Whistler: A Novel by Ann Patchett - 3

I looked at my watch. Five o’clock. I told my sister I had to go.

Leda, who had sunk into the couch while listening, sat up. “You can’t leave. You’ve only told me the part of the story I already knew.”

“I’m sorry. I had to start at the beginning.”

“So you start at the beginning, so what? This isn’t a therapy session. You have plenty of time.”

“I don’t. I promised Jonathan I’d be home. He’s leaving town in the morning. We were going to have a day together and then we ran into Eddie and then I wanted to come and talk to you. I need to go home for dinner. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be gone.”

“Where’s Jonathan going?”

“Wisconsin. He and his sister are cleaning out their mother’s house. There’s a lot that needs to be done before they can get it on the market.” Jonathan and Bea’s mother had died six months before, at the age of ninety-six. The enormous force of her will, combined with Bea’s tireless service, had kept her in her own house right up to the end.

“But his sister lives there. Can’t she do it?”

I shook my head. “Bea gets stuck with everything. She did all the caretaking because Jonathan was working, and now that he’s not working …”

“… he needs to clean out some closets. Okay, I get that, but I still want to hear about the accident.”

“We’ll do the rest of it later, I promise.”

Leda pushed her feet beneath my thigh. “I feel like I’ve been waiting forty-four years for this one, and now I’m impatient.”

I put down my emotional support pillow and stretched my arms overhead. “What if I give you the punch line?”

“What’s the punch line?” my sister asked.

“We lived.”

The late-afternoon light was soft and the leaves on the trees were new and everything in me wanted to walk along the edge of the park but time was short so I took the stairs down to the subway. Even then, I wouldn’t make it to Grand Central for the Metro-North 5:38, which should have been my train. I had once dreaded peak service, but remote work had changed everything in New York, including opening up more seats on trains. The people I’d commuted beside for years were probably living in Montana now. I’d text Jonathan and tell him to meet me at the restaurant, knowing full well that he would be standing on the platform when the train pulled in. There were things that Jonathan understood that few men had ever considered, including the comfort of seeing your spouse on the station platform instead of searching the parking lot for your car.

On the subway to the train, my head was full of things I hadn’t said or thought about in decades. I’d been interested in my own childhood when I was a child, but Eddie wasn’t the one who’d knocked childhood out of me. My mother’s third husband, Lucas Ekker, got the credit for that, and it wasn’t even Lucas as a person as much as it was Lucas as a concept who brought about that end. The first two husbands had left me so completely (until they came back) that when the third candidate for fatherhood arrived, I had reached my limit—no more, not interested. I was twelve, and my mother had abandoned the mythology of the Greeks in favor of a book called Name Your Baby . She gave birth first to Christopher and then Matthew. Lucas was a Methodist and so she converted from nothing to something, another dividing gulf we failed to cross as a family. She had the opportunity to start again from scratch, and good for her, and good for all the Ekkers, but it left Leda and me adrift in different ways. Leda grew up and sought the training to dig into other people’s childhoods so that she could sort them out, and I committed myself to reading and locked the rest away. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” First Corinthians, basic even for the nonbelievers. I did not become a man, but that was part of the problem. First Corinthians did not properly account for the experiences of women. I couldn’t say exactly where childhood ends, but dealing with your pregnant mother at the age of thirteen was as good a place as any to wrap it up.

Lucas Ekker had been my mother’s author at Houghton Mifflin. She saw the sales potential in his first book, Positivity! , where her colleagues saw only gifty nonsense. Thanks to her vision, he stayed on the New York Times list longer than Dale Carnegie. My mother went on the road with Lucas whenever possible, leaving Leda and me with neighbors, cousins, school friends, and, later, Eddie. This was back in the days of local television, local newspapers, stand-alone Sunday book sections. Every city could be a love-fest, a media-fest. If Lucas hadn’t invented positive thinking, he surely knew how to pitch it, and people ate it up. Smile for no reason in two-minute intervals. Hum in the car—the vibration of the larynx encouraged endorphins. Affix gratitude lists on the refrigerator with a rainbow magnet, one for each member of the family. When my mother married him, two years after divorcing Eddie, I had my own gratitude list to fill in on the refrigerator.

It wasn’t child abuse I suffered, but it was certainly child estrangement. The success of Positivity! was followed by a rehash called Positively Positive! Then came The Positivity Workbook! Positively Christmas! American Positivity! The Positivity Pop! and Positive Every Day! , which offered 365 platitudes in a tear-off format. They bought a big house on the other side of Winchester, where, despite the ample number of bedrooms, Leda and I continued to sleep side by side in our twin beds, the lamp with the dotted swiss shade between us. We created our own continuity.

It was the AIDS epidemic that ultimately crushed the Ekker empire, a blow that came later than it should have. No one wanted to be positive anymore. As bitter as Lucas was, and as unable to imagine his empire with a different brand, there was plenty of money to see them through. My mother was a numbers person and Lucas was not. To his credit, he had left all the financial decisions to her. She told him he could have the gold Rolex or the Porsche or the boat, but not the gold Rolex and the Porsche and the boat. He went for the car, and all four of us went through college free of debt.

I came up from the tunnel beneath 42nd Street and crossed through the terminal of Grand Central at a good clip, glancing up to see the blue arch of the ceiling painted with stars. Who wouldn’t be distracted by stars? Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had made the ultimate sacrifice for her country and still found the energy to save this beautiful train station, a living testament to not being defeated by one’s past. Jackie was also a book editor, I remembered that now. I wondered if Eddie had ever met her.

I checked the board and then rushed to track nine, slipping through the doors at the last possible minute. As I suspected, I had no trouble finding a seat. On the 6:23, I finally got the thing I needed, thirty quiet minutes to look out the window and explain myself to no one.

When I saw Jonathan waiting on the platform in his jeans and white dress shirt (he had yet to master the art of dressing for retirement), I thought that I might miss him if he stayed in Wisconsin too long. I remembered how Leda hadn’t been in favor of our marriage at the time. “Your absent father dies and you immediately take up with the hospital administrator who’s seventeen years older than you? I don’t think you need a professional to identify the problem with that.” But that was twenty years ago. Now she loved Jonathan. Everyone loved Jonathan.

“I got sushi,” he said, giving me a squeeze. “I thought this was a night best spent at home.”

Home. Oh, home would be better than anything. I hadn’t thought of that. There was still plenty of light. We could sit in the backyard and look at the peonies having their moment, take off our shoes and sink our feet into grass. I felt like I’d been in the city for a semester.

He walked me to the car and opened my door, then waited for me to settle myself in. “I can’t imagine how tired you must be,” he said.

I smiled up at him, thinking he might reach over to fasten my seat belt for me. “It was a day, for sure.”

“Did Leda help you get things sorted out?”

“We talked about it. I’m not exactly sure what sorting it out would have entailed.”

Jonathan got in. “I wish you’d come with me,” he said, looking over his shoulder as he backed out the car. “I know you don’t want to, but it’s pretty this time of year and Bea would die to see you.”

“You know I’m not going to Wisconsin.”

“But you could at least consider it for a minute, couldn’t you?”

I shook my head. I didn’t fly. I had stopped flying when my father, Buddy Zabriskie, died, which was to say that Jonathan and I had never been on a plane together. He knew my limitations when he married me, even though he would occasionally push on them to see if they held. We had taken our honeymoon on Cape Cod, our vacations in Maine. One of his daughters lived in Philadelphia and the other in Baltimore, and in both cases it was quicker to drive than it was to fly. I understood the inconvenience I caused, but other people lived with great burdens. There were wives who wouldn’t take the subway, wives who wouldn’t get on elevators. There were wives who were afraid to drive over a bridge and wives who refused to take the tunnel that ran beneath the river. We had taken the Queen Mary to Southampton and then taken the Chunnel to Paris for our tenth anniversary. It was splendid.

Jonathan once asked my sister over Thanksgiving dinner if she didn’t know someone who could fix me—hypnotism or EMDR—and to my great surprise my sister said yes, she could put me in touch with someone if I were willing to try. I handed her a dish of roasted sweet potatoes and said I was not willing to try. I said if she had had a similar experience on a flight, she might well have come to a similar conclusion, not to mention the fact that I believed it was healthy for Jonathan to spend time with his sister, in the same way I believed it was healthy for me to spend time with mine.

“I don’t want to leave you alone now,” he said. “I wish you’d come.”

“Why shouldn’t I be alone?”

“Well, clearly it rattled you, seeing him.”

“I was surprised, not rattled. I was happy to see Eddie. I loved seeing Eddie.”

“So, do you think you’ll call him?”

“Of course I’ll call him.” I looked at his profile. He kept his eyes on the road. “You liked Eddie, didn’t you?”

Jonathan nodded. “I did.”

I wondered if he’d gotten any packing done since he’d come home or if he’d just been taking apart the afternoon in his mind. “So what’s the problem?”

He stayed quiet a beat too long, then gave me a small smile that was meant to indicate bravery. “I want to be sure you’ll be here when I get back.”

“Seriously? You think I’m going to run off with Eddie Triplett?”

“I don’t,” he said. “But you have to admit, he seems to love you more than most of them do.”

“Jonathan, he’s my stepfather.”

That explanation provided no comfort at all.

I had been a young-looking thirty-one when we married, while Jonathan’s hair had gone gray around the time his wife died. More than one waitress commented on how nice it was to see a father and daughter going out to dinner in those early days. Neither one of us knew what to do with that one. I remember a particular dress I loved, a navy blue pinafore that I wore over a white blouse, and one day Jonathan asked if I would please get rid of it. “Give it to one of your tall students,” he said. “It makes you look like you’re twelve.”

These days no one looked at us twice because I was no longer his much younger wife. I was a woman safely past fifty, and Jonathan was newly seventy. We were at last a perfect match, and my husband wanted to make sure I didn’t mess it up while he was out of town.

I would tell this to Eddie someday. I would tell him that Jonathan was worried about what could happen, and then the two of us would laugh.

Jonathan and I ate our sushi in the backyard, sitting in Adirondack chairs. We stayed there until the sun, tired of waiting for us to go back inside, called it a night. We talked about his mother’s house and the work there was to do, how to dispose of a lifetime’s possessions. One of Bea’s sons was planning to drive over from Madison to help for a couple of days, and Jonathan’s older daughter, Sydney, was going to fly in from Philadelphia. Bea’s husband would be there, too. I still didn’t feel guilty. If anything, I felt glad there were so many hands on deck.

“It would be nice to be able to travel,” Jonathan said.

“We travel,” I said, seeing how the conversation was about to circle back.

“You get to be a certain age and you realize that time isn’t stretching out forever.”

“Is there something you want to tell me?” I’d brought out a box of strawberries and we ate them for dessert, dropping their little green hats into the lawn.

“I worked for a long time,” he said.

“I know you did.”

“I thought when the time came to retire, I’d be able to see some things. I don’t need to go around the world, but I’d like to see some things.”

“Jonathan, we’ve known each other for more than twenty years.”

“It’s not just that you’re afraid to fly,” he said. “It’s that you can’t ever go places with me.”

“What are you talking about?” Was he anxious about the trip?

“We have plenty of money, but you want to keep working.”

“We both worked. We always worked. No one came to the school and offered me a buyout. I’m still working.”

He looked at me. “This is the time we have.”

“So you want me to quit my job and start flying again? Neither one of those things interests me.”

“Well, see, that’s the problem,” he said. “Right there.”

