The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel

by Patry Francis

  While the attorney explained the legalities of transferring the lease, and taking formal ownership of the paintings, Hallie wandered toward the window. She was startled when she spotted Sam Maddox on the other side of the street. He stopped to buy a paper from a vendor and then slipped inside a little French café where Hallie herself sometimes picked up a coffee. So much for his urgent appointment, she thought, wondering if he was more like his father than she’d first imagined.

  Hallie wished there was time for her and Nick to have lunch, but he had to leave immediately to make afternoon office hours. The only communication they’d had about their morning was through their eyes, and the abraço Nick gave her outside the law office. “You need to come home,” he said before he disappeared. And then he looked back, reflecting the events of the day. “Soon.”

  The long ride back to Provincetown was probably just what he needed, Hallie thought—a chance to ponder it all, probably out loud, in the privacy of his truck. She would have liked to do the same, but she was due at the hospital in an hour. Fortunately, she only had to cross the park and trudge up Beacon Hill—an invigorating twenty-minute walk. She changed into the scrubs and clogs she’d brought with her in a restroom in the building, pulling her hair back in its usual ponytail and removing the slash of plum-colored lipstick that matched her boots. Looking in the bathroom mirror, she felt as if she’d reclaimed herself.

  However, when she hit the street, she turned impulsively toward the café into which Wolf’s son had disappeared with his newspaper. Hallie told herself she wanted to offer him the opportunity to see the paintings. But maybe she just wanted to catch him in his lie.

  Sam Maddox was so engrossed in his newspaper that he didn’t notice Hallie as she ordered her coffee and an almond croissant.

  “The Arts section?” Hallie asked, turning her head sideways to see what he was reading. “I thought you were more of a business type, what with all your important appointments.”

  Wolf’s son laughed softly, regarding her with the same deep attention he’s shown in the lawyer’s office. “Actually, I’m not particularly business or art oriented. I’m working on a doctorate in philosophy.”

  “It seems I guessed wrong.”

  Sam continued to smile. “Me, too. I thought you were the glamorous girl in black I just met across the street. That was quite a transformation.”

  “The glamour was borrowed from my roommate,” she admitted. “This is the real me.” When she dropped the heavy bag that contained what he called her transformation, her coffee sloshed over the top of her cup and splashed on his newspaper. She blotted it with napkins and apologized.

  Sam gestured at the ornate iron chairs across from him. “Please. Join me,” he said. Since she already had, it was hard to tell if he was being polite or sarcastic.

  Sliding into the set, Hallie got right to the point. “I came here because your father left me a painting, and I really think that you should have it. I’m not sure what his early work was like, but the Race Point series is pretty remarkable.”

  “So you followed me?” Sam appeared amused. He folded his paper neatly before him, and studied her. “I guess I should be flattered.”

  “No. No, you shouldn’t be,” Hallie said, exasperated that her relentless honesty had trapped her again. “I just thought you should know I would be happy—”

  “That’s very generous of you, but I’m not interested.”

  “Well, if you ever come to the Cape and you decide you want to see the paintings, my father . . .”

  But before Hallie could finish the sentence, his eyes stopped her. “Thanks again, but no,” he said firmly. “As I said earlier, I hadn’t seen my father since I was five, and I have no interest in his work.”

  Startled by his shift in tone, Hallie glanced at the clock. “I have one of those notoriously long resident’s shifts coming up in about half an hour, so I should probably get going.” She gathered her things. When she looked up, Sam was still watching her.

  “Let me guess. You’re going to be an internist like your father.”

  “My father is one of a kind, but yes, I’m studying internal medicine. How did you know?”

  “I suppose I’m like Wolf in that way. An observer. The only difference is that he studied distant horizons. I’m more interested in what’s up close.”

  “So what do you see?”

  “I see someone who’s going to be an amazing doctor someday. And also—” Abruptly, he stopped himself. “Well, it’s obvious why my father liked you so much.”

