Authors: Callie Wright
“I like your sweater,” said Anne. “You should wear it. Unless you’re hot. Then you should take it off.”
Hugh smiled. After weeks of hemming and hawing with the cellist, he appreciated Anne’s straightforwardness. “I’ll wear it,” he said.
Hugh offered to get her a drink, and at the self-tended bar he filled two glasses with red wine, then joined Anne in the corner she had carved out for them.
“Are you at HBS?” she asked, accepting her glass. “I haven’t seen you at the law school.”
“BU,” said Hugh.
“Law?”
“No,” said Hugh. “Education.”
Anne smiled and said, “I always loved school.”
Anne was a second-year law student at Harvard (where Hugh had failed to gain admission both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student, despite his meandering legacy—maternal uncle, paternal grandfather) and seemed destined for litigation. Having known him for less than five minutes, she argued that a master’s was a half degree; that he should immediately switch to a doctorate program; that he should rethink his “inchoate” thesis; that he should call her friend at Harvard, who would be happy to talk to Hugh about careers in education—and then she opened her purse and flipped through a tiny black book, rattling off the home phone number of the adjunct professor.
Hugh felt alert, shocked to life. In a matter of minutes, Anne had more assiduously evaluated his professional goals than any guidance counselor who’d come before her. Five more minutes with this beautiful woman, and he’d have his whole life sorted out. He nodded attentively as she told him about her plans for internships and the fields of law she liked best.
“What are you doing next summer?” she asked.
“Isn’t it November?” said Hugh.
“Right,” said Anne. “Sorry.” She blushed, tugging at her ear, and Hugh realized suddenly that this woman with the straight black hair and blue eyes of Superwoman was attracted to him. An editor of her law review, and she was trying to impress
him
.
Usually, Hugh relished a slow pace with women. Unlike most of his friends, who went straight to bed with their dates, Hugh had enjoyed the antiquated ritual of selecting a time, picking a place, presenting a lady with flowers, and taking her out for dinner. But after the party, Hugh led Anne back to her apartment on Central Square, where she let him undress her and turn her this way and that. He had never been so aroused. Through Anne’s eyes, Hugh appeared confident and strong, more sure of himself than he could ever remember being. He knew things she did not, and she was willing to be taught.
From that first night they were always together. Within a month, Hugh had moved out of his apartment and into hers, called her adjunct-professor friend, and applied to Harvard’s PhD program for the fall. Weekends, they explored the city, just the two of them, riding the T to the North End for lasagna or to the waterfront for clam chowder and beer. Anne picked the movies, while Hugh picked the restaurants, then at night they had hungry, possessive sex, each of them feeling lucky to have found the other.
But by late January, Hugh was ready to see some friends. They were in bed reading—Anne with a mystery, Hugh with a magazine and a six-pack of beer—when Hugh found himself skimming, flipping the pages without seeing the words. It had suddenly occurred to him that he and Anne had not yet been out with another couple. Was that possible? In three months? Most of his friends had gone home for Thanksgiving and Christmas, while Hugh and Anne had spent the holidays together in Boston; then there were papers, exams. But now they were nearly asleep at nine o’clock on a Saturday night, and if ever there was a time— Hugh looked up from his magazine to discover three empty beer bottles on his nightstand, the fourth in his hand.
“Hey,” he said, flopping onto his stomach. He reached under the covers and ran a hand up Anne’s naked leg.
Anne scooted down toward him without taking her eyes off the page.
“You know what we should do?” asked Hugh.
“Hmm?”
“Throw a party.”
Anne glanced up from her book.
“A Valentine’s Day party,” Hugh went on, slipping his fingers under the leg band of her underwear.
“Valentine’s Day?” asked Anne. She blinked, then quickly looked back down at the page, and Hugh realized he might have hurt her feelings. He was her first real boyfriend; maybe she’d been hoping for dinner à deux.
“Yeah,” said Hugh. He climbed on top of his girlfriend and she had no choice but to abandon her book. “Like for lovers.” He kissed her, feeling hugely turned on, but Anne only pecked his lips.
“You don’t want to?” he asked.
“Have sex or throw a party?”
“Right,” said Hugh, smiling, and before Anne could argue, he lifted her shirt over her head and kissed her again.
