CHAPTER ONE

    Codman Fearing has backbone, had to have to get through childhood with a name like that, why’d you name me that, he’d asked his mother, too young to know it might hurt her feelings that he found her maiden name a burden.  In those days, that’s how it was done, pass it down, mark who you came from, she told him, you have two good ones, my father and your great-grandfather, good men to remember, look what they left behind, why this town wouldn’t have a library if your great-grandfather Alfred Fearing hadn’t taken responsibility for that.

    Alfred, maybe that would’ve been better than Cod, he’d thought about that at the time, he was maybe six, but there’d been an Alfred in his class, always sat over against the wall under one of the tall blind windows that rose so high you could only see sky outside, nothing else to distract you. That Alfred was distraction enough, noodley tall, big feet and a fat lip, skin so white it looked blue to Cod, and yellow hair and dumb, so dumb not even Miss Hosley paid attention to him.  That Alfred made it not a better choice, and by the end of that year, Cod was used to being teased, to having his name the first thing people noticed about him, got stuck on, to its being a reason to prove himself on the playground, and he was big enough for that, taller than most kids in his class, skinny but strong and at six, he already read faster than anyone in his class and the teasing died down.

    Now he’s as old as his own grandfather and still skinny, but the strength is mostly in his mind these days.  Not so tall now, his bones seem to have warped, and the legs are a problem, knobby and painful, but every day, rain or shine, in snow or in ninety degrees he’s out the door, in parka and earmuffs, or in shorts and porkpie hat, and always the cane, tottering, he knows it, down the hill to the village, best thing for him.  Skin a little gray and splotched, hair still brown, still cut once a month, doesn’t get long so fast anymore, but he won’t tolerate it scruffy.  Some older men stop shaving, stop bathing, stop lots of things, not Codman, everything in its place where he can find it, that’s the thing to keep the mind on track.

    More and more these days, his mind tracks back to the thing still in the back of his closet, eighty-eight years old this summer he’ll be, and in this house forever, that thing’s been there for more than fifty, that neatly folded white dress.  You could see through it, he’d put a finger right through it even when it was new, it’d fall apart if he shook it out now, held it up to look at it, but he doesn’t.  He thinks about it now and then, thinks about it a lot, it helps him sleep after the tot of bourbon, after the kitchen door is locked, after the light’s out, he goes back and puts his hands all over that dress.  His idea of heaven is that dress and where it came from, how it felt under his fingers, so soft and sheer and very warm.

    Nobody remembers now, everybody’s gone, his best friend Rhody died last year and took that piece of history with him.  If he’d told anybody, ever said anything about that summer, it never came back to Cod.  Close-mouthed, that Rhodes Lincoln, he’d never talk about Cod behind his back, except maybe to say Cod was stubborn, no good pushing Codman.

    The young woman across the road reminds him, and he wonders what she sees – old fudd, but maybe more than that, and who cares, anyway, he knows who he is.  She reminds him, and every May, he picks carefully a big bunch of the lily-of-the-valley that still grows thick up against the porch, and takes it across to her, where she’s working in her own garden.  She knows it’s coming, but pretends surprise, and he can still smooth out his face and present a smile along with the bouquet, the ritual satisfying and mandatory for his sense of order and the seasons, and for something in his heart, white and soft and carefully folded.

    In his top drawer, he keeps the thank you notes she’s written, five of them in a stack behind the rolls of socks, all black to make the sorting easier for Dottie Hanrahan on Thursdays.  The paper, creamy like the flowers, is thick, unscented. Yesterday, he poked among the broad green leaves by the porch, and could tell it was time, that today would be the day, May second, right on schedule.  He picked all morning, no easy job for a man his age, kneeling out of the question and bending barely possible, but he got it done before the lily bed was out of shadow. The pale green stems bunched thick as his wrist, in a water glass now in the fridge, waiting till after lunch when he knows she’ll come out, when the baby is sleeping, when she gets things done outside.

