The Summer Guest (27 page)

“You’re a lot like him, you know,” my mother said quietly. “I’ve always thought so.”

I said, “Like Daddy.”

“ Jordan,” she said, and I heard her breathing change, “you’re making me sad again. It’s not your fault. But I’m going to put the phone down now.”

Before I could say anything, there was a dull thud on the line. I waited, the receiver pressed to my ear, listening to the soft sound she made as she wept, two thousand miles away. Please don’t cry, Mama, I thought, please don’t. A minute passed.

“There now,” she said. “All better.”

“I’m sorry, Mama. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Don’t be, Jordan. You just blindsided me a little bit. It’s funny to go back like that.”

“Is it a good life down there?” I said. “Are you happy?”

“Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that?”

“Well, let’s just say.”

“Oh, it’s hot as hell, Jordan. And the trees are all wrong. It’s funny, but that’s the thing that gets me the most, the trees. And missing you, sometimes. All the time. But yes. On the whole, yes. It’s a good life. Vince is the sweetest man alive, I write my books, the winters are easy as pie.” She stopped. “Your finger, Jordan.” Her voice was amazed. “You put it in the fan. I remember now. That’s what you were asking about, wasn’t it?”

“I guess it was.”

“Your father was always telling me to put it up on the table, someplace high and out of reach, but it was so hot that day, I guess I just forgot. I was cooking dinner, and you were playing on the floor, and then Colonel Graffam came to tell me, and that awful chaplain, I forget his name, everybody hated him. I guess I left you alone and somehow you got it stuck in the fan.”

“I think I did it on purpose, Mama. At least that’s what I remember.”

“Why would you have done that? No, it was my fault, honey, for leaving the fan where I did. God, it was an awful mess, blood everywhere, and you screaming like you did. It was all so crazy. I’d just found out about your father, and there I was, rushing you off to the doctor, not even a second to think about what just happened. The colonel offered to take you but I wouldn’t have it, just wrapped your hand in a towel and charged off to the infirmary. How could I have forgotten a thing like that?”

“Sounds to me like you remember pretty well.”

“But the thing is, I didn’t, not at first. Not until you asked about it. Why should that be?” She was silent a moment, lost in this question. Then: “It’s all right, isn’t it? There isn’t something wrong with it?”

“It’s fine,” I said, and wiggled it, as if she could somehow see. “Same as always. I’m having a little trouble playing the violin, but otherwise, no worries.”

I was glad to hear her laugh. “Well, that’s a relief,” she said. “You gave me a start there. I was worried something was wrong with it. Jordan?”

“Right here, Mama.”

“My turn. Are you happy? Is it a good life for you?”

“I think so,” I said, nodding as if she were right there with me. “I think it is.”

“And you love Kate, and she loves you.”

I listened to my breathing in the phone, the sound traveling the miles of wire from Maine to Texas and back again. “Somebody may ask me to do something today. Something I don’t want to do.”

“What kind of thing is that, Jordan?”

I cleared my mind and thought. But the idea of what I was feeling seemed to arc beyond my mind’s reach, like a skater racing past me on a frozen pond.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “It’s just a sense I have.”

“A sense.” She paused over the word. “Well, whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll know what to do when the time comes, Jordan. That’s all you can do.”

“I hope I can.”

“No, honey. I know you can. That’s the kind of man your father was. I would have kept him longer if I could have, but even so, I was never one bit sorry. I want you to remember that.”

And suddenly, just like that, I wasn’t afraid anymore. A new feeling flowed into me, strong and purposeful, and with it, a sudden awareness of my surroundings, the place and hour where I stood. It was just past noon; the sun was high. I think I loved my mother more just then than I had ever done in my life.

“I will, Mama,” I said, and realized it was the second promise I’d made in a day. “I will.”

May, and the drowsy blur of spring: we buried Meredith, Hal and I. The funeral was held at St. Thomas ’s on Fifth Avenue -gigantic and faintly frenetic, like a huge, grieving carnival, though for most of our friends, Meredith was already a memory, gone for years. When this was done, we traveled together the next morning, just the two of us, to Philadelphia, where we planned to bury her beside Sam.

