America America (34 page)

“I have a very good idea about it.”

She was staring openly at me.

“Doesn’t matter what he did in his private life,” Millar Franks said, and thankfully, he was not the kind of man who noticed anyone else’s reaction at the table. “Henry Bonwiller was brilliant. He was idealistic. He was compassionate. And, as you Americans say, he could play hardball. He was the only powerful progressive politician you’ve ever had.”

“That’s not the point,” I said.

“Yes, it is,” said Andrea.

I looked over at her. In a few months, she would be leaving us. I took a drink of wine and reconsidered. I suppose this is the real reason I didn’t say more. Not to spare our dinner, or our new friendship with Millar Franks, or to avoid the disapproval that had just appeared without the least disguise on the face of my wife. In truth, the reason I didn’t say anything was simply that Andrea would probably never again come with us on such a trip. She might never again sit at a dinner like this, might never again join our conversation so guilelessly, might never again submit to the gentle enchainment that we no doubt were to her now. I swallowed my wine and swirled what remained in my glass.

Millar Franks was going on about American liberalism, but even as I looked down I knew Andrea was aware of me. She was also gazing with obvious interest at our guest.

Andrea is like her mother. Devoted. Fierce. Willful. There is an unexpected trustworthiness in such a character, though, just as there is in Clara. When she was growing up, Andrea was the one who embarrassed us at dinner parties. One night when she was five years old, as her great-aunt Helen sat eating dessert at our table, Andrea said simply, “You’re as fat as a cheese”—an expression that has remained in our family since then; and at nine, a normally well-mannered age for girls, she still had no compunction about saying, in her tin-soldier’s voice, “I don’t like you,” to any grown-up blithe enough to fake affection toward her. She’s always seen right through that one. As a father, I have to say, I take some comfort in it.

And of course I know where it comes from, too. It’s the thing that most scared me about her own mother from the time I first knew her—that same abiding and prickly truthfulness. I first saw it in the days when I was a newcomer to the Metarey family, the days when—no matter how diligently I worked or what I told myself about my new station—I was most obviously an interloper in their world, both in Clara’s eyes and in my own. Clara saw that for what it was; but she also knew—well before I did, I suspect—that what I longed for was not the earthly comfort of that world but all its possibility.

And I’m sure Andrea would have treated an upstart like me the same way. The Metareys set out to make a president. If I asked Clara now what she saw in me, a boy who first spoke to her with a shovel in his hand at the bottom of a sewer trench, I believe that she’d say character; by which, I think, she’d mean discipline—which is the most basic thing her father must have seen, too. It’s a quality of my father’s, as well, expressed for him in the clean, narrow ring of silver between every pair of copper fittings he ever sweated, in the true vertical of every laid-out pipe in every basement he ever plumbed, and in the meticulous, brush-swept floor of every work site he ever left for the day. In another world this would have meant prominence or fortune, and in his own it meant respect, from the men he worked with and the men who hired him.

That’s the firmness Clara saw. And it’s the firmness I see now in Andrea.

My wife, though, probably saw something else in me, as well. I sometimes think that her view is still colored by the great, deferred reverence that she’s finally found for her father. And of course by any daughter’s regular longing for him. I have no doubt that if Liam Metarey had been born in my own house he would have worked as hard as I did and moved just as far as I did from my own beginnings; and it’s also clear that Clara and Christian competed for their father’s benedictions more solemnly than even most sisters do, if a bit more circumspectly. That’s part of it, as well. I still believe that in some way I’m only his stand-in. Liam Metarey was a man who sowed his worldly attentions at a distant reach but turned his private ones halfway inward; and certainly, to his children, this must have made them all the more prized.

