6 #2
“He wouldn’t know how lucky it is to be the one to tell it to a newcomer. Actors are all about luck. Executive Directors are all about spreadsheets. People are going to be rushing you from every direction wanting to tell you but I’m the one who got here first, or first after Eric.”
“You’re an actor?”
He looked down at himself: scrub pants, espadrilles. “It isn’t obvious?”
“No, I mean, of course, but actors don’t usually deliver schedules.” No one seemed to be confined to their regular jobs in this place.
“They do when the errand is presented as a personal favor to the very busy assistant stage manager.”
“Checking out the new blood?”
“I call it being thoughtful. Plus I wanted to be the one to tell you the story.”
“Did you tell the last Emily?”
“Unfortunately, no. Someone beat me to it, which makes this a sort of redemption.”
“Well, it wouldn’t be fair really.”
“What wouldn’t be fair?”
“If you got to tell all the Emilys.”
He nodded. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. So you’ve seen the lake?”
“I have.”
“And you know what it’s called?”
“Tom Lake,” I said. “But that’s a guess.”
He smiled again, showing off the wonkiness of his size XL teeth.
I’d been told that wonky teeth, like unpierced ears, were valuable human relics from another time.
“Excellent guess!” He gave a single clap.
“The lake does have an official name, the name they put on maps and watertable records, but that’s no concern of ours. ”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
“What you need to know is that all this land was once owned by a very wealthy family, Vanderbilts of some sort, though I’m not sure what sort. Railroad money, oil money, money money—-you know the type.”
I gave a slight nod, though I didn’t know the type from Adam.
“They spent their summers here, or a very small part of their summers, the part when they weren’t on a ship or in Scotland.
They had a castle in Scotland, which isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds because you frankly can’t swing a cat without hitting a castle in Scotland.
The many children were overseen by many Scottish nannies.
I should tell you that these were the friendly ones. Scottish nannies get a terrible rap.”
“They do.” I sat down on the windowsill, thinking this might be a long one.
He stopped. “Would you not do that, please?”
“What?”
“The windowsill. Not when the window’s open.”
“Really?”
“We’ve already lost one Emily.”
“She didn’t fall out the window.” I looked down at the ground, as if to check.
He shook his head and pointed to the corner of the room.
“Isn’t that a nice chair?”
I was sorry to give up the view but went and pulled over the chair nevertheless.
“Thank you,” he said.
“What about you?” The room lacked a second chair, and the windowsill was out, and I didn’t feel like offering him the bed.
“I’m a stander by nature. I do better standing.”
“Okay.”
“Where was I?”
“Scottish nannies.” Such a big, goofy smile, I thought. A movie star’s smile.
He stopped again. “You’re a wonderful listener.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Occupational hazard.”
“Hah! Well, that tells me how long you’ve been acting if you think actors are good listeners.”
“Scottish nannies,” I prompted.
He nodded. “So the family had a passel of girls and then Tom and then another boy after him, but our story is about Tom. Tom Something, Tom Scion--of--the--Aristocracy. Tom and his favorite Scottish nanny were taking a walk around the grounds. It’s a beautiful day, not unlike this one, and Tom points up the hill and asks the nanny who owns the house.
And the nanny says, “Och, Tom, yur father oones the hoose.”
I told him I thought his Scottish nanny accent was remarkably good. Not that I’d ever met an actual Scottish nanny.
“Thank you,” he said. “So young master Tom goes on, who owns the trees in the orchard, he wants to know, and who owns the horses, and who owns the hill itself, and who owns those flowers? The nanny very patiently gives him the same answer every time. ‘Yur father, yur father.’ It’s a patriarchy, I’m sorry to say.
The mother had no ownership of anything, not even herself. ”
“Understood.”
“By now young master Tom is running low on inventory, but he likes the game, so he keeps looking around until finally it occurs to him to ask about the lake. ‘Who owns the lake?’ And the nanny, we’ll call her Heather—-not that history wrote down her name but it feels polite to give her one anyway—-Heather, for whatever reason says, ‘Tom oones the loch.’