  Hallie blinked, feeling as if he was looking into a part of her that had long been invisible.

  “Thanks for following—I mean, for joining me,” he said and smiled.

  She was halfway to the door when he called after her. “Have you got a pen in that thing?” he asked, indicating her oversized bag. “Maybe you should give me your number—in case I change my mind about those paintings someday.” He held out his newspaper so she could write on it.

  Hallie studied him, wondering if it was a ploy. However, Sam’s eyes were guileless. She went back and scrawled her number on the top of the Arts section he’d been reading when she came in. “I’m hardly ever home, but you can leave a message.”

  It was ten p.m. the next night, and Hallie was in her favorite pj’s, hair braided, and about to curl up with her cat, when he called. “Sam?” she said, repeating the name into the phone. “Sam Maddox?”

  “We only met yesterday. You mean you forgot already?”

  “Don’t tell me. You’ve decided you want to see the paintings.”

  “Actually, I was wondering if you wanted to have a beer. I’m going back to New Jersey tomorrow and—”

  “Don’t you think this is kind of an odd time to call someone you barely know? Especially when that someone is just coming off a twenty-four-hour shift?”

  “Well, you said you were hard to reach. Besides, I thought you people from Provincetown were known for your spontaneity.”

  Now it was Hallie’s turn to laugh out loud. “Maybe the artists, but not the doctor’s daughter. Listen, Sam, thanks for asking, but I don’t date.” And then, realizing how odd that sounded, she quickly added. “Right now I’m totally focused on my residency.”

  “Who said anything about a date? I’m sitting in the Harvard Gardens all by myself. I thought you might hop in a cab and join me for a beer.”

  Hallie was about to tell him that she was planning to crawl into bed—crawl being the operative word. But then she thought of the way he had listened when she spoke, and his easy laughter. Yes, she thought, already pulling the braid out of her hair, and peering into her closet to look for her suede boots. “Just give me fifteen minutes.”

  They had ordered their second beer when Hallie looked at him frankly. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  “If it’s about my father—then, no. I’d prefer you don’t.”

  “I wasn’t going to. I mean, not exactly,” Hallie said quickly, feeling her color deepen. She wished she could explain that for a moment there his eyes had made her feel as if she knew him better than she did. As if she might have been able to speak to him as bluntly as she always had to Wolf.

  It was only after the beer arrived that Sam spoke again. “I have exactly one memory of him.”

  “A good one, I hope,” Hallie said tentatively.

  “We were having dinner together as a family, Wolf, my mother, and me—apparently a rare event since it stands out in my mind so much—and they were arguing, which feels like something far less rare. In any case, it didn’t take long before Wolf had enough. He threw down his napkin and walked out.”

  “And that was it?”

  “No, that wasn’t it. Not quite, anyway. Right before he left, he looked at me and said he was sorry—just like you did a moment ago, except that there were tears in his eyes. It may have been the most genuine moment that ever passed between us as father and son.”

  “And what did you do?”

  S
am shrugged. “I accepted his apology. Maybe not then, when I was four or five. But over the years, I came to understand that Wolf simply wasn’t equipped for family life. He never had been. I could either go on hating him for it—as I had as a kid. Or I could go back to that moment in the dining room and let him go.”

  “So all that stuff you inherited yesterday—where did it come from?” Hallie asked, emboldened by his honesty.

  “All that stuff?” Sam laughed. “You mean money?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “Lots of places. My ancestors got in on the ground floor of this country. Railroads, real estate, and some less honorable things, too. After my father learned that the Maddox family had been involved in the slave trade in Rhode Island, he was pretty much done with it—and them, too.”

  “But he held on to the money,” Hallie said, attempting to hide the shock she felt—and a flash of disillusionment with Wolf. “Even if he lived in a shack and wore the same two pairs of pants for ten years, he never let it go.”

