by Paul Russell
“Noah is not just a passive victim here,” Claire said. “It’s more complicated than you want to make it out to be. Noah wanted for what happened to happen. And he can take care of himself. From everything I know, I’m convinced of that.”
“You mean Tracy Parker is convinced of that,” Louis countered, “and he’s convinced you as well.” He was surprised to see her so easily duped—but then, Tracy’s charm had duped the lot of them. “I have this terrible fear,” he went on, “that Tracy Parker, like the boy’s father, believes about Noah only what he chooses to believe. And if that’s the case, then where does that leave us?”
“That leaves us with the boy. You’ve got to keep an eye out for him, Louis. To be there for him. Tracy tells me Noah’s got another two years at the Forge School. Well, you’ve got to make sure he thrives. You can’t let him be another Arthur Branson for you.”
But what did she know about Arthur Branson? Louis asked himself with alarm.
It was as if she could intuit his thoughts exactly. “Tracy told me,” she admitted. “He told me what Arthur told him. It’s true, isn’t it, Louis? You saved him all those years ago. And you never told anyone.”
Louis flinched to hear a truth so compromised, so undermined as that. Did Arthur really think he’d saved him? “I turned my back on him,” Louis said fiercely. “I know that’s what he thinks. But I got him through the Forge School. That was all I could do. I couldn’t do more than that.”
He thought Claire might be close to tears again. It had been a difficult day for her as well. He could see that now. He regretted that he had been harsh with her.
“You can’t blame yourself,” she said, and he was suddenly shocked to understand that the tears, trembling there but still held back, were not for herself, or for Tracy Parker, or even for Arthur Branson. They were for him. “All those years,” she said, “and nobody ever knew. It was heroic, what you did. And how lonely you must have felt.”
Even now he could not say, “I was afraid of loving Arthur Branson too much. That was why I had to turn away.”
“But now you have to do it again,” she said.
She was right; he knew that. This time he must not turn away.
“The trouble is,” he confessed, “I don’t like the boy very much.”
Claire looked at him compassionately. “No one said you had to,” she told him.
He dreaded the prospect more than he could say. It would demand of him a courage and discipline greater than he had ever sustained in all his long, unblemished career of teaching boys. Noah was a boy, after all, one might eventually come to love.
He rose, clenching and unclenching his fist, and did what he too rarely did these days. He bent down to where she sat and kissed his wife on the cheek. “Thank you,” he said, “for the delicious dinner. And for your wise words. I’ll do the dishes in a bit, but there’s one piece of business I need to attend to first.”
“I’m happy to wash up,” she said. She had never much trusted him with the fragile willowware. “Go ahead and do whatever it is you need to do.”
“Without you,” he told her truthfully, “I would be completely lost.”
He went into his study and shut the door. Opening the desk’s bottom drawer, he pulled out his notebook of many years—his life, he realized. Such as it had been. Or rather, the life that never was. Closed Fist, Open Palm. All those scrupulous pages of notes, and those other shameful pages as well. A sheaf of clippings fell onto the floor, and he stooped to pick them up. A high school hockey coach had been arrested on Long Island for regularly molesting one of his team members over a six-month period. In the photograph accompanying the article, a handsome boy of fifteen or sixteen sat next to his beaming, nervous-smiled abuser. Louis regarded the clipping, some years old, already yellowed, with detached calm. Lightning would not strike. In his mind he saw Noah Lathrop extend his hand; he saw Tracy Parker take that hand in his and cover it with his own, mortal flesh to mortal flesh. Their secret blazed electric between them, and he could see it clearly. Just as clearly he saw Jack Emmerich put his arm around Arthur Branson one afternoon outside the Heidelberg on Main Street when no one should have been around to observe.
Stuffing the newspaper clippings back in the notebook, he stuck it under his arm and left his study.
In the kitchen, where Claire was rinsing soap from the willowware, he opened and shut several drawers before she asked him, “Louis, what are you looking for?”
