by Ben Dolnick
“I can’t wait to use the fireplace.”
“I’ve always thought I could be someone who gets into birding.”
“We should buy a hammock.”
“We should buy hiking boots.”
Some of our readiness to leave may have been New York’s doing too; no city has ever been so cooperative in providing exit music for the uncertain. There was, one night on the N train, a puddle of Spam-colored vomit spread from pole to pole, with shoe prints. There was a deep, gut-rumbling alarm that sounded from the power plant near our apartment for an hour one morning. There was a prune-sized cockroach that skittered out from behind the coffee machine. Vomit, power plants, cockroaches: I leave the city to you; I’ll be with my beloved and my guitar on a fifteen-acre farm.
Hannah and I drove two hours up the Taconic for her in-person interview on a sun-scrubbed Thursday. The scenery nailed its role: in Hannah’s old college Volvo we sped through a crazy dark bounty of trees, over gleaming reservoir lakes, past hay bales and wooden fences and sculpture-still pecan-colored horses.
“Smell that,” Hannah said, rolling down the window.
“I know,” I said. “It’s crazy. I wonder if they put drugs in the air.”
Unless Hannah had been assaulted during the interview (it was conducted, at the house, by a sixtysomething board member whose main concern was whether Hannah knew of any art museums in the city that might be interested in giving his niece an internship), I don’t think either one of us would have considered her turning down the job. The remoteness of the museum, the lack of visitors, the apparent lack of other candidates—these were, we hardly even needed to assure each other, not problems at all: they were challenges; they were curiosities; they were virtues in feeble disguise. A mind made up is a formidable thing.
. . .
How can I tell you about the Rampes?
Our last night in the city—this was the end of August; the only things left in our apartment were an AeroBed and a box of Thin Mints—we had dinner with Hannah’s parents. It was hot but not gruesome, an emptied-out, leave-work-early-and-sit-dazed-on-a-boulder-in-Central-Park feeling to the city. We had dinner with the Rampes once a month or so, but this was only the second time we’d seen them since getting engaged, and they were determined to make it momentous: a send-off, and also a compensation for the last time, which had been the kind of hard-to-pin-down disappointment that was Hannah’s parents’ specialty.
The Rampes didn’t like me; this was the simplest, and maybe the most accurate, way to put it, but it wasn’t the way Hannah and I tended to put it, when we put it any way at all. It isn’t that they don’t like you, it’s that…It was that they’d seen Hannah’s older sister, Megan, go through such a series of relationship disasters (at thirty-three, she’d been divorced already, and was now living in Providence with a man they were fairly sure had stolen Terri’s pain pills from the medicine cabinet). Or it was that they didn’t know what to make of my sense of humor (Hannah’s dad, Bruce, grimaced whenever people other than himself made jokes, as if he were recovering from a punch to the abdomen).
In any event, our get-togethers tended to be festivals of stillborn conversations and strained smiles. My charms, which had paid my way through most of my life, were not accepted here.
Terri was in her early sixties, thin and unsure of herself. She had dark hair and Hannah’s nose and a quick, quiet voice. She was always calling Hannah because she needed help signing into her bank account, or because she was certain she’d bought theater tickets but somehow they’d disappeared. She’d worked in publishing, before Hannah was born, then in PR, then doing research for a historian (“I always thought I was just about to find what my thing was going to be”), but now she seemed mainly to make plans, and to worry.
Bruce was an eye surgeon; this was the first, and possibly the only, thing he thought you needed to know about him. He took yearly trips to Tanzania, where he performed free surgeries for village kids who then hung grinning from his biceps in photos. He jogged a loop of Central Park each morning, and was under the impression that their building’s doorman (“That’s all you running today, Mr. R?”) was personally fond of him. He had a full head of gray hair and pink skin and he interacted with everyone, including his offspring, in a way that managed to convey I’m going to do you the favor of listening hard to what you’re saying right now, but please understand that the meter is running.
