“Aw, so sensitive,” John said. “I’m just joking, sweetheart.” He shook Zev’s hand and looked him in the eye. “Thanks for dinner. And for taking good care of my girl.”
“You’re very welcome,” Zev said.
John took the keys from Katie and headed up the stairs.
“I should go,” Zev said quietly. “Right? You need some time together.”
“Sorry. It’s been so long. He just wants what’s best for me.”
“You are both finding each other, still. I understand.” A shadow passed over Zev’s face. “Wait—is it tomorrow that you go to London? Already?”
She nodded. “Just a few days,” she said. They held on to each other for a while, kissing briefly, but it seemed as though neither of them could wait to pull away.
“Okay.” Zev started to walk down Hester and then turned around. “Katie?”
“Yeah?” she said.
He pulled his leather jacket around him more tightly. “Nothing,” he said. His smile was grim, and she couldn’t blame him. The night had certainly not unfolded as he’d expected. “I wish you didn’t have to go right now. But yeah. I hope it goes well. Maybe I’ll get to meet your grandfather one day.”
Why did she feel as though she couldn’t take a full breath? The idea of losing herself to someone was no longer what frightened her most, she thought as she climbed the steps toward her apartment. It was the question of whether she could be vulnerable in that way while at the same time being a good mother. Her own mother had stumbled badly, and Katie still didn’t quite know where her father had taken the wrong step. It seemed that parenthood turned you into both a hero and a patsy, torn by competing impulses. And the question was if she wasn’t up to it, if she really wasn’t ready for motherhood—not now—could Zev still love her?
She rested a hand lightly on the flat of her stomach. It was time to ask her father some questions too. The door was ajar and the radio set on low to Jazz 88. Fresh, mismatched sheets were stretched out over the old couch, and her father lay there fully clothed with his shoes off.
“That was nice,” Katie said, hanging up her denim jacket. “I’m so glad you got to meet Zev.”
When he didn’t respond, she went over to the couch. He was fast asleep; his mouth hung open slightly, and his face, even in repose, was as fierce and tender as it had always been. But with his eyes closed he was stripped of something; she couldn’t be sure what it was. She reached down to touch his shoulder. “Dad?” she said.
He rolled his head to the side and brought his arms up over his chest. The skin on his neck sagged, and she was hit with the realization that as his child she would never know him fully. Gently, she raised his dead legs to the couch and pulled the sheet and blanket up over him.
There was no need to rush things. Tomorrow she would fly to the UK and take care of her grandfather. After that, she would turn to everything else—her father, her lover, herself. In what order exactly, she didn’t know, but did it matter? Probably not.
35
On the plane, David was full of chatter about his understudy work at the Broadmore; it was good to see him opening up when for so many years he had been like a moth confused by the interplay of light and dark, easily crushed. The joy of discovering something he was good at was visible in his quickened cadence, the serious pull of his mouth. They settled in, talking a bit about their father, about how he seemed, his look and demeanor, but not all that much. They had no habit of sharing concerns or fears, no vocabulary for doubt. It was what they had learned among the silences and turmoil of their teenage years. After throwing up twice in the minuscule, water-splattered airplane toilet, Katie decided to tell David about being pregnant. His eyes widened, and in the rush of his surprise he sounded like a child, and then—just like a child—he lost interest as quickly as if he were turning a page in a book. It was a relief to have that news turn out to be, somehow, so very ordinary. After a few hours in the air, he crashed hard, sleeping with his head twisted awkwardly, undisturbed by the flight attendant bringing food or the heavyset man struggling to sidle his way toward the aisle.
The road into London from Heathrow wove above the streets on an elevated highway from which the billboards and office buildings seemed to be close enough to touch. Once the black cab reached the outer suburbs, morning traffic thickened into a writhing snake. The road narrowed down to the A4 and became the London Road, shooting through identical brick row houses with tiny front lawns, remarkably clean of litter, overhung with the pall of exhaust.