“?‘Me?’ the boy asks.” The stranger propped against the wall of my bedroom let a split second of wonderment wash across his face, making himself into young master Tom, then just as quickly sent it on its way.
“The moment is very touching, and maybe Heather thinks she’s made a mistake but let’s be honest, the whole fucking place belongs to the father and there’s no reason the boy shouldn’t get the lake.
So he asks her what the lake is called.”
“I see this one coming, “ I said.
“There was an apostrophe--s back then, Tom’s Lake, but time condenses experience.”
“Sure.”
“The kid’s aglow. He spends a solid twenty minutes throwing stones and sticks into the water and shouting his own name.
After Heather finally corrals him back to the house and down for his nap, she tells the story to the kitchen girls, and even the head woman thinks it’s charming.
She says Heather ought to tell the Missus, and so Heather does, and the Missus loves the story and she tells her husband and her passel of daughters, and while it’s never a formal decision, they agree from there on out it’s Tom’s Lake. ”
When he stopped to make sure I was still with him, I realized he hadn’t told me his name. He had told me only the name of the lake.
“Now I know,” I said.
“Well, there’s a small coda, if you have one more minute.”
“You’re the one who knows how much time I have.” He had the schedule in his hand.
“You’re good. Let me just finish up. Okay.
Somehow the boy never catches on that the whole lake thing is a charade.
We all have a blind spot, right? That bit of incorrect information from childhood that mysteriously never gets updated, the person who makes it to thirty--five believing that unicorns had been hunted into extinction. ”
“Wait, unicorns weren’t hunted...”
He smiled at me, tipping his head to one side as if to say I was adorable, as in, I was to be adored.
“So Tom grows up and finds himself a bride, the sister of one of his Princeton friends, and he thinks it would be nice to get married here, to show her Tom’s Lake.
Out they all come, the families, the friends, the massive support staff, everyone on the train.
Tom hadn’t been to the house in years and the place is even more beautiful than he remembers it.
He can hardly wait to show her the lake. ”
“Does she have a name?”
He paused for a minute to consider this. “No, but for the sake of this conversation we’ll call her Lara.”
That same look of slight discomfort must have come across my face again because he held up the paper in his hand. “It’s on your schedule.”
“And your name?”
“Peter Duke.”
“Peter Duke,” I repeated. Such a nice sound.
“The two of them are walking hand in hand, and he’s going on about the house and the cherry trees and how they’ll spend at least part of their summers here, then he points to the lake, which, as you’ve no doubt noticed, is difficult to miss.
‘Tom’s Lake,’ he says, and what he’s telling her is that all of this is his, his and his family’s but eventually his because he’s the oldest son, and therefore hers in part, but of course that’s not the way she hears it.
She says, ‘That’s so sweet. But really, what’s the name of the lake?
’ because clearly this is not the family trout pond.
The lake goes on for miles. It doesn’t belong to a single person.
And just as Tom is about to repeat himself, he stops.
He suddenly remembers that day with Heather, who was by then long back in Scotland.
Heather, the first woman he’d ever loved because his mother was never really available to him.
And at that moment, standing there with his bride--to--be, he realizes that this body of water he has only heard referred to by his own name was not named for him at all, and that it did not belong to him.
Worse yet, he has no idea what the lake was called. ”
I went back to the window to look again at the lake and the day, to imagine the two of them stopping for this conversation. “Tell me they didn’t call the wedding off over this.” I was not a particularly romantic person but still, that would have been a disappointment.
Duke shook his head. “Quite the opposite, in fact. Something miraculous happened, something that sealed their love forever. Tom told Lara the truth.”
Involuntarily, I yelped. I made the sound a small dog makes when you accidentally step on his paw. “Oh my god, I was totally with you.”
Nothing in his face betrayed him. His cheeks didn’t flush, his long black eyelashes, so ridiculous on a grown man, did not cast down.
“He told her that he didn’t know the name of the lake, and that he had only this minute realized this fact, and that his nanny, and truly, his entire family, had infantilized him, not with malicious intent, but as a sort of sweet joke that was emblematic of both their love and how he had been coddled his entire life.
