Halcyon, page 21
Boose flinched when the chief placed the pendant in her outstretched hand; it was still hot from the flames.
* * *
—
I abandoned the writing of my book. I couldn’t say exactly when I made this decision. Perhaps I made it when I saw how despite Lucas Harlow’s tenacious activism, he still couldn’t resist pocketing a piece of General Lee’s pedestal; or perhaps it was witnessing Halcyon burn to the ground and the noxious smell of its stubborn ashes that lingered in the air. The more I pondered the dissolution of my own work and its rosy hypothesis that a spirit of compromise underwrote American life, the more I felt like Gore in the debate, unable to string a coherent sentence together, even if that sentence might have changed the very trajectory of our existence.
I had decided to leave Halcyon once and for all and to return to an uncertain future at Virginia College without a completed book manuscript and so with little prospect of achieving tenure there, or anywhere else for that matter. As I was packing up my things shortly after the fire, Ginny unexpectedly arrived at my door. Along with Dr. Shields, she had traveled down from Philadelphia to help Boose attend to the end-of-life minutia surrounding Ableson’s death. She revealed that before the fire (while I had been at Gettysburg with Lucas Harlow, as I calculated it) the judge had ruled on the validity of Ableson’s will.
The parties to the dispute had gathered on a conference call: Susan Templeton and her daughter, Ableson and his family, along with Dr. Shields and Ginny. The judge had read the ruling from a prepared document. It began with a preamble, noting the “exceptional nature of Mr. Robert Ableson’s circumstances” and the lack of preexisting case law. Nevertheless, the judge had to rule on the validity of the will itself. Before doing this a definition of death was required. The judge, a self-proclaimed textualist, had referred to his copy of Merriam-Webster: “a permanent cessation of all vital functions: the end of life.” If permanence was an enduring characteristic of death, the impermanence of Ableson’s death meant that he had never really died. If he’d never really died that meant he had always been alive. If he had always been alive then the transfer of his assets in trust to his inheritors was illegitimate. Those assets now reverted back to him and could be subject to damages depending on the court’s decision in the upcoming harassment suit Templeton v. Ableson. That was it.
The ruling had elicited a variety of reactions on the call:
Janet Templeton, speaking for both herself and her mother, had brandished her voice like a long-concealed weapon, asking the judge a number of tactical questions as to the trial’s progression, the method of discovery, the criteria for introducing evidence, to include fact witnesses and expert testimony. Initially, the judge answered these questions with patience but increasingly that patience grew thin. This ruling was a gift to the Templetons and when Janet’s eagerness matched that of a spoiled child tearing through a Christmas morning’s worth of presents, it was only her mother who had restrained her and said they’d have time to answer those questions later. Doug and Bobby had reacted to the news by hanging up immediately. Ginny imagined they’d hopped off the call to get on another call with their respective accountants and brokers to figure out what, if any, portion of their inheritance they might salvage. Boose had taken her father’s hand. She’d told him not to worry, while Dr. Shields had watched Robert Ableson from across the table, trying to ascertain what he might do next.
“Dr. Shields is at the main house with Boose,” said Ginny. “They’ve got something they want to show you.” The two of us traveled in silence the short distance from the guest cottage to the ashy remains of Halcyon, where Boose in her desire not to abandon her family’s home had chosen to stay in a trailer lent to her by the builder who’d overseen the renovation. When we arrived, Boose and Dr. Shields were gathered around a table on what had been the portico. The fire had hardly touched the garden, which with summer waning had spent its flowers, so only a few stubborn blooms remained. The weather would soon turn, and months would pass before it was again warm enough to sit outside. Ginny and I joined Boose and Dr. Shields, who held a manila folder, similar to the one that had contained the article about Ableson and his father on Saipan. He handed the folder to me, saying, “This letter arrived yesterday at my office.”
Inside was a handwritten note from Ableson. He had addressed it To my loved ones, and only a few lines followed, in which he said he’d made a mistake by coming back, that not enough existed here for him, and that he no longer wished to be a burden on anyone. Life, he concluded, must resume its natural course. Then he requested that they accept his choice.
