Carson Valley

by Bill Barich

  That had been her gift, Claire realized—an ability to hold onto love through hardship and disappointment. She had many chances and sometimes very good reasons to despise Victor, but she had remained steadfast in her affection.

  “Was I really such a rotten husband?” he asked her abruptly, still licking his wounds.

  “Of course you weren’t,” she told him. “You know better than that, don’t you?”

  His head was sunk in gloom. “I see my mistakes. I think about them at night.”

  “I never did anything wrong myself, did I?” Claire asked him coyly, sorry now that she’d hurt his feelings.

  “Oh, I’m not so sure about that!”

  “Here’s what I remember,” she said, with as much cheer as she could muster. “I remember the evening we met. I was out for a stroll with Maude Vescio, and you were sitting on a bench in the square with Tom Atwater. I believe you two were looking for girls.”

  Victor seemed heartened by the image of himself as a young rogue on the prowl. “Probably we were,” he said. “Probably you’re right.”

  “Do you recall what I was wearing?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do. A pretty blue dress.”

  “What a memory you have!” The dress was in fact a rose-colored blouse and a gray skirt.

  “That’s one good thing about me, anyhow,” he said proudly. “My memory’s like a goddam steel trap. Maude Vescio, did she ever have any interest in me?”

  “Oh, you were the prize catch of the valley! But we girls had you figured as a bachelor for life. We didn’t think anybody would ever land you.”

  “It’s crazy when you come right down to it. There I was closing in on forty, and I thought I was so goddam old!”

  “You were my first ‘older’ man.”

  “And I stayed that way.”

  “Yes, you did. You did indeed.”

  He got up to stretch and stood looking downriver toward the great oxbow of the Russian. She could tell that he had something on his mind and waited patiently as time had taught her to do while he circled around it and fumbled for a way to speak. “I’ve been considering that deal with Consolidated Vintners,” he said finally. “Wade Saunders, he sent me over a sample contract.”

  “And?”

  “Well, I go back and forth on it. The security angle appeals to me. It’d set up the kids real nicely if it worked out the way it’s supposed to. They’d earn a dividend on the harvest every year, and Consolidated would supervise the vineyard work. Meanwhile, the value of the land would keep appreciating.”

  Claire pushed him in the direction he was going, toward what would be best for Roger and Anna. “Why don’t you sign up, then? What have you got to lose?”

  He shrugged. “Quality wine grapes, they’re in short supply now. Some of the wineries around here, I’ve been selling to them forever. I’d hate to pull the rug out from under those fellows.”

  “You’d just be looking out for your family,” she said, urging him on. “People understand those things. They’d do the same if they were in your shoes.”

  “I’m not so sure of that.”

  “Why don’t you talk it over with the children? They might surprise you. I believe Anna’s had enough of New York, really.”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Promise me you’ll involve them, Victor. Will you do that for me?”

  “I will.” He sat next to her once more and put an arm around her shoulders. She felt the heated press of his blood and saw that his eyes were again rimmed in red. “You want to know the honest truth, Claire? I’m tired. This is too much work for an old man like me. They’ll be carting me off to the boneyard before long.”

  “Dear Victor,” she said, his hand in hers again. “Don’t you know you’re going to live forever?”

  “It won’t be living without you.”

  She wished that she could offer him some solace, but her strength was flagging. She was operating strictly on willpower, and that, too, was running low. “We’d better go, dear,” she told him. “I’m getting chilly.”

  The trip to the farm proved to be Claire’s last respite from the downward spiral of the cancer. She fell seriously ill again a week later and was unable to keep down any food at all. Her pain intensified and became the sum of what she was, so Ed Sawyer moved her to the hospital for the constant care she required, starting her on Demerol and soon escalating to morphine. The drug soothed her, but it also kept her in a hazy stupor, and often she failed to respond to the people who came to visit, old friends paying their final respects. Even Anna’s identity slipped in and out of focus for her, but she always knew Victor and had no problem recognizing her son when he arrived.