“I’m not saying you don’t interest me. For as long as you’ve known me, I’ve been a non-flying schoolteacher. I haven’t changed. We’ve rented the house in Wellfleet this summer. We still go away.” Jonathan was a wonderful person, a wonderful husband, who had become a little destabilized by his newfound free time. He was adjusting. I held fast to that.

“I want to go to Fiji,” he said. “I want to see the Milford Sound.”

I didn’t say anything. I waited to see where this was going. We were both looking up at the stars.

“All of Candy’s dreams had to do with travel. We were going to go places when the girls got older, when we had some money put away.”

“Candy?”

“She never got to do any of it. She was forty years old when she died, and for the years before she died, she was too sick to travel. She’d been to Rome and Florence when she was in college and that was it.”

“And I’m sorry. It was a terrible thing, but I don’t see—”

“It’s that we die, and we should think about doing the things we want to do while we’re able to do them.”

It might have been the looming prospect of cleaning out his mother’s house that was bringing this up, or maybe, if he really did feel threatened by the arrival of Eddie, he was letting me know that he could go, too. Maybe he was thinking about how gladly his first wife would have gone to Wisconsin to sort through the boxes of old report cards in the attic. All I knew was that he was leaving in the morning and I didn’t want to fight. “Maybe one of the girls would want to go.”

“Go where?”

“I don’t know. Fiji, the Milford Sound.”

He shook his head. “They’ve got their lives. They can’t walk out the door and travel with me.”

And clearly I could. “Ask Bea,” I said.

He sat with that one for a while.

“Bea never gets to go anywhere,” I said. “She’s been stuck taking care of your mother all these years. I bet she’d be thrilled to go.”

Jonathan ate another strawberry. “Maybe.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to talk about it.”

He waited. I could tell he was rolling the idea around, seeing if he could picture the two of them in Kyoto or Rome. “I’m sorry I said anything about Candy.”

“You know you can talk about Candy.”

He shook his head. “I still feel bad for her, that’s all. I think about all the things she missed, not only the travel but the weddings, the grandkids.”

I reached out across the wide arm of my chair and took his hand. The lightning bugs dotted the grass with brief yellow light. “You still have to pack.”

When we stood up, we held each other for a couple of minutes, and when we went inside, I took the suitcase off the bed and we made love, which was the best way I knew to reassure him. I was telling him he could go and come back and I would be here and it would all be fine.

In the morning I drove Jonathan to the airport, the second most reassuring thing I knew how to do. I thought about calling my mother on the drive home and telling her I’d seen Eddie, but I kept getting stuck on that week after the car accident when I was nine. Leda was still in the hospital on the second floor, unable to achieve peristalsis in her bowels, and Eddie was in the hospital on the fourth floor, having had surgery on his ankle. In 1980 the insurance companies were fine with people staying in the hospital until they had recovered. All I had was a brutal row of stitches down the left side of my face. My mother had arranged for me to stay at the Cathcarts’ house down the street. I would go to school with my best friend, Tavia. There was plenty to worry about, but nothing was coming to an end. I liked going to the hospital. I’d get Leda to write a note to Eddie: “Dear Eddie, I am sorry about your foot. Feel better soon. Love, Leda.” Leda confessed that she didn’t know how to spell “ankle.” Then I would take the stairs two flights up and deliver it, waiting for Eddie to write out his reply. “Dear Leda,” he began on the back of the same piece of paper, “I am sorry to hear you are still in the hospital. I hope there is more fun on your floor than there is on my floor. The fourth floor is the dullest floor of all. The food is bad and I am lonely. I think they should put us together in a double room. I would give you my ice cream. Love, Eddie.”

Eddie did not seem to be having such a terrible time. Our mother brought in the fat manuscript he’d been working on, and he sat propped up in bed, marking away. Eddie in the hospital didn’t seem so different from Eddie at home, except that he was wearing a green gown beneath his robe. What was different was me. I wanted to stay right there with him. I wanted to sleep rolled up at the foot of his bed.

“How are the stitches?” he asked me.

“Itchy.” I understood the stitches were small potatoes compared to everything else going on.

“You know scars make people more interesting. And not just pirates, all people.”

When I asked Eddie if he had any scars, he kicked back the covers and stuck out his bare leg, the one without the cast. His leg was pale and covered in long dark hair, an unattractive leg and still somehow thrilling to see. “Right there,” he said. “The neighbor’s dog Judith tried to take my kneecap off. Twenty-three stitches, thank you very much.”

I had had twenty-six stitches in my face, but I didn’t want to seem competitive. “How old were you?”

“Twelve.”

“What happened to Judith?”

“Not a thing. Her family had a nice, big backyard, and they fenced it in. I don’t think Judith was inconvenienced at all.”

I smiled. I had always wanted a dog.

“You know what I like about you, Daphne?”

“What?”

“You asked about the dog. You knew I was fine. You’re looking right at me. You wanted to make sure Judith was okay.”

“Well, I’m glad she didn’t eat your kneecap.”

“You and me both,” he said. “Go on and take the mail to your sister. I’m going to go back to work. No one wants to be fired when they’re in the hospital.”

I went to the bed and took the letter and gave Eddie a kiss. I believed that we were inseparable. We’d always liked each other hugely, but things were different now.

Buddy came to see us in the hospital, or he came to see Leda but both of us were there. Our mother, who must have been the one to tell him, left the room as soon as he walked in, as if there were some urgent mission she had only now remembered. He brought Leda a stuffed lobster and made it scuttle up the bed, which made her laugh. He said he was sorry he hadn’t brought one for me as well. “You were in an accident, too,” he said, maybe thinking that Leda’s appendix had ruptured in a car wreck. I told him I was fine, and Leda said the lobster could sleep on the nightstand between our beds so that it would be both of ours.

Four days later everything went to hell. I walked to our house after school and found my mother in the kitchen, sobbing, sobbing, her head down on the kitchen table, shoulders heaving. Surely Eddie or Leda was dead—I just didn’t know which one. Either way I wouldn’t be able to survive. I stood in the doorway, shaking, and when at last she looked up and saw me, my mother said that she and Eddie were getting divorced.

“What?”

She took a paper napkin out of the holder on the table and pressed it to her eyes. She could not stop crying. “I’m divorcing Eddie.”

“Why?” Was that an actual word I said, or did I make a sound?

“He could have killed you.” It was as if the accident had just happened, or was happening right this minute— BOOM! —only this time she was in the car. “Driving around in the dark like that, going out at night.”

“We were on our way home. It wasn’t his fault,” I said. I wasn’t crying. No one was dead, and what she was talking about was some sort of lunacy I could surely explain away.

“Leda’s in the hospital at death’s door, and then he takes you out and almost kills you.”

It was my death she was worried about? It was me she was afraid of losing? “The car slipped.”

“I can’t trust him. I can’t trust him with my children.”

“It’s Eddie ,” I said, because surely she’d forgotten who she was talking about. Eddie was more trustworthy than the rest of us put together.

Some version of this conversation happened again another twenty or thirty or forty times over the next month, and through the constant telling my mother honed the tale. Eddie had to leave our family because he had been so careless with my life. He had sent me out in the snow to find help. He did not bother to do it himself, even though his ankle was broken and his foot was pinned in place by the emergency brake. It was my fault that they were getting divorced?

“Not your fault, not my fault. His fault,” my mother said.

That part I never listened to because clearly it was my fault if she had to get divorced for my safety. That was the truth I carried with me. I chewed it up and swallowed it without examination. I was nine. My heart exploded with the blow.

But now I was fifty-three and driving back from LaGuardia on a Saturday morning, and for the first time I was wondering what had changed between the day after the accident, when we had been found at the raspberry farm, and four days after that, when I came upon my mother crying in the kitchen. What about those four days in which my mother went from one floor of the hospital to the other, sitting by Leda’s bed, sitting by Eddie’s bed? She was exhausted and often wept, but she was weeping with gratitude. Everyone was alive.

At nine I didn’t know enough to interrogate the story, and when it all became too painful to carry, I put it away. But it wasn’t painful now. Now this thing we’d lived through was a curiosity, and not one I was going to solve on the Hutchinson River Parkway coming back from the airport. I wasn’t going to call my mother until I had sorted it out, talked it through with Leda. When I got back to the house, I called Eddie instead.

He answered on the first ring. “Daphne!” he cried.

“Eddie!” I said.

“I don’t want to say that I’ve been walking around with my phone in my hand, but I’ve been walking around with my phone in my hand.”

“Is your heart on your sleeve?”

“Can you see it?”

“It’s radiant.”

“All the way in Westchester. I wouldn’t have thought. Oh, Daphne, it’s so good to hear your voice.”

“I feel the same way.” Eddie had aged, as all of us had aged, but his voice was still his voice. I would have been happy listening to him read me a takeout menu from a Greek restaurant: spanakopita, tzatziki, baklava.

“I’ve been carrying around my memory of you for a long time now and still you are remarkably fresh. How long has it been again?”

I told him, forty-four years.

He whistled. “Forty-four years. Isn’t that something? Now here you are all grown up and married. Did you have a nice wedding? I meant to ask you that yesterday. Did Buddy Zabriskie walk you down the aisle?”

“It was a nice wedding, very small, but Buddy died before I got married. That’s how I met Jonathan. I met him in the hospital when Buddy was sick.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Eddie said, and I could hear it in his voice. He truly was sorry. “I wasn’t allowed to say it at the time, but I was enormously fond of your father.”

“You knew him?”

“I’m sure I didn’t know him, but I’d do the handoffs when he came to get you and Leda. Or I’d drive to Gloucester to pick you up. Do you remember?”

And then I did remember in a fuzzy way, the joy of Eddie coming to my father’s apartment to reclaim us, the careful suppression of that joy until we were back on the highway. “I was so afraid of hurting Buddy’s feelings,” I said. “We never wanted him to know how happy we were to be leaving.” Or how happy we were to see Eddie.

“He was such a decent man who had no business getting married, certainly no business having children. I remember as soon as we’d gotten you all strapped into the backseat he’d close the door and look at me, and his eyes would be huge and he’d give his head a little shake, like he was saying, What the hell happened? All he wanted was to be out on his boat, have a couple of beers with the guys at the end of the day. Your mother was always screaming at him to keep hats on both of you.”

“Is that why Buddy was always buying us hats?”

“He was completely flummoxed by girls. He might have done better with boys, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Did he feed you Cheetos the whole time you were there?”

“Pretty much.”

“You were always dusted with orange when you came back. Did you ever read that Mishima novel, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea ?”

I smiled. I had.

“That was your father. His nature was to be on the ocean. Your mother thought she could change him, but no one changes another person’s nature.”

“Why did she even want to try?” That was the part I’d never understood.

“Well, Buddy Zabriskie was a notably attractive man. Virile, you know? Women were on him like a flock of seagulls.” Eddie sighed. “Your poor mother. She wasn’t much for picking husbands.”

“She married a third time. That one stuck.”

“Third time’s the charm. What’s this one like?”

“Positively positive.”

“How do you mean that?”

“She married Lucas Ekker. Do you remember those books?”

“She married Lucas Ekker ? I’m speechless.”

“Did you know him?”

“Of course I knew him! Your mother was his publicist when we worked at Houghton. What a pontificating bore of a man.”

“That’s him.”

“I shudder to imagine the through line between Buddy Zabriskie, myself, and Lucas Ekker.”

“My mother had range.”

“Well, I wish her every happiness. I do. She deserves some peace in her life. Did you tell her that we ran into each other?”

