by Julia Glass
Their eyes, like mine, were red, but they were composed. “Hi, Daddy,” said Clover. She sounded years younger than the teenage daughter who’d begun to speak to me that summer with thinly veiled condescension.
I uttered the only word my mouth could form. “Daughters.” This word meant everything to me in that moment: sun, moon, stars, blood, water (oh curse the water!), meat, potatoes, wine, shoes, books, the floor beneath my feet, the roof above my head.
I moved the tastelessly magnificent effusion of flowers from the table to a counter. I stared bleakly out the windows toward the pond. I knew that I needed to speak, to be reassuring, loving, protective, but no words came to my aid.
Clover made me a bowl of Cheerios. She sliced strawberries on top, slicing them the way her mother had taught her, between her hands with a small sharp knife. “You have to eat something, Daddy,” she said. “Or you’ll faint in the church.”
I did as she asked. I sat at the table, a slovenly mess, not caring if milk dribbled on my robe. The slate floor felt like ice beneath my feet. “This is going to be terrible,” I said at last.
“I know,” said Clover.
“Do you really want to go to Aunt Helena’s after? You don’t have to.”
“I think I do. I think we both do.” I could see, and yet another part of my heart began to crumble, that Clover was trying on the voice and manner of a little mother.
I looked at Trudy, who hadn’t spoken. “How about you, sweetie?”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice dull.
“You want to go?”
“Yeah. I’ll go.” She stared into her empty bowl. The room became silent again.
I finished my cereal. Clover cleared away the bowl. Without guidance, she had made me coffee, too—ghastly, muddy coffee, but I was profoundly grateful.
Then Trudy stood up from the table and walked across the room. Beneath a very short black skirt, she wore fishnet stockings. They, too, were black, but they startled me.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “I haven’t seen those stockings before.”
“They’re Clover’s.” She stood facing me, her arms stiff at her sides. She had my fine, sand-colored hair, my large forehead and ears. Anyone would look at her features and suspect, without having met me, that she was a girl who resembled her father.
“I don’t know if fishnets are the wisest choice for a funeral, sweetie.” Why did I say this? What did I know? Why should I care?
“Well, maybe Mom didn’t make the wisest choice, either,” she said.
Clover stood by the kitchen sink, staring at each of us in turn.
“Oh Trudy, honey, your mother didn’t choose to die. It was a terrible, terrible accident. Is that what you think, that she killed herself?”
“No,” she said. “Of course I don’t think that. I think she was totally drunk after your party where everybody got into that big stupid argument. She was drunk and she went swimming. Is that smart? What do you think?”
Both of my daughters seemed to have changed overnight, their behavior bewildering, alarming, dismaying. I felt as if I were having one of those dreams in which your most tender friends reprimand you or long-vanished traitors show up on your doorstep to tell you how wrong they were, how they want your love after all these years. None of it feels right or good. The world is widdershins.
“Daughters,” I said for the second time that morning. I held out my arms. “I love you both like nothing else under the sun. Let’s say whatever we want to say to one another, whatever we need to say, if that’s what it takes to hold ourselves together.”
Clover came over and hugged me. Trudy went upstairs. For the next several days, I was afraid to be alone with my younger daughter. I knew she had not forgotten the night of her mother’s death, her certainty that someone outside had been calling. And yet I could never find the courage, despite what I’d told the girls about speaking from our hearts, to mention that night to Trudy. That she had been lying awake, listening to a group of adults attack one another like petulant children, made me doubly ashamed. She never mentioned it, either.
After Trudy went upstairs that morning, after Clover went back to putting bowls and plates in the dishwasher, the phone rang. For the first time in days, I answered.
It was the secretary in the office of Poppy’s gynecologist, calling to confirm Clover’s appointment the following day.
“No,” I said, “she will not be there.… No, there’s no need to reschedule. Thank you.” I hung up.
Clover turned from the sink. “What was that?”
