The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  And then we all went into the kitchen. The men washed up and drank more schnapps. Paul had blood on his flannel shirt. It took half an hour for the hog to bleed out. The men drank more schnapps.

  The hardest part was getting the hog from the tree into the drum of hot water. My uncle cut the head off. I did not take a picture of this, but I took one of the men carrying the hog, on a pole, and maneuvering it into the drum. It was hard to raise it up high enough. Paul put his arms around the hog and lifted. They got it over the edge and down into the hot water. Tail first. Headless. The open neck on top. They left it in for about half a minute. Just enough to scald it, not cook it, and then they flipped it over, almost knocking the drum over, for another twenty seconds, and then they hung it in the barn, legs spread.

  I went back inside and made myself comfortable in the kitchen while the men skinned the hog. It took a long time. I washed up some dishes while Ma held baby Stella, and Izabella and Aunt Klaudia put the cherry jars on the porch to cool. Ma had run the soapy dish water so hot I had to grab each dish or glass and set it on the counter to cool before I could dry it.

  The men came back in, ate a plate of pierogis, drank more schnapps. I could see that the day had been a success, and the women could see it, too. Paul had passed the buttermilk test (though Ma never realized that it was a test), and the schnapps test, and the slaughtering test.

  But what about me? I was being tested too, though I wasn’t sure exactly what the questions were. There was baby Stella, who had incipient diaper rash. Hmmm. Not good. Ma wasn’t happy with my plan to teach Latin at the high school the following fall instead of staying home with Stella. But she liked the fact that Stella would have to come out here during the day.

  “Ma,” I said, “why don’t you learn how to drive? That would make everything so much simpler.”

  “Are you sure you want your mother driving out on the highway?” This from Aunt Klaudia.

  “It’s just Blackburn Road over to Kruger Road and into town. One right turn and one left turn at the stop light on Old Thirty-four.”

  Ma threw up her hands. She said something in Polish to my aunt. Keeping an eye on Izabella and on Cousin Michal.

  “They’re in love,” Aunt Klaudia said aloud, nodding at the young people. “Your ma’s worried.”

  I nodded.

  “What do you know now that they don’t know?” my aunt went on.

  “The woman cries before the wedding,” my uncle said, interrupting, “the man after.”

  My aunt turned to Paul: “What about you?”

  “No tears yet,” he said, and I could see he was enjoying himself.

  I started to make noises about getting Stella home. It was late afternoon. The hog would have to cool for a couple hours before sectioning. But Ma told me to sit still. She put an uncut loaf of bread on the table cloth and a strip of white cloth. And a bottle of wine.

  “Ma,” I said, “enough.”

  “Do this for your mother,” Pa said. He was standing behind my mother rubbing her shoulders.

  Aunt Klaudia acted as the starosta, the governor, the one who runs the show.

  “Stand up,” Ma said. “You too, Paul.” It was the first time Ma had used his name. “Give the baby to your uncle,” she said to me.

  Paul and I stood next to each other at the table and Aunt Klaudia joined our hands together over the bread and tied them together with the strip of white cloth. She made the sign of the cross over the bread. “May they always have bread beneath their hands,” she said.

  Aunt Klaudia sprinkled the bread with salt, to remind us that life will be difficult at times and that we’d have to learn to deal with troubles.

  Pa poured the wine so that we’d never be thirsty, so that we’d enjoy good health and good friends.

  “Anka,” he said to Ma, “you want to do the blessing.”

  We stood in a circle around the table and Ma blessed us with holy water. “I got it from Father Gordon after mass,” she said. “I hope it works okay.”

  “I know it will, Ma,” I said. “Thank you.” And I knew then that we were going to be happy. And we were happy, right up to that last year.

