Making Toast Page 6

  Ginny comes back for the opening of the conference. Soon she will have to return to Bethesda, where Jessie and Sammy have begun camp for the rest of the month, but for an unusual couple of days we have each other’s company. At dusk we take a walk. We feel older and smaller than we do with the grandchildren. The sky is orange and pink, the streets vacant except for the sounds of children in their houses. We speak of the presidential campaign and of things in the news.

  On evenings in previous summers we would walk to the ocean, half a mile from our house. Or we would go only as far as the bridge over the Shinnecock Canal, and turn back. Tonight we stay on the streets that run like tributaries to the water. We are familiar with these old and confident houses, though not with all their occupants. We know some houses intimately, since we traipsed through them when they were up for sale. Our house was out of reach when it was first on the market, but the owners had three homes elsewhere, and eventually accepted our offer, which terrified us. We walk over to Penniman’s Creek, where the water rummages with the pebbles.

  “I’m thinking of getting a kayak,” I tell her.

  “Do you know how to use a kayak?” she says.

  “I’ve done it two or three times.”

  “Is it dangerous?” she says.

  “No. I’ll get one for you, too.”

  “I think I’d be scared,” she says.

  I tell her, “If I can do it, anybody can do it.”

  It is nearly dark, and the streets have gone from gray to black. We hear the pop-pop of tennis balls. We hold hands, the way we did when we first dated in high school. I make a mental note to call a place in Wainscott that sells kayaks.

  On Quogue Street, we pass the home of our friend and next-door neighbor, Ambrose Carr, whose wife, Nancy, a kind and beautiful woman, died the November before last. She had been ill for a long while. Amby, a little older than we, has a patrician voice and the face of a 1930s leading man. One morning we chatted in the post office. In the early afternoon, he walked over from his yard to ours to tell me Nancy had just died in her sleep. When Amy died, he left a phone message for Ginny and me: “I love you.” These days he travels a bit, visits his children and grandchildren, tends his garden, and listens to jazz.

  In Bethesda, Ginny writes a poem called “Arch of Shade”—

  Rachmaninoff and Mozart

  Sift through the haze

  On River Road.

  Two hatted women wait

  In the heat for the Ride-on-bus.

  The Wii is the summer wish

  Come true.

  Your babies’ crib is disassembled

  And taken away

  Accepted

  With gratitude

  To be the bed for a new life.

  I am turning

  To the camp carpool line

  Only thinking of you.

  The arch of shade hovers

  The hot July sun rays

  Dapple the leaf arch

  To highlight the darkness.

  I am here.

  Ginny began writing poems three years ago, and has published a couple of them. They are very much like her. Nearly all begin with the description of a pleasant scene, often bucolic, then pivot toward the expression of a more serious idea or feeling. It is as if she were welcoming you into the poem, and when you walk in and feel at ease, she closes the door behind you, to reveal her real purpose, which, in “Arch of Shade” is to “highlight the darkness.” You must go back up the lines to detect earlier hints of that purpose, such as the women waiting in the heat and the disassembled crib. You might say, “I didn’t see that coming,” but the signs were there. So it is with Ginny. Her graciousness distracts people from noticing that she is alert to life’s dark places. She prefers it that way. Her poems hit their mark but gently. They crack the egg without breaking it.

  All five grandchildren come to Quogue for most of the month of August—Jessie, Sammy, Bubbies, Andrew, and Ryan. Ligaya comes too, guaranteeing our survival. In two shifts, the children arrive late at night, and they run from the cars to the playhouse. They have already declared it “awesome.”

  Kevin has built us a small stage, and one of the children’s early productions is a reenactment of American Idol. I play Paula. Another is a play based on Sammy’s imagined utopia of Moseybane. We call it “The King of Moseybane.” Harris had ordered costumes online for Sammy (the King); Ryan (the Prince); Jessie (the Wizard); and Andrew (the Knight). Boppo (the Dragon) and Bubbies (the Narrator) require no costumes.

  On opening night (which coincides with closing night), Ryan appears onstage with his mother, Wendy. Andrew would not appear at all at first, but, when coaxed, delivers his lines from memory. Jessie’s over-the-top Wizard is indistinguishable from her American Idol audition. The King looks stunned with his own power. Bubbies decides that his one line, “Dookies”—his word for his favorite cookie—will be more effective if delivered from the driveway, fifty feet from the stage, with Harris beside him. The Dragon has to compromise his ferocity by reading all the parts, except Jessie’s and Andrew’s. In spite of these creative differences, the audience—my brother Peter, Bob and Beth Reeves, and the remaining family grown-ups—is appreciative. The bewildered cast receives a standing ovation.

