Love, Dad

But she had also (and here she acknowledged her debt to Ralph Edwards) invited not only half the town of Rutledge and most of the people Jamie worked with in New York, but also many people Jamie thought he would never in his life see again. There was his closest friend from when he was a kid on Eighty-sixth Street (Jamie’s mother, who had helped Connie with the selection, stood by beaming as Jamie embraced the man), now a bit pudgy and going bald, an accountant in New Jersey. There was his old Army buddy, a rangy kid from Maine who’d trudged through the jungle by his side, and who’d once saved Jamie from an exploding grenade by tackling him and knocking him headlong off the machete-hewn trail; he was now a farmer, still living in Maine, married to a shy woman in her late thirties, who stood by uncertainly as Jamie and her husband reminisced about sudden death. There was Maury Atkins, his roommate from Yale, who had first warned him to stay away from Constance Harding, and who admitted jovially now that he’d almost made the biggest mistake of his life, embracing Connie, and surprising Jamie (Maury was now a banker in Bridgeport) by kissing him on both cheeks. There was Connie’s roommate from Lake Shore Drive, the bored-looking brunette who’d been sitting with her the first time he asked her to dance at that Yale mixer, the one who’d taught Connie to swear like a sailor. There was the couple who’d lived across the hall from them when they were renting their grubby little apartment on West Seventy-eighth; he’d been a dental student at the time, and his wife had worked for an insurance company; each night, as he’d pored over his textbooks and made his drawings of molars and bicuspids, she’d listened to the radio, wearing a headset and shaking her hips in time to the music as she washed and dried the dishes. There was the man who’d been the department head at the school where Jamie had taught photography three nights a week while waiting for his big break. There was the young, soft-spoken blond (now no longer young, his blond hair sifted with gray) assistant editor at Life, who’d murmured over and over again, “These are very good, these are very good,” before picking up the phone and asking someone named Charlie to come in and have a look. There was, under the Japanese lanterns on a surprisingly cool, clear night (it had been raining a lot this July), a steady parade of people from the past and the memories they evoked, and Jamie realized all at once just how long and how hard Connie had worked to reconstruct for him not only his own history, but the history they had shared together for so many years now.

In bed later that night, the partygoers gone, the Japanese lanterns extinguished and swaying in the treetops on a faint breeze that blew in over the river, the water trickling below their bedroom window, always a faint whisper in July, never the rushing torrent it became in March, she snuggled close to him and asked, “Did it make you happy, Jamie?”