House of Windows Read online

  "He needs to learn to do what I tell him."

  Ann didn't reply.

  "Don't you think it's crazy?" Leigh asked as the three of us returned to the table. "Honestly, how could Veronica think she could get away with something like this?"

  She appealed to Ann, who had seated herself with Robbie on her lap.

  "I don't know," Ann said.

  "She acts as if she's telling the truth," I said. "As if she believes her own story, anyway."

  "Ghosts? Visions? Curses?" Leigh said.

  I shrugged. "It could be."

  "Oh, you're only saying that because you write this stuff."

  Stung, I did not answer; although I felt my cheeks redden. Robbie saved me by overturning Ann's water. "Robbie!" I said.

  He rubbed the puddle he'd created with both his hands, spreading it across the table. I said, "Robbie!"

  "It's fine," Ann said, reaching for her napkin.

  "No, it's not. He needs to listen to me."

  "For God's sake," Ann said, "how old do you think he is?"

  "Okay," Leigh said, standing up and circling around to Ann and Robbie, who held out his wet hands to her. "That's lovely sweetie; very nice. What a brilliant boy you are." She caught him under the arms and hoisted him up. "Why don't you and Auntie Leigh go inside and see what messes we can make in there, and maybe Mommy and Daddy can go for a walk on the beach."

  "That's all right," I started.

  "Go," Leigh said, waving her arm at the car. Robbie copied her. "For heaven's sake. We'll be fine for an hour, won't we?" Robbie grinned at her, and Ann and I laughed.

  I looked across the table at my wife. "Do you want to?"

  "Maybe it would be a good idea."

  Leaving the remains of lunch for Leigh to attend to, we drove the mile or so to the nearest beach, Newcomb Hollow. Robbie's eyes started to fill with tears when he realized his mother was leaving, but Leigh distracted him by bouncing him on her hip and singing a nonsense song. Except for a van whose red exterior had been weather-beaten to dull lava, the beach's parking lot was empty, the ocean breeze swirling sand over the cracked asphalt. We parked next to the van and made our way down the shifting slope to the beach. The tide was in, the Atlantic sending in long, white rollers that hit the sand with a boom. Ann and I hadn't spoken since we'd stood up from the table. She struck off to the right, and I followed her.

  She was angry, I knew, at the way I'd spoken to Robbie. I wasn't particularly happy about my tone, either. In the abstract, I understood that he wasn't even a year old, that most if not all of what he did was in exploration of the world he was trying to know, that there was no need to take any of it as personally as I usually did. In reality, I could not seem to control the frustration that rose in me whenever Robbie failed to listen to me, which led me to responses far out of proportion to whatever my son was doing. For some years, I'd known I had inherited my late father's quick temper, but avoiding situations that would provoke it had been relatively easy, and, when such moments could not be evaded, they remained infrequent enough for me either to control my response or walk away from them. Indeed, in the English department, I had a reputation as easy-going, tolerant, even light-hearted. Having a child had changed everything, had placed me on the receiving end of more stress and tension than I had known—since I had been a child myself, and fearful of my father's sharp tongue, the sudden storms of his displeasure. If I thought I understood those rages better than I ever had, it was too small a benefit for the price of repeating my upbringing with Robbie.

  I caught Ann's hand. "I'm sorry."

  She said, "He's just a baby."

  "I know; I know that."

  "You can't yell at him about everything."

  "It's just—he doesn't listen to anything I say to him. You tell him something, and he does it right away."

  "Not always."

  "More than he does with me. I could count on one hand the number of times he's done what I asked him."

  "That isn't true."

  "It feels like it."

  Ann stopped walking and, to my surprise, hugged me. "You're his daddy," she said. "He knows that."

  Hand in hand, we walked on, silent. The wind tugged at Ann's hair, played with its curls, and I remembered our first trip here, both of us fresh from recent relationships soured, the long walks we'd taken on this beach, sometimes with Leigh, sometimes with Harlow, sometimes with each other. Once, we'd been accompanied by a dog, a red-gold Lab who had appeared from nowhere, frolicked around us while we walked, then raced away down the beach until he was out of sight.

