I knew,” he admitted. “Guilt, probably. Martin says the Chilmark house is probably a teardown.”
“And you feel like you’re betraying your mother.”
“Silly, huh?”
“No. You miss her. It hasn’t been that long.” When he didn’t respond, she said, “So, did Mickey get in okay?”
“Shortly after I talked with you. He arrived with the makings for Bloody Marys. Even celery.”
“Huh, imagine that. Mickey not changing.”
“It’s Teddy I’m worried about, actually. He’s having those spells again.”
“Really?”
“Not as bad as before, but still.”
“Remember that time we visited him in the psych ward?”
“Are you making this up?”
“Junior year. Not long after you all got your draft numbers. Finals week, I think. He had a meltdown and checked himself into the campus infirmary, and they transferred him to Yale/New Haven. Don’t you remember how awful he looked, how he just kept repeating that he felt really sad.”
Yes, and one of the doctors taking Lincoln out into the corridor and asking him if Teddy had ever talked about suicide. If he owned or had access to a gun. How in the world had he managed to forget all this?
“Tell me something,” he said, abruptly shifting gears. “Do you ever regret not going to Stanford?”
“That would be like regretting us. Our kids. Our grandkids.”
“I should’ve made you go. It wasn’t right for you to give that up.”
“Lincoln.” That feeling again, of his name on her lips. This time conveying forgiveness.
“Yeah?”
“I really need to get on the road. Your dad isn’t known for his patience.”
“Of course,” he said. “Go.”
Now it was her turn to pause. “I’m pretty sure there was one other reason you wanted that one last weekend on the island,” she said, and Lincoln felt a dark foreboding. “You were trying to decide.”
“Decide what?”
“Between me and Jacy.”
* * *
—
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOSER. Ridiculous name, ridiculous man.
That very first summer when Lincoln returned home to Dunbar from Minerva College, he’d begun to see his father with new eyes. His parents were waiting at the gate to greet him, and his first thought was Who’s the little pip-squeak standing next to my mother? Somehow his father had shrunk. Had he been ill? But, no, on closer inspection, he looked hale and hearty, full of his usual piss and vinegar, just…smaller. Not that he’d ever been a giant, of course. As a high-school freshman Lincoln had surpassed him in actual height, yet for some reason the fact that he was literally looking down at the man hadn’t registered. Why hadn’t he noticed when he was home over Christmas?
Of course this sudden perception was probably linked in Lincoln’s mind to other things entirely. As a boy he’d never questioned his father’s importance. After all, he was not only a minority owner of a mine that employed half the men in town but also a deacon of the church, which made him seem essential to the community. Ministers and mayors and country-club presidents came and went in Dunbar, whereas W. A. Moser was a constant, and until Lincoln went away to college, it never once occurred to him that he wasn’t universally revered, that some people saw him as judgmental and unyielding, a figure out of the Old Testament, more to be feared than admired, more tolerated than loved. One day that first summer, coming out of a shop on Main Street, Lincoln had fallen in step behind two men who were deep in conversation. “The reason he’s so upright,” one said, “is that he’s got a stick up his ass.” A year earlier it never would’ve occurred to Lincoln that they might be talking about his father, while now, without any identifying clues, he was sure of it. As the summer progressed, he began noticing other things as well. Even Dub-Yay’s friends willingly conceded that he was the oddest of ducks, and his high-pitched whine was often imitated to devastating comic effect. At the country club, where Lincoln served as a waiter, some of the higher-ups from the mine, their tongues loosened by alcohol, offered him unasked-for sympathy, marveling that he’d lived eighteen years in the same house with Wolfgang Amadeus Moser without murdering him.
Despite now regarding him differently, Lincoln continued to get along with his father well enough, mostly by avoiding politics. The war weighed on Dub-Yay or, rather, the nightly news did, with its constant coverage of student unrest, especially protests taking place in regions of the country he didn’t approve of to begin with, like the East and Northern California. It wasn’t that he approved of the