Chapter 1
Massachusetts, 1959
Surely by now, after a full month at Greenfield, Everett ought to have gotten over the dizzying sense of unreality he experienced whenever he remembered that he wasn’t one of the uniform-clad students. Here it was, already October, the leaves red and orange with the passing of time, not a trace of summer left in the air, and he still couldn’t shake the idea that the past twenty years amounted to nothing more than a daydream, and that the next time he walked into his classroom he would need to sit at one of the desks rather than stand before the chalkboard.
The great lawn was filled with parents who had come for the annual exercise in staged reassurance known as Visiting Sunday, during which they could see for themselves that their sons hadn’t wasted away or returned to a state of nature after a month out of their care. Everett half expected to look up and see his own parents in their shabby old-fashioned clothes, instead of these strangers—some of whom, astonishingly, were younger than himself. The children had been combed and scrubbed and stuffed into their Sunday clothes by housemistresses, faculty wives, and in the case of one exceptionally bedraggled young man, Everett himself. That too—the taming of the cowlick, the unpicking of shoelaces, the last-minute sewing on of mismatched buttons—had sent Everett’s mind careening wildly backward to a time when he had performed the same tasks for his classmates.
He shook hands with a few of his students’ parents, made the appropriate remarks, and had a cigarette halfway to his lips when he saw—well, he was ashamed to admit, even to himself, that his first thought was that he was seeing a ghost. But ghosts surely did not take surreptitious bites of chocolate bars, nor could they possibly have leaves clinging to the backs of their trousers from illicit leaps into the gardeners’ neatly raked leaf piles. But if not a ghost, then who was this child with his black hair and blue eyes, that unmistakable Cabot nose, and that even more unmistakable Cabot air of pedigreed good humor?
Well, Greenfield had to be crawling with Cabots, surely. It stood to reason that the Cabot family would as a matter of course send its sons to the school that had educated its fathers and grandfathers and which boasted not only the Cabot Library but also the Cabot Gymnasium and Cabot Tennis Courts. This child, who had just shoved the entire chocolate bar into his mouth and stuck the wrapper up his sleeve before turning to the headmaster with the insouciance of a born sinner, could be any one of a number of Cabot progeny.
As Everett watched, a man approached the child, casually passed him a handkerchief, and stuck out his hand to greet the approaching headmaster. With a shaky hand, Everett managed to light his cigarette. He inhaled and did the math: Tommy’s son was born in ‘47 and would now be twelve, so just the right age for first form. Everett let his gaze slide up the man who stood beside the child, up the legs of a suit that probably cost more than Everett’s car, up the lean body he had spent fifteen years trying not to think about, and finally to the face of the man who had been his ruin.
He puffed out a surprised gust of smoke. If not for the child and the math, he might not have recognized Tommy. The man was in desperate need of a haircut, and whatever efforts he had made with a razor must have happened in a dark room with a dull blade. Around his eyes were lines that hadn’t been visible in the society photographs Everett’s mother still insisted on clipping out and sending to him. There was something in the way he held himself, a rigidity and tension, that was new and unsettling, and would have been disconcerting to see on any Cabot, but most of all Tommy.
Before Everett could quite make sense of the fact that Tommy Cabot was suddenly a few feet away, Tommy was turning toward him. Everett froze. He didn’t do terribly well when things didn’t go according to plan, and he certainly hadn’t planned on suddenly coming face to face with Tommy. If he had been prepared, he would have come up with something to say, something safe and polite. But now he was faced with the decision of whether to seek cover in a nearby cluster of faculty or walk toward Tommy and the headmaster and probably make a mess of things. He stepped forward. No matter what had happened, he wasn’t hiding from Tommy. He owed them both more than that.
“Mr. Clayton,” Everett said to the headmaster, and then turned to Tommy, his hand outstretched in the best approximation of a polite greeting that he could manage.
Tommy’s face split into a smile that made Everett’s stomach drop. “Hell and—language, damn it, sorry about that Daniel,” he said, ruffling the child’s hair, “damnation, is that you, Ev? Of course it is, come here.” And then his arms were around Everett, who was left holding the cigarette in one hand, the other hand patting stupidly at Tommy’s back. He smelled the same, damn him, like the sort of aftershave you could only buy at a department store. And if he was broader and had lost all the angularity of youth, his body still felt recognizable, mapping onto Everett’s body in the same way it always had. Everett extricated himself as soon Tommy loosened his hold.
“Of course,” Mr. Clayton said. “You were in the same graduating class.”
“Class of 1941. We were roommates,” Tommy supplied.
“In that case, I’ll leave you to catching up,” the headmaster said, and proceeded across the lawn to shake hands with more parents. Everett wanted to call him back. Or follow him. Or possibly sink into the earth.
“What are you doing here?” Tommy asked. He was still smiling, as if this was excellent, such a happy coincidence, what a delightful reunion. “Last I heard you were in England.”
“I only came back a few months ago.” Everett’s voice sounded rusty and strange, as if he hadn’t used it in the years since last seeing Tommy. He was afraid that if he spoke, all that would come out would be a confession, fifteen years’ worth of I miss you. Instead he took a drag from his cigarette and tried to school his expression into professional nonchalance.
“This is Daniel’s first year,” Tommy said, gesturing at the spot where his son had stood a minute earlier. “What year is your son in?”
Everett gritted his teeth at the reminder that of course Tommy would assume that Everett had made the same choices Tommy had, that after all these years Tommy still didn’t realize that not everybody sailed through life without consequence. “I don’t—I’m not,” he stammered. “I’m teaching here.”
“You aren’t one of Daniel’s teachers, are you?”
“I only teach sixth and seventh years,” Everett said. “I haven’t seen Patricia.” That was the ticket, remind himself—remind both of them—that Tommy was married. He pointedly gazed around the lawn for a bright blond head.
“Oh,” Tommy said after a moment. “She isn’t here. She’s in California.”
Everett frowned. California was about as far as a person could get from a husband whose life was divided between Boston and Washington. “Well,” he said tightly. “Give her my best.” He had liked Patricia. Hell and damn, he had been there on their wedding day. He had danced with her while she kept up a steady stream of chatter that even at the age of twenty-three Everett understood to be the sort of kindness meant to save him from having to make conversation. Now he wondered if she had known, if she had suspected the special kind of hell it was for him to be Tommy’s best man.