“That’d be okay,” said Harrison. He wondered if they were supposed to shake hands or something, or if he needed to show his gratitude—his wild, deep gratitude—in some even more expressive way, like jumping up and down or throwing his arms around Eli’s slender brown neck. But while he was resisting this impulse they both were interrupted by a shout from the main lodge, where breakfast was not underway and no coffee awaited them or anyone else, because Gordon and Tony and Carlos himself had all, apparently, departed Roarke in the night, leaving a single letter of principled withdrawal for their former classmates and faculty, and never to return.
Chapter Eighteen
Anyone Else
In which Lewyn considers the grave responsibilities of guardianship, and
the seat beside the toilet turns out to be the best one on the bus
Lewyn was the only one of them who went home for spring break. Harrison had skipped the vacation （perhaps his weirdo school didn’t believe in vacations?） and Sally, he learned on his arrival, had apparently opted to stay at Cornell over the break to do some kind of internship with a local antiques dealer. This left Lewyn in a situation of exquisite discomfort, with our mother and the small person （though less small, even he could see, since the winter break） relentlessly present, and our father home even less than usual.
Johanna was in an especially bad way; this much was plain, even to him. The baby’s needs fell squarely on her, except for the four hours each afternoon when a woman named Marta arrived to perambulate it to sleep on the Esplanade and then do laundry in the basement. These were the hours our mother might appear in his room, asking about school and his new friends, or even his old friends, or—worst of all—Sally, who’d apparently been even more withholding from Johanna than he’d been, himself. Who were Sally’s friends? Our mother wanted to know. Was Sally dating any boys? And what did he know about this antiques person his sister had taken up with, who was some kind of a townie and not connected to the college at all? （Leave it to Sally, Lewyn thought, to find a non-Cornell person in a town jammed with students, faculty, and staff.） To these and many other queries Lewyn could provide no satisfying response, nor could he offer the slightest insight into his brother’s activities in New Hampshire, since the only information he possessed came from Johanna herself:
Harrison now knew all there was to know about chickens!
Harrison could drive a truck—a stick shift, no less!
Harrison would be spending part of the summer at some institute in Virginia, where he was giving a speech!
Lewyn had not one thing to say in response to any of these things.
“If you’re free on Thursday,” our mother said, “I’d like you to come with me on an errand. I could use your help.”
“Can’t Marta?” he asked. It was instinctive. He didn’t mean to be oppositional, and it wasn’t as if he had something else to do.
“No, she’s visiting her brother in the Bronx. Won’t take too long.”
So he agreed.
On Thursday, Johanna made him hold the infant while she and the car service driver adjusted a baffling number of straps and buckles to fasten the car seat to the middle of the back seat. There wasn’t adequate room for all three of them back there, which meant that he had to sit up front in the same seat that had recently hosted the driver’s breakfast, and the man made little effort to suppress his annoyance at having to clear away the detritus. A Hindi radio station was turned down low, and the baby objected loudly when her toy fell to the floor and Johanna wasn’t able to reach it. When they set off across the Brooklyn Bridge it began to rain heavily.
He realized, when they came to a stop on Park Avenue, just north of the Pan Am Building, that he’d never asked where they were going or indeed why they were going there, but it seemed clear from the neighborhood that Johanna’s errand was going to be either financial or legal in nature. Now, with the driver and his mother reversing their efforts on the car seat, seemed not a great moment to ask, so Lewyn stood on the sidewalk, awkwardly holding an umbrella over the stroller, waiting for the infant’s cradle to be snapped in. Then, still wielding the umbrella over the two of them, he walked behind his mother into the building.