Luke didn’t know whether he should feel relieved that the boy his daughter was sucking off wasn’t really her boyfriend. Was that supposed to be some kind of consolation? “He was at the party?”
She looked down at her knees.
“Are there other boys who might know where she is?”
She seemed to detect an accusation in this. “Just so you know, Ashley’s, like, this famous prude. I mean, if it will make you feel any better, she’s actually technically a virgin.”
As reassuring as this might be, it was merely balm applied to a wound that required stitches.
“‘Technically’?”
She blushed, which he took to be a good sign.
“Maybe…” she began.
“What?”
“I don’t know if I should say.”
“Please, Amber.”
“Well, you know Anton Hohenlohe?”
“Is he—”
“He’s not her boyfriend or anything. He’s always telling us all to come over anytime. He’s kind of creepy, if you ask me, I mean, we call him ‘MP,’ which stands for major pedophile, but we sometimes hang out over there. It’s like this clubhouse. So, I guess if she was looking for a place to hide out—”
She recoiled when Luke jumped to his feet.
“You won’t say I said anything?”
“No, I promise.” He started to lean down to kiss her cheek, then thought better of it.
He finally slowed to catch his breath only when he turned east at the corner of Seventy-sixth and Park, decelerating to a fast walk in order to master the surging tide of his righteous fury and to savor the prospect of its possible imminent release. It was a little after ten, a good time to surprise a sybarite sleeping off the revels of Saturday night; but the notion of his daughter as the virginal sacrifice of those rites set him running again, bolting across Madison, dodging a single Sunday-morning cab as he sprinted on to Hohenlohe’s town house, the address of which Amber had reluctantly provided.
A brass plaque inscribed HOHENLOHE was mounted above the single buzzer. Luke pressed the bell and waited thirty seconds before pressing it again, holding it down until the tip of his finger was numb.
Finally the intercom crackled. “For God’s sake, what is it?”
“It’s Luke McGavock.”
After a pause: “You’ll forgive me, but it’s a little early for visitors by my clock.”
“You can either come down and talk to me now or wait while I call the police.”
Luke was about to press the buzzer again, when the intercom gave another cough. “I’ll be down in a moment.”
Luke climbed up the steps to try to get a view through the windows, pacing from one side of the stoop to the other. He was envisioning scenarios of escape through the back garden when he heard the click of the inner door bolt.
Hohenlohe threw wide the outer door, presenting himself in a royal blue robe with black facing, attempting to project hauteur in his state of dishevelment. “Good God, man, it’s barely morning.” His accent, which was sometimes transparent, seemed now a Teutonic version of Oxbridge.
“I’m looking for my daughter.”
“What makes you think I’d know anything about your daughter’s whereabouts?”
“I hear underage girls are one of your specialties.”
“Whatever you may think, I can assure you I haven’t seen your daughter in some time. I understand she’s… out of town.”
“You don’t know how badly I want to hit you right now,” Luke said. “I’m sure you can understand that I’m not going to take your word for it. You can either invite me in to discuss this or I can wait right here for the authorities.”
“Very well,” he said after a moment’s deliberation.
The first set of stairs took Luke up to the parlor floor; the first room he entered showed the remains of the previous evening’s party: half-empty glasses, beer and wine bottles, the smeared, hatched surface of a Mapplethorpe flower photo that lay on the coffee table.
“I’m afraid the place is a bit—”
Luke brushed past him and took the steps, two at a time, up the second flight.
“Wait a minute! You can’t just barge into a man’s home.”
On the second landing, he threw open the first door at the top of the stairs to reveal the inner lair, with its king-size bed, a blue velvet duvet entangled with golden sheets on it, matching pillows scattered across the room. On the floor, by the edge of the bed, was a familiar-looking high-heeled sandal.
“See here, I’ll call the police myself.”
Luke strode across the room and flung open the nearest door. In his agitation, it took him a moment to recognize the terrified figure, swathed in a golden sheet, trembling against the luxurious backdrop of Hohenlohe’s wardrobe. He was dimly aware that he should be horrified—and later would wonder about his civic duty—but his relief just now far outweighed his sense of outraged morality.
“Hello, Bethany,” he said.
Luke was walking up Madison in the shadow of the protruding brow of the Whitney when Sasha called him on his cell phone to report that Ashley had turned up at his mother’s house in Tennessee.
“My God,” he said. “How did she get there?”
“She caught a bus, apparently.”
Luke realized it was an ungenerous thought, but in his giddiness he wondered which aspect of the story surprised her more, Ashley’s destination or her mode of transport.
“And she’s fine?”
“So it would seem.”
He was conscious of an almost filial sympathy for the mother of his lost and found daughter, even as he felt an exhilarating and impatient urge to share the news with Corrine, whom he imagined to have been restored to him along with his daughter. Because he had been convinced that if anything had happened to Ashley—if the worst had happened—it would have been the end of them, and he had been steeling himself for the loss of the two things that mattered to him the most.
