All the Lasting Things (25 page)

“Have you talked to him about it?”

“I googled theater camps in Lake George.” Cat’s fingers moving through the beans, snapping off all evidence of the vine with impressive speed.

“It’s come to that?” Claudia asked sympathetically. “Googling? I’ve been there.”

Cat laughed. “I don’t know. I feel like one day you’re taking business calls, and the next you’re packing your things and saying, ‘Sorry for breaking your heart.’” Two beans missed the pot and tumbled to the floor. She stopped midway from picking them up. “Claudia,” she began, flushing pink. “I didn’t mean.”

“Where’s my mother?” Henry hammered his palm on the table until Claudia stepped to his side and asked, “What do you need, Daddy?”

“You’re not my mother.” He sounded small all of a sudden, broken and lost.

“She’s not here. Is there anything I can get you? It’s me, Daddy. Claudia, your daughter.”

When Henry didn’t answer, Claudia looked to Cat with a tolerant smile.

“Open mouth, insert foot,” Cat went on.

Claudia raised a hand, a priest giving absolution, before returning to her salad. “He’s not cheating. Take it from the woman wearing the scarlet letter.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s my brother. He’d tell me.” She sounded sure, though her confidence on this front, in one’s ability to say, yes, without doubt, I know this person well, better perhaps than he knows himself, had been brutally shaken over the last year.

“Take this,” Claudia instructed, “and these.” She handed Cat the cool bowl of chicken salad balanced on a stack of colorful plastic picnic plates. “I’ll get my father.”

Over lunch, they discussed their imminent outing. Evelyn had to go to a big-box store to pick up odds and ends for Henry’s move: a hamper, a tiny television meant more to kill the nursing home’s antiseptic silence than to entertain him, and packages of new undershirts on which she’d been instructed to write his name. They’d agreed that Benji would drive their mother, Claudia would stay with Max and Henry, and Cat would go for a long, mind-clearing run.

But as they finished lunch and cleared the table, Max, apparently immune to the heat as he spread out with his considerably dog-eared score, had a different idea. Cat and Benji could go on a run. Claudia could drive Evelyn. And he, Max, could keep an eye on Henry.

Everyone, especially Claudia, thought this a bad idea.

“But Henry naps after lunch. He’ll nap. I’ll work. Won’t you, Henry? Besides,” he said, turning an eye full of challenge toward Evelyn and Claudia, “you two should spend more time together.”

Claudia sat on the wooden bench beside Max and put a hand on the pyretic pink of the back of his neck. He quickly ducked away. “You’re getting burned,” Claudia said.

Max slapped his sweaty cap onto the table and returned to the music sheets scattered in front of him. “We’ll be fine.”

“I don’t think that’s the best idea.”

“Well, I think it’s a great idea.”

“Max.”

“Claudia.”

She wanted to scold and say, “I’m your mother,” but she had promised herself she never would. She hadn’t earned the right to play that card.

“Go!” Max shouted when it was clear that Claudia had no intention of moving. He waved off her lingering body as if ridding a garden of crows. Benji, Evelyn, and Cat watched as a jolt ran through Claudia’s system. She stood. He lowered his voice. “When you needed space I gave it to you, you know? I gave you two months.
Two
months
. I’m asking for two hours,” he said with a stuttering laugh.

Nobody seemed to know what to say, but everyone, out of faintheartedness or bewilderment or the paralyzing fear of pushing back, bent in the direction of Max’s will.

“At least put on sunscreen,” Claudia said before retreating into the house.

Inside the gelid laboratory of the kitchen, Benji and Cat hatched a second plan to set Claudia’s mind at ease. Regardless of what Max wanted, regardless of what Max even had to know, they committed to camping out in the living room—unseen, unheard—until Evelyn and Claudia returned.

“Leave it to me,” Benji assured them. “He’ll be fine.”

