The Gazebo: A Novel (13 page)

Late at night, when the restaurant was finally dosing, the waiters gone home for the night, the lights extinguished in the cool, dim, gazebolike dining room, where the tables were already laid for tomorrow’s lunch, the heavy silver gleaming faintly and the water glasses shining, Martin left through the front door, walking out onto the cobblestones of Dobson Mews and heading toward his own home in Bloomsbury, empty now that Frances and Louisa had gone to live for a while in the country. The first thing he would think, when he walked into his sweeping living room with its rows of books and soft white couches and throw rugs, was how different this place was from the flat above the restaurant, where he had planned to continue living with Claire. Upon Martin’s marriage, though, he had moved out of the flat and into the many rooms of Frances’s house. He liked it when he and Frances were there together. Frances was a decent, gentle, responsible woman, and he had a
certain ease with her. They played duets on the piano, they read to each other, they went to the theater, they rubbed each other’s shoulders sometimes at the end of the day. They took shared pride in Louisa’s intelligence and grace, and they had developed a circle of good friends, other couples with similar interests and lives.

In the bedroom he sat on the edge of the high bed and slowly removed his clothes, letting his shoes and pants drop to the floor, the belt buckle clanking, realizing that his body felt different than it used to—somehow a little slower, less forceful as it moved though the world. His black hair now had the occasional silver in it—not much, just a bit, giving him a distinguished look appropriate for a chef, but what that silver signified was undeniable. He had been aware of Claire getting older each year, but now he began to understand that he was getting older, too, and that his body would continue its uphill climb, and the silver would thicken and multiply, and the years would pass and he still wouldn’t have her.

Lucas Swift died of a stroke in his home in 1966, with his daughter Claire sitting in a chair
beside him, holding his hand. He had suffered a smaller stroke a few weeks earlier and had refused to be taken to the hospital in Albany. “NO POINT” he had written in a ragged hand on a tablet of paper, for his speech had become confused. So he stayed at home, and Claire helped him exercise each day, wrapping his fingers around a pliant rubber ball and making him squeeze, and trying to get him to sit up in bed for a few moments each day. But the will wasn’t there. His wife, Maureen, was long gone, and now he saw that he would have a chance to follow her, so there was really no reason to fight this thing that had left him with a mouth twisted into a perennial half frown, one hand like a claw and a mind like a forgetful child’s. He would stay at home for the remainder of his life.

That remainder proved short, for another stroke came a few weeks later, and Claire moved in with her father once again. Daniel took care of the children and fixed them dinner. Though he wasn’t a good cook, he could prepare a simple stew. Claire sat holding her father’s tight hand, stroking his arm and talking to him about the past. When he died, she
thought that she had done what her mother had asked her to do, and now her job was through. Swift Maintenance was on solid footing, too, having expanded its reach and rented part of a spacious warehouse nearby to store all its tools and parts and house its offices. Now, Claire thought with some measure of irony, she was ready to leave Longwood Falls and join Martin across the ocean. But life was sometimes like an elaborate game of jump rope, which she used to play for hours with her friends on the bumpy sidewalks of Badger Street; if you didn’t jump in at the right moment, you could never jump in at all.

When the undertaker with the nervous blinking tic from Barker’s Funeral Home came, Claire kissed her father’s hand. “I love you,” she said to him softly, and then she stood, heading home to her husband and children, who were waiting.

On May 26, 1968, Martin walked through the streets of London, looking for a taxi to take him to the airport. London had completely changed since he had first moved here in the 1950s; it was now filled with teenagers, music,
and overly bright colors and an array of drugs, none of which interested him particularly, and all of which his daughter, Louisa, loved. She was a brilliant girl who wore miniskirts made out of paper, spent her time with stupid boys on motorbikes, incessantly played the same rock songs, and applied so much black kohl makeup around her eyes that she looked like a sick raccoon. Still, he couldn’t blame her, for she’d had a long recovery from her riding accident, and now she was well again, so she had chosen to go out into the world and embrace all of it.

