Diane was smart. She had gotten into Yale from a mediocre public school and from there gone to Harvard Law. Her brain was ferocious, alive, calculating. Her mind could concentrate absolutely on a subject, relentless to the finish, immaculate at arranging the details. More than anyone she knew, certainly more than Peter, she was here, in New York’s fast lane, on merit.
Diane put her hand down on Byron’s back and stroked gently. Then she let her fingers stray on his warm skull.
“He’s not a genius,” his father had said.
Byron could make do with Peter’s connections and become one of those mediocre children of the successful, lazy intellectually and spoiled by physical comfort.
Diane felt her mind pulse with energy. She imagined her tough, active brain could flow down through her arm, into her fingertips, and into Byron, into the soft, impressionable dough of Byron’s mind.
Peter made a living because his mother knew the right people. He got into Harvard because two generations had gone before him.
I made it because of my brain.
Diane closed her eyes and released the force of her intellect into Byron’s baby brain. She felt her body glow with the transfer.
Get there on merit like me, she ordered.
WHEN ERIC exited off the Maine turnpike and got on the two-lane country highway, Nina rolled her window down all the way and tilted her head out, her face to the wind. The cool country air splashed her cheeks and filled her nostrils with the perfume of nature’s maturity. Her eyes rested, gazing at the soft greens, the still white houses, the glimpses of shimmering bays and lakes, the winding stretches of placid road. With every mile, there were fewer and fewer things and people — less and less of lifeless cement, more and more of the breathing earth.
Nina glanced back at Luke. He had been peaceful in the car, soothed by the steady hum of the motor and the regular bumps of the highway’s seams. He slumped bonelessly in the hollow of the car seat, his veined eyelids were closed, and his long eyelashes rested, like discarded fans, on the white fabric of his face. His black hair was crazy from repeated perspirations and dryings, some locks curling up against gravity, others collapsed on his brow, stuck to his skin.
Eric’s thick thighs, naked in his blue shorts, glowed in the late-afternoon sun. Nina put her hand on the muscled mass of Eric’s leg, ironing the curled hairs between her fingers, and tried to imagine Luke-the-tadpole growing up to become like his bear of a father. Eric’s arms were so long that even with his seat retracted to the maximum, they looked cramped by the short distance from his shoulders to the steering wheel. Eric had to angle his knee to one side when lifting off the accelerator or else he’d bang it. His head almost touched the roof. Some of his kinky hair actually did. Maybe Luke cried at the prospect of all that stretching in store for his body.
They reached her parents’ summer cottage by eight. While Eric unloaded the car, Nina stood at the top of the bleached wooden stairs that declined from the lawn to the rocky shore. Luke was awake in her arms, his eyes wincing at the chilly sea breeze. The orange and pink light of the sunset glowed over the curved sky from the west, colors parachuting from the air to die in the water, tinting the cold blue of the bay red and gold. The dark approached them from the horizon, erasing the bright world. At the edges of the night, stars appeared.
“That’s the most sleep he’s ever gotten.” Eric’s voice boomed in the trafficless, unpeopled auditorium of the country, his sound abrasive amid the soothing noise of lapping tide, rustling leaves, and complaining gulls. “He’ll probably be up all night.”
“I’ll stay up with him,” Nina said calmly.
Eric cocked his head.
“Really,” she said, self-assured. Nina held Luke up to the side of her face. “See the stars, baby,” she whispered to the little circle of Luke’s countenance. “I think that’s Venus,” she added.
Eric stepped to her side. “Where?” Nina pointed to what she remembered her father had always told her was Venus. She showed Eric reluctantly, afraid that, with his literal mind, he might know otherwise and correct her.
“Wow,” he said instead. Eric looked at Luke and put out his enormous hand, reaching for Luke’s miniature version. “Maybe when you’re grown,” Eric said to Luke, closing on the little fist, “you can fly there.”
Luke frowned at his father’s big face, as though disgusted by the notion.
“I doubt it,” Nina said, thinking that this worried, clutching child would hardly dare the unknown.
“Yeah,” Eric said. “They don’t have money for the space program. Instead they’ll put up lasers to zap him.”
“God, Eric,” Nina said, disgusted.
“Just kidding,” he said.
“I know,” she reassured him. Eric was bound to reality, she reminded herself, and no matter how far the leash stretched, he would always be yanked back. Nevertheless, the spell had been broken and she carried Luke toward the house.
The four-bedroom cottage, set in a cleared circle at the edge of Blue Hill Bay, shielded from the road and neighbors by white birches and tall firs, was two hundred years old and had been in Nina’s family for a hundred and fifty years. Just inside the front door, on a hand-hewn beam, four generations of Nina’s family had marked the growth of their children. “Could you get a knife, Eric?” she asked.
“A knife?”
“I’m going to mark Luke’s height.”
Eric paused for a moment, studying the beam, and then peering at Luke. Nina knew he was about to make some pragmatic objection, something like the fact that Luke couldn’t stand up, but Eric must have decided against it, because he went to the kitchen for the knife.
The tradition was to make the first indentation for height at age five on Thanksgiving when all, or most of the family, was usually in attendance. Nina had always found the ritual boring. From age fourteen on, she had refused to participate, believing that it only intensified the endless competition among the siblings — her brother John had chortled over outgrowing dead relatives — and that, as a connection to previous generations, measurements of height were hardly a profound legacy. There were old American families who kept journals, or whose correspondence, when found in attics, spoke down the long hallway of time. And there were old American families who had at least left relics of their taste and interests and benevolence, who had begun institutions, endowed universities, founded museums, and had civic works named in their honor. But Nina’s family, the Winninghams, had merely left behind several turn-of-the-century Ivy League championship squash cups; a stuffy painting of Great-Grandpa, the banker; and a grant for Princeton, by a bachelor uncle, to give a graduating senior money to travel in Italy for a year. To what end no one knew.
The family had endured and lived hearty lives — that was all Nina could deduce from the stories of them. They were good amateur athletes; they made money steadily, although never excessively; they were helpful, but not extraordinary, citizens; they gave decent amounts to charity, but never boldly. The blank markings on the wall were a perfect symbol of their mute past: they had grown; they had procreated. Nina had decided instantly on seeing the beam that no matter how dull this conversation with her ancestors might be, she wanted Luke to speak early. None of the Winninghams had ever stepped out of line, made a rude noise, or changed anything they encountered. Luke, at least, would begin his life with an alteration of their tradition even while obeying it.