“Oh, God,” Millicent said.
“No, this is an adult,” Nick said into the phone. “Twenty—uh, hold on a second.” He leaned into the room. “How old is Tyler?”
“He’s twenty-eight,” Lily said.
Nick repeated the number to the person on the other end.
“Oh,” said Millicent. It was almost a random sound.
“I see.” Nick’s voice. “Well, what would be necessary in order for someone to enlist?”
“He’s not in the army,” Sheri said. “Jesus.”
They heard Nick again: “Thank you. You’ve been very helpful.” He hung the phone up, and walked in to them. “All they need is to make sure there’s no police record. And they don’t have to check with the family of an adult male who decides to enter the army.”
“He’s not in the army, Nick. He left his car by the river.”
Millicent stood and faced her daughter. “You stop talking like that, Sheri. You stop it right now.”
“I’m sorry,” said Sheri, lowering her head. Millicent moved to embrace her, and then they were both crying, holding each other, while Nick and Roger attempted to calm them. In the middle of this, the baby’s bright sounds took on the feeling of unspeakable contrast, and Lily was constrained to try quieting her. Finally she lifted her from the high chair and went into the living room. Nick followed her. She set Mary down on the sofa and began to change her diaper, and he went up to her and took her by the elbow. “Lily.” His face was ashen, his eyes shaded and circled by lack of sleep and worry. “Is there anything—” He halted.
“We were having trouble,” she murmured.
“I know he was having trouble about what happened with Buddy.”
“Yes.”
He appeared to be expecting her to go on, and when she didn’t, he sat on the sofa, next to where the baby lay. The baby was still making bright cooing noises and flailing her fat arms as Lily changed her. The diaper was only wet. Lily put it in a plastic bag and Nick handed her a fresh diaper.
“We were having trouble,” Lily repeated.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Trouble, Nick. The kind married people have.” She hadn’t meant him to, but it was manifest that he took this to be a reference to his relationship with Sheri. He shook his head, and dropped his gaze. She let it stand. There was an inertia down in her heart, now, a soul weariness, that drew all the strength out of her will. She no longer felt that she could decide anything; she was all reactions, watching him take hold of Mary’s hand and put his thumb in the middle of the little palm. Mary’s fingers closed around the thumb.
8
ON THE EIGHTH DAY, a call came through from a marine recruiter in New Orleans. He was calling at the request of the Oxford Police Department to say that Tyler C. Harrison was in basic training at Parris Island. The police had uncovered a form requisitioning any criminal record for the individual, as the recruiter put it. He’d already sent word to the commanding officer of the training unit that Harrison’s family wished him to contact them. But he was twenty-eight years old and an adult, and, as long as there was no abandonment, nor any neglected familial responsibility or emergency, they could not do more than make certain that he received the message.
Millicent, who took the call, thanked them, and then collapsed. Sheri was standing right there, and helped her to the sofa, where she lay in a befuddled trance made out of a combination of sorrow and relief. Lily, who had been feeding the baby, stood with the others around the couch where Millicent spent herself in tears and cries of anguish. “I did this. This is my doing,” Millicent said. “I’m being punished.”
Lily shook her head and was silent. The waiting had been so hard on everyone that the new situation took a long, strange hour to sink in. They moved through the house and got through dinner and the evening, with Millicent muttering from the couch, and the television rattling out stories about the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, like a vague something unfolding in the background, something inside the noise of the television itself, interior and of its construction, like a malfunctioning part of the machine. The television was always on, and was always so much the same as not to be noticeable, quite. It was the drone of other voices, something to fill the silences between the gloomy inmates of the house. Lily had gone back and forth between the two places—the little cottage in Yellow Leaf Creek, and here. That eighth night she’d spent at the Galatierre house, in the room she had shared with her husband. The wait was to be different, now, though it would still be waiting: now, they were all waiting for Tyler to contact them, to phone, or write a letter, or send a card. Something. But the days passed, and there was talk of war, as if the world had conspired with him to take him irrevocably away. Perhaps even to kill him.
No word came.
Lily went home, and kept, as well as she could, to the routine of her days. It was life now, and there wasn’t anything else for it. She went over to the Galatierre house each morning, for an hour or so. Rosa was there, too, having settled in for the rest of the summer, a houseguest. Everyone was being careful of Lily now, because her husband had abandoned her, and their child.
Nothing could be more frustrating than the feeling that people were only making minute scratches across the surface of the real dilemma.
She went on trying to write. The play was progressing, but in stops and starts; twice she had torn it down to begin again. And her concentration was divided all the time by the thought of Tyler, off on his self-destructive flight from her, even as she angrily sought not to consider him at all. And she was angry, when she examined her true emotions about it. She hadn’t expressed this to any of the others.
What she couldn’t decide was when, or how, or if, she might unfetter herself of the secret history.
One Saturday toward the end of August, Nick came to see her. “I was wondering if I could take you out to lunch,” he said.
