David Gates - A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

“She was a bitch,” Claudia said.

“ I was the bitch,” he said. “As they say. I’m afraid I must have liked it.” He took a sip of his water.

“Well, Daddy, look—you wouldn’t consider coming with me? Mom says Joe Family might be there.” This was her new name for Nathan.

“Thank you, no. I wouldn’t have thought that you, of all people, would still entertain that fantasy.”

She stared at him, the glass halfway to her mouth, then dropped her eyes. “I don’t know why I keep being surprised.”

“I’m sorry. As you say, I’m not a delicate soul.”

She drained her glass and held it out to be filled. “Daddy, are you not even curious? About me and Giancarlo?”

“I was waiting for you to tell me.” He lifted the half bottle, dripping, out of the thing—“humidor” wasn’t the word—and wiped it with the towel, then poured some for her. “I had assumed you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“Fine, you’re right,” she said. “I don’t want to talk about it.” She took a sip. He noticed fine traceries around her eyes and a single hard line slicing from each side of her nose down to the corners of her mouth. These lines seemed to have been drawn onto the face of the true Claudia, who had always looked young for her age—disturbingly so. “I think I’m going to apply to law school,” she said. “Given all that’s going on here.”

“Bind up the nation’s wounds?” he said.

“You can’t just throw up your hands.”

“Spoken like a woman who’s spent the last ten years in sunny Italy.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s over.” She picked up her glass again. “I was hoping maybe I could stay with you. While I get things figured out?”

“And, meanwhile, keep an eye on me.”

“Do you think you need that?”

“What a question,” he said. “What am I supposed to say?”

“You could have said no. Should we talk about what you’re going to do?”

“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’ve decided to go work in the inner city.” He had been thinking about how to phrase the joke to make its meaning more precisely double, but this would do.

“Daddy, I think that would be wonderful for you. And the people you could help.”

“The people I could help.” He clinked his glass against hers. “Here’s to them.”

—

Without telling Claudia, he wrote out a new will and faxed it to his lawyer. It left her the house and five acres, which included the barn and the tennis court; the other forty acres, with the pond and the cabin, went to Nathan; the money, fifty-fifty, to Claudia and her mother, since Nathan had done so well. The Volvo should rightly have gone to Martine: he’d heard from Jack Stephenson that she had found only an adjunct position at Fordham, and she could’ve sold the car for the money or kept it for the irony. But now that she had true love, there was no need for either. He directed that the car be auctioned off and the proceeds donated to Doctors Without Borders. He left the Jeep to Karen Friedman.

Claudia was staying at the house with him for a few more days before going down to New York. Through Jack, she’d arranged for three LPNs to come out in eight-hour shifts while she was gone. He was back in the king-size sleigh bed he had shared with Martine, which marked the place where he had shared the old double bed with Angela. Each night after dinner, he and Karen—no, he and Claudia—would play three games of Scrabble in front of the fireplace; they’d become evenly matched. Then, after trying to put himself under by puzzling out Shakespeare, he would swallow the one sleeping aid she allowed him: L-tryptophan, from the health-food store. The liquor cabinet, of course, she had emptied. One morning, when she went out to get the mail, he telephoned Rite Aid but was informed that his prescriptions could no longer be honored.

It snowed the night before he was to drive her to the train; they were calling for a foot or more. That afternoon he’d gone out to the barn and uncovered the Volvo, the blue tarp spattered with the droppings of swallows. It started right up, like the good Swedish car it was, and he moved it out into the driveway to make loading her bags easier in the morning. He had thought of simply driving off, but to where, and what then?

That night he lay there trying to decode the scene in The Winter’s Tale where the wife is pretending to be a statue—the silliest part of a particularly silly play—but then gave up, got out of bed and went to the window. Snowflakes were pouring straight down: he tried to follow this one, this one, this one, this one. White knife-edged crests had built up on the branches of the maple tree. Then he heard a roar that shook the house: only a section of accumulated snow sliding down the slate roof.

At some point he heard the plow come through and saw its yellow blinkers light up the window. He awoke to the sandy scraping of a shovel down below: Claudia clearing the walk. Daylight, and snow still falling. He smelled coffee. He had himself dressed when she clumped in, snow sticking to her green rubber boots. “I got a path dug out to the car,” she said. “But shouldn’t we take the Jeep? I don’t know if the trains are even going to be running.”

“I thought we ought to go in style,” he said.

The snow was knee-high on either side of the path she’d made; he saw that she’d cut the sides down at an angle, just as he used to do it. When she was a child, still living here. He went out and started the Volvo, put the heat on full blast and came back inside. “Be warm in ten minutes,” he said.

She poured him a cup of coffee and turned on the radio. “Let’s see if we can get the weather.”

“It’ll be fine.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger. “My own secret station.”

“That’s half your problem right there,” she said.

“I’d call that a conservative estimate,” he said.

They slung her bags into the trunk. A couple more inches had fallen since the plow had come through, and the smooth white of the road showed only a single pair of tire tracks.

At the stop sign, the tracks went straight ahead; Breakneck Hill Road was a virgin slope. He put on his turn signal.

Claudia looked over at him. “We’re not going this way?”

“It’ll save time,” he said.

“We have lots of time,” she said. “Do you want to get us killed?”

He jammed the shift lever into park. “Would you care to drive?”

“I’d care to live , Daddy. Do you even have snow tires?”

“I’ve been a doctor for forty years,” he said. “Do you think I don’t know what I’m doing?” He closed his eyes and listened to the tick-tick-tick-tick . “I’m sorry, Bunky.” He switched the signal off. “We’ll take the long way. It won’t make that much difference.” He pulled the lever back into drive and started the car forward; it fishtailed, then righted itself. Snow blew straight across the windshield, from left to right.

“I must be hearing things,” she said. “You haven’t called me that since—you know.”

He glanced over to see if she was crying. No. “Is it all right if I call you that?”

“As you say, it won’t make that much difference.” She reached over and patted his leg. “Sorry, Daddy. I’m just…Do you promise to take care of yourself while I’m gone?”

“Aren’t we leaving that to the professionals?”

“I told you, right? Mrs. So-and-so’s going to meet us at the station and she’ll follow you back to the house. Mrs. Chesler.”

“Now there’s something to look forward to.” He had already taken his vow of silence: not a word to any of them. If they reported him, well, he was a strange old man.