The Rampes had lived for thirty-five years in the same apartment on the Upper West Side, and they were both dedicated to New York in a way that bordered on the cultish. They knew someone in the city who excelled at every human endeavor: the best tailor, the best butcher, the best off-Broadway theater director, the best guy to talk to if you needed curtains. When they went on vacations—every couple of years they took a two-week trip to somewhere like Morocco or New Zealand—it was only to refill their store of fanaticism. “Is there a rule against putting ice in the water?” “You know what your mother pointed out after we’d been there a couple of days? No one was sitting in the parks! They’re just empty.”
When Hannah first told her parents that we were engaged, they had only just absorbed the fact that we’d be moving upstate. Terri said, “Wait, you weren’t on speaker. What did you say?”
“Nick and I are engaged.”
“To be married?”
“Yes.”
I heard Bruce’s voice in the background. “Since when?”
They took us out to a celebratory dinner at Il Buco (the best Italian restaurant) that was slightly, but only slightly, more successful than the phone call. Bruce, after some conversation about when we wanted the wedding to be (we didn’t know) and whether we thought it made sense to be taking on so much change at once (we did), got into an argument with the waiter about whether there were enough shrimp in his pasta. This was how nights with them went: awkward jousting, expensive food, and then Hannah, at some point afterward, asking, “Why can’t they just be normal with you?”
But her parents were not, Hannah would regularly insist, as difficult as they seemed. They’d come around. They were just protective. They loved her absurdly. And it was true; they did. My own parents, by comparison, were as involved in my life as an uncle and aunt. (My mom, when I told her that Hannah and I were engaged, said, “Oh, that’s great news. We just love her, love her,” and then asked if she could call me back because she was about to pull into the garage.) So there was something I envied, for all the unpleasantness, in the closeness of the Rampes. They regarded Hannah as in need of special protection, and they were going to be the ones who provided it. I even understood why.
This is a tricky area; I feel, edging up to it, like I’m walking a crumbly-edged trail on the lip of the Grand Canyon. I can’t tell how much of this is hindsight, but the story fluoresces now, it seems like the most important thing I ever learned about the Rampes.
In any event:
When Hannah was just out of Oberlin, she had a kind of breakdown. She didn’t tell me about this until we’d been together for about a year, and even after she had told me about it she only ever referred to it in the most general terms (“When I was having a hard time after college”; “When that stuff happened”). It was a chapter excised from the history books, reduced to a single uninformative paragraph.
What had happened, so far as I could tell, was that an ordinary but stressful set of experiences—the sudden death of a cousin, a bad boss, some complicated falling out with a friend—had all come in quick succession, and she had, in a way she’d never done before, cracked. Skipping work to weep in bed. Going out to dinners with friends and then, partway through, feeling so suddenly and inexplicably terrified that she would stand up and run back to her apartment, her heart racing. For a while she couldn’t sleep because she was afraid she’d stop breathing in the night, so she would call her parents and keep the phone next to her on the pillow. This was when she was living in the West Village with a roommate, working at a law office. There may have been mil
d delusions (she’d told me about her ceiling pulsating, her curtains seeming to flap at her), but some of these may have had to do with drugs: her roommate, seeing what a bad time she was having, had convinced her to take mushrooms, which had only pushed the meltdown into a new and direr phase.
The upshot was that she quit her job and broke her lease and spent a few months at home, trembling in bed, being dragged by her parents from one therapist to another, suddenly a child again at twenty-three, only more helpless than when she’d actually been a child. Bruce and Terri were at their best in a crisis, apparently. Cool washcloths pressed against her forehead. Cary Grant marathons on TMC. Bruce eventually got her an appointment with a psychiatrist he knew from med school, Dr. Blythe, and he ended up being the savior; he prescribed her a combination of pills and talk that, over the next couple of months, brought her to a state where she was exhausted but not miserable, and just as puzzled by what had happened to her as everyone else was. She found a new apartment. This was when she got her first job in a museum. By the time I met her you would never have guessed she’d had any sort of psychological trouble at all—she projected a capable, cheerful ease in the world; it would have been easier to believe that she’d founded a company in her twenties than that she’d had a breakdown.
