“As I’ve said before, I honestly believe he’s gone from our lives.”
Not one to mince words, she gibed, “As you’ve wrongly told me before,” then asked whom I was meeting with. At the mention of the name Atticus I could see a quick flicker of hopefulness pass across her face. “Well, maybe that’s a good thing.”
“Do you know whether Nicole’s back from town?” I asked.
“I think so, yes. Heard the car pull in ten or fifteen minutes ago.”
“All right,” I said, throwing on a light jacket. “Promise I won’t be gone long.”
When I went to the garage and climbed into the car, my mind lingering on Meghan’s optimistic look, I was jolted by Nicole in the passenger seat, plugged in to one of her devices, listening to music, while reading “The Masque of the Red Death,” for all intents and purposes lost in her own world. Had she got it in her head to come along with me, having somehow overheard my conversation with Atticus? I knew that wasn’t physically possible. Even as I’d deliberately strolled down into the field, fifty yards, sixty, from the house, I had been careful to keep my voice low as I spoke with my Providence confidant from a lifetime ago.
“Fish?” I said, after she told me what her Poe soundtrack was.
“You don’t know Phish? Next-generation Grateful Dead.”
“No, and I also don’t know what you’re doing in the car.”
She pulled out her earbuds, shut her book, and said, “I know you’re more used to Mom’s classical longhair stuff”—indeed, Meghan had been sorting books to Vaughan Williams or Delius, I could never tell the difference—“but, trust me, Phish and Poe go well together.”
“I’ll make a note of that,” I said. “Meantime, you’ll pardon me but I’m going to have to ask that Phish and Poe and you get out of this car. I have to go somewhere.”
Nicole turned toward me, her hazel eyes now serious. “So I gathered.”
“Well?”
“Well, that’s why I’m sitting here.”
“You can’t come along,” I said, with as much finality in my tone as I could muster. My daughter was as stubborn as she was smart, and I doubted there was much I could concoct that would dissuade her from joining me. She was one of the three primary reasons I couldn’t flee from the labyrinthine mess I’d gotten myself into, one that dated back to before she even entered my life.
Ignoring my dictum, she reached over her shoulder, pulled and buckled her seat belt. “I can sit in the car while you meet, or go sketch somewhere. Just, I want to be there to make sure you’re all right.”
“Meet with whom?”
“Slader, Atticus, Tamerlane the Turk, it doesn’t matter. You’re my father, and I know you’re in trouble, and I’m doing exactly what I imagine you would do for me if the roles were reversed,” she said.
“Maybe my troubles should stay my troubles, not yours.”
“Listen, I have a good idea what you’re up to. You’re making existential amends of some kind, and you’re in danger if you don’t follow through. How am I doing so far?”
“You’ve always been very perceptive, but—”
“Thank you,” she interrupted. “Now, I may not understand why you’re doing it, but I want to help you. Way I look at it, you invited me into this, I joined you without hesitation, and we’re in it together.”
“I wish I could simply agree, but it’s more complicated than you think,” was my airy response to her heartfelt words.
Ignoring me, she asked in a different voice altogether, “Have you ever read ‘The Masque of the Red Death’? It’s not one of his best, I don’t think, but his understanding of color—the ‘barbaric lustre,’ the ruddy light through blood-colored panes, the ebony this and scarlet that—well, it’s something else. Like a kaleidoscope from hell.”
As I listened, a radical idea came over me, perhaps so fantastic as to be absurd. Not that it formed in words, as such, not yet. Maybe its genesis was in that glimpse of hope in her mother’s eyes just a short time before, a glimpse that suddenly stirred in me a similar hope that there might be a way out of the quagmire I was in. Who knew where some of our best, and worst, ideas finally come from? Much of what I began to ponder as a possibility came down to the character or caliber—I was hard-pressed to find the right terms for it, now that the idea began to frame itself—of Nicole’s loyalty. The affinity she and I had developed from her earliest years was still profound. And while she wasn’t in any way a so-called daddy’s girl—she’d been her own old-souled woman since grade school—she was, after Meghan, the person I most counted on in an unreliable world. How much of the truth about my past I could entrust her with, without her losing respect for me, indeed, without her coming to despise, revile, even repudiate me, I would never know without giving her fidelity a trial test.
“You going to start the car, or do you prefer to spend the afternoon in the garage?”
I shrugged and backed into the lane, drove to the rural intersection not far from Maisie’s friends’ place, then headed along a series of roads that would eventually lead us to Rhinecliff, a hamlet set, as its name implies, on a rampart overlooking the wide Hudson. We parked at the bottom of a fairly steep hill, and while Nicole crossed the overpass that bridged the railroad tracks out toward the boat launch, where she planned on sketching the ragtag holiday regatta, I entered another historic clapboard hotel to meet another figure from my past.
“Don’t tell me I haven’t aged a day, because I won’t believe another thing you say,” were Atticus’s words of greeting. When he took my outstretched left hand in both of his, the wide smile on his face would discredit any onlooker who might suggest we were here for anything other than the most collegial purposes. “Come, I’ve got us a table outside.”
As promised, he was seated by himself on a stone veranda overlooking the tracks and grand river beyond. We sat at a wobbly table on which waited a bottle of white wine in a cooler, and two glasses. Overhead, a canopy blocking the filtered afternoon sun flapped pleasantly in the breezes off the water.
“Here’s to fresh beginnings,” he said, raising his glass in a toast.
“Or at least clean endings,” was my response as I touched mine to his.
Atticus had always been a little larger than life, I recalled, and now, years on, he had become distinguished. He wore a beige panama hat even in the semishade, and his glasses were tinted and thick and gave him an aristocratic air. His cleft chin and strong cheekbones further lent him an aura of casual nobility. The cream-colored trousers and blue blazer he’d worn in Rhinebeck were again on display. Nothing about the man insinuated anything other than success, the outward contentment of a life fulfilled.