The Summer Guest (7 page)

I was eight years old when my mother got sick, and though it took her over a year to die, I remember very little of this period. For many years my parents had tried to have another child-I was miles away from any potential playmates, and to let me go through life without the company of a brother or sister seemed simply cruel. But after a series of miscarriages they abandoned the idea. Whether or not this failure was related to the cancer that finally took her life is anybody’s guess; the timing tells me it probably was. When my father finally spoke of this, in the last months of his life, he claimed not to remember how many miscarriages she’d had-three or four, he said, though who really knew?-but the last was memorable enough, bloody and awful. My mother was almost six months pregnant when it happened, a sudden hemorrhage that began as she was hanging laundry on the line for the autumn sun to dry, and by the time she got back to the house, a distance of a hundred feet, her skirt and apron were soaked with blood. I was off playing in the woods somewhere, so I saw nothing of what happened next. Before my father could even put a call in to the hospital, a solid hour away in Farmington, my mother began to deliver, right there in the kitchen: a two-pound baby boy who had, in all likelihood, died sometime the day before, when the placenta had separated from the uterine wall. My father had seen enough in the war to know, or at least guess, what to do next: he tied off the cord with twine, and did his best to staunch the bleeding, though it was coming from inside, at the site of the abruption, far beyond his reach. Then he wrapped my baby brother in a towel, called the nearest neighbor, the Rawlings-a couple who lived nine miles away-to tell them to track me down, and drove my mother to the hospital in the truck.

By the time he got there my mother had lost so much blood that it appeared very likely she would die, that it would be a day of two deaths and not just one. This didn’t happen, but it is also true that she never fully recovered. She came home from the hospital three weeks later, pale and weak, a woman I hardly recognized. I had been staying at the Rawlings’, eating the huge batches of oatmeal cookies that Mrs. Rawling seemed to pull from the oven by the hour and generally feeling left out, because nobody had told me anything. I had even gotten it into my head that she would be bringing home the baby brother or sister I had been promised. In my heart it was a brother, and not even a baby but a boy my own age, so innocent was I of the facts of life. But all hope evaporated at the sight of my father helping my mother from the truck and into our house. There would be no baby, not then, not ever. She could hardly walk, and her skin was so colorless it seemed transparent, as I believed a ghost might look. She hugged me weakly and went up to bed, and all through the winter this weakness did not abate but seemed to widen around her like rings, so that the household fell into a kind of trance, as if we were all lost in a forest, though not together. She could not bring herself to read her novels or play the piano or do any of the things she loved, and when, in August, she began to cough and then to bleed again, this seemed not so much a new development as a continuation of the same decline.

She died the next January, in my parents’ bedroom, on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine and breathtaking cold-a day that I imagine was not all that different from the day eight years earlier when my father had climbed the roof of the lodge and found his life. I had been sent to the Rawlings’ for the afternoon-by this time I spent so much time at their house that I had a bedroom of my own-and when my father came to fetch me at five o’clock, the appointed hour, and instead of simply honking the horn of the truck from the Rawlings’ driveway as he always did, he came into the kitchen and sat at the old oak table and removed his hat and gloves without saying a word, the cold of the outside air clinging to his coat like the smell of cigarettes that followed him everywhere, I knew what had happened without exactly knowing it-I felt it in my bones. I was working on a model kit, a B-17 Flying Fortress. I showed it to him, the landing gear that dropped from the plane’s belly to snap into place, the swiveling gun turrets and ailerons, the opening bomb-bay doors. I had taken up the toys of war initially to please him, thinking it was something the two of us might share. But in the year of my mother’s illness, I had found myself alone with this interest, just as I had found myself alone with everything else.

My father examined the plane indifferently, saying nothing, then returned it to its place on the table. I realized then that Mrs. Rawling had stepped from the room; she had left us alone.

“Something has happened, Joey.”

I had taken out a tiny brush and begun to stroke paint on the plane’s fuselage.

“Joey, are you listening to me?”

“I want to fight in a war,” I said, still painting.

He gave a startled laugh. “Believe me, you don’t. That’s the last thing you want.”

