The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  If not for Isabelle. If not for Dr. Lartigue’s heart attack. If not for Señora Lartigue’s anger. If not for his own childish fear. If not, if not, if not. How useless these words, these dead-end wishes. His sister Marta, who knew about these wishes, told him they proved he’d been tainted by his time in America. People with too much money bought themselves regret along with big houses and cars, she said once. Regret was a disease, a fever. (But the money that went with the illness—this she liked, didn’t she?)

  On his way from the station in Lothian, Celestino bought eggs, an onion, a potato, and a pepper. The fat green ones tasted raw, unfinished, but they were the cheap ones. Mrs. Marsh, whose vast vegetable garden Celestino weeded and watered twice a week, had told him to help himself to her tomatoes that morning. They were spectacular tomatoes, some purple, some striped like flames, others yellow as taxis. When he shook his head, she said, “Don’t be ridiculous. All I did was plant them. You’re the one who keeps them growing.” He had carried the bag of tomatoes with him to Mrs. Connaughton’s, his afternoon job, but then, stupidly, had left it beside the kitchen sink of the man who’d let him call for a ride. He should have walked to the train station, to hell with Gilberto. He had been lazy.

  In his kitchen, he turned on the radio—the volume low. He was careful to keep Mrs. Karp happy, to jump when she needed him and otherwise to intrude on her life as little as possible. She was kind enough, but she could raise the rent at her whim—or decide she didn’t need him. And what if she should sell the house? Would he be forced to join his “compadres” in Packard?

  He listened to the news while he cooked. The war, always the war in Iraq. More suicide bombings. Children blown up on their way to school. I could have family there, he thought. He enforced the habit of reminding himself how his life could be so much worse, how Guatemala was said to be peaceful now, no more soldiers burning down villages, raping and killing the women. Even in the city, his mother and sisters were safer now. Mrs. Connaughton had insisted on showing Celestino her photographs from a tour she took the year before. “Your country is divine,” she declared. “I have never seen people who have such an exquisite sense of color.”

  As he chopped the pepper, he pictured the tomatoes he’d left on that kitchen counter. Mrs. Connaughton’s neighbor—Percy—had reminded Celestino of Dr. Lartigue. He was tall, his eyes the same silvery blue. But more than these features, he had that scholar’s air about him, the same clothes: khaki shorts and a thinly striped cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the same shirt you could wear with a tie and a suit. As if such men must always be prepared to dress up at a moment’s notice for a party or a business meeting. The first time Celestino had gone to live in Cambridge, Dr. Lartigue had bought him some of these clothes.

  The rooms Celestino had passed through, on his way to Percy’s kitchen, were old in a vain sort of way. The dark rafters hung below the ceilings, and the floorboards slanted this way and that. The rooms were stuffed with old things, decorated with flowery patterns the sun had faded long ago. You could not have fit in one more stack of books or historical picture: so much like Dr. Lartigue’s study. There was a portrait in a gold frame over a fireplace, the paint so crackled and darkened by smoke that all you could really see was the man’s moonlike face, its attitude grim, and a white patch of shirt inside a black, or blackened, coat. Throughout the rooms, a lime-colored dusting of pollen lay across every surface, from books to sofa cushions.

  That part, the dustiness, wasn’t like the Lartigues’ house. Señora Lartigue kept the rooms as clean as could be. Her conscience, though—could that be clean? Did she think of him, ever? Wonder where he was? Probably not.

  Celestino tried so often to bury the fantasy, stale by now, of returning to that house as a man with his own business—not the archaeologist he’d dreamed of being when he was small, nothing so far-fetched, but a designer of gardens, even parks—and seeking Isabelle. But surely Isabelle was living elsewhere, possibly married. She would be twenty-five.

  Celestino was twenty-six. He had not been back to Guatemala in seven years, not since before Dr. Lartigue had died, not since Señora Lartigue, two months later, had guessed correctly that he and Isabelle were sleeping together under her roof, had coldheartedly ambushed them in bed. How stupid that had been, how reckless. It did not matter that, as Isabelle had shouted to her mother, they were “old enough!”

