The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  Perhaps the spirit of youthful enthusiasm is contagious, for I find myself eager to have you over for tea or cocktails, the sooner the better, not just to discuss a plan I have to benefit the Historical Forum but to make neighborly amends. You have been correct about many things regarding our shared environment here, and I wish to offer you my humble apologies for calling in Hal last spring when we could have settled our differences without the interference of outside agencies!

  Is tomorrow or perhaps even this very afternoon too sudden? 4:00? 6:00? You name the time. I am wide open!! (Do you like smoked salmon? Edgar just expressed me this very special treat, wild-caught in Alaska, and I am longing to share it.)

  Please do call!

  Warmest regards,

  Laurel

  Wide open? I had to laugh at that: a frightening vision indeed. Little wonder that her son, Edgar, had fled to the farthest corner of the country as soon as he could make his own living. His father had fled long before. Whenever I felt myself pitying Mistress Lorelei, so rich but so lonely, I had only to remember (would that I could forget!) the way she’d literally flung herself at me after her divorce. At the last Christmas party I gave, more than ten years ago, she had lured me upstairs to my own bedroom, insisting she had good reason to suspect the existence of a secret compartment or passage near the chimney. Since our houses were built in the same year, by the same housewright, I assumed she was looking for the twin to some feature in hers. She had knocked and pressed her ear to the walls for ten or fifteen minutes—very convincing, this ruse—and then she had pounced.

  I cut off that conduit of memory, but I would answer her note. With the arrival of E & F, the diplomat’s role was part of my new, godfatherly persona. (I shook free a fleeting vision of Condi Rice in one of her twee Barbie suits.)

  I picked up the phone before I could change my mind. Thank heaven: her machine. “Percy Darling here. Why not this afternoon? I’ll cross the Rubicon at five or so. Salmon sounds splendid.”

  Tossing aside the cotton-candy missive, out the door I ran, the vigor returned to my legs. As I passed and hailed the tree-house builders (pleased to have remembered Ira’s name), I noticed, over the wall and through the line of maples along the driveway, Mistress Lorelei’s Mayan gardener watching them intently. I waved to him as well. “Hello there, Celestino!” I called out. His name I could recall, though I had not laid eyes on him in a month.

  I ran toward town and circled the green. As always when I passed the library, I felt a frisson of despair. On the front door was a poster, hand-lettered in Magic Marker, urging passers-by to stop in for a workshop—FREE! CHILD CARE AVAILABLE!—on building your own Web site.

  This propelled me into a sprint.

  The profession I chose, like the woman I chose, belongs to the past except in the minds of those who truly loved it and mourn its tragic demise. Even the educational path upon which it is based has become all but unrecognizable. What was once called library science now has a trend-driven hocus-pocus name, something like “informational studies.” A library that is respectably up to date is no longer a temple dedicated to the guardianship of books or a sanctuary for the hallowed art of reading.

  No.

  A library is a zone of cyberkinetic values, a brain as viewed by the cold, lizardly pathologist: a numbingly gray place, of systems and wiring, of knowledge-related transactions that may or may not (preferably not, to many of my grandson’s peers) require the use of books. A library is now far more like a bank than like a church or a museum—cause for rejoicing in the minds of the Orwellian clerks who service its needs. Ten years ago, Matlock’s public library—a cathedralesque Victorian structure, built of red brick, its front door crowned with a stained-glass window depicting the warrior-scholar Athena—endured a so-called renovation. Perversely, all books were permanently removed from the vaulted central room, the tall shelves replaced by carrels containing Internet Access Stations and bins displaying movie DVDs. The information desk is now manned (womaned) by someone whose main job is to help you reserve time slots for the computers or guide you through the arduous process of “logging on.” If you do not watch your feet as you pass through this room, you are sure to trip on the electrical cords that creep everywhere like kudzu.

