Читать книгу After You've Gone - Jeffrey Lent - Страница 9

Spring 1921 came early to Elmira so by mid-May the daffodils and tulips were failing and well-placed lilacs were rioting in bloom and the grass greened and men in overalls were out pushing mowers, the spinning blades leaving clippings that for a brief period each afternoon smelled like fresh-cut hay. On a Thursday afternoon in the third week he left his office exactly at six and crossed the campus to the house. Girls hurried past with either downturned heads or quick bright smiles—both gestures reassuring and meaningless at once— they invested more power over their academic and personal futures in him than was true but only he knew that—they must believe otherwise to excel. He gave this little thought that afternoon—he’d made this same walk easily a thousand times. Perhaps closer to five. Mostly he was enjoying the summerdream of the day. Examination week was quieting everything except the twelve hundred anxious brains and then there was the week of steady hoopla and stern pronouncements of graduation and another week of letter writing and meetings with faculty and then he and Olivia would take the train north to summer at the Lake. Both of their daughters would come for visits with their husbands and young families and there were the uncertain weeks when his son Robert would come, most likely checking some girl into a hotel in Watkins Glen where he would spend most of his time from late afternoon on each day, showing up at the cottage mid-morning still hungover when father and son would circle slowly with taut jabs of language and cast eyes within the iron circle of protection erected for her son that Olivia produced. Striding with purpose, breathing the flowered spring air, the truth was simple and long known to him; he loved his three children but struggled with his son and almost always had. There were many reasons for this, starting he supposed from the beginning with the age difference between the boy and his much older sisters although even this was problematic—it seemed to Henry that he and his little man had been close as his own dreams until the frightening bout of whooping cough when the boy was eight. Although even that seemed long ago and unlikely.

Henry was holding his shoulders a bit too tightly as he walked toward dinner with his wife. And perhaps his son. There was no telling. And as frustrating as this was he knew, as he approached the tennis courts and heard the thock of a ball and saw the two young students, done with their examinations or taking a much needed break, calves flashing below their skirts, the red clay softened with the evening sun, that once he rounded the courts and passed the small clump of Lombardy poplars and his own house came into view, knew if his son was lounging on the porch or steps for the last of the sun— Henry could see him, in his golfing knickers and argyle stockings, a sweater tied over his shoulders or if it was a harder day the young man would be wearing his puttees and uniform, the swagger stick cane drifting through his fingers like a baton, even then, Robert would toss back his whiteblond hair and smile at his father and Henry’s own surge would leap for a moment as his face broke to smile. How close they’d come to losing him.

It was almost as if he’d had two families. The girls born little more than a year apart, Alice first within a year of marriage and Polly fourteen months later—Polly tall like her father and willowy even yet with her young daughter, fiery, determined, even and easily pugnacious while Alice remained ever his firstborn with a game cock to her eye and mind that kept her nimble. Alice was a reader and would argue books with her father. And while she made no overt claim to peacemaker she alone could turn a conversation without anyone realizing she’d just done so. Even after almost ten years he missed her presence in his house and looked forward, most of all, to the few weeks or month she and her family would be at the Lake.

On the other side of the balance sheet were the four hundred young women he loosed upon the world each spring, each imbued with everything he’d worked his life for. For which purpose his life seemed designed. Even as undoubtedly some of these girls would lose within months or years what they had gained. He could not change the world.

It was a beautiful day. A fine afternoon for tennis. Healthy bodies. Shadows stretching but the air still warm. He looked forward to shirtsleeves over his meal. He could now smell pork roasting, the smell of food from the house still hidden, mixing with the newmown grass—the same campus workmen who were mowing earlier that week had taken down the storm windows and doors and fitted the screens. He was a breakfast and supper man. Lunch was light, always, even in winter. Midday food clouded the mind. And the evening meal was supper. Dinner was on Sunday, the early afternoon roast joint after chapel or church and then a short nap. He would stay up late that one night of the week, composing the next week’s study plans when the rest of the house was already asleep. It made perfect sense to him—the day of rest being over but for sleep.

He rounded the clump of poplars, their slender intertwined branches flecked with delicate new green and for a moment he was in their shadow and the coolness of the spring earth enveloped him and then he left the broad walkway and crossed the front lawn, up the brick walk to his house. He’d thought Olivia might be waiting him on the porch as she often did these new days but the porch was empty. He went up and in, stopping in the front hall to leaf through the mail on the telephone table and, after a moment waiting for her to hear him, he called out her name, somehow already knowing, feeling the emptiness of the house. He draped his jacket over the stair rail and loosened his tie and collar with one hand as he walked down the hall, passing the dining room already set for three and into the kitchen. The note on the table was from the housekeeper Irma, addressed to Olivia, the time noted in the upper right corner, 5:15, the quiet remonstrance of invaluable help who knew she was. The roast should come out at six-thirty and rest before being carved. It didn’t matter that this was old routine—what mattered was the mistress of the house had not been there in person to thank Irma for her day.

