The City of Mirrors

“Do you have enough money? Harold, did you give him any cash?”

“I’m fine, Mom. I have plenty from the summer.”

His mother’s eyes have begun to pool with tears. “Oh, I said I wouldn’t do this.” She waves her hands in front of her face. “Lorraine, I said, don’t you dare cry.”

He steps into her warm embrace. She is a substantial woman, good to hug. He breathes in the smell of her—a dusty, fruit-sweet aroma, tinged with the chemical scent of hairspray and the off-gassing nicotine of her breakfast cigarette.

“You can let him go now, Lori. We’re going to be late.”

“Harvard. My Timothy is going to Harvard. I just can’t believe it.”

The ride to the bus station, in a neighboring town, takes thirty minutes along rural highways. The car, a late-model Buick LeSabre with a soft suspension and seats of crushed velour, makes the roadway beneath them seem vague, as if they are levitating. It is his father’s one self-indulgence: every two years a new LeSabre appears in the driveway, all but indistinguishable from the last. They pass the last houses and ease into the countryside. The fields are fat with corn; birds wheel over the windbreaks. Here and there a farmhouse, some pristinely kept, others in disrepair—paint flaking, foundations tipping, upholstered furniture on the porches and abandoned toys in the yards. Everything the boy sees touches his heart with fondness.

“Listen,” his father says, as they are approaching the station, “there’s something I wanted to say to you.”

Here it comes, the boy thinks. This impending announcement, whatever it is, is the reason they’ve left his mother behind. What will it be? Not girls or sex; apart from one awkward conversation when he was thirteen, the subject has never been raised. Study hard? Keep your nose to the grindstone? But these things, too, have already been said.

His father clears his throat. “I didn’t want to say this before. Well, maybe I did. I probably should have. What I’m trying to say is that you’re destined for big things, son. Great things. I’ve always known that about you.”

“I’ll do my best, I promise.”

“I know you will. That’s not really what I’m saying.” His father hasn’t looked at the boy once. “What I’m saying is, this isn’t the place for you anymore.”

The remark is deeply unsettling. What can his father intend?

“It doesn’t mean we don’t love you,” the man continues. “Far from it. We only want what’s best.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The holidays, okay. It wouldn’t make sense for you not to be here for Christmas. You know how your mother is. But otherwise…”

“You’re telling me you don’t want me to come home?”

His father is speaking rapidly, his words not so much spoken as unleashed. “You can call, of course. Or we can call you. Every couple of weeks, say. Or even once a month.”

The boy has no idea what to make of any of this. He also detects a note of falsehood in his father’s words, a manufactured rigidity. It is as if he’s reading them off a card.

“I don’t believe what you’re saying.”

“I know this is probably hard to hear. But it really can’t be helped.”

“What do you mean, it can’t be helped? Why can’t it be?”

His father draws a breath. “Listen, you’ll thank me later. Trust me on that, okay? You might not think so now, but you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. That’s the point.”

“That’s not the goddamned point!”

“Hey, let’s watch the language. There’s no reason for that kind of talk.”

Suddenly the boy is on the verge of tears. His departure has become a banishment. His father says nothing more, and the boy understands that a border has been reached; he’ll get nothing more from the man. We only want what’s best. You’ve got your whole life. Whatever his father is actually feeling lies hidden behind this barricade of clichés.

“Dry your tears, son. There’s no reason to make a mountain out of a molehill.”

“What about Mom? Is this her idea, too?”

His father hesitates; the boy detects a flash of pain on the man’s face. A hint of something genuine, a deeper truth, but in the next instant it’s gone.

“You don’t have to worry about her. She understands.”

The car has come to a halt; the boy looks up, amazed to discover that they’ve arrived at the station. Three bays, one with a bus awaiting; passengers are filing aboard.