  “Roger’s here,” the old man informed her one afternoon. “He’ll sit with you for a while.”

  Claire glanced up from her pillow and through heavy-lidded eyes saw Roger at the foot of her bed. She was struck as ever by how little he resembled his sister, being round where she was firm, shorter and much fairer in complexion, and even-tempered where she was passionate. He had a crooked nose that he had broken in a football game, badly needed a haircut, and wore a small gold hoop of an earring in his right ear. A part of him would surely remain boyish forever, she thought. He had been that way even as an infant, intrigued by every shape around him and every shaft of light, giggling as she changed his diapers, never crying or throwing a tantrum, comfortable in the hammock of his own skin.

  She could not stay awake very long in spite of his company and dozed for about an hour. It was dark outside when she awoke, and there was a gusty breeze that signaled rain and rattled the hospital windows. Roger sat reading by a lamp. He was so engrossed in his book that he didn’t notice she was watching him. She watched as mothers do, observant and indulgent, appreciating the opportunity and marveling in a primal way that she had ever given birth to him.

  It took a forced cough to break his diligent studying. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said apologetically. “Can I get you anything?”

  “Some water would be nice. Not too cold, please.”

  He poured her some water from a plastic pitcher and held the glass to her mouth. “Drink it slowly,” he cautioned her. “There you go.”

  “I’m so pleased you’re here, Roger.” She was aware of his touch, of its delicacy. “You have such soft hands.”

  He stroked her damp brow. “It is from avoiding hard work,” he told her with a smile. “Those vegetables don’t fight back.”

  “What’s that funny little book you’re reading?”

  “This?” Roger held up a miniature paperback, almost perfectly square, five inches to a side. “A book of Japanese poetry.”

  “Can you speak Japanese?”

  He shook his head. “But I’m taking a class in it now. This is a bilingual edition. The poems are translated into English.”

  “Will you read me one?” Claire asked.

  “Sure,” he said, flipping pages. “See what you think of this.”

  She listened to him intently. His voice was round and deep, rich with respect for the lines he was reciting, and she felt proud of him simply because he was her son and no one else’s, a young man who was learning Japanese. She heard a strange but beautiful music in the poem, like the chiming of a bell, but its meaning escaped her. “It’s beautiful, Roger,” she told him. “Who wrote it?”

  “Ikkyu Sojun. He was a monk in Kyoto in the fifteenth century. When he was seventy, he fell in love with a blind singer who was just forty and moved her into the temple with him.”

  “I’ve been thinking about love,” Claire said softly.

  “What about it?”

  “How it changes.”

  “And how does it change?” Roger asked, stroking her forehead again.

  “Like the wind.”

  Her eyes closed then, and she napped for a short while. When she stirred once more, she was bewildered and couldn’t see very well. There were only shadows lacking in any detail. “Roger?” she asked, groping for him. “Ar
e you still here?”

  “I’m here. Would you like me to come over and sit by the bed?”

  “Yes, please.” His nearness consoled her. “Everything’s getting all mixed up.”

  The bedroom appeared to be crowded when Claire opened her eyes again. She saw Anna sitting where Roger had been, and it was as if her two children had become one. They were undivided, both parts of a seamless whole. She heard Anna speak to her and thought with all the concentrated power that she could bring to bear on the situation what she should say in reply, but there was nothing. She had run out of the language for such emotions if ever she’d had any, and yet she felt a comforting clarity between herself and Anna, with no interference of any kind, and that gave her peace. Then it occurred to her quite suddenly that she did have something to say, and she touched her daughter’s cheek and said, “Don’t cry, Anna. Don’t cry.”

