Byron's Lane

by Wallace Rogers

  I hoped he’d find her there. Adams needed a diversion from his Christina Peterson crisis.

  It was barely a fifteen-minute drive to the motel from Adams’s house. The Budget Inn was on Brookfield’s main east-west street, just inside the city limits. We cruised through the parking lot. Adams didn’t see a car or a vanity license plate he recognized, but wasn’t surprised. Linda’s husband would buy her a new car as frequently as the rest of us replace bottles of shampoo. The gold Lexus that she drove when she had last visited Adams was surely long gone from their four-car garage.

  We parked next to the motel’s office. Adams reached across me into the glove compartment and pulled out a brown leather two-fold wallet. He opened it up and flashed a silver badge at me. “The Minnesota Highway Patrol gives these to state legislators. It’s saved me a few speeding tickets,” he said. “Maybe the badge will allow me a peek at the guest register. I’ll meet you in the coffee shop in ten minutes.”

  Adams was out of the car before I could unlatch my seatbelt. He disappeared into an A-framed building next to a two-story row of motel rooms. The place was at least fifty years old; its style was vintage 1960s, the colors of its peeling paint pink and teal. I got out of the car and walked across the parking lot, toward the Emporium Coffee House.

  The Emporium had an authentic coffee house feel to it. Based on its appearance and its unfamiliar name, I assumed it was a locally owned and operated business. Tastefully laid out, the establishment was a cut above the others in the neighborhood. And so were its patrons. The pleasant smell of fresh ground coffee greeted me as I approached the front door.

  Waiting in a short line of people wanting to be seated, I looked out over a roomful of tables, chairs, and customers. They were cluttered in no special way around a brightly appointed open area that spread out two steps below the coffee bar where I was standing. My casual survey of the room abruptly stopped when I discovered Christina Peterson sitting off in one of its corners. She was not alone. The man opposite her, his knees touching hers, was Richard Hunter. I recognized him from the newspaper picture Adams had shown me.

  Between them were a partially eaten muffin and two coffee cups. The food and the crockery filled most of their table’s surface. He was talking intently to her. In the process of making his point, his right hand found a way through the plates and cups that littered the table and rested on hers. She looked down at her coffee cup and up at his face and nodded in agreement to whatever he was saying.

  Christina Peterson did not look happy. But she didn’t seem unhappy, either. There was an unmistakable air of intimacy about the picture they made.

  A clerk informed me that I was next in line. I ordered two regular black coffees to go—they could be made the fastest. As soon as the drinks were put in front of me and I’d paid for them, I rushed outside, meeting Adams in the middle of the parking lot.

  “I don’t think Linda’s here,” he announced. “I looked at a week’s worth of registration slips. I described her to the desk clerk. I’m sure he would have remembered her if he had seen her. The phone calls are a mystery. I guess I’ll just have to be sure I’m around the next time I get one.”

  He put his Styrofoam coffee cup up to his lips and frowned as he finished his first taste. “All those blends of coffee, and you got plain black?”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  *

  Near the end of our short drive back to Adams’s house, I dutifully reminded him that he wanted to do something about his will. He thanked me for the reminder and told me that he could accomplish what he needed to do in what remained of Saturday afternoon. He asked if I’d graciously give him a couple of hours alone in his office. “I need to follow up on a couple of things and have some checks to write and bills to pay. If I put it off, I’m afraid I’ll forget about it.”

  As Adams opened his front door and led me back into his house, he mumbled something about my Lawrence of Arabia quote. He reached into his carry-on bag, still lying in the middle of the foyer, and gave me his black book.

  “I liked that Lawrence of Arabia quote last night. Write it on one of the blank pages in the back, okay?” He turned down the hallway and disappeared into his office.

  I carried the Day Runner up the stairs and laid it on the bed in my room. After I finished unpacking, I sat down on the carpeted floor, my back up against the foot of the bed, facing the room’s wall of windows. A pen in hand, I slid the black book off the bed’s comforter and onto my lap. Trying not to intrude on Adams’s business or private thoughts, I turned the pages to the first blank sheet. I couldn’t help but see Adams’s last entry on the opposite page: “Monday meeting, 10:30 @ sheriff’s office—Brookfield. Should I bring UM threat letter received Friday 9/23?”

  I wrote the quote about success wrested from sure defeat on the next page and shut the book. I couldn’t ask Adams about the threat letter without betraying the trust he demonstrated when he gave me his black book. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was the first time he’d ever allowed it to be put in someone else’s hands. I decided that I would wait to ask Adams about the letter until after his Monday morning meeting at the sheriff’s office. I’d call him from California and make him talk about it.

  Downstairs, the door to his office was opened. I stepped just inside the doorway and put his black book down on the edge of his desk. He looked up at me from his computer monitor.

  “Hey, Tom, I’ve got an e-mail here from Gabe Chance. He’s offered me those Cleveland Indians shares again. If I bought them from him, maybe I’d be involved in discussions about how to make the Indians pennant contenders. Technically, I’d be a part owner, right? But, then again, Chance owns less than three percent of the team. I guess I’d be lucky if they sent me the minutes of their meetings.”