“I haven’t yet.” The phone and I went out the kitchen door and into the backyard, where I sat in Jonathan’s Adirondack chair.

“There’s a fear, of course, that once you do, I’ll never hear from you again. I’ll have to put your memory back in its little box, but even if that’s the case, this has been wonderful for me. I can’t begin to tell you what it’s meant to see you again after so many years, to be able to talk like this.”

“Why are you talking like one of us is about to die?”

“Because I’m afraid of getting my hopes up.”

Two tiny rabbits were grazing their way through the tender spinach in one of Jonathan’s raised beds. Rabbit Mecca. “If my mother told me you were a Russian operative working to overthrow democratic elections, I’d still want to go to dinner with you.”

“Would you? Oh, Daphne, that would be wonderful. I’ll expense the whole thing to the Kremlin. Bring Jonathan! Maybe Leda and her husband would like to come as well.”

“Jonathan’s in Wisconsin with his sister, cleaning out their mother’s house.”

This information was met with such prolonged silence that I wondered if the call had dropped. “Are you there?”

“Sorry,” he said. “Thinking.”

“I can wait. I’m in the backyard. It’s nice out here.”

“I have to go to a party tomorrow night at the Century Club.”

“Some of the parents have graduation parties for the girls there. They always like to rope in a teacher or two. It’s extra fancy.”

“That’s the place. This party will be extra fancy, black-tie. I’d asked a friend to go with me, but my friend caught a cold, a summer cold. She made her regrets this morning. The thing is, there’s no way for me not to go. Fiftieth anniversary, fifty couples, very precise. Polly would never forgive me if I didn’t come, or if I came and didn’t bring someone. Forty-nine and a half couples for her fiftieth wedding anniversary would kill her.”

“Is this an invitation?”

“It would be, if the thought of asking you didn’t seem so overwhelming.”

“I’d be happy to go with you.”

Again, there was silence on the line, and this time I knew to wait. I stretched my legs out in front of me, tilted my face up to the sun. Jonathan had wanted a retirement party, a fancy one, and I had thrown it for him, which meant I had the perfect dress to wear to the Century Club.

“I used to think that if I ever saw you again it would be like this,” Eddie said, his voice quiet.

“Like what?” I asked. I wanted to hear him say it.

“Like it was still the two of us, like we were in the car.”

“I know,” I said, even though I had failed to imagine what it would be like to see Eddie again. After the end of childhood, I had failed to imagine him at all.

“Do me one more favor.”

“Name it.”

“Don’t tell your mother you’re going with me. You can tell her once it’s over, but I don’t want to worry that you’re going to call her before I see you and then you’ll decide not to go.”

“You really are a Russian operative, aren’t you?”

“It’s a job,” he said.

“I’ll call my mother next week.”

“You were always a kind child, Daphne, and you grew up to be a kind adult.”

Eddie said he would hire a car and pick me up in Bronxville. I told him to pick me up at Leda’s. “That way I won’t have to go home if it’s late. I’ll spend the night in the city. I sleep there all the time.” I gave him the Has’ address at the Gallant Green. I told him I would see him tomorrow.

The whiff of betrayal where my mother was concerned did not trouble me. I called her faithfully once or twice a week, as did my sister, as did my brother Christopher’s wife, Paula, the favorite. My brother Matthew was married to a dentist named Lyle, and Lyle, like my brothers, was not held to the standards of regular calls, and of course Jonathan and Leda’s husband, Steve, were not expected to call at all. Such were the laws of patriarchy. Since my mother did not believe the phone worked both ways, there was no chance I would hear from her and be forced into a lie. I would simply tell her the next time we spoke that Jonathan and I had run into Eddie at the Met.

That I wouldn’t tell Jonathan I was going to the Century Club with Eddie was the more troubling omission. I didn’t want to lie to my husband, but I also didn’t want him packing boxes in Wisconsin while worrying that I was running off with my stepfather. He would never tell me not to go, but it would bother him, which would bother me. Whatever happened between me and Eddie this time around needed to be between the two of us.

Whenever the parents of one of my students got a divorce, or the parents of any of the girls at school, I made myself available. The first one was a sweet girl named Hannah, who, after being bright and talkative for nearly an entire semester of British literature survey, drifted to the far left-hand corner of the classroom, put her head on the desk, and fell asleep. After class I asked her if she was sick, and she said she wasn’t sick, only tired. Then she failed to hand in her next two papers. When I talked to her about that she said she was sorry but she was very, very tired. I told her she should talk to the nurse, but she declined. I told her that I would need to call her parents and she stood up and closed the door to my classroom. Her parents, she told me, were getting divorced.

Jonathan believes we all have our ministries. He would have said that his was metastatic melanoma, but in truth it was much larger than that. Jonathan’s ministry was loss, the loss of a spouse, sure, but he knew how to translate that into the loss of a friend, a parent, a child. He had been a brilliant hospital administrator because he never stayed in his office. When he walked the halls, he kept an eye out for suffering. Jonathan knew how to stand beside suffering, not only the patients and their families, but the nurses and the doctors and the housekeeping staff. He knew when to speak and when to say nothing, when to bring a glass of water or take a stranger in his arms. He believed it was his job to comfort people, and he never turned away from the responsibility. That’s the way it was for me and the girls whose parents were splitting up. I could repeat those platitudes that parents spit out about how it wasn’t the daughter’s fault because they were all true. It wasn’t her fault, but she was the one who’d have to live with it. Sometimes it was only one lunch we had, while other girls stayed close to me for months. It was a terrible loss for all of them, the end of their lives as they’d known it. Funny to think that what I was drawing on was my experience with my father, who I didn’t know to miss until he was dead. The pain of missing Eddie was too much for me to contemplate, especially since I was the stated reason he’d been sent away.

I texted my sister and made plans to spend the next night at her apartment. Leda and Steve had plenty of empty beds. Neither of the girls were home from college yet. Only their son, Henry, was around, and Henry Ha was always glad to see me.

“Ask Eddie to come early and have a drink with us,” Leda said. “Do you think he’d do that?”

“I know he would.”

“Do you have any idea what he drinks?”

Leda had every last thing any guest could ever imagine, but this was for Eddie and she wanted to get it right. I told her he drank Chardonnay.

Jonathan called the next afternoon when I was folding my dress into an overnight bag. “Do we want a set of china for twelve?” he asked.

“China?”

“Bread plates, salad plates, dessert plates, luncheon plates, cream soup bowls, flat soup bowls, serving pieces including but not limited to a tureen and a turkey platter, all in zippered, quilted bags.”

“Well, we don’t need it,” I said, wondering where we would even put it. “We don’t use the china we have.” The china we had was the china Jonathan and Candy picked out for their wedding registry, back in the days of sterling flatware and stemmed water glasses and place-card holders that looked like tiny bouquets of porcelain flowers. This, no doubt, was the china Jonathan’s mother had picked out when she got married, unless it was her mother’s china. “Do you want it? Is it sentimental?” I went in the closet to look for my evening bag.

“Everything is sentimental. All of it matters and none of it matters. You can’t believe all the things I’m not asking you about. Bea said I should ask about the china.”

“Bea doesn’t want it?”

“Bea wants to hire a service that sells what they can and carts the rest to the dump.”

I felt a surge of fondness for my sister-in-law. “It’s not a bad plan.”

“We have to at least look through it all. This house is my mother’s archive—the history of an entire life as recorded in personal possessions.”

I found a black satin clutch and dropped it in the bag, then took out a box of jewelry from the bottom drawer of the dresser. I never wore my pearls. “I’m guessing the girls don’t want china.”

“I think Sydney came out here to make sure I didn’t send her anything. She keeps texting pictures to Rachel, but Rachel doesn’t want anything either.”

I sat down on the bed in an attempt to make myself pay attention to what he was saying. “I hope you don’t drive home in a moving van, but you should take what you want.”

“I don’t know what I want. You should see the Christmas tree ornaments, the ones she collected on trips, the ones Bea and I made when we were kids. But it’s not just Christmas tree ornaments, it’s Easter rabbits and Easter baskets and Thanksgiving napkins and Fourth of July hats, thirty years’ worth of Gourmet magazine in binders, three giant boxes of loose photographs. We’re going through all my father’s stuff, too.”

“Your father’s stuff?” Jonathan’s father had died years before Jonathan and I met.

“She kept all of it. Handkerchiefs, belts, Rotary bulletins.”

I lay back on the bed, my head beside my tiny overnight bag. “It’s too much.”

“I want to scream at her, but she’s dead. She’s old and she’s dead.”

“Listen to me. Remember when I said you should take a trip with Bea? Start planning it now. Call the service that comes and takes it all away. Have them come three days from now. Spend three days going through things, and if you don’t look at all of it, well, you don’t. Otherwise you’re going to go out of your mind.”

“Oh, too late for that. Everything in my bedroom is still there, all the stuff in the desk drawers, the closet, under the bed. It’s like Pompeii. I feel like I’m going to get stuck here, like I’m going to fall into the past and it’s never going to let go of me.”

How interesting to think of two married people falling into their own separate pasts so far away from one another but at the same time. “Where does Bea want to go? Rome? Prague?”

“Norway,” he said.

I closed my eyes. I saw my husband and his sister on a ship looking out over the fjords. I told him I loved him.

“I love you, too,” he said. “I love you so much that I’m glad you’re not here. Have you called Eddie Triplett?”

“Not yet.”

“You should call him. He’s probably waiting to hear from you.”

“Probably,” I said. Lying had never felt like such an act of kindness. Jonathan didn’t need one more thing to worry about, especially when there was nothing to worry about.

After we got off the phone, I found the shoes I’d bought for the retirement party, stashed away in their box. They were both sparkly and low to the ground. I gathered up the makeup I never wore and tossed that in as well. Once I had everything together, I locked up the house and walked to the train station.

My nephew Henry ate the second half of a meatball hero while his mother ran a flat iron through my hair. Her plan was to curl my straightened hair and pin it up, a complex grooming skill acquired from her daughters. I was wearing Leda’s bathrobe at the kitchen table. When she finished, I would step right into my dress without messing up her work.

“I never thought about the discrepancy of the days,” Leda said when I laid out the order of events between her appendectomy and Eddie’s banishment.

“So let me get this straight,” Henry said, licking his fingers. “When the two of you were little kids, Grandma had this wonderful husband you were both in love with, then she divorced him for no reason.”

“Well, there must have been a reason,” Leda said.

“No reason you know of,” Henry said.

I clarified. “She told me it was because he had almost killed me in a car accident, but he didn’t almost kill me.” Henry was a beautiful kid who had his mother’s empathetic nature and his father’s head for math. Whenever Henry was in the room, I believed in the survival of our species.

“And she married Mr. Positive after that?”

We nodded, newly mystified by a fact that had stymied us decades before.

“So Eddie isn’t your stepfather. Mr. Positive is your stepfather.”

Leda shook her head. “Eddie Triplett is our stepfather, ‘stepfather’ being an honorific bestowed or withheld by the stepchild.”

“Did you just make that up?” Henry asked his mother.

“I did,” she said, “but I’m also right.”

“She’s right,” I said.

“So do you think Eddie had an affair with one of the nurses in the hospital?” Leda asked.

“Either that or Grandma found out he was a spy,” Henry said, finishing off his sandwich.

I turned my head to smile at him and barely missed getting my ear burned off with the flat iron. “That’s what I said.”

“Hold still,” my sister said.

Steve leaned into the doorframe of the kitchen. “Is there time for me to go for a run?”

