by Karen Raney
A kink in the drive kept the house hidden until the last minute, and as it curved into view, I had a flash of astonishment that the place was still there, the two-step back porch, the chalet roof with its burden of white, the sunken stillness of the frozen lake beyond, that all this had not vanished too.
My father met us at the door, his neck thrust forward from a lifelong effort to peer closely at things. He hugged me and gave Alison a dignified squeeze around the shoulders; they had met once before. Strangers, bashful people, strays, and underdogs always received his special attention; he was like Robin in that respect. I thought I saw Alison nestle into him for an instant before pulling away. From what little she said, her father had been abusive or neglectful or both. She kept her family apart from whatever went on between us; or maybe the truth was I had not shown a great deal of interest.
In the living room, I was assailed by the sharp sweet smell of pine. Gloves and mittens had been spread to dry on the raised hearth. Maddy’s straw angels, each one playing a different instrument, were arranged as always on a silver tray. The tree in the corner was strung with unlit lights and tinsel, but as of yet no ornaments. It was our tradition to decorate the tree together, lifting the ornaments one by one from the segmented boxes. Remember the gingerbread man, Mom? Remember the reindeer I made in second grade? I love the glass bell. Don’t you love the glass bell?
I had resolved not to prepare myself for the reality of Christmas, and now I pushed away the voices. I forced myself to see through the eyes of Alison, who had never been here and could not miss Maddy: the front window filled with lake; my mother smiling her way from the kitchen, wiping her wrists on a hand towel sewn to her apron, a gracious, old-fashioned mother who could move with the times; Barney prancing around, on everybody’s side.
I had warned my mother things were rocky between Robin and me. After welcoming Alison, she kissed the two of us and scanned our faces, intensifying the wattage of her smile. I felt she was taking my little hand and putting it in Robin’s little hand and urging us to make up before lunchtime.
My father went down to the dock to check the depth of the ice, taking Rose, Alison, and Barney with him. Robin stayed behind. He lowered himself into an armchair; he got up and scurried to the utility room, deciding finally to shovel the deck while I withdrew to the kitchen. I was putting peanut butter and spaghetti on the shelves when a knock came on the back door, so soft that I mistook it at first for a tapping branch.
Norma stood on the mat. In her white parka and gloves she looked like something carved out of a snowbank. Her cheeks were scarlet from the cold. When she pushed back her hood I saw that her reddish gold hair was cut short and sprayed out from her face without bands or clips. For one paralyzing moment I thought she had come for a tryst with Robin. But no: she was smiling freely and hugging me as if meeting me for the first time after some kind of close call.
I shouted for Robin. I watched carefully as they greeted one another with workmanlike smiles, and then I led the way through the hall so they couldn’t see my face.
Behind me, Norma whispered: “Has she seen it?”
I stopped. “Seen what?”
“I was waiting for you,” said Robin. He went over and pulled the trapdoor down by its strap. He unfolded the hinged steps and secured their rubber feet on the floor.
“You’ve finished the attic?” There was a time when I’d loved surprises.
His face held little expression. “You go first.”
At the top, the step now fitted onto a landing from which the whole room was visible. Mutely I stood and waited for Robin and Norma to join me.
Deep reds and purples, spiced yellows, burnt-orange-colored rugs and hangings glowed like hearths against the white walls. Long low sofas. In-built bookshelves. Floor cushions at a low table. Dark floorboards with the eddying sheen of stone. Fallingwater was built on rock over a stream. This room was built from wood up in the trees. No concrete encased it. No waterfall roared underneath. Yet the same kind of horizontal grace had been achieved, the same rich colors, the same invitation to curl up and take cover in a place that was everywhere exposed to the outside world. Light came in from all angles, seemingly not from windows at all, though there were windows in every direction, a long slot of them along the eaves, slanted ones in the roof space, and an arched window at the end that I had last seen propped against the wall, wrapped in plastic. Snowy branches filled it now.
Why didn’t Robin say something, even if I couldn’t? We had not discussed the details. I’d had no idea it would turn out like this. Because the new room had not been finished in time for Maddy, I had taken little interest in it once she got sick, and none after she died.
“We tried to get the spirit of it.” Robin’s voice was subdued, wary.
“We?”
“I made all the cushions and things,” said Norma shyly. I had almost forgotten about her. “I found the rugs and hangings. I’m ashamed to say I’d never been to Fallingwater before. Living so near!”
“You helped Robin finish the room?”
“Oh no.” She smiled. “I just came in at the end and dressed it up a little. I like interiors. I’m not artistic. Not at all. But I’m good at sewing.” I knew if I tried to speak again I would cry. “They didn’t let you take photographs indoors. I took notes, and there were some pictures online. We got the colors pretty close. Didn’t we, Robin?” They exchanged a glance of the kind nurses exchange over a patient’s head.
“The staircase still needs to be built. I thought I would just go ahead and get everything else done while you were away.” He was talking rapidly. “Instead of, you know, waiting.”
“You mean I’m no good at making decisions these days?”
“Obviously change it around!” Norma rushed to say. “If you don’t like anything. It’s yours.”
