by Sue Miller
Karen was there, fully dressed, mirabile dictu, and with shoes on her feet, even if they were some kind of sneaker, blue with shimmery streaks. Annie had asked Sarah to keep an eye on her, which must have included her going over there ahead of time for a wardrobe check; and Annie saw Sarah or Lucas or Frieda standing next to her every now and then through the evening, one or another of them talking with her, guiding her this way or that with a hand at her elbow.
At some point Annie looked across the room and saw the old woman standing in front of the open refrigerator like someone assessing its contents for leftovers, and she started to go over to try to distract her. But one of the students appeared next to her then, and gently guided her to the table, where she seemed instantly occupied with the food.
“How Graham would have loved this!” someone said, and Annie agreed.
“I can imagine him here, the life of the party, as usual.” Yes, she said.
“This is so wonderful. The only thing missing is Graham.”
Oh, I know, Annie said. So true, she answered. It wasn’t easy, but it wasn’t as hard as all the earlier commiseration had been. It made her glad that she’d asked for the delay, the extra months to prepare herself for this night.
And gradually it turned into the party Graham had wanted anyway—really, just a party. She stepped out of the house later in the evening, looking back up at the soft flickering candlelight in the windows, and listening for a moment to the din, satisfied with it, and also saddened by it. Graham would have loved it.
They ran out of wine, and she had asked one of the student helpers to get out a case of the cheaper white that Graham had always kept on hand in the pantry refrigerator. (“If we’re that drunk, we’d just be wasting the good stuff.”) She had already begun to say goodbye to the early departures. Karen had disappeared, and Sarah was moving around more freely, more energetically, perhaps as a result. The student helpers were everywhere too, replenishing the serving dishes, pouring wine, picking up the dishes and glasses left here and there.
Annie went outside again, to cool off this time. There were perhaps ten people on the back patio by now, and Annie lingered out there, talking to Remi Caldwell from next door about e-books, a pleasant, predictable discussion. He was all for them, Annie against—on Graham’s behalf as well as her own. Several people came to say goodbye to her during this conversation, which meant the discussion meandered as they jumped in briefly—e-books, yes. But also Amazon, self-publishing—the familiar gamut, the familiar positions. They also touched on the housing crisis, the impossibility of McCain’s choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. Obama’s chances. Felicity Rogers said that if he won, she would never stop being terrified that he’d be assassinated, that it was almost enough to make her hope he wouldn’t win. The discussion turned to 1968, the terrible wave of assassinations and the Democratic convention in Chicago.
When Annie came back inside, needing to use the bathroom, she saw that there were fewer people in here than outside, maybe only seven or eight of them left, mostly sitting down now in the living room, lost in earnest discussion, probably of the kind she’d just been having. Or maybe just deeply absorbing gossip. Lucas and Jeanne were among them. Annie had noticed earlier that Jeanne was one of the few people who looked as though they’d thought about anything like mourning apparel—in her case, a black silk suit that made her more formidably beautiful than ever. Now she was sitting with her bare feet tucked under her on the sofa. She waved to Annie.
Annie went through the kitchen area, where the student help was cleaning up—bagging trash, washing dishes—and tried the handle on the lavatory in the back hallway.
Locked. Someone called out something from within, she couldn’t hear what because of the kitchen clatter, but she decided not to wait in any case. She went up the back stairs, through the bedroom, to the bathroom on the second floor.
She’d stood up well, Annie thought, lifting her face to the mirror as she washed her hands. She’d had a sense of this evening as her own version of a tribute to Graham, the eulogy in the form of food and wine, in the form of the kind of party he had always loved. Now she was glad that it seemed to have worked, and that in many ways—in many of the old ways—even she had had a good time. She knew that the silence after everyone left, the solitude—especially after Sarah went back to San Francisco—that would be hard. But perhaps she’d sleep tonight. She was tired enough. She dried her hands and ran a comb through her hair. She put on fresh lipstick and came out of the bathroom, out into the hallway by the front stairs.
And was stopped.
Stopped by a noise from the front room, Graham’s study.
It was weeping, she recognized after a few seconds of mystification: that irregular, shuddering intake of breath that accompanies silent weeping.
Sarah, she thought instantly. Annie hadn’t seen her in a while downstairs. Of course, Annie had been outside, in back. But she didn’t think Sarah had been in the living room either.
It must be Sarah, then, come to sit by herself in Graham’s study. Annie had come in here several times herself in the last weeks, come in to mourn for Graham, come in and thought, what was she ever to do with this room? It was his. If he was anywhere, he was here.
And of course, he was nowhere, so it was from here he was most absent.
She went to the doorway, thinking she would hold her daughter, comfort her, feeling a rush of love for Sarah that it seemed their closeness after Graham’s death had intensified.
The light was on in the hall behind her; it let her see into the room. There was a figure in Graham’s chair, resting her head on her arms, which were set on his desk. The party noise swelled downstairs, laughter, a woman’s sharp cry of delight.
“Sarah?” she said, though she knew in the second before she spoke that it wasn’t Sarah. This figure was smaller and too feminine—too female.
