Chapter 3.

"A Letter for Emily"

Chapter 3. Their Father

“Yes,” he anticipated. “I know the way. Remember, I grew up here…”

Ellse had drawn a map as if Unca Pete weren’t competent enough to follow back roads of Essex County near Paragon Lake, or bright enough to remember the turn-off at the sign near Penrose Pond. By her directions, she would have had him drive nearly as far as Tigandernock, then double back past Street Road, entering Kings Point Village from the east near Lake Champouix. This despite the geographical fact that the road from Potterbrook came in from the west.

“You people with doctorates,” she would say in accusatory tones. “No common sense!”

And he had heard that so often, he would bow his heard and wait for it to blow over. It was, of course, a load of rubbish. Nor were the Ph.D.’s he knew, less than spectacular, the best of them, in their personal appearance and poise, although the pubic envisioned pale skinned, pencil-limbed nerds barely able to tie their own shoelaces.

The white Beetle swung hard into a narrow byway, and the forest that kept a respectable distance along the Northway, seemed less timid and quite capable of swallowing any who dared the unmarked road in the wrong season.

Of course, The Forest Primeval, took on a sinister darkness in winter months, annually engulfing whole, those few City drivers who ventured out unawares. Not every year and not many, but enough to give a wary man pause, he thought to himself. It was a matter of respect and caution, not fear.

Everyone had heard the stories, even those far removed and years away from the North County: it could kill. The salesman from Westchester County who strayed too far north from the Grand Duchess Hotel in the center of River Falls across from the city park and bandstand. Lost his way in the North Country an hour before a blizzard. They say his gasoline gave out as he tried to find his way. Then he realized he’d left his coat at the hotel.

But that had been in the dead of winter, not late July when the greens were their thickest, and the water just warm enough to bathe.

Top down, the bright convertible spinning around shaded corners, he mused how he had been of these forests, playing among the roots of their trees as a child. The summer he’d spent up this way clearing brush from the historical excavation site outside the Revolutionary War fortress of Kings Point. High school was it? Years back. British Light Infantry redoubts, cannon balls and lost shards of rum bottles.

He had tramped the numbingly cold streams, anyway, the waterfalls and willows. The thought gave him a chill and his arms shivered involuntarily.

Weather and season brought it back, that infallible directional sense on one’s former turf, the perfect intuition of which turn to make even if he was logically unsure of the best turn. Nonverbal, he told himself.

Something about the streams and waterfalls up here, clear and cool.

Past Penrose Museum and other decaying Greek Revival hulls of ancient farm mansions, past the creeks and brooks where they had waded as children and lovers. Past the yards and rusting automobiles.

Architect E. Glenn Banting’s brick federal 1830s-era farmstead appeared down the road, and he pulled closer and into the drive off Factoryville Road. He looked around, recalling Civil War era iron ore mines, long past ruin and overgrown, past desertion, past renovation as historic sites the elder Mr. Banting and even his grandfather Dr. Banting had struggled to establish, and past exploratory state funding for the dig sites he had worked as a teenager. It was the kind of house an Ivy-educated architect might have chosen, even if he had married into it after divorcing his mother.

His second wife had once married a middle-aged, wealthy businessman when she was still in her teens, and had done well after his death with a controlling interest in real estate and insurance.

Twenty years. Could it really have been twenty years since E. Glenn had divorced his mother, since the wedding here on this very lawn where he’d danced under blue and white striped tents, where the band had played, where he had hung, suspended between loathing the treachery of remarriage and the old man’s right to be happy?

E. Glenn would be here, somewhere. Beyond the cats pacing the breezeway, the open screen door promising sound and life within. Near the shouting of a woman whom he knew to be his stepmother. Yes, Joyce; his father’s wife.

E. Glenn was in. Unca Pete’s filial duty. To stop, especially with E. Glenn in remission. Could it really have been twenty years? Twenty years that added equal parts to an ex-wife’s bitterness and a son’s forgiveness.

And to that wedding all those years before he brought a girl. That girl from Maine. That girl in the summer research program where the cook, coming to camp early, had seen his footprints in the dew leading directly back from her cabin to his.

“Son!” cried E. Glenn, interrupting his son’s train of lurid images on some coastal beach that summer long past. Each in turn looked the other over, circling slightly, appraising. Both steady, but looking at his father, Unca Pete knew it could have been worse with him.

