The Summer Guest (3 page)

He filled a basket with logs and returned to the house. As he entered, the first thing he noticed was the smell: the dry, dusty scent of old air rising through the floor vents on waves of heat. He found Amy at the kitchen table, Joey nestled on her lap; she was spooning watery cereal into the little boy’s mouth.

“How did you…?”

She looked up, her lips pressed in a smile she could not contain; he could tell she was delighted with her surprise. “It wasn’t so hard,” she said dismissively, and wiped the boy’s chin with a rag. “There were instructions on the burner. The oil tank is practically full. And look.”

She rose and carried the baby across the room to the cook’s desk; on the shelf above it sat an old, cathedral-style radio. The dial was yellowed from years of heat from the radio’s tubes. She turned the knob and Joe heard static as the tubes heated up, then, rising behind it like a cloud, a strange and distant music-fiddles, an accordion or hand organ, bells that chimed with a hollow, concussive sound. It was a sort of music he had never heard before. So far north, the station was probably Canadian.

Amy was holding the baby against her chest; she took his tiny hand in hers and, still holding him against her, swayed back and forth, dancing in place.

“What do you think?” she asked the baby. “How about a little dance with your mother?” She looked at Joe, her face pleased. “There was a package of fuses by the box,” she explained. “I guessed which one and got it right.”

He removed his gloves and sat at the kitchen table, stunned. Already the room was warm enough for shirtsleeves. Holding the baby, Amy took three steps across the room in time to the music, turned with a flourish, and took three steps back.

“Well, that’s the way to do it, I guess.”

“Don’t just sit there with your mouth open,” she said, still dancing. “I’m not a child, you know. What’s the matter with Daddy?” she said to the little boy. “Does he think Mommy’s a baby? Does he? Are you the baby, or is Mommy? Hmm?”

He laughed and shook his head. Gone so long; of course she would have learned to do such things. He recalled how in one of her letters she had mentioned, casually but with unmistakable pride, that she had changed a tire on the car.

“I’m sorry. I know you’re not.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, save your apologies.” She shooed him out of the kitchen. “Go set us a fire while I make breakfast.”

They had powdered eggs and coffee, and Spam fried up with butter on the stove. They were clearing away the dishes when water began to pour in.

“Ice dams on the roof!” He was yanking every pot he could find from the kitchen cabinets and tossing them onto the floor. “We turned on the heat, and now everything behind them is melting and backing up under the shingles. Goddamnit!” They scurried around the lodge doing their best to catch the leaking water, which seemed to come from everywhere-down the window jambs, along the crown molding, even out of the light fixtures. The problem was more than ice dams, he realized. The roof was full of holes.

“So, what do you know about roofing?” he asked her.

“Heating and electricity only,” she answered, and passed him a pot: it was all a great adventure, suddenly, a game without consequences. “The rest, I’m sorry to say, is up to you.”

He went outside into the snow and found a crowbar and an old wooden ladder in the shed. The snow at the base of the eaves was at least a yard deep; he pushed the base of the ladder into it, then stepped on the lowest exposed rung and ascended, crowbar in hand. Amy watched from the ground with the baby in her arms as he banged away at the ice that had backed up over the gutters. Chips flew everywhere, diamondlike bits that gleamed in the sun. He made his way across the front of the lodge, hammering off the ice in chunks, then took a shovel up to the roof to push off the snow.

“Be careful, Joe.”

The roof was steeply pitched, but in the soggy snow he found his footing. Whole areas of shingling had rotted away. Here and there someone had covered the worst of it with a tarp, but even this was nearly gone, frayed and ruined from exposure.

“It’s a mess up here,” he called down. “The whole thing will probably have to be reshingled.”

“Please, just leave it, Joe. You’ll break your neck up there.”

It was almost funny: after all that had happened, she was worried he’d fall off a roof. He climbed to the apex, where he dared to stand upright, one foot positioned on either side of the roof’s crest for balance. The frozen lake stretched away from him like a huge china platter, the sunlight blazing so brightly off its surface he could barely absorb it; on the far shore, dense woods marched up the hillsides and away, into ice and nothingness, the very top of the world. The cloudless sky was the color of cobalt, so blue he felt he could suck the whole thing into his lungs, breathe it in and out and become a part of it.

“Joe, for god’s sake. Get down from there.”

“It’s spectacular!” he cried out. “Unbelievable!”

“Never mind that, just get down.”

