Chat

Chapter 1





“Made it, Ma. Top o’ the world,” Leo quoted theatrically, his words shrouding his head in the cold night air. “What would you think if I went out like that?”

His mother twisted around in her wheelchair to look at him balefully. “I don’t understand why such a wonderful dancer would do a movie like that.”

Leo smiled down at her as he pushed her gently along a shoveled path, across the broad courtyard before Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts, universally nicknamed The Hop. “I warned you, Ma. I told you it wasn’t Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

“You said it was a gangster movie,” she persisted, “not an ode to a psychopath.”

Leo burst out laughing. “Wow. You make it sound pretty deep. I just liked it when he shot the car trunk full of holes to let the guy inside breathe, or when he went nutso in the prison dining hall after finding out his mother died.”

She faced forward again as they neared the curb. “How did I end up with such a disturbed child?” she asked meditatively.

“Hey,” he told her. “You got one son who’s a cop. Stands to reason the other should go to the dark side. It’s nature’s balance.”

He went to pass by her on his way to unlock the car, when she grabbed his wrist in a quick-moving, wiry hand.

This time, her expression was soft and appreciative. “I’ve been doubly blessed, Leo,” she told him. “Both my boys are just right.”

He leaned over and kissed her wrinkled cheek, warm in the evening’s chill. “I love you, too, Ma. I hear they’re playing Polanski’s Repulsion next week.”

She tapped the side of his head playfully as he moved away. “Oh, now, that sounds like a comedy.”

“You have no idea,” he admitted.

She watched him bustling about, unlocking doors, starting the engine to get the heater going. It wasn’t all that cold, even though it had been dark for several hours. Dartmouth’s trademark Green was coated with a new layer of snow, which shimmered under the glow of dozens of traditionally designed streetlamps. These, along with the formal brick buildings looming darkly beyond them, and the enormous library’s beautifully lighted clock tower at the far end, lent the entire scene a timelessness, as if she might have been waiting for her son to hook up a horse and sleigh instead of a Subaru.

“All set,” he said, stepping behind her once more and easing her chair off the sidewalk to where it nestled beside the car’s open door.

She reached out and took hold of the two handles Leo had attached just inside the opening, one high and one low, and nimbly used them to assist herself inside. Her legs were too weak to support her, but they did move, which was a godsend in situations like this. She was already attaching her seat belt by the time Leo opened the car’s rear door to slip in the folded wheelchair.

He joined her moments later, making the car rock as he virtually fell into his seat. An enthusiast by nature, he never did anything by half measures, including the most mundane of actions.

“You want to stop somewhere for ice cream or cocoa or something?” he asked.

Now she was looking at the facade of The Hop, from which they’d just come on their weekly Friday night outing. Designed by the same architect who later did Lincoln Center in New York, it looked like the kind of place that would offer a broad sampling of the arts—modern by one light, slightly worn by another. She and Leo came here frequently, local beneficiaries of the college’s mission to be a generous cultural neighbor.

“No,” she answered him. “Not tonight. Drive me around the Green, though, will you? I love the buildings.”

Leo backed out of their parking space and slipped into the thin traffic, taking his first left to engage the long eastern reach of the Green.

“Feeling touristy?” he asked.

She was watching the buildings go by, but also the students, huddled in their winter clothing, marching determinedly in small groups or singly, intent on their mysterious goals, which could as easily have been the next beer or a rendezvous as some scholarly pursuit. Although she’d been a local her entire life, even if from Vermont, just across the river, she’d never had the envious, resentful view of the college so many other “townies” harbored, nor had she delighted in the supposed depiction made of the place in the movie Animal House. She worshipped education, and while her sons had become a police officer and a butcher and hadn’t benefited from Dartmouth’s offerings, she had made sure they developed an appreciation of music and literature and art, and she’d trained them to be analytical, appreciative, mindful, and kind.