When Jeff woke me around six hours later, I snuck into the kitchen to heat up a bottle for him, and saw that Toby was still passed out on the floor, his head and naked shoulders protruding from the top of his sleeping bag. When I returned an hour later to use the bathroom, he was still fast asleep. I got dressed, fed Jeff some gooey oatmeal, then scribbled a note to Toby, telling him where to find breakfast stuff and asking him to stop by the library sometime before noon “after you’ve explored all the wonders of Pelham.”
I did my usual morning routine, dropping Jeff off at Babs’s house, stopping by Miller’s for my cigarettes.
“Heard you got company staying with you,” Jesse Miller said.
Her tone was completely mild and unthreatening—she was just making a passing comment—so I replied in a similar vein.
“That’s right—an old college friend of ours has dropped by for a couple of days.”
“And how’s the doc’s dad?”
“Still alive, but only just.”
“Tell him how sorry I am the next time you’re speaking to him.”
“I will,” I said.
When I reached the library, Estelle said, “So I hear you’re entertaining lone men on your own.”
“Oh for God’s sakes . . .”
“Hon,” she said, “welcome to Pelham.”
Over our morning coffee I answered her assorted questions about my houseguest—sticking to the line that he was an old college friend—then tried to keep myself busy with work. An hour or so later, as I was restacking books, I heard the door open and Toby ask Estelle if I was around.
“Ah,” she said, “so you’re the tall, dark stranger who wandered into town last night.”
Toby laughed, and I hurried out from the stacks, wiping book dust off my hands en route.
“Don’t listen to my boss,” I said, “she’s an agent provocateur.”
“I have a soft spot for agents provocateurs,” he said, extending his hand to Estelle. I could see Estelle looking him over, and trying (without success) to suppress a smile.
“So you were at UVM with Hannah and Dan?” she asked him. I could see Toby do a double take—and for one horrible moment I thought he might say, “Who told you that?”
But to his immense credit, he understood what was going on and said, “That’s right. Hannah’s dad was my adviser.”
Estelle seemed to buy this, but another unsettling thought clouded my head. Say she works out who Toby is? Surely she must have read about all the sit-downs at Columbia and how this Toby Judson was the chief provocateur. Then she’s going to think: Why did Hannah lie to me?
And she’d be right to think that, because there was no reason why I couldn’t have told her the truth. That’s the problem with lies—they always push you into a corner, from which there is little chance of escape without looking like a duplicitous fool.
“How’d you sleep?” I asked him.
“Like the dead,” he said. “I even feel vaguely human today. And I’ve just spent the last half hour exploring the delights of Pelham. Quite a friendly place. As soon as I walked into the luncheonette . . . what’s it called again?”
“Miss Pelham’s,” I said.
“Yeah, well, as soon as I walked in there and sat down, the waitress said, ‘You wouldn’t happen to be the college friend who’s staying with Doc Buchan and his wife?’”
He winked at me, and I was sure Estelle caught the hint of conspiracy between us.
“We like to live in each other’s back pockets in Pelham,” Estelle said. “Which means we have a kind of communal intelligence service that would make the CIA envious. And we hate when anyone does anything out of the norm—like having an old male friend stay when her husband’s away.”
“Well,” Toby said, “wasn’t it Conrad who said: ‘It’s only those who do nothing that make no mistakes’?”
“Heart of Darkness?” Estelle asked.
“An Outcast of the Islands,” Toby said.
“So what are you planning to do today?” I asked Toby, trying to change the subject.
“Not really sure. Any ideas?”
“If you like the Great Outdoors,” Estelle said, “we’ve got plenty of it around here.”
“Yeah, you could go over to Sebago Lake, maybe rent a canoe if you know how to navigate one.”
“Oh, I was sent to summer camp like every Shaker Heights kid.”
“You grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio?” Estelle asked.
“I’m afraid so.”
“Well, one of my maternal aunts married someone from Shaker Heights. Name of Alisberg. Ever heard of them?”
“Nope,” Toby said.
“She’s still alive, my aunt . . . well, just about. And I talk to her once a month—and she knows everybody in Shaker Heights—so I must mention you to her the next time we speak. What did you say your last name was?”
“I didn’t, but it’s Mailman. However, I doubt your aunt would remember my folks, because they moved to Florida around fifteen years ago.”
“Oh, Ruthie’s the sort who remembers everyone she’s ever met. What did your dad do?”
“A lawyer.”
“Listen,” I said, interrupting, “if you want to go to Sebago Lake now, I can lend you the car.”
“That would be cool,” Toby said.
“Do you know how to drive a gear shift?”
“No problem,” he said, motioning that I should follow him out to the street. “Nice meeting you,” he said to Estelle.
“You too,” she said.
I grabbed my cigarettes off the reception desk (Christ, did I need a smoke now) and told Estelle I’d be back in a minute.
Outside on the street, I offered Toby a cigarette. He shook his head. I lit one up. As I sucked in a deep lungful of smoke, Toby arched his eyebrows and said, “Now would you mind explaining why you did something so dumb like tell everyone I was an old college friend?”
