Hours passed. She did not wake. Arch did not come home or call. The sky grew dark. I fixed myself a drink and sank into the couch. The bourbon made me drowsy. I closed my eyes and drifted off into a dreamless sleep.

thirteen

As expected, Arch became mayor. He named Terrence Robie the head of a new commission on racial reconciliation and the recognition of black history. More quietly, Terrence’s Forward Progress after-school football program received a generous private donation to add lights, bleachers, and a turf field, and to knock down and replace the old warehouse with a new gymnasium. Marylou Greene, stung but still shrewd, accepted Arch’s offer to serve as executive director of the Metropolitan Planning Commission. Nick Averett became Arch’s chief of staff, Bart Walsh his deputy.

Vanessa performed admirably in the role of political spouse, showing up whenever required, smiling, saying all the right things. But at home in the great house on the Boulevard, the facade dropped. The nursery she’d prepared for Hope became a shrine to her grief, a retreat from which she rarely emerged. Arch made appropriate gestures toward helping her move on, but Vanessa refused, as if to give up her sorrow would be to accept that she was not to blame for it, and that was something she was not yet ready to do. So he gave up and went back to work. What little free time he had, he spent with Averett. No one considered this inappropriate. Averett was Arch’s chief of staff, after all.

I didn’t judge him. Instead, I did what I could to fill the breach. I didn’t feel it at the time, but looking back, I must have sensed opportunity in Vanessa’s decision to cloister herself, as it afforded me the chance to fill the role of doting husband, which Arch had at least temporarily abdicated while he busied himself serving the city. No one appeared to find this arrangement inappropriate either. Irony of ironies: everyone in the Creighs’ circle thought I was gay—the homo artiste, providing safe, platonic companionship for Vanessa while Arch was preoccupied with more pressing and important matters.

But I also understood Vanessa as Arch never could, and not just because I loved her. Despite knowing better, I have never found the strength of will to stop looking backward. This is why I ran away, I think. Yet even when I found a life in a place so far removed from the leafy lanes of Belle Meade and the people there who had so entranced me, I never stopped looking toward the northern horizon.