“Sure,” Leda said. “Plenty of time.”

“I don’t want to miss him,” Steve said.

“It’s early. You won’t miss him,” Leda said. “Run away.”

Henry pushed back from the table and patted his stomach. “I’ll go with you.”

“After eating a hero?” I asked.

He shrugged. Leda told him to put his plate in the dishwasher.

Steve paused for a moment to look at my hair. “She does good work,” he said. The compliment was for his wife, not for me. Steve Ha could not care less about my hair.

“Go,” Leda said. When they were gone, she asked me how I planned to manage this.

“I don’t think it’s going to be complicated. I’ll wait and see if Eddie tells me, and if he doesn’t tell me, I’ll ask him. I’d rather hear his version before I talk to Mom. Whatever happened, I’m pretty sure he did it, though. He seems to carry a lot of guilt.”

“But then so do you, and so do I, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t do anything.”

Which was why she was Dr. Ha, “Your Therapist.”

My dress was jade green with a rounded neck and half sleeves, fitted waist and full skirt, though not too full, appropriate for any formal retirement party, anniversary party, or wedding. With my hair done up, you could still see the trace of the scar that ran along the side of my face, but like everything else, it had, with time, faded to insignificance. Steve and Henry came back from their run and got cleaned up. Leda put a silk blouse on with her jeans. When the doorman called to say that Mr. Triplett had arrived, the four of us went down the hall to wait in front of the elevator.

“This is sort of ridiculous,” Henry said. He was seventeen.

“You think it’s ridiculous because you’ve never known the fleeting pleasure of having a decent stepfather,” Leda said to her son.

“There are a lot of cultural experiences you miss out on when your parents stay married,” Steve said.

“You’ve deprived me of everything,” Henry said. Then the doors opened and the elevator presented Eddie Triplett in a tuxedo holding a small vase of lilies of the valley.

He raised his free hand and covered his mouth to stare at the four of us while we smiled like fools. His eyes blinked hard behind his tortoiseshell glasses. “Look at you,” he said.

“Hi, Eddie,” Leda said.

“Look how beautiful you are, all of you.” There was a woman with him in the elevator, her Pomeranian on a leash. He turned to her. “Have you ever seen such a beautiful family?”

“I have not,” the woman said generously.

I held out my hand, as if he were standing outside in the rain. “Come on.”

He shook his head. “It’s too much.”

“That’s true,” Leda said. “But you can’t stay in the elevator forever, and I will only hug you in the hall.”

“Go on,” the woman said, maybe hoping to get to her own floor but not wanting to rush the moment.

Eddie stepped forward then, straight into Leda’s arms. He gave her the flowers, and when she introduced her son and husband, he hugged them as well.

Where had this happiness been? Not with our father in his apartment near the docks, and not with our mother and the exceedingly positive Lucas Ekker. The joy of childhood had come in moments with Leda and in moments with Eddie Triplett, who had been with us for such a short time. We walked to the Has’ apartment as a family, all of us touching him.

“Heavens, would you look at this?” Eddie said, going to the long bank of windows to take in the view of the park.

“It never gets old,” Steve said.

“You live in the city?” Henry asked.

“Downtown,” he said. “Chelsea.”

“That’s fashionable of you,” I said.

“Trust me, it was not always the case, but I bided my time. I waited for fashion to find me.”

“These flowers are beautiful,” Leda said, holding them up to the light. “And what a beautiful vase.”

“The vase is the present,” Eddie said. “It belonged to my mother.”

Let’s say Leda was never surprised, but in that moment she looked at him with absolute wonder. “Oh, Eddie,” she said.

“I have a present for you, too,” he said to me. “I’m giving it to you later.”

“Thank you. Thank you in advance.”

“I didn’t know what kind of flowers you liked. Lily of the valley were your mother’s favorite.”

I leaned in to my sister to smell the small bouquet. They smelled like our mother, the way she had smelled when we were children. I remembered almost nothing. Eddie remembered everything.

Eddie asked Henry about high school. He asked Steve about finance. Leda had made cheese puffs and brought them out with some nuts and a bottle of Chardonnay.

“Perfect timing,” Eddie said. “Perfect everything.”

“Whose anniversary is it?” Steve asked.

“Skip and Polly Hotalling, college sweethearts.” He raised his glass in acknowledgment of the long union of Polly and Skip.

“Which college?” Henry asked. He was a rising senior. He was interested in colleges.

“Yale,” Eddie said. “We went to Yale. Well, Polly went to Pine Manor. Yale was only men when we started out, which tells you how old I am.”

“I didn’t know you went to Yale,” I said.

Eddie nodded, chewed his cheese puff. “You did. You’ve just forgotten, and you’ve forgotten because it is not an interesting fact. These are wonderful,” he said to Leda.

Had I known where Eddie went to school? Had I known where he grew up or if he had a sister of his own? “So you’ve been friends since college?”

“Skip was my roommate. He and Polly met at our graduation dance. We had one foot out the door, and there she was, a freshman bused in for the evening. She was the size of a teaspoon. Skip liked to say he had to wait for her to grow up before he could marry her, like Elvis and Priscilla.”

I crossed my legs beneath the stiff skirt of my dress. If I told my students that once upon a time girls dressed up to be bused to dances in hopes of finding husbands, they would call me a heretic. They would demand that security escort me off campus. Steve got up to refill Eddie’s glass, but Eddie shook his head. “There will be many toasts this evening. I must pace myself.”

“Are you making a toast?” Leda asked.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen,” he said.

“You’re going to the Century Club not to praise them but to bury them?” Henry asked.

“Ah, yes, wrong toast,” Eddie said. “The real one’s in my pocket. I thought I could reuse the one I wrote fifty years ago for their rehearsal dinner, but when I found it—” He shook his head. “The sentiments were breathtakingly stupid. I don’t suppose I knew much about marriage at the time.”

“Were you the best man?” I asked.

“The very best.”

Eddie had a car waiting, so we didn’t stay long. We were saying our goodbyes when Eddie stopped to look at a painting in the living room and asked if it was really a David Hockney. He’d been glancing in that direction the whole time we’d been in the apartment. Steve and Leda had gone out on a limb to buy that painting. “We went out to the last leaf on the limb,” Leda liked to say, but all these years later they were happy to sit and stare at it. As it turned out, what they had bought was eternal life. The apple tree would always be glowing, the field around it would always be lush, the colors would always be more than anyone thought possible. Eddie and Leda and Steve were standing in front of the painting when Henry came up behind me and tapped my wrist. When I looked at him, he said nothing, but turned around and walked down the hall to his bedroom. Maybe Henry was the spy. I followed him. His running clothes were in a soggy pile on the floor. He closed the door behind us. Was there anything in nature like the bedroom of a teenage boy? The twin bed, the poster of Einstein sticking out his tongue, a trophy that said “Best in Show” on the bookshelf.

“Dude’s gay,” he said to me in a quiet voice.

“What?”

“Gay,” he said again. “I’m guessing that’s why Grandma divorced him.”

I looked at the door as if I could see Eddie in the living room. “Because he likes Hockney?”

Henry closed his eyes.

“I don’t know! Not Hockney. What makes you think he’s gay?”

Henry sighed, as if to say the elderly were blind. “I’m betting it’s not a secret. You should ask him.”

“I’m not going to ask him.”

“No, sure, listen, I’m not trying to out the guy. He seems totally sweet. I’m just saying if you’re wondering what went wrong, that’s probably what went wrong.”

This information was followed by a light knock, then Leda stuck in her head. “Showtime,” she said. She looked at Henry and then at me. “Are you two having a conference?”

I nodded and gave my nephew a hug. “Fill your mother in.”

“You bet,” Henry said. “You’ll have a great time. You look pretty.”

We all said our good nights, and after one more meaningful stare at the Hockney, Eddie and I were in the car on the way to the Century Club.

“Oh, your sister,” he said, shaking his head. “What a marvel she is.”

“It’s true.”

“I have guilt where Leda’s concerned. She was a wonderful child but quiet, harder to know.”

“Leda was always taking things in. Even at seven, she was training to be a therapist.”

Eddie nodded. “You and I had such a natural affinity. We were easy. I never spent as much time with Leda and I should have. I always thought I’d get to know her better later on, but I should have tried harder when we had the time.”

It was almost seven o’clock and the light came slanting between the buildings. Everything it touched turned to gold. “Trust me, Leda remembers you as the highlight of her childhood, the same way I do.”

Eddie turned away from me and looked out the window. “Don’t make me cry,” he said. “If I start now, I’ll cry all night. I may cry all night anyway.”

Dude’s gay. No problem with that, unless he was your husband, unless you didn’t know. Eddie was not my husband. In the backseat of the black SUV I took his hand.

“Both of you married nice men,” he said. “Both of you seem happy.”

“We’re happy.”

“You were happy children. You didn’t have the best possible circumstances growing up, but you were little light bulbs, both of you. Life beats that out of so many people, but not the two of you.”

“Leda and I had each other. That was a huge help.” And we had you, I wanted to say, but was that me being sentimental? Could Eddie have made a difference in the short time we were together? I looked at him. “I don’t know if you had siblings,” I said. “I can’t remember where you grew up. I don’t think I knew you went to Yale.”

“An older brother, Martin. Younger sister, Amy. Altoona, Pennsylvania. And you knew I went to Yale,” he said. “I taught you both the Whiffenpoofs song.”

And then, of course, I did know. We sang it everywhere. We sang it on the way to the Century Club. “ We are poor little lambs who have lost our way … ” Eddie shining on the lambs’ chorus: “ Baa, baa, baa. ”

He smiled. “It drove your mother to distraction, you and me and Leda, bleating.”

“Leda sang it in the first grade talent show,” I said. There was a memory that unpacked itself out of thin air.

Eddie nodded. “A cappella. She was terribly brave.”

When the car pulled up at the club, Eddie turned to me. “I want you to know that if you never do another kind thing in your life, this will have been enough.”

“Is the party going to be that bad?”

“No, it will be a beautiful party. I just didn’t want to go in there alone.”

“Well, good. You don’t have to go in there alone.” And so we went through the doors of the Century Club, arms linked, into the sea of older men in tuxedos and women in silk pantsuits and good jewelry. Always get married in May—it ensured anniversaries full of peonies and ranunculus and anemones. The room might as well have been a cutting garden. “The Hotallings like flowers,” Eddie said as my gaze went from one massive arrangement to the next. We filed into the receiving line with everyone else, fifty couples to mark fifty years, everyone moving forward. All of them knew Eddie. His name was a bass note called again and again. I could see how truly rotten it would have been to show up to this thing alone.

“Ed!” the woman at the front of the line said, holding out her arms to him. He let go of me long enough to kiss her. Polly Hotalling wore a white silk duster over white silk pants, an outfit appropriate for a second marriage or a fiftieth anniversary. She was still the size of a teaspoon.

“Ed,” her husband said, and shook his hand. Skip Hotalling was trim and tall, a full head of silver hair and a cleft in his chin, for heaven’s sake. A leading man from bygone days. “Who do we have here?”

Eddie put his arm around my waist. “Here we have my daughter, Daphne Fuller. Daphne, these are the famous Hotallings, Polly and Skip.”

Skip, Polly, and I were each taken aback by the introduction but for different reasons. For me, it was a huge promotion. I held out my hand and said how glad I was to meet them.

Skip, lost, kept on smiling, but it only took Polly two beats to catch up. “Daphne Zabriskie?”

I smiled. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me that, but yes, Daphne Zabriskie.”

