“Oh, hullo, hullo, it’s been a dog’s age!” he gushes. His sister Gillian giggles sheepishly from my father’s leather armchair.
“I dread these things, too,” I say as I shake Will’s hand (having graciously decided against “Got a few quid on her, have you?”).
“We are so sorry,” says Gillian. “How sudden!” Behind her looms a close-up of Steffi—wearing, as usual, an expression of disingenuously Sisyphean angst. I’d trade places with her in a minute.
“How’s the sports biz?” I actually hear myself say. (It’s shamefully American to talk about jobs, but I cannot for the life of me remember the names of my cousin’s children, and I overheard after the service that he is in the midst of a craven divorce.)
“Never better. I’m concentrating on golf; there’s a revolution in footwear.”
“A revolution. Ah!” Lamentably, not a drop of my whisky remains.
“He’s covering France and Spain—booming new markets,” cheerleads Gillian.
“Nice ground to cover,” I say.
“Indeed. I’m a fortunate man.”
“Very,” I say, at which point we collide with silence. “You know,” I finally manage, “I mustn’t abandon my brothers out there.”
“Oh we must catch up with them too!” says Gillian, relieved. Will has the nerve to turn back to Steffi.
I do intend to go outside, but my obstinate feet take me through the kitchen and up the back stairs. En route, I nab a handful of biscuits from a platter of cheeses. This is utterly childish, I say to my hopeless self as I ascend.
Sunlight falls through the open door of the library. With the excuse that this is a vantage point from which to keep an eye on events below, I take my squirreled biscuits in and close the door behind me. From the window, I see our guests strolling every which way in threes and fours: out to the once-farmed fields behind us, over the footbridge across the burn. You’d think they were attending a property auction. Bowls of vichyssoise are being carried out on trays, and some of the elderly guests have seated themselves at the tables, but there is no other sign that the meal is imminent.
As the soups are placed, I see that Dennis, too, has his moment of rightness: The meal he prepared already appears, as his daughter would say, perfectly perfect. In the center of each table is a small cluster of white peonies. On white plates on white linens, each bowl of soup, also white, is garnished with a pink chive blossom (ah yes: dried from Vee’s incredible garden). Very archetypal, very Snow White, Mal would have said approvingly. In some cultures, he would remind me if he were here, white is the color of mourning. “Blood shows up better on white,” he might have remarked.
Having wolfishly consumed the biscuits, I look down and see crumbs on the carpet. Looking for a means to sweep them up, I scan the desk. Squared pertly on the blotter is a pile of catalogs, from which I borrow a laminated price list (ultrasound equipment, I’m impressed to see—so my brother’s one-upping James Herriot). After transferring my crumbs to the wastebin and replacing the price list, I find myself sitting at the desk. Not one to drink at midday, I am a wee bit drunk, and when I am drunk I am cowardly.
When this desk was Dad’s, there were story files and cuttings strewn about the perimeter, leaving only a small green clearing on the blotter for work. Here Dad wrote his correspondence, and the surface of the blotter was speckled with ink from his fountain pen. Now the blotter is unstained (the paper brown, not green) and cleared of everything but the catalogs and the slimmest of notebook computers (closed). Lined up beyond are a pewter cup of colored pencils and Biros, a calculator, a stapler, and a notepad printed with the unpronounceable name of some veterinary anesthetic.
In the drawers to the right (yes, I open them) are color-coded folders with labels like LAMINITIS CASES and PARASITES, CURRENT LIT. and DYSPLASIA—ACUPUNCTURE/ALTERNATIVE. I laugh at one labeled EXPANSION IDEAS. (You Boy Scout, I think, and then remember my similar impression of Véronique the Girl Guide in those wellies. Yes, my spouse-swapping notion’s not half bad: these two seem made for each other.)
But the drawers to the left still contain a jumble of my father’s things: in the top drawer, his pen, a pair of reading spectacles, a tin of anise drops, a battered empty wallet, a pocket notebook with the telltale curvature of a hind pocket (used pages all ripped out).
