Life
The verdict was guilty. First degree.
Jilly and Hayward went to live with their grandparents. Age seven was a little young for this, but the moment Jilly reached fourth grade, I gather, the Cabots shipped her off to the same school in England where members of the royal family send their children. Hayward was there already.
It was over a decade later when I got a letter from Prudence, filling me in on more recent developments.
By this point, Jilly was off to Sweet Briar College in Virginia.
Hayward had attended his grandfather’s Ivy League alma mater—his admission secured, perhaps, by a donation that made possible the construction of the Cabot Center for Business Studies.
Hayward had dropped out of college, but he had gotten a job on Wall Street through some family friend, where he made a lot of money. He had a lot of money already, of course.
Then one day I opened up the newspaper and there he was in The New York Times, charged with securities fraud.
Around this time, women started coming forward, accusing Hayward of drugging them for the purpose of sexually assaulting them.
He was ultimately found guilty on multiple charges of rape and sentenced to prison, though unlike his father, he’d been able to hire an expensive attorney, who had gotten him out on bail, pending appeal.
The Cabots held on to Wonderland, but except for the occasional weekend, Prudence told me, it sat empty nearly every summer after Regina’s death. What was left of the family came up on Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. Never Labor Day, for understandable reasons.
Jonathan Gleason, my beloved tennis coach and friend, died of AIDS at the age of twenty-nine, the year I turned nineteen.
By that time, I’d long since put tennis away.
I didn’t even know what became of the Bancroft racquet Jonathan had given me—long out of date by this point, but once my most prized possession.
My mother had a stroke at the age of fifty-one and died two weeks later. I think all those years of holding on to so much bitterness ate away at her heart.
My father finished his novel. More surprisingly, he sold it to a small publisher in Berkeley, California.
He called the book Wonderland. In it, he told the story of a couple of boys who grew up almost like brothers in a tenement apartment building in a rough New Jersey town, and of the summer they got jobs at a country club in Maine, where one of them fell in love with a beautiful girl from the other side of the tracks—and, much to her parents’ chagrin, married her.
In the novel, the boy saves his beautiful, deeply troubled wife from jumping off some rocks in a quarry in Maine. Wishful thinking, you might call it.
Though my father’s novel wasn’t a bestseller, it sold well enough that he was able to get himself a little condo in south Jersey, where he lived—sober, mostly, with only a couple of slipups—for a few good years before his death at age fifty-nine of lung cancer.
I went to college on a full scholarship and earned a degree in physical therapy, all thoughts of playing tennis long evaporated.
I got a job right after graduation at a rehabilitation center for veterans of the Gulf War.
As much as I had loved making up stories once, I did not pursue that secret dream of mine.
Those pages I wrote that filled my leatherbound journal the summer I was fourteen (quasi-erotic juvenilia, you might call them) represented my one magnum opus.
You could say I lost my focus, my hunger maybe—that’s what Jonathan had called it—or simply my faith in myself.
Those ninety-two days at Wonderland—the hours I spent out on the tennis court, and hitting alone against the backboard until close to midnight, refusing to stop until I’d returned five hundred shots in a row without missing one of them—I had known, briefly, what it felt like to be in charge of my own destiny.
When I fired a tennis ball over the net, I felt strong and worthy, without needing anyone’s approval, and it didn’t even matter if a girl with a closet full of tennis outfits, whose mother was on the board of the country club, called my shot out when it wasn’t.
I knew who I was and what I was capable of. I felt powerful.
But in another way, what I experienced over the course of that Wonderland summer was a terrible abuse of my own power.
You could say that I brought about the ruin of Forrest Emerson’s life.
You might even say I’d led Regina Emerson to kill herself as an act of revenge against her husband.
He had betrayed her, alright. And I had betrayed him.
For that I could never forgive myself. Because of that, I believed I had no right to happiness or joy.
For a long time, I lived without much of either.