America America (22 page)

It’s daunting for everyone, I suppose, to realize how chance can rework a life. At Sixty-third Street, we found a single guard rubbing his hands and stamping his feet in front of the hall. The performance had indeed been canceled. I still remember the way that guard looked. An exaggerated, almost zoological face; a cigarette-stained smile and a mustache above it like a frozen strip of fur. All of it narrowed by the earflaps of a Russian-style cap. A Pole, maybe. Or a Slav. An unlikely angel. He pointed us around the corner to the single business that remained open: a coffeehouse, named Linden’s.

So many things had to be right. It was a large place, maybe fifty tables, and a corner position that looked out on both streets. We arrived just as a couple was getting up from a booth. At first, Holly took the seat that faced the counter and I took the one that faced onto Broadway; but in a moment she got up and asked me to switch so that she could watch the snow. We changed places. I was looking at the counter now, where knots of customers were taking off hats and coats, stamping boots, and shaking out umbrellas. A squad of waitresses passed close in front of me every few seconds carrying dishes from the kitchen. The busboys were moving, too, hauling big wash trays back in the other direction. But then for some reason there was an exodus: the door opened, a cold breeze washed through the place, and for a moment or two all the standing coats and hats disappeared; and at the same time the waitresses paused in their continuing bustle from the kitchen. For a brief instant I could see all the way across the dining room.

It wasn’t that I recognized her immediately—she’d changed enough that I really didn’t—but my glance lingered anyway. She sat in a booth by herself at the far window, half-turned away from me. She was starkly different. Her cheeks looked either bruised from tears or overly made up, and her hair was short. Still, I had only a moment to look at her, but even before the band of customers regathered at the counter and blocked my view again I had understood with a start who she was.

I remember my reaction. It was shame. I was ashamed to be sitting there across from Holly Steen with her rabbit fur hat and her eager expression. Her thrift-store gloves and her easily given enthusiasms.

We’d ordered omelets, and when Holly finished hers she stood and said she had to use the bathroom. I reached to take her hand, and when my elbow knocked her cup, she said, “We’re so glad to have you in the family.” Then she made her way through the crowd.

When I reached the other side of the restaurant, Christian didn’t even seem surprised. All she said was, “Oh, no—I’m a wreck, aren’t I?”

I stood there looking down at her. She was searching in her purse for something. I only had a few moments. “You look beautiful,” was what I said.

“I’m having a hard day, actually.” She pulled out a book of checks and tore one off.

“Are you all right?”

“Do I
look
all right?”

“I can’t imagine what you must have gone through.”

“I guess it’s been a hard couple of
years
, actually—if you really want to know. I guess I never knew how it felt. Did you?”

“You can’t,” I said. “Nobody can.”

“But we’re having a party this weekend.” She handed me the check. “You ought to come, at least.”

The address was on Eighty-sixth Street, on the west side. “A party?”

“Remarkable,” she said. “But true.”

“No, it’s just that I’m afraid it would be hard. I’m still down in Philly.”

“Who are you here with then?”

I guessed she’d seen. “A girl,” I said. Then I added, “from school. She’s in the bathroom now. How’s Clara?”

“She’s good. She’s about to get engaged.”

“Who to?”

“To a guy she doesn’t want to marry.”

“Oh, I see. In that case, I guess—well, give her my best.”

She looked up. I waited for her to go on.

Her hands were resting in her lap, and she lifted one and set it on top of mine. Then she looked away. “Well,” she said after a moment, “you’d better go back to your table, then.”

O
NE NIGHT
I
WALKED DOWN TO
the dining hall for dinner and found it empty. This was my first Saturday back at Dunleavy after my mother’s funeral. Maybe it was because of this that on my walk to dinner that evening I hadn’t noticed that the paths were empty. And the dining hall itself was abandoned. I checked my watch: six o’clock. The usually boisterous front room was vacant and no places were set at the tables, but instead of looking for someone and asking where dinner was, I walked back to the dorm by myself and up to our room. I’d always been beleaguered at Dunleavy by the sense that I’d failed to grasp something—something important that was the birthright of all my classmates—but that night, perhaps because of what I’d just gone through, I seemed to have been released somehow from my usual apprehensions. I ate some crackers from the drawer and went to the end of the hall for water. That was my meal. No one else was upstairs, either. I sat down at the window in our room.

I hadn’t been there long before I began to hear sound. It grew louder, then softer. Some kind of music. It would appear for a time; then vanish. I stayed there at the window, listening, thinking about my mother, until I realized it was coming from the heating duct. I squatted by the register and listened. A chorus. A chorus of voices.

Presently there was a knock on the door.

“Wow, man,” Astor said. He always knocked, even at our own room. “You think it was angels?”

“I knew it wasn’t angels.”

That made him laugh. “Nobody told you, I guess?”

“I guess not.”

“It’s every Saturday night now. Spring semester, man.” He rolled his eyes. “Glee club—instead of dinner. We eat downstairs and not in the dining room. And we
sing
. Dunleavy tradition.” He rolled his eyes again. “But everybody’s got to do it, man. O’Breece just asked me where you were. It’s not bad, though—really. You might like it. I kind of do, even. I know all the words, too, from my brother. You can have my lyrics book. Mr. O’Breece used to be some kind of opera singer or something. The seniors call him
Mr. Obese
.”

