LITMIR.BIZ

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their thoughts far away from their missing professor.

      Then there was only the summer pall of an empty campus.

      Alice and Polly returned in early July and cleared their mother’s intimates from the house; clothing, coats, handbags, the entire drawer of white gloves, things of that nature and, without seeking his advice or consent, divided up her jewelry which he only realized after they’d departed and which made him a little angry—he would have liked the bittersweet activity of going through the pieces and recalling what they marked and where they came from and designating not only his daughters but his granddaughters but it was not worth fussing about. It was possible the girls knew best anyway. And he had the only thing that mattered—the wedding band of slender but premium gold, the twin of which was with her in the ground. It had taken him three years to pay off those simple rings.

      He decided against the full six weeks at the Lake and only went for the last week of July and the first of August, not so much a decision as understanding how much of it he could stand this year. Two days before he took the train up, he sat at his desk and penned his letter of resignation to be effective immediately following the commencement exercise of 1922. Which he hand delivered to Fred Singleton, his closest friend on the board of trustees the same afternoon he wrote it. And stood in the hot July parlor with a glass of iced tea while Fred was courteously considerate and so the protest disguised as praise was short and perfunctory.

      He had to catch a noon train for Lakemont. It was more of the same strangeness. This departure had always been overseen by Olivia amid days filled with trunks in the front hall and detailed arrangements with the housekeeper.

      Instead he packed a single suitcase, the sort he’d take if traveling for three or four days to lecture somewhere. By nine o’clock in the morning he was done and all that remained was the twenty minute taxi ride to the station. He returned to his desk and wrote a letter to the Holland American Line, requesting schedules and fares for New York to Rotterdam the following May. This, like almost everything else accomplished that summer was not so much thought through as simply one more cog in the wheel of sequence he was upon. It was not such a grand plan but something he’d intended to do for a long time and quite clearly he’d have to do something once that resignation took effect. For within that damning sluggish grief he’d known he couldn’t remain as he was, as he had been. And the fact remained— his house, his home for many years, where his children had grown up, where Olivia had overseen their passage into the world and where once he’d thought they’d enjoy some years of peaceful solitude, had never become that, and never would. And come July of next year some other man, some other family would come to occupy it. Already, that not-quite year looming seemed more than he might bear. He thought, hoped, once the students returned in September his work would save him. It always had.

      He had alerted no one of his arrival. So no one would meet him at the station. This was fine. He’d walk down. He’d done it before. That simple dirt road down through the vineyards toward the shoreline trees and drop of land that led to the spit where the cottages lay out of sight was one of perhaps three places on this earth where he felt his soul left its footprints.

      His suitcase bumped his leg and the handle was wet in his hand so he switched sides and examined the day. Stretching both sides ran the long rows of grapevines on their wire supports, now in midsummer heavy with dark large leaves hiding the bunches of green grapes, the hedgerows between the vineyards filled with the sluggish summer afternoon birdsong, the woodchuck he saw yearly eating the clover planted between the rows of vines suddenly standing upright to look at him. He whistled a sharp note and the chuck was gone underground. Below lay Seneca Lake with a small fleet of sailboats working under a northwest breeze and also the occasional wake of a motor speedboat, which he did not like but he couldn’t hear it up here and he’d learned to live with them as with much else.

      Across the lake a hillside identical to the one he was descending rose evenly above the shore. Gentle, these lakes were. People spoke of Seneca with pride; the coldest, the deepest, the most dangerous of mood. He never argued but wore a secret smile. No Bay of Fundy, this. Even in winter.

      The Grotto they called it, although the name had probably been attached to the place before any of them came along. Like a number of other narrow stream-ravines that broke the farmland on that southwestern side of Seneca Lake—centuries of water running downhill through the limestone and shale ledges had rendered this restricted tight gulch of slender streams and deep pools and waterfalls either broad or long braided drops, all down to the lake. What made this one distinctive was the small several acre delta that had formed at the shoreline. And the half dozen substantial cottages, one of which had been Doyle and Mary Franks’s wedding gift to their daughter and sonin-law many years before.

      Henry walked down knowing that this also was a particular occasion. Certainly gone was the plan to retire here—he could not imagine the long winters without Olivia although not so long ago the idea of that solitude had appealed—the two of them alone with lazy tucked-in days just reading or conversing, listening to the phonograph or taking the daily strolls that were more hike than walk. Not that he would sell the cottage. It would remain as it was now, and over the years become even more so: The summer retreat of his daughters and their families. And all would grow there and flourish in those long never-ending all too short summers of childhood and come to love and know this place as their grandmother had and perhaps one day, one of his daughters or one of their children in a future he could not imagine might gain age and serenity and choose this place as a final home. He hoped so. But it would not be him.

      All were there save for Alice’s husband Philip who Henry liked because he was an awkward sincere man older than his years, a lawyer in Chicago who would only get away to join them for the first two weeks of August.

      The two weeks passed with more ease than he’d expected. His daughters with little effort that he knew disguised great coordination retained the summer routine that had endured, existed from their own childhoods—breakfast was a great meeting of the family and the food was almost afterthought to the planning of the day’s activities. Lunch was either catch-as-catch can or immense picnics spread on blankets on the lawn. The children would stay in the water until they were blue and prickled with gooseflesh, teeth chattering. Some evenings dinner was eaten as a group—other times Henry would dine with the Westmores or the Pyles, and as always accepted an invitation to dine with Joseph Jensen and family—the local farmers at the top of the hill who owned the vineyards and by long-standing agreement kept watch over the cluster of cottages during the winter although the Pyles often spent Christmas here. The hole left by Olivia and Robert was within and around all these things but once there, Henry could not have imagined not coming, because the hole was communal, hovering over all the adults and Henry realized this was part of the letting go—part of receding into memory—his wife and son were owned part and parcel by all these people, surely not only by him alone.

      But it was with his granddaughters that the summer regained some measure of its old glow, and new as well as he more so than before saw the perpetuity of the generations.

      The girls were tentative with him at first and he understood this— he stood closest to the mystery of death, the fearful everlasting absence of their grandmother and remote uncle but it was this very hesitation of theirs that pressed him from the shell of mourning back toward life. Early morning when the sun was just up on the still water, he would take the old rowboat, dark green with oars hand-smooth with age, and the two sisters and their cousin aboard to poke along the dents and small coves of the shoreline, the sun warmly lighting this east-facing shoreline in etched detail and they would follow the mallard hen and her three ducklings from a short distance and the girls would bring bread to break and toss as the ducks bobbed alongside, the nervous mother back some few feet until the crumbs began to float and then she would streak in and grab one up. Or round the point where there was a great leaning willow and they would glide with the oars up through the long slender drapes of soft leaves and the girls would break tender tips free and fashion garlands for their hair or, as the water stayed calm he’d row out a bit into the lake, where the bottom began to drop but was still in sight and drift again, all leaning quiet against the rail gazing down into the water for fish, not interested in the fry and minnows or even the flash of a pumpkinseed sunfish but waiting for the green trout shadow to dislodge from

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