Shame kept me from meeting her eye. My cagey performance on the dock and on her picnic bench, my mission to conceal and disclose my anguish. Why had she bothered? Why make soft furnishings for a dream room for someone you barely know? People did irrational things; people did all kinds of extraordinary things. Walter and Rose were in on it too. Built by my father as a cabin-in-the-woods, the house had been enlarged, redesigned, and improved on for forty years. The attic would be the last refinement.
“I like it,” I said. “I love it.” The uselessness of words!
Joy would have been on Maddy’s face had she stood where we were standing. Maybe the others were furtively noticing and tactfully ignoring whatever was on my face now. The room had the melancholy of fires and aquariums and libraries and late afternoons; that could not be helped, but there were riches too, beyond the melancholy, or hidden deep inside it.
It was too intimate, the three of us standing together in this space they had made for me. I went over and picked up a cushion in a geometric design of blue, red, and black, studied the fine overstitching along the border; put it down; stroked the heathery weave of a throw; touched the deep red cushions and the wall hangings, edged like vestments with gold.
The bookcase held a few paperbacks. Propped on one of the shelves was a small frame. I picked it up: a black-and-white photograph of Maddy, aged seven. At the time her hair had been a close-fitting cap like mine was now. Her hands were tucked in the pockets of her denim jacket. She gazed out of the frame at we who were assembled in the room that would never be hers, with an expression that was tolerant and childish and quizzical and humorous, made from all the tones of photographic gray. I live here now.
Downstairs the others crashed in, stamping and barking, in high spirits from the cold.
• • •
Four and a half inches the auger had measured and the decision was made not to walk on the ice. Everyone trooped up to the attic to admire the room. At the table for sandwiches, Norma tried to engage Alison in conversation. I could see they would tolerate each other but never get along. Alison turned instead to Robin. He explained to her in a low voice how to start a fire with a lemon, whil
e at the end of the table, Rose and Walter assured each other once again that fracking would never come to Tawasentha Lake.
I sat in a daze. My arm was taken; Norma’s clear concerned eyes searched mine. “So how did it go over there? Not a complete disaster, I hope?”
“Long story,” I whispered. “Life-changing. Tell you later.”
Robin had started quizzing Alison about London, her job, her ambitions. “Fine arts?” he scoffed. “Applied arts? What does that mean? No, we need something much more objective. What about how you clean it? You’d have the dustable arts, see? The sprayable arts. The dry-cleanable arts . . . ?” If anyone could open her up, it was Robin. It was the kind of nonsense he used to spin with Maddy.
I turned back to Norma, who wanted to know about London and my job and our holiday plans. I let her do the work, while trying to listen and return the questions, but I was having trouble seeing her from the correct distance. It was not just the haircut and the winter pallor and the blue of her eyes, deeper than I remembered. Too much had been said, whether in her presence or not. When I looked at Norma, time dilated and shrank. In white shorts she shoved off the dock and raised her paddle to wave. I flew away and returned. She made her cushions. I made my accusations. We sat at the table drinking chocolate in thick sweaters. Maddy was nowhere to be found.
At the door I thanked her again, so insistently that she drew away and exited with an embarrassed, indulgent smile, and I spent the afternoon by the window watching the snow float down. By dusk it had stopped. My mother cooked lasagna, I won a game of Shanghai I had no interest in winning, and my parents and Alison turned in early.
• • •
We kept finding things to do instead of going to bed. Robin cleaned the kitchen; I tried to read. When he headed to the basement to tinker with the boiler, I pulled down the trapdoor steps and slipped up to the new room. I had not yet had a chance to sit on the couch, which turned out to be a padded shelf that floated off the wall with no visible means of support. I’d brought the portable house phone with me. I tapped in the number before I could think better of it.
Glenda’s thick, peculiar voice added to the distortion on the line. “That’s very good news. We are so grateful. We’ll use it wisely.”
Who said “wisely” anymore? “I want to be consulted at every stage, you know. To retain control.”
“Yes, of course.” We both knew it was an illusion. Who can control anything nowadays, let alone the use of images?
“My thinking is,” I said, “Maddy made it for the campaign, and she gave it over to the campaign. She must have been happy for it to be used.”
“I think she was.”
“She must have wanted people to see it.”
“The fact is,” said Glenda Sedge, “it’s out there already.”
I hung up and kept my body very still on the floating shelf, beside the black-and-white photo of Maddy, hands in the pockets of her child-size jacket. Careful! she said. Careful! I said. You’ve been at Jack’s? It’s not deep. It’s nothing. Had I opened my hands and allowed another precious thing to be taken away? Her shadowed eyes, her penciled face, changing continually on the screen inside a screen. When her ruin was complete, the applause began. In private she could laugh. Joy undid her. She was out there already. A free, shining thing.
Branches blocked the window with their burden of snow. Clods of it fell silently to the roof below. If I didn’t clutch and grasp and I didn’t turn away, maybe the rich colors and horizontal grace and the warmth of the side lamps could be assimilated piecemeal and one day the room would be mine.
