Anthropology of an American Girl: A Novel - By Hilary Thayer Hamann Page 0,197

soon be dead. He doesn’t have the stamina for the minutiae of survival; as far as he’s concerned, no one is going to go shoeless.

I know because he tells me things. I always come early for dinner—family dinners are on Thursdays—and I meet him at one of the cocktail tables at 21 or in the Oak Room or at Tavern on the Green. Every now and then we eat at Doubles, a club in the Sherry-Netherland. He lays down his cigarette before he stands to greet me. Then he grabs the waiter’s sleeve to order me a Tanqueray and tonic, which I accept even if I don’t feel like having it, because I made the mistake of ordering one once, and from that point on, Mr. Ross thought it was my preference. One law of being a gentleman is to know a lady’s preference, and it’s not good manners for her to keep switching on him. When my drink arrives, we eat nuts with brown husks, the kind that look like pussy willow buds.

Sometimes I find him smoking across the street from his house, on a bench by Central Park. If it’s somewhat depressing to see Mr. Ross huddled on a bench like a bum—especially one of those broken benches without back slats to connect the exposed cement posts—it’s a clever place for him to hide, because no one would ever think to look for him there. He’s not supposed to smoke because of his health. Everyone always yells at him, but it never does much good. I usually try to take his mind off death for a few minutes.

He’s been talking about dying since I met him, and according to all reports, for some time before that. But since he returned to work following his heart surgery five years ago, no one seems particularly alarmed by his fears. Maybe he talks about dying to try to get people to take better care of him. Or maybe he secretly wishes to be done.

“The soul seeks equilibrium,” my father speculated when I asked why a man who loves his family and his job would smoke and drink in defiance of medical advice. “People who are responsible and successful often act recklessly to counterbalance all that selflessness. If you’re ninety percent accountable for others, chances are you’ll fill up the remaining ten with unaccountable behaviors.”

On one unseasonably warm day in March, after he put out his cigarette under the broken bench, Mr. Ross and I walked south toward the park entrance across from the Beresford, where the Ross family lived. We climbed to the top of one of those mammoth rocks with sides that look like the flaky Italian pastries Dad loves, the ones shaped like seashells, with all the layers, called sfogliatelle.

“Look at the sunset, Mr. Ross.” It was beautiful, like standing inside a purple pillow. “Those clouds aren’t really purple,” I said. “It’s the orange that makes them seem so.”

He set his briefcase between his knees and sat carefully. I put my hand out behind him. He was a big man, almost twice my size. Still, I felt compelled to catch him should he lose his footing.

“Do you think all animals notice color changes the way we do?” I asked. “I mean, even if they aren’t conscious of changes in the same way, they still experience sunset, the serenity of it, the purple-sky feeling. It’s like a certain vibration. And of course, there are variations infinitely subtler than color which people know nothing about. Cats see in the dark. Pelicans catch fish you can’t imagine are there.”

Mr. Ross did not speak for several minutes. I thought he might actually have been unwell after all. Usually he was talkative like the rest of his family. He just lifted his face and squinted like Robert Mitchum into the still point of sundown as if fire-gazing.

“‘The vision is for he who will see it, and he who has seen it knows what I say,’” Mr. Ross recited, adding, “Plotinus, third century A.D. Plotinus spoke of ‘The flight of the alone to the alone.’”

I wasn’t exactly sure what he meant, though he’d obviously moved beyond pelicans and cats. The flight of the alone to the alone—what a pretty thing to say at the close of a day, and an appropriate thing, and I was grateful as ever for his company. It’s interesting to think that in order to see, you must be willing to see, and that you can share what you have seen