Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  Also, though he didn’t want to live in Dunbar, he liked the idea of being close enough to drop in occasionally. His mother had few friends, and he knew how much his visits meant to her. And he had little doubt that she and Anita would soon become fast friends. His father was a different story. He was still having a tough time adjusting to the idea of his son marrying a non-Christian. (By Dub-Yay’s strict definition, Catholics didn’t qualify.) When Lincoln had broken the news that he’d fallen in love with and hoped to marry a Catholic girl, Wolfgang Amadeus had repeated the word, as if its meaning were obscure. “Catholic,” he mused in his helium voice. “Roman Catholic?”

  At any rate, this was the new adult life he and Anita had been preparing themselves for during those final months at Minerva. Why would he have agreed to a long holiday weekend on the island with his friends that would’ve postponed, psychologically, at least, the very future he and Anita were so keen to occupy?

  “You again,” said his wife, her voice abruptly there on the line even before his cell registered a ring. “What’s going on now?”

  “Okay, it’s 1971. May.”

  “This is getting weird, Lincoln.”

  “Bear with me. Whose idea was it for us to spend Memorial Day on the island?”

  “Yours.”

  “Mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? That makes no sense. Weren’t we trying to save money? Flying back East, even on standby, would’ve been expensive.”

  “Except you didn’t, remember? You and Teddy stayed in Connecticut after graduation. Your rent was paid through the end of May, and he had that internship at the Globe that started in June. You’d wanted us to head west right after graduation, but I had a family reunion over Memorial Day, and we couldn’t leave until after that.”

  “Right,” Lincoln said, these details coming back to him now, as they so often did, on the wings of Anita’s certainty.

  “How come Teddy and I didn’t just go to the island after graduation?”

  “Your parents were supposed to be there. Your mom talked Dub-Yay into spending a couple weeks in the Chilmark house before returning to Arizona. But then he reneged and they flew straight back.”

  Fucking Dub-Yay, Lincoln thought now. Still chafing over the fact that Lincoln had sided with his mother and attended Minerva instead of enrolling at the University of Arizona, he’d basically attended graduation under protest, complaining that the trip back East would cost a small fortune and when they got there they’d have to turn right around and fly home again. To which his mother replied that if he was interested in getting his money’s worth, they should spend a week or two in Chilmark. They had no renters lined up until early July, so why not? Unable to think of a plausible excuse not to off the top of his head, the old boy had given in. But later, when push came to shove, he changed his mind, just as Anita remembered, offering some cockamamy excuse about trouble at the mine, the workers again threatening to unionize, that obliged him to head straight back to Dunbar. Lincoln felt his throat constrict. His mother never saw the island again.

  “Anyway,” Anita was saying. “When you found out the house would be empty, that’s when you floated the idea. We argued about it, if you recall.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were supposed to be with me that weekend. At the family reunion. You didn’t want to come because you wouldn’t know anybody.”

  “Your family terrified me. The way they all talked at once, always getting louder and louder. I grew up an only child.”

  “I wanted to introduce them all to the man I was going to marry.”

  Lincoln felt the sting of his selfishness, so like his father’s, across the decades.

  “And on Monday, after everybody left, you and I were supposed to rent a U-Haul truck and load it up. But you were still on the island, which meant that job fell to my brothers and me.”

  “What an asshole. Why would you marry a man who did something like that?”

  She ignored him. “You finally waltzed in late Tuesday morning determined to hit the road, right that minute. My mother had fixed us a nice lunch, but you said we needed to leave if we were going to make it to Buffalo by nightfall. God only knows how you decided on Buffalo, but you made it sound as if the sky would fall if we only got as far as Albany. We said goodbye to my parents and drove off within half an hour of your arrival.”

  “Not that you’re holding a grudge or anything.”

  “Hey, don’t blame me, buster. You’re the one reminding me about what a brat you were.” But then her voice softened. “Mostly I remember the trip itself.”

