The New Yorker Stories

while she set forth her conditions, living her life in the imperative. In advance of their speaking, she wanted him to know that she would hang up if he asked when she intended to break up with Addison (Addison!) Page. Also, as he well knew, she did not want to be questioned about her mother, even though, yes, they were in phone contact. She also did not want to hear any criticism of her glamorous life, based on her recently having spent three days in England with her spendthrift boyfriend, and also, yes, she had got her flu shot.

“This being November, would it be possible to ask who you’re going to vote for?”

“No,” she said. “Even if you were voting for the same candidate, you’d find some way to make fun of me.”

“What if I said, ‘Close your eyes and imagine either an elephant or a donkey’?”

“If I close my eyes, I see . . . I see a horse’s ass, and it’s you,” she said. “May I continue?”

He snorted. She had a quick wit, his daughter. She had got that from him, not from his wife, who neither made jokes nor understood them. In the distant past, his wife had found an entirely humorless psychiatrist who had summoned Keller and urged him to speak to Sue Anne directly, not in figurative language or through allusions or—God forbid—with humor. “What should I do if I’m just chomping at the bit to tell a racist joke?” he had asked. The idea was of course ludicrous; he had never made a racist joke in his life. But of course the psychiatrist missed his tone. “You anticipate the necessity of telling racist jokes to your wife?” he had said, pausing to scribble something on his pad. “Only if one came up in a dream or something,” Keller had deadpanned.

“I thought you were going to continue, Lynn,” he said. “Which I mean as an observation, not as a reproach,” he hurried to add.

“Keller,” she said (since her teenage years, she had called him Keller), “I need to know whether you’re coming to Thanksgiving.”

“Because you would get a turkey weighing six or seven ounces more?”

“In fact, I thought about cooking a ham this year, because Addison prefers ham. It’s just a simple request, Keller: that you let me know whether or not you plan to come. Thanksgiving is three weeks away.”

“I’ve come up against Amy Vanderbilt’s timetable for accepting a social invitation at Thanksgiving?” he said.

She sighed deeply. “I would like you to come, whether you believe that or not, but since the twins aren’t coming from L.A., and since Addison’s sister invited us to her house, I thought I might not cook this year, if you didn’t intend to come.”

“Oh, by all means don’t cook for me. I’ll mind my manners and call fifty-one weeks from today and we’ll set this up for next year,” he said. “A turkey potpie from the grocery store is good enough for me.”

“And the next night you could be your usual frugal self and eat the leftover packaging,” she said.

“Horses don’t eat cardboard. You’re thinking of mice,” he said.

“I stand corrected,” she said, echoing the sentence he often said to her. “But let me ask you another thing. Addison’s sister lives in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and she issued a personal invitation for you to join us at her house for dinner. Would you like to have Thanksgiving there?”

“How could she issue a personal invitation if she’s never met me?” he said.

“Stop it,” his daughter said. “Just answer.”

He thought about it. Not about whether he would go but about the holiday itself. The revisionist thinking on Thanksgiving was that it commemorated the subjugation of the Native Americans (formerly the Indians). Not as bad a holiday as Columbus Day, but still.

“I take it your silence means that you prefer to be far from the maddening crowd,” she said.

“That title is much misquoted,” he said. “Hardy’s novel is Far from the Madding Crowd, which has an entirely different connotation, madding meaning ‘frenzied.’ There’s quite a difference between frenzied and annoying. Consider, for instance, your mother’s personality versus mine.”

“You are incredibly annoying,” Lynn said. “If I didn’t know that you cared for me, I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and let myself in for your mockery, over and over.”

“I thought it was because you pitied me.”

He heard the click, and there was silence. He replaced the phone in its cradle, which made him think of another cradle—Lynn’s—with the decal of the cow jumping over the moon on the headboard and blue and pink beads (the cradle manufacturer having hedged his bets) on the rails. He could remember spinning the beads and watching Lynn sleep. The cradle was now in the downstairs hallway, used to store papers and magazines for recycling. Over the years, some of the decal had peeled away, so that on last inspection only a torso with two legs was successfully making the jump over the brightly smiling moon.

He bought a frozen turkey potpie and, as a treat to himself (it was not true that he constantly denied himself happiness, as Lynn said—one could not deny what was rarely to be found), a new radio whose FM quality was excellent—though what did he know, with his imperfect hearing? As he ate Thanksgiving dinner (two nights before Thanksgiving, but why stand on formality?—a choice of Dinty Moore beef stew or Lean Cuisine vegetable lasagna remained for the day of thanks itself), he listened with pleasure to Respighi’s Pini di Roma. He and Sue Anne had almost gone to Rome on their honeymoon, but instead they had gone to Paris. His wife had just finished her second semester of college, in which she had declared herself an art history major. They had gone to the Louvre and to the Jeu de Paume and on the last day of the trip he had bought her a little watercolor of Venice she kept admiring, in a rather elaborate frame that probably accounted for the gouache’s high price—it was a gouache, not a watercolor, as she always corrected him. They both wanted three children, preferably a son followed by either another son or a daughter, though if their second child was a son, then of course they would devoutly wish their last to be a daughter. He remembered with bemusement the way they had prattled on, strolling by the Seine, earnestly discussing those things that were most out of their control: Life’s Important Matters.

Sue Anne conceived only once, and although they (she, to be honest) had vaguely considered adoption, Lynn remained their only child. Lacking brothers and sisters, she had been fortunate to grow up among relatives, because Keller’s sister had given birth to twins a year or so after Lynn was born, and in those days the two families lived only half an hour apart and saw each other almost every weekend. Now Sue Anne and his sister Carolynne (now merely Carol), who lived in Arlington with her doctor husband (or who lived apart from him—he