“Perfectly perfect,” I agree with melancholy satisfaction. I dip a finger in the water and touch Laurie’s nose. “No dripping on my dress!” she exclaims with a grimace. As she runs back out toward the sun, I hear David quarreling gently with the vicar over hymns.
A YEAR AND A HALF after we opened the shop, it was showing a decent profit. Ralph’s money (and ego) allowed us to serve good wine after our readings, and half a dozen mentions in wildlife magazines led visiting naturalists through our door (to which I had affixed a bell, compliments of Malachy Burns). We added to our merchandise one-of-a-kind birdhouses made from the tragic remnants of newly felled national forest in northern Idaho (ten percent of the proceeds went to the Nature Conservancy, another scheme of Ralph’s).
As the air warmed that spring, steeped in the fragrance of crowning hyacinths and budding trees, my morning walks shed their puritanical purpose. I fancied that they had begun to signify the well-trodden path of my life, which I had grown to like. Uncringingly at last, I enjoyed my apparent health and drew from my hierarchy of alliances a superior sense of order (even Mal’s niche seemed clear). Thanks to Felicity’s ruckus at dawn, I rose earlier than most of my neighbors and took my route slowly, with relish, feeling generally thankful rather than sullen. I looked forward to browsing the untouchable wares in the FedEx lorries (reliably trading their trousers for shorts). I stopped to contemplate buildings and plantings I’d never noticed before.
A true curiosity was the tiny white weatherboard house at the corner of Greenwich and Charles. Set back against a mammoth, nondescript apartment building, it had its own little lawn, partitioned from the street by a tall wooden fence; to see the house properly, you had to squint between the slats.
In any other setting, you’d pass this house right by as a runty ramshackle thing, its roofline flat, its windows and doors pathetically crooked, its rooms surely not much larger than cupboards. It reminded me of windbeaten cottages in the poorest seaside towns along the Firth of Forth. But here, in this muscular setting, it was breathtakingly quaint, and its lawn, though minuscule by suburban standards, was magnificent for such a crowded, coveted corner of the world. So while the place looked as if it had sprouted like a carbuncle from the dull cement skin of the building next door, you could well imagine it as the third or fourth pied-à-terre of a film star.
There was a child’s swing set and, parked in the driveway, a blue station wagon. I had never seen any sign of activity until one morning that May—when, for the first time I could remember, the station wagon was gone. A woman with a long dark ponytail was crouched on the grass; for several seconds, her back to me, she remained in this attitude. She appeared to have lost or to be planting something.
When she stood, I saw first that she was holding a camera and, second, that she was a man. He looked straight at me and said, “You with the invisible dog. If you’ve got half an hour, I could use an assistant.”
I froze; my white shirt had given me away through the fence.
The man laughed. “I don’t lure in suckers to bury them in the basement, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He walked to the driveway, opened the gate, and leaned out to look at me more directly. “Well, come on in there. I’ve got coffee and such.”
I started in on some fable about an architectural critic friend who’d told me about this house and I was just having a look and perhaps I’d looked a bit long and—
“Looking’s no crime,” said the man as we came face-to-face. My embarrassment amused him.
He did not take me into the house but offered to bring me a cup of coffee. He came out a moment later, carrying a lawn chair as well. He took it to the place where he had been crouching, unfolded it, and told me to sit. “This is tedious,” he said, “so go ahead and sunbathe till I’m ready.”
A large silver spoon was lying in the grass. My host now began to play with its position, repeatedly standing back to look at it through the camera. Then he knelt down, leaned close to the spoon so that his face was just inches away, held the camera at arm’s length and clicked the shutter.
Other than sipping my coffee (which I did not enjoy but had felt compelled to accept), I sat quite still. I felt awkward but safe, not because of the man’s disavowal of criminal intention but because I knew that innumerable flat dwellers could look down upon us from three sides as they showered, made their breakfasts, and dressed for work.
“Now here’s where you come in,” he said abruptly, holding out the camera. I put down my coffee and took it. He squinted at the sun and held a light meter near the spoon. As he leaned down, his T-shirt rose above his jeans. Beneath the shirt, his skin was pale and smooth. A sparse patch of brown hair grew in the small of his back.
