It had been exactly as terrible as she had feared. But at least it had not been more terrible.
“How long is it going to be like this?” Henry asked her.
How long is a piece of string?
“We’re going to be all right. That’s the main thing.”
“Okay,” said Henry. He sounded brave, but not at all convinced.
“I had a patient once,” she said, “who had a really terrible thing happen to her …”
“What was it?” Henry wanted to know, not unreasonably.
“Well, she had a son who was very ill. He had schizophrenia. Do you know what that is?”
Sherlock chose this moment to attempt to climb the topmost step, directly into Henry’s lap. Henry laughed and pulled him up the rest of the way.
“Um … he was insane?”
“Yes. Well, ‘insane’ is a legal term. He was very sick. He had a severe mental illness.”
“That was the terrible thing?”
“It was a terrible thing, but not the terrible thing she meant. What actually happened was that he died because of his illness. He was only nineteen or twenty.”
“I didn’t know you could die from being insane.”
Grace sighed. She hadn’t meant to share the details, but she supposed it was unavoidable.
“Actually, his illness caused him to commit suicide. That’s what happened. And his mother, my patient, as you can imagine, was so sad. And she had to find a way to get some peace after this terrible thing. And one day she said to me, ‘For the rest of my life, it’s the first thing they’ll say about me when I leave the room.’ And I remember thinking: Yes, that’s true, it will be. But we can’t really do anything about what they say when we leave the room. We’ll never be able to control that. And we shouldn’t try. Our job is just to … well, be in the room while we’re there, and try not to think too much about where we’re not. Whatever room we happen to be in, just, be there,” she finished lamely.
He didn’t seem to take this in, entirely, but why should he? It was so abstract. Perhaps, to a twelve-year-old boy, it was also a little feminine, a little middle-aged-mom. And the truth was that Grace herself had very little idea of how to simply be where she was, while she was there. Until recently, she’d thought far too much about what she had thought and said and done, and not much at all about how she … just … was. And it didn’t help that she had thought and said and done some pretty awful things. But at this particular moment she was sitting on a back porch, looking at a lake she had looked at for her entire life, with Henry beside her, both of them stroking a not very clean hound from Tennessee. That was not awful. So she was not awful, at least, not right this minute. And Henry … did he seem not awful, too? He did. Under the gruesome, appalling circumstances, yes, he really did. So it would be the first thing people said about them when they left the room—forever, for as long as they both lived—and that was grim indeed, no doubt about it. But on the other hand, neither of them would ever be able to change that, and it was kind of a relief to realize there was no point in trying.
Henry put his face up against the dog’s face. Sherlock licked Henry’s mouth extravagantly. Grace tried not to react.
“Is Daddy insane?” Henry asked suddenly.
“No. Not that way, at least. He won’t hurt himself, Henry. I’m sure of that.”
It was cold again, and the light was gone entirely. Grace moved closer to him on the step, and closer to the dog. The dog was warm.
Then Henry said: “Where do you think he is?”
Grace shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t have any idea. Sometimes I hope they’ll find him, because I’m so angry at him, I want him to be punished. And sometimes I hope they won’t, because as long as they haven’t caught him, I won’t have to really face whether he did it or not.” Then she realized that she had said this aloud, to her own son. And she was horrified.
“Do you think he did it?” Henry asked.
Grace closed her eyes. She waited as long as she could, which was not very long. Because he had asked, and she had to answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE END OF THE WORLD
Vita came down to Great Barrington every Tuesday for a staff meeting at one of Porter’s satellite clinics, and if there wasn’t a crisis to keep her there, she and Grace had lunch somewhere in town. Knowing Vita again was like being readmitted to great chunks of her own life, memories she had allowed to atrophy or just put away because, without her friend, they were inexpressibly sad to think about. Now, at odd moments, she found these things restored to her—appearing, apropos of nothing, while she drove up and down Route 7 or waited for Henry outside the gym where his baseball team did their winter training. She remembered books they had read, clothing they had shopped for and shared or occasionally fought over. She remembered Vita’s mother and her aunt, who was an eccentric—probably, she now understood, a tiny bit bipolar—who sometimes babysat for them at Vita’s house, sneaking them each a Sugar Daddy after Vita’s parents left for the evening. All of these things, and so many others, so inconsequential in themselves, but together a Victorian crazy quilt of her own life. She loved that. She was so grateful for that.
After lunch they went to Guido’s together, for Vita to stock up on things that were not findable in Pittsfield (“a gourmet wasteland,” she called it), and it was there that Grace discovered Guido’s chicken Marbella, the paragon of its culinary species. Grace had made chicken Marbella any number of times in her own kitchen, and she’d always thought it came out fantastically well, but Guido’s was better. Really massively better. Soon she and Henry were eating Guido’s chicken Marbella most Tuesday nights, and Grace had yet to truly figure out why this version of the dish tasted so much better than her own, which annoyed her, but not so much that she declined to eat more of it. Tuesday had become Grace’s favorite day of the week.
