My mother had died years before, of pneumonia. The girl I had been dating at the time had said to me, not unkindly, that although I was very sad about my mother’s death, one of the advantages of time passing was sure to be that the past would truly become the past. Words would become suspect. People would seem to be only poor souls struggling to do their best. Images would fade.
Not the image of the wall painted to look like the ocean, though. She was wrong about that. Herb had painted it exactly the way it really looks. I found this out later when I went snorkeling and saw the world underwater for the first time, with all its spooky spots of overexposure and its shimmering irregularities. But how tempting — how reassuring — to offer people the possibility of climbing from deep water to the surface by moving upward on lovely white nets, gigantic ladders from which no one need ever topple.
On Frances’s porch, as I stared at the photographs of my father, I saw him as a young man standing on a hot island, his closest friend a tall broomstick of a man whom he would probably never see again once the war was over. He was a hero. He had served his country. When he got off Guam, he would have a life. Things didn’t turn out the way he expected, though. The child he left behind was raised by another man, though it is true that his wife missed him forever and remained faithful in her own strange way by never remarrying. As I continued to look at the photograph, though, it was not possible to keep thinking of him as a hero. He was an ordinary man, romantic in context — a sad young soldier on a tropical island that would soon become a forgotten land. When the war was over he would have a life, but a life that was much too brief, and the living would never really recover from that tragedy.
Herb must also have believed that he was not a hero. That must have been what he was thinking when he wrote, in wispy letters, brief, transposed captions for two pictures that did not truly constitute any legacy at all.
In Cold Spring Harbor, as I put the pictures back in the envelope, I realized that no one had spoken for quite some time. Frances tilted her glass, shaking the ice cubes. She hardly knew us. Soon we would be gone. It was just a quick drive to the city, and she would see us off, knowing that she had discharged her responsibility by passing on to me what Herb had said was mine.
WINDY DAY AT THE RESERVOIR
1
Fran figured out that the key worked when it was inserted upside down — all the Brunettis had mentioned in the note was that the key had to be turned counterclockwise to open the door.
Chap groped along the wall for the light switch, found it, and said, “There!” triumphantly. On wooden pegs hung above the switch were the family’s ski-lift passes: Lou Brunetti, smiling the same way he smiled in his passport picture; Pia, poker-faced, self-consciously touching the ends of her hair; Anthony, cherubic and bemused, no doubt thinking: What is the family into now? Another world that his father intended to master, with books about organic gardening and expensive skis to allow people to streak through the snow.
This would have been a bit much to notice simply from looking at the picture of Anthony, but Chap had seen some of the letters Anthony wrote Fran, who had once been his first-grade teacher. She was a hero to the Brunetti family because she had put them in touch with the doctor who prescribed Ritalin for Anthony. By the time he had taken the drug for a month he had made friends. Dishes no longer toppled from the table. He began to finger-paint with great concentration. That winter, Fran had invited the Brunettis to dinner. The Brunettis had reciprocated by having them over for sweet wine, homemade biscotti, and a slide show of Capri, where they had often vacationed before they emigrated to the States at Lou’s insistence. Fran had given them Mastering the Art of French Cooking. They had given Fran and Chap a print of the Trevi Fountain, taken from an old book, with so many birds circling the gushing water it seemed a cartoon caption should be underneath. In late summer, they had gone to the visiting carnival together. Fran had recommended her dermatologist when Anthony’s doctor was mystified by a rash behind his knees. Pia had sewn Fran’s niece’s wedding dress. When the Brunettis moved away to Vermont, Fran and Chap put on a brave front and helped pack their dishes. There was much amusement when they gave the Brunettis a bottle of champagne to open in their new home, and the Brunettis gave them a farewell present, too: a kind of Amaretto liqueur impossible to buy in the States. The women were teary, and the men shook hands, squeezing with extra