It was just past noon when we arrived. I hadn’t been back to the cemetery for several years, not since the worst of Meredith’s illness had consumed me. As the limo pulled up, I saw the funeral director waiting for us at the gravesite. Beside Sam’s small headstone was Meredith’s casket, suspended on a metal bier with straps to lower it, and next to that, a mound of freshly turned, coffee-colored earth. It was a strange and unsettling experience to see these things, a feeling I had not prepared for-this place that had for so long been the site of one grave, now remade for two, like a hidden symmetry revealed.

But something else was different, wrong. A sky too abundant, and a feeling of exposure; the air itself seemed distorted, hazy with dust and unfiltered heat. As we stepped from the limo, the full magnitude hit me like a fist. Not a hundred yards away, where before had stood a field of headstones, there now was naked earth. A fleet of bulldozers, giant earthmovers with their beetlelike carriages and wide gleaming blades: half the cemetery had been scraped away.

“What the fuck,” Hal said.

He was wearing sunglasses, his chest and shoulders broad as a bodyguard’s inside his dark suit; his anger seemed fierce, a black force uncoiling inside him. Days and days of grim death-the awful phone call he surely knew was coming, then the bleak journey down from Williamstown, and of course the funeral itself-and now this. I actually worried that he might hit someone, or else turn and strike the car. But then he shuddered, reaching a hand out to brace himself against the limo’s gleaming fender, and I saw his strength was false; there was nothing at all behind it. The slightest puff of air might have brought him to his knees.

“Jesus.” He shook his head despondently. “What the fuck.”

“I know.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Wait here.”

I left him at the car and approached the funeral director, a man with long gray sideburns who was wearing a slightly too-tight suit of blended navy, a suit he must have had dozens of. Under the warm sun, his brow was glazed with sweat. Without pausing to shake his hand I pointed past him toward the construction site.

“You mind telling me what that’s all about?”

He turned, a quick dart of the head to follow my gesture.

“I’m sorry,” he said nervously. “I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

The color had drained from his face. “The new interstate, Mr. Wainwright. The Blue Route. It’s going to run from Conshohocken all the way down to Chester. They started work last fall.”

The air was so full of grit I could taste it, feel it grinding between my teeth. “No, I sure as goddamn hell did not know.”

Hal had stepped away from the car to join us where we stood, under the wispy shade of a threadbare hemlock-just a sapling when we had buried Sam, but now thirty feet tall. The plan was that we were going to read a poem: Emily Dickinson, a little thing without a title, not a dozen lines long, about death coming in a carriage. That was all: no priest or other mourners, no long line of cars in the dust, just the two of us and the warm spring wind and these words of good-bye. Now we would have to read it over the roar of heavy machinery and men in hard hats yelling to one another about the baseball scores.

“How can they do that? It’s a cemetery, for god’s sake.”

“Eminent domain, Mr. Wainwright. I’m afraid it means the state can do whatever it wants.”

A bolt of raw anger surged through me. “I know what eminent domain is. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to?”

He stiffened his back and swallowed. No doubt he wanted to tell me to go to hell, and he wouldn’t have been wrong. But his voice when he spoke was calm, professional. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Wainwright,” he said. “If you wish, I’m sure we can make other arrangements.”

“Our son is buried here. He’s been here twenty years.”

He nodded. “And believe me, I do sympathize. You’re not the first to complain. But the state’s promised to build a retaining wall to deflect the noise and fumes. If you came back a year from now it would all be different. It’s really just a question of the timing.”

Timing, I thought. Good God. But it was Hal who spoke next.

“What’s to stop them from digging up this end of the cemetery?”

“Well, technically nothing.” The director took a handkerchief from his back pocket to mop his forehead. “But as far as I know, the state has no plans to condemn any other parcels. This area should remain just as it is.”

“Christ,” I said. “They better not.”

