Jeremy Thrane (41 page)

Amanda took the envelope, unsealed the flap, and slid out the card.

“A Hallmark card?” she said, laughter catching in her throat.

“Read inside,” I said.

She flipped it open. It took her a moment, but then she looked up at me, amazed. “I don’t believe this,” she said. “Really?” She burst into tears and clasped my hand.

“What?” said Lola, taking the card from her.

Irene read it over Lola’s shoulder, moving her lips exaggeratedly, as if she were a silent-movie actress and the audience had to read her lips to figure out what it said.

“You found him,” Lola said calmly as her hand fluttered down to rest lightly on my other hand, her brown eyes clear and dry, her expression quizzical. She had been barely out of diapers when Angus had disappeared. Unlike Amanda and me, she hardly remembered him.

“I think so,” I said. “Unless it’s some other Angus Thrane about his age who used to be a lawyer in San Francisco. It’s possible, I guess.”

“But,” said Amanda, teary-eyed, “how did you get this?”

I explained about calling the American Bar Association.

“The San Juan Islands,” said Emma. “Remember, Irene? The camping trip we all took up there when Jeremy was a baby?”

“Angus didn’t seem to like it there much,” said Irene. “He complained about the weather.”

“Should we call him?” asked Amanda.

“Do you want to?” I asked.

“We could do it tomorrow,” said Lola.

“Oh, I’d like to be there,” said our mother. “For this historic moment.”

“Would you mind very much if I came too?” said Irene with her “charming” laugh, her lips pursing so much on the word “too,” I thought for a moment she was going to kiss someone. “It would be great to say hello to Angus after all these years!”

My sisters pressed each of my hands at the same time, informing me that I was expected to handle this to make up for the fact that I’d had so many perks and privileges when we were kids: more authority and power, a later bedtime, a bigger allowance.

“I think we need to call our father alone, just the three of us,” I said, looking out at the water so I didn’t have to meet my mother’s eyes. “We’ll tell you everything afterward, Mom, all the gory details.”

“Of course,” said Emma promptly, through obvious disappointment. “I completely understand.”

“That seems unfair,” Irene began querulously, but I cut her short.

“Irene,” I said. “It’s none of your business.”

All four women sighed simultaneously in a general, unanimous expression of indulgence toward me and my crabby, intolerant masculine predilections. I’d seen some or all of them react in the same way to Leonard when one of his lectures exceeded its natural limits of length and fever pitch, or Richard Rheingold at the instant when the joke he was telling became too shaggily unwieldy to sustain its weak punch line. It was a sigh of female solidarity, expressing their superiority to men, their half-fond, long-suffering comprehension of our blunt and hapless simplicity.

I stood up and silently walked away. Coming toward me along the pier were my two brothers-in-law; we met at the bench where Leonard still sat alone, and surrounded him all at once. He looked up at us. “Boys,” he said precisely.

The three of us looked at one another. “That’s us,” I said. “A bunch of guys.”

“A mess of lads,” Liam agreed.

“About time,” said Leonard, his eyebrows writhing. All four of us laughed.

“A passel of mates,” Fletcher put in heartily, a beat too late.

All around us, people were drifting along in nuzzling twosomes, drinking champagne, coming off the boat or going back onto it. A wet gust of wind came at us from the river, but the rain held off, and a moment later a low beam of sunlight struck the side of the
Skillet
with watery-gold evening light. Looking up at the railing, I saw a small crowd of guests looking down at us; the contrast of shadow and light seemed to show the sadness and terror behind their smiles, like the faces in Felicia’s paintings; the illusion was as starkly shocking as if their skulls had suddenly been revealed under their skin. Then the sun was covered by a swiftly moving cloud, and they turned back into happy wedding guests again.

Leonard stood abruptly and said to no one in particular, “All hands on deck,” then stumped his way over to the gangway.

“Maybe we should go with him,” said Liam anxiously.

He and Fletcher moved toward Leonard, flanked him, and each took one of his arms. He allowed them to lead him up to the
Skillet
and down into the hold.

