing. So I was stupid, too. Or arrogant. Here.” I gave him my handkerchief after all.
I drove on. By tacit, weary agreement, we abandoned words. I felt Robert look at me when I passed the turnoff for Matlock, continuing toward Ledgely. When we pulled into Norval’s driveway, he said, “Granddad, is your house gone, too?”
“Let’s just say that what remains of it will soon belong to Maurice Fougère. He tells me h
e will restore any damage with the utmost loving care. Something I cannot imagine devoting to anything or anyone at this particular moment, so bully for him.”
Robert began to apologize all over again, but I didn’t wait to listen. I got out of the car and started toward the house. Helena passed me with a look of sorrow. I cut across the grass to avoid her reach. I went upstairs, to the guest room with the twin beds that Robert and I would share like a pair of children (and aptly so) until his mother felt she could bear to see him—or until he was carted off to prison. Out the window, I saw Helena coaxing Robert from the car.
I no longer aim to run every day, but when I do set out, I enjoy learning the byways of my new town, where the houses, many two or three hundred years old, stand hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, angled every which way like guests pressed together at a cocktail party, liquor having stripped them of all inhibition. Many yards are no bigger than a bedspread. My new road (a very old road) is a short one-way lane that leads off a colonial thoroughfare flanked by larger, more symmetrical homes. At the far end, it forks: right takes me to the harbor; left, toward the burial ground that occupies the highest hill in town. The oldest graves dominate the summit, where revolutionary patriots—in their day, insurgents and rebels—are lauded on one worn, tilted slab after another. Granite steps set into the hill take me, if I watch my footing, to a plinth erected in 1848 as a mourning and memorial for sixty-five men and boys who set forth from Vigil Harbor on a dozen fishing vessels and died together in a single storm, leaving—as the inscription so chillingly reports—43 widows, 155 fatherless children, and many a heart cleft in twain. Nothing like a hit of hardcore history to put your own troubles in perspective.
Continue down the far side of the hill (too rocky and hazardous for running) and one reaches the newest graves, though only plots reserved decades ago remain to be filled. At the insistence of her parents, this is where we buried Poppy’s ashes. Their remains joined hers eleven and fifteen years later. There’s not much space remaining in the family’s allocation, but I doubt Trudy or Clover plans to end up here. We’ve never been visitors of graves; I’d always felt that if Poppy’s spirit lingered anywhere, it was over that beautiful nameless pond in Matlock. Of the place I will have lived for most of my life, that pond is what I miss most.
My visit here in late May was the first I’d made in at least a decade. I did not even think to bring flowers. The very first time I faced Poppy’s finished gravestone, alone, months after her burial, I thought, This is where the story ends. The only story that mattered then, and for some time to come, was ours.
Many days, I swim in the harbor. I clamber buffoonishly down a façade of rocks, wearing my conspicuously tropical swimsuit, and risk a dive, hoping that a wave won’t hurl me back against the jagged ledge. I work my way in loops among the moorings and the vessels: the dinghies, pleasure yachts, waterborne gas guzzlers, a few stalwart fishing boats that somehow still bring their owners a living. (Or maybe the fishermen of Vigil Harbor, like the rock musicians of Matlock, rely on so-called independent income; I have yet to diagnose the socioeconomic quirks of this place.) I suppose it’s not exactly prudent to undertake such an activity at my age, but it feels like an act of healthy defiance. If some yahoo in a motorboat splits my skull with his fiberglass hull, well, there are worse ways to go. Trudy could fill me in on several.
I was too busy playing Perry Mason (or Perry Mason’s client) to pack my belongings. At Evelyn’s recommendation, I hired a cheery group of teenagers who called themselves Girls on the Go. I’d stop by to check their progress on my way from Norval’s house to Anthony’s office or to whatever courtroom demanded my presence. Trudy showed up at meetings and hearings as often as she could, though Douglas did so more often. I spent more time with my son-in-law in three months than I had in two decades. We discovered that we’d both defected to the Red Sox after Yankee-loyal boyhoods (and that we felt secretly guilty). He gave me a set of barbecue tools for my new life and promised to help me use them. By e-mail, we began to share the titles of our favorite books.
Yet the hardest task I had before me wasn’t spending my summer loitering in various fetid hallways of justice (always too hot or too cold); it was obtaining the mercy of Laurel Connaughton. Hell hath no fury like that of a woman burned out of an irreplaceably old and beautiful home, gone up in smoke her priceless antiques, family mementos, and inexplicably beloved dust ball of a cat. (The cat had been seen lurking elusively in the woods, but no one could catch him.)
In truth, for the first time ever, my heart went out to Laurel. I certainly did not blame her for wanting to see my grandson drawn and quartered. She had a lawyer, too, who made her intentions clear to Anthony. Someone would do serious time for this, and the only someone at hand was Robert.
