KATE BATTISTA WAS gardening out back when she heard the telephone ring in the kitchen. She straightened up and listened. Her sister was in the house, although she might not be awake yet. But then there was another ring, and two more after that, and when she finally heard her sister’s voice it was only the announcement on the answering machine. “Hi-yee! It’s us? We’re not home, looks like? So leave a—”
By that time Kate was striding toward the back steps, tossing her hair off her shoulders with an exasperated “Tcch!” She wiped her hands on her jeans and yanked the screen door open. “Kate,” her father was saying, “pick up.”
She lifted the receiver. “What,” she said.
“I forgot my lunch.”
Her eyes went to the counter beside the fridge where, sure enough, his lunch sat precisely where she had set it the night before. She always used those clear plastic bags that supermarket produce came in, and the contents were plainly visible: a Tupperware sandwich box and an apple. “Huh,” she said.
“Can you bring it?”
“Bring it now?”
“Right.”
“Jesus, Father. I’m not the Pony Express,” she said.
“What else have you got to do?” he asked her.
“It’s Sunday! I’m weeding the hellebores.”
“Ah, Kate, don’t be like that. Just hop in the car and zip over; there’s a good girl.”
“Sheesh,” she said, and she slammed the receiver down and took the lunch bag from the counter.
There were several strange things about this conversation. The first was that it had happened at all; her father distrusted the telephone. In fact his lab didn’t even have a telephone, so he must have called on his cell phone. And that was unusual too, because his only reason for owning a cell phone was that his daughters had insisted. He had gone into a brief flurry of app purchases when he first acquired it—scientific calculators of various types, for the most part—and after that had lost all interest, and avoided it now altogether.
Then there was the fact that he forgot his lunch about twice a week, but had never before seemed to notice. The man did not eat, basically. Kate would get home from work and find his lunch still sitting on the counter, and yet even so she would have to shout for him three or four times that evening before he would come to dinner. Always he had something better to do, some journal to read or notes to go over. He would probably starve to death if he were living alone.
And supposing he did feel a bit peckish, he could have just stepped out and bought something. His lab was near the Johns Hopkins campus, and there were sandwich shops and convenience stores everywhere you looked.
Not to mention that it wasn’t even noon yet.
But the day was sunny and breezy, if cool—the first semi-decent weather after a long, hard, bitter winter—and she didn’t actually mind an excuse to get out in the world. She wouldn’t take the car, though; she would walk. Let him wait. (He himself never took the car, unless he had some sort of equipment to ferry. He was something of a health fiend.)
She stepped out the front door, shutting it extra hard behind her because it irked her that Bunny was sleeping so late. The ground cover along the front walk had a twiggy, littered look, and she made a mental note to spruce it up after she finished with the hellebores.
Swinging the lunch bag by its twist-tied neck, she passed the Mintzes’ house and the Gordons’ house—stately brick center-hall Colonials like the Battistas’ own, although better maintained—and turned the corner. Mrs. Gordon was kneeling among her azalea bushes, spreading mulch around their roots. “Why, hello there, Kate!” she sang out.
“Hi.”
“Looks like spring might be thinking of coming!”
“Yup.”
Kate strode on without slowing, her buckskin jacket flying out behind her. A pair of young women—most likely Hopkins students—drifted at a snail’s pace ahead of her. “I could tell he wanted to ask me,” one was saying, “because he kept clearing his throat in that way they do, you know? But then not speaking.”
“I love when they’re so shy,” the other one said.
Kate veered around them and kept going.
At the next street she took a left, heading toward a more mixed-and-mingled neighborhood of apartments and small cafés and houses partitioned into offices, and eventually she turned in at yet another brick Colonial. This one had a smaller front yard than the Battistas’ but a larger, grander portico. Six or eight plaques beside the front door spelled out the names of various offbeat organizations and obscure little magazines. There was no plaque for Louis Battista, though. He had been shunted around to so many different buildings over the years, landing finally in this orphan location near the university but miles from the medical complex, that he’d probably decided it just wasn’t worth the effort.
In the foyer an array of mailboxes lined one wall, and sliding heaps of flyers and takeout menus covered the rickety bench beneath them. Kate walked past several offices, but only the Christians for Buddha door stood open. Inside she glimpsed a trio of women grouped around a desk where a fourth woman sat dabbing her eyes with a tissue. (Always something going on.) Kate opened another door at the far end of the hall and descended a flight of steep wooden stairs. At the bottom she paused to punch in the code: 1957, the date Witebsky first defined the criteria for autoimmune disorders.
The room she entered was tiny, furnished only by a card table and two metal folding chairs. A brown paper bag sat on the table; another lunch, it looked like. She set her father’s lunch next to it and then went over to a door and gave a couple of brisk knocks. After a moment, her father poked his head out—his satiny bald scalp bordered by a narrow band of black hair, his olive-skinned face punctuated by a black mustache and round-lensed, rimless spectacles. “Ah, Kate,” he said. “Come in.”
“No, thanks,” she said. She never could abide the smells of the place—the thin, stinging smell of the lab itself and the dry-paper smell of the mouse room. “Your lunch is on the table,” she said. “Bye.”
