a while Ben came in. He now had the belly that comes after forty, and a heavy beard, white speckling the brown. Still, I had no trouble recognizing him. “Denny, what a pleasure,” he said, and kissed me on the cheek.
“You look so much like your father I almost fell out of my chair,” I said.
“So I’ve been told about fifty times today.”
He sat down. A waiter approached, a man older than me, whom I recognized from the staff parking lot. Ben demanded wine, and the waiter withdrew. “Listen, I have some news,” he said. “It’ not official yet, so you’ll have to keep this to yourself for the time being. They’ve offered me the job. Writer-in-residence in the English department, one semester a year.”
“Wow,” I said. “Congratulations.”
The waiter brought the wine, as well as menus. “Kind of incredible, isn’t it, when you consider that back in the dark ages, the damn place didn’t even see fit to admit me? But that’ neither here nor there. The point is, now that I’ve got the job, I can buy it back.”
“Buy what back?”
He looked at me as if I were an idiot. “The house, of course.”
“Oh, the house,” I said; and then, as my train of thought caught up with his: “You mean your parents’ house?”
“What other house would I be talking about?” he asked, laughing. And he was right to laugh: Clearly I was an idiot to have imagined that just because, over the years, I had more or less stopped thinking about the house, he would have also.
“But is it even on the market? I remember Nancy sold it to a couple of law professors.”
“Yes, Travis and Eleanor Ault. But then they split up and sold it to a Dr. Clark from the medical school. He kept it a few years, made some horrible quote-unquote improvements in the garden—they tore out the old fish pond, can you believe it?—and then he sold it to the people who own it now. Their name is Shoemaker. She’ in zoology and he’ some sort of higher-up on the development council. Anyway, it’ not for sale, at least officially, but when I went in for my interview with the provost, he basically said, ‘What can we do to get you to come?’ So I mentioned the house, and he made a few phone calls, and the long and the short of it is, they’re willing to sell if the price is right. They’re asking a lot—close to two million—much more than the appraised value, so I’ll probably have to do a deal on my new book before I write it, just to have the cash for the down payment. And to think that my father paid thirty thousand dollars for that place, and now it’ worth . . . But there’ no point in going into the numbers. Wellspring owes this to me, after what they did to my mother. Of course I’ll have to take out a huge mortgage. Luckily I can manage it. Barely. Thank God I don’t have kids!”
“Congratulations,” I repeated—rather weakly, for the figure of two million dollars had left me dumbfounded.
“I’m glad you’re happy,” Ben said, even though I had said nothing to suggest that I was. “You see, I was thinking it all over this afternoon, in my room over at the Ritz-Carlton, and I realized that you were the only person around who would understand why this mattered so much to me. I haven’t told my sister yet. I’ve been putting it off. I suppose I’m frightened how she’ll react.”
“Why?”
“Well, we never talked about it then—it was too important to present a united front—but when we were trying to persuade the provost to let us keep the place, in the back of both our minds, and my mother’, too, I suppose, there was always this lingering question: In the event that we won, which of us would actually live there? We could hardly have shared the house. We would have driven each other crazy. And of course Mark would have insisted that we buy him out of his share, and then would the one who did stay have to buy out the other one? At that stage, neither of us could have afforded to. I know Daphne would have tried to trump me with her kids—you know, I have children, and you don’t, and therefore I need the house more than you do, so the kids can trample the flowers and clog up the pool with