My mother’s last passport.
Barely distorted by the raised characters of the Crown’s official stamp, there she is, so happy she’s almost laughing. There are only a couple of countries recorded: France, the Netherlands, France again. The passport expired three years after she died.
I pocket the passport and close the top drawer. I am just opening the next one, just seeing my name in my father’s handwriting on a bulky envelope, when the pitch of noise from the lawn changes. The conversation rises an octave in excitement and I hear the clink of cutlery on glass. Going to the window, I see that nearly everyone is seated and that David is standing expectantly, waiting to welcome his guests. I doubt he’s noticed my absence.
I slam shut the desk drawer and bolt down the back stairs. In the kitchen, the servers are seated for a break around the kitchen table, reading magazines and chewing gum. I must look like a madman, dashing through the room and out the door, but they barely notice.
David has just finished his (brief, brief!) welcome, and people are lifting their spoons and tasting the soup. I slip into the nearest empty chair—empty, I see too late, because it’s in a spot most people would likely avoid: between a woman one might size up as a lonely aging bore and an alarmingly elderly man who must devote what little energy he has to getting the vichyssoise, unspilled, to his mouth. He does not register my arrival.
I’m barely seated, however, before the woman says, “Fenno. You are Fenno,” with a smile too flattering not to like. Though initially I thought her old enough to be my grandmother, she is probably my father’s age. Her hair is white, cut in a sharp pageboy that looks more utilitarian than flapperish or chic. She wears a gray linen dress—its sleevelessness daring, since she is not slim—and no jewelry other than a dainty wristwatch, which serves only to make her arms look thicker than they already are. Nor is she wearing the customary hat. (Not, hence, a member of our church. She is English, in fact.)
“Guilty as charged,” I say.
“Photos. I have seen photos. Handsome runs in this family, no doubt about it.” She lifts her soupspoon and pauses. She looks as if she’s about to conduct a symphony. “I will miss Paul.” She sweeps the spoon in an arc. “But that is what we are all here to say, by our simple presence, is it not?”
She is Marjorie Guernsey-Jones, all the way up from Devon. She saves me the predictable inquiries by declaring that she met my father six years ago—to the week, if she is not mistaken—on a tour of Greece and that she is proud to have helped convince him to lease the house on Naxos the following year. Two years ago, she visited him there (Well who didn’t, I groan inwardly), and it’s a journey she will always remember for the invigorating hikes they took. “We might as well have mapped that island, I tell you. Not a mythic stone unturned. Paul is the ideal touring companion because he never argues and never complains. And—not insignificant, mind you!—he can read the most wretched map like a migrating goose reads a coastline.”
From my right, I hear the gentle snoring of the very old man. A bee hovers near the flower in his abandoned soup, then spirals harmlessly away. Thus forced (or freed) to give this woman my undivided attention, I find after a few minutes that I do not mind at all. I like the way she calls Dad by his first name (not “your father,” incessantly, as if his name died with him), and I like the way she never corrects her own use of the present tense in describing him. If I could fully admit how sad I am that he is gone, I could fully admit that these habits of hers are a comfort to me.
“Paul told me you are a devotee of American letters.”
“Yes. Well, I was, in a more serious way, some years ago.”
“I do love Willa Cather.”
<
br /> I smile. I’ve never much cared for Cather.
“Taught Death Comes for the Archbishop to my girls a few years running. Might have taken place on the moon, it was that fantastical to them.” She laughs. She pours us both a second glass of wine. “Paul told me how much he’d have liked you to take his place at the paper.”
“I disappointed him there.”
“Oh no, no. He just had a brief period of needing to air his minor laments—and he knew, let me tell you, that they were minor. I told him he was a fortunate ingrate. I didn’t have a single child to do so benign, so absolutely correct a thing as to go his own self-sufficient way. But then, I was just getting back at him that night.”