The cab headed straight for their hotel on Marylebone Road. There was a tidy familiarity to England that Katie found comforting. Weaving through central London, she was struck once again by its orderliness, the way everything had its place. Patterns everywhere you looked: in the multicolored bricks scalloped along the rooftops; in the fluted iron railings bordering front lawns; in the rows of trees, all pruned just so, leaves supple and ever rustling. There was far more sky visible than in New York, and when the sun came out, it was so vast and shocking that the streets glinted with surprise. One ray of sunshine, and Londoners shed their coats and jackets with joyful exuberance, as if they’d suddenly found themselves transported to a beach in Majorca—a whole country for which a simple change of weather led to a transformation of personality.
They showered and drank some coffee but wasted no time walking over to the nursing home. Grumpy was sitting in a chair by the window. He wore clunky glasses that made his eyes look twice their normal size and held knitting needles in his fleshy fingers. The window was cracked open, and a stream of air whistled in, ruffling the blanket laid over knees as giant and misshapen as boulders.
“Sunshine! Boyo!” he said, his face brightening. “What a fabulous treat!”
“Am I seeing correctly, Grumps? You, knitting?” Katie asked, peeling off her jean jacket. “Are we in some kind of alternate universe?”
Harry Amplethwaite held up a long, thin scarf that snaked over his armrest and onto the floor. “Nothing like fashion accessories to spiff up a dull wardrobe. As your grandmother always said, idle hands are the devil’s work. And if I’m working, it means blood’s still pumping through my veins.”
“Yo, Grumpy,” David said, and they did a complicated fist bump and then hugged, slapping each other on the back. They loved playing up the kid slang for fun. “You look rad.”
“Yes, well. Could do with a bit of a spit and polish,” Grumpy answered.
“You always look dashing,” Katie said. Though his face was animated, it sagged at the edges like melting wax, his heavy eyebrows drooping in the middle as though pressed down by two invisible thumbs. His hair was gloriously thick and near black, neatly parted to one side. “How are you feeling? Any better?”
“Rotten,” he said. “But then I’m well into my tenth decade, so who’s complaining?”
They sat around his little table, and he filled them in on the various simmering feuds going on in the nursing home. For a mathematician and an engineer, he was an excellent storyteller. David turned on the electric kettle, and they drank some Tetley’s, using Gram’s wafer-thin china cups with the gold edges and watching the birds peck at the privet hedges outside.
As they talked, Katie managed to inhabit multiple places at once: she was in the room with her grandfather, absorbing the smell of wool and the faint tang of privet, while also being in her apartment with Zev and then her father. She was still trying to make sense of it. All along she had made the assumption that Zev was too different from the man she had imagined for herself for the two of them to actually stay together. Across that gallery that night she’d caught sight of him again, she remembered thinking, So what if it’s just for fun? The pull she felt didn’t have to have a reason other than being a physical imperative. But that had changed. The abandon wasn’t just a fleeting revelation—it permanently loosened something inside her. And having her father react to him in that awkward, prickly way made her understand that she would have to claim Zev, assert her right
to love whomever she chose.
Securing a van and a wheelchair from the nursing home, David and Katie took Grumpy to the British Museum. In all the years they had visited their mother’s family in England, they’d never missed a trip to the museum, hours-long strolls through echoing halls, legs buzzing with fatigue. They always headed straight for the Assyrian rooms, with their winged-lion sculptures and carved stone panels. Grumpy had flown a Vickers Wellington bomber when he was twenty-one years old and a member of the RAF during the war. They’d engaged in battle at Habbaniya, eventually ending up on the outskirts of Baghdad (where he’d been mildly injured by an even younger soldier who was a member of his own regiment). He loved to regale his grandchildren with stories about his haplessness.
