Читать книгу After You've Gone - Jeffrey Lent - Страница 12

O God whose mercies can not be numbered.

The deaths of his wife and son produced a series of stunned blurred relentless days and nights leading toward the double funeral after which Henry felt battered and marooned as upon a pinnacle of loosely stacked roofing slates, the rush of people suddenly receded, the press of which he’d ridden in perverse energy that while it was occurring seemed what life would now be like, until it was done and he was utterly alone.

He will swallow up death in victory.

A sullen morning with low wet woolen skies above the tower of Trinity Episcopal Church, the early promise of May abated for several days. Henry upright and rigid with a daughter either side of him, flanked by granddaughters and alert sons-in-law. The other front pew held Doyle and Mary and Olivia’s bachelor brother Quincy and the two aunts and Mary’s mother, a collapsed crimped woman in a wicker wheelchair.

The two coffins under their palls.

Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks

So longeth my soul after Thee O God.

The nave filled behind them, the scent of damp wool and undoubtedly compassionate small dashes of perfume sifting in waves. The lilies of resurrection flanking the alter. His chest constricted, his hands squeezed by his daughters, Polly weeping silently but for the shudders against him.

Raised in incorruption.

The rising and singing and sitting again. Henry did not sing. The prayers. He kept his eyes open upon the two caskets, his hands now furious as if his fingers would rend and shatter themselves.

And now shall he lift up mine head

Above mine enemies around me.

Incongruous, somewhere in the ranks of pews behind him sat four young veterans of the American Field Service as well as their officer, the same man who’d recruited Robert from Cornell. Met the evening before at the vigil, the man who for five years Henry had entertained the possibility of meeting and the words he might say—words sucked out of him, gone. Perhaps it was the moment, as likely the presence of the other young men, ambulance drivers. The words in that letter late autumn of 1916:

Robert, alone with the other drivers, is an honorable man in a place utterly shorn of honor & humanity. None envisioned what they’d encountered, few quailed. Robert wasn’t fearless, we all work in great fear. But the work must be done. His wounds are such that I speak with great confidence of his recovery. I shall, I swear upon my soul, return your son to you whole. Most sincerely, diddly-do.

Six months later with sunken cheeks and skin like wax Robert hobbled off the train on crutches, his rasping wheeze from the effort accentuating his appearance that stopped Henry even as Olivia rushed forward, Robert’s head raised then a bit over his mother’s shoulder to meet his father’s eye, a solemn cold appraisal as if battle had already been joined. Or joined again. The morphine still a secret but not for long, Robert caring less about the crushed tops of the glass ampoules, the syringe rinsed with alcohol and rubber tourniquet left on the glass shelf below the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Home a month and the wicked little roadster appeared. I was a volunteer, Robert explained to his father, but I still got paid. And now? And now what? Olivia long into more nights than Henry could recall, listening, talking, responding, defending. Time, she’d said. Over and over. Time and patience. Cajoling. Excusing was what Henry thought but knew better than to say. And did not need to because Robert felt it from his father as a current, a pulsation. Blown off the motorcycle with its sidecar carrying a French officer from a dressing station outside of Verdun, back, back toward the lines and the field hospital, the mortar Robert said heard as a sudden shriek and the Frenchman was pulped, the machine destroyed, Robert some time in the mud before the regular ambulance convoys tried again after the shelling, the mist of gas already dissipated, the gas actually missed, unrecorded, no one aware of it during that empty hour, a sudden change of breeze sweeping it over him as his lungs gasped for air against the blood seeping from his leg. The gas only realized days later in the hospital outside Chantilly. He was fortunate, all the nurses told him. One night after Olivia was in bed Robert had come in late smelling most clearly of sex and gin and sat with his father and told him this, adding the nurses took a special interest in reviving all of his functions at which Henry rose silent and left the room.

In my father’s house are many mansions.

