The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  I got Paul set up at his desk with his Lincoln books and his Riverside Shakespeare, and for a while the new book and the NEH application seemed like real possibilities. Paul sent me to the college library for books and more books. The literature on Lincoln is enormous. Every item opened new doors, new corridors to be explored: Sandburg’s biography, the Herndon Papers, Charnwood’s Abraham Lincoln, journal articles that had to be photocopied.

  Arthur Jamieson, a colleague from Knox’s Lincoln Center, stopped by once a week to chat. Paul wrote notes with Lois’s Mont Blanc roller ball, which he’d managed to hang on to, using one of his Clairefontaine notebooks with a deep red cover.

  I transcribed them onto the computer. I don’t think of myself as a tech person, but I had mastered Microsoft Word, which had replaced Word Perfect. I set up function keys, and I created headings for the document map so Paul could move around the document freely.

  The oxygen tank slowed him down. Once you start the oxygen, you have to keep on. The oxygen machine sat next to the door of the half bath. It had a very long plastic tube that could reach through the whole apartment, though it sometimes got tangled, like his shoelaces. If I wasn’t home, and Lois was out at the funeral home, Paul would have to call Cornucopia, the deli down below us, and one of the student workers would come up and untangle him. I arranged to have my lunch period free at the high school so I could check on him at noon. And Lois, of course, was always ready to help.

  In the evenings we read Lucretius, in Rolfe Humphries’s fine translation; we read my translations of Catullus—and Paul knew enough Latin to ask intelligent questions about some of my choices. We read Shakespeare, too—Lincoln’s Shakespeare: Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth. Lincoln liked to recite the opening soliloquy of Richard III. He preferred Claudius’s “O, my offence is rank” in Hamlet to the famous soliloquies. And he kept coming back to Macbeth’s speech to his wife after the murder of Duncan: “Better be with the dead.”

  What was Lincoln reaching for? What about Paul?

  When Paul was especially agitated we read the copy of Henderson the Rain King that Stella had given him for Christmas, or, if the weather was clear and not too cold, we’d do some star hopping out on the deck with Stella’s telescope. I’d taken Astronomy for my science requirement at Knox, and we had the copies of Mike Lynch’s Illinois StarWatch and Terence Dickinson’s Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe that we’d given to Stella along with the telescope.

  Paul wasn’t afraid of dying. It wasn’t fear that poisoned his last months; it was anger, and irritability. “Sixty-five years old,” he’d shout—though actually he was only sixty-four when he died—“and I can’t even untie my own shoes.”

  “Why don’t you let me put in some new laces,” I would say. “Those laces are too long. That’s why they get tangled up when you pull on them, and they’re full of little knots.” But he didn’t want new laces; he wanted the old laces to work properly, and the new, shorter laces remained in a box on top of his dresser. They’re still there. His laces continued to tie themselves into knots till he couldn’t put his shoes on any longer and had to wear slippers or sandals with Velcro straps.

  I came home at noon one cold, clear day in March and was surprised to find the garage door open. Paul, who was using a wheelchair now, had managed to wheel himself down to the garage and wrestle off the tarp that covered the sports car. He was sitting in the car, which was facing out, with his portable oxygen tank on his lap. I pulled the Cutlass Cruiser in beside him.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I want to drive around the parking lot,” he said. He was wearing a pair of leather driving gloves. “They were in the glove compartment,” he said.

  The garage opened onto a city parking lot with entrances on Mulberry Street and Seminary Street and an exit onto Main Street. You could circle around.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “You’ll have to get a new battery first,” he said. “And change the oil, if there’s any oil in it.”

  “Why don’t you call Jones and Archer. They’ll send someone over this afternoon, then we can drive around when I get home.”

  “I want to do it now,” he said. “And I don’t want anyone else touching the car.”

