“My mother’s well, thank you.”
“Tell her I said hello, that Polly and I said hello.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Your mother had some funny ideas,” he said to me, still smiling.
Skip Hotalling had his own teeth, a peculiar thing to say, but in this room it set him apart. I looked at him square and told him I knew nothing of my mother’s funny ideas, because it was true.
At this bit of information, Skip Hotalling’s straight shoulders rolled forward slightly, and the smile he had worn for the evening’s duration fell away. Right in front of me he grew old, and not only that: I could see the energy it cost him to hold up his own bright veneer. He left me then, turning to the woman on his left while buttering a dinner roll. From what I could make out, she was the wife of one of Skip’s former partners at the four-namelaw firm where he had worked. That partner was seated on Eddie’s side of the table. The man on my right—I turned to him—had also been a partner at the same firm but retired early to pursue the study of lepidoptera, which, he said, would have been his life’s work had his father not forced him to attend law school. He and his wife (she was across the table) now spent half the year in Costa Rica, where they owned a condominium not far from the edge of a national park. The rest of the time he volunteered at the Museum of Natural History. He had played a significant role in the creation of the museum’s butterfly vivarium. Eighty species! He told me the first time he went through, he wept, and one of the eighty species alighted on his face to drink from his tear. He was an enthusiastic student of nature, and I was grateful for his willingness to carry the entire burden of conversation. I saved up the details of the glasswing butterfly, the blue morpho, and the tropical checkered-skipper to tell Eddie later.
Once the cake had been served, Eddie stood, and someone tapped a knife against their glass. Ten waiters circled the five tables, pouring champagne into the flutes that had been waiting there.
Eddie smiled and nodded. In a roomful of tuxedos both ill-fitting and out of date (because who wanted to buy a new one at seventy-six?), Eddie looked razor-sharp. He took a piece of paper from the inside pocket, looked it over, then returned it to his pocket, a bit of theater to say he was going off the cuff. “When I arrived at Yale my sophomore year, I was nineteen. My roommate, one Skip Hotalling, had beaten me there by ten minutes and claimed the better bed, but he left me the desk beneath the window to make up for it. At dinner that night, I asked him what he planned to do with his life. Back in those days,nineteen-year-olds had the answer to that question, and even if we were wrong, and we were usually wrong, we went forward with a great deal of purpose. Skip told me he was going to be a lawyer who worked with Native peoples to restore the promises of government treaties.” There was a big laugh here, and Skip raised his hand and smiled. Eddie let them work their way through the moment before giving them something else to laugh about. “When he asked me what I was going to do, I told him I was going to write the great American novel.” The crowd laughed again with, I thought, a lot of unnecessary whooping. Eddie only smiled. “Both of us failed,” he said, “and in other, related ways, both of us succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. We continued to believe in one another’s dreams long after giving up on our own. Skip’s confidence in my abilities saw me through times when my own confidence failed. What good luck that the gods of Yale’s housing lottery assigned me a friend to see me through the rest of my life, a luck that was perhaps only bested by Skip seeing young Polly Wellons standing by the punch bowl as we were leaving the graduation dance our senior year. We were halfway to our room when he told me he was going back. He said he’d seen someone he thought he knew.”
For a moment I saw Eddie as I remembered him—his voice, the way he stood, the way he moved his hands. “He’d seen someone he thought he knew, meaning Polly, whom he had never met. Polly, the girl he would come to know better than anyone else in his life. There is so much randomness to youth. The person assigned to share your room becomes your friend, the girl you pass on your way out the door becomes your wife, and from these random encounters our entire lives are built, four beautiful children came into the world, and they, in turn, found the peoplethey were meant to spend their lives with. There are ten grandchildren now. Ten new people who in part owe their lives on earth to Skip admitting that there was something deeply familiar about the girl he had passed, and trusting himself enough to turn around to go back and see who she was.