  Paul and I had our differences. He loved Homer, I loved Vergil; he turned to Plato for his metaphysics, I turned to Lucretius; he loved Faulkner, I loved Hemingway; he reread War and Peace every three or four years, I reread Anna Karenina; he was a lapsed Methodist, I was a lapsed Catholic; Paul played the blues. His heroes were Dr. John, whom he’d met once in Cincinnati, and Otis Spann. My musical heroes were Bach and Chopin. Paul could read music, but he could also play by ear and could play in any key. He’d just grab a handful of notes and off he’d go, left hand rock solid, right hand dancing. I needed to learn things one measure at a time. Paul liked his eggs poached; I liked mine soft-boiled. He was careless with money and had expensive taste in clothes and wine; I was careful. Paul couldn’t find things; I could find anything. “Just by thinking,” as Paul used to say. He liked his Shakespeare on the stage (“in the body”) and always served as dramaturge for college Shakespeare productions. I liked my Shakespeare in the study. He preferred Florence; I preferred Rome. Paul wasn’t afraid of anything, especially authority; I was more cautious. I obeyed the rules—most of the time—at least till late in life. He wanted to sail out into the deep water; I wanted to hug the shore (though in the end I let myself get blown out to sea). He wanted to buy an eight-inch Cassegrain telescope so we could see out to the edge of the universe, but I said they were too expensive and so we made do with the smaller telescope that we’d given to Stella one Christmas. Paul liked driving fast, which was bad for our insurance. He even had his license suspended for a year. I hadn’t gotten a ticket in more than forty years. Paul was a superb cook and did all the cooking. I didn’t start to cook seriously, with some imagination, that is, till after his death. I took it up partly to pass the time and partly to taste life twice, taste the past. He read the New York Times and had an opinion about everything; I read the Galesburg Register-Mail and worried about the school board elections and the price of hogs and the new aluminum castings plant on Kellogg Street. He loved cars but didn’t know anything about them; I had no interest in cars, but I knew how to change the oil in our old Oldsmobile and put in new plugs and points. Paul had wanted to buy a Mazda Miata when they first came out in 1994 and were all the craze, but I always stood in his way and we bought an Oldsmobile station wagon instead. Later, at the end of his life, he bought the old sports car that had been left, so to speak, in our garage when Dr. Potter’s widow moved into assisted living at the Kensington. Paul offered her the price of a Mazda Miata, and she took it. By this time he had to lug around an oxygen tank.

  Paul wrote with ball point pens, which he lost as soon as he used them. We had to keep a huge supply. I wrote with a Pelikan Souverän 600. Not the most expensive pen in the line, but the most beautiful. Paul fancied spaghetti strap dresses. I had a closet full of them. I wore them around the house and even in bed, fooling around with Paul, but I wasn’t comfortable wearing them in public. I controlled the money—the checkbook—and gave Paul an allowance. He never had anything left.

  Paul was sexually adventurous. I was not exactly innocent, but I let Paul show me the way, and it was like riding in a sports car with the top down. Like the little sports car in the garage that he never got to drive. Except a few times around the parking lot. There was barely room for the two of us and his portable oxygen tank, but we used to sit in it with the garage door open and keep an eye on the cars pulling in and out of the parking lot, and the people who walked by. Plato’s cave? Or the catbird seat?

  But these were the sort of differences that hold two people together, like the gravitational field that keeps two binary stars orbiting around each other, or around their common center of mass. Like Sirius A and Sirius B.

  The real problem, the real heartache, was more complicated. Paul did not go gentle into that good night. And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that we sq
uandered most of that last year. And there was nothing I could do about it now. It was too late. The show was over. The gavel had come down. The verdict had been delivered. The final score had been registered at the scorer’s table. The manuscript had gone to press and it was too late for revisions. The deadline had passed.

  I blamed Paul; I blamed our son-in-law, Jimmy; I blamed our daughter. I blamed everyone but myself.

  PART III: 1995–1997

  4

  Circles of Doors (October–December 1995)

  We were married for thirty-three years. Where did the time go? I suppose everyone who lives long enough wonders the same thing. And they do what I’ve been doing. They look at old photos and wonder why the same pictures appear over and over again: Paul shooting the hog behind the ear; Paul and Pa and Michal with their arms around the pig carcass while my uncle pulls on a rope, like three men embracing the same woman; the enormous pile of leaves that the choir kids raked up in the fall; the garden after we’d planted it at the end of May and then after we’d put it to bed in October. But I was glad I still had the photos. The rakes had long spindly fingers.