  “I grew up on a farm,” I said. “I know how to put in a new battery, but I can’t do it right now. George Hawkinson is coming to Roman Civ. to demonstrate the principles of the Roman arch. We’re going to start a model of the Pons Fabricius. Why don’t you take it easy this afternoon and I’ll put in a battery as soon as I get home.”

  He wasn’t happy with this plan—there was no patience left in his system—but there wasn’t much he could do about it except call Jones and Archer (the garage on Kellogg Street where we had our Oldsmobile serviced), which he didn’t want to do.

  “We’ll have to get more air in the tires, too,” I said. “We can use the pump we got for emergencies. If I can find it. The one you plug into the lighter. If there’s a lighter.”

  A brown UPS truck drove past the garage. And then a semi backed into the loading dock of the furniture store to the north. The cab blocked the opening. We couldn’t have driven out even if the car had been ready to go. Paul started leaning on the horn, but no battery, no sound.

  George Hawkinson, who taught physics, had a way of explaining arches and demonstrating bridge construction that never failed to engage my Latin students at all levels. It never failed to engage me.

  How do you span a space? The Greeks depended on beams, which limited the space you could cover to the length and strength of your beams. Look at Agamemnon’s tomb at Mycenae! One long beam. The Etruscans had arches, of course, but no one else really explored the possibilities of arches till the Romans.

  We rearranged the desks so everyone could see.

  George already had his wooden centering, attached to a wooden base, on my desk at the front of the room. The centering would support the “stones” till the keystone of the arch was in place.

  He constructed the arch by placing voussoirs, or wedge-shaped stones, made out of some kind of casting compound, around the wooden centering, dropped the keystone into place, and removed the centering.

  The arch was very stable as long as you kept the wooden supports at the outer edges in place to contain the outward thrust. This is the key. An arch, unlike a beam, carries weight under compression, not tension. But you have to contain the outward thrust.

  He invited one of the larger boys to press down on the top of the arch. The boy put a lot of weight on the arch without demolishing it. Impressive.

  Then George removed one of the wooden supports. The arch gave way under minimal pressure.

  He replaced the support, laid down the centering, and rebuilt the arch. “What can go wrong,” he asked, “if the arch is supporting a roadway? You’ve got your constant load. That’s easy to calculate: snow cover, the weight of the bridge itself. But you’ve also got nonconstant loads. Pedestrians. Vehicles.

  “As long as the stress line is contained in the arch itself, the arch will hold. But if you put too much weight and the sides of the arch start to bulge out of shape . . . In other words, when the compression is greater than the stress line, the arch will collapse.

  “You can keep this from happening by adding spandrels and by filling in the space between the spandrels with concrete, and you’ve got your roadway.”

  George pointed out the relevant features on the model of the Pont Saint-Martin, in northern Italy, that we had constructed the previous year. The Pont Saint-Martin is a single semicircular arch spanning about thirty-five meters and supporting a one-lane road. The Pons Fabricius, the oldest bridge in Rome, is more complicated than the simple and beautiful Pont Saint-Martin. It consists of two arches instead of one, spanning half the Tiber from the Campus Martius on the east to the Isola Tiberina, the two arches supported by a pier in the river itself. A third, small arch in the center allows water to pass through unobstructed i
n case of a flood. The bridge has been in continuous use since 62 B.C. George set up three teams: one to make scale drawings, another to make the voussoirs, a third to construct the wooden centerings.

  In retrospect I see that Paul and I were the two large arches, and Stella the smaller arch in the center, and that Jimmy put so much weight on the bridge that the arches bulged out till they no longer contained the stress lines, and the bridge collapsed.

  I didn’t take out the old battery till Saturday. It was larger than a normal car battery. I took it to an auto parts store and paid a hundred twenty-five dollars for a replacement, and for six quarts of oil and some lithium grease. I installed the new battery, sprayed the terminals with lithium grease, drained the oil, cleaned the oil pan, added new oil. I decided not to bother with plugs and points unless I had to.