One Friday night in late February, Grace finally brought Henry to the stone house to meet the group, Windhouse. By then she and Leo had been getting together every couple of days, and not always with the excuse of having run into each other at the library. Leo was reporting good progress on his Asher Levy book and feeling optimistic about finishing the first draft before his sabbatical ended in June, though he had not been able to show that Levy (and his boatload of refugees from Recife) were the actual first Jews in America. A merchant in Boston appeared to have arrived in 1649, five years earlier. “A bitter, bitter pill,” said Leo. But he laughed when he said it.
Grace had intended to cook something for the Windhouse dinner, but on the day in question she met with a rental agent in Great Barrington to look at office space. There was a newly vacant suite of rooms in a barn, converted for professional use and full of attorneys, consultants, and therapists of all stripes. The rooms overlooked a winter field (the farmer grew hay and corn, according to the rental agent) and were warm and sunny, even at this uncongenial time of year. She tried to picture her oatmeal couch here, the desk and swivel chair from her New York office, the leather Kleenex box holder, the kilim rug, but the truth was that she didn’t want any of those things in this pretty place. New couch. New Kleenex box holder. The white ceramic mug Henry had made at camp, the one she kept her pens in—she would keep that. She loved that. Finally, she would be able to get rid of that Eliot Porter. It was about time.
She went back to the agent’s office with him, and after that there wasn’t time to go home and cook, so she ended up buying a big pan of chicken Marbella from Guido’s, on her way to pick Henry up at his orchestra rehearsal. Henry looked a little tired and he had forgotten they weren’t going home, but he perked up when he smelled the chicken Marbella on the front passenger seat. “Will there be other kids?” he asked, sounding dubious.
“I don’t think so.” She thought of Leo’s stepdaughter. He hadn’t mentioned her when they’d met earlier in the week. “He has a stepdaughter, though. Around your age. A little older.”
“Great,” he said with heavy s
arcasm. To a twelve-year-old boy, the only thing worse than an evening of grown-ups was an evening with grown-ups and a slightly older girl. “I don’t have to play violin with them, do I?”
“No, no,” she said. This wasn’t part of the plan. But now that he mentioned it, hadn’t Leo once said something about Henry “sitting in”? He made her agree to leave his violin in the car.
At the stone house, she wedged into the only remaining space at the end of the steep driveway, parking behind a Subaru with a BARD COLLEGE QUIDDITCH bumper sticker and another that read: OLD BANJO PLAYERS DON’T DIE … THEY JUST STOP FRETTING.
“Can I bring a book?” said Henry.
She hesitated. “All right. But look, give it a chance first, okay?”
“Fine.” He climbed out. She picked up the tray of chicken and got out, too. He followed her to the back door.
They were playing inside, loud enough that no one came to the door when she knocked. She knocked again. Then, with a shrug, she turned the doorknob and went in, carrying the tray. Behind her, Henry shut the door.
“Oh, hey!” Leo said. The music stopped. He bounded into the kitchen. “Grace! Great!” He leaned forward and gave her a kiss, very chaste but very warm. “And you,” he said, addressing Henry, “are Henry, the new fiddler we’ve been expecting.”
“Um … no,” Henry said. “I mean, I play the violin. I don’t play the fiddle.”
“Details,” Leo announced. “Come in, we’ve got a fire. You want something to drink?”
Henry asked for soda. It was a calculated move, since they didn’t drink soda at home.
“Oh, sorry. Not big on soda here. You like cranberry juice?”
“No, that’s okay.”
Grace accepted a glass of wine and sipped it nervously. She hadn’t realized she was nervous until the wine actually came into her hand, but then it occurred to her that three of Leo’s best friends were waiting in the next room. And then it occurred to her that she sort of cared what they thought of her.
She had been inside the house only once, many years before, when a summer storm knocked out the power around the lake for two or three days and the families had convened in unprecedented (and unrepeated) neighborliness on the stone house lakefront to grill up whatever remained in people’s fridges. She had no specific memories of Leo from that day, but she did remember the house itself, or at least its single most impressive feature: the fireplace’s massive mantel of river stones that seemed to take up an entire wall. Seeing it now as she entered the room, she knew that her memory had not exaggerated its size or general impact: It reached up to the ceiling and out beyond the edges of the fireplace itself, as if the stoneworker had simply been carried away by the beauty of the available rocks, which were variously brown, gray, and faintly pink. Wedged between them horizontally, almost as an afterthought, a long split log served as a mantelpiece. Alongside, as they entered, Grace saw Henry’s eyes go right to the fireplace and travel up and down, taking it all in exactly as she had when she was his age, more or less. I know, she told him silently. I felt the same way.
There was a fire in the fireplace entirely equal to its grandeur. It popped and licked and threw warmth out into the room, which was perhaps why the musicians—there were three of them seated on the couch and armchairs—had drawn themselves away from it. One of them, a heavyset man with a fading hairline, stood up as they came in.
“This is Colum,” said Leo.
The one who grew up in Scotland, she remembered, shaking his hand.
“Hi. I’m Grace. This is Henry.”
“Hi,” said Henry. He shook Colum’s hand as well.
