Chances Are E-Book

Richard Russo

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 503

Beschreibung

One beautiful September day, three sixty-six-year-old men convene on Martha's Vineyard, friends ever since meeting in college in the 1960s. They couldn't have been more different then, or even today - Lincoln's a commercial real estate broker, Teddy a tiny-press publisher and Mickey an ageing musician. But each man holds his own secrets, in addition to the monumental mystery that none of them has ever stopped puzzling over since 1971: the disappearance of their friend Jacy. Now, decades later, the distant past interrupts the present as the truth about what happened to Jacy finally emerges, forcing the men to reconsider everything they thought they knew about each other. Shot through with Russo's trademark comedy and humanity, Chances Are also introduces a new level of suspense and menace that will quicken the reader's heartbeat throughout this absorbing saga of how friendship's bonds are every bit as constricting and rewarding as those of family. For both longtime fans and lucky newcomers, Chances Are is a stunning demonstration of a highly-acclaimed author deepening and expanding his remarkable body of work.

Leseprobe

‘No one understands men better than Russo, and no one is more eloquent in explaining how they think, suffer and love. At a rough time for masculinity, Russo’s flawed but always decent characters are repositories of the classic virtues of their gender. . . . [Chances Are] blends everything we love about this author with something new. Yes, this is a novel about male friendship, fathers and sons, small-town class issues and lifelong crushes, and it provides the familiar pleasure of immersion in the author’s distinctive, richly observed world and his inimitable ironic voice. But this is also a mystery about a 1971 cold case.’

Kirkus Reviews (starred)

‘Russo’s first standalone novel in a decade mixes his signature themes—father-and-son relationships, unrequited love, New England small-town living and the hiccups of aging—with stealthy clue-dropping in a slow-to-build mystery . . . In the final stretch, surprising, long-kept secrets are revealed. This is vintage Russo.’

Publishers Weekly

ALSO BY RICHARD RUSSO

Mohawk

The Risk Pool

Nobody’s Fool

Straight Man

Empire Falls

The Whore’s Child

Bridge of Sighs

That Old Cape Magic

Interventions

On Helwig Street

Everybody’s Fool

Trajectory

The Destiny Thief

First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Allen & Unwin

First published in the United States in 2019 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

Copyright © 2019 by Richard Russo

The moral right of Richard Russo to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Allen & Unwin

c/o Atlantic Books

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

Phone:

020 7269 1610

Fax:

020 7430 0916

Email:

[email protected]

Web:

www.allenandunwin.com/uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 91163 036 4

Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 91163 037 1

E-Book ISBN 978 1 76087 168 0

Printed in

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For those whose names are on the wall

For a second there we won.

Yeah, we were innocent and young.

“Miss Atomic Bomb,” The Killers

Prologue

The three old friends arrived on the island in reverse order, from farthest to nearest: Lincoln, a commercial real estate broker, practically cross-country from Las Vegas; Teddy, a small-press publisher, from Syracuse; Mickey, a musician and sound engineer, from nearby Cape Cod. All were sixty-six years old and had attended the same small liberal arts college in Connecticut where they’d slung hash at a campus sorority. The other hashers, mostly frat boys, claimed to be there by choice, because so many of the Thetas were hot, whereas Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey were scholarship students doing the job out of varying degrees of economic necessity. Lincoln, as good-looking as any of the frat boys, was immediately made a “face man,” which meant donning a scratchy white waist-length jacket to serve the girls in the sorority’s large dining room. Teddy, who’d worked at a restaurant during his junior and senior years of high school, became a cook’s helper, making salads, stirring sauces, plating entrées and desserts. Mickey? They took one look and escorted him over to the sink where a mountain of dirty pots sat piled alongside a large cardboard box of off-brand steel scrubbers. Such was their freshman year. By the time they were seniors, Lincoln had been made head hasher and could offer both his friends positions in the dining room. Teddy, who’d had enough of the kitchen, promptly accepted, but Mickey said he doubted there was a serving jacket big enough to fit him. Anyway, he preferred remaining a kitchen slave to making nice with the fancy girls out front, since at least the galley was his own.

Converging on the island forty-four years later, all three were grateful for the educations they’d received at Minerva, where classes had been small, their professors available and attentive. To the naked eye, it had looked like most other colleges did in the late sixties and early seventies. The boys had long hair and wore faded jeans and psychedelic T-shirts. In dorm rooms kids smoked dope, covered the smell with incense, listened to the Doors and Buffalo Springfield. But these were mere matters of style. To most of their classmates, the war seemed a long way off, something that was going on in Southeast Asia and Berkeley and on TV, not coastal Connecticut. Editorials in the Minerva Echo were forever lamenting the lack of any real activism. “Nothin’s happenin’ here,” one said, riffing on the famous song lyrics. “Why that is ain’t exactly clear.”

No place on campus was less rebellious than the Theta house. A few of the girls smoked weed and went braless, but otherwise the sorority was a protective bubble. Yet it was here, far more than in their classes, that the real world began to reveal itself conspicuously enough that even nineteen-year-olds like Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey couldn’t ignore it. The cars parked out back of the Theta house were not only nicer than those in the regular student lots but also the faculty’s. Stranger still, at least to young men who didn’t come from wealth, the owners of the vehicles in the Theta lot didn’t feel particularly lucky to be at Minerva, or even to have parents who could afford the staggering tuition. Where they came from, Minerva was the natural extension of the first eighteen years of their lives. Indeed, for many, this had been a safety school, and they spent their freshman year getting over the disappointment of not getting into Wesleyan or Williams or one of the Ivies. Though they’d known the statistics on the grades and SATs required to get into such elite institutions, they were used to having other factors count, too, things you could neither talk about nor quantify but that still caused doors to magically open. Anyway, Minerva was fine. At least they’d gotten into the Theta house was how they looked at it. Otherwise, they might as well have gone to UConn.

