All the way back to New York, my mind went to Buddy. Isn’t that strange? The one father I didn’t have to deal with. Buddy had managed to be true to himself. My mother had always talked about Buddy in terms of his selfishness, which was not incorrect—he had largely abandoned our family to do what he wanted to do—but in a way his story was not so dissimilar to Eddie’s. He was supposed to give up the ocean for my mother, and Eddie would give up men. Looking back, it was easy to see that neither one of those things was ever going to happen.
My father went to Boston College from Gloucester on a football scholarship—a win for everyone. The school got a big Catholic boy who was fast and good with his hands, and my father could still go home on the weekends to work on his family’s boat. This was years before Doug Flutie’s Hail Mary pass put BC on the map as a force in football, which in turn brought in the high tide of alumni donations. When my parents went there, it was still mostly a school for local kids who came to class on the T, then went home to sleep in their childhood beds. That’s what my mother did. My father had a room in the dorm as part of his scholarship, and soon enough Abigail was in that room more often than not.
“We were really something back in the day,” Buddy told me, years after the fact. “She’d be waiting in the stands after the games, and I’d go and pick her up. A big tall girl like that thinks no one’s ever going to pick her up and swing her around again.”
When Buddy lost his scholarship, it had nothing to do withfootball. He was good, and they were more than happy with him. Then he wrapped a line around his hand while pulling up a lobster trap, and the middle part of that line got caught in the boat’s propellor. Five little bones were snapped, which meant surgery and the rest of the season in a cast. They might have forgiven that, Buddy was popular, but the strength never fully came back, and he couldn’t catch the ball with one hand anymore, and half of the time he couldn’t catch it with two, but it made Abigail love him more, the sweet injured bird, and it made him love her more because she didn’t seem to care that he was no longer at football practice or playing in football games or on a bus going to play in football games. She talked him into staying in school, where his scholarship was reconfigured into a loan, though not the kind of life-crushing loans students get today. He gave up his room on campus and moved home. Everything was manageable, and Buddy read his history books while his father drove the boat and his brothers made fun of him, though not much. Buddy Zabriskie wasn’t a guy to be made fun of. When my mother turned up pregnant at graduation, she didn’t want him working on the boat anymore. She kept saying he was going to drown and then what was she supposed to do with a baby by herself? So he got a job as an assistant-assistant coach at Boston College, and my mother went to work in a realty office. Buddy was still allowed to go out on the boat on the weekends because they needed the extra money, and who ever drowned on a Saturday?
What would life have been like had my parents stayed married to each other and my father kept working on the boat? What if they rented a place in Gloucester together and my mother still landed her publicity job at Houghton Mifflin? What about the life in which they were good to one another and therefore goodto us, all of us good together? I would have liked to have seen that.
Next fall I would be more attentive to the sad girls who washed up in my classroom after their parents broke the news of their divorce. There were things I remembered now, including the particular longing that life could stay as it had been. How strange that such a pointless wish could resurface after all these years.
For a while I slept on the train, my head against the glass, the bridges and coastal towns rushing by. The train was still an hour out when my phone pinged.
Lunch?It was Eddie.I can come to Bronxville.
I laughed. No one from the city had ever come to Bronxville for lunch. I pushed myself upright in my seat and told him I was on my way into the city. Send me the address. I would meet him at his office.Send.
Then, for the briefest moment, I regretted my quick reply. Wasn’t it too soon to see him again? I shouldn’t present my life as a vast expanse of open time into which he was welcome to drop in at will.
But wait, no, he could! He could come anytime! I wasn’t dating Eddie Triplett. We were not at the start of some disastrous affair. The ping from the phone had woken me from a dead sleep, that was all. I was confused. I wanted to see him. I wanted to see him more than I wanted to see anyone. I would gladly run all the way to Random House to throw my arms around his neck because somewhere deep inside myself, in a place inaccessible to me since I was nine, I had missed him every day of my life.
The guard checked the name on my driver’s license against a list of welcomed visitors and found me there. He took my picture, gave me a badge, and sent me up. I was sorry to be wearingsneakers and jeans, sorry that I hadn’t taken a shower this morning before leaving early, but not sorry enough to decline the invitation. Upstairs, the lobby was big and bright and full of walls of brand-new face-out books, each one lit like a star. I told the receptionist I was there to see Mr. Triplett. The words were hardly out of my mouth, and there he was, coming around the corner.
“Daphne Fuller for Mr. Triplett,” he said, holding out his arms.
“You’re sure you want to go to lunch with him?” the receptionist asked. It was her job to be the straight man. I imagined she waited all day for an opening.
“Look who’s jealous,” he said to her. “Miss Bilardello, I want to introduce you to my daughter, Daphne Fuller.”
“Yourwhat?” she said.
“Mydaughter. Of the long-lost variety.”
I held out my hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
Miss Bilardello shook my hand, then turned back to Eddie. “She doesn’t look like you.”
“Well, she did. She used to. You should have seen her when she was a baby. We could have been twins.” Eddie hugged me. “Should you come and see my office?”
“Yes, please,” I said, then waved goodbye to Miss Bilardello at the desk.
We went through the corridors of books, books beautifully displayed as well as books in boxes and in naked stacks on the floor. Books up and down the walls. Eddie stuck his head into every open door, introducing me. “This is Daphne,” he sang. “I want you to meet Daphne.”
All of them stood up and smiled and shook my hand. Theyloved him, that was clear. Everyone was glad to see Eddie and meet his friend.
His office was buried in books and I wanted to read all of them. I wanted to sit in a chair with every book he’d ever sat with, think about him thinking through all those sentences and pages and chapters. Here was his heart: in these books. He had loved them and so I would love them. I had the feeling that all the books in the hallway were inching their way in for their terminal stop. Eddie had a good window. I remembered going to his office at the old Houghton Mifflin on Park Street, the one that had once been a closet. “This is where they store the Eddies,” he had said to me then.
“It used to be impossible to get anything done here,” he said, picking up a stack of manuscripts from the second chair so I could sit. He sat down at his desk. “There were always meetings and new interns and somebody wanting to come in and shut the door so they could share the latest palace intrigue. I would go home at night and do my editing at the breakfast table, which meant I was either at work or working at home or sleeping. But now everyone prefers to work at home, except for me, because I’m the opposite: I’m tired of working at home. Now I can work in my office and no one bothers me. Some days I go to the cooler and fill up my little cup with water and bring it back to my desk and I don’t pass another living soul. Excellent for my productivity butsad, of course. Young people learn by osmosis, and now they don’t get to knock on my door and ask me what a semicolon is supposed to do. I guess someone else will tell them. I wasn’t going to be around forever anyway.”
“So you do think you’ll retire?”
Eddie laughed. “I think I’ll die, which I suppose is a form ofretiring. That Ed, they’ll say. He was very retiring.”
“Stop it,” I said, and I meant it. Stop.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving. I left before breakfast.”