Henry took a tumbler from the cupboard and shaved ice from the block in the icebox that stood next to the new refrigerator, went into the dining room to the cupboard built into the wall along the china cabinets, dug his wallet from his rear pocket and slipped out the small key, opened the cupboard and poured a hearty splash of rye over the ice, relocked the cupboard and replaced the key in his wallet.

Robert did quite well managing with bootleg whisky or bathtub gin.

It had not always been that way.

He carried his drink through the kitchen and out the back door where he wasn’t surprised to find the Dodge sedan in place under the hickory tree and no sign of Robert’s two-seat roadster. He took the first sip of his drink and went back inside, walking through the house and up the stairs, passing their bedroom with open door, the high bed made up neatly and the blinds up to let in the afternoon warmth, a pleasant room of dark wood and carpet, bedclothes, and wallpaper all varying shades of ambers. Down the hall past closed bedroom doors, the empty ones and Robert’s childhood room reclaimed these four years and at the end into the small room he used as his home office, the ceiling pitched to accommodate the attic stairs. He’d have preferred to sit on the front porch for this end of day libation but even with the respectful distance according himself and his home those days were gone now, save for the comfortable nest of privacy at the lake cottages.

Henry had taken the Temperance Pledge at the age of ten in the Freeport Baptist Church and silently renounced it five years later but the message was taken and held—even in the occasional raucous parties during the summer he was the measure of thoughtful restraint.

Which didn’t preclude him from enjoying his rye over ice before dinner. Or wine on festive occasions. And it hadn’t been the laws of prohibition that now held that restraint in even greater check. As he told himself not for the first time that he could serve as example for no one who refused to see him as such. But still. He would do what he could.

He sat at the small rolltop desk and wrote a short note to his mother, took a checkbook from the drawer and filled out the monthly check, addressed the envelope, his script as fine and even as the ruler-snap on his knuckles all those years ago had enforced, sealed the envelope and set it aside. From the window here he could see the poplars and the tennis courts—the game had ended.

He swallowed the last of the whisky-water and stood to pull his watch from his vest pocket when he heard the car crunch in over the gravel behind the house. Whatever jaunt Robert had enlisted his mother in had come to an end. Well and good and it would remain so. Henry was determined to be pleasant over dinner. Most times he was successful and the times he was not he always knew he’d lost whatever battle was being fought. Because it was a battle without winners.

He was halfway down the upstairs hall when the front doorbell rang. He’d expected to hear their voices and the slap of the kitchen screen door the other end of the house. And realized the automobile had been far too quiet to be the roadster. He set his empty glass on a side table and called “Coming,” as he made for the stairs and then the door below opened, no one bothering to ring the bell a second time and he cleared the second floor just in time to see his father-inlaw Doyle Franks and longtime family friend and physician Emery Westmore let themselves in and stand looking up at him, the men side by side, faces tightly drawn and silent.

Stricken, Henry thought.

Doyle said, “I can’t bear this.” Then pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and performed some ancient ablution across his features, not blowing his nose or dabbing his eyes but something both more and less vague. Raising a screen for an unbearable moment.

Henry arrested on the fourth step.

Emery Westmore revolved his hat in his hands by the brim, crown out, shielding his belly. He said, “They were motoring back on the Horseheads Road and there was a truck on that curve just before the Erie tracks.” He glanced down and said, “I’m sorry, Henry.”

And a world was gone, not changed but gone and he was already lost and sinking within when some stolen voice, something borrowed or brought up, the rasp of a timorous breast-broken crow. “What are you telling me.”

Later, so much later, he wandered through the house turning off all the lights except for one low reading lamp in the parlor with its frosted globe and tasseled shade to sit within a roar of silence pounding blood vessels in his ears—his very heart—and the mantle clock chimed one and he realized it was already the next day, the day after their deaths. Never mind sleep and rising in the dawn which he doubted would happen anyway. Last thing he’d turned off the scorched coffee in the percolator on the stove and realized someone, perhaps Irma, perhaps Olivia’s mother Mary, or any one of the faculty wives or friends who had drifted through the house as the news spread and those self-elected who came within their rights—someone had removed the roast from the oven and placed the covered pan in the refrigerator. Alice and her family had already boarded the overnight from Chicago and he’d managed to convince not Polly but her husband Jack to wait for dawn to set out on the drive from Utica and so sat in his parlor with the date to be carved already behind him and the gaping void already drawing before him but for these hours, at least these hours now, alone and silent within the emptiness of what appeared to be a fully occupied home.