  In a panic, certain that in her fury Señora Lartigue would have his student visa canceled, make sure that he was sent back to his country, his village, forbidden ever to set foot here again, Celestino had run. He had taken a bus to New York, where an older cousin drove a gypsy cab. For two weeks he had stayed in the cousin’s apartment, hardly going outside, as if Señora Lartigue might descend from the open sky, a scornful black eagle, swoop him up and deliver him to his punishment. One day his cousin told him he had to leave or work. So he’d worked, a few months here, a few months there: busboy, night clerk in a bodega, janitor in a dress factory. Finally, he mowed lawns in the Bronx, for Spanish-speaking families who’d made enough money to buy houses. He worked almost mindlessly for two years before he realized that this, too, had been stupid and reckless.

  Some childhood vision of Señora Lartigue as an all-powerful goddess—like the Aztec goddess who ate warriors whole, the one in the stone relief on Dr. Lartigue’s desk—had blinded him to reason. She had been free to kick him out of her home, but could she really have taken away his chances at finishing college? Even though Dr. Lartigue was no longer around to help with his tuition, wouldn’t the school have taken pity on Celestino, helped him stay, given him work to pay for his classes? All this had not occurred to him until it was too late. And when he thought of Isabelle, how his fear of her mother had outstripped his desire to be with her, he had to wonder whether he’d deserved all his good fortune in the first place. Maybe Dr. Lartigue had been a poor judge to see Celestino as “a boy with potential.”

  In the Bronx, there was a fancy estate on the river where people went to admire the flowers and picnic on the lawns. A woman whose grass he mowed had told him they taught classes in gardening there. By that time, his cousin had found a girlfriend and had two babies. Celestino had moved into a place of his own: small, sooty, looking through a fire escape onto the roof of a dry cleaner. The smell from the vent was stifling, the fumes of hell. He could not afford the classes at the estate, but sometimes, on weekends, he went there and walked around, studying the labels beside the plantings, watching the gardeners do their work. A few of them were friendly, so he forced himself to speak up, to ask questions. He learned how to test soil, how to deadhead roses and divide tubers, how to train a fragile vine, how to deepen the roots of saplings so that they would grow tall and hold fast against the wind. He learned about slugs, earthworms, nematodes, aphids, about blights and beetles that threatened the strange northern trees with which he’d become familiar.

  He was twenty-four when he’d found the courage to return to Boston. His cousin knew someone who had a job in a fish-processing plant in Gloucester. There were workers who spoke their language, not just Spanish. But as soon as Celestino arrived in the bus station, he’d taken the T to Harvard Square. Everything seemed shinier, more modern than he remembered—the subway train, the tiled platform, the escalator that carried him into the open air. Even the red brick sidewalks that were meant to seem ancient looked as if they’d been scrubbed. How had so much changed? How had the years passed so quickly? Yet the prosperity he saw made him hopeful. He looked for Isabelle as he walked among the college buildings, toward her family’s house—where perhaps he would find her on the shaded porch.

  Nothing had changed in the elegant neighborhood where the Lartigues lived. Perhaps the cars, which seemed larger. And the young trees planted along the narrow street: they were taller, dense with leaves. Now he knew the names of these trees. Sycamore, linden, magnolia, spruce. From his time at Wave Hill, he could even identify the different magnolias that flourished this far north, the
ones whose late flowers were rarely damaged by frost.

  The Lartigues’ driveway was empty. The garage was closed. The front curtains—and with a jolt he recognized them, the same blue pattern of country scenes in France—hid the grand rooms within. The mailbox beside the door was stuffed with mail, as if no one had checked it for a couple of days.

  He’d stood on the street a long time before daring to walk around the side of the house. He looked about in every direction first, to make sure that no one could see him, call the police. His heart beat hard, warning him away.

  The gate, the brick path, the rhododendrons with their rubbery, almost tropical leaves: all of it the same. At the back of the house, he walked close to the edge of a window. The same green table ran from one end of the kitchen to the other. The same green cooking pots hung from a copper rack, like musical instruments waiting to be played. But now there was a dog, which jumped up at the window. It wasn’t a menacing dog, but it started barking loudly.

