Authors: Callie Wright
“Graham’s father is talking to a lawyer. I wanted to tell you myself, before you heard from him.”
Hugh went rigid in his chair as the content of her words took form. “Heard
what
from him?”
Caroline lowered her voice, her lips brushing the receiver. “Graham said he was standing on top of the monkey bars when he fell.”
“Caroline,” he said. “Is this about us?”
“Hugh, no,” said Caroline quickly. “That part was fine.”
Fine
: an indecipherability at best, a calculated reduction at worst; his children’s catchall for every suspicion, doubt, boredom, delight, wonder, fear, and disappointment; their most obscene four-letter word.
Hugh took a deep breath, then closed his eyes and said, “Has Graham said anything about…? I mean, does he remember…?”
“I don’t know,” said Caroline. “I don’t think so.”
“Caroline,” said Hugh, “can we talk about this in person?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “It was hard enough to convince Richard to let Graham return to school while we sort this out.”
Hugh thought of Anne—liability, lawsuits, negligence—she would know what to do. But in the two weeks since the boy’s fall, Hugh hadn’t breathed a word about the accident to his wife.
“Can we slow this down?” asked Hugh. “Can I see you?”
Caroline seemed to consider it, then said, “Can you come here?”
They settled on twelve thirty the next day and Hugh hung up the phone.
Paralyzing half thoughts swirled through his head. A lawsuit, Hugh could not handle. If Richard Pennington brought legal action … if Caroline was compelled to testify … if the boy started to remember … Hugh knew enough about litigation to understand that even if they settled, everything could come out. Accidents happened—children fell—but what he’d done with a student’s mother was condemnable, and if Anne didn’t kill him first, the talk in town alone would close his school.
Hugh pressed the intercom button and called Mrs. Baxter into his office. He asked her to pull everything they had from their insurance agency in Oneonta. He’d stay here all night if necessary—he’d read the insurance forms, he’d review the accident report, and tomorrow he’d go see Caroline.
Hugh pictured himself as an indefensible ten-year-old watching in horror as his brother slipped through the ice below Reacher Falls. Neither running for help nor easing across the ice to try to catch George’s hand, Hugh had let the great tragedy of his life wash over him. Now it seemed as if all the decisions since had been made in that single moment of indecision—but Hugh was no longer a child. He sensed something sinewy, powerful rising up in him, a long-dormant beast stretching its shoulders and hams. He felt protective not only of his school but of himself. If Richard Pennington wanted a tangle, Hugh would be ready; and if seeing Caroline Murphy again would help him to prepare, Hugh was especially game for the fight.
4
Moonlight seeped through Hugh and Anne’s twin skylights, reflecting softly off Bob’s dinner plate in the darkening room. From a nearby backyard, he heard the sounds of children shouting and squealing until one of them threatened to tell, then it was quiet for a moment before they began to laugh again. A dreamlike familiarity pressed Bob back to a long-ago dinner hour with his own family, his younger brother already excused and racing off to play while Bob remained at the kitchen table with his mother watching him watching his peas grow cold. He traced a knot in Anne’s dinner table—the pine side door from his father’s dairy barn—and pictured the barn’s gambrel roof, the sliding great door, the shiplap siding. The hayloft had been big enough to encompass Bob’s entire childhood, from hide-and-seek with his brother to courting Maud Corley below a dormer on the east side.
If no single memory ever told the whole story, Bob preferred to focus on the happier times, freezing his mind at the hypersharp vertex of a scene when everything was exactly as it should be—what good did it do to look forward or back? Who needed to be reminded that from that same treasured hayloft Sonny had fallen through the feed chute, dropping a full story and breaking his pelvis, or that Bob and Maud had dozed off under the dormer, waking only when the sun was already cresting the horizon and Bob’s father was beginning his ascent into the loft? Bedridden, Sonny had missed a year of school and never gone back, though he’d been the better of the two Cole boys at reading and math. As for Bob’s indiscretion with Maud, an unforgiving Mr. Corley had shamed the dairy cooperative into dropping Wilson Cole from its membership, and after five years of struggling on his own, Bob’s father had been forced to find work in the village, a step back, laboring for another man.
