-Not so fast, Sis. I'm serious. If the two of you were so po-tay-to po-tah-to, why did he propose?
She shrugged and put her coffee down.
-It was my mistake. I got pregnant and I told him so when we got to England. I should have kept my trap shut. If he was a pain in the neck when I came out of the hospital, you can just imagine what he was like after that.
Eve lit a cigarette. She tilted her head back and shot the smoke toward the ceiling. Then she shook her head.
-Watch out for boys who think they owe you something. They'll drive you the craziest.
-So what are you going to do?
-With my life?
-No. With the baby.
-Oh. I took care of that in Paris. I just hadn't got around to telling him. I was going to find some way to cushion it. But in the end, I had to let him have it.
We were quiet for a moment. I stood to clear the plates.
-I had no choice, Eve explained. He'd cornered me. We were a mile at sea.
I turned on the tap.
-Katey. If you start washing those dishes like my mother, I'm going to throw myself out the window.
I came back to my seat. She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
-Don't look so disappointed in me. I can't bear it-not from you.
-You're just catching me off guard.
-I can see that. But you've got to understand. I was brought up to raise children, pigs & corn and to thank the Good Lord for the privilege. But I've learned a thing or two since the accident. And I like it just fine on this side of the windshield.
It was like she'd said all along: She was willing to be under anything, as long as it wasn't somebody's thumb.
She tilted her head to study my expression more carefully.
-Are you going to be okay with this?
-Sure.
-I mean, I'm the fucking Catholic, right?
I laughed.
-Yeah. You're the fucking Catholic.
She tamped out her cigarette and pulled back the lid on the pack. There was one more left. She lit it and threw the match over her shoulder; then she held it out to me like an Indian chief. I took a drag and handed it back. We were both silent, trading the tobacco.
-What are you going to do now? I finally asked.
-I don't know. I've got the Beresford to myself for a bit, but I'm not going to stay. My parents have been hounding me to come home. Maybe I'll pay them a visit.
-What's Tinker going to do?
-He said he might go back to Europe.
-To fight the Fascists in Spain?
Eve looked at me in disbelief and then laughed.
-Shit, Sis. He's going to fight the waves on the Cote d'Azur.
Three nights later, while I was undressing for bed, the telephone rang.
Ever since seeing Eve, I'd been expecting it-a call late at night, when New York was in shadows and the sun was rising a thousand miles away over a cobalt sea. It was a phone call that but for a patch of ice on Park Avenue might have come six months, or a lifetime, before. I felt my heart race a little. I slipped my shirt back over my head and answered the phone.
-Hello?
But it was a weary patrician voice.
-Is this Katherine?
-. . . Mr. Ross?
-I'm sorry to bother you so late, Katherine. I just wanted to find out if by any chance . . .
There was silence on the other end of the line. I could hear twenty years of upbringing and a few hundred miles of Indiana trying to contain his emotions.
-Mr. Ross?
-I'm sorry. I should explain. Apparently Eve's relationship with this Tinker fellow has come to an end.
-Yes. I saw Eve a few days ago and she told me.
-Ah. Well. I . . . That is, Sarah and I . . . received a cable from her saying that she was coming home. But when we went to meet her train, she wasn't there. At first, we thought we had simply missed her on the platform. But we couldn't find her in the restaurant or the waiting room. So we went to the stationmaster to see if she was on the manifest. He didn't want to tell us. It's against their policy and what have you. But eventually, he confirmed that she had boarded the train in New York. So you see, it wasn't that she wasn't on the train. She just didn't get off. It took us a few days to get the conductor on the phone. By that time he was in Denver headed back east. But he remembered her-because of the scar. And he said that when the train was approaching Chicago, she had paid to extend her ticket. To Los Angeles.
Mr. Ross was quiet for a moment, collecting himself.
-So you can see, Katherine, that we're quite confused. I tried to reach Tinker, but it seems he's gone abroad.
-Mr. Ross, I don't know what to tell you.
-Katherine, I wouldn't ask you to betray a confidence. If Eve doesn't want us to know where she is, I accept that. She's a grown woman. She's free to chart her course. It's just that we're parents. You'll understand one day. We don't want to meddle. We just want to make sure that she's all right.
