Hellish as these long talks under shady trees were, I would have withstood them forever; but Ivy wasn't as content as I was to know when she was out of her league. And in a way she was right; there was no such thing as being out of her league. She was seventeen and gorgeous. She got Patrick Goddard to notice her, then to watch her, then to tease her and be teased back, then to ask her out. I watched all of it. I watched Patrick Goddard, who was a good-looking, callow asshole, charm the pants off Ivy — I mean literally, in his Stingray after tennis, right in the parking lot of the club. They drank together in his car, Ivy being too young to go to bars, and in the movies, and in the park, and Ivy, I noticed miserably, seemed happy.
Ivy and I still played every once in a while, but only, I think, because she didn't want to cut me off immediately after reaching her objective; she was trying to be polite, or sensitive, or something. The talks under the trees got shorter, though. During one of the last ones, I asked her — emboldened by my understanding that the talks were coming to an end — whether she was having real, adult conversations with Patrick Goddard. She just looked at me like she had no idea what I was talking about. Then she said, “Look, girls have to get experience somehow. And high school guys — no offense, but they don't know what the hell they're doing. The guys at school, they'll get drunk and feel me up and I'll be like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ I feel like saying, ‘Hey, what are you even trying to accomplish down there?’ I almost feel bad for them, and that's not a good thing to have happen. You know why?”
I didn't.
“You wind up giving it away out of pity,” she said flatly. “And pity, Kyle, is the worst.”
But Ivy was wrong. It wasn't the worst, not at all, not even in the same neighborhood. The worst was that one morning I came down to find my parents standing in the kitchen. The phone had just rung. Generally my parents ignored me at breakfast, sitting at the kitchen table reading the newspaper and refusing to make any conversation whatsoever until they'd finished their first cups of coffee. On this day, though, my mother was actually cooking, frying eggs and sausages, and pouring glasses of juice. I sat down and started to eat without asking any questions.
After watching me for a few minutes, my father cleared his throat and spoke. “Ivy McAllister died last night in a car accident,” he said. “She and Patrick Goddard were driving home at midnight and he lost control of the car. They hit the highway median and rolled over. Patrick's in critical condition but he's going to survive. We just heard from one of the neighbors.”
I put my fork down. It was years before I ate eggs again. “He was drunk,” I said.
“They didn't say anything about that,” my father said in a measured tone.
My mother looked at me. “What makes you say that?”
“I just know,” I said.
I left the house and drove around for hours, all that day and well into the night, passing through all the dark, safe, suburban streets, and when I got back at one in the morning my parents were sitting straight-backed on the couch, waiting for me to come home.
Neither my father nor I returned to the tennis club for the rest of the summer. He was obviously not going to play with Frank, and I planned never to go back to the tennis club ever in my life. My plan was to avoid all the places I had ever seen Ivy; that way, I reasoned, it wouldn't be so glaringly obvious she was gone. I was helped in this line of thought by the fact that I was leaving home at the end of August. I had another terrible summer job, packing boxes in a factory, and worked as much overtime as I could, exhausting myself day and night.
When my father drove me to college he tried to get me to talk about her — he knew how I felt, and I knew he knew — but I just wouldn't, or couldn't, and I never did. Even over the years, even after I went back to the club, I never talked about Ivy with my parents, and if the subject came up with people from school, people who'd also known her, I changed the subject or left the room. I only rarely talked about her, with people who'd never met her; it was as if she belonged to me, and couldn't be shared.
My father and I stopped using “McAllister” as a code word, and so far as I know he never played with Frank again. They lost touch, and anyway it wasn't as if they were ever really friends; they just played tennis together for three years. My father played with a rotating succession of partners and, when I was home in the summers, with me. We slipped into long, lazy matches in which we focused as much on maintaining long rallies as we did on hitting good shots; there was a harmony between us, on and off the court, that only increased the older I got. Though I'd been playing tennis all my life, it was in those later years, after I graduated from school, that I really fell in love with the game, its easy back and forth, the thud and twang of racket strings, the shadows of trees over an asphalt court on an otherwise sunny day. There was no more graceful moment, I came to see, than the finite silence of the ball before it hit and bounced, no more satisfying equation than a strong serve meeting a stronger return. It was like my father always said: it was a game of finesse.
Of course we saw the McAllisters from time to time, in the store or on the street, and news of them reached us now and then. What happened was that Frank, to no one's great surprise, left Beth Ann for Eleanor MacElvoy. Beth Ann kept the house and was given custody of Melissa. Frank had two more kids with Eleanor, strapping, poorly behaved blond children, according to my mother, who thought Beth Ann had gotten the short end of the marital stick. I couldn't help wondering if he would've gone through with leaving Beth Ann if it hadn't been for Ivy dying. But of course there was no telling. The world would have been different in a million ways if she hadn't died, and that was only one of them.
As I got older I came home less often — saddled by job commitments and, eventually, family ones as well — but always visited at least once in the summer, and my father and I always played tennis when I did. The game grew into a staged ritual for us, less sport than ceremony, a language each of us spoke best with the other. My father stood practically glued to the baseline with stiff knees, his old man's legs seeming too thin to support the rest of his body. He'd stretch his arms out far, then farther, to return my shots, with his feet unmoving, and if one made it past him, which happened all the time, he'd only shrug. He'd grown philosophical to an intense degree. Then, in his seventy-fifth year, he was diagnosed with cancer and soon became too sick from the treatments to play. Over a period of months he grew thinner, older, sicker, and a year later, philosophical even then, he said good-bye to us and died.
My mother and I shared the work that followed his death: arranging the funeral, settling the estate, selling the house. She was going to live with her sister out West, and I wasn't going to be coming home anymore, not to this home, anyway.
On a windless, quiet Sunday I went to hit a few last balls at the club with Anil Chaudury, who still lived in town. It was a cool July afternoon; a front had blown through the night before, and the air still held the wetness of it. We served a few balls, slowly, no hurry. On the next court over, a father was yelling instructions to his teenaged son, and I stared at them for a second, awash in memory, before realizing that the father was Frank McAllister. He'd grown stout in his middle years, his face rounder and redder, and his hair was almost gone; but he still ran back and forth to the net like a bounding Labrador, and was trying to teach his son to do the same. The boy was thin and freckled and had very blond hair. He looked around fifteen.
Does it make any sense to say that although I was grieving for my father — whom I had the joy of loving and of knowing well, as a friend and as a parent — it was at that moment, thinking about Ivy, that I thought my heart would break? All of a sudden I was fighting back tears. It seemed crazy to me that I had gone on living without her all these years, that the world had somehow kept functioning, that anyone had grown reconciled to the death of a seventeen-year-old girl. From the other side of the net, Anil asked if I was okay. I lifted my palm to him, asking for a pause, then walked over to Frank McAllister and said hello.