William T. squinted at the far horizon, but the mountains were losing their outlines. He heard his own breath, catching and rasping in his throat. Trees a mile away on the slope of the closest disappearing mountain were moving, crowns bending in the force of the wind.
“Goddamn,” William T. said. “Is that what I believe it is?”
And then the snow was upon them.
William T. lifted his face to the sky. He opened his mouth to the wind, and whiteness was all about him. The clouds had relented at last, come down to earth and encircled Panther Mountain in their cold embrace. William T.’s breath mingled with the whirling snow. The false William T. appeared to William T. out of the whiteness, walking his California beach, eating avocado on a redwood deck built onto white sand, California wind chimes hung all about his house, their tones blending with the sound of the ocean, folding and retreating on a distant Pacific shore.
A red splash at the shore of Deeper Lake turned into a puffy red parka turned into Crystal, waving at him. She cupped her hands around her mouth and called.
If you could have known then what you know now, would you?
She was faint and blurry. He opened his eyes and she was gone, turned into a cardinal perched on the branch of a distant white pine.
They worked their way down the mountain.
Whiteness now covered the ground, and the contours of the horizon were lost. Miles away up on Star Hill, in the steel branches of an abandoned fire tower, William J.’s chimes whirled and called to the wind in their own unknowable language. The cardinal flitted from branch to branch, a splotch of color in the midst of none. The Panther Mountain trail was a narrow sweep of white among trees and underbrush already freighted with the weight of snow. The cardinal stayed ahead of them. The bird was like Sophie used to be, William T. thought, all motion without thought, trusting that as fast as she went she would not fall.
At dusk once William T. had driven by the old Sterns Cemetery on his way to the Buffalo Head in Forestport and seen the dark shape of Burl, the hem of his old black coat flung out around him like blood spilled and dried on the surface of the flaming autumn leaves, bent and encircling William J.’s stone.
“There’s a reason for everything, according to you,” William T. said. “That’s what you believe. Right?”
“Right.”
“But let me ask you something else, Burl.”
Burl waited.
“What if, in the end, there is no reason? What if it’s all a mystery?”
From somewhere high in the clouds above the tossing wind and the whirl of falling snow came the distant drone of an airplane.
CRYSTAL’S TRAILER WAS DARK, ONLY A DIM glow from the living room. William T. pulled up in the driveway and sat for a time with the motor idling. Then he turned it off.
His footprints were dark outlines in the new snow. The only light within came from a small lamp next to the couch in the living room, where Crystal slept silently beneath an afghan. Her hair was damp and smelled of soap and sleep. The radio next to the lamp was tuned so low he could barely hear it, but he bent his head to listen and heard Emmylou Harris.
I don’t want to hear a sad sto-ry, we both already know how it goes …
William T. stood by the couch, listening in the darkness, watching Crystal sleep. He had driven with his lights off, navigated through the new-fallen snow, as yet unplowed, by the moon hanging high and round in the distant heavens. As he passed Burl’s he had rolled down the window. Cold night air had rushed through the cab of the truck and drawn itself into his body.
William T. sat down in the chair next to the couch and listened to Emmylou, crooning above the sleeping Crystal, singing a song he’d known for many years. A scent rose off Crystal, the scent of the hand lotion she kept in a nameless white bottle next to the soap on her kitchen sink.
“Crystal,” he whispered.
Her eyes opened. She propped herself on one elbow.
“It’s late,” she said. “Are you all right?”
“Crystal,” he started, and then he could not speak.
She waited.
“It snowed,” he whispered.
“Yes.”
“Crystal,” he said again, and again he could not speak.
He did not know how to say to her what he wanted to say. Patient Crystal.
“Crystal, should I have done something with my life?” he said.
Johnny stirred and moaned in his room down the hall. When Johnny dreamed, what did Johnny dream about? Did he sense a life out there that was his, a life that could have been, that still could be, if only he could find it? Crystal lay still, listening until Johnny was quiet.
“What makes you think you haven’t?” she said.
She eased herself off the couch.
“Come with me.”
Johnny lay asleep in his twin bed, in his room down the hall. A red quilt covered him and he looked like a child-man, his breath so gentle that his chest barely rose and fell. Two heavy chairs were pushed next to the bed, their arms forming a cage.
“In case he rolls,” Crystal said, in answer to William T.’s questioning look. “So he won’t fall off. It’s happened sometimes, if he dreams.”