“I’ve found them,” he said. He took the box, and when he left the house he could sense that she stood at the kitchen window and watched him, as she did sometimes when he shoveled snow at night and she worried about his heart.
He did not mind that she saw him now. He had nothing to hide. Making his way through the snow into the middle of the garden, he struck the first match along the rough strip on the side of the box. The flame quivered. From far away a police siren rose and fell. And then it ceased. Everything lay perfectly still and silent.
Calmly, with no regret, he tore page after page of his life’s work from the notebook and fed them to the cleansing fire. He had expected the doomed, beautiful pages to soar aloft one by one, weightless, glowing against the night sky like the flames from Tracy Parker’s chimney. But that did not happen. The pages curled to cinder and ash. They did not fly heavenward, or if they did, black against black, he could not see them in their ascent.
XVIII
She had once said to herself—she remembered it so clearly—that there were certain mornings in spring that felt almost exactly like being in love. She had been so young then, filled to bursting with a bright arc of longing as wide as the sky itself. Nearly half a century ago that had been, when the twin throbs of Frank Sinatra and a boy named Jimmy Wellington pulsed in her young heart—and the marvel was, certain mornings in spring still felt almost exactly like being in love. Of course she had grown old, she had become an ancient creature, not so much undesirable as simply beyond considering. Well, if there would be no more falling in love, there was nonetheless still the spring, its inimitable light, the sheen of ambient desire with which it suffused everything, everything.
With all the impulsive energy of youth, Betsy strained at her leash. Everything about this April morning, it seemed, was worth investigation. “Easy there,” Claire reminded the little beagle. Tracy had been right: the confines of an apartment in the city would have been no place for an animal like Betsy, and if Louis had been less than enthusiastic about taking her on, Claire was nonetheless certain she had done the right thing by insisting on it.
“I suspect Louis will miss him far more than I,” Libby said. For a moment Claire thought her walking companion meant Tracy, but of course she didn’t. Libby knew nothing about any of that.
“I’m certain he will,” Claire told her friend. “He’s taking it very hard. Though he’s convinced Reid won’t last more than three months in a monastery. At least that’s what he’s telling me. He predicts he’ll be back among us before summer’s over. He’s not even hiring a replacement—that’s how confident he is.” She tried, without much success, to picture Reid Fallone on Mount Athos. She saw him in a burlap robe fastened with a rope belt; he was riding a donkey. There was not a woman in sight.
She had to laugh at the absurdity of it.
Libby said, “If Louis thinks Reid’s not completely serious, then he knows my husband far less well than he supposes. Funny, isn’t it, that the two of them could have gone on being such friends, and each so completely clueless about the other.”
“That was undoubtedly part of the attraction,” Claire told her difficult friend of so many years. “When you get right down to it, we don’t ever want to know one another too well. We want there to be that mystery. Where there’s mystery, there’s hope.”
“I suppose,” Libby said. “I have to say I’m a little tired of both right now. I like living in the present, as they say. One day at a time. Though I can’t wait to sell that awful house and move into some place more
livable.”
“You always hated that house,” Claire told her. “It was never you.”
“It never was, was it?” Libby admitted. “I’d say marriage does that. After a while you don’t even recognize yourself anymore. The you you started out with, I mean. I do wonder, sometimes, what would have happened if I’d never met Reid.”
“Then I suppose I would never have met Louis,” Claire said.
“And where would we be today? What would we be doing with ourselves?”
“Impossible to imagine,” Claire said. “Don’t even waste your time trying.” And she meant it. This was exactly who they were; their lives couldn’t be sloughed off or reinvented or banished as if they never had been. There was no going back for any of them, ever. Libby might feel herself living one day at a time, freed into some exhilarating future, but Claire knew that was just something one said to oneself—an admirable enough mantra, but no one, in the end, lived like that; each was borne forward, as if on a great tide, by the weight of everything that had already happened. Each rode a wave fathoms deep; at every turn the past overtook the present in a great surf-rush of joy and regret.
