The girl looked straight ahead through the windshield. “I live far from here.” She spoke with an accent, either Russian or Polish. “Can you just take me to Lenox? They have a bus.”
“All right.”
The girl’s white pumps were scuffed and dirty. She had high arches, bunions. Round muscles in her calves. A dancer, Claire suspected. She sat with her ankles crossed, her knees turned out, and her hands clenched in her lap like a first grader on picture day. Her purse was small, a child’s purse.
“Do you need a coat?” Claire asked, showing her the coat.
The girl looked at it. “You don’t want it?”
“It’s too small. It was my mother’s coat.”
The girl examined it. “It’s nice. You sure?”
“Of course. What’s your name?”
“Petra,” she glanced at Claire uncertainly. “Here, they call me Pearl.”
“Where are you from?”
“I am from Poland.”
Claire offered her a cigarette and she took it, gratefully. “My eye is ugly, yes?”
“Does it hurt?”
The girl shrugged. She gazed out the window, her eyes empty.
“I hope it gets better soon,” Claire said, at a loss. “It’s a nice day, isn’t it?”
“It’s too windy,” the girl complained.
“How long have you been here, in this country?”
“Two years only.”
“Your English is very good.”
She jerked her head, arrogantly, as if she didn’t care if it was good or not. “I don’t like America,” she said finally.
“That makes two of us,” Claire said.
“What you say?”
“Nothing. Just an expression.” They rode for a while in silence. The girl opened her window and let the sun onto her face. “Are you a dancer?”
The girl nodded as if it were a secret. “How do you know?”
“Your feet.”
“I was with my company. We came here to perform. You know Jacob’s Pillow?”
“Of course.”
The girl rubbed her nose. “I can get out here.”
“Look,” Claire said. “If you ever need work.” She wrote down her phone number on a scrap of paper. “I’m a sculptor. You could model for me.”
The girl took the paper and got out. “Thanks,” she said, taking the coat. She got out, affecting a cool arrogance, and as she climbed the steps of the town hall to wait for her bus she threw Claire’s number in the trash. Claire sighed, feeling stupid, useless; the girl obviously didn’t want her charity. She stood back in the shadows to wait. The town hall had been built in the early 1800s, a brick building with Corinthian columns, and it occurred to Claire that not much had changed over the centuries since it had been built—women were still getting beaten up by the men who claimed to love them. Driving away, Claire felt strangely anxious—regretting that she hadn’t driven the girl home. It would have saved her the humiliation of being the main attraction on the local bus, one that would inspire either pity or deranged satisfaction.
5
The driver brought Nate to the garage in Canaan, explaining that the owner of the place was a mechanic of distinction who always had good European cars for sale. The mechanic was a wiry Frenchman named Otto, whose tiny paneled office was covered with pictures from his glory days in racing. Otto walked Nate around the small lot, apologizing for his low inventory. He had only two cars for sale: an older Ford pickup and a ’97 BMW. “What about that?” Nate pointed to a vintage blue Thunderbird with whitewalled tires. “Now there’s a car.”
“That’s a customer’s car,” Otto said. “Not for sale.”
“Who owns it?”
“An unusual man owns that car.”
“Well,” Nate said, as though he were impressed.
“I fix all his cars. We’re good friends,” Otto said, as if trying to convince Nate. “I’ve been to his house. He has parties with big sweeping tents. Miniature horses. Even monkeys, once. Food, you’ve never seen such food. Banquets.”
“What does he do?”
“That’s privileged information, I’m afraid,” Otto said. “But he does it very well, I promise you that.”
Nate bought the truck and paid the Frenchman in cash. The truck’s owner had recently died of a stroke. “He was a meticulous man,” Otto told him. “Very wise.” The man had had a long career as a theater director and lived on a farm in Stockbridge. “It is very sad what happens when we are old,” Otto said. “Tragic.”
Otto folded the title into an envelope and handed Nate the keys. “It’s a good truck,” he assured Nate, caressing the hood of the pickup affectionately. “She won’t give you any trouble.”
