“Not really.” Hand stole a glance at his watch.
In a weak small voice, Wade said, “I’ve changed since then. Since the divorce, I mean. I really have.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“Did you explain that, to her lawyer, I mean, when you talked to him?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. And he offered an arrangement that should interest you.”
Wade quickly looked up from his shoes and watched the man with suspicion. He thought, Lawyers — the sonsofbitches are all in cahoots, making deals behind your back, swapping favors, trading off one case now to win another later. “Tell me.”
Hand wheeled in closer to Wade and smiled sympathetically. He did mention to Cotter — just in passing, he said, not as a threat — his knowledge of Mrs. Horner’s relationship with her attorney, which relationship, while not illegal, was potentially embarrassing, to say the least, and he did explain to Jackson Cotter that Wade recently had changed his way of living to a considerable degree. The combination of the two, he said, convinced Cotter, after consulting with his client, of course, to agree that if Wade would abandon his suit, Mrs. Horner would allow him to have Jill stay with him on two weekends a month and on alternating Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and for two weeks in the summer instead of one. The arrangement, he added, need not be formalized in court.
Wade nodded solemnly. “I get it. You got Cotter to put the arm on Lillian, and now you’re putting the arm on me. You guys cut a deal so that Lillian gives up something, and I give up something, and you two go away with our money in your pockets.”
Hand backed his wheelchair to the middle of the room, where he slid his yellow pad into the carrier and his pen into his inside pocket. “This arrangement, if you accept it, keeps you out of court, Mr. Whitehouse, in a case you would surely lose. Which saves you ten times the money you have spent, not to mention the emotional damage these things inflict on all the principals, especially the child, whether you win or lose. And I have gotten your visitation rights doubled. What more do you want?”
“Nothing on paper. Right?”
“Mr. Whitehouse, you hired me for my legal advice. Do you want it?”
“Yes, goddammit.”
“This is the best deal you will get in this state. And you only got it because Jackson Cotter made the mistake of becoming involved with your ex-wife and does not want to ask your ex-wife to perjure herself by denying it, which, of course, she would do, and then it would be your word against hers, that’s all. And frankly, no one would believe you. Not even Mrs. Horner’s husband or Jackson Cotter’s wife. Consider yourself lucky,” he said, and he wheeled toward the door and swung it open for Wade. “Or hire another attorney.”
Wade slowly rose from the chair. “Lucky,” he said. “Lucky, lucky, lucky.” He walked across the room, and as he left he looked down at the man in the wheelchair and said, “Okay, so when’s the next time I can see my daughter?”
“Your ex-wife expects you to pick her up today.”
“You arranged that with Cotter.”
“I did.”
“Thanks,” Wade said. He walked through the door and down the hall, past the secretary, who did not look up from her typing, and out to the street.
It was a bright sunny day, the air cool and crisp against his freshly shaved face. Wade stood on the steps of the building and looked down at Pa’s red truck parked in front. The vehicle looked ridiculous and made him ashamed in the usual way. He rubbed his cheek and realized freshly that his jaw no longer hurt him. Touching his tongue gingerly against the place where the afflicting tooth had been, he felt only a swollen mass of tissue, numb and stupid, it seemed to him. He had tried, Lord, how he had tried to break through the pain and confusion of his life to something like clarity and control, and it had come to this — this dumb helplessness, this woeful thickened shameful inadequacy. At bottom, he knew, there was love in his heart — love for Jill that was as coherent and pure as algebra, and maybe even love for Margie too, and love for Ma, poor Ma, who was dead now and gone from him forever, and love for Lillian, in spite of everything: love for women—but try as he might, he could not arrange his life so that he could act on that love. There were all these other dark hateful feelings that kept getting in the way, his rage and his fear and his feelings of pure distress. If somehow, with one wild bearish swing of his arm, he could sweep all that away, then at last, he was sure, he would be free to love his daughter. At last he could be a good father, husband, son and brother. He could become a good man. That was all he wanted, for God’s sake. To be a good man. He imagined goodness as a state that gave a man power and clarity in every conscious moment of his daily life. Slowly, he descended the steps and got into the truck and started the motor. He backed it out and drove west on Clinton Street, to pick up his daughter.
On the ground between the yellowed grass and the leafless forsythia bushes by the sidewalk, slubs of porous snow shrank slowly below the late morning sun. Wade parked the truck next to the curb, got out and walked up the front path to the door of the house, a charcoal-gray split-level with pink shutters, and rang the bell. He heard the chimes inside, the first four notes of “Frere Jacques,” and the clicks of Lillian’s high heels on hardwood as she approached the door.
She drew the door in and stood behind the glass storm door and gazed at him, expressionless and still, as if posing on the other side of the glass for her portrait, as if she were her portrait: tall and slender, wearing a pale-gray wool dress, silver-and-lapis bracelet and necklace, her chocolate-brown hair tied up behind her head, off her neck — and she looked intelligent as hell, Wade thought, like a schoolteacher, filled with information and judgments and opinions that he could never have.
How did she get this way? How did she get so damned smart, this Lillian Pittman of Lawford, New Hampshire? How did she end up in this nice house in Concord’s west end, with shrubs and a neat lawn and a garage with an almost new Audi in it? That she had married Bob Horner, who sold insurance, did not explain it — that only explained the money, and lots of people Wade knew had as much money as Bob Horner, even people in Lawford. Bob Horner was not rich, and even if he were, it would not have made Lillian smart.
No, it was something else, something that had always been there, in her eyes, even when she was a girl and Wade had first fallen in love with her — and suddenly he realized that it was why he had fallen in love with her in the first place and why he had been so obsessed with her all those years: he had looked into her eyes way back then, when they were both high school kids, and he had seen her intelligence, the wonderful complexity of her awareness, and he had seen his own smart eyes looking back at him, and for a while he had felt intelligent too. Then, after a few years, because he no longer saw his own eyes looking back at him from hers, he had lost that belief in his own intelligence, and from then on, all he felt when he looked at her was stupid.
So it was not really a question of what had happened to her; it was a question of what had happened to him. How had he come to this? How was it that he, Wade Whitehouse of Lawford, New Hampshire, a man who had once been as intelligent and complexly aware as she and possibly even gifted, was standing like this on the stoop of his ex-wife’s house, hat in hand, come begging for a visit with his child, a man wearing cheap mismatched clothes and driving a borrowed battered old stake-body truck, a man without a proper home to call his own, without a job, without any respect in the community, without a wife and with no one to care for but a drunken father who hated him and whom he hated — how had this sorry man come to be the adult version of the bright boy he had seen twenty-five years ago in Lillian Pittman’s eyes?