WINTER OF 1965
ANTON’S FEDORA
Chapter One
Merry False Christmas
It was December 10, an odd day to celebrate the Christmas holiday. It was not even quite six in the morning, and Anton “Anthony” Addison-Rice was fast asleep and dreaming about his right hand.
He dreamed he was swimming in the Olympic-sized pool off his high school gym, which, suddenly and for no apparent reason, turned into the open Atlantic Ocean. He raised his right arm in a powerful stroke, breaking the surface of the water. Then he raised his head to look, which his coach would have disciplined him for doing, and his right hand surprised him . . . by being there. It was backlit by a hazy sun, and appeared completely real. Whole and perfect. As though nothing had ever happened to it.
He allowed himself to bob upright in the dream swells, treading water, just staring at the hand. It struck him as an unexpected visitor. It felt similar to the way his late grandpa Anton had come into his dreams a few months earlier. It had the same too-vivid, sharply defined feeling to it—an image that would be slow to fade.
So he spoke to the hand, much the way he had spoken in his dream to Grandpa Anton.
He said, “There you are. I thought you were gone. Why was I so sure you were gone?”
Then the dream let him go and he opened his eyes. It might have been a sound that knocked the dream away. It might have been his mother opening his bedroom door. Because, now that his eyes were open, he could see that she had.
He was holding his right arm aloft, the way he had done in the dream. But the background to the scene was not a hazy sun, but his mother, standing in his half-open bedroom doorway. And the hand was not there after all. That most important factor had only been true in the dream.
He sighed deeply and shifted his focus to his mother. She was watching him silently. Watching him stare at the stump of his right wrist. She had a taut look of disapproval on her face, as if she preferred he ignore the situation. Well, she did prefer that. He knew it from experience. Ignoring situations was her number one life skill.
“You have to get up,” she said.
“It’s awfully early.” His eyes narrowed as he attempted to focus on the clock beside his bed. “Can’t I just say goodbye to you from here?”
“We have to celebrate Christmas.”
“We can’t celebrate Christmas.”
“Why on earth can’t we?”
“Because it’s only . . .”
But he was too close to asleep to grasp the date.
“It’s the tenth of December,” she said.
“Right. I knew that. Who celebrates Christmas on the tenth of December?”
“We do, this year. Now listen. Your father went to great lengths to buy you a present he knew you would like. And you will come out to the living room and open it and show some appreciation for his troubles. You get me, Anton?”
“Anthony,” he said.
He should have known better. He should have given it up long ago, at least at home.
She crossed the room, taking his chin in the right hand she was fortunate enough to have—and probably didn’t even appreciate. Her fingernails dug into the skin of his face, hurting him.
He did not say “Ouch,” though it would have been easy and natural to do so.
“Now you listen to me, young man. Your father lost his own father not even a year ago, and you will not dishonor the memory of your grandfather by suggesting that his name is not good enough for you. I won’t have it. Now get dressed and get out to the living room, pronto. Your father and I have a plane to catch.”
His father was on the phone, its long cord stretched into the living room. His mother was in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee. She looked at Anthony’s face, then down at his pajamas and robe, her own face darkening.
“I told you to get dressed.”
“You also told me you had a plane to catch. Do you have any idea how long it takes me to get dressed?”
“Never mind. Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“Abel!” she shouted. “Get off the phone. We’re having Christmas.”
“I’m on hold with the airline,” he shouted back. “I can’t just hang up!”
She sighed a loud, theatrical sigh.
Anthony sat at the breakfast counter between the living room and kitchen, and watched her pour him a mug of coffee.
She had first offered him coffee nine days earlier, on his eighteenth birthday. Before that he had poured himself many cups of coffee, and she had not outright prevented him from doing so. Did she think it would have been contributing to his delinquency to offer coffee even one day before he reached that magical age of adulthood?
She set cream and sugar in front of him, followed by the mug of fresh coffee. The cream and sugar seemed odd to him, because she should have known by then that he took neither.
“Your grandma Marion will look in on you.” It was a statement that didn’t seem to leave room for discussion.
“I don’t need anyone to look in on me,” he said.
“You like your grandma Marion. Don’t you?”
“Of course I do. I love Grandma Marion.”
“Then don’t argue. Think of them as visits. And in her presence there will be none of this Anthony nonsense. You are not free to break that woman’s heart. Am I understood?”
He nodded vaguely and sipped at his coffee. She had brewed it too weak.
“I want to hear it out loud from your lips. Am I understood?”
“Yes,” he said, enunciating clearly. “You are understood.”
He looked around to see his father standing beside him, beefy arms across his chest. Tapping one upper arm with the fingers of his opposite hand. Which meant everybody had better hurry up for him.
“They will not be delaying the flight again,” his father said. More to Anthony’s mother than to Anthony. “A word to the wise. We need to leave in five minutes, tops, or we’re going to miss our plane.”
Anthony sat in the living room, alone on the couch. A dizzying mountain of suitcases sat stacked in front of the door. Anthony’s mother sat in the print wing chair, watching him. His father paced. Now and then his mother shot her husband a withering glance, but each one slid off him unnoticed.
The coffee table in front of Anthony had been cleared. On it sat two wrapped gifts. Nicely large. He already knew what was in them. The telescope was not boxed, and its shape was evident through the candy-cane-printed paper. The second gift was a long rectangular box which Anthony assumed would be the telescope’s tripod.
It was a gift he had hinted at relentlessly. He would have been surprised had it been anything else.
He reached out and began to tear away the paper with his left hand.
Apparently he was too slow for his father, who dove in and began to tear with him.
“I’ll just help you open this,” he mumbled.
“Abel!” his mother shouted. It actually hurt one of Anthony’s eardrums. “Sit!”
It was fairly unusual for her to speak to her husband that way, but not unheard of. On the occasions when she did, he would not mount a defense.
Abel sat.
“It’s just that there’s a cab waiting downstairs,” Abel said, sounding almost meek. “And the meter is running.”