The River King

by Alice Hoffman

  From then on, she sat out on the ledge every time Harry came calling for Amy. Poor Amy, Carlin pitied her. Amy thought she had won an exceptional prize, but each day she would have to worry that someone prettier and fresher would catch Harry’s eye, and she’d bend herself around him, like the willows beside the river must in order to survive along the banks.

  “He’s mine now,” Amy gloated, and when Carlin replied that she was welcome to him, Amy refused to believe that Carlin hadn’t been torn apart by their breakup. “You’re just jealous,” Amy insisted, “so I refuse to feel sorry for you. You never appreciated him in the first place.”

  “Did you do that to your hair because of Harry?” Pie asked one night as she watched Carlin run a comb through her chopped-up hair.

  “I did it on impulse.” Carlin shrugged. She did it because she thought she deserved to be torn apart.

  “Don’t worry,” Pie said to Carlin, her voice sweet with concern. “It will grow back.”

  But some things weren’t so easily repaired; at night Carlin lay in bed and listened to the wind and to the sound of her roommates mates’ quiet breathing. She wished that she was still the person she was before she came to Haddan, and that she, too, could sleep through the night. Whenever she did fall asleep, during the gray and freezing dawn, it was Gus Carlin dreamed of. In her dreams, he was asleep underwater, his eyes wide open. When he arose from the water to walk through the grass, he was barefoot and perfectly at ease. He was dead in her dream and he carried with him the knowledge of the dead, that all that matters is love, here and beyond. Everything else will simply fall away. Carlin could tell he was trying to get home; in order to do so he needed to climb a trellis covered with vines, not that this obstacle deterred him. Though the vines were replete with thorns, he did not bleed. Though the night was dark, he found his way. He climbed into his attic room and sat on the edge of his unmade bed, and the vines came in after him, winding along both the ceiling and the floor until there was a hedge of thorns, each one resembling a human thumb, each with a fingerprint of its own.

  Was it possible for the soul of a person to linger if it so desired, right at the edge of our commonplace world, substantial enough to move pots of ivy on a windowsill or empty a sugar bowl or catch minnows in the river? Lie duwn beside me, Carlin said in her dream to whatever there was left of him. Stay here with me, she begged, calling to him in whatever way she knew how. She could hear the wind outside, rattling against the trellis; she could feel him beside her, his skin cool as water. The hems of her bedsheets grew muddy and damp, but Carlin didn’t care. She should have followed him over the black fence, into the woods and along the path. Because she had not, he was with her still, where he would remain until the day she let go.

  * * *

  VERY FEW PEOPLE IN TOWN REMEMBERED Annie Howe anymore. Her family’s acreage had been sold off in parcels and her brothers had all moved west, to California and New Mexico and Utah. Some of the older residents in the village, George Nichols at the Millstone, or Zeke Harris from the dry cleaner’s, or even Charlotte Evans, who hadn’t been much more than a child when Annie died, recalled spying her on Main Street, certain that they would never again see a woman as beautiful as Annie, not in this lifetime or in the next.

  Only Helen Davis thought about Annie. She thought of her daily, much the way a devout person might utter a prayer, words summoned forth without design. Therefore, she was not in the least surprised to smell roses one cold morning at the very end of January, a day when ice coated every growing thing, lilacs and lilies and pine trees alike. Carlin Leander also noticed the scent, for it overpowered the caramel aroma of the bread pudding she had in the oven, in the hopes that dessert might tempt Miss Davis’s appetite. Miss Davis had gone to bed the previous Sunday and simply hadn’t gotten up again. She had missed so many classes a substitute had been hired, and the members of the history department grumbled about the extra work they were forced to take on in Miss Davis’s absence. Not one of them, including Eric Herman, knew that the woman they’d feared and disliked for so many years now had to be carried to the bathroom, a task that all but defeated Carlin and Betsy Chase working together.