He walked behind me, twisted the lens and adjusted a few small knobs on the camera from over my head. His hands were all knuckles, graceful but well worked.
I felt as if I were underwater, forbidden by the elements from speaking. I leaned forward, clutching the camera, waiting for orders as my nameless director walked beyond the spoon, folded his arms, and stood facing away.
“Center the spoon,” he said from this stance. He had an accent strong enough that even I could recognize it as midwestern; I’d had a classmate back at Cambridge who uttered those prairie-wide vowels. He was from Chicago.
This man was probably in his thirties, but he had a full youthful face, like pink-skinned Italian boys in Caravaggio’s paintings. His eyes were cinnamon-colored, and his hair, pulled back, revealed an off-center widow’s peak that gave his expression a cynical touch, as if one eyebrow were permanently cocked. He wasn’t particularly tall or muscular, but his body had a loose wiliness that gave him a presence as good as brute strength.
When I clicked the shutter as ordered, it became clear what he was doing: photographing his reflection in the spoon (or having me do so). His image was little more than a black sliver in the spoon’s broad convex face. The sky with its roiling white clouds prevailed. After I clicked the shutter, he turned, raised his arms, and told me to shoot again. He changed his position or changed the spoon itself twenty or thirty times, at each pose saying, “Shoot,” as if I were a marksman at an execution. At the end of the roll, he reloaded the camera and handed it back for another round.
After the second roll, he took the camera and said, “You make a decent assistant, no chitchat. Be along here tomorrow?”
I said that I would, though I feared my voice was trembling.
“Great,” he said, smiling. “My assistant have a name?”
I told him. He shook my hand and said, “Tony Best. I’d invite you to hang out, but I have a rendezvous.” He lampooned the French word with a hick’s pronunciation, and I did not know if this meant he had no rendezvous at all or had somehow noticed my appraisal of his accent and wanted me to know he could not be patronized. I thought about that off and on all day.
That night, I was boiling potatoes and reading Roethke at my kitchen table when the phone rang. “Do you own a tuxedo?” Mal asked urgently. “All I need are the shirt and cummerbund.”
I told him I owned a tuxedo that had belonged to my grandfather, but I hadn’t worn it myself in years.
The apartment door was open, and when I walked in, I heard retching. Mal was bent over the kitchen sink. His arms, braced on the countertop, shook. I stood there, uselessly passive, clutching my jumbled garments.
“Christ, what time is it?” Mal gasped when he stood up. “Christ,” he said again when I told him it was ten past seven.
Mal was naked from the waist up, his shirt thrown aside near my feet. It smelled of vomit. After wiping his face with a tea towel, he threw it on top of the shirt. He told me, in a businesslike but strangely earnest tone, that he needed my help.
He asked me to hold up the shirt I’d brought. I’d expected petulance or sarcasm, because it was so rumpled, but he merely took it and said, “In the bathroom. There’s an iron on the highest shelf over the sink and some of that lurid pepto-bilge in the cabinet. I hav
e an eight o’clock curtain. Kiri Te Kanawa is singing.”
I found the Pepto-Bismol at once, glad not to have to rummage through the crush of apothecary labels I encountered (that kind of prurience does not afflict me). But to reach the iron, I had to stand on the toilet, and as I leaned awkwardly over the sink, I knocked a jar of cotton balls and a small wooden box off the top of the medicine chest. I decided to take Mal the iron and the medicine first, then come back and clean up.
Mal had set up an ironing board. He downed a swig of Pepto-Bismol as if it were whisky, said “Christ, I don’t even know if I can take this stuff,” and set about ironing the shirt. “Thank God Gramps didn’t go in for ruffles.”
The jar had not broken (falling on a fine if threadbare purple kilim), and I jammed in the scattered cotton. The wooden box, lid thrown aside, had landed face down behind the toilet. When I picked it up, a sheaf of Polaroids spilled out like a pack of cards.
