The Distinguished Guest (28 page)

Linnett nodded drunkenly, a diminishing series of bobs of the head. “Yeah, I see your point.”

After a moment, Alan said, “There must be an up side to this, Gabs.”

“Oh, I am not complaining,” Gaby said. “Only observing.”

“It gives you a lot of freedom though, if you think about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, the accent marks you as foreigner, of course, and therefore . . . I don’t know. Not part of the American dialogue.”

“Well, thank you very much,” Gaby said, in mock affront.

“No, you know what I mean, I think. There are, for instance, rules for Americans, we’re sort of silenced about this and that. Particularly, like this afternoon, the racial stuff. And
you don’t have to honor that silence.”

“I was not even aware of it.”

“That’s what Alan’s saying, I think, Gaby,” Linnett said.

He laughed, sharply, and after a moment, said, “But also, more than your being unaware, I don’t think a person like Marcea would hold you so accountable for what you might
say.”

“Pffft,” Gaby said. “There’s nothing I could possibly say that could offend Marcea anyway.”

“Well, I’d argue that with you, but not effectively, I think.”

Gaby had just opened her mouth to answer when Lily’s bell rang, a faint tinkling under the sound of the storm. “Ah, excuse me,” she said. She got up and crossed the room.

Instantly Alan got up too, and pretended to be busy again in the kitchen. He didn’t want to have to talk to Linnett.

It turned out that Lily felt too tired to come to the table. Alan helped Gaby fix a tray, and she took it back into the guest room. When she came back, Alan poured the soup into the warm tureen
and brought it to the table, and they sat down and started their dinner at last. Outside the storm was steady. They spoke of it, of Marcea driving back to Providence.

Gaby got up and began to sauté the scallops for the warmed salad. Above the hiss and sizzle, she spoke loudly. “This will just be a moment. I hope you’re not starving to
death.”

“No, no,” Linnett said. “The soup was so good.” Then, after a moment she began to speak about her impending departure, at the end of the week she thought. She had to
report for jury duty.

In the way she pronounced
du-ty
, Alan heard that she’d crossed the line into true drunkenness. Either he or Gaby would have to drive her home.

“Well, you can always hope they’ll reject you,” he said. “If you’re at all educated, they usually do.”

“Oh, but no, I love jury duty,” she said. “Just the circumstances of it. You know, getting up in the morning and going to a place where there are other people, and grousing
about the weather or someone or other’s incompetence. It’s like the real world again. Like having a job. I hope they
do
pick me.”

“Last time Alan was called, he was turned away,” Gaby said. She’d brought the salad bowl to the table. A citrusy aroma rose from it as she began to dish it out onto their
plates.

“No,” Alan was saying. “Last time I
did
serve. And it was the stupidest thing I ever heard. Remember? It all centered on a curb cut. This guy was suing the town because
his neighbor got a curb cut. I’d never truly understood what boredom was before that trial.”

“I’d forgotten that one,” Gaby said. “I was thinking of the one when we were still in Boston.” She passed their plates.

“Ah, that one.” He turned to Linnett. “That one was a homicide. Murder. I was glad not to have to decide it.”

“God, no. Someone’s whole
life
in your hands.”

Gaby sat down and they began to eat.

Linnett began to tell a jury-duty story, one of her own, but Alan was barely listening. He was remembering the kid, the black kid charged with murder. He was powerful-looking, short and
thick-necked. It was the early seventies, an era when he might have been expected to have an Afro, but his hair was clipped short. He wore glasses, horn-rimmed glasses, and a suit. He and his
lawyer, a white woman in
her
glasses,
her
suit, conferred briefly about each potential juror, and Alan remembered their eyes on him as the judge, a polite, seemingly offhand man,
asked him a few questions about what he did, about his training as an architect. Though he was relieved when the judge said he was dismissed, he was oddly disappointed too, as though his ability to
be impartial, to be fair to this young man—to be his defender, if that’s the way it played out—had been questioned. He wanted to explain himself. “I believe in
innocence,” he wanted to say.

Later Alan had looked in the paper for news of the kid, but he never found a mention of the trial. Apparently it was an ordinary murder, a routine case. Whether the kid was guilty or not, it
wasn’t worth writing up.