  “This is so embarrassing,” Miss Davis would say each time they helped her to the bathroom, which was the reason Betsy had not told Eric how dire the situation was. Some things were meant to be kept concealed from public view, and that was why every time Betsy and Carlin stood outside the open bathroom door, they kept their eyes averted, trying their best to offer Helen a bit of privacy The time for privacy, however, was over and with it the pretense that Miss Davis’s health might improve. Yet when Betsy suggested a trip to the hospital or a call to the Visiting Nurses’ Association, Miss Davis was outraged. She insisted it was only the flu that had her down, but Carlin knew the real reason she demurred was that Miss Davis would never tolerate being prodded and poked and kept alive past her time. Helen knew what was coming for her, and she was ready, except for one last act of contrition. In hoping for forgiveness, even those who are failing may hold on to the material world, they cling to the edges until their bones are as brittle as wafers and their tears have turned to blood. But at last what Miss Davis had been waiting for had arrived on this cold January afternoon, for it was then that she breathed in the scent of the roses, and the fragrance was so strong it was as if the vines had grown up through her bedroom floor to bloom and offer her absolution for all she had done and all she had failed to do.

  Helen looked at the window to see the garden exactly as it had been when she first came to Haddan. She, herself, had always preferred red roses to white, especially those gorgeous Lincolns, which turned a deeper shade with each passing day. She did not panic the way she had feared she might when her time came. Although she was grateful for her life, she had been waiting to be forgiven for such a long time she’d thought she might never experience what she wanted most of all, and now here it was, all in a rush, as if grace and mercy were flowing through her. Things of this world fell into their proper place and appeared to be very far away: her hand on the pillow, the girl coming to sit beside her, the black cat at the foot of her bed, curled up and sleeping, breathing in, breathing out.

  Helen felt a sweetness rising within her and a vision so bright she might have been gazing upon a thousand stars. How quickly her life had gone by; one moment she had been a girl taking the train to Haddan and now here she was in her bed watching dusk fall through the window, spreading out across the white walls in pools of shadow. If only she’d known how short her time on earth would be, she would have enjoyed it more. She wished she could let the girl beside her know as much; she wanted to shout, but Carlin had already gone to dial 911. Helen could hear her asking for an ambulance to be brought around to St. Anne’s, but she paid little attention to Carlin’s distress, for Helen was now walking to school from the train station, suitcase in hand, on a day when all the horse chestnut trees were in blossom and the sky was as blue as the china cups her mother used to set the table for tea. She had come for the job at the age of twenty-four, and all things considered, she had done well. The girl fussing about seemed silly and Helen wished she could say so. The panic in the girl’s voice, the sirens outside, the cold January night, the thousands of stars in the sky, the train from Boston, how her heart had felt that day when her whole life was about to begin. Helen signaled to Carlin, who at last came to sit beside the bed.

  “You’re going to be fine,” Carlin whispered. This was not at all true and Miss Davis knew it; still she was touched to see that the girl had turned pale, the way people did when they worried, when they truly cared.

  Don’t forget to turn off the onen, Helen wanted to tell the girl, but she was watching the roses outside her window, the gorgeous red ones, the Lincolns. There was the lovely sound of drowsy bees, the way there had been every June. Each year at that time, the campus had exploded into bands of red and white, ribbons of peach and pink and gold, all because of Annie Howe. Some people said bees came from all over the
Commonwealth, beckoned by the roses at Haddan, and it was well known that local honey was uncommonly sweet. Don’t forget to enjoy this life you’re walking through, Helen wanted to say, but instead she held on to the girl’s hand and they waited together for the paramedics to arrive.

  This was a volunteer crew, men and women called away from their dinners, and as soon as they walked into the room, they all knew no lives would be saved tonight. Carlin recognized some members of the team: there was the woman who ran the dance studio, and the man who worked at the mini-mart, along with two janitors that Carlin had passed many times but had never paid much attention to. The woman from the dance studio, Rita Eamon, took Helen’s pulse and listened to her heart while a canister of oxygen was wheeled in.

