Chapter 42
WILLIAM
The afternoon William had arrived in New York for Shay’s engagement party, he was mistaken for someone else.
Shay was in class, their mother arriving the next day, and so he found his own way to her apartment on the Upper East Side.
On the street, the elegant buildings all brown and pink brick, an old woman waved to him.
“Charlie!” she’d said. “How’s your father?
” William looked beside and behind him, but there was no one else nearby.
The woman was walking a honey-colored cocker spaniel and wearing a fur coat that hung down to her ankles.
Her hair was a brushed cloud. He slowed his pace, politely explaining she was mistaken, but she only laughed and told him to take her the two blocks home.
It was obvious from how she rested her weight on him that she could use the support, so William walked with her arm in arm.
She smelled like talcum powder, and she told him about how she’d seen his father at the opera a month ago, a performance of Don Pasquale that really was not that funny, and that he’d had a bad cough, and she’d told him to try a tablespoon of mustard.
By the time they arrived at her building, a part of William thought that perhaps she’d actually seen his father.
That for the past three years, he’d just been in New York, going to the Metropolitan Opera in a new suit, trading stories with men on the subway, reading the Times on a bench in Central Park.
“Well, give him my best,” the woman had said, tugging at her dog’s leash. “And tell him to come see me. I’ll buy those tea cakes.”
“I will,” William had said, though of course he could not.
* * *
The engagement party was being hosted at some private club where the doorman’s coat had brass buttons and red piping.
The marble floor was tiled like a chessboard, and there was a small room off to the side fogged with cigar smoke that William did not dare enter.
His mother frowned at the flowers—long, bowed stalks dripping with yellow petals he didn’t know the name of—and sipped from her coupe of champagne.
In the bathroom, a man wearing white gloves stood stiff as a soldier, not making eye contact as William peed.
He and his mother were the only members of their family in attendance.
No one lived out East, and it would have been absurd for anyone else to fly, so the party was for Andrew’s family, friends of their family, and Andrew and Shay’s friends.
His mother was knit into a tight circle of Mrs. Pruitt and three other women with elbows sharp as arrows.
William looked for Joel, Shay’s only college friend whom he felt comfortable with, but he was not there.
Andrew attempted to include William, introducing him to young men who looked just like the ones William went to school with, their faces blank and American enough to be printed on currency.
When William told them that he washed dishes for a living, Andrew laughed and clapped his shoulder as if he’d told a good joke.
Hours before the party had begun, Shay had apologized for it.
I told Mom you all didn’t have to come. It’s for the Pruitts, not us, she’d said, but then there she was, standing at its center, throngs of women and girls clutching at her left hand and lifting the ring above her heart.
When William arrived, she’d seemed happier than she’d been in months, though there was a slight manic edge to her that made him uneasy.
It reminded him of their father, though he would never tell Shay this.
She couldn’t stop touching his face, and though Shay was never neat, the apartment was a true mess.
The desk and couch were cluttered with silt-glazed coffee mugs, plates with toast rinds, books and books: texts for her law school classes, but also Emerson’s Self Reliance; Beyond Freedom and Dignity, by B.
F. Skinner; a slim volume of John Ashbery poems. She was Shay amplified, Shay in abundance, and he would have worried it was coke if he hadn’t known exactly what that looked like from chefs and waiters.
After making him a piece of toast, she couldn’t seem to sit still, and so they’d gone on a long walk, buying hot dogs from a battered cart.
They talked about the restaurant, impersonated two cab drivers they overheard screaming at each other in Italian.
Shay was her silliest around him, a side she rarely revealed to others, and they could make each other laugh with no more than a word.
She’d been so serious and consumed by law school, but now she joked like she hadn’t in years, and he decided to bury his resentment for how rarely she called him.
He would mirror her happiness, assuming it was the engagement that had gifted her this joy.
At the party, William drank because there was nothing else to do, because drinking like this was a default for someone his age.