When Max woke—fifteen, twenty minutes later—he jumped, startled at first by the unfamiliar surroundings, the shocking greenness of grass in need of trimming. He turned to see a ragged but fully functional beach umbrella stabbed into the ground behind him, casting him in benevolent shade, but ignored this as if it had always been there and snipped the thread connecting his mouth to a button of drool on his score. The midafternoon air, without a breeze to freshen it, rose thick and steamy. He didn’t mind the heat: it reminded him of Dallas (not that he cared if he ever saw Dallas again) or, more accurately, of Arnav. The heat climbed like a steep but scalable slope. A challenge to be overcome and somehow a comfort, if only it didn’t make him so sleepy.

He rubbed his eyes. He wanted to call Arnav, to apologize for what he’d said, to tell him all that he now knew, but a chain wrapped round his mind refused to let him stray. He picked up the page where he’d left off. Evelyn and Claudia and Jane would have to wait. He flipped to the beginning of act two. Here: the organizing theme, the faintest quote from Elgar’s “Nimrod.” Into this dawning melody, he twined the motifs of the characters, the reedy lilt of beautiful and grounded Mrs. Ramsay, the cello-heavy brooding of her philosopher husband, young James’ tender despair, of everyone from capering Cam to solemn Andrew. Everyone and everything set in a losing race against time. Mrs. Ramsay’s theme dying as she died. Andrew: lost to the war. Prue: lost in childbirth. Everyone else aging, tattering into something stiller, quieter, more spare and profound, but nevertheless redolent of their younger selves. The echo of them in them. Max picked up Woolf and found the passage he’d marked.

there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a bark; a bleat; irregular, intermittent, yet somehow related; the hum of an insect, the tremor of cut grass, dissevered yet somehow belonging; the jar of a dorbeetle, the squeak of a wheel, loud, low, but mysteriously related; which the ear strains to bring together and is always on the verge of harmonizing, but they are never quite heard, never fully harmonized, and the sounds die out, and the harmony falters, and silence falls.

This, he’d done. The sound of passing time, harmonies splintering into shards of dissonance and, one by one, being swept off the shore by silent waves, churned by the soft opening of act three into smooth shells of beach glass and Lily’s first astonished words.
What does it mean then, what can it all mean?
He pushed his way past another stinging thought of Claudia—
would
she be crushed by such honesty?—and fought to stay on the lawn with Lily, the unrealized artist, alive with all of her self-doubt as she lifted her brush from her canvas and tried to stop Mr. Ramsay from striding across the lawn with some silly comment about his boots.

Max had days, whole months, when he doubted his music could genuinely touch another soul. Just as Lily couldn’t reach Mr. Ramsay in any truly meaningful way:
There was no helping Mr. Ramsay on the journey he was going
. Was anyone to be helped? (And who would help Claudia?) Could music, Max’s music, possibly be a lifeline? To someone? To anyone? If he let it, his mind could chase his doubts about his creation until he hadn’t an hour left in which to create; he could wonder endlessly whether what he made had the power to reach a single person or whether everybody, in the end, like poor old Ramsay, was doomed to make the journey alone.

A call came from the house, faint but still loud enough to nick him from his concentration. He couldn’t make out the words, but soon the sound resolved itself into Henry’s voice and the embers of a barely there keening fanned into a bellowing shout. Max put his pencil down and listened. “Dead!” He tossed the only word he could make out into the pan, waiting to see how much it weighed. Could he ignore it? Did he have to go?

“Liar! You’re a no-good liar!”

Trudgingly, Max loped to the screen door where Henry’s complaint came clear as a bell: “She’s not dead, you’re a goddamned liar! Jane! Jane!”

Max called in, a sharp warning thrown at a barking dog. Immediately Henry ceased. Max called in again, softer this time, a question—
You okay?
—but again got no response. Torn but effectively deaf to anything but a strand of music waiting to be laid down on a staff, he hurried back to the table. He didn’t have time for Jane. Understanding what needed to happen, he knew better where to place the notes, how to begin his graceful climb. He had to balance all things: light and dark, youth and age, vision and blindness, life and death, music and silence. Just like Virginia Woolf, he had to hold on to everything at the same time. He must, like Mr. Ramsay, sit in a little boat rocking beneath the lighthouse, both triumphant and defeated. He must think
I have reached it!
and
We perished, each alone.
He must make the music large enough to contain the despair and the hope, the failure and the goal, the truth and the lies. He must be large enough to contain both.