He would, he thought, in time forgive himself even as he was already forgiven for his ugly outburst as Emery Westmore described the accident where it appeared the waiting truck had blocked view of the signal lights just beyond the curve and so also the rushing freight train as Robert swept around the truck as if there was no possible reason for it to be halted there or perhaps he simply thought it was going very slowly but the whistle from the engines pulling the hundred coal hoppers had long before been swallowed by the wind as the little roadster piled head-on into and then under the massive twisting steel.

“He was drunk, wasn’t he? On top of the goddamned morphine. Drunk and doped and driving his own mother and going too fast, isn’t that it? Damn it, Emery, tell the truth.”

But there was no truth to tell. After lunch Robert had made it most of the way through a round of golf at the Club and then wheezing and gimping had quit but his partner Fuzzy Chickering had sworn neither of them had been drinking. This, Henry knew could be true or not but even as he spat his viciousness he recoiled before it. For much as she loved her son and as she’d admitted to Henry after a single hushed late-night quarrel, also loved riding in the fast two-seater, Olivia would not have been persuaded, even on such a lovely day, if Robert was listing more than usual. In ways she worried about him more than Henry did but her indulgences were not foolish. Most likely, he knew, she was thinking the bracing motor car ride would be a tonic delightful with the afternoon, a better way for her son to fill that time than most others.

But now in the darkly hushed house there was no anger. Henry sitting alone accepted that in ways that would not last, that the days ahead would change and alter and fully reveal themselves to him but for the moment he was essentially numb to the death of his son. Not from anger and certainly not from having given up on him but a far more complex process of grief and relief, reconciliation and guilt, that extended back to the day in the spring of 1916 when the letter arrived, mailed from New York on the afternoon Robert was to board the steamer for France, already a member of the American Field Service Ambulance Corps, the letter timed so when it arrived he was already days at sea and far from their reach. As if they’d truly had any. Plucked, Henry thought, with the other young romantics eager for a war they were missing and no doubt aware of their status as the elite of American youth—the best and brightest and so already special and thus indomitable. The shrapnel and the gas seemed to end the war for him until he did come home and the war was evident in a long grip, in ways at first uncountable and then over the past four years ever more clear and leaving all three of them helpless within a seemingly endless reach.

He sat with his hands on his knees trying to sort his mind which was not ratcheting along but felt thickened as if it were the slush of a thawed pond. If this was grief he did not understand it. Nor was it the grace of faith for while he silently ran through the usual passages of condolence and strength they were vacant words more cloudy and vague than he already felt but neither was it a crisis of faith but simply God along with much else had left the house. He told himself it was the shock, the suddenness of it but even this did not explain the sluggish leaden mind. Was he thus? His true self? In a trite huff Robert had once called him a shell of an intellectual wrapped in a husk of self-importance and Henry had not risen to that juvenile jab but walked out of the room although the barb of the words had stayed with him. Not truth but that his son should see him such. Where was grief? He did not know.

Hours ago briefly alone in the kitchen with the doctor, Henry had refused the sedative offered, not able to explain he already felt sedated, only saying there had been too much of that stuff around the house anyway.

Westmore studied him and then said, “If anything, Henry, there might’ve been a split second when they realized what was about to happen. But the rest of it was too fast and absolute. Neither of them felt a thing.”

“Am I to find solace in that?”

Westmore raised an eyebrow. “Few are so lucky in death. You know that.”

“But,” Henry stopped. Then quietly, as if guilty he said, “I would’ve liked the chance to have talked to her.”

The doctor nodded. “You think so now. But such scenes are rarely as gratifying as we imagine. And usually a culmination of weeks or months of suffering. And the patient,” he corrected himself, “the dying person is not always in sound mind. My own mother as she lay dying was such. I bent to kiss her cheek, thinking she was sleeping and told her that I loved her. At which she opened her eyes, raised herself onto the pillows and told me she had no idea what that meant anymore. And sank back and died. What she left me with.”

Henry was quiet a moment. Then said, “Thank you.”

But now this night, this morning belonged to Olivia.