“Because I thought the idea that you were Dan’s friend wouldn’t—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, cutting me off. “That’s what I figured when that waitress mentioned it. God forbid it should be some guy who doesn’t know the good doctor, staying all alone with his wife while he stands vigil by the hospital bed of his dying father.”
“All right, I was a coward,” I said.
“No, you were just being prudent—and I understand that. And I know that, if I had used my real name, your librarian friend would have worked out who I was, and how we weren’t all great pals at UVM . . . as if I’d have gone there in the first place.”
“Hey, there’s no need to get all Ivy League about it.”
“All right, I’m a snob. But listen, don’t worry if she does eventually work out who I am. You can always say something like, ‘Because of his radical credentials, he prefers to travel under an assumed name’ . . . and yeah, I do know that sounds pretentious as hell. But she strikes me as a pretty cool woman for a small-town librarian, so I think she’ll work out why I don’t exactly announce who I am and what I’ve done over the years.”
“My, what a big head you have.”
“All the better to impress you with, my dear.”
“You’d make a shitty Big Bad Wolf.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment. You sure you don’t mind me taking the car?”
“As long as you don’t wreck it. It’s the orange Volvo parked behind the doctor’s office. And Sebago Lake’s just about fifteen minutes from here . . .”
“Why don’t we do Sebago Lake this afternoon?”
“We?”
“Yeah—you and me and Jeffrey. I can take the car now and drive over to Bridgton to get the necessary supplies for the dinner I’m going to cook for you tonight.”
“There’s no need for you to cook dinner.”
“I know. I’d like to cook for you. And before that I’d like to take you and Jeffrey out for a canoe ride on the lake . . . especially as it is such a spectacular fall day.”
He held out his hand
for the keys.
“So does that sound like a good plan?” he asked.
I dropped the keys in his hand.
“Sure,” I said.
He asked me what time I got off work. I told him. He said, “That should give us a good two hours on the lake. By the way, I didn’t lock the apartment door on the way out. Was that cool?”
“There’s no such thing as theft in Pelham. Only nosiness. See you at two-thirty.”
Back in the library, Estelle gave me a very knowing smile.
“Well, he is seriously dreamy.”
“Yeah, and I’m seriously married.”
“Hey, I’m just making an aesthetic judgment . . . though if I was all alone with him in that small apartment of yours . . .”
“I’m not all alone with him. I do have my son there.”
“No need to get all serious on me, Hannah. I’m just kidding around.”
“You know what it’s like here, Estelle.”
“Everyone knows he’s Dan’s friend too. So you’re covered if, in the privacy of your own home, you want to undress him with your teeth.”
“Ha.”
“Two of those and you’d be laughing. And speaking of laughs, what the hell was a boy from Shaker Heights doing at the University of Vermont? No one outside of the Northeast ever goes there.”
“He was a ski bum.”
“That makes sense . . . though I’ve never met a ski bum who quoted Joseph Conrad.”
“Well, now you have.”
When I got back to the apartment with Jeff after work, Toby was already there, unpacking a vast array of Italian produce in the kitchen. I blinked in amazement as real olive oil and cloves of garlic and actual Italian sausage and a big wedge of Parmesan cheese and a bottle of Chianti appeared out of the paper bag.
“Where did you get all that?” I asked.
“Didn’t you know you had an Italian deli in Pelham?”
“Come on, tell me how you found this stuff.”
“I asked around, that’s all.”
“Asked where?”
“At the supermarket in Bridgton—which, outside of Chef Boyardee tomato sauce, has absolutely nothing in the way of Italian stuff. But someone at the shop told me about this little place off Congress Street in Portland, which apparently is the only Italian deli in the entire state of Maine. So I drove over there, and hey, presto: the makings of a great rigatoni con salsiccia.”
“You drove all the way over to Portland?”
“It’s only an hour each way—and your Volvo seems to be able to handle all those bumpy back roads. Not the prettiest of towns, Portland. Still, the deli was quite a find. The owner’s named Paolo, his dad came from Genoa, worked as a fisherman on the Maine coast, then set up this little operation which the son now runs . . . I got the whole story, not to mention a cup of very good espresso.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“Ask and you shall find out. And don’t look so startled. I was just in the mood for cooking Italian.”
“I’m impressed, that’s all.”
I was also a little ashamed that it had taken an out-of-stater to suss out that there was an Italian deli within an hour of here. Not that I ever got any farther than Lewiston these days. Ask and you shall find out. That was the problem—I never asked about anything.
Toby finished putting the last of his Italian shopping away, then turned to me and said, “So, shall we head to Sebago Lake while we still have a couple of hours of light?”
Toby insisted on driving us over to the lake—“I never get the chance to drive in Chicago”—only he went by a new route, bringing us to a picnic area on the far side of the lake where there was also a place to rent canoes.
“How’d you find out about this place?”
“Asked at a gas station in Bridgton where I could rent a canoe at the lake.”
“Ask and ye shall find out.”
“As Jesus once said to Karl Marx.”
“Amen.”
