He bought a ham sandwich, dropped Lloyd Feiffer’s forty dollars in a beggar’s cap, descended a tunnel, and boarded the 20th Century Limited to Chicago. After waiting around for most of a day, not venturing out of the station, he caught a train to Missoula.
* * *
—
A clear, warm night with a bright, nearly full moon. Wallace Graves waited at the depot. He had brought one of the household dogs, a leggy black-and-white thing, and they looked down the tracks together as the train’s headlight grew larger and its huffing louder. The locomotive passed in a burst of heat and screeching brakes. Framed by sliding, slowing yellow rectangles of light, people were standing, putting on hats, gathering possessions. Doors opened and figures descended; porters heaved trunks from the baggage car. Wallace picked out Addison’s stooped and looming silhouette on the platform. He held up a hand, and Addison nodded as though greeting an acquaintance and not a brother, not ending a separation of nearly two decades. When Wallace embraced him, he felt as though he were clutching an oversize skeleton to his bosom.
“Where’s your luggage?” he said.
Addison bent to greet the dog. “I don’t have any.”
“You have that.” Wallace indicated the slim cardboard parcel under Addison’s arm. “What’s in it?”
Addison cleared his throat. “Your letters and the photographs you sent. And your drawings of the children.”
Addison had never acknowledged any of the dozens of portraits Wallace had sent, and for years Wallace had imagined them vanishing into the prison garbage. They were only little jots, sketches in ink and watercolor, easily done, but still the thought of any of his work being destroyed gave him a helpless, horrified feeling. Now the slender cardboard portfolio, carefully tied, brought a tightness to his throat.
When Addison left home for the sea, Wallace had been a small boy, separated from his brother by ten years and a little crop of nameless gravestones out under a walnut tree. Stillbirths. When, eleven years later, he’d made his own escape from their silent parents and the hardscrabble family farm, he’d set his course for the address scrawled in the upper left corner of Addison’s brief annual letters.
A redbrick house near the Hudson. Even as a young man, Addison had been taciturn and inscrutable, but he let Wallace live with him, among his paltry furnishings and bewildering souvenirs from far-flung places. He had even paid for Wallace to go to art school.
Wallace gestured toward the depot. “Come. This way.”
His long gray Cadillac touring car, his special joy, was parked out front. It had originally come to him in a card game during his Great Winning Streak of 1913, a month when he’d gambled his way through a succession of mining towns and won not only the car but enough gold dust to visit every brothel he happened past and then to buy himself a house, too. （A wise decision, it turned out, to sink his assets into the house before the Great Losing Streak of 1915.） He had taken care to park the car under a streetlamp so Addison would be better able to admire it—the black trim still gleaming, the top folded back, the thick, deep-treaded tires helpful for getting out en plein air, the front and rear seats in black leather, extravagantly scratched by dog nails.
“Marian is enamored with it,” he told Addison. “She’s a funny one. I’m always finding her outside polishing it or poking around the engine. When I take it to a mechanic I drop her off, too, so she can watch.”
“You said so in a letter.”
“It’s just that you never reply.” Wallace opened the passenger door with a flourish, gesturing his brother inside. The dog snaked in first and bounced into the backseat. “You must be desperate to see the twins. They wanted to come along, but I told them we shouldn’t mob you. It’s late anyway. They’ll be asleep, but you can peek in at them. They sleep out on the porch when it’s not cold. Well, when it’s not dangerously cold.”
“I know,” Addison said, pulling the door shut. “I read the letters.”
“But you don’t reply.” Wallace went around, settled in the driver’s seat. “Thank you, though, for the, ah, the financial support. It’s been very welcome.” He started the engine. “Home’s not far.” Pulling away from the curb, he went on, “I’ve put the fear of god into Jamie and Marian not to wake you in the morning. They get up horribly early. They’re practiced at entertaining themselves until a decent hour. They go up the creek, up the mountains. I don’t know where they go. I hope that doesn’t sound neglectful—I couldn’t stop them if I tried. They take the horse, usually. Do you know how to drive?”