NINE

Harry

I never saw her again, my nurse with her knitting needles. I had dreamt her, of course, or the morphine had; I knew this without being told, as I also knew not to ask. Still, I thought she might visit me again, or I hoped she would, that night by the lake when I slept but did not sleep, dreamed but did not dream, was awake every minute and also not. The final unmaking of time, all its solid, familiar order undone, so that even the rhythm of day and night has lost its meaning and one is everywhere in one’s life at once; all that night I drowned in time. And when dawn came—when the blackness of the shades began to pale, and the sky began the slow unlocking of its captured light—I was so surprised to find I was alive I assumed I actually wasn’t. I was dead, but Meredith and Sam were not; while I had slept and died the earth and its heavens had flipped like a cake from a pan, and it was they who were alive, and missing me.

“Pop?” The creak of the cabin door, and behind it, a sweeping arc of day. Morning fills the room; in the chair by my bed, my grown son, Hal. I feel these things without looking. Just lifting my eyelids seems to require an impossible effort, like lifting a piano or reciting the phone book.

“Pop, it’s Hal.”

I thought I said something. I thought I said, I dreamed I was dead, Hal. I saw your mother and brother. She was giving him his bottle in the armchair by the window, the one with the maple tree outside. The leaves were fat and green, and it was long ago.

“How’re you feeling, Pop?”

The baby began to cry; his diaper was wet. She changed him on the dresser, softly humming a song through the pins she held in her mouth. That sweet time of bottles and diapers, the smell of talcum and steam from the stove and the quiet house, and days folded into days. The taste of pins. It was a good dream, Hal.

“That’s okay, Pop.” His hand takes my wrist; he is watching me breathe, I know. I do my best to give him good breaths. But all the air I possess seems to sit at the top of my lungs, the slenderest inch of oxygen, like an ankle-deep puddle marooned by an evaporated sea.

“Well, you rest more.” He pats my arm to tell me I’ve done well. “Okay? Just rest. I’ll be back in a little while.”

Footsteps, voices, all about me the rising tide of day. I hear the sound of Joe’s pickup driving down the trace, the hollow clap of aluminum canoes coming on and off their racks, the bee-like, dopplered buzz of an outboard as it rounds the farthest point—the sounds of departure, of everything streaming away. Franny enters, full of her big-heartedness and the well-intentioned pretense that with a little more shut-eye I will be as right as rain and ready to run the hurdles. She kisses me on the forehead while she smooths my hair with her fingers, tells me about the weather in her loud, husky voice, holds my head to help me take small sips of water from a plastic cup. Harry, she says, are you being good? No fooling around now; rest is what you need. The lake isn’t going anywhere, she says. When she is gone, Hal, my good lieutenant, returns with January, and a breakfast of muffins and juice I can smell but not bring myself to look at. From the little girl’s lips bubble pleasant bits of wordlike sound: “baboo,” “mawmish,” “ticknuck.” Gibberish, and yet as I watch her from my bed, her thoughts are as clear to me as the voice of an orator at a podium: Where is Mommy? Why is everyone acting this way, the way they do when I can’t sleep because my ears hurt and they take me to the doctor? Her eyes inspect my useless form with calm appraisal. I like the ducks, the ducks are interesting. There are ducks in New York, at the park where we go on Sunday and Daddy reads his paper, ducks and a carousel and a zoo with white bears like the ones in my snow globe. I like the bears best of all. If you’d asked, I could have told you. Grandpa, is that why we came, because you’re sick, and to see the ducks in Maine?

Is that what it means to be old?

 

Meredith’s hand healed and was soon forgotten. Even the doctor who examined it the next day—complimenting my handiwork, and the choice of diaper ointment—seemed wholly unalarmed. We’d been to a party? How many drinks had she had? She looked tired; was the baby letting her sleep? He waved a flashlight beam over her damp eyes, asked her to hold out her hands and press her palms against his own, to stand on one foot and hop. The last made her laugh with embarrassment; hopping, like some kind of pogo stick! Was that all modern medicine could come up with? Twelve hours since the smell of burning skin had filled the kitchen, and now she was joking. The doctor was nobody we’d seen before: a slim man, olive-complexioned, who exuded a faint aroma of oranges. The lenses of his eyeglasses were thick as paperweights. When he was finished with his questions, he pulled a stool to the examining table and sat. Atop his head floated a disk of pink skin that I watched while he re-dressed her hand and smoked, squinting over the cigarette that bobbed in the corner of his mouth. He had read something lately, he remarked, about cigarettes and their deleterious effect on circulation at the extremities. He tipped one shoulder and frowned. He was no example, he admitted, rising and plucking a speck of tobacco from his tongue, but perhaps she might consider quitting smoking.