-Mr. Ross, if I knew where Eve was, I'd tell you-even if she'd sworn me to silence.
Mr. Ross gave a truncated sigh, the more heartbreaking for its brevity.
What a scene that must have been: Having gotten up at dawn to make the journey to Chicago, the Rosses probably drove with the radio off, exchanging only the occasional word-not because they were some cliche of a married couple that time has turned into strangers but because in that closest of emotional alignments they were dwelling in the bitter-turned-sweet sense that their daughter, prone to self-reliance, bruised by New York, was at long last coming home. Through the revolving doors they walked, dressed as for a Sunday service, making their way through the democratic melee of the arriving and departing, a little anxious but on the whole exhilarated to be fulfilling this mission essential not simply to their parenthood but to their species. How devastating it must have been-that first inkling that their daughter wasn't going to be there, after all.
Meanwhile, in another railway station over a thousand miles away-one filled with color and light, its architecture reflecting the optimistic modern style of the West rather than the brooding industry of America's great nineteenth-century depots-Eve would disembark. Without a trunk to pick up from the porter, she would limp out onto a palm-lined street with no particular destination in mind, looking like a starlet from a rougher, more unforgiving land.
I felt a great wave of sympathy for Mr. Ross.
-I'm considering hiring a Pinkerton to look for her, he said, obviously unsure of whether this was the appropriate step. Does she know anybody in Los Angeles?
-No, Mr. Ross. I don't think she knows a soul in California.
But if Mr. Ross were to hire a detective, I thought to myself, then I'd have some advice for him. I'd tell him to go to all the hock shops within ten blocks of the train station looking for a skateable engagement ring and a chandelier earring missing its pair-because that's where the future of Evelyn Ross had just commenced.
The next night, Mr. Ross called again. This time, he didn't ask any questions. He was calling to give me an update: Earlier that day he had talked to a few of the girls at Mrs. Martingale's-none of them had heard from Eve. He had contacted the Missing Persons Bureau in L.A., but as soon as they learned that Eve was of age and had bought her ticket, they explained that she did not meet the legal definition of missing. To comfort Mrs. Ross, he had also checked the hospitals and emergency rooms.
How was Mrs. Ross bearing up? She was like someone in mourning, only worse. When a mother loses a daughter, she grieves over the future that her daughter will never have, but she can take solace in memories of close-knit days. But when your daughter runs away, it is the fond memories that have been laid to rest; and your daughter's future, alive and well, recedes from you like a wave drawing out to sea.
The third time Mr. Ross called, he didn't have much of an update. He said that while going through some of Eve's letters (in search of mentioned friends who might be of help) he had come across the one in which Eve described meeting me for the first time: Last night, I spilled a plate of noodles on one of the girls; and she's turned out to be a real jim dandy. Mr. Ross and I shared a good laugh over it.
-I had forgotten that Eve was in a single when she first moved in, he said. When did you two become roommates?
And I could see the problem I had gotten myself into.
Mr. Ross was in mourning too, but he had to be strong for his wife. So he was looking for someone he could reminisce with, someone who knew Eve well but who was safely in the distance. And I fit the bill just perfectly.
I didn't want to be uncharitable, and having this little chat wasn't such an inconvenience, but how many chats would follow? For all I knew, he was a slow mender. Or worse, he was someone who would savor his grief rather than let it go. How was I going to extricate myself when the time came? I wasn't going to stop answering my phone. Was I going to have to start sounding mildly rude, until he got the message?
When the phone rang a few nights later, I adopted the voice of a girl with one hand on her key chain and the other through the sleeve of her coat.
-Hello!
-Katey?
-Tinker?
-For a second I thought I had the wrong number, he said. It's good to hear your voice.
-I saw Eve, I said.
-I thought you might have.
He gave a halfhearted laugh.
-I've sure made a hash of it in 1938.
-You and the rest of the world.
-No. I get special credit for this one. Since the first week of January, every decision I've made has been wrong. I think Eve has been fed up with me for months.
