“I remember when I was young I used to play tennis with my father,” Robert Wakefield recalled. “Sometimes for a change of pace we’d go for a run in Central Park, or shoot a few baskets. I guess after a day of bending his brain as a journalist and scholar, Dad needed to let off some steam. We had some of our best talks when we were both pretty sweaty and out of breath.”
Ned had driven from C.S.C. to his parents’ house for dinner. After washing the dishes, he and his father had headed outside to play one-on-one in the driveway.
Ned tossed the basketball to his father, laughing. “I guess it shows that I have something on my mind.”
“It shows,” Robert confirmed with a grin. He pushed the graying hair back from his forehead, then took a shot.
Ned caught the rebound. Dribbling the ball, he considered how best to express his thoughts. It was hard because they were fuzzy. “It’s not any one thing that’s bugging me,” he began. “I just don’t feel the way I expected to feel a week before I graduate from college.”
“How did you expect to feel?”
“On top of the world.” Ned went in for a lay-up. “I was always so excited about the future, you know? So certain that the world couldn’t wait for me to get out there and solve all its problems.”
“The idealism of youth. It’s a wonderful thing,” his father said, laughing.
“Well, I don’t feel it anymore. I used to think I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I believed in my goals. But now...”
Robert mopped his forehead with a towel. Then he waved the towel at the redwood picnic table in the side yard. “Let’s sit down.”
They took seats facing each other. “Ned, you know your mom and I have always been supportive of your ambition to be a lawyer. We’ve put money aside for you so that nothing should stand in your way. But if you don’t want to go to law school next fall, or ever, that’s OK with us, too. We’re behind you, whatever you decide.”
“I knew you would be, Dad. Thanks. I’m not ruling law school out altogether yet. I guess I just need to figure some things out first.” Ned raked his fingers through his shaggy brown hair. “I need to find a way to get rid of this... lost feeling. I don’t know when it started. Maybe it has something to do with how shaken up our country’s been lately. I know a lot of kids feel like they don’t know where to go next.”
“This crazy decade has unsettled everybody, even old folks like your mom and me,” Robert assured his son. “But I get the impression there’s more to it for you than just that.”
Ned nodded. “There is. There was a girl...” He gave his father a brief account of his friendship with Alice Robertson. “When I saw her and talked to her, everything made sense somehow. Just looking at her, I felt like the ground was a little more solid under my feet. I could see a little more clearly.” He laughed. “I bet you think I’m a nut, huh? Falling like that for a girl I hardly know.”
“I was as much of a nut about your mother,” his father confessed. “I decided I wanted to marry her before I even laid eyes on her!”
“That’s because you and Mom were made for each other. But Alice and Patman...” Ned frowned. “When I heard she was going to marry him, everything stopped making sense. It was like all the pieces of the puzzle I’d started putting together were scattered all over the floor again. I don’t know, Dad. I don’t know what to do next,” he exclaimed in frustration.
“No one ever said growing up was easy, son. And it certainly hasn’t been easy for us Wakefields. There have been plenty of broken hearts in this family.”
“Really?” Ned was curious.
“Take my father,” Robert said. “He was devoted to my mother while she was alive, and since her death he’s remained faithful to her memory. He never remarried. But there was another girl before he met her—the sister of a college roommate, I believe. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that she disappointed him so deeply that he dropped out of school and took off for the West Coast on some kind of crazy journey of self-discovery.”
“Wow.” Ned couldn’t imagine his grandfather, a tweedy college-professor type, doing anything so cool.
“Now that I think of it, there’s sort of a pattern,” his father continued. “Wakefields have always done a lot of journeying—we’ve really zigzagged across this country. Of course, it all started with Theodore Wakefield, my great-grandfather.”
“Wasn’t he the one who came over from England?”
“That’s right. He gave up a family fortune and title in order to gain his independence. The legend is that he met a girl on the ship over, but lost her when they reached the shores of America. He wandered for years trying to find her before he settled down with Dancing Wind.”
“So everybody found something—someone—even if it wasn’t what they started out looking for,” Ned reflected.
“I think that’s the way life works most of the time. It has to do with destiny. Come on inside, Ned. There’s something I’d like to give you.”
Ned followed his father into the house and down the hall to the study. Robert opened the top drawer of his desk, removing his checkbook and a small black jewelry box. From the box, he took a gold ring. “This belonged to Theodore Wakefield,” Robert explained, handing it to Ned. “It’s been passed down for generations. I think it’s seen Wakefields through a lot of adventures, through good times and bad. I hope it brings you luck.”