“No, wait!”
He turned from her to speak to someone in the room behind him. “Pyoder? Come out and say hello to my daughter.”
“I’ve got to go,” Kate said.
“I don’t think you’ve ever met my research assistant,” her father said.
“That’s okay.”
But the door opened wider, and a solid, muscular man with straight yellow hair stepped up to stand next to her father. His white lab coat was so dingy that it very nearly matched Dr. Battista’s pale-gray coveralls. “Vwouwv!” he said. Or that was what it sounded like, at least. He was gazing at Kate admiringly. Men often wore that look when they first saw her. It was due to a bunch of dead cells: her hair, which was blue-black and billowy and extended below her waist.
“This is Pyoder Cherbakov,” her father told her.
“Pyotr,” the man corrected him, allowing no space at all between the sharp-pointed t and the ruffly, rolling r. And “Shcherbakov,” explosively spitting out the mishmash of consonants.
“Pyoder, meet Kate.”
“Hi,” Kate said. “See you later,” she told her father.
“I thought you might stay a moment.”
“What for?”
“Well, you’ll need to take back my sandwich box, will you not?”
“Well, you can bring it back yourself, can you not?”
A sudden hooting sound made both of them glance in Pyotr’s direction. “Just like the girls in my country,” he said, beaming. “So rude-spoken.”
“Just like the women,” Kate said reprovingly.
“Yes, they also. The grandmothers and the aunties.”
She gave up on him. “Father,” she said, “will you tell Bunny she has to stop leaving such a mess when she has her friends in? Did you see the TV room this morning?”
“Yes, yes,” her father said, but he was heading back into the lab as he spoke. He returned, pushing a high stool on wheels. He parked it next to the table. “Have a seat,” he told her.
“I need to get back to my gardening.”
“Please, Kate,” he said. “You never keep me company.”
She stared at him. “Keep you company?”
“Sit, sit,” he said, motioning toward the stool. “You can have part of my sandwich.”
“I’m not hungry,” she said. But she perched awkwardly on the stool, still staring at him.
“Pyoder, sit. You can share my sandwich too, if you want. Kate made it especially. Peanut butter honey on whole-wheat.”
“You know I do not eat peanut butter,” Pyotr told him severely. He pulled out one of the folding chairs and settled catty-corner to Kate. His chair was considerably lower than her stool, and she could see how the hair was starting to thin across the top of his head. “In my country, peanuts are pigs’ food.”
“Ha, ha,” Dr. Battista said. “He’s very humorous, isn’t he, Kate?”
“What?”
“They eat them with the shells on,” Pyotr said.
He had trouble with th sounds, Kate noticed. And his vowels didn’t seem to last long enough. She had no patience with foreign accents.
“Were you surprised that I used my cell phone?” her father asked her. He was still standing, for some reason. He pulled his phone from a pocket in his coveralls. “You girls were right; it comes in handy,” he said. “I’m going to start using it more often now.” He frowned down at it a moment, as if he were trying to remember what it was. Then he punched a button and held it in front of his face. Squinting, he took several steps backward. There was a mechanical clicking sound. “See? It takes photographs,” he said.
“Erase it,” Kate ordered.
“I don’t know how,” he said, and the phone clicked again.
“Damn it, Father, sit down and eat. I need to get back to my gardening.”
“All right, all right.”
He tucked the phone away and sat down. Pyotr, meanwhile, was opening his lunch bag. He pulled out two eggs and then a banana and placed them on the flattened paper bag in front of him. “Pyoder believes in bananas,” Dr. Battista confided. “I keep telling him about apples, but does he listen?” He was opening his own lunch bag, taking out his apple. “Pectin! Pectin!” he told Pyotr, shaking the apple under Pyotr’s nose.
“Bananas are miracle food,” Pyotr said calmly, and he picked his up and started peeling it. He had a face that was almost hexagonal, Kate noticed—his cheekbones widening to two sharp points, the angles of his jaw two more points slanting to the point of his chin, and the long strands of his hair separating over his forehead to form the topmost point. “Also eggs,” he was saying. “The egg of the hen! So cleverly self-contained.”
“Kate makes my sandwich for me every single night before she goes to bed,” Dr. Battista said. “She’s very domestic.”
Kate blinked.
“Peanut butter, though,” Pyotr said.
“Well, yes.”
“Yes,” Pyotr said with a sigh. He sent her a look of regret. “But is certainly pretty enough.”
“You should see her sister.”
Kate said, “Oh! Father!”
“What?”
“This sister is where?” Pyotr asked.
“Well, Bunny is only fifteen. She’s still in high school.”
“Okay,” Pyotr said. He returned his gaze to Kate.
Kate wheeled her stool back sharply and stood up. “Don’t forget your Tupperware,” she told her father.
“What! You’re leaving? Why so soon?”
But Kate just said, “Bye”—mostly addressing Pyotr, who was watching her with a measuring look—and she marched to the door and flung it open.
