Ask Again, Yes (47 page)

“Well, he worked down here until his legs got bad. And he had his pension. He had a lot by some standards. In any case, what’s there is there. He didn’t have debt, which kind of surprised me, considering how he was.”

“How’d you find me?”

“I ran his social security number when he died. His old marriage license came up. Then it took a good three weeks to track you down.”

“Poor Suzie,” he sighed. “She’s a good girl, really. What a shock.”

“Have you informed the other beneficiaries?” Anne asked. “Are we all getting packages like this?”

“Should be. The notices and copies of the will all went out on the same day. Oh, and Mrs. Stanhope? The other thing is he wanted to be buried up north.”

“Up north where?”

“Up there. New York. Near you all.”

“Near who all? Me?”

“You, yes. And his son. His deceased mother and father. He spoke of his mother, in particular.” But they couldn’t hold him, Mr. Diviny explained. Who knew how long it would take to track down the family? So they had a little Catholic wake down there with an open casket and all, and then he was cremated.

Anne looked out the window to the parking lot but couldn’t make sense of any of it. None of it. An ice cream truck went speeding by on Route 7, its music off. His mother who had never even acknowledged their wedding, or the fact that that first baby died. Anne had gone to her wake and funeral but had refused to kneel by the body.

“I haven’t seen hide nor hair of this man in twenty-five years.”

“Well,” Mr. Diviny sighed. “As the poet said, every savage loves his native shore. I hear an accent in your voice. You don’t feel the same?”

“No. Not really. Suzie can have the ashes. Is that her name? Suzie?”

“Nope. Doesn’t want them. She’s furious. Can’t blame her. Besides, those weren’t Brian’s wishes.”

“She can have the house then, as long as she keeps the ashes. I don’t care.”

Mr. Diviny was silent for a long time. “I understand you and Brian parted ways under difficult circumstances.”

So he had told his friend a few things, Anne thought. Suddenly, a light on the phone she was using started flashing. She didn’t know what it meant.

“I’m going to advise you to think about that, Mrs. Stanhope. And besides, half that house is your son’s.”

A young nurse came to the door of the office just then. She held her pinkie and thumb up to the side of her head and kept miming something until Anne told Mr. Diviny to please hold.

“What?” Anne asked.

“You have a call. Peter. He says he’s your son? Should I put him through to this line?”

“Yes!” Anne said. “What do I do?” She rushed Mr. Diviny off the
phone and was nervous all of a sudden that he’d change his mind, get sick of waiting.

But the young nurse came around the desk, pressed the flashing button, and nodded at her. And there he was.

In Gillam, a cup of tea in front of him, Francis read everything through for a fifth, sixth, seventh time before calling Kate. Lena read it through just once. Francis had seen her gaze run down the list of beneficiaries as if she might find her name there, too, since his was there, and when she didn’t find it, she announced she was going for a walk. As he stood at the counter and listened to Kate’s end of the line ring, he caught sight of himself in the stainless steel of the microwave door and saw a person who was haggard, a piece of driftwood left in rough waters for far too long. His hair was sticking straight up and he was wearing his eye patch again, the last prosthetic having deteriorated more quickly than the ones before. Less than three years old and a fine, dark ridge had appeared along the iris, and his eyelid blistered from closing over it a thousand times a day. He didn’t want to order another. Every new prosthetic eye was a marker of time—how much his face had aged since the last.

“I knew it was you,” Kate said when she answered. “Can you believe this? We were rushing around all morning and almost didn’t open the mail. What in the world did he leave to you?” Kate wanted to know. She was breathless, as if she’d run in from the yard when she heard the phone ringing.

“Don’t know. It’s going to arrive in the next few days. Under separate cover, the letter says.”

“What could it be?”

Whatever it was, Francis decided he didn’t want it. If it had any value, he’d give it to Peter. If it didn’t, he’d just throw it away.

“How’s Peter?”

“Fine,” Kate said, lowering her voice. “Seems okay. Surprised, I guess. He never expected to see him again but he didn’t expect him to die either.”

That was exactly the way Francis had felt about his own father, hearing about his death from so far away.

