Harriet, bringing the news, had heard about Yale’s distant death in the jungle from her husband Alf, he having been called out to attend to poor Kate, who had collapsed on receiving the notice. Oxford, too, though he fussed confusedly over his wife, seemed utterly stricken, and little Cornell sat in a corner staring mutely, unwiped snot running down his quivering upper lip like liquid glue. Only Columbia, home from university where she was studying pre-med, had had the presence of mind to call Alf and then use a little basic first aid for treating shock victims, feet up and all that, both parents submitting to her ministrations as though in a trance. After everyone else had been taken care of and the body had been brought back from the war zone and the memorial service held, Lumby fell into something of a melancholic stupor herself, though no one noticed by then or took it seriously, no one except her teachers at college who flunked her out of pre-med. But she couldn’t keep her eyes on the page, couldn’t even sit through an exam without her mind drifting off. Yale had been her favorite, maybe the only human male in the world she had truly loved and admired, and the world just seemed emptied out when he was gone, not worth the effort. When her mother asked her what was wrong, she said nothing seemed real anymore, she couldn’t believe in it, it was like everybody was just pretending. All life’s an artifice, her mother said. We are born into the stories made by others, we tinker a bit with the details, and then we die. She said this so sadly it made Lumby cry, and then that made her angry. Her mother never did really get over what happened to Yale, she just slowly declined over time, becoming ever more silent, until she died three years later, shortening her suffering at the end with a bottle of sleeping tablets from the drugstore, a withdrawal and departure that Lumby, needing her, could never quite forgive her for. Before that, however, there was one brief moment when the family pulled itself together to receive Yale’s French sweetheart Marie-Claire when she paid a return visit to the town a year after his death, staying with John and his wife, who was an old friend, and also coincidentally Yale’s girlfriend once upon a time. Lumby’s parents treated Marie-Claire like a daughter that week, hosting quiet, somewhat dreary dinners, taking her out to visit Yale’s grave, going through all of Yale’s belongings with her, presenting her with many mementos of him, and returning her letters to her. She received these things gratefully, tearfully even, trembling all over, yet left them behind when she went home, taking Cornell with her like something she’d won at the carnival but didn’t want; they had to bundle Yale’s effects up and mail them to her. She was not there to receive them. Lost forever, those things. Nearly lost her stupid little brother Corny in the bargain.
Paying her respects at Yale’s tomb was not the only purpose of Marie-Claire’s visit to town that year. She was also returning her friends’ second honeymoon trip to Paris of the year before and attending her little godchild’s christening (godmotherhood not really a part of that Protestant ceremony, but on the subject of religion John and his wife were generously broadminded and worked it in), which had been especially arranged for her arrival. The baby, named Clarissa in honor of Marie-Claire, was a restless child who kept the household up all night (“She is, what you say, a girl-party, no?” said Marie-Claire with pride), and all day, too, as though afraid that she might miss something if she closed her little eyes. When Marie-Claire, touring John’s airport, asked him what they would have called the baby had it been a boy, he jokingly replied, little Hankie, thank-ee. Though reminiscent still of the homemade dirt strips of aviation’s early days, John’s airport had been expanding. Over the year, getting friends to pitch in, and with money from his mother-in-law, John had been able to install a generator out there, build a new hangar, and clear enough land to extend his runway to nearly six thousand feet, about half of it paved. The paved length was all he needed for his little single-engine four-seater, of course, but he was already thinking far ahead to the time when jets and cargo planes would land here and he might even have a feeder airline of his own, or at least be operating some kind of air taxi service, linking his town to the great urban centers, which, from up on high, seemed to shimmer on the curved horizon like untapped treasure troves, spoils for the airborne adventurer. From up there, he could see, too, displayed like a briefing chart, how his town down below would grow, and in which direction, which properties he should buy, which sell, and where he should build his malls and housing developments. These revelations his wife missed out on mostly, grounded by her mother as she was, the doctor’s prenatal seconding of the motion, after the difficult birth, still in place as well. The way things turned out, John probably should have left Marie-Claire on the ground, too, but though John enjoyed women in every imaginable way, what he loved most at that youthful time in his life was getting blown at the controls a couple of thousand feet up in the sky, and Marie-Claire had a kind of crazy explosive voracity, as he had discovered already last year in Paris, which not only turned her small delicate mouth with its pebbly rows of teeth and muscular tongue into something between a hydraulic pump and an automatic carwash gone amok, but which seemed to possess her entire body, causing her to tremble violently from head to foot and, whimpering like an animal at the door, even as her mouth with its flickering tongue raced madly up and down his shaft, to clutch and claw at his flesh as though trying to dig her way inside. Of course, fucking Marie-Claire was, if sometimes a bit like throwing yourself off a cliff, an even greater treat, but this was not Paris and at home on the ground that late spring, everyone supposedly mourning Yale, he was trying, with only partial success, to keep his distance from this wildly unpredictable girl, so susceptible to contagious sorrows, and up in the air fucking was impossible.