TWO

Joe

W hen Hal telephoned to tell me his father was dying, I couldn’t help myself. My first thought was: Thank God.

It is possible to hate somebody you also love, as I both loved and hated Harry Wainwright, though it was a lesson I learned not from Harry but my father, the great war hero. He taught me this the day my mother died, when he asked me, a boy of nine, to be brave when I could not; and again three days after Halloween, 1968, when, a man at last or so I thought, I was made to give that manhood back to him and forever be a coward and a criminal.

I asked Hal how long.

“Months. It depends. He’s tough, you know?” Hal cleared his throat. “A tough nut. He’s got a deal to offer you, Joe. One I think you may like.”

Which told me that I would also hate it. “Deals are what he’s best at.”

“He wants you to fly up to New York. We’d like to send the plane for you. Excuse me one second?” The sudden, deep well of the hold button, long enough for me to wonder if he’d forgotten me. Then he returned. “Joe, I’m sorry, but there are some people here I have to see. Totally urgent stupid stuff, but there you are. Where did we leave this?”

“I think you were . . . sending me a plane?”

“Not showing off here, Joe. Just trying to move things along. You’ll like it, I think. Be sweet to the pilot and he may even let you sit up front and play with the wipers.” He cleared his throat. “And, because we’re friends, and in an effort to be less than totally vague, I will also tell you that you may want to have a lawyer handy.”

“Isn’t Sally a lawyer?”

Sally was Hal’s wife, a real legal sharpshooter from what I’d heard, though I mostly knew her as a pretty woman in a flannel shirt who usually sent her backcast looping into the trees behind her head. The last time I’d seen her, two summers before, the flannel shirt was a big one of Hal’s, hanging halfway to the backs of her knees but riding up in front over the big belly of her pregnancy.

“Yes, but in this case Sally would be what you would call the other lawyer.”

“So we all need lawyers, is what you’re saying. For whatever it is you have in mind.”

Hal sighed. “This is Harry, Joe. He likes drama. I’d tell you more if I could. I’ve got a cousin just out of law school. Not too bright and his suits are bad, but he means well and he needs the work. I’ll put you in touch. Lucy fine?”

“You know Lucy.”

“Pleased to hear it. Our love, all right? And to Kate.”

“You serve those little whatyacallums on that plane of yours? You know, in the foil packets?”

I could practically hear him nod. “Honey peanuts.”

“That’s it. Honey peanuts.”

“There’s more than peanuts in this for you. I’ll say it again. Think about it, all right? But think fast. He’s dying, Joe. ‘Months’ is what they say when they mean dying as we sit here talking.”

 

This was back in April, before Harry pulled his big surprise; Lucy and I were still in Big Pine Key, finishing out our third winter in the stolen sunshine. It was a good life shaping up down there for us—I had two boats working, a solid and growing list of clients, and a tan that would have made me nervous if I were one to worry about such things—all of it just profitable enough that it didn’t feel like a vacation. Our condo, which I had bought for a song at a sheriff’s auction, was, like everything else on Big Pine, made of materials as light and phony as a child’s art supplies, but it did the job: two bedrooms, one of which I used as an office for bookings and paperwork, a little kitchenette, and a balcony off the living room with a view of the docks where I kept the boats, and beyond them, on the far side of the bay, the Key Highway, leapfrogging over the water to Marathon. We didn’t feel as if we belonged there, but we weren’t exactly homesick either, and evenings when we didn’t rent a movie or hover by the phone waiting to hear from Kate (who had survived twelve years of, let’s be honest, completely so-so public education courtesy of the Greater Sagonick Community School District to hit the dean’s list at Bowdoin six semesters running and had MCAT scores through the high heavens), Lucy and I would sit for hours on the balcony, drinking something and maybe talking a bit, but mostly watching the headlights soar like distant angels over the water and feeling amazed that such a place existed.

That night, I sat with Lucy and told her about Hal’s call. She cried at the news, as I knew she would, though she also did not want me to watch her: she averted her face and wept without making a sound, and when she turned again to face me I knew the crying was over.

“You should go,” she said to me.

“To New York?”

She sighed and wiped her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “He wants to see you, Joe. Or Hal does. Honestly, what harm could it do now?”

“That’s what I’m wondering. Hal said I would need a lawyer, for starters.”

“That sounds like Hal, not Harry. He won’t even let his father go to the head without running it through legal.”

“Even so. It’s a reason to be cautious, don’t you think?”

On the causeway, headlights floated dreamily past; looking the other way, out toward the channel and the open sea, I could make out the twinkling bulk of a cruise ship, its boiler stacks strung with lights, pushing south from Miami like a floating Christmas tree turned sideways. This close in, she was probably headed for Key West, where the fun, I was told, never stopped.

“Luce—”

She stopped me with a hand. “Joe,” she said. “Joe. It was all a long time ago. Go see what’s on his mind.”

As we both knew I would, which is how things are when you’ve been married twenty years and spent most of this time as isolated as a couple of bears in the Yukon: a lot of what passes for discussion is really just taking in the scenery, and a recap of something you both already know. Hal’s cousin called the next morning, right on schedule, but I told him I was tied up and would call him back, having no intention whatsoever of actually doing so. I like lawyers fine—despite the jokes, most are just people with a job—but whatever Hal had to offer, he would have to offer me alone. I had one boat on the water for the day; Tyrell, my sole employee, had taken out the smaller of the two with a group sent over from the big resort on Hawk’s Cay. But the second, the Mako, which I used for deep sea, was in for engine maintenance, so I spent the afternoon doing various odds and ends to prep it for a weekend party and keeping an eye peeled for Tyrell’s return. My deal with Tyrell was a sweet one; unless somebody asked for me in particular, all the flats-guiding was his to do, with the two of us splitting the take, plus the tip, which he got to pocket free and clear. On any given day I’d have him out on the water for at least four hours, making money for both of us and generally scaring the whiskers off our white-bread clientele with his dreadlocks, Jamaican accent, and twelve-o’clock doobie (he thought I didn’t know about this; of course I did), though by Miller time everybody would be happy as a band of Smurfs, full of stories about the huge fish they had caught or not, and a permanent appreciation for Tyrell’s mystical ability to tell them where to drop a cast. No doubt most attributed this to some kind of island wisdom, or else the dope, but I knew better. Tyrell was actually from Corpus Christi and had a master’s degree in marine bio from Texas A&M. The accent was pure theater, something he had picked up in the Peace Corps.