“Katherine, dearest, don’t rush off!” Her father stood up. “Oh, dear, this isn’t going well at all. It’s just that she’s so busy, Pyoder. I can never get her to sit down and take a little break. Did I tell you she runs our whole house? She’s very domestic. Oh, I already said that. And she has a full-time job besides. Did I tell you she teaches preschool? She’s wonderful with small children.”
“Why are you talking this way?” Kate demanded, turning on him. “What’s come over you? I hate small children; you know that.”
There was another hooting sound from Pyotr. He was grinning up at her. “Why you hate small children?” he asked her.
“Well, they’re not very bright, if you’ve noticed.”
He hooted again. What with his hooting and the banana he held, he reminded her of a chimpanzee. She spun away and stalked out, letting the door slam shut, and climbed the stairs two at a time.
Behind her, she heard the door open again. Her father called, “Kate?” She heard his steps on the stairs, but she strode on toward the front of the building.
His steps softened as he arrived on the carpet. “I’ll just see you out, why don’t I?” he called after her.
See her out?
But she paused when she reached the front door. She turned to watch him approach.
“I’ve handled things badly,” he said. He smoothed his scalp with one palm. His coveralls were one-size-fits-all and they ballooned in the middle, giving him the look of a Teletubby. “I didn’t mean to make you angry,” he said.
“I’m not angry; I’m …”
But she couldn’t say the word “hurt.” It might bring tears to her eyes. “I’m fed up,” she said instead.
“I don’t understand.”
She could believe that, actually. Face it: he was clueless.
“And what were you trying to do back there?” she asked him, setting her fists on her hips. “Why were you acting so … peculiar with that assistant?”
“He’s not ‘that assistant;’ he’s Pyoder Cherbakov, whom I’m very lucky to have. Just look: he came in on a Sunday! He does that often. And he’s been with me nearly three years, by the way, so I would think you would at least be familiar with his name.”
“Three years? What happened to Ennis?”
“Good Lord! Ennis! Ennis was two assistants back.”
“Oh,” she said.
She didn’t know why he was acting so irritable. It wasn’t as if he ever talked about his assistants—or about anything, in fact.
“I seem to have a little trouble keeping them,” he said. “It may be that to outsiders, my project is not looking very promising.”
This wasn’t something he had admitted before, although from time to time Kate had wondered. It made her feel sorry for him, suddenly. She let her hands drop to her sides.
“I went to a great deal of effort to bring Pyoder to this country,” he said. “I don’t know if you realize. He was only twenty-five at the time, but everybody who’s anybody in autoimmunity had heard of him. He’s brilliant. He qualified for an O-1 visa, and that’s not something you often see these days.”
“Well, good, Father.”
“An extraordinary-ability visa; that’s what an O-1 is. It means that he possesses some extraordinary skill or knowledge that no one here in this country has, and that I am involved in some extraordinary research that justifies my needing him.”
“Good for you.”
“O-1 visas last three years.”
She reached out to touch his forearm. “Of course you’re anxious about your project,” she said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone. “But I bet things will be fine.”
“You really think so?” he asked.
She nodded and gave his arm a couple of clumsy pats, which he must not have been expecting because he looked startled. “I’m sure of it,” she told him. “Don’t forget to bring your sandwich box home.”
Then she opened the front door and walked out into the sunshine. Two of the Christians for Buddha women were sitting on the steps with their heads together. They were laughing so hard about something that it took them a moment to notice her, but then they drew apart to let her pass.
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Anne Tyler
Praise
Dedication
Title Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Extract from Vinegar Girl
Copyright
‘A brilliant book…by a masterly author’
‘Attention to detail combine with brilliant chiaroscuro to produce a modern classic. The picture is so rich and original that it will be revisited again and again’
‘Anne Tyler has won herself a devoted following. Rightly so: her novels are beautifully controlled, witty, subtle, with an undercurrent of human warmth…In her latest novel, her characteristic mixture works its magic again’
‘I can think of no other writer whose novels I look forward to with such gleeful anticipation. A Patchwork Planet is her fourteenth book, but were it her fortieth, it would not be enough for me.
Arnold Bennett defined the essential characteristic of the really great novelist as ‘a Christ-like, all-embracing compassion’. Anne Tyler has that in spades. No life is too ordinary, no existence too humdrum to be spared her penetrating gaze and gentle humour…This book is a delight from beginning to end’
‘A tour de force of an opening chapter, and sets an extraordinary standard, which Tyler somehow maintains throughout this wonderful novel…Barnaby’s life is so engrossing, there is such a clatter of subplots – family squabbles, car purchases, domestic wrangles – that it is only when you get to the last, perfect cadence that you realise how carefully, minutely plotted a novel this is…It is…probably Tyler’s finest novel yet’
‘Nick Hornby called the latest offering from Anne Tyler “a cause for celebration” and it is…If you’re in the mood for a bit of salvation, this gem of a novel might just give you some inspiration’
‘It is Anne Tyler’s rare skill to invent characters who are good and funny and to make them real. Take this book on your hols: follow St Paul’s advice and “think on those things that are lovely and of good report”. There is no false sentimentality and a great deal of wisdom in A Patchwork Planet’
‘A subtle, gentle drama of the everyday, punctuated with Tyler’s perceptive wit… one of contemporary fiction’s most acute pyschologists’
‘Fans of Anne Tyler already relish her gentle, witty way with the small things in life. Her characters are always vaguely out of step, often social failures, but with a core of humanism which gradually makes a difference to the lives of those around them…there are few authors who can whittle out such charmed characters…A delight’
‘Anne Tyler’s new novel, A Patchwork Planet, will be huge this summer…this is as good as, if not better than, her award-winning Ladder of Years – tender, moving and very, very funny’
Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941. She is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Breathing Lessons and other bestselling novels, including The Accidental Tourist, Saint Maybe, Ladder of Years, A Patchwork Planet and The Amateur Marriage. In 1994 she was nominated by Roddy Doyle and Nick Hornby as ‘the greatest novelist writing in English’. She has lived for many years with her family in Baltimore, where her novels are set.
