4. Chapter 4 Alex #2
When did it happen? When did the guy in the photograph become the man behind the desk? Was it the firm? The money? Was it slow, a degree at a time, the way a house settles. Or was it always there, underneath the grin?
And the question I didn't want to ask but couldn't stop:
Is that what I become?
Twenty years in this room, in this chair, nodding at this desk.
If I signed, would I be sitting on the other side in thirty years, building a cage for my own kid?
Would I have a photograph on my wall of the one time I was free, and would I point at it and say, that's the standard without hearing what I was actually saying?
My father's voice continued behind me. Quarterly projections. Board governance. I turned away from the photograph. And my eyes went to the high trophy shelf.
Silver, mostly. Cups and plates and small engraved things in a line, polished by someone whose name I did not know, arranged by height. I had never once read the engravings.
I read them now. Squash trophies, Greenwich, 1979, 1980, 1981. A crystal weight from the firm. A shallow silver plate engraved with a golf score I couldn't decipher. Two cups from Kingswell, my father's era.
And at the end of the row, tarnished at the handles, the largest cup on the shelf.
INTERCOLLEGIATE ROWING ASSOCIATION NATIONAL CHAMPIONS — 1967 RIVERSIDE UNIVERSITY
Five names below that. Riverside University. Riverside.
I couldn't place it at first. Then it came.
The Riverside Club. Jace at the head of the table, jaw set, looking around the room the night before he graduated.
This program isn't supposed to win. We don't have the money.
We don't have the boathouse or the donors, or even the trophy that's supposed to be in that case down there.
Riverside had a missing trophy. My father had a Riverside trophy. My father was born in 1961 and had been nine years old in 1970. The math ended there and started somewhere else, and where it started was not with him.
My grandfather. The man whose Patek was on my wrist. Whose face I had walked past in the Kingswell hall of class photos for eighteen years.
I didn't know the year it was taken, or how, or by whom. I knew it belonged somewhere else. It had belonged somewhere else my entire life. And nobody in this house had ever mentioned it.
My father finished the call.
"Still here," he noted, turning.
"I was reading the folder," I lied.
"Good." He sat back down. The glasses went on. The legal pad came forward. "Close the door on your way out."
I nodded, then walked toward the door. Paused for a moment.
Do I ask about the trophy?
No.
I left and closed the door behind me. I didn't know yet what I was going to do about the trophy, but what I knew was where it was and whose it wasn't.
***
My mother was in the foyer.
Box of holly cuttings against her hip, one-armed, cheeks still pink from the cold.
"Alex. How was your meeting?"
"Productive."
"How was your walk?"
"Lovely. Cold, but lovely. I went out past the boathouse to the inlet." She shifted the box to her other hip. "Would you help me with the wreath? The service did the front, but the mantle one is mine, and I could use someone tall."
I followed her into the living room, took off my sweater, and rolled the sleeves of my shirt to my elbows.
We started wiring the branches, and for ten minutes she was herself. Or the version of herself that existed when the study door was shut. She talked about the garden in Greenwich, a frost that had taken her late roses, a neighbor's dog that wouldn't stop barking.
Normal updates. The kind I got around the holidays because we spoke little during the semester. Her voice was calm, her hands steady on the wire, and for a few minutes we were just a mother and son making something for the mantle.
"I saw Frederick on my walk," she said, reaching for a sprig of holly.
Frederick. The heron. He'd been coming to the inlet for as long as I could remember, a tall gray shape standing on one leg in the shallows, and at some point my mother had given him a name, and the name had stuck.
"Mom. Why did you name that heron?"
She looked at me. "You don't remember?"
"No. I just always remember you calling him Frederick."
She smiled.
"You were seven," she said. "You'd been reading a book about a Labrador, and you followed me around the kitchen for three days asking if we could get a dog. Your father said no." She paused. "You cried about it."
"Really?"
"I'm surprised you don't remember. You sat on the dock and I sat next to you, and you had your face in your hands and you were so upset, Alex. Over a dog you'd never even met."
I didn't remember this. Or maybe I did somewhere underneath.
"Fredrick was out on the inlet that afternoon," she said. "Standing on the rocks the way he does. And I pointed at him and told you he could be our pet and that his name was Frederick."
"And I believed you?"
"You stopped crying, and you watched him for about twenty minutes. And then you said — " She laughed, quiet, holly in her hands. "You said, 'Can we bring him inside?'"
"What did you say?"
"I said no. He's a wild creature, Alex. He's free. We can't put him in the house."
This story captivated me; this memory, I could not remember.
"And you said, 'But he'll fly away and never come back if we don't bring him inside.' You were so worried about it. Seven years old, sitting on that dock, terrified that if you didn't grab him and hold on, he'd leave."
She put the holly down and looked at me.
"And I told you: if he doesn't come back, he was never ours. And if he comes back, that means he loves us."
The living room was quiet. The fire my father hadn't lit clicked softly in the grate. Outside the tall windows the lake was white and still, and somewhere on it, probably, a heron was standing on the ice the way he'd been standing on it every winter of my life.
"He comes back every year, Alex. Nineteen years. Nobody feeds him. Nobody built him a house. He just comes back because he wants to. Freedom is better than a cage."
She picked up the wire cutters and snipped a loose end.
She looked at me. "I love you, sweetheart."
I loved her back. I always would. I also understood for the first time that her love would never save me.
Not because she didn't have enough. Because her love couldn't help me if I was living in a cage.
She knew what was going on. She saw me for who I was.
And she would never say how she really felt aloud when it contradicted my father. But she said it in the way she could.
"I love you too, Mom."