Empire Falls

smiled. “You’re rather like your mother in that respect. But then, people are forever confusing will with power, don’t you find? I have a theory about why, if you’re interested.”
    “Why I’m like my mother,” Miles asked, finally taking his seat, “or why people confuse will with power?”
    “The latter,” she said. “After all, there’s nothing very mysterious about why you take after your mother, is there. Your father isn’t exactly the sort of man who inspires imitation. No, people confuse power with will because so few of them have the foggiest idea what they want. Absent any knowledge, will remains impotent. A limp dick, as it were.” She regarded him, eyebrow arched. “The lucky few who happen actually to know what they want are said to have will-power. ”
    “That’s all it takes?”
    “Well, let’s call it a necessary beginning.”
    Miles allowed himself to settle into his chair. More than anyone he knew, Mrs. Whiting had the ability to draw him into conversations he otherwise would have avoided. The reason seemed to be that her conclusions were invariably antithetical to his own. “So you think human beings are meant to know what they want?”
    Mrs. Whiting sighed. “That word ‘meant’ suggests you’re up to your old tricks, dear boy, casting everything in a religious light. That won’t do if you intend to be mayor.”
    “I don’t,” he pointed out. “Certainly not of Empire Falls in 1959.”
    “But that’s where you’re foolish, dear boy. Most Americans want it to be 1959, with the addition of cappuccino and cable TV.”
    “That’s what they want, or what they think they want?” The person he was thinking of was Janine. His soon-to-be-ex-wife was never uncertain about what she wanted, just disappointed by its eventual acquisition. Miles himself had been an example. The Silver Fox, though he didn’t yet suspect it, would be another.
    “That’s not a particularly helpful distinction, is it? What is wanting but thinking? But for the sake of argument, let’s accept your terms and begin at the beginning. Adam and Eve. They knew what they wanted, did they not?”
    “I doubt it,” Miles said, also for the sake of argument. “Until it was forbidden.”
    “Precisely, dear boy. But once it was forbidden, they suffered no such doubts—am I correct?”
    “No. Just regrets.”
    “Do you imagine that refusing the forbidden fruit would’ve made them happier? Would that have eliminated regret or merely redefined it?”
    She had a point. “I guess we’ll never know.”
    “ I certainly won’t, dear boy, but like our progenitors, I’ve not resisted many temptations. You , on the other hand …” She dangled the thought. Mrs. Whiting had never made any secret that she considered Miles a case study in repression. “Did you have a nice vacation?”
    “Wonderful,” he said, eager for the old woman to understand that fine times could be had by others.
    Mrs. Whiting studied him carefully, as if suspicious that his enthusiasm masked a falsehood. “You return there every summer, don’t you.”
    “Just about.”
    “Has it occurred to you to wonder why?”
    “No,” he told her. When not insinuating that he was repressed, the old woman liked to imply that despite his intelligence, his views were parochial, the result of his having traveled and seen so little. Like many rich people, she seemed not to understand why the poor didn’t think to winter in Capri, where the weather was more clement. Nor did it strike her as unfair to suggest as much to a man who for twenty years had tended one of her businesses while she traveled. “I’ve got friends who have a house there,” he continued, leaving unsaid what Mrs. Whiting no doubt understood perfectly well—that only charity made even so modest a vacation possible.
    Actually, it was Miles who had introduced Peter and Dawn to the Vineyard all those years ago, during college. They’d all been poor then, and when they pooled their resources that fall they’d had just about enough to pay for the ferry crossing. They’d slept on the beach, illegally, beneath the cliffs at Gay Head, confident that after Labor Day they wouldn’t be rousted by the island police, who probably numbered no more than half a dozen. It was during this weekend on the island, Miles suspected, that Peter and Dawn had fallen in love, first with the island and then with each other. Since then they’d considered Miles instrumental to their happiness