It wasn’t that Martin was stodgy; just last week, John Lennon and Paul McCartney and a couple of music executives had come to dinner at the Gazebo, and Martin had felt thrilled, peeking out through the round glass window of the kitchen door throughout the meal To his immense pleasure, both Beatles finished every bit of food on their plates. He thought to himself,
I must tell Claire
, for he would be seeing her very soon.

Although Martin took comfort from his wife and daughter, and from his professional success, and although he’d been the subject of
various newspaper and magazine articles and was about to publish a cookbook called
Recipes from the Gazebo
, he often felt as though he were living a dream life. It was as though his sleeping self was here in England while his active, waking self was off exploring a narrow street in Italy with Claire.

Frances tolerated Martin’s annual visits to Longwood Falls, though she never liked them. While she knew they were “innocent,” she was still threatened, and she had a right to be. He loved seeing Claire; it was the moment in each year that still made him happiest, that made him truly alive. Would he be this happy if they were together all the time? It was hard to say. Frances always complained a bit before he left, sitting before her vanity mirror in the big bedroom and lifting her heavy hair off her neck (she had graduated from the long braid of her earlier years to a more elegant chignon), and saying, “Is she much more beautiful than I am? Is that it?”

“No,” he would say as he packed his briefcase and his overnight bag. “She’s not. Not at all.”

“Then she’s smarter,” Frances would say.

“She doesn’t even have a college education,” Martin would reply. “And you got a first in philosophy at Cambridge.”

Frances snorted lightly. “A lot of good it does me,” she said. “I hardly get much of a chance to be a philosopher shopping in Harrods.”

“But you chose your life,” he said.

Frances looked in the mirror and their eyes caught. “Yes,” she said. “You chose your life, too, Martin.”

“I’m fully aware of that,” he replied. “Aren’t I a good husband? Don’t we have a nice time of it?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “We do.” And it was true; they did.

“All I want is once a year to be allowed to go off quietly like this,” he said. “I don’t really think it’s so much to ask for, and yet you always make a fuss.”

“I’m sorry, darling,” Frances said, and then she suddenly stood and turned around to him, kissing him full on the mouth and taking him by surprise. Her kisses were always intense and deeply felt and absorbing. Out of the corner of his eye he could see the embrace in the
vanity mirror. He stopped packing his clothes and kissed her in return, for he was her husband, and he did, after all, love her.

A day later, he was back in Longwood Falls, stepping off the platform into another warm afternoon. The world had changed so much in the 1960s, but the changes hadn’t seemed to affect this little corner of it. There was still a sleepiness here, a leisurely quality. The primary feeling Martin had when he entered the square was:
this is the town where Claire lives
. That thought was foremost in his mind, stronger than the thought that this was the town where he himself had grown up. His childhood was rapidly fading, the memories of the big white house with the slippery floors starting to dim.

But as he walked along the path toward the gazebo—half an hour early today, and Claire was not yet there—his childhood suddenly came barreling back to him. For his father and mother were walking toward him on the path. There was no way he could avoid them; although they had not yet seen him, they were coming straight at him, and he felt his heart begin to race. He had put aside most thoughts
of his parents over the years, although sometimes he dreamed about them. Did they dream about him, or think about him at all? They had never tried to contact him, their only son, though even if they had, he didn’t know what he would have done. Now here they were, the mother and father he had not seen in fifteen years, and he was shocked.

First of all, his mother had grown fat; though she had once been slender and blonde, drinking had coarsened her, as it inevitably does to everyone who dedicates a life to it. Her eyes seemed to be swimming, and her walk was unsteady, not because she was drunk, but merely because her metabolism had been thrown off balance. She was wearing a hat, of course, this one the color of a beet and sitting flat on her head, as though it had landed there from another planet.

But the more surprising change was in his father, who had lost his luster, his overt rage. He seemed like a weak man who was growing old. He was still probably a mean man, uncharitable and full of a desire for revenge against various perceived enemies, but the anger that had once driven him was buried in–side
an old man’s face. His hair, which had been thick and dark like Martin’s, was thin. It wasn’t threaded through with silver, as was his son’s, but instead was a watery gray, the color of age. His skin seemed mottled, and he walked slowly. No one would feel threatened by such a man, Martin thought, and he couldn’t believe that he had spent so much of his childhood in fear of his father.