  Once, I blamed these changes on the computers themselves. (Through my decades at Widener, we classified and reclassified volumes again and again, enduring a series of achingly absurd systemic quakes, each christened with yet another acronym from MARC through OCLC to HOLLIS. Walls were ripped open to accommodate more cabling. Throughout our reading rooms, the bitter glow of screens began to clash with lamplight.) But such blame is naïve, merely another form of condemning the messenger. In retrospect, I am forced to accept that an atheistic passion for the abstract nature of existence, a leaning toward the mathematical, would have led sooner or later to an antireverence toward all things bibliographical, a sort of baby-with-the-bathwater ethos. It is no coincidence that the first books were religious in nature. Word of God and all that. Since I stand firmly in the God-is-for-sissies camp, I follow the logic of this evolution with more sorrow than outrage.

  You will assume that my house was filled to the rafters with books. Well, yes, there were quite a lot of books throughout, underfoot and overhead, tumbling out of my haphazardly placed bookshelves, stacked beneath chairs, beside beds, even in the bottoms of a closet or two. But I was never a “collector.” My love of books is a love of what they contain; they hold knowledge as a pitcher holds water, as a dress contains the mystery of a woman’s exquisite body. Their physicality matters—do not speak to me of storing books as bytes!—but they should not inspire fetishistic devotion. I kept no preciously glass-fronted cases, did not assign a room of my home to be an officially designated library, nor did I collude with antiquarian book dealers, haunt trading fairs, or participate in any bibliographic commerce other than spending too much money at the bookseller I have always favored in Ledgely. It was and still is called the Narwhal, a play on the name of its longtime proprietor, my dear friend and onetime colleague Norval Sorenson, who can still get me nearly any volume my heart desires and whose wife, Helena, became one of Poppy’s closest friends.

  Why did I, a robust red-blooded man born before World War II, become a librarian … a profession that, in the mid-twentieth century, was scorned as the refuge of timid, bookish women and a handful of homosexual, sandal-wearing fops? I loved to read, and both of my parents were teachers. Mother English, father history. Really, it was as simple as that. In our house, in Montclair, New Jersey, there were bookshelves in every room, and every room’s collection of books fell within a designated subject. All wars up to and including the Civil War occupied the living room; twentieth-century wars dominated the foyer and downstairs hallway. (My father, a fellow of pacifist temperament, taught history through teaching wars.) British fiction, my mother’s first love, encircled the dining room table. There were cookbooks in the kitchen, of course, but European literature in translation crammed the breakfast nook, and up in my parents’ bedroom lived biographies and memoirs. In the guest room slumbered science and the visual arts; a dozen gardening volumes held court in the downstairs bathroom. In my room, however, books toppled this way and that, as I pleased; my mother, wisely, relinquished her control beyond my door.

  It was straightforward, then, the path I followed; I see it as proof of a happy childhood. Take that, Dr. Freud (Philip Larkin, too). And like so many people who find their calling early, I found my spouse early as well. I met Poppy at a party in Cambridge, the year I started working as a stacks page at Widener. I had been invited to one of those cattle-call cocktail gatherings at the home of the curator of rare books. There, nearly all books were housed in glittering glass-fronted shelves, where keys in the locks left one assuming that to open the cases without permission might trigger an alarm.

  Knowing no one, I gripped my gin and tonic (too strong for me back in those innocent days) and pretended great interest in a case of leather volumes in
languages I did not speak or read.

  “Boo,” said a girl from close behind me. “You are just pretending, aren’t you?”

  Genuinely startled, I said, “Pretending what?”

  “To give a hoot about those books.” She peered into the case. “I mean, Chaucer? Who really enjoys Chaucer?”

  She was extremely pretty, the cheeky girl, and she knew it.

  “As it happens, I love books. And Chaucer.”

  “Of course you love books. You’re here at Rupert’s. Which means you’re at Harvard. So of course you do.”

  I was confused. “Well, then you’re at Harvard, too.”

  She laughed. “I’m the daughter of people who used to be.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Mm. Used to teach here. Now they teach in France. It’s not so cruel there.”

  “Cruel?”

  She laughed again.