On December 1, 1969, the evening of the nation’s first draft lottery, Lincoln convinced the house mother to let the hashers serve dinner half an hour early so they could all crowd around a tiny black-and-white TV in the back room where they ate their meals. Given that their fates hung in the balance, the mood was strangely buoyant, at least at the beginning. Of the eight hashers’ birthdays, Mickey’s came up first, 9th out of 366 possibilities, causing the others to break into a chorus of “O, Canada,” which might’ve gone over better if they’d known more than the first two words of the song. Of the three friends Lincoln’s came next at 189; better, but not safe enough, and impossible to make plans around.

As the lottery continued, a relentless drumbeat of birthdays—April 1st, September 23rd, September 21st—the mood in the room grew more somber. Earlier, while serving the girls’ dinner, they’d all been in the same boat, but now their birthdays made individuals of them, people with singular destinies, and one by one they drifted away, back to their dorm rooms and apartments, where they would call their parents and girlfriends and discuss the fact that their lives had just changed, some for the better, others for the worse, their grades and SATs and popularity suddenly beside the point. By the time Teddy’s birthday finally came up, he and Lincoln and Mickey were the only guys left in the hasher room. Passionately opposed to the war, Teddy had told his friends earlier in the day that he would go to Canada or jail rather than get drafted, so to him the lottery was meaningless. But of course that wasn’t really true. He didn’t want to go to Canada and wasn’t sure that when push came to shove he’d have the necessary courage of his convictions to actually go to jail in protest. Distracted by these thoughts, by the time only twenty-odd unannounced birthdays remained, he was convinced that his had already been read out and he’d somehow missed it, maybe when they were adjusting the TV’s rabbit ears. But then there it was, 322nd out of 366. He was beyond safe. Reaching to turn off the TV, he realized his hand was shaking.

There were a dozen or so Thetas they counted as friends, but only Jacy Calloway, with whom all three were in love, was waiting outside the sorority’s back entrance when they finally emerged into the frigid dark. Once Mickey told her—with that big, goofy grin plastered on his face—that it looked like he was headed for Southeast Asia, she slid down off the hood of the car she’d been sitting on, buried her face in his chest, hugged him close and said, into his shirt, “Those fuckers.” Lincoln and Teddy, both luckier on a night when that—not smart, not rich—was what you wanted desperately to be, managed nevertheless to feel intense jealousy when they saw the girl of their collective dreams in Mickey’s arms, never mind the uncomfortable truth that she was already engaged to another young man entirely. As if Mickey’s good fortune in this brief moment somehow mattered more than the short straw he’d drawn an hour earlier. Then, as his birthday was announced, both Lincoln and Teddy had the same sickening reaction: that two years ago the people in charge had taken one look at Mickey and assigned him the shittiest hasher duty in the Theta house, and when he reported for duty, he would again be sized up at a glance and sent straight to the front lines, a target no sniper could miss.

Right this minute, though, with Jacy nestled in his arms, they couldn’t believe his incredible good fortune. This is called youth.

LINCOLN HAILED FROM Arizona, where his father was minority owner of a small, mostly played-out copper mine. His mother was from Wellesley, the only child of a once well-to-do family, though, unbeknownst to her, not much of that wealth remained when her parents were killed in a car accident while she was a senior at Minerva College. Another daughter might’ve resented how little was left of the family fortune after their debts were squared, but Trudy was too devastated by sheer grief for anything else to really register. A quiet, solitary girl who didn’t make friends easily, she was suddenly all alone in the world, untethered from love and hope, and terrified that tragedy might befall her as suddenly as it had her parents. How else to explain her decision to marry Wolfgang Amadeus (W.A.) Moser, a small, domineering man who had little to recommend him besides his absolute conviction that he was right about anything and everything.

Not that she was the only one he managed to bamboozle. Until his sixteenth birthday, Lincoln actually believed his father, whose outsize personality was in stark contrast to his diminutive stature, had done his mother a favor by marrying her. Neither attractive nor unattractive, she seemed to disappear so completely in large gatherings that people afterward couldn’t remember whether or not she’d been present. She seldom objected, even gently, to anything her husband said or did, not even after they returned from their honeymoon and he informed her that of course she would forsake her Roman Catholic faith and join the fundamentalist Christian sect to which he belonged. When she accepted his proposal of marriage, she’d taken for granted they would live in the small desert town of Dunbar, where the Moser mine was; but she’d also assumed they’d take vacations from time to time, if not in New England—which her husband confessed to loathing—then maybe California, except it turned out he had no use for that coast, either. He was a firm believer—as he explained it to her—in “learning to love what you have,” by which he seemed to mean Dunbar and himself.

To Trudy, everything about Dunbar and the man she’d married felt foreign, at least at first. The town itself, hot and flat and dusty, was unapologetically segregated, whites on one side of literal railroad tracks and “Mexicans,” as they were called, even those who’d resided there legally for over a century, on the other. Though it was, to her way of thinking, a nothing town, Dunbar seemed to have everything W.A. (Dub-Yay, to his friends) Moser required: the house they lived in, the church they attended, the shabby little country club where he played golf. At home he ruled the roost, his word law. Her parents had discussed things, so she was surprised to learn that her own marriage would operate on a different model altogether. They’d been married for several years before Lincoln came along, so it was possible they had argued occasionally about how things would play out—his father gradually bending Trudy to his will—but Lincoln’s impression was that while his mother might’ve been surprised by her new life, she accepted it from the moment she set foot in Dunbar. The first time he remembered her digging in her heels was when it came time for him to apply to colleges. Dub-Yay meant for him to attend the University of Arizona, his own alma mater, but Trudy, who’d gone to live in Tucson with a maiden aunt after her parents died and finished her degree there as well, was determined that their son would be educated back East. And not at a big state university, either, but a small liberal arts college like Minerva, the school she’d dropped out of a semester shy of her degree.