  Celestino retreated quickly to the front of the house. He hurried back the way he’d come, back toward the Square. He could still hear the dog barking as he rounded the corner onto Brattle Street.

  After stopping to catch his breath, he had walked to the Charles River, a place that would always remind him of Isabelle. What was he doing? Was this folly all about her? He had been with other girls in New York. None for very long, but his life hadn’t been suited to settling down, nor had he wanted to settle down. Not there. Unlike his cousin or the other chapines he’d met, he wanted more than a shabby apartment in Queens or the Bronx. He did not feel right in the city, and he certainly did not want to have children in the city. He could read the news, see what became of so many children born to people like him. For this reason, he could never completely trust the girls he knew. So many of them seemed to be prowling, like panthers scouting the shadows for mates. (Animal nature, hardly wrong.) The ones he liked, who did tempt him—eventually, they saw that he was not to be caught. A few raged and called him names. Sometimes he told them they were right. This he had learned from Isabelle, to know when you deserve someone’s anger, even if you cannot choose to be any different.

  Standing by the Charles River, watching two sculls pass by, the rowers bending together like parts of a wooden toy, he remembered going to watch a crew race with the Lartigues. That was during his first visit, when he was fifteen yet felt, in this place, so much younger. They’d had a picnic on the green riverbank. They had introduced him to pâté and capers and cheeses from France.

  He thought of going back to the house, waiting for Señora Lartigue. Why? To ask her forgiveness? He laughed. What would it mean after all the time gone by? Dr. Lartigue hadn’t even left a will, nothing to show that he’d regarded Celestino—or so he’d said—like another child.

  Soon after fleeing to New York, Celestino had telephoned his family. His father had refused to speak with him until he came home to account for his rash behavior. He let a month go by before phoning again. His father held firm. And so it remained, each time he called. Then, just one year after Dr. Lartigue’s death, his mother told him that the dig had shut down—almost without warning. For one season, other men had carried on Dr. Lartigue’s work, a younger professor in charge. But the following year, as Celestino’s father and his crew had prepared for the start of the season, only a few archaeologists came. They had come to close the dig and take their stored belongings away. Their grant had ended, and without Dr. Lartigue’s leadership, it would be hard to renew. They assured Raul that another group of archaeologists, from a museum in Antigua, would soon take over the project. There were no grand speeches to the villagers this time.

  Six months later, Celestino got a short letter from one of his sisters. They were moving. A band of thugs had come to the village; there was a panic, fear that the raids had started again, even with the new government in power. People fled, or they hid. It turned out the thugs were looters looking to scavenge the site. Loyal to the end, Raul and two other men tried to defend the locked storeroom. They were beaten. The thieves were angry that the shed contained nothing but tools, books, and papers. They claimed they would return to find out where the valuable things were hidden.

  Raul told his wife and daughters that what he had to do was go directly to Antigua and find the museum, tell the archaeologists there about the looters, demand to know when they would come to continue the work of Dr. Lartigue. When the women had not heard from Raul for four months, they decided to travel to the city and find him.

  Of course, they never found him. They found a museum that displayed relics like the ones Dr. Lartigue had been digging up near the village, but no one at the museum had heard of Raul—or of plans to continue the dig. The women were lucky to find jobs at a tourist hotel. What was the point of traveling back to their village? The trip they’d taken to reach the city had been risky enough.

  That day in Cambridge, as Celestino walked along Brattle Street, past the regal many-windowed houses of the richest, most successful people, with no idea where he was headed or what he intended to do, he noticed two separate groups of Latino men working on the lawns. He listened to them speaking with one another. They were Mexicans, Indians from a region just a few hours from where he’d grown up. He knew their way of speaking from back in New York.

