The Distinguished Guest (4 page)

After a long time, Alan said, “You know I think you’re in the right, don’t you?”

“It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Well, it may not matter, but I want you to know it, because I’m not going to let you do it. Hurt him. Or more likely, yourself.”

They drove in silence. Alan drove past their turnoff, but it was five minutes or more before Thomas asked, “Where are we going?”

“I’m not sure,” Alan said. “Not home.”

“Dad, I want you to take me home.”

“I think we’re going to New Hampshire,” Alan said.

After a long time, Thomas said, “Dad.”

“We’ll just take a trip,” Alan said. “We’ll just stay away awhile.”

“I don’t want to,” Thomas said.

“Well, I don’t either, but that’s the story. That’s what we’re going to do.”

And for the next three days, Alan and Thomas wandered northern New England. They bought boots and hiked a little on the lower reaches of the White Mountains, through the wide patches of granular
snow held in the shadowed woods. They sought out covered bridges and drove back and forth through them.

They were days of peculiar but real pleasure. They moved from one cheap motel to another, from restaurant to restaurant, from convenience store to convenience store, pretending to be
connoisseurs of this trashy world. (“Which do you prefer, Velveeta or Cheez Whiz?”) They compared bedding, mattresses, the cleanliness of bathrooms, the number of cigarette scars on the
furniture, the number of bugs. And Alan was grateful for nearly every moment of it.

In the end, it was Thomas who suggested it was time to get back. It was a Sunday. His piano lesson was Monday. He needed to practice. They were in what was called a “family-style”
restaurant in a mill town in Maine. Alan had been trying to signal the waitress for the bill. Now he lowered his hand and looked at his son.

“It goes without saying, Thomas, so I’ll say it, that I won’t take you unless you’re ready to let go of this thing with Ettie.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

And that was that. Alan paid the bill, they got in the car and drove back. It got hotter as they moved south, from winter to spring. In their absence, the magnolias on Bowman’s town green
had come into bloom. When they got home, Thomas went directly to the piano. He played for the remainder of the day, and Ettie moved around the house like a shadow.

For several months after that, there was an uncomfortable formality between the boys, and then somehow it ended, and they were once again what they’d often been: the oddest of
friends—Thomas awkward, enthusiastic, too intense; Ettie self-contained and confident.

And still as successful with women as he’d been then. Even when he’d been home earlier this summer, he’d had numberless telephone calls to make, and he confessed to them all at
dinner one night that he’d managed the ending with one woman and the beginning with another badly, so that he was having to scramble not to hurt anyone’s feelings. “It’s a
pretty messed-up, bigamous situation at the moment,” he’d said glumly.

There were jokes about “overlapping” women, there were Groucho Marx, big-a-me, big-of-you jokes, but they were all aware that this—whatever you’d call it: tendency?
ability? failing?—seemed to have become part of who Ettie was.

And of course he was also practical, practical, practical. He was spending this summer in New York, doing a kind of business internship in a bank before he went back to college. And whatever he
did in the end, Alan was sure he would be successful. The gods would smile on Ettie.

As for Thomas, who knew? Alan and Gaby had made him go through four years of college, which was perhaps a mistake. Now he was at the conservatory, in a world they didn’t understand.
Whenever they suggested something for his life, the summer job for instance—Ettie had one after all—he would say, “That’s impossible,” and they would realize that all
their assumptions about what was good for him were irrelevant, maybe even wrongheaded.

Alan’s concern and love for both of his sons made him slightly uneasy around either one alone, but his relations with Thomas were perhaps more tense. He felt this was because he was
naturally more drawn to Thomas, more sympathetic to him. This made him feel protective and anxious on Ettie’s behalf, and made him steel himself against Thomas a little, will himself not to
fall for Thomas’s sloppy, careless charm. Most of all, not to value Thomas’s gifts above Ettie’s, though by nature Alan did, of course. At the same time, it was the presence of
those gifts and the unknown world they’d opened to his son, that sometimes made him feel shut out of Thomas’s life.

