timing was off. By catch up with you later, I must have meant something less definite and further off than later this week. He had done no more than accept my daughter’s invitation to play tennis and been a good partner to her. I couldn’t blame him. I wasn’t about to thank him for it either.
In the intervening days, Vicky and I had gone back to practicing together and I had gotten to appreciate her improvement up close. But it didn’t bring us together—we didn’t click. I wanted to help her to continue her progress, but she wanted me to marvel at it. She not only ignored my corrections, she took offense at them wherever she could find it. What she was after was a yes-man, not a coach. And that was what I became, looking past her flaws and limiting my comments to compliments that couldn’t have done her good in the end.
This end was mercifully approaching—the end of school vacation, that is and, a few weeks later, the end of the season. The wind would replace the dirt it had stripped from the foundation with leaves, and a dry thaw would crack the clay. The net would be taken down from the posts, the tape for the lines up from the ground, the pipes that fed the sprinklers drained, the roller and brushes stowed away, our racquets screwed into presses.
It was a matter of chance that I should have come home early from work. I hadn’t gone in till noon, but the firm’s internal investigation had reached such a pitch that I grew tired of the shouting and knocked off before five. I might have had it in the back of my mind for Vicky and me to squeeze in one last workout.
The auspices were good. At Penn Station I ducked into a train as the doors were shutting. My timing had given me no chance to pick up an afternoon paper, but even this turned out well. The trees were in their autumn beauty. The farther we got from Manhattan—past the markets, depots, sedge-stubbed marshland, and water towers of Woodside and Flushing—the farther east we traveled, the deeper the color of the leaves, the redder, the more golden, the fierier, and the more advanced the season. With the section-ends of the rails clipping beneath us like the second hand of an accidental clock, we seemed to be heading into the future, except that since I was riding backward, I imagined instead that I was backing, counterclockwise, into a lovely past that unfurled itself in retreat from the setting sun. I arrived home renewed.
I went inside, and hearing voices from the back, found Bud, Vicky, and a boy about her age in the living room, racquets, soft drinks, and a briefcase on the coffee table between them. “How are you, fella?” Bud said and stood up. He had a way of engaging you before you’d had a chance to size things up, a forward charm. But I didn’t find it charming then. Even from the periphery he was becoming a persistent presence. My domain was shrinking.
“This is my son Daniel,” he said. “Danny, shake hands with Mr. Fox.” The boy was sitting cross-legged, and the uncrossing seemed to give him some trouble. Bud might have reached over and jerked him up if the coffee table hadn’t been in the way. “Get up, Danny! Sorry, Neil. He’s got no instincts for the social graces. Brilliant kid, though. Mind like a steel trap.”
Bud wasn’t kidding about his son’s lacking social graces. Still in his overcoat, the boy looked like a seminarian. Darkly sallow, pimply, and shy, he was already taller than his father but stooped away the extra inches, which were just more awkwardness.
He limply shook my hand while gawking past me. I thought that he was staring from shyness at his briefcase till my glance shifted from the coffee table to Vicky’s side of the couch. I felt my jaw set and my blood rise. “Excuse us for a moment, will you?” I said. “Vicky, if I may speak with you privately?”
Vicky took her time getting out of her chair. A cobweb dangled from a curtain rod behind her. “Put down your glass,” I said to her, “and follow me.”
I led her to the maid’s room, shut the door, and switched on a light. The wallpaper had horse-and-buggy drawings and was beginning to peel. The bedspread was covered in newspaper, the bolster doubled up for reading against.
“I thought we’d agreed on your returning that . . . that outfit.”
“I didn’t get a chance. I needed something to wear today. No laundry gets done around here anymore.”
“You must have a dozen other things.”
“Not for tennis, Daddy.”
“And in your mother’s closets?”
“Her stuff? You must be kidding.”
“I’m not.”
As we argued, I advanced toward her and she retreated, not so far that I was standing over her but near enough to see the goose bumps on her arms—and not only her arms. In the entirety of its width and span, that Italian number wouldn’t have covered more than a few dozen goose bumps.
“We’ve already had this discussion,” I said. “We’ve got guests out there.”
“So why are we in here then? Let’s go entertain them!” she shouted and did a lewd little shimmy that her slinky top didn’t begin to clothe.
“I can’t . . . I won’t have you—”
“Listen to yourself—you can’t even speak! You should see yourself quivering like an old schoolmaster.”
“—I’m saying that I won’t have you looking like a tart!” And when I heard myself, I even felt like a schoolmaster, a tyrannical schoolmasterly father who thinks it’s his duty—his impossible duty—to see his daughter through other eyes than his own. But then I looked at her again in her half-naked ripeness and thought, She doesn’t know what she’s doing!
“I mean,” I continued more quietly, “that you shouldn’t provoke—”
“Who, who am I trying to provoke, which member of the family”—she pointed toward the living room—“the bookworm in there? He’d only notice me if I were in a book. His dad? He seems to like you. You think he’s hard for his friend’s daughter—the man he thinks is his friend. Imagine that!”
“Not them, me. You’re trying to provoke me.”
She started past me for the door.
“You are not going back out like that!” I said.
She grabbed the doorknob, and I grabbed for her. I wanted her shoulder but instead got her hair, and before I quite realized what I was doing, I yanked her by it, wrenching back her head. She staggered, and one of her barrettes landed on the twisted bolster.
She went over to get it and sat down on the bed. “Is that what you do?” she asked through tears. “I wonder why she waited so long.”
I went back to the living room. They’d had the sense to go, though Bud had found a cardboard coaster and left a note on the back in block letters, with a cursive postscript:
NEIL,
SUPPER TIME. WE’RE OFF.
SEE YOU AT OUR PARTY IF NOT SOONER.
BUD
P.S. Quite a girl you’ve got. Hits it like a ton of bricks.
That damned party—I still hadn’t sent my excuses. After this performance, it was a wonder he still wanted me to come.
I picked up the pen and scribbled on the coaster, “THANKS FOR THE INVITATION. AWAY ON BUSINESS. REGRETS,” and walked it down to the mailbox at the top of his driveway.
And what sight greeted my eyes at the bottom? An Alfa roadster not unlike my own, a newer model in a different color—beige, taupe, off white, ecru, who knew what they called it. I knew what I called it, by any color.
chapter two
Sometimes, when Frances was a pup, I would walk down with her for a late paper and a pack of smokes to a stationery shop in the village that stayed open on weekends. It was a nice ritual. The shopkeeper was cordial and the cigarette on the way back tasted especially good. But a shopping center opened, dozens of storefronts on the spine of a hill running almost a mile west to the center