This is not a subject that is easy for me to talk about, not only because under the influence I have behaved abominably, but because giving it up was at the heart of the transaction I made with Will. In exchange for my abstinence, he would give me the closest thing to a normal family I'd had since my early childhood, the years before I understood that there was something freaky going on in our house; not everyone's father vanished for months on end. By the time Mom, Gladys, and I drove through Death Valley with a pair of binoculars, as if he might be hiding behind a creosote bush-by then I knew that our trip was not five days and four nights in Fort Lauderdale, not the spring vacation other kids in Mrs. McGrath's third-grade class at Carteret Elementary School went on. One of the things that made my father's leaving puzzling was that when he was with us, he seemed to be enjoying himself. He was not quarrelsome or short-tempered; the mood around the house was not storm, whoosh, bang, I'm outa here. The worst thing you could say about him was that he was remote. The best was that his remoteness was excellent preparation for life without him when he was gone for good.
It was not a long ride down the asphalt to the Winstons' dirt road, but it was long enough for me to feel the sudden weight of these memories, the intricate ways in which they led to one another and made a mockery of all the work I had done to keep them in the very back of my mind. Now they were front row, center, and my head was swimming.
"I guess I thought he was over that," Ginny said, and it took me a moment to realize that we had not exchanged a word since leaving the house, and that she was talking about her father.
"Over what?"
"Suicide. After Jesse died and Daddy was in the loony bin, whenever the phone rang, I was sure it was someone calling to tell me he was dead. But then he met you, and he was so happy."
I waited for her to say something more, to acknowledge that that was a long time ago, all that happiness, and there is only so much we can do to make unhappy people happy, and it is not much, after all. But she was only twenty-five, and it takes a few more decades to come to that, if we ever do. In any case, Ginny was way past comforting me. She was doing to me what I was doing to myself, what I had been trying to contain in the back of my mind, a place as crowded with unpleasantness as Pandora's box. Quietly, in only a few words, with all the years between the great happiness and the present disappeared into ellipses, my stepdaughter was blaming me for her father's death, as I was blaming myself.
7. Slipping
LOW TIDE.
Piping plovers.
Sanderlings with their toothpick legs, skittering over the shoreline like wind-up toys on speed.
A light canopy of clouds far out over the ocean, which I knew would tint pink when the sun began to drop in a few hours.
The bustle and buzz of a cocktail party, a catered clambake for forty. Voices coasting on the wind, wholesome early evening laughter, a parade of small children chasing a beach ball. The sassafras fire in a sand pit, lobsters, clams, corn, all cooking beneath a canvas tarp, the guy cooking, whom they kept calling the Bake Master, in a butcher's apron and corny chef's cap, telling stories of getting his eyebrows singed and his forearms blackened. The name of the catering company across the apron, something about lobster tails or sea legs. I don't remember anymore.
I remember the oddness of the wild setting and the precious dinner decorations, Martha Stewart fetched up on the shores of Swansea. Bales of hay covered with blue-and-white-checked tablecloths and baskets of baguettes and trays of miniature carrots and zucchini. Galvanized tin pails of wildflowers and sunflowers, cloth napkins that matched the flowers, a wicker basket of lobster bibs. A high school girl, maybe the Winstons' daughter, going around with a petition on a clipboard to build a series of airborne nests on the public beach to save the plovers from certain extinction. This was not public beach. And the dogs. I remember the dogs.
I remember that I kept looking low to the ground for hideous Henry, but these dogs were fleet, pure goldens and Labs, made to run, made to be cuddled and kept close by, not abandoned, as Will must have abandoned Henry, because I could imagine no other fate for him.
I remember wondering what I was doing there, waiting on the drink line to get a glass of club soda from a kid who could be a Kennedy, a young man with lopsided Irish good looks and a toothy, bright smile. I was half-listening to the hostess, Sue Winston, tell a woman with an English accent about her forthcoming biography of Louisa May Alcott. Behind me another woman was talking about the celebrity auction always held in the middle of the summer, to which celebrities in years past had donated lunch or dinner with themselves to raise money for the social service agency that provides help for winter people impoverished by the departure of summer people at Labor Day. And then Hunter Abbott's voice began to come in clearly, a bit upwind, the familiar stories of the aging newspaperman, a cranky widower who still smoked Lucky Strikes, whose favorite subject was still the Old Days in Saigon. He and Will could work up a routine, even though they had been there on opposing teams, Hunter in the press and Will in the CIA. Will's distinction was that he was one of the few CIA people deeply opposed to the war, which made his life there another kind of hell from the hell of the war itself. After I got my club soda, I would stroll over to the circle where he stood and tell him Will was dead.
The surprise of a hand on my shoulder made me jump. It was Evan. "How're you doing?" he said quietly.
I did not know where to begin. I was not sure I wanted to begin. I noticed Ginny at the foot of the sand dunes talking intently to Mavis, Mavis nodding and then reaching to pat and hold Ginny's arm. It hurt me to think of my awfulness toward her; it made me want to flee from myself and from here, and once I felt that, or named it, everything I heard and saw encouraged flight, especially the silly sight of the beach done up as a Pottery Barn display window.
"Did Ginny have a copy of the will?" Evan asked.
"Did she ever."
"Surprises?"
"He left me a dollar."
"Ouch."
"Made his grade school friend one of the beneficiaries on his life insurance policy. She got the share that used to have my name on it, but it was only a hundred thousand. I know in your crowd that's chopped liver."
"Hardly, my dear."
"Evan, this looks like a wonderful party, but I-"
"I'm not sure what the law is, but I think that in the middle of a divorce-"
"I'm not quite in the mood for this-the lobster or the law. You wont be offended if I take a powder, will you?"
"Don't run off to be by yourself. After my father died… You're not going to look for the dog, are you? I know you're tough as nails, but-"
"Nails? Me?" Crying with Ben today? At the airport with Ginny sobbing in my arms?
"I meant that you're strong and you don't seem to need a lot of-"
"Maybe Styrofoam, Evan, but not steel."
"Will was angry, Sophy. That's all the dollar was about. But whether the whole package will stand up in court…"
"That makes two of us who are angry. And you know what?" This had just come to me, this nugget of justice or wisdom, though I am no longer sure it was either. "Now we're even. He got back at me for leaving him, so I don't have to feel guilty anymore."
"I'm a lawyer, not a psychiatrist," Evan said, "but this line of thinking could impair your judgment about suing his estate, which I believe you have every reason to pursue."
"Evan, may I have a word with you?" It was a man who looked silvery, distinguished, already tanned, a man who went around saying, May I have a word with you, and got all the words he wanted.
"Sophy, would you excuse me for a moment?"
I nodded and walked a few steps to the drinks table and asked for a club soda. "How's it going?" said the bartender.