He didn’t want whatever it was Brian had left for him, but still, he found himself glancing at the clock more than usual, waiting for the mailman. Wednesday and Thursday went by. On Friday a package came but it was subscription vitamins Lena ordered.

Finally, on Saturday, a small cardboard envelope arrived from Georgia. Francis was expecting a box. Maybe a large box. An envelope meant it was more likely a check. Or the deed to something he owned. Or the key to a lockbox somewhere he figured Francis would be able to find. He probably didn’t even know his own son had been a captain in the NYPD.

And then he thought, Oh Christ, what if it’s a letter?

Lena wasn’t home, so Francis called Kate.

“Did it come? What is it?”

“It came but your mother isn’t here.”

“So open it now. I’ll stay on the phone. Or, you know what? We could go there, open it together. Oh wait, hang on.” She turned from the phone and he heard the low register of Peter’s voice in the background. Then Kate’s, muffled because she was covering the mouthpiece with her hand.

“Dad? Can you wait an hour? We’ll come there. Then Mom will be home, too. Tell her not to worry about cooking. We can get a pizza or something for the kids.”

Peter wasn’t there entirely willingly, Francis could see as soon as he walked through the door. He looked healthy lately, younger than he had
a year before. But on that day he had some of the same expression he’d worn when he and Kate came to tell them that they’d gotten married, a wild, skittery fear around his eyes.

“What could it be?” Francis asked, holding up the envelope, and Peter recoiled from it a little as if he didn’t want to know. Kate had already told Francis the value of the house in Georgia, the stocks, Brian’s meager life insurance, purchased, presumably, before diabetes set in. But there’d been no personal note to Peter, and privately, Kate said to Francis, she knew Peter was disappointed. He didn’t imagine he’d get an apology or anything, but maybe some sort of acknowledgment that things had not been ideal. An acknowledgment that Peter had done well with his life, despite everything. But how would Brian even know that? Kate wondered aloud. He didn’t know a thing about Peter as an adult. There was a woman down there who lived with him, took care of him, Kate told Francis, and Brian left her nothing. Not only that, but he’d never said a word about being married, having a son.

Francis made a sound of disgust. It was always the same. People didn’t change.

“So between them,” Kate continued, “Peter and Anne decided to cut her in for a third.”

That surprised him. Shocked him, even, and he didn’t know he could be shocked. “That’s very decent,” he said. He wondered if he’d have been as decent, if he were in their shoes.

“Okay!” Lena said, putting a plate of cookies on the table. “Let’s not drag it out any longer.”

So they pulled up close to the table, all leaning forward to see. Francis pulled the tab of the envelope across the top and flipped it over, tapped it on the table until the contents slid out: three photographs, and one prayer card, Saint Michael the Archangel. All four of them held perfectly still as they looked and tried to understand. The first photo was a snapshot of a pretty blond woman with a long, slim neck. The next was a photo of two sunburned young men sitting in the bleachers at the old
Shea Stadium. And the third photo was of Peter, around kindergarten age. All of the photos were yellowed and stained.

“Are you sure these were meant for you?” Lena asked after a long moment of silence. “Is that lawyer sure?”

“What happened to them?” Kate asked, picking up the one of Peter. “Water damage?”

“Sweat stains,” Francis said. “I’ve seen these before.” The day came back to him. The heat. The smell of the Bronx burning. The sound of the alarms ringing and clanging and buzzing every minute of the day. They were crazy years, and looking back sometimes he wondered why he’d gone at the job so hard. He often thought of himself giving chase, pursuing subjects down alleys, into dark lobbies, up stairwells. Why hadn’t he just pretended, like some others did? Why hadn’t he quit and then said simply that the suspect had gotten away? Everyone would have believed him. Only later, years and years later, did he look back at some of the situations he’d been in and see he was lucky to be alive.

He picked up the photo of Anne, and turned to Peter. “He showed me this one in 1973. July. We were on patrol. He kept it in the lining of his hat.” He touched the prayer card, and the photo of Brian and George. “These, too.”