pressure. Then they were gone, and after a year or so they wrote more often than they called. There was a May rendezvous in Boston, at a restaurant in the North End, when Anthony sat briefly on Fran’s leg even though he otherwise took pride in being a big boy, and talked excitedly to Chap about computers. At the end of the evening, though, in their own car, Fran and Chap agreed that the Brunettis seemed much more restrained — not with them so much as with one another. Fran wondered whether Pia resented the move. Chap thought a sort of rigidity had set in with Lou: would he ever before have had such strong opinions on regional politics? He had actually banged the table, reminding Fran of the way Anthony behaved when she first met him. Lou had spoken to the waitress in Italian, tapping the bread and sending it back because the crust was not crisp. Pia, much to Fran and Chap’s astonishment, ordered a martini instead of mineral water before dinner. In the ladies’ room, Pia confided to Fran that Lou had been urging her to see a fertility doctor because she had had trouble conceiving. She was having trouble, she told Fran, because she was taking birth control pills. Her husband was almost forty-six; she could not imagine why he would want to have more children. Alone at the table with Lou, when Anthony was invited into the kitchen to meet the chef, Chap had learned nothing more than that the natives of Vermont blamed the governor for the mosquito problem. Before they parted, it was agreed that for their vacation, Fran and Chap would house-sit for the Brunettis, who would be gone in July, visiting a cousin in Atlanta, then continuing to New York City, where at the end of a weekend they would board a cruise to nowhere. “What if the ship doesn’t ever leave port but the people on it all disappear instead?” Anthony had said. His father had chuckled, as Pia frowned with real concern.
Several days later, the key to the Brunettis’ house arrived in an envelope in the mail, Scotch-taped to the back of a postcard of cows in a field. “Maybe they know they preside over Heaven on Earth!” Lou had written underneath the information printed at the top: that there were 450,000 cows in Vermont. Pia’s note was warm, thanking them several times for picking up the dinner check. Warmer than she had been in person, Fran said sadly, handing the note to Chap. In the note, Pia told them how to open the door, what to do if the sump pump did not come on during a hard rain, and the peculiarities of one burner on the gas stove. There was a P.S., telling them that mosquitoes bit more when the body was warm. After a dip in the stream behind the house, Pia said, they could sit on the banks for twenty minutes or half an hour without being bitten.
When they began to walk around the house, sensing the shape of lamps and fumbling for buttons or switches to turn them on, they noticed, immediately, that the Brunettis had become collectors: of wooden decoys, hand-tinted photographs, glass insulators, silver candlesticks. It was a big house, but so low-ceilinged it felt constricting, in spite of the four-over-four windows that came almost to the floor. For a while, disoriented, they noticed small things; the house had been added on to so many times, the configuration of rooms was impossible to predict. The long span of shelves in the living room sagged from age, not from the weight of books. Lou’s architecture books, many of them oversized, were lined up on the bottom shelves, but the rest of the shelves held only a few paperbacks. As they toured the living room, they found pepper shakers from the fifties: Scottie dogs and pirouetting ballerinas whose craniums poured salt and pepper; seven box cameras in a row; at least a dozen unpaired ladies’ shoes, fancy high heels from the forties; hair combs displayed standing upright in shallow bowls filled with sand; Roseville vases; replicas of the Eiffel Tower. The Italian landscapes both of them had always admired were there, clustered now in the hallway that led to the kitchen instead of interspersed throughout the house. Mastering the Art of French Cooking was in the kitchen, but Fran could see no other cookbooks; it looked as if the book had been put in the bookstand and placed in the center of the counter so Fran wouldn’t miss seeing it. More decoys were clustered at the far end of the counter. On the refrigerator, another picture of the intense Anthony stared them in the eye. There was a postcard of the evangelist Matthew (Fran took it off the freezer door and turned it over; it was from a museum in Germany), and several photographs, slightly overlapping, of what was probably the Brunettis’ garden: phlox, gladiolas, columbine, twiggy lilacs.