By two o’clock he hadn’t returned, a good omen, since his party had signed on for only half a day but now had obviously sprung for the full ride, so I decided to kill the rest of the afternoon by driving up to have a look at a boat I was hoping to buy. I say “hoping” because there was no way on God’s green earth anybody was going to loan me the scratch for it, and with Kate planning on medical school—she had her heart set on either UCLA or Dartmouth Hitchcock—I saw nothing but the worst kind of cash squeeze in my future. But this boat! A 1962 38-foot Chris-Craft Constellation with twin MerCruiser Blue Water 350s, totally restored with glossy teak from bowsprit to transom, more varnished wood in the wheelhouse than in all the pubs in Dublin, all of it completely top-shelf right down to the bait wells with custom circulating pumps and enough electronics on the helm to command the U.S. Seventh Fleet: in all my life, I had never seen a boat like this. It wasn’t the best rig for deep sea, or fishing of any kind, as I would spend half my time mopping up the blood and reminding people to use the goddamn coasters. But we want what we want, and I wanted this boat, never mind the price tag, an eye-popping $220,000, about the same as four years of medical school in sunny California or snowy New Hampshire, take your pick. She was docked in Marathon, and the only reason she hadn’t sold was that the owner, a former “labor official” from Providence, was now out of the country “indefinitely” and had left the sale to the yard where she was kept. This was a fox-henhouse proposition if ever there was one, as the slip fees and maintenance on a boat like that easily brought in three times the money they would see from a brokerage commission, so the thing had sat through two winters with nary an offer I knew of.

I parked the truck in the yard lot, ducked into the office to fetch the key, and walked down to the slip where she was waiting, in all her forgotten glory. I had met the owner, Frank DeMizio, once before, when I’d first gone to the yard to take a peek—a tough-looking, squarish little man with a face like a piecrust and enough hair on his back to throw a shadow. He was wearing nothing but a Red Sox cap and a pair of aquamarine bikini briefs, and when I introduced myself and told him I was there to see the boat, he didn’t offer me his hand to shake but simply grunted and went back to wiping down the bait boxes with a shammy cloth.

“Felicity,” I said, reading the name off the transom.

“Means ‘pussy’ in Latin,” he said.

“I think it means ‘happiness,’ ” I said.

He shrugged his big shoulders and wrung his cloth into a bucket. “Same thing, innit?” He rose then and had a hard look at me where I stood on the dock. “You cocksuckers never give up, do you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Fucking IRS. Nothing satisfies you, you parasites.”

“I’m not from the IRS. Ask Carl.” Carl was the yard owner; he knew my business, who I was.

“That lying rat fuck?” He crossed his beefy arms over his chest. “He’s twice as dirty as I ever was. You tell Agent Tortorella to check his books, he wants a good laugh.”

I fished through my wallet for a business card, which I held out to him over the gunwale. “Listen, I’m really not from the IRS. I run a charter service out of Big Pine.”

He rolled his eyes, but then took the card and looked at it. “Joe Crosby.” He frowned and lifted his eyes to me. “That you?”

“That’s right. I just told you.”

His face softened. “Well, fuck it. So you did.” He sat down heavily on the bait box and shook his head regretfully. “Sorry about that. You gotta believe me, these guys have been all over my ass. I can’t take a dump without some fed reaching out of the bowl to grab the paper from my hand.”

“Forget it,” I said. “If you don’t want me to look at the boat today, I can just come back another time.”

“No, the hell with it.” He waved me up like we were the best of friends. “Who knows if there’ll be a next time, the way this is playing out. Might as well come on board and have a look around.”

He gave me the full tour, even started up the engines and took us for a quick spin out to Key Vaca, and by the time we returned, he seemed to have forgotten all about his troubles. We sat on the aft deck and shot the breeze over a couple of cans of Coors; he told me how he had found the boat nine years ago in western Connecticut, falling apart in somebody’s barn, and had put it back together piece by piece, hoping someday to retire someplace warm and spend the rest of his life puttering around on it. His marriage was long over, his kids were grown and gone. Except for a crappy little townhouse in Providence and a ten-year-old Cadillac, the boat was what he had. He’d gotten as far as bringing her all the way down from Newport, piloting it himself right down the East River and under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. But then he had come into his office one day to find the place crawling with police, not just local cops but IRS and FBI, his file cabinets and desk and computer all sealed with yellow tape and making their way on handcarts to a step van parked in the alley.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Frank said, lighting up another of the long brown cigarettes he had smoked all afternoon. “You think those cocksucking Kennedys were ever put under investigation? They never did anything I ain’t done.”

“Can’t say I know much about it, Frank. I’ve heard that, though.”

“Well, they sure as hell weren’t.” He shook his head and smoked. “Irish trash from Southie. They’re no better than me, and look at the fix I’m in.” He fell silent for a minute, then flicked his cigarette over the transom. “So, you innerested?”

So much time had passed I had almost forgotten the boat was for sale. I felt a little stab of shame that I didn’t have the money, or anything close to it. All I was doing was window-shopping.

“Two-twenty’s a pretty big nut, Frank. For a guy like me, anyway. She’s a beautiful boat, though.”

“Beautiful doesn’t begin it,” he corrected. “Beautiful is something you say to a broad. You’re beautiful, sweetie, yes you are.” With a bearlike hand he patted the gunwale. “This, my fucking friend, is a work of fucking art.”

“It’s a shame you have to sell,” I said. “I’m not sure I’d even feel right taking her from you.”

“Yeah, well.” He looked dismally out over the water, squinting into the fading light. Nearly four hours had passed since I’d appeared on the dock. “Listen. Do me a favor, will ya?”

I nodded. “Sure thing.”

“Be a good guy and get the fuck out of here.” He waved his can of beer toward the parking lot, now all but empty, except for my truck. “Go on. Back to where you came from.” He frowned and looked at his hands. “Just leave me the fuck alone.”

I did as he asked, leaving him there with his melancholy thoughts, and when I called the yard a month later to order a new propeller for the Mako and asked Carl if Felicity was still for sale, he told me that Frank had flown the coop. There were no liens against the boat, IRS or otherwise, as far as he knew; the maintenance bills were being sent to a PO box in Coral Gables and paid by wire from an offshore account—fishy as hell, but probably legal or at least hard to touch. Since then she had sat through summer and another winter, soaking up maintenance fees and pelican poop and bobbing forlornly in the swells. The odd thing was, the one time Carl had talked to Frank, and told him that I still came around the yard from time to time to look at her, Frank had said it was all right with him if I wanted to take her out. According to Carl, Frank had said he was sorry, and that it was a shame for a boat like that not to get any use at all, especially from someone who appreciated her.

That afternoon, with Tyrell still AWOL and nothing else on my plate—except of course for Hal’s airplane, and a certain amount of melancholy brooding of my own—I took Felicity out to Key Vaca, as Frank and I had done that afternoon a year ago. Despite her bulk she did a comfortable fifteen knots that sliced nicely through the swells, and it was easy to understand, sitting at the helm, the attraction of such a thing—why Frank had wanted it, and maybe done one or two things wrong in his life in order to get it. (Okay, not maybe, and not one or two; but I liked to think he hadn’t done anything truly terrible, such as kill someone, up there in dirty little Providence.) It was nearly a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of luxury pleasure craft, but in a way it was also a small thing; when you’re in a boat on the open sea, that smallness is what you feel, and the memory of this feeling is what calls you back. In his haste to depart, Frank had left an open chart on the table of the main salon: the Caymans, of course, world-class haven for tax cheats. Beside it I found a little pad of paper with course headings and distance calculations written in a small, almost girlish print. Too fucking far, Frank had written, underlining the words twice, hard enough to break the tip off his pencil. The thing was, it wasn’t too far for a boat like that, not if you knew what you were doing. It was just too far for Frank.