  Before the summer, I got Obama baseball caps for Ginny, Harris, Carl, Wendy, John, the five grandchildren, and myself. I had the caps made to order in a specialty store in the Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, shopping mall. White caps with “Obama” in navy blue lettering—very handsome caps. In a brief if overblown ceremony, I presented everyone with a one-of-a-kind Obama cap. Harris said it would make him look silly to his medical partners. John simply said it would make him look silly. Carl said no one in the company he works for knew who Obama was. Wendy looked mildly pleased. Each of the children tried the cap on for approximately half a second, then tossed it aside, never to pick it up again. I wore mine often. Ginny, who had been running a one-woman campaign for Obama for the past two years, wore hers everywhere. Distracted by the children, she left it on the beach one day. The following afternoon—though the cap did not have her name in it—the lifeguard returned it to her. Amy would have looked great in that cap, her pony tail bouncing out of the opening in the back.

  Wendy announces to the family that she is pregnant. Jessie hopes it’s a girl.

  With two additional customers, I become a short-order cook, on the receiving end of commands fired at me all at once: cereal, no cereal; cereal with milk and without; orders for skim milk added to Silk and “cow milk” minipancakes and miniwaffles, with and without sugar, with and without butter, with and without syrup. Bubbies remains consistent in his preference for toast.

  To deliberately irk Sammy, I teach Andrew and Ryan the “Boppo National Anthem.” At once Ryan adopts it as his favorite song (I do not know how many other songs he knows), and he sings it at the top of his quite considerable voice. Andrew seems to tolerate the anthem, but is skeptical of the lyrics. He wants to know if I am truly great. I look at Sammy who smiles with derision. By now, Bubbies is old enough to pick up the song. Jessie, always a good sport, goes along, so the morning glee club consists of the boisterous baritone of Ryan, the hesitant tenor of Andrew, the forceful soprano of Jessie, the raspy alto of Bubbies, and Sammy, belting, “I hope he’s not stinky.” It occurs to me that the other adults may not approve of this exercise in self-aggrandizement, but that is the price one pays when one is truly great.

  My anger, being futile, flares in the wrong places and at the wrong times. One evening I blew up at three-year-old Ryan. Ryan not only has size and a deep voice, he also has a gangster’s way of speaking, which amuses everyone, Carl and Wendy especially. When he wants water, he growls, “Waw-duh!” He had just run headlong into Bubbies, flattening him in the hall upstairs. I yelled and Ryan cowered. He grabbed his binky. I took it away from him. I overreacted. I apologized. He apologized. He said, “I wish I had super powers so I could fly over Bubbies and not hit him.”

  Wendy was sore at
me for coming down on Ryan as hard as I did. She was silently sore, doubling my guilt. Wendy is dear to me, and she is careful and loving with Jessie, Sammy, and Bubs. She understands that women like herself, and Liz Hale, Leslie Adelman, and a few others of Amy’s age, represent a connection to Amy. The children may look at these women, remember how their mother was with them, and see them as surrogates. I know they do that with Aunt Wendy. I promised myself I’d make things right with her, but I didn’t have to. Soon after my blunder with Ryan, we were good again without my having to try.

  Amy and Harris were married in our Quogue house in 1998 on one of those fiercely bright June days which draw artists to eastern Long Island. It never mattered to Amy that we could not afford a big wedding like those of her friends. I told her what was possible. She was thrilled. We rented a big white tent, which billowed in the wind on the front lawn. Amy and Harris chose a band from New York that played mostly sixties music. There were blue blazers and red ties and navy-blue dresses with white trim, and many white roses. The sky was clear as glass.

  We had asked Amy what sort of ceremony she and Harris wanted, and she said they’d like the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, a close family friend, to marry them. After making inquiries, we learned that New York State does not permit cartoonists (or any other layperson, for that matter) to perform wedding ceremonies, so we arranged for two ceremonies—one by the cartoonist and a legal one performed by Erik Kolbell. The morning of the wedding, Amy, Ginny, and Jane Pauley, the television journalist and Garry’s wife, were having their hair done at the Quogue beauty parlor. Jane had given Amy a pair of diamond earrings to wear as “something borrowed.” At the beauty parlor she told Amy her earrings would be borrowed only until the pronouncement of man and wife, after which they would be hers to keep. Garry said many beautiful things to the couple, before telling the assembled that he was marrying Amy and Harris with the power vested in him “by the State of Euphoria.”

  The following day, before Amy and Harris went off on their honeymoon, we served a brunch for the wedding party and friends. Amy and I took a walk, just the two of us, arms around each other. I do not recall what we said.

  Bubbies sits in my lap in the den. He locks his hands behind his head when he relaxes. I do the same. We sit there in a lopsided brown leather chair—same pose, sitting in tandem, like luge drivers.

  One evening, he points to the shelf to his left and says, “Book.” He indicates The Letters of James Joyce, edited by Stuart Gilbert. It seems an ambitious choice for a twenty-three-month-old boy, but I take down the book and prop it up before us.

  “Dear Bubbies,” I begin. “I went to the beach today, and played in the sand. I also built a castle. I hope you will come play with me soon. Love, James Joyce.”

  Bubbies seems content, so I “read” another:

  “Dear Bubbies,

  Went to the playground today. Tried the slide. It was a little scary. I like the swings better. I can go very high, just like you.

