All the Finest Girls

by Alexandra Styron

  Lou’s hair.

  The dark of my room. Late at night.

  A chest cold.

  My breathing slow and thick. Lou bends over me to rub something icy, minty, on my chest. Her hair glistens in the light from the moon and gives off a candy-sweet smell.

  Put yah head back, lickle one

  The smell of her hair is frozen, vanquished by the menthol she dabs gently beneath my nose.

  In the morning, my mouth waters when I look at the glass jar in her bathroom, filled with the pink jelly that sweetens her hair, so inviting I can already taste it on the back of my throat. Dippity-do.

  I fumble with the top, dippity-doing my finger in the cool, soft gel. Slip my finger between my lips.

  Candle wax, fire, and alcohol.

  BUCKS BEAT ROYALS IN LITTLE CRICKETEERS SEASON OPENER

  So read the headline on one of the crumbling brown clippings. The short account praised the teamwork and batting skills of several boys, including Philip Hodge. Under Philip’s name was a line where a now-faded ink had once drawn attention to the spot. Along the edge, in the same nearly invisible pen, was a handwritten comment that I didn’t read. I stepped back a bit to take in the entire wall.

  CHALWELL ACADEMIC PRIZES GO TO LISTON, HODGE

  YOUNG BATTER NAMED ALL-ISLAND

  THREE SET FOR FALL STUDIES AT AMERICAN UNIVERSITY

  Here and there were pictures of Philip, circled in faint lines. His little-boy face staring out from a team picture. A strip of photo-booth shots, mugging, adolescent. The clippings dated mostly from the late sixties and seventies. One, less damaged and with a date only three years past, was posted below the others.

  MISS LETTSOME TO MARRY YOUNG HODGE IN MAY

  Mr. and Mrs. Gerald “Sugar” Lettsome, proprietors of Sugar’s Construction Ltd., in Carrot Bay, have most happily announced the impending wedding of their daughter Floria Hyacinth to Philip Arthur Hodge, son of Mr. Errol Hodge of Eldertown.

  The groom, a graduate of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, is the chief financial officer of the family concern, Foxy’s Ltd., owners of the legendary Foxy’s Palace. Foxy’s doors were first opened in 1943 by Clemont “Foxy” Rose, father of Errol Hodge’s deceased wife, Patrice. Mrs. Hodge was a descendant of Thomas P. Rose, and a valued member of the Eldertown Garden Club.

  Miss Lettsome is an afterschool teacher at the St. Clair Boys and Girls Club, where she met the groom-to-be, as he is a member of that organization’s board.

  The groom is also the son of Miss Louise Alfred of Petionville.

  Near the foot of the bed, the cardboard sleeve of a record album was propped against the slatted glass of the window. In the cover photograph, six dreadlocked men posed along the length of a limousine. The car and clothing styles were at least a decade old. RUDE BOYS, read the lettering in red, gold, and green above the picture. I looked closely at each face until I found a familiar one. Derek’s tiger eyes looked warmly at the camera. He was leaning on the man next to him and laughing. He was in motion, handsome and joyful. If it weren’t for his eyes, I might not have recognized him.

  There among all the news of her children, I scanned Lou’s wall for some evidence of me. Lord knows I should probably have been concerned with something more profound, mindful of the sorrows of others. But I wasn’t. Lou had always been a keeper. In her room on Marbury Road, on a shelf with pictures of the boys, she kept a little trove of clippings, trinkets, and ticket stubs arranged just so. If you signified in Lou’s life, she had evidence. She had bought me my first diary (white leatherette with a little gold lock and key) and taught me how to press sticky corners on blank pages to make my own photo album.

  There was no reminder on that wall of Connecticut, of my family, of me. A dry, crackling vent of air, pollenated with unsavory feelings, blew through me and pitched me back on my heels. I sat down on the bed and rested my head against the wall. I couldn’t help but think of my father again. In the stupor of my recent illness, I’d managed to block out our chance reunion. It made me laugh to think I could have forgotten. Maybe the two things, my sickness and Hank’s cameo, were directly related. Perhaps the threads of events fit into some natural, mysterious pattern. Hank, the pragmatist, would scoff at such a notion. But how could it be otherwise?

