My father stepped down from the train first and reached up for me, and I fell forward into his outstretched arms for the short flight to the platform. My mother came down. My skin tightened in the cold. At the other end of the car, a lone passenger climbed aboard. A conductor’s blue-capped head popped out, dipped back inside. The doors clicked shut and the train pulled out the way it had come in, terminus turned origin.
We stood on the platform setting down and picking up luggage, adjusting our coats and scarves. My father had his Olivetti case and a beaten leather valise, an artifact from his youth that I had stuffed with paper and colored pencils, assorted jewels, a plastic cup bearing the faded logo of the New York Yankees, and because the bag was also the permanent residence of a rock collection, two yo-yos, a Slinky, plastic plates, teacups, dollhouse furniture, hair bands, pennies, and a battered Etch A Sketch, it weighed almost as much as I did. I had made it as far as the apartment door before surrendering it to my father. He had a small gym bag, as well, containing his personal effects. My mother, in addition to her own bag, carried two more, one primarily stuffed with winter clothing for me, the other with board and card games. I was their only child; they were older parents; one might say they intended to treat me with great care, if not indulgence.
When my father looked at the sky, the gray, muscular shadowing of the clouds stretching toward the horizon, only the constant stitch of the power lines kept his sense of complete insignificance in check. It was nearly silent after the train had gone. A halyard tinged against the mast of a flagpole, the standard’s fabric popping in the wind. Sound was swallowed up into the mass of the sky, and when he turned to say to my mother, There they are, his voice was carried away. She slipped her hand around his neck and pulled him to her ear and he repeated it, though she’d already seen.
Out in the lot, Jane Vornado was waving at us from behind the wheel of her Land Cruiser, its mint-green chassis spattered with mud and road salt. My mother and I climbed into the front and my father accordioned into the back, among fishing tackle, a flare kit, our luggage, and situated himself on a bench, atop a coil of marine rope. The vehicle smelled like gasoline and bilgewater. Jane took it easy out of the parking lot and ambled along at thirty-five, but even at that speed my father couldn’t hear what was happening up front. The dash blowers didn’t do much, and what little heat they did produce leaked out of the cab before making it to him. The whole thing rattled like a box of tools.
My father knew Sid Feeney would be there. The Feeneys owned the house next door, a white saltbox with a flagpole in the front yard. In the summer a ring of whitewashed rocks surrounded a bed of red, white, and blue flowers at the base. He supposed Feeney was out there at the first melt, touching up the rocks with a bucket and paintbrush, shimmying up the pole to polish the finial. Feeney wrote military histories, broadly researched hagiographies of Allied commanders that never failed to make the bestseller lists. He appeared never to have been troubled by a moral decision, which is to say that he knew inherently right from wrong and felt that it would be treasonous to question his self-assurance, installed as it had been by God Almighty himself. Feeney depressed the hell out of my father.
The tire treads sang on the pavement. Every pothole rattled his teeth, and when they plummeted from the pavement onto the dirt road that led to the house, he bashed his head against the steel roof.
Full of bile on most subjects, my father was especially sour about this setup. Supported by the pylon of their immense wealth, the Vornados rusticated on the weekends inside a full-scale reproduction of bygone days, playing out a fantasy of Life on the End, where they dried fish from the shed rafters and wore waxed canvas jackets, chopped wood, made venison stew, attacked the house’s curling cedar shakes with antique shingling hatchets, at night slept under mounds of Hudson Bay blankets, refusing heat unless it came from a hot brick. They spoke of the land and sea as though they had bartered for their homestead with the Montaukett. It must have all come from a sense of guilt over their success, he supposed, a desire to do honor by the memory of their parents’ struggles, or those of their grandparents, or whoever had come over in steerage and broken their backs on the Lower East Side for a dollar a week. Who, my mother asked, was he to judge? Just because they want to have a little fun on the weekends, their morality is out of whack? It’s out of whack, he replied, because the Mercedes parked in the garage beneath the canoes is their morality. So that allows you to label them inauthentic? she said. This is what people do, isn’t it, Erwin? They hang up one costume and put on another one.
Through the murky window of the Land Cruiser he saw, well, scenery: wilderness, snow, the wind-bent trees, a slice of the striated sky. The woods were thick on either side of the road, the spaces between pines stuffed with brush, spindly hardwoods struggling in the shade of towering hickories, an impassable landscape packed with eastern red cedars spouting billowing rolls of evergreen, one trunk spawning another, which split for another, and on and on. Even in the dead of winter the woods were as dense as a wall.
Once you had arrived on set, there was no way out. My father was to play the writer, the husband, the crank, the one with a fresh lump atop his skull to symbolize his spiritual injury.
A final spine-obliterating thud, and Jane ratcheted the brake. From the garage Bo Vornado approached the Land Cruiser, arms out, as if to embrace the vehicle itself. He moved through the world with an ease that my father imagined to be primarily the result of a healthy childhood, ruddy-cheeked, rough-and-tumble, football with brothers in the fall leaves, a hearty impertinence charming to teachers and girls alike, taking what he wanted when he wanted it, wanting for nothing. What he knew of Bo he arranged in a daisy chain that reduced the man to a manageable shape: varsity quarterback, student body president, matriculation at Harvard, Porcellian, elevation to toastmaster, reward of a desk at an investment firm. Taken under the wing of a managing director, he’d bidden his time, risen through the ranks, and, as prophesied, at the appointed hour slayed his mentor and appropriated his office and title. Then, bored by conquest, he’d struck out on his own. On principle, my father was opposed to Bo’s existence, so anodyne, so well oiled, his entire life an unobstructed downhill run through fresh powder, yet he couldn’t help liking him. Bo’s masculinity had been so perfectly forged that it shielded him from any self-analysis of whatever failings lurked within his personality. He had, indeed, been raised to be a gentleman, charming, mindful of the needs of others, deferential to his elders, a steady arm on which a woman could lean. He’d never been in danger of displaying the syrupy, overly respectful attitude perfected by those boys who kept a sharp part in their hair, learned their catechism, and masturbated compulsively; he had, instead, a musky, mysterious air, that of a ram perched atop a mountain peak surveying his territory, and when he greeted my father with a hail-fellow-well-met embrace, my father’s heart rose a little, as though they were old boarding school chums reunited after decades. There was no question in my father’s mind that it was an embrace as practiced as a well-wrought wrestling hold, one designed to transmit authority and strength. Dominion. You are within my fold now, old boy, no harm shall befall you. It worked like magic.