Deborah took to visiting Mrs. Gartner once a week. Mrs. Gartner would ask if hummingbirds still visited the feeders she’d put up—of course Deborah said they did—and if the swallows still made nests in the corner of the porch, which was true. She would bring roses from the garden (the old lady could smell them, at least) and stewed rhubarb from the plant in the side yard. Deborah got stories about the Gartners’ courtship—he used to bring her blueberries he’d picked, in a Maxwell House coffee can—but she could never find out how they had come to raise the granddaughter. “Children can be such a disappointment”: that was all the old lady would say. A few times, at her request, Deborah went over to sing, in what the nurses were instructed to call the living room, and she roped me in to accompany her, on an old Chickering upright. For conservatory types, we were convincing enough: I’d worked my way through Buffalo playing lounges, and Deborah could sing “My Old Flame” or “Someone to Watch Over Me” without sounding like a lieder-trilling twit. After Sophia was born, Deborah brought her along a couple of times, but Mrs. Gartner got “agitated,” as the nurses put it, when Deborah took the baby away, thinking it was her baby.
Demented though she may have been, Mrs. Gartner had kept her mouth shut about Royall Brown until after we’d closed on the house. Deborah asked her how she’d known it was his ghost, and she said, “Why, who else would care?” Before Mr. Gartner’s heart attack, he’d been trying to talk her into moving to Florida.
Deborah began hearing Royall Brown, too: a floor creaking somewhere as we lay in bed, a door slamming, a thump outside, the faintest ping from my piano down in the living room. Never anything that might not have been a gust of wind, or the house settling, or an apple falling from one of the old trees I never got around to pruning—we used to talk about buying a cider press—or a wasp lighting on a piano string. Or, in the fullness of time, Sophia sneaking out to buy drugs. Deborah once saw a patch of fog over his grave in the shape of a man, but it dissipated by the time I could get out to the porch. His presence, she told me, felt “disapproving.” I made my will a couple of months ago, and it specifies that my body be cremated, so I won’t be joining the cast of characters up across the road. Or my own mother and father, buried in the town in Massachusetts where I grew up, seventy miles from here as the spirit flies. And I doubt that my own spirit—if I have such a thing, if I am such a thing—will be mooning around the house, rattling windows and wringing its see-through hands over, say, having failed to love when it was still possible.
Deborah had clearly worked up her farewell aria with some care: she would never have a career now, she told me, but at least she might have a life (this was a false ending), and (here comes the final cadence) she never wanted to see this place again. Come Judgment Day, they’ll confront me with a pie chart, showing just what percentage of me wanted this. So I’ve left the house to Sophia—who, when the time comes, might be more sentimental than she is now and unwilling to sell off her childhood home, from which she ran away for good at sixteen. She’s twenty-two, has apparently straightened herself out and lives with a boy in Berlin; if I’m accurately intuiting my own trajectory, she’ll inherit this place when she’s about thirty. By which time I will have done my important work—you understand that’s a joke, yes?—and the world (if I’m accurately intuiting its trajectory) will be shot to hell too, and she might be glad of a refuge—for however long such a refuge will last—twenty miles off the nearest interstate, where you can still sit and drink on the porch of a white clapboard house.
I hadn’t seen Sophia for three years when she paid me a visit last month before flying to Germany, bringing the boyfriend as a buffer. Since my time, she’d had a piece of metal, like a tiny dumbbell, installed in her eyebrow, to show the world she’d been wounded. They sat together on the sofa and turned down my offer of a gin and tonic. “I’m trying to picture what your life is like now,” she said.
“I can help you with that,” I said. “First you picture a hand coming out from under the piano lid.”
“I guess you were always funny,” she said.
“Until I wasn’t.”
“I’ve let that go,” she said.
The boyfriend had wandered over to the piano. He played a scale with his right hand—I watched the thumb spider up under the fingers—and then grabbed a two-handed diminished chord. The only kind of chord of which my piano is now capable, one might say, if one were still funny. “This is an amazing instrument,” he said.
“Well then,” I said. “Oblige us.”
“I don’t really play.”
“Oh, bullshit,” Sophia said. “Eric’s band is going to Scandinavia next month.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well, give my regards to Norway.”
He went back and sat on the sofa. She got up and said, “We’re going out on the porch for a little, okay?”
“I can go out,” he said.
“No, you sit.”
“If you change your mind,” I said, “the gin’s in the freezer.”
I followed her out; she sat down in an Adirondack chair and tucked her feet under her. I lowered myself into the chair next to her, bracing on its arms like an old man. “Why are you being a prick to him?” she said.
“I thought I was being self-ironic. I guess I’m not used to being around people anymore.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel sorry for you?” she said. “This was Mom’s idea, you know?”
“I’m just glad you came. And I had wanted to meet your friend.”
“Well, now you can check that off.”
“Since you’re here, I should probably show you a couple of things. This house is going to be yours someday, so—”
“Oh,” she said. “Lucky me. What, are you making plans for an early exit?”
“Okay,” I said. “Believe me, if I were in your shoes? I’m sure I’d feel the same way. I just want to do what little I can at this point.”
“What am I supposed to say? ‘I’m sorry I was such a handful’? How about this? When I’m getting ready to check out, I’ll forgive you.”
“I thought you said you’d let it go.”
“So I guess I was lying,” she said. “I studied under the master, right?” She stood up. “We’re going.”
“Could I just make one thing clear?” I said.
She opened the door to the living room and looked back at me. “What?”
What indeed?
“No, nothing,” I said. “I’ll let you have the last word.”
—
By the time Mrs. Gartner died, Deborah had been living in Cambridge for a year. But she’d kept in touch with a couple who live on our road—my road—and who no longer keep in touch with me, you’ll be surprised to hear. She called me the night before the funeral to say she was renting a car and coming up. “I just wanted to forewarn you,” she said. “I promised her.”
“Now you’ve shamed me into it,” I said.
“That would be something to see,” she said. “Your shame.”
“Oh, it’s on permanent display,” I said. “It’s become one of the local attractions.”
“Good you still have your sense of humor,” she said. “It must be getting quite a workout these days.”