The First Warm Evening of the Year (14 page)

“Wine,” Eleanor answered, “so what you brought is just right, but if you prefer something else, scotch or vodka . . .”

“This seems the perfect night for wine,” I told her.

Walter said, “What you brought is better than what I was about to open, so I'd like to pour one of those.”

I said, “I'd be honored.”

Walter uncorked and poured one of the Burgundies. “I hope Charlie didn't give you the idea Eleanor and I are a couple of lushes. We just think every day deserves its proper send-off.” He made easy eye contact when he spoke, with me and with Eleanor, while Eleanor prodded the plate of cheese and bread in my direction, and made sure I served myself.

Walter was an architect, now semi-retired—Charlie was his partner—and Eleanor had been a high school physics teacher until she retired eight years ago.

While we drank our first glass, we talked about New York City, what part of town did I live in . . . And what sort of work did I do . . . Walter and Eleanor liked to drive down a few times every year and spend a week going to the theater and concerts, seeing the museums and galleries. They talked about their favorite restaurants, and asked me about mine, and the conversation never moved too far from these topics until Walter refilled our glasses, and Eleanor said that Charlie had told them why I was in Shady Grove, that both she and Walter thought it was a good idea that Simon had come back to see his sister's house. But that was all they said about it. Then, in a tone so warm it made me think she was going to tell me that they'd made up the guest room for me, Eleanor asked, “Now, what would you like to know about Laura? Charlie seemed to think you wanted to talk to us about her.”

“I did,” I said. “I do. And I was pretty sure I knew what I wanted you to tell me. But that's changed.”

“In what way?” Eleanor asked.

I told them about looking through Laura's scrapbook, that I'd found it troubling.

“But I don't think you really want to talk to me about that,” I said. “Or if I have any business having that conversation with you.”

Walter and Eleanor looked at each other.

“There were several things about Laura that were troubling,” Walter said. He leaned forward, just a little. “Laura didn't come back to Shady Grove because she missed her hometown. She wasn't a small town girl at heart who wanted to go back home.”

“Both of her parents had died,” Eleanor told me, “so it wasn't family she was coming back for, either. She just couldn't stand being in Paris without Steve. And not only Paris,
any
where in Europe. We thought it was just a temporary move. That Laura would stay here for a year or two. Just to get her legs under her, and then she'd get involved in her music again.”

Walter said, “She could have put another group together in Europe, or in America, or joined one. She had the chances.”

“But what she wanted,
needed
, actually,” Eleanor said, “was to stay as far away from that part of her life as she could.”

“She lost her taste for it,” Walter said. “No, not her taste.” He turned to Eleanor.

“Her passion.”

“Her passion,” Walter agreed.

“It was the life she believed in,” Walter said. “And one day, Steve's walking down the street and drops dead. Forty-five years old.”

“And just like that. Gone.” Eleanor snapped her fingers. “Laura was only thirty-two.”

“There wasn't much left for her to be passionate about,” I said. “Considering— That was a huge decision she made marrying Steve. Anyone that confident when they're that young usually ends up miserable, divorced, or disenchanted. But Laura
knew
, and she was
right
. It makes sense,” I said, “doesn't it? That she wouldn't want anything more to do with that?”

“And yet,” Eleanor said, “if she hadn't gotten sick, she might have gone back to performing. She talked about doing it.”

I thought for a moment before I decided to tell them, “She told Marian that she wished she could fall in love the way she'd been in love with Steve. Just once more. She said she just wanted to feel that way again.”

“Marian
told you that?” Eleanor asked.

I said, “That's right.” When they didn't say anything, I said, “Did I say something out of line?”

Walter shook his head. “Nothing like that. It's just—”

“Did Marian have an answer?” Eleanor asked. “For Laura, I mean.”

“Marian said she wished she had Laura's courage.”

There was another quick glance over at Walter before Eleanor said, “We knew that Marian talked with you, but she never indicated that it was with such—”

“Candor,” Walter said.

“If we seem taken aback,” Eleanor told me, “it's because Marian is not that forthright with most people.”

“Did she just come out and tell you that?” Walter wanted to know.

“She couldn't have just blurted out something like that,” Eleanor added.

“What we're saying,” Walter explained, “is that we assume it was part of a longer conversation. And that she must have been quite at ease talking to you.”

“Look,” I said, “you're Buddy's parents and Marian's in-laws, and I'm not all that comfortable talking about this.”