PART THREE
Holidays
27
The dogs announced his arrival—three adopted strays who met him halfway up the gravel drive and escorted him to the house, leaping and clawing at the window of the Bronco he’d rented at the Nashville airport.
Luke’s mother still occupied the Victorian farmhouse in which he’d spent the second part of his childhood, a few miles south of Franklin on the Columbia Pike, along the ill-fated route that had brought Hood’s Army of Tennessee from Spring Hill to the southern edge of town, where it was devastated by entrenched Union forces. Although Luke’s paternal ancestors had built one of the area’s historic estates, it had long since passed out of the family; the farmhouse, dating from the lean years after the war, stopped short of any pretensions to plantationhood. Luke always thought of it as his mother’s house, in part because of its resemblance to her family home in Massachusetts—its simple lines and gables closer to the architectural vernacular of rural New England than to the Greco-Georgian vocabulary of the landed southern gentry—and because his father had bought it for her, so she could keep horses and escape the social claustrophobia of what was then more village than town. The first eight years of her marriage had been spent in the rectory of the church, just inside the line of the old trenches. Digging in the garden, she and the children would frequently turn up relics of the carnage—musket balls, rusted belt buckles, grapeshot, and, once, a pitted five-pound ball from a Napolon gun, which now sat on the mantel of the farmhouse.
His mother rose up now from the autumnal ruins of the vegetable garden, trowel in hand, and waved—the lovely consort of the pumpkin-head scarecrow who ruled over the browning and broken stalks of corn, dressed in a bright orange UT windbreaker. Luke always pictured his mother outdoors like this—on horseback, playing tennis, gardening. Her husband had playfully accused her of being a pantheist, fresh air and sunshine the bread and wine of her faith. Such a nice day, you should go out and play was the refrain that haunted his childhood. She hated seeing a
tree cut down for any reason and she did not share the ingrained belief of southern womankind in the dangers of the midday sun or of airborne pestilence, nor could she entirely understand why her firstborn was so often hunched over a book, a posture she regarded as both unnatural and unhealthy. Drawn to the light and the air, she could never countenance his need for interiors, his love of books and movies and sheltered reading alcoves.
As she walked out to the driveway, still lanky and slim, he realized with a pleasant sense of surprise one of the reasons Corrine had looked so familiar when he first saw her, standing just beyond the precinct of the ash and the debris, though the resemblance faded as his mother drew nearer; her skin showed the parchmenty texture and piebald spottiness of a blond sixty-three-year-old sun worshiper. It took a moment for him, as always, to recalibrate, to adjust her younger image with the reality of the present.
He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head as she loped toward him wearing his old Deerfield sweatshirt over a pair of khaki shorts; he was as touched that his castoffs still constituted part of her wardrobe as he was to see the welcome in her smile and the recognition in her eyes—the brilliance of which always startled him anew and made him feel that no one else really knew him, that his encounters with other humans were pale reflections of these sparkling reunions. He mostly forgot this in the intervals in between—a realization that brought on a flood of guilt when he realized how intermittently he treated them both to this pleasure. A week in the Hamptons this summer… already three, four months past. Before that, Thanksgiving and his father’s funeral. His failures as a father mirroring his shortcomings as a son, although the dogs seemed not to care about either as they bounded and barked around him.
“My handsome boy, you’re so thin.” This was her highest compliment. “You’ve lost that horrible business-dinner bloat.” She turned her examination to his face. “How are you, Luke?”
Unable to answer this simple inquiry, he felt his composure dissolving, the years falling away, as he buried his face in her hair, its lemon-oil scent always reminding him of sunlight itself. When he lifted his head and tried to speak, he found himself gulping for air, his vision blurred, his memories crowded with fears and regrets.
“It’s all right,” she said, stroking his back rhythmically.
“You look good,” he finally managed to say.
“About like an old saddle that’s been left in the sun. Not that it matters. Ashley’s out back.”
“How does she seem?”
“Well…” She sighed. “Pretty fair, considering. Though just now she’s nervous as a housefly on a windowpane. She’s been kind of a wreck about the prospect of seeing you.”
He walked over to the car and checked his reflection in the window; it seemed bulbous and bloated, as if he’d just been pulled up after several days underwater.
“Don’t worry, you look fine. Just be sweet to her. This isn’t the moment to get all disciplinarian.”
“What do you think—I’ve been beating her?”
“No,” she said, “quite the opposite. I think you’ve let her run a little too free.”
“Like you did with me.”
“That’s true,” she said, smiling. “But your dad was always there to crack the whip.”
“I’m just grateful she had sense enough to come here.”
“She’s welcome to stay as long as she wants. Or as long as her mother will let her.” She paused. “How is Sasha?”
“She’s fine, I suppose.”
His mother nodded skeptically.
“Actually,” Luke said, “I don’t really know anymore.”
Nora lifted her eyebrows and held her tongue.
Luke was so used to defending his wife to his mother—and vice versa—that it took him a moment to realize he no longer cared to. It was as if the fog of gloom that had enveloped him since he’d first suspected Sasha’s infidelity now seemed pierced by a glimmer of relief. For years, he’d felt he had to choose between them.