  A delirium swept over Claire in the next few hours. Ed Sawyer worried that she would drop into a coma, but she hung on for three more days. Only in rare moments did she know herself still to be a presence on earth, orbiting instead through the hyperspace that separates the living from the dead. She slept dreamlessly now, in a state that wasn’t really sleep. “This is a relief,” she whispered to Victor on her last night, unable to see his face anymore but feeling the powerful grip of his fingers. She heard him walk away and heard some other voices in the room, but she was not connected to them now. Then there were no sounds at all, only silence as she drifted off a final time.

  5

  The cemetery at St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in Carson Valley occupied a grassy hillside overlooking town. About forty mourners gathered there for the funeral of Claire Torelli, a Lutheran convert by reason of her marriage, who was to be buried in a family plot where some of the chipped and blighted headstones were almost a century old. Claire had not attended services at the church for at least six months, and Victor had never attended them except under duress, so it fell to Anna to handle the arrangements. She moved with the dullness of a sleepwalker through a host of detailed work, discussing an obituary notice with a cub reporter from the Herald, who used the word homemaker anyway, and talking with a new young priest about a simple ceremony to be performed at the gravesite.

  It was early in the afternoon when the mourners began their slow march up the hill, following a team of pallbearers led by Roger Torelli, who had nicked himself while shaving and wore a faded blazer with dull gold buttons. The older men and women were perspiring heavily in the spring heat, audibly chastising themselves for forgetting to bring their hats. One sound in particular stood out for Anna, a locomotive chuffing that Jack Farrell produced as he wrestled with his paunch against gravity, grunting with each thudding step. He was dressed appropriately in black, but not everyone in the funeral party had been able to honor that tradition. Arthur Atwater had on a ravelly Harris tweed sportcoat, dark brown and missing an elbow patch, while Fred Vescio was dressed in a pinstriped suit of blue serge that must have dated from the 1930s and made him look like a gunsel for the Capone mob. Wade Saunders, a newly signed CV contract in his pocket, could have been on his way to a rodeo in his bolo tie and fringed suede jacket with a Rotary Club pin fixed to his lapel.

  Anna, in a simple black shift, walked with her father, an arm linked loosely through his. She shortened her stride to accommodate his limp and heard him swear every time he stumbled. The anguish on his face was too distressing for her to absorb. She was washed out herself, sunk in a sorrow deeper than any she had ever known. She had wept in church and was teary-eyed again, her heart on the point of breaking whenever she imagined the whittled-down old woman in the closed casket. She had no use for formal religion, but she was still affected by the dark and bloody symbols that had frightened her as a child—the nails in the flesh, the crown of thorns, the terrible dripping wounds on Christ’s body. It hurt her, too, that the weather should be so perfect, sunny and cloudless, precisely the sort of day when her mother would roll up her sleeves and start digging in the garden, planting annuals in beds and using a pitchfork to turn over the soil for vegetables.

  The young priest kept his remarks brief and unfancy, as Anna had requested. He spoke of things about which he had no firsthand knowledge, but at least he did it convincingly, commenting favorably on the Torellis’ long marriage and their importance to the community. He seemed resigned rather than saddened, as though he had already dealt with many deaths in his brief service in the clergy and understood that he would have to deal with many more before he confronted his own. Yet at the same time he looked so clean and fresh-faced, just out of the seminary, that Anna, still weeping, believed that he had no real experience of suffering. She felt inducted into mysteries he couldn’t possibly fathom, and her shoulders heaved desperately when her father, his teeth gritted, approached the grave and tossed in a handful of dirt.

  Her turn came next. Emotions cycled through her—rage, emptiness, and a sense of incalculable loss, above all else. She saw how badly she had underestimated the power of grief, saw how it could command the entire stage of a person’s existence, crippling a bereft spouse or a stricken parent. What was it that Atwater had said about getting over things? Some do and some don’t. Her own innocence, a quantity she had assumed to be nearly exhausted, was in fact apparently bottomless. Anna was learning so quickly there in the cemetery under the treacherous sun that she became a little unmoored and almost fell as she started downhill. Betty Chambers came to her rescue and took her by the elbow, offering condolences, and together they trudged past a stony mausoleum atop which a cherub stood guard over the privileged remains of Angelo D’Annunzio, 1883–1969, who had sired eleven children and was beloved by them all, according to the chiseled inscription.