  Lincoln chuckled. “Right. All those Motel Sixes. No AC. Us not having sex.”

  “Lying to our parents. Telling them we had enough money for separate rooms. A quarter for the Magic Fingers was a splurge.”

  “Seems like another lifetime.”

  “There’s another thing you’re conveniently forgetting. You originally pitched the Vineyard weekend as being just you and Teddy and Mickey. Then, after I reluctantly agreed, I find out Jacy’s going to be there.”

  “Teddy’s the one who talked her into coming,” he said, the memory suddenly there for the taking.

  “Ah,” she said. “That you do remember.”

  She was right, of course. His memory, when it wasn’t failing him utterly, was suspiciously selective.

  “So what’s all this about?”

  “I wish I knew,” he admitted. “Guilt, probably. Martin says the Chilmark house is probably a teardown.”

  “And you feel like you’re betraying your mother.”

  “Silly, huh?”

  “No. You miss her. It hasn’t been that long.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “So, did Mickey get in okay?”

  “Shortly after I talked with you. He arrived with the makings for Bloody Marys. Even celery.”

  “Huh, imagine that. Mickey not changing.”

  “It’s Teddy I’m worried about, actually. He’s having those spells again.”

  “Really?”

  “Not as bad as before, but still.”

  “Remember that time we visited him in the psych ward?”

  “Are you making this up?”

  “Junior year. Not long after you all got your draft numbers. Finals week, I think. He had a meltdown and checked himself into the campus infirmary, and they transferred him to Yale/New Haven. Don’t you remember how awful he looked, how he just kept repeating that he felt really sad.”

  Yes, and one of the doctors taking Lincoln out into the corridor and asking him if Teddy had ever talked about suicide. If he owned or had access to a gun. How in the world had he managed to forget all this?

  “Tell me something,” he said, abruptly shifting gears. “Do you ever regret not going to Stanford?”

  “That would be like regretting us. Our kids. Our grandkids.”

  “I should’ve made you go. It wasn’t right for you to give that up.”

  “Lincoln.” That feeling again, of his name on her lips. This time conveying forgiveness.

  “Yeah?”

  “I really need to get on the road. Your dad isn’t known for his patience.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Go.”

  Now it was her turn to pause. “I’m pretty sure there was one other reason you wanted that one last weekend on the island,” she said, and Lincoln felt a dark foreboding. “You were trying to decide.”

  “Decide what?”

  “Between me and Jacy.”

  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOSER. Ridiculous name, ridiculous man.

  That very first summer when Lincoln returned home to Dunbar from Minerva College, he’d begun to see his father with new eyes. His parents were waiting at the gate to greet him, and his first thought was Who’s the little pip-squeak standing next to my mother? Somehow his father had shrunk. Had he been ill? But, no, on closer inspection, he looked hale and hearty, full of his usual piss and vinegar, just … smaller. Not that he’d ever been a giant, of course. As a h
igh-school freshman Lincoln had surpassed him in actual height, yet for some reason the fact that he was literally looking down at the man hadn’t registered. Why hadn’t he noticed when he was home over Christmas?

  Of course this sudden perception was probably linked in Lincoln’s mind to other things entirely. As a boy he’d never questioned his father’s importance. After all, he was not only a minority owner of a mine that employed half the men in town but also a deacon of the church, which made him seem essential to the community. Ministers and mayors and country-club presidents came and went in Dunbar, whereas W.A. Moser was a constant, and until Lincoln went away to college, it never once occurred to him that he wasn’t universally revered, that some people saw him as judgmental and unyielding, a figure out of the Old Testament, more to be feared than admired, more tolerated than loved. One day that first summer, coming out of a shop on Main Street, Lincoln had fallen in step behind two men who were deep in conversation. “The reason he’s so upright,” one said, “is that he’s got a stick up his ass.” A year earlier it never would’ve occurred to Lincoln that they might be talking about his father, while now, without any identifying clues, he was sure of it. As the summer progressed, he began noticing other things as well. Even Dub-Yay’s friends willingly conceded that he was the oddest of ducks, and his high-pitched whine was often imitated to devastating comic effect. At the country club, where Lincoln served as a waiter, some of the higher-ups from the mine, their tongues loosened by alcohol, offered him unasked-for sympathy, marveling that he’d lived eighteen years in the same house with Wolfgang Amadeus Moser without murdering him.