  “I guess it was all he thought he could do for me. The only way he knew how to be a father. That was the real reason I wanted to get out of that office yesterday. For the second time in my life, Wolf nodded in my direction and said he was sorry.”

  After that, Sam had shown up in Boston every weekend. He even came when Hallie was on duty and their dates consisted of late-night dinners from the vending machine in the hospital cafeteria. And he called constantly, leaving long messages that made Hallie laugh, or think about something she’d never thought about before.

  Four months later they were sitting on a hand-woven rug Abby had brought back from a trip to Honduras, enjoying a picnic-like feast of take-out Thai and a Singha beer and listening to her neighbor’s salsa through the wall when Sam grew unexpectedly serious.

  “I never thought I was anything like my father until you told me how he painted the same scene a thousand times, trying to get it right,” Sam said.

  “You plan to take up painting?” she asked, as casually as she could. Since the night at Harvard Gardens, Wolf had remained an implicitly forbidden subject between them.

  “No, but I have that kind of determination,” Sam said. “Except that you’re my Race Point.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’m transferring to BU. New Jersey is just too far away from the woman I love.”

  “But Rutgers has one of the best philosophy programs in the country, and you love it there. You said so yourself,” Hallie argued before she allowed heself to absorb the most important part of his statement. Had he really just told her he loved her? Though they had been sleeping together for a couple of months, the relationship still felt comfortably undefined. “Oh, God, Sam—what did you say?”

  “I think I have loved you ever since that day when you spilled your coffee all over my newspaper. Maybe even before that.”

  “Are you saying you fell in love with me because I’m a klutz?”

  Sam laughed. “I fell in love with you because you were the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen—even after you changed out of Abby’s clothes. And because you were a struggling medical student who had just inherited a painting that might turn out to be very valuable, and you were already offering to give it away.”

  Hallie unfolded herself from her comfortable cross-legged position and got up to pace the room. She looked down and focused on her brightly colored striped socks. “Sam, I don’t know. I’m not sure I even believe in—that kind of thing.” Only when she heard the words out loud did she realize how much she sounded like Wolf.

  “Well, let me be the first to tell you: You do,” Sam said confidently, stopping her with both arms. “I’ve felt it, Hallie.”

  Hallie leaned her body against his and cried. Because she was afraid of loving him. And equally afraid of ending up like Wolf, all alone in a shack. Or like her father, shackled to his own loneliness by a distant past. She kissed Sam’s neck, his cheek, his mouth. Then she unbuttoned his shirt and kissed the skin of his muscled shoulder.

  “Is this your way of saying you love me, too?”

  Hallie pulled him toward her room. She nodded slowly, more surprised by the word that rose up inside her than he was. Yes! Yes, she loved him. She loved him for all the ways he wasn’t Gus. He was punctual, organized, driven. He rarely showed emotion, but when he did it was as solid as his body felt beneath her hands. In the end, however, she married him for the qualities that brought back her first love: his ability to make her laugh, his perceptiveness, and his simple, but oh so rare, goodness.

  Now, seven years later, Sam produced a pint of milk for Hallie, then took Nick’s seat at the table. He had the kind of presence the house demanded—one as stalwart as her father’s. “So what’s the plan? You want to keep the place and use it as a summer house? Is that it?”

  “Could we?” Hallie couldn’t believe he was even considering it. She breathed in sharply.

  “Honestly? I don’t know.” Sam took a long drink from his beer. “It’s not just Wolf’s lingering presence. It’s you, too. When I watched you on the stand at the priest’s trial, I felt like I was seeing someone I’d never met.”

  Hallie was grateful for the dim bulb in the kitchen as she felt her color deepening. So he knew. And then she realized that of course he knew. That was why she married him—because he understood her as no one else had. No one but her father and Gus.

  “All that—what I testified about on the stand—it was so long ago,” Hallie said, and for the first time, the words really felt true. “We can make this house—this town—our home. Ours and Lizzie’s.”

