Catherine Flaherty leans against the aluminum door jamb, eyes gleaming, mouth uncertain, and says exactly nothing at this important moment, merely nods her pretty head. Yes. Yes.
It’s all up to me.
The clear moon on this night has posted a smooth silver hump above my dark horizon, and I have only to stand up, put my hands firmly on my chest like St. Stephen and suggest we stroll out into the cool air of Park Avenue, maybe veer over to Second for a sandwich and a beer at someplace I will have to know about (but don’t yet), then let the dreamy night take care of itself and us from there on. A couple. Regulation city-dwellers, arm-in-arm under that dog moon, familiars strolling the easy streets, old hands at the new business of romance.
I take a peek at the clock above Eddie Frieder’s cubicle, see through his office window, in fact, and out through the bright night at the building across the street. The windows there are yellow with old-fashioned light. A heavy man in a vest stands looking down toward the avenue. Toward what? What is on his mind, I cannot help wondering. A set of alternatives that don’t appeal to him? A dilemma that could consume his night in calculating? A future blacker than the night itself? Behind him, someone I cannot see speaks to him or calls his name, and he turns away, raises his hands in a gesture of acceptance and steps from view.
By Eddie Frieder’s clock it is the eleventh hour exactly. Easter night. The office is silent and still, but for a faraway computer’s hum and for the clock itself, which snakes to its next minute station. There is a sweet smell on the odorless air — the smell of Catherine Flaherty, a smell of full closets, of secret private-school shenanigans, of dark (but not too dark) rendezvous. And for a moment I am stopped from speech and motion, and imagine precisely how she will take on the duty of loving me. It is, of course, a way I know already, cannot help but know, all things considered (that’s one subject that does not surprise you once you’re an adult). It will be the most semi-serious of ways. Not the way she would love Dartmouth Dan, nor the way she will love the lucky man she is likely to marry — some wide-eyed Columbia grad with a family law practice all in place. But something in the middle of those, a way that means to say: This is pretty serious, though only for experience sake; I’d be the most surprised little girl in Boston if this turns out to be important at all; it’ll be interesting, you bet, and I’ll look back on it someday and feel sure I did the right thing and all, but not be sure exactly why I think so; full steam ahead.
And what’s my attitude? At some point nothing else really matters but your attitude — your hopes, your risks, your sacrifices, your potential islands of regret and reward — as you enter what is no more than rote experience upon the earth.
Mine, I’m happy to say, is the best possible.
“Well, hey,” I say in a stirring voice, hands upon my breast. “What say we get out of here and take a walk? I haven’t eaten since lunch, and I could pretty much eat a lug wrench right now. I’ll buy you a sandwich.”
Catherine Flaherty bites a piece of her lip as she smiles a smile even bigger than mine and colors flower in her tulip cheeks. This is a pretty good idea, she means to say, full of sentiment. (Though she is already nodding a business woman’s agreement before she speaks.) “Sounds really great.” She flips her hair in a definitive way. “I guess I’m pretty hungry too. Just let me get my coat, and we’ll go for it.”
“It’s a deal,” I say.
I hear her feet slip-skip down the carpeted corridor, hear the door to the ladies’ sigh open, sigh back, bump shut (always the practical girl). And there is no nicer time on earth than now — everything in the offing, nothing gone wrong, all potential — the very polar opposite of how I felt driving home the other night, when everything was on the skids and nothing within a thousand kilometers worth anticipating. This is really all life is worth, when you come down to it.
The light across the street is off now. Though as I stand watching (my bum knee good as new), waiting for this irresistible, sentimental girl’s return, I can’t be certain that the man I saw there — the heavy man in his vest and tie, surprised by the sudden sound of a voice and his own name, a sound he didn’t expect — I can’t be certain he’s not there still, looking out over the night streets of a friendly town, alone. And I step closer to the glass and try to find him through the dark, stare hard, hoping for even an illusion of a face, of someone there watching me here. Far below I can sense the sound of cars and life in motion. Behind me I hear the door sigh closed again and footsteps coming. And I sense that it’s not possible to see there anymore, though my guess is no one’s watching me. No one’s noticed me standing here at all.
THE END
Life will always be without a natural, convincing closure. Except one.
Walter was buried in Coshocton, Ohio, on the very day I sounded the horns of my thirty-ninth birthday. I didn’t go to his funeral, though I almost did. (Carter Knott went.) In spite of everything, I could not feel that I had a place there. For a day or two he was kept over in Mangum & Gayden’s on Winthrop Street, where Ralph was four years ago, and then was driven back to the midwest by long-haul truck. It turns out it wasn’t his sister I saw on the train platform in Haddam that night, but some other woman. Walter’s sister, Joyce Ellen, is a heavy-set, bespectacled, YWCA-type who has never married and wears mannish suits and ties, is as nice a person as you will ever meet, and has never read Teddy Roosevelt’s Life. She and I had a long, friendly visit at a coffee shop in New York, where we talked about the letter Walter had left and about Walter in general. Joyce said he was a kind of enigma to her and her entire family, and that he hadn’t been in close touch with them for some time. Only in the last week of his life, she said, Walter had called up several times to talk about hunting and the possibility of moving back there and setting up a business and even about me, whom he described as his best friend. Joyce said she thought there was something very strange about her brother, and she wasn’t all that surprised when the call came in. “You can feel these things coming,” she said (though I do not agree). She said she hoped Yolanda wouldn’t come to the funeral, and I have a suspicion she got her wish.
Walter’s death, I suppose you could say, has had the effect on me that death means to have; of reminding me of my responsibility to a somewhat larger world. Though it came at a time when I didn’t much want to think about that, and I still don’t find it easy to accommodate and am not completely sure what I can do differently.
Walter’s story about a daughter born out of wedlock and grown up now in Florida was, it turns out, not true, but simply a gentle joke. He knew, I think, that I would never run the risk of letting him down, and he was right. I flew to Sarasota, did a good bit of sleuthing, including some calls about birth records in Coshocton, I called Joyce Ellen, even hired a detective who cost me a good bit of money but turned up nothing and no one. And I’ve decided that the whole goose chase was just his one last attempt at withholding full disclosure. A novelistic red herring. And I admire Walter for it, since for me such a gesture has the feel of secrecies, a quality Walter’s own life lacked, though he tried for it. I think that Walter might’ve even figured out something important before he turned the television on for the last time, though I wouldn’t want to try to speak for him. But you can easily believe that some private questions get answered — just in the nature of things — as you anticipate the hammer falling.
Coming to Florida has had a good effect on me, and I have stayed on these few months — it is now September — though I don’t think I will stay forever. Coming to the bottom of the country provokes a nice sensation, a tropical certainty that something will happen to you here. The whole place seems alive with modest hopes. People in Florida, I’ve discovered, are here to get away from things, to seek no end of life, and there is a crispness and a Tightness to most everyone I meet that I find likable. No one is trying to rook anybody else, as my mother used to say, and contrary to all reports. Many people are here from Michigan, the blue plates on their cars and pickups much in evidence. It is not like New Jersey, but it is not bad.