Skip laughed. “No one ever put one over on Polly.”

“No one was trying to,” I said, still beaming. I knew how to beam.

“You look beautiful,” Eddie said, and pressed Polly’s hand to his heart. “Let everyone else see how beautiful you are.”

“You’re at our table,” Polly said to me, spider to fly.

I felt the doom ahead as Eddie steered me towards the bar. A young woman in a sequined dress leaned her hip into the curve of the piano, singing, “ I wandered around and finally found the somebody who … ”

“Well, we’re here,” he said. “Let’s make a night of it.”

“Daphne Zabriskie ,” I said, a glass of Sancerre in hand. What open bar featured a good Sancerre? None that I’d ever seen. “Have I met them before?”

Eddie nodded. “Probably, when your mother and I were first dating, or it may have even been when we were palling around. Your mother was once a great pal of mine.”

“Good to know.”

“Polly and Skip came to see me a couple of times in Boston before they had children. Polly was besotted with children so we brought you and Leda along.”

“She’d remember me from that?”

“Polly has what we used to call an acute memory. She would remember that Abigail’s daughters were Daphne and Leda. I’m a little surprised she was able to pull up Zabriskie.”

“Wait, were they at your wedding?” The one in which he married my mother, the one in which Leda and I got matching dresses made of yellow silk with a sewn-in slip. Eddie called us daffodils.

He shook his head. “They were not.”

“You were the best man at their wedding and they didn’t come to yours?”

“Your mother did not care for the Hotallings.”

“Ed!” a woman cried, short gray hair, large black glasses, making her way towards the bar. “Tell me what to read!”

“Daphne, this is Maxine.”

Maxine and I shook hands.

“Maxine likes to play Stump the Band but with books. Maxine has read everything. Don’t engage with her. She was the associate publisher at Farrar, Straus.”

“Retired,” Maxine said, hitting the word hard. “Out of the loop. Yesterday’s news. Tell me what to read.”

I longed for my husband, who was probably cleaning out a linen closet now, eighteen sets of sheets for double mattresses. He could have played the retirement game no matter where he turned.

Eddie took a sip of his drink. “Je refuse.”

“ The Bee Sting ,” I said.

Maxine smiled, a little smear of lipstick on her tooth. “Good,” she said to me. “Smart.”

“Don’t do it,” he said. “She’ll break you.”

“ The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny ,” I said, trying again.

“I finished it two weeks ago.” She turned to Eddie. “If the party had been three weeks ago, she would have had me.”

Eddie shook his head. “She says things like this to keep you playing. Chances are she finished it six months ago.”

I felt like I was at a slot machine. “ Independent People .”

“Halldór Laxness, Iceland, published in two volumes in 1934 and ’35. That’s an excellent choice.”

“She really does take the air out of the room, doesn’t she?” I said to Eddie.

“This one’s smart,” Maxine said. “New editor?”

“Daphne is my daughter,” Eddie said. It was his story for the night.

Maxine looked at the two of us together. The room was getting louder by the minute. There was a bottleneck of traffic coming into the bar and we were part of the problem. “We should move,” I said, raising my voice.

“This is the story I want to hear,” Maxine said, not moving.

“It’s a long one,” Eddie said, also raising his voice. “You’ll like it.”

“I’ll take you to lunch next week. I want you to tell it to me someplace I can hear you.” Maxine turned to me. “Daphne Triplett, it was a pleasure to meet you.”

I told her the pleasure was mine, and maybe I meant it. I got a kick out of Maxine. I watched the crowd open slightly and then swallow her up. “I wonder if I’ll meet somebody tonight who calls me Daphne Fuller,” I said to Eddie.

“Give it time. There’s bound to be a doctor here somewhere who worked with your husband.”

“Isn’t there something, I don’t know, combative about introducing me to people as your daughter when they all know you don’t have a daughter?”

“Probably,” Eddie said, killing his drink. “‘Combative’ is a good word.”

“You know, if you’re not having fun, we could always call Leda, see if she and Steve want to meet us for dinner?”

“Too much trouble,” Eddie said over the noise.

“It wouldn’t be any trouble.”

He tapped a stud on his tuxedo shirt, the noise reducing us to gesture. “I’d get in too much trouble.”

The room smelled like flowers, like competing perfumes, like white wine. The louder the party became, the easier it was to be there. We went through a period of shouted introductions, which in turn gave way to pantomime, Eddie pointing to me, me smiling, hands shaken, then people pointing to the bar, tipping back an imaginary glass. He knew everyone.

Then a waiter came by, tapping a mallet against a three-note xylophone, as if we were at the opera and the second act was about to begin. (The second act was about to begin!) We all filed into the dining room.

The white linen tablecloths were strewn with another garden-load of flowers, arranged low enough that we could see across the table, votive candles dotted around. The message was that, despite the enormous amount of money spent on this evening, the hostess was fun, still playful, natural. The five tables of ten were set with place cards: Polly and Skip anchored table one, with each of their four married children and their spouses anchoring tables two through five. Eddie walked me to each table and introduced me to the Hotallings and the Hotalling partners: two sons married to women, two daughters married to men, eight people who referred to Eddie as uncle.

“Alex,” Eddie said when we stopped at table five, “I want you to meet my daughter, Daphne Fuller.”

Alex (then Sam, then Mae-Mae, then Nanette, and all of their beloveds) shook my hand and commented on the fact that Eddie didn’t have a daughter. “What closet have you been keeping her in?” Alex (Sam, Mae-Mae, Nanette) asked.

“I had an entire life before you were born,” he told them. “Daphne is the best part of that earlier incarnation.”

Mae-Mae, a woman who combined her mother’s power and unfriendliness with her father’s beauty and height, put her arm around Eddie. “Uncle, does this mean she’s getting my inheritance?”

“Don’t you worry, darling. There will always be something for you.”

“I’m his goddaughter,” she told me. “Which means I’m his daughter but with god attached.”

“Come along, come along, more people to meet,” Eddie said, smiling. He guided me away.

“Is she for real?” I asked.

“For real insofar as she is what she seems, but she’s joking about the money. Mae-Mae is an intellectual properties lawyer, and her husband is a hedge funder of the mega-yacht variety. Her inheritance is a long-standing joke between us. I suppose she’ll need my money after I’m dead to tip the crew.”

“What a sparkling wit.”

“It’s a Hotalling family trait. They tease. The whole lot of them. They practice when they’re together.”

We went to table one to find our seats. “You’re Esther Newberg,” Eddie said to me.

“My third name of the night,” I said.

“No, Esther is my friend with the cold. She couldn’t come.” Esther Newberg had been seated directly across the table from Eddie.

“We have to switch this,” I said, picking up the place card. I was seated next to Skip Hotalling.

“I have no doubt that Polly worked on the seating chart for a month. If you switched the cards, she would switch them back. She would tell you the reason she and Skip have made it fifty years is that they never sat next to one another at a dinner party.”

“But I’m not your wife. I’m your daughter .”

Then someone else who Eddie knew swept him away, and I was left alone to sit in Esther Newberg’s chair.

The evening had been fun up until this point. The camaraderie between Eddie and myself kept things jolly. Women in cocktail pajamas admired my dress and the men who were with them admired me. A part of me, a person small and far away, was thrilled to have Eddie call me his daughter. He never would have done that if Buddy were alive, but here at the Century Club, there was no one to be hurt by so small a misrepresentation. All he meant was that he had chosen me, and I appreciated that. Still, around now I was wishing I was in my own backyard. The role for which I was the stand-in belonged not to Esther Newberg but to my mother, who had yet to be apprised of her ex-husband’s reappearance. Wasn’t it her responsibility to be seated across the table from Eddie? To be seated next to Skip Hotalling, who even now was working his way towards the chair at my left?

But my mother was decades out of the picture, and she hadn’t liked the Hotallings anyway. If she hadn’t invited them to her wedding, then chances were good they wouldn’t have invited her to their golden anniversary dinner.

“Daphne Zabriskie,” Skip said once he was seated. “I could have spent fifty years guessing who I might be seated next to this evening and I don’t think I would have come up with you.”

“Would you have come up with Esther Newberg?”

Skip nodded. “Oh, sure. Esther’s a friend from Sag Harbor. Her place is four blocks over from ours. We see Esther all the time.”

“I guess that doubles the disappointment.”

My host laughed heartily, and the other members of our table smiled to think that Skip had been seated next to a woman both witty and young.

“So you and Polly live in Sag Harbor?”

“We live in Darien, but we get out to Sag Harbor when there’s time. A lot more time now that I’m retired.”

Again, I longed for Jonathan, but then remembered that even if he were here, he would not be able to take this burden from me. Jonathan would have been seated on the other side of the table next to Polly.

“How long have you been retired?”

“Five years. Five long, dark years,” he said. “What about you and Ed? Have the two of you been in touch for a while now?”

“A while,” I said, because what did “a while” even mean? “I’ve enjoyed being with him.”

“No one’s better company than Ed. I would bet you he’s the favorite person of everyone in this room.”

“He has my vote,” I said.

From across the table Polly sent a telepathic communiqué to her husband, who then picked up his salad fork at the moment she picked up her salad fork. The first course had begun. “How’s your mother these days?”

“My mother’s well, thank you.”

“Tell her I said hello, that Polly and I said hello.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Your mother had some funny ideas,” he said to me, still smiling.

Skip Hotalling had his own teeth, a peculiar thing to say, but in this room it set him apart. I looked at him square and told him I knew nothing of my mother’s funny ideas, because it was true.

At this bit of information, Skip Hotalling’s straight shoulders rolled forward slightly, and the smile he had worn for the evening’s duration fell away. Right in front of me he grew old, and not only that: I could see the energy it cost him to hold up his own bright veneer. He left me then, turning to the woman on his left while buttering a dinner roll. From what I could make out, she was the wife of one of Skip’s former partners at the four-name law firm where he had worked. That partner was seated on Eddie’s side of the table. The man on my right—I turned to him—had also been a partner at the same firm but retired early to pursue the study of lepidoptera, which, he said, would have been his life’s work had his father not forced him to attend law school. He and his wife (she was across the table) now spent half the year in Costa Rica, where they owned a condominium not far from the edge of a national park. The rest of the time he volunteered at the Museum of Natural History. He had played a significant role in the creation of the museum’s butterfly vivarium. Eighty species! He told me the first time he went through, he wept, and one of the eighty species alighted on his face to drink from his tear. He was an enthusiastic student of nature, and I was grateful for his willingness to carry the entire burden of conversation. I saved up the details of the glasswing butterfly, the blue morpho, and the tropical checkered-skipper to tell Eddie later.

Once the cake had been served, Eddie stood, and someone tapped a knife against their glass. Ten waiters circled the five tables, pouring champagne into the flutes that had been waiting there.

