Jonathan Dee - Palladio

She passed all her exams, taking them unproctored on her dining-room table. No one cared if she cheated or not. She skipped graduation, getting her diploma in the mail. All they had taken from her was something she had never really valued anyway; still, it wore on her, and she didn’t like the feeling of having nowhere to go.

In the middle of the night, in the darkened house, Molly came downstairs to the kitchen with a blanket around her shoulders and called Richard in Berkeley. He was home for once; it was after midnight there as well. Some sort of Indian music droned quietly in the background. She told him the whole story.

“I’m sorry to dump this on you,” Molly said quietly, afraid of waking her parents, “but I don’t have anyone else I can talk to. I’m stuck in my room in the middle of nowhere with these two lunatics who keep telling me I’ve brought a plague on our house. Okay, yes, I had an affair with a married man and maybe I shouldn’t have done it, maybe I should have foreseen all this somehow, but still, I don’t understand what they want from me. I don’t know what to do. I know they want me out of here. I’m supposed to go to college in four months. Dad’s out of work in another eight and they haven’t even bothered to put the house on the market yet. I can just imagine going up to him right now anyway and asking him for twenty grand so I can go to Bennington or wherever.”

“Do you want to go to Bennington?” Richard’s voice was a lot slower and more soothing than she remembered it, like a voice on the radio. He didn’t sound high, though. She knew she should take the opportunity to ask him more about how he’d been doing; but it was just such a relief to find someone who could talk calmly with her about the whole thing.

“No. I mean, no more there than anywhere else. I don’t know. The most appealing thing about it is getting the hell out of here.”

“So don’t go. Take a year off. Take five years off. What’s the law that says you have to finish learning things when you’re twenty-two?”

“And do what in the meantime?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Come out here and live with me for a while. Something different. Til you get everything else figured out.”

At that, Molly started sobbing. One act of kindness was all it took now. Richard said nothing to try to quiet or comfort her; he waited patiently for her to get control of herself.

“Oh, right, that’ll go over real big,” she said, when she had settled down a bit. “I’d have to ask Dad for the money for that, too. A little vacation for me, I’m sure that’s just what he’s thinking about, a little gift he can give me.”

“Ask him. I think I know him better than you do. Ask him.”

When she asked him, his expression never changed. He waited until he was sure she had finished talking, and then he said, “How much do you need?”

A few weeks later, near the end of a hot June day, Molly walked aimlessly through the quiet, cool rooms of her house. Her parents were out. A cab was coming in the morning to take her to the airport in Albany. She was all packed. The narcissus and the daffodils Kay had planted years ago were browning in the sun; the paint was cracking on the vacant houses in the development; Molly went out on to the porch barefoot to listen to the sounds of the valley and to see if it all looked any less familiar to her now that she was relatively sure she would never lay eyes on it again.

On the road in front of the house a young girl was riding her bike. She rode in a lazy figure-eight right by the Howes, pedaling slowly, not looking where she was going unless she had to. She was overweight, and wore a big loose Little Mermaid T-shirt over pink bicycle shorts. She turned around to pass the house again and Molly saw that it was Bethany Vincent. When she noticed that Molly had seen her, she stopped circling and slid forward off the seat so her feet were flat on the road. Molly stood waiting for a minute or more, but Bethany’s expression never clarified; the sun was right in the girl’s face, and she held up one hand as a visor over her eyes. When Molly started down the porch steps Bethany hopped back up on to the seat of her bike and rode away.

JOHN WOULD HAVE felt at home in a world governed by an unspoken compact ordaining that anytime anything awkward or unpleasant happened, everyone involved would agree to forget about it and to go forward as if it had never happened at all. This may have been less a fantasy than a kind of vestigial memory of his childhood in Asheville, North Carolina, in particular of the houses of some of his older relatives, whose genuinely terrible secrets were held aloft by a magical understanding that any break in the chain of pleasantry would result in those secrets’ crashing noisily to the floor in plain view of everyone. But John lived in New York now; and somehow he had surrounded himself with people who had no capacity for ignoring things that were difficult to explain — most conspicuously at work, where Roman spent the days immediately following the Doucette debacle glowering at him from across their office, ostentatiously awaiting some explanation for John’s failure to mention his friendship with Mal Osbourne. John soldiered on as best he could, cordial and red-faced. On the subsequent Monday Roman didn’t come in at all. Only by checking with the receptionist did John learn that his partner had decided to take a week’s vacation.

Rebecca, too, tried hard to be supportive when he told her of the strain on his relationship with Roman; but she had trouble getting past the fact that he had never even said anything to his partner about that bizarre Saturday with Osbourne. It was kind of a funny story, she thought; certainly there was nothing embarrassing or shameful about it. Why keep it a secret?

“Don’t you feel you guys are friends?” she asked gently. “I know we don’t see them much outside of work—”

“We’re friends,” John said glumly.

“You trust him, right? Wouldn’t he trust you as well? I mean, why wouldn’t he?”

“You’re probably right.” He wanted to bring the conversation to a close by making every concession.

But she was too perplexed. “Aren’t you assuming that he would think the worst of you? That he’d think you were lying, you were ambitious, you scheduled the whole thing because you somehow knew the Doucette review was coming up and then you lied about it?”

“I see your point,” John said.

“Well, have you ever given him any reason to think that way about you?”

He sighed.

“Of course you haven’t,” she answered herself. “You should just have told him. Now you’ve turned nothing into something.”

John didn’t welcome being analyzed and so he agreed with her. There was a part of him, though, that held a more self-justifying view: We live in the age of directness, he thought; circumspection, the art of leaving things unsaid, is a lost one.

Still, he knew that no such formulation could answer the charge that his silence had been pointless, and he was desperate for things to go back to the way they had been. When Roman came back from his petulant vacation, John took him out to the Tenth Avenue Grill for drinks and told him the complete story of his dealings with Mal Osbourne, all its unlikelihoods intact, laced with apologies but pointing out also, in his own defense, how unbelievable it all seemed. He could tell that in Roman’s mind, miffed though he was, the whole Doucette episode was already just about consecrated to the past, to the war-story pantheon, even though they were still less than three weeks removed from the trip to Philadelphia (which meant that John had not yet received his handwritten letter from Osbourne about his “exciting new venture,” so he didn’t need to worry about whether to throw in that detail as well).