A Play for the End of the World

by Jai Chakrabarti

  At the station, she took time to freshen up, though she knew her father would be waiting impatiently for her. She smoothed the wrinkles out of her dress and pulled her hair tightly into a bun. Her face in the mirror struck her as more urbane. She had visited the year before for the holidays, when New York was still terrifying to her, and the trip home felt like a respite from the city. She’d spent the better part of her vacation waking up late, strolling to Jeannie’s pastry shop, then walking to the Haw River alone, then back to the house again to make dinner for her father, who asked her detailed questions about the geography of New York. But she’d never been good at the directions of things, and the questioning left her feeling she should’ve paid more attention to the relationship of the Hudson River to the Long Island Sound, or exactly how many blocks Central Park spanned. This year, she’d felt more prepared, having ridden the trains in four out of the five boroughs, and she’d even been out kayaking on the Hudson. It had been a lazy Sunday, and Jaryk had done all the paddling, keeping them away from the wake of passing barges.

  She found her father in the waiting area talking to a station employee. He’d kept his head of jet-black hair, shaped into what her mother had called the “military marquee,” but his posture was less than its usual perfect. As he asked the station employee a question, he was hunched over, seemingly deferential.

  She tapped him on the shoulder. “Daddy,” she said. “Remind me to take the train next time.”

  “You too good for the bus now?” he said with a grin. She thought about hugging him like she used to as a little girl, but they settled for a handshake. His grip was as ironclad as she remembered it.

  Their house was well away from the road. They owned enough of the surrounding land that they would never have to worry about neighbors peeking in. That had been one of her father’s retorts when Mama wanted to pursue music in New York or finish her training back in Atlanta. They wouldn’t have their space, he’d said. Everyone would be looking in on them. Not that there was anything of note to look in on; he just loved his own land.

  She left him to walk the grounds and didn’t return to the house till she knew he’d left for his job. Her father was in charge of the regional taxi dispatch and would be coordinating operations until dinnertime.

  She found that the living room had been meticulously maintained. Mama hadn’t been a good housekeep, but her father believed in the orderliness of things. Soon after Mama passed, he’d created a system of cleaning each part of the house, one day at a time. Perhaps there were a few more copies of Field & Stream on the mantel, but otherwise the house had kept its harmony. For the final eight years they were married (the culminating event of which was not divorce but death and bereavement), Carol and Jim had slept in separate rooms. They still walked to church together, still threw dinner parties for their small group of friends, but once it was just family, they wouldn’t bother to strike up a conversation with each other unless the need was severe.

  Lucy had always been pulled between her father’s and her mother’s affections, but everyone concerned knew that she had to make a choice. Mom or Dad, Carol or Jim. Not both. That she chose her mother was no surprise. They had always bonded more deeply. It was in her mother’s room that she could delight in chaos. The sheets on the bed were perennially rumpled. Folders of sheet music covered half the floor, so that she had to tiptoe to the bed. The ashtray on top of the upright piano was ever full.

  When she’d visited the year before, she found the disorder of her mother’s room beautifully maintained, but this time she saw that her father had reclaimed the space. The bedcovers were the same silk her mother had ordered from a catalog, but now the bed was properly made, the stray sheets of music had been collected into piles, and the floor had been sanded and treated. What struck her the most was the framed picture on the dresser: the three of them at the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1955. It had been a time of extraordinary, unrecoverable happiness, when Mama had been fully theirs—not worrying about that other life she could’ve had as a musician but waking up early with the family, making each day bloom with her imagination.

  That portrait made Lucy worry. Her father had never been one to dote on the past; he believed nostalgia was a manageable side effect of growing older. Perhaps he did need her to visit more now. She settled down to the piano and played from the sheet music lying atop it. Bach, her mother’s favorite. She had had hopes of Lucy doing better than she had, becoming a concert pianist, and Lucy had tried. Now, she thought she ought to have paid more attention to Mama’s lessons. She missed the feel of her hands on the piano, all the quiet it brought out in that room.

  Her father was busy most of Christmas Eve at the dispatch, and when he came home he seemed too exhausted to do anything but help himself to her reheated steak and potatoes. Christmas morning, they walked to her mother’s grave to lay flowers. She brushed snow off the gravestone where it said, “With a Voice Divine.”

  Afterwards, her father left to check on his drivers, and she headed to Jeannie’s pastry shop, which this year had to stay open on Christmas on account of the backlog. She’d worked at Jeannie’s when she was saving money for college, and now she worked herself into a sweat kneading and carrying dough into the ovens. Jeannie pretended to be mortified by her helping on such a short trip, but Lucy knew she was happy to have the extra hand.

  Back at her father’s house, they had Christmas dinner with Richard, her maternal uncle, and his four sons and their families. Her oldest cousin was her age but already had three boys under five. Noah, the middle child, followed her around the kitchen and held on to the hem of her dress. After dinner, they sipped brandy from mugs her uncle had fired in his kiln. It was that hour when the children summoned the last of their energy for one more run around the tree. The evening ended after Noah scraped his forehead on the mantel. Lucy held him close, sang him a lullaby, and reminded him how wonderful his presents were. Soon he was smiling again.