Eddie smiled and nodded. In a roomful of tuxedos both ill-fitting and out of date (because who wanted to buy a new one at seventy-six?), Eddie looked razor-sharp. He took a piece of paper from the inside pocket, looked it over, then returned it to his pocket, a bit of theater to say he was going off the cuff. “When I arrived at Yale my sophomore year, I was nineteen. My roommate, one Skip Hotalling, had beaten me there by ten minutes and claimed the better bed, but he left me the desk beneath the window to make up for it. At dinner that night, I asked him what he planned to do with his life. Back in those days, nineteen-year-olds had the answer to that question, and even if we were wrong, and we were usually wrong, we went forward with a great deal of purpose. Skip told me he was going to be a lawyer who worked with Native peoples to restore the promises of government treaties.” There was a big laugh here, and Skip raised his hand and smiled. Eddie let them work their way through the moment before giving them something else to laugh about. “When he asked me what I was going to do, I told him I was going to write the great American novel.” The crowd laughed again with, I thought, a lot of unnecessary whooping. Eddie only smiled. “Both of us failed,” he said, “and in other, related ways, both of us succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We continued to believe in one another’s dreams long after giving up on our own. Skip’s confidence in my abilities saw me through times when my own confidence failed. What good luck that the gods of Yale’s housing lottery assigned me a friend to see me through the rest of my life, a luck that was perhaps only bested by Skip seeing young Polly Wellons standing by the punch bowl as we were leaving the graduation dance our senior year. We were halfway to our room when he told me he was going back. He said he’d seen someone he thought he knew.”

For a moment I saw Eddie as I remembered him—his voice, the way he stood, the way he moved his hands. “He’d seen someone he thought he knew, meaning Polly, whom he had never met. Polly, the girl he would come to know better than anyone else in his life. There is so much randomness to youth. The person assigned to share your room becomes your friend, the girl you pass on your way out the door becomes your wife, and from these random encounters our entire lives are built, four beautiful children came into the world, and they, in turn, found the people they were meant to spend their lives with. There are ten grandchildren now. Ten new people who in part owe their lives on earth to Skip admitting that there was something deeply familiar about the girl he had passed, and trusting himself enough to turn around to go back and see who she was.

“If you ask Polly, she’ll tell you this fiftieth anniversary should have taken place four years ago, because she wanted to marry Skip right there by the punch bowl on the night they met. But Skip insisted she finish college while he went to law school. As the old saying goes, good things come to those who wait. Polly and Skip were always good together. I learned what it meant to be married not by watching my parents, but by watching the two of them. And while I didn’t manage to do as good a job”—(more laughter)—“my life has benefitted immeasurably from the love and attention they’ve shown to one another. And so your best man again raises his glass to the bride and groom. I wish you, if not another fifty years”—(laugh)—“then many more excellent years, beautiful golden years.” Eddie raised up his glass. “To Polly and Skip.”

“Polly and Skip!” the crowd cried, and when we lifted our champagne, the sound of glass touching glass rang like a hundred tiny bells.

Skip Hotalling, who had not so much as looked in my direction since the salad course, turned. “Your father,” he said to me. “He does go on.”

Women pressed their napkins to their eyes. Men discreetly checked their phones. The band struck up “What a Wonderful World,” and Skip gallantly led his wife to the dance floor. When Eddie came around the table, everyone he passed touched his sleeve and congratulated him. “You should have been a novelist!” they said, each after the next. He sat down in Skip’s chair, the newly empty seat beside me.

“That was beautiful,” I said to him.

“I would have rather given them a kidney, but neither of them wanted it.”

“Do you want to dance?” Nearly everyone had left for the dance floor—bursitis in their hips, plantar fasciitis in their heels, they rocked back and forth like creaky boats.

Eddie leaned towards me. “If I dance with you, I’ll have to dance with every woman in this room.”

“If that means I’ll have to dance with their husbands, then I say we skip it.”

“What I want,” he said, “is to use this moment of confusion to make a break for it.”

I stood up, dropping my napkin on the table. The lepidopterist had printed out his name and number on the back of Esther Newberg’s place card in case I ever wanted him to take me through the vivarium, and I put the card in my bag so I could throw it away later. He had been kind, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by leaving it on the table. Eddie and I walked along the edge of the dance floor with everyone waving at us. Eddie laughed and pointed at the bar, then we made a break for it.

Outside, the city was finally, beautifully dark. “How comfortable are your shoes?” he asked.

“I only buy comfortable shoes.”

“I didn’t keep the car,” he said. “I was going to call one, but I could stand a walk if you wouldn’t mind.”

“I never liked being in a car with you anyway,” I said, and he laughed.

“The minute you get tired, let me know and we’ll hop in a cab. I’ll take you to Leda’s.”

“Which is in the wrong direction if you’re going to Chelsea.”

He shook his head. “No such thing as a wrong direction.”

And so we headed uptown on Fifth while the traffic streamed towards us. We were three blocks from the Century Club before Eddie stopped to light a cigarette.

“You still smoke?” Oh, that single cigarette he had at night on the front steps after dinner, how I harassed him through every drag, the nine-year-old nicotine police. “You’ll die! You’ll die!” He wised up eventually and waited until after we went to bed to smoke. Children are righteously abstemious where any pleasures not available to them are concerned.

He took a deep inhale. “I deserve this cigarette. I deserve an entire carton. The funny thing is I just started again. I quit smoking decades ago. In fact”—he looked at me, surprised to remember that I was part of the story—“in fact, I quit after our famous accident. After your mother suggested I not come home from the hospital or come back to Houghton Mifflin, I went to Polly and Skip’s in New York because where else was I going to go? Back to Altoona? To Mom and Dad? What a mess I was! I’d had surgery on my ankle and foot, I had a cast up to my knee, non-weight-bearing, mind you. I wasn’t allowed to so much as tap it on the floor. Polly and Skip were living in a third-floor walk-up at the time. When they brought me home, I had to go up the stairs backwards on my ass. They had two babies by then, Alex and Mae-Mae. There was a pull-out sofa in the living room that must have been made out of coat hangers and twine. Your mother had left two suitcases on the front porch. I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to you and your sister. I was homeless, jobless, footless, family-less, an awful, awful time, and then I lit a cigarette in Polly’s living room because I couldn’t get downstairs to smoke, and as it turned out, that was the worst thing that happened.”

“Wait, he’s a Mergers and Acquisitions lawyer living in a walk-up with two babies?”

“Funny you should mention that. Polly often noticed the same thing. But Skip refused to move to a building with an elevator until he’d paid off all his school debt. I think that happened the next year, when Nanette was born.”

“I’m trying to imagine it.”

“You can’t. Anyway, that’s when I quit smoking. I’m sure Polly did me an enormous favor.”

“And when did you start again?”

Eddie tipped up his chin, exhaled. “Maybe six weeks ago? I’d have to do the math. I only smoke on an as-needed basis. Absolutely minimal, I promise you, nothing to worry about. The only place to smoke in New York is on the street, and I don’t want to be outside walking around at all hours.”

“Did something happen?”

“When?”

“Six weeks ago.”

He shrugged. “A bad day,” he said. “I thought, There was a time when I would have had a cigarette on a day like today, and then I thought, Why not? What substantial damage can a cigarette do to me now? So I bought myself a pack. Do you have any idea how much a pack of cigarettes costs these days?”

“No clue.”

Eddie started to give me a number and then thought better of it. “I’m not going to tell you. You’ll lose all respect for me. Do you want one?”

I declined.

“Good girl,” he said.

Eddie stopped to look in the window of Sephora. “Do you remember when this was a bookstore?”

“I do not.” I had bought moisturizer there, shampoo. I did not say this to him.

“Closed in 1988. What a blow. This used to be the Scribner building, and downstairs, they had the most beautiful bookstore you’ve ever seen in your life. I used to come here on my lunch hour, leave all those books in my office so I could come over here and look at books.”

“What did you edit then?”

His face was bathed in the light reflected off skin care products. “Novels. Novels then and novels now. I would edit collections of short stories when my authors turned collections of short stories in, and later, when memoirs became a thing, I edited those. Collections of essays, all of that. But all the while I tapped them ever so gently in the direction of novels because that’s what I loved. That’s what I was good at.”

“Writing?”

“Reading.” He shook his head. “I wish you could have seen this bookstore.”

“I was seventeen in 1988.”

“That’s why your mother and I should have stayed married. It would have been a stretch, I realize that, but I would have shown you New York before it was devoured by skin care emporiums and nail salons.”

I had more questions than I knew words to ask, but I decided to start with the obvious one. “Tell me more about the Hotallings.”

“Oh, them.” Eddie stared at a pyramid of little white tubs of grapefruit facial scrub, as if he could will them into being books. “They’re my best friends. They’ve always been there for me. They have also been a great source of pain. I think that pretty much covers it.”

We walked again. Eddie held on to the filter of his cigarette until we passed a trash can. I added in the place card. “Let’s go to the Plaza and have a drink,” he said. “Do you want to?”

I’d already had more to drink than I usually have over the course of a month, but I told myself the walking helped. Eddie said we were going to go to the Oak Bar, but when we arrived, the hotel was in the full swing of celebration and the celebration called to us. Two doormen pulled open the heavy glass doors fitted in brass and welcomed us in.

“They’re expecting us,” Eddie said, sotto voce.

I scanned the milling crowd, men in tuxedos, women in cocktail dresses, long dresses. “Maybe we should find some other hotel,” I said. “We could try the Sherry-Netherland.”

He took my arm. “Act natural.”

The wedding we walked into was long over, as was the dinner that followed. By the time we arrived, the cake had been cut, and the layered white slices trimmed in ganache rosebuds were lined across a long table like the sugared shingles for a candy house. Some of the guests had taken a slice back to their table, but most of them were dancing. Whoever had gotten married at the Plaza had hired an entire orchestra for dancing, as well as a structural engineer to erect the floral arrangements, as the flowers spiked to extraordinary heights before spreading out in lacy canopies. Were the sprinkler system tripped, we could all seek refuge beneath the stephanotis. This was the magic hour, when the music played at a humane decibel and the parents and uncles and aunts were dancing, grandparents were dancing, a smattering of elderly among the glorious youth. Countless young women in sherbet-colored slip dresses leaned against the broad chests of so many handsome men, some of them in white dinner jackets, others in tuxedos of midnight blue.

“Look!” Eddie whispered.

And sure enough, the bride danced past us—either in the arms of her father or the arms of her much older husband, it was impossible to know—her bare shoulders emitting light, her long black hair loosely configured and pinned with orange blossoms, the white silk of her hem dusting the impeccable floor. She smiled at the man she danced with, husband or father, with so much love it would have been enough to sustain him for the rest of his life. In another minute the crowd had shifted and she was gone again. I thought of my seatmate, the lepidopterist, and how he must have felt in the jungles of Costa Rica, having witnessed an insect so impossibly beautiful and rare, a once-in-a-lifetime sighting.

“Come on,” Eddie said, and then he was holding me in his arms as we joined in that swirling river of life, every body in sway to the time of music, everyone glad to have been asked to bear witness to such happiness. The bridesmaids and groomsmen, siblings and cousins, friends from work and from school, each one abloom with radiant life. They loved the bride and the groom. They rejoiced in their happiness. They hoped to find such happiness themselves one day, or maybe they already had: she was there in his arms, he was there in her arms. Despite all the fires in the world, on this night, in this room, they believed the whole thing might work.

“It’s the perfect antidote to a fiftieth wedding anniversary dinner,” I said to Eddie. “I hope every single couple at the Hotallings’ party found a wedding to crash on their way home.”

“A requirement,” Eddie said.

“Look, look, there she is again.” We both stopped dancing, and the people around us stopped as well, as if the moon had split the clouds to bathe us in light. Twice we had seen her. We couldn’t believe our good fortune.

We stayed on the floor for a few more songs. Eddie knew all the words, and he sang them quietly so only I would hear. “ People stop and stare, they don’t bother me, for there’s nowhere else on earth that I would rather be. ”

“Who?” I asked.

“ My Fair Lady , Lerner and Loewe, 1956. In the recitation of Broadway musical lyrics I cannot be beaten.”

