Authors: Callie Wright
Hugh tracked the cordless to the base of the refrigerator, where he secured it with shaking hands. “I thought you were grounded,” he said.
“I have to eat.”
Teddy, who was inexplicably shirtless, had emptied a box of Golden Grahams into a large mixing bowl and was now stirring in milk with a wooden spoon. Dinner. It was close to eleven o’clock and his growing boy hadn’t been fed.
“Help yourself,” said Hugh.
Teddy palmed the base of the bowl and rafted a whale’s portion into his mouth. Pipelike clavicles carved deep pockets on either side of Teddy’s gullet—Hugh could’ve sunk a pool ball in there.
“I was lifting,” said Teddy, registering his father’s gaze. He leaned back against the counter and cradled the bowl against his countable abs, but all the pectorals and deltoids in the world couldn’t offset the fact that the sum total of Teddy still did not add up to an adult.
All Hugh had ever wanted was a family, and yet here he was wrecking his own. Until now he’d been a good father, warm and affectionate, with so many different brands of hugs that Teddy and Julia had named them: the goose hug, which involved hooking chins over shoulders, and the tug hug, where the point was to wrestle free. Both kids had gleefully submitted to Hugh’s affections when they were babies, and Julia still occasionally permitted a plain old hug, but here was Teddy trying to grow up, trying to put on twenty-five pounds by next baseball season, and Hugh did understand that he could lose him. Parents lost their children all the time. Some boys drowned, and some grew up and saw their fathers for what they really were.
Hugh put the phone back on the hook. He and Caroline were on their own.
“Teddy,” he said.
Teddy moved a spoonful of cereal into his cheek like a squirrel storing a nut. “What?”
“Maybe we should talk about this.”
“Okay,” said Teddy.
But Hugh faltered. For eighteen years, he had paid attention: he knew when his children were dissembling and when they were sincere. Julia wanted to be on the tennis team, and Teddy was afraid to go to college; Hugh could tell by the way his son refused to even talk about Oneida that it was going to be a problem getting him there. But now, perhaps for the first time, Hugh realized that his kids could read him, too.
“I don’t know how much your mother told you,” Hugh began. Teddy waited. “There was an accident at the school.”
“Was it the school’s fault?” asked Teddy.
“No,” said Hugh, glad to be able to answer something honestly and emphatically. “There’s no foundation for a lawsuit.”
“Then why’d you need to go over to the woman’s house in the middle of the day?” asked Teddy.
A jab, words meant to stun Hugh, to pin him in place. Hugh had never seen this side of his son. But Teddy was right: Hugh hadn’t needed to go to Caroline’s house today, and yet he hadn’t been able to stay away. He thought back to the night he’d met Anne, to the relief he’d felt, as if he’d been drifting for years and had finally found a buoy. Anne’s faith in Hugh had lifted him up, galvanized him, but the mirror of her faith had been distrust—nothing less than all of him would do, which was more than Hugh, and maybe more than anyone, could give. It seemed to Hugh that for twenty years now Anne had been waiting for him to fatally disappoint her, and Hugh wondered if, when she found out what he’d done that day—as she inevitably would—she might not process this final transgression as a kind of relief.
“It’s complicated,” said Hugh.
“Sounds it,” said Teddy. He began to shake more cereal into his bowl and Hugh thought, I’ll take you to the mall this weekend and get you some vitamins and powders. We’ll get you to college somehow. But Teddy wouldn’t even look at him.
Hugh hadn’t meant for this to get so out of hand so quickly. He and Anne had a lot to work out before Hugh could talk openly to Teddy. And there was still the matter of the lawsuit to settle—Hugh felt his stomach drop at the prospect of losing Seedlings—complicated by the fact that Teddy had glimpsed him with Caroline. It could have been worse—the nipple, the running inside hand in hand—but that was just it: How had Teddy, normally deaf and blind to anyone’s existence but his own, intuited from twenty yards that Hugh was committing an act of indecency? Yale-bound Dave Blunt hadn’t discerned anything untoward in Hugh’s hand-kiss—though probably Dave hadn’t recognized Hugh. Still, hadn’t thousands of innings as spectator, father, and number-one fan earned Hugh the benefit of Teddy’s doubt?
“About what happened today,” said Hugh. “You should’ve talked to me first.”
Teddy stopped chewing. “I know what I saw.”