  "What are you thinking about?" I asked.

  "Veronica's story."

  "Oh."

  "Do you believe her?"

  I hesitated, said, "I think so. She believes what she's saying; I'm sure of that. If you could have been there, heard her. She was completely submerged in the story she was telling. But," I added, "Leigh's comment about me accepting Veronica's story because of what I write touched a nerve. Maybe I'm too willing to take what she's saying at face value."

  "What other choice do you have? You can't spend every second doubting every word that comes out of her mouth."

  "No, I can't."

  "Are you planning on staying up with her, tonight?"

  "If she returns before it's too late. I'm pretty shattered."

  "Why don't you take a nap when we get back to the house?"

  "Really?"

  "Leigh and I can look after Robbie."

  I laughed. "How sad to think that sleep now occupies the same place in my life sex once held."

  "You can't blame this on Robbie. You kept yourself up."

  "Yes, yes, guilty as charged."

  "As long as that's all you're guilty of."

  "Honey," I said, "what are you implying?"

  "Nothing," Ann said. "But Veronica's attractive, and she's already lured one member of the English department away from his wife—"

  "You have nothing to worry about."

  "Good."

  When we got back to the Cape House, I went upstairs for a two-hour nap. My dreams were vivid in the way that daytime dreams are. Most of them centered on Belvedere House, and even asleep, I was not surprised at this. In one, I was at a huge party, like the department parties I'd attended, only much bigger, as if the entire college had been invited. Dressed in a black suit I knew with dream-certainty had belonged to his father, Roger Croydon shook my hand and told me that the shrimp-dip was wonderful, and his liver wasn't bad, either. This gave way to another dream I could not recall, which yielded in turn to a long scenario in which I was searching Belvedere House's rooms for Robbie, whom I could hear somewhere nearby, crying, but whom I could not locate. As the dream went on, Robbie's cries grew more frantic, my search more panicked, until finally I swam up out of sleep.

  True to her word, Veronica did not make dinner; although Addie and Harlow did; nor was she back in the hours thereafter, while we tidied up and bathed Robbie. She did not walk in the side door until ten, by which time Robbie was long since in his porta-crib and everyone else had gone upstairs for the night. "Are you going to wait up?" Ann had asked me.

  "Just for a little while," I'd answered. I had thought I might read—interestingly enough, The Complete Ghost Stories of Charles Dickens—but I could not keep my attention sufficiently focused on the page in front of me to make any headway through it, so I abandoned nineteenth century prose in favor of twenty-first century images and turned on the TV. The second half of The Innocents was showing, and while it was not my favorite film, it passed the time until I heard the side door open well-enough.

  "I wondered if you'd wait up for me," Veronica said when she walked into the living room. She was dressed in a dark purple pantsuit with a black blouse.

  "Anything for a good story," I said.

  "You really want to hear the rest?"

  "Of course."

  "It's just—"

  "You're regretting having told me the first part."

  Veron
ica considered my statement. "Actually, I was asking myself if I was today. Hang on a minute." She retreated to the kitchen. I heard the cupboard open, then the refrigerator. The clink of glass on glass told me she was removing the mostly full bottle of Pinot Grigio from the top shelf; the pock of the cork being pried loose confirmed my supposition. She reappeared with a glass of wine in one hand, the open bottle in the other, and her jacket folded over the arm with the glass. She indicated the empty water glass on the coffee table in front of me and held up the bottle. "Want some?"

  "No, thanks."

  "More for me." She placed the bottle on the coffee table, transferred her glass to her free hand, and placed her jacket on the arm of the couch before settling herself onto it. She eased off her shoes, and curled her legs up beside her. "I swear," she said, tasting the wine, "I've done more drinking the last day than I have—than I have in a while."

  I waited for her to pick up the thread of last night's narrative, wondering if she'd spring up and decide another shower was in order.

