“Hoo, no visiting hours now, honey,” said a large, blessedly cheerful woman, shaking her head emphatically. “You got family upstairs?”
I had lied enough, so I explained that a friend of mine had been admitted while I was out of town, and I was anxious to know at least where I would find him once they did allow me up. The woman sat down at a computer screen, which lit her spectacles with a running pattern of tiny stripes—names, names, names scrolling past—and then she punched a key that stopped the stripes, and then another. She said, “Huh.”
Not morgue, not morgue, not morgue, I thought. But would she even be authorized to tell me such bad news? What could she tell me?
Body released to the family.
Scheduled for autopsy.
No such person. Not any longer, hon.
She said, “Mr. Burns was moved from ICU yesterday afternoon. Doesn’t show a room number here, but if you come back after eight, the system should cough one up. Answer your question?”
“Is he . . .?” I wanted to ask if he was conscious, able to level at me the full arctic sting of his rage.
“Hon, I don’t know from medical know-how,” she said, guessing at the nature of my curiosity. “Hon, we just guard the portals and the names hereabouts. You go off and get some sleep, won’t you? Coffee machine’s busted, ain’t no hospitality neither. Your friend seems to be among the living, that much I can tell you.”
I did not return home but walked here and there through the brutal cold, hands driven into my pockets because I had left my gloves behind. I looked into warmly lit windows occupied by headless but beautifully dressed mannequins and garish arrays of cosmetics. At five, I went into a coffee shop and ordered eggs. Another loner offered me part of his paper, but I refused. At six, I went back to the hospital and sat in the lounge. There was no sign of the motherly woman who’d helped me three hours ago. At seven, as I had hoped and feared, Lucinda walked through the revolving door. She saw me almost before I saw her. She set a shopping bag on the floor and hugged me.
“I thought you’d fallen off the earth,” she said without a trace of scolding.
“I was . . . I was completely out of touch. I’m so sorry.”
Her smile drove deep lines into her face. “I think he’s going to be all right. I think, if I’m persuasive enough, they’ll let him go home this afternoon. They’ve been very kind to us here.”
I wondered about the “us,” how large it was. Lucinda went over to the reception desk and had an inaudible conversation with the young man now at the computer. I looked down into the shopping bag: bananas, bagels, a New York Times, white tulips. A small paper bag.
Lucinda touched my arm and picked up the bag. “I found a place that makes incredible rice pudding. I don’t suppose he’ll be eating yet, not solids, but you never know. I’m always optimistic.” She smiled warmly at me, as if I’d been here all along, a helping hand in the catastrophe. “That’s just how I am,” she said, and took my hand as if I were her child.
“I tried to call you last night, when I got in . . .” I stopped, ashamed that I was about to make excuses.
“It’s ridiculous, but I’m uptown for now; Zeke insists on hotels. He’s used to a staff and a telecommunications center; not me, thank heaven.”
When we stepped off the elevator, she walked straight to the nurses’ station, beaming. I lagged behind, uncertain what part I had to play. I saw heads shaking, then a smile or two, concessions being made. Lucinda came back to me. “They’re letting me peek in, just a five-minute peek. I’ll tell him you’re here and coming back later. They have to clean him up and take him for some tests. If the tests send him home, I’m all for that.”
“I’m not sure he’d want to see me anyway,” I said.
“Don’t be silly. Besides, he’s still quite out of it. He was touch and go for a few days, and while he knows where he is, I don’t think he knows when he is.” She laughed at her small joke. I wanted to share her giddiness, her fragile relief, but I was not so optimistic. I was glad the nurses would let in only Lucinda for now. I was sure he would greet me like a second plague (or would that be a third?).
EVERYONE IS LAUGHING. I can’t see them from up here, but their voices carry. My twin brothers and their wives still linger at the long wooden table in the kitchen (we haven’t used the dining room once), and I will rejoin them after I’ve packed. Early tomorrow, I will head back to New York. I need to organize myself before another night of drinking and reminiscing. This one will be long and, I hope, free from recriminations or veiled competition.