  “My father says Harvard is a difficult mistress, ready to betray you at the slightest lapse in protocol or devotion. If you make it here, you can’t relax. Not for a minute. The peak of a mountain, he says, is always a perilous place to stand, no matter how sweeping the view.”

  Articulate though her speech might have been, I found it irritating, but at least someone was talking to me. I took a sip of my gin and felt its sting deep in my sinuses. I sneezed. “Well,” I said, “in principle, I see what you mean. But I’m very happy here.”

  “Yes, that’s because you’re young. You’re grateful to be here. And that’s fine! That’s exactly as it should be. For now. If you’re smart, though, you’ll see it as a stepping-stone, not a destination.”

  My eyes watered from the impact of my drink. “Who are you? Are you always this impertinent?”

  She did not answer my second question. She introduced herself as Penelope Goodwin. “I’ll let you call me Poppy if you tell me your name.”

  “I don’t care what you let me call you, but I’m Percy,” I told her. “Percy Darling.”

  She looked at me, wide-eyed for a moment, as if I’d shocked her. I braced myself for some predictably dog-eared jest about my surname. “Percy Darling,” she said, “are you from Vigil Harbor?”

  I’d begun to find her less attractive than strange. I glanced about, to see if any of my new coworkers stood nearby, anyone to rescue me from this peculiar interrogation. “Where’s that?”

  “Darling,” she said, “is an old name in Vigil Harbor. You’ve never been to Vigil Harbor, up near Gloucester?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  She looked skeptical. “Very old, very romantic. That’s where my father’s family landed. A place for seduction, my mother says. So. The very first lighthouse keeper was Ezekiel Darling. We’re probably distant cousins.” She took my drink out of my hand and set it on top of the bookcase. “You’re not enjoying this—the drink or the party. Come to my house for something better than Chaucer and pretzels.” She started away from me but stopped when she sensed I wasn’t following.

  “Come on, cousin. I live next door. You can always change your mind and come back. I’m taking care of my parents’ house. Let’s go make ourselves some supper, what do you think of that?”

  “Do you even know the Smithsons?” I said as we crossed our host’s backyard and passed through a hedge. “Did you simply barge in?”

  “I used to babysit for their kids. The kids grew up, so now I take care of their plants and their dog. They invite me to everything. They think I’m lonely.”

  Why she had approached me in that crowd of strangers, I did not ask for months. I did not want to press my luck. When I finally did, she told me that she had been attracted first by the color of my shirt (“It was such a celestial blue, I mean like actual sky”) and then by the earnest look on my face as I pretended to scrutinize those books.

  “My heart went out to you,” she said, “for being so over your head. And then I found out you were a Darling. And you are.”

  We married the next year. We were twenty-four years old.

  When I returned from my run, I saw that Robert and Arturo were up in the tree, straddling limbs on opposite sides of the trunk, while Ira was—with the help of Celestino—handing up a long board. Robert and Ira were bare-chested. It was early October, yet the heat had returned for what was sure to be the last bold parry of summer.

  I stopped at the tree. “Hello, young craftsmen,” I said, striving not to sound winded. “Please do take care not to kill yourselves.”

  “Granddad,” said Robert, “this part is a cinch. And hey—Mrs. Connaughton’s loaned us the help of this very able-bodied guy.”

  Celestino nodded at me, his smile aloof or shy, I couldn’t tell which.

  “Now let me get this right,” I said. “I thought the idea was that the precocious little architects of the—the Nightshades? the Toadstools?—were to build this masterpiece.”

  “We build the platforms, ladders, and guardrails, the basic structure,” said Ira, “and then we bring the kids in to do the fun stuff. The embellishments. The interior details. They’re like the decorators.”

  “Ah! Well, carry on.” As if my permission were the least bit germane.

  I struggled with the recurrent sensation I’d been having for over a month, that I was not the lord of the manor here but, rather, a favored guest at an eccentric country estate where children called the shots. A sort of toffee-coated Lord of the Flies. If Julie Andrews or Suzanne Pleshette had appeared on the lawn and broken into song, it wouldn’t have fazed me one bit.