“It’s unimportant,” I said. A lie, but also the truth. Poppy’s death did for Clover what nothing else could have accomplished so well. It took the allure out of boys and sex—out of everything—for many months to come. Years later, she would make up for that loss, but in the short run, Clover lived as if someone had, after all, locked her up in a tower.
A few nights after my visit to Packard, Sarah and Rico came over for dinner. I promised burgers far superior to those at Mama Jo’s. Sarah arrived with a pie for dessert and a DVD for Rico to watch.
We ate in the kitchen, and then I set Rico up with his movie—starring an animated sponge (good Lord)—in Poppy’s dressing room. In the living room, I lit a fire. This time it was Sarah who did not drink. So when she flirted with me, I knew it had to be deliberate, and I was unnerved. She sat next to me on the couch, rather than in the wing chair by the hearth.
“I suppose this is our chance for grown-up conversation,” I said.
“It’s a place to start.” One of Sarah’s knees touched one of mine.
This agitated me so much that I got up, poked at the fire, then took the wing chair myself. We talked about the candidates, the upcoming primaries, and we talked about her stained glass, how she’d arrived at this medium through sculpture.
During a pause, she looked around the room. (I hoped the dust wouldn’t show in the firelight.) Her eyes came to rest on the pastel portrait of Poppy that sits on top of a bookcase. It shows her, full figure in black leotard and red tights, arms raised to form a steeple, fingertips touching. It’s not terribly good, but it was done by Helena, who took a few art classes at a nearby museum.
“Is that your wife?”
“Yes.”
Before I could fret much about what I’d say next, Sarah said, “I know about how she died. How awful.”
“Does Clover tell everyone?” Irrationally, I felt angry.
“Everyone seems to know anyway.”
“One of the town’s sordid evergreens.”
“I wouldn’t say that. Apparently everyone loved her. What I heard is that you’re not the only one who still misses her.”
What could I say to this? Was it a test to see just how much I did still miss her? Finally, I said, “I’m sure you don’t intend to, but you make it sound as if there’s a competition.”
Sarah frowned.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m sorry, too. For you and your daughters.”
“Oh, we’ve done all right, despite their being raised by me. They taught me that you don’t pack sandwiches with mayonnaise in a brown-bag lunch. That Charlie Rose is better than Ted Koppel, because of the guests, not the hair. And that girls are smarter than boys. About everything. I taught them that you can survive having your sheets changed once a month or less. And that being able to drive a stick shift is not just useful but cool.”
Sarah did me the courtesy of laughing. I told her all about Trudy, how she’d been a moody, secretive teenager yet a brilliant, driven student. I bragged about her recent promotion. I did not tell her Clover’s history.
When she and Rico left—at eight-thirty, because it was a school night—Sarah kissed me on the cheek, but she held her lips there for several seconds.
I stayed up well past midnight. I felt as if my breathing wouldn’t slow down enough for me to sleep. I spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror over my bathroom sink, in the harshest light. I wasn’t ugly, not yet.
I had a full head of silverish hair; my complexion hadn’t burst into a doily of varicose veins. Since starting my retirement fitness program, I had lost ten pounds. I fancied that strangers might now describe me as solid rather than portly. My shoulders were broad, my posture decent. Perhaps I looked young for my age? At my last checkup, Dr. Fields had joked that I looked much better in person than on paper.… But really.
What was it, after all these years of casual, unforced monkery, that made me want to take this woman into my arms, to see her naked—no, to be naked with her? Had I become, at last, the quintessential dirty old man? Was I deluded, pathetic, about to fall off a precipice of mortification? My earlier confidence in her attraction to me began to look as absurd as it was. I went to bed a self-appointed fool.
Yet the next day she called and asked if I would like to accompany her and Rico into Boston the following weekend, spend an afternoon at the Fine Arts Museum. We drove together in her car, listening to a tape of Peter, Paul and Mary that Rico loved. Was this nothing but children’s music now, the songs that were sung in Cambridge coffee shops when I had courted Poppy, songs meant to rouse a rabble? Had Pete Seeger evolved into a banjo-plinking Captain Kangaroo?