He told her that he didn’t know the name of the lake at all. ”
“I believed you this entire time!”
“This would have been his Siddhartha Gautama revelation, the moment the prince casts off his wealth to go and live among the suffering and the poor to seek his spiritual path, but he loved her too much.”
“Stop.”
“And he loved the house. Really, he was crazy about the house. And the place in Scotland. And the triplex in New York.”
“So why is it called Tom Lake?”
“No idea.”
“You’re not playing George, are you?” He didn’t seem young enough to be George, but I thought he probably could have played the invisible chickens if that was the part he’d been given.
He gave me a casual two--finger salute. “Editor Webb, newspaperman.”
“You’re my father?”
“I had hoped your mother would have told you someday.”
We stared at one another until the small room felt very small. I was the one who looked away.
“You’ve got an hour,” he said, holding up a second page. “There’s a map.” He took one large step forward and laid the papers gently on the bed, as he might have picked me up and laid me gently on the bed.
This is a story about Peter Duke who went on to be a famous actor.
This is a story about falling in love with Peter Duke who wasn’t famous at all.
It’s about falling so wildly in love with him—-the way one will at twenty--four—-that it felt like jumping off a roof at midnight.
There was no way to foresee the mess it would come to in the end, nor did it occur to me to care.
I have long been at peace with Duke the famous actor, but my feelings for the person who walked into my bedroom that first day at Tom Lake are more complicated. I’ve made a point never to think of him at all, except that now I am thinking of him.
I am making one part of my life into a story for my daughters, and even though they are grown women and very forward thinking, let’s just assume I leave out every mention of the bed, even the two sheets of paper that are resting there on top of the covers.
“I feel like I’m on the verge of anaphylaxis,” Maisie says. “I’m serious. My throat’s closing up.”
Emily and Nell just look at me, their throats already closed. The four of us are back among the cherry trees where the rain is falling so gently we don’t even acknowledge it.
“How do you ever get over someone like that?” Maisie asks. What she means is that I must not be over him still, and I must never have loved their father as much as I loved Duke.
“Do you remember when you would beg us to take you to the county fair every summer?” I want so much to make them understand this.
“How the three of you would not shut up about the fair. The fair! Oh my god, I wanted to drown the whole lot of you in a bucket. You would needle and whine until finally we gave in. Your father and I would try to get you to come to the community hall and look at the quilts and pet the angora rabbits, but you wanted to eat chili corndogs and cotton candy and then get on one of those god--awful rides that had been put together by three heroin addicts with a sprocket wrench, the rides that made you feel like your head was going to be flung off your neck by centrifugal force. One of you would vomit on the other two in the ride and then the next one would vomit on me in the parking lot while I was trying to clean you up and the next one would vomit down the back of Daddy’s neck in the car.
And then in the morning you were all bright as daisies, begging to go back. Do you remember that?”
“I loved the fair,” Maisie says, her sisters still mute with wonder.
I turn to face my middle child. “Would you want to go now?”
“Maybe,” she says, but she is twenty--four, the age I was at Tom Lake.
“Would you say that the ride was better than being a veterinarian? That you’d rather be whipsawed by something called the Zipper than you would deliver that foal in the middle of the night?
” I can argue with Maisie because Maisie is logical and strong.
I will always be afraid of waking up the part of Emily that has long been dormant.
I will always be afraid of accidentally breaking something in Nell that is fragile and pure.
But Maisie is up for it; no one will ever have to worry about Maisie.
“I don’t see why you have to give up one for the other,” she says.
“You don’t have to,” I tell my daughter. “You want to. You wake up one day and you don’t want the carnival anymore. In fact, you can’t even believe you did that.”
Nell turns her face away. Emily is holding on to her own braid with both hands. They aren’t buying it. “We’re not talking about a carnival,” Emily says. “We’re talking about Duke. I believe in Duke.”
I want to tell her she used to believe in the Easter bunny, too, but I don’t. I could say that to Maisie but not the other two.