“That would be Billy,” Nora said. “He’s always harrying the mares. Sometimes I think they missed something when they gelded him.”
Ashley winced at this.
“What’s the plan for tonight?” Luke asked, secretly wincing himself. “Can I take you two ladies out to dinner?”
“Matthew and Debbie have invited us all over tonight.” Nora turned to her granddaughter. “How does that sound?”
“That sounds okay,” Ashley said.
“Why don’t you go wash up and change, then.”
Luke walked out to the back pasture, fending off the goats, the horses approaching in expectation of the evening meal. He escaped into the barn and climbed the ladder to the hayloft, the warm air in the eaves thick with the odor of the old chestnut boards, rotting hay, pigeon shit, and the faint musk of the fox den beneath the hayrick. Motes of dust swam like insects in the shaft of orange sunlight piercing the gloom through the door at the far end of the loft.
She answered on the first ring.
“I miss you,” he said.
“God, you don’t know how much I was hoping it was you.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m home. Let me just get the kids settled and I’ll go in the bedroom.”
He became aware of the faint lowing of pigeons and looked up to see them lined up on the beam above him, shuffling sideways, regarding him warily, as if they retained a collective memory of the days when he’d carried a pellet gun.
“I’m here,” she said. “How are you, my angel?”
“Strangely optimistic,” he said. “Ashley seems okay. Our first encounter wasn’t a total debacle.”
“And your mom? She must be happy to have you. I know I would be.”
“I told her about Sasha. That she was having an affair.”
“You told her?”
“And that I didn’t really care anymore.”
“What did she say?”
“She was too polite to say ‘I told you so,’ but I got the feeling she thought it was the nicest gift I’ve given her in years.”
“That seems like, I don’t know, a big step.”
“It is. I’ve made up my mind. Don’t say anything; it has nothing to do with you. Well, not nothing. Everything has to do with you. But I’m not asking for any kind of reciprocal gesture. You’ve just made it easier for me. I realized on the plane that I don’t have to be miserable.”
“Oh, Luke. I don’t know what to say.”
“I’m not asking you to say or do anything.”
“I know. I know you’re not and I love you for saying it. But I can’t go on like this. I feel so dishonest. God, Luke, what I want to do is tell him. I don’t think I can wait.”
He could hardly believe she’d said it, wanting her to want this even as he feared the consequences. But he was sure of one thing. “I’m happy to hear you say that.”
“But you don’t think I should?”
He ached to hear the note of despair in her voice. “It’s not that. You have to think about the children.”
“I know,” she said. “If it weren’t for that—oh fuck, I don’t know what to do, Luke.”
“I don’t expect you to know right now. You don’t have to. And you don’t have to do anything right now except take care of yourself. I’m not going anywhere. I can wait.”
“Do you really want me?”
“I want you so badly, I can hardly stand it.”
“Me too.”
“We have time,” he said. “The rest of our lives.”
“I like the sound of that.” She paused. “Do you think I’d like it in Tennessee? I have this image of the kids riding their bikes barefoot to school and going fishing with cane poles. Where are you right now? I want to picture you.”
“I’m in the hayloft in the barn.”
“I wish I could be there with you. Making love in the hay… Oh, shit, they’re fighting. I’d better go.”
“Can I call you tonight?”
“It might be better if I called you.”
“I love you.”
“You better.”
He lay back on the rough flooring of the loft, dazed and exultant, listening to the amorous murmurs of the pigeons and watching the light fade. He felt giddy with the knowledge of his power over Corrine even as he felt unworthy of it. He wanted to be a student of her goodness and decency, a slave to her whims. He wanted to be her protector, though he worried that he was instead the primary threat to her well-being.