The night the past autumn of early dark when he sat with crossed legs and folded arms as for the first and only time in their marriage Olivia stood before him in the house otherwise empty, her eyes glistening wet with rage and held tears and spoke in a deadly chill voice just hours after the final shouting between father and son. You. I’ll no longer stand for you to blame Robert or myself. I was never outside my bounds as mother. You think I coddle him but I don’t. It’s some blameless place in your own mind you’ve cultivated for years and years—it’s your own poison Henry. How did he fail you? When? Better to ask yourself how you failed him and still do. You assail him at every opportunity. This anger, this vitriol Henry. When he was missing and then word came of his wounds, I listened to you and remained silent, thinking this is what a father does, this is how he copes, how he expresses his own fears. Even as we huddled together and I knew your fear as real as mine there was that anger of yours seeping through. It felt like contamination. I prayed, Henry. I prayed to spare him and prayed for your understanding and each prayer as heartfelt and heavy upon me as the other. And here he is returned to us. Not what he was but then, what was he, to you? When was he ever enough, just Robert? What do you know of what he should be? Henry, tell me. When I see you unable to extend a portion of the compassion and hope that you give to all these young women but not your own son? Oh you put a roof over his head, you allow him meals, you ask nothing from him. Except every moment for him to be otherwise. From what exactly, Henry? From yourself? Is that all you have to offer a son? Henry, he loves and admires you, but he is not you and never will be. Can’t you allow him that? Can’t you see he’s lived and seen things we can’t begin to comprehend? The vitality has been sucked from him and each day you remind him of that. I’m sorry to say this Henry but you’ve disappointed me. At his age, would you have done what he did? And if not, Henry, why not? Why not ...

Grant to all who mourn a sure confidence in thy fatherly care, that, casting all their grief on thee, they may know the consolation of thy love. Amen.

For the first time in his career he skipped all the graduation festivities and the commencement itself, excused graciously by those few he chose to offer his intentions to, and then, those days alone and silent in his small upstairs office in the house, increasingly aware that his absence was noted almost certainly exclusively by himself, save for the three students who expected him to present their special commendations and who certainly were no less delighted by whoever stood in for him, their thoughts far away from their missing professor.

Then there was only the summer pall of an empty campus.

Alice and Polly returned in early July and cleared their mother’s intimates from the house; clothing, coats, handbags, the entire drawer of white gloves, things of that nature and, without seeking his advice or consent, divided up her jewelry which he only realized after they’d departed and which made him a little angry—he would have liked the bittersweet activity of going through the pieces and recalling what they marked and where they came from and designating not only his daughters but his granddaughters but it was not worth fussing about. It was possible the girls knew best anyway. And he had the only thing that mattered—the wedding band of slender but premium gold, the twin of which was with her in the ground. It had taken him three years to pay off those simple rings.

He decided against the full six weeks at the Lake and only went for the last week of July and the first of August, not so much a decision as understanding how much of it he could stand this year. Two days before he took the train up, he sat at his desk and penned his letter of resignation to be effective immediately following the commencement exercise of 1922. Which he hand delivered to Fred Singleton, his closest friend on the board of trustees the same afternoon he wrote it. And stood in the hot July parlor with a glass of iced tea while Fred was courteously considerate and so the protest disguised as praise was short and perfunctory.

He had to catch a noon train for Lakemont. It was more of the same strangeness. This departure had always been overseen by Olivia amid days filled with trunks in the front hall and detailed arrangements with the housekeeper.

Instead he packed a single suitcase, the sort he’d take if traveling for three or four days to lecture somewhere. By nine o’clock in the morning he was done and all that remained was the twenty minute taxi ride to the station. He returned to his desk and wrote a letter to the Holland American Line, requesting schedules and fares for New York to Rotterdam the following May. This, like almost everything else accomplished that summer was not so much thought through as simply one more cog in the wheel of sequence he was upon. It was not such a grand plan but something he’d intended to do for a long time and quite clearly he’d have to do something once that resignation took effect. For within that damning sluggish grief he’d known he couldn’t remain as he was, as he had been. And the fact remained— his house, his home for many years, where his children had grown up, where Olivia had overseen their passage into the world and where once he’d thought they’d enjoy some years of peaceful solitude, had never become that, and never would. And come July of next year some other man, some other family would come to occupy it. Already, that not-quite year looming seemed more than he might bear. He thought, hoped, once the students returned in September his work would save him. It always had.

