Rear-View Mirrors (2 page)

“Looks like he's home,” Mr. Peck spoke up cheerfully, anxious, it seemed, to be rid of me. Three lights were on in the house to our right. Vengefully, I pictured my father hanging by the ankles from one of them.

I retrieved my suitcase from the back seat of the car, thanked my chauffeur, and watched him drive off. Then I turned and stared at my father's house, reluctant to finally meet the man I'd traveled so many miles to see. The evening air felt foreign to me: hot and strangely heavy. I was sweating, though whether because of the heat or out of nervousness I wasn't sure. I stood for five minutes, then started up the driveway, not so much attracted by my father as repelled by the mosquitoes.

I climbed up the porch steps and set down my suitcase. I peered through the screen door into the living room, saw no one there, prepared to knock, then decided that that was too familiar a summons for someone who, until now, had wanted nothing to do with me, and who'd left me to wait at the bus stop besides. Taking great pleasure in treating him as the stranger he was, I rang the bell.

Footsteps sounded above. Stairs creaked. And it occurred to me that Mr. Peck might have pulled my leg as I had pulled his—and dropped me off in front of the wrong house. Which possibility, when a figure appeared, provided me with a justification for my stiffly formal greeting.

“Pardon me. But would you happen to be Mr. H. L. Tate?”

The man facing me was lit only from behind, reducing him to silhouette. “Yes, that's right.”

I was thunderstruck. Wasn't he going to ask me in? Astounded, I stared at the shape before me: tall, broad-shouldered, holding a pipe. Surely he knew who I was. Or did women with suitcases commonly appear on his porch? I took a deep breath, determined not to lose this duel of indifference.

“Then I suppose it was you,” I stated casually, “who didn't meet me at the bus from Boston.”

The shape took a step back and looked at its watch.

“My goodness—you must be Olivia.”

I nodded.

“I forgot the time altogether.”

I didn't believe him for a minute. The bastard! He'd swallowed his pride, sought me out,
sent
an invitation and a ticket—then turned the tables by not picking me up, forcing me to go hunting for him. Making
me
the seeker once again.

“I must have dozed off for an hour,” he explained.

With a lit pipe in your mouth? I asked myself. Finally, he opened the door, and I picked up my suitcase and hauled it inside. A reunion several steps down from Stanley and Livingstone on the Great Meetings list.

“How did you get here?” my father asked.

I set down my things and turned around, seeing him for the first time in the light. And at once I felt my anger subside, overcome by the fascination of viewing my father in the flesh. Though at first sight he seemed more monument than man: massive frame, vast hands, giant feet. He was round-faced and bald, slightly flabby, and was dressed in an undershirt and checked shorts.

Each detail about him was a surprise, and my eyes flitted quickly from one to another: the bushiness of his graying eyebrows, his wire-rim glasses, the scar on one shin, the fineness of his fingers and their neatly trimmed nails. Then suddenly I recalled his question.

“A Mr. Peck drove me here,” I replied. “He said he was going out this way.”

My father thoughtfully sucked on his pipe. I noticed his eyes surveying me and couldn't help but wonder what he thought.

“Rather on the tall side, aren't you?” he inquired.

I was dumbstruck. Yes, I was tall. Too tall.
His
fault, it was now plain to see. I'd hoped for some fatherly compliment—and vowed not to let my defenses down again.

“I must say, your hair's darkened up a good deal.” His voice was oversized and his cadence slow, as if he were an orator from the last century. “Despite all that surfing and lounging in the sun.”

“There's no surfing on San Francisco Bay,” I shot back.

He grunted. “And how's your mother faring? Still writing those pompous articles?”

I let this loaded question pass and noticed the papers spread around his desk. “How's the Great American Novel coming?''

He continued as if I hadn't spoken. “I don't believe that woman could say ‘Pass the salt' without footnotes to Aristotle, Karl Marx, Julia Child, and Amy Vanderbilt.”

I waved away his vile-smelling smoke. “Is listening to
this
the ‘remarkable opportunity' you dragged me here for?”

