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The name on the other man’s lips is enraging. But he’s asleep, snoring lightly again. Oliver’s careful not to wake him, even feeling the anger and the hurt. It’s as if Drew has disrespected Mary. Oliver’s Mary.
He rises from the bed and totters a little on his unsteady legs. He has always hated the way dead wives are portrayed in the movies—those dreamy, slow-motion images of soft light and glowing faces uncomplicatedly happy, glorious paradigms of love and acceptance. His memory of Mary is of her sorrows about him, her pinched face gone early to wrinkles. There were laugh lines and it wasn’t all pain; yet Oliver remembers too many instances. He wishes it were different, wishes he could go back and find the beginnings of everything, wishes he could fix it, change it. And it wasn’t ever really the war, either. He was drunk when he enlisted those years ago. No, Oliver’s fault lines are older than the war. He’s too honorable a man to use his wounds in Vietnam as an excuse for anything. Sitting back down on the bed, he puts his hands in his lap and thinks of Mary in the first spirited days he knew her. In important ways, Alison is a continual sweet reminder of Mary as Mary was then, except that, lately, Alison has been showing signs of distress, too.
Oliver’s mood is so black just now, and he bows his head a little, breathing in soft sighs. He sets about clearing his mind, and starts making the attempt to find something good in his immediate surroundings.
The window is coming to light, the sky all clouds, bruised and heavy-looking without quite being storm clouds—the kind of sky that is crowded with folds of gray but never yields up any precipitation. A traveling sky, Oliver thinks—it will move on and rain somewhere else, probably over the sea. There’s snow on the windowsill and lining the panes of glass, and a thin coating of hoarfrost has formed along the bottoms of each one, perfect as all the pictures of winter windows. The clouds are visibly moving across the sky.
He thinks of this as of trouble that moves over the world, and something of his dire mood does begin to dissipate somewhat—the clouds are moving. The storms have passed. Like that, it is possible that trouble, too, may be moving on for a time. There’ll be work for the winter.
There’s that. The rest of the work on the Temporary Road house.
Yes, he thinks. Temporary. That’s me.
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He smiles, mildly proud of himself for making the joke. He thinks of Holly and Fiona. New friends. He’ll labor not to be sad just now.
A nurse comes in and is startled to find him sitting there. She emits a small gasp of surprise that wakes Drew, who sits up and looks at the room. “What the hell,” Drew says. And Oliver waits for the name. But Drew lies back down and closes his eyes again.
“I didn’t expect anyone to be up yet,” the nurse whispers. Oliver’s not seen her before. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says. And he sees that she’s staring. His nerve tic has got her confused. He explains it, and the explanation is as automatic as the tic itself.
“Has the doctor been to speak to you?” she asks.
“Not yet.”
“I’m supposed to check your blood pressure and take your pulse.”
He holds out his arm, and she wraps the sleeve around it, competent, not even having to concentrate, her mind elsewhere, while he watches.
Abruptly, he feels a sense of affection for her, so intent on her life, whatever it is, with whomever it is lived. Something’s worrying her, because something is always worrying everyone. He believes anyway that he sees it in her eyes as she proceeds, measuring the diastolic and systolic matter of his living pulse, the intricate and mysterious signals of his heart.
“You’re new,” he says.
She nods. “Today.”
“Hello,” he says.
“Hi.”
“This your first job?”
She smiles, letting the tightness go out of the sleeve. “This is my fourth hospital.”
“You don’t look old enough. How old are you?”
She smiles. “Blood pressure’s very good.”
“I’ll live to be a hundred,” Oliver says.
Then she seems to relent. “I’m twenty-nine.”
He smiles. “I’ve got socks older than you.”
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3.
Friday morning. A light is on in the Butterfields’ bedroom, made super-fluous now by the brilliant eastern sun at the window. Elizabeth wakes with a throbbing headache and pain around the eyes. The last school day of this week, and the schools are open. It takes her a bad little moment of darkness to remember herself. When she can manage to move at all, she rises and looks back at his side of the bed, which is, of course, empty. Last night, she packed the suitcase again, deciding that, with everyone coming next week, she’ll be the one to leave. But she can’t bring herself to do it. Now she takes a shower, puts fresh clothes on—it’s all the motions of leaving—and changes her mind yet again: she will leave.
She works to close the suitcase and has to turn around and sit on it, pressing down with both hands. The latch clicks shut just as she realizes that her toothbrush and makeup kit are in there, so she flips the latch, and the lid pops open. It’s ridiculous. She puts her hands to her face, sits down on the bed, and begins crying again.