Nate shook his hand and got into the truck and drove off the lot. He slid the envelope onto the visor, where he discovered a photograph, a Polaroid, which had been fastened in place by a rubber band. Nate pulled over to take a closer look at it, a forgotten relic of a dead man’s life. It was a picture of a girl, maybe seventeen or eighteen, leaning against a tree, holding a gray rabbit, her long yellow hair twisted into two symmetrical braids. She was smiling at the photographer, not just an ordinary smile, Nate thought, but one that suggested some deeper knowledge, a thrilling secret. She was tall, wearing a white peasant blouse and a skirt she might have made herself out of a pair of blue jeans, cut at the seams and sewn down the middle, embroidered with rainbows and hearts and flowers. Someone had written her name along the bottom of the Polaroid: Claire, Jack Rabbit Farm, 1988. It was a lovely photograph, he thought, and debated bringing it back to Otto, who might have sent it back to the girl, wherever she was, as a poignant gesture, but abruptly he decided against it. He returned the Polaroid to the visor and secured it under the elastic, where it had been all along, and flipped the visor back into place.
He drove east toward Massachusetts, passing wide green fields and brown barns and large country homes with tennis courts and swimming pools and acres of open land. There were gardens and white picket fences and pumpkin fields and weary, paint-chipped churches and graveyards with crooked black stones. He crossed over the border and took the state road south, into Stockbridge, a quaint little town straight out of the Norman Rockwell paintings that had made it famous. There were historic buildings of whitewashed brick. Old clapboard houses. Window boxes blazing with petunias. American flags snapped and twisted in the bright wind.
The apartment was in a Victorian house on Main Street. It was a brooding old place set back from the road behind an ornery row of lilac bushes. The clapboards were painted a tawny shade of yellow, and there were chalky blue shutters and window boxes. The front porch held an assortment of creaky wicker furniture. Nate rang the little bronze bell beside the door and waited, glancing through the lace curtains. He stood there feeling foolish, then finally stepped inside the empty vestibule. Someone was playing a piano, Chopin. It was coming through the door of a first-floor apartment that had been left ajar. Nailed on the same door was a sign: Superintendent. “Hello?” Nate knocked, peering into the apartment.
The music stopped abruptly and another sound took its place—the sound of birds. Nate ventured down a narrow hall into a small living room, the walls of which were lined with towering stacks of birdcages. There were fat white doves and cockatiels and parakeets. The superintendent, a once famous pianist named Larkin—Nate put him in his early nineties—sat at his piano, hunched over the keys as if he and the instrument were having an intimate discussion. He wore a rumpled linen suit with glaring tea-colored sweat stains, red suspenders, and a striped bow tie. On his feet were a pair of black rubber flip-flops; his toenails were thick and yellow as the claws of his birds. The place stank of birds and gritty coffee and ripe bananas and the ash on the old man’s cigarette was two inches long.
“Mr. Larkin?” When there came no response, Nate tapped him on the arm. “Mr. Larkin?” He spoke loudly.
The old man jumped, his face flooded with color. “You don’t have to shout!
”
“I’m Nate Gallagher. I’m here about the apartment.”
“Ah, yes, Mr. Gallagher.” Larkin struggled out of the chair and extended his trembling hand. “Welcome to Amadeus House.”
They shook. “Those birds,” Nate said. “They’re really something.”
“My old lovers,” Larkin said. “You don’t have to worry, they’re good tenants, they know the rules. Come, let’s get you established.”
Using his cane, he opened a small cabinet that contained rows of skeleton keys and, with surprising agility, selected two for Nate. “The front door is locked promptly at ten,” he warned. “If you don’t have your key, you’ll have to sleep in the yard.” Nate followed him up the wide staircase with its shiny black banister, across the spacious landing. Windows with diamond-shaped panes overlooked the front walk. Nate noticed a girl walking toward the door, carrying a stack of sheet music. He wondered if she was another tenant.
“Resident,” the old man corrected him when he asked. “No, that’s one of my students.”
They peered over the banister as the young girl entered the vestibule and walked toward Larkin’s apartment. She was wearing cutoff shorts and a T-shirt and had her sunglasses pulled up on her head like a headband. “I’ll be down in a moment, my dear,” Larkin called down to her.
The girl tilted her head, wickedly appraising Nate. “Who are you?”