“He had the worst halitosis,” Meredith said on the ride home. Her hand, wrapped in heavy gauze, lay palm-up on her lap—not part of her, but an object in its own right, like a package she was bringing to a party.

“I thought he smelled like oranges. Isn’t that strange? Who smells like oranges?”

The doctor had given her a painkiller of some kind, a large white pill he said would make her drowsy. For a while we drove in silence.

“Maybe I will,” she said finally.

“Will what?”

She turned toward me in her seat. Her left hand floated upward, a levitating cloud, and made a little wave. “Quit smoking.”

Which she did; she stopped that very day, sweeping through the house to collect the cigarettes and matches and toss them in a bag and out the door, and soon enough the bandages came off, and what happened that summer night in the kitchen on Marvine Road faded from memory—a small and curious episode, but in the end an isolated occurrence, or so we thought, and certainly nothing to fret over. How did you get that scar? a friend might ask, passing her a drink at a party. That scar there on your hand? And for a moment Meredith would pause to examine it, to hold her hand before her face and turn it in the light like an old letter she’d found in the bottom of a drawer. Oh, this? she’d say, her voice brightening with recognition This scar? You know, it was the funniest thing, what happened, the strangest thing really; we’d just gotten home from a party—Harry, do you remember? That doctor with the awful breath. You always tell it better than I do.

Then Sam was sick, and what happened that night in the kitchen was mislaid, along with everything else. We were the parents of a sick child, a baby who would not grow, who still, as he passed his first birthday, wore the same clothing, the little T-shirts and fuzzy bags with arms, that we’d bought the week when he was born. It fell upon us swiftly, that awful year, beginning with an autumn cold that became bronchitis, which became pneumonia, and on and on—a period of time that seemed not to pass but to spread like spilled ink into a single, everlasting night of panic. No one understood what was happening; even the doctors could not explain it, not completely. His lungs were weak; there was something wrong with his liver; his heart, for no apparent reason, skipped every sixteenth beat. His body was a magnet for every kind of illness and infection. For a while we thought CF—cystic fibrosis. But the tests said no. Through the winter and spring he worsened: measles, strep throat, roseola with a blast of fever and convulsions; no childhood illness failed to touch him in those months. But when I remember that time, it’s not the frantic nighttime dashes to the hospital I think of, or even the long, white hours of the hospital, but odd, unrelated moments when I found myself alone. Dusting off the car in the driveway after a sudden snowfall, in case Sam needed to go to the doctor; standing by the electric doors of the emergency room to wait for news and watching a haze of spring rain floating through the lighted cones of the street lamps; sitting in the kitchen of my quiet house on a morning in July—a morning when our baby was actually home and well—and feeling, for the first time, that Sam would truly die. Other children Sam’s age would have been walking, saying their first words, learning to eat from a spoon. Our little boy was learning only how to leave us behind.

He would be forty-five now, a grown man, if he had not died that fall. His final pneumonia took him quickly: a fever that rocketed skyward, the tiny, bottlelike lungs filling, coma, death within hours. After all he’d been through, it seemed a mercy, though of course that was an illusion, something to say to fill the silence of his missing life: the bicycle he would not ride, the books he would not read, the friends he would not have and the girl he would not kiss. The thousand pains and pleasures of his life, shelved in a tomb that the door of early death had sealed. No, there was no mercy in what happened to my boy at all. When he died, he weighed just eleven pounds.

It’s said that many marriages do not survive the loss of a child, that such grief is a room parents enter together but depart alone. I have no cause to argue the point, having sat in just that room. From that day forward we loved each other, Meredith and I, but we loved with broken hearts. And when, on a morning not long after we had buried Sam, I came into the kitchen to find Meredith standing at the window, cupping the curve of her stomach in a secret way that I alone understood, I knew we would go on.

 

Why Sam but not Hal? There is no knowing. I might as well ask, why Meredith and not me? I had a dog once—what a dog he was! A retriever with something else mixed in, a breed that liked to work and herd: Australian shepherd, maybe, or collie. I named him Mauritz, though Hal called him Ritzy, and it stuck. Ritzy the dog. A steadfast member of the team, as relentless as a metronome: Meredith joked that he would have taken a job bagging groceries at the corner market if only he’d had hands. I loved him, as one can only love such a dog; but I also knew what he was. Behind his eyes, twin chestnuts of the most tender soulfulness, lay, encased in its suitcase of bone, a brain that knew nothing at all of time or sorrow or even the true joy that sorrow makes possible—only its own desire to please, an aching, needful love that could achieve its fullest contentment with the most meager offering: a stale biscuit, a walk around the block to do his business, a pat on his golden head. His own existence, its nature and finitude, was a mystery to him; he might have thought he was a person, or else I was a dog. The day I took him to the vet to have him put down—he was thirteen, his hips so bad he could barely walk to his bowl—I could think of only this to say: “You have been a good dog, and a great comfort to me, and I thank you.” It was all he wanted to hear. I’d never wished so badly to be the dog he thought I was.