“We're comfortable talking to you,” Walter said. “So please. For one thing, we'd like to know how you got Marian to talk about Laura so honestly. And about herself. All she told us was that she met you and you seemed to know what you were doing.”

“She's more than just a daughter-in-law to us,” Eleanor said. “She's like our own daughter. She always was. And when we lost Buddy it brought us even closer together. It's been ten years and she's still so unhappy. And that's very upsetting.”

“What I told you before,” Walter said, “that there were some things that troubled us about Laura, we feel the same about Marian. They were like, well, two peas in a pod, as far as their sorrows were concerned. And that probably wasn't very good for either of them.”

“Like they'd found a kindred spirit in each other.” Eleanor got up and walked across the room to close the window. “Laura should never have come back, and Marian should never have stayed. It was the worst thing. For both of them. Of course, Geoffrey, there's all kinds of death. Laura in her little house. And Marian out there in the country all alone. That's no way to live.” She came back to the couch.

Walter started to uncork the second bottle of wine, but Eleanor stopped him and smiled.

“If you're going to open that one,” she said, “Geoffrey's going to have to stay for supper.”

I said I'd like that.

“Don't be so sure.” Eleanor said, “Walter does most of the cooking and we can't guarantee anything better than just all right.”

Walter got up. “That second bottle of wine can only make dinner better,” he said and left the room.

W
e didn't sit in the dining room, but at the small table where we'd had our wine and cheese. Eleanor put out place mats, with linen napkins, yellow and white plates, and what looked like their good silverware.

Supper was more than just all right, although Walter said, “In New York City you call for some kind of exotic takeout. In Shady Grove you have to settle for defrosted leftovers.”

I told him I'd take the defrosted leftovers.

Eleanor said my good manners did not go unappreciated and any and all compliments, true or politic, were welcome.

A little while later, Walter told me, “You're not a very judgmental person, are you, Geoffrey?”

“Because I like our supper?”

“Because with all you've seen and heard,” Eleanor said, “you don't seem terribly critical.”

“If you're talking about how Laura or, for that matter, Marian chose to live their lives, I find it hard enough to imagine those lives let alone criticize them.”

“I can certainly understand that.”

Walter said, “I don't know what Charlie and the others told you about that first year after we lost Buddy.”

“My God,” Eleanor said looking first at me, then at Walter, “we all walked around like we were in trances.”

We were all quiet for a moment or two after she said that until Walter asked me, “Do you know Eliot?” Which seemed an odd segue.

“I've met him,” I said.

“One of the kindest people you'll ever know,” Eleanor said. “I'm not the only person who'll tell you that.”

“One of the most generous,” Walter said.

“I can see that,” I said.

“It's doubtful Marian would have gotten through that first month—that first
year
,” Eleanor said, “without him. Now, this was before Laura moved back. And Marian felt that she couldn't impose herself on her friends, or us, to come out there and help her. Which wasn't the case of course.”

“Marian has a way of seeing things that challenges explanation,” Walter added. “Eliot's been married once, and divorced, but he's been in love with Marian since high school. Hasn't he?”

Eleanor nodded her head. “But that's not why he did what he did for her. There was no agenda.”

“No,” I said, “Eliot doesn't impress me as someone who'd have an agenda.”

“And that would have been fine, for a short while,” Walter told me, “but . . . whatever you've heard about Buddy was not an exaggeration. And it's understandable that Marian would have found Eliot the least—”

“Threatening.” The word seemed to break out of Eleanor's mouth, then in a gentler tone, she repeated, “threatening. To her love of Buddy and his memory.
Her
memories. The Marian you've met, Geoffrey, is not the Marian who was married to our son.”

Walter said, “The two of them together were incandescent,” and I recalled the first time I heard Marian's laugh.

Walter shifted his body, and the movement beneath his shirt was more muscle than fat. “We thought Eliot was just helping her get past the loneliness while she came to terms with what happened to Buddy. But the two of them staying together like this and for so long. It's just not healthy.”

“And then Laura—Marian and Laura—just reinforced each other's grief.” Eleanor smoothed her napkin and fitted it along the edge of her plate. “If it was only for a year, maybe, then it was just a normal time of mourning, but after that, it's the way you're living your life.”

I said, “And when Laura died, I suspect Marian's sadness only grew deeper and more intractable.”

“I just don't think Marian ever saw her way out.” Eleanor was looking at Walter.

Walter put his hand on my shoulder. “And now, you've come along.” He held his hand there a moment longer, before he picked up the plates and walked out of the room.