While Ned examined the family crest engraved on the ring, his father wrote out a check and handed it to Ned. Ned whistled when he saw the amount. “This is a lot of money, Dad. I can’t take this from you.”
“It’s a graduation gift from your mother and me,” his father insisted. “You can use it for law school tuition or you can spend it on travel. Whatever you want.”
Ned slipped the ring on his finger. “Thanks, Dad,” he said. He felt a lot better knowing that he wasn’t the only Wakefield to experience doubts and disappointments. His father had also showed him that his uncertainty about the future was really a valuable freedom. He was standing at a crossroads. His life had never held so much possibility, and probably never would again. Like generations of Wakefields before him, he was about to embark on his own personal journey of self-discovery.
Ned crossed his bedroom on the top floor of the rambling white house he’d shared for two years with a few other C.S.C.students. Lifting the arm of the record player, he set it back to the beginning of the album. I’m lucky the other guys aren’t around, Ned thought wryly. It was about the tenth time he’d played “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Ned, however, couldn’t hear the song too many times. It reminded him of Alice—it was one of her favorites, too. Alice, whom he would never see again. Alice, who was marrying another man that very day. In fact, she was probably already married. By this time, Alice Robertson had probably become Mrs. Henry Patman.
Dusk settled over the house, but Ned didn’t bother switching on a light. Since he was taking only his backpack on the trip and it was already crammed full, he supposed he was done packing.
He sank down in an ancient armchair that leaked stuffing and looked around the room. His cap, gown, and diploma lay in a heap on his desk, a reminder of the previous day’s commencement ceremony. On the bed was a pile of things he still had to stuff in his backpack: plane ticket, passport, traveler’s checks, maps. Thinking about the trip he was about to take, Ned felt a flicker of excitement. First he would fly to London, then travel north to Yorkshire to visit the village of Wakefield, the ancestral home of his great-great-grandfather Theodore. From there, he intended to see as much of Europe and Asia as he could before his money ran out. To make the cash last, he’d travel cheap—hitchhiking, taking trains, and staying in youth hostels.
From the front of the house, Ned heard the doorbell ring. Someone looking for the girls in the front apartment, he guessed. The sound reminded Ned of the phone call he’d made earlier that day. The phone had rung and rung... and finally Alice had picked it up. He was probably the last person she wanted to hear from on her wedding day, but he had had to tell her one last time that he would never forget her, that he would always be there if she needed him. And something in her gentle voice as she said goodbye had told him that she believed his vow, and appreciated it.
His elbows propped on his knees, Ned dropped his head in his hands. Stop thinking about her! he commanded himself. It’s not going to get you anywhere. She’s Hank’s now, forever and ever and ever. But the fact that Alice loved another man couldn’t alter Ned’s devotion. Since the day he had saved her life, he’d felt connected to her in a fundamental way. He knew he could travel to the ends of the earth and that wouldn’t change. Alice Robertson was a part of his heart.
It took a moment for the voice to penetrate through the music to his consciousness. Someone was calling his name from the yard. He ran to the window. A figure stood on the lawn below—a girl in a long white wedding dress, her feet bare, her loose blonde hair shimmering in the moonlight. It was Alice! Alice, dressed as a bride. But she wasn’t standing at the altar with Hank. She wasn’t dancing in Hank’s arms. Instead, she had somehow found her way to his house.
Ned bounded down the stairs and burst through the back door. If there had been any question in his mind about why Alice was there, it disappeared when he saw the love and hope in her angelic blue-green eyes. In three strides, he was at her side, sweeping her up in his arms. Through the thin cotton of his T-shirt, he could feel her heart beating fast against his. And when she lifted a hand to touch his face, he saw that she was no longer wearing Hank’s ring.
Ned’s joy was too intense for words. With gentle fingers, he traced the curve of her cheek, her forehead, her lips. Then he put his mouth on hers. They kissed, and kissed again. Finally, they fell onto the grass, dizzy and laughing from the intensity of their feelings.
“No shoes,” Ned observed, reaching to tickle Alice’s foot.
“I left them behind when I left Hank,” Alice explained.
“And you came here.” The thought of it filled Ned with awe and love and gratitude.
“You said you’d be there if I ever needed you. And I did, and you were.”
Ned pulled her close for another kiss. “I want you to need me for the rest of your life, Alice Robertson. I know I’ll never stop needing you.”
