The Rule of Four (46 page)

We watched in those final weeks as the investigation into the fire at Ivy drew to a close. At last, on the Friday before commencement, as though the announcement had been timed to give closure to the academic year, the local authorities acknowledged that Richard Curry, “in a way coincident with firsthand accounts, precipitated a fire within the Ivy Club, causing the death of both men inside the building.” In support of this, they advanced two shards of a human jaw, which matched Curry’s dental records. The explosion of the gas main had left little else.

Yet the investigation remained open and nothing specific was ever said of Paul. I knew why. Just three days after the explosion, an investigator had confessed to Gil that they held out hope of Paul’s survival: the remains they’d found were merely scraps, and what few of them were identifiable were Curry’s. For the following days, then, we waited hopefully for Paul’s return. But when he never did return, never staggered from the woods or turned up in a familiar place, having forgotten himself for a time, the investigators seemed to realize it was better to be silent than to ply us with false hope.

Graduation came warm and green, without a whisper of wind, as though such a thing as Easter weekend could never have been. There was even a butterfly in the air, fluttering like a displaced emblem, as I sat in the yard of Nassau Hall, surrounded by classmates in our robes and tassels, waiting to be pronounced. Up there, in the tower, I imagined a bell tolling silently without a clapper: Paul, celebrating our fortune, just behind the creases of the world.

There were phantoms everywhere in that daylight. Women in evening gowns, from the Ivy ball, dancing in the sky like nativity angels, announcing a new season. Nude Olympians streaking in the courtyards, unashamed of their nakedness, in a specter of the season just passed. The salutatorian quipped in Latin, jokes I didn’t understand, and for an instant I imagined that it was Taft up there who addressed us; Taft, and behind him Francesco Colonna, and behind them a chorus of wizened philosophers who all delivered a solemn refrain, like drunken apostles singing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

The three of us returned to the room one last time after the ceremony. Charlie was heading back to Philadelphia for a summer of ambulance work before medical school in the fall. He had chosen the University of Pennsylvania, he told us finally, after wavering for so long. He wanted to stay near home. Gil was collecting the knickknacks from his bedroom with a touch of eagerness I half expected. He confessed to having a ticket out of New York that evening. Going to Europe for a while, he said. To Italy, of all places. He needed some time to figure things out.

We collected our last day’s mail together, Charlie and I, once Gil was gone. Inside the box were four small envelopes, identical in size. They contained registration slips for the alumni directory, one to each of us. I placed mine in my pocket, and took Paul’s, as well, realizing he hadn’t been stricken from our class list. I wondered for a moment if they’d drawn up a diploma for him, too, which now sat somewhere uncollected. But on the fourth envelope, the one addressed to Gil, his name had been crossed off, and mine had been written in his hand. I opened it and read. The form had been completed, with an address penned out for a hotel in Italy.
Dear Tom,
it said, across the inside lip of the envelope.
I left Paul’s here for you. I thought you would want it. Tell Charlie I’m sorry for leaving in a rush. I know you understand. If in Italy, please call. —G.

I hugged Charlie before we parted. A week later, he called me at home to ask if I planned to attend our class reunion the following year. It was the sort of pretext only Charlie would invent for a phone call, and we spoke for several hours. Finally, he asked if I would give him Gil’s address in Italy. He said he’d found a postcard Gil would enjoy, which he tried to describe to me. I realized, underneath what he was saying, that Gil hadn’t given him a forwarding address. Things between them had never really recovered.

I wasn’t in Italy, that summer or afterward. Gil and I met three times in the four years that followed, each time at a class reunion. There was less and less to be said between us. The facts of his life gradually assembled with the graceful preordination of words in a litany. He returned to Manhattan after all; like his father, he became a banker. Unlike me, he seemed to age well. At twenty-six, he announced his engagement to a beautiful woman one year our junior, who reminded me of a star from an old movie. Seeing them together, I could no longer deny the pattern to Gil’s life.

