November is a bleak month in Boston. The leaves come off the trees. The women are wearing coats. It rains a lot. They’ve invented Thanksgiving and football to raise it up from the dead, but it’s still pretty sad.

I had tried to avoid thinking about Des, but it was a waste of effort and time. It meant lying in bed, wide-awake, with the same thoughts turning up. Wednesday night I found myself sitting in the dark with the radio on, wishing I had a pack of cigarettes to pass the time. I have some Jameson’s left, but I was not in the mood for getting drunk.

I should be pleased, after all.

Susannah had called. She was up from New York for a couple of days. Sarah was home from college, but both she and Matty were out visiting friends when I went by the house around noon. I stopped to talk to Mary Ellen because she hadn’t called with her usual invitation and it was then she told me her new boyfriend would be there and I would not be invited for dinner the next day as I had been in the past. It would be the first Thanksgiving dinner I had ever missed with the girls.

So, like a fool, I was sitting in my underwear in the dark and thinking about all the things I had already thought about too many times before. And a lot of that was about Des.

I was thinking about the last weekend I had seen her, just a few weeks before. Des had rented a car. She never explained why, but I assumed it might have had something to do with her work.

That was the weekend of Halloween.

I used to get a kick out of Halloween. Mary-Ellen took the girls down to the Garment Factory and they bought a pile of old clothes and dressed up. I put on an outfit I had found at Goodwill years ago—something that might have once belonged to a fat little banker fallen on hard times. A pair of galluses kept the pants up so about six inches of leg showed. When I put on a Derby hat and rubbed some black on my upper lip I looked as much like Charlie Chaplin as a six foot four inch, two hundred and forty pound man can. I handed out the candy at the door to little kids who had bigger eyes on me than I had on them.

Matty dressed up and went out with her friends this year but I have no idea where my old outfit has gone to. Besides, Mary Ellen had been pretty uncomfortable with me at the door the last time I did it—the year of the divorce. So I was sitting in my room most of that day, same as this. But then I was reading the Stark book on Loyalists of Massachusetts and trying to make some headway on my story, or at least pretending to.

Most weekdays Des took depositions or did legal research for Carey, Frost, and Theil. She was not required to do courtroom duty, which was fine with her, but she had to go out sometimes for the depositions.

She called fairly late that Friday afternoon and asked what I was doing. All I had was a short job Saturday night at the Whistle, a nightclub over on Lansdowne Street. I was supposed to run interference for a Country singer who was going to ‘surprise’ her main squeeze in some kind of outrageous costume. Her boy friend was the lead singer in the rock group featured there. But I could hand that off to Burley. He was still low man on the totem pole and got the fewest gigs. Besides, Burley likes rock music. I might have thought twice if Miss Country was doing the performing. So I told Desiree I was free despite my mood.

Des wanted to go down to the Cape. I reminded her it was Halloween. It never gets that cold on the Cape, but in November it’s a chill that goes to the bone. She didn’t think much of my negative attitude. She said that was the best time, when no one else was there. I didn’t argue. Partly it was just me wanting some company. I would have done whatever Des wanted.

I assumed then that I’d get to see the girls in a few weeks on Thanksgiving, but thinking about Halloween had put me into a funk that day as well. I had the Friday off and just about read myself into an early sleep by the time Des called.

She said, “You want to go swimming?”

I got cute. “Sure. Your place or mine.”

She said, “The Chatham House. They have a pool.”

“I don’t have a bathing suit.”

“We don’t have to use the pool. Or, you could just borrow one. I’m pretty sure they won’t let you swim in the nude there. It would scare the children.”

“When should I pick you up?”

“I’ll pick you up. I have a car for the week. I’ll be there in a hour.”

Suddenly, just like this evening, a very dark night had brightened considerably. Life jerks you around. The real job is keeping your balance.

As forward as she had been on the phone, Des was quiet in the car. I had no idea what was on her mind. I tried to make conversation.

“What did you do yesterday?”

“Friends.”

“I missed you.”

“I missed you too.”

“Busy week?”

“Yes.”

That was about it for the first half an hour or so. It’s a long drive. After awhile she asked me about the story I’ve been working on. We’ve talked about that before. She always seems interested. I told her it had hit a bump. I didn’t say who put the bump there. I just told her I had come on some new information that had changed my viewpoint a bit. She seemed to want me to talk about that so I did.

Becky had called me in October, out of the blue. She had been working on an idea. She has friends at the New York Historical Society. Because many of the Loyalists who left New York after the Revolution in 1783 moved up to Canada via Halifax, following the same pattern as the earlier evacuation from Boston, she wondered if we might find some link. There was a nice cache of letters at the Society from various sources which had been microfilmed but not indexed. There were interns sitting on their thumbs. Why not see if they might turn up some contact with Izaac Andrews?

