The Children (2 page)

Kindness always came naturally to Spin. He got that trait from his father. Whit was actually a very kind man, but he could come off a little gruff if you didn't know him. I'd known him since I was two years old. That's when he and my mother got together. Of course, I didn't really understand what was going on between them at first. Apparently, no one did. They somehow managed to keep it a secret for over a year. But in the summer of 1988, just before he turned forty, Whit Whitman fell in love with our mother, Joan.

Connecticut had a major heat wave that summer; people still talk about it. The Fourth of July fireworks were canceled because of the fire risk. Some people had their wells run dry. Lawns were brown, streams evaporated, and local farmers watched their tomatoes roast on the vine, but Whit's memories of those days remained vivid, if not entirely accurate, and in every one of them, the grass surrounding Lakeside was greener and the gardens more alive with color than ever before.

Whit had no recollection of any dry spell that summer because he was always drenched. His clothes clung to his damp skin all day, and each night, he'd leave his wife, Marissa, alone in the house with her drink, her book, and her disdain, and he'd stride, nude and “savagely alive” (his actual words), out across his lawn to the lake. There he'd float on his back, sometimes for hours. He'd search the sky for the Dippers, Big and Little, for Polaris, Orion's Belt, and the other twinkling constellations that had fascinated him in his boyhood. Now they fascinated him once again. Whit said there were times that summer when he felt that the muscles in his chest weren't equipped to sustain his swelling heart. His every waking moment pulsed with thoughts of Joan.

It was a thorny situation. Whit was the first to admit that. Joan, though still quite young, had Sally and me, and wasn't divorced from our father yet. Whit was also married and had his son Perry, who was then about seven. The thought that two families were about to be dismantled was agonizing to Whit, but the thing that tortured him most wasn't his guilt, it was the humbling knowledge that midlife affairs like his were so common. His love for our mother was anything but common. I know this because he would sometimes shout this information, spittily, at Sally and me—especially if he was into his gin. His love for Joan was the most extraordinary thing he had ever experienced. Suddenly, all was illuminated. He had lived his life thus far as a sort of affable, obedient pet—first to his mother and father, then to his wife. Whit had always done what
others
had wanted him to do, not what he wanted. College, law school, marrying his first serious girlfriend, joining his father-in-law's firm in Manhattan (he would count these off on his fingers for us, like crimes), it had all been expected of him, and he fiercely resented the expectations of others.

Whit had never been in love before. He saw that now. His marriage to socially striving Marissa was nothing more than a dull, ill-conceived alliance. It was a sham; there was no other word for it, and it had been from day one. Within weeks of his first tryst with Joan, Whit knew that life was shorter and more exquisite than he had ever imagined, and what was left of it, damn it, he would spend with her.

The surprise of Marissa's pregnancy, almost a year into the affair, complicated things, but it didn't alter the course Whit had set for himself. For the duration of his wife's pregnancy, he stayed in their town house on the Upper East Side. Two months after Spin was born, he moved out for good. He moved up here to northwest Connecticut, to Lakeside Cottage, where his family had spent their summers for four generations. Once we moved in with our mother, Whit had the house winterized so we could live here full-time. Perry and Spin visited every other weekend, certain holidays, and one month of the summer.

This house is huge. It's old and drafty. In order to cut back on energy costs, Whit would close the heating ducts in the boys' rooms when they weren't here, and he'd often forget to open them until after they arrived on wintry Friday nights. So there were the cold beds and, over time, another kind of chilliness that developed between Whit and his sons, especially Perry. Marissa had remarried and remarried well. Her new husband, Peter Sommers, was wealthy, like Whit. Probably not quite as wealthy, but he actually worked. Marissa and Peter held a certain contempt for Whit. Perry picked this up early on, and eventually he absorbed it himself.

