But the dream of the hotel had evaporated with Claudia’s unequivocal “Forget it!” and every increasingly emphatic “No!” since. Benji withheld his disappointment from Cat, concerned that what he could only describe as his sister’s selfishness would glaringly expose his own, but he held out hope on another front: she’d leased the cottage on Saratoga Lake through the end of September, and although Benji had never stepped foot in it, her tour through the “Summer 2012” album on her smartphone convinced him that here was the perfect place to wall up with Ophelia and finally get down to “country matters.”
“We have two weeks before you have to be in New York. Two weeks without my parents hanging around.”
“Hanging around? Benji, it’s their house.” She moved her hand from his zipper and rapped a knuckle on the hard plastic casing that covered his leg. “Besides. You’re supposed to stay put.”
He stopped short of insisting. Already he’d sailed further with Cat than he once thought possible. Why press his luck and risk running aground the ambivalence that kept her from making an invitation in the first place? But the time for pressing his luck had come. It was Monday. If Benji wanted to play lord of Cat’s castle, he had to stop behaving as if rejection were a virus he feared catching and simply ask if he could move in.
He stood at the living room window, waiting for her to come. Now that the trial of lunch was over, now that Henry had convicted him of wearing his hair too long or never having read Montaigne, he could take up his afternoon post. He parted the curtain and looked out at the street. One of the prettiest Alluvia had to offer, the tall maples and gently sagging Queen Annes of the town’s forefathers, but quiet on a morning like this, everything still as a painted backdrop. Benji waited, watched. His mind lingered over the sight of a silver Mercedes parked across the street, a rare curbside flower not indigenous to these parts, but before he could bother to guess its origins, Judge Judy called him away. He hobbled back to the couch. The copy of To the Lighthouse that Cat had given him lay butterflied on the armrest. He tried ignoring “The Case of the Dented Bumper” and opened it to where he’d left off: Mr. Ramsay stalked across the lawn with the notion that a truly splendid mind could tackle the range of human thought, from A to Z, while his own mind, splendid enough but nevertheless limited, would never get farther than Q. Benji read,
How many men in a thousand million… reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, ‘One perhaps.’ One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how man will speak of him hereafter.
But reading, at least in front of the doily-collared Judge Sheindlin, was a losing battle. He watched two more cases with a vacant stare, as pleasantly glazed-eyed as fledgling sobriety allowed, and made it halfway through a third — inept wedding planner, deplorable bride — when the doorbell rang. From the kitchen, Evelyn called out that she’d get it, but Benji shouted back, thunking across the tasseled carpet as quickly as he could and throwing open the door. The man standing on the mat lunged forward without so much as a hello and took Benji into his arms.
“Roger?” Benji croaked.
Roger Fitch held on to his godson for a good minute, too grateful (to judge from the crush of his embrace) that Benji was actually there to hold on to. When the hug wound down, he stepped back, taking Benji by the shoulders, assessing him. “Benji, my boy,” he said brightly, “you look like I popped your balloon.”
Roger was a small man, daintily built, with a pronounced gap between his front teeth and ears that stuck out from his immaculately shorn head with elfin prominence. Physically, he looked less suited to building the careers of literary giants than to cobbling their shoes or tinkering with their watches, but Henry (and, according to Henry’s math, at least five other decorated scribblers) would have been digging ditches without him. His writers called him Leo or, when they felt like driving the point home, Napoleon, for though he stood barely tall enough to ride most roller coasters, there was something undeniably magisterial about this son of a grocer from Canarsie, the product of public schools and city colleges, who, despite (or maybe because of) his humble origins, understood the appeal of world domination. To see Roger hammering out the details of a subrights contract or poaching an author from an agency twice the size of his own was to watch him grow a foot before your eyes.
“You were expecting someone prettier,” Roger said, cutting off Benji’s apology with a solid, avuncular pat on the back. At least once a year, in the heyday of Henry Fisher’s career, Roger could be counted on to materialize at this very door, contracts for Henry in one hand, Zabars for the rest of the Fishers in the other. He made it known that it wasn’t a trip he enjoyed making — the few charms of upstate New York that he could name (camping, cow tipping) held no appeal for him — but Benji, who used to race to his car like a bounding dog, ranked high among its consolations. He dropped his bags at his feet and gave his godson another hug.
Roger was, like many a well-heeled Manhattanite, hopelessly provincial; everything he could ever want ranged on an island thirteen miles long. Should he ever need a face-to-face with one of the few non — New York — based writers he represented, he insisted they bring their business to him, the indignities of traveling beyond Brooklyn being a form of penance for living in Eugene or Princeton or some other godforsaken land. To this rule, he made two exceptions. In 1965, at the age of thirty, Roger Fitch packed up his desk at one of the country’s leading literary agencies and took with him two young writers nobody at Curtis Brown thought to miss. The first was E. Pritchett Moon; the second, a twenty-seven-year-old construction worker who’d written his first novel in a tiny apartment alongside his boss’s garage. Edwin, author of what turned out to be an endlessly proliferating saga of randy warlocks, earned him money, vast sums of it. Henry, who continued hanging drywall until his third novel won him the National Book Critics Circle Award, earned him respect.
“Did my father know you were coming?” Benji asked.
“You know me, Benji. I don’t leave the fortress unless I’m summoned.”
“Yeah, but does he remember summoning you?”
“He remembers fine,” Henry said, suddenly behind them, surprisingly stealthy on his stocking feet.
“There’s nothing wrong with his hearing.” Roger winked before walking off to clasp his old friend’s hand.
The buzz finally drew Evelyn out of the kitchen. She hurried down the hallway, wiping dish suds on her flowered robe. “Roger? What on earth?” She opened her mouth and laughed, somewhere between charmed and offended by the surprise. “Henry didn’t,” she began, then, reconsidering, leaned in for a conspirative hug. “I could kill him. Look at this place. Look at my hair.” She pulled her robe more tightly around her and sourly cinched the belt.
“He’s not here to check if the pillows are fluffed,” Henry said, starting back toward the kitchen. “Let’s go, Leo.”
Roger offered Evelyn his arm and followed along. “Don’t worry about your hair, Ev,” he said, polishing his shining head like Aladdin’s lamp. “Look at mine.”