The argument began at the dinner table with his father proclaiming in his high, whiny voice, “You know, do you not, that for any such thing to happen, I would have to be dead?” A statement that was clearly designed to end this conversation, so Lincoln was surprised to see on his mother’s face an unfamiliar expression that suggested she’d contemplated her husband’s mortality with equanimity and was undeterred. “Nevertheless,” she said, and this in fact did end the discussion, at least for the time being. It resumed later in his parents’ bedroom. Though they kept their voices down, Lincoln heard them going at it in there through the thin wall that separated his room from theirs, and it continued long after his father, who always went to the mine early, was usually asleep. It was still ongoing when Lincoln himself finally drifted off.

The next morning, after his father, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep and unaccustomed domestic discord, headed off to work, Lincoln lay in bed mulling things over. What on earth had come over his mother? Why was she waging this particular battle? As far as he was concerned, the University of Arizona was perfectly fine. His father had gone there and several of his classmates were heading there, too, so he’d know people. After tiny Dunbar he was looking forward to life in Tucson, a big city. And if he got homesick, he could easily make the short journey back to Dunbar for the weekend. A couple other classmates would attend colleges in California, but nobody he knew was moving to the East. Did his mother imagine he wanted to be on the other side of the country, where he didn’t know anybody? And going to classes with kids who’d all graduated from fancy prep schools? Well, what did it matter? At some point after Lincoln fell asleep, his mother had no doubt come to her senses and realized the futility of openly opposing his father on this or any related subject of significance. Order, by now, had surely been restored.

So he was surprised again to find her in the kitchen humming a jaunty tune and not at all sheepish about what had transpired the night before. She was still in her robe and slippers, like most mornings, but also seemed to be in unusually high spirits, as if she were about to go on a long-anticipated vacation to an exotic port of call. It was all extremely disconcerting.

“I think Dad’s right,” Lincoln told her, pouring himself a bowl of cereal.

She stopped humming and looked him in the eye. “What else is new?”

Which brought him up short. After all, it wasn’t like she and his father argued all the time and he always took his father’s part. Last night’s was, in fact, the first real argument he could remember. Now here she was spoiling for yet another fight, this time with him. “Why spend all that money?” he continued, trying to sound reasonable and unbiased as he poured milk on his cereal and grabbed a spoon from the drawer. It was his intention to eat standing up as usual, leaning against the counter.

“Sit,” she told him. “There are things you don’t understand, and it’s high time you did.”

Grabbing the step stool from between the fridge and the kitchen counter, his mother climbed up onto the highest step. What she was after was on the top shelf of the cupboard, and far in the back. Lincoln watched, amazed and, yes, a little frightened. Had she hidden something up there where his father wouldn’t find it? What? A ledger of some sort, or maybe a book of photographs, something secret that would shed light on these things he supposedly didn’t understand? But no. She was reaching for a bottle of whiskey. Since he hadn’t moved away from the counter, she handed it down to him.

“Mom?” he said, because it was seven in the morning and, really, who was this strange woman? What had she done with his mother?

“Sit,” she repeated, and this time he was glad to obey, because his knees had jellied. He watched as she poured a slug of amber liquid into her coffee. Taking a seat across from him, she set the bottle on the table, as if to suggest she wasn’t done with it. He half expected her to offer him some. Instead she just sat there staring at him until, for some reason, he felt guilty and looked down at his cereal, which was getting soggy.

The gist of it was this. There were several facts about their lives of which he was ignorant, starting with the mine. Sure, he’d known that it was slipping, and that over the last several years the price of copper had tanked. Each year there were more layoffs, and the workers had again threatened to unionize, as if that would ever happen in Arizona. Eventually the mine would close, and the lives of all these men would be shaken. None of this was news. No, the news was that their lives might be shaken. Indeed, they already had been. Many of the extras—things they had that many of their neighbors didn’t, the in-ground pool, the groundskeeper, membership in the country club, a new car every other year—were thanks to her, she explained, to the money she’d brought to the marriage.

“But I thought—” he began.

“I know you did,” she told him. “You’ll just have to learn to think differently. Starting now.”

The night before, his father had attempted, as usual, to lay down the law. He refused to pay for any son of his to get educated in a part of the country he scorned for its snobbery and elitism; he’d come back a damn Democrat or, worse, as one of those long-haired Vietnam protesters who were on the TV every night. A private, liberal arts education back East would cost them five times what a “perfectly good” education could be had for right here in Arizona. To which his mother had replied that he was wrong—imagine her actually telling him any such thing!—because it would cost ten times more. She’d telephoned the admissions office at Minerva College and knew whereof she spoke. Not that cost was any concern of his, since she meant to pay for it. Furthermore, she continued—imagine, continuing!—she hoped their son would protest against a war that was stupid and immoral and, finally, that if Lincoln voted Democratic he wouldn’t be the only one in their tiny family to do so. So there.

Though Lincoln loved his mother, he was reluctant to accept these new economic claims as factual, mostly because they cast his father in such an unfavorable light. If she, not he, was responsible for the “extras” they’d so long enjoyed, why had his father allowed him to believe that W.A. Moser alone was the source of their relative comfort? Nor did this new maternal narrative align with what he’d been told since he was a child—that, yes, once upon a time his mother’s family had been wealthy, but that her parents’ death had exposed an economic house of cards: bad investments, covered up by improvident loans, dwindling assets leveraged again and again. That even once the money ran out, they’d continued living the high life, summering on the Cape, taking expensive midwinter vacations in the Caribbean, bundling off to Europe whenever the mood was upon them. Partygoers and heavy drinkers, they had probably been drinking the night of the accident. They were . . . yes, don’t deny it . . . like the Kennedys. To his father’s way of thinking it was a morality tale about foolish, decadent people who hailed from an arrogant, snobby corner of the country, people who didn’t know the meaning of hard work and had finally got their long-overdue comeuppance. He’d stopped short of claiming he’d rescued Lincoln’s mother from a dissolute life, but the inference was there for the taking. Was his mother now insisting this familiar narrative, so long unchallenged, was a lie?

