time those stone lions out front pissed him off, remember?”
“Okay, but why?”
“I’m supposed to explain why statuary would piss off a drunk?”
Teddy shrugged again. “Okay, so how about this. Why do you think he stayed in the kitchen scrubbing pots when he could’ve been out front with us?”
“I just assumed he was being Mickey.”
“That’s a tautology, not an explanation.”
“I’d look up the word, but I’m driving.”
“Well, the door-prize question is why he changed his mind and went to Canada.”
At least this one made sense to Lincoln. “I’ve always wondered. In the end I suppose I thought you and Jacy convinced him. You’d both been riding him since December. Maybe when the time came to actually report, he saw the light. Like Paul on the road to Damascus? Anyway, where are you going with all this?”
“I don’t know,” Teddy confessed, “but back in college I used to think you could change people’s minds. You’d reason with them, and if you knew more and you were clever and persistent, you’d eventually win them over.”
Now Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. “In addition to yourself, you’re describing our current president.” Of the many bones he had to pick with Obama, this one topped the list; the man seemed to believe the world was a rational place in which everyone proceeded from goodwill.
“Isn’t that the whole idea of serious debate? We forget that even under Nixon, most people supported the war. Eventually, though, there was just too much evidence.”
“There’s your answer, then. Mickey was like the rest of the country. He reached a tipping point.”
“Except in his case, it was never about the evidence, and reason never came into it. He promised his father he’d go. Nothing else mattered.”
Lincoln nodded, beginning to understand. “So what you’re saying is—”
“If we didn’t change his mind, what did?”
“Okay, I guess that’s fair enough, but why is this suddenly so important?”
“I guess what I’m getting at is there’s a lot we don’t know about people, even the ones we love best. There are things I’ve never told you about myself, and there are probably things that are none of my business that you haven’t told me. But the things we keep secret tend to be right at the center of who we are. Tom Ford never let on that he was gay, for instance.”
“True,” Lincoln said, “but we knew.”
“I didn’t.”
“Really?” Though now that he thought about it, Lincoln wasn’t sure he did, either, not when they were at Minerva. A decade later, though, when he read of Ford’s death in the alumni magazine he hadn’t been surprised; at some point, subconsciously, he must’ve put two and two together.
“What’s interesting,” Teddy was saying, “is that people aren’t more curious about each other.”
“Don’t we all have a right to privacy?”
“Absolutely. But that’s not what I’m talking about. We let people keep their secrets but then convince ourselves we know them anyway. Take Jacy. We all were in love with her, but what did we really know about her? I’d never met anybody like her before, so I had no frame of reference. And if you think about it, she was in the same boat. We must’ve been as mysterious to her as she was to us.”
“Except there’s nothing very mysterious about us.” But as soon as Lincoln said this, he realized it was bogus. Because there had been times when she seemed to be studying them and puzzling over their entire non-Greenwich existence. Public schools. Split-levels with Ford Galaxies in the driveways. Mortgages. Neighborhoods full of first- and second-generation immigrants. Two-week summer vacations someplace nearby. People for whom summer wasn’t a verb. She appeared to be drinking it all in. Had she been wondering if maybe it was as good as or maybe even better than what she knew? “Did I ever tell you my mother’s take on her?”
“Your mother met her?”
“No, but I talked about her. How wild she was. I even gave her a slightly sanitized version of the night at the dog track in Bridgeport and our barhopping back to the Theta house. Then about Jacy giving us big wet kisses in front of the house president. When I finished, my mother had this strange look on her face, like she couldn’t figure out how a son of hers could be so dim-witted. She wanted to know if it hadn’t occurred to me that Jacy might be waiting for one of us—okay, I guess me—to work up the courage to declare his true feelings.”
“She really said that?”
“It