“The decision to come was yours,” he replied. He blew a smoke ring into being and watched it jellyfish through the air. “As for the opportunity I mentioned, I can put it quite simply: I'm
seeking
an heir.”

I cocked my head in surprise. “An
heir?”

“I've led a solitary life,” he announced. His manner was disinterested, businesslike. “George Washington, in his farewell address, warned the nation against ‘entangling alliances.' I applied his advice to my personal life, and always found it to be sound counsel. Now, however, with my end drawing near, I've discovered myself desiring a successor. Someone to defend my reputation against critics and my grave against snowmobiles. To whom I could entrust the house and land, and the continuation of the Virgil Stark series.” He walked to a window and gazed outside. “I felt I was bound to contact you first, as my only relation, aside from my brother. Though family blood counts for nothing in this. Should you prove unfit, or not want the position, I've a large pool of other applicants to draw from.”

I studied my father in disbelief. “But your end's not drawing near—you're still young.”

“Forty-nine, to be exact. And a recent sufferer of heart palpitations. Cardiac disease, it so happens, struck down both my father's parents.”

“But even so—” I responded lamely. On the top shelf of the bookcase beside me I spotted a pair of cycling trophies, looked closer, and made out his name on both, struck that a former athlete should have so little confidence in his body.

“I suggest you give me, and New Hampshire, a month. After that, I'll pay your way back when you like.” He turned around. “Have you eaten?”

“On the bus.”

“Then you'll probably want to get some rest. Your room's upstairs, at the end of the hall.”

He stood where he was, making no motion to help with my suitcase or show me the way.

“You may find it somewhat warm upstairs for sleeping, by California standards.”

He smiled smugly. I thought of the heat in Sacramento, my mother's hometown, and was about to speak up when he continued.

“Your mother whined constantly about the humidity. In light of which fact, and in spite of your sex's reputed edge in physical endurance, I've placed a small electric fan by your bed.”

Some choice: I could either swelter or admit that my mother and I and all females were frail.

“Should you find it necessary,” he added.

Lifting my suitcase, I tossed him a flat “Good night,” marched up to my room, put the fan in the hall, and shut the door. It would just be four weeks, I reminded myself. Then he could sort through the rest of his “pool” of applicants—if they existed. Which, I mused while opening the windows, seemed
highly
doubtful. Which, in turn, explained the welcome I'd received, or the lack of it. For despite his unruffled, rhetorical style, my father was clearly desperate: sick with the fear of death, a disease for which I was his only known cure. His casual rudeness was merely a face-saving show of resistance to our new roles. He'd cast me aside; now he must court me.

Fanning myself with a magazine, I turned a circle in the center of the room. It was small and low-ceilinged, containing a bed, night table, rocking chair, bookcase, and chest. On one wall was a frame holding two amber moths. I approached and read the label beneath them: “Huckleberry Sphinx.
”
I went to the bathroom, nearly falling over the fan when I walked out the door. Then I got my nightgown out of my suitcase, slipped it on in the dark, and lay down. Two minutes later I took it off. Two minutes after that I noticed I was starting to think about the fan, then clenched my teeth and struggled to forget it. I was slippery with sweat. Mosquitoes whined in my ears. No hint of a breeze entered the windows, just the racket of crickets and frogs and God-knew-what-other natural insomniacs. I felt as if I was on the set of
Tarzan,
not snug in some quaint New England village, and wondered if I'd be dead of malaria by the time my month here finally ended. I tried to put myself to sleep by fantasizing my return to California: kissing the concrete at the Oakland airport, inhaling the salt air, rejoicing in the fog, pledging my allegiance to the Golden Gate—then was interrupted by the call of a bird. It was simple and clear and very close by: three notes repeated over and over. It was new to me, and seemed strangely sad. Abruptly, the singing stopped, though the song continued to sound in my head. And suddenly I remembered my mother's recollection, on the way to the airport, of listening to this very bird's call her first night in the East—and sat up in bed, wide awake, realizing I too had just heard my first whippoorwill.

