It wasn’t hard to understand why this house had maintained such a privileged position in Woolly’s imagination. It would have maintained a privileged position in Emmett’s, had he had the luxury of growing up in it.
Through a pair of open doors Emmett could see a dining room with a long oak table, and down the continuation of the hallway he could see doors leading to other rooms, including a kitchen at the end. But if Woolly and Duchess had been in one of those rooms, they would have heard him calling. So Emmett headed up the stairs.
At the top of the steps, the hallway led in both directions.
First, he checked the bedrooms to his right. Though they differed in terms of size and furnishings—some with double beds, some with single beds, one with a pair of bunks—they all shared a rough simplicity. In a house like this, Emmett understood, one wasn’t meant to linger in one’s bedroom. One was meant to join the family downstairs for breakfast at the long oak table, then spend the rest of the day out of doors. None of the rooms showed any sign of having been used the night before, so doubling back, Emmett headed for the other end of the hallway.
As Emmett walked, he glanced at the photographs on the wall, intending to give them only passing consideration. And yet he found himself slowing his pace, then stopping altogether in order to study them more closely.
Though the pictures varied in size, all were of people. Among them were portraits of groups and individuals, children and adults, some in motion, others at rest. Taken separately, there was nothing unusual about them. The faces and clothes were ordinary enough. But taken together, there was something profoundly enviable about this wall of photographs in their matching black frames. And it wasn’t due to the prevalence of sunlight and carefree smiles. It was a matter of heritage.
Emmett’s father had grown up in some version of this place. As he had written in his last letter, what had been handed down in his family from generation to generation were not simply stocks and bonds, but houses and paintings, furniture and boats. And when Emmett’s father chose to tell anecdotes of his youth, there seemed no end to the cousins, uncles, and aunts gathered around the holiday table. But for some reason, for some reason that had never been fully explained, Emmett’s father had left all of that behind when he moved to Nebraska. Left it behind without a trace.
Or almost without a trace.
There were the trunks in the attic with their exotic stickers from foreign hotels, and the picnic basket with its orderly arrangement of utensils, and the unused china in the hutch—remnants of the life that Emmett’s father had relinquished in order to pursue his Emersonian ideal. Emmett shook his head, uncertain of whether his father’s actions should give him cause for disappointment or admiration.
As usual with such puzzles of the heart, the answer was probably both.
Progressing down the hall, Emmett could tell from the quality of the photographs and the style of the clothing that the pictures were moving backward in time. Starting at some point in the 1940s, they receded through the thirties and the twenties all the way into the teens. But when Emmett passed the side table at the top of the stairs, the photographs reversed course and began advancing through the decades. It was when he had returned to the 1940s and was looking with curiosity at a blank space on the wall that Emmett heard the music—music coming faintly from somewhere down the hallway. Passing several of the rooms, he homed in on the sound until he stopped before the second-to-last door and listened.
It was Tony Bennett.
Tony Bennett singing that he would go from rags to riches, if you’d only say you care.
Emmett knocked.
—Woolly? Duchess?
When neither replied, he opened the door.
It was another simply furnished room, this one with two small single beds and a bureau. On one of the beds lay Woolly, his stocking feet extending beyond the end of the frame, his eyes closed, his hands crossed on his chest. On the bedside table were two empty medicine bottles and three pink pills.
With a terrible sense of foreboding, Emmett approached the bed. After saying Woolly’s name, he shook him gently by the shoulder, finding him stiff to the touch.
—Oh, Woolly, he said, taking a seat on the opposite bed.
Feeling the onset of nausea, Emmett turned away from his friend’s expressionless features and found himself staring at the bedside table. Having already recognized the little blue bottle as Woolly’s so-called medicine, Emmett picked up the brown bottle. He had never heard of the medication printed on the label, but he saw that it had been prescribed to Sarah Whitney.