She had already eaten a sandwich, but she went with him to the café on the square. It was a sunny, unpleasantly muggy noon, a blue haze obscuring everything in the distance. He seemed even more pensive than usual, staring at the menu. The waiter was a boy, with fair skin and his hair cut so close he had only stubble on his scalp. Nick ordered a chicken sandwich, and then asked Lily what she wanted.
“Iced tea,” she said to the waiter.
After the waiter left, Nick took a breath, leaning back in his chair and looking down at his own hands on the table. “I’ve had a call from Tyler.”
Lily waited for him to continue.
“We had a long talk.”
“About me?” she asked.
His gaze only brushed past her, then seemed to wander about the room. There were other people in the café, and he nodded at someone who had evidently recognized him. “About everything,” he said, low.
“Tell me.”
“He told me everything, Lily.”
She looked at him.
“He doesn’t want to come home.”
“He told you that.”
“In so many words.”
“And?”
He sat forward. “Well, he wants to know what you’re gonna do.”
“Does he think I’ll divorce him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what did he say, Nick?”
“He said he wants to know what you’ll do.”
“As in?”
Nick shrugged. “I guess divorce.”
“What else did he say.”
“Well, that—that you and he were a mistake.”
“Go on.”
“Lily, I said he told me all of it.”
She felt the pain rise under her heart, that it had come. It was here. The feeling was truly as if she had only been waiting for it to be final, even as she had hoped for some answer. She let the tears come, did not move to wipe them from her eyes; they welled up and rolled down her cheeks. He reached across the table and took her hand.
“I wish it was anybody but me having to tell you this.�
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“Who else knows now?”
“Nobody,” he said with an edge of incredulity. “You couldn’t think I’d say anything to anybody else.”
“But Tyler told you.” She sniffled. And now she began wiping the tears away.
“He—he wants to know what you’re gonna do.”
“He can’t call and ask me himself?”
Nick looked down. “He says he doesn’t—that he can’t talk to you again.”
“Oh, really.” She felt this along the nerves of her face, like a slap.
Nick said, “He’s nuts, if you ask me. Completely crackers.”
“Even knowing what you know?”
“Yes.” His gaze was direct.
“He doesn’t want to see me or the baby.”
Nick nodded. “I could tell it hurt him. But yes. He seemed especially adamant about that—the baby.”
“Well—that’s complete, then.” She sobbed. “That’s that.”
“I’m sorry, Lily. I’m so sorry.”
“No,” she said, waving this away. “Really.”
“If it means anything—he has no desire to have anything to do with his mother or Sheri, either. Or me, for that matter. He wants to sever all ties. That’s his phrase. ‘All ties.’”
Lily regarded him. There was a grave, wounded expression on his face, and he ran one hand across his forehead, as if to soothe a pain there. She said, “Tell Tyler I’m going down to New Orleans.” Until the moment the words had come from her, she hadn’t known this was what she would do. Now, having said them out loud, nothing else seemed possible, or right.
“Well, as I said, he’s not coming back here. He’s determined about that.”
“I haven’t expected that he’d come back.” She was trying to gain control of herself, fighting the tears with everything she had.
“I’m so miserably sorry about this,” Nick said. “I feel like a bastard. He wanted to dissolve his interest in the dealership. That’s the only reason he called me.”
“I know,” said Lily. “It’s okay. I know.”
The waiter brought the sandwich, and the drinks. Lily’s hand shook, lifting the glass, and Nick reached over again to take hold of her wrist, a sympathetically steadying touch. “I wish things were different.”
“No,” she said. “It’s all right. I’m fine. I am.” But she couldn’t stop the tears.
“He wasn’t up to you, Lily, wasn’t worthy of you.”
The others in the café were noticing them. She held a handkerchief to her face, and turned a little, sobbing, trying to keep herself from making a sound.
Nick took a small bite of the sandwich and then set it down on the plate. He touched her wrist again, and then drew his hand away. “Lily, I made him set part of the money aside for you now—separate from whatever comes out of the divorce. I got that done. It’s not a lot, but it’ll tide you over.”
She couldn’t speak. It seemed to her now that everything before this had been dreamlike, a progress of trials from which she believed she could emerge wiser, stronger, braced for the next set of difficulties but essentially unchanged, her life fundamentally as it had been. “I want you to tell Sheri and Millicent,” she said. “I’m going to spare myself that one.”
He nodded. “He’d like you to sue for the divorce.”
“I want it mutual,” she said. “Grounds of incompatibility or something like that.”
“He said you could say he abandoned you.”
“No,” Lily said. “Mutual incompatibility. There is such a thing, right?”
“I think there is.”
“Then that’s what I want.”
“I’ll make sure he understands it.”
“I’d like you to help me sublet the house.”
“I will. I’ll manage it.”
“You’re my closest friend here, now,” she told him. “And I would’ve thought that so unlikely once.”
He set his gaze elsewhere, and she saw the moistness in the bottom lids of his eyes.
“Nick,” she said.
He turned to her.