Jonathan didn’t like to dance, and Eddie was a wonderful dancer. After we stopped, Eddie set out to find champagne. I was at the dessert table picking up a slice of cake and two forks when a young woman draped in salmon-colored satin, one of the glorious bridesmaids, came up to me. “Mrs. Fuller?” she said. “Oh my god, I thought that was you! Oh, you look so beautiful!”

Repair people and students and former students were the only people who called me Mrs. Fuller, and since I didn’t remember her fixing my roof, she must have been in my English class. So many bright young women had passed through my teaching life that I dreaded running into them. They receded so quickly after graduation, replaced by the fall’s fresh crop. I was smiling stupidly as Eddie returned with the champagne. He put the glasses down on a small table and I put down the cake.

“Ed Triplett,” he said, holding out his hand to her.

“Kathy Schultenover,” she said, taking his hand. “Oh my gosh, are you Mrs. Fuller’s husband?”

“I’m Daphne’s father,” he said, as if this were a common mistake.

“ Father! ” she said. “Oh, I love that. You brought your father !”

The father-husband business tripped me up, and as a result I was both slow and stupid in my response. “What a beautiful wedding.”

“Right? We’re having the best time. I think everyone’s having the best, best time, and it’s so wonderful that you came, both of you. Livi must be over the moon. And look, I’m engaged!” She raised her delicate hand, the twinkling stone a not insignificant burden. “I’m going to invite you to our wedding. Would you come, both of you? You should come, Mr. Triplett.”

“That’s a wonderful invitation, but I won’t hold you to it,” Eddie said.

Then, without warning, Kathy Schultenover put her arms around me and pressed her head against my neck. “I’m a tiny bit drunk,” she said, “but I love you. You were my favorite teacher. I read Madame Bovary because of you.”

I kissed the top of her head and said she might have been my favorite student. When she stepped away, there were tears caught in the mascara of her lashes. Then a young man appeared out of the mass of dancers and took her in his arms. She waved to us as they danced away.

Eddie shook his head. “I wouldn’t have missed that for anything.”

“The bride was my student ?”

“It’s hard for me to imagine forgetting a girl like that.”

I shook my head. “There were so many of them.”

“Did you remember Kathy Schultenover?”

“I remember the name Schultenover, but I don’t remember what year she graduated or what she read for her senior thesis.” I shook my head. “You remember all the lyrics to musicals and I can’t remember my own students. I’m terrible.”

“The songs stay the same while the people cycle through,” Eddie said. “It’s madness to think you could remember all of them.”

“I remember you,” I said.

“Well, see, that’s plenty.”

“I love teaching,” I said, staring out at the brightly colored tide of dancing youth. “There aren’t many schools left where you can assign Madame Bovary to an eleventh grader and she’ll come back after Christmas break to tell you she read A Sentimental Education for fun. When they read David Copperfield , they read the whole thing. They read The Return of the Native . The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester. Moby-Dick !”

“I hate to tell you, but everyone read Moby-Dick when I was in high school, and I didn’t go to any fancy private girls’ school on the Upper East Side.”

“Times change. Soon no one will believe the wonders I’ve seen, smart kids reading big books and writing papers without AI.”

“I don’t believe they write their own papers,” Eddie said.

“Jonathan wants me to retire, but I won’t do it, not as long as girls get drunk at weddings and talk about Madame Bovary .”

“You’re fifty-three,” he said. “You’re too young to retire. For heaven’s sake, I’m too young to retire.”

We took up our cake and champagne and walked the room’s perimeter until we found a velvet banquette tucked in the far back corner, our own wedding island. There we settled in.

“This cake is better than the last cake,” I said. Eddie said he hadn’t eaten any of the last cake, and I said in that case he would have to take my word.

“I take your word on everything,” he said.

The champagne was better at the Plaza, too, but there was no need to harp on it.

“So are you going to tell me?” I leaned back into the banquette and pushed off my shoes, which had grown less comfortable over the course of the evening. Like Kathy Schultenover, I was a tiny bit drunk.

“Which part?”

“Let’s say all of it, but why don’t you start with my mother. I think we should get her out of the way.”

Eddie looked across the room and smiled at the extraordinary flowers, the candlelight, the dancing groomsmen. “Your mother would have loved this. Wedding crashing was exactly her style. In the years that I knew her, your mother was extremely game, extremely pretty, and extremely angry at your father. She was also good at her job. We worked on a couple of books together. I was still a junior editor, but she was a full-fledged publicist. Publicists mature more quickly than editors. We’d go out to lunch sometimes. She had a hard time going out after work.”

“Single mother, two kids.” Once again I remembered to humble myself in the face of all my mother had held aloft.

Eddie nodded. “I liked her kids. On the weekends, I’d take her and the two daughters to a sandwich shop between Harvard Square and Central Square called Uncle Bunny’s. Editorial made more money than publicity, and they paid the men more anyway, and I had no dependents, so by comparison I was rich.”

There we were, the four of us taking the commuter rail in from Winchester and then taking the T to Harvard Square and walking up Mass Ave. to Uncle Bunny’s. I held Eddie’s hand the whole way. “Raspberry-lime rickeys.”

“That’s right, and your mother got egg salad. Uncle Bunny’s made the best egg salad sandwiches. So there we were, coworkers, pals. A couple of times we met up with my friends, the Hotallings. Polly had grown up in Boston and liked to come in to see her parents. Once, when you and your sister were with your father for the night, your mother and I went out to dinner with the Hotallings like two couples. We went for Turkish food and all of us had too much to drink, except for Polly, who was pregnant with Alex at the time. Skip was being difficult. He had it in his head that the best way to deal with our situation was for him to belittle me in front of Polly, in case she had a good imagination, which, by the way, she didn’t have.”

Skip Hotalling had told me my mother had some funny ideas. “Do you want to tell me about the situation?”

“With Skip?”

“That’s who we’re talking about, right?” Because, come to think of it, Skip was the natural progression from my mother. I emptied my glass of champagne.

Eddie looked alarmed. “You mean your mother didn’t tell you any of it?”

“I was nine .”

“I know how old you were, but she must have, later on.”

“There was no later on. We didn’t talk about you. I don’t think my mother ever said your name again.”

Eddie sat with this for a minute “Wait here, will you?” Then he left the banquette and was swallowed by the dancing crowd. A singer in a silver catsuit strutted out in front of the orchestra and I knew that everything was about to change. No more Lerner and Loewe. She opened her set with “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” and all the aunts and uncles and grandparents turned and left the floor as if dismissed. My god, how sad my mother must have been to have lost Eddie Triplett to Skip Hotalling, having already lost Buddy Zabriskie to the sea. Unlike Polly, my mother had an impeccable imagination.

When Eddie came back he was carrying an open bottle of champagne. “I tried to pay for it, but the bartender wouldn’t let me.” He filled our glasses again. “First, let me say, your mother is a prince. That’s the only word I have because calling her a princess sparks the wrong connotation. She was good to keep all of this to herself.” He looked over at the stage. “Isn’t that very loud?”

I nodded. “She is. Did you really think I knew?”

“I thought you must have known some of it.” He shook his head. “This is strange. It’s been decades since I came out to anyone.”

“So you’re out.”

“Everyone’s out,” Eddie said dryly. “Except the men who are married to women who think they’re straight.”

“Polly knows you’re gay?”

“Polly Hotalling wouldn’t dream of having a chair recovered without showing me the fabric samples first.”

No matter what, he made me laugh. “Are you good at that?”

“I am neither good nor interested, but certain stereotypes prevail.”

All the parts of the story swam out of order: the pieces that were mine, the pieces that were Eddie’s, the parts that belonged solely to my mother. “I’m trying to get my head around all of this.”

“Okay. I shouldn’t have started with the Turkish restaurant. That’s not where this starts. This starts at the beginning of my sophomore year at Yale when I walked into my dorm room and found Skip Hotalling lying on the better of the two beds.” Eddie shook his head. “When he looked up at me, it was god and man. His grandmother was a Creek Indian, did I tell you that?”

“ Don’tcha wanna dance with me, baby? ” the catsuited woman sang. “Don’tcha wanna dance with me, boy? ”

I shook my head. I listened. I didn’t say, You have told me nothing.

“That business about him wanting to devote himself to the cause of the Native American people was real, at least until he started law school. He had this country in his blood. A more beautiful man there never was. I can look out over this trophy case of human life and promise you not one of them could hold a match to Skip Hotalling at nineteen. And on top of that he was tender and funny and dear. Very dear to me.”

I tried to reconcile the boy in the story with the taciturn man seated next to me at the Century Club on the evening of his fiftieth wedding anniversary. I suppose we all change. “So the two of you—?”

“That’s a long story, the two of us. Back then we didn’t know what it all meant. We didn’t know if the other was interested or how our own interest might manifest. It was very difficult to study.”

“I’m assuming you figured it out.”

“I did,” he said. “We did. But it took some time. Twenty-three days to be exact. Twenty-three days of potential bliss we wasted waiting for the other one to make the move.”

“Who made the move?”

Eddie tipped his head down so as to look at me over the top of his glasses.

“You made the move,” I said.

“Later it would become our favorite topic of conversation. Skip said he had no experience in these matters. Dreams, hopes, desires, of course, but no experience. So I said no experience here either.” He pressed his hand to his starched tuxedo shirt. “Pure as snow.”

“Let the record state that Mr. Triplett had no past at all.”

“He believed me,” Eddie said. “And I believed him. It was all very sweet.”

“So then what?”

“Then we decided that college would be the happiest time in our life, which it was. After college we’d both get married and have children and lead regular lives, all the while maintaining a second life that would be the two of us—Skip and Ed. That’s not so complicated, right?”

“So Skip marries Polly.”

Eddie nodded vigorously. “Skip marries Polly. As you know, he met her at that god-awful dance the week before graduation. We had one more week together, then it was home for the summer and Skip was going to start law school at Columbia and I was going to Boston to be a slush-pile reader at Houghton Mifflin because I hadn’t found a job at a New York house. Skip was still irritated that I hadn’t taken the LSAT. He thought we both should go to law school, put the future off for a few more years, but I had no interest in the law. We had one more week together in the dorm, one more week of real life before the whole thing fell apart. Skip wanted to stick to the plan: we would both get married and then it’s fine to go off together as much as we wanted because that’s what guys do, he said. Skip says, ‘All we’ve got to do is find the right girls,’ and I said, ‘You can’t just find a girl. It’s not like you’re looking for a car.’ And he said, ‘The hell it’s not,’ and he turned around and went straight back to the dance, where he found Polly Wellons by the punch bowl waiting for her roommate to come back from the bathroom.”

“Now you’re making me feel sorry for Polly.”

For a moment we sat there, taking in the beauty of young people dancing, everyone having had too much to drink. The catsuit had moved on to “Proud Mary.” There were backup singers now, and men with horns. The volume continued to dial up and soon we’d have to excuse ourselves or be saddled with a lifetime of deafness.

“It’s hard for me to feel sorry for Polly,” Eddie said absently. “I believe she’s gotten everything she ever wanted, and she’s had fifty years with him.”

I imagine that Polly did not get everything she ever wanted. “So he went to Columbia and you went to Houghton.” I didn’t want to raise my voice, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to hear.