Ahead of them, for instance, was Tracy Parker’s haunted house. Their leisurely stroll across campus had not intentionally brought them this way—unless Betsy had been leading them all along. Did she recognize her old home? Under a spell of tantalizing scents the dog tugged mightily at her leash, zigzagging this way and that along the sidewalk and up onto the ragged lawn.
The building needed sprucing up: new paint, the chimney repointed, the front porch jacked up. You didn’t notice such things so much when a place was lived in. Now the vacant windows seemed to cry aloud the house’s sad emptiness. Come July, the Brills would move in; life would fill the house once again; the rooms would echo with the laughter of children, though she wasn’t sure she had ever heard those dreary children laugh. Perhaps the singing of hymns would echo, then.
Betsy was positively delirious. She rolled in the wet grass, her nose shiny with dew. Should she turn her loose, let her commune to her heart’s content with this bit of ground where no doubt dog and master had frisked together on those luminous autumn afternoons when, as Tracy had confided to her once, his life had seemed at last to be starting to make some sense? It had been six weeks since Betsy’s adventure in Central Park, but Claire was still cautious. “She does have this tendency to take off like a shot,” Tracy had warned. She remembered how he had knelt down and nuzzled the dog’s head with his lips; how she had heard him whisper “Bye, sweetie”; how she thought he had brushed away a tear. “Take good care, of her,” he’d told her, then added, “and yourself too.”
This is all I have left of you, she thought with a wistfulness that still had the power to unsettle. Along the front porch, beneath the somber rhododendrons, several bright clumps of daffodils caught her eye. The sight made her heart leap; these bulbs she had given him one afternoon, and that he had actually, bless his heart, taken the time to plant. Bravely they turned their buttery perianths toward the sun. Had she been in love with him? No, she thought, but she had been very fond of him; he had been a thawing sun in the late winter of her long marriage, a brief but much-needed change in seasons.
Libby seemed to sense her thoughts—or perhaps it was only the house that suggested the subject. “I heard about what happened with that new teacher,” she said.
Claire’s heart quickened. “You did?”
“Reid mentioned it when we talked last. He said the young man just up and quit.”
So that was the official explanation Louis was promulgating. Claire had wondered. She herself had mentioned nothing to Libby one way or the other; had told her, in fact, rather than rehearse the real story, that she and Louis had rescued Betsy from the pound—which wasn’t, she reminded herself, entirely a lie.
“Yes,” she said, surrendering to the party line. “I imagine he just got overwhelmed by things. Being a teacher is harder than one supposes, really. It takes a special commitment.” She knew she was being altogether unfair to Tracy, who had, after all, been quite an extraordinary teacher in certain ways—but then it was not with Tracy, finally, that her allegiance must lie. “Louis took over his classes,” she continued loyally. “It’s been rather a burden on him. He hasn’t seen the inside of a classroom in so long. Though I actually think he’s rather enjoying the challenge. He used to love teaching. I think this gives him a sense of purpose—which, between you and me, he’s been sorely lacking for some time now. And the boys are keeping him very much on his toes. He delights in the boys.”
She had stood at the window and watched him burn the manuscript he had labored on for so many years. Had it been in a fit of despair? Or had he finally let go that futile dream that had held him in thrall for so long? These days he seemed possessed, oddly enough, of a new sense of freedom. She knew no other way to put it.
“And are things well between you and Louis?” Libby asked. “Something like that can sometimes put a strain on things. Unsettle the equilibrium.”