“You did.”

“That’s how I know. Joey, put that goddamn thing down, please.”

I began to, or thought I had, but before I could do this he grabbed the plane from my hand and slammed it onto the newspaper so hard that the wheels snapped off and shot in opposite directions across the kitchen.

“You broke it!”

“Joey, forget the plane. Sweet Jesus Christ. It’s a fucking toy.”

I had never heard him talk this way-not just the words themselves, but the measured anger of their delivery, like the sound of an axe blade grinding on a stone. I thought he might actually hit me, something else he had never done before.

“I have something to tell you. Your mother has died. Do you understand what this means? She was very sick, and she has passed away.”

“You broke my plane, you asshole!”

And then he did hit me, once, with the back of his hand. He was a strong man, and if he had allowed his anger to do as it liked, he probably would have broken my nose. But even as his hand caught me across the cheek-a solid snap that unscrewed my eyes and sent me tumbling backward from my chair-I felt beneath this blow not only his anger but also his restraint, a force even more terrifying, for it was something he commanded. This is exactly the kind of blow you deserve, it said.

“Get up,” he said.

I lifted my face to see Mrs. Rawling in the kitchen doorway. The funny thing is, I always thought of her as older-an old woman. But when I think about her now, she probably wasn’t even forty. Her husband worked as a lineman for the telephone company, a cheerful, rail-thin man who always wore suspenders and liked to do magic tricks with quarters and napkins, and the fact that they had no children of their own-an anomalous condition I have never considered until this moment-probably made my visits as bittersweet as hearing a song from the past and knowing every note without being able to recall its name. I detected in their generosity to me a love that was equal parts sadness, and one time, when I was sleeping at their house and had come down with a fever, I awakened in the middle of the night to find the two of them sitting by my bed, fast asleep.

“What’s going on in here?” Sarah Rawling’s eyes were white saucers of alarm. She looked at me where I lay on the floor, then at my father, still sitting at the kitchen table with my airplane model spread out on the newspaper. “Joe, have you been drinking?”

“He’s fine, Sarah. You can see that. Leave the boy be.”

She came to where I was sitting, holding my cheek, and knelt to face me. I was too astonished even to cry. “Joey, did your father strike you?”

“I’ll decide what’s right for him, Sarah. Go on now, son. Get up.”

I somehow made it to my feet. I wanted at that moment only to throw myself into Sarah Rawling’s arms, to have her be my mother from that day forward. But I was too ashamed even to look at her and turned my face away.

My father stood and cleared his throat. “Your mother has died today, Joey. You’ll need to be a man from now on. That means that if you speak to me as you just did, you’ll get what’s coming to you. I’m sorry to say that, but it’s so. Now get your coat.”

I never set foot in the Rawlings’ house again, and I got the war I wanted. From that day forward my father and I lived a new kind of life, one in which the two of us, like opposing armies locked in a bitter struggle the cause of which neither one remembers, lobbed listless shells at one another from distant bunkers. I went to school and played with my friends and did my chores around the lodge, but in my heart I might have been a thousand miles away, so little did I care about any of it. I became a good guide-as good as he was, even better-and for that I won a measure of my father’s respect. But it wasn’t respect I wanted. I wanted, like him, to find my life.

This is exactly what happened, of course, and that is the part of the story in which Harry Wainwright played his part, and why I now found myself in New York, ready to sign over my worldly goods to him, albeit for more money than most people see in a lifetime. Hal was right: I should have skipped Cats. I sat through the first act, bored and baffled-it reminded me of some kiddie show on TV, the sort of thing dreamed up by well-meaning adults who’ve spent no time around actual children-though a couple of the songs weren’t so bad, and it wasn’t on the whole unpleasant to sit in a darkened theater for a couple of hours without one serious thought in my head, especially given the alternative, which was lying around my hotel room, getting fat on snacks from the minibar and fidgeting with the gold-plated bath fixtures. I’d decided to hang around New York a day or two; with two million bucks on the line, the last thing I wanted was to appear ungrateful. But I was also hoping that something would come along to tell me what to do next.

