style="font-size:15px;"> “I’m with Nick on that,” Seana said, “but imagining what people will feel after you’re dead—that’s ordinary self-serving stuff we all indulge in now and then. It doesn’t account for why we’re making this trip.”
I said that even though Mister Falzetti was a lousy piece of work, it was still something to lose your only child, and that there was this too: that after Nick died, I kept remembering what Max said once when he’d come home from the funeral of a colleague’s daughter: that the rabbis taught that although there was a word for a child who lost his parents, and for a husband or wife who lost a spouse, there was no word for someone who lost a child, so terrible was the loss.
“That’s the mush side of your father’s brain talking,” Seana said. “Sentimental crap. When he gets into his rabbinic groove, spewing homilitic pap, I head for the exits.”
“You’ve never had a child to lose,” I said.
“So?”
“So how would you know what it’s like?”
“Loss is loss.”
“I don’t buy it,” I said. “There are losses, and there are losses. They’re not all equal.”
“And imagination’s imagination,” Seana said. “It can go anywhere and feel anything. You don’t have to lose a child to feel what it would be like to lose one.”
“Methinks she doth protest too much,” I said.
“Give it a rest, Charlie,” she said.
“What I think is that if you’d ever had a child yourself, and if…”
“Goddamn you!” she said, and whacked me hard across the face with the back of her hand, then walked away, fast.
I caught up to her, grabbed her by a shoulder, and turned her around. “Hey—!” I began, but before I could say anything else, she wrenched her shoulder free and pushed me away.
“I gave you fair warning,” she said. “I gave you fair warning, and I’ll do it again. Don’t you ever talk to me like that. Don’t you ever, ever talk to me like that, do you hear? I’d have made a good mother if I’d wanted to—a damned good mother.”
“I agree.”
“Prick!” she said, and she drew back her hand to whack me again, but then let it drop to her side, and walked off toward the near end of the boat landing.
Neither of us spoke again until we were back in the car and were approaching the Falzettis’ house. The house was large, and set on a slight rise that overlooked a small fishing harbor that contained one of three islands owned by Andrew Wyeth and his wife. The Wyeths’ island was set in the mouth of the harbor and covered about twenty acres, with a beautiful old lighthouse at one end that the Wyeths had used as their home before they’d bought two other islands in the area, and before they’d moved back to Pennsylvania. I told Seana about the Wyeths, and suggested that if we stayed a few days, we might visit their other two islands, which were much larger than this one—four to five hundred acres each—and that Wyeth’s wife had turned these two islands into wildlife refuges where local fishermen could base their operations.
“Thanks for the good news on the environmental front,” Seana said, and she punched me on the arm, lightly. “So okay—here’s what just happened: because I’d convinced myself you were tougher-minded than your father, I became momentarily disillusioned—upset with myself—for having been blind to the squishy regions of your sensibility. You were right about Max, though. He’d be a distraction.”
When Nick’s mother opened the door—she was a short, compact woman with light blue eyes that, like Nick’s, were almost translucent, and gray hair that had a hazy purple sheen to it—I hugged her and told her how sorry I was about Nick, and as I did I recalled that the first time Nick invited me to his parents’ home we were halfway through a meal she’d set down for us before I realized she was his mother, and not the housekeeper.
Mrs. Falzetti said it was good to see me again and that I looked wonderful, then wiped at her eyes with the back of a hand. I introduced her to Seana, who had been one of my father’s students, I said, and—the story we’d contrived on the way north—was on her way to a writer’s retreat near Acadia National Park, and (but why was I surprised?) Seana said something sweet and appropriate about it being impossible to feel what it would be like to lose one’s only child.
Mister Falzetti came to us then—“Call me Lorenzo,” he said at once, and I hugged him too, which seemed to surprise him—his body stiffened—and told him how sorry I was about Nick, and that Nick had been my closest friend and had always looked out for me. Mister Falzetti was wearing a navy-blue blazer, a powder-blue mock-turtleneck, gray flannel slacks, and white deck shoes. I’d first met him at a UMass homecoming football game nearly twenty years before, and he looked the same now as he had then: lean, strong, and, in his yachting outfit, though without a captain’s hat, what my father would have called ‘natty.’
He looked at Seana then, and seemed taken aback that she was there, but recovered quickly and spoke to her in his usual cold, confident way: “You’re Seana O’Sullivan, aren’t you,” he said.
“That’s correct.”
“I’m an admirer of your two novels,” he said, and he led us into the living room, which was handsomely appointed in a soothing combination of contemporary furniture—sleek plastics and stainless steel—and antiques: an oak sideboard, a large French country table, rush-covered ladder-back chairs, electrified oil lamps, and, around the room, discretely placed, a dozen or so model ships, some of which, I knew, Mister Falzetti had made: fishing boats, sailboats, steamboats, ocean liners, and fully rigged tall ships like those you see in pirate movies.
If you’d met him in this setting, or in the home Nick had grown up in, in Longmeadow, Massachusetts, an upper middle class suburb south of Springfield—the house in Maine had been the family’s country home until Mister Falzetti retired and they moved here full-time—you would have thought he’d probably gone to Harvard or Yale, and had been the CEO of an old-line WASP corporation. But it wasn’t so. “What my dad does is to turn shit into gold,” was the way Nick had described his father to me. Mister Falzetti had grown up in the North End of Boston, one of nine kids from a poor Italian immigrant family, and had started out, at fourteen, digging sewer lines for a company in Newton, after which, when he was sixteen, he’d moved to a small, mostly Polish farming town in Western Massachusetts where he set up his own business—mowing lawns, plowing driveways, pumping out septic tanks. Though he never finished high school, he was a fanatic about education—the one thing, he liked to say, the bastards can’t take away from you. And when it came to smarts—Nick loved quoting him on stuff like this—being a Wop among Polacks was like being the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. By the time he was twenty-one, he owned his own company, which pumped out shit and sludge from people’s basements and septic systems, dug up their leach fields, put in their sewer lines, and plowed and repaired their driveways, and he’d also been able to corner lucrative contracts for school bus routes, waste treatment operations, and road work—salting, plowing, repairs—in a half-dozen Western Massachusetts towns.
“So let’s get to it, Charlie,” he said as soon as he’d poured wine for me and Seana. “Tell us about Nick, since, except perhaps for poor Trish, you knew him better than anyone. Tell us about our boy: was he happy near the end?”
“Not especially,”
