A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [44]
Harrison sat at the desk with its lamp and blotter and telephone. He removed the inn cards (the promotions, the list of local attractions) so that the desk was as uncluttered as he could make it. He’d have liked a second cup of coffee and thought about the espresso machine in the library, but he might meet Bridget or Agnes or even Jerry there, which he was not yet ready to do. No, now he needed to make a connection to his family—to Evelyn—however tenuous, however quixotic (Harrison would arrive home before the letter did). He could call, but he didn’t want to hear his wife’s rushed voice, her perfunctory questions: How are you? How was the flight? What’s the inn like? Rather he would like to see Evelyn in repose, curled up on the leather couch in what passed in his house for a library, a third of the shelves filled with children’s books, sitting with a cup of coffee (lucky girl) while she read Harrison’s words. The effort of a letter seemed atavistic in an age of e-mail—deliberately Luddite and time-consuming—and yet it was this image of Evelyn, one he hardly ever saw in real life, that inspired him to rummage through the desk drawer to find the inn’s stationery: large sheets of heavy white paper with the name of the inn embossed white on white on the back flap of the envelope so as not to intrude commercially upon the letter writer’s thoughts.
Pure Nora, Harrison thought.
Dear Evelyn,
How long has it been since I sat down to write to you? A year? That trip to London? I’m inspired to do so again and hope you don’t mind this rambling letter, nor the fact that I’ll be within Toronto’s city limits when you receive it. As always, I think back to the days when you were living in Toronto and I was in Montreal, and we wrote incessantly. I remember listening for the postman’s steps along the sidewalk (I was like a dog in that; I could tell his gait three houses away) and bounding down the stairs to snatch the envelope—always gray—from him, and carrying it with care, as if it might crumble, to my squalid room. I’d fall into a swoon of pure emotion as I read. Possibly it’s that feeling I’m trying to recapture now: rare as I grow older. More likely to happen when watching the boys, I think. By the way, how are they? (Absurd to be asking a question I’ll already know the answer to when you read this.) Not too annoying while I’m gone, I hope. Though secretly I think both they and we like the holiday of an absent parent, any novelty being preferable during the school year to the same old.
I arrived at the inn this morning. It’s quite unique—all gables and porches and improbable rooflines, which might sound Gothic but isn’t really. Maybe it was in the days when Carl Laski lived here, but Nora, his widow, the woman who owns the inn and has arranged for Bill and Bridget’s wedding (you remember I mentioned Nora) has made the place terrifically inviting—very up-to-the-minute with espresso machines and Jacuzzis in the bathrooms. The rooms feel calm, and one has a sense of “having arrived.” I think Nora’s a genius at this. Perhaps she’s found her true calling. Certainly she seems happy, if distracted, and we are all amazed by this incredible weather—sunny and seventy degrees. Is it glorious there as well? I see this as a good omen for Bill and Bridget, for whom I wish only the best. Bridget has a fifteen-year-old boy I’m looking forward to meeting. Wonder if Bill’s put a glove in his hand yet.
I’ve never talked much about my days at Kidd. You once asked me why. I think—no, I know—it’s because my time there ended so badly. I told you that my roommate died a month before graduation, but I’m not sure I ever told you how.
All of us were friends. Stephen (who was