  10

  IRAN INTO MY father on Valentine’s Day, less than a month before Lou’s death. I remember the afternoon as snowless but bright and clear cold, the kind of day that makes New York sidewalks glitter like tinsel. That morning I’d woken up and known something wasn’t exactly right. My ears were clogged and there was a stiffness about my chest, as if some incubus had made a midnight visit and sealed me in a plaster body cast. I thought about calling in sick, but with a new collection to be hung, there was just too much to do. I thought that I was doing just fine, but Emmeline must have felt otherwise. At noon she made a definitive shooing motion and sent me out for a break.

  I followed the museum’s tunnel system as far as it would go, then pushed my way out onto Fifth Avenue. The bitter wind immediately sprang teardrops to my eyes and froze them on my cheeks. Actually, I remember thinking, I really don’t feel so hot. Taking a stool at the closest coffee shop, I hunched over a cup of thin tea and ordered from Rene, the counterman, some toast I knew I wouldn’t eat. The restaurant was freezing, arctic, like a goddamn icebox. Was the heat on the blink? I wondered, looking at the back of Rene’s sweat-soaked shirt. I swiveled around and was puzzling over the condensation fogging all the plate glass windows when Hank walked through the restaurant’s double doors. His face was lost behind an enormous paper cone bearing the name of a Madison Avenue florist, but I recognized instantly his chapped fingers and the wristband of his old Timex.

  He took off his winter hat and I watched him, undetected, while he shifted his parcel around, waiting to order. I was amazed at how vulnerable he looked, standing there alone. His white hair, which he’d always worn long, was cut close, exposing his ears in a boyish way. The glasses were the same time-worn tortoiseshell, dull and speckled along the arms from years of being dangled from his mouth and chewed on when he wanted a cigarette. And though the cold had flushed his cheeks, I thought I could see a faded tan from perhaps a tropical vacation not long past. He looked attractive, approachable.

  When he spoke to Rene, I leaned in to hear him over the lunchtime din. His voice was soft, almost apologetic, not the deep bass I’d remembered it was but scratchy and thin, as though he were straining against some terrific heartbreak and had to marshal all of his courage just to get to the sentence’s end. Where’s my Quiet Boy? my mother used to say ruefully, dumbfounding me. The father I knew was distant, and at times silent, but even then he was, to my ears at least, thunderous. He was never quiet. I was shocked to hear this gentle voice. He sounded like someone thoughtful, decent, a man to whom a young woman might easily be drawn.

  It struck me suddenly, seeing him there, how much I resembled my father. We looked like each other but like no one else I knew. I used to think every older man looked like Hank, and he like them. They were Fathers, and shared the same Fatherness. I mistook the back of every graying head for his. But I’d never seen a family resemblance between the two of us. And I knew no other Abrahams who might have given additional clues, Hank being an only child whose parents had died long before I was born.

  On my mother’s side of the family, nobody looked alike. Where other families are known for how their members resemble one another — generations of golden hair or button noses, square jaws or widows’ peaks — the Kanes resisted replication. When I was a little girl, my grandmother Edith was squat and muscular, wearing her red hair no-nonsense short like a man’s. My mother was all long legs and blond tresses, her siblings a variety pack of brunets. And then me, hair black as pitch and skin so blue white that for a time I misread the label on the milk my mother drank, thinking it was named for the pallor it resembled. Skin milk. Even my grandfather, whom I knew only from pictures, was wholly dissimiliar to anyone else. Like a loo
se confederation of changelings, we were none of us alike and startled even ourselves that we shared a family tree. It is why, I’ve often thought, my grandmother seemed always disappointed in us but never surprised.

  That day at the counter, something particular in my father’s countenance got me up from my stool. His eyes, gray like mine, held a queer startled expression. The quality made me think of a face trapped inside a scientist’s jar, a mad scientist whose victims were preserved at the moment of capture. The hint of panic was entirely familiar. I saw it all the time when I looked in the mirror.