  Ordinarily, I got in my postmarathon swim before the kiddies’ first recess, but that day, my late start meant that—unless I wanted to run the gauntlet of their impish stares on my way to the pond—I had to wait until after lunch, after “first dismissal.” Most of the children were picked up, swallowed by the maws of their parents’ lumbering minivans, at twelve-thirty, though a small group stayed on for Lunch Bunch, a nosh-and-nap session that lasted another hour. And then, except for the teachers who lingered to clean up the day’s bedlam, I had the place to myself.

  I paid bills in my study, pausing to watch Robert and his crew balance and hoist boards, hammering in stereo. That poor tree. I could feel its anguished gaze through the window: its arboreal Et tu, Brute? I sighed. Poppy had once called herself my leavener; she had known how to tease me out of my possessive, pessimistic anxieties. If she had been there beside me, she would have said, “Percy, it’s a tree. A divine majesty of a tree, but your grandson knows just what he’s doing. And please think of the delight he is building with that hammer. Think of it!”

  The years I spent with Poppy amount to less than half—even closer to a third—of the time I have known our daughters, and yet the truth is that Poppy abides with me still, inside my head, speaking to me, far more than do Trudy or Clover. If I had a nickel for all the times I have uttered, alone with myself, “Oh, Poppy”—in sorrow, in exasperation, in pleasure or relief or physical pain—I would have amassed a bank balance large enough to buy the entire town of Matlock and to rule the place as I damn well pleased, from firing the idiotically plugged-in librarian to knocking down the hideous addition on the Harris Homestead and replanting Jonathan Newcomb’s three-acre turfiganza with nothing but milkweed. Ah, but that was not to be my destiny. Far from it.

  I waited until the last civilian tank had slid past the window. I grabbed a towel from the mudroom and set off for the pond. Passing the barn, I could hear Ira as he led the Lunch Bunch in a song comparing love to a magic penny. He played the guitar and sang the sappy lyrics without the slightest inhibition. Actually, he had a rather nice singing voice, and I chastised myself for regarding his choice of employment as any more odd, in these times, than mine had been in a stodgier era. As I had done for my entire working life, he was holding his own in a profession ruled by women. Good for him, I thought as I backstroked my way across the pond, from under one shore’s canopy of yellow leaves across the open stretch of sky to another.

  You give the magic penny away and, poof, y
ou possess another, and another and another and another. Lend it, spend it, and you’ll have so many, they’ll roll all over the floor! Whether she’d been sincere or not, Mistress Lorelei had a point about the children’s voices. They had a tranquilizing, even mesmerizing effect. “Oh, Poppy,” I said for the five trillion ninety-ninth time.

  At last I pulled myself from the water, wading through the soft sandy mud. I wasn’t squeamish about the mud, as most people were; I loved the feel of it between my toes. Our neighbors had always thought us vaguely mad to swim in the pond—someone had seen a snapping turtle more than once—but Poppy and I scoffed at their timidity. For years, until it finally rotted, I put out a raft from May to October. Perhaps, I thought idly that day, I could bribe Robert into building a replacement.

  I wrapped the towel around my shoulders and walked up to the house, to the outdoor shower. Members of the Lunch Bunch were making their exit, receiving their hugs and kisses, relinquishing their tiny satchels.

  I stayed in the shower a long time, staring up at the sky through the trees. I would swim at least through the end of the month, but this would be one of the last balmy days of no goosebumps, no gasps from the cold air against my wet skin. The morning paper decreed a sharp downturn in the temperature that night. Very soon, for a brief time, the water would be warmer than the air.

  I came out onto the pathway singing snatches of the magic penny song. I was still in my swimsuit, toweling my hair, when I practically collided with a mother leading her child by the hand.

  “Greetings!” I barked in sudden alarm.

  “I’m sorry!” said the mother.

  Startled speechless, we faced each other, six inches apart. I glanced at the boy to be sure I hadn’t knocked him down. He stepped off the path, scowling at me. When I focused on the mother, she was staring at my midsection. She actually laughed.