But for her parents, of course, the memory was still close. To have watched your child collapse is to live the rest of your life on a partially frozen pond. So their wariness about me may have made a certain kind of animal sense. Their daughter had demonstrated the capacity for sudden plunges, and I had not yet proven myself capable of picking her up.
Anyway, that night in August, we grilled hamburgers out on the deck of their apartment and watched the sun set showily over New Jersey. Bruce and Terri were arguing in their repartee mode about Terri having forgotten to buy cayenne for the corn. Their dog, a fat black cocker spaniel named Mickey (who had a regimen of pills much more extensive than Hannah’s), kept wandering between our ankles, hoping for scraps.
“A toast to your engagement…,” Bruce said, lifting up a strikingly full glass.
“And to starting to think about wedding dates and venues and all that fun stuff,” Terri said, clinking carefully.
The main thread of conversation kept returning, despite Hannah’s best efforts, to how much they’d miss us once we moved. Terri inched her chair closer to Hannah’s and said, “You realize, I hope, that you’re going to have to call us the second you get there. I can’t stand driving on the Taconic—after the last time I said I’d never do it again—and just thinking of you two with the car all loaded up and all these other drivers weaving around…”
Bruce kept going inside to adjust the volume on the stereo—whenever conversation wasn’t aimed at him directly, he kept himself in a state of restless bustle: making sure the burgers didn’t need to be turned, plucking dead leaves out of the plants by the railing.
“A patient of mine has a house not far from Hibernia,” he said, coming back outside. “Twenty-nine minutes—I looked it up. You ought to get together for a meal.”
He was still wearing his blue biking outfit from a ride that afternoon; whenever he came near I got a whiff of low tide.
“I’m sure your seventy-year-old patient is dying to have dinner with his doctor’s daughter and her fiancé.”
(The word fiancé still had a certain unsheathed-blade effect on her parents.)
“He’s fifty-nine, for your information,” Bruce said, recovering himself.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to know someone up there?” Terri said. “That’s the part I always found scary about moving, the not knowing anyone.”
We’d finished dinner, and I was in the kitchen refilling my water glass, mentally congratulating myself on having gotten through the night—in the pantheon of Rampe dinners, this had been fairly painless—when Bruce walked in behind me and let the door swing shut. I realized I’d been set up, stalked like a deer.
“So,” he said, zipping and unzipping one of the pockets on his shirt. “You’ve probably noticed we’re a bit stirred up.”
“Are you?” I said. “I know this is a big deal.”
We were standing a few feet apart, not quite looking at each other.
“Lemme just get to the point. Hannah’s our priority. You don’t understand what that means yet, but you will. Megan is too, of course, but you understand why this might all be a little more—intense, with Hannah.”
I nodded solemnly.
He stepped closer and put his hands on the edge of the island and lowered his head, like a boxer between rounds. What he said next didn’t sound like him; normally his voice had an eyebrow-wobbling, ironic quality—Hannah called it his Oh do you? voice—but now all smugness, all playfulness, was gone. He spoke quickly and quietly.
“You’re taking her off somewhere, just the two of you, you’re talking about getting married, things are feeling pretty good right now. I know you think you know her well, you guys have been together a few years, but I want you to know she’s trickier than that. She seems very sure of herself, but that’s taken work, that’s not an accident. If this moving upstate doesn’t work out, or if you decide, well, whaddaya know, maybe marriage isn’t the thing, she’ll take it harder than you can probably imagine. And you won’t be the one who picks up the pieces.” He cleared his throat, seeming to sense that he’d gone too far. “Look. Terri and I just want her to have a happy life, good husband, good family, all the standard stuff. We just want to be sure you get that.”