Not entirely, she conceded, but neither was it the whole truth. Yes, her parents had been improvident and, when the financial dust settled, the family fortune had been all but wiped out, but a small house in Chilmark, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, had somehow been saved from creditors and placed in a trust for her until she turned twenty-one. Why had Lincoln never heard about the place? Because when his father learned of its existence shortly after they were married, he’d wanted to sell it—out of spite, according to his mother, to further cut her off from her past and thereby keep her tethered more securely to himself. For the first time in their marriage, she’d refused to meet his demand, and her intransigence in the matter had surprised and perturbed W.A. Moser so profoundly that he’d refused, again out of spite, to ever visit the damn place. His obstinacy was why, year after year, the house had been rented during the summer season, the rates going up each year as the island became increasingly fashionable; and this money was placed in an interest-earning account they dipped into from time to time for all those extras. She now meant to use what remained on Lincoln’s education.

Ah, the Chilmark house. When she was a girl, she told him, her eyes moist at the memory, there was no place in the world she’d loved more. They arrived on the island on Memorial Day and didn’t return to Wellesley until Labor Day, she and her mother in residence all week, her father joining them on weekends, when there would be parties—Yes, Lincoln, there was drinking and laughter and fun—people crowding onto the tiny deck that from a distant hill overlooked the Atlantic. Her parents’ friends always made a great fuss over her, and she didn’t mind that there were few other children around because for three long months she had her mother’s full attention. All summer long they went barefoot, their lives full of salt air and clean-smelling sheets and gulls circling overhead. The floors got sandy and nobody minded. Not once all summer did they go to church, and no one suggested that this was a sin, because it wasn’t. Summer was what it was.

She hoped Lincoln would one day come to feel the same way about the Chilmark house, and to that end she’d already made the necessary arrangements for him, not his father, to inherit it. She just wanted him to promise that he wouldn’t sell the property except out of some grave necessity, and promise, too, that if he did have to sell it, he wouldn’t share the proceeds with his father, who would hand over the money to his church. It was one thing, she said, for her to give up her sole true faith, but she had no intention of allowing Dub-Yay to permanently endow a bunch of damn snake handlers, not with her money.

It took his mother most of the morning and several whiskey-laced coffees to impart all this new information to her slack-jawed son, who listened with a sinking heart, his entire reality having been violently altered. When her voice finally fell, she rose to her feet, wobbled, said “Whoa!” and grabbed the table for support before ferrying his cereal bowl and her coffee mug over to the drainboard and announcing that she thought she’d take a nap. She was still napping when his father returned from the mine that evening, and when Dub-Yay roused her to inquire about dinner, she told him to cook it himself. Lincoln had rehidden the whiskey bottle in the cupboard, but his father seemed to intuit what had transpired in his absence. Returning to the kitchen, he regarded his son, sighed deeply and said, “Mexican?” There were only four restaurants in Dunbar, three of them Mexican. At their favorite they ate chile rellenos in profound silence that was interrupted only once, when his father said, “Your mother is a fine woman,” as if he wanted that entered into the official record.

Gradually things returned to normal, or what had been normal for the Mosers. Lincoln’s mother, having momentarily located her voice, went back to being quiet and submissive, for which Lincoln was grateful. He had friends who lived in houses ruled by discord. When all was said and done, he supposed he had every reason to feel fortunate. For one thing, he’d just come into property. For another, though it would be a financial strain on his parents, he’d apparently be heading off to an elite East Coast liberal arts college next year, something nobody from Dunbar had ever done before. He would think of it as an adventure. But listening to his mother explain the facts of their existence had shaken him profoundly. The solid earth beneath his feet had turned to sand, and his parents, the two most familiar people in his life, into strangers. In time he would regain his footing, but he would never again entirely trust it.

_________

TEDDY NOVAK, also an only child, grew up in the Midwest, the son of two harried high-school English teachers. He knew his parents loved him because they told him so whenever he asked, but sometimes he got the impression that their lives had already been chock-full of kids before he came along, and suddenly here he was, quite possibly the kid that would break their spirits. They were forever grading papers and preparing lessons, and when he interrupted these pursuits, their expressions conveyed unspoken questions like Why do you always ask me and not your father? and Isn’t it your mother’s turn? I did the last one.

As a boy Teddy had been small, fine boned and unathletic. He liked the idea of sports, but when he tried to play baseball or football or even dodgeball he invariably limped home bruised and battered, his fingers bent at odd angles. He came by this naturally. His father was tall but skeletal, all elbows and knees and thin skin. His Adam’s apple looked like it had been borrowed from another, much-larger man, and his clothes never seemed to fit. When his shirtsleeves were the right length, there was enough room in the collar for a second neck; if the collar was snug, his cuffs ended midway between elbow and wrist. His waist was twenty-eight inches, his inseam thirty-four, so pants had to be ordered special. In the middle of his forehead there grew a luxuriant tuft of coarse hair that was surrounded by a wide moat of pale, mottled skin. No surprise, his students called him Ichabod, though no one could say for certain whether the nickname derived from his appearance or from his special fondness for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the first text students encountered in The American Character, his signature senior lit course. What Teddy’s father liked best about the story was that his students could be depended on to miss its point, which he would then clarify for them. They enjoyed the supernatural element of the Headless Horseman, and when he turned out not to be supernatural at all, they were disappointed. Still, they found the story’s ending—in which the all-American Brom Bones triumphed and the pretentious schoolteacher Ichabod Crane was made a fool of and run out of town—deeply satisfying. It took some heavy lifting to convince them that the story was actually an indictment of American anti-intellectualism, which Washington Irving had recognized as central to the American character. By arriving at precisely the wrong conclusion about the story’s purpose and meaning, they had unwittingly made themselves the butt of the joke, or so Teddy’s father maintained. Particularly hard to convince were the school’s athletes, who naturally identified with Brom Bones, who was strong and good-looking, cocky and cunning and dim-witted, and he ended up with the prettiest girl in town, just as they themselves did with the cheerleaders. Where was the satire in that? To them, the story was about natural selection. Even if it had been satirical, Teddy’s father—ridiculous-looking man that he was—was the wrong messenger. He deserved, the jocks believed, a fate not unlike Ichabod Crane’s.