From a pay phone at the dock I called Kate. It was just evening, a little after seven, and I hoped she would be back in her room after dinner. If she didn’t answer I was prepared to hang up and head home, but she took it on the third ring, a little out of breath.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Daddy? Hang on a second. I just got in.”

“Take your time, Kats.”

She held her hand over the receiver to talk to someone, then came back on the line. “Sorry. Here I am.”

“There you are.”

“Is it, like, eighty degrees down there? Because today it fucking, excuse me, snowed. Again. In April.” She laughed at someone in the room. “I’m glad you called, actually.”

“How’s that?”

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” She sighed theatrically into the phone. “California. Airline tickets. Remember? We were supposed to sort it out by last week.”

We had talked about it over her spring vacation; at the end of May we were planning to fly, the two of us, out to LA to visit medical schools: USC, UCLA, UC San Diego. Maybe a jaunt in a rental car up the coast to San Francisco, to see Stanford and UCSF.

“Right you are. Must have slipped my mind. I’ll get on it, Kats, I promise.”

“I don’t mean to nag, but you know. It’s important. Like, my whole entire life, to be exact. I also wouldn’t mind seeing that Universal Studios Tour. I could use some serious kitsch about now.”

“Got it. Serious kitsch. Your whole entire life. Roger wilco.”

“Daddy? That’s not the reason you called, is it?”

“Sure it was. Planning for California. I’m on the job, Kats.”

“Daddy.”

“Okay, you’ve got it out of me. The truth is I just took out somebody’s boat for a little spin, and it put me in the mood to hear your voice.”

“Not the naked gangster’s Chris-Craft?”

“Labor official, Kats. Labor official. Nice fellow, too, once you get past the gruff exterior and the grand jury indictment.”

Kate paused for adjustment. “Dad? This isn’t one of those your-mother-and-I-have-decided-to-take-some-time-apart calls, is it? Because a lot of that has been going around up here. And if you’ll pardon my saying so, you sound a little strange.”

“No worries, Kats. Your mom and I are fine, unless you know something I don’t. Looks like I’m going to be taking a little trip, though.”

“I thought Big Pine was a little trip.”

“A trip from my trip, then. A kind of a business thing.”

“Hmmm. Very mysterious.”

“I’d tell you more, but it’s top secret, I’m afraid. At least for now.”

“Daddy, I know you. You don’t do top secret. Top secret is not your thing.”

“Don’t be so sure. I might surprise you, Kats.”

“Speaking of which. You know, there’s a girl in my dorm who thinks her dad works for the CIA.” Kate lowered her voice, having fun. “Supposedly he’s an accountant for the State Department. But then he up and disappears for weeks at a time. She also thought she saw him on CNN, in the background of a shot taken in, like, Turkey or someplace. He was wearing sunglasses and a turban.”

“Sounds pretty fishy.”

“That’s what I thought. Does the CIA have accountants?”

“Somebody has to do their books, I guess. Kats?”

“Yeah, Dad?”

“Remember that summer when you were growing the beans? I think they were beans.” My mind was wandering, doing surprising things. “That science project for school.”

“Peas, Dad. Sure, I remember. What about it?”

“No reason, I guess. I was just thinking about it. You sure were all fired up about it. How old were you, thirteen?”

“Well, it was eighth-grade science, with Mr. Weld. So I guess that would be about right. We used to call him Fartface Weld.”

“That’s right, Phil Weld.” I was thinking of my thirteen-year-old Kats, dressed in shorts and a bathing suit top and her mother’s straw hat, working away in the Maine dirt. The memory was so vivid I could practically smell it. “You know, I think I thought it right then—that girl is going to be a scientist.”

“You sure this isn’t one of those calls, Daddy? You don’t have, like, a brain tumor or anything?”

“Positive, Kats. Your mother’s at home. Give her a call so she can tell you herself.”

“Nah. What do they say on that show? Fuggetaboutit. A girl can talk to her dad about peas if she wants to.”

“And vice versa.” While we’d talked, evening had come on, the sky above and all around purpling with the day’s last light. “You get back to your studying, okay? We’ll see you in a month.”

“You too. And Daddy? Please don’t forget this time.”

“Forget?”

Another sigh, and too late I remembered. “Daddy, the tickets. God, you’re hopeless. Don’t make me go over your head and call Mom.”

“Roger wilco,” I said. “Two airline tickets for one hopeless Dad.”

 

It is not necessarily the best thing in the world to be friends with a man like Harry Wainwright. There’s his money, for starters, which is so much more than the kind of money most people have that there’s simply no comparison—a pile so enormous it’s like a force of nature, and not a little dangerous to be near, like a mountain that could fall on you at any minute. In a business like mine, you deal with wealthy people constantly—odd, in a way, because fishing isn’t what you would call a naturally upscale activity, what with all the blood and bad smells—and one thing you learn is that people with serious money didn’t get that way by always being nice. Someone threatens to sue me just about every year; usually it’s all just bluster, some trivial complaint that boils down to I-didn’t-have-enough-fun, and I tell myself it’s a small price to pay for a life that’s arguably better than anybody else’s. Even so, a man like Harry Wainwright is one to take seriously; right or wrong, he can do you some major damage. I don’t mean they’d find you in the trunk of your car somewhere in the eelgrass (though I have dealt with some guys like that—my friend from Providence being exhibit A, I suppose). What I mean is a man like Harry Wainwright can buy whatever he wishes, and if he wanted to buy me, he had the dough to make this happen.

I flew to New York on the last Wednesday in April, just me and the pilot and, thanks to Hal, an industrial-size box of individually wrapped packages of honey peanuts. Attached was a note: “Enjoy the flight; best taken with Scotch.” I didn’t know how many of them I had to eat to look thankful, so I worked my way through two packets with the help of a glass of thirty-year-old single malt from the plane’s well-stocked bar, then flushed a bunch more down the toilet before we landed—not at one of the big New York airports but a smaller field in New Jersey. Hal had sent a limo—another first for me, though after the Learjet, the limo felt like nothing at all—and I put on my necktie as we crossed the Lincoln Tunnel into Manhattan and headed downtown.

