“Back in the earliest days, when you and my mother were friends at Houghton Mifflin. She thought Skip was so angry at you because you were sleeping with his wife.”
“Skip was so angry at me because I was sleeping with Skip.” Eddie turned back in his seat. “I don’t know why people bother to guess at things. They’re always wrong.”
“Skip still seems angry.”
We could see the water from the car now, blue sky, blue water, the bobbing boats, the occasional storybook cloud. “I wish you’d come out with us on the boat,” Eddie said. “There’s no explaining how lovely he can be. Which is not to say he isn’t perfectly capable of being a complete ass. Both things are true. Both things are true for most of us, I suppose.”
“So you’re telling me I don’t have to worry about your leukemia?”
“I am telling you,” Eddie said, “that given the state of theworld, worrying about my leukemia, or my relationship with the Hotallings, should be far down on your list.”
Jonathan asked some more questions about Eddie’s numbers and the details of his medical care. Jonathan, who had spent much of his adult life in a hospital, was full of knowledge he no longer knew what to do with. Listening to him ask about leukemia was like listening to him recite the lines from a play he had once been the star of. He sounded good.
“I’ve had two flare-ups, if that’s the term,” Eddie said. “One last year and another one maybe three years before that. One dose of chemo and a little rest and I was back on track.”
“That’s reasonable,” Jonathan said.
Eddie turned to me and smiled. “See? Your husband says I’m reasonable.”
I smiled back. I wasn’t entirely sure we weren’t being snowed, but I would wait and ask Jonathan later. He would know.
“We’re on the Cross County?” Eddie asked, looking at the signs overhead. “Don’t you live in Bronxville?”
“We’re about six minutes away from our house. That way.” I motioned in the general direction.
“Take me to the train station in Bronxville then,” Eddie said. “You’ll lose the rest of the day if you drive into the city and back.”
“We have the rest of the day to lose,” Jonathan said.
“No, I can’t stand this. Or I have a better idea: Take me to your house. Show me your house and let me use the bathroom. I didn’t go before we left Skip and Polly’s because I didn’t want to impede the departure and that was a mistake.”
After a little more tugging back and forth, we finally agreed to take Eddie home with us, and then later we would drive him to the station.
Bronxville was not unlike Winchester, the town where Igrew up. Bronxville denizens lined the platform every morning to take the train to New York City, while Winchester denizens took the commuter rail to Boston. In certain sections of both towns the houses ran towards mansions, and, in Bronxville’s case, foreign embassies, but there were also plenty of houses I thought of as regular. We lived in one of those houses. Our life had never seemed as delightfully regular as it did on that day coming home from Darien.
“It’s wonderful to be home,” Eddie said, even though he’d never been to our home before. And I thought to myself, Yes, it is.
I showed Eddie straight to the bathroom while Jonathan brought in the bags of food. We were set for the next three days’ worth of lunches and dinners. Not having to cook made me think for a minute that going to brunch had been worth it. It had been worth it because now I knew what was going on with Eddie.
“There’s a drawing of a rabbit in the hallway that looks like a Dürer,” Eddie said when he came back.
“It’s not,” I said.
“Well, still, it’s quite good.” He stopped and looked around, then went to a painting of two rabbits eating the edge of a cabbage leaf. That one might have been my favorite. There was something both industrious and romantic about it. After a while, he went and stood in front of the Beatrix Potter in the front hall. “Will you give me the rabbit tour?”
I didn’t ask him how he knew, and I didn’t tell him that no one had asked before. I called to Jonathan, who was still in the kitchen. “He wants to see the rabbits,” I said.
I didn’t think about Candy much anymore. For years I did.I thought about how Rachel and Sydney still missed her, but I didn’t wonder if Jonathan missed her. In that moment I saw it cross his face, the loss of her, the pride he felt in this small, lingering accomplishment: she had put together a first-rate collection of rabbits. “This was the first one she bought,” he said, starting with the cabbage leaf. “She found it in a junk shop in Anchorage.”
“When were you in Anchorage?” I asked.
“Never,” he said. “One of her friends got a job there after college, fell in love. Candy was in the wedding. I didn’t know her then.” He led us down the hallway to speak of the rabbit that was not a Dürer. “It’s good, though, right? It’s French, late 1800s. She paid some real money for this one.” The most expensive one, of course, was the tiny Beatrix Potter in the heavy frame, a rabbit in a calico dress holding a spoon. “This broke two of Candy’s rules, the first being no one was allowed to buy a rabbit painting for her, and the second being no rabbit anthropomorphizing. She didn’t believe in rabbits wearing dresses. But she forgave me. That’s the kind of collector she was.”
“She had the most extraordinary eye,” Eddie said, pulling his glasses down the bridge of his nose when he got close.
“She was disciplined, I’ll say that. She never wanted the house to be overrun. She sold several off over the years because she’d find a new painting she liked better. The fact that she picked them all out herself turned out to be the real gift. They make me think of her, of what she liked, which is much better than paintings that remind me of going shopping.”
We showed him every rabbit in the house, including the one that none of us could stand, a thin dead hare hanging upside down, its back legs bound together with twine, its ears limp.We kept it in the laundry room. “She was already sick when she bought it,” Jonathan said. “She hung it in the kitchen back when we lived in Beverly. The girls couldn’t stand it. They were so young then. I don’t know what Candy was thinking. I mean, I do know, and the girls knew, too. They used to take it off the wall and hide it under the couch or in the coat closet. Finally she gave up. They still hate the painting. If one of them is home for a while, they stick it between the dryer and the wall.”