  The Torellis had not hired a limousine. That would have been too showy and expensive for the old man. He had driven his truck to the church instead, so Anna rode with him back to the house on Quail Court, while Roger trailed them in the Taurus. A number of close family friends dropped in soon afterward with food for a buffet, cakes and cookies and pies, fried chicken and bread fresh from the oven, pots of soup and stew, an age-old valley custom still commemorated. Anna served coffee distractedly, pestered by Jack Farrell, who seemed to have romance on his mind, oblivious of his impropriety. She put out some wine and beer and a bottle of brandy, as well. Nobody was comfortable at first. The guests huddled in knots, as if they needed protection, and chatted about blameless subjects in hushed voices. They were like children who were trying to be good, Anna thought. They were afraid to make any noise or cause any disturbance, being overly reverential, still intimidated by the nearness of death and unwilling to insult it, not yet returned to their human selves.

  It was Charlie Grimes who finally broke the unnatural quiet. “Here’s to a helluva woman,” he blurted out, raising his brandy glass with one hand and swiping at his eyes with the other. “She’s up there with the angels now.”

  “Amen to that,” said Pepper Harris, and there was some scattered applause.

  The positive reception encouraged Grimes to say more. “She was a wonderful gal to be with,” he continued, after fortifying himself with a big swig from his glass. “One time, we all took a vacation trip to Reno, and we just had the best time ever. Claire even won a five-hundred-dollar jackpot on the slots.”

  “They took her picture with the manager of Harrah’s,” Fred Vescio boasted. “Then they threw in a free steak dinner for us all. We never had it so good. Isn’t that right, Victor?”

  Torelli offered a melancholy smile. “That’s right.”

  “Did you win that suit up there, too, Fred?” Farrell asked.

  Vescio plucked defensively at his pinstripes. He’d been paid a brutal abuse. “Don’t you dare make fun of my outfit,” he warned. “This is the very suit I got married in.”

  The story about Reno opened up the floodgates of memory. In turn, Claire was celebrated for her kindness and generosity, her compassion, her hybrid tea roses, and—by Grimes again
—her ability to live with Victor for so many years without going over the wall. When there was nothing left to relate, when every anecdote had been shared and every bit of praise doled out, the guests filtered into the twilight, singly and in pairs. Anna experienced their absence as an echoing void. She began collecting the dirty plates and cups and stacking them in the kitchen, glad to be doing something again and recapturing a sense of purpose that had deserted her during her mother’s final days. Her father observed and advised her from the kitchen table, pouring himself liberal doses of wine, while Roger sat on the living room couch and watched a cop show on TV The ancient family dynamic was locking into place, Anna realized with chagrin. Nothing would ever be addressed, nothing would be confronted directly. Nothing would be settled.

  “Well, she had a good life,” the old man said morosely. “Up to the end of it, anyway.”

  “Yes, she did,” Roger agreed.

  “She was a wonderful woman. One in a million.”

  Anna felt sympathetic toward her father, but she knew also that he would descend into sloppy pools of self-pity if she gave him half a chance, so she joined him at the table with a pad and pencil. Her need to break the stalemate was so strong that it affected her like a rush of adrenaline. “We have to get ourselves organized,” she said urgently, brushing the hair from her face. “I’m going to make a list of things to do. What about Mother’s clothes? Do you care where they go?”

  “Donate them to the Salvation Army or somebody,” her father growled, throwing a hand in the air. “I don’t give a good goddam either way. Her jewelry’s all yours. Roger’ll just have to wait.”

  “For what?” Roger wondered, turning his head to look.

  Torelli pulled out his grandfather’s pocket watch, sterling silver and bearing the insignia of a famous jeweler on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, and let it swing by its chain. “For this,” he said smugly.

  “I can wait.”