  Despite now regarding him differently, Lincoln continued to get along with his father well enough, mostly by avoiding politics. The war weighed on Dub-Yay or, rather, the nightly news did, with its constant coverage of student unrest, especially protests taking place in regions of the country he didn’t approve of to begin with, like the East and Northern California. It wasn’t that he approved of the war; he didn’t. But neither did he think you had to endorse something in order to support it. It was more a question of whom you chose to align yourself with: on the one hand, a known liar and crook like Nixon; on the other, a bunch of grubby, long-haired protesters and pot smokers who didn’t have an ounce of ambition, unless it was to take up the sitar. “Give peace a chance to what?” his father liked to ask whenever someone waved that particular sign on TV. If any son of his felt the urge to carry such a poster in public, he proclaimed—as if he’d fathered a great many sons in addition to the one sitting there in the dark living room with him—he hoped that son would do him the favor of shooting him in the head so he wouldn’t have to watch him prancing around on television. “And shoot your mother, too, while you’re at it,” he advised. “She should be spared that sight, as well.”

  Lincoln also began to see his parents’ marriage differently. Why had he not noticed before that they never invited people over for dinner or even a get-together on the patio? Why, outside of church, did they appear to have no intimate friends, especially given how starved his mother seemed for companionship? Why, whenever Trudy was on the verge of becoming friends with some woman in the neighborhood, did his father always find some fault with her? And why, when they sat next to each other on the sofa, did his parents seldom touch? For the first time he wondered if his mother might be unhappy. Each new, unwanted epiphany further untethered him.

  Indeed, on every occasion he returned home from college, he found new reasons to rethink the first eighteen years of his life—the house he’d grown up in, the neighborhood he’d explored on his bike as a kid, the town of Dunbar itself. Things that had always felt solid, familiar and reassuring suddenly seemed not just peculiar but somehow diminished. Evenings, when he wasn’t working at the club, he and Dub-Yay would sneak in nine holes of golf after dinner as the desert cooled in the dusk. He’d always loved their quirky little country-club course, but after playing the lush green courses back East, where errant shots went into the water or deep in the woods, he saw how little real challenge this one offered. It was flat as a pancake, and a well-struck ball rolled forever on its parched fairways. Was that what his father liked about it? That the par fives were all easily reachable in two, allowing you to believe you were a big hitter?

  Everything felt bewildering. Time itself seemed to operate differently; instead of poking along languorously, it began moving at warp speed. Free will, which more than one of his Minerva professors had suggested might be an illusion, appeared to genuflect before grim fate. Two of his classmates were killed in Vietnam, and several others died of overdoses. At least two girls, including one Lincoln had dated, were rumored to have had abortions. Boys he’d sworn to remain friends with forever now seemed like strangers, and they clearly felt the same about him. “I don’t remember you being so stuck-up,” one told him. Others had gotten jobs at the mine, which meant frequent layoffs, sitting around in local bars and collecting unemployment, drinking cheap beer and waiting to get rehired. Still others, having flunked out of college, moved back in with their parents and were working at minimum-wage jobs, their dreams—assuming they’d had any—gone bust that quickly.

  Early one August morning, the summer of his junior year, Lincoln’s mother joined him on the patio where it was shady and he was reading a book for a class he’d be taking that fall. “I bet you’re real anxious to get back,” she said, pulling up a chair and setting a tall glass of ice tea in front of him. His mother’s sun tea was among a very few things about his life in Dunbar that remained exactly as he remembered.

