“Tomorrow,” he said. “When your wife and young Maisie are out of the house to go fetch your older daughter, who, I assume, will be assisting you with the printing as ever. If you planned on joining them, don’t. You usually stay home when they pick her up anyway, so that shouldn’t be a problem.”
Floored by the frosty confidence with which he made these statements, as well as their accuracy, I sat back, wondering how long he had been spying on me and my family. I looked past Slader and saw that the ginger-headed man who’d been watching us had settled up and vanished. Another drinker now occupied his stool.
“You’ve gotten older, Will. Set in your ways, given to routine. I know more about you and yours than you might care to imagine. For instance, I’m sure you’d have preferred that Nicole skip that art reception she’s attending tonight, unfortunately scheduled on a Friday, when she usually comes up. But if you look at it from her perspective, the Saturday morning trains are less crowded and tend to run on time. Preferable for her, I think, no?”
“Goodbye, Henry.” And with that I rose.
“Till tomorrow,” he said, looking straight ahead at where I’d been sitting.
I left the tavern, which had grown noisier while we were there, and emerged from its merry gloom into the late afternoon light of the bustling village. After climbing into my car, a worse-for-wear minivan we’d bought some years ago, where I had parked it in front of the inn, I sat there with my hands draped over the steering wheel, thinking, or trying to think, about what had just happened.
One of my guiltiest pleasures as a boy, embarrassing as it is to admit from the distant vantage of adulthood, had nothing to do with pornographic magazines, violent comics, anything of the kind. No, when my parents were out of the apartment and I was left to my own devices, I loved nothing better than to secretly pull down a first edition from my father’s collection and, against the rules, read the book cover to cover. I was careful. Knew not to hold an eighteenth-century octavo in contemporary calf wide open, but rather at a prudent angle so its hinges wouldn’t be strained. Knew my hands had to be clean and dry, not something puerile consumers of porn needed to worry about. So it was I read my way, over several weeks, through a 1749 first-edition set—six volumes bound in sprinkled calf, with engraved armorial bookplates on each pastedown—of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, looking for, and not finding, the dirty parts.
Driving home from Rhinebeck, recollecting this youthful indiscretion, I realized that I intended that night to read the poems in Poe’s Tamerlane in their original binding, just as juvenile Poe himself saw them in print for the first time. No matter how jejune the poetry, how compromised the copy might be, reading the priceless pamphlet from a bygone epoch was the only way to make my experience meaningful to me. Why? Because this was how I might best begin to familiarize myself with the overall look and feel of its unevenly inked pages, the featherlight heft of it in my hands. Also, it would constitute a first step toward acknowledging and owning that I was in the midst of falling again from grace. It was a fall I suppose I had always known was inevitable. As warm wind from the open car windows swept around my face, I felt at once melancholy and ecstatic.
When she was four years old, Nicole could draw a perfect straight line. Before she was six, she could draw flawless concentric circles, even harder to do. By the time she was ten, she was able, without any help from her father, over the course of a snowbound week during winter break from school, to produce an admirably detailed pen-and-ink drawing replicating one of Piranesi’s etchings of Rome. Not faultless by any stretch. She was no Piranesi, as she was the first to avow, and had never set foot in Rome, but her reproduction was as respectable as any copyist much older and more experienced might produce. It hangs, framed, in the guest bedroom at the farmhouse. That she didn’t sign it as her own creation showed how mature she was from the beginning.
Given Will’s gifts as a calligrapher, and the bond he shared with Nicole as they sat together at the kitchen table while he gently helped her hone her skills, I wasn’t surprised at how steadily our daughter progressed as an artist. And given my own passion for art, we were happy to pass dreamy long hours in museums where she could make friends, as she liked to put it, with O’Keefe and Cézanne, van Dyck and van Gogh, Degas and Léger. With every visit, her knowledge grew by the leaps and bounds of a Matisse dancer. When it came to budgeting her supplies—pens, nibs, inks, paper, canvases—we were the epitome of indulgent. Nothing made me happier than to see her hazel eyes light up when she opened a fresh sketch pad and box of oil crayons and sat down to draw.
Nicole never cared about most things other girls her age craved. By middle school, her daily outfits consisted of paint-stained sweatshirts, cuffed jeans, and heavy black boots. She wasn’t antisocial as such, was always an excellent student, but as she reached her teens, going out on dates, hitting movies, attending rock concerts were lower among her priorities than drawing, painting, learning lithography. In retrospect, it should have come as no surprise that she would want to treat even her own skin as a canvas. After a prolonged phase of lobbying, Nicole convinced me and Will to let her mark her entry into young adulthood with a de rigueur tattoo, though neither of us was thrilled by this idea that had consumed her as flame consumes kindling. She chose a lovely if fierce kingfisher, her favorite bird and spirit animal, perched on a branch, its blue crest like a shock of electricity, its eyes majestic, its long beak trained ahead as it prepared to impale a fish, or anything else it fancied. Since the kingfisher was inked on her shoulder, it remained hidden most of the time. To this day, embarrassing as it is to confess, her fearsome totem sometimes takes me aback.
When she emerged from the Maple Leaf onto the open-air platform in Rhinecliff, her kingfisher caught my eye, as Nicole wore a camisole with a blue-jean shirt tied around her waist. Even down here by the Hudson, whose low waves lapped against the rocks that paralleled the track, it was muggy from the rains, hot from a strong morning sun that had been cloaked behind clouds for much of the month. Nicole smiled at me while Maisie skipped over to help with one of her bags, and I thought to myself, though I’d never mortify her by saying so, what a beautiful young woman she had become. Quirky, yes; a little idiosyncratic, sure; but stylish in her own way. Her dark auburn hair was cut unevenly across her forehead and above her shoulders, no doubt by herself. As ever, no makeup, though she didn’t really need any. She’d left her trademark black leather boots in the city, exchanged today for a pair of cordovan clogs. An aficionado of silver rings, she wore several on each hand.
“How was the trip?” I asked, hugging her hello, and we fell in step together walking toward the badly rusted stairs that led from the platform to the station.
“Three bald eagles today,” she answered. “Down past Bear Mountain.”
“Not half bad,” said Maisie.
“And how’re you doing, Maze?” Nicole asked, shifting her pack from one shoulder to the other. Nodding at the bandages on Maisie’s arm, she added, “How’s the other guy look?”