The Envelope

Theron

There were forty-one clocks in the house at Ledge Point, and for twenty-six days after the funeral every one of them had been telling Theron Wexcombe the wrong time.

He had noticed it on the second morning. The grandfather clock in the front hall ran four minutes fast. The carriage clock in the library had stopped altogether. The brass ship's chronometer his father had won in a card game in 1989 and loved more than any of his sons was gaining something like ninety seconds a day. It was the sort of thing a house did when the person who wound it was gone. Kit had wound them. Every Sunday evening for six years, with a tiny key on a ribbon and a paper napkin in his back pocket to wipe the dust off the glass, whistling through his teeth like a man tuning a cheap guitar, he had gone from room to room correcting the house against the radio. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody had known, until he stopped, that it was being done.

Theron had not wound them. He had considered it. He had stood in the hall one evening with the key in his hand and found that his left hand, the bad one, the one that had not been entirely trustworthy since the winter he was twenty-four, would not hold still enough to find the keyhole. So he had put the key back on its nail and gone upstairs and answered email until two.

Now it was a Wednesday in November, a little after eleven in the morning, and the sky over Rhode Island Sound was the color of wet slate. A cold wind came off the water and pressed against the long windows of the east gallery. Theron stood in the doorway of his mother's sitting room with a tray in his hands and watched her not eat.

"Mother."

"Put it down, darling."

"It's the broth. Mrs. Aldrich made it this morning. She says you took three spoonfuls yesterday and she'd like to see four."

"Mrs. Aldrich counts spoonfuls the way a banker counts coins. It's very sweet. I don't have the strength to resent it." Constance Wexcombe did not turn from the window. She sat in the wing chair with a rug over her knees and her silver hair loose, which Theron had never seen in thirty-six years until the week of the funeral, and her thin hands lay in her lap like two white gloves somebody had forgotten to put away. "Put it on the table. I'll have it later."

"You said that yesterday."

"And I'll say it again tomorrow. I'm very consistent."

He set the tray on the little mahogany table by her elbow, adjusted the napkin so the corner lay parallel to the edge, and straightened. He did not sit. There was a chair opposite hers, a low button-backed thing in faded green silk that had been his grandmother's, and he had not sat in it since he was a boy. He could not have said why. It seemed to him that sitting would imply he planned to stay.

"Theron."

"Yes."

"You're standing like a waiter."

"I'm standing like a man who has a meeting at twelve thirty."

"With whom?"

"The bank. The Kittiwake loan." He glanced at his watch, an old steel Omega with a cracked strap, because it was the only watch in the house he trusted. "Hale will be there. He'd like to renegotiate the terms of the Bristol expansion in light of the circumstances."

"Which circumstances?"

"Mine. Yours. That we've lost a—" He stopped. "That the family has had a loss, and the board is anxious."

"Your uncle is not anxious," said Constance. "Your uncle is hungry. There is a difference, and one day you'll learn to tell them apart." She still hadn't turned her head. Her profile was sharp and pale against the glass. "Go to your meeting. Wear the gray tie. It makes you look less like a funeral."

"Mother—"

"Go on."

He didn't move.

For the first time, she turned. Her eyes, the same light, clear gray as his own, had gone a little red at the rims, and the skin under them looked like tissue paper. She had been the most beautiful woman on the Eastern Seaboard in 1985, according to a magazine he'd found in the attic as a boy, and she was still, at sixty-two, the most precise. She had never raised her voice in his hearing. She had never used a contraction when she was angry. She looked at him now with a quiet, level, devastating attention.

"You haven't been in his workshop," she said.

Theron's jaw tightened.

"Have you?"

"No."

"It's been twenty-six days."

"I'm aware of the number."

"Of course you are. You count everything." It was said without cruelty. It was nearly tender. "It's been bothering me. All the other rooms, you've seen to. The boy's bedroom, his closet, the boat shed. You had the car towed. You dealt with the police and the insurers and the lawyers and the florists and the man from the church who wanted to know about the hymns. You sat through three hundred people, shaking hands. And you haven't set foot in the one room in this house where he actually lived."

"I've been busy."

"You've been afraid."

He said nothing.

