A realtor had put one of those big gold lockboxes on the front doorknob, making the extra house key Adams had given me useless. My key was supposed to be able to open the back door, too, so I took the long walk around his house, past the untended lilac bush that had overtaken his woodpile, and climbed the steps up to his deck. On the deck floor, next to the doorway, was a large box with a blue-and-white Hansen’s label on it. Inside were the shingles Jim Breech had promised Adams he would send.
Before I put the key in the door lock, I turned around for a last look at Adams’s prairie. The late October afternoon sun, low in the gray sky, thrust its rays out defiantly from between layers of dark clouds that tried unsuccessfully to smother them. I was now and forever absolutely sure that Adams had bought this house because of what I was seeing from his back deck.
The vista spread before me was exactly the same as one over seven hundred miles and more than forty years removed from it—the one that stretched out in front of us and the rest of our lives when we were seven years old. The sun shone exclusively over an area that could accommodate development of nine blocks of three- and four-bedroom ranch-style houses with no basements.
“You build the garage if you want one, and you finish the inside the way you want. The three-bedrooms are eleven thousand dollars; the four-bedroom homes cost fourteen thousand dollars. Special financing is available for veterans.”
It was the dialogue of a commercial that ran incessantly on Cleveland’s television and radio stations and drew us all to Maplewood in 1957. My father could mimic it perfectly. He often did, every time he itched to move somewhere else. He talked about moving all the time.
Memories swept over me again. The undertow carried me through the door I had just unlocked and into the kitchen. I dragged Breech’s box of shingles inside.
I looked out over his prairie again before I slid the screen door closed and turned my back to it. I stood in the doorway a long time. Byron’s Lane had established our parameters, not our boundaries. Adams should have known that. He should have discovered that in bits and pieces scores of mornings standing on his deck drinking coffee, and hundreds of evenings watching the sun set through his two-story living room window.
I took off my blazer, laid it on a kitchen stool, and dropped the car keys on the counter opposite the sink. I wanted to finish what I had to do as quickly as possible. I hadn’t shed my discomfort about being in Adams’s house after he’d been killed in it. The first thing that I did was sneak around the first floor and turn on all the lights. Then I started putting Adams’s personal things in boxes. I moved quickly from room to room. His sisters wanted all his clothes to be given to the Salvation Army. They said the Salvation Army would come and collect the clothes from the dresser drawers and the closets as soon as I called them, which I intended to do the next day. It would be noticed that dress among down-and-out men hard on their luck in Minneapolis and Saint Paul had improved appreciably the first holiday season Adams was not in our midst to help celebrate.
There were no framed photographs of people displayed anywhere in Adams’s house, except for the usual pictures on the wall in a politician’s office: Adams shaking hands with two presidents, a vice president, three governors, a Peace Corps director, six ambassadors, and a secretary of state. A nearly empty cedar chest hiding in the back of the walk-in closet in his bedroom contained his college and graduate degrees and the associated badges of achievement someone wears at the ceremonies where they’re awarded such things. The chest also stored a portfolio of wedding pictures, programs and credentials from presidential inaugurations and political conventions, three baseball World Series, a Masters golf tournament—and his white high school varsity basketball letter, trimmed in Maplewood royal blue.
The ring Adams brought home from Iraq was also in the chest. I took it out and put it on the desk in his office.
Three boxes in the office closet, stacked among ten years of tax records, contained pictures he had taken. As digital photography made film almost obsolete, his interest in photography waned. Almost all of the photos Adams had taken had been tossed into one of the boxes. He talked once about organizing them in some viewer-friendly way, but later decided that the project was pretentious. “Who would ever want to see my pictures?” he wondered out loud when we visited three years ago. “Nobody” was his answer.
There were a few pictures of Kathy and other significant women he’d dated and lived with, mostly standing in front of scenic backgrounds or familiar buildings and monuments. Most of the photographs were of unidentified, anonymous places all over the world—the kinds of places one doesn’t see on a guided tour. Many of them were good enough to be framed and exhibited. Some were stark, yet richly beautiful—landscapes lacking any intrusion of people, with the exception of unidentifiable masses unaware that their picture was being taken.
I dug further into the pile and found an unframed eight-by-ten of a woman leaning against a grocery cart, staring at a six-tiered shelf full of boxes of a hundred different brands of breakfast cereal. I recalled what Adams said about choices the last Sunday breakfast we had together. I decided I’d keep it. I moved the photograph to the kitchen, putting it next to my coat so I wouldn’t forget it.