“ And I never lost one minute of sleepin’ worryin’ ’bout the way things might have been. ”

“No,” Eddie said brightly. “There was a last-minute reprieve. Harvard took Skip off the wait list. He lost his deposit at Columbia, and we got a convincing two-bedroom apartment in Cambridge. Polly was a sophomore at Pine Manor in Chestnut Hill. Skip only let her visit once a week. He said he needed to study. I am certain I saw more of young Polly Wellons in those years than he did. She was always trying to fix me up with her friends, until she decided that none of them were good enough for me. After graduation, Skip landed his big job in New York and bought an engagement ring. Polly and her mother took a year to plan the wedding.”

“So where does my mother come in?”

“Back to the Turkish restaurant and my friend Abigail Zabriskie,” Eddie said. “I was not in good shape after that dinner. Once Skip and Polly got married and moved away, there was a period of great awkwardness between us. Clearly we needed to wrap things up, and we all felt the burden of that, even Polly, who had no idea what was going on. Skip’s answer was to be a total bear to me whenever we were together. After that horrible dinner, your mother and I decided to take a walk through the Commons. I wasn’t talking and she wasn’t talking and then finally she said, ‘So how is he your friend?’ and just like that, the whole story came out. I had never told anyone the truth about Skip, not before or since, except of course for tonight. Well, I told your mother the truth about all of it.”

“And that’s when you started dating?” Jesus, Mom, what were you thinking?

“Sweet word, ‘dating,’ but yes, that’s when things started. For the record, I adored your mother. She was wonderful to me. And I loved you and your sister. She was offering me an off-ramp from the half-life I’d been living. I could have a wife and children and the little house—”

“—and all you had to do was give up Skip.”

“Which, on that night, did not seem like such a hardship. No one would say such a thing today, but there was a time when it did not feel like lunacy to want what the majority of the human population had. Your mother’s deal was that I had to give up Skip and give up being gay. I know it sounds terrible now, but she didn’t know any better. I’m the one who should have known better.”

“Now I have to feel bad for Polly and my mother.”

“They were never in the same category. Your mother was a true friend betrayed.”

A photographer appeared at our little table then. Later it would occur to me that I should have sent her away, considering that I didn’t remember the bride and hadn’t been invited to the wedding, but in the moment I tipped my head to Eddie’s chest and he wrapped his arm around my shoulder.

Somewhere around midnight a new singer appeared, a girl who looked to be every minute of fourteen, and suddenly the ceiling was lit with violet light. That she was extremely famous was clear to everyone, even those of us who had no idea who she was. She was the last great surprise of the night, and when she took the stage, the wedding guests lost their minds, keening and whistling and stamping their feet. We decided, through a series of hand gestures, that the time had come for our departure. We declined the gift bags being handed out at the door. We didn’t want to take advantage of the situation.

Once we were outside the Plaza, we briefly discussed taking off our shoes and climbing into the fountain like Scott and Zelda, and then thought better of it. This was what it meant to grow old: we were capable of thinking better of it before it happened.

“Do you remember—” I began.

“I remember everything.” Eddie’s arm was back around my shoulder.

A few small clouds sailed miles above us, passing the moon. “Do you remember the story you told me that night in the car?”

“Which one?”

“The one about the woman and her horse.”

“Oh, that one,” he said. “Of course I do.”

“Whistler,” I said, and suddenly I was afraid I’d cry again. Being drunk was a terrible burden.

“Whistler,” he said, looking up at the moon between the buildings. “That’s right.”

“I thought about that woman and her horse for a long time after you left, and I wondered if maybe you’d told me the story because you were leaving and you wanted me to know you’d come back for me, which, of course, you did.”

“Only it took me considerably longer than you thought it might.”

I smiled. Oh, this night, this arm around my shoulder. “Did you make that story up for a reason?”

Eddie stopped and lit another cigarette, and this time I almost asked if I could join him even though I don’t smoke. “I didn’t make that story up. It was a book proposal, straight off my desk.”

“Someone else made it up?”

“No, no, nonfiction. I was more open to nonfiction back then, and it was the most spectacular story. The woman’s name was Mary Carter. She lived on a ranch in Wyoming about fifty miles south of Sheridan.”

I would have sworn the story wasn’t true, even though Eddie told me at the time that it was. Nothing about it seemed true. “How do you remember this?”

“Because I tried to buy the book. I tried for years. An agent had seen a piece about the accident in the newspaper, it was practically nothing, maybe three inches of column, and she got in touch with Mary. She told Mary there was a book in there. The agent sent me the clipping and a brief outline. For all I knew, the agent had written the proposal herself because Mary Carter never seemed to have any interest in writing a book. She and I talked several times. She was a shy person, very polite. I would have flown out to Wyoming to meet her, but then my foot was in a cast and I was living on the Hotallings’ couch. I thought it could be a great book, especially the business with the horse. I called her again once I settled at S&S. I even called her when I got the job at Random House. Random House! Boy, she’s going to listen to me now. But Mary Carter didn’t know Random House from a mimeograph machine. She’d listen to me tell her own story back to her, explain why it was meaningful, why people would want to read it, but I could never get her on board. The farther away she got from the accident, the less she had to say. I think it was hard for her to tell me to leave her alone.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“She died,” Eddie said. “Years and years ago. She was older than I was, maybe fifteen years or so. Her daughter wrote to tell me. She said when she was going through her mother’s things, she found my letters. She said she knew her mother cared for me, she could tell that by reading my side of the correspondence.”

“How did she die?”

“The daughter didn’t say, but I always had the feeling that Mary wanted to get the hell out of here.”

Though it hadn’t been discussed, we were walking back to Leda’s, going north along the dark edge of Central Park. I thought about what it would be like to go into that park and lie there for three days, looking up through the trees thinking you were going to die. “How’s your ankle?”

“The ankle is a brilliant metaphor for that time in my life. My ankle was unbearably painful, and I thought it would never function the same, and then, maybe a year later, I realized I hadn’t thought about it for the entire day. My ankle and I recovered, and that was sad, too.”

“What about the horse? Did the horse die?”

“Whistler? Oh, Whistler must be dead by now. I read the proposal in 1980. Horses last, but not that long. Funny that you think about her, though. Do you want to hear something crazy?”

“Tonight? Something crazy?”

“When I got the book proposal back in 1980, it came with a picture of the horse.”

“You told me that.”

“When?”

“In the car.”

Eddie shook his head. “Oh, the past, the past. Anyway, when your mother told the people at Houghton I was quitting, she packed up my office and mailed the boxes to Polly and Skip.”

“That’s aggressive,” I said, but the other thing that should be said is Oh, my poor mother.

“The picture of the horse was in the box. And when I finally set myself up at S&S, the picture of the horse was pinned to a cork board in my office. I would have told you I did it to remind myself to be vigilant about trying to close the deal, but the truth was I found the horse comforting. After a while I got it a little frame, and in that frame it sits on my desk to this day.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Not about anything. When you come to my office, I’ll show you. The authors always go straight to Whistler. They all want to know if it’s my horse.”

When you come to my office. That was the part I got stuck on.

When we arrived at Leda and Steve’s building, we took another moment to stand beneath the dark red awning, Eddie with his hands on my shoulders.

“I still have a million and six questions,” I said. I wondered if the doorman would let me sleep on one of the couches in the lobby as I was too tired to take the elevator upstairs.

Eddie yawned. “I’ll answer anything.”

“Promise? Promise you won’t disappear again?” I wanted never to let go of him.

“I didn’t disappear. That makes it sound like I abandoned you. I was exiled.”

“You’re missing the point. I don’t want to lose you.”

“Okay then. Till death do us part,” he said. “How about that?”

“Sounds good.” Now I was yawning, too. “And you have to promise me you won’t die.”

“Oh, Duck,” he said. “I’ll die, and so will you. I promise to go first and check it all out, make sure things look good up ahead.”

I saw an empty cab going downtown and my arm shot up. “ Hey! ” There were so few people on the street, so few cars, and the cab saw me and skidded to the curb up ahead and we trotted off to meet him. “Call me tomorrow,” I said, and kissed his cheek. Then he was in the taxi, squeezing my hand through the open window and letting it go. I kept standing there. All the lights were green, and in a minute he was gone.

Henry said he hadn’t waited up for me, but he was up, sitting in the dark living room playing a video game with someone in Reykjavík. I sat down on the couch beside him and fell backwards.

“How did it go?” he asked, continuing to play. I guessed it wasn’t the kind of thing you could stop once you were in the middle of it.

“You were right.”

Henry’s head gave an imperceptible nod. “Okay, but did you have a good time?”

“I may have had the best time of my life.”

He looked at me then, his face awash in blue screen glow. “Are you drunk?”

“I am.” I closed my eyes.

He tapped his goodbye onto the screen. “Wait a minute.” He got up and went into the kitchen, then he came back with an unreasonably large glass of water and three aspirin.

I sat up and thanked him.

“Aspirin is old-school,” he said. “It’s the most amazing drug and nobody takes it anymore because it’s always been around.”

“And because it burns a hole through your stomach lining.”

“This is Bufferin , as in buffered . Do you think I’m not looking out for you? Never take Tylenol when you’re drunk. You’ll blow out your liver.”

“You are my North Star,” I said.

“Did it make it any better to know?” He kept his voice quiet in deference to his sleeping parents. He was such a good boy.

“It did. When Eddie told me he was gay, I didn’t say anything about David Hockney. It was out of my system.”

“Good,” he said. “That’s good. Are you going to bed?”

“I am,” I said, but did not move.

“Should I get Mom to come and help you?”

I took a deep inhale and pushed myself up, first to sitting and then to standing. I wobbled slightly, and wondered how we had walked all the way from the Plaza. “I’ve got this. I love you. Good night.”

“I love you, good night,” he said, and went back to his game.

My two nieces, Wynn and Clare, were not yet home, and so I was sleeping in Wynn’s room. I struggled to reach the zipper on my dress, but the fabric was stiff and restrictive. The length of the sleeve did not allow my arms to properly bend. Leda had zipped me up. The only other time I’d worn the dress, at Jonathan’s retirement party, Jonathan had been there to both get me into it and get me out. I didn’t have the life force to walk back to the living room and ask for more help from Henry, and I didn’t want to ask him to unzip my dress anyway. I kicked off my shoes and crawled into Wynn’s bed. The pattern of her quilt was called Ohio Star. She told me that once.

All that night, I dreamed of my father, the two of us out on the boat. The engine was loud and spit out greasy black clouds of diesel exhaust, but in this dream the wind was coming straight from the east and the day was clear and fresh and Buddy was so happy, and I was so happy to be there with him as we chugged out towards the open sea.

In the morning, Leda came in quietly with a beverage tray: black coffee, orange juice, more water, and two pieces of dry wheat toast to sop it all up. She must have been talking to Henry. The clear bottle of aspirin balanced like a sentinel between the orange juice and coffee. “Scoot over,” she said, then saw that I had slept in my dress.

“Okay,” she said. “What a night.” She opened her daughter’s dresser and found a pair of scrub pants and a field hockey T-shirt, then she liberated me from my cocktail dress, which allowed me to fully inhale for the first time since yesterday in the early evening.

“Oh, this is so much better,” I said.

“Wait, sit next to me, you’ve still got pins in your hair. Does Jonathan usually get you ready for bed?”

“I don’t usually go to bed drunk.” I scratched fiercely at my scalp, a wonderful feeling.

She handed me the mug. “Start with this.” We crawled into bed together and pulled the covers up. “Tell me everything, and I mean everything. Don’t leave out a word.”

I leaned against her. “Okay, first, Eddie came to your apartment to pick me up.”

“Yes,” she said, nodding. “That’s good. Start there.”