Surprisingly, they were not pornographic. Even more surprisingly, most of them included someone I recognized. Looking happy and healthy, here everywhere was Armand, the doomed alluring young baker. At the seaside. In a tux—ruffles, canary yellow. On Mal’s green velvet chaise longue—lips pressed to Mal’s cheek, Armand holding the outstretched camera. Grinning flirtatiously from between two stately cakes on pedestals—in the shop which was now mine. I thought of the day I’d met Mal, the way he’d scrutinized every inch of that altered domain. He wasn’t seeing; he was remembering.
“Andiamo!” called Mal, so I fumbled the Polaroids into their box and back to their appointed Siberia.
The shirt looked crisp now and fit Mal perfectly. Hastily, he pulled on his jacket. I realized that we were the same height, the same size all around; even the same coloring, but for our eyes. He looked more like a brother to me than either David or Dennis. As I followed him out, it occurred to me that I had expressed little concern. I said, “Was it something you ate? Will you be all right?”
“My newest wonder drug. They like to sneak up on you, exact a little penance now and then. Remind you how grateful you’d better be not to be dead.” He hurried downstairs ahead of me.
Mal jogged toward Hudson Street to find a cab. At the end of the block, he turned around and called back, “Thank you! You saved my sartorial life!” Felicity heard his voice from her perch in my living room; I could hear her muffled squawks of excitement as I crossed the street—but she liked my company, too, and did not seem disappointed when I came in alone.
DAVID WAS RIGHT: the church overflows with bodies, seated and standing. The hymns, from the mouths of all these singers, resonate so fiercely against the stone walls that I wonder if they could crack. And I am right, in that we fulfill some kind of classic family template. I, Literary Chip Off The Old Block, remember my father (briefly, briefly, as David’s austere gaze from the front pew reminds me) as a man of intellectual hunger and professional integrity. (I might have given a different eulogy as the Black Sheep Returned From Abroad, but it would be no less flattering.) Dennis, Happy-Go-Lucky Perpetual Youth, tells fond, funny stories about our home life, most of them involving genial mishaps rather than pranks (our father having been born with a somewhat recessed funnybone). David, Heir Apparent, performs an homage to our father as granite cornerstone of family and community (no talk of family trees this time—wary, perhaps, of commingling clichés).
Afterward, the vicar flicks a switch that sets the bell tolling, and we stand on the small front lawn of the church, accepting the respects of everyone from old schoolmasters I’d thought long dead to dozens of strangers who worked at the Yeoman—driving lorries, operating presses, copyediting late-breaking stories at dawn. I am reminded of the small kingdom my father ruled (fairly, by all accounts), a kingdom I can remember visiting a shabby two or three times once I’d grown up and consciously turned that life down.
In the reshuffling of transportation, I am once again in the pickup but this time with Lil. David sent Dennis home, to meet the first guests and get the hirelings under control, then went back into the church to pay the vicar.
“God I’ve missed you, where’ve you been?” I gush, leaning across the seat to kiss Lil when she climbs in beside me.
Lil blushes. “Dramatic as ever, Fenno.” She frowns at the small thicket of keys David gave her. “What are they all to, I always wonder.”
I pull out two that look like they’d start a car. “Cages, I imagine.”
She laughs lightly but doesn’t look me in the eye. I feel as desperate for her attention as a teenage boy courting an experienced woman. She looks more rested than she did the night of our family dinner, but the lines in her profile seem too numerous. She is still compact, but not with the fawnlike figure she had in her twenties. After marrying David, she let her brilliant red hair grow out into its natural waves, which she ties in back with a ribbon. The earrings she wears are far less gypsyish than those of university days, and only the slightest dimples on her earlobes betray the extra piercings which she was among the first to flaunt.
David and Lil married the summer they both finished university; David went straight to veterinary college, while Lil found a job in a girls’ school teaching history (her “modest but heady ambition,” she’d told me that long-ago Christmas Eve, wearing her Faerie Queene dress: “My plan’s to oil those imperial cogs with a drop or two of anarchy!”). But when, several years later, David used his inheritance to start his own surgery, she resigned her teaching post and joined him, taking care of everything from decorating examination rooms to charming David’s banker. It mystified me how she could make such a sacrifice, do such menial things, but I have never seen any sign that she does not love this work as much as she loved her teaching.
“Do you know, it’s been more than twenty years since I saw you on that stage making love to Bob Dylan.”