I headed off the pier, back toward dry land. I lived only eight blocks away; I could easily go home and take a shower and change and spend the rest of the night in comfortable clothes that fit me and didn’t make me itch. It felt good to be back in the streets, anonymous again, a free agent. I unlocked my building’s front door and climbed up to the apartment; Scott and Matt were gone, and the place felt refreshingly small and quiet. All the excited voices, the wind off the river, the strong emotions of the ceremony, felt miles away. I stood under the hot jet of water with my eyes closed and let it pummel my skin and run off me in rivulets, down the drain.

I reboarded the
Skillet
half an hour later, my hair still damp, wearing clean black twill trousers and my favorite shirt, a long-sleeved red cotton crew neck. I went down into the belly of the boat and waited in line at the bar for a good long spell, bantering with all the other thirsty guests, staring out through the portholes at the darkening sky and river.
Finally, I wrangled another vodka on the rocks from the bartender, who by now was looking even more battered, and whose former ahoy-there-matey cheer had curdled into a parboiled resignation. Drink in hand, I went forward to stand on the catwalk. Below me, on the dance floor, a crowd of people seemed to be jumping and jogging and doing the twist. Amanda’s band was playing a raucously good-humored set that consisted primarily of requests yelled out from the dance floor, an agreeable mishmash spanning five or six decades and genres. The burly blond fellow who’d been conscripted to play guitar in Amanda’s place was, I gathered, the accordion player’s boyfriend or roommate. I liked the way he played. Instead of Amanda’s fancy plucking and strumming, he banged on his guitar as if he just wanted to get the job done as efficiently as possible, which changed the whole tenor of the band so much, it could have been a different set of musicians. He was the locomotive that drove the whole thing; he kept his movements and stage business to a minimum, conserving all his energies for making the appropriate noises on his guitar and singing in a strong, no-nonsense voice.

My skittering eye alit on the three Rheingolds, standing below, holding their drinks in their right hands at waist level, as if they were a trio of backup singers frozen mid-routine. Since the last time I’d seen her, last fall, Beatrice had chopped off all her long brown hair. She’d got herself a minimullet, short on top, long in the back, that proclaimed her sexual orientation to anyone who chose to see it; I guessed that her parents had not, and might never. Irene’s eyes were hooded, her mouth hung slightly open, her cheeks looked long and white; her unguarded expression, if that was what it was, contained equal parts loneliness and arrogance. She looked old and careworn, even though she was flanked by her family while all around her, people were dancing a free-for-all hora to “Hava Nagila,” the most cheerful minor-key song in existence. I wondered then, with sudden real curiosity, what had kept her from attending the ceremony, and realized that I would probably never know.

Liam stepped up to the microphone and gestured to Amanda, who had been hoisted aloft on a chair by a group of her friends and kept up there, despite her writhing and laughing injunctions.

“I’d like to sing a song,” Liam’s voice boomed into the mike, “for my beautiful new wife on our wedding day.”

“This’ll be lovely,” said Feckin, who had been lurking at my side for a while, looking down with me in amused silence.

“No doubt,” I said back.

Liam paused for a squeal of feedback, then cleared his throat and muttered, “A-one two three four,” and the band came crashing in right on cue. I half expected him to sing an anthem expressing his joy and relief at finally getting U.S. citizenship, but it turned out to be a simple three-chord rock song with a poppy little beat whose chorus went “Blind date, it’s a blind date, is she the one for me, I will have to see, it’s a blind date and love is blind.” Liam’s voice was hoarse and tuneless; I had somehow thought all Irishmen were born with mellifluous, resonant tenors, but maybe they’d revoked his the day he’d left the Emerald Isle. Amanda leapt down from the chair, made her way to the stage, and threw her arms around her husband; he threw his around her, and they danced cheek to cheek while he sang the rest of the song. She seemed to be crying again, judging from the quantity of mascara running down her cheeks.

“What is this?” I asked Feckin.

He smirked at me. “The theme song of a show on TV,” he said. “The one she absolutely hates.”

“She doesn’t seem to hate it today,” I said, recalling that she’d also cried at my Yeats poem, which would have made her roll her eyes if she’d been in her right mind. It was interesting that qualities she normally deplored, namely my stuffiness and Liam’s oafishness, were making her cry today; maybe the parts of the brain that controlled annoyance and sentimentality were right next to each other.