I didn’t know if I was being warned or cursed or what, exactly. My face was burning, and a part of me wanted to march out onto the deck and grab Hannah by the arm and storm out of these lunatics’ lives forever. Instead I swallowed and told him that I understood.
“I’m glad,” he said, putting his hand on my back and guiding us out into the living room. “That’s very good.”
We all said elaborate goodbyes in the front hall (“You’d better go already or I’ll start crying,” Terri said, already crying), and on the subway ride home, Hannah, resting her head on my shoulder, said, “What did my dad say to you in the kitchen?”
“Just to be careful on the drive, because of cops.”
The next morning, thanks to nerves and a leak in our AeroBed, Hannah and I woke up before the alarm. I’d just had a dream involving climbing a sand dune. We lay for a few minutes in that cobwebby preverbal state, not talking. The light in the room, our soon-to-be-former bedroom, was blue; the street outside was the quietest I’d ever heard it.
“You feel like manifesting a move?” Hannah finally said. This was a phrase I’d almost forgotten—we’d heard a blond-dreadlocked woman say it a few years before on the phone in an incense-stinking birthstone-and-beads store on Bleecker Street; she’d been manifesting a move to Brazil, wondering when the universe would start sending her signs of compliance.
“I do,” I said. My heart, possibly just for reasons of morning-systems balkiness, had started knocking around in my chest like a trapped squirrel. “Do you?”
“I do,” she said, sitting up. “The vibrations have commenced.”
[“Farewell Kiss,” Wright Historic House teaching materials]
…
Once there was a man named Edmund Wright. He lived in New York City, when it was much smaller than today but still a very big city. He had a happy family and he liked his job, which was writing books, but he always had a bad feeling that something was going to happen to his oldest son, William, whom he loved more than anything in the world. Sometimes he would have dreams where William would fall out a window. Sometimes he would just be sitting at his desk and out of nowhere he would imagine William getting trampled by a horse.
So one day, when Edmund had had enough of being scared, he decided to move his family out of the city and up to a little town called Hibernia. He was sure that William would be safe there. And sure enough, life was good in Hibernia! Edmund and his family ate vegetables from their garden, and went for walks in the beautiful woods. �
��I feel as sturdy as one of these oak trees!” said Edmund. For the first time in years, he had some peace of mind.
But one foggy fall evening, Edmund decided to go into town to visit a friend. He hitched up his horse and carriage [show Carriage Illustration # 1] and he told his family that he would be back in time to say good night. But his horse had only taken a few steps when Edmund heard a cry and felt his carriage stop in its tracks. What Edmund hadn’t seen, because the evening was dark and the fog was thick, was that, just as the carriage was pulling away, William had been climbing up the wheel to give him a farewell kiss. William had been pulled into the spokes and now his lifeless body lay in the road. “No!” Edmund cried. “My boy! My beloved boy!” But it was true: William was gone.
Edmund and his family lived in Hibernia for many years afterward, and they still had three wonderful children [show Wright Family Portrait #2]. But secretly, Edmund never forgave himself for William’s accident. “Why?” he would ask. “Why did I ever leave New York?”
And sometimes at night, when no one else was awake, William’s ghost would appear by Edmund’s bed, looking just as he had when he was alive, only much paler now and floating a few inches off the ground. William’s ghost never said a word—he just moved across the room like a cold patch of fog. “I’m sorry!” Edmund would cry out, waking up his wife. But the ghost wouldn’t speak. It would just move closer and closer—and then, just before it disappeared, it would lean over and, with its icy lips, give Edmund a farewell kiss.
Discussion questions:
• Do you think Edmund really saw William’s ghost late at night, or was it just his imagination? [Call on three to four students.]
• Why do you think Edmund said he should never have left New York? [Call on three to four students.]
• Have you ever had a bad feeling you couldn’t explain? Did you act on that feeling? Why or why not? [Call on three to four students.]