I can still taste the white chocolate mousse, worthy of a dinner on Mount Olympus. After a week of this food, I’m hitching my belt a notch farther out. The salad days loom, I think idly. What does that expression really mean? It’s an idiom whose definition I can’t keep straight, no matter how many times I look it up.
Despite those first gorgeous days, it’s rained for most of my time here. The peonies are battened flat against the grass, the petals pummeled off their stems; the lawn, though ecstatically green, is a marsh. Dennis was nevertheless determined to grill the meat outdoors (lamb again, this time drenched in coffee, of all things). Lillian held a golf umbrella over the chef and his fire; afterward, they came in wet, shivering and giggling, but bearing a platter of perfect pink lamb, its thin black crust pungently steaming.
The little girls ate with us, engulfing our attention; only after they were firmly put to bed did we discuss the one thing we’d been avoiding: division of material spoils. It was far easier than I’d expected, perhaps because the children’s gaiety left us feeling friendly and generous. There wasn’t much I wanted to pay to have shipped across an ocean; David, having claimed the house itself, conceded to Dennis the few pieces of furniture he wanted. Véronique—admirably, I couldn’t help thinking—held her tongue about everything but the family silver. We did not mention Dad’s ashes; there had been ceremony enough, and that would have to do.
My clothing is packed in a minute. I leave out khaki trousers, a comfortable cotton shirt, a jumper, a jacket with my passport tucked inside. My flight does not leave Prestwick till early afternoon, but Lillian will take me for a detour, one more visit to her doctor’s clinic, one more “donation.” I wince at the memory of yesterday, not so much all the drawing of blood and the prying questionnaires but the embarrassingly genial nurse who led me to my little room; the chair whose upholstery had clearly been waterproofed; the absurdly small cup with the wrapper so hermetically sealed that I had to open it with my teeth; the magazines and videos, all hilariously wrong. Thank heaven I’m a bloke with a good imagination.
Lil went with me. We were in David’s pickup again, as we’d been after Dad’s service. This time I insisted on driving. We had more than an hour on the road ahead of us, during which I had no earthly idea how we would manage to converse, so the minute we had both closed our doors, I turned to Lil and said, “Look. We’re just going to pretend that this is perfectly routine and dull, what we’re doing here, which means that we aren’t going to discuss it. I have plenty of American friends who would howl at this approach as pathetically British, but that’s what we are, isn’t it? That’s the fate of our natures.”
She didn’t laugh. Looking pained, she said, “I’m thinking about all these tests I’m forcing you to have. . . .”
“To get these tests behind me will be a relief. Like going to the dentist after great procrastination.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“See what I mean?” I laughed. “My dear, everything I’m doing here is very kind of me, it’s more than very kind of me. That’s not the point.”
“No.” She looked like she was going to cry. I was tired of seeing her cry. I took hold of her shoulder and shook her just a bit.
“Lillian, Lillian,” I said, “you’ve been depressed for too long, you’re in the habit. Where’s the girl whose scanty dresses showed off her tits and knickers all over the place, leaving hard-ons right and left, who danced li
ke a rock-star nymph in front of the masses? Where’s the lass who sent me that passionate letter, who’s determined to buck a few pretty lofty conventions to get what she wants?”
For a moment, I was afraid I had driven her deep into herself, that she would ask me to get out of the pickup, that she would back down. She closed her eyes and sighed loudly. She raised her hand, as if she were one of the schoolgirls she used to teach. “That girl’s right here. Right here.”
And off we drove.
From my childhood desk, I take my father’s envelope. Once more, I empty its contents onto the bed. The lipstick, the drawing, my mother’s kennel book, my birth certificate, the letter. I decide not to reread the letter, not now. It will only baffle and disappoint me again.
The medals and the key I found in the vase downstairs, those I leave on the table beside my bed; perhaps they have nothing to do with my parents at all. Perhaps David’s right: the vase and its contents were left there by Tealing’s previous owners (one of them exceptionally brave and, if he is still alive, missing the material proof, poor chap).