When Linnett got up to go to the bathroom, she started walking before she was fully settled on her crutches, and one of them flipped out from under her arm. She nearly fell, and Alan and Gaby
half-rose simultaneously, and then slowly sat down again as she adjusted herself and moved away down the hall.

“I’ll drive her home if you like,” Alan said in a lowered tone. “She shouldn’t go alone.”

Gaby smiled. “I don’t like.”

“Oh, come on, Gaby.”

“No, it isn’t that, really. It’s just so awful out. I mean, just look.” They sat for a moment looking mostly at their own reflections in the glass, but suddenly conscious
too of the noise of the storm around them. “We could just put her in Thomas and Etienne’s room,” Gaby suggested. “The beds are made up.”

“If she’ll agree.”

“I’ll insist. I’m very good at that. With my adorable little French accent.”

“All right,” he said. He stood and began to clear the table.

Gaby lowered her own voice. “She likes to drink, I think.”

“It’s probably easy, when you live alone, to get in the habit of having too much.”

“Yes, but we held dinner off for too long. I feel responsible.”

“Well, but who knew about Lily?”

After a moment’s silence, Gaby said, “She seems completely exhausted. Poor old thing.”

“She has for a couple of days, don’t you think?”

“Still. Was she terribly upset this afternoon?”

“I don’t know.” They heard the bathroom door opening and Linnett starting down the hall toward them. “She was so tired it was hard to tell. But she wanted me to defend
her, I think. The way she sees things. And I couldn’t.”

Gaby nodded and touched his hand as Linnett sat down again.

They were still sitting at the table at about nine-thirty when the telephone rang. Alan answered it. It was Marcea McKendrick, apologizing if she was interrupting or bothering them.

“Not at all,” Alan said. He felt an odd excitement at hearing her voice—perhaps that her goodbye hadn’t been the final one, that he might have another chance. To what? He
didn’t know.

“It’s just, I had the radio on,” she said, “fixing a snack, and I heard that this storm that’s coming in? That it’s like a hurricane. Hurricane force, anyhow.
And it didn’t seem like you knew that. It’s supposed to hit the whole coastline tomorrow. That’s what they said.” Her voice thrilled as the bearer’s of bad tidings
often does.

“When?” Alan asked. “Tomorrow?”

“Yeah, they think like late morning or early afternoon? Anyway, I wanted you to know.”

“Well, yes, thanks. We sure
didn’t
know. We’re still just sitting around the table.”

“Well, I’m glad I called then.” There was a pause. “Good luck,” she said after a few seconds.

“Yes,” he said. “And thanks again.”

He had barely finished telling Gaby and Linnett when the telephone rang again. Thomas. He’d been watching TV with a friend when they interrupted the program with an alert. “They
showed it on the map, Dad, the possible trajectories. And you’re sitting right in the middle of one of them.” His voice was nearly breaking in his excitement. Behind him, Alan could
hear Gaby doing her insisting to Linnett.

“Do you want me to come down?” Thomas asked.

“Definitely not,” Alan said. “It’s got to be very bad driving, and there’s not that much to do anyway. I want you to stay right there.”

“We could get hit too,” Thomas said enthusiastically.

“Well, you can always hope,” Alan said.

“It
is
kinda cool,” Thomas said.

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Hey, you kinda think so too, don’t you?”

“I do and I don’t. But I know what you mean, son.”

By the time Ettie called at a little past eleven, Lily and Linnett were sleeping. Alan and Gaby had been busy for an hour or more. They’d brought all the deck and yard furniture into the
house. The living room was crowded with the odd collection, there was barely room to move around. They had started to tape the windows.

Gaby answered the phone, and Alan could tell by the way her voice widened with pleasure who it was. While she spoke to Ettie, she moved around the kitchen area, loading the main dishwasher,
wiping the countertops. They didn’t talk very long, though Alan heard her ask about the internship, and about when he would come home. She laughed then, and said, “Yes, if we’re
still here.”

When she came back to help Alan, she said, “He saw it on the eleven o’clock news.”

“How is he?” Alan asked.

“He sounds very good,” she said. “But then, he always does.”

Alan was struck by the truth of this.

Before they went to sleep, Alan and Gaby lay in bed for a while listening for news of the storm on the radio. (The television was in Thomas and Etienne’s room because Gaby disapproved of
it. One of Alan’s occasional and intense pleasures was lying in sheets that smelled of his sons, and watching whatever it was Gaby wasn’t interested in, usually sports.)