I also decided that the rest of us ought to have a chance to see some of Adams’s remarkable pictures. As I sorted through them, I formed a plan to publish a book that included the best of them. The project would afford me an opportunity to keep my friend alive for a few more months. If the picture book sold, the money could be used to augment his scholarship fund.
As I was deciding how to take the boxes of pictures back to Connecticut with me, the front doorbell rang. It took two more rings before I could make my way from Adams’s office down the hall to answer it.
My hand on the doorknob, I paused, realizing that what I was about to do, at exactly this place, was a replication of Jonathan Adams’s last moment alive. I hesitated long enough to take a deep breath. Then I opened the door. The realtor’s lockbox bounced when I pulled the door toward me. The unexpected bang was startling.
On the other side of the threshold stood Christina Peterson.
She smiled at first, and then she frowned. Her blond hair was loosely gathered on top of her head, pinned there precariously, looking like it could all easily tumble down with one casual headshake. She wore no make-up; her face was puffy, her eyes red. She was clad in sandals, jeans, and a sweatshirt that advertised a dolphin rescue center in the Florida Keys.
“I saw a car in the driveway. I hoped it was yours. I wanted to see you before you left.”
Christina made no mention of where she had been and why she hadn’t made any effort to contact me since Adams’s death. They were matters instantly unimportant.
After standing too long in the doorway, I reached over the threshold for Christina’s hand and gently pulled her across it. She fell through the doorway and into my arms. We held each other for a long time. Our sobs made our bodies shake. Her neck and her hair were wet with my tears. They were the first I had shed since Maggie’s death.
“Can I help?” she asked. She spoke so softly I wouldn’t have heard her voice if my ears hadn’t been two inches from her mouth. Christina gently pushed back from me and took a tissue from the front pocket of her jeans. She wiped the tears from her face with soft dabs. Then her eyes dropped. They caught a faint red stain that remained embedded in the white grout on the foyer’s gray marble floor. Her chin shook, she shivered, and her lower lip began to quiver. Both of us needed to get away from this place.
“Of course you can help,” I quietly answered. “I’ve got a few more things to collect in the study. You can help me finish my walkthrough. You can help me carry boxes out to the car.” I reached for her chin and gently tipped her head from the floor to focus on my face. She managed a smile and turned to close the door behind her. She put her arm around my waist and maneuvered us around the rose-stained spot on the floor, down the hallway,
and into the study.
Legs crossed, we sat on the carpeted floor, at opposite ends of Adams’s office. My thoughts were not about what I was supposed to be doing; they were about how nicely Christina would have fit into Adams’s mercurial life. I wasn’t as sure that a reignited relationship with Lisa Chandler, dropped unexpectedly in his lap in his last moments, would have turned out as well. But it’s likely he would have pursued it, given Christina’s involvement with Richard Hunter.
There was really not much more to do at his house that evening. Nervously rearranging things we had already packed away, Christina broke our silence. “I wish Jonathan and I could have had a talk like you and I had at my party.”
Christina had pulled from a box a framed picture of Adams sitting with Bill Clinton on a sand dune, somewhere on the Outer Banks. Both of them were staring out at the Atlantic Ocean. She carefully examined it, running her fingers around its edges. She looked up at me.
“What makes us fragile and dissatisfied when we have every reason to be confident and content? Why are we so sad and vulnerable in the midst of having so much?” Her words echoed throughout Adams’s disheveled house.
I thought about that glorious night on the dock at Pine Lake. “Too many choices, too few tests and measurements of how we’re doing,” I answered. This was Adams’s opinion, but I had seized it and made it my own. He would have approved.
I put the three boxes of Adams’s photographs in the trunk of my rental car. Christina had written my address on them. We made sure they were taped tight enough to accompany me back to Connecticut on my plane the next evening as baggage. I had asked Christina to label the boxes so she would be inspired to keep my address somewhere. It worked. When I returned to Adams’s office, she was sitting at his desk, writing my address and my telephone number on a piece of stationery she had found in its half-opened top drawer.
While I had been busy in the kitchen labeling boxes that needed to be shipped to Adams’s sister, Christina had found and claimed two items: Adams’s State Capitol building access pass and a small brass pelican paperweight that he often absentmindedly played with during long conversations she’d had with him in his office. She noticed me watching her from the hallway. With tears in her eyes, she held the identification badge out away from her so I could see it. She had put it around her neck as carefully as if it had been a pearl necklace. “It’s the only picture of him that I’ll have, except what’s been printed on campaign brochures or in newspaper articles I’ve saved.”
