Lou’s fame was riverlike—deep and narrow in some places, then broadening unexpectedly into shallows. His books sold a thousand, maybe twelve hundred copies each, but schoolchildren everywhere studied his villanelle “Where Are the Bees?” His later style, increasingly aphoristic, had inspired critics to call him a new minimalist, and at seventy-five, with his unrepentant hippie politics and eloquent Forest Cycle, Lou had become an icon to environmentalists, who printed his verse on T-shirts and posters—usually without permission. Like Matisse cutouts, Steiner’s late pared-down poems were all space and edges on the page. The best-known was his found poem, “Tree.” One line, which read simply:
Here I stand. I can do no other.
Molly was honest. She said Orion’s father scared her. Over the years, Lou had grown shaggy, rambling, slightly unhinged. Orion’s mother, Diane, thought perhaps Lou was suffering from early Alzheimer’s. The idea frightened Orion, who preferred to think late-night rambles, naps on park benches, and tirades to writing classes were existential rather than neurological symptoms. End-stage poetry. Reading Shakespeare obsessively, drinking heavily, a man like Lou was supposed to turn Learlike when his hair went white.
As a boy Orion had avoided Lou. Naturally, he’d taken his mother’s side in the divorce, and lived with her in run-down farmhouses where they grew tomatoes and trained pea plants up strings to the porch roof. He tried to comfort her by staying out of trouble and entering science fairs. His childhood sweetheart, Emily, had been his mother’s sweetheart as well, the daughter she had always hoped for, and even now, so many years later, Diane asked after Emily with a certain wistfulness—although she liked Molly very much. Then Orion felt a twinge of guilt, although he knew it was irrational, because he hated to disappoint his mother, even in imaginary ways. In college, where he might have grown wild, he’d settled in with Molly, and stayed with her.
Orion didn’t avoid his father anymore, but spent time with him when he could. As Diane said, “He is your dad, and he isn’t getting any younger.” Lou was charming in his fashion, his countercultural effusions refreshing now that Orion made his way in the material world. True, his father had recently been called to the dean’s office to explain an incident in a poetry workshop when he’d ripped up a student’s manuscript, dashing the pieces to the floor and stamping on them “like Rumpelstiltskin” as one witness averred in The Middlebury Campus. There was also Lou’s troubling history with young women poets, his musettes as Diane called them. But he had slowed down in this regard, and if his clothes were wrinkled and his beard untrimmed, he was an original, and it felt good to have a parent who worked in pencil and called Otter Creek his office. Lou had no idea what ISIS did. He had never owned a computer, and the one time he had met Molly’s parents, at Harvard graduation, he’d told them a long dirty joke, to see if they would laugh.
He chortled when his son phoned one bright December Sunday. Orion was explaining that Molly’s parents had come up to visit and they were all having brunch that morning. “Who brunches these days?” Lou asked.
“I guess I do,” Orion said.
“Brunch when you’re old, sleep when you’re dead” was Lou’s advice.
Orion glanced at the closed bathroom door where Molly was showering. Postcall, she’d come straight from Beth Israel Deaconess and had had no time to rest.
“True story,” Lou said. This was how all his jokes began. True meant “Jewish.” “Three old ladies in Miami, poolside, brunching at the Fontainebleau. They see someone new: Velcome, velcome. How are you? Then one of the old-timers says, Nu, ve don’t have time for small talk. Let’s get some things out of the vay. Money? Money you have, or you vouldn’t be at the Fontinblow. Granchildren? You got? Show. She opens up her wallet and, you know, fans out the pictures on the table. Sex? … Vatvas, vas”
“You think I’m living like an old lady.”
“I leave you to extrapolate.”
“You think youth is wasted on the …”
“I do like a wasted youth,” Lou mused.
Molly emerged in a cloud of steam and began searching for clean clothes. Wrapped in her towel, she glanced at Orion and took in his fisherman sweater, worn to threads at the elbows.
“Why do you like a wasted youth, Dad?”
“Listen, it’s like the man with his face pressed against the glass at the Ferrari dealership. If you have to ask …”
“I should go,” said Orion, as Molly pointed at the clock-radio, but he did not get off the phone. “What are you doing today?”
“I’ll be walking at Abbey Pond,” Lou replied. “You remember, don’t you?”
Of course he did. In springtime Lou used to take little Orion to look for lady’s slippers. Double petals hanging from springy stems, flowers rising from mossy, mulchy ground. “I don’t think they look like lady’s slippers,” Lou had told Orion. “I think they look like lady’s something else.”
“Drive carefully,” Orion said. “And take it easy out there.”
Molly’s cell phone was ringing. Her parents were waiting downstairs to take them to Henrietta’s Table.
“The ground’s uneven,” Orion reminded his father
“Old and infirm as I am,” Lou intoned, “it’s so crowded in the woods these days that if I fall, I’m sure somebody will find me.”
“Can we go?” Molly asked.
“I was just waiting for you,” Orion replied, and then into the telephone, “bye, Dad.”
“Farewell. And good-bye, Molly.”
Molly’s father was famous too, in an entirely different way. Carl Eisenstat was a physicist, and not the garden-variety kind. He had been in one of Orion’s college textbooks as the Eisenstat Principle of something or other. Matter? Motion? Orion could not remember, although it was assumed that he knew which. The Eisenstats assumed many things. The last time they’d come up from Princeton, Carl had announced, “I take it the two of you are planning to get married.” Orion had started back, offended that Carl would touch on a matter so private and confusing, but Molly’s father pressed on implacably: “And I make that assumption because you’ve been seeing each other for so long.”
Of course they had talked about getting engaged. Orion and Molly had lived together in their apartment off Putnam Avenue for three years. They had a routine; they had a life; they had a lot of stuff. Their third-floor warren opened onto a ramshackle but surprisingly large roof deck where they entertained. They kept a hibachi there, aluminum lawn chairs, and a camping table they had found on the street. On summer nights when friends came up for drinks, they passed around a pair of tweezers for the splinters that split off the sun-warped railings.
Molly’s plan had been to get married when Orion finished graduate school, and he had always liked this idea—keeping marriage at an indeterminate distance, along with his degree. At the time, Orion’s professional and financial prospects had been pleasantly vague. Now, however, they were unavoidably bright. Five months after Orion broke Lockbox, the system was up and running, or as Jonathan put it, “running better than ever,” and ChainLinx was huge. Projected earnings were shooting through the roof, and this was not lost on Molly’s father. Nothing was.
“You’ve been getting a lot of press,” lanky, white-haired Carl informed Orion in the buffet line at the restaurant, and Orion ducked his head, something between a nod and a shrug. Orion, Jonathan, Aldwin, and Jake had just appeared in Fortune magazine under the heading “Tycoons in Training.”