No Book but the World: A Novel (12 page)

After Neel’s death, June remained in the Office about a year before the isolation drove her to Freyburg Center, where she rented an apartment over the bicycle shop. Fred stayed with her for stretches of time, but by then he’d turned eighteen and begun traveling for long periods. Not independently, of course. Old friends of Neel’s, many of them former Batter Hollow students, would offer to put him up and give him work as a favor to June. I never knew to what extent he was truly productive, earning his room and board, or whether these stints were more a matter of glorified babysitting. But I believe Fred must have been able to contribute meaningful work. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t lazy, and given the right kind of task he could be more diligent and thorough than most people. It seems possible that the great variety of experiences might have expanded him, too, made him more worldly and wise.

I can’t account for all the places he traveled, all the jobs he held. By then I was busy building my own life with Dennis, working hard to become someone other than I had been: an adult, a wife, a music teacher. I do recall hearing about a stint he did on a lobster boat off Gloucester, and another on a maple syrup farm in Vermont. And I recall, of course, the summer after Neel died when that family brought Fred to the Magdalen Islands, employing him as a kind of companion for their twelve-year-old son. It was, June said, precisely his unconventional upbringing—the fact of his having been allowed to spend all those years ungoverned in the woods, hiking and exploring, foraging for wild strawberries and mushrooms, telling time by the sun—that made him perfect for the job. She told me about it over the phone, shortly after persuading the family to invite him, and she spoke in an excited rush, sounding happy and relieved and something else. Vindicated. As though reporting that Fred’s upbringing hadn’t been a disservice to him after all.

I was a newlywed that summer, having married Dennis six weeks before Neel’s third and fatal stroke. Publicly, I joked I’d caused it. Privately, I believed I had.

By then Dennis and I were living in Queens, where he worked for Greensleeves, a green-energy consulting firm, and I led Clap Your Hands! music classes for preschoolers at the Flatbush Y. I’d stumbled into the job, recommended by a family for whom I’d babysat while in college, and was somewhat surprised to find it suited me, both the consistency and the nostalgia, for I used many of the old songs and rhymes and handclap games that June had taught us when we were little. Every now and then there’d be a child who reminded me of Fred. The child could be girl or boy, black or white, shy or rowdy—none of this mattered. What would catch my attention was something less visible than atmospheric: a sense of profound detachment, an inability to participate with the rest of the class in any way, either to sing along or to sit still, and yet, from the moment I unzipped my duffel bag and began handing out rhythm instruments, a kind of intense rapture. I always found a way to let such a child have whichever instrument he or she desired, even if someone else had already chosen it, even if the caregiver tried to step in and mediate.

No, no, Robert, this nice little girl had the castanets first
.

He should have them,
I’d say, trying to project peaceable sagacity. And quickly I’d hand a pair of claves to the nice little girl, whose lip might be starting to tremble.
Hey, I bet you’d be really good at these
.

That Neel found my job an abomination factored heavily into why he and I were on less than stellar terms during the last years of his life. (“Cookie-cutter music,” he called it, never mind that I’d learned most of it from June.) After he died, I made an effort to visit June at least every couple of months, but the truth is I found it depressing.

My mother was sixty-five when Neel died: young. Her hair, which still hung heavy halfway down her back, had turned a rich ivory. Its new paleness brought out the warm cork tones of her skin and made her dark eyes sparkle. She hadn’t put on much weight as she aged, but the pounds she had gained looked healthy, softening her somewhat angular frame. There was no reason she couldn’t have continued being active, doing the things she had done before his death: taking yoga, teaching figure drawing at the American Legion Hall, playing flute. But she complained of feeling tired and she complained of feeling old, and whenever I visited I’d find the kitchen table blanketed with old Batter Hollow yearbooks and newsletters, things she claimed to be in the process of cleaning out but which seemed only to accumulate in ever more precarious piles. And she never wanted to cook anymore.