The woman sat up quickly and turned toward the open doorway, her face lifted to Annie, ravaged by grief, sorrow, and then quickly something else. Guilt. Apology.
It was Rosemary. Rosemary Gregory.
Annie had a moment of confusion, and then of sudden clarity. Followed immediately by a powerful sense of her own stupidity, her own unwillingness to have looked, to have seen.
Rosemary. Of course, it was Rosemary.
21
“Did you know? About Graham’s . . . lover?”
She’d waited until nine in the morning to call Frieda and ask if she could come over there, to Frieda’s place. She didn’t want to see Edith, Edith who was too kind, too good. She wanted Frieda. She wanted someone else Graham had betrayed. She wanted someone who would be angry with her. For her.
Frieda’s face changed. She didn’t speak for a moment. She took her glasses off and polished them—carefully, it seemed—with the hem of her shirt, a faded polo. She put them back on. Then she said, very softly, “Yes. I did.”
“How?” Annie couldn’t disguise her shock. “How did you know?”
“He told me.”
“He told you!” Annie laughed, a sharp, ugly bark. She felt doubly betrayed. Graham, and now Frieda too.
Frieda, who had known and not said anything. Who had held on to this knowledge, this secret with Graham. Somehow, especially after the toast last night, after their embrace, this seemed unbearable, this . . . betrayal.
“God!” Annie said. “I just can’t stand this.”
Frieda nodded. She seemed ashamed somehow, Annie thought. Embarrassed.
Well, she ought to.
(“Perhaps you should wash up,” she’d said stiffly to Rosemary. “I think the bathroom is free.”
A stupid, stupid thing to say, when what she meant was that Rosemary should get out, get the fuck out of Graham’s room.
“Oh,” Rosemary had said. Her breathing was audible and ragged. “Sure,” she said, in a small, congested voice, getting up, not looking at Annie as she stumbled past her toward the bathroom.
Annie had quickly shut the door to Grah
am’s room; and then stood there stupidly in the hall with her hand still on the doorknob. Stood there, as unsure of what to do next as she was when Graham’s ashes had arrived. Thinking about this later, she had smiled bitterly. Both moments marking the end of something, of course.)
“But how did you find out?” Frieda asked her now.
“What difference does that make?”
“It doesn’t. It doesn’t, of course. I . . .” Frieda lifted her shoulders.
“I just know it,” Annie said. “She was . . . she was in Graham’s room, at the end of the party. When I went upstairs. She was crying.” Annie closed her eyes for a moment.
When she opened them, she looked at Frieda, who was frowning back at her. Her mouth was slightly open. She looked puzzled. Her glasses seemed just as smudged as before she’d polished them.
“Don’t you sometimes just know things?” she asked Frieda.
“I suppose,” Frieda said, after a few seconds had passed. Then, after a longer silence, she said, “But . . . this is the party last night you’re talking about?”
Annie stared at her for a moment. “Yeah?” she said. What was Frieda’s point?
“Oh,” Frieda said. “I guess . . . uh. I guess I was just confused.”
“Huh!” Annie said. They sat there, not looking at each other.
(Lucas and Jeanne had still been there, at Frieda’s, when Annie arrived, though they said they were just leaving, that they needed to get back. “I don’t mean to drive you away,” Annie had said.
“You’re not,” Jeanne said.
“Are you sure?”
“No, no, no, no,” Jeanne said. “Not at all. We really do need to get back. We’re supposed to turn the car in this afternoon.”
Lucas said, “And you and Frieda need some time together, I’m sure. No, it’s fine.”
So there’d been the politeness there too. Annie was sick of it. Sick of making nice.)
Frieda said, “If I can just say . . .”
“Say away. It won’t make any difference to me.”
Frieda took a deep breath. “It’s just, I don’t think it mattered much to him, in some way.”
Annie snorted.
“No,” Frieda said. “No, what I mean is that I wish I had understood that when . . . even when he and I were together. Because it was true then too, I think. That it didn’t really matter.”
“Then why do it?” Annie said furiously. “Why take the risk of . . . doing such damage. To you? To me? Of getting caught?”
Frieda was silent for a long time. “I don’t know. Of course I don’t know. But the way I saw it . . . I’ve come to see it, I guess, as part of his . . . Grahamness. Just his appetite, for everything.”
“So you forgive him. How generous.”
“Annie,” she said reproachfully. Her plain face was anguished.
(When she heard Rosemary starting to come out of the bathroom, her instinct was to hide. Almost frantically, she opened the door to the study and went in, closing it quietly, quickly behind her. She heard Rosemary go downstairs, and her body relaxed. She stood there for maybe a minute, her thoughts racing. Then, almost breathless, she stepped across the room and sat in Graham’s chair. Her legs were trembling.
It was dark in there with the door closed, but the window was open and she could hear music drifting up from below, music she’d chosen for the party—jazz, one of Graham’s favorites: Cootie Williams, his horn rising clearly every now and then. She could hear voices outside now, too.
Sarah, it was. Sarah on the porch saying good night to someone, her voice audible, deep and clear. The other voice was just a low murmuring in response.
Sarah. She could ask her to handle the rest of the party. Sarah could explain her absence: poor Annie, poor grief-stricken Annie.