“Have you phoned the police?” I asked.
Boose averted her eyes and Ginny glanced at Dr. Shields. It was clear that he was making the decisions. “We haven’t yet,” he said. “We wanted to talk to you first. When did Robert last pay you a visit?” Dr. Shields spoke with an utter lack of urgency, without any pretense of wanting to circumvent Ableson’s desire to have life resume its natural course, which evidently included the fire that had consumed both him and Halcyon. Nevertheless, I explained how not quite two weeks before, Ableson and I had enjoyed a drink at the guest cottage together. “Did he say anything to you during that drink that you think the authorities should know?” And, as Dr. Shields asked, it became clear to me that the four of us were gathered around this table not so much in an effort to account for Ableson but rather in an effort to get our story straight before the authorities became involved, at which point I mentioned the bottle of Scotch. “Bowmore, I think it was. He said he’d bought the bottle when Elizabeth was born and that he’d been saving it for a special occasion.”
Dr. Shields glanced at Boose. “It’s important,” he said, “that when the authorities arrive you mention he’d come by to drink that bottle with you. Did he give a reason why he’d finally chosen to open it?”
“No, no reason. He said now seemed as good a time as any.”
“What else?” asked Dr. Shields. The question wasn’t only posed to me, but also to Boose and Ginny as he glanced at the three of us around the table. When we shook our heads, he excused himself and went into the house to phone the authorities and thus set in motion the investigation into Robert Ableson’s suicide.
* * *
—
Later that day, a half-dozen local and state police congregated at Halcyon, along with the two Drs. Jones. One by one they questioned the four of us. They asked about the note, about Ableson’s state of mind before and after the judge’s ruling, and, as Dr. Shields had predicted, when questioning me they showed particular interest in the bottle of Bowmore. During my interview on the portico, the Drs. Jones hovered behind the police, feeding them questions with an expression of mild panic frozen onto their faces. Throughout this ordeal, which stretched into hours, Dr. Shields was the picture of calm.
He had a story he needed to tell on Ableson’s behalf. Without a body, it wasn’t immediately clear that this was a suicide, although many of the signs were there: the note, the bottle of Scotch, and, most importantly, the motive. I wasn’t certain what Dr. Shields said in his interview with the authorities, but I imagined this was a conversation he had long been preparing to have, perhaps ever since Ableson had first told him the carefully curated story of his own father’s death. Now Dr. Shields had an opportunity to return the favor.
Of course, Ableson’s suicide eliminated the Templetons as a concern. Their complaint of ongoing harassment would vanish as quickly as it had appeared. The law couldn’t hold the dead to account in the same way it could the living. Ginny needed only to notify the judge, which she did as the authorities drew their questioning of Dr. Shields to a close late that afternoon. While Ginny and Dr. Shields remained occupied, Boose and I sat on the far end of the portico watching the sun set through a gray haze that hung over her property. For a woman who had twice endured the death of her father, as well as that of her mother, she seemed remarkably sanguine and in complete self-possession, as if she had always known it would come to this—which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. How else would it go? Parents die. Children survive them. What remains is passed on. There is, as Ableson wrote, a natural order to things. Still, I felt myself in awe of her ability to endure that order.
“Janet Templeton won’t take this well,” she said with her gaze fixed over her garden. When I asked Boose whether she thought the Templetons might continue to cause her problems, she notched her eyes upward as if solving an algebraic equation; then, conclusively, she answered no, saying “Susan Templeton never really wanted to file a complaint against my father. Her daughter pressured her into it. Sure, Janet will be upset, at least for a while. But she’s young…Every day that a person wakes up on this earth, think of all they have to forget just to get themselves together and keep going. The younger you are the less there is to forget, so it’s easier. Janet will move on, finish her degree, maybe even discover some new galaxy in the cold, dark reaches of the universe. Also, her mother’s petition succeeded in the end, so that helps too. I read in the paper a few days ago that the Gettysburg Park Service had torn down the Virginia Monument.”