Charlie and I kept up much better. To be honest, he wouldn’t let me go. He holds the distinction in my life of being the hardest-working friend I’ve ever had, the one who refuses to let a friendship fail just because the distance grows and the memories fade. In the first year of medical school, he married a woman who reminded me of his mother. Their first child, a daughter, was named after her. Their second child, a son, was named after me. A bachelor myself, I can judge Charlie as a father honestly, without worrying how I fare in comparison. The only way to do it justice is to say that Charlie is an even better father than friend. In the way he cares for his children there is a hint of the natural protectiveness, the world-beating energy, the enormous gratitude for the privilege of life, that he always showed at Princeton. Today he is a pediatrician, God’s own doctor. His wife says that on certain weekends he still runs with the ambulance. I hope someday, as he still believes, Charlie Freeman will come before heaven at the hour of judgment. I’ve never known a better man.

What became of me, I’m hard-pressed to say. After graduation I returned to Columbus. Except for a single trip to New Hampshire, I spent all three months of my summer at home. Whether it was because my mother understood my loss even better than I did, or because she couldn’t help feeling glad that Princeton was behind me—behind
us
—she opened up. We talked; she joked. We ate together, just the two of us. We sat on the old sledding hill, the one my sisters used to pull me up, and she told me what she’d been doing with herself. There were plans to open a second bookstore, this one in Cleveland. She explained the business model, the way she’d been running the ledgers, the possibility of selling the house now that it was going to be empty. I understood only the most important part, which was that she’d finally started moving on.

For me, though, the problem wasn’t moving on. It was understanding. As the years have passed, the other uncertainties of my life have seemed to clarify themselves in a way my father’s life never did. I can imagine what Richard Curry was thinking on that Easter weekend: that Paul was in the same position Curry himself had once been in, that it would be unbearable to let his orphan son become another Bill Stein or Vincent Taft, or even Richard Curry. My father’s old friend believed in the gift of a clean slate, a blank check on an unlimited trust; it just took us too long to understand him. Even Paul, in the days when I still hoped for his survival, gave me reason to think he’d simply left us all behind, escaping through the tunnels without ever returning; the dean had left him with little hope of graduation, and I had left him with no hope of Chicago. When I’d asked him where he wanted to be, he’d told me honestly: in Rome, with a shovel. But I never reached the age when I could ask my father those sorts of questions, even if, in retrospect, he was probably the sort of man to give them an honest answer.

I suppose, then, looking back on it, that the only way I can explain why I became an English major after having lost my faith in books—why I had such a sense of possibility working on Colonna’s book after rejecting my father’s love of it—is that I was looking for those pieces I thought my father must have left me, the ones that could piece him back together. For as long as I knew Paul, for the duration of our research on the
Hypnerotomachia,
the answer almost seemed to be in my grasp. For as long as we worked together, there was always hope I might eventually understand.

When that hope fled, I honored my contract and became a software analyst. The job I got by solving a riddle, I took because I’d failed to solve another. Time in Texas passed more quickly than I can account for. The heat of summer there reminded me of nothing I’d known before, so I stayed. Katie and I wrote almost weekly during her last two years at Princeton, letters I began to wait for in the mail, even as they became less frequent. The last time I saw her was during a trip to New York to celebrate my twenty-sixth birthday. By the end of it, I think even Charlie could sense that time had come between Katie and me. As we walked through Prospect Park in the autumn sun, near the Brooklyn gallery where Katie worked, I began to understand that the things we once cherished had remained behind us at Princeton, and that the future had failed to replace them with a vision of things yet to come. Katie, I knew, had been hoping to begin something new that weekend, to chart a new course by a new set of stars. But the possibility of rebirth, which had buoyed my father for so long, and preserved his faith in his son, was an article of faith I’d slowly come to doubt. After that weekend, I began to fall out of Katie’s life entirely. Shortly afterward, she called me at work for the last time. She knew the problem lay on my end of things, that mine were the letters that had become shorter and more distant. Her voice brought back an ache I hadn’t expected. She told me I wouldn’t be hearing from her again until I figured out for myself where we stood. Finally, she gave me her number at a new gallery, and told me to call when things were different.