  When everyone had left, Lucy sat on an arm of the sofa, leaned against her father’s shoulder. The fire burned with a soporific glaze. Neil Diamond’s Just for You played for the fifth time.

  “Daddy,” she said. “I’m seeing someone.” It was news she would have told her mother, saving it from her father till she was ready and sure. Now he was the only one left to tell.

  “How long’s this been?”

  “Six months.”

  “Well, I’ll be darned.”

  “Now what do you mean by that?”

  He ran his hands through the thick mane of his hair. “I just figured that after you quit music school you’d come back home. But now you’re seeing someone, and you’re setting up roots. It’s not the story I expected for my old age. You see that chair?”

  She looked over at the rocking chair in the corner, which always had seemed too wobbly to support anyone. “What about it?”

  “It’s fixed now,” her father said. “I’ve been cleaning up around here, but I could use your arm with the roof. I’m not sure I can get up there by myself anymore.”

  She paused. There was a pine tree in their yard that had been there since before she was born and looked just the same now as it had when she first could remember it. That was how she thought of her father: unchanging through the seasons. She gave him another look: maybe more gray around the temples, a few more wrinkles. Otherwise, he seemed like the same man who’d built her wooden play set from scratch.

  “Daddy, I don’t believe that. You’ve got the heart of a teenager. You’ll climb that roof when you’re a hundred and two. Aren’t you happy for me?”

  Her father stoked the fire into a renewed vigor. When it was good and bright, he made his way up the stairs without another word.

  Alone, she put Bill Withers on the stereo, cleaned the dishes, and dried them with Mama’s monogrammed towels. For once she’d shared something meaningful, but her father had been thinking about himself.<
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  The next morning, Lucy made a point of taking a walk before breakfast. Her bus wasn’t till the evening, and with a few hours to kill, she hiked to Timothy Norwood’s house. Timothy was their family’s oldest friend, though he was a generation older than her parents. For as long as she’d known him, he’d lived opposite the Haw River in his two-room log house that seemed too flimsy to withstand even a single winter; but with Timothy’s patchwork skills, it had survived every storm the Carolina winds had carried.

  Her last semester of high school, when life without Connor seemed unbearable, she’d visited Timothy almost every day. He would lead her out to his garden and put her to work: “Prune this” or “Lift that one up,” he’d say. He seemed to know how the sunlight would fall before it did, which of his beloved marigolds or goldenrod or hyacinths would make it into the heart of summer. Those ones he knew weren’t likely to survive were the ones he gave the most attention, bending at the hips to spray water at their roots, whispering some secret language into their shriveling cores.

  The night they found Connor in the ditch, the medics had cleaned as much of his remains from the car as possible; only then had they called the family. Connor’s father had been the one to tell Lucy. He had begun the conversation by saying, “I thought you should know…”

  They all gathered by the side of the road: Connor’s parents, an uncle, three siblings, and Lucy, all in their pajamas by the turnoff to Hoffman Road. Nobody had bothered to change into anything more formal, so there they stood, deep into the other side of midnight, the emergency lights illuminating their flannel. Connor’s uncle, who was a lapsed pastor, said a few words in the direction of the mauled Ford. Nobody talked about how blue Connor had been the last few months, how his moods had begun to shift like a pendulum in an earthquake. They prayed over the dead, though the body had been removed; they prayed toward whatever remained of the boy they’d loved.

  Lucy knew better than anyone else that Connor was suffering—decades later, she’d come to think of it clinically with a word, bipolar—but for years she’d blame herself for not doing more, his ghost rising up in her bed to haunt her. It was only with Jaryk that she’d felt absolved. When she’d told him about that night by the ditch and all the months before, the signs she thought she should’ve seen, he’d listened to her as if his life depended on the telling.

  “You loved him. You let him experience joy. For that, I believe he is grateful,” Jaryk said.

  He is. Jaryk pointed to the sky, to the dark beyond the roof of his apartment, where they were, the cosmos over the bend, and said, “I believe he loves you still.”

  It was strange to think she’d fallen deeper in love with a man as he’d said her old boyfriend was looking down at them from the ether, but already she knew Jaryk Smith would be no ordinary encounter.

  Timothy had helped her live through that time by giving her work that took her mind off her troubles, but it was only time and the deep attention of a new lover that let her see Connor in a new light. She could not have saved him—she never had the power.

  Timothy hadn’t known Connor or asked about him; that wasn’t his way. She found him now by the fire, reading a leather-bound book.

  “Well, look at you,” he said, rising gingerly from his chair.

  When he held her hand, she could feel a slight tremor. Even he had aged and brittled. “I came to see Daddy,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. “He talks about you more than he talks about any one thing.”

  She thought he was joking. How could her father spend more time talking about her than about his beloved baseball cards or the deplorable state of the North Carolina roadways? She’d known him to talk about everything but her life.

  Timothy continued, “He tells me about your job. All those people who come to you for advice. That’s a lot of responsibility. And he talks about when you were a little girl, when you climbed up trees looking for honeycomb.”

