32. Connor
CONNOR
They’ve moved him into the small room at the back that used to be my grandmother’s sitting room, because it’s on one floor and the door’s wide enough for the equipment.
It smells of eucalyptus. Somebody’s put one of those bowls in the corner, and under it there’s the smell that’s been in this house my whole life, old books and cold fireplaces and furniture polish, and the two together catch me low in the throat before I’m through the door.
He’s smaller. The chair’s the same chair and the rug’s the same rug and there’s a great deal less of my grandfather inside his own cardigan than there was in December, and my knees go loose in the doorway. I put a hand on the frame and pretend I’m only standing there.
Lena goes in ahead of me. She’s better at this than I am. She kisses him on the side of the head and tells him he looks disgraceful and he says, “I’ve had my hair done,” and she laughs, and I stand in the doorway getting hold of myself.
The nurse gathers up a couple of things.
“Ten minutes,” she says.
“Longer than that,” Ambrose says, without opening his eyes.
“Fifteen.”
“Go away, Bernadette.”
She goes, and pulls the door to behind her, and then it’s the three of us and the machine going on its stand.
“Sit where I can see you both,” he says.
There’s a settee under the window. We sit on it. Lena takes my hand and doesn’t make anything of it.
“Right.” He gets a breath. “I’ve been putting this off for the pleasure of it. Now I’ve run out of road.” The machine hisses. He waits for it. “Connor. I lied to you.”
“When?”
“In the drawing room. Your mother there, your uncle.” A breath. “Fire going. The whole theater.” His eyes open. “I told you there was no money coming from me. Nothing in any will of mine that mends it. And I made you say it back to me.”
“Grandpa—”
“There was a provision then. There’s one now.” Another breath, longer, harder won. “Had it drawn months before that night. My own lawyer. My own share.” He stops, gets more air. “Signed it while you were still driving out here wondering how to tell an old man what his daughter had done.”
I can’t get a word up. My ears are roaring.
“My share was never in the family instruments,” he says. “Separate since 1981. My daughter’s never had a hand near it.” His head goes back against the cushion. “She’ll find that out from a letter. Which I regret.” A pull on the oxygen. “Not very much.”
“You let me stand up at your party and lose everything.”
“Yes.”
“You made me say it out loud. Twice.”
“I did.”
“Grandpa—”
“Because a choice that costs nothing—” The breath runs out on him. He starts again. “A choice that costs nothing isn’t a choice. It’s a slogan.”
The room goes quiet except the machine.
“You’d have said it either way.” He’s looking straight at me now, and his voice is thin but there’s nothing soft in it anywhere. “You’d have stood up in that room. Said you’d rather have nothing.” Breath. “Every person in it would’ve believed you. Including you.”
“Then why?—”
“Because you’d have gone to bed that night on a mattress you knew was there.” A hand comes off the blanket and drops again. “And in ten years, when it was hard—” The machine takes over, and we wait, and it’s terrible. “You’d have wondered.”
Lena’s thumb presses into the back of my hand.
“Now you know,” he says. “Five months broke. Your wife on a sofa in somebody else’s apartment. And you never once came out here and asked me for a penny.” His eyes close. “I watched you not ask.”
“It nearly killed me,” I say.
“Yes. That was the price. I’m not apologizing for it.” He almost smiles. “I’m eighty-five. I’ve earned the right to run one last play.”
Lena’s hand tightens on mine.
“What’s in it?” I say.
“Enough that you won’t be sleeping in your car.” A breath. “Not enough to be comfortable. You’ll get the letter and you’ll be disappointed.” Another. “I’d like you to be disappointed in front of me, so I can enjoy it.”
“That’s not?—”
“You’ve had a soft life.” He shifts himself up an inch and it costs him more than he lets on. “You’ll work. You’ll have a mortgage. A novelty for you.” His mouth twitches. “A great source of entertainment for your wife.”
Lena makes a small wet sound that’s mostly a laugh.
