him.”
So that’s the game. Marc is going to jump if he doesn’t get it, and Kimmer will have another shot, so, pretty please, won’t you make your wife withdraw? Desperate indeed! I remember Stuart Land’s complaint that Marc has not been attending to his work because he is so upset… and his comment that he could help Kimmer in Washington. Perhaps he did.
“It isn’t easy for any of us. I’m sure it’ll come out the way it’s supposed to.” A little unfeeling, I guess, but how can Dahlia Hadley think it is my job to reassure her?
Dahlia refuses to give up. “You do not understand, Talcott. This is not just jitters. Marc is worried. Yes, that is the word. He is worried, Talcott. He will not tell me what is on his mind. We have always shared everything, ever since we have been together, and now he is keeping something from me. And it is… eating him.” She shakes her head, waving her hand vaguely toward her son, who is drawing a picture with Bentley. “It is wrecking my family, Talcott.”
I am not sure how to respond, but I want to say the right thing, my sense that it is not my place to comfort her blasted from my mind by the sudden exposure of her pain. Maybe Dahlia is not manipulating me. Maybe she really is worried about her husband. Maybe there is really something to worry about.
“I’m sorry, Dahlia,” I say at last, patting her shoulder. “I really am.”
She clutches my jacket, and, for a scary moment, her head bobs forward, as though she is about to rest it on my chest. Then Dahlia stiffens, less in anger than in embarrassment: she let the conversation get away from her and, belatedly, is concerned about what the wide-eyed teachers must be thinking.
“Oh, Talcott, I am sorry too.” Standing straight once more, no longer holding my hand, she is wiping her nose with a handkerchief. There are tears on her face, but I did not see them begin. “It is not right to burden you. Go and get your boy, take him home, and hug him. That makes everything better.”
“You do the same, Dahlia. And don’t worry.”
“Or you. And thank you.” Still sniffling. “You’re a kind man.” Spoken as though she does not meet a lot of them.
I walk heavily across the room to get my son. The teachers step away, making a path: my furtive chat with Dahlia has transformed me into a celebrity.
Strapping a sleepy Bentley into the car seat he has probably outgrown, I glance back at the school I am beginning to hate. Miguel and his mother are in the doorway, holding hands. Dahlia, evidently herself once more, is chatting with one of the teachers, making her laugh. Miguel waves haughtily, very much his father’s son. As I steer around the potholes, bumping the undercarriage of the Camry no more than three or four times, I marvel at the vicissitudes of fortune. If McDermott has truly fled to Canada, and if Conan Deveaux truly killed Freeman Bishop, then Kimmer is right: it is time for me to stop worrying. It is just a matter of getting my sister to stop all the conspiracy nonsense. If Addison will help, maybe I can.
The skeleton, I remind myself exultantly, as sharp memories of Jack Ziegler’s sickly face swim upward into my consciousness. Marc is worried about the skeleton.
Five minutes later, I pull the Camry into the driveway of our twelve-room Victorian in the heart of the faculty ghetto. We are, as Kimmer often reminds me, surrounded by the law school on all sides. Dear Dana Worth lives two blocks farther along Hobby Road, around the corner is Tish Kirschbaum, our token feminist, and Peter Van Dyke, our token fascist-these are Kimmer’s nicknames, not mine-is right across the street. Theo Mountain’s back yard abuts Peter’s. Four more faculty members live within an additional three-block radius. Once the mansions of Hobby Hill were hideously expensive, available to only the most senior professors in the university, and only those among them who came from money. But the Elm Harbor housing market has been soft now for close to fifteen years running, and youngish professors in the financially advantaged schools-law, medicine, and business-have purchased the huge homes once reserved for the masters of Mencius and Shakespeare and the curvature of space.
