Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [138]
At one function, I had set up my bar in a high-ceilinged room. There was gleaming furniture laid out on Oriental carpets, and the walls were a raised-panel oak I was admiring, waiting for the party to begin, when a woman five or six years older than I came up to the bar and stared at me. She was lovely, her blonde hair pulled up in a twist, her clavicle tanned above a black cocktail dress. She said, “Aren’t you Andre Dubus’s son?”
“Yeah, how’d you know that?”
“I work at Godine, your father’s publisher.”
I did not remember meeting her or any of Pop’s publishers, but a summer before there’d been a cookout at Pop’s house, a few people there from Boston. Maybe it was then. An older man stepped up beside her. He was tall and wore a double-breasted blue suit, the room filling with guests behind him. She smiled up at him and was about to say something, but he put his hand on her elbow and ordered from me a Glenfiddich on the rocks.
While I poured it, she said, “Dad, this is Andre. His father is with us at Godine.”
He gave me the once-over in my barman’s uniform. “What is he, a printer?”
“No, Dad, his father is one of our authors, one of the best short story writers in the country.”
“Oh.” He took me in again, a slight shrug in his shoulders, this young man before him getting paid to be subservient. “Nice to meet you.”
“You too, sir.”
His daughter apologized for her father, but I was already busy taking orders from polite men and women in summer-weight suits and cocktail dresses, clothes my mother and father had never owned or worn. These were cheerful people in their forties, fifties, and sixties, so many of them fit-looking and tanned, flashy watches on the men’s wrists, delicate bracelets of gold or silver or turquoise and silver on the women’s, their earrings glittering, their teeth as straight and white as the rich girls I’d known at Bradford College, and as pleasant as they were to each other and to me, it was clear I was being put in the same category as all the other people in their lives who performed services for them that made them feel more comfortable, well-traveled, well-fed, well-housed, and soothed, services they paid for with money the rest of us would never know. And it was like waking from a dream of rain to find yourself wet and getting wetter.
But the outrage I’d had in Austin was largely gone; all night long I saw these people not as a class, but as individual men and women. There were no woods, only trees.
These people threw a lot of parties, too: for a judge retiring from the bench; for a daughter or son going off to a job in some city; for weddings and engagements; to celebrate a promotion; or—and there were many of these—just to have a party, as if the summer itself was being celebrated.
And what was wrong with that? What was wrong with taking your money and spending it on a good time?
There was the twenty-fifth reunion of lawyers who had all gone to Harvard Law School, an institution I had never heard of until I found myself standing in my tie and vest behind an outdoor bar not far from a hot tub and swimming pool where a dozen men stood around drinking and laughing and shooting the shit. Most of them were in shorts and Bermuda shirts, and they all wore a heavy brass graduation ring on the ring finger of their right hands. Some were tanned and handsome, their temples beginning to gray, a few others pale and plump and bald, like they’d spent their entire lives sitting behind a desk in a suit in a dim office. But they seemed happy to me, or at least happy to be among one another again, each of them a rich lawyer. Behind them, their wives swam in the pool or soaked in the hot tub or sat in the shade of massive umbrellas at glass tables sipping from glasses of wine I’d poured for them.
The men drank