“If you want more than that, you’ll go and earn it. Like your grandmother and I did.” His eyes drift shut. “Best twenty years of my life.” Breath. “Never once been able to explain that to anybody in this family.”
I get my hand over my eyes for a second. My throat’s shut.
“And it’s yours,” he says. “Not the trust’s. Not the company’s. No review, no trustee, no conduct clause.” The machine does its work while he gathers the rest. “I’ve had it written so it doesn’t come apart if you embarrass anybody. I’m told that took some doing.”
“There’s a condition,” Ambrose says. “It isn’t money. I want you both awake for it.”
“Go on,” Lena says.
“Rowan Street stays exactly as it is.” He turns his head to her, slow, careful of the line at his face. “Your name. On its own. No company, no encumbrance, nobody’s option to buy.” Breath. “Not my son-in-law’s. Not my daughter’s.” His eyes come around to me. “Not my grandson’s either.”
“Ambrose.”
“If anyone ever comes to you with paper about it, from any direction—” He runs out, takes another. “The answer’s already written into my instrument. The answer is no.”
“Ambrose—”
“I’m not doing you a favor. I’m nailing a door shut so nobody in a hundred years can get it open.” He looks pleased with himself. “It’s the only thing I’ve done all year that’s purely spite and I recommend it.”
Lena laughs and it comes out wrecked.
“The other thing is a gift,” he says. “I’ve thought about it more than anything else on the list.”
“Which is what?”
“The Halstead.”
I actually sit up.
“The Halstead,” I say.
“Eleven rooms on a bad corner.” Breath. “Boiler that sounded like a man being murdered.” His eyes are shut again and there’s something happening at the corner of his mouth.
“The company’s kept it as an overflow property for thirty years and it’s an embarrassment to them.
Nobody’s looked at it since your father was alive.
” The machine hisses through the pause. “I bought it back. Out of my own share. It goes to the pair of you.”
Lena has gone completely still beside me.
“You can’t?—”
“I’ve done it. It’s done. It was done in February.” He waves a hand. “It’ll want everything. Roof, wiring, the lot. You’ll fight about it.” A breath, and something under it that might be a laugh. “I’d like the two of you to fight about a roof for a change. A roof’s an honest thing to fight about.”
“Grandpa.”
“Both names, Connor. Jointly, on the deed.” His eyes open and there’s the whole man in them for a second, the one from the photographs, the one who worked a front desk half the night with my grandmother.
“Not yours with hers added. Not hers with yours attached.” The breath goes.
He takes another and makes it count. “So one hotel in this family finally belongs to a marriage. Instead of a dynasty.”
Lena makes a sound and puts her free hand over her mouth.
“Don’t,” he says. “Bernadette will come in.”
We talk for a while after that about ordinary things, because he wants to and because I’d sit in that chair for a week.
He asks Lena about the boiler at Saugatuck and she tells him about Dennis, and he says good, that’s a man to keep, and asks whether Ruth’s got the linen room straight yet.
He asks me whether the extended-stay place does a proper breakfast and is disgusted by the answer.
He tells us a long story about my grandmother throwing a set of keys at a health inspector in 1968 that I’ve heard before and would hear a thousand more times.
He tires very fast, and then all at once.
“Right,” he says. “Out. Both of you.”
Lena stands up and kisses his forehead and he lets her, and then she says, “I’ll come Thursday,” and he says, “Bring something from that kitchen of yours, the food in this house is a scandal,” and she gets to the door before it gets her.
Then it’s me.
I stand next to that chair and I don’t know what to do with my hands, and he looks up at me with his head back against the cushion.
“Well,” he says.
“Yes.”
Neither of us says it. There’s a version of this where I get down on my knees next to the chair and say the whole thing out loud, and he’d hate it, and he’d have to be kind to me, and he hasn’t the breath.