Battleground Meadows was a planned community a few miles from the center of Franklin, one of dozens that had sprung up in the old tobacco and cotton fields in the years since Luke had gone off to school. His younger brother, Matthew, had chosen to stay close to home, establishing a law practice in Franklin the same year he married the Nashville girl he’d met his first week at Vanderbilt. He and his bride, Debbie, rented a carriage house in town, a few blocks from his office, moving out to the more spacious subdivision just before the birth of their second son. With its four bedrooms, playroom, and media room, the faux Georgian house sat at the end of a cul-de-sac, where the boys could ride bikes and play ball with their friends. Luke remembered the tobacco field that had been plowed under for this development, a place where he and a friend had shot crows with a .22 while drinking a six-pack of Pabst. You could still see the burlap balls from which the young dogwoods and boxwoods grew.
Luke wasn’t one of those for whom southernness was a religion, for whom nostalgia was an emotion more primal than lust. When giving directions, he did not refer to landmarks that had disappeared years before—“Turn left up where the old Swann place used to be”—and he’d never owned a Confederate flag. His mother, after all, was a Boston Yankee, and above all else he was his mother’s son—her firstborn, her spoiled confidant and surrogate. His younger brother had embraced his patriarchal heritage, particularly after Luke had left for prep school in the East. Though he returned only intermittently, it irked Luke to see the changes in his hometown and throughout the surrounding countryside—not only the unchecked development but also the fact that regional identity survived mainly as a tool of marketing, the way that their southern legacy was parodied even as it was getting paved over.
He’d gone through a brief period, his freshman year at Williams, of active apostasy. Returning for Christmas break, he’d announced his disapproval of the monument to the Confederate dead in the town square, but as his convictions mellowed, he had come to regard it as an authentic expression of historic memory, unlike the twin cannons sitting on spoked wheels outside the entrance to Battleground Meadows.
“Good to see the artillery is still in place,” Luke said after they had exchanged the other formulae of reunion on Matthew’s doorstep.
“Cain’t never tell when them Yankees might sneak round again,” Matthew said, exaggerating his drawl, which had always been thicker than Luke’s, smiling serenely with that imperturbable, almost Buddhist mien of his, which caused many to underestimate his intelligence. He radiated an almost maddening sense of being at home in the world, or at least his own corner of it, and feeling comfortable in his skin. Taller and heavier than Luke, he was slow and deliberate in his physical movements and in his mood swings, traits that Luke associated with the South as much as with his brother’s bearish solidity. Ashley buried herself in this bulk, wrapping her arms around him. Luke had always envied his ease with children, most especially his own daughter.
“Doesn’t look like you’re exactly in fighting trim,” Luke said, patting his brother’s belly, which had grown larger and softer in the year since they’d seen each other.
“Just storing some fuel for the winter. I expect I can still whup your ass on the tennis court.”
“Uncle Matthew’s just a cuddly bear,” Ashley said. “Don’t mind Dads. Anorexia is kind of like a religion in New York. Half the girls in my school are bulimic.”
“We could use a little of that thinking down here,” Nora said, patting her younger son
’s belly. In her value system, excess flesh was a moral failing, a sign of indolence. It was one of her unshakable prejudices; in addition to fat people, she disliked gum chewers, hunters, self-promoters, as well as cosmetics, public displays of affection, shopping, and dark, airless rooms.
“I guess skinny Uncle Luke won’t be wanting any fatty fried chicken,” Debbie said, smiling impishly. Marriage, motherhood, and a Talbots wardrobe had utterly failed to supplant Luke’s first impression of his brother’s wife in a cheerleader’s uniform.
“We got sushi out to the mall now, bro.” Matthew hoisted Ashley up onto his back as she giggled and pretended to resist. “Thanks to all them Japanese at the Nissan plant.”
“It’s actually really pretty good, Dad,” Ashley said from her perch on Matthew’s shoulders. “They even have toro.”
For all his envy of her easy alliance with Matthew, Luke was pleased to see her in this affectionate, childish mode. “When we were growing up,” Luke said, “there were only three kinds of fish around here—canned, cat, and sticks.”