Barnaby Gaitlin has less in life than he once had. His ex-wife Natalie left him and their native Baltimore several years ago, taking their baby daughter Opal with her. He acquired an unalterably fixed position as the black sheep of the family. And this family isn’t one where black sheep are tolerated. The Gaitlins are rich and worthy, supposedly guided by their own special angel to do the right thing...
I AM A man you can trust, is how my customers view me. Or at least, I’m guessing it is. Why else would they hand me their house keys before they leave for vacation? Why else would they depend on me to clear their attics for them, heave their air conditioners into their windows every spring, lug their excess furniture to their basements? “Mind your step, young fellow; that’s Hepplewhite,” Mrs. Rodney says, and then she goes into her kitchen to brew a pot of tea. I could get up to anything in that basement. I could unlock the outside door so as to slip back in overnight and rummage through all she owns—her Hepplewhite desk and her Japanese lacquer jewelry box and the six potbellied drawers of her dining-room buffet. Not that I would. But she doesn’t know that. She just assumes it. She takes it for granted that I’m a good person.
Come to think of it, I am the one who doesn’t take it for granted.
On the very last day of a bad old year, I was leaning against a pillar in the Baltimore railroad station, waiting to catch the 10:10 a.m. to Philadelphia. Philadelphia’s where my little girl lives. Her mother married a lawyer there after we split up.
Ordinarily I’d have driven, but my car was in the shop and so I’d had to fork over the money for a train ticket. Scads of money. Not to mention being some appointed place at some appointed time, which I hate. Plus, there were a lot more people waiting than I had expected. That airy, light, clean, varnished feeling I generally got in Penn Station had been crowded out. Elderly couples with matching luggage stuffed the benches, and swarms of college kids littered the floor with their duffel bags. This gray-haired guy was walking around speaking to different strangers one by one. Well-off guy, you could tell: tan skin, nice turtleneck, soft beige car coat. He went up to a woman sitting alone and asked her a question. Then he came over to a girl in a miniskirt standing near me. I had been thinking I wouldn’t mind talking to her myself. She had long blond hair, longer than her skirt, which made it seem she’d neglected to put on the bottom half of her outfit. The man said, “Would you by any chance be traveling to Philadelphia?”
“Well, northbound, yes,” she said, in this shallow, breathless voice that came as a disappointment.
“But to Philadelphia?”
“No, New York, but I’ll be—”
“Thanks anyway,” he said, and he moved toward the next bench.
Now he had my full attention. “Ma’am,” I heard him ask an old lady, “are you traveling to Philadelphia?” The old lady answered something too mumbly for me to catch, and instantly he turned to the woman beside her. “Philadelphia?” Notice how he was getting more and more sparing of words. When the woman told him, “Wilmington,” he didn’t say a thing; just plunged on down the row to one of the matched-luggage couples. I straightened up from my pillar and drifted closer, looking toward Gate E as if I had my mind on my train. The wife was telling the man about their New Year’s plans. They were baby-sitting their grandchildren who lived in New York City, she said, and the husband said, “Well, not New York City proper, dear; White Plains,” and the gray-haired man, almost shouting, said, “But my daughter’s counting on me!” And off he raced.
Well, I was going to Philadelphia. He could have asked me. I understood why he didn’t, of course. No doubt I struck him as iffy, with my three-day growth of black stubble and my ripped black leather jacket and my jeans all dust and cobwebs from Mrs. Morey’s garage. But still he could have given me a chance. Instead he just flicked his eyes at me and then swerved off toward the bench at the end of the room. By now he was looking seriously undermedicated. “Please!” he said to a woman reading a book. “Tell me you’re going to Philadelphia!”
She lowered her book. She was thirtyish, maybe thirty-five—older than I was, anyhow. A schoolmarm sort, in a wide brown coat with a pattern like feathers all over it. “Philadelphia?” she said. “Why, yes, I am.”
“Then could I ask you a favor?”
I stopped several feet away and frowned down at my left wrist. (Never mind that I don’t own a watch.) Even without looking, I could sense how she went on guard. The man must have sensed it too, because he said, “Nothing too difficult, I promise!”
