It was therefore with a certain dread that he approached his father the day after his sixteenth birthday, alarmed at what he and the prostitute had done the night before and unsure of what to tell his father. Should he thank him? Should he slap him on the back? He often felt that he knew his father very well, but it was at times like this that his father, their lives, the very clothes they wore seemed indescribably alien.
“Father,” he said, sitting down to blueberry muffins and coffee. “Good morning.”
“Hmmm,” said his father with his cup to his mouth, a newspaper folded in his free hand, his eyes busy with finance. After a moment he glanced over at Kit, who gave him a careful, generic smile. “Is that all you’re having for breakfast?” Chad asked.
“I’m not very hungry,” Kit said.
This time, “Huh.” A sort of surprised grunt. A small leer. The closest Chad Barrows ever came to complicity or an admission that he had delivered up his son to a whore.
By the last days of May 1980 Kit had finished his junior year at Yale and thought he’d learned most of the things his father could teach him. He knew about finance—everything to do with money and how to make it. He knew about politics. He knew how to have things done, quickly and with little fuss, and how to make the world work to his advantage. He had accompanied his father often enough, listened to him always, watched him, copied him, come to know his colleagues and what they had to teach a young man just starting out. He had worked alongside his father, been scolded and, nearly as often, praised. Together they had planned his future, imagined it, looked forward to it. Everything, for Kit, rolled smoothly along. Every promise, his father said, would come to pass. But then Kit arrived home a day early from college and found that the senior Barrows had been holding out on him.
It was actually Holly who taught Kit this lesson. He had been with her little since their childhood, for they were only at home together during holidays and summer months, which Holly spent in as much seclusion as she could manage. At eighteen, she had insisted on living, during her time at home, in the apartment over the carriage house in which they stored their automobiles, and Kit had taken care never to violate her privacy. And when Holly visited the main house for meals or rare conversation, Kit found her so changed from the small girl he’d known that he had little to say to her. She had become so withdrawn, so serious, so separate from everything that he considered important. While he spent his summers as his father’s apprentice, she spent her days sailing, or wandering in the woods, squandering her hours, scribbling in blank books, keeping her distance. While he welcomed every chance to ally himself with his father’s colleagues and to make for himself the beginnings of a name, she seemed content with her autonomy and her solitude. The occasions when she sought him out were usually as awkward as they were rare, and they always left Kit with the disturbing impression that he had somehow done her wrong.
She had seemed, as a child, such a good and eager companion that Kit sometimes wondered what had happened to change her so radically. But most of the time he did not think about her at all.
On the night of May 20, 1980, Kit arrived home from Yale for the summer, set to present his father with a 3.2 average and a brace of Maine lobsters. When he drove his car into the carriage house, he was surprised to find a strange car parked there. And when he pulled in alongside it and switched off the quiet engine, he was startled to hear music coming from the apartment overhead and then the uncommon sound of his sister laughing. He imagined that Holly had invited a friend to visit and was relieved to discover that she had one.
Feeling better and better, Kit gathered up his lobsters, and, leaving his luggage for others to negotiate, headed for the house.
A cluster of magnolias adorned the stretch of lawn between the carriage house and the main residence, and as their blossoms moved in the breeze, the trees anointed the night air. They reminded him, suddenly, of his mother, who had planted them. This unsolicited memory unsettled him. It made him feel that closed doors should remain not simply closed, but locked.
Kit nearly walked right into his father.
“Good God, you startled me,” Kit said, offering his hand. “What are you doing out here? I meant to surprise you, and now you’ve spoiled it. Did you hear the car?”
“Kit,” said his father, leaning close. “Welcome home.” His eyes were not fully open. He stank of whiskey and filthy hair, and his hand in Kit’s was shaking. With overwhelming revulsion, Kit realized that the grass at his father’s feet was glazed with vomit. He was then astonished to see his father sit down in the wet grass and settle himself with a phlegmy sigh. Kit stepped carefully out of the soiled grass and crouched down next to his father.
“What are you doing out here?” he whispered. When Chad did not answer, Kit turned and looked where his father looked.
At first he saw nothing extraordinary. The night was quiet but for the waxy chafing of magnolia petals overhead and the lobsters who scrabbled mildly inside their bag. Then Kit looked up toward the widow’s walk that adorned the carriage-house roof. Holly stood there, drenched in