She pulled the quilt up around Johnny’s shoulders. In sleep, Johnny’s bad leg looked the same as his good leg. His crumpled hand was relaxed. Crystal bent over him and kissed his forehead.
Then she took William T.’s hand and led him down the hallway to a room with a double bed and white sheets. A bureau, a small mirror. A quilt folded at the foot of the bed. Crystal placed her hands on his shoulders and raised herself up so that her face was close to his.
William T. had not kissed anyone but Eliza in all these years. The feel of Eliza’s kisses was as familiar to him as his own breathing. Eliza was far away now, at the sister’s in Speculator, and for a moment she appeared in his mind. Sitting by a window, gazing out at the sister’s withered phlox bed by the frozen-over creek, a blanket pulled around her shoulders.
They lay down together. Through the window next to the bed William T. saw the dim outline of the white pine that sheltered the trailer. He lay on his side, head propped on his hand. Crystal had slipped off her sweater and lay facing him in a T-shirt and jeans.
“Hello,” he said, not knowing what to say.
“Hi,” she whispered.
Crystal’s white sheets were whiter in the darkness and they smelled as her shirt did of sun and wind. She must hang her clothes out all year long. William T. pictured her standing outside in her giant red parka and big men’s boots, pulling off the clothespins and folding stiff, frozen clothes into a wicker basket.
Her hand came up and hovered by his face, tentative. She did not blink. He was aware of her fingers, their warmth, so close to his face. He closed his eyes against a rush of feeling that he could put no name to. Then Crystal’s fingers were on his forehead, smoothing down the curls that even at fifty were still mostly brown. You need a haircut, Eliza used to say, gazing at him as if he were a store mannequin poorly dressed.
“Curls,” Crystal said. “When I was little how I wanted curly hair.”
“Why?”
She smiled. “We want what we don’t have, I guess.”
William T.’s eyes ached suddenly with the force of tears. Crystal’s fingers traced the line of his forehead, his cheeks, his jaw. William T.’s arm trembled and nearly gave way.
“Your eyes are closed,” she whispered.
He nodded. Then the bed creaked as she moved, her slight weight shifting. She was above him, he could feel the warmth of her body and smell her Crystal smell of sun and wind. She lay herself down on top of him and his arms came up about her, circled her back and drew her closer. Her breath was on his face and she was absolutely still. He could feel her along his entire length, her thighs on his, her stomach on his, her breasts soft against his chest.
William T. traced the outline of her neck with his fingers. He turned his hand over and brushed the backs of his fingers acros
s the hollow beneath her collarbone.
Her eyes, which he knew were gray, were dark in the dark light. She took his hand in hers and rubbed his fingers against her cheek, closed her eyes.
Her mouth was so soft.
His hands slipped beneath her T-shirt, her T-shirt which was rough the way cotton dried outdoors in a breeze was rough. He expected straps and hooks but there were none. There was just the feel of her skin, smooth and warm. The narrowness of her rib cage was a surprise to him: Birdlike bones rose and fell underneath his hands.
Thin cotton slipped down her shoulder and revealed her breast, a slight curve of white in the moonlight. He cupped the curve with his hand and felt the beating of her heart. Her body trembled and her skin was soft, so soft, as soft as her mouth. Under his fingers and tongue her nipple hardened and again she shivered. He closed his eyes and laid his head on her bare breasts, her heart in its prison of flesh and bone lifting against his cheek in its steady rhythm.
“It’s been a long time for me,” she murmured, and he could hear the hesitation in her voice.
“How long?”
She shook her head, and he saw the bright reflection of the moon in her tears.
“Long,” she said. “When I was young.”
Twenty years ago Johnny had been a skinny child with eyes that gazed up and to the side. Crystal’s hair had been long and her fingers as slender as they were now. The uncertainty he had heard in her voice—When I was young—hung in the air between them. William T. had once been young. His foot had hovered over the thin ice of a November morning mud puddle. He had caught a pencil flung by a girl with long auburn hair; run down a dark road in search of a lost child; stood underneath his red spruce and listened to old women overhead talking to the wind in a language he couldn’t understand. He had once heard a girl’s voice come haunting out of the open window of a car traveling too fast down a country road.
A lump rose in his throat and emotion rushed over him, the sense of life all about him, passing around and through him, his if only he could figure out how to hold on to it.
“Crystal, do you not know how beautiful you are?” William T. said.