Things were never different. Not for me, anyway. It wasn’t long before my mother’s new bookstore prospered, and she called me back to run the one in Columbus. I told her it was too difficult to leave Texas, now that I had roots. My sisters visited me, and Charlie with his family once, each leaving with advice on how I could get myself out of this slump, how I could get past this, whatever it was. The truth is, I’ve just been watching things change around me. The faces are younger every year, but I see the same formulations in all of them, reissued like money, new priests in old denominations. I remember that in the economics class I took with Brooks, we were taught that a single dollar, circulated long enough, could buy everything in the world—as if commerce were a candle that could never burn itself out. But I see that same dollar now in every exchange. The goods it buys, I no longer need. Most days, they hardly seem like goods at all.

It was Paul who weathered time’s passage the best. He always remained at my side, twenty-two and brilliant, like an incorruptible Dorian Gray. I believe it was when my engagement to an assistant professor at the University of Texas began to collapse—a woman who reminded me, I see now, of my father and mother and Katie all at once—that I took to calling Charlie every week, and thinking of Paul more and more. I wonder if he wasn’t right to go out as he did. Striving. Young. While we, like Richard Curry, suffered the depredations of age, the disappointments of a promising youth. Death is the only escape from time, it seems to me now. Maybe Paul knew he was beating it all along: past, present, and any distinction in between. Even now, he seems to be leading me toward the most important conclusions of my life. I still consider him my closest friend.

Chapter 30
                           

Maybe, then, I’d made my decision before I ever received this package in the mail. Maybe the package was only the accelerant, like the alcohol Parker spilled on the club floor that night. Not even thirty, and I feel like an old man. The eve of our fifth reunion, and fifty years seem to have gone by.

Imagine, Paul said to me once, that the present is simply a reflection of the future. Imagine that we spend our whole lives staring into a mirror with the future at our backs, seeing it only in the reflection of what is here and now. Some of us would begin to believe that we could see tomorrow better by turning around to look at it directly. But those who did, without even realizing it, would’ve lost the key to the perspective they once had. For the one thing they would never be able to see in it was themselves. By turning their backs on the mirror, they would become the one element of the future their eyes could never find.

At the time, I thought Paul was parroting wisdom he’d gotten from Taft, which Taft had stolen from some Greek philosopher, the idea that we spend our lives backing into the future. What I couldn’t see, because I was turned the wrong way, was that Paul meant it for me, about me. For years I’ve been determined to get on with my life by doggedly hunting down the future. It was what everyone told me I should do, to forget the past, to look forward, and in the end I did it better than anyone might’ve expected. When I arrived, though, I began to imagine that I knew exactly what my father felt, that I could identify with the way things seemed to turn against him with no explanation.

The fact is, I don’t know the first thing about it. I turn around now, toward the present, and find that I’ve had nothing like the disappointments he experienced. In a business I knew nothing about, which never captured my heart, I’ve done well for myself. My superiors marvel that, after being the last man out of the office for five years, I have never taken a single day off. Not knowing any better, they mistake it for devotion.

Seeing that now, and comparing it to the way my father never did anything he didn’t love, I come to a certain understanding. I don’t know him any better than I ever did, but I know something about the position I’ve taken all these years, turning to stare at the future. It’s a blind way to face life, a stance that lets the world pass you by, just as you think you’re coming to grips with it.

Tonight, long after leaving the office, I quit my job in Texas. I watched the sun go down over Austin, realizing it had never once snowed in all my time here, not in April, not even in midwinter. I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to crawl into a bed so cold, you wished there was someone else in it. Texas is so hot, it helps you believe you’re better off sleeping alone.