“Tie goes to the runner, Teddy. You should’ve come to me.”
“Why? What would you’ve said? I saw you kiss a woman.”
“Her hand,” Hugh corrected.
“You kissed her!” said Teddy.
Wrong. After the hand, before the nipple, she’d rested her chin on Hugh’s head for a matter of minutes. He’d been thinking that her front porch needed painting and that he could do it for her this summer. Her skin had felt warm against his.
Hugh tried to put himself in Teddy’s place. What did his son need? His father, of course. The best thing that could happen to Teddy right now would be to discover that he’d been wrong.
“Look,” said Hugh, “I probably shouldn’t have kissed her hand, but I was pretty overwhelmed by the lawsuit. Anyway, your mom’s taking care of that now.”
“She’s over there?”
Hugh’s stomach lurched, his throat nearly closing off. He checked his watch and nodded.
Teddy set his cereal bowl in the sink, soggy wheat squares floating in a pond of sugary milk. For a moment he was quiet, then he said:
“I don’t believe you. Sorry, but I don’t.”
Teddy turned his back to Hugh, demonstrably sloughing off childhood, that unrepeatable quality of youth—trust in your parents—gone the way of Teddy’s gapped baby teeth, his halting first steps, his
lellow
for
yellow
, his
Dada bye bye
. Hugh felt the sensation not as pain but as loss, a severed umbilicus, a collapse of the continuum linking Hugh to George and their parents, then back to Teddy and Julia—only now Hugh was the father—and of all the breaches it would be this that his son remembered: middle of the workday, Teddy’s father in the driveway, a woman who was not his mother, and who really gave a fuck if it was only her hand?
How had Hugh thought he could explain this?
He heard himself say he needed to sit down, then he was sitting down, nestled on the floor between the oven and the island.
“What’s going on?”
Julia.
“Maybe he fainted,” said Teddy, standing back.
Julia galloped away, made a ruckus, and returned with a glass of water. She handed Hugh a sleeve of Ritz crackers, then opened a jar of peanut butter and dipped in a steak knife.
Soon Hugh was up at the counter on Teddy’s bar stool, with Julia stationed at his side.
“I’ll stay with you,” Julia volunteered.
“No,” said Hugh.
“’Night,” said Teddy.
Hugh tried to touch him, reach for his arm, pat him on the back, but his son was already swinging around the newel on the back banister and propelling himself up the stairs.
“Is Teddy in trouble?” asked Julia. “Is he grounded?”
Hugh closed his eyes. He was fragile, sick from the rolling hills of mania. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, hadn’t slept in days.
“Is this about the baseball card? Why’d Teddy throw it in the lake?”
“Julia—”
“Forget it,” she said. “You never tell me anything.”
Hugh opened his eyes. “What don’t I tell you?”
“You asked my coach to give me the exhibition match.”
That. It was so far down on Hugh’s list of problems, it took a Herculean effort to attain the proper level of gravity when he said, “You’re
good
at tennis, you
like
tennis, but I know it’s not always easy for you to ask for things.”
“Well, now I’m playing Carl tomorrow, and if I lose, I’m officially off the team.”
“I’m sorry,” said Hugh. I’m sorry and I’m sorry. “I’ll call Coach Klawson.” There was no chance he’d be expanding the school, anyway.
“No, don’t. It’s better this way. At least Carl’s speaking to me.” Then, “Did you really kiss that woman?”
Hugh started to say
her hand
, then paused, measuring his next words against all future knowledge, the possibility that Julia would soon know everything. Anne would be home any minute; there was no telling where this night was headed.
“Can you do me a favor?” asked Hugh.
Julia shrugged, nodded. His only comfort: he was her favorite.
“Can you go to bed?”
Julia slid off her stool. “First I have to go to Carl’s.”
“Now?” Hugh frowned. “It’s a little late.”
“It can’t wait,” she said. “You know that book
The Sex Cure
?”
Everyone’s favorite cocktail-party scandal, Cooperstown’s
Peyton Place.
The recently retired Father French, who had baptized both of Hugh’s children, kept an annotated copy in his living room, proudly noting the location of the book’s Episcopal church on
French Street
.
“Yes,” said Hugh warily.
“I was kind of inspired by it.”
Uh-oh, thought Hugh.
From what he understood, the fallout from the novel had been sizable. He seemed to recall that on one Halloween night a drunken mob spray-painted the author’s house with threats, running her out of town.
