“That’s fashionable of you,” I said.
“Trust me, it was not always the case, but I bided my time. I waited for fashion to find me.”
“These flowers are beautiful,” Leda said, holding them up to the light. “And what a beautiful vase.”
“The vase is the present,” Eddie said. “It belonged to mymother.”
Let’s say Leda was never surprised, but in that moment she looked at him with absolute wonder. “Oh, Eddie,” she said.
“I have a present for you, too,” he said to me. “I’m giving it to you later.”
“Thank you. Thank you in advance.”
“I didn’t know what kind of flowers you liked. Lily of the valley were your mother’s favorite.”
I leaned in to my sister to smell the small bouquet. They smelled like our mother, the way she had smelled when we were children. I remembered almost nothing. Eddie remembered everything.
Eddie asked Henry about high school. He asked Steve about finance. Leda had made cheese puffs and brought them out with some nuts and a bottle of Chardonnay.
“Perfect timing,” Eddie said. “Perfect everything.”
“Whose anniversary is it?” Steve asked.
“Skip and Polly Hotalling, college sweethearts.” He raised his glass in acknowledgment of the long union of Polly and Skip.
“Which college?” Henry asked. He was a rising senior. He was interested in colleges.
“Yale,” Eddie said. “We went to Yale. Well, Polly went to Pine Manor. Yale was only men when we started out, which tells you how old I am.”
“I didn’t know you went to Yale,” I said.
Eddie nodded, chewed his cheese puff. “You did. You’ve just forgotten, and you’ve forgotten because it is not an interesting fact. These are wonderful,” he said to Leda.
Had I known where Eddie went to school? Had I known where he grew up or if he had a sister of his own? “So you’vebeen friends since college?”
“Skip was my roommate. He and Polly met at our graduation dance. We had one foot out the door, and there she was, a freshman bused in for the evening. She was the size of a teaspoon. Skip liked to say he had to wait for her to grow up before he could marry her, like Elvis and Priscilla.”
I crossed my legs beneath the stiff skirt of my dress. If I told my students that once upon a time girls dressed up to be bused to dances in hopes of finding husbands, they would call me a heretic. They would demand that security escort me off campus. Steve got up to refill Eddie’s glass, but Eddie shook his head. “There will be many toasts this evening. I must pace myself.”
“Are you making a toast?” Leda asked.
“Friends, Romans, countrymen,” he said.
“You’re going to the Century Club not to praise them but to bury them?” Henry asked.
“Ah, yes, wrong toast,” Eddie said. “The real one’s in my pocket. I thought I could reuse the one I wrote fifty years ago for their rehearsal dinner, but when I found it—” He shook his head. “The sentiments were breathtakingly stupid. I don’t suppose I knew much about marriage at the time.”
“Were you the best man?” I asked.
“The very best.”
Eddie had a car waiting, so we didn’t stay long. We were saying our goodbyes when Eddie stopped to look at a painting in the living room and asked if it was really a David Hockney. He’d been glancing in that direction the whole time we’d been in the apartment. Steve and Leda had gone out on a limb to buy that painting. “We went out to the last leaf on the limb,” Leda liked to say, but all these years later they were happy to sit andstare at it. As it turned out, what they had bought was eternal life. The apple tree would always be glowing, the field around it would always be lush, the colors would always be more than anyone thought possible. Eddie and Leda and Steve were standing in front of the painting when Henry came up behind me and tapped my wrist. When I looked at him, he said nothing, but turned around and walked down the hall to his bedroom. Maybe Henry was the spy. I followed him. His running clothes were in a soggy pile on the floor. He closed the door behind us. Was there anything in nature like the bedroom of a teenage boy? The twin bed, the poster of Einstein sticking out his tongue, a trophy that said “Best in Show” on the bookshelf.
“Dude’s gay,” he said to me in a quiet voice.
“What?”
“Gay,” he said again. “I’m guessing that’s why Grandma divorced him.”