"I'd like you to go through his desk," said Constance. "Today. Before your meeting, if you can. I can't do it, and I won't have a stranger do it, and I don't want it left until I'm dead." She turned back to the window. The light fell across her cheek. "There's a drawer in the left side that sticks. The boy never fixed it. He said he liked knowing which one was his. See what's in there. Tell me if there's anything I should know."

"What would there be?"

"I don't know, Theron. That's the point of looking."

…

The workshop stood at the bottom of the lawn, past the boathouse, a low shingled building with a green door and a slate roof that Kit had bribed three apprentices with pizza to re-lay the summer he was nineteen. In his father's time it had been the place where the gardener kept his mowers. Now it smelled of cedar, linseed oil, and a faint sweet undertone of machine grease and old coffee, and the smell hit Theron like a hand to the sternum the moment he opened the door.

He stood on the threshold for some time.

Everything was exactly as it had been. A half-built skiff lay on its sawhorses in the center of the floor, ribs exposed, the planks stacked beside it with spacers between them so the wood could breathe. Hand planes hung from nails along the south wall in order of size. Along the north wall ran a long bench cluttered with chisels and clamps and cups of pencil stubs and a transistor radio the size of a loaf of bread. A coffee mug sat on the corner with an inch of something black and furred at the bottom of it. On the back of the door hung a canvas apron, stiff with sawdust, with a rip at the pocket.

Theron closed the door behind him.

"All right," he said, aloud. It was a stupid thing to say. His voice sounded unnatural in the quiet. "All right, Kit. Let's get on with it."

The desk stood in the corner under the window. It wasn't really a desk. It was an old sea chest on trestles, black-painted, brass-cornered, with a slab of plywood laid across the top and an office chair that didn't match. There was a lamp and a stack of boatyard invoices and an empty bag of pretzels. A framed photograph sat propped against the wall: Kit at nine, on the dock at Bristol, with a fish too big for him and a gap where his front teeth should have been, and beside him, big-eyed, solemn, with his hand resting on the boy's shoulder, a skinny sixteen-year-old in a rugby shirt whom Theron recognized after a moment as himself.

He had not remembered the shirt.

He did not sit in the chair. He opened the drawers one at a time, left to right, with the care of a man defusing something. Pencils. Receipts. Sandpaper in a rubber band. A tin of lozenges. A paperback copy of The Riddle of the Sands with the cover torn off. A parking ticket from Providence dated last March, stapled to a note that said DO NOT TELL T. in block capitals. Theron read it, and found, against all reason, that he was smiling. He folded the ticket into his wallet.

The left-hand drawer stuck. He had to wedge two fingers into the gap and heave. It came free with a protesting squeal, and he stood for a moment with it half-open in his hand, as though he'd opened a door on a lit room and caught somebody undressing.

There were only three things in it.

A bundle of postcards from their father's sailing trips, held together with a black hair elastic. A small leather notebook, which he set aside without opening. And an envelope.

It was a plain white business envelope, letter-sized, creased at the fold, slightly soft from handling. In the upper left corner, in discreet navy type, was a printed return address:

LUMEN FAMILY CRYOBANK

One Weybosset Square, Suite 200

Providence, Rhode Island

Theron turned it over.

It had been opened and resealed. On the flap, in Kit's slanting, impatient hand, were two words in blue ballpoint: Don't panic.

He read them twice. Then, because there was nothing else to be done, he slit the flap with his thumbnail, and drew out the single folded sheet inside.

It was a letter. It was dated eleven months ago.

Dear Mr. Wexcombe,

Thank you for the continued trust you've placed in Lumen Family Cryobank. In accordance with our annual policy, we write to confirm the current status of your donor registration.

You have been assigned Donor ID 4417. As of this date, you have 1 (one) vial remaining in our active inventory. Per your original agreement, vials are released only to registered recipients following full legal clearance. Should you wish to withdraw from the program, retire your remaining inventory, or amend your contact preferences, please complete the enclosed form...

He stopped reading.

The room had gone very quiet. Behind him, in the rafters, the old building ticked and settled in the wind. He could hear the water slapping the pilings under the boathouse, and somewhere far away a gull, and, quite close, the blood in his own ears.

Donor ID 4417.

Vials.

He read the letter again from the beginning. Then a third time, slowly, finger under every line, as he'd taught himself to read contracts at twenty-five, to make certain that nothing could hide between the words.

Dear Mr. Wexcombe.

It was addressed to Kit. It could not have been addressed to anyone else.

