Please Remember This (3 page)

It was a warning.
Don’t expect anything of me unless you are willing to go to Kansas.

Her reasons made little sense. There was a family history, something about losing farms during the Depression. Her parents had grown up in Kansas, but as children, they had had to leave, their families tying mattresses to the roofs of cars like characters in
The Grapes of Wrath.
It sounded like an ordinary enough story to him, nothing in it to make her so determined to go there, but he didn’t care whether or not she
made sense. He was infatuated. If Kansas was where she was going, then that was where he was going.

She finished her book the summer after their freshman year and within six months had sold it to a small alternative press under what Duke now knew to have been a terrible contract. It labeled the book as “work for hire.” Nina got money up front, but in exchange she gave up all her rights. She would receive no royalties, no additional money based on the amount of actual sales. But because the contract bought the rights not only to this book but also to two more that she hadn’t yet written, the money had been enough for her to quit school and move to Kansas. Duke went with her.

The other students in the creative writing program were envious and disbelieving. They all felt they had gotten a bad deal. It was a lousy time to be a college student. Nothing important was happening. The war in Vietnam was over. Watergate was over. Woodstock was a memory, something your older brother and sisters had gone to. What was the point of being a free spirit if no one was trying to restrain you? Why be a rebel when there was nothing to rebel against? They felt cheated.

But Duke and Nina had created their own Woodstock. The two of them were going to Kansas.

They went first, then others followed; and once Nina’s book was published, word traveled.
If you’re in the Midwest, go to a town on the Kansas side of the Missouri River. It’s called Fleur-de-lis, and there’s a group of people called the Settlement.

It wasn’t a commune. There was no organization,
no clear list of who was on the bus and who wasn’t. People had to fend for themselves financially, but those old rural houses were big and the farm economy was so bad that living was cheap.

It hadn’t been the perfect idyll that people now portrayed it as, but there had been parts that had been very good. You could hear the meadowlarks singing through the open farmhouse windows. People did sit up late, talking about books and music, watching the fireflies flit through the dark prairie grasses. Sierra Celandine would come across the road from the little tenant shack she lived in to bake bread in Duke and Nina’s kitchen. She would make four loaves at a time and leave them cooling on the windowsill. She made crabapple jelly and plum jam, their jewellike lights glowing through the thick glass of the Ball jars.

Duke’s own writing went well. He wrote conventional science fiction and soon he too had a novel under contract with Nina’s publisher. He was more successful than a new writer could expect to be, but his success was nothing compared with Nina’s.

That was one thing they still said about him—that he resented her for having been more successful. It wasn’t true. He didn’t resent her success. He’d resented her talent. Who wouldn’t? To be able to do what she had done—what writer wouldn’t want that?

But that wasn’t why he had left.

It had bothered him that her talent excused her from all other responsibilities. Sometimes there’d be a bunch of people living in the house, and Sierra
would make up a duty roster. His name was certainly on them, he had chores, but Nina never did.

But that wasn’t why he had left.

She would never do anything that felt hard to her. If someone had been staying in the house too long, it was Duke or Sierra who had to tell the person to find a place of his own. If Nina thought she was going to miss a deadline, it was Duke or Sierra who had to tell her publisher. If the car was making strange noises or the roof was leaking, Duke or Sierra had to take care of it. Her writing was hard enough, Nina said. She couldn’t take on anything more. Sierra didn’t seem to mind, but he was a writer too, and having to take care of everything meant that it took him an extra year to write his book.

But that wasn’t why he had left.

Nor had Nina seemed to care very much about the rest of them. One girl had lost all her canvases when someone’s car had caught on fire. It was a heart-breaking loss, two years’ worth of work gone, but Nina hadn’t said anything to her. Nina hadn’t cared. She was selfish and self-centered.

But that wasn’t why he had left.

He had left because she was manic-depressive.

He hadn’t known it when she was alive. She was “creative”—that was the label that explained all her behavior. But several years later he had been reading an article about bipolar disorders, and he had recognized Nina’s symptoms immediately. She had had periods of high energy during which she couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop working, followed by those
times when she withdrew into her writing room, sometimes not speaking to anyone for two or three days.