Still-home! Number 41 Hobby Road is a massive house, built at the end of the nineteenth century, with wide rooms and high ceilings and graceful wainscoting. A house to entertain in, although we never entertain. A house to hold gaggles of children, although we will never have more than one. Everywhere floors are sagging and panels are cracked and pipes are groaning-but they are our floors and panels and pipes. We are only the third black family ever to live in the section of town called Hobby Hill, sixteen square blocks of elegance, and the other two deserted the cause long before we arrived. I do not know how many owners our particular house has had, but it has survived them all, has even thrived. Somebody turned the basement into a playroom, somebody renovated the kitchen, somebody added a cramped garage where Kimmer, despite my entreaties to protect the more expensive of our cars, refuses to park her BMW because she fears the narrow entry might scratch the blinding white paint, somebody updated all four full and two half baths, including the one for the maid in the attic, if we only had a maid and could afford to heat the attic; yet I like to think the house has hardly changed since being built. Eight years after we bought the place, I am still tickled to walk in the front door, because I know that the original owner was the longtime provost of the university, a fussy Latin and Greek scholar named Phineas Nimm, who died around the time of the First World War. Something over a hundred years ago, responding to a survey from an unknown Atlanta University professor named W.E.B. Du Bois, Provost Nimm wrote unapologetically that a colored man, whatever the level of his educational achievement, would not be welcome as a student. As an undergraduate, I discovered a copy of the letter in the university archives and nearly stole it. After all these years, the irony of owning Nimm’s house still brings me a bitter satisfaction.
As the daylight fades, Bentley and I play kickball in the yard for half an hour, watched with approval by Don and Nina Felsenfeld, our elderly next-door neighbors, who are sitting on their screened porch, as they do every day around this time, sipping lemonade. Don was in his day one of the nation’s leading experts on particle physics, and Nina remains an expert at welcoming strangers, the Jewish tradition of hesed: within an hour of the arrival of the moving truck eight years ago, she was at our door with a tray of cream-cheese-and-jelly sandwiches. She has brought us other trays over the years, including one three weeks ago, after my father died, because she grew up in the kind of family where, when somebody died, bringing food was what neighbors did. Don and Nina believe that nothing is more important than family, and Don, who often spends a friendly evening whomping me at chess, is fond of saying that nobody ever lay on his deathbed wishing he had spent a few more hours at work and a few less with the kids.
Kimmer thinks they are interfering busybodies.
And they are, evidently, about to interfere again, because, as soon as I judge that my son is too tired to play any longer and turn around to head inside, Don rises to his feet and opens the door to his porch. He beckons to me over the high, thick hedge that separates our lots. I nod, take Bentley by the hand, and wander toward the front of the house, which is the only way around the sprawling, prickly hedge. Don and I meet on his front lawn, and there is a moment while he plays around with his pipe.
“How’s the little chap?” he asks at last, referring to Bentley.
“Bentley’s doing great,” I answer.
“Grape! Bemmy grape!” chirps my magnificent son, reaching out his free hand for Don’s. “Dare you!”
“Yep,” says Don with every appearance of seriousness, swallowing the tiny proffered fingers in his own. “Yep, you’re quite a grape little chap.”
Bentley giggles and hugs Don’s bony leg.
Don Felsenfeld is a tall, awkwardly thin man, graceless and aloof, the son of a Jewish farmer from Vermont. In his heyday, it is said, he knew more about subatomic particles than anybody on the planet, and a favorite bromide on campus is that he should have had the Nobel Prize twice. A sometime socialist and full-time atheist, Don once wrote a popular book whose title made a joke of Einstein’s famous and difficult line: The Science of Unbelief: How the Universe Plays Dice with God, he called it. Now he is close to eighty, dresses every day in khaki trousers and the same blue cardigan, and spends most of his time gardening or smoking his pipe or both.
“Been quite a couple of weeks for you,” says Don. No smile, few words: Jewish he may be, but Don Felsenfeld is pure New England too.
“I suppose.”
“Nina’s cooking for you.”
“She’s sweet.”