Anne capitulated to the party but let Hugh handle the arrangements. Over the next two weeks, he sent out invitations and collected decorations, cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom, straightened his desk and paid two outstanding bills. Hugh had always wanted to host a party but secretly he’d doubted that anyone would show. Now, with Anne in his corner, Hugh hardly cared if theirs was a flop. He’d drop Jim Croce on the turntable and they’d slow-dance alone.
The morning of the party, Hugh presented Anne with a dozen long-stemmed red roses, and the smile on her face and the brightness of her clear eyes buoyed him. He believed he knew how to make her happy, and she him. But later, while Hugh ran around topping off their guests’ champagne glasses and passing plates of heart-shaped brownies, Anne only watched from the couch.
“Aren’t you having fun?” he’d asked, circling by.
“I am,” she said. She held out her empty glass and let Hugh refill it.
“Did you meet Albert and Linda?” Albert’s girlfriend was a lawyer and Hugh had thought she and Anne would hit it off.
“I think so,” said Anne. “The blonde?”
Hugh took her by the hand and pulled her into the mix. He introduced her to his classmates, to his friend from the record store, to an old girlfriend who was now dating a hairstylist. He presented Anne to a social worker in need of legal advice, then watched with pride as she settled in, found the rhythm of her legalese, and appeared to enjoy herself. But ten minutes later she was in the kitchen, getting a jump start on the dishes.
“Anne,” said Hugh irritably when he tracked her down.
“What?” She plunged her hands into a sink full of suds.
Maybe he should’ve asked her what was wrong. Maybe she should’ve told him. Instead, Anne remained with her back to him, her black silk skirt gently sweeping her knees. It was their first real fight and neither of them seemed to know what to do, so they did nothing. Anne finished the dishes while Hugh waltzed back out to his party, and in the morning Hugh put away the dishes while Anne vacuumed, and all was apparently forgotten without either of them having said a word.
In March, Hugh was again rejected from Harvard, but by then he was nearly finished with his master’s program and had been offered a one-year fellowship in the mayor’s office. It was as good a place as any to spend a year. Anne’s job would take precedence when she graduated next spring, and Hugh hoped for San Francisco or London, someplace he had never been. Tokyo, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur. He’d teach English as a second language. They’d ride bicycles to work.
Then Anne was pregnant, and their choices narrowed considerably. From the outset, there was no question in Anne’s mind that they would keep the baby. Such an ambitious and strong-willed woman (with tens of thousands of dollars in student loans) might not have seen this as the right time to procreate, but Anne was nothing if not convincing. She was twenty-six; he, twenty-eight. They were financially stable, living together, and likely to marry. A baby had always been part of the larger picture, Anne argued, and Hugh—whose larger picture had recently included the possibility of living in a tree house in New Zealand—agreed fatherhood could be considered an adventure, too.
Before Anne began to show, she was lobbying to move home to Cooperstown. Her father had a close friend who was a partner at a small law firm in nearby Oneonta; she could be running the firm in ten years, she said, and without all the clamoring and grinding and face time normally required of new associates. Plus, in Cooperstown they’d have her mother, Joanie, a former nurse, to sit for the baby, and Hugh would be free to take a job. Although Hugh couldn’t imagine what he would do in an upstate New York town of two thousand people, he did like the idea of living near the Hall of Fame.
The single possession that George had bequeathed him was an autographed 1957 Ted Williams card, and the fog that enshrouded Hugh’s memory of his brother—indeed, of his entire early childhood—seemed to lift when Hugh thought about baseball. He pictured the two of them seated at the right and left hands of their mother for the Red Sox home opener, an afternoon game, mid-April, and a workday, certainly, or their father would have been with them and they would not have been forced to wear their jackets on that almost-warm day. George—eleven years old and with only eight months left in this world—held his prize baseball card in his sweaty hand. Their father had warned him that an autograph would devalue it, but George was ready with his ballpoint.