“I know. I was there.”
“You were?” When she asked what that was like, I considered telling her about Lucas Harlow’s complicated family history, the way we’d walked Pickett’s Charge together, the grass brushing against our ankles, the gradual rise up toward the stone wall, and the marker dedicated to the 11th Mississippi Infantry. Ultimately, I chose not to mention any of it. That history wasn’t mine. Lucas Harlow would have to decide what it meant to him, whether to teach it or to hide it. Now that he’d destroyed his monument, I hoped he would choose the former but the choice was his. To answer Boose’s question of what it was like to see the Virginia Monument toppled, I simply answered, “It was time to let it go.”
A beat of silence passed. “What’s next for you?” she wanted to know.
“Head back to school, I guess. I have to teach next term.”
“Will you finish your book there?” I told her, no; that I wouldn’t be finishing my book at all. This confused her. When she asked why, I didn’t have a satisfactory answer, except to say, “It just never came together in the end.” She was very sorry to hear that and knew what a distraction her family could be. She hoped it wasn’t their fault my work hadn’t progressed. Maybe if I just gave it a little more time? When I told her that I’d decided to take a break from writing altogether, she again apologized, saying how she wished I’d had a better experience at Halcyon. “No,” I said. “Don’t be sorry. If anything, this place has given me a fresh start.”
The two of us sat quietly. We watched the light change as it filtered through the grove of pear trees and fell on the last of the hydrangeas, aster, and Mary’s old bed of peonies. Parts of the garden remained dug up in places. There was a bit more planting left to do but, despite the fire, it would soon be finished, and the house eventually rebuilt. In a year, or maybe two, Halcyon would be exactly as she’d always remembered it.
EIGHT
HALCYON
George W. Bush lost the popular vote that November but won in the Electoral College. On Thursday, January 20, 2005, he became the 44th president of the United States. Gore’s supporters decried the antiquated system that delivered this result. Between the election and the inauguration, they demanded reforms, but once Bush took office, those calls for reform subsided until, eventually, everyone accepted things the way they’d always been.
Quieter, more considered voices hadn’t blamed the Electoral College for Gore’s defeat; instead, they had blamed his administration’s failed scientific policies. Bush had carried the election with razor-thin margins and, had Gore stayed away from controversial programs like cryoregeneration, many believed he could have succeeded to a second term. Only days before the election, a spate of newspaper articles reported a series of suicides among those who had participated in Gore’s programs, including Robert Ableson. Within Bush’s first hundred days in office, he cut all federal funding for these programs and placed restrictions on any future research.
In the years that followed, I couldn’t help but imagine alternate histories. What if Ableson had made a different set of choices? If he hadn’t taken his own life, if he hadn’t provoked Susan Templeton’s harassment suit, would the scientific advances sponsored by the Gore administration have further advanced mankind’s understanding of life, death, and the permeability between the two? They would have at least swung the election back in Gore’s favor. But it wasn’t only scientific policy and electoral outcomes I wondered about. During those first hundred days of Bush’s administration, while he was quietly shutting down Gore’s scientific initiatives, he was also laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq. This required his administration to educate the American people on a different science, one that involved theories about yellow cake, its uses, as well as the uses of certain aluminum tubes and the possibilities of uranium enrichment.
After that war started, it seemed as though the Bush administration ricocheted between crises, whether it was the president’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or his administration’s inability to predict the devastating financial crisis of 2008. Polling as low as he was, Bush proved no match for his challenger, whom I’d first heard of during those months I’d spent at Halcyon, when the idea of an African American president, elected by this country, had seemed a prospect as far-fetched among the electorate as resurrection once had been among the scientific community. In the lead-up to that election, I was glad that I was no longer teaching at Virginia College because our nation’s long, complicated history with the Civil War again took center stage—although, due to the efforts of individuals like Lucas Harlow, who had made a name for himself as the country’s leading advocate for the removal of Confederate monuments, much of the iconography of that period had been displaced from public view and consigned to a constellation of underfunded and poorly attended museums across the country.