We waited for Hal to grow sick, as his brother had, and to this day I think that because of this fear we never quite loved him well enough: we braced ourselves against his departure with the timid fantasy that he was not our son but a kind of visitor, a nephew or refugee, a child misplaced by unfortunate circumstances and temporarily given to our care. No photo albums or memento books or birthday parties (not until he was twelve and simply insisted; by then we had moved to Chappaqua and Hal couldn’t be stopped from showing his friends he had a house with a pool). His entire early childhood went unrecorded and then, as his mother became ill, was subsumed by her struggle. I made my money, grew my business; it’s not important how. Two stores became four, four became eight, a phone call from a withering competitor, offering to sell, and then the floodgates opened. My touch was golden; everywhere it was said that Harry Wainwright could do no wrong. And yet the money was nothing, the long hours pure distraction; Sam’s death had turned me from a father into a provider, and into this task I poured myself like water from a pitcher. All of which is not to say that Hal is not a fine man, only that I can take no credit for this.

And, giving the loudest laugh to our fears, Hal was not just healthy, but robust. I realized this all at once, on an evening when Hal was fourteen. I was moving the garbage cans to the corner, a pair of large cans on wheels, when, over my shoulder, I felt his presence. The sun was behind us; his shadow, thrown on the driveway, stretched ten feet into the road. The effect was an illusion, a ten-foot-tall boy on eight-foot legs, like a giant from a fairy tale, but when I turned, the image I had just seen conflated in my mind with the actual boy before me, and what I saw wasn’t a boy at all, but a man, or nearly. The broad chest, the tight waist, the legs and arms roped with muscle: all of these were a man’s. He wore gym shorts, red high-top sneakers, and T-shirt despite the autumn chill—it was October, close to Halloween—and in the crook of one arm he was cradling a basketball. The way he held it, with such casual ease, seemed to transform the object completely, to inject it with vivid life: not a toy but a tool, like a carpenter’s hammer or a writer’s pen, it had become an extension of all the coiled energy inside him.

“What are you staring at?”

“Nothing. Just taking out the cans.”

“You were staring.”

I shrugged, still taken aback by the sight of him. I felt a little foolish. I loosened my tie. “How you holding up there? You want to shoot some baskets?”

He frowned. “You never shoot baskets.”

“I can try. I used to be pretty good, you know.”

He said nothing about this, but released the ball and gave it one firm bounce on the blacktop, catching it cleanly with a single, outstretched palm.

“Back in Scranton.”

I heard the derision in his voice: Scranton, my boyhood Eden. I hadn’t been back for years and years; my father was long dead, my mother living now in Florida. Every quarter I sent a huge check to the nursing home, and three or four times a year I flew down to visit, usually alone, since Meredith could no longer travel. But Scranton: I’d not really been back for more than a quick visit since ’43, and the day my father drove me north to the Maritime.

“Sure.”

“I’m thinking of trying out for the varsity.”

“Hey. That’s great. You should.”

He bounced the ball again. “I could have done that,” he said flatly, and pointed with his eyes to the cans.

“It’s no bother. I’ve got it.” I rolled the last can into its spot by the curb. “The varsity. That’s really terrific, Hal. What does your coach think?” I tried to remember his name but couldn’t. A heavyset man with a back wide as a tortoise, wearing a whistle on a string. Myers?

“The cans are my job, Pop. That’s all I came out here to say.”

 

By this time—the day I saw my son’s shadow in the driveway and knew how much I’d missed—Meredith’s hand was no longer a mystery. Another shadow falling across those years of work and worry: as Hal grew, the inkling that something was seriously wrong with Meredith grew beside him, like a dark flower in an adjacent pot. Small, inexplicable injuries, the kind of mishaps that happen to everyone from time to time but in Meredith began to accumulate with the force of a mortal argument. For a while it was a joke: clumsy Meredith, accident-prone Meredith, Meredith who could trip over her own feet on a bare floor in broad daylight. She dropped things, knocked things off tables, sliced her fingers open on knives and can openers, banged into other cars in parking lots; her arms and legs and hands accumulated scars like a Russian general’s medals. Headaches, and a permanent sheen of sweat, and she was always, always cold: For goodness’ sake, she would grouse, why is it always so freezing in here? Did somebody forget to pay the gas bill? What’s wrong with this thermostat? What’s the point of finally having a little money if we can’t heat the house? Never mind that it was summer, the windows wide open, the leaves fat and full of chirping birds. Once, on a trip to Florida, on a day of ninety-degree heat and humidity heavy as goulash, she wore a wool coat to the beach.