Red Sox versus the Yankees, a pitchers’ duel; both teams went scoreless until the bottom of the fifth, when the wooden 0 was finally pulled inside the Green Monster and replaced with a triumphant 1. Between innings, George darted to the left-field line to peer down at Ted until the usher tapped him on the shoulder and sent him back to his seat. Two more scoreless innings, then a home run, Yankees, who added two more runs in the ninth to go up 3–1 and ensure another at-bat for the Sox. It was George’s last chance, and without asking permission he bolted from his seat and charged the wall. “Hey, mister,” he called, cantilevering at the waist and stretching out his arms like an angel, pen and card in hand. “Would you mind?” And maybe because Hugh had it all wrong—it wasn’t the middle of an inning; it was batting practice, it was warm-ups, it was the last out of the game—or maybe because Ted sensed what Hugh and his mother could not—that this boy was ethereal and his brief life must be made great—the Splendid Splinter jogged over to the wall and reached up with his left hand and signed.
Hugh would take this card to Cooperstown, a shrine to a shrine.
In May 1976, they rented a two-bedroom apartment across from Clancy’s deli, where Hugh stopped every morning for coffee and doughnuts before strolling Teddy the quarter mile to his grandparents’ house. Joanie and Bob, soon to be rechristened Nonz and Poppy, waited at the kitchen door to swoop out and take over the handles on Teddy’s stroller, rocking him backward up the three-step stoop and sucking him into their rich-smelling kitchen. “Have fun,” Joanie would call. “Good luck,” she’d say, as though there was some enterprising thing that Hugh was off toiling at. In fact, he would often just return to the apartment and watch TV until it was time to collect Teddy at three. He tried to see his situation as a phase—
When your mother and I first moved to Cooperstown … When you were just a baby
—but really he had no idea what came next.
It was Joanie who sold Hugh on the one-story brick building with an abandoned playground out back and a
FOR SALE
sign in front: the old community center that had burned two years before and been rebuilt elsewhere. A new house had gone up on the lot where the gymnasium had once stood, but the separate property of the rec hall, less than a tenth of an acre, was still on the market.
“You should buy it,” Joanie said, jiggling Teddy on her hip. “You need something to make you happier here.”
Anyone could see that Hugh was floundering. He’d had friends in Boston, and Anne to occupy his time. Now his wife worked up to six days a week, ten hours a day, and when she was home, she wanted only to curl up in their apartment and watch TV. Mornings, when Hugh dressed Teddy for the day, stuffing the baby’s chubby legs into his tiny denim overalls, Hugh could not find himself in the room. He saw the changing table, the hamper of dirty laundry, the diaper pail that needed emptying; he saw Teddy’s tonsure, a ring of light-brown fuzz circling his pate; he saw his son’s cornflower eyes, bright and expectant—but where was Hugh in this scene? “People get married and have children,” Anne had said. “That’s what they do.” And Hugh had agreed, and here he was, except that he wasn’t really. Not really.
Now Joanie said, “Picture it. You could have a little school. Maybe not a
high
school, exactly, but something.” She passed Teddy to Hugh, as though she were introducing them. “Like for this guy,” she said.
Hugh slipped his hands under Teddy’s arms, felt the weight of the boy on his shoulder; he touched his child’s chin with his finger, wiping a bubble of drool from Teddy’s soft skin.
Hugh borrowed the money for the down payment from his father-in-law, who was only too happy to see Hugh gainfully employed. When Seedlings opened, in September 1978, Teddy’s baby sister, Julia, was the same age Teddy had been when they’d first moved to Cooperstown—a fact Teddy proudly repeated to his new classmates, six “twos and threes” comprising the first class at Seedlings. Back then Hugh had been head teacher, assistant, and principal all in one.
With a new sense of purpose and an expanding group of friends, Hugh began to feel settled in Cooperstown. Where he had grown up in the ersatz community of dorm rooms and dining halls, Hugh delighted in knowing that Teddy and Julia would come of age organically, roaming the village on their bikes, learning to swim in the lake, with grandparents and neighbors and friends acting in loco parentis to make sure they didn’t get lost along the way. This small-town safety net stretched beneath all of them: not only did Hugh and Anne have each other for guidance, they had Bob and Joanie; their neighbors at the Cooper Lane Apartments; Sheila McMann, the real estate agent who had found 59 Susquehanna Avenue for them when they’d outgrown their two-bedroom apartment on Brunlar Court; Pat Byrne, their contractor, and his wife, Nancy, a maternity nurse at Bassett Hospital, who had helped deliver Julia.