The Might Have Been (8 page)

“Dr. Whitson and family,” the man said, stepping forward and around Edward Everett and the woman.

“Yes, Dr. Whitson,” the maitre d’ said.

“Sir?” the bellhop said to Edward Everett, one eyebrow raised in invitation.

He followed the bellhop to the smaller dining room, although he knew where it was. “Two for dinner,” the bellhop said to the hostess seated behind the desk at the entrance, reading a paperback romance novel.

She sighed, closed the book after folding down a corner of the page she was reading, slid off her stool, plucked two menus from the desk and walked off into the dining room, not even waiting for any sort of acknowledgment from either Edward Everett or the woman who was, inexplicably, following him and the hostess toward a table in a far corner. She seated herself in one of the chairs while Edward Everett maneuvered himself into the other, laying his crutches on the floor and nudging them under the table.

“War wound?” the woman said, shoving the stainless ware off the napkin folded on the table in front of her and laying the napkin on her lap.

“I’m sorry,” Edward Everett said, “but—”

“Look,” she said. “You were going to eat alone. I was going to eat alone, and …” She gave a little shrug, closing her eyes. Edward Everett couldn’t tell, but it seemed she was trying to suppress tears. She took in a deep breath and opened her eyes. “We don’t have to talk. Hell, look at most of the rest of the couples here: they’re not talking.”

Edward Everett glanced around the dining room. At one table, a man made notes in a pocket notebook while the woman with him sorted through her purse as if she was looking for something, laying keys and wadded tissue on the tabletop. At another table, the woman looked up from her plate expectantly toward the man, giving him a
small smile. In return, he briefly glanced at her and then looked down at his lap.

“It’s fine,” Edward Everett said, and opened the menu. He felt uncomfortable sitting with the woman; she was older than he was by clearly more than a decade and, although he told himself he would never see any of the people in the restaurant again and would, at this time the next day, be back in Ohio, he hoped they didn’t think he and the woman were a couple: perhaps mother and son, or older sister and younger brother, but not together.

“What is it with men?” The woman closed her menu, slapping it onto the table with enough force that it jangled the flatware.

“What are you talking about?” Edward Everett said quietly. At the next table, two elderly women paused in their own conversation and were studying the two of them.

“I’m not hideous,” she said.

“No,” Edward Everett said carefully.

“You’re thinking, ‘I hope they don’t think she’s with me.’ ”

“No,” he said.

“It’s coming off you like an odor. ‘She’s old.’ ”

“I don’t even know you,” he said. “I just came downstairs to have dinner on my last night here. You followed me.”

The woman held up her hand. “Please.”

“Just don’t—”

“Make any more scenes?”

“Yes,” he said.

She raised her right hand in a scout salute: thumb and pinky circled, her other three fingers up. “I swear.”

Hoping it was as good as the steak for which the restaurant on the other side of the lobby was famous, he ordered a sirloin, medium, and a baked potato. The woman surprised him by ordering the same, except medium-rare, and asked for an extra portion of sour cream for the potato. “And a carafe of your house red,” she said. “Wine?” she asked Edward Everett.

“Sure,” he said.

“Two glasses, then,” she said.

They sat in silence, waiting for their meals. Edward Everett stole
a look at the woman, who seemed lost in her thoughts. She stared vacantly at a far corner of the room, tapping a tooth with a long fingernail that was polished a deep red. When she was younger, she was probably beautiful, he thought. Her features were surprisingly delicate; her nose was thin, as were her lips; her makeup was careful in a way that made it appear natural, but as he studied her, he could see it covered wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and creases on her forehead.

“So,” she said, startling him. “A six or a seven? At least a five.”

“What?”

“You’ve been staring at me for two minutes. You’re trying to decide whether I’m pretty enough. I know I don’t rate a nine and certainly not a ten—even when I was your age—but come on, you have to give me a five.”

Edward Everett blushed. “I wasn’t—” he stammered.

“Okay,” she said.

The waitress brought their wine and salads and the woman began shoving the tomato wedges to the edge of her plate. “What’s your name?” she asked, lifting a bite of lettuce to her mouth.

“Edward Everett,” he said.

“Well, Mr. Everett, I’m Estelle Herron. Two ‘r’s,’ not one like the bird.”