He had alerted no one of his arrival. So no one would meet him at the station. This was fine. He’d walk down. He’d done it before. That simple dirt road down through the vineyards toward the shoreline trees and drop of land that led to the spit where the cottages lay out of sight was one of perhaps three places on this earth where he felt his soul left its footprints.

His suitcase bumped his leg and the handle was wet in his hand so he switched sides and examined the day. Stretching both sides ran the long rows of grapevines on their wire supports, now in midsummer heavy with dark large leaves hiding the bunches of green grapes, the hedgerows between the vineyards filled with the sluggish summer afternoon birdsong, the woodchuck he saw yearly eating the clover planted between the rows of vines suddenly standing upright to look at him. He whistled a sharp note and the chuck was gone underground. Below lay Seneca Lake with a small fleet of sailboats working under a northwest breeze and also the occasional wake of a motor speedboat, which he did not like but he couldn’t hear it up here and he’d learned to live with them as with much else.

Across the lake a hillside identical to the one he was descending rose evenly above the shore. Gentle, these lakes were. People spoke of Seneca with pride; the coldest, the deepest, the most dangerous of mood. He never argued but wore a secret smile. No Bay of Fundy, this. Even in winter.

The Grotto they called it, although the name had probably been attached to the place before any of them came along. Like a number of other narrow stream-ravines that broke the farmland on that southwestern side of Seneca Lake—centuries of water running downhill through the limestone and shale ledges had rendered this restricted tight gulch of slender streams and deep pools and waterfalls either broad or long braided drops, all down to the lake. What made this one distinctive was the small several acre delta that had formed at the shoreline. And the half dozen substantial cottages, one of which had been Doyle and Mary Franks’s wedding gift to their daughter and sonin-law many years before.

Henry walked down knowing that this also was a particular occasion. Certainly gone was the plan to retire here—he could not imagine the long winters without Olivia although not so long ago the idea of that solitude had appealed—the two of them alone with lazy tucked-in days just reading or conversing, listening to the phonograph or taking the daily strolls that were more hike than walk. Not that he would sell the cottage. It would remain as it was now, and over the years become even more so: The summer retreat of his daughters and their families. And all would grow there and flourish in those long never-ending all too short summers of childhood and come to love and know this place as their grandmother had and perhaps one day, one of his daughters or one of their children in a future he could not imagine might gain age and serenity and choose this place as a final home. He hoped so. But it would not be him.

All were there save for Alice’s husband Philip who Henry liked because he was an awkward sincere man older than his years, a lawyer in Chicago who would only get away to join them for the first two weeks of August.

The two weeks passed with more ease than he’d expected. His daughters with little effort that he knew disguised great coordination retained the summer routine that had endured, existed from their own childhoods—breakfast was a great meeting of the family and the food was almost afterthought to the planning of the day’s activities. Lunch was either catch-as-catch can or immense picnics spread on blankets on the lawn. The children would stay in the water until they were blue and prickled with gooseflesh, teeth chattering. Some evenings dinner was eaten as a group—other times Henry would dine with the Westmores or the Pyles, and as always accepted an invitation to dine with Joseph Jensen and family—the local farmers at the top of the hill who owned the vineyards and by long-standing agreement kept watch over the cluster of cottages during the winter although the Pyles often spent Christmas here. The hole left by Olivia and Robert was within and around all these things but once there, Henry could not have imagined not coming, because the hole was communal, hovering over all the adults and Henry realized this was part of the letting go—part of receding into memory—his wife and son were owned part and parcel by all these people, surely not only by him alone.