Through her lawyer, I begged her to meet me for lunch at the Ledgely Inn. I asked the lawyer to tell her that I had something important to give her and that I would only give it to her in person.
She arrived at the inn first; I found her at the table, drinking sherry and eating bread sticks. I couldn’t help noting that she looked fine for someone who’d just lost everything she owned. Her hair was freshly dyed, her cheeks pink—though, judging from the temperature of her gaze when she saw me enter the dining room, they were flushed with fury. She continued to stare at me as I seated myself across from her. She did not so much as glance at the shoebox I placed on one of the empty chairs.
“I’m here so you won’t ever bother me again,” she said.
“I appreciate it, Laurel, I do.”
“Tell me what you have to say. I have nothing to say to you. I can’t believe I ever thought you a friend.”
“As you can guess,” I said, ignoring a statement I had no right or desire to contradict, “I’ve come to ask that you let the judge show some leniency to Robert. You know he wasn’t the mastermind. You know he wasn’t even there that night. I think we’ve established those facts.”
“The cleverest of criminals are never at the scene of the crime.”
The waitress gave us our menus and a basket of popovers. I pushed the basket toward Laurel. I set the menu aside.
“Laurel, were you ever twenty years old?”
“No, I was not,” she said. “Not in the manner that young people today are twenty. Irresponsibly. Narcissistically. Never having been taught self-discipline or sacrifice. That grandson of yours will learn the meaning of those things now.”
“He’ll learn them no matter what you or I do about this.” I had to admire the eloquence of her scorn. Perhaps I’d met my match. Perhaps, I thought sadly, I’d never given her enough credit.
She tore a popover into pieces. She spread butter on one piece. “Edgar has suggested I move to Alaska. Alaska! Can you believe it?” Her laughter was brutal.
“You’re not planning to rebuild? You can’t replace the house itself, but surely you have more than …” I realized I’d be foolish to mention insurance.
“You haven’t heard the news?” she said. “Maurice Fougère is buying my land, too. Maybe he’ll turn the nursery school into a junior college.” She glared at me. “I saw the drawings for what he plans to do to your house. He’s using the damaged roof as a fine excuse to rip the back right off and put in a huge conservatory roof. Promises to look like a giant terrarium. It’s not visible from a common way, so he can do what he pleases. The Forum is impotent to stop him. Though now”—she snorted—“who the hell cares. Not I.”
I hadn’t heard any of this. So that was Fougère’s brand of tender loving restoration. Laurel watched me absorb the news, no doubt pleased at my dismay. Then she said, “Pete told me you have something to give me. Was that a ruse?”
“I do have something for you. But I want you to think about Robert first. I’m not asking you to let him off the hook; that won’t happen in any case. You know he can’t return to Harvard. Probably not to college, or a regular program, for a while.”
“I’ll think about it. I promise nothing.”
r /> I decided this was as far as I’d get. I reached for the shoebox. I held it in my lap while the waitress took our order. When she removed the menus, I set aside the lid and laid the first packet of letters between my fork and knife. “Truthful,” I said. I laid the second packet beside the first. “Azor.”
In their gung-ho pillaging of my cellar, the Matlock police had used a crowbar to pry open the cupboard in the wall by the chimney. Poppy and I, unable to force it open years ago, had assumed it was a long-abandoned storage compartment. The two packets of letters—his and hers—that emerged from the cupboard had been tied with ribbon and wrapped inside a lambskin, but after manhandling by the police, the skin had been lost and the ribbons had disintegrated. There were more than thirty letters in her packet, a dozen in his. Gently, I’d bound them with cotton twine. “I thought you’d be the best caretaker for these,” I said. “You’re the one, after all, who thought my house had a secret space. In a way, you were right.”
Laurel could hardly hide her historian’s hunger. Still, her reach across the table was tentative. “Truthful and Azor? My Azor? You mean Truthful and Hosmer.”
“No. Azor. Looks as if they were in love, behind the brother’s back, for years. I haven’t read them all. I don’t know if the story here has a beginning or an end.” A middle, certainly. The custard; the jam; the scallop tucked in the bacon. The good wife of the younger brother had been in love, embroiled in clandestine bliss, with the older brother, the one with the bigger house, the greater fortune, the one who stayed a bachelor so unusually long. Poor Hosmer, the one who’d foolishly chosen farming, had been cast too predictably as the cuckold. Had he ever found out? I had read enough to understand the gist of the correspondence, but deciphering the minute, frilly handwriting had given me a headache. Now I wished that I had taken the letters to a copy shop. I doubted that Laurel would ever share the full story with me, as she would have so eagerly, over gin and salmon, only a few months before.