She was draining, she was demanding. Whether she was manic or depressed, she sucked up all the oxygen in the room and left none for anyone else to breathe. She was mentally ill.

That was why he had left. She was so exhausting and exasperating during her manic stages that he was almost relieved when she became depressed. He hated himself for feeling that way. That was why he had left. He hated the person her mental illness had made him become.

That Nina Lane had been manic-depressive was now well accepted. A psychiatrist writing about bipolar disorders in creative people had used her as a case study. Even without as much information as Duke had, the doctor had convinced most people of his diagnosis.

Although not her most die-hard fans. They ignored it. They didn’t want anything to have been wrong with Nina Lane. It was easier to blame Duke Nathan. They had wanted a simple story. Duke Nathan had left Nina, so she killed herself. It was all his fault. That was a good story.

Duke, of course, had many regrets. He wished he had been stronger, better able to live up to the challenges of a mentally ill partner. He wished he hadn’t left with Kristin; that made his leaving seem more of a romantic issue than it really had been. He wished he hadn’t been so surprised by Nina’s suicide. He wished he could have helped her, stopped her.

Publicly he had said nothing about her. He never would. There would have been no point. Her fans wouldn’t have listened, and no one else would have cared.

Being Duke Nathan hadn’t been easy. It wasn’t a job for sissies. A writer supporting a family—he and Kristin had married and had kids—needs to teach, edit journals, and give lectures, but even to this day some doors were closed to him because he was the bad guy in the Nina Lane story.

But what could a person do? Life had cast him in a low-rent version of a Ted Hughes-Sylvia Plath saga. He had soldiered on with as much dignity as he could muster.

Tess had bought more linens while she had been in Kansas, and she spent her evenings the first two weeks after getting home working on them, repairing damages, treating stains, starching, ironing, getting ready for a weekend antiques show. At the show, a lady with a shop offered to take some on consignment, but after she explained the financial terms, Tess declined the offer.

The next morning at work, she found in her office mailbox a personal-looking envelope. Her name was handwritten. The lettering on the envelope flap revealed only an address in New York City, but no name.

She slit open the envelope and unfolded the monarch-sized paper. Splashed across the top of the paper in bold blue letters was the name
Duke Nathan.

Dear Tess,

I trust my name is familiar to you.

Sierra Celandine tells me that you were in Kansas during the Nina Lane Annual Birthday Celebration. Presuming that that reveals a very understandable interest in Nina, I am going to venture to introduce myself to you. I will be in Los Angeles teaching a workshop, and I will come to Willow Place in the middle of the afternoon on Wednesday, June 5.

Please don’t reply to this. If you don’t want to see me, simply tell whoever guards the entrance. Forgive me for sounding like Sierra, but I would like you to do whatever feels right at that moment.

With my best wishes,
Duke Nathan

 

Tess stared at the letter. Duke Nathan … of course she knew who he was. He was her father.

If her grandparents hadn’t said much about Nina, they had said even less about Duke Nathan. To speak of him would mean speaking of Nina’s suicide, and that was never done. A child, as Tess knew from her training, readily adopts her caregivers’ assumptions. Her grandparents never thought about him, so Tess hadn’t either.

During her first semester at Stanford, her acquaintances in the Nina Lane Enthusiasts Society thought that she should go to New York and confront Duke Nathan. “He walked out on you,” Margaret kept
saying. “He
abandoned
you. You should go make him explain himself.”

Tess couldn’t afford to go to New York and confront anyone. “What earthly good would that do?”

“He should be accountable for what he did,” Gordon insisted. “He should be made to pay.”

“My grandparents would kill me if I ever took money from him.”

Gordon blinked. “We weren’t talking about that kind of compensation.” Gordon got a huge allowance from his parents; he never gave a moment’s thought to what things cost. “Money’s not the issue here, not at all.”