  Adams had met Gabe Chance in graduate school, after Chance had had his Field of Dreams Moonlight Graham moment as a brief member of the 1971 team.

  Called up from the minor leagues at the end of the season, when teams could expand their rosters, he tore the tendon in his pitching arm warming up in the bullpen during a meaningless late September game against the Baltimore Orioles. Almost thirty years later, when the team’s owner took the baseball club public in a stock offering in 1999, Chance used what was left of a signing bonus he had prudently invested to buy a few hundred shares. He refused to sell them and make the same tidy profit all the other shareholders did when the current owner bought the team.

  I offered my business advice from the doorway: “Owning part of the Indians is appealing, but it doesn’t make any business sense. The stock has got be way overvalued. You won’t live long enough to recover your outlay,” I counseled.

  Adams got up from his chair, laughed, and closed the door in my face.

  I instinctively headed for the television in the living room. During the time it took me to walk down the hallway, through a corner of the kitchen, around the L-shaped couch, and past the fireplace, I was oddly reminded that, in my family’s house on Byron’s Lane, we were forbidden to watch television on Saturday afternoons. It was a strange rule, and the only one my mother ever held fast. It imposed no great hardship on me, especially in late September. I wasn’t much of a college football fan, and the Indians had vanished from baseball’s American League pennant race by then. I spent most Saturdays up the street with Adams at El Capitan, vagabonding around the neighborhood, or doing the two-mile trek, on foot or by bicycle, to the shopping center to hang out with friends at the lunch counter at Woolworth’s. We’d nurse ten-cent Cherry Cokes for an hour so that we wouldn’t be told to get up and leave.

  When I was a reach away from the remote, I decided that instead of aimlessly flipping through a hundred and fifty channels, I’d spend my time alone with an interesting book that I expected was lurking somewhere on the shelves in front of me. Books were my business, so I wasn’t keen on spending leisure time immersed in something dense or significant. I decided I’d look for boo
ks full of pictures.

  Three hundred books had found a home on the shelves on either side of the television. Arranged by genre, a fourth of them were novels. Almost all the novels were nineteenth- and twentieth-century American classics in hardcover and paperback. Sprinkled among them were books of poetry and Shakespeare. Public administration textbooks and books about government that had escaped from Adams’s offices at the State Capitol and the university filled the top shelf to the left of the television. A majority were history books, an impressive collection of mostly American history, including a shelf full of biographies.

  My hand followed my eyes, causing me to occasionally pull a book from a shelf and thumb through its pages. My attention eventually settled upon a stack of oversized books pushed into a corner of the lowest shelf. I pulled the pile from the bookcase and restacked it on the carpet. I recognized the exposed binding of the second one from the bottom: our high school yearbook. I eagerly yanked it from the pile. My copy was long lost, probably during a move from someplace to somewhere early in my marriage. Maybe it was thrown away by my mother when she moved to Florida, along with my baseball card collection.

  I’d been looking for a picture book. This one was filled with hundreds of pictures of people I knew once—faces I hadn’t gazed upon in two-thirds of a lifetime.

  Stretched out on Adams’s living room carpet, yearbook in front of me, I opened it up to its first page. I closely studied each picture and the captions below them. When I finished the section set aside for our senior class—about half the yearbook—I skipped to the index of names at the back.

  My name had more page numbers next to it than I thought it would. I felt good about that, particularly when I compared the number of entries written after my name to most of the rest of the names on the page. When I think about high school, I remember it being about endurance rather than enjoyment. The shorthand résumé next to my name suggested something else. I turned the pages back and forth, from the index to pictures of favorite teachers whose faces I had long forgotten; to sophomore girls I’d dated; to senior girls I had hoped to date, but never had the nerve to ask.

  I turned to the first page of the index and found “Adams, Jonathan.” It was hard to miss. He had a paragraph of page numbers wrapped around his name: varsity club, class salutatorian, Most Likely to Succeed, National Honor Society, baseball and basketball teams, senior class vice president, student council vice president. I smiled as my finger ran down the list.

  Adams had been the vice president of almost every high school organization he’d joined. At the end of our junior year, a week after he had won two separate elections for vice president—next year’s student council, next year’s senior class—Adams shared with me his theory about vice presidencies. He said he was high-profile and well-liked enough that he could probably run for vice president of anything without much chance of losing the election. His opponents for vice president, when he had any, were usually people of potential, testing the waters. Most kids with a résumé like Adams’s would probably have run for president. But the vice presidency, he explained to me, guaranteed him a seat at the table when important decisions had to be made. He could win the seat at little risk, avoiding the trauma of having to deal with losing an election. Inevitably, two months into his vice-presidential term of whatever club or class he was a member, the executive board would be looking to him instead of the president for direction on whatever was pressing and important on the agenda. That infuriated Bob Gundy, Adams’s archrival at Maplewood High School, who often held the position of president.

  The first blank page in the back of Adams’s yearbook was crowded full of quotations, well wishes, and familiar signatures. My eyes were drawn to a quotation printed on the bottom of the inside cover page, falsely signed as Lord Byron, and written in Adams’s distinctive handwriting:

  For pleasures part I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near;

  My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.

