The Distinguished Guest (10 page)

In the margin at the end of this passage, Linnett wrote, “Ask about this: unconscious. Anger. Not expressed much in life, no?”

Late on Sunday, Linnett drove down Broom Lane to the mailbox marked
Maynard
, just to be certain how long it would take her to get there the next afternoon. You couldn’t see the
house from the road—the gravel drive was overarched with trees. Linnett drove on to the next mailbox and turned around.

On Monday, she drove there again, slowly, feeling unexpectedly nervous. The branches hanging over the driveway scraped against Frank’s car. Linnett had to pull her elbow in to avoid
getting scratched. She came out of the trees to a wide field falling away to the left. Near the top she could see the rows of twiggy apple trees. The driveway circled to the right, where the trees
were thicker. Linnett parked under a beech tree next to a big, banged-up station wagon. She opened the door, hauled out her crutches, and leaned them against the car. Awkwardly she pulled the
backpack over to herself and struggled to get it on. Then she heaved herself up from the car and slowly made her way on her crutches over the bumpy ground.

The modernity of the house surprised her. She had imagined an old house, a wide porch where she’d sit and talk with Lily Maynard. In concession to the cape architecture of the town, this
house was covered in shingles that had just begun to weather, but it was also very much its own thing, a stripe of windows wound horizontally around it, a green-painted pipe railing she leaned
against now as she mounted the wide stairs one by one. She rang the bell. Through the sidelight of the door she could see that the space inside was one large room, with a wall of windows on its
other side open to the river below the house.

Noreen opened the door, and Linnett watched her eyes round at the sight of her hunched over her crutches. “Hi,” Linnett said. “I’m here to see Lily Maynard. Linnett
Baird.”

“Come in,” Noreen said. She stepped back and held the door open for Linnett. “Right over here. She’s expecting you.” She gestured into the big room.

Linnett surveyed it quickly—a kitchen along the far wall, and in front of the windows to the river, a dining room table ringed with chairs. The furniture in the living area all sleek and
modern, except for a grand piano in the corner and the odd Victorian piece. Seated in one of these, tilted awkwardly, as though she were a doll plunked abruptly down, was a skinny old woman,
white-haired. She was wearing what looked like pajamas, of a pale green. Linnett lurched slowly across the room, staring at her. Lily Maynard’s face was shockingly empty. As her eyes took
Linnett in, though, they lighted with amusement at her predicament.

When Linnett was a few feet away, the old woman reached over and touched the two canes leaned against her chair. “Well,” she said, in a breathless, rushing voice, “I see we
have each come ready to put our best foot forward.”

When she got home later that afternoon, home to her rented cottage, Linnett poured herself a gin and tonic. Then she sat down at her computer.
Lily
, she named the file. And
she typed:

Within two days of Lily’s arrival in Bowman, Alan shifted most of his working life away from his study in the house to his office in town, an office he had maintained
previously mostly as a place to meet clients and as a storage area for his work. Almost every day for the first few weeks of Lily’s stay, he’s carried something he’s pillaged from
home—that’s how he thinks of it—up the narrow stairs to the door with his name on it. Even now he keeps bumping up against an absence, something he needs that isn’t
here—slides, a reference book, a catalogue. But he makes do, he stays away from the house. Whatever he needs can always wait until tomorrow. It’s a slack period for him anyway.

Though he could be revising the lectures he’ll give this fall.

Though he’s someone who’s always had projects to do in slack periods—cabinetry, competitions to enter. (For several years he’d built harpsichords when he didn’t
have enough other work, and it was during this time that Thomas’s interest in music had been born.)

What does he know of Lily’s life at his home? Enough. He knows that there are often visitors. He has seen the shopping lists Lily leaves in her scratchy handwriting for Gaby or Noreen. On
this account Noreen has asked for a raise. She hadn’t expected, she said, to have to prepare lunch or tea for three or four people several times a week.

He knows that the secretary has started to come this week, and that Lily likes her. Gaby has met her more than once and she says the woman seems nice, but tough. They’ve laughed about it,
actually, that she will have to be tough to work with Lily.

Alan is glad to be able to laugh at something in the situation because he’s been surprised by his reactions to his mother, surprised and discomfited. He has never pretended to have an
intimate or easy relationship with her, but before this visit, he would have said they had come to a kind of peaceful equilibrium between themselves.

Almost from the moment she moved into his life here, though, he has been angry at her, and then at himself for his anger. He’s made excuses to himself, for himself: usually he has visited
her, in his old home, her apartment. Never has she stayed more than a night or two in any of his houses. Never has he had to accommodate her life, her patterns. Never has she been so old, so
demanding. None of this helps him, or eases his feelings toward her. And he’s come to think that at the center of these feelings is his response to what she seems to be using this visit for:
the destruction of his past.

For Alan is the one who carries out her trash, and he has seen the carefully torn pages of Lily’s history. Of his own history: his father’s writing, the words leaping up at him. He
allows himself to take just these in, the phrases, the words on the torn sheets that lie on top, before he turns them out into the green plastic bag, dumps garbage on top of them, ties the neck up,
and hauls it to the shed. But his indignation at this—is this what he feels?—is something he keeps to himself. He hasn’t talked to Lily about it. What could he say, after all?
He’d not known that there were such letters, such papers. How could he assert any right to them now, any right to their preservation? What would he do with them anyway? Would he even want to
read through them, to know any more than what his mother has already made public of what happened between her and his father? Of his own growing up and what it meant to them?

