“Hi, Dad,” she said.
He held her tightly for a moment, as old people sometimes do, never knowing which embrace will be the last. Then he turned to me and shook my hand with his firm, industrial grip.
“How you doing, Steve?” he asked.
“Fine.”
It was Peter’s turn then, and Carl all but yanked him from the ground.
“You got a girlfriend yet?” he demanded.
Peter had not had time to answer before Amelia’s voice came booming toward us from above.
“Don’t ask personal questions, Carl,” she snapped, but in a friendly, joking tone. She shook her head with comic exasperation. “What am I going to do with him?”
She was a tall, slender woman, with thin arms and a somewhat hawkish face. She seemed to hop down the stairs toward us, nervous and bird-like. Once at the bottom of them, she swept Peter into her arms, then Marie. Finally she turned to me, gave me a quick, no-nonsense hug, then firmly pushed me away.
In her youth, Amelia had been a great beauty, locally renowned, and I assumed that the glancing, cautious way she had always embraced and separated from me was a holdover from those bygone days when her slightest touch had given too strong a signal to the breathless men who’d flocked around her. According to Carl, these same men, old now, with shaking heads, still spoke of her in the social club downtown. They still can’t get over that I had her every night,” he’d once told me with a wry, self-satisfied grin, then added significantly, “And she was just eighteen years old, Steve. Can you imagine that?”
Now she was seventy-one, still tall and dignified, like her daughter, but with withered skin, iron-gray hair, and hasty, nervous eyes that glanced about restlessly, as if trying to get a glimpse of where it had all gone.
We followed her into the house, all of us climbing up the stairs toward the open front door. Carl brought up the rear, pulling himself up by means of the old wooden rail.
Marie and her mother disappeared into the back of the house while Carl and I sat down in the front room. I looked at him silently, smiling amiably, as I watched him ease himself down into the overstuffed chair by the piano. A mild heart attack had shaken him three years before, and only last summer he’d fallen in the garden behind the house, and, unable to get up, had wallowed in the tomato plants for nearly ten minutes before Amelia had finally spotted him and come running to his side.
Now, as I watched him, he seemed to age almost by the minute, his hair whitening, his skin wrinkling, his long legs drawing up under the cuffs of his trousers.
For a moment he remained silent, then he nodded idly toward the piano.
“You don’t play, do you, Steve?” he asked, a question he had asked me several times before, always forgetting my answer.
“No,” I said.
“Amy used to play,” Carl said. He drew in a deep breath and let it out in a quick, exhausted rush, as if the burden of holding in his breath were becoming too much for him. “She played for the Knights of Columbus,” he went on. “At a dance one night when Jimmy Doyle didn’t show up.” He winked boyishly. “She wasn’t that good, but she gave it a good try.”
I smiled.
“All you can ask, right?” Carl added. “To give it a good try.”
“I suppose so.”
“It’s the same for life,” Carl said. “You can’t do more than give it a good try.”
I nodded softly, letting my eyes drift away, hoping that with that gesture I could avoid giving Carl any further encouragement toward sharing his philosophy. In the past few years, as old age had overtaken him, he’d become increasingly homespun and folksy, dotting his conversation with empty truisms that annoyed Marie, but which Amelia seemed hardly to notice.
“I wouldn’t say Amy was at a professional level,” Carl went on. “But she was pretty good.” He pulled a red handkerchief from the back pocket of his trousers and began to wipe his face, his eyes drifting over the room.
It was a room that Amelia dominated entirely, pictures of her lined up on top of the piano or hanging from the walls, all of them taken much earlier, in the days of her youthful glory. She’d been her father’s favorite, and probably her mother’s, too, and she’d grown up beneath the gaze of a thousand desperately admiring eyes. From that spawning pool of frantically beseeching men, she’d selected a factory worker named Carl. It had been a choice which had baffled, disturbed, and finally embittered her parents. In the end, they’d entirely rejected Carl, an experience he’d never forgotten. “My wife’s parents froze me out,” he told me that first weekend when Marie brought me to his home. “My wife was so pretty, you see. They thought that was her ticket to a brighter future, you know? Then, poor thing, she got tied up with me.”
It was precisely that brighter future that seemed to shine from the photographs which cluttered and overwhelmed the room, all of them taken during Amelia’s glory days, first as a little girl in her father’s arms, later as an adolescent growing toward a stunning womanhood, and finally as a young woman posing by the lake on that single, breathless day her beauty reached its frail, already fading peak.
I drew my eyes away from that last picture and toward the woman herself as Amelia suddenly came back into the room. She was carrying a large picnic basket, and Marie and Peter were standing just behind her, both of them holding a few lightweight folding chairs.
“We thought we’d go on a picnic,” Amelia said. Her eyes swept over to Carl. “What do you think, hon? Just a short walk over to the spring?”
Carl nodded. “Yeah. I’m up for that,” he said, already pulling himself to his feet.
I looked at Marie. She was smiling at Carl with great cheerfulness and affection, which were still on her face when she turned to me.