“This is Mr. Gallagher. He’s a novelist.”
Nate bowed slightly. “Well, not officially.”
“Not officially what?” the girl said.
“Well, I’m trying to write one.”
The girl smirked, raising her eyebrows. “I’m kind of in a hurry, Mr. Larkin.”
“Begin with your scales, my dear. I won’t be a moment.” With his trembling hand Larkin unlocked the door and they went inside. The apartment was large and bright with the oversized rooms of a bygone era. Sunlight fell through the tall windows. Leafy vines clung to the windowpanes, dappling the floor with heart-shaped leaf-shadows. The only furniture in the living room was a worn velvet sofa the color of pears. The bedroom overlooked a back garden with a birdbath and wrought-iron benches. There was a four-poster bed, a large antique dresser, a desk and chair. The kitchen was modest, but neat.
“Satisfied, Mr. Gallagher?”
“It’ll do fine.”
Larkin gave him the keys and shuffled out. Nate went into the bedroom to try out the bed. The rickety frame protested, the springs squealed. He lay there for a while, listening to the sounds of the house wafting up through the heating vents. The muffled voices of strangers. The opening and closing of doors. Larkin’s impertinent student, practicing scales.
The next day his books and computer arrived from the city. He set up his desk in front of the diamond-shaped windows where he could watch the people down on the street. He rather liked his view of the old brick library across the street and the coffee shop alongside of it with its plate-glass windows. There were three other tenants in the house and he came to know their patterns. He shared the second floor with a pair of identical twins, unsmiling sisters who went off to work each morning in nursing scrubs. Often they’d return from work carrying forlorn bouquets of flowers—he would find trails of faded petals on the stairs. He had never met the tenant on the third floor, the only evidence of whose existence was the sound of a cello that wandered down mournfully through the vents, and the startling rattle of empty wine bottles that collected in a recycling bin just outside the door. Nate did not mind the maudlin cello, but on some occasions it influenced his mood and he’d have to leave the house. He’d walk through town, looking into the windows of houses with their lights coming on, families sitting down to supper. Or he’d walk through the cemetery with its Pilgrim stones and think of Catherine, the only woman he had ever loved. Sometimes, he’d go to Hardy’s, a dark little bar on Water Street that catered to the townies. It was a drinker’s bar and the grim atmosphere suited him, the small lamps on the tables with their crooked red shades, the old books scattered around the place, written by the great writers of the Berkshires—Hawthorne and Melville and Edith Wharton—the dark green walls covered with oil paintings, most of them horse pictures or scenes of the hunt, and the lingering musk-odor of beer and whiskey. They had Ballantine on tap and a pool table in the back. The bartender had an unusual turnip-shaped head and a mustache that resembled a salamander. He poured a liberal glass of scotch, which kept all the regulars, including Nate, coming back for more.
6
One night, against his better judgment, he left the bar and went for a drive. The long black roads were flooded with fog. The broken yellow lines fed his vision like bread crumbs, luring him into some forbidden place. He had no business driving down Hawthorne Road at one o’clock in the morning after drinking half a quart of whiskey, yet he’d been putting it off since the day he’d arrived, and he couldn’t wait any longer. Just a glimpse of her, that’s all he wanted; maybe it would be enough.
He had not forgotten their road, a dirt driveway up the mountain, a mile long into wilderness. People called it exclusive, living apart from everyone else, being separate—but he couldn’t imagine it. Excluded was a word he’d use. He crossed over a short bridge, the sound of the river filling his ears like the rain that had fallen that afternoon. The day came back with startling clarity. The eerie yellow light in the car. The baby fussing. The greenish tint to Cat’s skin. You take her, she had said.
He’d been a different man then.
The fog grew denser near the top of the hill. He shut off his headlights and pulled over and parked in the bushes, then went up the rest of the way on foot. It was like walking through a cloud. At last the house appeared, blurred by the fog. A single lamp was lit on the second floor. A vintage black Mercedes sat in the circular driveway. He heard a noise coming from the dark fields and realized it was the sound of horses. Beyond the white fence he saw a silver horse galloping through the fog. His heart felt tight, like he couldn’t breathe, and his eyes went damp. For him, it was a haunted place. He’d waited two hours in the driveway for the coroner, he recalled, hearing the infant screaming inside the house. They’d covered Cat with a red velvet blanket and taken her away in a black station wagon.