She went to the window, slid the screen up, and leaned out. “Sarah,” she called, and after a moment Sarah appeared in the walk, looking around. Annie called again, and Sarah looked up.
“I need you up here,” she said.)
“I hate him,” she said now to Frieda.
“That’s not true. That’s the problem. The problem is you don’t hate him. You don’t.” Frieda’s voice was gentle, as though Annie were a child she were comforting.
“No, you’re right. I don’t. I just want him back.”
“Of course that’s it.”
“Then I could hate him. I could hit him, anyway.”
They were both silent for a long moment. Frieda looked exhausted. “For what it’s worth,” she said quietly, “he loved you. He loved you very much. You do know that, don’t you?” Annie thought suddenly of John, of what he had said to her the night after Graham died. Wasn’t it exactly this? That she should remember that Graham had loved her? No matter what else happened? Or maybe, no matter what she heard?
Had he been referring to this, to Rosemary?
Did he know too?
“Did everyone know?” she asked Frieda.
“I . . . I don’t think so.” Frieda shook her head. “No, no, they didn’t.”
She leaned forward now and opened her hands out toward Annie, the gesture a bit like the one Annie had made to her in thanks for her toast at Graham’s party. “His marriage to you meant everything to him.”
Annie laughed again, a sad little noise. “Well, maybe not quite everything,” she said.
After a moment she blurted, “I just don’t know what to do with all these feelings.” She raised her hands helplessly. “I should be able to just grieve, shouldn’t I? I should be able to have that.” This is what she had felt last night, sitting up late in Graham’s study after everyone had gone home, after she’d heard Sarah go to bed. That this shouldn’t be happening now. Not yet. Not yet.
Not yet, because in those long days and weeks after his death, she had been feeling her grief as her deepest connection to Graham. While she mourned him, while she felt as fragile as she did, he was still with her, in some sense. His death had seemed to her even to draw them closer—maybe because she was so frightened of life without him, maybe because she barely wanted to go on. In any case, she had felt completely engaged with him. He was never not in her thoughts, it seemed.
Now this insult—she supposed that’s what she felt at some basic, shabby level: insulted—this insult separated her from Graham more than his death had. Rage instead of sorrow. Rage, and then jealousy.
What stage of grief would this be, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross? The wish to kill, to punish, the already dead person?
In the dark of Graham’s room, in the silence of the house after everyone had left the party, she had remembered a moment at the other party, the party at the bookstore where they’d met all those years ago. The moment when he leaned over her, and she felt taken in.
Now she understood that differently, that verb, that preposition. She felt taken in differently.
She felt robbed, cheated.
“You might be just as confused if he were still alive,” Frieda said.
Her voice sounded almost tearful to Annie. But she wasn’t interested in Frieda’s sorrow now. “At least I could hit him really hard then,” she said.
“Well, that,” Frieda said. She looked almost tearful too, and suddenly smaller to Annie. Weak.
“But maybe he would have helped you with your anger,” Frieda said. “Your sorrow.” Her open face, even plainer now in her anguish, was pleading. “Maybe you would even have had angry sex as a way of getting back together. Or maybe you would have cried together.”
Annie had a sudden vision then of Frieda and Graham crying together at the end of their marriage. Hadn’t Frieda told her once that they did? That they held each other and wept?
She could imagine too his crying with her, she could imagine crying with him—for who he was, for what he’d done. Their holding each other in terrible consolation for both their losses.
It’s what she wanted, suddenly—him, holding her, him with her—and it made her weep.
Frieda crossed the room and knel
t in front of her, her arms reaching up, encircling Annie’s waist. Annie let her. She let her, but some unyielding part of her felt separated from Frieda, angry and unconsoled.
22
Jeanne said, “What could they be talking about, do you think, your two mothers?”
They were on the Mass Pike going west, home to New York. Lucas looked over at her. She had tilted the seat of the rental car partway back, and was turned slightly to him, resting almost on her side. Her hands lay still on her belly, which was beginning to show a little, though over the last few days no one except Sarah had seemed to notice, preoccupied as they all were. He loved her hands, which were long and smooth and elegant, the nails unpolished but beautifully shaped. He loved her pregnant belly, the way it pulled her abdomen lower, the way it had already loosened and softened her body. He reached over to set his hand, too, on the slight curve.
“My father, would be my guess,” he said.
“Yes?” Her eyebrows arched higher. “They would talk about him together, you think?”
Lucas shrugged and put his hand back on the steering wheel. “They’re friends,” he said.
“Even so,” Jeanne said. She had always thought it was strange, Frieda and Annie’s relationship. Not so much that Annie was kind to Frieda—that, she understood. Annie could afford such generosity. But for big, homely Frieda to be kind to Annie, her pretty successor—that, she’d told Lucas, she didn’t comprehend.
“They both loved him,” he said now. “They’re both grieving. Who better to talk to?”
“I should think it would make it harder. It means they are both thinking of the same things. The things he did with both of them.” She stretched, and was quiet for a minute or two. “I wouldn’t care to share my memories of you with someone who had the same memories.”
“No one does.”
“No one wishes to share?”