I quickly replied: “I’ll send you a better picture of him as soon as I’m home. Keep the ring, too. It’s yours. It’s next to the computer.” I had left the ring in a conspicuous place, on the keyboard of his desktop computer, so I wouldn’t forget to take it with me when I left.
She hadn’t noticed the ring until I called attention to it. She picked it up and examined it for just enough time to express her admiration. She placed it back on the desk. She looked up at me, puzzled. How could I ever think she’d accept something so special and personal; something that either belonged to or was intended for someone else? What authority did I have to give it away?
I told her how the ring had come to the place where I had found it. I told her how Adams scoured the old bazaar in Amman searching for a setting to match the stone he’d found. I told her how much he looked forward to giving it to her when he returned from Iraq. I explained that I intended to give the ring to her if I ever saw her again. It was hers.
Christina pushed her chair back from the desk. Shaking her head, she leaned slightly forward and put her head in her hands. Strands of her hair fell down to her shoulders. She stared at the ring through cloudy, tear-filled eyes. She was afraid to touch it.
I doubted if it would ever find a permanent place on any of her fingers. What I had told her about the green amber ring made it too special to wear in a casual way. The ring’s beauty would cause people who noticed her wearing it to ask where she got it. Its story was too personal to share. But in my presence she took it and put the ring on the third finger of her left hand. She looked up at me and managed a smile through a few sobs and a thick curtain of tears.
“I’m happy you have the ring. Jonathan would be ecstatic.”
We both looked at each other for a long time, silent.
“There’s one more item of business I have to take care of. Are there some envelopes in the top right-hand drawer?” I asked her. “Would you pass them to me?”
She opened the drawer. It was empty except for three oversized tan-colored envelopes. She lifted them from the drawer and pushed it shut. She was about to hand them to me when she suddenly pulled them back, having noticed the names written boldly on two of them in black felt pen: Christina Peterson, Tom Walker.
She stared at the envelopes. Then, hands trembling, she gave me mine and the third one, marked Kurdistan.
She placed hers reverently on top of the desk. I opened the Kurdistan envelope first. It contained a cashier’s check for two hundred and forty thousand dollars with instructions to deliver the money to the families of his murdered Iraqi staff. On a separate folded sheet tucked inside the envelope were their addresses. I showed the contents of the envelope to Christina and told her their story. I folded the envelope in half and placed it on my lap.
I turned the envelope with my name on it over in my hands, like a child does a birthday present, trying to guess what might be inside.
“Can we open them together? Here and now?” Christina asked.
“It’s the only way I’d want to do it,” I said. I marveled at the possibility that somehow, some way, Adams was directing the scene in which we were acting.
“You open yours first,” she insisted in a choked voice, handing me a letter opener she’d taken from a desktop coffee cup. The sound of the letter opener sawing through the large sealed envelope echoed through the room.
Three things were inside my package. They fell into my open, waiting hand and overflowed onto my lap: a tattered black-and-white glossy picture of our Martin’s Amoco Oil Dodgers baseball team, labeled “Maplewood Little League, 1960 Champions”; an opened FedEx envelope that contained a certificate for four hundred shares of Cleveland Indians stock and a stock transfer form with my name on it, signed by Adams and Gabe Chance, dated the day after I left Minneapolis for California; and an eleven-by-sixteen black-and-white photograph of El Capitan in Yosemite Park, carefully wrapped in white tissue paper, signed in the lower right-hand corner in white ink by Ansel Adams.
Smiling through tears, I handed the letter opener back to Christina. She carefully cut the top edge of her envelope and pulled from it something written in blue ink, in Adams’s best handwriting, on a piece of letter-sized expensive linen writing paper. She read it silently. Tears tumbled down her cheeks. Her hands were shaking as she tried to pass the paper to me. Her dazzling green amber ring sparkled as it caught beams of light coming from the desk lamp.
It was Cummings’s poem, “somewhere i have never travelled.” I looked at it. I smiled. I handed it back to her. She carefully put the poem back in the envelope.
I pulled myself up from the floor and took Christina’s hand to urge her up from the chair—the same way I had rescued her at her party.
“I know where Adams hides his thirty-year-old Scotch. I’ll fetch the bottle and two glasses while you get one of his jackets from the hallway closet and turn off the lights behind us. We’ll sit out on the deck and talk about Jonathan and the gifts he gave us.”
It was half past ten o’clock—a crisp, moonless late-autumn evening. The sky was clear and cloudless. I had never seen so many stars. It was so dark we could hardly see each other’s faces, even though we were sitting just an arm’s length apart.
The End
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Byron's Lane Page 21
