The Summer Guest Page 6

  “I’ll be honest with you, Joe,” Hal was saying. “I’m not in love with this, as a business deal. But I think everybody here knows that’s not what this is.”

  “Jeez, Hal.” I flipped back through the agreement, if only to keep my eyes and hands occupied, skimming past pages of information I should have cared about or at least read. “Two million bucks is a lot of money. For that kind of bread, I would have been happy to fly coach.”

  Hal nodded smartly; the chummy banter was over for the moment. “That’s the general idea, Joe. My father wants to get this thing done. What do you think?”

  And I paused to wonder: what did I think? Every man has his price, and Harry had found mine—more than found it, actually, as a million five would have produced in me more or less the same set of emotions: a heady rush of pure greed, followed by the unsettling awareness that all the problems of my life had been solved in one painless instant. But that, of course, was just the problem. Somebody offers you something you suddenly can’t live without, but five minutes ago never knew you needed—well, there’s a catch somewhere, the most obvious being that what feels like luck is actually somebody else’s wand being waved over your life.

  “Just one question, Hal. What does he want to do with it?”

  “The camp?” Hal leaned back in his chair. “Keep it in the family, I suppose. There’s not much else he could do with it. That’s really his to decide, Joe.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “I have to know this.”

  Hal shot a look at Sally, who nodded a lawyerish nod, then turned his eyes back toward me. “He’s rewriting his will, taking this into account. That’s as far as I can go. And don’t ask Sally, because she can’t tell you. You’ve heard of a little thing called attorney-client privilege? She can’t even tell me.”

  “You said yourself this wasn’t just a business deal.”

  Hal sighed. “Look, here’s the bottom line. He wants to be helpful, Joe. Forgive me, but we did a little digging, and we know your situation. You’ve borrowed pretty heavily in the last few years—”

  “College,” I interrupted. “For Kate.”

  “Fair enough. But there’s also the place in Florida, and the new boats. You’re stretched pretty thin. I know you want to make a go of it down there, and you should. You’re entitled. You and Lucy are entitled. With the right seed money, the two of you could really set yourselves up nicely. I know you’ve made some inquiries about selling one of your leases back to Maine Paper. That’s exactly the kind of thing that Harry wants to avoid.”

  I felt my face grow warm. “Is this the part where you turn on the salesman’s charm, Hal? Because where I come from, talking about another man’s debts is not a way to make friends. And if you really want to know, they approached me. They have for years. I can set my fucking—excuse me, Sally—my fucking watch by it. The answer is always no.”

  “But how long can it stay no?” Hal took a deep breath and rubbed his eyes. “Look, Joe, I’m not going to try to tell you how to run your business. You’re absolutely right, and I apologize. It’s been a hell of a week, a hell of a month, really. You don’t know the half of it. So if I’ve spoken too bluntly, I’m sorry. But I also won’t insult your intelligence. We’ve known each other too long. This is a good deal. Hell, it’s a great deal. We both know that. You’re never going to find another buyer with this kind of dough to spend. And with Harry, you don’t have to watch the thing broken up and sold back to the loggers. That’s the real point, Joe. You can have my word on it, if you like.”

  I looked at Sally, who so far had said nothing. She was sitting with her hands folded on the table, her face unreadable as the sphinx. “Sally? What do you think of all this?”

  She gave a smile I read as cautious. “It’s your decision, Joe. I can’t tell you what to do.”

  “You look a little worn-out, Sally. That little girl of yours letting you get any sleep?”

  “Not much.” She laughed wearily. “But I’m sure you remember what it’s like.”

  “Do I ever. You want real ulcers, wait till she’s off at college. You know what’s back in style for kids these days? Tattoos. Half of Kate’s friends look like merchant seamen, or else gypsies, with all the piercings. Though it’ll be something else by the time yours reaches that point.”

  “I’m sure Kate’s more sensible than that.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Sensible. Probably a lot more sensible than her dad.” I paused a moment to listen to those words: “her dad.” Roger wilco. Two-million-three for one hopeless Dad.

  “Listen, Joe,” Hal was saying, “nobody wants to pressure you. Think about it. Take all this with you, and for god’s sake show it to a lawyer. Talk to Lucy, talk to Kate. We’ve booked a room for you at the St. Regis. Stay as long as you like. See the Empire State Building, take in a show, whatever. It’s all on us. The plane can take you back whenever you’re ready.”

  “Lucy told me I should see Cats.”

  Hal grinned encouragingly. “That’s the spirit. Sure, see Cats. Hang on a second.” He swiveled in his chair and picked up the phone. “Zoe? Can we get a ticket for Cats for Mr. Crosby for”—he looked at me and raised an eyebrow—“tonight’s performance? A good seat, orchestra, somewhere in the middle. No, just have them hold it at the theater.” He hung up the phone like a man who was used to getting things done easily. “Alakazoo,” he said, and rubbed his hands together. “All set.”

  “Thanks, Hal. That’s nice of you.”

  He rose from his chair to signal that the meeting was over. “Well, they say you have to see it once. You want anything else while you’re in town, you give a ring. I can even get you tickets for the Knicks.”