At the museum, when we entered the galleries devoted to antiquities, Sarah let Rico run farther ahead of us than I would have allowed.
“He knows this place by heart. And he won’t go far,” she said. “He even knows some of the guards by name.”
In ancient Egypt, where the lighting was grim and the mummies held Rico’s young, ghoulish attention, Sarah took my hand. I gasped so loudly that a nearby stranger glanced at me, concerned. She squeezed my hand harder.
“Are you all right?” she whispered.
“I would describe myself,” I said, after the stranger turned away, “as febrile with apprehension. No, anticipation.”
She positioned herself in front of me, so that she could look me in the face. “Me too.”
“Tell me what this writing says!” called Rico, sparing me from cardiac arrest. We gathered around an elaborately graffiti’d mummy while Sarah read the captions aloud.
In the car, driving back, it was all I could do not to take her hand between the seats. We talked about Elves & Fairies, soliciting Rico’s opinions on the tree house, Mr. Ira, the sing-alongs. He wasn’t the most talkative child (how Clover could fill the world with words at that age!), but he described the tree-house furnishings in almost scholarly detail.
When we reached Matlock, Sarah dropped me off without coming into the house. I was exhausted, yet equally disappointed to see her drive away.
I called her that night, when I felt sure Rico would be in bed.
“I’m so glad to hear your voice,” she said. “I’m sorry we left you off like that. I didn’t trust myself.”
“I’m no scoundrel.”
“I can’t say the same for myself,” said Sarah. She told me that she had a cousin who lived in Ledgely and sometimes helped out with Rico; he’d take the boy for an overnight visit almost any weekend.
“Weekend?” I groaned.
“I’m afraid so. And I have a lot of work right now. Which is good.” She laughed. “Anticipation. Remember?”
Somehow, I made it across the desert that stretched toward Friday. And then she was there, on my front porch, wearing a long blue dress, carrying a bottle of wine. She wasn’t inside my house ten minutes before we fumbled our way upstairs, already enmeshed. I had made the bed up with excruciating care. I had swept and dusted for the first time in weeks, instigating a fit of sneezing. I had neatened the stacks of books on the window seat. Yet none of this order mattered in the least.
As we became gradually naked, under the covers, in the mercifully early dark of late October, I felt Sarah’s strength, so surprising, so oddly comforting, as we solved the urgent puzzle of fitting ourselves together for the very first time. I forced myself to remain silent, not to make the pathetic excuses that older men do in movies with scenes like this one; she would understand or she wouldn’t. Yet I was trembling, too. I could feel exactly how my body had aged since it had last engaged in a naked embrace. I could feel the appalling looseness of my flesh, from my throat to my thighs.
I opened my eyes at one point, unable to believe that Sarah felt such ardor. Sensing my hesitation, she opened her eyes as well. “I know what you’re thinking,” she whispered. “And you’re dead wrong.” She did not, thank heaven, tell me that I was handsome or virile or sexy. She just closed her eyes again and wrapped herself more tightly around me.
In the middle of the night, I woke abruptly at the sound of the toilet flushing. Terrified, I sat up and must have cried out. Framed in the bathroom door, in the instant before the light snapped off, I saw the silhouette of a woman.
“It’s me,” said the silhouette. I remembered who she was only when she sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on my shoulder. She said in a rough, sleepy voice, “Are you hungry? We never had dinner.” She offered to make us grilled cheese sandwiches or a salad or French toast: whatever I had on hand. I remembered the preparations I’d made for our dinner, the food still waiting on the kitchen counter.
“Steaks?” I said.
“Absolutely anything,” said Sarah.
After dressing, making dinner, eating it together at the kitchen table, we returned to bed. Naked again, this time I became aware of her body more than mine. She was indisputably younger, but I felt, too, how much older she was than Poppy had been when we last shared this bed. I did not know it yet, but already that night my physical memories of Poppy—her fingers, breasts, tongue, and feet; her frazzled hair against my face—had begun to fade. Perhaps, I realized later, I stopped guarding them so closely.