And thus I am the recipient of those attentions once again, twice reflected, from his grandchildren. Andrea doesn’t often stop to talk to us now, but when she does it’s with perfect honesty. Clara was openly skeptical of me from the day I met her until the day I wept, standing on her lawn, for my mother. Evidence of an intrinsic understanding of what Mr. Metarey—in a different, darker submission—must have understood himself: that the heart can’t be denied its timing, whether terrible or graced. The afternoon of my mother’s service, Clara moved charitably in and out of my conversation, her hand on my back, reminding me every few moments that she was standing there—a wall I’d always known was solid but that now, suddenly, I could lean on. She did the same thing on our wedding day, not ten years later.

And now it’s Andrea who does it. She’s not the most voluble of our children but she’s certainly the one who’s always provoked the fiercest expression of loyalty from her friends, from girls who used to stay up half the night with her on whispered phone calls, and from boys who’d regularly climb the spindly cedar beside our porch to try and break her queenly resolution. Which I don’t think many of them did. Like her mother, she isn’t afraid enough of anyone to be duplicitous. And like her mother, she won’t let you in until she’s decided to. She’s been that way since she could talk.

That night on the boat, the sea was rather rough and I was sleeping lightly, but I woke shortly after midnight, seemingly without prompting, to find a figure standing in the dimly lighted doorway of our stateroom.

“She’s not in the cabin,” Dayna said.

I sat up in bed. “What? Who’s not?”

“Andrea. She’s not in her bed. I wasn’t sure whether I should say anything.”

I switched on the light above my pillow. My first thought, truly, was not Millar Franks.

“She was there when we went to sleep,” she said. “But now I woke up and she’s not.”

I didn’t bother to wake Clara. Above ship, the decks were slick with dew, and Dayna and I walked their full length, glancing aside into every portico with its two-seat bench and brass-cased running light, and through every porthole into the library and the lounges and the anteroom behind the bridge, from where passengers sometimes watched the crew at work. She was nowhere to be found. I looked over the railing. We were three days north of Vancouver, under a harvest moon. The dark water glinted as it rose in the wake of the prow. I knew Millar Franks was staying on the upper deck, where two penthouse suites stood on either side of the hallway, around a corner from the captain’s quarters.

We walked there. I knocked at his door. No answer. I didn’t knock again. Not out of decorum, really, but because I realized that if Andrea was in there I didn’t want to force her to emerge. Her sister and I waited a few moments in the covered hallway, then returned to the deck.

Dayna is our careful, observant one. Unlike Andrea, she’ll wait out a stranger, quietly, like some bird in the grass, and unlike Emma, she’ll lie down on our living room couch the same evening and report to Clara and me every thought and feeling she’s had that day, as if we were indeed her friends and not, as our Emma seems to believe, her jailers. She reminds me sometimes of my mother—of the way she was just before she died, at least—inquisitive and insistently conspiratorial, and at the same time, I suspect, ceaselessly private. And her laugh, when it comes—not all that often but not rarely, either—is as clear as water. Of course I hear Christian in it.

Emma is our reticent one. She has in her much of her maternal grandfather, in fact. Much of Liam Metarey’s modest grace and affable, generous view of the world, and much of his guarded, quiet solicitude, too. And strange as it may sound, she has grown up touching me on the shoulder, just as her grandfather used to. How is that possible? When she wakes me from a nap in my leather library chair, it is with a hand rustling my hair, and whenever we part for any length of time, first she hugs me and then, stepping away, she reaches back to touch me on the shoulder. She was no doubt sleeping untroubled back in the cabin.

But here was Dayna, fourteen, worried with me about Andrea. She was no doubt more sophisticated than her peers by virtue of having two older sisters, but she was still not at the age when I could assume she knew exactly what was on my mind. I suppose that was prudish of me. In retrospect, it seems particularly so. But that night as we made our way down the penthouse hallway back onto the misty upper deck, I had the feeling of standing delicately between the two of them, of trying to protect my oldest and youngest daughters at once.