They were announcing my train now. (“The delayed 10:10,” the loudspeaker called it. It’s always “the delayed” this or that.) People started moving toward Gate E, the older couples hauling their wheeled bags behind them like big, meek pets on leashes. If the woman in the feather coat said anything, I missed it. Next I heard, the man was talking. “My daughter’s flying out this afternoon for a junior semester abroad,” he was saying. “Leaving from Philadelphia; the airline offers a bargain rate if you leave from Philadelphia. So I put her on a train this morning, stopped for groceries afterward, and came home to find my wife in a state. It seems our daughter’d forgotten her passport. She’d telephoned from the station in Philly; didn’t know what to do next.”
The woman clucked sympathetically. I’d have kept quiet myself. Waited to find out where the guy was heading with this.
“So I told her she should stay put. Stay right there in the station, I said, and I would get somebody here to carry up her passport.”
A likely story! Why didn’t he go himself, if this was such an emergency?
“Why don’t you go yourself?” the woman asked him.
“I can’t leave my wife alone that long. She’s in a wheelchair: Parkinson’s.”
This seemed like a pretty flimsy excuse, if you want my honest opinion. Also, it exceeded what I would consider the normal quota for misfortunes. Not only a lamebrain daughter, but a wife with a major disease! I let my eyes wander toward the two of them. The woman was gazing up into the man’s face, pooching her mouth out thoughtfully. The man was holding a packet. He must have pulled it from his car coat: not a manila envelope, which would have been the logical choice, but one of those padded mailers the size of a paperback book. Aha! Padded! So you couldn’t feel the contents! And from where I stood, it looked to be stapled shut besides. Watch yourself, lady, I said silently.
As if she’d heard me, she told the man, “I hope this isn’t some kind of contraband.” Except she pronounced it “counter-band,” which made me think she must not be a schoolmarm, after all.
“No, no!” the man told her. He gave a huff of a laugh. “No, I can assure you it’s not counterband.”
Was he repeating her mistake on purpose? I couldn’t tell. (Or maybe the word really was “counterband.”) Meanwhile, the loudspeaker came to life again. The delayed 10:10 was now boarding. Train wheels squealed below me. “I’ll do it,” the woman decided.
“Oh, wonderful! That’s wonderful! Thanks!” the man told her, and he handed her the packet. She was already rising. Instead of a suitcase, she had one of those tote things that could have been just a large purse, and she fitted the strap over her shoulder and lined up the packet with the book she’d been reading. “So let’s see,” the man was saying. “You’ve got light-colored hair, you’re wearing a brown print coat. … I’ll call the pay phone where my daughter’s waiting and let her know who to watch for. She’ll be standing at Information when you get there. Esther Brimm, her name is—a redhead. You can’t miss that hair of hers. Wearing jeans and a blue-jean jacket. Ask if she’s Esther Brimm.”
He followed the woman through the double doors and down the stairs, although he wasn’t supposed to. I was close behind. The cold felt good after the packed waiting room. “And you are?” the man was asking.
Affected way of putting it. They arrived on the platform and stopped short, so that I just about ran over them. The woman said, “I’m Sophia—” and then something like “Maiden” that I couldn’t exactly hear. (The train was in place but rumbling, and passengers were clip-clopping by.) “In case we miss connections, though …,” she said, raising her voice.
In case they missed connections, he should put his name and phone number on the mailer. Any fool would know that much. But he seemed to have his mind elsewhere. He said, “Um … now, do you live in Baltimore? I mean, are you coming back to Baltimore, or is Philly your end destination?”
I almost laughed aloud at that. So! Already he’d forgotten he was grateful; begun to question his angel of mercy’s reliability. But she didn’t take offense. She said, “Oh, I’m a long-time Baltimorean. This is just an overnight visit to my mother. I do it every weekend: take the ten-ten Patriot Saturday morning and come back sometime Sunday.”
“Well, then!” he said. “Well. I certainly do appreciate this.”
“It’s no trouble at all,” she said, and she smiled and turned to board.
I had been hoping to sit next to her. I was planning to start a conversation—mention I’d overheard what the man had asked of her and then suggest the two of us check the contents of his packet. But the car was nearly full, and she settled down beside a lady in a fur hat. The closest I could manage was across the aisle to her left and one row back, next to a black kid wearing earphones. Only view I had was a schoolmarm’s netted yellow bun and a curve of cheek.
Well, anyhow, why was I making this out to be such a big deal? Just bored, I guess. I shucked my jacket off and sat forward to peer in my seat-back pocket. A wrinkly McDonald’s bag, a napkin stained with ketchup, a newspaper section folded to the crossword puzzle. The puzzle was only half done, but I didn’t have a pen on me. I looked over at the black kid. He probably didn’t have a pen, either, and anyhow he was deep in his music—long brown fingers tapping time on his knees.
Then just beyond him, out the window, I chanced to notice the passport man talking on the phone. Talking on the phone? Down here beside the tracks? Sure enough: one of those little cell phones you all the time see obnoxious businessmen showing off in public. I leaned closer to the window. Something here was weird, I thought. Maybe he smuggled drugs, or worked for the CIA. Maybe he was a terrorist. I wished I knew how to read lips. But already he was closing his phone, slipping it into his pocket, turning to go back upstairs. And our train was sliding out of the station.