  After Paul’s divorce was final we sold the house on Chambers and bought a big shingle-style house on Prairie Street. When I think of “home,” that’s what I think of—Prairie Street, not the farm—though Paul kept on with the hog slaughtering till Pa had his first heart attack in 1978 at age sixty-six. Paul taught Ma how to drive so she could drive the Studebaker into town to the Hy-Vee or the library. He talked cooking with the women, learned to cook pierogis and borsht and even cheese babkas. He talked local politics with the men. My uncle was a brakeman on the railroad; Pa was a mechanical engineer and union steward at Maytag. Ma came to live with us for a couple of years after Pa’s death. Paul spoke at their funerals and served as a pallbearer.

  Ma got to see a copy of Paul’s book, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Inner Life, before she died. She didn’t read it, but she kept it by her bed. The book received some national attention and Paul was invited to spend a semester at the University of Verona.

  By the time we went to Verona in the fall of 1985 both my parents were dead, my aunt and uncle too. Miss Buckholdt had come out of retirement and was teaching a couple sections of Beginning Latin, and in 1995 Father Viglietti—who’d replaced Father Gordon—had been hired to teach two sections of Latin 3. The Latin program had been recognized by the Illinois Classical Association as one of the best in the state; I had received the Farrand Baker Illinois Teacher of the Year Citation and had published several translations, including a translation of Catullus XXXI, celebrating his return to his old home in Sirmio, in the New Yorker.

  Paul was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 1995, just before the start of the fall term. Against the doctor’s advice he decided to teach that term. Two sections of Shakespeare I. Histories and Comedies. He was sixty-three years old; I was fifty-five; Stella was thirty-two.

  By his birthday in early November he was having trouble breathing. His big classroom voice had been reduced to a loud breathy whisper, which he tried to correct, unsuccessfully, by pinching his vocal cords together.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving the choir kids came, as they always did, to rake the leaves in the big lot north of the house where we had our garden—tomatoes, lettuce, arugula, and herbs. Paul and I always put the garden to bed while the kids were raking, but this year he was too weak. He tried to stack the logs that Mr. Friend, who looked after the yard, had dumped in the drive, cut short so they’d fit in the old coal fireplace, but he couldn’t manage it and I got the choir kids to do it. He sat in a chair at the edge of the garden and took pictures of me pulling up the tomato plants, and of the kids hauling leaves to the back of the lot on a big tarp that was starting to fall apart—documenting the occasion, as he did every year. Kodak moments that he wouldn’t be around to remember.

  There were still lots of green tomatoes on the plants. I thought I’d picked them all at the end of September. “We’re still in the tomato business,” I said to Paul. “For a while, anyway.” We always let the green tomatoes ripen in the basement. In the dark. We’d usually eat the last tomato in January. They tasted great, as if they’d gained strength there on the shelves, in the darkness. On shelves. On an old trunk. On the seats of old wooden chairs.

  I pulled up the stalks and stuffed them in garbage cans and yard waste bags. On Wednesday I’d drag them out to the curb.

  Autumn is my favorite time of year. Well, it’s probably everybody’s favorite time of year. People often announce this preference the way they announce the fact that they don’t like hospitals or funerals. As if it set them apart from others. But this year was so sad that I thought it did set me apart, apart from everything old and familiar. Or maybe it put me at the center.

  The wind had torn all the leaves off the maple trees that Paul had planted in the parkway and most of the leaves off the big oak tree at the back of the lot. The students piled the leaves against a shed in the back and helped me pull up the cattle panels we used to stake the tomatoes and put them on top of the leaves to keep the leaves from blowing away. I didn’t bother to cut off the bits of rope we used to tie the plants to the cattle panels.

  “You should be singing,” I said to one of the choir kids. “How about ‘Autumn Leaves’?”