We’d drive into Freyburg and have dry little sandwiches and wilty garden salads at the Front Porch Cafe, and then she’d say she needed to buy something, always something modest and cheerless, like toothpaste, and we’d walk to the five-and-dime, and then she’d suggest we check out the book sale table at the library, or browse the thrift shop, one thing after another until it was time for my train back to the city, and I’d come away feeling how attenuated her life had become, and how deeply she’d grown to dread spending any time at all back at Batter Hollow.

“You don’t have to stay, you know,” I finally told her. “It’s not like you’d be hurting his feelings if you leave.”

Her eyes went wavy but the rest of her remained composed and she returned my gaze so steadily that I grew hot and appended out loud what we both must have been thinking: “Like
I
did.”

Because I’d gone away to college, my departure from Batter Hollow coincided with the Manseaus’, and I think Neel conflated the two, experiencing my embarkation as another abandonment, if not an outright switching of allegiances. It’s true that I grew close to the Manseaus during college, but as a result of happenstance rather than conspiracy. I attended New York University, mere blocks from their West Village apartment. Kitty had gone off to Oberlin, and Don and Meg, missing her, no doubt, took to inviting me for dinner every now and then. I loved to go. Their apartment, over on Jane Street, was modern, stylish, full of air and light. They always had interesting people over: grant administrators, civic planners, secular humanists—all these things I’d never even heard of up in Batter Hollow. And they treated me like an adult. It wasn’t only that they assumed my interest in conversing with their friends; they assumed their friends’ interest in conversing with me. They seemed to find it natural I would drink a glass of Rioja with them, keep up with the editorial page, have an opinion about everything from the Times Square renovation project to the Lewinsky scandal to what was happening in Kosovo. And, in no small part as a result of their expectations, I did.

Their older daughter, Ellie, the one who’d been in the Peace Corps, was living by then in Chad, where she did something with NGOs and microloans (more new vocabulary for me), but Dennis was living in Long Island City, and was sometimes at these dinners, often with a girlfriend. He had a succession of these, each one pleasant in a subdued sort of way. I studied them with surreptitious fascination, unable to suss out what made them particularly desirable. In the absence of more obvious charms, I invented all sorts of hidden attributes: they possessed scathing wits, cooked gourmet novelties, were terrors in the sack. That each must be in some way exceptional was a given, for Dennis, I was coming fervently to believe, might have had his pick of any woman in the city.

Dennis fascinated me. Initially I tried to convince myself it was just because of Kitty and the many ways they were at once like and unlike each other. His eyes were the same vivid chicory blue, but more deeply set, and awninged by thicker brows. His hair, once as blond as hers, had settled into a complicated honey brown. The most riveting similarity was the cleft chin. His was much more pronounced. I couldn’t decide whether it was handsome or absurd.

But what fascinated me most was a quality he did not share with Kitty: his modesty, his innate reserve. Dennis was capable of dazzling (as at our first encounter, when he tossed the white base of the lamp into the lavender sky), but never actively sought an audience or applause, so that even his starriest moments—whether of drollery or brilliance or bravery or benevolence—possessed a kind of stealth quality, with the result that when they caught my notice I felt specially rewarded, singled out.

Once I admitted to myself that I’d fallen in love, I fell as one does for every aspect of the man, however minute, and especially for those most foreign to me: his wingtips, his French cuffs, his taste for dark chocolate, his taste for octopus, the way his barber shaved the back of his neck, the crinkles that had already, at twenty-five, begun to etch the corners of his eyes. Each one of these in turn made blood rocket through my body. Long gone were the days when I joined Kitty in mocking him for attending Clenchbutt Academy; now I paged hungrily through his old yearbooks and drank in stories of his prep school days: the lab coat he’d stolen from a beloved chem teacher only to return it days later, tie-dyed; the beer bottle fight he’d broken up between classmates, which gave him the shiny raised scar on his left shoulder; the early-morning rowing in shells on the mist-shrouded Clembrook River.

I remember the first time I placed my finger in the lovely depression (I’d decided in favor of it) in his chin. We had already slept together but this felt more intimate, more riskily presumptuous even than that, and I could not work my voice above a creaking whisper: “How do you shave in there?”