He buried his head in her shoulder. Her hand came up and stroked his hair, kept smoothing itself over his head, her finger tracing his ear. She put both arms around his back and held him.
He thought of her question.
The memory of William J. on the railroad track turned into a young man in a cornfield, his voice playing catch with a girl who ran instead of walked, turned into a boy sitting atop Star Hill listening to a crystal radio, turned into a child tracing a map of the unknown world onto onionskin.
“And this is where we’ll meet, Dad.”
William T. watched him, defenseless.
If you knew then what you know now, would you still choose to have lived your life?
William J. looked up at his father from his tracings, his eyes hollowed with compassion, and nodded.
On his one plane ride William T. had parked in the big economy lot and walked into the airport carrying his suitcase. He had given the woman his ticket and watched his bag disappear down a motorized walkway. He had expected to leave in the early evening, but there had been a storm, and delays, and he had spent the night sitting in a chair at the Syracuse airport surrounded by tired travelers.
They had finally boarded at dawn. William T. had found his seat next to the window. Directly on his left was a huge cylindrical engine. When it started up it had made a tremendous noise, so much so that William T. tore off bits of a napkin and plugged his ears with it. He could feel its vibrations throughout his body, feel himself thrumming along with the engine.
They had waited on the runway a long time. William T. had looked out his small oval window and counted the planes, large and small, lined up and waiting before and behind his. He watched a tiny prop plane skitter onto a runway, rocking suddenly out of the cloud-covered sky like a spider spinning itself to the ground. Around William T. the other passengers began to fall asleep. Some huddled under the airplane’s thin blue blankets. Others blew up inflatable U-shaped pillows, strange little things, and adjusted them around their necks. William T. had stared out the oval window. They were next in line.
When they started taxiing he had gripped both armrests. Clouds hung heavy over the entire horizon and there was no definable sunrise, just a gradual lightening of the sky. Then the plane tilted up and William T. was pushed farther back into his chair. He gazed out the window and felt the rear wheels leave the pavement. The big silver tube heaved itself into the air and the ground, the hangars, the surrounding houses tipped and tilted away, a crazed upending of the way in which William T. was accustomed to seeing.
The window had filled with cotton fluff and William T. realized that he had entered the cloud cover. He stared at the double Plexiglas panes and watched tiny rivulets of water stream toward the base of the window. He had thought of all the water contained within the heaviness of these clouds, and imagined it longing to be shed, to be released upon the silent earth.
Across the aisle sat a little boy, his father asleep next to him. The child had gazed out William T.’s side of the plane, witness to the whiteness.
Then there was a flash of blinding light and streaks of brilliance. They had broken through the cloud cover and reached the sky above. It was dark blue, a blue darker than William T. had ever seen while standing on the ground. The sun shimmered and reflected off the steel gray of the airplane, which was heading higher still. William T. had never seen light so bright.
William T. had gazed at the sparks and glints of a distant sun. All about him exhausted travelers had slept on, unaware of the humming of the great engine that drowned out all other sound. He had been weary beyond measure but he had bade himself nonetheless to stay awake. A man without physics, William T. knew that this was as close as he would come in his lifetime to understanding the mystery of flight.
Miles below, ordinary human beings had woken to the drone of an unseen airplane. Trees had lifted themselves toward an invisible sun. Wind stirred the chimes of a thousand unseen houses and in one of them, a boy was tilting his head and listening to something beautiful, something his father could only sense.
About the Author
ALISON MCGHEE is the author of two previous novels. The first, Rainlight, won the 1999 Minnesota Book Award and was selected by Library Journal as one of the Best First Novels of 1998. The second, Shadow Baby received rave reviews and won the Minnesota Book Award in 2001. She is a recipient of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, whose past winners include Louise Erdrich, Richard Ford, Alice Munro, Jane Hamilton, and Rosellen Brown. Her short fiction and poetry have been published widely in literary magazines. Born and raised in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York, McGhee currently lives in Minnesota and Vermont.
Copyright © 2003 by Alison McGhee
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Three Rivers Press, New York, New York.
Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
www.crownpublishing.com
THREE RIVERS PRESS and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McGhee, Alison, 1960-
Was it beautiful? : a novel / Alison McGhee.—1st ed.
I. Title.
PS3563.C36378 W37 2003
813′.54—dc21
2002010841
eISBN: 978-1-4000-5154-0
v3.0
Was It Beautiful? Page 18