I looked again at the woman. At the packet, to be specific.
It was resting on top of her book, which sat in her feather-print lap. (She would be the type who stayed properly buttoned into her coat, however long the trip.) Where the mailer was folded over, staples ran straight across in a nearly unbroken line. But staples were no problem. She could pry them up with, say, a nail file or a dime, and slip them out undetectably, and replace them when she was finished. Do it, I told her in my head. She was gazing past her seatmate, out the right-hand window. I couldn’t even see her cheek now; just her bun.
Back in the days when I was a juvenile delinquent, I used to break into houses and read people’s private mail. Also photo albums. I had a real thing about photo albums. The other kids who broke in along with me, they’d be hunting car keys and cigarettes and booze. They’d be tearing through closets and cabinets all around me, while I sat on the sofa poring over somebody’s wedding pictures. And even when I took stuff, it was always personal stuff. This little snow globe once from a nightstand in a girl’s bedroom. Another time, a brass egg that stood on scaly claw feet and opened to show a snapshot of an old-fashioned baby inside. I’m not proud of this. I’d sooner confess to jewel theft than to pocketing six letters tied up with satin ribbon, which is what I did when we jimmied the lock at the Empreys’ place one night. But there you are. What can I say.
So when this Sophia woman let the packet stay untouched—didn’t prod it, didn’t shake it, didn’t tease apart the merest corner of the flap—I felt something like, oh, almost envy. A huge wave of envy. I started wishing I could be like that. Man, I’d have been tearing into that packet with my bare teeth, if I’d had the chance.
The conductor came and went, and the row houses slipping by turned into factory buildings and then to matted woods and a sheet of gray water, but I was barely conscious of anything beyond Sophia’s packet. I saw how quietly her hands rested on the brown paper; she was not a fidgeter. Smooth, oval nails, pale pink, and plump white fingers like a woman’s in a religious painting. Her book was turned the wrong way for me to read the title, but I knew it was something worthwhile and educational. Oh, these people who prepare ahead! Who think to bring actual books, instead of dashing into a newsstand at the last minute for a Sports Illustrated or—worse yet—making do with a crossword puzzle that someone else has started!
It bothered me more than I liked to admit that the passport man had avoided me.
We were getting close to Wilmington, and the lady in the fur hat started collecting her things. After she left, I planned to change seats. I would wait for Sophia to shift over to the window, and then I’d sit down next to her. “Morning,” I would say. “Interesting packet you’ve got there.”
“I see you’re carrying some kind of packet.”
“Mind if I inquire what’s in that packet?”
Or whatever. Something would come to me. But when the train stopped and the lady stood up, Sophia just turned her knees to one side to let her out. She stayed seated where she was, on the aisle, so I didn’t see any natural-seeming way to make my move.
We left Wilmington behind. We traveled past miles of pipeline and smokestacks, some of them belching flames. I could tell now that it was rap music the kid beside me was listening to. He had the volume raised so high that I could hear it winding out of his earphones—that chanting and insisting sound like the voices you hear in your dreams.
“Philll-adelphia!” the conductor called.
Of course Sophia got ready too soon. We were barely in sight of the skyline—bluish buildings shining in the pale winter sunlight, Liberty Towers scalloping their way up and up and up—but she was already rising to wait in the aisle. The exit lay to the rear, and so she had to face me. I could see the pad of flesh that was developing under her chin. She leaned against her seat and teetered gently with the swaying of the car. Critics are unanimous! the back of her book said. The mailer was almost hidden between the book and her cushiony bosom.
I put on my jacket, but I didn’t stand up yet. I waited till the train had come to a stop and she had passed me. Then I swung out into the aisle lickety-split, cutting in front of a fat guy with a briefcase. I followed Sophia so closely, I could smell the dusty smell of her coat. It was velvet, or something like velvet. Velvet always smells dusty, even when it’s fresh from the cleaners.
There was the usual scuffle with that automatic door that likes to squash the passengers—Press the button, dummies!—and the usual milling and nudging in the vestibule, and then we stepped out into a rush of other people. It was obvious that Sophia knew where she was going. She didn’t so much as glance around her but walked fast, coming down hard on her heels. Her heels were the short, chunky kind, but they made her as tall as I was. I had noticed that while we were standing on the train. Now she was slightly taller, because we’d started up the stairs and she was a step above me.
Even once we’d reached the waiting room, she didn’t look around. Thirtieth Street Station is so enormous and echoing and high-ceilinged—a jolt after cozy Baltimore—that most people pause to take stock a moment, but not Sophia. She just went clicking along, with me a few yards to the rear.
At the Information island, only one person stood waiting. I spotted her from far across those acres of marble flooring: a girl in a denim jacket and jeans, with a billow of crinkly, electric red hair. It fanned straight out and stopped just above her shoulders. It was amazing hair. I was awestruck. Sophia, though, didn’t let on she had noticed her. She was walking more slowly now, downright sedately, placing her toes at a slight angle outward, the way women often do when they want to look composed and genteel. Actually, she was starting to get on my nerves. Didn’t that bun of hers just sum her up, I thought—the net that bound it in and the perfect, doughnut shape and the way it sat so low on her head, so matronly and drab! And Esther Brimm, meanwhile, stood burning like a candle on her stick-thin, blue-denim legs.