“Getting back?” I begin to feel, from the intensity of her gaze, as if this woman sought me out—though hadn’t I stumbled onto her?
“Well, that I don’t have children—people can look at me and guess that, young man, don’t you think? Aren’t the words dear old aunt as good as tattooed on my brow?”
Probably blushing from guilt, I protest.
“No. Don’t deny it. Well I said as much to Paul—about the tattooed business. And he laughed and said that the first time he saw me, the words he saw there were old maid.” When I tell her that I cannot believe my father would be so rude, she lays a plump hand on my arm and says, “Paul is a bit of a hazard on ouzo and we both had far too much. It’s the antiwhisky, you know—wicked as the Antichrist. It’s the Greeks’ revenge on everybody else’s colonial grandiosity, trampling what little foliage they have, carting off their history pillar by pillar. One day I hope they sack the British Museum.”
“What about Alexander?” I ask—and receive a headmistressy look.
“Dear one, your history is woefully blurred. Alexander was the king of Macedonia. He conquered Greece.”
This woman tells me nothing about my father that I did not know—nothing I can put a finger on—but when I begin to realize what an easy kinship they had, I am fascinated yet disapproving. Disapproving, it dawns on me with a third glass of wine, because I’m wondering just how close she was to Dad. My mother was pretty and seductive almost to the end, and even if my father’s affections for this woman blossomed after Mum’s death, they feel like an aesthetic affront, a desperation. I’m appalled to be thinking such thoughts—and I don’t even know if this woman was more than a friend. Probably not, as she tells me that she knew Dad mainly through letters.
I’m so caught up in our conversation that I gasp when I feel the old man’s head fall onto my shoulder. Marjorie Guernsey-Jones leans nimbly across me and grasps the man’s arm to keep him from slumping to the ground. “Welcome back, comrade,” she says in answer to his haplessly darting gaze. She goes behind me and helps him regain his balance. Indicating with a nod that I should move to her seat, she takes mine, pours the man a glass of water, and gaily introduces herself as if he’s just dropped in from a nearby table, not from an untimely snooze. This puts me next to a man I recognize, after a mental struggle, as a past picture editor of the Yeoman and, beyond him, his wife. We reacquaint ourselves awkwardly, and for the rest of the meal we discuss the ways in which news reporting has changed (for the worse, to be sure) since my father’s day.
After the sweet earthy tajine and tart green salad, the peaches in their purple liqueur are served, along with plates of thin chocolate wafers. The peaches look (perhaps through a scrim of too much Margaux) like tastings of a sunset. While we eat this morsel of divinity, a few guests stand and give tributes to Dad, none too drunken, and then, as people finish their tea and mill about to take their leave, a piper in full ceremonial dress steps out of the house (a complete surprise to Mr. Yet Again Out of the Loop). All these transitions are ordinary features at such occasions, yet the seeming spontaneity of each is a marvel—orchestrated by David, I know without asking. The piper is one of my father’s closest friends, the Yeoman’s managing editor for decades. Squinting into the afternoon light, he plays “Flower of Scotland” and “Skye Boat Song,” undaunted by tears that seep from his eyes (and, predictably but honestly, from everyone else’s too, all but those of the teenage help as they stack and ferry plates; death, to them, would be reassuringly quaint).
In the crush of good-byes, as doors slam and people traipse in and out of the house to use the loo or fetch their jackets and shawls, I cruise along in a mild alcoholic muddle, shaking hands, embracing women I’ve barely met, helping old men fold their stiff bodies into their cars. Most of them are gone when I feel a firm grip on my elbow. I turn to see Marjorie Guernsey-Jones, whose earlier disappearance left me feeling wounded.
“Dear one, I’m off to pester friends in the Lake District before I head home, but I’d wanted to leave you with something.” She’s holding a packet of letters secured with postal twine. I see her name scripted in my father’s hand.