  I shook his hand and gave Sally a final hug. “Give our best to Lucy, won’t you, Joe?” she said. “And Kate too.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “Don’t forget these,” Hal said, and handed the papers to me. “I mean it, Joe. Have somebody look over that with you. Harry wants everybody to be happy.” He rapped his knuckles on the table—mahogany, I guessed, from the deep, clean sound of it. He was probably just as relieved as I was to leave things as they stood. “So, the lake ice out yet?”

  I was holding the papers a little awkwardly; they didn’t seem like the kind of thing a person should fold and shove into a pocket, and I hadn’t thought to bring a briefcase. I settled for putting them back in the manila folder and tucking it under my arm. “It should be. Always happens about this time. I haven’t talked to Jordan in a couple of weeks, though.”

  “Don’t know how he stands it up there, all by himself. Young guy like that. I’d go nuts.”

  “He says he gets a lot of reading done.”

  “I’ll bet he does. If you speak to him, tell him my dad hopes maybe to get up there for some fishing. I doubt it’ll happen, but there’s nothing he’d like more. Talks about it all the time.”

  Sally left us, and Hal led me to the elevator, where he shook my hand again. “We really appreciate you coming like this, Joe.”

  “I was glad to do it.”

  “Well, just so you know.” The elevator bell sounded; the doors slid open on an empty car. “One last thing, Joe.”

  I had seen this coming too. Where was Hal in all of this? Now that Sally was gone, I was pretty certain I would hear it.

  “I’m listening.”

  He looked quickly over his shoulder to make sure we were alone. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Sally, because she’s sort of a fan. But you might want to reconsider Cats.”

  In the years before my mother died, before my father’s spirit hardened like a skin of ice and he became the sort of man that people respect without actually getting along with, he liked to tell the story of how he had come to the camp. This took place right after the war, his war, a war in which he gave half his face and one emerald-green eye to the Thousand Year Reich on the point of a German sniper’s bullet, and though you’d think that such an experience might be a lifetime’s singular event, the
one that splits it into this “before” and that “after,” such was not the case with my father. (That came later, when my mother died of ovarian cancer, three months before her thirty-eighth birthday.) If anything, that sniper did my father a favor; I have no doubt that had he missed, I would have grown up the son of a Boston white-shoe lawyer who would have spent his years on earth, as many people do, wondering who he was truly supposed to be.

  They came to the camp on a winter day in ’47, an event I don’t remember though I am told I was there, a baby seven months old. Though in later years my father’s injury softened—as he aged, the fleshiness that came into his face padded his scars and fractured jawline so that his face appeared not so much collapsed as something merely lived-in—in those first years it was a stark and surprising thing to look at, the sort of face that quiets a room and parents shush their children over, and I think he took my mother and moved up to Maine simply to get away from people. My father had been a handsome man, not movie-star handsome but good-looking in an earnest way that women liked and men took to, and although he was not vain about his appearance, it would have been a hard thing for him to see in people’s eyes not the pleasant curiosity he was accustomed to but pity or even fear. More than this, though, a face like my father’s is a story—a public story—and I believe he tired of telling it. As long as he wore the face of war he was somebody both smaller and larger than who he imagined himself to be: not Joe Crosby, but Joe Crosby, War Hero. It took me years to understand the importance of this fact, but my father’s injury was unusual in that it was nothing he himself could see; if he had lost a leg or arm or taken a bullet to the spine, as happened to many men he knew, the situation might have felt different to him. His was an injury he did not see but saw out of, and the fact that the world he saw was for the most part the same place it had always been, save for the pitying looks it gave him in return, made him wish for a life in which his was the only gaze. He spent the better part of two years in the hospital; when he was finally discharged, in March of ’46, he returned to law, but only halfheartedly. A few years earlier, an uncle had left him a small inheritance; my father had set this aside, planning to use it to buy his partnership when the time came, but when he heard that the camp had come up for sale—the previous owners had all but abandoned the place and were about to lose it to the county for unpaid taxes—he couldn’t write the check fast enough.

  He had visited the camp in the late thirties, a Harvard grad slumming away the summer months washing dishes and flirting with the waitresses before entering law school, and at a party in Blue Hill he met my mother; though he never said as much, I am certain that these two events merged in his mind, so that the camp and my mother were, in a way, one and the same, and the chance to buy it must have seemed like the hand of destiny at work. The story he told me was a simple one, perhaps a little strange: all he said was that the first morning after they’d arrived, he climbed to the roof of the lodge and looked at the lake, and knew that he had found his life. I was a child when he told me this, so his words made no sense. Finding your life. How could you find something that was all around you, something that had never been lost to begin with? He might have said he had found the sun at midday and the moon at night. And the thought, too, of my father standing on the roof for the sheer hell of it—a place he warned me never to go, as I would surely fall and break my fool neck—excited and perplexed me. Even back then, in the years before my mother died, my father was a measured man. He distrusted displays of emotion, was not a big talker, and conducted his domestic affairs with the same levelheaded punctuality that he used to run his business. He was not an unfeeling man: he had friends, liked a joke, and loved my mother deeply. But as far as I could see, he was hardly the sort to climb a roof and feel some cosmic rightness pouring through him. That was my generation, not his, and though I would eventually spend many hours on the roof myself, I could never reproduce the feeling. How could this be the same man?