I felt completely powerless. How had I missed this? What else had escaped my attention? What would Meredith have said, if she’d known we were going to bury her within a hundred yards of the Pennsylvania Turnpike? A canvas tarp was spread on the ground around her casket, dressed with flowers, banks and banks of them piled high, and on the casket too-all of their petals coated with a film of gray dust.

“Mr. Wainwright? Shall we go ahead with the service, then?”

I turned my eyes to Hal. He knew nothing of what had happened that night in the library. No one did, except for Elizabeth, who probably had guessed, and perhaps Mrs. Beryl as well, who would have wondered why Meredith had given her that particular night off. But I knew neither would ever say a word. Nobody official had bothered to examine the situation more closely; as far as the world knew, Meredith had died in her sleep.

“Pop?”

I managed a nod. Hal turned on his heel to the director.

“All right then,” he said. “Let’s do this.”

We decided to stay the night in Philadelphia. I can’t recall whose idea this was, but I think we both knew, instinctively, that it was the right one. The long drive home, and the eerie quiet of the house on our arrival, the specter of Meredith’s bedroom still waiting to be dismantled; the two of us puttering around the place, trying to figure out how to occupy ourselves, what or even if to eat and whether or not to turn on the television, and when to go to bed. It was a prospect I dreaded almost physically; surely Hal had envisioned these things too, and the idea of a night in a good hotel, and a meal together in a city we hadn’t lived in for years, seemed like just the ticket.

We rented a suite at the Rittenhouse and decided to send the car away; it would be a simple enough matter to take a train back to New York the next morning. We’d brought no luggage with us, but even this odd fact seemed unimportant. At the front desk we gave the concierge a list of things we’d need for the night, toiletries and fresh shirts and underclothes for the morning, and rode the elevator up to our two-room suite, so neutrally decorated we could have been just about anywhere: San Francisco, Paris, even Bangkok. I went to the windows and opened the drapes. It was midafternoon, a Friday in spring. Our suite overlooked Rittenhouse Square, a section of town that always reminded me of certain parts of London: polished and old-world, its slope-shouldered brownstones and old churches laid out on a grid of hushed, well-planted streets that radiated from a central park with pathways and green lawns and, at the center, a pool with a sundial and a sculpture of a lion. From where I stood at the wide windows, eleven stories up, a soft haze of pink-and-white dogwood blossoms seemed to float over the square, punctuated by an understory of red azalea bushes in riotous bloom. A scene of mute activity, like the opening shot of a movie: men in shirtsleeves, hurrying to and fro; the usual lovers lazing on the lawn; women in scarves and spring jackets, some pushing strollers or accompanied by young children, bits of birdlike color that seemed to gather and disperse according to some unseen physical principle; a pair of long-haired college boys tossing a Frisbee, and, hunched over a cluster of concrete tables, a group of black men playing chess. Upon everything the sun poured down like a golden liquid. After such a day, it was a handsome sight-a vision of human life that seemed to hold the properties of eternity-but soon the scene would change: between the buildings and above them, a billowing bulk of storm clouds had sailed into view. First the puffy crowns, churning heavenward on waves of heat; and then, as I watched, the dark prow and undersides, dragging a blade of shadow, like a great ship docking over the city. A spring thunderstorm: of course. The heat had been building all day. As I watched, a greenish gloom descended over the park, into a hundred upturned faces, and then the wind arrived. It raked the dogwoods like a claw, swirling the air with petals; the Frisbee, ripped from its trajectory, squirted upward and shot out over Walnut Street, away. I turned from the window as huge, penny-size drops of rain began to thud against it.

“Hal?”

A moment of inexplicable panic: my heart contracted with a fear as biological as breathing, as if he were a little boy again, and I had lost him in a crowd. But when I looked through the door I found him, stretched out on one of the room’s two big beds. He was still wearing his tie, though he had taken off his jacket, which hung from the corner of a chair. One foot was bare, the other clad in a sock he hadn’t managed to remove before unconsciousness had taken him. A minute passed as I watched him sleep. Outside, the sizzle of lightning, and moments later, the rattling afterthought of thunder. I selfishly wished the noise would rouse him, so we could watch the storm together, but all he did was turn against the pillow. At last I closed the drapes and pulled a blanket over him and sealed the door behind me.