I started to speak. Eleanor lifted her hand to stop me, got up to turn on a few lights, looked past me in the direction of the kitchen, said, “You don't mind if I leave you alone for a minute,” and walked out.

I sat there thinking about the expressions on the faces in the photograph Marian kept at her nursery; and the faces in Laura's scrapbook; the way couples know each other's conversations; and the things they keep framed on the wall, sealed in a book, and when that can't ever be enough.

I heard Walter and Eleanor talking in quick, muted voices as they came back to the porch. Walter was carrying a tray with coffee and a setup. After he and Eleanor sat down and while Walter poured, Eleanor leaned forward and put her hand on top of mine. “In the ten years since Buddy's death, the two children who weren't already married got married. Charlie, as you know, stayed here in Shady Grove, and our other son and both daughters have moved away. They all have their own children, we have grandchildren. And all Marian's done in those ten years is grow ten years older.”

“Coming here every week for dinner . . .” Walter said.

“Keeping herself and, to a lesser degree, the rest of the family in a state of grieving,” Eleanor put in.

Walter spread out his hands and turned them palms up. “Robert Frost said he could state what he knew about life in three words: ‘It goes on.' Marian has got to allow her life to go on.”

“It can't stay like this,” Eleanor said. “It's driving the whole family crazy. And that includes Marian. It's time she had a real relationship instead of—”

“I'm either missing something,” I said, “or I'm just dull.” I was speaking to Eleanor, but it was Walter who answered.

“Dull is not the word that springs to mind.”

“Do you think Marian's ever been as candid with Eliot about anything as she's been with you? So, if you want to—what, Walter?”

“See where it might lead?”

“Where it might lead,” Eleanor repeated, “we're all for that.”

“There's Eliot to consider.”

Walter asked me, “When are you expected back in New York?”

“Thinking of locking Marian and me in a closet?” I asked back.

Eleanor said, “As if.”

“I'm sure we'll think of something.” Walter was speaking to Eleanor. Then he raised his coffee cup and said, “Here's to the time when we have more in common than the death of our friend.”

W
hen I got back to Laura's house, Simon was sitting on the sofa. The scrapbook was next to him. He looked up at me with an expression I'd grown used to.

“I think I've seen enough,” he said. “I'm ready to leave.”

“I'll put you on a bus,” I told him. “I'm ready to stay.”

Thirteen

T
he following morning, I put Simon on the early morning bus out of Lenox, Massachusetts, but not before I slipped a hundred dollars into his hand.

“The fifty you asked for the last time,” I told him. “And fifty more because I feel like it.”

When the bus pulled away, I got back in my car and drove northwest, heading to the town of Minnota, New York, in the Adirondack Mountains, where Buddy had his cabin.

Walter had offered to come with me, but all I wanted were directions. I preferred seeing the place all alone, on my own. A little more than two hours after I left Simon, I found the gravel driveway. It was at least half a mile long, bisecting the deep woods, then opening to a large field where a yellow clapboard house was nestled just off-center, with a long, wide lake at the end of a small clearing, and several yards away an inviting little guesthouse of cedar shakes. There was no sign of the ramshackle cabin Buddy had left behind, or one that even resembled it.

If Walter's directions hadn't been so exact, I might have thought I'd made a wrong turn along the way. And then I thought about the ten years that had passed, with only Marian standing still.

I left my car at the side of the driveway, called out “hello” a couple of times, but no one appeared from inside the house or out.

Although it was late April, there was a chill in the air, the sky was overcast and pale, the wind was quick against my face.

I called out again, again no one appeared, and I walked up a narrow dirt path, passing the lake where Buddy loved to fish. A wooden dock extended about fifteen feet over the water, and farther out, three or four hundred feet from where I stood, was a small island with a gazebo.

I tried imagining Buddy walking to the frozen lake on a frigid morning and back to his cabin when the sun set on the winter afternoon. What he might have seen in the woods. What he heard within the heave of the ice and on the wind. Or did he see, did he hear, only his isolation? If this was Buddy's respite from being Buddy, was Marian part of what he was escaping? Did Marian ever wonder if she was?

I was walking back to the driveway when I saw the car pull up; then a man was coming toward me. He might have been forty or even younger, his hair was thin on top, his face suntanned, at least what was visible behind his dark red beard. He wore overalls and a gray rain slicker. He looked like a seasoned boatswain.

“Insurance salesman or Jehovah's Witness?” he asked as he approached.

“Tough choice,” I answered.

“Then I'll assume you're lost.”

“Not the way you mean.”

“Lost is lost, isn't it?” he said.