But all that had passed now, and none of it could be changed—Bob saw no point in scrutinizing his mistakes. Anne, on the other hand, liked to examine everything. Even as a child she’d been maddeningly analytical, wanting to know why he waited two weeks to cut the grass—until it was nearly impossible to push the mower—when if he would only mow the lawn every week he could finish his chore in half the time. Because Bob didn’t like mowing the lawn! But he’d also been enchanted by his clever and serious daughter, an altogether different sort of person from Bob. Where he had been an average student, Anne anticipated her teachers’ assignments and worked ahead in her spelling book. Bob was hopelessly disorganized, but Anne laid out her clothes the night before school. His daughter did her chores without prompting and even offered to help Bob finish his, scrambling onto the roof to dig wet autumn leaves out of the gutters or slithering into the basement crawl space to open the vents for summer. It was almost as though Anne were the parent and Bob and Joanie the children and, as such, Anne was especially protective of her mother.
Out for a drive together on a Sunday afternoon, Anne might inform Bob that Joanie no longer liked going to the hair salon, therefore he needed to buy her mother a portable at-home dryer; not only that, but Anne knew exactly where to get it—Western Auto for $10.44—and they could stop there on their way home. The next Saturday, Bob might come downstairs thinking he’d spend an hour reading the paper and Anne would cut him off at the pass, whispering in his ear that her mother’s birthday was coming up and she and Bob had to get down to the Smart Shop right away to see what they had in Joanie’s size. If Bob felt guilty about the cause of Joanie’s discomfort at the hair salon, it was Anne’s precocious grasp of her parents’ marital discord that completely gutted him. His bright, perceptive daughter, who understood far more than she ought to, was not censuring him for his bad behavior but was instead trying to help him, and Bob both appreciated her advice and felt physically ill when he considered that she was only twelve years old.
But now Anne was an adult, too, and Bob was in no mood to accommodate her calculating mind. If his daughter wanted to know how he could be both hungry from lunch and unwilling to eat his dinner, here’s how: he’d hardly slept the night before, and he missed his wife. After Bob had insisted that Anne make up his new double bed with a set of queen-size sheets from Chestnut Street, the extra fabric had caught at his legs all night long, keeping him just this side of REM, but at least the sheets had smelled like home. Bob pressed his head between his hands and squeezed. In the hour since their spat at the dinner table, Anne had not come back downstairs, and Bob feared he owed her an apology. Yes, he had been petulant—he could hear Joanie telling him he knew perfectly well how to make a sandwich—and yes, when left alone at the dinner table like a recalcitrant child, he had in fact cleaned his plate, but Anne could hardly expect him to run upstairs and check on her as though she were still ten years old. Bob and Anne hadn’t lived in the same house since she’d graduated from high school and he wasn’t sure he could bear the arrangement again.
Outside in the backyard, a white picket fence separated the lots to either side of Hugh and Anne’s house. There had been a time when Bob could name nearly every family in every home in the village: the Olsens would’ve been Hugh and Anne’s neighbors to the left, the Jankowskis in the perpendicular house on Beaver Street, and the Beckers directly behind them on Pioneer. Now the best he could do was identify a place by what it had once been. Gone were three hardware stores, two barbershops, a shoe repair, a butcher, and a furniture store on Main Street, replaced by baseball-card outlets and souvenir shops for the growing number of tourists who found their way to the village every year.
At the age of eighty-six, Bob was straddling two worlds, and occasionally he seemed to slip into the gulf between them. Last fall, at the intersection of Pioneer and Main Streets, he’d been on his way to the post office when he’d got to thinking about a fire in the late sixties that had burned down three businesses across from the entrance to Doubleday Field—the Tower of Pizza, the Pic ’n Pay, and one other, right in between. What was the name of that place? They’d sold high-end women’s clothing, lingerie in back, and as Bob pictured white tissue paper in delicate cardboard boxes, he’d failed to notice his car bearing left instead of right—following his train of thought toward upper Main Street. He hit the brakes too late, plowing into a streetlight and barely missing Brenda Corrington’s granddaughter on her lunch break from Church & Scott.
After that, Bob had known what was coming. Not a humorless trip to the body shop but an end to Bob’s days on the road. He and Joanie had reached the agreement the way they’d settled so many things between them over the years: in the context of another conversation altogether. Joanie had insisted that her Toyota was acting funny, then asked if she could borrow Bob’s car, and even as he’d known that the keys wouldn’t be coming back to him, he’d unclasped his silver ring—a retirement gift from Charlie Stanwood—and told Joanie not to adjust the mirrors; he had them exactly the way he wanted them.