What he had noticed, a few moments before, was that Thomas had turned the conversation away from Alan’s interest in his own music to Ettie, to his brother. It was the first time Alan had
remarked this. Maybe Thomas felt too that he was the more natural son for the family he’d been born into. Maybe he was himself aware of trying to make room for Ettie, of not wanting to claim
too much of the attention for himself.

Alan sighed.

“You’re just not looking forward to it, are you?” Thomas asked.

Alan looked over quickly at him. Thomas was smiling. He was thinking of another parent, another child: Lily and Alan. Alan smiled back. “It isn’t bad, as you say. And it’s
never dull, having Lily around. I think she’s a lot frailer than we remember her, though.” Alan usually visited his mother in Chicago once a year or so, but it had been longer this
time. Almost two years. Clary, who’d helped Lily empty out and sell her apartment when they thought she could move into the retirement community, had told him she’d failed a lot in this
interval.

“Yeah, I haven’t seen her for, I dunno, maybe four years,” Thomas said. “But actually I’ve noticed her letters are pretty . . . spidery now. The writing, I
mean.” He lifted his own hands, held them up flat, fingers spread, as though appreciating their steadiness, their power. Alan glanced over at them. They were huge, though the fingers were
long and slender. The tips were slightly spatulate.

He looked at his hands gripping the steering wheel, thinking of how he took their strength, their control for granted. He saw them as extensions, really, of his thinking mind, his brain. He saw
them as necessary tools. He’d injured one once, the right hand, in fact. His drawing hand. He’d been angry at Gaby, at her confession of an affair. In his rage, he put his hand through
a window. He’d sliced a nerve. It had taken months for the nerve to regenerate, months of not knowing whether it would, whether his ability to draw was gone. He and Gaby had been unusually
tender with each other through that time, both stricken with fear and guilt. There was a faint white crescent curving down from the loose skin between thumb and forefinger and across the back of
his hand as a reminder of all of that. Alan turned his hand on the wheel so he couldn’t see it.

He parked the car in the big central lot. He and Thomas agreed, as they walked through its damp, echoing darkness, that Thomas would stay with Lily, once they’d greeted her, and Alan would
go back for the car and swing around to get them and Lily’s luggage.

They were about ten minutes early for Lily’s plane. They started toward her gate, but the sign by the security barrier said that only ticketed passengers could go past it. Alan went back
to the ticket counter to get passes. The line there was long and it was moving slowly. He felt a rush of irritation at Thomas. This was his fault. If he’d been on time, they’d be at the
gate now, with the passes. He returned to where his son was standing slouched against the wall, unshaven and scruffy. He looked like a drug dealer, Alan thought.

“There’s not going to be time to get passes before the plane comes,” he said. His voice was chilly. “We’ll just have to hope she can make it by herself.”

They leaned silently again the wall for a minute or two. Then Thomas said, “Maybe they’ll escort her, the way they do with kids.” There was apology in his voice, and Alan
instantly forgave him. “Or if she’s really out of it, maybe they’ll put her in a wheelchair.”

Alan shrugged. “Well, let’s not worry. Either way, I’m sure Lily will be okay. She’ll be running the show. Whatever it is.”

Some passengers had begun to file past them now. Alan stepped forward and asked one of them where they were from. Not Chicago. Washington. He and Thomas stepped back against the wall once
more.

And then the wave of people redoubled itself. Another plane must have unloaded. Alan and Thomas stepped forward and stood about four feet apart, letting the crowd flow around them, scanning.

“Check it out, Dad,” Thomas called suddenly. Alan looked at him. He was laughing. “We’re surrounded by Lilys.” He gestured. “It’s like
camouflage.”

And it was true. There was what seemed to be a convention suddenly, of old women. Old women in pantsuits and pastel sweatsuits, many with that extraordinary white hair touched to pale blue.
There was a powdery floral scent in the air. The women were wearing name tags, most of them. “Hi, I’m Betty.” “Hi, I’m Louise Farmer.” They moved more slowly
than the other passengers, who hurtled through them, grim-faced and determined. They were in clusters of two and three, the unimpeded helping those with walkers and canes. Their bright, thin voices
swam around Thomas and Alan.

“I give up,” Thomas called over. “I’ll never spot her.”

“Oh yes you will,” Alan answered. “There’s no one like Lily. You’ll know her when you see her.”