  Love,

  James Joyce.”

  Bubbies turns the pages. I occasionally amuse myself with an invented letter closer to the truth of Joyce’s life and personality.

  “Dear Bubbies,

  I hate the Catholic Church, and am leaving Ireland forever.

  Love,

  James Joyce.”

  It tickles me that Bubbies has chosen to latch onto a writer who gladly would have stepped on a baby to get a rave review.

  I try to put back the book, but he detects an implicit announcement of his bedtime, and he protests. “Joyce!” he says. Eventually, he resigns himself to the end of his day. He puts the book back himself, and quietly says, “Joyce.”

  When Bubbies was a few months old, Amy used to prop him on her knees, hold him under the arms, and look straight into his eyes with an indefinite urgency. Then she would sing her curious lyrics to the tune of “Frère Jacques,” which now makes me wonder if she had an unconscious premonition that she would not be around for him.

  We are the strong men, we are the strong men.

  We lift weights, we lift weights.

  Heavy weights and light weights,

  Heavy weights and light weights.

  We are the strong men.

  I drive Ginny and Jessie to New York, and join them for a pancakes-and-French-toast breakfast at a diner uptown, then go my own way. This is to be a girls’ day out in the big city. Sammy will have his own day later on. In the morning Ginny and Jessie go to a hair salon, where Jessie gets a blow-dry and has her nails polished. The manicurist asks what color she wants. She chooses an electric blue.

  In the early afternoon they go to the American Girl store, a mecca for preteens in midtown, on Fifth Avenue. The store sells the American Girl dolls and their clothing and paraphernalia, clothes for children to dress like their dolls, books about dolls, paper dolls, has a tearoom where a child can have lunch or tea with her doll (it is booked solid, so Ginny and Jess lunch elsewhere), and a doll hospital. Jessie gets an American Girl sweatshirt and a white nightgown for herself and her doll, and two books. She also buys a computer game for her friend Oana.

  They stroll and they chat, taking in the still magnitude of New York on an August day. They go downtown to the West 20s, where friends of ours, the artist David Levinthal, his wife, Kate Sullivan, and their little boy, Sam, live in a large loft. Kate is a professional baker. She and Jess make cookies together in various shapes, and she gives Jessie molds to make more. On the way back uptown, Ginny points out the Gramercy Park neighborhood where I had grown up, and where she and I spent lots of time in our high school and college years. John ends his workday with us at dinner. John has always been a favorite with the children, who are drawn to his gentleness and reserve. At his appearance, Jessie cheers. She deems the day “perfect.”

  Carl, Wendy, and the boys return to Fairfax, leaving Ginny, Harris, the children, and me to spend a few days together before summer ends. I stand holding Jessie’s hand at the lip of the ocean. When she was a baby, she would not allow her feet to touch the sand. Sammy had the same reaction to snow. Neither child trusted uncertain surfaces. Now Jessie plunges into the water. Harris sits a few yards away making a castle with a moat with Sammy. Ginny wears her Obama cap. She and Bubbies remain under the yellow-and-white-striped umbrella. She reads to him, her calm and patience limitless.

  A picture comes to mind of my mother reading to Peter when he was Bubbies’s age. She too was a teacher. I watched them as they sat on lawn chairs in a hotel where we were staying, my mother positioning the book under a shaft of sunlight.

  I tell Jessie, “Here comes the wave. Here it goes. Will it touch our knees or our ankles or our toes?”

  “Our toes,” she says.

  Miles east of here, the beaches of Southampton and East Hampton are mobbed, but in Quogue the beach lies open, with ample room for play and for walking. A girl about Jessie’s age approaches and introduces herself. “I’m Schuyler,” she says. Jessie greets her warmly. She moves on. Jessie watches the boats against the pale sky. She watches the bigger boys on their boogie boards. She smiles with her mouth slightly open and gap-toothed and amazed, the way Amy did at her age.

  “Let’s go in!” says Harris. He and I take turns holding Jessie in the waves. She swims from one of us to the other as we tread water about thirty feet apart. Ginny, on shore with the boys, observes us anxiously. A strong swimmer, she has always been wary of the ocean. Amy was also a strong swimmer. Our favorite photo of her as a six-year-old was taken in a swimming pool in Washington, Amy underwater, doing the breaststroke toward the camera.

  “Daddy! Here I come!”

  Before heading home, we get ice cream cones. Sammy wants a sugar cone with vanilla ice cream and rainbow sprinkles. Jess and Bubbies want cups of vanilla. Harris abstains. Ginny and I have moosetracks. Constellations of families are spread out on the beach. Ours does not look very different from the others.

  Late in August, we return to Bethesda for the first days of the children’s
schools. Bubbies begins preschool at Geneva. Ginny takes him. He cries on his first day, and is fine after that. School for someone thirty inches high—it seems preposterous. Jessie starts second grade at Burning Tree, Sammy kindergarten. He is excited, mainly about taking the school bus. The first day, Sammy’s bus runs out of oil on the way home.