The six o’clock dinner hour chez Matthew was all clamor and spills: milk carton on the table, plastic glasses… arguments relating to table manners and homework, ominous references to starving children in other countries, the house’s mod-con sterility ameliorated by the haphazard clutter of family life—the lacrosse stick leaning against the refrigerator, the PlayStation console, videos and discs atop the television set, the chess set on the dining room table.
Sasha had endured these meals over the years with the brittle forbearance of a princess visiting the cancer ward, whereas Ashley had always been delighted to participate in the unfamiliar ritual of parents and children dining together and to learn from her male cousins how to burp, blow milk out of her nostrils, and make a catapult of a fork. For her, this suburban middle-American sprawl was thrilling and exotic.
Davis, the fourteen-year-old, hunched over his plate at the kitchen table beside Ashley, and edited his succotash, separating the lima beans from the corn with his fork; his practice was to confront the horror all at once, eating the lima beans in one or two gulps after everything else was gone.
“Your dad used to do the same thing,” Nora said. “Separate his vegetables into little piles and save them till the end.” She’d pointed this out many times before.
“Whereas Luke was always sneaky about it,” Matthew said. “Hide them in his pocket or slip them to the dogs.”
“That sounds like Jackson,” Davis said, aiming his tongue at his sixteen-year-old brother, who rolled his eyes, having reached the age where family life proved a constant torment.
“Not that he was really fooling anyone,” Nora said, looking fondly at Luke.
Debbie’s upturned nose seemed to twitch over her pursed mouth as she studied her mother-in-law, weighing the apportionment of maternal affection.
“Now he sneaks cigarettes,” Ashley said. “He says he’s going to the newsstand. But really he doesn’t want Mom to know he smokes, so he can keep complaining about her smoking and feel superior.”
Nora turned to the boys. “Your dad, on the other hand, would turn it into a big showdown, a battle of wills. He’d save the vegetables till the end and then he’d force them down in one bite, gagging and retching theatrically.”
“That sounds about right,” Debbie said.
“Did he puke?”
“One night,” Luke said, “he Hoovered the broccoli and promptly threw it up all over the table. After that, I think they stopped insisting that he finish his vegetables.”
Davis peered at him. “Did you make the rescue workers eat vegetables, Uncle Luke?”
“We didn’t have many vegetables. Although there was a garbage man who was a vegetarian.”
“Weird,” Jackson said.
“He was actually a very interesting guy,” Luke said, conscious of his own eagerness to convey, most especially to his brother, the demographic range of his new acquaintances.
“Did he smell?”
“Davis, don’t be a snob,” his father said.
“Do you still think Uncle Luke’s a snob, Dad?”
Debbie blanched, looking across the table at her husband, whose attention seemed to be absorbed by a delicate operation involving his knife and the skin of his chicken.
“He always has,” Luke said, stepping into the awkward silence. For the first time that night, he could clearly make out the white crescent scar on his brother’s forehead, signature of a rock Luke had beaned him with one summer.
“Oh my goodness,” Debbie said, rising from her seat. “Luke, I know you drink wine with dinner. And here I’ve forgotten.” Theirs was the kind of household in which cocktails preceded dinner, while milk and iced tea accompanied it. “I’ve got some cheapo Tasmanian chardonnay in the fridge—actually, I think we still have that bottle of Bordeaux you brought the last time you were here.”
“Even if it wasn’t mature then,” Matthew said, “it’s bound to be drinking well by now.”
“I think I’ve been zinged by my little brother,” Luke said.
Davis was puzzled. “What did you mean, Dad? How did you zing him?”
Ashley, the precocious city girl, got the joke. “He means that wine needs to sit around for a long time before it really tastes good and it’s been forever since we were here. It’s like—what, two years, Dad?”
“Not quite a year, actually. Gramps’s funeral.”
“Did you serve wine at the soup kitchen?” Matthew asked, changing the subject. “Lafite-Rothschild? Mouton?”
“Not even wine in a box, I’m afraid. There was a strange moment, the day after, when some of the guys broke into a bar and started carrying beer back to the site.”