    In the buff-colored kitchen, he eats what Dottie has left for him, last night’s chicken in a sandwich, wheat bread, no mayonnaise, and a glass of beer.  Finished, he sets the plate and glass in the sink, and goes to the living room to see if she’s come out, that young woman.  His windows are nearly covered with an overgrowth of rhododendrons, the ones planted by his mother when the house was built, when this house was the last one up the hill from the village, when beyond it were just apple orchards, until at the top, the Cadet Parade Ground rolled off to the cove. All built up now for the last sixty years, looking like it’s always been a neighborhood, but he remembers when it wasn’t, when the house she lives in now was still downtown in the village, he remembers the day it was moved, slaked and hauled up the hill, and put back together across the street in the middle of an orchard, his mother’d had a fit.  He watched that, too, first from the porch, and then from this same window behind the rhododendrons, lower then, giving him a good view.

     He can see now, over the bulk of his own front hedge and through the lacy one across the street, unkempt, his mother would have said, that the young woman is just out, setting down a basket, putting on her gloves, taking stock of what she’s got to do.  She wears a hat, straw, and a denim skirt and a thin white sleeveless shirt that makes him sigh, makes him turn from the window and move as quickly as he can back into the kitchen, where he takes the lilies from the fridge, shakes the excess water into the sink, wraps the crisp stems in a paper towel.  The scent burns in his throat, makes him need the cold edge of the soapstone sink against his palm, makes him close his eyes.

    He knows better than to go right now, with this pleasurable but queasy feeling rising, making him reach over to drag a kitchen chair near the sink so he can sit, so he can wait till his heart stops pounding.  Now it’s his forehead pressed against the soapstone, and he is grateful to the core for the cold hardness, for the burning thickness in his throat, for the green honey taste of lilies on his tongue. Recently these brief sallies into sensation have flared more and more frequently, small resurrections that feel like real life.  Now he thinks maybe they’ve just been stored up, that his years of refusing to look back – Orpheus as investment counselor - have bought him this. Resurgence of the boy he was, that’s what this feels like, this overtaking thrust of boyishness, of young man’s fancy, of things done in the dark hollows of the ancient cemetery downtown, in its arching black-green thickets, in the tang and must of new growth and old leaves.  A gift now, his reward.

    It wasn’t always like this.  For years, he’d put it out of his mind, for years he came home only for holidays, natural for a young man to move on, to make his own way, expected.  By the time his stepfather had died and years later, his mother, by the time this house was his, it seemed a good thing to come back, to be where everyone knew who he was, where by then, what happened that summer felt like someone else’s story. Dry years, maybe, but now this – a man overboard he is, washed ashore, grasping for a handhold in the foaming sands.

    He’s no fool, Cod, he knows these moments aren’t regeneration, not the start of something new.  Pinwheels, they make him think of, trinkets, tokens, but he’s ready for whatever’s out there, whatever’s in his head, bring on those surprises. You’re the end of the line, Codman, his mother said it more than once during her long wait for him to marry, and before that, too, passing the wand when his father was lost in the Great War, and again, in Flanders, when she took him to find the grave.  In school that year, the year he was ten, they’d memorized the poem, the poppies and the crosses row on row, and there they’d been, at least the crosses, but in the white geometry blanketing the Belgian field, there was no sign of his father. The next summer she married Horace Bassett, and they built the house in whose kitchen he now sits, and where upstairs in his room is the closet on whose shelf reposes, next to a pile of old sweaters, the dress.

    The end of the line.  She would say it even now, if she could, it makes him smile.  It’s himself he may be at the end of now. Not that he dwells on it, but inklings poke up daily, and when occasionally, he allows himself to analyze his recent flushes of falling in love, in heat, in passion, he sees them as the last display of Independence Day, when the blankets are folded, when the band is packing up, when the crowd is turning away, and then struck dumb by one last dazzling pyrotechnic.  Ahhh!