It was when her speech began to flatten and slur—not the way a drunk speaks, the words collapsing under their own weight, but more as a kind of snuffing out, certain syllables inexplicably melting as she spoke: peesh for peach, shuz for shoes, tawble for table—that a diagnosis was achieved. I use the passive deliberately; it was an event without agency, as when one says “It’s Tuesday” or “It rained.” Syringomyelia: nothing we had ever heard of, and for just a moment, sitting in the doctor’s office on Fifth Avenue on a pleasant winter afternoon after a train ride into the city and a good lunch downtown, the newness of the word itself made us fail to feel its weight. Seated on the far side of his desk, we shared a funny look. We had a boy in school, a business to run, ideas about the future: of a house in Maine or Florida, or selling the business and retiring early, of seeing London and Paris and Rome. If we had never heard of it, how bad could it be? Though of course the opposite was true: we’d never heard of it because it was rare, infinitesimally rare, and nothing you would want to know about if you didn’t have to, like a brutal little war fought far away among people whose names you couldn’t pronounce.

The doctor removed a fountain pen from his shirt pocket and, on a yellow legal pad, quickly sketched a pair of lines with a series of flattened circles between them. A cutaway view of Meredith’s spine, we understood; really, it ought to curve a little bit, he said, like so, but we got the idea. He pointed with the tip of his pen to the flattened circles. See these? They were cysts, he explained, fluid-filled spaces where none should be; it was possible Meredith had been born with them, or at least had had them many years. It was hard to say, though in her case he believed the condition had been present for some time. She might have a single cyst, or several. The precise mechanisms were not well understood, he continued, though it was known that over time these cysts elongated, pushing nerve tissue against the bones of her spine. Imagine a balloon, he said, slowly expanding in a tube. Patients usually felt the effects first at the extremities—she said she’d first noticed this some years ago, yes, an incident with a cigarette, when she’d burned herself and not felt it? And, as the condition progressed, other things, the complaints she knew so well: the sweating and the constant coldness, the headaches and stumbling, the cuts and scrapes and difficulties of speech and the lack of sexual responsiveness. (For we had conceded this, too, when pressed, though also saying, well, wasn’t such a thing more or less natural, didn’t that just generally fade over time in any marriage?) All of this happening as the cysts filled and stretched and did their damage.

We listened like students, feeling somehow chastened; I had the absurd thought that we had fallen into a dream in which we were kids together at school and had been held back after class. The doctor’s office door was closed; hung on the wall behind his desk were diplomas, certificates, assorted testaments to his credentials, all in heavy, gilt-edged frames. I tried to read them but failed, realizing only then, and with a mild alarm, that they were written in Latin. Time flattened under their gaze; all our life, it seemed, we had been sitting in offices like these. All right, I said, rousing myself, but about these cysts. When would they stop growing? Or could they be removed somehow? A pained and startled look bloomed across the doctor’s face. He was sorry, he said, that he had not been clear. The thing was, they didn’t stop growing. And inside the spinal column was far beyond reach. Perhaps someday such a thing would be possible, but that was years away. The nerves, we understood, were slowly being crushed. There was nothing to be done. He was truly, truly sorry. He knew we had a boy, still young. It was not good news, he knew.

How does anyone begin such a new era in their lives? We thanked him and left and took a taxi to the station. The strangest thing of all, how ordinary life goes on: even the condemned man needs to fill the hours. Beneath the smudged heavens of Grand Central, we ate littlenecks at the Oyster Bar, then went to catch our train. Before boarding, Meredith bought a magazine from a vendor on the platform, and a bag of roasted cashews. As the train carried us north, I watched her flipping through the pages, pausing here and there to read an article of interest, chewing on the roasted cashews that she removed, one at a time, from the waxed paper bag. The pages were printed with a cheap ink, and I saw that her fingers were smudged. Neither of us had said a word about the doctor’s pronouncement; we had entered a kind of trance, the bubble of first-knowing. Her condition could take ten years to run its course, he’d said, and watching Meredith read her magazine, I felt for the first time in my life the shortness of a decade. Ten years, a hundred years, a thousand—once passed, I thought, time was all the same, all over. When the train stopped at Hartsdale, I saw, under the lights of the platform, that it had begun to snow. The air was as still as held breath, absolutely without motion, and the snow descended through it in loose, unhurried swirls, following barely detectable currents. A moment of churchlike silence: the car was so quiet I could hear the snow falling. I watched it a moment, then closed my eyes and tried to hold this image in my mind, to make it last, but then I felt the yank of the car as the force of the engine was relayed down the line and we were pulled out of the station, away. A surge of cold air behind us, and the conductor marched through the car, grabbing ticket stubs from seat backs, singing the names of the towns that lay ahead: White Plains, Valhalla, Mt. Pleasant, Hawthorne.

Meredith took my hand. “It will be all right,” she said.