I slept two hours on the sofa, dreaming of rain, and awoke to darkness and the knowledge that the storm had passed. Beyond the window the evening sky was the color of a bruise; a single star glittered in the twilight. Voices reached me from the bedroom, and then the vapid music of a commercial. I checked my watch; it was nearly eight thirty.

Hal was sitting up in bed, watching television. His eyes flicked toward me as I entered the room.

“News flash. You snore, Pop.”

I sat beside him on the bed. Time seemed to have slipped its moorings entirely; it seemed like whole days had passed since we’d visited the cemetery. My body was suffused with an unexpected physical contentment, as if I’d received an injection of iron. I gave Hal’s knee a shake. “Hungry?”

Hal’s eyes had returned to the television: Star Trek. He nodded slightly, his mind still lost in the program. “God, will you get a load of this guy.” He gestured dismissively toward the screen, where the actor Leonard Nimoy, wearing a Greek robe and laurel wreath, was strumming on a lyre. “Oh,” Hal said, as if he’d just thought of something. “The concierge dropped off our stuff a while ago.”

“Really? I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Well, we all heard you, like I said.” He cheerfully tapped the wall behind his head. “The people next door called to ask if somebody was strangling a walrus.”

“Very funny.”

I rose and stretched. Atop the bureau I found a shopping bag from Brooks Brothers-the fresh shirts and underclothes we’d requested-and a selection of toiletries on a glass tray: toothbrushes and paste, razors, a tin of old-fashioned beard cream. My desire to leave the hotel room was suddenly acute; even to remain another minute would steal some essential energy from us. Though the shirts were for the morning, I opened the bag, removed the one I knew to be my size-a robin’s-egg blue, with some bit of white snaking through the weave-and changed quickly. The room had grown dark, save for the flickering, fish-tank glow of the television.

“What do you say, Hal?” I clapped my hands together. “Turn that thing off and let’s get some dinner.”

At last he pulled his eyes from the television. A thin smile crossed his lips. “Okay,” he said. “You know me. I can always eat.”

We set out into streets washed clean as laundry by the rain. The air had cooled and smelled of damp concrete. We walked up the block to a brasserie the concierge had recommended, the sort of restaurant he would probably suggest to two men, but not a man and a woman together: dimly masculine, with a long mahogany bar and just a few tables pushed against the wall. The menu was written on a chalkboard the apron-clad waiter brought around to each table and propped on a folding chair, waiting with a look of boredom while we read. We ordered quickly and each drank a beer while we waited for our meal: a plate of oysters followed by slablike chops of veal and heaps of mashed potatoes in a dark, smoky gravy. We were hungry and spoke little, saying just enough to keep silence at bay, but the truth was, it was not an evening for talk; I was satisfied for the moment just to share Hal’s company. All day, since the cemetery, the feeling had grown within me that I was leaving the world, and that it would be Hal’s from now on. It was not a feeling I knew or had a name for. But as I sat in the restaurant watching Hal eat, each measured portion finding its way from plate to fork to mouth, the sheer fact of his physical existence seemed as inseparable from my being as my own flesh, my blood and bone. Our time together would be short. In two days, he would be returning to Williamstown, to take his final exams and finish out the semester. I had called the dean, to ask if he could be somehow excused from this obligation, and though I was told that under such circumstances arrangements could be made for him to take makeups at some later date, Hal had refused. The last thing he wanted, he said, was to have a bunch of tests hanging over him. He’d made plans to spend the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, where a group of his friends from the lacrosse team had rented a house and planned to get jobs-construction, bartending, whatever they could find. It didn’t matter; the point was to be together, I knew. So there was this, too: the emptiness, oddly pleasurable, of missing him.

When the waiter came to clear our plates, Hal settled back in his chair and issued a small, satisfied groan.