  I began to make my way over to him, a little slick of sweat erupting on my forehead. Nerves, I suspected, since my teeth were chattering like a teletype machine. The meeting suddenly seemed lucky; I’d actually had Hank on my mind just a few days before. He’d recently published a new book, the first in ten years or so. Morality and the Millennium was a collection of his more recent essays, most of which were political in nature. A disciple of James and Dewey, Hank had taken his former pragmatic position — that the intellectual left could no longer afford to wait for the Ignorant to see the Truth, that time was past due to concentrate on the suffering of our poorest citizens — and turned up the heat to a full scorch. I hadn’t read the book myself, but from the damning reviews, I gathered that Hank had attacked not only his enemies on the right but his friends and compatriots as well. I remembered one critique in particular by the conservative commentator Arthur Block in a newsweekly. Block dubbed the book peevish and a flaccid effort from an old warrior. He also scolded Dad for wandering far afield from the courage of his lifelong convictions, even though those convictions had always been disagreeable to Block. He charged Dad with regressing into an “infantile rant” and feebly bolstering his argument with attacks on the Republican congress that were “beneath reproach.”

  I had also read a quote somewhere from my father’s old friend Max Rubinstein, whom Hank had apparently excoriated as a coward. Hank labeled him a cop-out who’d gotten fat in the groves of academe.

  “Hell was his heaven and earth,” Max rejoined. “Thus spake Zarathustra.”

  I felt sorry for my father, knowing how sensitive he was to criticism. And I figured as well that at his age, a radical intellectual with unpopular views had a pretty dark future himself. I’d considered calling him but decided that that would only make him feel worse.

  When I got around the crowd at the counter, I touched his elbow. He immediately recoiled. It was too late to turn back.

  “Oh. Addy,” he said, peering over his misted lenses. “Jesus. I … I thought you were trying to mug me.”

  “No, Dad. Just saw you and thought I’d say hi.”

  The frame of his glasses had broken and was being held together by a fat swatch of duct tape. They bent as he took them off.

  “Right, right.” He blinked at me like a soft, caged animal.

  “What brings you over here?” I asked. My father and his wife lived on Upper Central Park West in an area I took great pains to avoid so as not to run into them.

  “Nothing special. Nothing much. Just, you know, errands.” He glanced at his package. “Anemones for Linda. She loves them.”

  Hank had a green thumb. In and around the garden on Marbury Road he could make anything grow. Trembling wisteria, flaming red hibiscus, polyanthus, larkspur. He would lift his worn nylon gimme cap and garden shears from the hooks in the muck room and wander the property every afternoon when the weather was fine. I followed behind at a discreet distance, rapt. It was part of our game to pretend that he couldn’t see me. But when he walked through the wooden gate and inside his seedling patch, he always shut the door behind him and held up a hand to stop me following. The first summer after Dad left us, the garden was set upon by rabbits, destroying inside of a month what it had taken him a dozen years to create.

  He shifted his parcel, fiddled with the paper.

  “Have you a beau these days?” my father asked, careful not to look at me.

  I laughed, a phlegmy hiccup, really, shook my head. In the two years since my final breakup with Daniel Moss, I could not claim I’d had so much as a date. Nor had I wanted for any kind of attachment. But it was difficult not to take my father’s question as a loaded one and be conscious, as usual, of my failings.

  Hank chewed the inside of his lip. I searched for something to say.

  “Well, you look really good,” I finally ventured, trying not to inflame the situation.

  “Thanks, thanks. We went over to Korea, Pusan. You know Linda’s family is still there.”

  I did not know. Linda had been Dad’s teaching assistant, and he’d moved from our house directly into her apartment. When he left the university four years later, they moved to New York. I hadn’t met Linda more than a handful of times.

  “Just got back,” he continued. “The food was extraordinary. Extraordinary.”

  “Great, that sounds great.”

  My father stole a glance over the cash register and in through the short-order window.

  “How’s your work? Still at the museum?”

  “Yeah. It’s good, busy. I’m assistant director of paintings conservation now. So. That’s good.”