“This one he must have added later,” he said, picking up the photo of Peter. Francis remembered Peter at that age: a weird kid, always sitting on the rocks out back with soldier figurines, whispering to himself as he made them battle each other. A weird kid, maybe, but his father had loved him, had tucked him into the lining of his hat so that he could look at him when his patrol car was idling, or when a day was hard, or maybe when he felt afraid.

“Why did he send them to you?” Peter asked. “And not to me?” He was staring hard at the photo of himself.

“I don’t know,” Francis said.

Maybe he sent them to Francis because he believed Francis alone would know what the photos meant to him, and he would tell Peter. The
young cops today probably kept all their photos on their phones, kept the linings of their hats empty.

Or maybe Brian was saying he was sorry to Francis, for whatever part he played. Maybe he was saying he should have done something more, seeing how they’d been partners, once, for six sweltering weeks in the summer of 1973.

Or maybe he was saying, simply, that he remembered. That he’d not forgotten, even from the distance of so many years and so many miles, that he’d had a different life, once.

Or maybe he wasn’t saying anything at all, but simply wanted to mail the photos to someone who wouldn’t be upset by them because he didn’t want to throw them away, not after their having protected him through all his tours. This slim-necked woman was the woman he’d married. And this boy was the boy he’d made with her. And maybe he had to get their images out of the house in case Suzie came in to rub cornstarch between his toes.

There was no accompanying note, and anything that had once been written on the back of the photos had long ago been smudged away.

“What’ll happen with the ashes?” Lena asked.

“They’re being shipped to my mother,” Peter said. “She’s going to bring them down here and we’re going to have them buried with his mother. George suggested that.”

“It’s pretty easy,” Kate added. “They just open up a little spot in the same plot.”

Better than sitting on someone’s shelf, Francis thought.

Slowly, everyone began to move from their places. Lena got up first and took a few pork chops out of the fridge. She took down the bread crumbs from the high cabinet, brought out the eggs. After a minute, as Kate continued to look from one photo to the next to the next and then back to the first again, Peter got up to help Lena. Without being asked he grabbed a few apples out of the bowl. He sliced them and dropped them into a pan with butter to soften for a quick sauce. He ducked his
head to glance out the window at the kids, who were out playing on the rocks.

“Kate,” he said over his shoulder, and lifted his chin to indicate something that was happening outside. They looked at each other quickly, and smirked. Some private pride about one or both of the kids, Francis knew.

And then he saw what he’d never seen before, which was that Peter was fine. And Kate was fine. Lena was fine. And he, Francis Gleeson, was fine. And that all the things that had happened in their lives had not hurt them in any essential way, despite what they may have believed at times. He had not lost anything; he’d only gained. Was the same true for Peter? For Kate? Yes. And yes. Would they be somewhere more magnificent than this were it not for everything that had happened? Would their lives have been fuller and happier? Looking at them now, he didn’t see how it would be possible. For the very first time, he felt that Peter was his blood.

“Hey,” Lena said, coming up behind him and putting her hands on his shoulders. He could feel her looking at the pictures again, so he looked, too.

“You know what I think?” she asked.

“What?” Francis asked.

Lena tightened her grip. She leaned down so that he could feel the warmth of her face against the crook of his neck.

“I think we’ve been luckier than most people.”

He let that swell over him like a wave, and when he bobbed up from the black water, his chest full, his body tired, the sky looked more blue than when he went under.

“What do you think?” she asked, the softness in her voice belying the strength of her hands.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

acknowledgments

I’m deeply grateful to several trusted readers and friends who took time away from their own novels and other obligations to read early pages of
Ask Again, Yes
in very rough form, and whose questions helped me see these characters more clearly. Many, many thanks to Jeanine Cummins, Mary Gordon, Kelsey Smith, Callie Wright, and most especially to Eleanor Henderson and Brendan Mathews, who read several drafts and kept urging me forward.

To the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for selecting me. The fellowship bought me additional writing time while I was working on this novel, but more importantly, it gave me confidence when I needed it most.

To Lesley Williamson and the Saltonstall Foundation for twice providing me space and quiet to work with very little notice. I get more done in one week at Saltonstall than in three months of my real life. I wrote the last two chapters of this book in the downstairs studio there.