The others waved from the opposite couch. The woman named Lyric (hippie parents) had long black hair, gently graying in a way that black hair in Manhattan simply never did, a long nose with a markedly rounded bridge, and a lap full of sheet music (“Please, don’t get up,” said Grace, meaning it). The teenager beside her, her son, got to his feet, holding his fiddle. He was called Rory.
“I’m sorry to interrupt,” said Grace.
“You didn’t,” Colum said, and Grace heard, even in those two words, his still-resonant Scottish accent. “You brought dinner. That’s quite a different thing.”
“Chicken,” said Leo. “I put it in the oven.”
“I’m really hungry,” Rory said. He looked a little like his mother, with her same strong nose—a nose that might truly be called aquiline—and very dark hair, but he was a bit rounder, a bit softer. Dad, whoever he was, must be an endomorph.
His mother laughed. “You’re always hungry.” To Grace she said: “Feeding Rory is a full-time occupation.”
Rory, sitting down again, put up his fiddle and began to trace a faint tune, not loud enough to interrupt. His hand seemed to move in its own world, as if it belonged to another body altogether. Henry, Grace noticed, was watching it closely.
“I’m so glad to see where the music’s been coming from,” she said. “I sit out on my dock sometimes and listen.”
“An audience!” Leo smiled. “At last!”
“Oh, wait now, you said you had groupies. You said ‘a modest following.’”
“Modest is right,” Colum said. He had picked up the guitar that had been leaning against the armchair. “We’re up to … well, I’d say a good two figures.”
“That’s …” Henry was frowning. “Isn’t that like ten people?”
“Precisely.” And he sat, taking the guitar across his lap.
“Well, that isn’t much.”
“No,” agreed Leo. “But now that you and your mother are here, things are really looking up. Luckily we’re not in it for the screaming mobs.”
“Luckily,” Lyric said with a small laugh.
“We’re in it for … the love of the art form.”
“I thought we were in it to meet girls,” said Rory.
Henry, Grace couldn’t help noticing again, seemed slightly captivated by him.
“The kind of girls you want to meet, my love,” said his mother, “are not coming out to hear string bands.”
“Wait,” Henry said, “are you, like, a string quartet?”
“String band,” Leo said. “Technically any group composed entirely of string instruments is a string band. I guess that makes a string quartet a string band, too.”
“Yeah, right,” Rory said with exquisite teenage disdain.
“But mainly it refers to bluegrass, Irish, and Scottish music. Sometimes it gets called roots music. Do you know any roots music, Henry?”
Henry shook his head. Grace, imagining Vitaly Rosenbaum’s thoughts on roots music, nearly laughed out loud.
“Not a big thing in New York,” Grace said. She had taken an empty seat next to the fire and crossed her legs at an angle away from the heat.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Colum. “There’s a major scene in the city now. Mainly Brooklyn, but we’re making headway in Manhattan. Paddy Reilly’s on Twenty-Ninth has a lot. And the Brass Monkey. I go there if I’m in the city on Sunday nights. Anyone can go and play.”
“Really,” Grace said. “I had no idea. Just not on my radar, I guess.”
Leo, who was on his way back to the kitchen, said: “Very Zeitgeist, obviously.”
“Well, that would explain my ignorance. I’m far from the Zeitgeist.”
“What’s that?” Henry asked, and Rory, rather charmingly, tried to explain it to him.
Grace went into the kitchen and helped Leo set out the food. There was, as well as the chicken Marbella, a big salad, a pan of baked acorn squash, each half containing a little pool of melted butter, and two loaves of Leo’s Anadama bread.
“He’s great,” said Leo.
“Oh. Thank you. Yes, he is.”
“I think he’s interested. What do you think?”
“I think you’d do anything for another fiddler.”
He put down the knife he’d been wielding on his loaves and grinned at her.
“You know,” he said, “I might. But ev
en if I don’t get him to come over to the dark side, he’s still great.”
“Yes,” Grace agreed. “He still is.”
The food was ready, so the others came in and loaded up their plates, then everyone returned to the fire, sitting back down carefully alongside the instruments. Henry tipped over his acorn squash, not difficult to do, and spilled melted butter over his plate. Grace went for a paper towel.
“It’s so good,” Colum said when she returned. “Did you make this?”
“No. Guido’s in Great Barrington made it. I make this dish, too, but there’s something in Guido’s I don’t put in mine. It’s so much better. I wish I knew what it was. Some herb, I guess.”
“Oregano?” Leo guessed.
“No. There’s oregano in mine.”
“It’s the rice vinegar,” said Lyric. “There’s a little rice vinegar in here. I can taste it.”
Grace, with a forkful of it even then on its way to her mouth, stopped and looked at it.
“Really?”
“Taste it,” Lyric said.
Grace did. And as she did, she thought of sushi rice, Napa cabbage, Japanese pickles—the things she associated with rice vinegar. As soon as she put the fork in her mouth, there it was: rice vinegar—right there, floating everywhere. “Oh, my God,” she said, “you’re absolutely right.”
It had made her almost absurdly happy. She looked around at them all, delighted.
“You work in Great Barrington?” Colum asked.
“I’m a psychotherapist. I’m moving my practice to Great Barrington.”
The Undoing Page 41