“I think she’s having an affair,” he said. “Or at least she was. It doesn’t really matter at this point.”
His mother was far too generous, and too well-raised, to gloat—to allow that she’d been expecting something like this for years—although neither did she bother to feign surprise. She had done her best to take Sasha to her heart, and to hide her feelings when she found it impossible to do so. “I’m sorry, Luke.”
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’m the one who should be sorry for you. I know what you’ve put up with all these years.”
“I only ever wanted you to be happy.”
“I thought I was for a while. And then I got used to being less than happy.”
“We can talk about it later,” she said. “Right now, you should go find your daughter.”
Ashley was in the riding ring, on Scheherazade, the aging Arabian mare his mother had inherited from a neighbor, as she had most of the horses. He opened the back gate and started out across the back pasture, inhaling the rich nostalgic sour mash of grass and hay, urine and manure. The horses lifted their heads from their grazing and turned to watch him, while the pygmy goats rushed from their pen to mob him, grunting and butting one another as they rubbed against his calves, muddying his chinos.
Ashley continued to circle the ring as he approached. She had a beautiful seat, and seemed to him more at ease on horseback than she did on her own newly elongated limbs. When he reached the ring, she changed direction and cut a figure eight. He leaned up against the fence and watched while she completed another circuit at a canter and brought the horse to a stop just across the fence from him.
“Whoa, good girl,” she said.
“Does she still switch her leads?” he asked.
“Not as much.”
“You both looked good.”
Ashley busied herself patting the mare, which stepped forward and shoved its nose into Luke’s elbow, discharging a hot blast of breath. Failing to find a treat, she ducked her head to yank at a tuft of grass just outside the ring. Ashley pulled the mare’s head up and backed her away from the fence, not yet having looked at her father.
“I’m happy to see you,” Luke said. And, in fact, he was relieved to have just discovered a large reserve of love for her, reassured to see this girlishly ponytailed and helmeted figure atop a horse, as he’d seen her in simpler times.
“Are you?” she asked, glancing down at him fearfully.
He was glad that at this moment she had the advantage of height. “Of course I am.”
“I didn’t think you would be.”
“I’m glad you’re here. If you had to run away, at least you picked a good place to come to.”
She nodded sullenly, rubbing the mare’s neck vigorously. “Are you here to take me back?”
“I’m here to talk to you.”
She rolled her eyes.
“I don’t blame you for anything that’s happened, Ashley. If anything, I blame myself.”
“I know what you think.”
“And what do you suppose that is?”
She shook her head stubbornly. “You know.”
“I have no idea. Nor do I have a lecture prepared. I don’t really even have a plan, to tell you the truth.”
She looked down at him skeptically. “I was afraid to see you.”
“I know.”
“I can’t look at you.”
He’d imagined this as his line, said it to her many times in his rehearsals for this encounter. He removed his sunglasses and held them out to her. “Would these help?”
She shook her head, but then, thinking better of it, leaned down on Scheherazade’s neck, plucked the shades from his fingers, and clamped them on her face.
“Why don’t you rub the old girl down and put her up. I’ll meet you inside.”
Nora was at the kitchen counter, pouring water from the kettle into the old silver teapot. He paused at the door, taking in the cypress wood, the olfactory residue of grease, the bright green apples
piled high in a wooden bowl on the refectory table. Of all the memories this might have conjured, what he came up with was the day he’d skipped school and had been surprised by his mother and Duck Cheatham.
He took a seat at the table.
“Did she tell you she wants to stay here?” Nora asked.
“For how long?”
“Well, I don’t know. Indefinitely.”
“I think it’s a great idea,” he said. “But I doubt Sasha’s going to go along with it.”
“Ashley seems to have some kind of ace up her sleeve.”
“Something on Sasha?”
“It would seem so. But you mustn’t say I told you. I want her to feel she can trust me.”
“How did I get everything so wrong?” Luke said.
“I’ve always been proud of you, Luke. Even if I didn’t always understand some of your choices.”
“Like Sasha.”
“Well, she’s a beautiful woman. I always thought it must be about sex.”
He was taken aback, not certain he’d ever heard the word on his mother’s lips.
“That was certainly part of it.”
“It doesn’t last, though. Does it?”
“How long did it last for you?”
“With your father, you mean?”
He shrugged. That was what he’d meant, but now he wanted to know if there were other answers. Not that he actually expected any.
“It was a different era. Women weren’t supposed to enjoy sex. We were taught that it was a duty to be fulfilled, a cross to bear for the sake of security and family. It was years before I really came to appreciate it. And by then… well, let’s just say it was almost too late. Your father had his heart bypass, and something changed in him. Our timing was terrible.”
The back door hinges squeaked and Ashley walked just inside and stopped.
“How was Scheherazade?” Nora asked.
“I think her right foot’s still bothering her a little,” she said. “And she’s got a fresh bite on her right flank.”