  She tried to seem unsurprised. In New York love and work had hurried her along so that she spent less and less time dwelling on home. But it seemed her father had assumed the familial role of guarding her in his thoughts.

  “You need any help around the house?” she asked. “I got my daddy’s arm, you know.”

  Timothy asked her to haul in firewood. She took a sled out onto his property to salvage tinder by the armful. He stood with her in the cold in his flannel shirt as she worked up a sweat.

  When Timothy was resupplied with enough firewood for the rest of winter, she made him tea. “What about his health, my old man?”

  “He’s complaining more, but he’s all right,” was what Timothy said. It was an enormous relief to hear it from him.

  All those afternoons she’d visited in her senior year of high school, Timothy never asked her why she came. He was too patient to force anything out of her, but when spring blazed into summer, the daffodils at the edge of his garden having acquired the look of preening ballerinas, sun-washed and proud and full of hope, he said, “Lucy, look at those nails on you. When did you last trim them?”

  She said she hadn’t trimmed her fingernails in a while, even though they’d started to bother her when she played the piano. He sat her down at the river’s edge, where bream were swimming up to the shallows, and from his pocket he withdrew an ancient nail clipper. It was gold rimmed and monogrammed J.N., which were his father’s initials. Then he put his hands over hers. She felt the places in his palm the sun had kissed.

  “Why don’t you call your papa to pick you up?” Timothy asked her now, after they had finished their tea. “Bet he likes to chauffeur you fancy city people around.”

  When her father came to get her, Lucy made every effort to be kinder, through the rest of the afternoon and into the evening of her departure. He seemed more fragile, more in need of Mama’s grace, which now, truth be told, was Lucy’s to give. She hugged him hard and was grateful when he reciprocated, albeit awkwardly, in the station full of strangers.

  “You call more often now,” her father chided, gently.

  “Yes, sir,” she said. She hugged him once more, then boarded the bus to the life she’d learned to love.

  * * *

  ………………

  She was back in the city and at work the day of New Year’s Eve. There were hardly any clients, so she spent the day thinking about Jaryk but not calling him. When it was time to wrap up, her coworkers invited her dancing, and later that evening she met them at a dimly lit club in Spanish Harlem, where the band started out playing soul. Soon the claves, congas, and trombones came out, and frenetic rhythms born of another continent pressed against her. It no longer mattered that it was below freezing outside and the club poorly heated as she danced and sweated through her dress. At the stroke of midnight, she found herself in the arms of a capable dancer, who spoke only Spanish and taught her steps she didn’t think her body could muster. She got home at three in the morning, feeling alive with the city that had taken her back.

  The next week she saw Jaryk again. He visited her at her office (she had resolved to let him call her, not the other way around) and approached her desk shyly with a handful of pansies.

  They went out for lunch, talking about everything but Misha and that night at his apartment, as if the conversation about the orphanage in Warsaw had never happened. They began seeing each other again, but this time it was a harder love: she was into him so solidly she couldn’t see how deep the fall was. She made a little home in his apartment, bringing in shelves of her own books and her makeup and three or four of her dresses. They cooked together, giant meals that welcomed winter: squash, buttered corn, stews thick with spice and love. They lived through each other, through the frost and the chill, and when he held her in his arms, she thought of the possibility of children, of the something deeper and lifelong she hoped would soon come.

  One evening, after a dinner of herbed chicken, t
o which Lucy had added dollops of butter and heavy cream, he told her about his earliest years. “I grew up a country boy, so this is the food we dreamed of,” Jaryk said, addressing the leftover chicken on her plate. He’d been raised by his aunt, alongside her four sons, and as soon as he’d turned five had worked on the family farm. There was no memory of a mother, who’d died shortly after he was born, or of a father, who’d left not long after he was conceived, but Jaryk said he remembered the many hours of work. The contented mornings waking with the cattle, carrying his pail to their stalls to collect fresh milk. He said he remembered the soreness of his muscles and how that made even the simplest food taste wonderful.

  Lucy asked why he’d left for the city, how he’d ended up in an orphanage, and Jaryk shrugged. “When the Germans came, I was one mouth too many to feed. If you’ve ever seen a house with five young boys, then you’ll know how much they can scarf down. So, my aunt packed me off with warm clothes. She’d heard about this doctor in the city, who was taking children from the villages and who had food to go around.”

  Lucy was an only child; she didn’t know the first thing about fighting for your portion. Still, looking at the remnants of their meal—Jaryk’s plate without a crumb but hers with half a chicken breast in its cream sauce—she felt grateful for these comforts. Surreptitiously and also a little guiltily, she took a few more bites, but Jaryk didn’t seem to notice. She knew he was thankful for her felicity in the kitchen, the way she’d saved him from a life of street food and takeout. After he did the dishes, Jaryk kissed her for a long minute, his hands smelling of the lavender detergent she’d introduced to his apartment.

  That weekend, Jaryk said he was going to surprise her with a special date and that she should dress up nice. She picked out a blue chiffon dress she rarely had occasion to wear and met him at the Lincoln Center fountain, where she found him waiting in a suit and tie, a little pomade in his hair. He took her by the hand and led her into the gilded premises of the Metropolitan Opera House for a production of La Bohème.