Carr lets out a long breath. “He wasn’t an ambassador, Mrs. Calvin.”
“Of course not, dear. Now wait just a minute and I’ll get your father.”
6
It is raining in the Berkshires, a warm patter from a low sky. The waxy leaves shudder, branches bow under the gray weight of water and humid air, and the odors of damp wood, moldering paper, and rodent piss rise from the clapboards and curling shingles of his father’s house. Carr stands on the front porch and feels the old lassitude creep over him like a fog. It’s been years since he’s spent more than a night or two in the sagging Victorian pile, but its musty gravity is insistent.
The reek of long neglect and decay is the perfume of Carr’s adolescence-of the year he spent here with his father and mother following their abrupt, chaotic decampment from Mexico City, and of the boarding school holidays he endured in the years after his mother’s death. The creeping torpor-the feeling of lead in his bones, cotton wool in his skull, and breath coagulating in his lungs, of life coagulating around him, even as it surges ahead in the world beyond the slumping stone wall-is what has kept him away, except for days here and there, since the morning he left for college. Part of what has kept him away.
Eleanor Calvin is at his side, her wiry, freckled hand on his arm. She wears paddock boots, pressed jeans, and a rain slicker-a bright yellow flame against the overcast. Carr eyes the knee-high stacks of newspapers and magazines that run the length of the porch. Calvin follows his gaze.
“It’s hard to keep up,” she says. “He has so many subscriptions, they accumulate faster than I can get to recycling.”
The piles of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy are yellowed and dissolving. To Carr they look no different from the ones he saw the last time he was here.
“I told him he can get them all online,” Carr says.
Eleanor Calvin nods sadly. “It’s difficult for him sometimes, remembering the passwords. And then he gets angry.”
“Nothing new there-angry is his usual state.”
Calvin frowns and shakes her head. “It’s because he’s scared of what’s happening to him.” She pats Carr’s arm. “It’s what the doctor said, dear-there’ll be good days and bad, and over time more of the bad ones. But today he’s good, and you should enjoy it. I told the ambassador you were coming, and he’s looking forward to it.”
Carr sighs, but doesn’t correct her.
Inside the light is gray, as it always is, regardless of weather, time of day, or season of the year. Arthur Carr is in the dining room, at the head of a long table that is layered in newspapers, folded laundry, and heaps of unopened mail. He looks up from his FT, blinks his gray eyes, and pushes half-glasses into a still dark hairline. His face is long, angular, and academic-looking, the skin of his cheeks pink from shaving, the fine nose veined from drink. It isn’t Carr’s nose, which is twice broken but otherwise unmarred, and the eyes are different too: Carr’s are hazel, like his mother’s, but still the resemblance is pronounced. Which always startles Carr and makes him uneasy.
“You’re sunburned,” Arthur Carr says. “How do you manage that from behind a desk? Or do they have you in the field now?” Still the Ivy League drawl, but higher-pitched now-an old man’s voice.
Carr isn’t sure which they his father means. He’s left his employment status vague since being fired from Integral Risk, adopting Declan’s usefully elastic consultant when pressed. It’s been months since his father has pressed. “I had some vacation time,” he answers.
“Well, don’t waste it here,” his father says. He points a long finger at the dining room window and the neon yellow form of Eleanor Calvin standing on the porch. “I told her not to bother you, but she gets so damned dramatic.”
“It was no trouble-I’d planned to come next week. I just moved things up a little.”
Arthur Carr turns back to his newspaper, rattling the page. “At any rate, you must be glad to get out of that sewer.”
Carr has been vague about his living arrangements too. His father believes that he’s still in Mexico City. “It’s not so bad,” Carr says.
His father snorts. “Long as you don’t need to breathe the air, or drink the water, or drive ten blocks in under an hour. I don’t know how you stand it.”
“It’s not so bad,” Carr says again.
“ Not so bad? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Twenty years down there, I could never stand it.”
Noxious shitholes was the phrase his father favored, and he used it often-more often with a few drinks in him. Carr remembers him red and fuming, a glass in one hand, the other gesturing at a broad window, and the low, smudged skyline-of what city Carr can’t recall-that lay beyond, hunched under a shelf of smog. He remembers his mother too: pale and still and quiet before his father’s wave of complaint, always in a dress and heels, always with a cigarette. He doesn’t remember the details of his father’s rants, but the broad strokes were all the same: the wrong political connections, the wrong family ties, the wrong school ring; the inept boss, the paranoid boss, the vengeful boss; favors and grudges; being passed over, and passed over again. Thwarted. And so it went in Lima, Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, Asuncion, Quito, San Salvador, Managua, Ciudad Juarez, and Mexico City.
Carr remembers his father’s rising voice, his mother’s massive silence, and his own clenched dread. It was a swooping, taloned thing that seized his chest, seized his voice, and chased him through the houses that blended one into the next.
They were different, it seemed, only in their addresses. Always walled and gated, with leafy courtyards and burbling fountains, their rooms were cool and quiet, their furnishings heavy, dark, and carefully arranged-like store displays, and just as lifeless. Carr can still recall the sour odor of spilt wine that lurked in the sofa cushions, and the smell of singed fabric-the remnants of one of his parents’ parties, or maybe of a prior resident’s. Not their sofas, of course, and not really their houses: they were just the latest in a long line of temporary lodgers-in and out in two years, maybe three. The attendant cooks and gardeners and maids, always dark and wary, had greater claims on those places.
He made friends from time to time, other Foreign Service brats, and he remembers his quiet envy of the houses that they lived in. Not very different from his own in shape or size, they’d been transformed by an alchemy unknown to his family from anonymous showrooms into homes, with photos on the mantel, bicycles in the drive, and a carved pumpkin at Halloween. They made wherever he was living seem like a rented van.
Arthur Carr wasn’t an ambassador; he wasn’t even close. The highest he’d climbed in nineteen years was to the number three spot in the Economic Section of the embassy in Mexico City. That was his final posting, and he’d lasted barely ten months.
His father is up now, leaning at a sideboard that is littered with white plastic grocery bags. A flock of ghosts, Carr thinks, and they make a noise like dry leaves as his father brushes them aside to find a rocks glass. Carr checks his watch as his father pours an inch of scotch and swirls it around.
“You look like your mother when you look like that,” Arthur Carr says.
“A little early, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” his father asks, and lets his reading glasses fall to his nose. “And just what the hell do I have to wait for?”
The rain has lightened to a mist when Carr returns to the porch, and the air is warmer and more cloying. Eleanor Calvin is staring at the treetops and the leaden sky.
“There’s a salad for lunch,” she says. “There should be enough for both of you. And there’s roast chicken for dinner, and some new potatoes.”
“I booked a room at the Red Lion,” Carr says. “I can eat there.” Eleanor Calvin sighs, still looking up. She’s waiting for something. “Do you need a lift home?” Carr asks.
She shakes her head. “It’s just a mile, and hardly raining.”
“It’s no trouble, Mrs. Cal-”