3
/ Butterflies

The sun rises, stares me straight in the eye, and I grope for my watch on the table. It reads 5:15, but my body is still in California and feels strongly that the sky should be black, the birds silent, and sensible people asleep in their beds. I get up from mine, put on T-shirt and shorts, and search my backpack for the New Hampshire map. I take out the bag of granola as well, and admire the pack a moment: it's new, bought with the money I earned this year, a step up from my mother's hand-me-down suitcase. Then I go downstairs, case the kitchen, and give thanks to my uncle when I find some canned milk. I decide that if I choose to live here when the house becomes mine on my twenty-first birthday, I'll always keep a six-pack of his beloved Bluebird ale on hand.

I take my bowl of granola outside and sit in the sun on the porch steps. The air is cool. Spiderwebs are still dewed. Swallows are swooping around the barn. I unfold the map, locate North Hooton, then spot Lake Kiskadee to the north. I wonder how the ride came to be an annual tradition for my father and am startled to measure it for the first time and find that it's nearly a seventy-mile loop. Longer, I reflect, than the trip across my high school stage at graduation last week—but otherwise so similar. I recall my mother standing when my name was announced and clapping conspicuously, despite which spectacle I managed, somehow, not to trip on my robe. I'd always been a good student, had earned straight
A
s that semester, and graduated with honors. She was proud of me; by her standards I'd succeeded and was now, in her eyes, an adult. But for me the ceremony felt incomplete. Which is why I stopped here on the way to Maine: to perform a corresponding rite of passage in the imagined presence of my father. To attempt the ride he took each year. To acknowledge his influence and picture his approval. To graduate in his eyes.

I take in my bowl, find a grocery bag, and put in it my wallet and knife and some food. I fill my canteen and put it in too. Then I comb my hair—I've let it grow out since last summer, till it now almost reaches my waist—braid it to keep it out of my face, put on a cap, and lock the house behind me. A swallow flies out the barn door when I open it. I wheel out the bike and clean off the seat. It's an old Raleigh ten-speed, forest green under the dust, with a small wicker basket in the front. Not likely to be seen in the Olympics, but it'll do for me, as it did for my father. I close the barn door, put my bag of supplies in the basket, and straddle the bike. I pause. Then I raise the creaking kickstand with my foot. And
suddenly
I'm off.

I slither down the dirt drive, turn onto the harder-packed dirt of Hatfield Road, and find out at once that the seat is too high. My feet can barely stay with the pedals—not surprising, given my father's height. I figure that I can put up with it till the gas station, then start up a rise. I reach for the changer and shift down two gears, relieved to learn that the derailleur works. I pass the Rabbs' house. The road turns to pavement and the air is suddenly sweet with hay. I hear chickadees calling and see what I think might be a chestnut-sided warbler. Then I coast down a hill, the cool air raising goosebumps, spot the white spire of the Congregational church, turn right, and pull in at the gas station.

The “Closed” sign is up. It doesn't open till seven. I look at my watch, find it's only 6:20—then hear what sounds like a tool falling. I walk around to the side of the station and am surprised to see the garage door open, a car inside, and a pair of black sneakers sticking out from under it.

“Excuse me, but can I fill up my tires?”

A body slides out from beneath the car and I'm further amazed to find that it's Owen's.

“Olivia! How do you like that.”

This, I note to myself, is one of his longer speeches on record. I smile. “Didn't think I'd run into you here,” I state truthfully. “But I'm glad I did.” Also true.

“Just fixing my car. Before I start on other people's.” He stands up, as tall as I am now, and seems pleased to see me. A great relief, since I'm much in his debt, unknown to him.

“I've got the carving on my dresser at home,” I say, repaying part of it.

Modestly, he shrugs this off, wiping his greasy hands with a rag. “Sorry about your dad last fall.”

“Ancient history,” I answer him, shrugging off his statement in return. We catch up on the past twelve months and trade fall plans: U.C.L.A. for me, building cabinets in his uncle's shop for him. He fills my tires till they're hard as granite, checks my chain, and gives it some oil. Then, even though I can do it myself, I let him lower the seat a few inches, perhaps to provide further cause to thank him. Which I do several times, explain I have to go, and promise I'll write him about the dig.