At last he inched down the roof on his backside and descended the ladder, breathless.

“We’ll need to call somebody to fix this. Or at least get the worst of the holes covered.” He was so energized he could barely contain the sensation. Of course he would try to reshingle the roof himself. The hammer in his fist, the tool belt at his waist weighed down with nails, the hours of intensely focused labor: each sensation was as precisely drawn in his mind as if it had already happened. Fixing a roof: how hard could it be?

“Amy, you’ve got to see the view,” he said.

“Are you crazy? I’m not going up there.”

He thought a moment. “Maybe there’s another way.” He took the baby from her arms. “Come on.”

He led her into the house and upstairs to the staff quarters, which they had not yet explored. Five tiny bedrooms tucked under the eaves: he selected a door on the north side, facing the lake, and opened it. The room was a disaster. Some small animal, a squirrel or chipmunk or even something the size of a raccoon, had gotten in, leaving tufts of fur and debris scattered everywhere. On the bureau sat an empty whiskey bottle, and beside it, an ashtray full of butts. The mattress was bare and stained. It was the same room where Joe had slept the summer before law school, when he had worked at the camp as a dishwasher.

“What a mess,” Amy said, and wrinkled her nose. A look of alarm crossed her face and she quickly took the baby from him and backed out the door. “Do you think it’s still in here?”

He pointed to the ceiling, where scraps of wood had been nailed over the hole that led, Joe knew, to a crawl space, and above it, the threadbare roof. “I doubt it. Whatever it was, it’s long gone.”

He stepped inside, ducking his head under the narrow eaves of sagging plaster, and over to the room’s only window. Outside was a broad overhang, like a terrace; he had passed countless summer nights there, sitting and smoking, alone or with other employees of the camp, young men like him on a lark between college and whatever came next, talking about girls or their plans for the future or even, as some believed, the coming war. He had even kissed a girl up there once, a waitress at the camp; for a languid hour they had listened to the loons and kissed one another under the stars, like a scene in a movie, but she had a boyfriend in town, and that was as far as things had gone. He had actually convinced himself he was in love with her, and for weeks he had moped about it. But then, in the last days of summer, he had driven with some of the staff down to Blue Hill for a Labor Day dance and spent the night talking at a table with a friend’s cousin, a girl from Back Bay with intense gray eyes who was studying piano at the Conservatory. When he returned the next week to Boston he phoned her, and within a year he and Amy were married and living together in student housing across from Harvard Stadium.

The room had a small desk and chair; he pulled the chair over to the window, opened it, and bent his back low to step outside. The overhang, exposed to the sun, was clear of snow. It was almost six feet wide, and yet the urge to keep his weight low was strong; in his knees he felt the gathering softness of his fear, the absurd belief that somehow he would pitch forward into space. He pushed this thought aside and stood upright, filling his chest with air: below and before him he beheld, once more, the lake and woods, and beyond it, unseen but felt, the border across which had issued the morning’s strange music. He could still hear it in his head, the way the high notes of the fiddle had seemed to dance over and around the bass line of thumping bells. He turned and reached through the open window to help Amy up.

She frowned, incredulous. “You’re kidding.”

“Not a bit.”

“You think I’m going out there? I am not.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. We used to come out here all the time.” The happiness he’d felt all morning was still building within him. It seemed to course through his very veins. He could do anything; anything was possible. “Hand me Joey first. Then I can pull you up with my free hand.”

On tiptoes she lifted herself to peer out the window. At last she groaned in surrender and lifted the baby toward him.

“Please, Joe, be careful.”

He took the baby from her. Their little boy was wearing a blue snowsuit with silhouetted reindeers dancing across it, and a cap that Amy had pulled down over his ears and forehead so that only his face showed. His hands were bare; clipped mittens dangled from his sleeves. Joe settled his son into the crook of one elbow, then lowered himself again to the window to offer Amy his free hand. But she shook her head and bent her back low, as he had done, gripping the window frame to pull herself through.

“Just don’t drop him,” she warned. She blew the air from her lungs and rocked her weight back with one foot on the chair. “This is absolutely the stupidest thing we’ve ever done, bar none.”

He wanted to laugh. “You’ll see.”

She gave herself a pull and at once she was up and outside, beside him. As he watched her, the fear melted from her eyes. In its place he saw the pure radiance of her astonishment.

“For the love of God, Joe.”