  “It’s pulmonary edema,” Rita Eamon told the others before turning to Helen. “Want some oxygen, honey?” she asked Helen.

  Helen waved the offer away. There was blue sky above her and all those many roses, the ones that gave off the scent of cloves in the rain and the ones that left a trace of lemon on your fingers, the ones that were the color of blood, and those that were as white as clouds. Cut one rose, and two will grow in its place, gardeners say, and so it had happened. Each one was sweeter than the next and as red as gemstones. Helen Davis tried to say, Look at these, but the only sound she could force out led them to believe she was choking.

  “She’s passing on,” said one of the volunteers, a man who’d been doing this job long enough so that he did not flinch when Carlin began to cry. He was one of the janitors, Marie and Billy Bishop’s son, Brian, who had worked at Haddan for quite a while and who had in fact fixed Miss Davis’s refrigerator some time ago. People said Miss Davis was nasty, but Brian never saw any evidence of that; she’d had him sit at her table when he was through working, which was more than anyone else at the school had ever done. She’d given him a glass of lemonade on that hot day, and now Brian Bishop returned the favor. He took Miss Davis’s free hand and sat across from Carlin as if his own dinner wasn’t cdoling on his table at home, as if he had all the time in the world.

  “She’s going easy,” he told Carlin.

  Someone from the rescue crew must have turned the oven off when they went into the kitchen to phone the police station and report a death on campus, because hours later, when Carlin remembered the bread pudding and hurried to retrieve the pan, the pudding was perfectly done, the syrupy topping bubbling and warm. At the president’s house they knew something was wrong when the ambulance pulled up. Dr. Jones called Bob Thomas, who went out to the ambulance to ask what was going on and was surprised to find he recognized the fellow at the wheel from somewhere; although Bob Thomas couldn’t quite place him, the driver, Ed Campbell, was a member of the grounds crew and had been mowing the lawns and salting the paths at the Haddan School for more than ten years. It was a gloomy evening, and bad news hung in the air.

  Bob Thomas waited until the hospital in Hamilton called to notify the school that the death certificate had been signed, then he asked the janitor on duty to ring the chapel bells. When the community gathered in the dining hall, Helen Davis’s passing was announced. She had been at school for so long no one could quite imagine it without her, except for Eric Herman, who had been waiting for more years than he’d like to count to take her place as the chair of the department.

  “If she was that ill, it’s better this way,” Eric said when he saw how upset Betsy had become.

  But his words weren’t any comfort. Betsy felt as if something had been tossed down a well, something precious and irretrievable ; the world seemed much smaller without Miss Davis as a part of it. Betsy excused herself and walked back to St. Anne’s; the sky was black and starry, as cold as it was deep. A north wind was shaking the trees, but in the arbor behind St. Anne’s a pair of cardinals slept in the thicket, one gray as the bark, the other red as the deepest rose.

  Carlin was still in the kitchen, cleaning up. She’d tied one of Helen Davis’s white aprons around her waist and was arm-deep in soapy water, crying as she scrubbed the pots. She had already consumed three glasses of the Madeira stored in the cabinet under the sink and was extremely tipsy, with a pink cast to her skin and her eyes rimmed red. For the first time the black cat hadn’t begged to be let out at dark, rather it perched on the counter and mewed uncertainly. When Betsy came in, she draped her coat over a kitchen chair and examined the half-empty bottle of Madeira.

  “You can turn me in if you like.” Carlin dried her hands and sat across from Miss Chase at the table. “Of course, I never turned you in for having men in your room.”

  They stared at each other, dizzy from the scent of roses, their mouths dry with grief. Betsy poured herself a glass of wine and refilled Carlin’s empty glass as well.

  “It was just one man,” Betsy said. “Not that I need to explain myself to you.”

  “Miss Davis had a crush on him. She invited him to Christmas dinner. It’s none of my business, but in my opinion, he’s definitely the better man.”