  Sam filled a long moment with silence before he spoke. “Before today, I never really understood how much it meant to you.”

  “How could you? I refused to admit it to myself. But look at this place, Sam.” She swept open the curtain like a game-show host to expose the moon-drenched water, the lights from town, the blinking eye of the lighthouse. “You’ve got to admit it’s pretty incredible.” She wasn’t sure if she sounded more like a realtor or a travel guide.

  “There are lots of incredible spots on this earth that aren’t emotional land mines.”

  “But this is my father’s house. My house. When I saw the estate-sale crowd in the yard this morning, I couldn’t let it go. Not the house or anything in it.”

  Sam tossed his empty bottle in the trash. “It’s hard for me to understand that, you know. I never felt that way about any place. Certainly not the house where I grew up with my mother and stepfather. And none of the places I lived after that. They were just rooms. Beautiful rooms. Utilitarian rooms, But in the end, just rooms. The only place I’ve ever missed is that funky little apartment you had in Mission Hill. The first place we had sex.”

  Hallie laughed. “With the Cure thumping in the background, and a couple fighting downstairs. I loved that place, too. Maybe we should move back.”

  “Or maybe we should just go upstairs and try out your old bed. If it’s as good as it was in Mission Hill, we just may have found ourselves a new home.”

  Chapter 25

  After they found an architect, Hallie and Sam spent most of their weekends in Provincetown, supervising the renovations. To them, however, it felt more like an exorcism. Doors and windows were knocked out, replaced and widened, walls were tumbled, and the ghosts who’d been there so long they’d even claimed their own bedrooms were finally banished.

  Everything shined on the young, expectant couple in those weeks. People who didn’t know them stopped to say hello, and longtime residents, curious about Wolf’s son, warmed when they noticed the way Sam’s hand drifted protectively to Hallie’s growing abdomen in the middle of an ordinary conversation.

  They were making coffee in Aunt Del’s narrow kitchen the first time Hallie felt the baby flutter inside her. “Sam! Sam—” she cried. For the rest of her life, she would remember the slant of light across his face as his expression moved from concern to heightened attention to pure joy in the span of a second. />
  “Really?” he said. “She moved?”

  All Hallie could do was beam and nod while the whole world shifted in a delicate dance beneath her hands.

  That night, they lay in the dark under the same floral quilt Hallie remembered from her childhood. Their stomachs were full of Aunt Del’s sopas do Espirito Santo and the crusty bread she had served with it. It was a labor-intensive stew that Aunt Del usually made for holidays, and they’d both had seconds.

  “What did she call that soup again?” Sam said. “It was pretty awesome.”

  “Sopas do Espirito Santo. ‘Holy Ghost Soup,’ in English. And for a semi-vegetarian, you sure sucked it up. Did you know it contains beef and chicken?”

  But Sam wasn’t thinking about the excess meat. “Holy Ghost soup? You’re kidding me, right?”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve been eating it all my life and I’m still a godless heathen.”

  “You are not,” Sam said. Even though he never went to church, enough of his Episcopalian upbringing remained to make him uncomfortable when she voiced her strong feelings against faith.

  “Aunt Del says you used to sleep in this room sometimes when you were a kid?”

  “When Nick had a date.” Hallie studied the familiar cracks in the low ceiling, a map of the sleepless nights she had sometimes spent, and her cruel prayers to no god in particular: Please let it be a flop!

  “I didn’t know Nick dated.”

  “He was a man, wasn’t he?” Hallie said, repeating Aunt Del’s explanation. The one she’d never liked. “Unfortunately, nothing ever worked out.” Only as an adult, seeing her father’s loneliness, had she realized just how unfortunate it was.

  “I bet you chased them all away.”

  “I played my part. You have no idea how much I regret that now.”

  “Nick was his own man. If he’d wanted another woman in his life, he would have had one.”

  Hallie nestled against his shoulder. “How do you always manage to say exactly what I need to hear?”