I take Mum’s passport out of the desk as well and weigh it in my hand, wondering how serious a felony this theft would be; but who else would want it? Looking at her face, I remember something: all our family pictures. Unlike our father, Mum did not come from a “distinguished” or well-documented family; one of its few legacies—and that one perhaps not entirely authentic—is my name. Fenno, she told me, was the name of a fierce, courageous chieftain who lived in the remote Highlands several centuries back and kept his clan safe from marauders. He was part Viking, my grandmother claimed, explaining our pale hair and skin.
So the family photographs, the old ones, are nearly all of my father’s more prosperous kin, and though Mum never spoke ill of these relatives, she kept their pictures—and even most of those taken of us, her sons—in a captain’s chest under a paisley rug in the living room. In dividing up the larger, more visible objects, we forgot this slice of our past. I think I will not bring it up.
I slip everything, including Mum’s passport, back into the envelope, the envelope into the side pocket of my bag.
I turn out my lamp and start toward the kitchen stairs, but I pause at another wave of laughter. How are we all so merry in the wake of a death? Are we reinforcing the parapets of life? I listen. Dennis’s laugh is the loudest, David’s the deepest-pitched. Lil’s . . . Lil’s is altogether new; I hardly heard it this past week. It is, to my ears, full of her new resolve, new gratitude, the sense of moving forward after standing still so long. I worry that circumstances will betray her again, but motion is what she needs right now, even if it’s risky.
Véronique’s laugh is, again to my biased ears, self-consciously seductive. Yet I find myself succumbing to a gratitude of my own; she has been mercifully discreet since our dreadful conversation in that paradise of a garden. She behaves as if it never happened. Yet the distance between us has acquired a bemused tenderness. At dinner, watching my nieces hold court, I thought of taking their father up on his repeated invitations to visit them in France; for the first time, I could picture myself in their mother’s house, under her dictates, possibly even enjoying myself.
Thinking of the girls, I realize that I may not see them again before I leave, that I did not say good-bye. I open the door to the room where they are sleeping, my brothers’ old bedroom. The glow of a night-light guides me along the straits between mattresses, suitcases, toys, and shoes. There is a cot set up for the baby: Christine sleeps hunched in a tangle of white wool, nested into a corner. Only her forehead and an eyebrow are showing. I reach into the cot and straighten the blanket over her body, pull it away from her face. Just as I have it perfect, she rolls over and twists it up again.
Théa and Laurie, though they have separate, adjoining mattresses, are sleeping together on one. Théa’s body is draped half on the mattress, half on the floor. Laurie, the alpha sleeper, lies splayed on her back, one arm thrown dramatically across her sister’s neck. Gently, I move Laurie’s arm down by her side and pull a blanket across their bodies as well; they do not stir.
The two sisters sleep so silently, I have to peer carefully to see the motion of their breathing. If I kneel down to bring my ear close, I can hear it; it sounds literally pure, as if their lungs were lined with pristine wedding-gown satin. I wish for an instant that they were mine.
Their mattresses are near the ladder that leads to the foxhole. I look up, into darkness. The window is right there, but the moon and stars are well hidden by clouds. How long has it been since I climbed this ladder—twenty, twenty-five years? The opening at the top is narrow, difficult for all but the most nimble adults to pull themselves through.
Out of curiosity, I open the drawer of the nearest bedside table. After a snowstorm that knocked out power for a week when I was a child, Mum put torches in every room; David and Dennis each kept one at the ready.
So little here has changed, I marvel as my hand closes around the torch; it even works. When I turn the beam upward, it collides with the great fan-shaped window, revealing rivulets of steadily streaming rain that make a tiger pattern on the glass. All right, I think, and I climb. I knock my head against the rim of the opening but, with a little contortion, pull myself up and through. I sit cross-legged before the wide window, as we did when we were small, and switch off the torch. I wait patiently for my eyes to adjust, for the silhouettes of fields and woods to come clear. Now the kitchen voices are out of range; all I hear is the rain, its careless clatter. I begin to discern its differing impact on the leaves of the trees, on the slate terrace, against the windows and the shingles of the roof so close to my head, along the copper gutters shunting it away. These must be the melodies Felicity hears when she sings in return; she could easily outsing these torrents, and though her opera would be an imitation, her joy would be deep and real. I, too, seem to be a connoisseur of rain, but it does not fill me with joy; it allows me to steep myself in a solitude I nurse like a vice I’ve refused to vanquish.