  "Do you know where I was today?" Veronica asked. "No, you don't. How could you? I was in P-town. I spent the day with Viola Belvedere."

  "Thomas Belvedere's Viola?"

  "She's her own person, but yes, his widow."

  "I thought she didn't talk to anyone."

  "She doesn't. It's taken me a year to convince her to speak to me."

  "What did you talk about?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Thomas's summer in the house."

  "You win the prize. We talked about a lot of other things, too."

  "That's quite a coup."

  "Her house has this absolutely magnificent view of the ocean, these three huge windows that frame the sea and sky like paintings. I could have stared out of them for hours, lost myself in the view. Except—"

  "Yes?"

  "Talking to you last night, telling you everything I did—it stirred up my memory. I was kind of annoyed. I mean, here I was, interviewing this woman who doesn't do interviews, and in her beautiful house, besides, and I couldn't stop thinking about my story."

  "But you were there—"

  "Because of the house, I know. I just—I hadn't planned on everything being so immediate. Here I am, drinking Earl Grey out of a china teacup that's so expensive I can feel it, listening to Viola Belvedere talk about Willem de Kooning making a pass at her, and all I can think about is the drive Roger and I made back from the Cape."

  "Back from the Cape?"

  Veronica nodded. "Things hadn't gone the way I'd hoped. There were a few, nice moments, but overall, the trip was worse than a disaster. We didn't escape anything, not by a long shot.

  "So there we were, driving west on 90, the Berkshires raising themselves around us. We hadn't spoken in hours. Déjà vu. I was—overcome, I guess that's the right word, by one of those memories that arrives from nowhere and completely absorbs you, so that for the two or three seconds it takes to play in your mind's eye, you relive it. I was sixteen, with my mother and father on what was to be our last family trip, to Mystic, Connecticut. It was September—Labor Day weekend. I was still at the age where the prospect of spending three minutes, let alone three days, with my parents made me ill, but I'd always wanted to see Mystic, and if I brought my Discman and a couple of thick books with me, there was a good chance they'd take the hint and leave me in peace. I was right. As long as I was present for breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and as long as I returned to the hotel room by ten—my parents were content to allow me to roam Mystic myself. Mostly, this meant I found a coffee and ice cream shop overlooking the Sound and sat drinking successive cups of cappuccino and plodding through Moby Dick. Melville had seemed appropriate to bring to a former seaport, you know? I hadn't read him, so I had no idea he was such a titanic windbag. Suffice to say, it didn't take me long to find out. I learned more about cetology than I ever would have dreamed existed. It was like, okay, I get it: everything in the world can be related to whales.

  "There was one exception to my parents' laissez-faire attitude, and that was Saturday afternoon. My father wanted to go on a whale watch, and he wanted my mother and me to come with him. He insisted, which was pretty rare. Talk about life imitating art. I resented the interruption of my personal time, but I was curious to see the creatures that had so captured Melville's imagination they'd become a way of understanding the world for him. Mom was the one who really didn't want to go. She wasn't much of a swimmer, and the prospect of being out in two or three hundred feet of water as enormous animals cavorted around her was not her idea of a good time. She and Dad argued about it over breakfast Saturday morning. Why couldn't he take me and she'd browse the shops until we returned? That was fine with me, but he was adamant. We were going to do this as a family, he said, his face turning not red but gray as he grew more agitated—a forecast of the heart attack that would, in three months' time, carry him first to the hospital, then the cemetery. My mother gave in, and it was settled.

  "They offered free Dramamine on the whale-watch boat. Mom took two, which made her extremely tired. For most of the trip out, she sat in her chair, smiling absently, eyes glassy, lids gradually lowering over them. By the time we reached the whales, she was snoring quietly. Dad wanted to wake her, but I convinced him to let her be. I was sure she'd prefer to open her eyes and find herself back at the pier. Who knows? She probably took two pills for exactly this effect.