"No," said Theron.

He said it quietly, to the empty workshop. The half-built skiff stood in its ribs, patient and silent. The radio on the bench said nothing.

"No. You wouldn't. You were twenty. You wouldn't have—"

But he could hear it. He could hear the exact tone his brother would have used, bright and offhand, the one he'd used to announce he was dropping out of Brown, switching from philosophy to marine engineering, bringing home a girl with a nose ring. Don't panic, T. It's totally fine. It's honestly like donating blood. He could see the slouch of the shoulders and the grin, the crooked brightness that had made it impossible to stay angry for longer than a day, and the way he'd have tucked the letter into the drawer and not mentioned it again, because he assumed, because he always assumed, that there would be plenty of time.

One vial remaining.

Theron put the letter down on the desk. He put both hands flat on either side of it. The left one trembled. He pressed it harder into the plywood, as though the tremor were something that could be flattened, and stood there with his head down while the sea wind pulled at the shingles.

He had been twenty-four when the doctors told him.

He remembered it with an enormous clarity that he could not afford to examine: the fluorescent hum of the oncology suite at Sloan Kettering, the paper gown, the pale young resident who could not meet his eyes. He had asked about options and been told, kindly, that the cancer was aggressive and the window narrow. The chemotherapy would begin Monday. The doctor, an older man with a bow tie and a face like a tired hound, had said, Mr. Wexcombe, I have to ask. Have you considered banking sperm?

He hadn't. Of course he hadn't. He'd been twenty-four years old. He'd been working eighty-hour weeks at the yard to keep his father's creditors from the door. He had not imagined his body as something that could fail him in the one particular way that would be permanent.

We can arrange it today, the doctor had said. If you can get to a clinic by five.

He'd had a board meeting at four.

He'd gone to the board meeting.

He still did not know, thirteen years later, whether it had been pride, or terror, or a belief that if he did not acknowledge the possibility, it could not occur. What he knew was that he had walked out of that conference room at half past five with the Bristol expansion approved, and gone to the clinic, and found the door locked. The chemotherapy had begun on Monday. By March he was clear. By April, a scan had told him, in the careful language of men delivering a verdict, that he would never father a child.

He had told no one but his mother.

Not Kit. Kit had been eleven and stricken enough as it was; and later, as Kit grew, the moment for telling slipped by, week after week, until the silence became a kind of load-bearing wall. Isabelle had found out, of course. She had been very kind about it for eighteen months. Then she had stopped being kind, and then she had stopped being there, and the last thing she'd said to him in the foyer, with her coat on and her bag over her shoulder, was, You don't need a wife, Theron. You need a ledger. Someone to log every transaction and tell you the balance.

He had not argued. She was right.

Now he stood in his brother's workshop with the last piece of the family tucked into an envelope that said Don't panic, and the silence in his chest went on and on, and he had the clearest sense of watching a very long fuse burn down toward a very small thing.

"Oh, Kit," he said.

His voice cracked on the second word. He turned away, and put his fist against his mouth, and stood facing the wall with his shoulders shaking until the worst of it passed. It did not take long. He had practice.

Then he wiped his face with the heel of his hand, straightened his tie, and returned to the desk.

He looked at the other thing in the drawer. The leather notebook. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands, felt its softness, and opened it.

The first page said, in Kit's capitals: PROPERTY OF C. C. WEXCOMBE. IF FOUND, RETURN TO BRISTOL, OR TO WHOEVER'S BUYING THE BEER.

He turned a page. Another. They were lists, mostly: lumber orders, tide tables, the names of three girls and a phone number with a question mark. Halfway through, under a sketch of a sailboat's lines, a single line was written in a different pen.

Told T about the donor thing? No. Not yet. After the regatta. He'll be in a good mood after the regatta.

Theron closed the notebook.

The regatta had been in August.

Kit had died in October. He had been carrying the sentence in his pocket for two months, waiting for his brother to be in a good mood.

…

He was forty minutes late to the bank.

Hale was waiting in the lobby of Rhode Island Citizens, in a navy suit and a pale blue tie, with his phone against his ear and one polished shoe tapping the marble. He looked up when Theron came in and smiled, with all his teeth, in the warm sympathetic way of a man who intends to take a thing from you and would like you to feel cared for in the process.