I hear the burn now, too, its eager rushing. Its banks have filled enough this week that it is unusually noisy. I entertain memories of playing by its banks which have not crossed my mind in years. David, Dennis, and I would dig through the leafy mulch with our hands, carving out miniature rivers that meandered down the slope between the trees. This was a time before they doubted my dominion. I was head engineer and would order them to collect rocks and sticks of very particular dimensions, to fashion embankments and dams, bridges and jetties. When the design was complete, I would make them relay water in pots from the burn to the top of the slope, to pour through the waterways I had masterminded. When the burn was dry, we would bring water from the kitchen. We made boats from birchbark, buoys from conkers that fell from an old chestnut tree in front of the house.
In my memory, this type of play seems to extend over years of my life, but in reality it probably occupied us for a single set of seasons, spring to autumn, then became as dull and outmoded as the last year’s fascination.
It is easy to imagine our parents spying on us through a window, sharing a moment of pride in our cooperation, our inventiveness, our diligence; picturing our respective futures as happy, productive, intelligent citizens—or even collectively, our lives plaited quite naturally into a family venture: Fenno McLeod & Brothers.
I felt as if a stone were plummeting from my throat to my groin when a new thought struck me: that soon there might be another child, mine but not mine, who would play among those trees by that burn, would grow up in the very house where I had grown up, perhaps in the very room, sleeping in the very bed, going (though I hoped not) to the very same schools. Which of the places, objects, and recreations surrounding me now had shaped which parts of my grown—or outwardly grown—self? Had they anything to do with my innate loneliness, my strange satisfaction at thinking myself so misunderstood, my reluctance to recognize love where I ought to have seized it?
My eyes have adjusted, and through the blu
r of rain the sky looks curiously bright. Lights are on in one of the distant houses built in a pasture where sheep used to roam; slender trees sway to and fro, unable to resist the rhythms of the wind. Off to the side, Mum’s old kennel is a gnomelike mass—the only bit of our material past that David intends to expunge. Otherwise, I’m quite sure, the torches will remain in their appointed drawers, the dusty vases on their high shelves, the stalwart lilacs where they were planted before we were born. Perhaps my father’s cabled jumper will remain on its hook in the kitchen, to sag yet further, toward his wellies on the floor below.
In New York, it is fashionable to dissect one’s childhood publicly, to see the most ordinary events as the genesis of later failures, disappointments, betrayals. Dinner parties become roundtable discussions about what our parents’ proclivities—how they disciplined or toilet-trained us, taught us to draw or ride a bicycle—“did” to us all. The past is a hall of mirrors, not of statues. I think of my mother’s possible infidelities and mine; should I be hunting down some subtle connections there?
I look around me; predictably, the space is much smaller than I remember it. At the back are a few boxes which must contain toys we tired of: archery sets, elfin armies, incomplete packs of playing cards. But to the opposite side of the hatchway is an odd assembly of small shapes. On all fours, I crawl gracelessly around the opening to see it more clearly.
A dolls’ tea party, much like the picnic under the lilacs. Of course: Laurie, perhaps even Théa, could climb up here and create a separate world, just as we had done. I am happy to see the parasol I gave Laurie, opened and propped in place by stacks of boyhood books, elegantly sheltering the party. The Chinatown doll and two French companions sit around a makeshift table laid with doll plates and cups (no ashtrays this time). The table, a box of some sort, is draped with an Hermès scarf patterned with poppies, and as I wonder whether Véronique permits such casual use of her overpriced accessories, something about the little table strikes me. I lift a corner of the scarf.