But they didn’t. Alan didn’t. She had to plant herself in front of him, and even then his instinct was to keep looking past this tiny creature teetering on two canes before him, to
keep searching for his true mother.

“A fine welcome,” she said, and he almost jumped at hearing her voice.

Gaby padded barefoot around the dark kitchen, her hands moving quickly and surely in and out among the familiar shadowy shapes, making coffee. Every time she opened the
refrigerator, a knife of light slashed into the room and she had to squint her eyes shut, but she didn’t turn the lights on. She never did. She didn’t like to at this hour.
Her
hour, of the day. Of the night.

“How do you stand it?” her friends asked her. “God, four
A
.
M
., I could never do it.” But this was Gaby’s routine,
she was used to it. Not just used to it—she’d chosen it, she’d shaped it. At work by four-thirty, she was usually home again around two. In mid-afternoon she napped for several
hours and then, around five, she got up and returned once more to the shop for an hour or so to close up.

It had been the children who had waked her in the past, returning noisily from their after-school activities, banging the doors of whatever house they were in, thumping and clattering, dropping
things—books, musical instruments, sports equipment. Now it was Alan, who came in and gently touched her shoulder. Often they sat and talked in a desultory intimacy as she came slowly awake.
This had come to be, too, the time of day they were most likely to make love, with the late sun streaming in the room and lying with a warm, hard light across their aging bodies. And in the last
few years, he’d taken to coming back to the shop with her almost every day and helping her with the closing up.

In the winter, yes, sometimes she did mind it. It was especially hard sliding into the frigid embrace of the car in the darkness, her breath pluming smokily from her nose. The car’s heater
would just have begun to blow tepid air on her legs by the time she was pulling up at the shop. The shop itself was cold and hollow-feeling until the oven’s heat and the odor of baking made
the space seem slowly smaller and more welcoming.

She loved these days though, the pale darkness of summer. The windows were open to the noises of daybreak—the first delicate stirrings of trees in the wind, the fierce, awakened energy of
the birds. And she loved to watch the pearly light imperceptibly arriving as she moved alone in her house while Alan still slept. Alan, and Lily today. She’d been there four days.

And had already seemingly made herself perfectly at home. They’d put her in the guest suite and arranged it as she requested, as a kind of bedroom-office. Lily had immediately settled into
a routine centered on her work—boxes of papers she’d sent ahead by train and now had Alan set out around her worktable for her. And they had settled into a routine too, centered on
her.

It was clear to Gaby that Alan was having more difficulty adjusting to Lily’s presence than she was. And it was true that when she was with them, Lily
presided
, in a sense, in spite
of having to make her pronouncements in a weakened, whispery voice. She could be biting, she could be sarcastic, and Alan often responded with his own version of the same thing.

Partly for this reason, Gaby has been getting the old woman ready for bed at night. Alan gets her to the bathroom in the morning and leaves her sitting in bed with coffee, awaiting Noreen, the
woman they’ve hired to help out. Since Noreen leaves before dinner each day, Gaby decided quickly that it would be better for both Alan and Lily if she were the one with bedtime duty.

She has surprised herself with the tenderness she sometimes feels for Lily as she performs this service. Just last night, as Gaby was leading her from the bathroom to the bedroom to help her get
undressed, Lily whispered in that rushed, breathless way, “ ‘When you shall be old, you shall stretch forth your hands and another shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst
not go.’ ”

“Ah,” Gaby had said, for want of anything better to say. Was this a protest?

“John. The Book of John,” Lily whispered.

“Oh yes!” Gaby said, as though she recollected the passage.

Lily sat carefully down on the edge of the bed. She tilted her head back and her face labored a moment. Then she incanted softly, “ ‘When you were young, you girded yourself and
walked whither thou wouldst: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands and another shall gird thee and carry thee whither thou wouldst not.’ ”

A few moments later, as Gaby knelt down to untie and remove Lily’s shoes, she had a sense, suddenly, of doing something holy, something that made her feel, in some deep way,
of use
.
Holding the shapeless foot in its thick stocking on her lap, she had felt tears of compassion and love spring to her eyes.