“How soon can you get me the money?”
TWENTY-TWO
1
THE SPRING and summer months in London are filled with social responsibility. It is as if Mary’s presence, after the time away, is a catalyst for family members and new acquaintances to concoct ways to trespass on her time. No one means to impose upon her, and she knows this, and yet she feels the intrusion, and must therefore expend the effort not to be rude or neglectful of anybody. She has made the acquaintance of Ethel MacDonald and Mathilda Goldie, and there are daily communications from Macmillan about her book, which she has begun to decide she wishes not to pursue, feeling unready yet to express what she will finally have to say about it all. A cousin, also named Mary, has published two novels under an assumed name, and when this cousin sees the pages of The Bites of Benin she speaks of descriptive power, and tone. Mary reads her cousin’s novels and feels too unprofessional as a writer, though she finds her cousin’s subject matter painfully frivolous. She communicates to Macmillan that she definitely wishes not to pursue publication, and supposes therefore that the matter is at an end.
But there are money worries, and Charley maintains his languorous ways, talking idly of the Far East and his study of religious practices there, usually going on about it as though it is an accomplished fact. Nothing comes of any of it; and nothing comes of his proposed memoir about their father, either. Mary confides in Mathilda Goldie, who is exactly what her husband claimed she would be: a maverick, with ideas of her own about almost everything. Mathilda thinks she should ignore Charley, and make her own plans. The two women spend afternoons together, sometimes joined by Lady MacDonald, and old friends from Cambridge. Charley remarks that Mary is like someone daydreaming a lot of the time, but the fact is she’s planning her return to Africa. When it becomes clear that Lady MacDonald must go down to join her husband in Calabar, Mary decides that the two of them must travel together.
But then Lady MacDonald is delayed indefinitely. There are matters she must attend to in London, and in any case Charley continues to dally, putting off his own journey. There is so much tension in the flat that Mary spends many afternoons in the reading room of the British Museum, poring over the work of the great scholars of anthropology.
One afternoon in late October, she’s coming out of the venerable old building, and she sees Gladstone, only seven months removed from his last, and disastrous, stint as prime minister, making his way in. He wears a long black coat. His side hair is long and unkempt under the crown of a straw hat. He’s accompanied by three young gentlemen of apparent military rank, and he walks very slowly, stooped, using a knobby cane, and looking every bit of eighty-five. He glances her way. She looks into the piercing old eyes, and he looks back.
—Young woman, he says.
—Sir, says Mary.
Then he’s gone inside, the door closing on him.
She goes home with the excitement of a girl, and a little of the feeling of having seen a ghost. Charley is lounging on the couch, under the bright window, as she climbs to the top of the stairs into the flat.
—I saw Gladstone, she tells him.
Charley’s reading a newspaper, and doesn’t look up from it.
—I’m hungry, he says.
There is a char woman and a cook, both of whom she desires to dismiss, to save money. He won’t hear of it. And it incenses her that he lacks even the energy to request his meals from them. He leaves that, and everything else, to Mary.
—That’s fine, she says now. That’s very well indeed. You’re ’ungry. I’m Mary.
He looks up from the paper.
—Excuse me?
—Nothing, she says.
—Sound your aitches, can’t you? My God, that’s annoying.
She goes into the small kitchen, where the cook, a Mrs. Starrett, is already preparing tea. Mrs. Starrett is a squarish, heavy-featured woman whose family disowned her for
having married an Irish Catholic. In the evenings, she tends toward garrulousness, and likes to tell Mary of the sacrifices she has made for the love of her husband. Her good-natured belief that Mary is headed down the wrong path by not immediately seeking a husband is, of course, manifest.
—I ’eard, mum, Mrs. Starrett says. The master’s ’ungry.
—Thank you, says Mary.
She goes up the little stoop into her study, where her father’s notes and papers are stacked and boxed, and maps of various rivers and estuaries of the African coastline are hung. She works on her notes a little, though she has resolved not to publish the book. Her studies have demonstrated to her the superficial nature of the knowledge she gathered on that first stay in Africa. Her earlier modesty about it with Goldie, she realizes, is justified. She possesses enough detachment to know this.
So she will go back. And it is more than simply wanting to. It is a requirement, almost a duty, not a little because she’s convinced that if she stays in London she might go out of her mind. Charley comes bumping up the stairs, having found something in the newspaper to amuse him, and wanting her to hear it. Someone has speculated that the never-caught Cheapside murderer might be a member of the royal family.
Mary watches him read this little tidbit, his eyes bright with glee, wide with a boy’s pleasure in macabre speculation. She loves him, loves even the irresponsible idleness that is so much a part of his being. She no longer feels maternal toward him, if she ever did, yet she does experience the wish to protect his fragile sense of the world as a place existing for his entertainment. This understanding of him is almost visceral, wordless: Charley is not capable of viewing things straight on, but must always see through the prism of his appetite for diversions.
—Imagine the queen reading this, he says. She’ll have apoplexy.
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