Their extravagant anger against Duke Nathan bewildered Tess. She tried to examine her own feelings about him, and all she could say for sure was that she could never be that angry at anyone. But shouldn’t she be angrier than they were? Wasn’t she the one with the most at stake? Somehow their flamboyance was robbing her of the emotion that was rightly hers.

So what was she going to do when he came to see her now? Would she tell the guard not to admit him? No, of course not. She was curious. Why was he coming? She was suspicious. What did he want?

On Wednesday, June 5, she crossed Willow Place’s gleaming lobby and put out her hand. “I’m Tess Lanier.”

“Duke Nathan.” His hand closed around hers.

He was a burly, bearded man. She could see nothing of herself in him.

He apologized for being late. “I live in New York, and even so, I didn’t expect the traffic to be this bad.
But I’ve been admiring the building. It looks like an attractive facility. Will you show me around?”

She nodded and gave him the tour just as if he were looking for a place for his aging mother. He asked her no personal questions and said little about himself.

This is my father. What does that mean?
Nothing. It meant nothing. He could have been anyone.

He was wearing a wedding ring. Did he have children? Did she have brothers and sisters? She couldn’t imagine herself with brothers and sisters.

Her special ladies, the ones who took her drawing class, looked up interestedly when she opened the door to the South Activities Room. She introduced him, not as her father, but simply as “Mr. Nathan from New York.” Mrs. Gettis asked him how he knew Tess; he said that he had known her grandparents when he was much younger.

He invited her to dinner, and she accepted. So far, they had talked about nothing but Willow Place.

The maître d’ held out her chair and shook her napkin out for her. When he moved away, Duke Nathan spoke. “That wasn’t true about my knowing your grandparents. Nina never took me home.”

“Oh?” Tess opened the menu. A number of the dishes were made with cilantro. She didn’t like cilantro.
Nina.
He had said the word so calmly, as if this were a normal thing to talk about.

“But she didn’t hate her parents,” Duke Nathan continued. “She was miserable growing up, but she didn’t hate them.”

“They would not have deserved it.” Tess felt very
loyal to her grandparents. How could anyone have hated them?

But hadn’t there been moments when she had? When Grandma wouldn’t even try to swallow those pills. Yes, they were huge, and when Tess cut them, they became powdery and bitter, but still … And Grandpa and the television. Yes, it was wonderful that one of the local channels started to show
Gunsmoke
reruns just when he needed his favorite program the most, but he had kept the volume so loud …

She should think about cilantro. It was all right to hate cilantro. “That’s really why I was in Kansas,” she said quickly, “for my grandparents. I was trying to find their farms.” Grandpa had suggested this after asking her to go to the Birthday Celebration, and she had gone looking for the properties on Sunday morning. “They were both born there. Their families—”

She broke off because he was nodding. He knew. How odd to be around someone who knew her family history. No one in her life now knew anything about her past. Her roommates kept forgetting that she had been raised by grandparents.

“It sounds like you didn’t find them,” he said.

“No.” Tess had been disappointed at not finding them, but she had told herself that it didn’t matter. She was not the type to have had a mystic experience blending with her ancestral earth. “And it wasn’t a very good weekend to ask around.”

“Your grandfather had the directions turned around, which isn’t surprising, since he was only seven when his family had to leave. It took Nina a while to figure that out. The Lanier place is four
miles north on County Route Five, and the Swensons were off Dr. Bird Road. You turn left just beyond the culvert and go about two-tenths of a mile. Nina went to both places a lot.”

Tess had been on County Route Five and she had probably gone at least four miles. She would have driven by her grandfather’s home without knowing it.

“I would like to write those directions down, but I don’t imagine I’ll ever be back.”

“Why not?”

“Money. I have hardly traveled at all. I’m not going to go to the same place twice.”

He looked up, surprised. “You don’t have anything from Nina? I know that the trilogy was done as work for hire, but surely there had to be a different contract for
The Riverboat Fragment.
Its sales are nothing compared to the trilogy, but even in the worst case, even with a four percent contract … the thing’s never been out of print.”