  “I am,” he admitted, though saying so felt like a betrayal. After all, he wasn’t exactly suffering. He made decent money at the club, and waiting tables there wasn’t so different from slinging hash at the Theta house. He took as many shifts as management would give him so the summer would pass more quickly.

  “You shouldn’t feel guilty,” she said, reading his mind. “You have your friends. You’re getting a good education. There’s nothing for you here.”

  “You and Dad are here.”

  “You know what I mean.” They were quiet, then, though clearly there was something on her mind. “You think you’ll marry that girl?” she said. “The one you mentioned?”

  “Jacy? We’ve never even been on a date. Also, of the three of us, she seems to like Mickey best. And anyway,” he continued, “she’s wild as the wind. I don’t think she’s really in love with any of us.”

  “Maybe she’s waiting to see which of you has the courage to declare himself.”

  Then they fell quiet again, until Lincoln chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “I was just trying to imagine introducing her to Dad,” he admitted.

  She regarded him sadly. “In matters of the heart that is not where your mind should go.” But she seemed to understand that that’s where it did go, and probably would go for a very long time. Eventually, he might come to repudiate his father’s doctrine, but the man himself would be tougher to exorcise.

  “THE THING TO UNDERSTAND about your father,” Lincoln’s mother had once explained when he was in high school, “is that you always have a choice. You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.”

  At the time he’d seen her remark as defeatist, but gradually understood that she wasn’t advocating capitulation so much as making sure he fully comprehended the consequences of confrontation. Her husband’s perseverance, she knew better than anyone, wasn’t just dogged; it was positively tidal. And how right she’d been. Arguing with his father was like trying to put a cat in a bag: there was always a limb left over, and at the end of that limb a claw. Not one to be intimidated, especially in front of Anita, Lincoln often questioned and on occasion even repudiated the Gospel according to W.A. Moser, but he never achieved anything like victory because the man refused to admit defeat and never, ever quit the field. “Back when you were a Christian,” Dub-Yay would say, apropos of nothing beyond reminding him that his conversion to Catholicism, deca
des earlier, was still in play. When Lincoln had explained that he and Anita both felt it was important to present a united front to their children when it came to religion, his father, who would’ve made a fine country lawyer, responded that he couldn’t agree more. However, he pointed out, if Anita had converted to Church of God, the front they would be presenting to their children would be both united and correct instead of just united. Whenever he and his father disagreed, Lincoln was simply wrong.

  That he should remain so stubbornly committed to finding a third path—some strategy that halved the distance between angry confrontation and meek acquiescence—was perplexing even to Lincoln. His mother had already pointed out that he only had the two choices. Why couldn’t he quit looking for the third that she’d assured him—and she would know—didn’t exist. Even now, at sixty-six, he was still trying to square the Dub-Yay circle, to reconcile what never could be—that his two very different parents wanted very different things from their son. When he pleased one, he of necessity displeased the other. When his mother died, he thought maybe that would put an end to the struggle, but no. Though she might be dead and buried, she continued at odd moments to plead her posthumous case, especially here on the island, the place she’d loved most. Wasn’t that what her quiet fifth-column insurgency had been about all along? Her need for him to understand that even though his father was a force of nature, he was her son, too? By refusing to relinquish the Chilmark house, she was declaring, in terms her husband had no choice but to accept, that there was some part of his wife over which he’d never hold sway. Clearly, to her the Chilmark house wasn’t just wood and glass and shingle. That it represented a time when her parents were still alive, when she felt happy and safe in a world they’d created, long before W. A. Moser turned up? Had his father, Lincoln wondered, understood all that?

  How could selling not be a betrayal? Wouldn’t it hand his mother a posthumous defeat and imply another triumph for the Moser genes, all the more satisfying because it would be transacted by their son, not himself? What saddened Lincoln most was the very real possibility that his mother had known from the start how all of this would eventually play out. Hadn’t she said as much? You can do things his way, or you can wish you had.