In all the years I had known Harry Wainwright, I had never once set foot into anything you might call his world. I’d been to New York, of course, though not for years—my parents had brought me for some kind of hospitality trade show—and my memory of the city was a child’s: feeling small and scared on the busy streets, the carnival thrill of a taxi ride, the fussy stiffness of wearing my best clothes and the raw wonderment of watching my lunch, a peanut butter sandwich, pop out of a machine at an Automat in Times Square. Harry’s offices were located on Wall Street, fourteen floors of a gleaming tower overlooking Battery Park and, if you craned your neck just so, the New York Stock Exchange. The lobby was a citadel of polished granite and marble; it was close to lunchtime, and men and women with nice haircuts and good suits, many of them with a cell phone pasted to an ear, were hurrying to and fro. I felt a little embarrassed by my rumpled necktie and threadbare blazer, like a kid dressed for his first job interview; the tie, the only one I owned, was twenty years old, an anonymously indestructible navy blue knit I kept around for weddings and funerals.

At the security desk I was given a visitor’s pass and directed to the express elevator, which I rode up to the fortieth floor. The doors slid open, revealing a second lobby of polished stone, and on the far wall, the words H P WAINWRIGHT HOLDINGS, INC. Below this was a wide counter where the receptionist sat, a young black woman with cornrows and a telephone headset. One minute you’re in sunny Florida, poling the flats for bonefish and thinking about a cold beer with your name on it waiting back in the fridge; the next thing you know somebody sends a plane and there you are, landing on Mars.

The receptionist took my name and directed me to take a seat, but before I had a chance to, the wall beside the receptionist’s desk opened—a door I hadn’t noticed, that no one was supposed to notice, I figured—and Hal stepped out, not in a suit as I had expected but in a black T-shirt and jeans and cowboy boots that probably weren’t made of ordinary cowhide but something more exotic—elk, or maybe ostrich. I had to remind myself that this was the same Hal I had known since we were kids; Hal’s just eight years younger than me, and had been coming to the camp with his dad off and on for years.

“Joe, welcome. Glad you could make it.” He offered me his hand to shake. “The flight okay?”

“A little bumpy at the end. Your pilots always drink like that?”

“Only when their paychecks don’t clear.” He glanced over my shoulder and furrowed his brow. “Okay, where’s that lawyer we talked about you having? We did discuss this, didn’t we?”

“We did. I decided against it.”

Hal shook his head disapprovingly. We were going through the motions, of course, but it had to be done. “Joe, Joe. You Mainers can be so goddamned stubborn. Take my advice on this, will you please? Let me get somebody on the phone for you. I can have them over here for you in a jiff.”

“Seriously, Hal,” I said. “I don’t want one.”

“Sally is nobody you want to tangle with without counsel.”

“You’re only saying that because she’s your wife. As far as I can tell she likes me fine.”

Hal sighed. “Well, it’s your funeral. You might as well come on back. We’re all ready for you.”

“Harry too?”

“It’ll be just me and Sally, I’m afraid. It hasn’t been a good week for him. He’s pretty much holed up in Bedford these days, Joe.”

He led me into a maze of offices and cubicles, all clean and white and nondescript, then up a second elevator and down another long hallway to his office, where his assistant was waiting.

“Zoe, this is Mr. Crosby.” He turned briskly to me. “Joe, you need anything, this is the person to ask. She’s the real brains of the outfit.”

Zoe rose to greet me, and I was hit by a bolt of recognition—we had talked dozens of times on the phone, when she had called to make reservations, or else just to say “Please hold for Mr. Wainwright,” meaning Hal. I had made a picture in my mind of an older woman with bifocals, which was, of course, completely incorrect: the woman whose hand I shook was no older than thirty-five, with a mane of black hair and a miniskirt figure. At least I had been right about the glasses, though hers were shaped like eggs and made of a material that was either gold or silver, depending on which way she turned her head under the fluorescent lights.

“He’s being nice,” she said. “I don’t know a thing. Except where the bodies are buried. Can I get you coffee or water, Mr. Crosby?”

Hal frowned. “You still do that?”

“Only for people I like. How about it, Mr. Crosby?”

“It’s Joe, please. And no, thank you.”

“That must be some place you have up there in Maine. Hal and Sally just rave about it.”

I shrugged. “I’m a lucky man.”

“Luckier than you may know,” Hal said. He poked a thumb across the hall. “Okay, enough love. Let’s get this thing rolling. We’re actually set up in the conference room.”

“The conference room,” I said. I looked at Zoe. “Sounds pretty fancy.”

“Just how we do things around here,” Hal said. “Haven’t you figured it out yet, Joe? We’re trying to impress you.”

Sally was waiting for us, wearing a lawyerish blue suit and seated on the far side of a long table. A handshake seemed wrong, so I gave her a hug and stepped back to look at her. Hal was a good-looking fellow by any estimation, but his marriage was a fair fight: even dressed for court, Sally was about the prettiest woman who crossed my path with any regularity.

“Looks like motherhood suits you, Sally. How about a picture?”

She smiled at my request. “Well, as it so happens . . .”

Out came her wallet, and the snapshot everyone has: a fat, happy baby, so plump she had creases in the middle of her forearms. They’d put one of those frilly little headbands on her so people would know she was a girl, a nervous touch I liked.

“She’s just beautiful,” I said. “Good for you.”

Sally took the photo from me and returned it to her wallet. “That’s already way out of date. She’s walking now, gets into everything. Hal spent the weekend baby-proofing the apartment.”

“You did that, Hal?”

He grinned self-consciously, though I could tell he was proud of himself. “Bet you didn’t know I was so handy.”

“Come up this August, there’s plenty of work for you if you want it.”

“Don’t laugh, Joe,” Hal said. “I just might take you up on that.”

We took our places, Hal and Sally on one side of the wide table, myself on the other. The room was all business—just the table, a huge gleaming slab of a thing, and behind Hal, a second, smaller table with a computer and a telephone. On the table between us sat a water pitcher and glasses, and a single manila folder, which Hal opened.

“Okay, the first thing to say here, for the record, is that Sally is present in her capacity as my father’s personal attorney. The offer my father wants to make to you is a personal one, not one connected to the company. All right with that?”

I nodded. “Sure. Seems clear.”

“Just so long as it’s understood.” Hal poured himself a glass of water. “Anyway, I might as well cut straight to it. Here’s the deal. My father wants to make an offer for the camp, Joe. He wants to buy it, I mean. And he wants to do it right away, or as soon as possible.”

This was, of course, exactly what I’d figured on. The plane, the peanuts, the limo ride: a hundred other things besides, and at the end of the day, a man who scouts the water for his living knows things in his gut, as I’d known this.

“What’s he offering?”

Hal raised an eyebrow. “Don’t look so surprised, Joe.”

“I’m not. It’s all right.”

He sipped the water. “What’s all right?”

“All right, I’m listening.” I nodded at Hal and Sally in turn. “If the offer’s a good one, we can talk about it.”

Hal took out the papers and slid them across the desk. “The figure is more than generous, I think. Anyway,” he said, and wagged a finger, “it’s right there.”