Hugh thought of his own scandal, rippling now from Cooperstown to Cherry Valley at the speed of his wife’s car. Recklessness. Not just with his school but his livelihood, not just with his marriage but his kids. Hugh had dropped them off in the carpool lane of family crisis, and it occurred to him that he, too, could be run out of town.
“Some things in the book were true,” said Julia.
“I’m pretty sure nothing in the book was true,” said Hugh.
Julia seemed to consider this. “Well, the thing I wrote about Carl was.”
Hugh braced his head in his hands, pressing his temples. “When you say
wrote
…”
Julia gestured expansively to the night, and Hugh thought he knew what she meant. The truth was out there, and nothing would ever again be the same. Anne knew; Mrs. Baxter probably knew. Teddy knew enough, and Bob would guess the rest. Julia was too busy creating her own scandal to bother yet with her father’s, but eventually, she, too, would know.
It had only been two weeks since he’d met Caroline, and yet after only two weeks in 1974, Hugh had already decided to move in with Anne—maybe he was the kind of guy who just knew. Hugh pictured Caroline slipping gracefully into his life, their life, tiny enough to be suspended above it until he’d pulled her in and pulled her in again. She had brought with her a depth of feeling that had eluded Hugh for years. It was a great unkindness he was doing to his family, but Teddy and Julia weren’t babies anymore. With a mother like Anne, his children would survive utterly; she would will them into adulthood; she would bend rivers to lift them up from the dead.
Hugh told Julia to forget her trip to Carl’s and go to bed, then wiped down the counter, loaded Teddy’s cereal bowl into the dishwasher, and returned the peanut butter to the pantry. In the hallway outside his bedroom, he took a sheet and blanket from the linen closet, then went back downstairs to make up his bed.
He sat on the couch in the dark in the den without laying out the sheet and stared at the moonlight through the skylights. The Seedlings School was in his wife’s hands now. Hugh was asking her to defend him when she no doubt wanted to crucify him, and as much as Anne disliked gossip, she might easily decide this was his problem, not theirs. Seedlings should’ve had a head teacher on yard duty, and Graham should not have been standing on the monkey bars; but head teachers took breaks, and kids tested the boundaries of their secure worlds, and Hugh, whose job it was to take care of the children, had not failed: this time when a boy had fallen, Hugh had reached out his hand. Now he seemed to be floating, flying north. Knowing how bad it would look if he was asleep when Anne came home, he did not lie down. Instead, he dove straight into that phantasmagoric pool of memory where the possibility always existed of discovering one more word, a forgotten smile, a blue-sky day, and the sound of his brother’s voice saying,
Come on, come on
, his running feet just ahead of Hugh’s, flattening the dew-heavy grass with prints that stretched out for all time, a path to follow.
10
Anne was not normally a timid driver, but the magnitude of her mission coupled with the undeniable elevation of her blood alcohol level left her crawling along at the speed limit, tracking the centerline through squinted eyes. A fine mist clung to the windshield, and her wipers swished by at regular intervals until that proved to be too soporific, then on came the radio and down went the windows—she did not want to end up in a ditch.
In order to remain awake, Anne focused on the pending negligence claim. From what Anne understood about the accident, if Mr. Pennington decided to go through with his suit, the court would likely grant judgment for the Seedlings School before trial: New York Civil Practice Law and Rules section 3212. Even if the teachers hadn’t been the paragon of supervision—what had Hugh said about assistants on yard duty?—they hadn’t
caused
the accident. Kids climbed, kids fell—it didn’t matter whether a teacher was watching or not—and no proximate cause meant no case.
As these facts marched logically across Anne’s mind, the unlikelihood of Caroline testifying came into stark relief. Anne wasn’t the only one who stood to lose something here. Recalling Hugh’s reference to Caroline’s twelve steps, Anne could assume Caroline’s suitability as a caregiver had already been called into question in a courtroom setting. The last thing she’d want would be to revisit that particular locale.
There was a way in which this could be easy, then. Anne had the advantage of anonymity; Caroline didn’t know what she looked like. Anne could introduce herself as Seedlings’ lawyer, bullet-point the risks of a trial to Caroline’s custody agreement, threaten her with deposition under oath, and advise Caroline against participation in any court proceedings. What personal connection to Hugh Obermeyer? Anne could use a pseudonym, perhaps Joanie Cole.