Polly shook her head. “What about you?” she asked me. “You’re still working, aren’t you?”
I had no idea if Polly had ever had a job outside the home, buttaking care of Skip and their children had no doubt been plenty. I nodded.
“Look at her,” Skip said, pointing his breadstick in my direction. “Of course she’s working. She’s a child. She should be working.”
I spent my days working with the fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old set, girls who thought of me as time’s own crone, so Skip’s perspective pleased me. Age was a matter of comparison, and in this room I was young. “No one’s offering buyouts for private school teachers. And anyway, I love teaching literature.”
“Books, books, books.” Skip laughed. “The family obsession. Like father, like daughter.”
Every person in the room knew that Eddie was not my father, and we knew his calling me his daughter was nothing more than kindness, but Polly couldn’t let it stand. “Howisyour father?” she asked.
I told her my father was dead.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and said it genuinely. If she was trying to change the subject, she hadn’t meant to change it in that direction.
“It was a long time ago.”
“That’s how Daphne and I met,” Jonathan said, jumping in. “Her father was a patient at my hospital outside of Boston.”
Eddie took a sip of his drink. “What a nice man he was.”
A slight rearrangement of understanding took place among the people around the table. I felt the shift. “You knew Buddy Zabriskie?” Jonathan asked.
“I was married to his wife,” Eddie said. “I was the stepfather of his children.”
Jonathan nodded. “I’d just never thought about it.”
“Abigail had many feelings where Buddy was concerned, many large feelings, so when there were things that needed to be dealt with, they tended to go through me. Buddy and I got along fine. In fact, he came to see me a couple of times when I was in the hospital after Daphne and I were in our famous car accident. He would go to see Leda and then he would come upstairs to check on me.” Eddie looked at me then. “Your father was such a decent man.”
“I didn’t know her first husband came to see you,” Polly said. I wondered why it bothered me so much to hear Polly refer to my mother only asher.
“He did. He’d bring me a copy of theGlobe, a couple of magazines. I remember he brought me a Peter Matthiessen book calledMen’s Lives, about fishing off the coast of Long Island. I’m sure it had to do with the time in which I read it, but the book made a huge impression on me. All about impermanence.”
I could see my own hardback copy of that book on the living room shelf at home. I knew exactly where it was. “He gave it to me when I graduated from high school,” I said to Eddie. “He loved that book.” Buddy was full of surprises.
“He gave you a book about fishing for your high school graduation?” Polly asked, no doubt thinking of the gifts she’d assembled for her own children when they graduated from Choate.
“I was so close to calling him when it came time for me to leave the hospital,” Eddie said, though now he was speaking to himself.
“You were going to call Buddy?” I asked.
Eddie nodded. “I was thinking of who I could go to. I didn’t want to go back to Altoona, to my family. I didn’t think I shouldask anyone from Houghton since I’d be leaving the job.”
“You called us,” Polly said. “Of course you came to us.”
“I wanted to be near the girls,” Eddie said. “I didn’t know that I wouldn’t be able to see you anymore. I thought if I went to Buddy’s—”
“He would have said yes,” I said, speaking for my father, a man who might have dropped the ball on many fronts but spent his life in the service of generosity and hospitality, no questions asked.
“I know that,” Eddie said. “It’s quite an exercise, thinking about who would take you in when your ankle’s been crushed.”
“How is your ankle?” Jonathan asked, as if it had recently mended. We were all tumbling into the past.
Eddie raised his left leg and made a couple circles with his foot. “Never bothers me at all. Time is the great healer.”
“We took you in,” Polly repeated, adamant that her service be acknowledged.
Eddie leaned across the open space between their chairs, picked up her hand and kissed it. “And I am forever grateful.”