I looked the agreement over. Lock, stock, and barrel, Harry Wainwright was offering me $2.3 million for the camp—the buildings, the land, the right-of-way along the river, the leases on the parcels across the lake, everything right down to the leaky canoes and the kitchen pots and pans. In the days before I’d left Big Pine, I’d done a few computations. It was a lot of land, but not especially valuable, and as a business, the camp had never turned more than the thinnest profit. Harry’s figure was, as best as I could tell, about twice what it was worth, maybe a little more.

“I’ll be honest with you, Joe,” Hal was saying. “I’m not in love with this, as a business deal. But I think everybody here knows that’s not what this is.”

“Jeez, Hal.” I flipped back through the agreement, if only to keep my eyes and hands occupied, skimming past pages of information I should have cared about or at least read. “Two million bucks is a lot of money. For that kind of bread, I would have been happy to fly coach.”

Hal nodded smartly; the chummy banter was over for the moment. “That’s the general idea, Joe. My father wants to get this thing done. What do you think?”

And I paused to wonder: what did I think? Every man has his price, and Harry had found mine—more than found it, actually, as a million five would have produced in me more or less the same set of emotions: a heady rush of pure greed, followed by the unsettling awareness that all the problems of my life had been solved in one painless instant. But that, of course, was just the problem. Somebody offers you something you suddenly can’t live without, but five minutes ago never knew you needed—well, there’s a catch somewhere, the most obvious being that what feels like luck is actually somebody else’s wand being waved over your life.

“Just one question, Hal. What does he want to do with it?”

“The camp?” Hal leaned back in his chair. “Keep it in the family, I suppose. There’s not much else he could do with it. That’s really his to decide, Joe.”

“No.” I shook my head. “I have to know this.”

Hal shot a look at Sally, who nodded a lawyerish nod, then turned his eyes back toward me. “He’s rewriting his will, taking this into account. That’s as far as I can go. And don’t ask Sally, because she can’t tell you. You’ve heard of a little thing called attorney-client privilege? She can’t even tell me.”

“You said yourself this wasn’t just a business deal.”

Hal sighed. “Look, here’s the bottom line. He wants to be helpful, Joe. Forgive me, but we did a little digging, and we know your situation. You’ve borrowed pretty heavily in the last few years—”

“College,” I interrupted. “For Kate.”

“Fair enough. But there’s also the place in Florida, and the new boats. You’re stretched pretty thin. I know you want to make a go of it down there, and you should. You’re entitled. You and Lucy are entitled. With the right seed money, the two of you could really set yourselves up nicely. I know you’ve made some inquiries about selling one of your leases back to Maine Paper. That’s exactly the kind of thing that Harry wants to avoid.”

I felt my face grow warm. “Is this the part where you turn on the salesman’s charm, Hal? Because where I come from, talking about another man’s debts is not a way to make friends. And if you really want to know, they approached me. They have for years. I can set my fucking—excuse me, Sally—my fucking watch by it. The answer is always no.”

“But how long can it stay no?” Hal took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. “Look, Joe, I’m not going to try to tell you how to run your business. You’re absolutely right, and I apologize. It’s been a hell of a week, a hell of a month, really. You don’t know the half of it. So if I’ve spoken too bluntly, I’m sorry. But I also won’t insult your intelligence. We’ve known each other too long. This is a good deal. Hell, it’s a great deal. We both know that. You’re never going to find another buyer with this kind of dough to spend. And with Harry, you don’t have to watch the thing broken up and sold back to the loggers. That’s the real point, Joe. You can have my word on it, if you like.”

I looked at Sally, who so far had said nothing. She was sitting with her hands folded on the table, her face unreadable as the sphinx. “Sally? What do you think of all this?”

She gave a smile I read as cautious. “It’s your decision, Joe. I can’t tell you what to do.”

“You look a little worn-out, Sally. That little girl of yours letting you get any sleep?”

“Not much.” She laughed wearily. “But I’m sure you remember what it’s like.”

“Do I ever. You want real ulcers, wait till she’s off at college. You know what’s back in style for kids these days? Tattoos. Half of Kate’s friends look like merchant seamen, or else gypsies, with all the piercings. Though it’ll be something else by the time yours reaches that point.”

“I’m sure Kate’s more sensible than that.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sensible. Probably a lot more sensible than her dad.” I paused a moment to listen to those words: “her dad.” Roger wilco. Two-million-three for one hopeless Dad.

“Listen, Joe,” Hal was saying, “nobody wants to pressure you. Think about it. Take all this with you, and for god’s sake show it to a lawyer. Talk to Lucy, talk to Kate. We’ve booked a room for you at the St. Regis. Stay as long as you like. See the Empire State Building, take in a show, whatever. It’s all on us. The plane can take you back whenever you’re ready.”

“Lucy told me I should see Cats.”

Hal grinned encouragingly. “That’s the spirit. Sure, see Cats. Hang on a second.” He swiveled in his chair and picked up the phone. “Zoe? Can we get a ticket for Cats for Mr. Crosby for”—he looked at me and raised an eyebrow—“tonight’s performance? A good seat, orchestra, somewhere in the middle. No, just have them hold it at the theater.” He hung up the phone like a man who was used to getting things done easily. “Alakazoo,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. “All set.”

“Thanks, Hal. That’s nice of you.”

He rose from his chair to signal that the meeting was over. “Well, they say you have to see it once. You want anything else while you’re in town, you give a ring. I can even get you tickets for the Knicks.”

I shook his hand and gave Sally a final hug. “Give our best to Lucy, won’t you, Joe?” she said. “And Kate too.”

“Sure thing.”

“Don’t forget these,” Hal said, and handed the papers to me. “I mean it, Joe. Have somebody look over that with you. Harry wants everybody to be happy.” He rapped his knuckles on the table—mahogany, I guessed, from the deep, clean sound of it. He was probably just as relieved as I was to leave things as they stood. “So, the lake ice out yet?”

I was holding the papers a little awkwardly; they didn’t seem like the kind of thing a person should fold and shove into a pocket, and I hadn’t thought to bring a briefcase. I settled for putting them back in the manila folder and tucking it under my arm. “It should be. Always happens about this time. I haven’t talked to Jordan in a couple of weeks, though.”

“Don’t know how he stands it up there, all by himself. Young guy like that. I’d go nuts.”

“He says he gets a lot of reading done.”

“I’ll bet he does. If you speak to him, tell him my dad hopes maybe to get up there for some fishing. I doubt it’ll happen, but there’s nothing he’d like more. Talks about it all the time.”

Sally left us, and Hal led me to the elevator, where he shook my hand again. “We really appreciate you coming like this, Joe.”

“I was glad to do it.”

“Well, just so you know.” The elevator bell sounded; the doors slid open on an empty car. “One last thing, Joe.”

I had seen this coming too. Where was Hal in all of this? Now that Sally was gone, I was pretty certain I would hear it.

“I’m listening.”