Richard “Whit” Whitman (or “Idle Rich,” as Marissa had taken to calling him) was a little eccentric. But he wasn't really idle at all; he just stopped earning his own money after he met Joan. He had to leave his job at his former father-in-law's firm, but instead of starting his own practice or joining another, he retired and lived on the interest of an enormous trust that had been left to him after the deaths of his parents in the 1960s. Whit wanted to devote the rest of his life to the pursuit of things that
really
interested him. He was really interested in American history. To be more specific, he was interested in the history of American bluegrass music.

To be most specific, Whit was interested in banjos.

You could call it an obsession—most people did. He played the banjo. He collected rare banjos. Eventually, he built banjos—beautiful five-string banjos that he carved by hand in a workshop he had set up in a shed behind the old boathouse. Until he became very sick, until those last few months, you could find him working in that shed almost every day except Sunday. Whit sold many of the banjos he made. He had a little mail-order business, and eventually enthusiasts from all over the United States sought his instruments. He was a bit of a legend in the banjo community, but, well, it was the banjo community. It barely existed in the Northeast. In the grand scheme of things, I guess, it barely existed at all.

The Whitman money is old family money, mostly steel money. Whit's uncle Leander Whitman was the ambassador to Sweden during the Eisenhower administration. A John Singer Sargent portrait of Whit's grandmother used to hang over our living room mantel. Perry took it after Whit died because (he said) we never lock our doors. We don't lock the doors because we don't have much crime here, and even if we had, nobody would have known it was an important painting, because you could barely see the thing. On the mantel below it were always stacks of books, gloves, old dog collars, banjo strings, and guitar picks. Whit hated throwing anything away. He hated new things. He always drove the most beat-up car in this town—a rusty old Volvo. He was very thrifty, and so was Spin, at least before he met Laurel.

Laurel, we learned from Spin, was also a member of an important American family. Her great-great-uncle was Ernest Hemingway. Laurel grew up in Idaho. That's where her family is from—Ketchum, Idaho, where Hemingway lived at the end of his life.

In fact, Idaho is where Spin first met Laurel. Spin taught science and music at Holden Academy, the boarding school here in Harwich, and it was during Christmas break of last year that he was skiing at Sun Valley. He and Laurel first met at a lodge at the top of the mountain. She was with some old friends of his from Dartmouth. I don't know how she knew the Dartmouth group; I don't know how Laurel manages to insinuate herself into everything, she just does. Apparently, the friends wanted to hang out in the lodge and have another beer. Laurel and Spin decided to get in a little more skiing before the lifts closed. Spin had just bought one of those helmet cams, and he turned it on for their first run together. I've watched this video so many times that I have almost every second of it memorized. I keep looking for clues. Sometimes I find them.

For example, the other day I realized Spin says something right after the two-minute mark. I called Sally immediately. It was several hours before she called me back.

“Look at two-oh-four,” I said.

“I can't,” Sally said. “I'm at work.”

“Write it down. Two minutes and four seconds. It's right after she comes flying out from behind the trees and almost collides with him. He says something.”

“I'm not watching it anymore.”

“I thought it was just a sort of grunt. For the longest time, I thought he was just grunting, but he says something. He says a word, I'm certain.”

“Okay,” Sally said. “Listen, Lottie, stop watching it.”

“I can't.”

“Yes, you can. It won't change anything.”

“Also, at the beginning, she turns and flashes that smile at him. But it isn't really him she's smiling at. It's the camera, up on top of his helmet.”

“Yeah, I know,” Sally said. She was smoking a cigarette, I could tell. She told me she had quit.

“He was always so cautious, that's what gets me,” I said. “We used to make so much fun of him. I mean, I know he's a great skier, but the way they were speeding through those trees … They were flying. He would never have done that without her, he was trying to keep up with her.”

“Okay, stop now.”

“Just call me after you look at it.”

“No.”

“Watch it when you get home. See if you can see what he says.”

“No.”

After we hung up, I watched it one more time.

It starts with just some shaky whiteness. Spin is messing around with the camera, fastening it to his helmet. Then the world swings into view as he lifts the helmet up onto his head. He's near the ski lift. You can hear the whirring of the motors, the clanging of metal, all those muffled sounds in that rare air at the top of the snow-covered mountain. For a second or two, there's a glimpse of the steep white slope below and the wooded valley beyond, but then he's turned away from the slope and facing Laurel.

