Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,102

had a number of connections there, & that the next time she visited she would be sure to look me up & we’d have tea. I’ll be at college in Massachusetts, I thought, but I said nothing. She asked me if I’d been to several restaurants in Manhattan that I had never heard of. It meant to me that my father had been in my city without calling me. The chef came out after the meal and knuckled the head of young William, who grabbed his wrist and clung to it & tried to hang off it. Alexandra swatted her son playfully. “Monsieur Molineux,” said Alexandra to the chef, “C’était tres bon. Trop bon.”

My father worked all the next week. I saw London. I stayed out of the house for as long as I could. When I had visited every museum & every neighborhood that I wanted to see, I sat on benches in Hyde Park & wrote in my diary. I was sad. I missed my mother. William, by this point, had figured out that we were brothers, of a sort, & referred to me constantly as such. The differences between us made me very embarrassed. I wished I could be more natural around him. But I didn’t know how to be.

Once, Alexandra told me that it must have been difficult growing up the way I had, and that she understood because she’d had a mother like mine. “Still,” she said. “What a terrible loss. I’m so sorry.”

It wasn’t Alexandra’s fault that she said those things. I still don’t think it was her fault. My father had probably lied to her.

On Friday evening he sat down across from me—I had been lying on a sofa, thinking nobody was home, and when he entered the room I sprang to my feet—and asked me, “Arthur, have you given any thought to when you’d like to leave?”

I hadn’t. I was not sure what to say.

“I suppose you have plans for the summer?”

I did not. I made something up. A job that I did not have.

“Here’s the rub,” said my father. “The three of us are going to the shore next week to visit Alexandra’s parents. I’d invite you, but I thought that.”

He did not finish.

“Anyway I’ve bought you a return ticket,” said my father. “Different ship. You can exchange it if you like,” he said. “I don’t mean to rush you. Stay as long as you like. Use the flat while we’re gone.”

I decided that I wouldn’t.

On the day I was to leave, my father asked if I would mind terribly if he sent me to Southampton on the bus—he had a work obligation that he simply could not escape. Alexandra said, “You must come back and visit us anytime you like. William will be so sad if you don’t.”

“He had a family over there,” I said to Yolanda. “A different family.”

“Oh no,” said Yolanda.

“Yes, he did.”

“What about your mom?”

“He wasn’t married to the woman over there. They just had a son together.”

“You got a brother, then,” said Yolanda. “You told me you didn’t.”

“I suppose I do,” I said.

“What’s his name?” said Yolanda.

“William,” I said.

“You don’t talk to him?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t talk to any of them.”

I never saw them again in my life. I know that my father married Alexandra after my mother’s death, for in his biography it says so. I do not know what William is doing. I know that my father is still alive, for I get Christmas and birthday cards from him—this tradition began upon my departure from London & has not ceased—along with the money that he puts into the fund he established for me as a boy. But I know nothing else about him beyond what I read in the papers. The three of them exist in my mind as a hallucination or a mirage. That week exists in my mind as the week I lived somebody else’s life. Not mine. Certainly not mine.

I told the girl none of this. I said, “Thank you.”

“Yeah,” said Yolanda.

She paused. “How long you been inside here?”

“Here inside this house?”

“Yeah.”

“Ten years.”

“Till now,” she said.

“Why now?” I asked her.

“Because we went for a walk!” she said triumphantly. “We went outside.”

“You’re right,” I told her.

She went to bed not long after that. She put her sweatshirt’s hood up again. Ascending the stairs, she looked like a gnome, or like somebody’s good-luck charm.

• • •

I talked to Lindsay’s dad. He got home before Lindsay’s mother. Lindsay and I were sitting in