The first day, he thought. For all their lives, in hours dark and light, this was the day they would always remember. In his arms, in the bright sunlight, his little boy looked at him inquiringly, as if to say; why am I on this roof?

“For this,” Joe said, and held him high, to show him what was his.

Everybody has a story, so here is mine-the story of me and Kate and old Harry Wainwright, and the woods and lake where all of this takes place. My name: Jordan Heronimus Patterson Jr., son of the late Captain Jordan Heronimus Patterson Sr., USN, both of us Virginia born and bred, though now I live here, in the North Woods of Maine, where I make my living as a fishing guide. My father, a Navy pilot, loved the air, as I love what’s beneath it-the sun and light and snow and mountains of this remote place, and the big trout under the water. To meet me, you might think I must be simple, or unambitious, or just plain lazy, a grown man who fishes for a living; that is, a man who plays. When I take a party out on the lake, or downriver for the last of the spawning runs when they’ll still take a streamer, the man may ask me, or the woman if there is a woman, “What else do you do?” Or, “Do you really stay up here all winter?” A question I don’t hold against them, because I’m young, just thirty, and here is far from anywhere, the hardness of winter plain to see even on the sweetest summer afternoon in the twisted way the pines grow; they’re asking about movies and restaurants and stores, of course, all the things they love, so it’s natural to ask it: What else do I do? So I tell them about taking care of the boats and cabins, and hunting parties in the fall, which I’ll do if I have to but don’t really care for; and I may throw in a thing or two about college, how I didn’t mind going when I was there (University of Maine at Orono, class of 1986, B.S. in economics with a minor in forestry, thank you very much); and the man will nod, or the woman, thinking: Why, here’s a man of no account! And for one silent second they’re me, and happy because of it, and then they’ll ask me where to fish or what pattern to use on the line, and they’ll catch something because of what I tell them and go home to Boston or New York or even Los Angeles, and I’ll stay here as the snow piles up, something I can’t explain to anyone, not even to myself.

And if I sound as if I don’t like these people, that isn’t at all true. The camp is far north, four hours by car from Portland and tricky to find, and the people who will make such a journey are serious about fishing. They are rich, most of them, a fact they cannot hide; one sees the evidence in their cars, their clothes, the good leather of their luggage and shoes. It’s large what’s between us, make no mistake, and I know that to such people I am just another body for hire, like the nanny who raises their children, the broker who sells them the stocks that make them more money, the lawyer they retain when they wish to divorce. But because they are rich enough to have these things, they are gracious to me, even respect me, for I know what they do not: where the fish are and what they are likely to take. For this they rent me, body and soul, at two hundred fifty dollars a day, a hundred fifty for the half, as pure a bargain as I know about, and dirt cheap if truth be told.

There are regulars, too, people who come up here every year at the times they like best: early summer for the big mayfly hatches, or else the long dry days of August, after the blackflies have gone, the days are as crisp as a butterfly on pins, and the fish have wised up and aren’t especially hungry besides-not the easiest time to catch them, but that’s not why these folks are here, and not why I’m here, either. Which brings me to the last summer I saw Harry Wainwright-the Harrison P. Wainwright, he of the thirty-odd consecutive summers, the Forbes 500 and the NYSE and all the rest-who came up here at last to die.

We put on the dog for lifers like Harry Wainwright, which up here is really just a state of mind, since there’s no way to be fancy. The cabins are identical, rustic and spare, each with a couple of creaky cots, a potbellied stove, and a tippy porch on the water with a view across it to the mountains. What I mean is, we’re ready to see him, glad as hell to see him, because lifers like Harry are the bread and butter of a place like ours; we can’t afford to advertise, and don’t have a mind to anyway, having never bothered to begin with. At the time I’m speaking of, Harry was probably seventy, though until he’d gotten sick he’d aged easily, like the rich man he was. He owned a string of discount drugstores in the South and Midwest (I’d heard it said that if you bought a bottle of aspirin anywhere from Atlanta to Omaha, you probably paid Harry Wainwright for the privilege), and a lot of other things besides, a veritable empire of goods and services in which I had no stake, except for what he paid me as a guide. He hardly needed one; he’d fished this spot since Kennedy was in the White House and knew it as well as any man alive. His tips, always embarrassingly huge, were just another way of expressing his pure happiness to be here.

Did he impress me? Who wouldn’t be impressed by Harry Wainwright?