He turned off the parlor light and went up through the house in the dark where he sat on the far side of the bed, his side, looking out the window upon the silent dimly lit campus, his hands spread palms down on the tightly stretched counterpane that just this morning her hands had snapped tight and tucked. They might have a housekeeper but Olivia made their own bed. As he became aware of the faint violet sachet scent of the room, so long present he wasn’t sure when he’d last noted it and now recognized as long as it lasted it would be the scent of her. Then he was enveloped by the combination of absence and fullness within the house and placing his elbows on his knees sat with his face in his hands. Ephemerally he thought he heard her voice and then did not—as he tried to recall it, to raise it into the ear of memory it was maddeningly just out of reach, not even an echo so much as an audible glimmer—the tone and pitch he knew but could find no words, even direct memories of actual conversations were rendered in his own interior tongue. How could this happen so quickly? They knew each other so well. And then, the revelation of death—all this was now gone, the day-to-day gauge of himself against her, against that knowledge she had of him, was gone. And with that, a trembling uncertainty. What had he missed? What essential core of her had always been tucked back, withheld? It was true of us all, he knew this. It was how we live. And so, there is always that promise of one more fraction of knowing, one bit more slipped through one to the other. Now gone. She would recede, was receding already into the multiple beings of memory that belonged not to her but the people who knew her. He might have first claim but there were some no doubt who would think they knew her better. He’d seen and known this before—in fact it had been part of his life since his own youth. And he wavered under this, for with it came a short memory from the summer before at the Lake Cottage when he had arrived by train and walked down from the Lakemont platform and so entered the cottage with no one knowing he’d arrived and stood for a moment in the entryway; looking out the window at his two oldest grandchildren, cousins, playing on the grass that went down to the small incessant flap of wavelets against the smoothed shale shore and from down the hall overheard his daughter Polly speaking. Immediately afterward he broke it by reaching behind and pulling the screen door sharply shut because he did not want to, did not need to hear anymore of it. But still the tone and emphasis were unmistakable. As was the target of the comment.

“You’re a saint, Mother. No, don’t argue with me. Don’t defend.”

Polly’s voice was clear as if in the same room. Was this then part of the expenditure of dying? If he’d paused, waited to hear Olivia’s response he knew it would be no more clear than his earlier attempts, but he knew at least something of what she would’ve said, regardless of whatever set Polly off.

“I’m no more a saint than you, Polly.”

Or some such.

They’d eaten breakfast together. Robert was not yet up. There had been no argument, no discussion, nothing memorable. Perhaps they’d spoken of the coming summer reunion with the girls at the lake or that could’ve been the day before. She’d been wearing the yellow dress with the small blue flowers, he was sure of that. He’d read the morning paper when his plate was pushed aside, over his last cup of coffee. He’d kissed her goodbye but only the perfunctory buss of morning departure. So much lost, there. And yet. What would they have done otherwise if somehow they’d known? Emery had been right—it had been a fine lovely day for both of them right up until it tore like a sheet of paper. A far better day to die than to have someone die. A smile with no pleasure crossed his face and he was lonely again—only Olivia would’ve understood this wry humor upon himself. Only Olivia.

Earlier, but not much, after all had left but Doyle and Mary, Mary had come and taken him with a stern grip upon his arms, her eyes a red welter, looking up at him, an older different version of her daughter. “I was just recalling the two of you meeting. That first time. At the station to go down to the Lake. You were the new professor of English and we were all surprised by their choosing such a young man for the job. But even before you came up the word was out about you, did you know that? Now, who was it? I forget. Who was it that brought you up that summer? I can’t recall. And you were so sincere and polite and in such a bad suit. There wasn’t room in the carriage for you and we promised to send it back up but you said No, that you’d follow us down and we all thought that strange but endearing, a bit of a lark. And you didn’t follow but loped right alongside the carriage down the hill, right beside me keeping pace all the way. Commenting on the beauty of everything we passed but all the time your eyes on Olivia. And we all knew. Maybe you didn’t realize it but the rest of us did. And there was a dance the girls got together that very first night and arranged it so there was no one but you to take her ...”

And Henry held his again-weeping mother-in-law, his head over her shoulder as he patted her back, his eyes off across the years, thinking she’d gotten it wrong—he’d glimpsed Olivia two days before that day and hadn’t even known who she was but knew all he needed to.

In a long white dress tucked tight below her bosom, some sort of dairy-maid round cap trying and failing to hold her full dark chestnut hair that in sunlight took on hues of wildflower honey, her face turned away from him in a crowd of other young women but time to time her chin dipped toward him as she’d known too.

He stood in the dark room, only enough light from the window so the furniture were dark bulks although it could’ve been pitch night and not mattered but he made his way to the damask lace over her bureau top and lifted from among the scant bottles and single sandalwood box, the silver handled and backed hairbrush and gently pulled free one of the longer hairs there and left the room, wrapping the hair around his finger, over his wedding band as he went along the upstairs hall and stopped before Robert’s door. Where he lost his grip on the hair and felt it slip like air from his fingers.

Then he leaned his head, his forehead, against the shut door of his dead son, slowly bringing his hands up to press with his forehead against the door. To keep him in place. To remain upright.

As he finally wept.