Mrs. Cantwell lived on the Upper East Side and didn’t like crossing the park. “Why did you move to the West Side?” she said to him. “You should move back. There’s so much crime where you are.” Her prejudice worked in Edward’s favor. Because she didn’t like coming to his place, he went to hers. He got to decide when he went and when he didn’t. The boys could always drop by his apartment. He might not be there, but neither would she. Sam ran into her only one other time. He was seventeen, a senior at Trinity. “I suppose you’ll go to Princeton too,” she said. “Yes,” Sam said, “we Falkeses move in phalanx formation.” She gave a quiet hmmph. “They’re very smart boys,” Poppa said. “I’m lucky to have them in my life.” Mrs. Cantwell smiled at Mr. Phipps. “You are a lucky man,” she said. “Lucky to have you too,” he said.
The Falkeses and the Cantwells spent little time together. Once a year at most, Eleanor and Rupert would have dinner with her father and Marina. Eleanor and Rupert, but not the boys, were invited to Louisa’s wedding, a large affair, at the Plaza. They sent, as their wedding gift, six of her Tiffany china settings. Louisa’s note came three weeks later. “Dear Eleanor and Rupert (I hope I may call you that), Thank you for the six table settings. How very generous of you. We shall think of you at our Sunday dinners. Yours, Louisa.”
“I thought Smith could do better than that,” Rupert said as he read the note.
“What can you say about a gift that came from the registry? ‘It’s such a beautiful pattern.’?”
“No, Louisa meant to be rude,” Rupert said. “She’s envious. She has a grievance against you or us.”
Eleanor looked startled. “Should we have sent all twelve place settings?”
“If we had, the note would have been shorter, ruder,” Rupert said. “We should have sent one setting. The meanness of the gift would have pleased her. She’d have gushed in her note.”
“So long as Marina makes my father happy,” Eleanor said. “So long as she doesn’t turn him against Sam.”
—
Sam waited a week after talking to Lea to call Harry. “When are you going to stop licking your wounds and call Mom? You can think about it all you want after that.”
“I will,” Harry said. “Lea’s very worried about me. I think she thinks I’m having an affair. She can’t understand why I said what I said.”
“I can’t either,” Sam said.
“I’m right, but I’ll stop now,” Harry said. “For the record, Dad was a bigamist.”
“Are you having an affair?” Sam asked.
“Where did you get that idea?” Harry said.
“Susanna said she saw you with a woman downtown, in my neighborhood. Good-looking, red hair, high heels.”
“Did she?” Harry said. “A friend. A colleague really.”
—
Susanna Goffe was Sam’s best friend, and he was hers. “We lost each other climbing Mount Olympus,” Sam would say. “And found each other at Princeton.” They met during freshman orientation. Their attraction to each other was immediate and intense; within days of meeting, they were spending all their free time together.
Sam arrived at college a virgin. He knew he was gay from the time he was thirteen—“awareness and hormones arrived on the same afternoon,” he said to Susanna—but Trinity was too small a village for experimentation. He didn’t want to be the butt of “Gay Falkes Day” jokes, even though he knew his big brothers would beat up anyone who picked on him. Older boys and men, strangers, often made passes at him on the street; he stared ahead, ignoring them, curious but afraid. They made him feel like quarry. Sometimes they got belligerent, yelling after him, “You too good?” He wondered at that as a come-on line. Did it ever work?
Knowing Sam was gay didn’t keep Susanna from falling in love with him. “I don’t want to be in love with you,” she said, “and I won’t let it get in the way of our friendship. I just wanted to let you know. You’re my favorite person in the world.”
Sam met Andrew in the spring of freshman year. Andrew was a first-year graduate student in history. Andrew knew from the very beginning that Sam was what he wanted. He pursued him the whole time Sam was at Princeton. Sam hung back, making excuses.
“I’m too young to get seriously involved,” he said. “I have years of education ahead of me.”
“You’re afraid of losing Susanna,” Andrew said.
“Yes,” Sam said.
“You don’t have to give her up,” Andrew said. “Just don’t sleep with her.”
“No fear,” Sam said.
Sam stayed in Princeton the year after he graduated, doing research for one of his professors, waiting for Andrew to finish his coursework. The following year, they moved to New Haven. Sam started medical school. Andrew worked on his dissertation, on “the Troubles.” When he finished, he got a position at NYU as an assistant professor. He commuted until Sam finished both degrees. Sam did his residency at New York Hospital, then stayed on, doing research.
In theory, Andrew liked Susanna and Susanna liked Andrew but they were jealous of each other and competed for Sam’s attention when they were all together. Sam took to seeing Susanna alone. Susanna worked for NPR, producing shows out of New York and waiting to fall in love with someone who wasn’t Sam.
Older relatives sometimes asked Eleanor if Sam was going to marry Susanna; she was around so much. “Of course not,” Eleanor would answer, “he’s gay.” They’d persist. “But wouldn’t you like it, if he did?” Eleanor always answered the same way. “I like him just the way he is.” To the boys, she always delivered a similar message: “We’re package deals. All or nothing.” It was intended as a caution against wishful thinking and envy.
When Sam was no more than eleven, he asked her why she was always polite to her mother, but never minded when Dad delivered one of his Granny slap-downs.
“Package deal,” Eleanor said. “Dad is who he is.”
Sam shook his head. “I think you like it,” he said.
“Yes,” said Eleanor. “?‘All or nothing’ occasionally works to one’s advantage.”
—
Eleanor and Rupert met Susanna on Parents’ Weekend freshman year.
“Are you a Goffe Goffe?” Rupert asked.
“That’s me, bona fide regicide stock. We did it. We killed Charles I. You don’t mind, do you?” she said, picking up on Rupert’s accent.
“No, I’m a republican, small r,” he said.
“Big R too,” Sam said. “We don’t mind, do we?”
“Not in the family, only the White House,” Susanna said. “No one in my family has done anything revolutionary since. And William Goffe died in his bed. Still, we’re treated better in Ireland than in England. Ancient grievance keepers, your tribe.”
“I’m a thoroughgoing American these days,” Rupert said. “No sense of history anymore.”
Susanna’s parents didn’t come for Parents’ Weekend, not that year or any year. They had divorced when she was an infant. She lived with her father and stepmother.
“I can’t tell if my father is nice, or only pleasant,” she said to Sam. “He’s completely under the thumb of my stepmother, who is a self-pitying pit bull.”
“Is she better or worse than your mother?” he asked.
“I’d put the odds in favor of my mother as 6 to 5,” Susanna said.