  “The jazz ensemble does that,” he said, and suddenly it took my breath away. Remembering the song. How I’d loved that sentimental old song in high school. And then I’d grown out of it. But now I was growing back into it.

  “Are you all right?”

  No, I wasn’t all right. I was thinking that we’d just paid almost seven thousand dollars for a new furnace and central air and that now we were going to have to sell the house. Paul was dragging his feet, but it would have to be done.

  Paul made his way to the back to take a picture of the huge pile of leaves sloping down from the shed at the back of the lot. So many leaves. Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Valombrosa. Paul and I took a bus once from Florence to Vallombrosa to see the leaves for ourselves. We walked a long way into the woods, and when we got back, the last bus for Florence had already left and we had to spend the night in a lovely old hotel.

  It was time to write a check for the choir kids. Paul had gone back into the house to get the checkbook. The wind had suddenly stopped, as if it had nothing more to say.

  The writing was on the wall. Paul would be starting chemo right after the holidays and had finally agreed to sell, so it would be our last Christmas in the old house and everything glowed in the candlelight of nostalgia as we waited for Stella to arrive from Iowa City. Winter is not a good time to sell, but I’d already talked to a realtor and I’d already put our names on a waiting list for one of the apartments, or “lofts,” on Seminary Street, where there was an elevator. It would be our last redoubt. So we had a plan. At least I had a plan. The plan included reading Shakespeare aloud. And maybe Lucretius, too, and Catullus, of course. It included listening to Bach and Chopin, and to Otis Spann, Pinetop Perkins, Dr. John, Roosevelt Sykes, and others. It included getting Paul’s old 78s out of the attic and maybe having them transferred to CDs. It included getting Stella’s telescope out of the attic and setting it up on the balcony outside our bedroom so we could keep an eye on the stars. It included playing some Brahms waltzes for four hands, and listening to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday afternoons. It included getting all our old photos in order, to pass on to Stella, so she’d have a record of a happy marriage, a happy family. With a little judicious editing, of course.

  Paul’s plan was to finish a long article, maybe a short book, on Shakespeare and Lincoln—Lincoln’s Shakespeare—that had been simmering on the back burner for several years. He’d already done a lot of the leg work, combed through the Lincoln papers and Herndon’s biography, and had decided to work it up into a proposal for the National Endowment for the Humanities. I was going to type it up for him on the computer. The project was a natural for Paul. He’d taught Shake
speare for thirty-eight years in a classroom overlooking the east lawn of Old Main, where Lincoln, in the fifth debate with Stephen Douglas, had first denounced slavery as a moral evil.

  “Listen to this,” he said, lying on his back on the couch and looking down through his half glasses at his handwritten draft.

  “Paul,” I said. “It’s Christmas. Why don’t you take it easy. I’ll light a fire.” I’d laid a fire in the fireplace but we hadn’t lit it. “Besides, I’ve got to get the capon in the oven.” I didn’t say what I was thinking—that this would be our last Christmas in the old house.

  “‘Lincoln’s fellow citizens,’” he went on, “‘took their Shakespeare seriously. In the spring of 1849 three different theaters in New York were mounting performances of Macbeth, Lincoln’s favorite play. The new res publica had apparently triumphed over the tyranny and discord distilled in that play, but the victory was not secure, and in Macbeth himself Lincoln saw the dangerous tendencies of the post-Revolutionary generation.

  “‘John Wilkes Booth, of course, modeled himself after Brutus, slaying the tyrant—’” He interrupted himself: “You think she’ll get here this morning?” he asked.

  “At least she’s coming,” I said.

  She, Stella—our hostage to fortune—had dropped out of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to go to New York and now was back in Iowa City working as a dispatcher for a trucking company. We’d been expecting her the night before, Christmas Eve, but she’d decided to drive to see her boyfriend, Jimmy, who was in prison in Ames, Iowa, for a parole violation. Stella had given us the impression that Jimmy was a student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when in fact she was going to encourage him to apply to the workshop. He had so many stories and had been lionized by the fiction writers, hungry for material, even before he’d been sent back to prison.