At intermission I left the theater and walked eight blocks downtown, into Times Square. This was back before the big cleanup, when you couldn’t take three steps in Manhattan without tripping over some poor soul sleeping on a greasy blanket and every other business was a peep show or adult “emporium” with some junior lieutenant from the porno brigade sitting on a stool outside to hustle in the crowds-a pretty depressing sight for any dad, and one that made me all the happier to pop for the twenty-two thousand bucks a year it cost to send Kate to a college that boasted about its “high acreage-to-student ratio” and kept her about as sheltered as a pet rabbit. My plan was to see where the New Year’s ball dropped; Lucy and I, and Kate when she was old enough, always stayed up to watch this on our grainy black-and-white with aluminum foil crimped to the antenna, a bottle of cold duck for the grown-ups and a glass of ginger ale for Kate. But it was April, and I quickly figured out that I was looking for a landmark that didn’t exist but for one day a year. By then it had started to rain; I hailed a cab, told the driver “St. Regis, please”-I had already figured out I didn’t need to give the address-and returned to the hotel.

The desk clerk gave me my messages, one from Lucy, one from Hal. I decided these could keep until morning and headed off to the bar for a nightcap, thinking this might clear my head of the show tunes that had seemed cheerfully catchy before but were now merely annoying. As he set me up with peanuts and a cocktail napkin, the bartender asked me if I wanted a Bloody Mary; I gathered from a little placard on the bar that it had been invented there. I took a Dewar’s and water instead, and spun on my stool in time to see a woman I recognized as Hal’s assistant, Zoe, enter the room.

She caught my eye, gave a little wave, and came over to where I was sitting. “Mr. Crosby.” She put down her briefcase to offer her hand. Her hair and glasses were damp from the rain.

“It’s Joe, remember? Just Joe.”

What I was thinking was what anyone would be thinking: no accident, interesting development, good-looking woman, disoriented married man, many miles from home. But this seemed like something from a story I wouldn’t even like to read, and the desk clerk’s note to call Lucy was, after all, still in my pocket.

“They’re pushing the Bloody Marys.”

“At this hour?”

“Famous for them, looks like.”

She shook a bit of rain from her hair and caught the bartender’s eye. “A Jack Daniel’s and water, please.”

The bartender brought her drink over, and she gave it a couple of quick stirs. “Hal thought I’d find you here. His bet was that you’d make it as far as intermission.”

“Does Hal ever get tired of being right?”

She laughed, a little uneasily I thought, tipping her face to turn the frames of her eyeglasses from gold to silver and back again. “That’s the one thing our boy Hal will never get tired of.”

“Sounds like a story.”

“Oh, it is, just not a very interesting one.” She jostled the ice in her drink and sipped. “Hal and I used to… well, I guess the phrase would be ‘go together.’ Long before he ever met Sally, who’s a totally great gal, incidentally, a good friend, and thinks the world of you.”

“That’s nice to hear.”

She laughed again. “Which part?”

“About you and Sally.” My mind caught on something, an idea I hadn’t even realized I was having. “You know, in the office today, looking at you and Hal, I sort of thought for a second there-”

“And you wouldn’t be the first to think it. But no. All over and done, everybody apprised of the facts.” She brought her briefcase up from the floor and removed a plain white envelope, fat with folded paper. “A present from Hal.”

I took it from her. On the outside was my name, written in a hand I knew to be Hal’s. “Do I open it here?”

“Hal would prefer that you did not. He also told me to tell you that when you’re done looking it over, please throw it away.”

I tucked it in my jacket pocket. Daddy, you don’t do top secret. Top secret is not your thing. I said, “If that’s how Hal wants it.”

“His other advice to me was to get you talking. Those were his exact words, in fact. Get him talking, see what’s on his mind.”

“I thought Hal was apprised of the facts.”

“Apparently not in this case.” She shrugged. “I heard what happened today. And personally, I’m glad. You shouldn’t make it easy for them.”

“I really was ready to sell. I kind of knew that’s what they wanted. There wasn’t really anything else they could want.”