They made their way slowly through the Nimrud rooms until they landed in Room 9, Nineveh, with its human-headed winged bulls. After a short but alarming coughing fit, Grumpy motioned for them to stop, and Katie and David took a seat on a bench while he rested. They had begun talking about the chain of command in the British military when David said, “You know Dad got out of prison, right? Did Katie tell you already?”
“Whoa,” Katie said, “talk about a non sequitur.”
A flush mottled the skin of her grandfather’s neck and crept up toward his jawline. “Well. The military operates in a hierarchical manner; its leaders demand respect and loyalty. And they deserve it. We gave our lives readily for those we admired. They were trusted. They were men of their word.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying Dad isn’t?” Katie asked, her eyes locked on his face. There was a fluttering of something unpleasant in her chest—doubt or the desire to defend?
Grumpy lifted his thick glasses up, balancing them near his perfect hairline, and rubbed at his eyes. His head swiveled decisively toward the display to their left, a fragment of an enormous stone slab with an image of a vessel on it and multiple oars. We have to talk about your father, John had written in letters from prison to her mother. “Did something happen between the two of you?” Katie continued.
Grumpy made a snorting noise. His big eyes were harder now. “Your father was what we call a runner. He ran away from his problems. Never one to admit his weaknesses. That man, I have never in my life met a man so capable of avoiding reality.”
“Yeah, well, he sure didn’t manage to run away from all his problems,” David said, shifting his weight uneasily.
“Why do you think he was always finding yet another new and exciting career opportunity? That foolish business idea in the early years, then what? Commercial banking and—what was it in the end—day trading? Or the other way around—I don’t remember. Could barely make a living for himself, let alone keep you all afloat.”
Katie realized she had never really thought much about her father’s profession, except to notice that the money—whatever money it was they’d had coming in, previously—had dried up after the conviction. She remembered the business card she’d unearthed, with her mother’s handwriting on it and a London address. It had struck her as unusual because of the name, the obvious foreignness. “Grumpy, so, remember that thing I asked you about a while back, some guy called Montenegro? Do you know who that is? I found an old card when I was tidying up at the cabin.”
Her grandfather stiffened visibly, and when he tried to adjust his glasses, his fingers were as ineffective as putty. “Montefiore,” he said. “If you must know, he was a private investigator. Hugo, the son of a friend from Cambridge, he arranged it for me. He’d lived in the States for a while, knew the system.”
David, his black leather jacket like a carapace, zipped to his chin, stood up and cracked his knuckles. A young Japanese family made their way through the room, the little boy trailing a piece of string with paper tied to the end. They all watched until the family was out of sight. “To help you do what?” David asked.
“Get evidence to present to Charlie. So she could see what she was dealing with.”
“You mean, evidence on, uh—against Lulu?” Katie asked.
“Goodness,” Grumpy said, gesturing emphatically, as though she were too stupid for words. “About all the other things, dear. Now take me home, will you please. We’ve had quite enough excitement for one day.”
She and David exchanged a glance. He seemed pale and bothered, sorry he’d brought up their father in the first place. But maybe he’d been stirring the pot on purpose; it wasn’t clear. On the streets, the sun shone on the speckled sidewalks, but the chill of the museum stayed with her, as if she’d been standing too long in a windy corridor and hadn’t noticed that her fingers had started to go numb.
36
In the next few days, they met with Grumpy’s physician, Dr. Abad, a small, round Persian whose hairline cut across the apex of his skull in an almost straight line. In precise, accented English he relayed that Grumpy’s blood pressure was still extremely low, but the infection was waning; he was a remarkably healthy man given his advanced years. Katie and David had tea with the home’s head nurse, Henrietta, a Miami Dolphins fan, and gave her a turquoise jersey.
They spent an entire day helping Grumpy sort out his tattered photo albums from when he’d lived in Kenya as a young boy. Later, she tried to ask him about the evidence he’d mentioned when they were at the museum, but he held up his hand, trembling ever so slightly, and she retreated. That night, Katie opted out of seeing Mamma Mia! at the Novello Theatre with David and a friend of his who was studying at Richmond. Grumpy and Katie ate a lukewarm roast-beef dinner at the cafeteria in Ravenswood, and afterward, as she helped him maneuver his massive frame onto the bed, he pointed her to his dresser, where a battered manila folder lay.