I wanted to tell her this was so, but couldn’t. It would not be all right. I looked at her hand in mine, then back out the window, where the darkness of a winter night hid everything from view.

“You’ll see,” she said.

Our car was waiting in the station lot, the windshield and fenders dusted with snow. Hal was still at a friend’s; we would have the house to ourselves. As we stepped into the front hall I felt a sudden rush of panic. The stairs, the narrow doorways, the bathrooms with their sleek tile floors: everything would have to be changed. Meredith would need a bedroom on the first floor; we would have to add on, or move. What a heavy task, to plan for these things, to sit at the kitchen table over cups of coffee and describe to a carpenter the ramps and handholds we would need to install before they actually became necessary.

The house was cold, even for me. I let Ritzy out into the yard, adjusted the thermostat, and got myself a whiskey; Meredith moved through the house, turning on lights and setting things to rights. I heard her dial the kitchen phone, then her voice, tired but somehow bright, speaking to the mother of the boy Hal had passed the day with: oh yes, absolutely, everything was fine, it was a nice day to be in the city, especially with the holidays over and all that craziness done for the year, and would it be all right, we were wondering, for Hal to spend the night? We so rarely got an evening to ourselves. One of us would come by in the morning, to pick him up for school. Wonderful, she said, loud enough for me to hear. We couldn’t thank her enough.

She came to me where I was sitting on the sofa, a glass of whiskey in my hand, though I had yet to take a sip.

“Do you want one?” I raised my glass. “I could make tea too.”

She shook her head: no. After all that had happened, after this long day of all long days, she still looked fresh: her gray suit still pressed, her makeup in order, her brown hair framing her face. Around her neck she wore the pearls I had given her for our fifth anniversary; somewhere between the front door and the kitchen she had removed her shoes.

“I always knew, Harry,” she said finally. “Not exactly, not the name for it, but the kind of thing it was. In a way I’m relieved to hear it.”

“How did you . . . ?” But of course I knew how. It was her body; she’d felt it moving away.

“That’s not important. And I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “Not now. Not tonight. Maybe not ever.” Her eyes were unyielding; she had decided something. “I’m tired, Harry. I need you to warm me up.”

“I set the thermostat. I can build a fire too.”

“Never mind that.” She extended a hand to me. Beneath the skin her bones were rods of ice. “What I mean is, you’re my husband, and I want you to come upstairs with me, now.”

She led me up the stairs, slowly, each step cautiously planted, as she had learned to do. In our room she turned on a bedside lamp, a blaze of light that neither of us wanted, and she quickly doused it again. The house had never felt so quiet. It seemed as if the whole world had forgotten about us, that the lights had dimmed everywhere, all across the planet. In New York and Chicago, Paris and Peking, in all the towns and villages of the world, humanity had lapsed into a sleep that did not include us, even in dreams. In the dark we undressed and got under the covers of our bed. For months, a year even, making love had been impossible; she was simply not able. We held each other a long while without speaking, both of us crying a little; I thought how we would have to be content with this from now on, holding and crying, but then she left my side. I felt myself sink into the warmth and softness of her, then the familiar pulsing that seemed to come from everywhere at once: from what she was doing and the air of the room and deeper still, through all the walls of the house, into the foundation, straight down through miles of rock to the center of the turning earth, and I closed my eyes and followed it. I understood what she was telling me; this was how we would make love from now on. She would love me with her body, however she could, until this could happen no more.

 

I want to tell this story truly, so here it must be said that I also loved another, and how that came to pass: the story in which the married man with the sick wife and the son he does not love enough, or well enough, because he is simply afraid to, permits himself the one, small present he is forbidden. The story in which he is not a hero, not at all.

And yet to say I loved Lucy would be a lie, or at least a kind of self-flattering half-truth. Those weeks in summer: I took them like medicine, a balm against my life, and Meredith’s slow dying. All year long I didn’t think of the place at all; I saw to my business and took Meredith to the doctor and learned to dress and bathe her, and hired the nurses that would help me do these things; I learned, in due course, about the drugs she needed for pain and infection, and how to keep her skin healthy and dry, and about the pans and bags, when that time came. When she could no longer hold a book or magazine or even a newspaper, I read them aloud, or sat in our bed beside her, turning the pages as she asked. I did all these things, and then each July, I packed the car, leaving Meredith in the care of her nurse, and drove north, and the camp would be there waiting, as if I’d never left. Nothing was ever stated or planned; and yet Lucy would find me at the check-in desk, timing some minor chore to coincide with my arrival, or else leave a basket waiting for me in the cabin, always number nine, and tucked in with the sandwich and fruit and sweating bottle of beer still cold from the icebox, a sarcastic, flirty note: Back for more raspberry pancakes, huh? or Warning, this basket will self-destruct in ten seconds, so eat fast. Innocent enough, though they were nothing I could bring myself to throw away or allow myself to keep.