Now Joanie was gone and their Buick was sold and their house was on the market. There weren’t many towns where the death of one resident could downshift the overall head count, but last Bob had checked, the population of Cooperstown was hovering around two thousand, with more people leaving than coming, and the new ones that did arrive—like his son-in-law—were frighteningly enthusiastic about the place. They acted like they’d discovered Shangri-La, like there were no other small towns left on earth, like there could be no problems in a village with only one stoplight. But Cooperstown had had its share of problems, just like anywhere else.
Bob could’ve turned on a light or the television, but right now he welcomed the dark and the silence. He marveled at Anne and Hugh’s enormous den, the four-hundred-square-foot addition to the back of the house that Hugh had commissioned when they’d moved in a decade ago. French doors, exposed crossbeams, recessed lightbulbs that must require an extension ladder to change. Anne’s single touch had been an entire wall of books, floor-to-ceiling shelves with a sliding library ladder that crossed in front of the French doors and carried a curious reader wall to wall and up to the highest shelf. A gable window let in additional light above the shelves, and Bob scanned the volumes from a distance, wondering what he would find.
Hands down, the biggest scandal in Bob’s lifetime had been the publication of a paperback novel in 1962. The first he’d heard of
The Sex Cure
had been at a lawn party at Stan and Betsy Cavett’s house on Glimmerglen Road, on a Saturday evening in early September, the weather already starting to change. An autumnal breeze stirred the grass at their feet as the sun dropped behind the hills to the west. Joanie hadn’t yet begun to dress for the cooler nights but when Bob offered her his sport coat, she said she’d rather go inside.
Bob liked the Cavetts better than Joanie did, and earlier in the evening they’d had a row about whether to come to the party. Bob and Joanie weren’t members of the country club and had seldom run with anyone from the Cavetts’ set, but at the vet club’s annual Christmas dinner last year, Bob had been introduced to Stan Cavett, an ER resident at the hospital, and they’d gotten along well. The son of a Catholic dockworker, Stan had graduated from the same state college as Bob, then worked his way through medical school before marrying Betsy Heath. Now he golfed with a high handicap, swam with a life preserver, played poker rather than bridge, and everyone seemed to like him all the more for it.
Stan had reached out to Bob many times that summer, inviting him to Sportsman’s Tavern for a drink after work or to dinner at the Otesaga hotel. They’d golfed together on the Leatherstocking course, and Stan had toured Bob around the lake in his new pontoon boat. If they docked at the country club for a few cocktails afterward, what was the harm? Stan was inclusive, generous, and all his friends were potential customers for Bob’s insurance agency.
Typically Bob stopped his memory of that night right here, with his second gin and tonic in hand, pleasantly light-headed but not at all drunk, Betsy Cavett in her fuchsia cardigan and black silk pedal pushers making her way toward him across the neatly mowed lawn. But tonight, alone in his daughter’s den with nobody to see him and no partygoers left, Bob risked a look, straining for what was past Betsy’s lovely blond bob: a group of guests gathering around Tom Halloway near the bar.
Bob had played golf with Tom two or three times that summer and remembered him for his remarkably deep voice and the impressive Plymouth Fury he drove, but they weren’t friends. Tom worked at a bank in New York, returning to Cooperstown only for the weekends; Bob had been to New York only twice, once for business and once with Joanie on their honeymoon.
Bob took a sip of his gin and tonic, swirled the ice, then sipped again. Slowly, casually, he made his way across the lawn to join Tom’s circle, positioning himself at the outer edge of the group, then asking the woman next to him, who looked to be in her early forties—Joanie’s age—what he’d missed.
“Tom’s going to do a read-aloud,” she said, rolling her eyes.
If there was one thing Bob had learned that summer it was that every party needed a spectacle, a story to be repeated and relived in the coming days, a mythmaking stunt to keep the memory of it alive through the long workweek to the next weekend. The time Archie Wheeler had driven his Cadillac straight across Paul King’s front lawn, knocking over the stone wall Paul’s grandfather had built. The time Millie Foster had slapped Ruth Potter for using Walt Foster’s necktie as a band for her hair. Joanie could nurse one martini all night, her lemon twist growing soggy in a pool of melted ice and gin, but Bob didn’t mind throwing back a few, letting go, and he figured that’s what was happening now, some new kind of alcohol-induced silliness for which Tom Halloway would be razzed on the tennis court in the morning.