"There he is," said Hale. "Thought we'd lost you. Everything all right at home? How's your mother? I called Tuesday. Mrs. Aldrich said she was resting."

"She's resting."

"Of course she is. Poor Con. It's a terrible thing. A mother should never—well." He laid a hand on Theron's shoulder, firm and warm and familiar. "You look tired, son. You're not sleeping."

"I'm sleeping adequately."

"You're thin."

"I'm what I've always been."

"You're a Wexcombe," said Hale fondly. "You'd keep working through a hurricane. That's your father in you. But you can't carry it all yourself, you know. That's what I'm here for. That's what family's for."

Family. Theron looked at the hand on his shoulder. It was large and well-kept, with a heavy gold signet on the third finger. It had once, many years ago, taught him to tie a bowline. He had been nine years old, and had loved his uncle with the uncomplicated adoration of a boy who had a rather cold father. Now he found that he had begun to take, without quite knowing it, a step backward every time Hale came near him.

"Shall we go up?" he said.

"Of course. Of course." Hale dropped his hand at last, and smiled again. "And then perhaps you'll let me take you to lunch. I know a place on Benefit Street. You need a decent steak."

The meeting lasted ninety minutes. Theron sat through it with perfect composure and heard perhaps a third of it. The loan officer, a young woman in a gray suit, spoke in rounded phrases about covenants and coverage ratios. Hale spoke in rounded phrases about stewardship and succession. At some point they agreed to something regarding the Bristol drydock. At some point Theron signed a paper. At no point did he cease to hear, running underneath it all, steady as a pulse, the same four words.

One vial remaining.

At two, as they crossed the lobby, Hale stopped and put a hand on his arm.

"Theron. A word."

"I have another meeting."

"It will take a minute." The smile had changed. It had become graver, softer, more concerned. "I wanted to say this at the house, but your mother's so fragile, and I didn't like to. It's about Kit's estate."

The tremor in Theron's left hand returned. He closed it.

"What about it?"

"Only that—well, it's a delicate matter. You know the voting structure of the company. Your father left Kit twenty-eight percent when he turned twenty-one. Now that he's—" Hale cleared his throat delicately. "Now that he's gone, those shares revert, under the old trust, to a pool. To be redistributed among the surviving family. Ansel Pryor has the paperwork. Naturally I'd expect you to receive the lion's share. But I wanted you to know I'd be happy to hold the remainder in a, well, a fiduciary capacity. Until things settle."

"Fiduciary."

"Just until the grief is less raw. I'd hate for you to have to worry about governance on top of everything else."

Theron looked at him for a long moment.

He thought of the envelope. He thought of the single line in blue ink. He thought, with the cold clean clarity that had gotten him through chemotherapy and two bankruptcies and the funeral of a boy he'd taught to swim: he is asking about the shares before the soil on the grave has settled.

"Thank you, Hale," he said. "I'll speak to Ansel."

"That's all I ask."

"Is there anything else?"

"No, no. Nothing." Hale squeezed his arm and let go. "Take care of yourself, son. And call your mother. She needs you more than she lets on."

…

It was after nine when he got home.

The house was dark except for one lamp in the east gallery and a wedge of yellow light under his mother's door. Mrs. Aldrich had left a covered plate in the kitchen. Theron stood in the front hall in his coat and listened to the clocks, all forty-one of them, each ticking out its private, slightly mistaken version of the hour, and then he went upstairs and knocked.

"Come in."

Constance was in bed, propped against a bank of pillows, with a book open in her lap that she plainly hadn't been reading. The tray had been moved. The broth was gone. A single lamp burned on the nightstand, and in its glow her face looked younger and more fragile than it had in the morning.

"You had the meeting," she said.

"I did."

"And Hale was there."

"He was."

"And he mentioned the shares."

Theron stopped in the doorway. "How did you—"

"Because I've known Hale Wexcombe for forty years, darling. I know the order in which he does things." She closed the book. "You found something."

It wasn't a question. He crossed the carpet, slowly, and stood at the foot of the bed, hands clasped behind his back, as he had stood at the foot of this same bed at five years old to report a bad dream. He took the envelope from his inside pocket. He held it for a moment. Then, with great care, he set it on the coverlet in front of her.

She read it without a word.

She read it, he thought, twice. Then she folded it along its crease and held it in both hands, against her chest, and closed her eyes.

