Читать книгу The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison, Kathryn Harrison - Страница 18

THE DISAPPEARANCE of the Aleut woman grieves him as nothing ever has. “I’m dying,” he tells the face in his shaving mirror. He expects the words to embarrass him, to rouse him from self-pity, but they feel true.

He reminds himself that he has lists of what he’s learned to do without: butter, milk, peach cobbler. Newspapers, paving stones. A decent library, and a place to buy new recordings for his gramophone. A hot bath in his own home instead of a threadbare gray towel and ten shavings of soap for a penny at one of the bathhouses.

And he has always been restrained in the expression of emotion. He didn’t cry when his father died, not even when the undertaker and his boy carried the corpse feetfirst from the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the road. After the funeral, Bigelow’s mother gave him a box of his father’s effects. That was the word she used, effects, and he remembers repeating the two syllables silently to himself, over and over, e-ffects, e-ffects, a compulsive mental throat clearing, but one that produced no result, for he never opened the box. He noted its size, and imagined what a container of its dimensions might hold—eyeglasses, cuff links, the sign, B. GREENE, ATTORNEY AT LAW, that had hung under the bell—but he didn’t open it.

So why, then, does he return to the woman’s abandoned house almost daily, driven to reconsider the two vacant rooms, the window’s empty pane of light as it moves across the floor and onto the opposite wall?

Sunday morning hours that he once squandered in church, crammed into a pew between mother and sister, grudgingly dropping nickels into the collection plate, he spends in rooms she has consecrated, a word that surprises him when it comes into his head. Consecrated. After all, he hasn’t been to a Sunday service in ten years. But how else to describe what he feels as he walks through her house, around and around, reeling with loneliness?

She chinked between the shrinking, warped boards of the house with scraps of leather, moss, paper—whatever came to hand—and in her absence these have fallen out and cracks have appeared, admitting air, light. He tries to restuff them, but the dried moss crumbles at his touch, the bits of leather and paper slip straight through and outside, then blow away. He presses his eye to the crack, watching the wind tease them over the packed dirt.