There’s no time for this. She has to find something to say to the crowds of adolescents who are ill-tempered about not getting the one more little day off because of the snow, and who will want nothing to do with schoolwork. Everything’s so strange now. It’s all coming apart, and she can’t master herself, can’t stop crying. In the bathroom, she tries with trembling fingers to put makeup on. Perhaps Will has gone in the night. The thought occurs to her, and she puts it aside, an aspect of this trouble that will present itself in time—she can’t think about anything just now but getting the makeup right, getting herself ready for the day’s tasks. She stops a moment and stares at her own face, with its bleary eyes and its small, downturning mouth. Then she washes everything off and wipes the towel hard across her features, as if trying to erase them as well as the makeup. She starts over, slightly calmer now, out of the pure force of anger. But her hands shake, and she has to remove it all still once more. She gets that done, then brushes her teeth—nearly gagging on the paste. It’s as if her body waits here, in-332
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tractable, refusing to cooperate, inert as a doll, yet resistant, too. Obstinately showing the signs of her misery. She stands, weeping, in front of the mirror, while trying yet again to put on her makeup. It’s preposter-ous. The mascara runs with tears as she applies it, though she continues to apply it anyway, stubbornly, angrily, sniffling. When it’s at least marginally done, and her eyes are only dark-shadowed and red, she puts everything back into the suitcase and tries again to push it shut. It won’t go. She lacks the strength to close it, and so she opens it and throws some things out, hurls them away from herself as if they are the cause of her sorrow. At last, sitting on the suitcase, she’s able to latch it shut.
And she lugs it downstairs.
Will is sitting at the kitchen table, with his hands folded in front of him, staring at the room, actually looking around it, a man who has found himself in unfamiliar surroundings.
“I have to go to work,” she gets out. “I’ll find a room for this weekend.”
He rises, dazed-seeming, staring at the suitcase. “I’ll take you wherever you want,” he says.
“I’ll take myself. And I’m taking the car.”
“How will I get to the store?”
“You’ll have to figure that out.”
He looks down. “I have no excuse, Elizabeth. I’m sorry. Can we please not do this?”
“Do you want a ride to the store?” she says.
He sits back down. “Can’t we please talk?”
“Oh, really—Will. What’s there to say? She had a nervous breakdown and you fucked her.”
“I don’t know what happened,” he says. “I’m still trying to figure it out.”
“Well, you’re gonna have a lot of time to do that.”
“I love you, Elizabeth.”
“Oh, Christ,” she says. “Anything else?”
“I’m sorry?” he says. Then: “No—god. I’m—I’m so sorry, Elizabeth.
Please.”
“Those are words,” she says. “Not much to them, you know?”
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“I’ll make it up to you.”
“Words.”
For a moment, he can’t speak.
“Words,” she says again, as if to herself.
“What—what do I say to Mark and Gail?”
She shakes her head. “Tell them—tell them I left you. They’ll understand that.”
“Oh, Elizabeth,” he says, and his voice breaks.
“If you need something, call your mother.”
“Please,” he says.
For a few seconds, she simply stares at him, while he stares back. She tries to see the man she has known all these years as her husband. He’s not there, it seems, not this hunched, pitiable figure in the kitchen, looking at her with pleading, dishonest eyes. Finally, he drops his gaze, and she goes out to the car with her packed bag, gets in, and heads to the school.
4.
Brother Fire has a dream of the house where he grew up. The rooms are eerily as they were then. The light is as it was on so many overlooked fresh spring mornings that he lived through, and they were common as air, as all the hours of his youth. The hours, yes, of being a devout boy, growing up in that fine old house, the last one before his mother died. This is a dream but not a dream; somehow, it is an actual walking through. Everything’s complete, everything’s itself, tangible, palpable as a stone held in his palm—the texture of a painted wall where the brush left its mark; the nicks in the wainscoting; the shadow path of heavy foot traffic in the hall; and the smells, too, of old wood, plaster, dust, washed clothes, floor wax, his father’s sweetish tobacco. He stops and stares at the paintings on the walls: Christ in the garden, a flower-dotted field, blue mountains under snowy canyons of cumulus clouds, a 334
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shimmering lake mirroring an autumn scene. He looks at the hall table, with its little standing crucifix that his father brought from Italy when he was a boy, and here is his mother’s chair by the front window, here are the baseboards with their gleam of white paint, the flat white walls, the shirts hung on the line across the kitchen, in the sun, where they can dry. It is all breathtakingly just as it was, and, while he’s aware of this as a dream, he feels also the physical presence of these things, their cor-poreal reality. He’s moving through the rooms, amazed and glad, even as the smallest part of him stands back with an odd admixture of something like alarm and aversion at the fullness of it all. It is as though he has died and—as people used to say when someone died—gone home.
At the last second of the dream, he’s standing in the doorway of the bedroom where, at fifteen, he first understood that he would not lead a usual life: here’s the single, austere frame bed, his, with its sheets rumpled, and here are the books on his nightstand, the missal, The Histories of the English Kings, Ivanhoe, Shakespeare, The Lives of the Saints, and Aquinas. He’s home.
Home.
The years of his traveling away, and away, seem to rush at him like a great gale, and he believes, in his sleep—and is not unhappy about it—that he’s dying, that this is the last sight he will see of this earth, this ghost walk through his childhood home.
He sits up in his bed, hears his own steep intake of breath, shuddering, feeling, believing that something bad is unfolding out there in the stillness of the morning.