Of course, I was also still thinking of the sea. We walked the loop of gangway again, where I could feel the sickening heave of the boat, the full-length tilt and countertilt from the swells that were moving southeast against us as the vessel labored north along the coast. I moved to the railing, pretending to look out at the moon, but really to get a glimpse of the water, to see just how formidable it was. There was a steady wind but not a stiff one. No whitecaps about. I took a pair of binoculars from one of the hooks behind us and pointed it out at the featureless dark. Was I expecting to see her head bobbing somewhere off the stern?

What I did see, in fact, when I suddenly had an idea and leaned over the rail to swing the lens down toward the boat’s waterline, was her shoulder and the back of her hair, and her elbow over the railing alongside a bench on the low deck where the launches were stacked at the stern. Then her cheek, smiling and nodding. I waited. After a moment, a man’s arm, gesturing and pointing out at the water.

“Look,” I said, aiming the binoculars for Dayna. “Land ho!”

“Oh!” she said. “Who’s that with her? Is it Mr. Franks?”

“That would be my guess, too.”

“They’re going to catch cold, Dad.”

“Only if we’re lucky, sweetheart.”

After I brought Dayna back to the girls’ cabin, I emerged again and went for a walk alone on top. The swells still canted the deck in their sickening cadence, and as I moved between the handholds I realized the wind had grown stronger, too. In front of the captain’s bridge the weather vane’s cups were whirling furiously, and there was a low humming noise from somewhere in the rigging. If Clara had been awake, I knew, she’d have asked me to leave our daughter alone.

When I emerged from the inside staircase onto the low deck, though, Millar Franks didn’t even pause in his elocution. He was facing me when I appeared out of the steel hatch, and he nodded but kept on talking. The boat rolled slowly and I found myself looking down at the black water, then back at the horizon. Andrea’s back was still turned to me as she sat at the railing, watching him. She was leaning in his direction. I have to say my heart fell. He continued with his speech, still pointing over the sea at what from this low vantage and in the running lights off the stern I suddenly realized was some kind of baitfish school, roiling the engine’s wake. He even reached out at one point and touched her on the arm.

That’s when she turned.

As I said, Andrea is very much like her mother. That’s why, I think, she drew herself up when she saw me, gathered her resolve into a pose of defiance that even in the dim light I recognized. She gazed directly at me.

“Oh, Daddy,” she said. “You can go to sleep now.” Then she added, more softly, “I’m fine.”

For a moment I had a remembered fear of what she might do. But then she merely turned and refocused her attention on Millar Franks; and after another moment I turned as well, and went inside to bed.

“O
KAY, BUT DIDN’T YOU
also think of what it
meant
?”

“Of what
what
meant?”

“You know what I’m saying, sir. What it actually
said
. The
fatal road incident
.”

“I was sixteen.”

“And I’m seventeen. But I know exactly what it meant.”

“You have the benefit of hindsight.”

“And didn’t you, sir?”

“And three decades of skeptical journalism.”

“Maybe.”

“But, yes, Trieste, I did.” I stood from the desk and went to the window. “But there’s something that happens—I’ve seen this since—there’s something that happens when you’re involved in an affair like that. Involved in a lie like that.”

“You start to believe it’s true.”

“Well—yes.”

“If I wrote that, Mr. Sifter, you’d say it was a cliché.”

“Well, yes I would. Possibly. But really, it’s something I learned for myself. And something I know for myself. First you tell the lie. With fear, or something like it. I guess, at sixteen, what I felt all the time was more like excitement. That’s right—maybe more like excitement than fear. Or maybe the fear caused the excitement. That could be it. And you tell it like that for a while. Everybody told it like that for a while. Liam Metarey. The staff. I’m sure Henry Bonwiller, for that matter. I’m talking about a few days. Maybe a week. But if you keep telling it—if for whatever reason it’s discussed and discussed, and the lie is what you tell, and what everybody around you tells, then at a certain point—and it’s really damn quickly, that’s the other thing—at a certain point you just
do
. You believe it.”