Mom moved behind Niels again, but again I wouldn’t let her catch my eye.
—
AND THAT WAS how we lived, for a good long while anyway. Audra, who’s always worked particularly hard, left for the publisher’s every morning at seven. Forty-five minutes later, I walked the kids to school, then made my way back to the apartment, where Lorenzo would be waiting out front with the day’s customaries: a triple espresso, a chocolate croissant from Flakey’s, and the usual grooming kit unzipped to a set of German nail clippers and a Japanese razor. (On the far side of the pivoting desk there was also a pack of flossers, a tin of breath mints, a bottle of mouthwash, a shaving mirror, and four newspapers, all of them arranged on the tray like the tools of a particularly well-informed but hedonistic dentist.) In the afternoon, Anna-Maria delivered the kids to my mother’s. At 8:30 or 9:00 in the evening, Lorenzo dropped me back at the house.
Mom changed everything. It wasn’t that luxury didn’t agree with her; it was just that she hated wasting anything at all — envelopes, tea, money of any denomination, time, or intellect. Squandering what the world had allowed us was to her the great sin of our epoch (a point with which I’ve come to agree). Within weeks, she knew most of the used-goods stores in Lower Manhattan. And the kids went along on her shopping trips as though exploring a newly charted land. Niels readied himself with a map. Emmy (who needs no map) brought along a reporter’s notebook. One afternoon I opened it to a page that contained a matrix of milk, ice cream, and butter prices at all the markets in the neighborhood. She’d figured everything by the ounce.
Naturally, Mom also availed them of the art museums. I knew the more prominent ones myself — the Met, MoMA, the Guggenheim — from the money-related events I’d attended in their inner rooms. But Mom went further. She succeeded in doing for the kids what she’d once hoped to do for Paulie and me, on all those drives to Chicago. And the kids didn’t even seem to mind.
Over the first months, they became familiar with just about every landmark, major or minor, on the New York art scene, from the Whitney to the Neue to the Folk Art. They went to the Chelsea and the Rubin and a whole slew of private galleries whose buzzered doors she scoffed at but still entered. The Frick didn’t allow children, but she talked them in anyway. On weekends they went by subway to the Museum of African Art in Harlem and the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, where they picnicked from a wicker basket she’d bought from a street cart. I could well imagine all these expeditions: the kids, watching the paintings, being watched by Mom; Mom waiting saintlike for any sign of interest.
Emmy no doubt heartened her. Emmy will absorb whatever is presented — music, art, mathematics — and store it in the permanent collection. Niels will flit around like a bee. But when the bee settles on a flower, it settles.
I could imagine Mom charting their futures.
“They’re interesting,” she said to me one day. “They’re not like you were at that age. Or Paulie, for that matter.”
“Well, they’ve got plenty of Audra in them, too.”
“Yes, yes, you’re right.” She nodded, as though the thought were new to her. “I can see that.”
“Niels is like you,” I offered. “More well rounded.”
She eyed me.
“I mean that as a compliment.”
“Thank you.” She smiled, but after a moment, the smile thinned. “Emmy is the one — the one I worry about.” She touched her head. “She could—”
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“But she won’t,” said my mother. “We just won’t let her.”
—
OUR COUNTRY PLACE in Litchfield is an eighteenth-century colonial with a hundred acres of oak and maple out back. Out front is a brook whose course has been nudged with a backhoe so that it makes two gurgling passes beneath a pair of Japanese footbridges beside the driveway. At the loop of the bank, the old carriage house has been converted into an office — yes, the pads, the pencils, and the caramels, though not the boxes.
That’s where I was when the phone rang one Saturday a couple of years ago. “Who’s this?” I said, hearing a woman say my name on the line. Her voice prodded something in my memory.
“Cleopatra Biettermann,” came the reply.
“Do I know you?”
“My husband and I are old friends of your father’s. Cle Wells was my name then.” She paused, taking a dramatic breath. “Your dad’s not doing well, you know.”
“How do you mean?”
“He told me that the two of you had some kind of falling-out. That’s why I called.”
“How’s he not doing well?”
“When I spoke to him recently, he didn’t sound very good.”
I was still trying to place her voice. “Well,” I said. “He can sound that way.”
“I know he can.” She paused. “Hans, your father is an extraordinary man. He’s unlike anyone either of us has ever known.”
“Well, on that point, we agree.”
“Oh—” she said, inhaling sharply.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Then she added, “For just a second there, you reminded me of him.”
We were both silent. Then I said, “So, how exactly is he not doing well?”
“I think you need to go see him,” she said.
7. Proof
Drunkard’s Walk
ON THE PHYSICO jet, the waiter served a dry-aged New York strip with raspberry reduction and a plate of miniature asparagus spears under dill. In Detroit, I settled into a stick-shift Audi. I could have landed at an airport closer to the house, but I was looking forward to the drive. The GPS said 112 minutes.
I made it in ninety.
The thing is, I nearly missed the turnoff. That’s how different it all was. The gravel road that in my childhood had curved down into a cedar-strewn swampland and over a shaky wooden bridge had been paved and straightened. Asphalt so black it looked as though it had been laid that morning. White lines down the sides like the stripes on a Ping-Pong table. At the intersection sat a new hotel — a Lakeland Suites with its bright green shamrock, slowly turning. Next door, a slickly rounded Speedway station, its line of pumps turned gold by the evening light. I had the thought that if I continued down that shining slice of pavement, I’d find a business park at the end.
And I almost did.
It was a housing development. Gray and beige saltboxes with steep green roofs, the dark living-room windows reflecting a dozen shimmering balls of flame as the sun moved down below the trees. Closer to the bridge stood a longer, lower construction with the same steep roof. A parking lot wrapped around three landscaped sides. I thought it might be a gym; then maybe a bowling alley; then a school. Then I read the sign: A SINNING MAN NEVER PRAYS — AND A PRAYING MAN NEVER SINS.
My father was passing a mega-church now every time he went into town.
Just before the creek, I made the sharp turn onto the rutted two-track. This part was paved now as well — the same darkly glinting asphalt and shining white borders. All of it burnished to amber by the evening. The old trestle bridge had been replaced by a steel one, with a fenced-in foot lane. On the far side, peeking from the trees every hundred feet or so, were driveways that ended in carved mailboxes — smallmouth bass and startled owls and friendly bears with their jaws open for the postman. People had taken to naming their cabins: TEES FOR TWO, A LONG DRIVE, ANGER’S AWAY! I could see the screened-in porches through the boughs and the lamps burning in the living rooms. Suddenly a row of streetlights blinked on.