Now they saw him. It happened all at once. Lucinda Rayfiel gasped, squeezed her husband’s upper arm, and said, “Look.”

They stopped on the path about six feet from one another. The parents regarded their child, and he met their gaze. “Mother,” Martin said. Then, nodding, he added, “Father.”

“Oh, Martin,” said his mother, and she burst forward and pressed herself against him. “What are you doing here?” she asked him.

“I’m here to see a friend,” he answered, his voice careful.

“Oh? A good friend?” asked his mother.

“Yes. Very good.”

“Look at you,” his mother went on. “All grown up and so distinguished.” He put an arm around her, patting her on the back, as if
consoling a child. And like a child she sobbed against him, as though realizing in this moment all that she had missed out on over the years that they had not spoken. Throughout her tears, Ash Rayfiel appeared embarrassed, his hands shoved in his pockets, looking away from this display of emotion. Martin was partly moved, partly not. He felt no desire to cry, but he did feel genuine regret at the loss of a mother. Of course, she had been lost to him long before he had ever gone off to Europe.

Claire, on the other hand, was a good mother; he knew this from his friend Hush, who was still dutifully sending Martin periodic reports. Hush, who now had a child of his own, a few years younger than Claire’s children, had said that Claire was a devoted, indefatigable mother, always creating wild Halloween costumes for her children and attending every performance of the school concerts they were in, listening proudly to each squeak of their clarinets, and always available to help them memorize lines of a play or prepare a science project involving lima beans and cotton balls. She was available to them;
she was
there
. If Martin and Claire had had children together, as they had so much wanted, she would have been there.

Martin’s mother pulled back now, and he saw that she had an apologetic look on her face; it was apparent in her swimmy eyes and on the cheeks that were a shade too red from both rouge and broken capillaries. “Oh, Martin,” she said. “I wish we could start again.”

“Me, too,” he said.

“You’re doing well, we hear,” Lucinda Rayfiel said. “We have friends in London; you remember the Babbingtons from the club—Bill and Norma?”

He nodded, though he had no idea who they were.

“Well, they moved to London some years ago, and they often write to us and say what a big shot you are,” she went on. “Once they even sent us a newspaper clipping from the London
Times
about you! We’re terribly proud, of course, and we wanted to tell you that, but your father thought it best—” Her voice broke off here; she looked away.

Now Ash gazed directly at Martin, his eyes as impassive as ever, and stiffly said, “I
thought it best to leave you to your way of life. Not to interfere. You never liked interference.”

“That’s right, I never did,” Martin replied, but he knew that it wasn’t courtesy that had kept his father away; it was strong dislike, almost hatred. You couldn’t really see it in Ash Rayfiel’s stance, for he was really just an aging, fading man in expensive clothes, but Martin knew it was there, blazing somewhere beneath the surface.

“Will you come up to the house?” his mother asked. “Alex has the car waiting around the corner.”

“What happened to Henry?” Martin asked, remembering the kind chauffeur he used to sit beside in the Bentley.

“Oh, Henry died years ago,” said his mother. “A brain tumor. It was very sad, really.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Martin said. He wished he had known; he would have attended the funeral and visited Henry’s wife, who worked as a housekeeper elsewhere in the Crest. Henry was dead, and so was the large Swiss cook who had an obsession with cheese, not to mention an aunt and two uncles.
“I can’t come to the house, Mother, I’m sorry,” Martin went on. “I have to see my friend now. But maybe you could visit me in London sometime. I know you and Father like to travel.”

“Thank you, Martin,” she said. “We actually don’t travel much anymore, but perhaps we’ll come.” He kissed her good–bye, and his father nodded briskly, and then they were off, slowly continuing their stroll across the center of the square. He knew they would never come to visit him in London; he knew that there was a good chance he might never see them again.