The Vagabonds Read Online Free Page B

shut his eyes and pictured his sister Joanna, a continent away and staring at the other sea, and sister Claire uneasy in her starter castle—“Oh
excellent,
” Lucy was saying, “we give you our premium homegrown and tell you we’re going to China and acquiring a baby and you say it doesn’t matter”—and then the three of them mourning together, together again for the first time in years, he and Claire and Joanna grown-ups now or all of them anyhow trying to be,
Nel mezzo del cammin
—in the middle of the road, the middle of the journey—and standing in their adult garb beside their mother’s corpse . . .
    So it is no surprise to him when the lawyer calls. Beakes’s voice is fluting, sibilant; David tries to remember the way that he looked.
    “Mr. Saperstone? You don’t mind if I call you David? It’s like yesterday, it seems to me, when you were still in grade school here and we came to the
Nutcracker Suite.
”
    Bald, flat-nosed, wearing glasses, that much he can remember, but not if Beakes is short or tall; he has the impression of wideness, a bow tie, a blue shirt . . .
    “And I remember how your mother loved to watch you dancing, how she absolutely loved it when you came out on stage. You remember I played piano?”
    “No.”
    There is static on the line. It crackles. The lawyer offers his condolences, and then the rest of it, the request he join his sisters and the prepaid ticket east. “Your mother left instructions. She was very precise about this, Alice was.” Beakes coughs. “A trust, you understand, comes with conditions; the provider can establish terms—and that’s precisely what your mother did. She wants all three of you to come to Saratoga Springs. It’s a proviso of the will.”
    “All three of us?”
    “Of her children, I mean. The grandchildren are welcome too, but it’s you three she stipulates.”
    “Stipulated,” David says.
    “This proviso that you come to town? It’s an interesting codicil.”
    “Concerning?”
    “I have no desire to be secretive. It’s not a secret, David, and I’ll be happy to disclose the asset as soon as you children assemble together. It’s what your mother wanted, it’s precisely what she stipulated and therefore what we, before probate, must do.”
    He agrees. He deploys the techniques of avoidance—formality, politeness—till lawyer Beakes is mollified and says, that’s fine then, we’ll expect you in the office, see you soon.
    David cradles the phone and stares at the window and tries to deal with what he’s heard, the size and shape of it, the sudden summons back to what he thought he’d left. Outside a homeless man is picking through recycling bins, gathering bottles and cans. A car siren announces itself down the street and before it shuts back off he listens to the blaring notes, the caterwauling repeated complaint. An ambulance rattles down Ashby, or maybe a police car, and he asks himself in what way an ambulance siren differs from a police cruiser’s and how to assess its direction and if you could, listening, tell.
    He does his breathing exercise, inhaling for the count of eight and holding for the count of eight and releasing for sixteen. Upstairs, there is gospel music and the muffled roaring of a vacuum cleaner, and a door slams in the entrance hall: two times. He lies on his tatami mat and tries a series of positions and these too fail to calm him; therefore he ceases willed evasion and tries to remember and does:
    David is six, maybe seven years old. He’s standing with his father at the entrance to the racetrack, so it must have been August in Saratoga, and what he wants is ice cream but his father insists on a Coke. “A Coke won’t melt,” his father says; “you wouldn’t want ice cream all over your shirt.” There are horses and trainers and horses and jockeys and he can distinguish between them—the jockeys and the exercise riders—because exercise riders can wear what they want, and he’s holding his paper