No one spoke to him but a loud girl with stringy blond hair and one of Andrew’s uncles, a priest wearing a blazer over his black shirt and collar.
They stood quietly together before one of the room’s only paintings, a still life of ripe, glistening fruit and a dead rabbit, and the priest asked him if he knew about the doctor who was accidentally killed by the IRA that week, a man who just happened to be walking his dogs by a car wired with explosives.
William said he didn’t, trying not to slur his words.
It was hard for him to follow the news. It all felt like too much, especially during Watergate.
Everyone he knew watched it like theater, but it all just made him deeply sad.
They were all losing something. Their faith in government, in America, was dying, but no one else his age seemed to care.
They felt liberated by it, casting off politicians like teenagers casting off overbearing parents, but he wasn’t ready for that, he said.
He needed to believe that beneath the surface there was more than just rot.
The priest brought him a glass of water, and when he took a sip, the water dribbled onto his tie, and he apologized, embarrassed.
Shay found him on the balcony. It was too cold to attract anyone else, unusually biting for October, and she pulled her coat tight across her chest. Her long hair was tucked into her collar.
“I’m sorry I left you to fend for yourself,” she said.
“It’s your party, you don’t need to be sorry,” he said. He’d gotten another beer after the glass of water, and he took a sip, hoping it would warm his limbs. “It looks like Mom is making friends.”
“I think they’re all terrified of her. She’s the only receptionist I know who can make a room full of wealthy New Yorkers think they’re somehow beneath her.”
They both laughed, and William wished they could stay out there together, even though the air was so icy it burned his throat.
“I bet they all would have loved Dad,” he said.
“Maybe.” They almost never spoke of their father, and William could tell Shay was uncomfortable at the mention of him, but ever since that old woman had flagged William down on the street, his father had been a companion, walking quietly beside him.
“I didn’t really think before about how you won’t have him to walk you down the aisle.”
“I don’t care about that. It’s not like I need to be given away or anything. Andrew and I already live together, and I’m an adult. I’ve had to be an adult since I was in grade school, thanks to them.”
“I know, but I just—I feel like that’s one of the things he would have really loved to do. And the speech too. I’m sure he’d have spent way too long choosing some poem to quote or some really sentimental childhood story to share.”
Shay looked down at her toes, as if considering something. He felt an energy vibrating off of her at the same high frequency as when he first arrived. “Well, that was his choice. To miss all of this.”
“I mean, I don’t think anyone chooses to be hit by a train.”
“William.”
“What?”
He could sense what was coming, that she was starting to pry open the casket they’d all agreed to keep shut, but no—Shay wouldn’t do that.
She stood up straighter, and behind her, the party continued to whir, the guests as indistinct as shadow puppets.
“I know some part of you knows this. I never talked to you about it before because I wanted to—protect you.”
“Protect me?”
“That’s what I thought I was doing, but I see now I was just being weak. I didn’t think of it as lying, but lately people have helped me see how I’ve failed, and I know I failed you.”
There was something odd in her voice, a formality, like she’d said these words before. “I don’t really understand what we’re talking about,” he said.
“You remember those nights we’d wake up because Dad was sobbing.”
He did. The heaving ruptured his sleep. It began in Shay’s final years of high school. The apartment was never purely dark, lit by the faint yellow fog of a streetlamp, and William would lie awake listening until the light shifted to dawn’s pale blue. “Yeah. It happened once or twice.”
“It happened more than that. Couldn’t you hear it?” She stepped closer, and he felt her pressing into him, like she’d actually been waiting to say all of this since he’d arrived.
“So because you heard him crying, you’re saying—”
“You know it’s not just that. There were the days he’d call off work and just lie in bed, how quiet he could get at dinners, especially near the end. He stopped giving me books, stopped talking to me—I mean, Jesus, when he was young, they wouldn’t even let him fight in the war.”
“Because of his hearing.”
“No, not because of his hearing. Aunt Janice told me, when I was sixteen, that he’d been hospitalized when he was a teenager. They did shock therapy, made him sit in a bath for hours.”