He started with the cellos in D minor. Cellos, with Max, always had a lot to say. The cellos provided the pulse whereby the heart beat. He heard the violins next, and a soft wind, barely a breath—what was it?—coming from the flutes. No, not flutes. In truth, he didn’t much care for flutes. Oboes. Yes, oboes were better. Let the breath come from them with a somnolent air. He thought of writing, he once explained to Arnav, as being tuned to a transmission in another language from another place, another plane. The composer, the writer, any artist tried his best to catch what he could, but as with all translation, something inevitably was lost. He tried to capture what he heard as faithfully as possible, with as little loss, with as little distortion as possible. He looked down at the page, disappointed. Then he smelled smoke.

A pleasant smell at first, wood, a neighbor lighting a barbecue or burning branches in the yard. Max breathed it in greedily, but after a moment it grew into something else, becoming thicker, more complicated. He couldn’t parse the scent, but something other than wood burned. He erased the notes he’d just written, cuffed the rubber shavings onto the grass, and poised his pencil to go at them again. The cellos, yes.

He wrote without stopping until, at last, the coming sound of it, the hiss, a gunfire
pop!
made him turn. His eye, still half-expecting a silvery scarf of smoke from a neighbor’s lawn, the burning of dried branches in a heavy drum, trailed the fences and hedgerows. But no. As soon as he saw it, the radio switched off, and another sound overtook him as the music died. Everything drowned in the cloud of tar-black smoke mushrooming above his grandfather’s house. It swelled through the air, climbing taller than the trees, tattering into thinner gray wisps only at its highest point. Max ran. He ran as fast as he could across the lawn and up the back steps to find the second floor roiling with smoke. Small fires, some growing, some curling and sputtering out, burned from one end of the house to the other. Scattered like a pile of burning leaves, index cards filled with cramped and tightly written words provided the glowing orange ember that turned the shower curtain into a scrim of flame or writhed in corners into harmless curls of ash.

He called Henry. He covered his mouth with his shirt and started toward the study, where the smoke thickened and singed. Fires of varying sizes danced erratically in every room, but the largest was here, in a furnace fed by a thousand books, some of which Henry had thrown to the floor in a madly budding bonfire.

“Henry!” Max called. He heard nothing. Then, to his left, from the couch, came a rough, hacking cough. Plume after plume of smoke moved past him like a row of soldiers with only the slightest space between. He tried to time his passage to the billowing march but missed and, swallowing a fiery mouthful of smoke, fell to his grandfather’s side in a fit of jagged retching.

Henry easily outweighed him by thirty pounds, but Max was young, stoked with adrenaline, and, filling his lungs with clean air from under the sofa, capable of holding his breath for an impressive length of time. He heaved Henry, who was by this time mostly dead weight, into a standing position and dragged him forward. They nearly tripped over a tangle of books strewn across the floor, but fumbled into the hallway, where the smoke thinned and there was air to be had. They careened down the stairs. Both coughing violently, tears scorching their eyes, a rope of clear, pendulous snot dangling from Henry’s nose as they crashed through the screen door and fell with a clatter onto the porch.

A band of neighbors, frozen on the lawn with looks of terror and amazement, snapped to life at the sight of them. Four men who were no longer made for running ran up the steps, two taking Henry, two taking Max, and pulled them onto the lawn, while a clucking cluster of women hovered above, unbuttoning Henry’s collar, wiping Max’s face, assuring them that the fire department was on the way. Henry, still rasping, face smeared with soot, whimpered, “She’s not dead. She’s not dead,” while Max hung his head between his knees, heaving heavily, and, barely able to form the words, told him to shut up. Far away, the wail of a siren.