Page 56 - A Little Life: A Novel

that. It was like any relationship, he felt—it took constant pruning, and
dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort,
why wouldn’t it wither? The only thing he missed—besides Hemming—

was Wyoming itself, its extravagant flatness, its trees so deeply green they
looked blue, the sugar-and-turd apple-and-peat smell of a horse after it had
been rubbed down for the night.
When he was in graduate school, they died, in the same year: his father
of a heart attack in January, his mother of a stroke the following October.
Then he had gone home—his parents were older, but he had forgotten how
vivid, how tireless, they had always been, until he saw how diminished they

had become. They had left everything to him, but after he had paid off their
debts—and then he was unsettled anew, for all along he had assumed most
of Hemming’s care and medical treatments had been covered by insurance,
only to learn that four years after his death, they were still writing enormous
checks to the hospital every month—there was very little left: some cash,
some bonds; a heavy-bottomed silver mug that had been his long-dead

paternal grandfather’s; his father’s bent wedding ring, worn smooth and
shiny and pale; a black-and-white portrait of Hemming and Aksel that he’d
never seen before. He kept these, and a few other things, too. The rancher
who had employed his parents had long ago died, but his son, who now
owned the ranch, had always treated them well, and it had been he who
employed them long after he might reasonably be expected to, and he who
paid for their funerals as well.

In their deaths, Willem was able to remember that he had loved them
after all, and that they had taught him things he treasured knowing, and that
they had never asked from him anything he wasn’t able to do or provide. In
less-charitable moments (moments from just a few years prior), he had
attributed their lassitude, their unchallenging acceptance of whatever he
might or might not do, to a lack of interest: what parent, Malcolm had asked

him, half jealously, half pityingly, says nothing when their only child (he
had apologized later) tells them he wants to be an actor? But now, older, he
was able to appreciate that they had never even suggested he might owe
them a debt—not success, or fealty, or affection, or even loyalty. His father,
he knew, had gotten into some sort of trouble in Stockholm—he was never
to know what—that had in part encouraged his parents’ move to the States.
They would never have demanded he be like them; they hardly wanted to

be themselves.