Yes, I say. My father smiles reassurance. And I call down to tell Bridey and Penny that I’ll be a little later than I thought. Tomorrow, I say.
We’re using up all the sun, he says. You’d better hurry back.
Penny says something in the background I can’t hear and I ask about it. She said, Bridey says, You’re never leaving Maine. But she has a plan you’ll hear when you get back.
Thick as thieves, I tell myself as I hang up the phone. They’re stealing me.
Do you remember what it was like, to be young? You do. Was there any innocence there? No. Things were exactly what they looked like. If anyone tries for innocence, it’s the adult, moving forward, forgetting. If innocence is ignorance of the capacity for evil, then it’s what adults have, when they forget what it’s like to be a child. When they look at a child and think of innocence they are thinking of how they can’t remember what that feels like.
I have to know how Freddy’s doing. I could call, but instead I go over to Mrs. Moran’s new house. After her husband’s death, my mother tells me, she moved. A quick trip through Portland’s rain-stained houses, all of them a wrong color for happiness up in this part of town, the part between the stores and the sea. The Eastern Promenade, Munjoy Hill. There’s a cemetery here where kids come in and kick the stones down regularly. Because they probably hate the dead for being free from the sights around them.
Her house is near the sea. In a sense all of Portland is near the sea. Red-brick buildings, mostly, in a crest over the land on the rise of hill here, a gentle brick murmur to the slope of the whole town no matter where you are, the slope Irom where the glacier came through. Don’t think this means Portland isn’t beautiful; it’s why it’s beautiful. In any case. She stands taking in her mail as I arrive. I barely recognize her. And she doesn’t recognize me.
Fee, she says, when I reintroduce myself. Shocking, how you’ve changed. She takes me inside her dark clean house.
Freddy’s my only one, she says, as I sit down. And she flips open a scrapbook. Pictures from the choir, the robes, the rope belts. All that smooth hair gleaming on head after head. Freddy Moran, the book says on the front. And she shows me the clippings of Peter’s and Zach’s obits.
I’d last seen Freddy in a restaurant in the Old Port. I was home from California, visiting, out to lunch with my mother, who sat, radiantly blond and happy to see her son again, across from me. It was a two-story seafood place, red carpets sanguine in the stained afternoon sunlight that tugged the gauzy sheers in the windows. Captains’ mirrors on the walls distorted us all into faraway and tiny shapes. I watched them for a while, thinking, those are the real mirrors.
He moved through my center of vision like a shadow, like a floater bouncing through the fluid of my eye. The room went black like a wick blown by the wind, returning quickly. It was him, I thought. He had turned into an elegantly attractive, clean-cut young man. His gait gave him away, his walk a little faster than the rest of him, as if his legs were always dragging him forward.
To my mother, I said only, as I rose, I have to go say hi to someone. She gave me a crooked smile and consented.
I found him in the downstairs, seated at the bar, a dark, wooden affair. He took me in as I entered, in a way I recognized. He was checking me out. Hi, Freddy, I said, and his eyes opened large, as if they needed more room.
Aphias, he said. Jesus.
As I stood in front of him, I realized I didn’t know what it was
I would say to him. I was so happy to see him, I had followed the feeling, and not arranged for anything to say. For it remained that we really had nothing to say to each other. Up until that instant, when language there was gathered, like condensation forming on a window, inside us both.
It’s been so long, I said. I don’t know where to start.
You look great, he said. I heard you were in California.
I’m visiting, I said. It’s been great out there. For me.
We were a study in contrasts. I’d adopted a shabby mode of old-man-style clothing in high school and never really gotten far from it. That morning I wore a black T-shirt, a pair of old suit trousers made from charcoal wool, and cordovan leather shoes, on the worn side. I knew I looked sallow from smoking too much. Freddy glowed, rosy-cheeked, smooth-faced, he smelled clean from where I stood, and was dressed in a red polo shirt and khaki pants, brand-new running shoes on his feet. He looked protected, from germs, depressions, extremes of poverty and misfortune. None of this was true, though. Just a marvelous show. Marvelous even as mine was drab.
It was good to see you, he said to me. Uncertain as he said it.
I went back to my table, the world altered. The lunch, flavorless, my mother soundless: I couldn’t hear her. I’d look up periodically and see her mouth moving, and I knew she was saying things, but I couldn’t hear any of it. All I could think of was what a terrible person I was. How I needed something terrible to happen to me. And years later, looking at the pictures of this in my head, moving in time, resolving one into the next, I can see how it never occurred to me that the reason Big Eric had gone to prison was because he was found, by the law, to be guilty of the crimes. Not me. I was not the one in jail. I wasn’t guilty. Was it enough, that the law said it?
Not then.
He’d been wandering the streets in his coats, no pants. In his apartment, his clothes were found, all of them soiled. He was wearing only the coat because it was his only clean thing to wear — he hadn’t lost all of his mind. His mother came and burned the clothes, packed up his things and tried to clean the apartment. He’d scraped all the plaster off the walls and painted it blue, she tells me before I leave her house. It looked as though someone had exploded in there. She shuts the book and goes into the other room.
When he gets out of the hospital, she says, returning with a mug of coffee for me, he’ll be coming back here.
In his bed at the hospital, he’s a tiny map to himself. A reduction. The dementia is now the least of it. I recalled a friend telling me how either his meds or his virus caused his face to hollow as it went for the fat under his skin. Freddy’s face has hollowed, and the bed rises a little in a way that is meant to be his body. I stand in the doorway, unsure of how to go into the room. This is the content of our first visit.
5
Penny presents her idea to me a few days after I return on a warm summer afternoon some ten years after we first met. She’s aged well, and here on the patio of the Provincetown seafood restaurant where she’s asked me to meet her to talk about this, age seems to have brought to her mostly poise. She’d quit smoking some years ago, reviving what turned out to be a rosy-cheeked complexion, and she’d stopped dying her hair that henna red, finally, and allowed it to be dark brown, a color more like that of a stone than a coin. She plucks at her hair as I approach her through the dozen Perrier umbrellas on the deck and she rises to kiss my cheek, so that I catch the faintest scent of sandalwood. I never think to wear scents, but I like hers and make a note of it. Hello, she says, against my ear.
You look fantastic, I say. Teaching hasn’t done a thing to you that’s bad.
She’s an art teacher now at a private school on the northern coast of Maine. Your fault, she says of it, when she first tells me. You always made it sound so beautiful up there. Where she is now, though, East Knot, is more beautiful than where I grew up. She’d helped me get settled in New York and had then left me there, and I resented it. I tell her so.