He looked quickly over his shoulder to make sure we were alone. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Sally, because she’s sort of a fan. But you might want to reconsider Cats.”

 

In the years before my mother died, before my father’s spirit hardened like a skin of ice and he became the sort of man that people respect without actually getting along with, he liked to tell the story of how he had come to the camp. This took place right after the war, his war, a war in which he gave half his face and one emerald-green eye to the Thousand Year Reich on the point of a German sniper’s bullet, and though you’d think that such an experience might be a lifetime’s singular event, the one that splits it into this “before” and that “after,” such was not the case with my father. (That came later, when my mother died of ovarian cancer, three months before her thirty-eighth birthday.) If anything, that sniper did my father a favor; I have no doubt that had he missed, I would have grown up the son of a Boston white-shoe lawyer who would have spent his years on earth, as many people do, wondering who he was truly supposed to be.

They came to the camp on a winter day in ’47, an event I don’t remember though I am told I was there, a baby seven months old. Though in later years my father’s injury softened—as he aged, the fleshiness that came into his face padded his scars and fractured jawline so that his face appeared not so much collapsed as something merely lived-in—in those first years it was a stark and surprising thing to look at, the sort of face that quiets a room and parents shush their children over, and I think he took my mother and moved up to Maine simply to get away from people. My father had been a handsome man, not movie-star handsome but good-looking in an earnest way that women liked and men took to, and although he was not vain about his appearance, it would have been a hard thing for him to see in people’s eyes not the pleasant curiosity he was accustomed to but pity or even fear. More than this, though, a face like my father’s is a story—a public story—and I believe he tired of telling it. As long as he wore the face of war he was somebody both smaller and larger than who he imagined himself to be: not Joe Crosby, but Joe Crosby, War Hero. It took me years to understand the importance of this fact, but my father’s injury was unusual in that it was nothing he himself could see; if he had lost a leg or arm or taken a bullet to the spine, as happened to many men he knew, the situation might have felt different to him. His was an injury he did not see but saw out of, and the fact that the world he saw was for the most part the same place it had always been, save for the pitying looks it gave him in return, made him wish for a life in which his was the only gaze. He spent the better part of two years in the hospital; when he was finally discharged, in March of ’46, he returned to law, but only halfheartedly. A few years earlier, an uncle had left him a small inheritance; my father had set this aside, planning to use it to buy his partnership when the time came, but when he heard that the camp had come up for sale—the previous owners had all but abandoned the place and were about to lose it to the county for unpaid taxes—he couldn’t write the check fast enough.

He had visited the camp in the late thirties, a Harvard grad slumming away the summer months washing dishes and flirting with the waitresses before entering law school, and at a party in Blue Hill he met my mother; though he never said as much, I am certain that these two events merged in his mind, so that the camp and my mother were, in a way, one and the same, and the chance to buy it must have seemed like the hand of destiny at work. The story he told me was a simple one, perhaps a little strange: all he said was that the first morning after they’d arrived, he climbed to the roof of the lodge and looked at the lake, and knew that he had found his life. I was a child when he told me this, so his words made no sense. Finding your life. How could you find something that was all around you, something that had never been lost to begin with? He might have said he had found the sun at midday and the moon at night. And the thought, too, of my father standing on the roof for the sheer hell of it—a place he warned me never to go, as I would surely fall and break my fool neck—excited and perplexed me. Even back then, in the years before my mother died, my father was a measured man. He distrusted displays of emotion, was not a big talker, and conducted his domestic affairs with the same levelheaded punctuality that he used to run his business. He was not an unfeeling man: he had friends, liked a joke, and loved my mother deeply. But as far as I could see, he was hardly the sort to climb a roof and feel some cosmic rightness pouring through him. That was my generation, not his, and though I would eventually spend many hours on the roof myself, I could never reproduce the feeling. How could this be the same man?

I was eight years old when my mother got sick, and though it took her over a year to die, I remember very little of this period. For many years my parents had tried to have another child—I was miles away from any potential playmates, and to let me go through life without the company of a brother or sister seemed simply cruel. But after a series of miscarriages they abandoned the idea. Whether or not this failure was related to the cancer that finally took her life is anybody’s guess; the timing tells me it probably was. When my father finally spoke of this, in the last months of his life, he claimed not to remember how many miscarriages she’d had—three or four, he said, though who really knew?—but the last was memorable enough, bloody and awful. My mother was almost six months pregnant when it happened, a sudden hemorrhage that began as she was hanging laundry on the line for the autumn sun to dry, and by the time she got back to the house, a distance of a hundred feet, her skirt and apron were soaked with blood. I was off playing in the woods somewhere, so I saw nothing of what happened next. Before my father could even put a call in to the hospital, a solid hour away in Farmington, my mother began to deliver, right there in the kitchen: a two-pound baby boy who had, in all likelihood, died sometime the day before, when the placenta had separated from the uterine wall. My father had seen enough in the war to know, or at least guess, what to do next: he tied off the cord with twine, and did his best to staunch the bleeding, though it was coming from inside, at the site of the abruption, far beyond his reach. Then he wrapped my baby brother in a towel, called the nearest neighbor, the Rawlings—a couple who lived nine miles away—to tell them to track me down, and drove my mother to the hospital in the truck.

By the time he got there my mother had lost so much blood that it appeared very likely she would die, that it would be a day of two deaths and not just one. This didn’t happen, but it is also true that she never fully recovered. She came home from the hospital three weeks later, pale and weak, a woman I hardly recognized. I had been staying at the Rawlings’, eating the huge batches of oatmeal cookies that Mrs. Rawling seemed to pull from the oven by the hour and generally feeling left out, because nobody had told me anything. I had even gotten it into my head that she would be bringing home the baby brother or sister I had been promised. In my heart it was a brother, and not even a baby but a boy my own age, so innocent was I of the facts of life. But all hope evaporated at the sight of my father helping my mother from the truck and into our house. There would be no baby, not then, not ever. She could hardly walk, and her skin was so colorless it seemed transparent, as I believed a ghost might look. She hugged me weakly and went up to bed, and all through the winter this weakness did not abate but seemed to widen around her like rings, so that the household fell into a kind of trance, as if we were all lost in a forest, though not together. She could not bring herself to read her novels or play the piano or do any of the things she loved, and when, in August, she began to cough and then to bleed again, this seemed not so much a new development as a continuation of the same decline.