Despite my continued affinity for Shelby Foote and my belief that compromise was the spirit that underwrote this country—even if I’d failed to coherently prove this point in a book—I had by this time made a career shift. I still taught, but not at the university level and not history. I had, instead, earned a certificate to teach elementary school math. With a bit of help from Ginny (who had handled the divorce of the superintendent of the Philadelphia schools) I had secured a job in the city and had resumed my life not far from the apartment where she and I had first lived when married. Unlike history, math was objective and defied interpretation. As for my students, they were ten- and eleven-year-old kids. As long as you taught the material, there was no wrong way to do it. Also, I’d met someone.
Amélie taught French. Dark-haired and dusky-eyed, she’d come from the gritty port city of Toulon on a two-year work visa, part of an exchange program to deliver more foreign-language instruction to inner-city public schools. Her English was shaky, my French nonexistent, but during her first semester our class schedules conspired to make us the only teachers in the faculty lounge for one fifty-minute period each day. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Ginny, which was perhaps part of the attraction, and the age difference between us was similar to that of Robert and Mary Ableson. Also, she wore her dark hair like Mary, tied back in a chignon that revealed her long neck. I fell for her instantly, and with me putting a little effort into my French-English dictionary she fell for me. Because of her youth, whole possibilities stretched before us, a new life, a family. Which left me equally excited and terrified.
Over a decade had passed since that summer at Halcyon, but I’d kept up with Dr. Shields and often went to him for advice. A few times a year, I would meet him at his office at the Abramson Cancer Center and we would grab a bite around the corner at the same greasy spoon diner where we’d first taken a meal together. His obligations at the hospital had slowed as he approached retirement and he’d used this increased allowance of time to participate in overseas medical missions. He’d traveled extensively on these missions, to Africa, to eastern Europe, to Central America, but the one place he’d returned to repeatedly was the island of Saipan. The first time he went, he’d visited the airfield. Not long after returning from that trip, the two of us had met at the diner and, leaning over his plate, he’d told me how meaningful it’d been “to stand right where I lost my father.”
When I spoke to him about my life, he was patient and listened closely. Amélie had no long-term desire to remain in the United States. She wanted to return home and wanted me to return home with her. “If you leave, what will you do?” Dr. Shields asked. To which I answered, “Teach math, I guess.” He nodded and listened as I sketched an approximation of what life might look like for me outside this country. “When would you come back?” he asked, and I told him that I didn’t know. “What does Ginny think?” and this last question was hardest of all. Ginny knew about my workplace romance and that the woman was younger, but nothing else. She and Amélie had never met. I’d kept them apart because of my embarrassment; when they saw how closely they resembled one another what would each think? Dr. Shields laughed when I explained this. “You worry too much,” he said. “You’re a young man. You have your entire life ahead of you.”
* * *
—
For the rest of dinner, Dr. Shields and I talked politics. Neither of us could believe how quickly President Obama’s eight years in office had passed. Our reservations notwithstanding, we agreed he’d done a good enough job. As unlikely as it might have seemed during the darkest hours of Bill Clinton’s impeachment and conviction, the Democratic Party had now crowned Hillary the presumptive nominee. Based on every poll, she seemed poised to return to the White House in triumphant style. Both Dr. Shields and I thought the masterful handling of her ex-husband had proven key to her political success. She had very publicly divorced him but then also very publicly forgiven him, praising his accomplishments as president at every turn, building a reputation for magnanimity that led her to the Senate, to the State Department, and on to her current trajectory toward the highest office in the land. If I spoke with such certainty about her victory, it was because of the disarray in the Republican field. Ever since Bush’s single term, the party had no sense of itself, allowing its populist wing to war openly with its establishment wing. While a disciplined Democratic Party coalesced around Hillary, the Republicans had literally dozens of candidates vying for their nomination in a debate that was no debate at all but veered toward incoherence. “She’s bound to win,” I concluded.