She's bent over, brushing something off the top of one of her ski boots for the first twenty or thirty seconds, and then she whips her head up and smiles at the camera. She's wearing goggles. All you can see is a silver helmet, the blue-tinted goggles, the long, wavy blond hair, and that perfect smile, and somehow you have it all. As many times as I've watched this, I'm never prepared for her beauty in that instant, when she faces Spin and we see her for the first time. It's the moment when I feel I can see her most clearly, when I can finally see her for who she really is. But the strange thing is, you really can't see her face at all. What's most noticeable is the reflection of Spin in her goggle lenses. There he is, twice, smiling from each lens.

“I'll race you down,” Laurel shouts.

“Okay, you start,” Spin shouts back.

“Oh, you think I need a head start?”

“You might,” he says.

And then she turns, stabs the snow with the tips of her ski poles, and she's gone.

She's fast, skipping along the tops of the moguls. It's a little hard to see here, because it's so bouncy, but she's wearing a bright yellow parka, and we never let her out of our sight, perched as we are on Spin's head. He's finally gaining on her when, suddenly, she cuts into the woods. He cuts in after her. This is the great part. This is the reason Spin sent us the video the same day that he took it. It makes your heart race. He's carving little lines into some deep, untouched powder, speeding down a steep, heavily wooded trail. It actually looks fake in parts. Sally noticed that when we first saw it. It looks animated, like a video game, the way the trees are whipping past.

First they're in among the evergreens and you can hear Spin laughing. He quietly curses once, when he snags a branch with his arm. He stays up, though. He's behind her, and then he's not; she cuts out of sight and he's slaloming his way around the trees. The evergreens are gone. The trees have become just trunks; they're in the deciduous trees now. If they had stopped, Spin would have been able to identify each tree for Laurel. He can tell a maple from an ash, just by the pattern of the bark. Even in the dead of winter, he knows one tree from another. He can closely estimate their ages; he probably would have if they had stopped. But they didn't stop. Spin must have regretted that gentleman's head start he'd granted her. We all laughed about that later, when we watched the video together. He had underestimated her.

Suddenly, she flies out from behind some trees on the left of the screen and almost hits Spin. This is the 2:04 mark I was telling Sally about. He says a word, and then he's skiing very fast behind Laurel.

“She waited until we got to the bottom to tell me she was on the U.S. Olympic team,” Spin told us a few months later, when we all watched the video together.

“Short-listed,” Laurel corrected him. “I wasn't on the team. I was short-listed. I tore my meniscus during the trials.”

So modest.

Spin definitely says something around the two-minute mark. I don't know why I hadn't noticed it before. I watched it. Then I watched it again.

“I'll get you,” he says. Or maybe it's “Look at you.”

It's really something, seeing the world from Spin's perspective. I think that's why I keep watching it. You can hear his breath in that video. You can see the tips of his skis pointing left, right, left, right, then straight down the mountain.

Spin always made everything look easy. You should have seen him play tennis when he was a kid. You should have seen him play the guitar or the banjo. Spin made the varsity hockey team at Holden his freshman year, but he'd been skating here on the lake with us from the time he could walk. That's how I like to think of him now—the way he was before he met Laurel. Out on the lake. Often alone. Practicing stick handling and shooting, his hockey stick snaking along the ice, flicking the puck this way and that. There's a calmness that's specific to a frozen place such as a lake or a ski slope. The cold air traps sound. A skater's edge on crusty ice sounds like the only thing on earth. I can still see him now, gliding backward, skates crossing one over the other so effortlessly. And that thin amber light you get here on the lake on winter afternoons. On weekend mornings, we always had pickup games in front of the house. The loud clacks of the hockey sticks, the triumphant cries, the angry objections and laughter, Whit's roaring protests. We haven't played hockey on the lake in years. Kids play at the other end of the lake now that we're all grown up. The ice freezes here first, but nobody skates on this side of the lake anymore.