You have to understand Becky. It was a matter of pride with her. She had made a mistake in the original evidence for the murder of Mary Andrews and she wanted to correct it. And I needed the help. So I said yes.

In the middle of the week before Halloween I had an e mail and a PDF file of a letter written by a Revered Jedidiah Frost in 1784.

St. Johns. March 3rd,

We have been held by weather to the house of Izaac Andrews. The snow fills to our stirrups on the road making further progress impossible for the moment. Nevertheless, the whopping cough has reached Halifax and it is best we are out of it.

Mr. Andrews accommodations are comfortable and his wife has a good hand with meager stuffs. Our worries are beyond a sturdy door for the moment.

Andrews is a Boston man who has been here for some years and made a solid establishment. I am in his debt for our refuge. I write to make known our progress, but too, that you may be of some help. Mr. Andrews has made a solemn request of me which I cannot in equity refuse, but that I wish to fulfill in any case for conscience’s sake.

Before his leaving of Boston in the Summer of 1776, his eldest daughter Mary had gone missing. The sadness of this misfortune is cast over the family to this very day. In addition, the event was coincident with the disappearance of an assistant, an indentured helper by the name of Cary Peet, who had become dear to their home. With the help of Reverend Samuel Chase, now deceased, and of the Town parish in Long Island, this young Mr. Peet had been rescued out of New York as a child from a home riven by the Pox. Izaak Andrews has no knowledge of the boy’s living family now, but that they once worked as oystermen in a place called Brookhaven.

My request is for your assistance in finding any clue of these people now. The hope is that the boy and girl went off together and found God’s blessing with some relative in your vicinity. The boy, Cary, would presently be a man of about twenty-four years. He is of light complexion and red hair. The daughter, Mary, will have turned her 28th year in February, is fair, and I am told quite pretty.

My presumptions about the murder of Mary Andrews were now waste paper. As Becky has often said, “The history is better than the fiction.’ If I’m going to make anything of this novel now, I must see all of this in a new way.

Des did not hesitate. Before I had finished telling her about the letter from Reverend Frost, she was bursting with ideas. She has a cynical eye for human perversity. I think her work is too often concerned with individual meanness.

With Izaak, the father, apparently exonerated, she was immediately back to the murder itself. It did not have to take place over any great length of time. Rape, for instance is seldom prolonged. And if the act were not committed by British soldiers during the retreat, could it have been done by Rebels taking revenge on the Loyalist father?

This thought had been on my mind in any case from the beginning. Of course, I didn’t want it to be true. My sympathies were with the Rebels from the start. But like any aggregate of human beings, a small but significant portion will be sociopaths, psychotics, and criminals. And those were more interesting times.

What did Des say?

We spoke primarily about the story, of course. Even late that night, after we had made love, she still seemed caught by the possibilities. This was my fault. I needed someone to talk to. I always have. Conversations often seems to grease the wheel with me. The image of the solitary writer in his garret does not fit. I used to bore Mary Ellen with this kind of thing until she would nod off to sleep. But Des was wide-awake in the middle of the night at the Chatham House. You have to take a naked woman seriously.

What did she say?

I turned on the light in my room and tried to straighten it out from the churn of words I kept swimming through in the dark. In the dark, what I kept seeing was Des’ naked body. What I wanted were the words.

She had said, “Why was Mary Andrews nude. It’s a clue, don’t you think? There was no need from her to be completely stripped by her attacker. Especially if there was little time.”

‘Nude’ is a word I seldom use. It is somehow more prurient than naked. But she had used that word and it worked in my attempt at reimaging poor Mary Andrews. It made her that much more vulnerable.

I had brought the very same bottle of Jameson’s with me to the Cape that I have the remains of now. We had filled the water glasses from the room with crushed ice and poured the Jameson’s over it because Des liked it that way. By the middle of the night the ice had melted and I went down the hall the last time in my bare feet and wearing the bed spread over my shoulders and met a fellow coming in from the parking lot who could not help himself from saying that I looked very becoming that way. Des seemed to find that hysterically funny when I got back to the room and told her. She had become quite involved in her thoughts about Mary Andrews and had not laughed much before that at all. She likes to laugh.

And then, on a dime, she had said, “Your key is the boy. Your key is Cary Peet. If you can understand his role, you’ll know what happened.” Of course, I thought I knew his role. He was in love with Mary, and had gone to defend her when he heard her screams.

But then, I was starting all over again. I might as well think this through once more.

