If I Forget You(22)

And then at night, Henry wanted nothing to do with the old crowd. Plus, his parents saddened him. In some ways, he thought, you can never truly go home. Oh, he appreciated his mother’s cooking, and her chicken soup, in particular, clear and golden, served with bread and schmaltz on the side, always gave him a lift.

But the apartment was smaller than he remembered, his dad was even more withdrawn, his mother doted on him as if he were twelve, and the narrow streets were impossibly humid and hot on summer days, so much so that he longed for nights when they were slick with rain and the ocean breeze reached deep into the neighborhoods and he could sit on the rickety third-floor porch and read with a flashlight and listen to the water cascading all around him.

Henry knew Margot summered on the Vineyard. It was not until he had arrived at Bannister that he had heard summer used as a verb. And Martha’s Vineyard, while only perhaps forty-five miles away as the crow flies from where he has spent the majority of his life, might as well be on the other side of the planet. Until Margot, he had never met anyone who had ever been there. It is a place for rich people.

And so April turns to May and the summer is almost upon them. One afternoon, one of the English faculty members, a medievalist named O’Neill, stops Henry on the pathway running to the right of the largest quad and asks him about his summer plans. Henry tells him he is not yet sure, and he feels an ache as he says it, knowing that it is hard to imagine a plan that involves Margot, and then the professor asks him if he has any interest in staying here in the Finger Lakes and working at a winery owned by his brother and his brother’s wife.

“Hard work,” the professor says. “Work in the fields. Sell wine to tourists. But it comes with housing on the lake. Not much of a place, but good for a poet. If you’re interested, I could make an introduction.”

Later that afternoon, Henry tells Margot about it, and he hopes she will express disappointment and say, “Oh, I thought you would come to the Vineyard with me,” but instead she says that it sounds really cool. And the next day, Henry goes to meet Ted, the professor’s brother, a mild-mannered man with a long beard, and his wife, Laura, who is as quiet and serious as his father.

The winery is almost directly opposite Bannister, on the other side of the lake. Henry rides a bike there and it is a day bright with sun and the road to the small winery runs through acres of cornfields and then opens up with ten acres of grapes swooping down to the shimmering blue lake. The winery itself is nestled into a small hillside, so that only the roof is visible, and the front opens onto a sandy driveway. The owners have a house they built, visible across the fields to the south of the winery, and as part of the tour they take him down to show him where he would live if he is offered the job and chooses to accept.

It is a seasonal cabin, though it might be generous to call it that. It was erected originally for a family of migrant workers and has no running water or electricity, only an outhouse in the trees behind it. Inside it has two single beds, a few wooden chairs, and a table. Two small windows look out each side, one back to the vineyard and the other toward the lake. But it is only fifty feet from the shore of the lake and is completely private, and despite the subsistence living, it might be the most beautiful place Henry has ever seen.

“What do I do for water?” Henry asks.

“There is a spring right over there,” Ted says. “With a pump. And you can shower up at the house.”

Henry laughs. “And no refrigerator?”

“You can eat with us at the house. Meals included. When you want. You might get sick of us. And there is one at the winery. You can keep things in there.”

“I guess I always secretly wanted to be a monk,” Henry says with a smile.

Henry looks out to the lake then, and with an awareness that will later come to define his poetry, he thinks of how he almost left his fingers behind last summer on the floor of a Providence warehouse, only to live a year later on the shore of a new prodigious one far away from home.





Margot, 1991

The last night together before summer, neither of them wants to sleep. Margot is aware of the imbalance between them, the fact that Henry scrapes for a few dollars to buy himself a whiskey and ginger ale a few nights a week at the bar, while thousands flow directly into her bank account every month without her saying so much as a thing about it. But on this night, she says to him that she doesn’t want to hear any objections, that this one is on her, and they walk down to the lake on an evening that is summer-hot, to a place Henry has never been, this five-star hotel over the lake that is most famous for being the setting in a scene from the film version of Nabokov’s Lolita.

They walk into the massive inn with their arms linked, and at the front desk Margot asks for the honeymoon suite, saying it theatrically, and the clerk, a young man barely older than they are, takes her American Express Gold Card and says to both of them, “Congratulations, Mr. and Mrs. Fuller.”

“You can call me Henry,” Henry says. “Henry Fuller.”

And it is the shared joke of the evening, his taking her name, and all night he calls her Mrs. Fuller, and upstairs they check into a room that is built within the turret of the castle that is the hotel, and from its windows they look down on the lake below them and can see all the way across to where the land rises again and to where Henry will spend his summer.

It is Henry’s eyes that Margot loves the most. Dark eyes that are instantly friendly, eyes that literally twinkle when he is amused, as he is now, looking around at this room and the massive bed with its canopy hanging over it.