She died the next January, in my parents’ bedroom, on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine and breathtaking cold—a day that I imagine was not all that different from the day eight years earlier when my father had climbed the roof of the lodge and found his life. I had been sent to the Rawlings’ for the afternoon—by this time I spent so much time at their house that I had a bedroom of my own—and when my father came to fetch me at five o’clock, the appointed hour, and instead of simply honking the horn of the truck from the Rawlings’ driveway as he always did, he came into the kitchen and sat at the old oak table and removed his hat and gloves without saying a word, the cold of the outside air clinging to his coat like the smell of cigarettes that followed him everywhere, I knew what had happened without exactly knowing it—I felt it in my bones. I was working on a model kit, a B-17 Flying Fortress. I showed it to him, the landing gear that dropped from the plane’s belly to snap into place, the swiveling gun turrets and ailerons, the opening bomb-bay doors. I had taken up the toys of war initially to please him, thinking it was something the two of us might share. But in the year of my mother’s illness, I had found myself alone with this interest, just as I had found myself alone with everything else.

My father examined the plane indifferently, saying nothing, then returned it to its place on the table. I realized then that Mrs. Rawling had stepped from the room; she had left us alone.

“Something has happened, Joey.”

I had taken out a tiny brush and begun to stroke paint on the plane’s fuselage.

“Joey, are you listening to me?”

“I want to fight in a war,” I said, still painting.

He gave a startled laugh. “Believe me, you don’t. That’s the last thing you want.”

“You did.”

“That’s how I know. Joey, put that goddamn thing down, please.”

I began to, or thought I had, but before I could do this he grabbed the plane from my hand and slammed it onto the newspaper so hard that the wheels snapped off and shot in opposite directions across the kitchen.

“You broke it!”

“Joey, forget the plane. Sweet Jesus Christ. It’s a fucking toy.”

I had never heard him talk this way—not just the words themselves, but the measured anger of their delivery, like the sound of an axe blade grinding on a stone. I thought he might actually hit me, something else he had never done before.

“I have something to tell you. Your mother has died. Do you understand what this means? She was very sick, and she has passed away.”

“You broke my plane, you asshole!”

And then he did hit me, once, with the back of his hand. He was a strong man, and if he had allowed his anger to do as it liked, he probably would have broken my nose. But even as his hand caught me across the cheek—a solid snap that unscrewed my eyes and sent me tumbling backward from my chair—I felt beneath this blow not only his anger but also his restraint, a force even more terrifying, for it was something he commanded. This is exactly the kind of blow you deserve, it said.

“Get up,” he said.

I lifted my face to see Mrs. Rawling in the kitchen doorway. The funny thing is, I always thought of her as older—an old woman. But when I think about her now, she probably wasn’t even forty. Her husband worked as a lineman for the telephone company, a cheerful, rail-thin man who always wore suspenders and liked to do magic tricks with quarters and napkins, and the fact that they had no children of their own—an anomalous condition I have never considered until this moment—probably made my visits as bittersweet as hearing a song from the past and knowing every note without being able to recall its name. I detected in their generosity to me a love that was equal parts sadness, and one time, when I was sleeping at their house and had come down with a fever, I awakened in the middle of the night to find the two of them sitting by my bed, fast asleep.

“What’s going on in here?” Sarah Rawling’s eyes were white saucers of alarm. She looked at me where I lay on the floor, then at my father, still sitting at the kitchen table with my airplane model spread out on the newspaper. “Joe, have you been drinking?”

“He’s fine, Sarah. You can see that. Leave the boy be.”

She came to where I was sitting, holding my cheek, and knelt to face me. I was too astonished even to cry. “Joey, did your father strike you?”

“I’ll decide what’s right for him, Sarah. Go on now, son. Get up.”

I somehow made it to my feet. I wanted at that moment only to throw myself into Sarah Rawling’s arms, to have her be my mother from that day forward. But I was too ashamed even to look at her and turned my face away.

My father stood and cleared his throat. “Your mother has died today, Joey. You’ll need to be a man from now on. That means that if you speak to me as you just did, you’ll get what’s coming to you. I’m sorry to say that, but it’s so. Now get your coat.”

 

I never set foot in the Rawlings’ house again, and I got the war I wanted. From that day forward my father and I lived a new kind of life, one in which the two of us, like opposing armies locked in a bitter struggle the cause of which neither one remembers, lobbed listless shells at one another from distant bunkers. I went to school and played with my friends and did my chores around the lodge, but in my heart I might have been a thousand miles away, so little did I care about any of it. I became a good guide—as good as he was, even better—and for that I won a measure of my father’s respect. But it wasn’t respect I wanted. I wanted, like him, to find my life.

This is exactly what happened, of course, and that is the part of the story in which Harry Wainwright played his part, and why I now found myself in New York, ready to sign over my worldly goods to him, albeit for more money than most people see in a lifetime. Hal was right: I should have skipped Cats. I sat through the first act, bored and baffled—it reminded me of some kiddie show on TV, the sort of thing dreamed up by well-meaning adults who’ve spent no time around actual children—though a couple of the songs weren’t so bad, and it wasn’t on the whole unpleasant to sit in a darkened theater for a couple of hours without one serious thought in my head, especially given the alternative, which was lying around my hotel room, getting fat on snacks from the minibar and fidgeting with the gold-plated bath fixtures. I’d decided to hang around New York a day or two; with two million bucks on the line, the last thing I wanted was to appear ungrateful. But I was also hoping that something would come along to tell me what to do next.

At intermission I left the theater and walked eight blocks downtown, into Times Square. This was back before the big cleanup, when you couldn’t take three steps in Manhattan without tripping over some poor soul sleeping on a greasy blanket and every other business was a peep show or adult “emporium” with some junior lieutenant from the porno brigade sitting on a stool outside to hustle in the crowds—a pretty depressing sight for any dad, and one that made me all the happier to pop for the twenty-two thousand bucks a year it cost to send Kate to a college that boasted about its “high acreage-to-student ratio” and kept her about as sheltered as a pet rabbit. My plan was to see where the New Year’s ball dropped; Lucy and I, and Kate when she was old enough, always stayed up to watch this on our grainy black-and-white with aluminum foil crimped to the antenna, a bottle of cold duck for the grown-ups and a glass of ginger ale for Kate. But it was April, and I quickly figured out that I was looking for a landmark that didn’t exist but for one day a year. By then it had started to rain; I hailed a cab, told the driver “St. Regis, please”—I had already figured out I didn’t need to give the address—and returned to the hotel.

The desk clerk gave me my messages, one from Lucy, one from Hal. I decided these could keep until morning and headed off to the bar for a nightcap, thinking this might clear my head of the show tunes that had seemed cheerfully catchy before but were now merely annoying. As he set me up with peanuts and a cocktail napkin, the bartender asked me if I wanted a Bloody Mary; I gathered from a little placard on the bar that it had been invented there. I took a Dewar’s and water instead, and spun on my stool in time to see a woman I recognized as Hal’s assistant, Zoe, enter the room.

She caught my eye, gave a little wave, and came over to where I was sitting. “Mr. Crosby.” She put down her briefcase to offer her hand. Her hair and glasses were damp from the rain.

“It’s Joe, remember? Just Joe.”

What I was thinking was what anyone would be thinking: no accident, interesting development, good-looking woman, disoriented married man, many miles from home. But this seemed like something from a story I wouldn’t even like to read, and the desk clerk’s note to call Lucy was, after all, still in my pocket.