In the beginning, Sarah was firm about keeping Rico ignorant of our involvement. This meant that we made love at the oddest of times: mostly in the morning, on Mondays and Wednesdays, when she did not have to report at TGO. After she dropped Rico off at the barn, she would park out on the street, walk through my front door, and head upstairs. I would be waiting, having showered after an early run.
I don’t know why it felt risky and illicit, but I worried that someone would notice the change in my running schedule or the frequent loitering of Sarah’s car on the street. We did not speak, at first, of whether we cared if the adults around us knew we were lovers. We were doing nothing “wrong,” were we?
I knew that Poppy would have liked Sarah, but did this matter? Did I feel, against all logic, an adulterer’s guilt? Elsewhere in my addled psyche, I wondered just how much of a fool I’d been to spend the prime decades of my life so blandly as a monogamist and then a monk in an era of merrily fulfilled concupiscence. Poppy would have been amused to see me loosening up just as the rest of the world clamped down. “Neither a leader nor a follower be, sometimes I think that’s your motto,” she teased me once.
One evening in early November, as I read alone at the kitchen table, my dinner plate pushed aside, I was startled by the sound of my front door opening. Certain it must be Sarah, I closed my book and stood, a wide smile on my face.
But it was Clover who entered the room. Since the start of school, I rarely saw her after she finished her afternoon duties. Sometimes I would ask her to stay for supper, or she would invite me out, but ordinarily she went home to her apartment. Now she stood in the kitchen, looking decidedly unhappy.
So she had found out. Could she have the nerve to be distressed about my relationship with Sarah? (Was she jealous?) In haste, I began to cobble together my defense and was about to preempt her when she sat down at the table, across from me, and said, “Daddy, I need your help.”
I closed my book. I waited.
“Daddy,” she said, “I want them back. Filo and Lee. I need to ask if you’ll help me hire a really, really good lawyer.”
I saw her repressing the tears. I thought of her breakdown, the tornado of emotions it had unleashed. “Sweetheart,” I said, “is this the best time to think about that? I know you feel well est
ablished here now, but it’s only been a few months since you started this new enterprise. And it’s not as if …” I fought my desire to protect her from the truth. I spoke softly. “Todd’s a good father to them, and New York is the home they know best.”
“Daddy,” she said, “Todd’s found someone new. He said she loves the children. She loves my children. My children! And she … She.” Now the tears fell.
Into my mind came the duplicitous thought that Todd, after all he’d been through with Clover, would have made a wise choice in her replacement. Clover had no idea how often Todd and I had spoken in the first weeks after she’d fled. I liked Todd, and I was certain that if he said this woman cared for Filo and Lee, it was true. I was also certain that Clover hadn’t a prayer of winning a renewed battle for custody. I thought of the lawyers I knew best—all retired.
That I did not answer her at once was cruel, however unintentionally. What remained of her composure collapsed. She began to sob. “Daddy, it’s a woman.”
Would his newly chosen mate have been a polar bear? A sailboat? All I could say was “Yes, well …”
“Oh Daddy, there’s so much I didn’t tell you. I’m sorry. You must think I’m such a loser.” I could barely make out her words.
I got up and went to her at once. “When you need my help, daughter, that’s what I’m here for.”
Oh, Poppy.
5
So what do you think, everybody? Is this the coolest thing or what?” Ira stood, along with his assistant, Heidi, and ten four-year-olds, at the foot of the beech tree. They stared up into its branches, marveling at the wide structure that looked like a ship lodged snugly beneath a canopy of glistening burgundy leaves. Ira marveled, too, at how the tree appeared both gracious and omnipotent in the way it held the tree house so securely. Though he was being given the credit for this achievement, he wondered now how he’d ever believed it would actually, practically come into existence. He was a poor carpenter at best, and he’d copied his drawings from books. Robert’s manual ingenuity and Celestino’s brawn: those were the secret, essential keys to Ira’s success, and they had been little more than serendipity. What would have happened if that grandson hadn’t shown up the day Ira stood by the tree, gazing into the branches with total What now? bewilderment?