Free An Unfinished Season by Ward Just

acknowledged, he and my mother were at odds, bitter arguments that would spring from nowhere. The importance of “background” in the life of a family. The beauty of a triple pass approaching the crease of a hockey rink, game on the line. He was unable to identify the sources of these arguments that arrived from nowhere, so emotionally complex; and much later he came to understand that they were not complex at all but simple. He and my mother did not believe in the same things. They were equipped with different measuring sticks as to the people they admired and the qualities they valued. My father believed this was the direct result of the differences of family background and the values of the region they each grew up in. My father believed that you arrived in the world unencumbered and my mother did not; encumbrances were what you were given and not allowed to surrender. Encumbrance was my mother’s word for personality. Yet the mutual attraction, the force of nature, was so strong they knew they belonged together whatever their differences of taste and outlook.
    Her family had a place on the Connecticut shore, the gray-green waters of Long Island Sound glittering in the distance. The morning light was crystalline. On bright days the light was so sharp it hurt your eyes. It had the quality of platinum, as opposed to the dull iron of the Midwest. My father, standing on a sand dune at Westport, called it the edge-of-the-continent light, an eastern doomsday light without interference until you reached Portugal; and when he mentioned this to his girlfriend Jo she looked at him with a slow smile and said, Well, yessss, except Long Island would get in the way, wouldn’t it?
    And you’re looking at Venezuela, actually.
    My father thought the East was crowded, a land of small-holdings, too settled, too complacent and sure of itself, so different from Illinois that it might as well have been France, he said, pointing across the dinner table to the wallpaper, the dandies in their plumed hats. In the East you did not know your place. You thought you could get away with anything.
    The Wilsons loved their house, its age especially, three hundred years old and counting, the stone walls, the stone foundation and the walk-in fireplace, a flintlock and powder horn from the Revolution above the mantel, Audubon prints left and right, Mr. Wilson’s own watercolors on the wall opposite. The house was situated on a rocky outcropping, five acres of land surrounded by other five-acre parcels, each with its centuries-old house and a stone wall, and where the property met the road a swale, which Jo’s mother called a ha-ha. The garden, however, was the jardin des plantes and beside it a five-sided folie. They had a housekeeper, too, an ancient Chinese who ran things. Jo never, knew where she came from, only that she showed up one evening with Jo’s father and had been with the family ever since; her father said the woman had been in trouble, and he got her out of the trouble in return for her services. Remarkable creature, rarely spoke and seemed to be everywhere at once, gliding in and out of rooms like a ghost. She was definitely part of the family, called Ling, not her real name, a made-up name. She and Jo were especially close and whenever Jo was sick Ling would arrive in her room with a mysterious Chinese potion dissolved in tea; and the ailment, whatever it was, would vanish.
    Everyone called Jo’s father “Squire,” Squire Wilson, Esq. He was a maritime lawyer at one of the small, very old Wall Street firms, founded before the Civil War, representing shippers and the owners of ships and the leasing syndicates and the insurance firms, often all four at the same time. Squire thought maritime law a cut above any other branch of law. Being a maritime lawyer gave one standing, like coming over on the
Mayflower
or having the Hapsburg lip.
    My father said, Squire thought the law of the god damned sea was