contaminated by irony. I couldn’t bear it was what she had written to them on that final morning about the prospect of having to say goodbye. It was that loyalty, that innocence, that Coffin’s narrative sought to undermine by painting Jacy as a tramp, who’d maybe been disappointed when Mickey arrived on the scene and spoiled her fun, the kind she never got to have with the three of them because they were such cowards and prudes. It was a cynical, insidious argument that Lincoln would’ve rejected out of hand if it hadn’t semi-aligned with his mother’s own assessment of the situation—that Jacy might’ve been waiting in vain for one of them to find the courage to declare himself. They’d all been perfect gentlemen with her. What if it wasn’t a gentleman she’d been looking for?
All of which made Lincoln yearn for the one thing he clearly couldn’t have: he wanted his friends back, all three of them, and not just back but back as they’d been at Minerva, with their whole lives ahead of them.
What you really want, Son, Dub-Yay assured him, is your own lost youth.
But no, Lincoln was pretty sure that wasn’t it. He and his friends weren’t entitled to a second youth any more than they deserved a second chance to do everything right. Nor was it really about lost innocence, because by ’71 that had already been shaken by what they were learning about life in their classes, as well as at the Theta house, not to mention the war and a draft lottery that could alter their individual trajectories.
Then what? Dub-Yay wanted to know. If not youth or innocence, then what is it?
At first Lincoln didn’t know, but then he did. What he really longed for, he realized, was his generation’s naïve conviction that if the world turned out to be irredeemably corrupt, they could just opt out. Embarrassing, when you put it like that, but hadn’t that been the central article of their faith? They’d believed that being right about the war their parents were so stubbornly wrong about meant that they were somehow special, maybe even exceptional. They would change the world. Or at least they’d give its crass inducements, its various bribes and dishonest incentives, a miss. Wolfgang Amadeus might be wrong about a lot of things, but neither he nor Lincoln’s mother, nor anyone else in their generation, had been fool enough to imagine you could bail out of the world that made you.
Up the street, Beverly’s VW was backing away from the curb. Lincoln watched it drive up Circuit Avenue until the taillights disappeared. Joe, she’d called her father-in-law, not Dad, as Anita occasionally referred to Wolfgang Amadeus. And just like that Lincoln was certain that the two were, or had been at some point, more than friends. Yet more venomous, unwanted knowledge.
When his phone vibrated in his pocket, Lincoln thought about letting the call go to voicemail, but Wolfgang Amadeus wouldn’t hear of it. God hates a coward, Son.
“Lincoln,” Mickey said. Not Face Man, Lincoln noted.
“Mick. Where are you?”
“Your place. Chilmark. You need to go fetch Ted.” Not Teddy. Not Tedioski, not Teduski, not Tedwicki, not Tedmarek. Ted.
“He’s still in recovery.”
“No, he isn’t. I just talked to him.”
“They won’t release him until morning, Mickey. At the earliest.”
“Just pull up in front. He’ll be waiting.”
“Mick—”
“Do it, Lincoln.”
An order, and in or under it something in his friend’s voice that he’d never heard before.
Okay, Dad, he thought. What now?
But of course the connection had gone dead. The purpose of such imaginary conversations, he knew, was to practice for the day in the not-too-distant future when Dub-Yay, like Lincoln’s mother, would exist only in Lincoln’s mind. Bad timing, too. The world he and his friends had imagined they could either reinvent or opt out of had at last come calling. In fact it was banging at the door, demanding to be let in so it could present its past-due bill for payment.
“Tell me why,” Lincoln said, making a demand of his own, though to his ears it sounded both petulant and pleading. “Give me one good reason.”
“Because you both need to be here” came Mickey’s reply. “Because I’m only telling this fucking story once.”
Mickey
Though the season was different—the end of summer, not the beginning—the moon rose over the distant waves just like it did back in 1971. That night, too, there’d been a chill in the air, one that eventually drove them inside. Down the slope Mason Troyer’s house