“You broke into a bar?” Davis asked.
“I don’t know if they broke in, exactly. It was pretty chaotic down there. The normal rules were sort of suspended.”
“I’m sure,” Nora said, “the bar owner was happy to have you boys drink his beer.”
“Can Uncle Luke come talk to my class about Ground Zero?”
“That’s an interesting idea,” Debbie said. “Maybe, if he has time before he goes back to New York.”
“Did you see any dead people, Uncle Luke?”
“A couple,” Luke said.
“Was it gross? Did you have to touch them?”
“I carried a couple of body bags. We passed them along the line until someone put them in a Stokes basket. Everyone stopped working and took off their hard hats.”
“What’s a Stokes basket?” Even Jackson was now intrigued.
“It’s like a stretcher.”
“Uncle Luke may not want to talk about this right now,” Debbie said.
“Actually,” Ashley said, “Dad gets a huge kick out of being the hero.”
“I think your father’s earned a little pride,” Nora said, directing a hard look at Ashley, who in that moment discovered one of the limits of her grandmother’s indulgence. “And you should be proud of him, too, young lady.”
“We all are,” Debbie said, standing up to clear the plates. “Just like we’re proud of his brother, who’s been the president of the Boys Club and chairman of the Cancer Society and a volunteer fireman for I don’t know how many years.”
“Indeed,” Luke said, reminded that his sister-in-law was not as indiscriminately charitable as she might seem; she could not always stifle her sense of resentment that the spoiled firstborn, so she believed, basked in the sunshine of his mother’s love, while his younger brother labored dutifully in the shadows, without the recognition and affection that were his due.
“Well, if it comes to that,” Matthew said, “Ashley’s mom has us all beat on the charity front.”
“She’s definitely queen of the benefit scene,” Ashley said.
“What’s the benefit scene?” Davis asked, clearly puzzled by the sudden change in tone among the grown-ups.
“It’s where,” Ashley said, now on a roll, “you get to show off your latest
dress.”
“Mom says Aunt Sasha spends more on dresses than we spend on everything put together.”
Matthew glanced over at Luke, wearing a look of sheepish contrition.
“I certainly wouldn’t dispute that,” Luke said.
“Actually, she gets a lot of the clothes for free,” Ashley said.
“Why does she get clothes for free?”
“Because,” Matthew said, “she’s a beautiful woman and the people who make the clothes think she’s a good advertisement.”
Luke couldn’t help admiring his brother’s courtliness. Observing Debbie’s pinched expression, and Matthew’s reaction as he took it in, he imagined that his brother would pay for this observation later. “Ashley,” he said, “why don’t you help your aunt clear the table.”
Luke glanced back at his brother, who, seeing that Debbie’s back was turned, put a finger to his ear.
“Brother Luke,” he said, “I think I hear the brandy snifter calling.”
“Maybe it’s just a flirtation,” Matthew said, splashing more brandy into Luke’s glass.
They were holed up in the den, a Vanderbilt sports shrine–cum–Civil War museum. A refrigerator-size vitrine displayed the brittle gray-and-gold uniform of Captain Percy, an honored, if distant, relation who’d finished the war in a Union prison camp in Nashville. Matthew’s comprehensive collection of Civil War literature shared the shelves with team photos, trophies, golf paraphernalia, and relics of the great battle fought a couple of miles down the road.
Debbie had disappeared upstairs with the boys after Nora and Ashley had left to drive back to the farm.
“When I talked to Sasha on the phone the other night—I’ve got to admit I haven’t always been her biggest fan, but she sounded sincere. Between this crisis with Ashley and this other fucking thing—she sounded, well, contrite. Scared. She allowed as how you’d been going through a rough patch, but she said you two were pulling together for Ashley’s sake.”
“You always think the best of everyone,” Luke said. “I love you for it, but still. If Sasha’s scared, it’s because Melman withdrew from the field. She showed her hand too soon.”