“Scottish nannies,” I prompted.
He nodded. “So the family had a passel of girls and then Tom and then another boy after him, but our story is about Tom. Tom Something, Tom Scion--of--the--Aristocracy. Tom and his favorite Scottish nanny were taking a walk around the grounds. It’s a beautiful day, not unlike this one, and Tom points up the hill and asks the nanny who owns the house. And the nanny says, “Och, Tom, yur father oones the hoose.”
I told him I thought his Scottish nanny accent was remarkably good. Not that I’d ever met an actual Scottish nanny.
“Thank you,” he said. “So young master Tom goes on, who owns the trees in the orchard, he wants to know, and who owns the horses, and who owns the hill itself, and who owns those flowers? The nanny very patiently gives him the same answer every time. ‘Yur father, yur father.’ It’s a patriarchy, I’m sorry to say. The mother had no ownership of anything, not even herself.”
“Understood.”
“By now young master Tom is running low on inventory, but he likes the game, so he keeps looking around until finally it occurs to him to ask about the lake. ‘Who owns the lake?’ And the nanny, we’ll call her Heather—-not that history wrote down her name but it feels polite to give her one anyway—-Heather, for whatever reason says, ‘Tom oones the loch.’
“？‘Me?’ the boy asks.” The stranger propped against the wall of my bedroom let a split second of wonderment wash across his face, making himself into young master Tom, then just as quickly sent it on its way. “The moment is very touching, and maybe Heather thinks she’s made a mistake but let’s be honest, the whole fucking place belongs to the father and there’s no reason the boy shouldn’t get the lake. So he asks her what the lake is called.”
“I see this one coming, “ I said.
“There was an apostrophe--s back then, Tom’s Lake, but time condenses experience.”
“Sure.”
“The kid’s aglow. He spends a solid twenty minutes throwing stones and sticks into the water and shouting his own name. After Heather finally corrals him back to the house and down for his nap, she tells the story to the kitchen girls, and even the head woman thinks it’s charming. She says Heather ought to tell the Missus, and so Heather does, and the Missus loves the story and she tells her husband and her passel of daughters, and while it’s never a formal decision, they agree from there on out it’s Tom’s Lake.”
When he stopped to make sure I was still with him, I realized he hadn’t told me his name. He had told me only the name of the lake.
“Now I know,” I said.
“Well, there’s a small coda, if you have one more minute.”
“You’re the one who knows how much time I have.” He had the schedule in his hand.
“You’re good. Let me just finish up. Okay. Somehow the boy never catches on that the whole lake thing is a charade. We all have a blind spot, right? That bit of incorrect information from childhood that mysteriously never gets updated, the person who makes it to thirty--five believing that unicorns had been hunted into extinction.”
“Wait, unicorns weren’t hunted . . .”
He smiled at me, tipping his head to one side as if to say I was adorable, as in, I was to be adored. “So Tom grows up and finds himself a bride, the sister of one of his Princeton friends, and he thinks it would be nice to get married here, to show her Tom’s Lake. Out they all come, the families, the friends, the massive support staff, everyone on the train. Tom hadn’t been to the house in years and the place is even more beautiful than he remembers it. He can hardly wait to show her the lake.”
“Does she have a name?”
He paused for a minute to consider this. “No, but for the sake of this conversation we’ll call her Lara.”
That same look of slight discomfort must have come across my face again because he held up the paper in his hand. “It’s on your schedule.”
“And your name?”
“Peter Duke.”
“Peter Duke,” I repeated. Such a nice sound.
“The two of them are walking hand in hand, and he’s going on about the house and the cherry trees and how they’ll spend at least part of their summers here, then he points to the lake, which, as you’ve no doubt noticed, is difficult to miss. ‘Tom’s Lake,’ he says, and what he’s telling her is that all of this is his, his and his family’s but eventually his because he’s the oldest son, and therefore hers in part, but of course that’s not the way she hears it. She says, ‘That’s so sweet. But really, what’s the name of the lake?’ because clearly this is not the family trout pond. The lake goes on for miles. It doesn’t belong to a single person. And just as Tom is about to repeat himself, he stops. He suddenly remembers that day with Heather, who was by then long back in Scotland. Heather, the first woman he’d ever loved because his mother was never really available to him. And at that moment, standing there with his bride--to--be, he realizes that this body of water he has only heard referred to by his own name was not named for him at all, and that it did not belong to him. Worse yet, he has no idea what the lake was called.”
I went back to the window to look again at the lake and the day, to imagine the two of them stopping for this conversation. “Tell me they didn’t call the wedding off over this.” I was not a particularly romantic person but still, that would have been a disappointment.
Duke shook his head. “Quite the opposite, in fact. Something miraculous happened, something that sealed their love forever. Tom told Lara the truth.”
Involuntarily, I yelped. I made the sound a small dog makes when you accidentally step on his paw. “Oh my god, I was totally with you.”
Nothing in his face betrayed him. His cheeks didn’t flush, his long black eyelashes, so ridiculous on a grown man, did not cast down. “He told her that he didn’t know the name of the lake, and that he had only this minute realized this fact, and that his nanny, and truly, his entire family, had infantilized him, not with malicious intent, but as a sort of sweet joke that was emblematic of both their love and how he had been coddled his entire life. He told her that he didn’t know the name of the lake at all.”
“I believed you this entire time!”
“This would have been his Siddhartha Gautama revelation, the moment the prince casts off his wealth to go and live among the suffering and the poor to seek his spiritual path, but he loved her too much.”
“Stop.”
“And he loved the house. Really, he was crazy about the house. And the place in Scotland. And the triplex in New York.”
“So why is it called Tom Lake?”
“No idea.”
“You’re not playing George, are you?” He didn’t seem young enough to be George, but I thought he probably could have played the invisible chickens if that was the part he’d been given.
He gave me a casual two--finger salute. “Editor Webb, newspaperman.”
“You’re my father?”
“I had hoped your mother would have told you someday.”
We stared at one another until the small room felt very small. I was the one who looked away.