When eventually I began staying the night in his converted warehouse apartment in Long Island City, I would lie awake, too incredulous to sleep, listening to him breathe and gazing out the vast bank of undressed windows, taking in the endless wealth of lights.

From this vantage Batter Hollow seemed poorer than ever. I went home for holidays with increasing reluctance. Neel, after years of mental sharpness, had at last grown doddery—and simultaneously more pigheaded than ever. The combination was hard on June. Still only in her late fifties, she tried to maintain her equilibrium, but the effort showed on her face and in her posture, and also in the way the house and grounds fell into disrepair. The Shed looked derelict, its two front windows having been smashed and replaced with plywood. A heavy length of gutter hung diagonally off the Classrooms. One side of the Annex had become streaked with green tongues of mildew. The Art Barn, victim to a fallen branch, had a hole in its roof. If the Office showed less obvious external decline, the inside reeked of neglect: peeling plaster, engrimed bathtub and sink, moldings darkly furred with dust.

Fred, though he still lived nominally at home, rarely entered the house. June told me he spent more and more nights in his tree house. “I think he’s happy out there.” But whenever I saw him he seemed more silent and remote than ever. He’d grown tall and broad-shouldered, with a strong neck and a fine, manly jaw; he might’ve been really handsome if not for certain oddities: his unwashed, uncombed, uncut hair; the habit he had of bouncing on the balls of his feet; the way his eyes would meet yours, at once shy and rawly eager, for just a second before sliding away again. I noticed a funny smell about him, too, like wet leaves and mushrooms.

•   •   •

T
HE PHONE IN
Mr. Charles’s outer office rings again and a minute later the young woman Lisa appears in the door. “Sorry to interrupt,” she says. “But I’ve been asked to remind you that it’s past five.”

“What’s that?”

“And I have class tonight.”

“Hm?” Mr. Charles glances at her abstractedly, still keeping company with his most recent thought. Then his face clears. “Right. Right you are.”

“And you’re supposed to pick up cream cheese on the way home.”

He looks nonplussed.

“For the icing? Grandma’s carrot cake?”

“Oh,” says Mr. Charles. “Ayuh.”

Lisa gives a tiny roll of her eyes and retreats back into the outer office. So she is his granddaughter. So this is a family business.

Mr. Charles smiles apologetically, twisting the base of his pen and setting it down. “We’ll have to wrap up now. This has been,” he allows, “instructive.”

“What happens next?” After sitting here for so long in the stifling banana air, I find myself unnerved by the abrupt dismissal.

“I’ll get over to the jail tomorrow.” He flips a couple of pages on a desk calendar, then confirms, “Yes, I should be able to meet with your brother tomorrow. We have your contact info? You gave it to Lisa?”

I explain that I am staying in Perdu this week, and although he should have my cell I write down for him again both my own number and Mrs. Tremblay’s landline, adding what she said about the spotty cell reception out where she is. He stands and makes signs of closing up shop, straightening a few piles on his desk, tearing a slip of paper off a pad and folding it into his breast pocket, where I see he already has a little salad of other scraps.

“About visiting my brother—”

“Yes, yes, we can be in touch after I’ve seen him.”

“No, I mean—
my
visiting him. How I haven’t been able to see him? Because I’m not on the list?”

“Oh. Right. I should be able to . . .” His voice trails off as he redeploys his pen and jots down something else, then adds that piece of paper to the others in his shirt. “Try calling after four, you have the number? Call the jail after four tomorrow. I should be able to get that taken care of.”

I can hardly believe that dispatching this problem could be so easy—for him just a matter of making a call, when for me it has been an impossible plight. “Thank you.” I reach out my hand, a little sick with relief. We shake once more and I leave, fairly tumbling down the stairs and outside where it is cold and dark and smells blissfully like nothing except cold, dark air.

•   •   •

I
N THE MORNING
Mrs. Tremblay sets before me a plate bearing another egg, hardboiled this time, and a slice of honeydew. She apologizes for not serving toast.

“That’s all right.”

But she
tsk
s. “I put a piece in the toaster and then saw it was moldy. I just bought the loaf Tuesday!”