As a rueful parable, he told me how in France he had taken to going to bed early and rising with the sun for a swim. Dawn was so beautiful, he said, and in such a different way from the sunset, that he had asked Eve to watch it with him. In response, she started wearing eyeshades and slept every day until lunch. Then, on the last night, when Tinker was climbing into bed, she went off to a casino by herself and played roulette until five in the morning-coming up the drive, shoes in hand, just in time to join him on the beach.
Tinker related this as if it was somewhat embarrassing for the both of them; but I didn't see it that way. Whatever the limitations of Tinker and Eve's relationship, however expedient or imperfect or tenuous it had been, neither of them had reason to be humbled by that little tale. As far as I was concerned, the notion of Tinker rising alone for a sunrise that he wanted to share, and of Eve showing up at the very last minute from the other side of a night on the town, spoke to the very best in both of them.
In each of the various phone conversations that I had imagined having with Tinker, he had sounded different. In one he had sounded broken. In another confounded. In another contrite. But in all of them he had sounded unsettled, having come full speed through a ringer of his own design. Yet, now that I had him on the phone, he didn't sound unsettled at all. Though obviously chastened, Tinker's voice was also even and at ease. It had an ineffable almost enviable quality to it. It took me a moment to realize that it was the sound of relief. He sounded like one who is sitting on the curb in a strange city in the aftermath of a hotel fire, having nearly lost nothing but his life.
But broken, confounded, relaxed, or relieved-however his voice sounded, it wasn't coming from across the sea. It was as clear as a radio broadcast.
-Tinker, where are you?
He was alone at the Wolcotts' camp in the Adirondacks. He had spent the week walking in the woods and rowing on the lake thinking about the past six months, but now he was worried that if he didn't talk to someone he might go a little crazy. So he was wondering if I'd be interested in coming up for the day. Or I could take the train on Friday after work and spend the weekend. He said the house was amazing and the lake was lovely and -Tinker, I said. You don't have to give me reasons.
After hanging up the phone, I stood for a while looking out my window wondering if I should have told him no. In the doleful court behind my building a patchwork of windows was all that separated me from a hundred muted lives being led without mystery or menace or magic. In point of fact, I suppose I didn't know Tinker Grey much better than I knew any of them; and yet, somehow, I felt like I'd known him all my life.
I crossed the room.
From a pile of British authors, I pulled out Great Expectations. There, tucked among the pages of the twentieth chapter was Tinker's letter describing the little church across the sea, with its mariner's widow, its berry-toting wrestler, its schoolgirls laughing like seagulls-and its implicit celebration of the commonplace. I tried to smooth the wrinkles in the tissuelike paper. Then I sat down and read it for the umpteenth time.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN.
The Now and Here.
The Wolcotts' "camp" was a two-story mansion in the Arts & Crafts style. At one in the morning, it loomed from the shadows like an elegant beast come to the water's edge to drink.
We went up the lazy wooden steps of the porch into a sprawling family room with a stone fireplace that you could stand in. The floors were knotty pine and they were covered with Navajo rugs woven in every imaginable shade of red. Sturdy wooden chairs were arranged in groups of two and four so that in high season the different generations of Wolcotts could play cards or read books or assemble jigsaw puzzles partly in private and partly in kin. All was cast in the warm yellow light of mica-shaded lamps. I remembered Wallace saying that though he spent just a few weeks a year in the Adirondacks, it always felt like home-and it wasn't hard to see why. You could just imagine where the Christmas tree would go come December.
Tinker began giving an enthusiastic history of the place. He mentioned something about the Indians in the region and the aesthetic schooling of the architect. But I had started the day at six and put in ten hours at Gotham. So with the smell of smoke in the air and the rumble of thunder in the distance, my eyelids rose and fell like the bow of a boat on its mooring.
-I'm sorry, he said with a smile. I'm just excited to see you. We'll catch up in the morning.
He grabbed my bag and led me up the stairs to the second floor, where the hallway was lined with doors. The house must have slept twenty or more.
-Why don't you take this one, he said, stepping into a little room with a pair of twin beds.
He placed my bag on the bureau beside a porcelain washbasin. Though the old gas lamps on the wall glowed with electricity, he lit a kerosene lantern on the bedside table.
-There's fresh water in the pitcher. I'm at the other end of the hall, if you need anything.
He gave me a squeeze of the hands and an I'm so glad you came. Then he retreated into the hall.