  Paul sat in an old canvas deck chair and kibitzed, his oxygen tank on his lap, impatient, like a man who hasn’t lived up to his own expectations and doesn’t know what to do about it.

  “Paul,” I said. “You don’t know the first thing about cars.”

  “You’re right,” he said, “but I know this is a beauty.”

  We got Paul into the driver’s seat, with his portable oxygen tank. We couldn’t figure out the complicated seat belts, which were really harnesses, but we weren’t planning to go out on the highway, weren’t planning to leave the parking lot, in fact. We sat for a while, the oxygen tank between us, and then Paul turned the key and the engine roared, literally roared, the way a lion roars, deep in the throat.

  Paul engaged the clutch, killed the engine. The silence was startling.

  He turned the key and the engine roared again, a huge sound, like a jet plane, and he pulled out into the parking lot in a series of small jerks before he got the clutch under control. The car slammed to a halt when he hit the brake. He started up again and turned to the right, past the other six garages. Then he turned left and circled around the two rows of cars parked in the center of the lot.

  He shifted to second gear, briefly, then back to first. We went around twice, and then Paul managed to back the car into the garage.

  We sat for a while till the engine stopped ticking. We’d gone only what? Not even a hundred yards on the ground. We’d started out side by side, but Paul had driven a lot farther than a hundred yards in his imagination, had left Shakespeare and Lincoln far, far behind, and me along with them.

  In April we sold the house, contingent upon some repairs. Stella persuaded us to hire Jimmy, out of prison now. He was a good carpenter, she said. He could do anything.

  Let me tell you something about Jimmy Gagliano—Jimmy Gagg. What a piece of work he was. Worse than Howard Banks, worse than the writer who took her to New York, worse than all of them put together.

  Paul and I didn’t encounter Jimmy till Friday afternoon, though he’d already worked a week. He and Stella were staying in the house on Prairie Street, sleeping on the floor. He’d come over to pick up a check, and I got off on the wrong foot by addressing him in Italian. He looked at Stella: “You tell your mom to talk to me in Italian?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I thought . . .” But it didn’t matter what I thought.

  He was strikingly handsome, tall, with muscles like little mice running up and down his arms, under his tattoos, some professional—bat wings, two snakes intertwined—and some prison, the ink bleeding so you couldn’t make out what they were. He gave off a kind of hum, like a sports car idling, waiting for the light to change. I could see why Stella, or any woman, would be attracted to him.

  Stella herself was nervous, the color had drained out of her. She stood in the bay window and the light from the afternoon seemed to shine right through her.

  I asked Jimmy to carry up some boxes of books from the garage. We had a little cart in the garage he could use. You could convert it from a two-wheeler to a four-wheeler.

  “On the clock,” he said, looking at his watch. “I’m keeping track of my time.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  He projected an air of menace, cocksureness. Beating you back with his eyes and his tattoos, and his way of speaking his piece in short outbursts that didn’t leave any doubt about what was on his mind, but that interfered with normal conversation. He kept his head down when he spoke, as if he were in attack mode.

  “I’m a truth teller,” he said. “So let’s cut right through all the bullshit right at the get-go.” He was speaking to Paul, who was hooked up to the oxygen tank. “You’ve been sitting here with your books and your fancy electric piano and your fancy food and I’ve been behind bars, locked up in a cage. Like an animal. You don’t have to remind me, but you don’t have to avoid the subject, either. You probably have a lot of questions. Go ahead. Ask me anything you want.”

  “Fuck you,” Paul said, and I guess it was the right thing to say. At least it slowed things down. Jimmy laughed.

  Jimmy stacked the boxes next to Paul’s desk. “You read all these books?”

  “Every one of them,” Paul said, though it wasn’t true. At least not one-hundred-percent true.

  Jimmy shook his head.

  “I hear you’re a Shakespearean actor,” Paul said. “The Tempest.”

  “We did a short version,” Jimmy said. “But I was a natural. But you know what? If I was Shakespeare I’d have put Caliban in charge of the whole island.”