“If you ask Polly, she’ll tell you this fiftieth anniversary should have taken place four years ago, because she wanted to marry Skip right there by the punch bowl on the night they met. But Skip insisted she finish college while he went to law school. As the old saying goes, good things come to those who wait. Polly and Skip were always good together. I learned what it meant to be married not by watching my parents, but by watching the two of them. And while I didn’t manage to do as good a job”—(more laughter)—“my life has benefitted immeasurably from the love and attention they’ve shown to one another. And so your best man again raises his glass to the bride and groom. I wish you, if not another fifty years”—(laugh)—“then many more excellent years, beautiful golden years.” Eddie raised up his glass. “To Polly and Skip.”
“Polly and Skip!” the crowd cried, and when we lifted our champagne, the sound of glass touching glass rang like a hundred tiny bells.
Skip Hotalling, who had not so much as looked in my direction since the salad course, turned. “Your father,” he said to me. “He does go on.”
Women pressed their napkins to their eyes. Men discreetly checked their phones. The band struck up “What a Wonderful World,” and Skip gallantly led his wife to the dance floor. When Eddie came around the table, everyone he passed touched his sleeve and congratulated him. “You should have been a novelist!”they said, each after the next. He sat down in Skip’s chair, the newly empty seat beside me.
“That was beautiful,” I said to him.
“I would have rather given them a kidney, but neither of them wanted it.”
“Do you want to dance?” Nearly everyone had left for the dance floor—bursitis in their hips, plantar fasciitis in their heels, they rocked back and forth like creaky boats.
Eddie leaned towards me. “If I dance with you, I’ll have to dance with every woman in this room.”
“If that means I’ll have to dance with their husbands, then I say we skip it.”
“What I want,” he said, “is to use this moment of confusion to make a break for it.”
I stood up, dropping my napkin on the table. The lepidopterist had printed out his name and number on the back of Esther Newberg’s place card in case I ever wanted him to take me through the vivarium, and I put the card in my bag so I could throw it away later. He had been kind, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by leaving it on the table. Eddie and I walked along the edge of the dance floor with everyone waving at us. Eddie laughed and pointed at the bar, then we made a break for it.
Outside, the city was finally, beautifully dark. “How comfortable are your shoes?” he asked.
“I only buy comfortable shoes.”
“I didn’t keep the car,” he said. “I was going to call one, but I could stand a walk if you wouldn’t mind.”
“I never liked being in a car with you anyway,” I said, and he laughed.
“The minute you get tired, let me know and we’ll hop in acab. I’ll take you to Leda’s.”
“Which is in the wrong direction if you’re going to Chelsea.”
He shook his head. “No such thing as a wrong direction.”
And so we headed uptown on Fifth while the traffic streamed towards us. We were three blocks from the Century Club before Eddie stopped to light a cigarette.
“You still smoke?” Oh, that single cigarette he had at night on the front steps after dinner, how I harassed him through every drag, the nine-year-old nicotine police. “You’ll die! You’ll die!” He wised up eventually and waited until after we went to bed to smoke. Children are righteously abstemious where any pleasures not available to them are concerned.
He took a deep inhale. “I deserve this cigarette. I deserve an entire carton. The funny thing is I just started again. I quit smoking decades ago. In fact”—he looked at me, surprised to remember that I was part of the story—“in fact, I quit after our famous accident. After your mother suggested I not come home from the hospital or come back to Houghton Mifflin, I went to Polly and Skip’s in New York because where else was I going to go? Back to Altoona? To Mom and Dad? What a mess I was! I’d had surgery on my ankle and foot, I had a cast up to my knee, non-weight-bearing, mind you. I wasn’t allowed to so much as tap it on the floor. Polly and Skip were living in a third-floor walk-up at the time. When they brought me home, I had to go up the stairs backwards on my ass. They had two babies by then, Alex and Mae-Mae. There was a pull-out sofa in the living room that must have been made out of coat hangers and twine. Your mother had left two suitcases on the front porch. I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to you and your sister. I was homeless, jobless, footless, family-less, an awful, awful time, and then I lit a cigarettein Polly’s living room because I couldn’t get downstairs to smoke, and as it turned out,thatwas the worst thing that happened.”