  I was eight years old when my mother got sick, and though it took her over a year to die, I remember very little of this period. For many years my parents had tried to have another child—I was miles away from any potential playmates, and to let me go through life without the company of a brother or sister seemed simply cruel. But after a series of miscarriages they abandoned the idea. Whether or not this failure was related to the cancer that finally took her life is anybody’s guess; the timing tells me it probably was. When my father finally spoke of this, in the last months of his life, he claimed not to remember how many miscarriages she’d had—three or four, he said, though who really knew?—but the last was memorable enough, bloody and awful. My mother was almost six months pregnant when it happened, a sudden hemorrhage that began as she was hanging laundry on the line for the autumn sun to dry, and by the time she got back to the house, a distance of a hundred feet, her skirt and apron were soaked with blood. I was off playing in the woods somewhere, so I saw nothing of what happened next. Before my father could even put a call in to the hospital, a solid hour away in Farmington, my mother began to deliver, right there in the kitchen: a two-pound baby boy who had, in all likelihood, died sometime the day before, when the placenta had separated from the uterine wall. My father had seen enough in the war to know, or at least guess, what to do next: he tied off the cord with twine, and did his best to staunch the bleeding, though it was coming from inside, at the site of the abruption, far beyond his reach. Then he wrapped my baby brother in a towel, called the nearest neighbor, the Rawlings—a couple who lived nine miles away—to tell them to track me down, and drove my mother to the hospital in the truck.

  By the time he got there my mother had lost so much blood that it appeared very likely she would die, that it would be a day of two deaths and not just one. This didn’t happen, but it is also true that she never fully recovered. She came home from the hospital three weeks later, pale and weak, a woman I hardly recognized. I had been staying at the Rawlings’, eating the huge batches of oatmeal cookies that Mrs. Rawling seemed to pull from the oven by the hour and generally feeling left out, because nobody had told me anything. I had even gotten it into my head that she would be bringing home the baby brother or sister I had been promised. In my heart it was a brother, and not even a baby but a boy my own age, so innocent was I of the facts of life. But all hope evaporated at the sight of my father helping my mother from the truck and into our house. There would be no baby, not then, not ever. She could hardly walk, and her skin was so colorless it seemed transparent, as I believed a ghost might look. She hugged me weakly and went up to bed, and all through the winter this weakness did not abate but seemed to widen around her like rings, so that the household fell into a kind of trance, as if we were all lost in a forest, though not together. She could not bring herself to read her novels or play the piano or do any of the things she loved, and when, in August, she began to cough and then to bleed again, this seemed not so much a new development as a continuation of the same decline.

  She died the next January, in my parents’ bedroom, on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine and breathtaking cold—a day that I imagine was not all that different from the day eight years earlier when my father had climbed the roof of the lodge and found his life. I had been sent to the Rawlings’ for the afternoon—by this time I spent so much time at their house that I had a bedroom of my own—and when my father came to fetch me at five o’clock, the appointed hour, and instead of simply honking the horn of the truck from the Rawlings’ driveway as he always did, he came into the kitchen and sat at the old oak table and removed his hat and gloves without saying a word, the cold of the outside air clinging to his coat like the smell of cigarettes that followed him everywhere, I knew what had happened without exactly knowing it—I felt it in my bones. I was working on a model kit, a B-17 Flying Fortress. I showed it to him, the landing gear that dropped from the plane’s belly to snap into place, the swiveling gun turrets and ailerons, the opening bomb-bay doors. I had taken up the toys of war initially to plea
se him, thinking it was something the two of us might share. But in the year of my mother’s illness, I had found myself alone with this interest, just as I had found myself alone with everything else.

  My father examined the plane indifferently, saying nothing, then returned it to its place on the table. I realized then that Mrs. Rawling had stepped from the room; she had left us alone.

  “Something has happened, Joey.”

  I had taken out a tiny brush and begun to stroke paint on the plane’s fuselage.

  “Joey, are you listening to me?”

  “I want to fight in a war,” I said, still painting.

  He gave a startled laugh. “Believe me, you don’t. That’s the last thing you want.”

  “You did.”

  “That’s how I know. Joey, put that goddamn thing down, please.”

  I began to, or thought I had, but before I could do this he grabbed the plane from my hand and slammed it onto the newspaper so hard that the wheels snapped off and shot in opposite directions across the kitchen.

  “You broke it!”

  “Joey, forget the plane. Sweet Jesus Christ. It’s a fucking toy.”

  I had never heard him talk this way—not just the words themselves, but the measured anger of their delivery, like the sound of an axe blade grinding on a stone. I thought he might actually hit me, something else he had never done before.

  “I have something to tell you. Your mother has died. Do you understand what this means? She was very sick, and she has passed away.”

  “You broke my plane, you asshole!”