Teddy’s mother was also tall and loose limbed and bony, and when she and her husband stood together, they were often mistaken for brother and sister, sometimes for twins. Her most pronounced feature was an exaggerated sternum that she was forever tapping, as if heartburn were her constant, chronic companion. Witnessing this, people often leaned away from her, lest whatever she was attempting to tamp down suddenly erupt. Worse than any of this, for Teddy, was that his parents appeared to see each other much as the world did, though Teddy’s very existence hinted that there must’ve been a time when this was not true. All too aware they were physically ungifted, they seemed to take whatever solace they could from their superior sensibilities, their ability to articulate with wonderful disdain their various strong opinions, alas the exact talent that had doomed poor Ichabod Crane.

From an early age Teddy sensed how different he was from other kids and accepted his lonely lot in life without complaint. “They don’t like you because you’re smart,” his parents explained, though he hadn’t told them that he was disliked, only that he felt odd, as if some kind of instructional handbook on boyhood had been distributed to all the other boys. Because he so often ended up getting hurt when he tried to act like one of them, he mostly stayed safely at home and read books, which pleased his parents, who were disinclined to chase after him or even to wonder where he might be. “He loves to read,” they always remarked to other parents, who marveled at Teddy’s straight A’s. Did he love to read? Teddy wasn’t sure. His parents were proud not to own a television, so in the absence of companions, what else was there to do? Sure, he preferred reading to spraining his ankles and breaking his fingers, but that hardly made reading a passion. His mother and father looked forward to the day when they could retire from teaching and grading papers and do nothing except read, whereas Teddy kept hoping that some new activity would present itself that would be enjoyable without resulting in injury. Until then, sure, he’d read.

His freshman year of high school, a strange thing happened: an unexpected growth spurt by which he shot up several inches and put on thirty pounds. Overnight, he was half a head taller, with far-broader shoulders, than his father. Even more astonishing, he discovered himself to be a fluid, graceful basketball player. By junior year he could dunk the ball—the only boy on the team who could—and he had a fadeaway jumper that at his height was virtually impossible to block. He made the varsity squad and was the leading scorer until word got around that he didn’t like to mix it up. When shoved, Teddy would back off, and a well-placed elbow to the ribs discouraged him from entering the paint, where, as a forward, he was told he belonged. All of this made his coach so livid he even derided as cowardly Teddy’s fadeaway jumper, which the team depended on for anywhere from twelve to fifteen points a game. “You have to bang with them,” he’d yell when Teddy hung around at the top of the key, waiting patiently for his shot. “Be a man, you damn sissy.” When Teddy still showed little inclination to bang, the coach tasked one of Teddy’s teammates to play him aggressively in practice in the hopes of toughening him up. Nelson was a head shorter but built like a tank, and he derived great satisfaction from sending Teddy sprawling when he knifed through the lane on designed plays. When Teddy complained that Nelson was fouling him, the coach snapped, “Foul him back!” Of course Teddy refused.

Indeed, Nelson so enjoyed his hardball duties that he also took to putting a shoulder into Teddy’s ribs in the corridors between classes, knocking him into the lockers and scattering his books. “Brom Bones!” his father said, recognizing life from literature, when Teddy described what was going on. The remedy, as his old man saw it, was obvious: quit the team and thereby reject the stereotype of the American male as a brainless jock. Teddy didn’t see it like that. He loved basketball and wanted to play it as the noncontact sport he felt it truly was. He wanted to receive the ball at the top of the key, give any defender a shoulder fake, spin and take his fadeaway jumper. The sound the ball made when it went through the net without touching the rim was as perfect as anything he’d experienced in his young life.

His varsity career ended predictably, though had Teddy predicted it, he probably would’ve taken his father’s advice and just quit. One afternoon in practice, when he went up for a rebound, Nelson undercut him, sending Teddy crashing to the floor on his tailbone. The result was a hairline fracture of a vertebra that according to doctors could’ve been much more serious. Even so, it sidelined him for the rest of the season. Among the dozens of books he plowed through during his convalescence that spring and summer was Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which for some reason gave him the same feeling as swishing his jumper. When he finished the book, he asked his parents, neither of whom was religious, if he could attend church. Their characteristic response was that they had no objection unless he expected them to go with him. Sunday morning was when they read the New York Times.

Because Merton was a Trappist monk, Teddy tried the Catholic church first, but the priest there was what his father would’ve instantly identified as an anti-intellectual, a moron, really, as far removed from the monastic ideal as you could imagine, so next Teddy tried the Unitarian church a block farther away. There the minister was a Princeton-educated woman. In many respects she reminded Teddy of his parents, except that she seemed genuinely interested in him. She was pretty and not at all bony, so of course he fell in love with her. Still under Merton’s spell, he tried to keep that love pure, but most nights he fell asleep imagining what she might look like under her robe and stole, something he doubted Merton would’ve done. He was both heartbroken and relieved when she was transferred to another parish.

Senior year he was cleared to return to basketball, but he didn’t turn out, which compelled the coach to mutter sissy under his breath every time they passed in the hall. Either that or pussy, Teddy couldn’t be sure which. To his surprise, he discovered that he didn’t much care what Coach thought of him, though he must’ve cared a little, because that summer, just before Teddy headed off to Minerva, the coach, attempting to free a stick that had become wedged between the blade and the frame of his lawnmower without first turning the motor off, managed to slice off the top joint of what he always referred to as his pussy finger. Teddy, when he heard about it, couldn’t help smiling, though he felt guilty, too. He’d written his college entrance essay on Merton and doubted the monk would’ve taken pleasure in the suffering of another human being any more than he would’ve spent long nights, as Teddy recently had, imagining what a pretty Unitarian minister looked like under her vestments. On the other hand, Merton never met the minister in question and had apparently been a bit of a rake before his conversion. Also, Teddy thought, there was no reason to suppose that God lacked a sense of humor. He didn’t meddle in the affairs of men, Teddy had been told, or cause them to behave in a certain way, but so far as Teddy was concerned, Coach losing the tip of his pussy finger like that had to have tickled Him.