So I put my hand on his shoulder, all bone now, and he puts his over it and holds on. Hard. Harder than he’s got any business holding anything.
“You did it in front of witnesses,” he says.
“I did.”
“It’s the only thing I ever asked of anybody in this family.” His grip goes. “Go on. Go and be poor and irritating somewhere else.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And put the light off. Bernadette leaves it on like I’m a child.”
I put the light off.
At the door I turn around, because I can’t not, and he’s already got his eyes closed and his chin down, and the last thing I see of my grandfather is an old man in a chair in his wife’s sitting room with the machine going and the eucalyptus in the corner and the light off, exactly the way he asked for it.
Angela calls on a Sunday morning before it’s properly light.
I don’t remember crossing the room to the phone.
I remember the kettle starting behind me, and Lena stopped halfway down the stairs in my old sweater, already knowing, and Angela’s voice being very steady and very kind while I take in nothing past the first sentence.
My legs put me down on a kitchen chair without consulting me.
Lena takes the phone out of my hand and finishes the call. Then she gets down on the floor in front of me and holds my wrists while the kettle screams itself out, and it comes up out of me loud and ugly, and she leans her whole weight in and lets it.
The morning of the funeral my hands won’t make the tie.
Lena stands in front of me in her black dress and ties the knot herself, slow, and I hold on to her elbows and look at the wall over her head, and neither of us says a word.
In the car she puts her hand in mine on the seat between us and doesn’t take it back all day.
Five weeks later I’m standing on a porch with a box of books in my arms, sweating through a shirt in April, arguing about a doorway.
The house is on Perrin Street, on a road with cracked sidewalks and a lot of trees, and it has three bedrooms and a kitchen that needs doing and a garage nobody’s parked in since the eighties.
It cost what it cost. Part of it’s his and part of it’s what she’s earned and part of it is a mortgage that will be in my life until I’m sixty-two.
Lena finds that funnier every time it comes up.
It is, by any measure my mother would recognize, a small house.
Marisol has been carrying things all morning and complaining about it in two languages. Lidia sent a case of wine and no help at all, with a card that said I don’t lift. Ruth turned up mid-morning with a mop, took one look at the kitchen, and started, and cannot be stopped.
“Left,” Marisol says, backing through the door with the other end of the sofa. “Your left. My left. Connor, I swear to God.”
We get it in. It doesn’t fit where we planned and goes somewhere else and looks better there.
By late afternoon everything’s inside except one box, sitting on its own on the tailgate, and it’s the one from the fourth floor at Rowan Street. The guest book. The brass key rack. Her grandmother’s things.
I go to pick it up and Lena puts her hand flat on the lid.
“Mine,” she says.
So I stand out of the way.
She picks that box up herself and carries it across the yard and up the steps, and she’s not being ceremonial about it, she’s just carrying a box, with her hair up and paint on her jeans and her arms full, and she goes past me through our own front door.
“Where’s it going?” she says from inside.
“Wherever you want.”
“That’s not an answer, there’s a wall of them.”
“The room at the front,” I call. “The one with the window.”
“That’s the good room.”
“Yes.”
There’s a pause.
“Okay,” she says, and I hear her go up the stairs with it.
I stay out on the porch a minute.
There’s a lawnmower going somewhere down the block.
Somebody’s kid is doing laps on a scooter and giving me a suspicious look on every pass.
The van’s still open and there’s packing paper blowing around the yard, and my back’s gone, and I have to be up early tomorrow for a hotel I still work for, where a board is going to have a quiet look at me in the autumn and I’ll deal with that when it comes.
I grew up in a house with a name. I’ve slept in that house, and in a place on Ashcombe with a gate on it, and in flats in other cities I couldn’t tell you the address of now, and in a room over a parking structure with a laminate counter.
And I stand in the doorway of a three-bedroom on Perrin Street with my wife shouting something down the stairs about the window catch, and my eyes are stinging, and I have never once in my entire life felt this much like I finally live somewhere.