“You always bring that up, as if I were Queen of the Hippies.”
“You were!”
“I was going with the flow.”
“Better than standing numbly onshore—that’s where I was.”
“We were all so impressed with ourselves. We thought we were overcoming obstacles. We hadn’t a bloody clue about obstacles.” Lil looks worried as she pulls into a knot of traffic entering a roundabout. The gears grind as she downshifts for a lorry that’s cutting us off.
“I hate this thing; it’s a tank,” she says, putting an end to my reminiscence. I offer to drive, but she refuses, crowding the wheel like a novice. When we pass the last traffic light, she relaxes a little.
“I think David’s disgusted with me,” I say. I wonder if there’s any way I could tell her what David said about our mother, ask her exactly what he meant. I thought about it through much of the church service, where she was mentioned not once by family, not even (appallingly) by me.
“No, he’s just preoccupied—and very sad. He really is. He gets all officious, but it’s camouflage. You forget how much time we’ve spent with your dad since moving to the house. He was still so . . . hardy when he left last month. I think it’s more of a shock to Davey than it is to you or Dennis.”
Though her tone is sympathetic, I feel chastened. “I suppose I sound like the child who still fancies himself the bang at the center of the cosmos.”
“You know you don’t. You’re just not . . . here very much. I think you underestimate David.”
“Well I think he underestimates you.”
She looks at me, fleetingly. “I don’t know why you’d say that.”
“All this ‘preoccupation’—Dad’s death aside—is any of it with you? Anyone can see you’re distressed.”
“Business is almost too much for us to handle right now, since we built the extension with all that high-tech equipment. Which isn’t a bad thing. So I did convince him to get more help, but he’s terrible at delegating, terrible.”
“Oh fuck the business, Lil.”
The look she spares me is hurt, then angry. “Well fuck you, Fenno. The business is our life.” Her voice
trembles.
“Should it be? Do you want it to be? I doubt it.” This is terrible timing (a curse of mine), as Tealing gleams ahead of us in all its rustic conceit. One of the hired boys is directing cars to park up close against the hedgerow.
Lil says nothing further until she’s parked. She apologizes for losing her temper, but she’s looking at her lap, fiddling with David’s keys. “We’ll talk, really really talk, before you leave. Right now I’m hopelessly . . .” Her voice trembles again. I slide toward her across the seat, but she turns away to open her door. “We have to be hosts, that’s our job right now.”
I’m forced to agree with her there; from the line of cars sidling up on the verge of our country lane, it looks as if even the delinquent nonrespondents are here. “Let’s hope no one wants seconds on vichyssoise,” I say as we cut through the hedgerow like crashers. Immediately, we are recognized, separated, set upon with elaborate sympathies.
My two aunts and their grown children have arrived en masse, an explicitly united front. Pointedly or accidentally (who cares which), they missed the church service but are among the first at Tealing. Dad’s sisters never quite forgave him for selling their ancestral home so that he and Mum and the three of us could move out here to the country. Dad once told me that both of their husbands (now dead) had the means to buy him out, but they were established professionals, and from the castled enlightenment of Edinburgh, Dumfries was little more than a glorified village.
After going through the grief-stricken motions with my aunts, I manage to make it undeterred to the drinks bar, get myself a whisky, and flee into the house, quiet and dim except for the heated bustlings in the kitchen.
As if to get my bearings on the occasion, I go to the front hall, where we have placed our father’s ashes on the table below the mirror at which he would customarily adjust his hat before leaving for work. Next to the box stands a tiny crystal pitcher brimming with violets. I sip my whisky for a few long moments, closing my eyes to enjoy its astringently sugary scent. I lift the glass, make a Roman toast—“Hail, Father”—then wander into the dining room. Save for another of Véronique’s bouquets (this one gaudy with roses), it feels forlorn, a place which ought to be included in these antifestivities but has been shunned. As I’m trying to repress such maudlin sentiments (and trying to remember the last food I ate, necessary to absorb these spirits, literal and otherwise), I hear the unmistakable thwock, pause, thwock, pause, thwock, pause, ROAR of tennis on the telly. In the living room, I catch one of my cousins (Will, a salesman of sporting equipment) cheering on Steffi Graf.