MICKEY GIRARDI WAS FROM a rough, working-class neighborhood in West Haven, Connecticut, famous for bodybuilders, Harleys and ethnic block parties. His parents were Irish and Italian, his old man a construction worker, his mother a secretary at an insurance agency, both deeply committed to assimilation. They flew the flag and not just on the Fourth. A veteran of the Second World War, his father could’ve taken advantage of the G.I. Bill but knew a guy who could get him into the pipefitters union, which he figured was better. Mickey was the youngest of eight, the other seven all girls, and he was spoiled rotten in so many respects—clothes bought especially for him, his own room right from the start. Okay, it was about the size of a closet, but so what? The family’s house was large, as it needed to be, but modest, only three blocks from the beach, great in the summer when cool breezes came in off the water. When the wind changed direction, though, you felt like you were living under the nearby interstate, the traffic noise was so loud. Sunday dinners, you were home and no excuses. Spaghetti with sausage and meatballs and pork shoulder braising in tomato sauce. Michael Sr.’s mother’s recipe, handed down reluctantly to her Irish daughter-in-law, with one or two key ingredients left out for the sake of contrast. Family first, America second—or maybe vice versa these days, with so many grubby longhairs always flashing their imbecilic peace signs—everything else a distant third.

For Mickey, music came first. His first job was sweeping up the mall music store where he’d seen a Fender Stratocaster in the window and fallen in love. After the guitar came an amp. In a band at age thirteen. By sixteen, sneaking into raunchy New Haven bars and sitting in with older guys whose girlfriends didn’t wear bras and seemed to enjoy revealing this fact by bending over in front of Mickey, who would later joke with Lincoln and Teddy that he had a hard-on for all of 1965. “I catch you doing drugs with those guys,” his father warned, “you’re gonna be the first kid in America ever beaten to death with a Fenson guitar.”

“Fender,” Mickey corrected him.

“Bring it here then, smart-ass. We’ll do it right now. Save time.”

About the last thing in the world Mickey wanted to do was go to college. In school he’d always hovered between mediocre and piss-poor, but all his sisters had gone or were going, and college was what his mother wanted. Community college, live at home, was the plan. Mr.Easy, his mother called him. Always the path of least resistance. Mickey supposed she was right. He wasn’t terribly ambitious. But he failed to see what was so wrong with staying in West Haven. With his sisters gone, there was plenty of room, except on Sundays and holidays.

Unfortunately, even to go to the community college, you had to take the SAT, so one Saturday morning Mickey did. Not wanting to disappoint his mother by being the only kid ever rejected by a community college because of his SATs, he’d declined a gig the night before and actually gotten a good night’s sleep. He figured it wouldn’t kill him to try for once. Tuition was cheap, and if he did well enough to snag a few bucks to help with books and expenses, it’d put him in good with the old man.

When the results came back, his mother met his father at the door. “Have a look at this,” she said, pointing to their son’s score, which was in the top two percent. “The kid’s brilliant.”

Since Mickey was the only kid in the room, his father looked around to make sure another wasn’t hiding somewhere. “Which kid?”

“This one,” his mother said. “Your son.”

His father scratched his head. “This one right here?”

“Yes. Our Michael.”

His father studied the SAT results, then his wife, then Mickey, then his wife again. “Okay,” he said finally. “Who’s the father? I’ve always wondered.”

The next day, Michael Sr. was still trying to work it out. “Take a walk with me,” he said, grabbing Mickey’s shoulder with a meaty paw. When they were down the block and out of earshot, he said, “All right, come clean and I promise I won’t be mad. Who’d you get to take that test for you?”

Mickey felt his left eye twitch. “You know what, Pop?” he began.

“Don’t say it,” his father warned.

“Fuck you,” Mickey said, completing his thought.

Senior stopped walking and threw up his hands. “You said it.” Then he cuffed his son on the back of the head, hard enough to make his eyes water. “Help me out here, because I want to understand. You’re saying this test is on the up-and-up?”

Mickey nodded.

“You’re telling me you’re smart.”

“I’m not telling you anything,” Mickey said.

“You’re telling me that all this time you could’ve done good in school and made your mother proud?”

Mickey felt that seeing things in this light took some of the luster off the near-perfect SAT. He shrugged.

“What were we thinking?” his father said, more to himself than his son. “We were doing so good with girls.”

“Sorry,” Mickey said.

“Okay, listen up, ’cause this is what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna go to college and you’re gonna do good. No discussion. You either make your mother proud or you don’t come home.”

Mickey started to object, only to discover he wasn’t sure he wanted to. He himself was still processing the remarkable SAT results and had begun thinking beyond community college. At West Haven High, when word got around about his SATs, several of his former teachers stopped him in the hall. “Hey, what’ve we been telling you?” was what they all wanted to know. So instead of objecting to his old man’s command, he said, “Can I major in music?”

His father looked at the sky, then at him. “Why do you always have to push your luck?”

“So I can major in music?”

“Fine,” Senior said. “Major in Fenson guitars for all I care.”

Mickey thought about correcting him, but his father did have a point. He was always pushing his luck.

WHAT WERE THE ODDS these three would end up assigned to the same freshman-dorm suite at Minerva College on the Connecticut coast? Because yank out one thread from the fabric of human destiny, and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.

Lincoln

September was the best month on the island. The crowds were gone, the beaches empty, the ocean still warm. No need for restaurant reservations. After Labor Day, the politicians had all returned to D.C., the left-wing Hollywood/media types to L.A. and New York. Also gone were the smug, privileged frat boys, many of whom imagined themselves Democrats but who in the fullness of time would become mainstream Republicans. Half of Lincoln’s Las Vegas agency—or what was left of it after the Great Recession—was made up of Sigma Chis who’d been long-haired pot smokers and war protesters in the sixties and seventies. Now they were hard-line conservatives, or anyway harder than Lincoln. These days, a lifelong Republican himself, Lincoln had a difficult time finding comfort anywhere on the political spectrum. Voting for Hillary was out of the question, but if not her, then who? A baker’s dozen of GOP candidates were still in the race—some legitimately stupid, others acting like it—at least through Iowa. So Kasich, maybe. Bland wouldn’t be so bad. Think Eisenhower.