When we reached the island I veered right, toward a display of schedules on the counter. I heard Sophia’s heels stop in front of Esther. “Esther Brimm?” she asked.
“Ms. Maynard?”
Husky, throaty voice, the kind I like.
“Your father asked me to bring you something. …”
I took a schedule from the rack and turned my face casually in their direction. Not till Esther said, “Right; my passport,” did Sophia slip the mailer from behind her book and hold it out.
“Thanks a million,” Esther said, accepting it, and Sophia said, “My pleasure. Have a good trip.” Then she turned away and clicked toward the Twenty-ninth Street exit.
Just like that, I forgot her. Now I was focused on Esther. Open it! I told her. Instead she picked up the army duffel lying at her feet and moved off toward the phones. I meandered after her, studying my schedule. I pretended I was hunting a train to Princeton.
The phones were the unprivate kind just out in the middle of everything, standing cheek to jowl. When Esther lifted a receiver off its hook, I was right there beside her, lifting a receiver of my own. I was so near I could have touched her duffel bag with the toe of my sneaker. I heard every word she said. “Dad?” she said.
I clamped my phone to my ear and held the schedule up between us so I could watch her. This close, she was less attractive. She had that fragile, sore-looking skin you often find on redheads. “Yes,” she was saying, “it’s here.” And then, “Sure! I guess so. I mean, it’s still stapled shut and all. Huh? Well, hang on.”
She put her receiver down and started yanking at the mailer’s top flap. When the staples tore loose, rat-a-tat, she pulled the edges apart and peered inside—practically stuck her little freckled nose inside. Then she picked up the phone again. “Yup,” she said. “Good as new.”
So I never got a chance to see for myself. It could have been anything: loose diamonds, crack cocaine … But somehow I didn’t think so. The phone call was what convinced me. She’d have had to be a criminal genius to fake that careless tone of voice, the easy offhandedness of a person who knows for a fact that she’s her parents’ pride and joy. “Well, listen,” she was saying. “Tell Mom I’ll call again from the airport, okay?” And she made a kissing sound and hung up. When she slung her duffel over her shoulder and started toward one of the gates, I didn’t even watch her go.
The drill for visiting my daughter was, I’d arrive about ten a.m. and take her on an outing. Nothing fancy. Maybe a trip to the drug store, or walking her little dog in the park. Then we’d grab a bite someplace, and I’d return her and leave. This happened exactly once a month—the last Saturday of the month. Her mother’s idea. To hear her mother tell it, Husband No. 2 was Superdad; but I had to stay in the picture to give Opal a sense of whatchamacallit. Connection.
But due to one thing and another—my car acting up, my alarm not going off—I was late as hell that day. It was close to noon, I figure, before I even left the station, and I didn’t want to spring for a cab after paying for a train ticket. Instead I more or less ran all the way to the apartment (they lived in one of those posh old buildings just off Rittenhouse Square), and by the time I pressed the buzzer, I was looking even scruffier than my usual self. I could tell as much from Natalie’s expression, the minute she opened the door. She let her eyes sort of drift up and down me, and, “Barnaby,” she said flatly. Opal’s little dog was dancing around my ankles—a dachshund, very quivery and high-strung.
“Yo. Natalie,” I said. I started swatting at my clothes to settle them a bit. Natalie, of course, was Miss Good Grooming. She wore a slim gray skirt-and-sweater set, and her hair was all of a piece—smooth, shiny brown—dipping in and then out again before it touched her shoulders. Oh, she had been a beauty for as long as I had known her; except now that I recalled, there’d always been something too placid about her. I should have picked it up from her dimples, which made a little dent in each cheek whether or not she was smiling. They gave her a look of self-satisfaction. What I’d thought when we first met was, how could she not be self-satisfied? And her vague, dreamy slowness used to seem sexy. Now it just made me impatient. I said, “Is Opal ready to go?” and Natalie took a full minute, I swear, to consider every aspect of the question. Then: “Opal is in her room,” she said finally. “Crying her eyes out.”
“Crying!”
“She thought you’d stood her up.”
“Well, I know I’m a little bit late—” I said.
She lifted an arm and contemplated the tiny watch face on the inner surface of her wrist.
“Things just seemed to conspire against me,” I said. “Can I see her?”
After she’d thought that over awhile, she turned and floated off, which I took to mean yes.
I made my own way to Opal’s bedroom, down a long hall lined with Oriental rugs. I waded through the dachshund and knocked on her door. “Opal?” I called. “You in there?”
No answer. I turned the knob and poked my head in.
You’d never guess this room belonged to a nine-year-old. The bedspread was appliquéd with ducklings, and the only posters were nursery-rhyme posters. By rights it should have been a baby’s room, or a toddler’s.