He thinks of Mr. Petit, and a sense of complicity rides over him, as if his own mind has produced some trouble the poor man must suffer. For a brief few instants, he lies there in the residual power of his dreaming and allows the occult thought to grow under his breastbone—it feels rooted there, like the painful area around a bruise or edema—that this is all a sign, or a summons, involving Mr. Petit.
He rises, dresses, kneels to say his morning office, tries to put the thought from his mind. He trudges carefully along the thinly cleared sidewalk across to the church, to say mass. There are three people in the dimness of the last pews, heads bowed. All women. He knows them, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t
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knows the effort they made moving old bones to get here. He can’t stop thinking that he has been called by some power of intuition to seek out Mr. Petit this morning. The words of the sacrament go off from him like breath, no thoughts attached, and when there’s the slightest movement, the faintest sound—a cough, the shifting of someone’s weight on one of the kneelers, a sniffle—behind him, he turns and looks back, thinking it might be Petit. It’s a sin to cater to such impulses. He gets through the mass, walks back to the rectory, goes up into his room and kneels to pray. This is not salacious interest anymore, he realizes, but a sense of having intruded upon a man’s misery and started something. It’s frightening. He says a Rosary, words, repetition; he starts again, head bowed, knees hurting on the hardwood floor.
His curate is moving around downstairs. The old priest lacks the energy to face him, while understanding with a pang that, of course, he must.
Last night, Father McFadden had a new poem. He seemed low and discouraged and rather lost, and it was palpable that the reading—and some form of approval—of the latest poem was required. The poem was full of references to Dante and bad rhymes of the name—Auntie, can’t he, ante, vigilante, Monte (Carlo on the next line), and, worst of all, Constanti (nople on the next line)—and, of course, it was woefully far from anything like poetry. Bad, bad. Bad.
Deplorable, really. Brother Fire was tempted to say that it’s unmannerly, too. Even aggressive. God help me, he thought, I want to say that this man’s talent is in not seeing himself as the fool that he is.
The effort to be kind in such a state of affairs is draining on the nerves and generally exhausting. Brother Fire excused himself after some vague, appreciative remarks about the poem and a few comments about ways of dealing with spiritual dryness—this in response to the other’s discouraged mood—and then climbed the stairs to his room, his evening prayers, the relief of solitude, and the balm of his bed.
This morning, with the sense of approaching disaster, he walks down to the kitchen and finds the curate sitting with hands folded over a bowl of Rice Krispies, deep in the saying of grace. He looks up as Brother Fire enters.
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“Morning, Father,” he says.
“Morning,” says Brother Fire.
“We’ve been invited to Thanksgiving dinner. Holly Grey and her aunt.”
“Yes.”
“They called last night while you were away. I neglected to remember to tell you last night.”
“There’s no time pressure, is there?”
“Well, they want a response. I can’t go. Won’t go.”
“All right.”
“I’m thinking of leaving the priesthood,” Father McFadden says abruptly.
Brother Fire walks over and sits down across from him. “I am, too.”
For a long moment, they simply stare at each other.
Then they laugh. It comes loudly, like an involuntary spasm of the chest and throat, and then is quelled, so quickly that both men are embarrassed, and they move around each other in the small room, attending to coffee and the breakfast dishes, skirting the slightest contact, not even grazing shoulders. The phone rings, and Brother Fire picks it up.
It’s Petit. Brother Fire nearly blurts out his morning’s foreboding to him, but Petit’s talking. “Better come over to the high school, something’s up. Come now.” And then the line clicks.
“Hello?” the old priest says. “Hello?” Dial tone. He puts the receiver back and
turns to Father McFadden, who avoids eye contact, seems purposely incurious. “I’ve got to go out this morning.”
“I’ve been trying to write a poem about this thing itself,” says Father McFadden. “Not Dante and not Jesus. This. This that I’m feeling. I haven’t been able to. I’ve only got a few lines.”
The other tries not to show relief. “Where will you have Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Here’s the first verse: ‘Sadness is the present feast/For this sad man who’s not the least/Glad these days that he’s a priest.’ I can’t get much more than that, Father. There’s only this next half stanza—”
“I have to attend to something,” Brother Fire interrupts a little brusquely. “I just don’t have the time to hear more.”
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Perhaps he has never fully understood the word crestfallen until now.
Father McFadden, after a slight pause, says, “I’m staying here to su-pervise the sodality’s charity dinner.” He still makes no eye contact, his thick, dark brows stitching tightly together over his nose.
“That’s taken care of,” Brother Fire says. “There are plenty of volunteers for it. Why don’t you come with me?”
“I volunteered also. You know.”
The old priest moves to the doorway. “I do have to take care of this.”
“I’m sorry, Father.”
“You didn’t do anything to be sorry for. We’ll talk tonight.”
Outside, he walks to his car in the chilly sun, the blinding brightness of the snow, feeling the expanse of air and dazzle around him like something to which he has escaped.
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