Anyway, a relief to shelve politics for a few days. Lincoln had little doubt that Teddy, who would arrive tomorrow, was still a raging lib, though there was no way of telling whether he’d be in the Clinton or the Sanders camp. Mickey? Did he even vote? Probably not a bad idea to give Vietnam a conversational miss, as well. The war had been over for decades, except not really, not for men their age. It had been their war, whether or not they’d served. Though his memory was increasingly porous these days, Lincoln still remembered that evening back in 1969 when all the hashers had gathered in the back room of the Theta house to watch the draft lottery on a tiny black-and-white TV someone had brought in for the occasion. Had they asked permission to watch on the big TV in the front room? Probably not. The social boundaries of sororities, like so much else in the culture, had started eroding, as evidenced by their regular Friday afternoon hasher parties, but they could still crop up unexpectedly. Hashers still entered the house through the rear. Anyway, the draft wasn’t about the Thetas, it was about Lincoln and Teddy and Mickey and the others. Eight young men whose fortunes that night hung in the balance. A couple were dating Thetas, as Lincoln would the following year with Anita, and planned to see them later in the evening, but they’d watch the lottery on the crappy little set in the back room, not the big color one in the front room, because they belonged there, as did the war itself.

They’d made a party of it, everybody chipping in for a case of beer—strictly against the rules, but Cook wouldn’t squeal, not that night. The rule was that you couldn’t start drinking until your birthday had been drawn and you knew your fate. Mickey’s came first, shockingly early. Number 9. How was it that Lincoln could recall this detail, when time had relegated so much else to memory’s dustbin? He remembered, too, how his friend had risen to his feet, his arms raised like a victorious boxer, as if he’d been hoping for precisely this eventuality. Going over to the aluminum tub, he’d pulled a beer out of the ice, popped the top and chugged half of it. Then, wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he’d grinned and said, “You boys must be feeling pretty dry in the mouth right about now.” The other thing Lincoln recalled was glancing over at Teddy and seeing that all the blood had drained out of his face.

Absent from these vivid memories, though, was how he’d comported himself. Had he joined the others in serenading Mickey with the Canadian national anthem? Had he laughed at the god-awful jokes (“Been nice knowin’ ya, Mick”)? He had a dim, perhaps false, memory of taking Mickey aside at some point and saying, “Hey, man, it’s a long way off.” Because even those who’d drawn low numbers probably wouldn’t hear from their draft boards for months, and college students were allowed to finish that academic year. Most juniors in good standing—as Lincoln, Teddy and Mickey were—would get one-year deferments to complete their degrees before reporting for duty. Maybe by then the war would be over or, failing that, winding down.

Later that evening Lincoln called home, hoping his mother would answer, though naturally it was his father who picked up. “We watched,” he said, his nasal, high-pitched voice exaggerated by the tinny, long-distance connection. “Like I told your mother, they won’t go beyond one-fifty.” As with all his father’s opinions, this one was expressed as fact.

“Unless you’re wrong and they do,” Lincoln said, emboldened, perhaps, by being three thousand miles away.

“But I’m not and they won’t,” Dub-Yay had assured him, probably to allay Lincoln’s fear, though he sometimes wondered if his father’s pronouncements served some other, more obscure purpose. Ever since his mother let him in on the truth about their family finances, his father’s declarations had begun to tick him off. “How did the other Stooges make out?” Dub-Yay wanted to know. (Lincoln had told his parents that he and Teddy and Mickey, so unlike the preppy Minerva boys with rich parents, had come to think of themselves as the Three Musketeers, to which his father had immediately responded, “Three Stooges would be more like it.”)

Lincoln swallowed hard. “Mickey got nailed. Number nine.”

“It’s a foolish war,” his father conceded. “But you don’t get to hold out for a just one.”

Lincoln supposed he agreed, but it still annoyed him that his father would be so cavalier where his friends were concerned. “What would you say if I went to Canada?” Lincoln ventured.

“Not one blessed thing.” This statement was delivered without hesitation, as if Dub-Yay had been anticipating the question, given it some serious thought and was anxious, as always, to share his conclusions. “The moment you did that, you would no longer be my son, and we wouldn’t be speaking. I didn’t name you after Abraham Lincoln so you could become a draft dodger. How fared Brother Edward?”

That was his nickname for Teddy, who’d visited them in Dunbar that summer. Lincoln’s mother had liked him immediately, but Dub-Yay hadn’t been impressed. It was W.A. Moser’s deeply held conviction that a single round of golf would reveal everything you needed to know about a man’s character, and he had made up his mind about Teddy on the first tee when he failed to remove his wristwatch. Nothing pleased Wolfgang Amadeus more than to extrapolate the world from a grain of sand. In retrospect, though, Lincoln doubted the wristwatch incident had anything to do with his misgivings about his friend. More likely Teddy had said something provocative about the war or remarked that all the members of the Dunbar Country Club were white and the staff Latino.

“Teddy’s safe,” Lincoln said. “Three hundred–something.”

“Just as well. I can’t imagine what earthly use that boy would be in combat.” Or anything else, he seemed to be saying.

Had Lincoln even spoken to his mother that evening? Here again, memory, like a conscientious objector, refused to serve.

What was etched vividly in Lincoln’s brain, however, was the moment when all three Musketeers emerged from the Theta house and found their beautiful d’Artagnan shivering in the December cold out back. Just as he remembered the shameful thought that had entered his head unbidden—You lucky dog!—when she took a surprised Mickey in her arms and hugged him tight. You had only to glance at Teddy to know he was thinking the same thing.

Jacy. Vanished from this very island. Memorial Day weekend, 1971.