When I reach for the letters, she withdraws her hand and smiles, shaking her head. “But I am a weak woman, and I changed my mind,” she says. “So what I would like is your address, if you will, so that I may relinquish them farther along the road or, at the least, have them forwarded after my own demise.”
“May I have your address as well?” I hear myself ask in an uncontrollably robust voice.
Marjorie Guernsey-Jones breaks into a spacious grin. “Dear one, you certainly may.” She opens her pragmatically large handbag, tucks in the packet of letters, and pulls out a notepad to which a pencil is tied.
After exchanging addresses, we look at each other expectantly, not quite able to say good-bye. “May I ask you something else, something blunt?” my ventriloquist’s dummy utters. When she nods, I ask, “Are those love letters?”
She looks stunned, and at first I’m sure I’ve offended her. “Yes,” she says. Her eyes glitter. “Love-of-life letters. That’s what they are.”
After I help her into her car, Marjorie Guernsey-Jones rolls down her window and says, “You’d have been my favorite, too.”
AFTER THE TUXEDO, things changed with Mal; I had crossed some invisible membrane. The next week, he invited me to the debut recital of a cello prodigy. He said, “The cello is too sad an instrument to listen to alone.”
He might as well have gone alone, however, for all the attention he paid me at the concert. Mal was recognized by a dozen people in the lobby beforehand, spoke briefly with each one, and never introduced me. During the performance, he took occasional but fervent notes in a small leather book and otherwise kept his fierce gaze aimed at the young man onstage. Toward the end, he closed his eyes—transported by pain or pleasure, I couldn’t tell which. Halfway downtown in a taxi, he finally addressed me. We were stuck in a traffic jam, bathed in the pre-Disney neon of old Times Square.
“I went through that rigamarole myself, you know—or the earlier stages that might have been a prelude to that life.”
I suppose I looked moronically blank, because Mal laughed and said, “Confusion is like yawning, my dear. In all walks of society, you’re best off covering it up.” Then he told me about his childhood career as a prodigy flutist. “Not, thank heaven, a flautist. For which I have my parents to thank.” His parents, Mal told me, had been fans rather than impresarios. Mal had been the one to research the music camps and competitions, find a good teacher to act as a mentor in the literal and cultural backwoods of Vermont. Mal’s father was a lawyer and made enough money to pay all the necessary fees, to allow his son to forgo the summer jobs his classmates and his own siblings took as waiters and lifeguards and campground attendants. But that was a lifetime ago. He hadn’t made the bigtop.
“All I did for years, all I remember doing, was practice. Practice: such a limp word for the context. You do not, if you are serious, practice your instrument. You flay, eviscerate, excoriate the thing until it surrenders its thingness, until its carapace cracks open and it bleeds. Even a voice. You belabor it until any sound but the sound of that instrument is, to your ears, gelatinous babble.” As he lectured me, he gazed imperiously at a billboard showing a tight-b
odied boy in underpants that were tighter still. Mal’s face glowed blue, then red, then orange as trade names winked above the avenue before us.
“And so?” I said, though Mal clearly meant the story to end there. “So what happened?” Irritated at the way he’d ignored me for most of the evening, I felt like needling him.
“Family matters.” He sighed. “Ancient history.”
“What family matters?” I said. “What would stop you from pursuing any ambition?” At this backhanded insult, or so I assumed, Mal set his jaw and looked stubbornly out the window.
But then he told me, still gazing off into the symphony of artificial color about us, that when he was seventeen he made the finals of the first competition that would take him to New York. The week before he was to go (accompanied by his cheerleading family), his little brother was diagnosed with Hodgkins disease.
“I turned down Juilliard and went to the University of Vermont. It seemed callous, even to me, to leave home right after a virtual tornado had ripped away everything but the foundation. But you know, why I stayed hardly matters, does it? Maybe I didn’t have enough hunger for that life. Maybe I was secretly relieved. The little cellist we saw tonight? Voracious as the dickens.”