A few seconds after Alan turned off the light, Gaby said, “Well, we have done what we can.”

“Not quite,” Alan answered. “I’ve got the Admundsens’ house to think of too, and it’s a lot more exposed than we are.”

“Oh, Alan, of course! And the windows are just in! What will you do?”

“I’m going to head over in the morning, if it seems like there’s going to be time.”

“I will come and help you,” she said instantly.

After a moment, he said, “What about Lily?”

“Oh, Lily!”

They lay side by side. The rain drummed steadily on the roof and the deck.

Gaby spoke. “I’ll see if I can bring her to Noreen’s.” She had turned to him, he could hear the change in her voice. “That would be better anyway, Alan. It’s
that much farther inland.” Noreen lived in North Bowman, seven or eight miles up the road, in one of several developed areas of neat, nearly identical small houses.

“Yeah. You’re right. If Noreen will take her.”

“I’m sure she will. And then I’ll come over and help you.”

“Well, we’ll see. There may not be time for any of this.”

After a few minutes, she said, “It was sweet that the boys called, wasn’t it?” Her voice was slow. And then her breathing thickened, elongated, and he was alone. The rain
drummed and pocked the roof, slowed, then sometimes struck it fiercely, a watery bludgeon. Alan thought of the day ahead of him, of the confusion of the day past.

It
was
sweet that the boys had called. He saw their faces in his mind’s eye, the curious way they looked like brothers without resembling each other in the least.

He thought of Marcea then, of her call, her voice relaxed and open on the phone. He remembered the way her face had closed when Linnett told her he’d been beaten up. But she’d
called, called to warn them. He’d felt, he realized a kind of blessing when he heard her voice again, the sense of something having been forgiven. He had spoken, and she’d forgiven
him.

He thought of his own father suddenly, that last time he’d seen him, the gray-yellow death color of his skin, the tears that rose in his eyes when he coughed. How he stopped Alan from
speaking then, from saying what he felt.

Which would have been what?

After all, he really didn’t know, he realized. Maybe, in his youth, he had just wanted to hurt Paul, as he felt then that Paul had hurt him.

Rebecca had had a fight with Paul once, at the dinner table. Paul had casually asserted that all whites were guilty of racism, and Rebecca had turned on him, had said something about how in her
childhood, Paul would have defended her passionately against such a charge. When, she asked him, had everything changed? How was it that she had somehow, magically, become a racist? Was it
conferred on her with adulthood? Or maybe when she got her period?

Alan had been thrilled by this. Lying in bed now, he remembered Rebecca, as he hadn’t in years. He saw her face, handsome, dark. The long Maynard nose. Thomas looked a bit like her, he
thought.

She was personalizing things, Paul had said. He was talking about something else, something larger.

“Oh, Daddy, it’s always something larger, something larger. I’m tired of there never being any small truths. That’s what I believe in.”

Alan had never come close to such speech. Or the closest he’d come had been tonight, uselessly, with Lily. He saw her again, her utter collapse when he spoke the truth at last. His small,
small truth. In the dark, he winced.

Was this his revenge, he wondered, to speak it, this overdue truth? Or had he just been showing off—for Marcea? for Linnett?

And what truth anyway? Surely he wasn’t interested in
that
small truth, that wasn’t the issue, that he’d been beaten up.

What hope was there anyway in his life, at this point, and with that audience, for anything like a larger truth that connected to his story?

He turned in bed. He was suddenly seeing in his mind’s eye himself as a young man, encircled on the dark street, the shocking, naked hatred on the faces as they began to hit him. He
remembered his own sense of innocence then, confused at first—how could this be happening,
to me?
—and then, as the blows fell and the plume of pain unfurled, blinding and raging
and clear. After they left, after the last stabbing kick against his head, the piercing pain in his jaw, he’d lain there, curled up at first, and then on his back, looking up at the night
sky, black behind the angry screen of orangy city light, and he felt the relief, the pure joy, of having survived. But much more. The hard bright clarity of his own pain, of knowing that this, this
could not be altered or confused or taken away from him.
Mine
, he had thought, tasting his own blood, swiveling his tongue against his yielding teeth. Mine.