Following the wooded boundary of the property, Nate went around to the back and stood in an open field. It was late now and the house was dark. He stood there, conscious of the water seeping into his boots, and of the fact that he badly wanted a cigarette, even though he had quit. The horses had come to the fence behind him and were stamping their hooves. He turned to look at them. The largest was jerking its head. When he looked back at the house he saw that someone had entered the kitchen. It was Golding, the man who’d adopted his daughter seventeen years before, standing in a wedge of florescent light, his hand up on his chest like a pledge as he contemplated what to eat. He looked older of course, Nate thought, he’d put on some weight. Finally, he chose something and closed the refrigerator door. The room went black.
Nate stood there for another moment. His heart was beating very fast. He could hear the wind sweeping across the field. He tried to imagine what it must be like, living here in this place. He could never have given her this life, he thought. And it was what Cat had wanted for her, he understood that now. Cat didn’t want their child growing up poor and she had doubted his abilities and he had not proved himself to her. He would have liked to have done that, but never got the chance. That place they’d lived, that awful apartment, roaches big as his thumbs. There had been other babies in that building, he recalled. The Cubans downstairs, the Samoans on the ground floor. He could have done it; he could have raised her—somehow. He could have been her father. But the truth of it was he hadn’t wanted to.
He had made her—he and Catherine had made her together—and it had been miraculous, yet he could not appreciate the miracle. He had no claim to her. She was a splinter in his heart, too deep to retrieve no matter how cunning the tool.
Back in the apartment,
he fixed himself a drink and sat at his desk and began to work. He had only a small light and it cast an orange glow around the room. The window was open to the quiet street and occasionally he’d hear a couple pass by on the sidewalk below, talking softly to each other. Moths drilled their bodies into the screens and every so often he’d flick them off, sending them reeling into the night. He wanted very badly to write. He had things to say. His journey back from heroin had taken years and it had been an important journey. The madness of that time lingered still. He had decided that writing about it would somehow free him of it. He wanted to write about a man like himself, who had come to a point in his life. He wanted to dig a hole and put the past inside it and cover it back up again. He didn’t know if flowers would grow there or not. He hoped they would.
Suddenly tired, he lay down on his bed, admonishing himself for snooping around the Goldings’ property like some kind of pervert. He didn’t want to think what might have happened if he’d gotten caught. It had been a stupid thing to do. He closed his eyes, trying to revise in his mind his justification for coming back here, for taking a position at the very school the girl attended where he might very possibly be her teacher—the idea that he would come to know her and, yes, perhaps, even become a mentor of sorts, consumed him with both guilt and longing. Yet, he reasoned, he saw little real harm in it, as he would never reveal to her who he was.
In those early weeks before school started he found himself caught up in a routine. He would work on his book most of the day, then explore the neighboring towns in the afternoon. He always took his breakfast at the café across the street. The waitress was named Hazel and she recognized him when he came in now and always poured his coffee without asking if he wanted it and he always thanked her. In a matter of weeks, his status had been apparently raised from tourist to local, which was substantially better as Hazel generally neglected the tourists, who would shift and careen their torsos in an effort to get her attention. The locals were an odd assortment, an interchangeable collection of artists and madmen and a group he called the ex-people. The ex-people generally had money, and some had plenty of it. They had moved from someplace else with the intention of disappearing off the face of the Earth. They wanted to blend in and pretend to be anonymous, although they weren’t generally the sorts of people who could tolerate anonymity at all—those people went to places like Idaho and Montana. In Nate’s estimation, the ex-people liked to give the impression that they had relinquished the comforts of suburbia for a higher cause—as if they were living on the tundra as opposed to in a community that deprived them of absolutely nothing. Their concept of living the life of the rugged individualist was driving around in a mud-splattered Range Rover affixed with leftist bumper stickers—he had to admit they had a certain appeal. More than once, while hiking in the Berkshire wilderness, he’d heard a voice drilling through the trees like a woodpecker, signifying the approach of an ex-person on his cell phone.