  The Madeira had a heavy, bitter aftertaste, perfectly suitable, considering the circumstances. A few nights earlier, Betsy had gone to the phone booth at the pharmacy and called Abe, but as soon as he’d answered, she hung up, completely undone by the sound of his voice.

  “It’s all over now, and I’d just as soon nobody knew about it.”

  Carlin shrugged. “It’s your loss.”

  “What is that I smell?” Betsy asked, for the scent of roses was everywhere now. Surely, the fragrance was too floral to be wafting over from the bread pudding set out on the table. Betsy was surprised to discover that Carlin was such a good cook; she didn’t think anyone made desserts from scratch anymore, not when there were instants for just about everything other than love and marriage. She gazed out the window, and seeing the cardinals perched there she grew confused; for a moment she believed them to be roses.

  They let the cat out when it mewed at the door, then locked up, even though there was nothing to steal. In only a few days the maintenance crew would have the place down to bare wood and walls, carting the furniture down to the thrift shop at St. Agatha’s and toting boxes of books to the secondhand store in Middletown. By now the odor in the apartment was so strong that Carlin had begun to sneeze and Betsy felt bumps rising on the most tender areas of her skin, the base of her throat, the backs of her knees, her fingers, her thighs, her toes. The scent of roses was seeping into the hallways, winding up the staircases, streaming beneath closed doors. That night, any girl who had something to regret tossed and turned, burning up while she slept. Amy Elliot, with her terrible allergies, broke out in hives and Maureen Brown, who could not abide rose pollen, awoke with black spots on her tongue that the school nurse diagnosed as bee stings, although surely such an affliction was impossible at this time of year.

  A funeral mass was said at St. Agathas early Saturday, the last cold morning of the month, with several townspeople in attendance, including Mike Randall from the bank, and Pete Byers, who’d ordered the flowers from the Lucky Day and who sat in the first pew alongside his nephew and Carlin Leander. Abe came in toward the end of the service, wearing his grandfather’s old overcoat, for lack of something of his own that might be appropriate for such an occasion. He stayed in the back row, where he was most comfortable, nodding a greeting to Rita Eamon, who had come to pay her respects, as she did with every 911 patient the rescue team was unfortunate enough to lose. He waved to Carlin Leander, who looked like a pixie from hell with her hair all chopped off and the worn black coat, which was coming apart at the seams.

  After the service, Abe waited outside in the raw January air, watching as parishioners left the church. Carlin had wrapped a green woolen scarf around her head, but when she came down the steps, she looked chalky and chilled to the bone. Sean Byers was close beside her; anyone could judge his attachment from the look on his face. To see a wild boy so concerned made people passing by pity him and envy him at the very same time. Pete had to drag the boy back toward the
pharmacy to get him away from Carlin, and when at last he had, Carlin went over to Abe. Together, they watched six strong men from the funeral parlor carry out the coffin.

  “You’re not going to break Sean Byers’s heart, are you?” For Abe could still see the love-struck boy looking over his shoulder as he followed his uncle down Main Street.

  “People break their own hearts, if you ask me. Not that it’s your business.”

  It was a good day for a funeral, brutal and cold. The burial was at the school cemetery and Carlin and Abe set off in that direction. Carlin didn’t mind being with Abe; it was almost like being alone. She didn’t have to be polite to him, and he clearly felt the same way. When the scarf on her head slipped back he nodded toward what she’d done with the razor. “Walk into a lawn mower?”

  “Something like that. I mutilated myself.”

  “Good job.” Abe couldn’t help but laugh. “If Sean Byers wants you when you look like this, he’ll take you any way.”

  “He didn’t even notice,” Carlin admitted. “I guess he thinks my hair was always this way.”

  They passed the Evanses’ house, and Abe waved to Charlotte, who was peeking out her front window, curious to see who was walking along Main Street on such a dreadful day.