Hal accompanied me only a handful of times in those years; it was boring, he said, by which he meant quiet and always the same, and he missed being at home with his friends. He was an athletic kid who liked and did well at sports, rough games where boys collided into other boys: basketball for most of the year but also football in the fall and lacrosse when he was old enough. Standing in a cold stream or sitting stock-still in the bottom of a canoe for hours at a time, not even daring to speak so as not to scare the fish—these were as anathema to his nature as needlepoint. By the summer he was twelve he had had his fill, and it wasn’t for years and years, not until long after his mother had died, that he joined me again; for now I went alone.

“Tell me about Meredith.”

It was the summer of 1968, our fifth July, when Lucy asked me this. A year of tribulations: King was dead, Bobby Kennedy was dead, there were riots in the slums and in the prisons, that great liar Johnson had all but locked himself away, a mad king in his tower; on television every night we watched the prosecution of a war that seemed to test not one’s patriotism but the human appetite for gore. In March, Meredith had broken her hip in a fall in the bathroom; two surgeries, and it was still unclear if she would be able to walk again. The worst possible year. And yet here I was, drinking a beer on the dock after a day so idyllic I hadn’t wanted even to cast a flyline into it, lest even this small fingerprint of my presence disturb its perfection. I had spent the morning walking the long trail that ran beside the river, and then taken a canoe out for an aimless paddle around the lake. I hadn’t spoken a word since breakfast, not until Lucy had seen me on the dock and taken the Adirondack chair next to mine. That summer she had taken over the kitchen from Daphne Markham, who, it was said, had met a man through a Methodist missionary pen-pal service and gone off with him to Ecuador.

We were sitting side by side, watching the lake soak up the last of the light. A scene of such preternatural calm, the effect was distorting, like a spell: two miles away, the pine-clad mountains that rose from the far side had the softened look of Iowa hills in a Grant Wood painting. It seemed possible to reach out and hold one in the hand.

“Fair enough. What do you want to know?”

“Is she pretty, is she smart, does she like hats, what’s her favorite color?” Lucy laughed and folded her legs under herself, as limber as a gymnast. “You know, Harry, the details.”

I sipped my beer. “Yes to the first, very much, and I’ve always thought so. Yes again, but not in the same way as you. Absolutely no to hats. As for the last, I don’t know. Blue, I think. She used to wear a lot of blue.” She let the compliment pass, unremarked: just as well.

“Used to. What happened to blue?”

I took a moment to think. “Well, now that you mention it, she does have a kind of blue dressing gown she likes. My turn?”

“Not so fast. And you know Joe, anyway. Where did you meet her?”

“Why do you want to know that?”

“People meet.” She shrugged. “It’s always a story.”

“In a restaurant, near the end of the war. Where did you meet Joe?”

“High school. I was a dorky little freshman when he was a sophomore. It was kind of a May-December thing. We didn’t get together until later, though. What restaurant?”

“I don’t remember the name. It might have been more of a taproom. It had a separate ladies’ entrance, I remember, though you don’t see those anymore.”

“Thank God for small favors. Was she pregnant when you married her?”

The question caught me so short I laughed. “What gave you that idea?”

“Don’t be offended. A bar sounds . . . I don’t know, a little questionable. Even one with a, what did you call it”—she deepened her voice mockingly—“a ladies’ entrance.”

“I’m not offended. But it wasn’t that kind of place.”

“Okay, it wasn’t.”

I could have let the matter go. And yet to do so seemed foolish. Why not answer the question? “Well, technically—”

She stopped me with a laugh. “Technically, Harry? Oh, being pregnant is very technical, I’ve heard. Happened to a girl I knew at school. She was very technically pregnant.”

“Point taken.” I was not angry at all; far from it. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but the truth is, yes, she was. Barely, a matter of weeks. We didn’t even know ourselves. Or at least I didn’t. We just told everybody that Sam was born a little early.”

At the mention of his name, a silence fell over us, deeper than the simple absence of sound. She knew about Sam, of course. But I almost never spoke of him, not even with Meredith.

“Oh God, Harry,” she said after a moment. “Me and my mouth. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s all right.” I smiled to reassure her this was so. “It’s not bad to talk about him. In a way it’s easier up here. I didn’t realize it before, but I think he was on my mind all day.”

“What were you thinking?”

For a moment, I let my mind drift: where had my thoughts gone, through all the quiet hours?

“It’s hard to say, exactly. You don’t have specific thoughts, like I bet he’d enjoy this walk in the woods I’m taking, or he’d be this tall by now if he were still alive. It’s more a feeling, like he’s not so far away.” I shrugged, a little embarrassed. “I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“I think it does. Maybe it’s why you come here like you do.”