When I came down, Robin was in the hallway. He watched me retract and latch the steps. “I wondered where you went.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “Better than I ever imagined.” I wouldn’t blame him if he left me now, room or no room. Maybe a part of me would welcome it.
“It wouldn’t be half as good without Norma.”
“I don’t know why she bothered. She hardly knows us.”
He shrugged. “She’s that kind of person. She wanted to do something.” Exhausted as we both were, sleep was out of the question.
“Want to go down to the lake?”
39
A winter lake is alive with sound. Ringed with snow and under a lid of ice, it would seem to be the last place to make any noise. But static comes out of it, and strange gulping sounds, and sometimes the crack of a whip. Most unforgettable is the groaning, as if a colossal thing is rolling, dragging, and breaking apart. It seems to issue from the sky or from inside your own body. That’s the lake’s trick. It’s impossible to tell exactly where the sound comes from, and there’s no telling when it will start or end. You can only listen for as long as it lasts and not ask for any more.
We stood on the shore where the dock would have been. Late as it was, the moon had been high for hours, a cold half circle piercing the blue-black sky. In winter the dock was dismantled in sections and stored under a tarpaulin by the woodpile. One section we propped up sideways on the ground to put the chairs on. They sparkled now with frost. When we sat down, the chill burned without delay through my coat. Robin held himself stiffly.
“We got it out just in time this year.”
“It’s always a gamble,” I said. In the old days my father used to pull the dock up on Labor Day, but in these warmer times, we often pushed it back to October.
“I think your dad likes the gamble. Has the dock ever gotten stuck in the ice?”
“Once, I think. It had to be hacked out.” The time was past when my father could do any heavy work alone. The time would come when he couldn’t do it at all. “Thanks for helping him, Robin. When you came along, he could see a future for this place.”
Snow had a gleam of its own, duller than water. In winter there was no reflection and hence no doubling of worlds.
“I called Glenda Sedge.”
“You did?”
“I told her she could use Maddy’s animation.”
From the way Robin smiled with his lips together, I knew he’d thought all along that’s what I should do. “Feel okay? Now that you’ve done it?”
“I guess so.”
“That’s a good sign.”
“I could always say no later on.”
He studied me, ice crystals glittering in his beard. “I don’t think you will.”
“Maddy’s the one who put it out there in the first place,” I said. “For the campaign. It was her way of . . . facing things. But still it’s scary.”
“Because you don’t know exactly what they’ll do with it?”
“You never can be sure what the world’s intentions are toward your child. Do you feel that about Vince?”
“All the time,” he said. “That’s another story. But as a parent you don’t have a lot of choice. They have to go out there in the end.”
I was grateful to hear myself described as a parent. I would be, until the day I died.
Robin’s mustache hid his upper lip and made him look secretive and holy. I wanted to rip it off and expose his true expression. What had really happened between him and his ex-wife? After three years I thought I had the measure of Robin, but how much could we really know about each other and what we were capable of? Antonio’s long body, Antonio’s eyes and lips, existed in another dimension, outside the logic of what was happening to me now.
My eyes lingered on Robin’s profile. The lines radiating from the corners of his eyes were dignified and warm. Which expressions were true? “I’m the one who did nothing! Not that I wasn’t tempted.” That’s what he had said. In anger, possibly. Righteous anger, or something more complicated. Which expressions were true? Maddy’s serenely shut eyes, her quivering lips, her defiance, her naked despair? Or the laughing baby’s face, that invited me in and shut me out? Most of us would never reach the depths Maddy had gone to, facing what she faced, knowing what she knew. I resolved to keep “final final final” for myself, and not to speak again until Robin did.
I
heard myself say: “Have you forgiven me?”
He didn’t turn his head. “I don’t know.”
“Can you see why I might have thought . . . ?”
“Kind of,” he said. “I can kind of see it.” He paused a beat. “But it’s an awful way to treat someone.”
“I know. I’m so sorry, Robin. I went off the rails. I was imagining things.”
He turned his head to look at me, shapes from his breath dissolving in the night air and forming again. Beyond him the shoreline trees made a chain around the lake. With their cladding of white, they seemed closer together and blacker at their centers than in summer. Robin’s silence and the smug lines at the corners of his eyes suddenly galled me.
“So were you tempted?” I said, with Alison-like bluntness.
“Was I what?”
“Tempted.”
He studied me. “Not really.”
“Not really? What does that mean?”
“Were you?”
On a cliffside, looking down. “A little.” The words hovered in the air between us and then I was pleading with him, sick with fear for what could not be recovered and for what else could go. “Nothing happened! I told you, it was extraordinary circumstances. It’ll never be like that again.”
Hands in his pockets, shoulders rigid, he turned his head toward the lake. After what seemed a very long time, he said: “Do you know why everything is blue at night?”
“No, why?” I’d heard it before, but I needed him to tell me something, anything at all.
“Night vision is sensitive to the blue-violet end of the spectrum. It’s why in twilight everything takes on a blue tinge. Your rods are taking over from your cones.”
“But that’s not why moonlight is blue.”