“I was thinking,” he said. “Silence isn’t always empty, is it? It can drive a person quite mad. Give me that, would you?”
She brought the folder over to him on the bed and looked at him helplessly. He was frail and yet at the same time imposing, with his broad shoulders and implacable eyes. He opened the file and grabbed a tidy bundle of typed reports held together with a paper clip, a plastic bag containing photographs, and another one that appeared to contain receipts, fanning them out on the bed.
“What’s all this, then?” she asked.
“About your father, dear. You asked, and, well, you’ve never asked before, have you? It bothered me for years, this whole damn thing.” He coughed harshly into a soft cotton handkerchief. “Your mother, poor dear. It wasn’t clear what she really wanted back then, but I think that die has long been cast.”
Her grandfather kept talking as she picked up one item after another. The heading of one sheet read, Surveillance Report, Insight Investigators. The language was straightforward; there were dates and times and lists of phone numbers, interviews that had been typed up, and surveillance log sheets. There was a letter of termination from a RE/MAX Realty in Pennsylvania and a copy of a police report dated July 19, 1991, and another from November 22, 2002.
Names and dates and facts were visible to her, but even stitched together in this way, they didn’t assume a significance larger than themselves. As she shuffled some papers between her fingers, her head started clouding over. She wasn’t sure what all this was supposed to mean. Grumpy sensed her growing alarm and began talking more quickly, picking up first one document and then another.
There was so much she hadn’t known. She had not known that her father never actually graduated from Harvard (wasn’t there a diploma that used to hang in the master bathroom in West Mills?). She had not known that Grumpy bailed him out of jail when he got his first DUI and that the year he took town cars to work was not because he’d been given a raise, as she and David had thought, but because his driver’s license had been suspended. Her father had been laid off three times: Grumpy’s investigator had unearthed complaints from coworkers at his places of business. He’d been fired from a job selling insurance, back when he first met Charlie.
“But nobody’s perfect, Grumpy. Haven’t you ever done something you’re embarrassed about or m
ade a mistake?” Katie asked. She felt almost panicked, as though she were being told to jump from a plane. It seemed very important to defend her father, to put this into context. This cataloging and piling on of his minor misdemeanors was mean spirited, petty, even. “This isn’t really playing fair.”
“My dear, you’re entirely missing the point. What I’m saying is we reap what we sow. Everything we choose to do has consequences. And people do not change unless they want to change. They show us their colors; we just don’t see them.”
As they continued, her grandfather’s fingers became steadier and his voice stronger. She had not known that when she was three years old and her mother had her second miscarriage, her father was having an affair with a young woman named Dana Huntington, whose father was the CEO of Ulster Bank. At this last piece of information Katie turned away from him abruptly and searched for a glass she could use to get herself some water from the sink in the corner. She could not swallow properly. The brown linoleum shifted under her feet, and she steadied herself with one hand on the edge of the porcelain.
Grumpy flapped an interview form in the air. He’d known about that one, he said. He discovered the affair by accident when he was in the bank executing a transfer. Grumpy called the woman’s father, Barclay Huntington, and the next day she put an end to the affair. It turned out John had been invited to their estate in Westchester twice for family dinners. No one had known about the existence of a wife or a baby girl back in West Mills.
“I often wonder if things would’ve been different had I told Charlie about that one. But he insisted, your father. He’d made a dreadful mistake; he was repentant.” Grumpy held her eyes with his yellowed, watery ones. She could barely register what he was telling her now. “He seemed sincere, and I believed him. I thought he’d strayed once and that would be it. I didn’t want to ruin my daughter’s marriage! It seemed cruel not to give him another chance.”
The Forgotten Hours Page 25
