“No, Mom.”
“I’ll bet anything you’re not eating right.”
“I’m eating fine,” I said.
If I’d lost weight every time Mom claimed, I’d have been registering in the negative on the bathroom scale.
Now she was off to pull open a desk drawer. The woman could not sit still. Always something discontented about her, something glittery and overwrought that set my teeth on edge. “Where is it?” she asked, rummaging about. She came up with an envelope. “Here,” she said, and she sat back down and laid it in my hand. “Your birthday present,” she said.
“Well, thanks.”
“Maybe you can find yourself some decent clothes.”
“Maybe so,” I said, not troubling to argue. I folded the envelope in two and slid it into my jeans pocket. (I didn’t need to look to know it was a gift certificate from some menswear store or other, someplace Ivy League and expensive.) “Thanks to you too, Dad,” I said.
“You’re very welcome.”
He was propping the poker against the bricks, and the sight of his thin, sensitive fingers also set my nerves on edge, and so did the music diddling about as if it couldn’t decide where to go. I turned to my mother and said, “So. Are Gram and Pop-Pop coming?” Which was purely to annoy her, because I already knew the answer.
“No, they’re not,” she told me, brazening it out. “But your brother is, of course. And I invited Len Parrish too. He’s stopping by for birthday cake after; he couldn’t make it for dinner.”
No surprise to me. Len was one of those boyhood friends mothers always love, but he had gone on to big doings and left me far behind. I said, “Well, I wouldn’t hold my breath, if I were you.”
“He told me he’d come, Barnaby. I’m sure he’ll keep his word.”
The doorbell rang. “Oh! Jeff!” my mother said, and she jumped up and rushed to the hall, while Dad and I exchanged relieved grins. Things would proceed more smoothly now. Not only was my brother a better conversationalist, but he had a wife and baby who would help to dilute the atmosphere. Especially the baby.
Or actually, he wasn’t a baby. It shows how out of touch I was. When Jeff and Wicky entered the room, this little kid was toddling between them — a pudgy tyke in a suit like his dad’s and a polka-dot bow tie. “Look at that!” I said, getting to my feet. “Walking! At his age!”
“He’s been walking for months,” Mom said. “He’s nearly two, for heaven’s sake.”
“Happy birthday,” Wicky told me, kissing the air beside my left cheek. She smelled of toothpaste. She and Jeff made a model couple — Wicky an attractive blonde in clothes that were twins to my mother’s, Jeff dark and square-set and handsome in a stockbroker sort of way. He wasn’t really a stockbroker; he worked at the Foundation with Dad. But he had on one of those stockbroker shirts with the pinstripes and plain white collar.
“Where’d you park?” I asked him. “You didn’t park behind me, did you?”
“The birthday boy!” Jeff said, clapping me on the shoulder.
“Is your car blocking my car in?”
“Relax,” he told me. “I can move it at a moment’s notice.”
“Damn! You are blocking me in!”
But he was already heading toward the cocktail cart, where Dad had started rattling ice cubes. Wicky, meanwhile, bent to scoop up my nephew. “Give your Uncle Barnaby a birthday kiss, Jape,” she said, holding him out in my direction.
Jape? Oh, right: they called him J.P. Jeffrey Paul the Third. J.P. stole a peek at me and then buried his face in Wicky’s shirt-front. “Silly,” she said. “It’s your uncle! Uncle Barnaby! How does it feel to be thirty?” she asked me.
“Feels like hell,” I told her.
“Oh, it does not! Look at me: I’m thirty-three. I feel better than I did at twenty.”
“Well, you probably didn’t drink a case of beer last night,” I told her.
“True enough,” Wicky said.
“Oh, Barnaby!” Mom cried. “A whole case? You didn’t!”
These little rituals were so reassuring. I could always get a rise out of Mom.
Dad was taking drink orders. Jeff wanted Scotch, and the women wanted white wine. I said, “I’ll have whatever J.P. is having,” because I’d been only half kidding about last night. Then I was struck by the horrible thought that J.P. might still be breast-feeding. But no, he was having ginger ale, in a plastic cup with a bunny decal. Mine came in a glass, though. Dad handed it to me with a flourish.
“So! Barnaby! How’s it feel to turn thirty?” Jeff asked.
“What an original question,” I said. “Did you think it up all by yourself?”
“Oh, touchy, touchy,” he told me. “Don’t worry, it’s not a bad age. Twenty-seven was worse, as I recall.”
“Twenty-seven?”
“That’s when it first hit me that thirty was on the way. By the time it actually came, I’d adjusted.”
Count on Jeff: he plans ahead.
The whole bunch of us were standing, like people at a cocktail party. J.P. began spitting experimentally into his bunny cup. Wicky brought forth a sheaf of Christmas photos to show Mom. (She and Jeff and J.P. had spent Christmas in South Carolina with her folks, pretty much breaking Mom’s heart.) Dad and Jeff talked about, I don’t know, the Deserving Poor, I guess. “Exactly,” Jeff said heavily, rocking from heel to toe. “I couldn’t agree with you more. Exactly.”
I went over to the fireplace and considered the barn door awhile. Then I drifted into my father’s study. I stood sipping my drink in front of his bookcase, pretending to be absorbed by the titles. The Gaitlin Foundations First Quarter-Century, 1911–1936. The Gaitlin Foundation: Fifty Years of Compassion, 1911–1961. Dry as dust, I already knew, and dotted with black-and-white photos of Planning Council members in stiff dark suits.
On the shelf below was the ledger containing Great-Granddad’s epic poem and, next to that, his son’s contribution, done up by some obliging printer to look like a ledger too. Same gray cloth, same maroon leather corners, the title trimmed with spires and dangles of lace. Light of Heaven was the title. Grandfather must have fantasized that someone besides Gaitlins would read what he had to say, because he explained things the family already knew. My wife, Abigail McKane Gaitlin, was exceedingly devout, he wrote. From the sound of it, he had been visited by one of Creation’s dullest angels — a sweet-faced young secretary who arrived for a job interview at a “perilous moment” in his personal life and instructed him to appreciate his wife and children, after which she vanished. Reading between the lines, I always assumed that what we had here was an instance of attempted sexual harassment in the workplace, but that could have been wishful thinking; I was so eager for some sign of colorfulness in my family. The nearest thing to a renegade that we could claim was my great-aunt Eunice, who left her husband for a stage magician fifteen years her junior. But she came home within a month, because she’d had no idea, she said, what to cook for the magician’s dinners. And anyhow, Great-Aunt Eunice was a Gaitlin only by marriage.
Just look at Dad’s ledger; look at Jeff’s. A Possible Paranormal Experience, my father’s contribution, described the woman who stopped him on Howard Street and asked him for a match. While he was explaining that he didn’t smoke, the police arrested the gunman who’d been lurking around the next corner. (But the gunman was only Charles Murfree, the unbalanced grandson of those selfsame Murfrees who’d gone bankrupt after purchasing our Twinform patent, and he’d been stalking my family for decades, off and on. Wouldn’t you say, therefore, that if not for Angel Number One, Dad never would have been endangered in the first place?) My brother called his report A Tradition Repeated, which was appropriate in view of its many redundancies. I guess he was just doing his utmost to stretch a one-sentence encounter into a respectable length. (And a fragmentary sentence, at that. “Looking mighty spooky,” his angel had announced, briskly refolding the stock market page before she stepped off the elevator.)