  “Then I guess it’s a good thing you’re not Shakespeare.”

  “Good thing for Prospero. Good thing for you. Not for me. I’m Caliban, and Stell here is your precious little Miranda. And I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Jimmy,” Stella started to protest.

  “Shut up, Stell, I can handle your old man without your help.”

  “You don’t have to ‘handle’ me,” Paul said. “How about just talking to me. Like one human being to another.”

  “This island’s mine,” Jimmy said, striking a pose. “By Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me.”

  “No wonder they sent you back to prison,” Paul said. “I could never get the story straight from Stella.”

  “A friend of mine,” Jimmy said. “Somebody stole his dog. Up in Milwaukee. He asked me to get it back for him. That guy that stole it put up some resistance. That’s all. It was all bullshit.”

  “Why were you carrying a knife while you were on parole?”

  He shook his head at the stupidity of the question. “You know what I learned from doing that play?”

  “What?”

  “Everybody’s on stage. All the time. That’s what I came away with. You’re on stage. I’m on stage. Your wife’s on stage. Stell here is on stage.”

  “On stage?” I said.

  “The world’s a stage,” Paul said. “You’re not the first one to notice. But why did you need a knife?”

  “To cut through all the bullshit.” He looked around. “You’re on stage right now. You’re nervous, aren’t you, but you’re trying to act like you’re having a good time shooting the shit with me. Like Prospero shooting the shit with Caliban.” After a pause he asked if we had anything to drink.

  I looked at Stella, who was wearing tight jeans and a man’s blue shirt. She was thirty-three years old. Her life had not worked out the way we’d hoped, and our hopes had been pretty flexible. But here she was, and my heart ached with love.

  “There’s beer in the refrigerator,” Paul said, “and a bottle of wine on the counter, already open.”

  “He’s not like this when we’re alone,” Stella said to me. “He’s just nervous around Pa.”

  “Not like what?” Jimmy said, swinging his head around like a wrecking ball.

  “You know how you get,” she said, “around other people.”

  “How do I get?”

  “Like you are now. You wear this mask long enough you won’t be able to take it off.”

  “Get him a beer, would you,” Paul said to me.

  “I tell you what,” Jimmy said to Stella. “You tell your daddy to giv
e you the keys to that car in the garage and we’ll get the hell out of here, take it down to Iowa City tonight. Burn out some of the carbon.”

  “No insurance,” Paul said.

  “I’m not going to wreck it. I’m just going to drive it.”

  Paul shook his head. “It needs new tires before you take it out on the highway.”

  “Next week,” Jimmy said. “Put it on your auto insurance policy. I’ll look out for some tires.”

  “You won’t be able to afford them,” Paul said.

  “I will when I leave here,” he said.

  Jimmy did good work, I’ll say that for him. By the end of the first week he’d patched the room over the porte cochere and replaced and primed the curved trim on the bay window. But he couldn’t let go of the car. He wanted to know how much Paul had paid for it, but Paul wouldn’t tell him. He offered to buy the car—said he could get the money from his uncle—but Paul wasn’t interested in selling.

  The struggle over the car escalated. Paul was in bed at the end of the second week when Jimmy came to get his check. Jimmy stood in the doorway. “Prospero”—he had started calling Paul “Prospero”—“Let me ask you something, Prospero. Can you still get it up? I mean, a man in your condition—”

  “Jimmy!” Stella tried to intervene.

  “Jimmy,” I said. “How much do I owe you? I’ll write a check right now. At twenty dollars an hour a forty-hour week would come to eight hundred dollars. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t look at me that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Like you’re sizing me up.”

  “You’re still a good-looking woman, Mrs. G,” he said. “You deserve better than that old man in there. And that car in the garage. It’s just sitting there. What a waste. Like you.”

  “It’s Mrs. Godwin,” I said. “And that old man in there is my husband. Stella’s father. We’ve been married thirty-two years. And you can go to hell.” I got the checkbook.