  “Where did you find that?”

  I’d been so absorbed in the yearbook that I neither saw nor heard Adams enter the living room. He suddenly hovered over me, like an eagle about to descend on an unsuspecting lake trout. I quickly turned the page. I looked at my watch. More than an hour had flown by.

  “Lisa must have pulled it out of some box when she arranged those bookcases for me a million years ago.”

  I scooted across the carpet and took a seat on the floor, my back up against the sectional sofa, our high school yearbook in hand. Adams sat on the other side of the room, facing his book case wall, in front of the toppled stack of books I had discovered on the bookcase’s bottom shelf. He restacked them one by one.

  When he was finished cleaning up my mess, he walked over to the couch and sat next to me. “It’s been forever since I last looked at that yearbook,” he said. “Whenever it was, I remember I was bothered that there was no reference anywhere in it to what was going on in the country at the time. Civil rights protests that used to be non-violent freedom marches were full-scale urban riots. Two of the worst ones were in Cleveland and up the turnpike in Detroit. Vietnam War protests were happening everywhere. Four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard just down the road at Kent State. The women’s liberation movement was in full swing. And there’s not a hint about any of that anywhere in our yearbook.”

  I looked up from the book and smiled at him. “Don’t be so righteous, my friend. I don’t remember anyone in our lily-white, college-bound clique, including you, involving us in thoughtful conversations about civil rights or Vietnam. But I do recall a whole lot of discussion about girls, baseball and football, cars, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Besides, some of that stuff you mentioned was old news by the time our yearbooks were published.” I laughed. “Our attention spans had atrophied. It’s an evolutionary outcome we’ve passed on to the generations that have followed us.”

  “You’re right, Tom,” he finally said. After another moment’s worth of thought, he shook his head. “Maplewood did a good job insulating us from all that stuff, didn’t it? We were as far away from the east side of Cleveland and the campus at Kent State as we were from Vietnam. We were so insulated that my greatest crisis of conscience was about not giving CPR to an eighty-year-old chain-smoking farmer.”

  We spent the next hour passing his yearbook back and forth as we shared stories about the people on whose faces our fingers randomly fell. For dinner we reheated leftover pizza in the microwave, ate peanuts, and drank beer. Adams decided that we should be fashionably late to Christina’s party.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Adams started looking for something to wear to the party at half past seven. He finally found the right combination of jeans, blue cotton shirt, and tan suede jacket eighty minutes later. I waited for him in the living room for almost an hour. As I thumbed through the Vanity Fair magazine that I’d found Thursday night, I realized I had been in this situation many times before. We were sixteen years old the first time he did this to me. It was more fallout from the Pamela Drake experience. He needed to have all the stars as perfectly aligned as possible before he was ready to present himself to a woman. I’ve spent the equivalent of at least three full days of my life waiting for Jonathan Adams.

  *

  Christina’s front yard was a sea of cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs. Every light in her house was on. The sound of people talking loudly in her backyard and the smell of cigarette smoke wafted over the house and met us as we approached the front door. Adams muttered something about Hunter having invited busloads of his friends to the party. “Very few of mine smoke,” he said.

  Hunter greeted us at the door.

  “Hello, Jonathan. It’s nice to see you. Come in. I want to talk to you about tax abatements sometime tonight. Remind me, okay?” Hunter pulled Adams through the doorway by the hand he was shaking. He finally let it go and reached for mine.

  “You must be Tom. Chr
istina mentioned you were visiting. Welcome to our party. You’re from Massachusetts, right? How about those Red Sox?”

  I frowned. I lived in Connecticut and was a Cleveland Indians fan. I hated the Red Sox.

  Hunter had answered the door wearing tailored gray slacks and a black silk shirt. “He’s overdressed for a neighborhood party,” Adams whispered. Hunter was as tall as us, but his hair was shorter. It was unnaturally dark brown for a person his age; he had no hint of gray. His hair was perfectly combed, like a television newscaster’s. I heard Adams’s teeth grinding as Hunter welcomed me to “our party.”

  Hunter took the bottle of wine we’d brought over, announcing he’d take it to the kitchen and open it right away “so it could breathe.”

  “Red wine should always have a chance to breathe,” he said in an instructional tone. As we followed Hunter through the foyer, Adams whispered that Hunter’s comment was supercilious. Even people who grew up on Byron’s Lane knew that you open a bottle of good red wine and let it sit for a few minutes before you drink it.

  “I don’t know half these people,” Adams said too loudly as we split from Hunter and entered Christina’s crowded living room. It was easy to see the half to which he was referring. There were two herds of people in the room. The one on our left was dressed like us. Six hands from the conclave were enthusiastically waving us into their corner. The people on the right side grew quieter when we entered the room. I felt like a yearling at a horse auction.

  A living room full of people has always seemed a strange, unsettling sight to me. Taking a seat, as seats begin to be scarce, is like plucking the last piece of chocolate from a box of candy. We learned as children that taking the last piece of anything is impolite. So a place to sit in a crowded living room is always available, in spite of the size of the crowd.