  This, he thought, I can do: work on the gardens of the rich and make them grow. I will not have to keep a baseball bat on the floor beside my feet. I will not have to scrub inside the rims of toilets. Dirt, digging in the ground, he did not mind. He knew dirt well. So, it occurred to him, had his father when he had labored for those university men and believed the work would last forever, even change the fortunes of his children. Like father, like son: dreamers in the dirt.

  This was how, last spring, he had found his way to Loud, joining a group of men who waited on a city corner every day to be picked up and taken out to the country for work.

  He knew that the gardening would end with the first snow—he’d been through two years of this work in the city, under less successful men—and he had to wonder if winter would, once again, throw him back with all the others, sent out to shovel and blow away the snow. A season of misery. But Celestino, who had seen his first gray hair that morning in the small mirror over his sink, was determined that by the time the last leaves fell, things would be very different. He wasn’t sure how, not yet, but they would be. They simply had to be.

  3

  From: Trudy Barnes, M.D.

  To: Robert

  Subject: your aunt’s birthday

  hi robert: don’t forget clover’s bday dinner fri. pls do me a favor & buy nice earrings from the upscale hippie shop nr chauncy: dangly/sexy, don’t worry cost, will reimburse. clara can advise? dad will pick U 2 up at your house 6:00. granddad bringing cousins—surprise so do not tell!

  xxx mom

  p.s. clover’s new favorite color is orange

  “Hey, Clara,” said Robert without turning from the screen. “Mom thinks you’ve got better taste in earrings than I do.”

  “Of course she does.” Clara lay on Robert’s bed, reading her geo textbook.

  “Because you’re a girl, that what you mean?”

  “Because I’m, one, a woman; two, a woman with a sublime sense of fashion; three, the woman your mother hopes you will marry.”

  Robert laughed. That his mother approved of his girlfriend almost aggressively was an open secret; the closed secret was that he had no intention of marrying Clara, or anyone, anytime soon. He was not opposed to marriage—not personally or politically—but nowadays it was little more than a declaration of the intent to have kids. To include kids in any plans for the immediate future would have been reckless in the extreme. Never mind that his mother had given birth to him when she was still in med school. Totally insane.

  He spotted an e-mail from Granddad as well, subject Friday Night’s Festivities. And zap, an IM from Turo: mtg7! dnt fgt!

  Robert knocked loudly on the wall between their bedrooms. �
��Hey Turo, F to F, you droid!”

  At the end of their sophomore year, it had been Turo’s idea that they move off-campus together. Robert had loved their monastically snug yet privileged life in Kirkland House, their narrow beds, their institutional desks, but Turo’s passionate conviction, as usual, won him over in the end.

  “We’ll live economically, willfully,” said Turo. “We’ll partake of the community as we choose, not by daily coercion.”

  Robert had glanced out his window at Kirkland’s courtyard, where half a dozen half-naked girls were determined to bask in the April sun. “If this be coercion,” he said, “then dude, free will be damned.”

  Turo had laughed. “And look at it this way. A place of our own would give us a certain edge. I mean, if all you can think of is sex, my friend.”

  Robert admired Turo’s urge to resist convention, and once he’d pointed out to his dad that they’d save significant money by living off, even his parents were cool with the plan. But while the choice had been a good one for Robert (that part about the “edge” was true; even Clara seemed to crave him more for his independence), he wasn’t sure it was great for Turo. Lately, he’d become so mega intense, so involved in what he called “the underground” (as if they lived in the 1960s, as if anything metaphorically subterranean, truly hidden or secret, were possible now) that he had practically forgotten how to just be with other people. Just sit around the kitchen and talk. Sports, girls, parties, profs, just stuff. Between high school and Harvard, Robert had spent a long summer working on a nature preserve in Costa Rica. Not like he’d lived a third-world life (he was just another baby fatcat, no fooling himself about that), but he definitely felt as if he’d opted out of so-called civilization: basically powered down. After the initial freak-out of going offline cold turkey, he’d concluded that plain old-fashioned hanging out, ears off the iPod umbilical, phones and laptops away, no narcotizing of any kind (okay, maybe that great cerveza the locals drank), was crucial to your baseline sanity. “I did a low-tech detox,” he joked once he returned.