Des said to me, “He was a boy. If he would have been 24 in 1784, then he was only 15 in 1775. Boys started things earlier in those times, I suppose, but that seems very young to me. He might have been in love, sure, but he was no farm boy. An oysterman’s son, you said. And you think he worked in Izaac Andrews’ tavern, don’t you? But, she was older. She would have been eighteen.” Des had been speaking quickly then. Her drink in her hand already half finished. “Perhaps it was she who was in love with the boy. You can’t assume he was the cause of their relationship. Perhaps it was just her. Just a horny eighteen year old girl. By the time I was her age—“ she stopped herself and looked at me with one eyebrow arched, “hell, you don’t want to know what I was doing at her age.”

No.” I said to that. “No I don’t.”

And suddenly she had grown quiet and repeated it. “No. You don’t. That’s history. I am not that girl anymore.”

And she had held me then and stopped talking altogether.

Had I forgotten anything worth remembering?

On that Saturday we walked from Nauset light south until the beach ended in a flat hard spit of sand that seemed dangerous just for being so completely exposed to the unending assault of the waves, and then back again. We had jackets over our sweaters but still it was too cold to stop moving. The sun was uneven through thin clouds. The wind blustered at the first and last but calmed at midday. The beach is littered with debris and remnant foam and we collected odds and ends until our hands were filled and then used it all to make an odd little monument in a wind sheltered nook between two dunes—not far from where Henry Beston once had his Outermost House. We ate our lunch there.

I told her all about the Beston book, which I had read as a boy, and still love.

I started in on a sand castle until my hands were too numb to manipulate the piece of driftwood I used to dig. Des had covered herself in our blanket from head to foot and I quit the castle and covered the blanket over in dry sand. This seemed an eerie image in my mind now, with her body beneath like a grave, but at the time it was funny enough. She kept pushing her hand up from under so that the sand parted in small explosions to the plaid of the blanket, until there was too much for her to move. Then I ran my hand beneath at unexpected places and made her giggle and beg me to stop.

Des was right. No one was there except for several fishermen who stood within a few hundred yards of each other in loose companionship. They seemed more interested in us than we were in them.

One more thing she had said, came back to me.

“You have to be careful of what you wish for.”

Why was that?

We had talked about food, and movies and cars. I had told her about my wanting a motorcycle when I was a kid. I never got it.

She had said, “When I was younger, what I wanted more than anything was a Corvette. I’m not sure why. I think maybe my father wanted one but never managed to get it. In any case, I wanted a yellow Corvette. And then I got it. A present from someone. And the very first week I had it, I hit a telephone pole in Bodega Bay and ended up in hospital for a month. I had lots of time to think about what I wanted in life then. Maybe you’re better off without some things.”

What, I remembered was her use of the noun ‘hospital.’ The way the British do, without the article ‘the’. An odd thing. She had once wanted very much to be English.

It struck me that way at the time and I had offhandedly said, “Have you read much Jane Austin?”

She shrugged at the ridiculousness of the question. “Everything.”

“Wodehouse?”

“Sure. But I am more partial to the likes of Stella Gibbons and Barbara Pym.”

I had never read either. Much too ‘British’ for me. But even at the moment, it seemed odd that this girl from California and Texas should be taken as much by something so far from her own background.

At some point I had to sleep. I was weary, but not sleepy. My computer was open and I’d been typing what I remembered as fast as I could and then stopped to stare at her words on the rectangle of white in front of me in the darkened room. Like a field of soiled snow. My mind wandered to the New Hampshire fields I had seen the day before. My friend Gary had found what he wanted there. I suppose it was not always so bad to get what you wanted. I could easily want something like that myself.

Be careful of what you wish for reminded me of several curses, often attributed to the Chinese. My father used the phrases so often I assumed them to be Irish when I was a boy.

‘May you live in interesting times. May you come to the attention of those in authority. May you find what you are looking for.’ They have that quality of back-handedness which feels like something out Oscar Wilde or Ambrose Bierce. No. More American than English.

But the thought is this: even if I find Des, is she what I am looking for? Or will it be like my search for the story of Mary Andrews, something I did not understand from the first.

The time at the top of the screen was 3:29 AM.

In the morning, at nine, the girls were coming. Susannah had called, sounding suddenly like Mary Ellen, and told me to shave when I got up because she and her sisters were coming over to take me to breakfast. It was their way of making up for my not being with them for Thanksgiving dinner. Very sweet. Whether I had gotten any sleep or not. And then there was Becky.

Becky had called as well. She was making a turkey. In her own words, “You should not let this feat go to waste.”

I said, “You mean feast.”

“No.” she said, “I mean feat. Whether you come or not, at the over-ripe age of fifty-two, I’m going to cook the first goddamn Thanksgiving turkey I have ever made in my life. I would appreciate not having to deal with it all by myself.”

I was bound, after all–indentured as much as young Cary Peet by my debts to others. At the very least, Thanksgiving was worthy of giving thanks for what I had.