So, the story: In rolls Harry, whom we all knew was dying of cancer, late on an August afternoon in the Year of Our Lord 1994, with his second (i.e., younger) wife, his son and tiny granddaughter, all heaped into a big rented Suburban to haul them up from the airport in Portland with their gear: as beautiful a family as ever I’ve seen. The day’s just tipped toward evening, the best time to arrive, and it’s late enough in the season that the birches and striped maples are just beginning to turn in bright crowns of yellow and red, set against the blue, blue sky. Harry is stretched out on the second seat, his back propped against the door with pillows, like old Ramses himself; Harry Jr. (who goes by Hal) is driving; second wife Frances is in the passenger seat; January (named for the month of her birth or the month of her conception, take your pick) is tucked into her comfy car seat in the way back; the car cruises down the long drive. Everybody loves the last eight miles: when you finally arrive, it’s like you’ve already done something, like the fun’s already started.

We were expecting him, of course. The night before, we all sat down for a meeting, after Joe had taken the call from Hal, saying Harry wanted to come up, short notice he knew but was there space, and so on. We met in the dining room after supper: me, Joe’s wife, Lucy, who ran the kitchen and took care of the books, and their daughter, Kate, who was a junior at Bowdoin and worked in the summers as a guide, and Joe told us what he knew-that Harry had cancer and wanted to fish. The rest, about dying, was in there, but nothing he dared say. The next afternoon Hal called us from a pay phone in town to tell us they were thirty minutes away, so when the car came down the drive, Kate and Joe and I were waiting for them.

Still, when Hal opened the old man’s door, it was a shock, and for a moment I thought maybe we’d all missed something and they were bringing his body up for burial-though a man like Harry Wainwright should go to his reward in a pharaoh’s robes, not the frayed khakis and tennis shoes and ratty blue sweater, all of it looking pale and loose, that he had on. The sight of a rich man dying is one to shake all your assumptions about a free market economy; here is something-life, health, a fresh set of orders for maniac cells run amok-that can’t be bought. As Hal swung the door wide we all held our breaths a little, deciding how to be normal, looking at the sneakers, white as the underbellies of two freshly bagged trout. Hal gave Joe’s hand and then my own a solid shake-as I said, he’s a good-looking man, his hair gone prematurely silver and tied in a hipster ponytail, the skin around his eyes handsomely crinkled from squinting out over the world’s warm waters at all times of year-and then said loudly, to me and everybody else, “Pop? Jordan ’s here to help us get you out.”

Which proved tricky: the cancer, which had started in his lungs, had spread to the bones of his back. The poor guy was stiff as a cracker. Those last eight miles, as bouncy as a carnival ride, must have felt as bad as anything in his life. I scampered around to the rear passenger door; Frances climbed onto the backseat of the Suburban to hold his hands and keep him upright, and I popped open the door and let him sink into my arms. From the other side, Hal and Frances pushed his feet toward me, and as I pulled him out the old guy unfolded like a pocketknife; in a wink he was standing erect, me hugging him from behind, a little unsure if I should let him go or not. He weighed almost nothing, poor bird, although I also believed that if he fell the ground might actually shake, and it would be the worst moment of my life so far.

“ Thank you, Jordan.”

I looked past his ear and saw that I was supposed to hold him until Frances came around with the walker. Frances was maybe fifty, and I always thought of her as a little mannish, though in a pleasing way: she’s a solid woman, her thickness like the thickness of a good book. Fixed to one of the walker’s legs was a shiny chrome tank, about the size of a propane canister, with a clear plastic tube that ran to a heart-shaped mask that Frances wedged over Harry’s head to ride in the folds of his neck.

“I am, as you see, much reduced, and I thank you.”

This was Harry’s way of speaking; he liked to use expressions like “much reduced” when he meant sick as a poisoned rat. It’s easy to be dumb about the rich, but Harry Wainwright really was different from anyone else I knew. If you’ve read the articles, you know the story-Harry made sensational copy-a classic all-American bootstraps tale of ingenuity and elbow-grease, the hard lean years and the big idea and then the one-way rocket ride of his amazing life; point being, he was entitled to use any turn of phrase that pleased him. He also cursed a lot, though I could tell it made him happier to do than it makes most people. When Harry Wainwright called a fish “one whomping badass motherfucker,” I knew it really was.

“Sure thing, Mr. Wainwright,” I said. “It’s great to see you again.”