IT WAS STILL EARLY when the ferry docked in Vineyard Haven on Friday. Lincoln was supposed to have gotten there the night before, but thunderstorms at O’Hare had put him into Boston late; by the time he’d picked up his rental car and driven to Woods Hole he’d missed the last boat. He thought about calling Mickey, who lived somewhere nearby, but he’d mentioned his band had a gig that night, so there was nothing to do but check into a motel near the ferry landing. After e-mailing Anita to let her know he’d arrived safely, he considered walking into town to see if there was someplace still open for dinner, but he was exhausted, and his lower back was stiff with travel, so he decided instead to go to bed hungry. More weary than sleepy, he lay awake in the musty room, wondering what further ravages merciless time had wrought upon his friends and, sure, how he’d look to them. It’d been—what, a decade since he’d last seen them? No, not quite, because everybody at the Minerva reunion had been discussing the astonishing fact that America had elected a black president. Thank God for name tags, he remembered thinking. And for Anita, who never had any trouble recognizing people across eternities, though it was possible she’d followed them on Facebook or Googled them in advance. Every time she introduced Lincoln to one of her Theta sorority sisters, it was all he could do not to say, You’re kidding. Really? The men seemed to have fared better, though the years had punished them, too. The athletes in particular had gone to seed. At the last sighting Teddy was still trim, his face unlined except for crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, but his hair had thinned and his face appeared gaunt after an illness he seemed reluctant to name. No surprise there. He’d always been protective of his privacy. Mickey still had a head full of dark, curly hair that was only just starting to fleck with salt, and he still wore it relatively long, but he was working a beer gut that would’ve been his defining physical characteristic if he hadn’t been nearly six foot six. His good looks had always been of the rugged variety, but to Lincoln it looked like he’d been in a series of bar fights. And maybe he had been. Though usually the gentlest of giants, his temper would inexplicably flare up, and when it did, watch out.

Like that time they’d gone over to the SAE house. What, junior year? Three SAE pledges, as part of some initiation ritual, had crashed their hasher party with the Thetas that Friday afternoon, and in gratitude for not being tossed out they’d invited the whole crew to a bash at their frat that evening. Mickey had advised against going. “If we do,” he warned, “there’ll be trouble.” Which made no sense. The SAEs hadn’t caused any problems that afternoon, and their invitation had sounded genuine enough. But Mickey, who’d already drunk so much beer that he kept dropping soapy pots on the kitchen floor, would not be talked out of his mark-my-words prophecy. In the end, despite his dark misgivings, the others had convinced him to go along, just in case he was right and there was trouble. If things headed south, it would be smart to have Mickey on hand.

To screw up their courage Lincoln, Teddy, Mickey and the other hashers had returned to their apartment and drained the rest of the keg before heading over, en masse, to the frat. Only Teddy had stayed behind, claiming that Cook’s disgusting beef Stroganoff had set his stomach roiling, though Lincoln suspected a more likely cause was the possibility of a brawl. The SAE’s front door was flanked by two large stone lions, and Mickey, swaying on his feet, had set an empty beer can on the head of the nearest one. They could hear loud music pumping inside and wondered how anyone would be able to hear the bell when they rang it. Someone did, though—happily a pledge who’d been at the party that afternoon. He was a big kid, almost Mickey’s size, and looked like he’d been drinking ever since. It took him an inebriated moment to place them, but then he flung the door wide open and cried, “Gentlemen! Enter!” At which point Mickey stepped forward and punched him in the face. Unless Lincoln was misremembering, they’d all just stood there in the entryway, staring stupidly down at the coldcocked kid, until finally one of the other hashers put a hand on Mickey’s shoulder and said, “Well, you did warn us.”

By the following morning everyone at the Theta house had heard about the incident, and there was talk of firing the lot of them. Jacy, herself furious, arrived at their apartment midmorning and commenced pounding on the door. Lincoln and Teddy, groggy and hungover, had only just gotten up, but the sight of a livid Jacy brought them fully awake. “Where is he?” she said, pushing past them, and then, when they didn’t answer quickly enough, “Never mind. I’ll find him myself.”

Mickey’s dark, smelly bear den of a bedroom wasn’t the sort of place your average Theta would’ve willingly entered, but then Jacy wasn’t your average anything. If she was the least bit squeamish, she gave no sign, even when she discovered Mickey lying facedown on top of the blanket, clad only in his boxers. Instead of speaking, she kicked the bed, hard, causing its occupant to groan but not wake up. The second kick, even harder, did the trick. “Jesus.” Mickey blinked up at her in the dark. “Who let you in?”

“Give us a minute,” she told Lincoln and Teddy, and when they backed sheepishly into the hall, she kicked the door shut.

All too happy to be excused, he and Teddy had gone out onto the patio, where yesterday’s empty aluminum keg floated on its side in the metal tub. “We should return this,” Teddy said, as if this duty, in the context of the moment, were of primary importance. “Get our deposit back.”

“Right,” Lincoln agreed, but neither moved.

A few minutes later Jacy emerged with a very pale, contrite Mickey in tow. (Had she watched him get dressed? Lincoln wondered.) “Let’s go,” she said.

“Where?” Lincoln had felt obliged to ask.

“You’re going to the SAE house and apologize.”

They both focused on Mickey, who shrugged as if to concede they had no choice in the matter. As if, admit it, there was no chance the three of them together could take this girl in a fair fight.

“I wasn’t even there,” Teddy pointed out.

“All for one,” Jacy told him. “One for all.”

When they arrived at the SAE house, the beer can that Mickey had set on the lion’s head was still there. Lincoln remembered climbing up the porch steps and ringing the bell, but after that came a memory glitch. They must’ve muttered their apology, but to whom? The kid Mickey had punched? The house president? Had Mickey even spoken, or had Lincoln, as head hasher, assumed responsibility? Had the apology been accepted?

It must’ve been, because on the walk back to the apartment Jacy’s anger had leaked away, like air from a balloon. “Actually, it is