“You’re in your bathrobe,” I said. He was. It was blue with white stripes.

“Oh, yeah,” he answered. “Don’t ask me why. We sing wearing them. Another tradition, I guess. I’ve got an extra for you, man, if you need one.”

“That’s okay. I have my own.”

So, you see, it’s not hard to imagine what someone in my position would have thought about Liam Metarey—it’s not hard to imagine how continually grateful I was to the man whose sturdy hand had once again reached out to help me.

But it was that night, too, that I first had an inkling about my mother, as well. As I stood in the basement commons in my leather-tipped robe with the fifty other boys in my class, working through the tenor part of “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” my mind went incessantly to her. Had she had a part in this, also? I saw her, as far back as I could remember, sitting by the window with her fingertips against her head. Had she, in fact, long known? And if she had, could she actually have gone to Mr. Metarey herself? The Metarey family had always taken care of the citizens of Saline, especially any who were in need. She was certainly aware of that. Was that how all this was set in motion then, from the very beginning?

I don’t think she would ever have asked Liam Metarey for anything directly, but she knew what a word to a man like him could do. And it occurred to me that night that all of it could have been arranged—that all of it
must
have been arranged—without my father even knowing. My father was a proud man, more in his silences than in his words, and the most ardent expression of his pride was his self-sufficiency. That’s why my mother might have been forced to plan her contingency in secret, telling only Mr. Metarey and not her own husband. First my job at Aberdeen West, then my job in the campaign, and finally my departure for Dunleavy, all of it might have been plotted because she knew what was coming—even if she didn’t know when—and the deliberate arc of it might have been kept secret so that it evaded my father’s natural resistance. That’s what my mind kept returning to, as I stood midway back in the rows of giddy juniors wearing robes over their clothes. If she’d asked my father about it in its totality, I have no doubt he would have refused. But it was set in motion one part at a time, and he—like me—was swept along.

That semester, I discovered that I liked to sing. I found that I was decent at it, too—good enough, at least, that I fit in with my classmates. But there was something more to it; something about standing in that cool, low-ceilinged room, where against the four rock walls our voices built themselves into a torrent of sound, something about letting my own voice rise into that stirring mix that seemed at last to set me free.

T
HE HOUSE HAD BEEN CLEANED.
That’s what I saw as soon as I opened the door. The rugs were vacuumed, my father’s boots were sitting on a tray in the entry hall, and all the flowers had been removed except for a vase that had dried at the center of the dining room table. After I brought my bag upstairs to my old room, I came down to see him. He asked me to sit, then disappeared into the kitchen. The flowers were roses, dried papery thin. It was the first time I’d been back. Your childhood home without your mother is no longer your childhood home.

He came out carrying the salad bowl. “You know,” he said, “Mom did this every day.”

“What?”

“Made a salad. Have you ever made a salad?”

“A couple times.”

“You wash the lettuce. Then you have to dry it. If you don’t dry it, the dressing comes out watery. I hate drying it. But I do it. On a paper towel. That’s the way she showed me how. She showed me a lot of this stuff, you know.”

“And then she would dry the paper towel on the windowsill,” I said, “so she could use it the next day.”

“That’s right. So I do it now, too. Come look.”

He went back into the kitchen.

When I came up behind him, he said, “There it is,” and pointed to the sill.

There it was. Damp. Folded over the top stile of the sash to catch the sun.

“I’ve used the same one every day now since—since it happened,” he said. “She’d like that. Dries good as new.” He pulled the roll from the shelf. “They’re Scott, see? She always bought Scott. So now I do, too.” Her apron was still hanging on the stove handle, and after he set the towels back he reached to straighten it. “Wish I could tell her.”

“You seem to be getting along all right, Pop. Place is clean.”

“Her friends do that. She had a lot of them. I’m realizing that. Never knew it before, I guess. A different one every weekend. They clean the place.”

“Not a bad deal.”

“I don’t think they really need to do that. I can clean for myself. Gives me something to do, if you want to know. When I’m not working.”

“Who does the cooking?”

“I do,” he said. “Yours truly. Most of it, at least. I’m learning. It’s not so bad. No worse than pipe fitting, anyway—and I’d rather be cooking, to tell the truth. I made real string beans. You know what you have to do to make string beans? Pull out all the strings—or whatever you call ’em. But first you have to cut off the ends. Every single string bean. You know, two ends. Chop, chop. I made about thirty.”

“That’s a lot of chopping.”

“That’s right. Makes you appreciate every bean. And your mother did it every night.”

“She did, didn’t she? And she washed all our clothes, too. And if I needed my good shirt she ironed it.”

“Mine, too.” He lifted a pot lid, and steam licked the window. I could tell he was fighting his thoughts. “Then you boil ’em,” he said gamely. “I get the water on the stove before I start.”

“And add salt.”

“Right. She always added salt. Everything she cooked tasted good.”

“It did.”

“I miss her, Cor.”

“Of course you do, Pop. So do I. But I missed her before. Ever since I went to school.”

“I miss her every day.” He reached his arm to the stove and smoothed the hips of the apron. “Jeez,” he said. “Listen to me.” He blew his nose on a handkerchief. “But this is going to be just like hers.” He reached for the box of salt. “You won’t know the difference. I found her cookbook. It’s all I need. I read the whole thing.”