“You must be pretty depressed,” I said to Feckin, “losing your best friend to wedlock.”

“I’m not losing anyone,” he said mildly. “Why would I?”

“Don’t you have to move out of their apartment now?”

“I couldn’t do that to them,” he said. “I’m like their own feckin child.”

“How nice,” I said, “a ready-made family.”

“Believe me,” he said, “I wouldn’t do it for everyone.”

We stood there for a while, amicably enough, with nothing more to say to each other.

“See you later,” said Feckin presently. “I’m off to bum a fag.”

A moment later I saw him approach the clot of men just below me. One of them handed over a pack, shaking his head at the others. Feckin took three, stuck one into his mouth and two into his pocket; another of the men held a flame to the cigarette in Feckin’s mouth, and a cloud of smoke rose around his head. Then Feckin said something else that made them all laugh, and caused the first man to hand over his entire pack of cigarettes.

Nearby, my mother and Leonard were doing a herky-jerky shoulder-rolling sixties kind of dance to Liam’s song, laughing at each other. Suddenly, he seized her in his arms and gave her a kiss on the mouth. She seemed too taken aback to respond at first, and her arms dangled at her sides, but as he persisted, she leaned into him and embraced him back. Liam finished singing his song to Amanda; he swooped her into his arms and carried her off the stage to wild applause. The guitar player said something to the rest of the band and made a brief motion with his head to indicate a new rhythm, and they segued smoothly into an old country song with a three-four beat. My mother and Leonard began to waltz as the guitar player sang the lyrics in his warm, gritty voice. I noticed that he neither fondled the microphone nor made pained, self-important faces; he comported himself with the same unadorned quietude whether he was playing the guitar or taking a break, singing or not. He seemed to feel no need to leap around like an idiot or call attention to himself.

It dawned on me that I was in danger of developing a crush on him, so I tore my eyes away from his strong shoulders and fetching face and made my way aft to the bar and found the end of the line for drinks. At long last, when I’d collected a new drink, I continued upstairs to the deck, where I wandered around for a while, eavesdropping, chatting when I had to, taking the warm, river-smelling air into my lungs as I watched the lights sliding along the surface of the water. The river rocked and lapped against the rusty hull; the boards of the pier creaked, rising and falling with the waves.

After a while I found myself climbing the steps to the wheel room, which was empty except for a pile of instrument cases. I perched in the high, swiveling captain’s chair and spun the big wheel a few times,
played with the knobs of the defunct controls, then put my feet up on the dashboard or whatever it was called and leaned back and looked through the enormous, greasy windshield. A few minutes later, it began to rain. The river and lights blurred together in a sheer wash that ran down the glass. The roof overhead roared dully. When I heard footsteps coming up to the wheel room, I whisked my feet guiltily off the dashboard as if it were the coffee table in someone’s living room. I sat up straighter in the chair and began to swivel it back and forth casually with my hips, whistling to myself, just having a pleasant solitary moment before I rejoined the wedding party.

“Hey,” said the guitar player as his well-shaped head appeared in the doorway. “There you are.”

“Hello,” I said with a gladness I couldn’t disguise.

“I wanted to find you,” he said, “to say hello.”

“I’m Jeremy. Amanda’s brother.”

He came in, holding his guitar by its neck, and put it into its case. “I know,” he said. “We’ve met a few times over the years.”

I looked at him, considering.

“I was there last fall,” he said helpfully, trying to jog my memory, “when you fainted at Bombshell. I helped you up. Anyway, my name is Henry Tolliver.”

I squinted at him, casting back; his face swam out of the liquid darkness of memory at me, but I couldn’t see it clearly enough to know for sure.

“I would remember meeting you,” I said, resisting the urge to inform him that he had the same last name as poor drowned Maggie in
The Mill on the Floss
.

“Maybe not,” he said, and shrugged, smiling. “I don’t take it personally.” He came forward to stare through the windshield at New Jersey with me. “Did you know,” he said, “that this used to be a lightship, like a mobile lighthouse, that went out in storms to help foundering boats get back into the harbor? Sort of like a sheepdog. That’s what the bartender just told me.”