“He drowned. He was on a boat in Capri and he drowned.”
She meant both the famous actor and a young man I’d known a hundred years ago, the one who hadn’t crossed my mind in such long time. The two of them died together. I remembered how he would shake me gently awake at four in the morning, his hand running up my arm in the tangle of our sheets.Wake up, wake up, he’d say.It’s time to smoke.
“Mom and I went down to the kitchen and looked at our phones. There wasn’t any update in the news but the internet was flooded with pictures of him. There must have been a thousand pictures, and I said, one of these days, you’re going to have to tell us what happened.”
“I was worried about you finding out,” I say to Emily. “We talked about going over to the little house but we didn’t want to wake you.”
“We decided to go over there first thing in the morning but by then you’d already looked at your phone.” Maisie is apologetic. This has been weighing on her.
“You were worried about me?” Emily asks. “I met the man for what, twenty minutes when I was four years old, and I somehow managed to make the entire story into something that happened to me.” Emily lifts the bucket of cherries from her neck and upends it into the empty lug on the grass. After all these years of begging her to put him down, I can hardly believe the time has come. Emily knows everything now, and she is done.
And I am done, except for this: I saw Duke one other time, and of that time I will say nothing to my girls. His brief reappearance came in the period after my grandmother died but before Joe returned. It was years and years before that day in Michigan when he showed up on our porch. This was when I was living alone in New York and sewing for a costumer. He called me at seven in the morning. Not a Duke hour.
“Cricket,” he said. “It’s your past.”
This was in theRampartdays and Duke was already famous. Not the kind of famous he’d become, but anyone who saw him kept their eyes on the screen. I didn’t have a television, but a sports bar on my block had twenty of them and the bartender was not averse to letting me watch the small one he kept next to the ice machine. I’d show up on Thursday nights a little before nine o’clock even as I promised myself I wouldn’t. Not that it mattered. The bar was full of people who promised themselves they weren’t coming again.
“That guy,” the bartender would say, shaking his head. “Somebody explain it to me.” But I didn’t have to explain anything because half the time he was leaning over my beer, watching.
Duke told me he was in a hospital outside of Boston.
Had he said he was at a diner down the street and could I meet him for breakfast, I might have hung up the phone. But say the wordhospitaland everything changes. “Are you okay? What happened?”
“What happened,” he began, and then was quiet. “That’s a long one. That’s maybe a whole lifetime.”
So it wasn’t the kind of hospital I was picturing.
“What I was wondering is if you could visit me here. We get two visiting hours every afternoon before dinner. We’re supposed to write down a list of people we want to see. It’s an assignment, they’re very big on assignments here, and I’m having a hard time coming up with an answer. Then I thought of you, and howyou’d always been a such regular sort of girl, very sensible. I have a memory of you sewing.”
“You need me to sew something?”
“Phone calls are limited and brief in this neck of the woods, so let’s not waste our minutes hashing out the past and feeling bad. It’s pretty much a binary situation, yes or no. I just thought it would be nice to see someone who knew me from before. The Mythical Kingdom of Before. You knew me, didn’t you?”
“How did you find me?”
“Your uncle,” Duke said.
My uncle. Of course. I hadn’t been in touch with Ripley since I left New Hampshire but he could find the proverbial needle in a haystack, or he could pay someone to find the needle for him.
“Could you please tell me yes or no because I’m a little desperate to end this conversation before I change my mind. They’ve told me it’s important I have a visitor, therapeutically speaking.”
“I live in New York.”
“I know that.”
And so I told him yes, because yes was the only word I had for Duke. Yes was the only word I knew.
Buses were cheaper than trains, and so I took a bus from Port Authority to Boston, then in Boston I found the bus to Belmont and in Belmont I took a cab. This was exactly the sort of thing that would have floored my grandmother: I’d done all of it by myself. The hospital wasn’t a hospital at all, at least not in my experience of hospitals. It was more like a charming college campus in New England, one that had been rented out to shoot a movie about college. The signage was maddeningly discreet but I managed to find the administrative building and told the woman at the front desk, which was not a hospital front desk but a college front desk, that I was there to see Peter Duke. It was the sort of place where poets and academics came to dry out and/or work through their suicidal tendencies. They must admit just enough gentle actors tofill a quota because the woman at the desk was clearly no stranger to famous. The name Peter Duke didn’t quicken her pulse at all, she just opened a file and asked for my name.
“Lara Kenison.”
But even as she was tracing her finger down the list I knew I wouldn’t be there. He would have forgotten or changed his mind. He’d already told me he was close to changing his mind. She got to the end, and then went back to double-check herself. “I’m sorry,” she said.
It was cold outside and the light was already coming in through the leaded windows at a slant. The bus ride had been long and irritating, and now I was going to take the same trip back in the opposite direction and it would be too dark to read. “I don’t suppose you could call and ask him if he wants to see me?”
She shook her head. “There are a lot of rules about visitors.”
My bag was heavy on my shoulder, the copy ofMiddlemarchsitting in the bottom like a brick. I wondered if I could walk back to the bus stop and save the cab fare. I had been paying attention. I had not been paying attention. Duke hadn’t taken me to the hospital or visited me or brought me home. His brother did all that because Duke was very busy with his important work and he was drunk and the hospital was fifteen minutes away.