“Maybe that’s it.” I paused. “You know, it’s not the only reason, Lucy.”

Another silence, even of held breath. The mystery of the feeling between us, whatever it was, was suddenly out in the open, like a deer that had stepped without warning from the underbrush. Even the slightest movement would scare it away.

“Harry—”

“You have to go, I know. Feed the masses.” I made some nervous business of looking at my watch. “You’d better hurry, actually. I think I’ll stay here awhile, finish my beer.”

“That wasn’t what I was going to say, but you’re right.” There was sadness in her face, though I somehow felt I wasn’t the cause; it was for something I didn’t know about. It seemed to spread from her in ripples, like a disturbance on water.

“Harry?”

“Yeah?”

She unwound her legs and rose to go, touching me quickly on the shoulder. “Thanks for saying I’m smart.”

 

The next summer, Joe was gone. The story I heard through the grapevine was that his father had driven him north to Canada just before he was supposed to be inducted; Joe Sr. had a special way up there, involving old logging roads that nobody used or checked. He had arranged a job in New Brunswick for his son, as he had for so many others. A warrant had been issued for Joe’s arrest, on the charge of desertion.

The sadness I had seen in Lucy’s face that afternoon on the dock seemed to have settled over her like a change of season; it was the first summer that she neither greeted me at check-in nor left a basket in my cabin, and in fact I didn’t see her at all until the following morning, when I came into the dining room for breakfast. The place was packed; I lingered at the entrance, pretending to scan the room for a table. Then the kitchen door swung open, exhaling a sweet breath of cinnamon and bacon fat, and there she was, wiping her hands on a dish towel, speaking over her shoulder to somebody at the stove; turning, she caught my eye and smiled. She looked tired, older somehow, as if far more than a year had passed. The skin at her temples was stretched by worry. Her brow was damp, her hair uncombed and tied back in a careless bun. She hugged me quickly and told me I looked well, and that she was sorry she hadn’t been able to see me sooner. “I guess you heard” was all she said of Joe.

Later that afternoon everyone gathered in the main lodge, where Joe Sr. had rigged up a television. The room was crowded with guests, some regulars, old friends I knew; someone had brought wine and was passing it around in little paper cups. A man I hadn’t seen before said he’d brought a better television, a color Trinitron. A murmur of interest went up—well, why not, if he had brought a better set? But then someone else pointed out that the broadcast would be black-and-white anyway, the images beamed from a quarter million miles away, and the momentum behind the idea was lost.

Lucy appeared and took a place beside me on the sofa. Like some of the other women, she had dressed up a little and put on a bit of makeup, as if for a party.

“I wonder if Joe’s watching this,” she said. “Do they care in Canada? Do they even have TV?”

“Look,” a woman behind us said. “He’s coming out.”

The opening door, the slow progress down the ladder, the bouncing, marionettelike steps: images at once familiar and completely new, their strangeness magnified by their very ordinariness. As Armstrong’s foot touched the surface, a hurrah went up from the room. I suddenly wished I was back in New York, watching this with Meredith and Hal. I resolved to phone home as soon as the broadcast ended. Did you see it! I would say. The moon!

“I’ve heard it’s all faked,” someone said. It was the man with the color set. He looked around the room, grinning like a pumpkin. “This is all being televised from a TV studio in Texas.”

When no one laughed, the woman beside him, his wife I guessed, swatted him on the shoulder with a magazine.

“How would you know?” She spoke loudly to friends. “Believe me, he wouldn’t know if something was faked if his life depended on it.”

That evening after dinner we all went out to the dock and drank champagne, under a wedge of gray moon that seemed somehow closer, as if the world had risen to meet it. It followed a descending arc along the tips of the trees and, just past eleven, disappeared for the night. The champagne had taken hold: some people were swimming, despite the cold. The night had opened like a book. When the swimming ended a call went up for music; somebody ran a long extension cord up the dock to connect a radio to an outlet by the lodge. A wall of static, and then the air was filled with the sound of an orchestra, Basie or Ellington, the first bars of a song I didn’t recognize, and scampering up and over the wall-like barricade of strings, the unmistakable voice of Ella Fitzgerald. Bar by bar, the song came into focus, like a picture: “How High the Moon.” The sound seemed to reach us not through the airwaves but across a sea of time.

“Hey, everybody,” the man with the radio said, “I guess they heard!”

Couples found one another and danced on the dock. Lucy had left the party when the swimming began; sitting by myself, I felt a little relieved that she was gone. Had she stayed, I would have asked her to dance—it was inevitable, a fact ordained by the evening’s currents—but I felt this would have been awkward, not only because of what had passed between us the summer before, but also because Joe was gone.