He would, he realizes. He wants something from this history. It shouldn’t matter to him now, but it does. In part because he feels his adult life has been a slow lesson—a lesson for
a slow learner—in piecing together the elements in his childhood from which he’d fled then and now wants to understand. To master, perhaps. He has come late, he feels, to some necessary
questions about himself. And now he has to watch what he imagines might contain the answers—some of them anyway—disappear forever.

There’d been the memoir, of course. It had brought back a version of Alan’s past to him. But it was a version filtered through Lily, through her reading and understanding of events.
It did interest him, very much, but he felt a kind of Olympian curiosity reading it. It was too much her story, her take on things, to help him.

There were photographs in the memoir too, a thicket of them between pages 187 and 188, black and white photographs. Of the earlier pictures, most were familiar, he realized, poring over them.
He’d seen them in the albums that had sat in the bottom of the sideboard in the hall. Those albums had disappeared when his parents separated and he hadn’t thought of them again. In
fact, he’d forgotten they existed until that moment.

Some of the pictures were merely curiosities to Alan—those of Lily’s antecedents, of her childhood and adolescence, and the later ones of her friends at Blackstone Church, of her in
her study, and so forth. Some were merely amusing, or interesting: those of her and Paul together, and of the children as infants, and then in family groupings through the years. Here was Rebecca,
for instance, posed perhaps for her graduation photo from high school. Her hair was carefully turned under at the ends, her complexion and intensity were utterly airbrushed away. Her gaze off into
her future seemed only foolish and unknowing. A simp. And Clary as a teenager wearing a wide skirt puffed out over white tennis shoes and sweat socks. Here was Alan himself, poised on the
pitcher’s mound, about to go into his windup, looking, in the baggy uniform of that era, as helplessly skinny as Thomas did now.

But it was the photographs of Paul, of his father, that compelled Alan and confused him. There was one of him as a young man in the pulpit. His arms were resting on either side of it, and his
face was earnest and open, the face of a disciple. When Alan as a child had looked up at Paul preaching or praying, his father had frightened him. The pulpit at Blackstone Church stuck out, like
the prow of a ship riding slightly over the sea of faces in the congregation, and the view up wasn’t flattering. The light glinted meanly off Paul’s glasses, and his nostrils seemed to
Alan to bristle thickly with dark hairs. As a younger child, Alan was allowed crayons and paper, and he busied himself with them and tried not to look up at this father, the judge. From the age of
ten or so on, though, he was expected to listen, to attend without distractions to the sermons, and it was then that he came to understand that there were two quite separate sides to his father.
There was the one at home, loving, joking, sometimes a buffoon. And then the one in church, grave, exacting, calling on Alan to be better than he ever could be—he understood this even then.
He remembered looking over at Clary and Rebecca in church, at his mother, at the proud love flashing in their uplifted faces. He saw that they were unafraid of this Paul. He was their minister,
yes, but also husband and father. And indeed, in the picture, both sides of Paul were present. It made Alan wonder: why hadn’t he been able to see him in this way then—whole?

He hadn’t, that was all, and from the time his father divided in two for him onward, Alan had understood that the serious side, the grave side—the side that was inaccessible and
frightening to him—was the side that was more important to Paul.

When Paul tried in later years to talk to Alan (Alan imagined this as having been arranged nearly always by Lily: “I think you need to have a talk with Alan about . . .” whatever,
grades, drugs, girls), it made Alan feel inadequate and hopeless about himself, and angry at Paul for that feeling.

“What is it you’re trying to accomplish, son?” Paul had asked once. It was after the separation—Alan was fifteen, and Paul had taken him out for dinner. They were sitting
opposite each other in a booth in the Tropical Hut. Paul’s face as he asked the question was open and loving in the dimmed, orangy light. He was there, offering all his understanding.

“God! I’m not
trying to accomplish
anything, Dad,” Alan had said contemptuously.

But what he’d felt was the sense that he was expected to be more complex and aware of himself than he was. That he
should
have been trying to accomplish something with his behavior,
instead of just doing what seemed like the next thing to do, which at that age was smoking a lot of dope and trying to arrange a place and time to be alone with a girl named Mary Ann
Singletary.

It had been a relief to Alan when Paul moved to California. He was seventeen at the time, in his junior year of high school. Paul had left the church amid a scandal. As part of his commitment to
the community around him, and to what would later be called the black power movement, he’d been letting a gang from the neighborhood use the church for a meeting place. (This was also the
last step in the splitting of the church, and the beginning of the flight of the middle-class black members he’d had too. For it was this gang, after all, who’d been extorting lunch
money—any money they had—from the congregation’s children on their way to school.) A young girl charged that she’d been raped at one of these unsupervised “youth
fellowship” meetings. Paul had left at the church’s request, and had finally taken a job in Berkeley, a low-paying job doing community organizing. He wrote to Alan regularly, but their
relationship was over in any real sense. Paul came East for the appropriate occasions, but his life was somewhere else.

Alan hadn’t acknowledged that relief for years. Even when he was first talking to Gaby about his background, his young life, he spoke of feeling abandoned by Paul then. And of course he
was telling the truth when he said this, when he told Gaby he thought it was inexcusable that his father should have left him to the tender mercies of the likes of Lily. But that was just one
truth, one among many.

In her memoir, Lily wrote: