The Lake Shore Limited

by Sue Miller

  As soon as she stopped, he sat down. He sat down in a way that suggested he would never get up, a kind of grateful and rubbery collapse. After a moment, when she didn’t pull him up, he lay down on the sidewalk and put his head on his enormous paws.

  She squatted by him and patted his head, stroked the softly curling fur of his body. His tail slapped the sidewalk. He turned on his side and grabbed at her hand with his mouth, licking, chewing.

  “Not allowed, buddy,” she said. She clamped his muzzle shut with one hand and, with the other, scratched his belly, stroked him for a long time, talking to him, sometimes crying for a minute or two. She had to use the edge of her sweater—why not?—to wipe her eyes, her runny nose. She crouched there until her legs started to feel numb. When she stopped and stood up, he sat up too, watching her face, his tail swinging in wild swoops, wanting more.

  She started back north, toward home, and he pranced beside her for a few blocks, then slowed, then wanted to stop again.

  She let him. She stood by him while he rested for a few minutes, and then she squatted and patted him again. In this way, Billy crying and petting him, Reuben resting, they retraced their steps slowly back to the house, Gus’s house.

  The sky was lightening when they sat on the top step of the porch. Reuben lay down and instantly slept. Billy was exhausted, too, she realized. She leaned against the post at the top of the stairs. It was cool against her skin. The flesh of her arms under her hands felt chilly. She thought of Gus in the plane again. She stopped herself. Somewhere a rooster crowed. Across the street, she could make out the big pink plastic flowers stuck into the earth of the front yard by the old woman who lived on the ground floor. So much for the bother of gardening.

  She thought of her downstairs neighbor, how he might come out and find her. What would she say? She would tell him about Gus. She would have to. They’d known each other a long time. He owned the building and two others on the block. He knew all his tenants, but he especially liked Gus. He would be shocked and horrified. She would be, too, all over again. She would be, because she was, shocked and horrified.

  But a part of it—a part of her, a part of everything from now on—would be false. Would be a lie.

  Leslie drove down, by herself, on Saturday. Billy had held her off until then, but couldn’t any longer—she was insistent. She wouldn’t stay overnight, she said. She didn’t want to impose, but she wanted to see Billy, she wanted to be in Gus’s place, to look at his things.

  Billy was shocked at the way she looked. The open, warm quality she had always conveyed was gone, as if erased, though she said the same words, the same Leslie kind of things. But she seemed, Billy would have said, smaller. Exhausted.

  The worst moments, of course, were the very first, when she embraced Billy as though Billy needed comforting more than she did. “My dear,” she said. “Oh, my dear.” She held on, almost rocking Billy for a long moment. Billy could hear, she could feel, Leslie’s ragged intake of breath. When they stepped away from each other, she saw that Leslie was fighting tears.

  But Billy was tearful, too, because it was awful that Gus was dead. That so many were dead. That Leslie was so visibly in pain. Leslie’s gaze, resting on her, was soft, full of sympathy and affection.

  That shamed Billy, and she turned away. She went to make some tea, and they sat in the kitchen and talked. Mostly just going over, as everyone did in those days—even those who weren’t directly involved—how it had happened for them. How it was for Leslie at the airport, hearing about it and checking what she’d written down about Gus’s plane. The terrible ride back home, listening to the radio. Pierce finally turned it off, she said, and that somehow made it worse, made it final.

  Billy was aware of herself, of her responses, as she listened to Leslie’s account, as she told Leslie about her day, about how slowly she came to realize that one of the planes might have been Gus’s. She was conscious of trying to calibrate her grief, trying to hold on to a shred of honesty by not letting Leslie think she was overcome, or had been overcome. As soon as she could, she excused herself to walk the dog.

  Over the next days and weeks, Leslie misunderstood almost every gesture, every word, Billy said. The more Billy tried to back away from being the grief-stricken lover—the more she deferred to Leslie—the more Leslie insisted she had prior rights. She should have the final say on whether the Boston service should be at the school. She would know better than Leslie the list of friends to be invited. She should go through Gus’s things and choose what she wanted to keep. She should read at the service.

  Her no to most of these things seemed only to confirm Leslie’s sense of Billy’s lostness in grief. Again and again Billy told herself that she would be as honest as she decently could. She would try not to lie, not to pretend what she didn’t feel. But in the end it seemed to her that there wasn’t a truthful gesture she could make. She felt cottoned in falsity. Her dry eyes were understood by Leslie as shock. Her finding the too-expensive apartment in the South End was a sign of her need to flee the place where she and Gus had been happy together.

  Could she have told her the truth? Someone braver than Billy might have. But Billy knew Leslie took some comfort in believing that she had loved Gus, that she mourned him, so she said nothing. This was the least she could offer her, could do for her. It was, she slowly realized, the only thing she could do for her.

  The service was to be held at Gus’s school the first Saturday in October, in the chapel. Billy hadn’t done any of the planning for it, and she felt bad about that—that Leslie, so burdened by her unequivocal grief, should have had to do it by herself. Of course, Pierce had helped her; there was that. And Leslie said that Gus’s old friend Peter had helped, too, that he was “a godsend.”

  Billy did buy a new suit for the service, a dark gray suit. She assumed that this would be the only formal occasion in her life for remembering Gus, and she wanted her appearance itself to be a kind of honoring of him. The day of the service, she took her time getting ready. She applied her makeup carefully, she blew her normally messy hair smooth. About half an hour before Leslie and Pierce were to pick her up, she walked Reuben and crated him. Then she pulled a chair over to one of the curved front windows of her parlor apartment and sat looking out it for Leslie and Pierce’s old Volvo—they’d never be able to find a parking place. When she saw them pull up and double-park, she grabbed her purse and went quickly to the door. As she closed it quietly behind her, Reuben let out an anguished cry, long and mournful. She couldn’t stop to console him; she just had to hope for her neighbors’ sakes that it didn’t go on too long.

  Leslie had just stepped out of the car on the way to get her when Billy emerged. She looked elegant, Billy thought—all in black, with a royal blue shawl thrown over the shoulder of her suit. Her face was drawn but beautiful, her hair pulled back simply into a ponytail at the nape of her neck, as if she hadn’t wanted to bother arranging it. There was something immense, almost monumental, about her. Billy felt like a girl, a child, by contrast.

  They embraced—quickly, because a car had pulled up and was waiting behind the Volvo, the driver watching them with what passed for patience in this environment. Billy got in the backseat, where the child belonged, after all. Pierce turned around to say hello before he put the car in gear and began to drive. His voice was without the exuberance that usually marked it. It was tender, the way he must speak to the kids in his practice.

  Their conversation was polite, neutral. How was the drive down? How’s the dog? The new apartment? This is such a lovely neighborhood. Pierce said his favorite restaurant was close by and Billy said she’d have to try it. Leslie asked about how the teaching at BU was going this year. It was a relief for all of them, Billy felt sure, to get on the highway, where the noise made conversation unnecessary.

  At one point, though, Billy leaned forward to ask, “Is there anything in particular I should know about the service, or the reception?”

  Leslie turned sideways, almo
st in profile. “I think it will all just move along smoothly,” she said. “No surprises. Peter has arranged for some friends to talk, and the students wanted to do a choral thing. I think one of them will speak, too.”

  Billy was instantly swamped again by guilt about this, that she hadn’t offered to speak, or do anything else, in fact.

  “The headmaster’s in charge, for which I’m grateful. Mr. Willis. He put it in the paper and had someone contact every single person I listed. He’s been wonderful.”

  Leslie turned away, but not before Billy saw the tears well in her eyes. Sitting back again, she felt small and ashamed, ugly.

  They drove in silence, not even Pierce feeling compelled to talk. The trees had thinned out a bit—their leaves would begin to fall in earnest soon. For now they were at their most intensely beautiful, the colors on the hillsides astonishing. They turned off the highway onto the winding, almost-country roads. They drove by the old houses set far apart from one another, their lawns sprinkled with the fallen leaves, the new, low light dancing through the trees. They passed eight or ten bicyclists moving in a group at the side of the road, sexless and insectlike in their busyness, their gleaming helmets. Billy saw a yard sale in front of an open barn, an odd collection of possessions. There were dishes and chairs, two iron bedsteads leaned up against some old trunks. A small crowd of people was milling around, examining the boxes of things. Billy thought of the things she’d set out on the curb in Somerville, things that had been part of her life with Gus.

  They drove down the main street of the little town. It was lined with shops and restaurants, thick with people out doing Saturday morning errands. At the end of this strip, they turned onto the side street where the school buildings began. The dorms looked like simply more of the white Georgian houses of the village, but then the campus suddenly opened up and you saw the larger new administrative buildings arranged around the central lawn with its crisscrossing pathways. The sky was a grand painted blue behind the vivid trees and white buildings, behind the green of the glistening grass. Billy felt a sharp pain in her stomach, something like nausea, something like stage fright. She dug her fists into her midriff. It would begin now, her performance.

  Pierce parked in the visitors’ lot, and they walked together on one of the paths to the chapel building. Its narrow white steeple pierced the blue sky. Mr. Willis, the headmaster, a man only a little older than Gus, stood in its entryway, perhaps waiting for them. He was in his shirtsleeves, but he had a tie on. He greeted them and led them back to a private room. Gus’s friend Peter was already there, Peter and his pregnant wife and another couple Billy had met once. She waited her turn beside Leslie and Pierce to be greeted. She and Gus had had dinner with Peter and Erin two or three times. Now she murmured something: Thank you, she would call, yes, if she thought of anything they could do. Leslie was working so much harder, talking about Gus, remembering that Peter and Gus had once tried to hitchhike back to Boston when they’d missed the bus. That quite by chance she’d seen them when she was out doing errands, that she’d ended up driving all the way down with them, calling Pierce from a restaurant near an exit to tell him she’d be home late that night. “Do you remember?” she asked Peter. He nodded.

  “Imagine,” Leslie said to Billy, to the group, “me doing anything on a lark! But that’s what it was like with Gus.”

  As soon as Billy could, she told Leslie she was going to go and sit in the chapel.

  “Oh, Billy—oh, of course,” Leslie said. “I understand completely.”

  Don’t, Billy wanted to say. Don’t understand. But she said nothing of the kind. She said nothing at all.

  The chapel had no religious symbols or decoration. As Gus had told her, it wasn’t really a chapel at all. It was called that because all these old prep schools had at one time been sectarian, had started each day with a religious service and then made the daily announcements; so that the gathering for these announcements was still called chapel, and the place where you gathered was also called chapel. All anachronism, he had said. Like so much else about the school.

  It was large, with enough pews for the entire school population. Tall, clear windows opened out onto the trees and lawns of the campus. A bank of flowers, mostly white, sat across the apron of the stage. A lectern was set in the midst of them. Toward the back of the stage, there was a grand piano, its dark, harp-shaped lid propped open.

  Billy moved into a pew three rows back. There were programs set out along the seat cushions at regular intervals, each with a photo of Gus’s face. Over and over, Gus, smiling, bright sunlight making him squint, his yellow hair windblown. She picked one up and sat down, holding it. The pew creaked under her.

  She wasn’t alone for long. In a few minutes, people began to straggle in, taking seats nearer the back, whispering, talking quietly. After ten minutes or so, a young man came down the side aisle to the stage and mounted the steps. He sat down at the piano, arranged some music, and started to play. Billy wasn’t sure of the composer—Schubert, maybe. Then more quickly, the pews filled. Students, mostly, but also people Leslie’s age, Gus’s age. Billy knew none of them.

  Leslie and Pierce came in with the headmaster and Gus’s friends and took the first few rows. Peter’s wife, Erin, was sitting directly in front of Billy. She bent forward, as if praying, but perhaps she was only reading through the program.

  When the piano stopped, the headmaster stood and mounted the short flight of stairs to the stage. He greeted the room. The students—and, raggedly, a few others joining in—said, “Good afternoon,” back to him. There was a moment of silence, and then he said, “We gather to celebrate the life of our dear friend Gus Forester. Lost, among so many others, in the cruel events of September eleventh. But Gus was ours, and so we especially miss him, and we know all too well what an emptiness his death will leave in our lives.”

  Somewhere in the room, someone began to cry softly, and here and there people were blowing their noses. Billy shut her eyes for a moment. The pews’ creaking was a constant, the rustle of the programs, the shifting of people’s clothing as they moved.

  The headmaster spoke for a few more minutes, and then Peter came up and took his place. He introduced himself and talked, it seemed mostly to the students, about friendship, about his friendship with Gus in college and its irreplaceable importance to him. Gus’s loyalty, his joie de vivre. He mentioned Leslie, and Billy saw her lift her hand to her mouth.

  After Peter, a gaggle of students came up the steps and assembled themselves into two rows, the girls in front. The pianist did a quick introduction and they sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” As soon as they finished, one of the girls broke down. She was instantly surrounded by the three other girls, and they huddled down the stairs from the stage, their arms around one another, and then down the aisle, past Billy, who sat dry-eyed, not looking at them.

  One of the boys from the choral group had remained onstage. He stepped to the lectern now and talked about Gus as a teacher and friend, someone who pushed for excellence in their work and made them care about it, too. He called him “one of the great teachers.”

  The headmaster came up again. He announced the Twenty-third Psalm, and they stood and read it together, the beautiful words of calm faith. Was Gus a believer? Billy didn’t even know that.

  The whole room sat down, and then Leslie got up and went to the steps, mounted them. Billy looked down at her own hands, folded on the program on her lap, resting on Gus’s face in the photograph. She didn’t want to meet Leslie’s eyes, she couldn’t watch her face.

  Leslie carried a little sheaf of paper that she set down in front of her. She put her glasses on. The remarks were read, then, and as she started, Billy heard that quality in them—a bit formal, certainly composed. Leslie’s voice wobbled, though, and several times she had to stop.

  She talked about the age difference between her and Gus, about the joy he brought to her life, as a sister—almost as a mother. Near the end of the talk, she said, “How
glad I am to think of him in the last year, so especially happy in his work with many of you here, and in his life, with the woman he loved so much, Billy Gertz.”

  Billy breathed in deeply and unclenched her hands. She saw the print of her fingernails in her flesh, dark crescents arcing across her palms.

  There was a musical interlude, and then the headmaster invited anyone who wished to speak to add his remarks. For a long minute or so, it seemed no one would, but then a woman arose and introduced herself. There was the rustle of everyone turning to her. Billy turned, too. She was a tall, thin woman about halfway back, with a mass of long, wild graying hair. Her name was Augusta Sinclair, she said, “so of course, we were the two Guses. And somehow this was enough, in Gus’s world, for us to be friends. Sometimes he would ask me, ‘How is it in the alternate Gus universe?’ and he always took time to listen to my answer.” The other thing, she said, was how important his teaching was to him, how much he loved it and the kids. “And whenever I needed a shot of what I think of as emotional caffeine about my work, I’d find him, and that is exactly what he would give me. Actually, he gave me that in other contexts, too. I’ll miss him very much.” She sat down.

  After her a few students spoke, and then an alumnus, a young man who “had to come,” he said. Mr. Forester had changed his life, had made him understand that language shaped thought, clarified it. That if you couldn’t say it or write it, you hadn’t fully mastered it. “He was exacting, and I slowly learned to really, really love that. And it’s brought me to where I am today.” And then he said, “‘Explicate!’” and the room laughed.

  The headmaster stood up again and announced a student’s name. A young woman came up and read the 103rd Psalm, one Billy didn’t know as well—about God’s power, his generosity, and man’s smallness by comparison, God’s pity on man. The girl’s voice was strong, reading the lines. Near the end of the reading, she intoned, “As for man, his days are as grass. As a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone, and the place thereof shall know it no more.”