For perhaps a full minute the only sound in the room was the wind.

"The boy," said Constance, finally. "The silly, dear, impossible boy."

"Mother."

"He never told me. I would have said no. He knew I would. I would have said, it isn't done, Christopher, and he'd have laughed and done it anyway, and I'd have been furious for a week." She opened her eyes. They were very bright. "How old was he?"

"Twenty. The letter says he registered at twenty."

"And this—" Her thumb moved over the paper. "'One vial remaining.' What does that mean?"

"It means there are none left in storage except one. The others were—" He found he could not say sold. It seemed a vulgar word for something so grave. "Released. To recipients."

"Recipients."

"Women. Who wanted children."

"Then there are children. Out there. Somewhere." Constance's voice was very steady. "His."

"Possibly. It's—Mother, it's hard to say. The numbers vary. There may be none. Not every attempt succeeds."

"And the last one?"

"I don't know."

"Find out."

Theron said nothing.

"Find out," said Constance again, and for the first time in twenty-six days there was iron in it. She had sat up straighter. Her hands, clasped around the letter, had stopped trembling. "I want to know if there is a child. I want to know whose. I want to know where they are, and whether they're well, and whether anyone is looking after them. I'm not asking for a miracle, Theron. I'm asking for the truth."

"They won't tell us. The bank. The law protects donor anonymity—"

"I don't care what the law protects."

"You should."

"Why? What has the law ever done for this family?" She said it quietly, but it fell into the room like a stone. "It didn't save your father. It didn't save you at twenty-four. It wouldn't make the doctors wait for you to bank your sperm. It didn't tell your wife to stay, when she was fond of you. It certainly did nothing about that road at Brenton Point." She drew a breath. "I've done everything the law told me to do my whole life. I curtsied. I signed. I smiled at the bank. And in the end it gave me back a very beautiful casket and a form to fill out."

Theron looked at the floor.

"I lost one son," said his mother. "I won't be told that I may not look for the rest of him."

There was nothing to say. He stood at the foot of the bed, a tall, thin man in a gray tie and an expensive coat, thirty-six years old, with a left hand that wouldn't hold still, and he understood with perfect clarity that there was no argument in the world he could make against her.

"Find the child," said Constance Wexcombe. "Find the mother. Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs."

"And when I find them?"

She considered this.

Outside, the wind dropped for a moment. The house held its breath. And in that silence, forty-one clocks ticked on, each slightly wrong, each insisting on its own small version of the hour.

"Bring them home," she said.

"Mother. If there is a child—if the woman is willing—"

"Then you'll ask. Politely. As we were taught." Her eyes met his, level, gray, ruthless. "And if she isn't willing, you'll find a way to be persuasive. You're very good at that, Theron. You've been persuasive all your life. You persuaded the bank to give your father a second loan. You persuaded death to let go of you once already. I think you can persuade one frightened woman."

Frightened, thought Theron. You don't know that she's frightened.

But he didn't say it.

He picked up the envelope from the coverlet and slid it back into his pocket, and for a moment his hand rested over the place where it lay, flat against his breast, as a man might rest his hand over a wound.

"I'll find them," he said.

"Thank you, darling."

"I'll find them, and I'll ask."

"That's all I want."

It wasn't all she wanted. They both knew it. But he bent and kissed her forehead, which smelled of lavender and old paper, and she patted his cheek twice, briskly, the way she'd done when he was small, and let him go.

He went down the long staircase in the dark.

At the bottom, in the front hall, he stopped. The grandfather clock stood against the wall, tall and dark and slightly menacing, its brass pendulum swinging in the moonlight. It said twenty-two minutes past nine. By his watch it was nineteen.

He stood and looked at it for a long time.

Then he went and got the key off its nail, a small brass key on a faded blue ribbon, and held it up to the keyhole in the clock's tall door. His left hand shook. He steadied it with his right.

It took four tries.

On the fifth, the key slid home, and turned, and the whole case gave a long, sighing, mechanical shudder, like a living thing waking up.

He wound it, correcting the hands against his watch. He did it as Kit had, gently, with the tip of his tongue between his teeth. He did it for the carriage clock and the chronometer and the thirty-eight others, room by room, through the dark house, and by the time he finished, the east windows had begun to gray.

He did not sleep that night.

But when the sun came up over the Sound, every clock in the house at Ledge Point told the same time.