“Come on, Harry.” It was the wife of the man with the color television who pulled me to my feet. I could tell she’d had a lot to drink, though we all had. We’d introduced ourselves earlier in the evening; they were Ken and Leonie. She was a trim woman with reddish hair cut short and large, damp eyes—pretty, though in the slightly anxious way of fading beauties after forty. Her husband, a barrel-chested Irishman, was dancing with another woman from their group.

“I’m not much of a dancer,” I confessed.

“That’s good, because I’m too loaded to care. This is the first interesting thing that’s happened since we got here.”

She placed her head against my shoulder and pulled me in close. Her breath smelled of alcohol and lipstick. I thought of Lucy, wondering where she had gone off to.

“Hey, you’re good,” Leonie said after a few steps. “I don’t know what you were talking about.” She pulled her face away and directed her voice to her husband. “That’s right, honey,” she said cheerfully, “you go on and dance all you want, I’ve found somebody new.”

“Maybe you should dance with him,” I offered.

Her hand slid up my back until I felt her fingers lightly moving on the skin of my neck. The gesture was impersonal; I could have been anyone. Her body had turned to liquid, melding against my own.

“He doesn’t care, you know,” she said quietly. “It’s how we do things.”

“Really, I have to go after this one song.”

“Listen to you,” she moaned disapprovingly. “So uptight.”

We finished our dance and I made my escape. I hadn’t lied; it really was late, nearly one A.M. But it was also true that I’d felt myself on the verge of doing something foolish. Meredith’s illness had frozen that part of my life, made such urges seem trivial. But they could not be banished entirely. I’d pulled myself away from the music and dancing the way one says no to a fourth drink. But returning to my cabin down the dark path, I felt lonely, even a little ridiculous. I was forty-four years old; I might have been thirteen, or a hundred.

I undressed and lay in the dark, sleepless with the sugary champagne. Through the windows I could still hear the music of the radio, floating across the lake, and now and again a loud voice or laughter. More splashing: the swimming had resumed. I wondered if Leonie had found someone else to amuse her.

Then I was brightly, urgently awake, and wondering where I was. Someone was knocking on the door, or else I had dreamt this. I picked up my watch from the bedside table and squinted at it in the dark: 3:20. I had slept almost two hours. I lay back on the pillow and had almost forgotten the knocking when it came again: not a vigorous banging, but a quiet, almost uncertain tapping, like a code. I rose and opened the door.

“Harry?”

It was Joe. I flicked on the porch light and opened the screen to step out. His face was bearded and dirty; he was carrying a pack. The look on his face was one of embarrassment, almost fear. He held up his hands against the sudden light.

“Turn it off, please.”

“What are you doing here?”

He looked around nervously. “Please, just turn it off. I don’t want anyone to see me.”

I reached back into the cabin and doused the light. A moment of absolute confusion: I realized he hadn’t been looking for me at all.

“Shit, I’m sorry, Harry. Pretend you never saw me, okay?”

“Does your father know you’re here?”

“No, and he’d better not. I mean it.” He shuddered and shook his head. “Jesus, what the fuck.”

Another voice reached us from around the corner. “Joe? Joe, is that you?”

Joe stepped off the porch as Lucy appeared and flew into his arms. He picked her up and gave a happy growl. The months away had released something in him, a kind of animal power. He put her down and looked at her, hugged her again.

“God, you smell,” she said. “Where have you been?”

“Long story. Just never ride with chickens, is all I’ll say. What the hell, Luce? Didn’t you tell me cabin nine? I think I permanently scared the shit out of old Harry here.”

She lifted her face and saw me then, standing on the porch; I think she’d forgotten I was there. Old Harry. I understood that she’d been waiting for him, in one of the adjacent cabins, for hours—ever since she’d left the party.

“It’s all right,” I said.

Joe set himself free and stepped up on the porch again. “Sorry again, Harry. Didn’t mean to freak you out like that.” He held out his hand, and we shook. His fingers were rough as pumice. “I guess you know I’m a wanted man, so if it’s all right with you, mum’s the word, okay? If my father knew I was here, he could get in trouble too.”

“You can count on me,” I said. “I won’t breathe a word.”

He descended the porch again and joined Lucy on the path. For a moment, we all three just stood there. A part of me was honestly glad for them, and glad for myself, being there to see it, though I felt a strange ache, too. It was as if I could step forward into the darkness and be utterly consumed by it, obliterated without a trace, remembered by no one. Even to set foot off the porch would set this in motion.

“Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I mean it. You two should get going.”

“Harry?” Lucy’s voice was a whisper.

I put a finger to my lips. “It’s okay,” I said quietly. “Go on.”

They slipped into the shadows. Their absence was total, as if I’d never seen them at all. How long I stood there I can’t recall. I would pack my bags in the morning, I decided. I would leave and not come back. I stood another moment at the rail, saying good-bye. Then I opened the screen door and went inside to bed.