Silence, and I was surprised he hadn’t corrected me. For eight summers the joke was always the same: I’d call him Mr. Wainwright, he’d say, for god’s sake, Jordan, call me Harry, though I never, ever did. I wondered if he’d forgotten, and then if maybe he was too sick to remember who I was. But of course he’d call me Jordan. A dumb idea for certain, but still I thought it: How many Jordans could he know? My own father, who died when I was three, was the only other one I’ve heard of, and him I barely got to know, before his engines failed one summer night off Newport News and he crashed into the sea. (For a few bad months in college, when I’d fallen into a deep funk over nothing obvious, I passed a few hours in the company of the campus psychologist, an earnest young woman with a smile like something she had gone to school to learn. She got it in her bean that the fact that my father’s body had never been recovered was probably the root of all my woes-not wrong, but not exactly rocket science, either. In any event, one day my bad mood lifted and never returned.)

By this time, little January had been sprung from her car seat and was toddling around the driveway, dragging a stuffed Humpty Dumpty. I should say at this point that Hal’s wife, Sally, rarely came to the camp; I’d probably laid eyes on her twice in my life, though she was some sort of Wall Street lawyer and was probably just too busy. It was nice to see a man who would actually bring his eighteen-month-old along on a last-minute jaunt to the North Woods, but I could also tell that Hal was about at the end of his patience. He scooped his little girl up onto his hip and gave us all a weary look that said, Long day, not my idea, could we please just hustle this along and get the old man indoors? He lifted an eyebrow at Kate. “Could you?”

Kate stepped up and took January from him, making cooing promises about going down to the lake to see the ducks; Hal, his hands free, moved around the walker and pulled the mask up to Harry’s face.

“We’ve got dinner waiting for you in the dining room, Harry,” Joe said. “We can take your things to your cabin for you, so you just go along and get yourself settled.”

Harry said nothing; for a moment, we all just stood there, watching him haul in the air like a man with his face in a two-pound rose. It hurt like hell to see him that way; no one should have to think about breathing, which by then every one of us was.

Then, from inside the mask: “ Jordan?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Goddamnit, it’s Harry, Jordan.”

And what else could I do? I laughed, relieved as hell. And then Kate laughed, one of my favorite sounds in all this world, and Hal, and everybody else-even little January-all of us glad for the moment to hear a joke, to let the day’s minefield of a mood and this god-awful sense of death in our midst evaporate like a morning fog.

Harry looked around like we had lost our minds. “What’s so funny I’d like to know?”

Hal put a thick hand on his father’s shoulder. “Nobody’s laughing at you, Pop.”

“Well, you could if you liked.” Harry pulled the mask from his face and let it dangle there. His damp gaze drifted up into the pines, then fell back on me, standing there with one hand still on the walker, wondering what to do next.

“ Jordan, I’m here to catch a trout before I croak. Can you do it?”

I shot a glance at Joe, who was gathering their bags, then at Kate, keeping January busy with the Humpty Dumpty, and I saw that they were thinking the same thing I was: none of this was anyone’s idea but Harry’s. Pure harebrained whimsy, no matter how you sliced it: Harry was in a lot of pain, and he belonged in a hospital or at least in bed, not floating around the lake with me and scaring the wits out of absolutely everybody.

But then I thought: a last trout. Not out of the question, and of course that was what he’d want. More to the point, what difference did it make what Harry wanted, so long as he wanted something? It could have been a trip to Disney World or a glorious hour with a three-hundred-dollar hooker (though Harry never struck me as the type for either one), as long as it was something still ahead of him.

“Hell yeah, Mr. Wainwright. We can do that for you.” I gave him my best you-betcha nod. “Why just the one?”

Harry managed a crafty smile. “On a dry fly, Jordan.”

Now, this was a taller order. I saw no chance that Harry could actually wade the river, his best chance to take a fish on top. As for the lake, the summer had been hot and practically rainless, and what trout there were had long since headed for the lake’s colder waters, resting above the thermocline like so much unexploded ordnance (or, come to think of it, one very old and barnacle-encrusted F-4 Phantom lying in the drink off Newport News). It was productive if dull fishing if you were willing to take your time and drift a nymph or pull a wooly bugger below the surface; but to take one on top, as Harry wanted to do, would take plenty of raw luck and a first-class presentation besides, to land the fly as light as a baby’s kiss right on the nose of some off-chance cruising lunker. All of which, not incidentally, Harry certainly knew.