Mr. and Mrs. Lane were a sign that all was in order. They adopted my parents very much the way my first St. Paul’s friends adopted me: immediately, with the conviction of rescue, and with all attendant expectation of gratitude. Never mind. It was an invitation to the ball. His name was a monument and she was even better, a tiny heiress who had grown up adored in the hills of North Carolina.
The Lanes were sponsors, in a way, of my leaving for boarding school. If they had done it, then this was how it was done.
“He’s sort of a godfather,” I told Washington. “He wasn’t there at my christening, but he’s really involved now.”
New York said, “Married?”
“Definitely.”
“Do you like her?”
“I love her,” I told my friends.
I thought Mr. Lane hardly deserved her. They lived in a five-story brownstone on the loveliest of Chicago’s Gold Coast streets, but she answered the door barefoot, with no makeup, and took you by the hand. No child was made to feel like a child and no woman was made to feel unwelcome. She gave terrific gifts, silver cases and blown-glass bottles nestled in striped boxes. I’ve rarely seen her conspiratorial blend of secrets and goodwill. Her circle was clever and close. Her children, younger by a few years than my brother and me, were lucky devils.
Mr. Lane’s beard bothered me. I was unimpressed by his story of racing sports cars without headlights over country roads in Michigan. (I was more interested in my mother’s report of how he had bitten into a chocolate truffle at a dinner party and, finding half a pistachio inside, excused himself to the bathroom to inject himself with epinephrine before he died. It was a startling example of an adult’s vulnerability, which I did not often see. It was also, of course, a story about what a person might do without disrupting a dinner party—about what manners could conceal.) But my father thought he was great fun, and can I blame my parents for thinking it a kind of triumph when my dad was asked to join the small group of men who crewed on Mr. Lane’s yacht each August, cruising the Aeolian Islands?
It was really something, that he had taken me to lunch. And I had done so well that he’d said he would fly his plane to New Hampshire to take me to supper, once I had begun at St. Paul’s. I hadn’t even taken this idea seriously before now. Why hadn’t I seen the riches in my hand?
“What kind of plane?” asked New York.
“I don’t know. He flies it himself.”
She worked on this for a bit, then said, “You should do it. When’s he coming?”
Behold the grammar of entitlement: from the imperative should to the present progressive, from the provisional to the certain, just like that.
Could you do that, and have the world obey?
“Christmas,” I said. Christmas sounded good.
“Oh, great. Can he take us to the Vineyard?” asked Washington.
“Don’t be silly,” said New York. “He’s coming to see Lacy. It’s amazing.”
The girls looked at me differently after I told them about Mr. Lane. If I’d known, I’d have mentioned it the first day they invited me to sit with them at our welcome picnic. I’d have pinned it to my newb name tag. I’d have written that on my note to Shep.
Mr. Lane never did fly to me. But at a party that Christmas, after he’d presented me with a ribboned hat box that contained a bowler hat, his wife opened her satin clutch to allow me to peek at the pearl-handled Derringer she carried with her in the evenings. It was the first handgun I had ever seen. You will not see it again, in spite of Chekhov’s imperative.
May I suggest a substitution? The gun will not go off. It will be the man.
When I called home that fall, I never asked when Mr. Lane would fly up to take me to supper. Instead I sobbed and begged my parents to let me come home. This had to be done from the pay phone behind the gym rather than the one in the basement of my dorm, because I didn’t want other kids to hear. I crossed the road and stood beneath the fluorescent lights, bugs whapping and zipping, and cried until three minutes to ten, when I hung up, wiped my face, and crossed the road back to check in for the night.
My mother would get very quiet when I called from the pay phone in tears. My father would step up. “You have to give it a try. You need to stick this out.”
What could I say that would sound the alarm? As a parent, I can imagine heaps of tips: Shyla’s bra or my lone Holocaust investigations or purging lessons in the girls’ bathroom. The full bottles of vodka that I weighed in my hands in my urban friends’ room, the brands the kids loved in those years, lettering bright as aquarium fish through the liquor (not for nothing was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s son, who lived across the quad, nicknamed “Stoli”). What if I had mentioned the newb book, and how the girls in it were rated to two decimal points each? This was the semester my big-city friends were wild-eyed with the news