It was a short walk from the parking lot, past the picnic tables, to a little cabin at the lakefront manned by a lone guy in his fifties, renting canoes and rowboats.
“You’re my only customers today,” he said. “Come October, there’s hardly anyone on the lake anymore.”
I looked at the canoes and kept thinking how easy they were to capsize.
“Mightn’t it be safer in a rowboat?” I asked the lake guy.
“Oh come on,” Toby said, “for the authentic Maine experience, you’ve got to cross Sebago Lake by canoe. Anyway, it’s a perfectly calm day. Better than calm. No wind whatsoever.”
“Your husband’s right,” the lake guy said. “It’s glass out there today—and you’ve just as much chance of capsizing in a rowboat as you do in a canoe. Anyway, we’ll fit you all out with life jackets.”
Toby, however, chose not to wear his. “I like to live dangerously.”
“Well, excuse me, husband, if I’m Little Miss Prudent,” I said, “but Jeff and I are going to wear ours.”
“Well, wife, not everyone has to be as vain as me,” he said.
At least Toby was right about the stillness of the lake. It was one of those rare, peerless fall days when the sun was at full wattage, the air was suffused with a tang of impending winter, and the wind was nowhere to be felt. I sat in the bow of the canoe with my son clutched against me as Toby, in the stern, paddled us out into the middle of that becalmed inland sea. I looked north, south, east, west—all possible horizons, all defined by water and woodlands, its foliage alight with reds and yellows from the fiery end of the color spectrum. I leaned back, pulling Jeffrey even closer to me, and stared up at the sky—a hard blue dome, empty of all hints of impending gloom. I breathed deeply—the air so pure, so crisp, that I actually felt light-headed. And for a brief time, I lost all sense of the world beyond here. Everything that worried me, all my misgivings about my life, all the emotional baggage that I dragged with me, day in, day out . . . for a couple of precious minutes, it all fell right off me. There was no past, no future, no personal complexities, no sense of inadequacy or regret, and no guilt. There was only the moment: the lake, the trees, the limitless heavens, my son asleep against my chest, the dimming sun still incandescent on my face. And I found myself thinking: So this is what bliss is . . . fleeting, short-lived, ephemeral . . . and gone. In a moment.
At the other end of the canoe, Toby had also fallen silent. He stopped paddling and sat back, staring up at that great blue void.
“Are you religious?” he finally asked, breaking the moment.
“Not really, though I wish I was.”
“Why?”
“Oh, the sense of certainty, I suppose. The idea that you are not totally responsible for everything that happens to you. And, of course, the belief that there is something beyond all this.”
“That would be a pretty damn amusing discovery,” Toby said. “Life after death . . . though, personally speaking, from everything I’ve read about it, I think I’d find heaven pretty damn boring. Nothing to do but contemplate paradise. What would I do all day? There’d be nothing to change.”
“How can you be so sure that you’ll end up in heaven?”
“Good point, especially if God also happens to be a Columbia University graduate.”
“You really caused some chaos down there.”
“They deserved it.”
“Who’s they?”
“The university administration and the board of trustees. Letting the CIA operate covertly out of the think tanks they had set up at Columbia. Accepting large donations from companies that make napalm. Allowing the science labs to be used for research by the military-industrial complex.”
“But did you manage to change anything in the end?”
“We did get Columbia to renounce the napalm money from the big corporations, and the chemistry department did agree to stop working on several Pentagon projects.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
“You don’t so
und impressed.”
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” I asked.
“Revolutionary change doesn’t happen overnight—especially in such an ingrained capitalist system like the United States. The problem here, unlike pre-Bolshevik Russia, is that the proletariat lives under the illusion that they can push their way into the bourgeoisie through hard work and obedience to the secular state. You don’t have the same sort of downtrodden serf class as existed in czarist Russia. Instead, the exploitation is hidden under the guise of consumerism—making the working classes feel they need that new car, that new washing machine, that new remote control color television . . . all the totemic goodies of a rabidly acquisitive . . . am I boring you?”
“No, I’m listening,” I said.
“But you’re also sitting with your head back against the stern, staring up at the sky.”
“Can you blame me? Look at where we are.”
“Point taken.”
“I’m not trying to make a point, Toby.”
“No, but I stand guilty of shooting off my big mouth, as usual.”
“You talk a good game.”
“Really?”
“Oh come on, you do know that. And it is interesting.”
“But not in the middle of a lake on a day like today.”
“You’re learning,” I said.
Long pause.
“Why did you ask me if I was religious?” I asked.
“Because I get the sense that—how can I say this without sounding totally asinine?—you’re searching for some sort of meaning.”
“Isn’t everyone? But religion’s too easy. ‘God is watching you . . . God will help you overcome your problems . . . and if you play by the rules on earth, you’ll get life ever after.’ I don’t believe it for a moment.”
“But you do want to believe something, don’t you?”
“You mean, the way you believe in revolutionary politics, or the way my dad believes in nonviolent political change?”
“Perhaps.”
“Actually, what I really want to believe in is myself—and my ability to do something well.”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 126