“They’re pushing the Bloody Marys.”

“At this hour?”

“Famous for them, looks like.”

She shook a bit of rain from her hair and caught the bartender’s eye. “A Jack Daniel’s and water, please.”

The bartender brought her drink over, and she gave it a couple of quick stirs. “Hal thought I’d find you here. His bet was that you’d make it as far as intermission.”

“Does Hal ever get tired of being right?”

She laughed, a little uneasily I thought, tipping her face to turn the frames of her eyeglasses from gold to silver and back again. “That’s the one thing our boy Hal will never get tired of.”

“Sounds like a story.”

“Oh, it is, just not a very interesting one.” She jostled the ice in her drink and sipped. “Hal and I used to . . . well, I guess the phrase would be ‘go together.’ Long before he ever met Sally, who’s a totally great gal, incidentally, a good friend, and thinks the world of you.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

She laughed again. “Which part?”

“About you and Sally.” My mind caught on something, an idea I hadn’t even realized I was having. “You know, in the office today, looking at you and Hal, I sort of thought for a second there—”

“And you wouldn’t be the first to think it. But no. All over and done, everybody apprised of the facts.” She brought her briefcase up from the floor and removed a plain white envelope, fat with folded paper. “A present from Hal.”

I took it from her. On the outside was my name, written in a hand I knew to be Hal’s. “Do I open it here?”

“Hal would prefer that you did not. He also told me to tell you that when you’re done looking it over, please throw it away.”

I tucked it in my jacket pocket. Daddy, you don’t do top secret. Top secret is not your thing. I said, “If that’s how Hal wants it.”

“His other advice to me was to get you talking. Those were his exact words, in fact. Get him talking, see what’s on his mind.”

“I thought Hal was apprised of the facts.”

“Apparently not in this case.” She shrugged. “I heard what happened today. And personally, I’m glad. You shouldn’t make it easy for them.”

“I really was ready to sell. I kind of knew that’s what they wanted. There wasn’t really anything else they could want.”

I lifted my eyes to the painting over the bar. I hadn’t paid it any mind before, but I saw now that it was something quite special: an original Maxfield Parrish, or so the little plaque read, entitled Old King Cole. The painting was actually a mural, practically as broad as the bar itself, and done in several panels: Old King Cole on his throne, looking not merry at all but generally bored by life and half in the bag to boot, three men holding violins and doing a sort of jig at his feet. Three men, I thought: three men to serve the king. Roger wilco.

“I don’t know why I didn’t.” I looked back at Zoe. “They’re offering me a lot of money. Far more than it’s worth, really, though I probably shouldn’t say that to you.”

“What it’s worth is what they’ll pay, Joe. And I’m thinking, maybe it’s worth a little more to you than that?”

And that, in the end, was the real question; though, strangely, I had yet to put it that way to myself. Was it worth $2.3 million to me, yes or no?

Zoe drained the last of her bourbon and rose to go. “One thing I will tell you, Joe. Hal wants to put this thing together. That means you can do whatever you want. I’m telling you because I like you, and most people seem to think a guy like Hal holds all the cards. In this case, he doesn’t. The cards are yours.” She looked up at the mural then; a glimmer of recognition crossed her face. “Oh, I get it. Old King Cole. Like the rhyme.” She shook her head. “Hal’s a regular laugh riot.”

“Fiddlers three,” I said. “Okay. One and two—that’s me and Hal. The king’s obvious. What I can’t figure out is, who’s the third fiddler?”

Smiling, she moved her face toward mine. For a moment I actually thought I was about to be kissed, and was deciding what to do about that—as if the cards were mine. But then she stopped—I could have sworn she was about to wink—and tipped her head at my breast pocket.

“Read that and you’ll know.”

 

I kept my bargain with myself and let another twenty-four hours go by before looking at the papers Hal had sent me. You can’t make your living as a fishing guide without the patience to let things unfold in due course, and I passed the day as a tourist: window-shopping on Fifth Avenue, taking in the ceiling at Grand Central, riding the subway down to the bottom of the island to see the Statue of Liberty. It was nice to think of Hal’s envelope, sitting on the Louis XIV writing desk in my overpriced room at the St. Regis, waiting for me. I returned to the hotel for dinner, ate a steak at the bar under King Cole’s bleary gaze, and killed a couple of hours shooting the breeze with a pair of agribusiness executives in from Minneapolis for a trade show (their company manufactured a little gizmo that, from what I could tell, made it possible to control a tractor from outer space), rode the elevator to my room, showered and put on my pajamas, then lay on the big bed before finally opening the envelope. The document it contained was a photocopied addendum to Harry’s will, marked “draft,” with a little yellow Post-it note affixed: You never saw this. I read what it had to say, called Lucy to tell her what I had learned and what I thought our options were, then ripped the thing into pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

In the morning I awoke early, fisherman’s hours, and took a walk through Central Park just as the sun was punching through the skyline. I had the place practically to myself for the first half hour, but soon the paths filled up with people: joggers wearing headphones and dog-walkers with their dutiful pooper-scoopers, Rollerbladers who whizzed past me in a burst of musty air, a few nannies pushing strollers and talking together in Spanish. I walked around the reservoir and remembered my life, the days when my mother died and Kate was born and all the rest, and by the time I returned to the St. Regis, a little after nine o’clock, I knew what I would do. I took coffee and a sweet roll from a buffet in the bar and returned to my room to phone Hal.

“Two million five,” I said.

“Can you hang on a second, Joe? I have to go outside and fire Zoe.” A moment of silence followed, while he put the phone down and did whatever a man like Hal does when he’s about to drop a lot of money on what, he knew, was a sentimental whim, and not even his own.

“Okay, my friend. Two point five it is. And if you ever tell anyone what a pushover I am, I will have you vaporized. Believe me. I know people who know people. Are we done?”

“Mostly. Draw up the revised agreement but date it for September, after we close down for the season. I’ll sell him the camp, but I won’t be his employee. It’s nothing personal, I’ve just never worked for anyone and I don’t want to start now.”

I heard Hal sigh. “Of course it’s personal, Joe. It’s all personal. And September is too late, for reasons that are so obvious I’ll assume you’re bluffing. How’s this: Mid-July, but we’ll work something into the paperwork that leaves you in charge for the time being. Management to transfer to his estate at the time of his death, something like that. Sally can figure out the details. Will that satisfy you?”

I understood that it would have to. “All right. That’s good of you.”

For a moment neither of us spoke.

“Joe, it’s not everybody who gets to grant a dying man’s last wish. I don’t want to get too deep here, but that’s what you’re doing, and it matters. To all of us. I really mean that.”

“I know you do.” The receiver was heavy in my hand, and I realized if I stayed on the phone another second, I would probably change my mind. “Just send the plane, will you, Hal? I want to go home.”