He considered telling her that “Edward Everett” was his first and middle name but for the first time in his life it struck him that it was odd he was “Edward Everett” and not “Edward” or even “Ed.” She would ask how he got the name and he would have to tell her about his mother’s affection for Edward Everett Horton, admitting that he’d been named for a Hollywood second banana few remembered anymore. He let it go: what did it matter? Once the meal was over, he’d be back upstairs in his room, away from a woman he still doubted was entirely sane.

“What brings you to Montreal?” she said, giving the city’s name a pronunciation that sounded expertly French.

“I was playing ball,” he said.

“Like that?” she said, indicating his cast with her fork, Russian dressing dripping from its tines onto the tablecloth.

“No,” he said. “I got hurt a few weeks ago and the team moved on while I was in the hospital. My season’s over.”
Maybe my career
, he thought.

“Left behind,” she said. “That makes two of us.” She set down her fork, picked up the carafe of wine, poured them each a glass, lifted hers, tilting its rim toward him, an offer of a toast. He picked up his glass and touched it to hers, then took a sip. He was never a wine drinker—not dinner wines, at least. Whenever he drank wine, it was what he and his friends called “alcoholic Kool-Aid”: highly sweet apple and strawberry flavors. This was bitter and he suppressed a cough, not wanting to show her he lacked sophistication.

“So, what school do you play for, Mr. Everett?”

“Not a school,” he said. “The Cardinals.”

“Really?” she said. “You wouldn’t try to fool a girl, would you?”

“No.”

“I don’t remember any Everett playing for them.”

“I’ve been with the team since July,” he said. “I got called up—I was in Springfield.”
Could it really have been that long ago: the month before last?

“Not an auspicious start,” she said, and then went on almost immediately. “I’m sorry. I apologize. I have a tendency to—a lot of smarts, my father used to say, but not a lick of social sense. May he rest in peace.” She picked up her wine and raised it slightly upwards. “How did you get hurt?”

He told her about the game weeks earlier, about the play that hurt him, but not about his performance at the plate, partly because he heard the account through her perception: to someone else, it would seem a baseball version of “the one that got away.”
It didn’t count, but the game was thiiiiiiiiiis big
.

“My father was a Cardinals fan.” She took another forkful of her salad but paused with the bite partway between her plate and her mouth, as if she was remembering someone. “I’m not from here,” she said, taking the bite finally. “We’re from Indiana. Hoosiers, rah!” She raised a fist in a way that made him think of cheerleaders, and for a moment he could see her at sixteen, red-cheeked, giving a jump
on the sidelines of a football game in November, bouncy with youthful excitement. He tried to calculate when that would have been.

“By rights, we should have been Cincinnati fans, but for some reason …” She gave a shrug. “When I was a little girl, my father and I—but you don’t want to hear this. We said silence.” She held up the scout salute again.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You and your father …”

“You don’t have to,” she said, taking another forkful of lettuce and then inspecting it as if it were something distasteful, pulling a small brown and wilted leaf from the fork and laying it delicately on the edge of her plate before eating the rest of the forkful.

“You and your father,” he said again.

“We would sit up listening to Cardinals games on the Philco. The reception wasn’t always clear. We’d get overlap, you know, from other stations. My mother would say, ‘Howard, the girl has to get her sleep.’ ‘There’s plenty of time for sleep after October,’ he’d say. He was my hero for that.”

The waitress brought their dinners but got the orders mixed up: when Edward Everett cut into his steak, a thin trail of blood pooled around the edges of his sirloin.

“Not very ladylike,” Estelle said, switching their plates. “To order meat so near to still being alive.” She went on with her story. “Even after he died, I kept on with it. It was my way to stay connected to him. I remember when I was just out of college, my mother wanted to take me to Paris. It was what women of a certain sort did after college. She’d done it with her mother and so she and I were going to damn well do it. We were not close, but one did not say ‘no’ to one’s mother. Not then.”

She got lost again for a moment in some thought but came back after a second. “I didn’t want to go. The Cardinals were still in the thick of things and I didn’t want to miss it. They had a chance to go to the Series for the first time since 1946 and I was damn well not going to miss it. She didn’t understand. It wasn’t the baseball, it was—”

“Your father.”