“I'm falling in love with the widow of the man who used to own this place. I wanted to see it for myself.” I was as surprised by my honesty as he seemed to be. He smiled and made a “hmm” sound without moving his lips, kept showing me the smile while he said, “Well, take your time,” pushed his hands into his pockets, and told me, “I'm Aubrey Stein, by the way. This is my place now.”

I introduced myself, and Aubrey asked, “Did you just get here, or have you already had your look around?”

“Just pulled up. You've made a lot of changes, haven't you?”

“You sound disappointed.”

“This place is fixed so firmly in the minds of the people who told me about it, it's been fixed the same way in mine. That's all.”

“Sorry, but I had to do something with it.”

“I'm sure this is a big improvement. The house, the gazebo. All of it.”

“Do you mind if I ask what you
thought
you'd find?”

“The woman I mentioned? Her husband died up here, alone, in the cabin that was here. I guess you tore it down.”

He looked in the direction of the guesthouse. “It was over there. I kept the original floors. Beautiful pine. Not that that's any help or consolation.”

“What did you do with the stove?”

“You came with an inventory?”

“Another person's memories.”

“I had it repaired and gave it away. All the old lumber, too. Does that matter to her?”

“She doesn't know I'm here.”

The expression on his face made me think that this amused him.

“Look around,” he said. “Take your time.”

“I won't be long. I think I have the general idea.”

The sun was out now. Aubrey said it was feeling downright tropical, opened his coat, and walked toward the lake.

“I'm sure you've driven a long way,” he said over his shoulder, “and I don't have that many visitors this time of year, so why don't you stay a while. It's nice enough, we can sit out by the water.”

We grabbed a couple of folding chairs, set them up on the dock, took off our coats, and sat low to get the full warmth of the sun.

I said, “Buddy, the man who used to own this place, liked to come up here to ice fish.”

“This is a dreadful place in winter.”

“I'm beginning to think that's why he liked it.”

Aubrey made a low sound with his voice before he said, “I close it up at the end of October and don't come back till spring. Even now it's almost too early.”

I considered his suntan. “You obviously head south.”

“Africa.”

“Africa?”

“Go to South America and turn east?” He was grinning, and I grinned back at him. “I teach school in Namibia.”

“That's a long way to go to teach school.”

“They need teachers. I volunteer.”

I looked over the property again and said, “This is not where I'd expect a volunteer to live in his off-time.”

“Back in the nineties, I was riding high on the Bubble.”

“And you read the entrails and cashed out.”

“In retrospect, it looks like prescience, doesn't it? Although the people I worked with thought that I lacked vision and ambition. But I think a person has to ask himself: How much is enough? I had enough and I walked away.”

“I think it's also a question of how much do you need.”

“Not such an easy thing to answer.”

“So I've only recently discovered,” I said.

The sunlight settled on the surface of the lake. Two hawks circled above us, their shadows following along the ground. Somewhere in the woods the cawing of crows came like the rush of disaster, and the mad hammering of a woodpecker, then silence all around us and the empty sky.

Aubrey got up and walked to the end of the dock. He sat on the edge, his feet hanging over the side.

“A few months after I left my job, I found this place. Or it found me, if that doesn't sound too precious.”

“Then Africa found you.”

He looked over his shoulder at me, as though he wasn't sure if I was being snide or serious, pulled his knees up, and leaned back on his elbows.

“I researched various foundations that were about helping people, found one that did volunteer work in Namibia, and I signed on. I've been doing it for the past seven years. But, if I'm not being too nosy,” he said, “what else do you do besides look for the broken heart of the woman you're falling in love with?”

“Right now that's a full-time job.”

I assumed that Aubrey knew an equivocation when he heard one, and even if I'd had any idea what the past few days came to, even if I'd been able to come to any conclusion, I doubted that I could have expressed what I was thinking, and if I could, the only person I would have talked to was Alex, but I was sure he'd soon be occupied with Simon and what Simon had to tell him, and that was all right with me.

Aubrey had no other questions, and I had nothing more to say. If I'd closed my eyes, I would have seen Marian sitting in that small office at her nursery, Buddy's photograph behind her, because Buddy was always close by, looking over her shoulder. I would have told her about this day and offered her my explanation and she would tell me what she thought, and once more, time could not move slowly enough.

Aubrey said, “I don't think you found what you came for.”

“I'll just have to look somewhere else.”

I
spent the night alone in Laura's house. I dreamt that I was trying to rescue a sinking sailboat from Buddy's lake.