    His head cleared, he rises and reaches for the bunch of lilies, enfolding the stems again in the damp paper towel.  Through the kitchen window he can see, at the foot of the garden behind the house, the egg-shaped figure of Rhody Lincoln filling the Adirondack chair under the willow, one small loafered foot propped on the opposite knee.  Cod hopes Rhody will stay put for the time being, long enough for him to get across the street and back.



                                                 CHAPTER TWO

    From where he sits under the willow, Rhody can just see Cod’s kitchen window, the one over the sink, and through it, a shadow he knows is Cod’s head, bobbing in and out of view as he does something in its vicinity.  It’s clear to Rhody what that is, he’s fixing up those flowers, he watched him picking half the morning, enough to kill a fellow, all that stooping, but he’s a tough old bugger, is Cod, and not on his last legs yet.  Besides, it’s a labor of love.  He knows just what’s in Cod’s head, he might be in the self-same boat, if it weren’t for that bad clam last summer.  Though to be honest, he doubts it, he, too, thinks Codman’s recent episodes are by way of compensation.  Rhody, after all, had what he heard his grandson call “a life,” as in “get one.”  A comfortable marriage to a nice woman, short on passion, maybe, but long on companionship, not a thing to be underestimated.  Two sons, one now a partner in his firm, Lincoln, Gould, and Lincoln, you don’t get much better than that, if looking to leave something behind is what you’re after, and it was.  As for Cod, you’ve done alright, is what he told him at Cod’s retirement party, thirteen goddamn years ago, who would believe it?  True enough, and you couldn’t say the man didn’t have friends, hadn’t made his mark at Storrs, Fearing, and Phelps, look at the turnout, it’d made Rhody proud.  Still, when you came down to it, came down to a May afternoon in a fellow’s eighty-eighth year, it was a damn shame how one short summer before he knew what he was up to could shortchange a man’s whole life.  He’d set him straight right now if Cod ever let him get a word in, he knows he sees him, he just won’t catch his eye, doesn’t want to hear it.  What wouldn’t Rhody give for one more shot at it, a last short Scotch in one of Mama Fearing’s heavy crystal tumblers, the two of them here under this willow like old times, one more chance to get it off his chest and Cod’s, about that girl and that summer and how he’d let what happened shrink his whole life.   

    Though present circumstances make him privy to Cod’s state of mind, he’s not quite clear how safe it is to push him, what’s too far toward the truth, what might spoil these last bright scraps for Cod.  Rhody’s reluctant to risk that, maybe deprive him by insisting on facts and failed possibilities.  This is no time for unkind truths, the time was then. In the cool shade of the willow, Rhody flushes with what he recognizes as guilt, for the undone, the pressure not applied, the times he didn’t go far enough to make a difference.  What seemed the right thing to do that summer in their twenties, the two of them home before shipping out, that watching and letting Cod shut him up, now that seems a cowardly way to treat a friend. He should have spoken up right when he saw it coming, and didn’t he ever – Codman slick in his Navy whites and the Bowditch girl waiting out the war in her parents’ house across the street from Mama Fearing, no sense her being all alone out there in San Diego who knew how long, a husband already in the Pacific, home the right place for her, the old neighborhood, picnics and garden parties to take her mind off waiting for old Pocock with the mail, twice a day up the hill. Picnics and garden parties and her in her playsuit, peach or robin’s egg blue, or the big hats and flowered sundresses, or the white one.  

    By God, he can’t wait.  He’ll give Cod time to make his little call, get home, nap for an hour on the porch, but then, by God, he’ll make his move, Rhody will, plant himself on the swing across from where Cod snoozes on the wicker chaise and say it.  The trouble with you, fella, you get a notion and you just won’t let it go, some fool idea of honor.   While Rhody once understood, or thought he did, while he once went along with Cod’s decision to walk away, to let her go in a safe lie she could live with, now he wonders how much of his backing off was petty jealousy, was envy.  But will he say it?  Say how does it feel, you old fool, how does it feel to have your boy grow up with someone else’s name?