Was it possible, Claire wondered, that Reid had actually told Libby everything? Marriages were like that, even marriages on the shoals. For a moment she considered telling her friend the whole peculiar story—but to what end? So she said, not untruthfully, “Louis and I will be married forever. It’s how we are.” Some things, after all, did not need to be spoken, their reality too fragile to survive the telling. But these nights of spring did she not—rather often, in fact—wake to find him nestled against her in the bed, his arm draped across her as they slept? Or other small gestures: a pat on the shoulder, a peck on the cheek. He had never been less than courtly with her, but was she wrong in thinking she detected, to her great surprise, a tenderness she had not—to be truthful—felt from him in years? He had suffered his losses over the last few months: Lux, whose ashes now rested peacefully beneath the old lilacs in the back yard; Tracy Parker, disappeared without a trace into the surging anonymous crowds of New York; and now Reid Fallone, self-exiled to his cliffside monastery perched above a wine-dark sea. But those losses, she felt, hardly told the whole story. No; at night, finding her husband’s slumbering body curved into hers, mortal bearer of mortal secrets, she could at times wonder if what Louis Tremper had actually come to miss, after all these years, was none other than Claire herself.
It was enough, given everything that had happened, to bring a rueful smile to her lips. “Okay, Betsy,” she said with a firm tug of the leash. “Time to move on.” If Libby had noticed the ecstasy Betsy had lavished on the lawn, she did not show it. And Betsy, having paid homage, seemed content. “Shall we loop around the lake?” she asked her friend.
“Fine with me,” Libby said. “My morning’s certainly wide open. Come to think of it, the rest of my life is wide open.”
“Then let’s,” Claire urged. “It’s so beautiful out. And I can’t remember a longer winter.”
They followed the path from Tracy’s cul-de-sac across the campus’s great sloping back lawn, down to the water. Drifts of daffodils were blooming there as well, bulbs she had planted years ago, when her daughters were young. Over time, several hundred daffodils had multiplied to several thousand, a field of golden light.
Along the path, coming from the far side of the lake, two boys ambled toward them. One of them she had never seen before: tall and thin, he sported a rather astonishing splash of hair as bright as that lawn of daffodils, though not half so natural. The other boy looked familiar, but then there was a certain type of boy that age among which individuals were difficult to distinguish. His hair was cut very short. She remembered how, in the late sixties and early seventies, the school had once passed through the crisis of long hair; if only Jack Emmerich had been able to know that some thirty years down the line a look of near military austerity would once again be in vogue. For that was how this boy seemed to her, a young combatant in some desperate war—and then she remembered where she knew him from. A reception, back before Christmas; he had been in the co
mpany of his father. He was not beautiful, she thought, but there was in his face a haunted expression by which one could conceivably be intrigued. She tried to imagine the ways that face might have intrigued Tracy Parker, but it was nearly impossible, wasn’t it, to try to discover in the features of the beloved any real clue to the lover’s plight? But this, she was quite certain, was the boy Tracy Parker had lost himself over.
He seemed not to recognize her—and why should he? But as they approached he showed distinct interest in Betsy.
You would never guess, she addressed the boy silently, the things you and I have in common, now would you? She felt as if she knew him too well. Tracy had told her so much during their fugitive meetings at coffee shops and diners during those critical few weeks. He loved you, she wanted to tell the boy. He did the best he could in a situation the world made impossible.
Cherish that, she wanted to say. You can’t know what an extraordinary thing that is.
The wonder of it: that she who had always abided so strictly by the law had found herself, in the wisdom of her years, counseling a young man in acts that were strictly forbidden. The world is a miracle, she had found herself telling him. It is also full of terrible danger.
The dangerous boy scrutinized the dog on her leash. Did Betsy recognize him as well? On an impulse he stopped just as they were passing each other on the path. In a quick motion he knelt on the sidewalk and cupped the top of Betsy’s head with his open palm. His nails, she saw, were bitten to the quick.
Betsy nuzzled him feverishly, but then she tended to nuzzle just about everyone feverishly.
“Hey, doggie,” he said, using both hands to massage behind her ears. The taller boy looked on, expressionless.
“I love beagles,” the kneeling boy explained. “What’s its name?”
She hesitated, wondering what Louis would have her do.