The bed was where I looked first, because that’s where I figured she would be if she was crying. But she was in the white rocker by the window. And she wasn’t crying, either. She was glaring at me reproachfully from underneath her eyebrows.
“Ope!” I said, all hearty.
Opal’s chin stayed buried inside her collar.
I knew I shouldn’t think this, but my daughter had never struck me as very appealing. She had all her life been a few pounds overweight, with a dish-shaped face and colorless hair and a soft, pink, half-open mouth, the upper lip short enough to expose her top front teeth. (I used to call her “Bunnikins” till Natalie asked me not to—and why would she have asked, if she herself hadn’t noticed Opal’s close resemblance to a rabbit?) It didn’t help that Natalie dressed her in the kind of clothes you see in Dick and Jane books—fussy and pastel, the smocked bodices bunching up on her chest and the puffed sleeves cutting into her arms. Me, I would have chosen something less constricting. But who was I to say? I hadn’t been much of a father.
I did want the best for her, though. I would never intentionally hurt her. I walked over to where she was sitting and squatted down in front of her. “Opal-dopal,” I said. “Sweetheart.”
“What.”
“Call off your dog. He’s eating my wallet.”
She started to smile but held it back. Her mother’s two dimples deepened in her cheeks. The dog really was nibbling at my wallet. George Farnsworth, his name was; heaven knows why. “George Farnsworth,” I said sternly, “if you’re short of cash, just ask straight out for a loan, okay?”
Now I heard a definite chuckle. I took heart. “Hey, Ope, I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “First I had car trouble, see—”
“You always have car trouble.”
“Then my alarm clock didn’t go off—”
“It always doesn’t go off.”
“Well. Not always,” I told her. “Then once I got to Penn Station, you’ll never guess what happened. It was like a secret-agent movie. Guy is walking up to people, pulling something out of his coat. ‘Ma’am,’”—I made my voice sound menacing and mysterious—“‘would you please take this package to Philadelphia for me?’”
Opal didn’t speak, but I could tell she was listening. She watched me with her pinkish-gray eyes, the lashes slightly damp.
“‘Take it to my daughter in Philly; all it is is her passport,’ he said, and I thought to myself, Ha! I just bet it’s her passport! So when this one woman said she would do it, I followed her at the other end of the trip.”
“You followed her?”
“I wanted to see what would happen. So I followed her to her rendezvous with the quote-unquote daughter, and then I hung around the phones while the daughter placed a call to—”
“You hung around the phones?”
I was beginning to flounder. (This story didn’t have what you’d call a snappy ending.) I said, “Yes, and then—um—”
“You were only dawdling in the station all this time! It’s not enough you don’t look after your car right and you forget to set your alarm; then you dawdle in the station like you don’t care when you see me!”
It was uncanny, how much she sounded like her mother. Her mother in the old days, that is—the miserable last days of our marriage. I said, “Now, hon. Now wait a sec, hon.”
Which was also from those days, word for word. Some kind of reflex, I guess.
“You promised you’d come at ten,” she said, “and instead you were just … goofing around with a bunch of secret agents! You totally lost track of where you were supposed to be!”
“In the first place,” I said, “I take excellent care of my car, Opal. I treat it like a blood relative. It’s not my fault if my car is older than I am. And I did not forget to set my alarm. I don’t know why it didn’t go off; sometimes it just doesn’t, okay? I don’t know why. And I honestly thought you’d like hearing about those people I was so-called goofing around with. I thought, Man, I wish Opal could see this, and I followed them expressly so I could tell you about it later over a burger and french fries. Wouldn’t that be great? A burger and fries at Little Pete’s, Ope, while I tell you my big story.”
It wasn’t working, though. Opal’s eyes only got pinker, and for once she had her mouth tightly shut.
“Look at George Farnsworth! He wants to go,” I said.
In fact, George Farnsworth had lost interest and was lying beside the rocker with his nose on his paws. But I said, “First we’ll take George for a walk in the Square, and then we’ll head over to—”
“It sounds to me,” Natalie said, “as if Opal prefers to stay in.”
She was standing in the doorway. Damn Oriental rugs had muffled her steps.
“Am I right, Opal?” she asked. “Would you rather tell him goodbye?”
“Goodbye?” I said. “I just got here! I just came all this way!”
“It’s your decision, Opal.”
Opal looked down at her lap. After a long pause, she murmured something.
“We couldn’t hear you,” Natalie said.
“Goodbye,” Opal told her lap.
But I knew she didn’t mean it. All she wanted was a little coaxing. I said, “Hey now, Ope …”
“Could I speak with you a minute?” Natalie asked me.
I sighed and got to my feet. Opal stayed where she was, but I caught her hidden glimmer of a glance as I turned to follow Natalie down the hall. I knew I could have persuaded her if I’d been given more time.
We didn’t stop in the living room. We went on through to the kitchen, at the other end of the apartment. I guess Natalie figured my jeans might soil her precious upholstery. I had never seen the kitchen before, and I spent a moment looking around (old-fashioned tilework, towering cabinets) before it sank in on me what Natalie was saying.
“I’ve been thinking,” she was saying. “Maybe it would be better if you didn’t come anymore.”