But it was with his granddaughters that the summer regained some measure of its old glow, and new as well as he more so than before saw the perpetuity of the generations.

The girls were tentative with him at first and he understood this— he stood closest to the mystery of death, the fearful everlasting absence of their grandmother and remote uncle but it was this very hesitation of theirs that pressed him from the shell of mourning back toward life. Early morning when the sun was just up on the still water, he would take the old rowboat, dark green with oars hand-smooth with age, and the two sisters and their cousin aboard to poke along the dents and small coves of the shoreline, the sun warmly lighting this east-facing shoreline in etched detail and they would follow the mallard hen and her three ducklings from a short distance and the girls would bring bread to break and toss as the ducks bobbed alongside, the nervous mother back some few feet until the crumbs began to float and then she would streak in and grab one up. Or round the point where there was a great leaning willow and they would glide with the oars up through the long slender drapes of soft leaves and the girls would break tender tips free and fashion garlands for their hair or, as the water stayed calm he’d row out a bit into the lake, where the bottom began to drop but was still in sight and drift again, all leaning quiet against the rail gazing down into the water for fish, not interested in the fry and minnows or even the flash of a pumpkinseed sunfish but waiting for the green trout shadow to dislodge from its own drift and flash off and whoever spotted it would cry out and even if no other saw the fish the cry was never questioned and it was as if they had actually caught the fish.

Afternoons, when parents mysteriously wanted to waste this precious summer with naps he would take them up into the lower reaches of the gorge where they would pull apart the loose shale looking for fossils, mostly minute shells no larger than one of their own thumbnails but true as a scallop in design, there in the rock as if yesterday and he would wonder if his father had ever seen such a thing and what he would make of it. The youngest girl, Polly’s daughter Kate, always trying to catch up to her cousins Gretchen and Patty even though only a single year separated each of them, became adept at catching the small green frogs that lived about the smaller pools of the gorge and Henry named her Frogcatcher and told them all tales of the great Seven Nations of the Iroquois who for hundreds of years had lived along this vast belt of wondrous rich land and lakes. Leaving for the time being the closer tale of Sullivan’s march through that country of theirs, burning and destroying all villages and crops and stores of seed and leaving mostly the old people and women and children for the bitter winter of starvation ahead of them but content for now to let his grandchildren envision this place as it was now but with a different people and a different way of life than the one these children knew. So they might foresee, however briefly, other possibilities in life. And also find, with great excitement a small stone overhang where years of fires had smudged dark with soot soaked deep into the rock. He saw no reason to tell them this could be simply the summer campfires of their own families for the last half-century—let them believe those other people had been here. As he knew was true. Every year men working the vineyards found flint arrowheads and Joseph Jensen had a collection not only of these simple artifacts but several exquisite spear points, grinding stones, fishing weights, even a horn tool for cleaning hides. He hiked up the hill one drizzly day and called on Jensen and with the boldness of grief asked for and received three small but perfect arrowheads. Bird points, Jensen called them. And the next time the three girls went up with their Grandfather to search for fossils and catch frogs and salamanders he carefully seeded two of the points as they went and then proceeded to find the third. Which sent them all looking, scouring the ground on hands and knees but it was Kate who actually found one of the other points and so very slowly Henry had to discover the final one so each child had one. And a charming thing happened—the oldest girl Gretchen insisted they keep looking until they found one for Grandfather. Henry went along with this as long as he could and then, not so very much feigning exhaustion, declared he was done and perhaps another day they might find one for him. He was seated on a rock by the lower pool where the water threaded down in a long fifteen foot drop from above. It was warm and time for all to go back to the cottage and, for the children at least, the lovely long afternoon in the lake and on the diving raft buoyed fifty yards out in the deep water. And Kate, bold before her older cousins, came forward and handed her bird point to Henry and said, “Grandfather, you keep this. We’ll find another one. I know I will. I found this.” And Henry sat silent for only a moment, watching the deep serious face of the five year old, not in the least expecting this but knew the grace to accept the gift.