  “You sound like you have a cold.”

  I nodded, waved it off.

  “It’s really going around,” he said. “Linda’s got it, Dr. Orkin …” My father stopped himself and looked toward the kitchen again. He cleared his throat, adjusted the paper around the flowers. I felt an unexpected wave of dread.

  “Who’s Dr. Orkin? Dad? Are you sick?”

  “No, no. Dr. Orkin’s a … whatever. He’s a psychotherapist.” He smiled sheepishly, blushed. “Linda thought I might find it interesting. I’ve really just started. I don’t know if I’ll continue. But it’s been … amusing.”

  I looked out the window and up the avenue. Shrink Row.

  “Wow.”

  “Is it so surprising?”

  “Kind of.” I imagined my father in a dimly lit room, wringing his hands in a confessional mode, lightening his load. The idea was grotesque, obscene. And I was stung suddenly with a hot flame of envy.

  “But I don’t really know you,” I continued, trying to be helpful to both of us by closing the subject, “so what do I know.”

  My father grimaced and shook his head.

  “What does that mean — you don’t know me?” The woman behind the counter brought out a brown paper bag. He lowered his already low voice. “I’m your father. Jesus, Addy,” he hissed, “that is so like you. Always apart. Always judging.”

  A businessman in an overcoat who’d been waiting behind my father pushed between us with an exasperated shove of the shoulder. Hank picked up his bag and clutched the flowers. I felt the blood leave my face.

  “You ought to talk to someone,” he said buttoning up his coat. “It can be very instructive.”

  Hank backed toward the door. With his hat back on, he looked just as he had when I was small. Cloaked and impermeable.

  “I wish …” he began, and then stopped, fumbled with his packages. “In any case. Good to see you. I’ll be in touch.” Before the door shut behind him, he turned around.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I waited till I was sure he was gone, paid for my tea and toast, and headed toward the museum.

  The predella was a Flemish work, in tempera and oil, and I’d been restoring it for a couple of weeks. The panel, along with the triptych it fronted for, had survived a major fire that ravaged a sixteenth-century Italian villa. It was a small miracle that the paintings had made it out at all, and at the pleading of the English auction house that had rescued them, our atelier had agreed to make a restoration effort. The work was tough, not only because of the smoke and fatty deposits that obscured much of the painting’s detail, but also because I had no conclusive evidence as to the artist’s identity.

  I spent the first few days viewing the panel and doing research. The scene was of a figure at sea, with his sail blowing out in t
atters. Taken with the other panels — one of a man on bended knee receiving keys from Jesus, another of a white-haired figure enthroned — I figured that the artist had rendered several images of Peter. In each small painting the sky glowed luminously, even with the smoke damage, and featured a corona of light, a dove issuing forth from the circle’s center. The influence of Van Eyck was obvious, but I began to think that maybe the artist was a closer disciple of Juan de Flandes. The exceptional detail and the strangely unreal quality of the water and sky seemed more in keeping with de Flandes. But there was little to go on.

  I removed the frame to study the best-preserved portions. It was immediately apparent that there had been no previous restoration done on the panel. Usually with a work that old, restoration involves as much effort undoing other people’s mistakes as bringing it back to its original state. Inch by inch, I worked on the painting, making use of a new resin developed in Pietrasanta.

  For the first week, I felt confident that I was cleaning back to the artist’s final glaze, preserving the patina while returning most of the contrast and color to its former refulgence. I had removed the top coating of smoke and was beginning to get a fuller sense of the work’s original color and shading. Though slow going, the project was similar to many other restorations I’d made. But one day, coming in as the early morning light was banking off the west wall of the studio, I saw that I’d made a terrible error. A portion of sky, about the size of a dime, was reading much brighter than the rest of the painting. Initially I hoped the difference was caused by the slow drying time of the resin I was applying. But soon I became certain I’d gone too far and removed a layer of varnish. In fact, it seemed that I’d gone straight down to the gesso when I thought I was merely clarifying a section of cloud. If I was right, the area would never age again at the same rate as the rest of the work and would be irrevocably changed.