In the country there was both.
—
I woke on Christmas morning two or three years later. My father was born on this day. Eight decades back. Wearing a long fur coat I had bought secondhand in Southampton, I walked in the woods, the two of us did, the dog running ahead. At the weir the stream was frozen along the banks. In the light dusting of snow were the footprints of a wild duck.
We had lunch at the Lords’, Sherry and Pam’s — he was a painter, Fox’s good friend; theirs was that rarity, a perfect marriage, his third, her second. His income was meager but he owned a house. Occasionally they argued. “You’ve never been poor!” he cried, furious.
“Darling, I didn’t have the time,” she said.
The clear winter light was streaming across the fields. There were views from every window of the house. Sherry’s eighty-three-year-old mother was there also. She was a widow. I knew the story of her husband’s death. His heart was failing. The family had gathered to see him and at the end of the afternoon had left for the day. He was alone with the nurse. There was a bottle of scotch over there, he told her, would she care to join him for a drink? They sat sipping from their glasses as the sun set and evening came on. He finished his and held out his glass. “What would you say to one for the road?” he asked and then lay back. I believe they were his last words.
During the week before New Year I made some lists, jotted things, really: Pleasures, those that remained to me; Ten Closest Friends; Books Read. I also thought of various people as you do at year’s end. Did Not Make the Voyage: my mother’s baby sister who died, I think, unnamed; George Cortada; Kelly; Joe Byron; Thomas Maynard, aged eight; Kay’s miscarried child; Sumo’s puppies …
Late in the day we walked on the deserted beach.
Afterwards I bathed, dressed, put on a white turtleneck, and, looking in the mirror, combed my hair. I had seen worse. Health, good. Hopes, fair.
Karyl Roosevelt and Dana, her son, came for drinks. She had been the most beautiful woman. Perhaps as a consequence her life had been devoted to men. Even afterwards she spoke of them with affection.
She’d been married to a very rich man. The first time they went to Europe they flew directly to Yugoslavia and boarded Marshal Tito’s yacht. Tito, his sleeves rolled up, rowed her around a bay near Dubrovnik himself.
We drove to dinner at Billy’s. Very few customers. Then back to the house before midnight, where we made a fire, drank toasts, and read aloud from favorite books. I read the last speech in Noël Coward’s Cavalcade, the one in which the wife toasts her husband. They have lost both their sons in the war (1914–1918) and she drinks to them, to what they might have been, and to England.
Kay read from Ebenezer Le Page. Karyl, the last part of Joyce’s “The Dead,” where the snow is falling on all Ireland, also from Anna Karenina, Humboldt’s Gift, and The Wapshot Chronicle. Dana read Robert Service, Stephen King, and Poe, something long and incomprehensible. Perhaps it was the drinks. “As the French say, comment?” Kay remarked.
The fire had burned to embers, the company was gone. We walked in the icy darkness with the old, limping dog. Nothing on the empty road, no cars, no sound, no lights. The year turning, cold stars above. My arm around her. Feeling of courage. Great desire to live on.