“Exactly.
You
understand that. She couldn’t. So we went; they were in first place the day we left and they weren’t anymore when we got back six weeks later.” She laughed. “It will sound stupid, but I blamed myself.
If I’d been there, listening to the games, they’d’ve won
. Silly, and maybe you can’t understand that. One afternoon, we were going to the Louvre and on the way we passed a newsstand where they had the
International Herald Tribune;
I bought one and, while we were waiting in line to get into the room to see the
Mona Lisa
, I read the sports page. It wasn’t much—just a paragraph about a game they had with someone, I don’t know: Cincinnati or New York. My mother snatched the paper out of my hands in front of all those people—a rare lapse in decorum for her—and snapped at me. ‘For God’s sake, Esty. We’re in the Louvre.’ She stepped out of line and marched the newspaper to a trash can and came back. I could tell the newsprint all over her hands bothered her. It made me think of Lady Macbeth—‘Out, damn spot’—the way she kept wiping one hand against the other to try to get them clean. The Cardinals ruined her trip to the Louvre.”

“When was this?” he asked.

“No. I won’t tell you. You just want to know so you can figure out my age. You’re …” She closed her left eye and regarded him with her right, calculating. “You were alive by then. I’m certain of it.”

“I’m twenty-six,” he said, for some reason shaving a year off his own age.

“Twenty-six,” she said, laughing. “I’m still not trading you my secrets. Okay, Mr. Twenty-six. What’s your story?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I play ball. I’ve always played ball. That’s it. Not much of a story.” He picked up a roll and broke it in two, buttering half and laying the other half on the bread plate between them and then took it back and put it on his own plate, aware of his gaffe: they were strangers. She wouldn’t want to eat half a roll he’d touched. “Were you part of that wedding I saw earlier?” he asked her.

“My baby sister’s,” she said, and then brightened. “She’s twenty-five. Younger than you, so there you go. That answers one of your questions.”

“Questions?”

“ ‘Is she old enough to be my mother or just an older sister?’ ”

“My mother is—”

“Oh, God, here we go.”

“She’s fifty-nine.” Or had she turned sixty by then?

“That’s a relief. I’m nowhere near fifty-nine.”

She had me late
, he thought, but did not say. His mother was thirty-two when he was born, a Catholic woman who by then despaired of ever having children, until he came along: her one and only miracle.

“My sister wanted to be married in Paris,” the woman said, cutting a bite from her sirloin and eating it.

“Wow,” Edward Everett said. “Paris. Your family goes there quite a bit.”

“You see, that’s just it. I went. She didn’t. The fortunes, well, have fallen since my father …” She finished her sentence by waving her fork in the air in a gesture that suggested she was dispersing smoke. “The Herron family, well, had its wings clipped. Financially. This was a compromise. Faux Paris. Here we are in the Salon de Jardin.” She gave a short laugh. “
Garden Room
,” she said in an exaggerated Midwestern accent, prolonging the “a” in “garden” and the “o” in “room.” She shook her head. “Pretentious—my sister has no idea what this is costing my mother. She took on a mortgage. I only hope to God she can pay it.”

“Isn’t the wedding still going on?”

“I’m confident it is.”

“But you’re—”

“Not there. Correct.”

“Shouldn’t you be?”

“Oh, it most definitely is unseemly that I’m not. The maid of honor has left the building. Not literally, of course. I’m still in the building, but … you know what I mean.”

“Why?” he asked.

“No. I haven’t had enough wine to tell you that particular secret. But maybe soon.” She winked at him, picked up the carafe and poured more wine into her glass, although it was only half-empty,
filling the glass until the wine rose nearly to the brim. She started to set down the carafe but then, as an afterthought, filled his glass to the rim as well. “Cheers, Mr. Everett. Cheers.” She lifted her glass in a toast and when they touched glasses, wine lapped from hers onto the tablecloth. “I am not a good customer today, am I?”

They fell into a silence then, eating their steaks and potatoes, while the restaurant around them began to fill up. Before they finished their meals, every table in the place had a party at it and there were patrons two and three deep at the entrance, some standing on tiptoe, craning their necks to gauge their prospects of being seated. The woman had ordered a second carafe of wine without asking if he wanted any and, between the two of them, the second was nearly empty: perhaps half a glass remained in it. Edward Everett had drunk three or four glasses, Estelle twice as much. Her eyes seemed unfocused and as she cut her meat, her movements lacked the precision they had when they began. He finished the wine in his glass and drained the carafe into it to prevent her from drinking any more. Not that another half glass would matter, he thought.