  "That left my father and me to watch the whales, which wasn't the worst of situations. Dad and I got along all right—not great, but not that bad, either. Maybe that was because he didn't pretend he understood me—unlike Mom, who never missed a chance to tell me she knew exactly what I was going through. When she was my age, she'd had an experience that wasn't even remotely similar to mine but that qualified her as an expert on whatever my difficulty was. The point of these stories seemed less to offer me any real advice than to allow her to relive selected moments of her youth, as if she needed to reassure herself that she'd had one. Dad didn't bother with stories he knew I didn't want to hear. If I came to him with a problem—which was basically never, but hypothetically speaking—he listened to whatever was bothering me, asked a couple of questions to clarify matters, then delivered a pronouncement. Your best friend's talking about you behind your back? Get a new best friend. His solutions were always direct and completely unworkable.

  "The funny thing is, buried under the layers of my mother's ever-expanding autobiography was usually an insight I could use. I just had to be the princess and the pea. I had to be able to feel that tiny sphere through all those mattresses. What I appreciated about Dad was more a matter of style. He listened; he asked questions; he told you what he thought. End of story. When you're a teenager—at least, when I was, the last thing I wanted was for my parents to identify with me. I wanted them to respect who I was, which was, of course, completely different from either of them, let me do what I wanted to, and provide food, shelter, and cash as needed. Neither of them lived up to that ideal—not even close. What it boiled down to was, Dad was slightly less annoying than Mom.

  "There the two of us were, standing at the railing as the ship rode up and down surprisingly choppy waters. Dad had positioned himself at the railing almost the second we'd boarded the ship. He'd looked over to where Mom and I were sitting and gestured to either side of him, eyebrows raised, but I'd shook my head and so had Mom. He'd shrugged and returned to watching the harbor. As the boat had made its way out into the ocean, he'd stayed where he was, the wind catching his hair—he wore it in a bad comb-over—and tugging it up over his head like a pennant. I'd paid more attention to him than I'd intended. I'd brought Moby Dick, only to find that a few minutes of reading on the high seas made my head ache and my stomach feel like it might like to send my lunch up for a second look. I'd forgotten my Discman in the car, so that left people-watching as a way to kill time. Most everyone else was seated, staring off at the sea. A few hurried in the direction of the bathrooms, their faces distinctly green, thei
r mouths unstable. Fewer still stood at the rails—mostly young couples wrapped around one another, laughing in each other's ears, and my father. Hands clutching the rails, back straight, he looked more vibrant than I was accustomed to. He didn't remind me of Captain Ahab—God forbid, right? He didn't remind me of a ship's captain, or even an officer. What he made me think of was an old sailor, the kind of guy new sailors—new officers, too—were told to listen to, because he'd already forgotten more about the sea than they'd ever learn. It was strange, seeing him that way, strange and kind of nice.

  "The ship slowed, and the guide's voice crackled over the speakers, announcing that they'd sighted a family of humpbacks ahead to our right at about two o'clock. Everyone rushed over to the rail. Dad was perfectly placed. Leaving Mom asleep in her chair, I pushed my way through the crowd until I was next to him. He put his right arm around my shoulders and pointed with his left hand. 'There they are,' he said, 'there.' Fifty, sixty yards away, what looked like the back of an enormous snake curled under the waves. To its right, a flat tail like the leaf of some huge, exotic tree raised itself above the water before sliding straight down into it. To the left, a long, white-gray lozenge—a flipper—waved lazily. There were eight whales altogether, six adults and two calves, and for the next forty minutes, we watched them and I think they watched us, too. The guide's voice droned on throughout, listing this or that feature that identified this or that whale. Every time he'd say, 'Directly in front of us, you'll see a whale with a large dark patch in the center of her tail. We call her Spot,' Dad's hand would shoot out, his finger drawing a straight line to it. 'Do you see it?' he'd say, and I did. Under normal circumstances, I would have found such a display completely intolerable, but these circumstances were not normal. I couldn't distinguish any of the marks the guide referred to, while Dad was able to do so before the guy had completed his sentence. My father's face was—it was like, he was completely there, completely involved in what was happening right in front of him, not distracted by anything.