And E. Glenn, arching his eyebrows behind gold frames, fumbled to turn up his hearing aid.

“What?” he asked as much with eyes as much as his voice.

Inside, Joyce had not turned away from the counter, joined in the conversation behind her back. She had reclaimed E. Glenn from his personal, emotional and financial ruin, and his son was glad of that much. Back to Kings Point from River Falls on the Hudson, back to her first husband’s brokerage, back to that tiny brick mansion that so suited them both.

“How’s your family?” asked his father ungenerously.

Unca Pete smiled it off, shrugging slightly. “Lydia grows taller by the day, and she’ such a little slip of a thing. My wife’s classes and medical school are going well, thanks.”

E. Glenn lifted his head to stare through the bifocals and asked again.

“She’s a trooper. Both of them are. Can’t wait to get back to Alabama myself,” said E. Glenn’s son with a mix of admiration and wistfulness.

“Sure you won’t have dinner with us, Peter?” Joyce broke in, as usual speaking far too loudly as had become her habit as Glens had lost his hearing.

“Really, thank you. We just finished a birthday roaster with cake at Ellie’s with Trapp. Something to drink would do for now.”

“Join me in a toddy?” offered E. Glenn, turning his head away from a cabinet from which he just taken a bottle.

Alcoholism and manic depression run together in families, the son reminded himself. Any genetics professor knew that.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Pete lied. He was dying for a beer, but tea would look better. In fact, he knew how much he drank: almost as much as Glenn.

As darkness dimmed the greens and golds illuminating the bay window, the three sat, each with his small folding table. Pete watched Joyce talking to the television as she ate, her cheers raising and boosting the gymnasts toward their Gold Medals.

“What’s new with Flight Eight Hundred?” Pete asked no one in particular.

“Not much,” she shouted excitedly to deride the investigation. E. Glenn had been busy washing a slab of sirloin down with bourbon.

He glanced from one to the other, past the Olympics from Atlanta, and marveled secretly how well these two accommodated one another. He was quietly grateful for the strength of this loud, brassy woman. E. Glenn was well-attended.

As dinner ended, the perfection of the match amused him.

The Loud, as Mate to the Deaf.

“You’ll stay in Mother’s Room, won’t you?” E. Glenn commented.

Suppose so.

With that old twinge, he recalled he was uncertain whether he had slept in Grandmother’s Room and was suddenly abashed. Gramma no longer heard or saw well, and her recent mutterings contained nothing more recent than the Second World War. Or, so they said since she’d been removed to Moses Luddington Hospital nursing care.

He had once written her and corresponded with her, and she wrote back as well, but that was years back. His last letters had never reached her, although E. Glenn had made a point to demand he write every time he, himself, phoned, and for years.

She had been moved to the nursing home when her needs exceeded what Glenn and Joyce could offer at home.

He glanced down at tea poured , the water boiled, and he felt at ease.

Tea.

Tea was always her treat, with Gramma. As a young man, he had often visited his elegant Southern grandmother-poet, and they had chatted over tea, completely oblivious of his construction clothes and heavy work boots.

She had been a lady.

He sipped and felt at ease again as the warm liquid slid down his throat.

Neither was watching and the flickering of the screen caught his eye as the others talked vaguely.

“Try some?” E. Glenn turned in his direction, lifting a juice glass with unsteady hands.

Unca Pete squinted enough to ascertain the color as midway between dark olive and oily black, reminding him of dams being mucked out at Potterbrook, his revulsion masked by politeness.

Joyce explained the therapeutic mix of ginseng with bean sprouts, sold as a vitamin supplement for prostate cancer.

“We have to keep that PSA at zero,” Joyce said with a look of fearful concern and no small exasperation. E. Glenn downed it like a child taking milk

Pete could not grasp what it meant, but E. Glenn’s complexion looked, well, awful.

Yellow.

Orange.

A nasty color when a man’s black hair and heavy bluish beard went to snow.

For an instant, he wanted back the younger man his father had been. The one who had climbed the highest of the Adirondacks with the ADK Mountaineering Club, who stood against the snowy summit in a red flap-eared cap. The one who ruled dinners when his mother was young.

Pete’s uneasiness faded to answers about lawyers, and when the thing would be over, and how much.

Would he have to sue?

Sue.

Sue.

All those months waiting.

And that night, he fell asleep to dreams of brooks flowing and large white cars.

* * *