Telling Time

by Austin Wright

  notorious terrible century my privileged and peaceable life mostly lived under threat of Hitler, nuclear, end of the world the cold war is over will I know in time?

  There was a folder tagged PENNY, separate from the three-part Wyoming manuscript he had read.

  What should I do about Penny Young? Recently I saw a young woman in the bookstore who looked like her, but I knew Penny would no longer look like that, which made me wonder if I’d recognize her. And would she recognize me?

  I drive out to the South Village several times a year. I do this to give guests a tour and refresh myself in the surrounding geography. I go through the little crossroads village with its grocery store and post office, aware of the possibility. I read names off mailboxes along the road. I notice the old women. I watch them wherever I go. I see them in our own grocery store and post office and library and on the ferry dock, some healthy, some weak, some with sad faces, depressed or grieving or bitter, some bright in their eyes, some with lipstick and rouge on their cheeks. The dazzling white hair flares, and I go on wondering which one could be she? I try to project the likely changes from my snapshots of her at twenty-one. I watch the short ones especially. Noses and chins never stop growing, and I enlarge hers until she looks like Aunt Edna, which is probably wrong since her chin as I remember it was small. She’ll have put on weight, is she now fat? Is it hard for her to get about?

  Things have happened to her, the probable and the possible. She had children, or she did not. She takes care of a jolly large family in her living room reading letters from five kids around the country, while three small grandchildren play on the floor. A stable hearty marriage. A difficult stormy one. Fidelity and loyalty. Philandering and adultery. She’s a widow, she keeps a shrine to him in a corner of the bedroom and his name still in the telephone book. She was ill and watches her diet now with a regime of pills. She has spent the last ten years of her life doing volunteer work. Her bones ache, arthritis. She goes about the house gaunt and skinny leaning on a cane, angry with her fate, waiting bitterly for death. She’s dotty with obsessions. Her memory has failed, she sits in her room served by her sacrificial daughter; not remembering Wyoming or the summer of 1941.

  If she is in good health, sound mind and good nature at seventy-three, she won’t mind telling me about the life she’s led. I can respond. Dear Penny, I know what a child I was. I grew up. I fathered five children. I was admired by students and colleagues including women much older than she was then. I became President of a University. I was big and powerful.

  For years I scorned her memory. I made her symbol of my ignorance and the shallowness of the age. Yet when I think of her at seventy-one, what I remember is sweetness, generosity, her good and honest heart.

  What would happen if I called her up?

  May I speak to Mrs. Glade please? Are you the former Penny Young? Did you go to Wyoming to study field geology in the summer of 1941?

  Consider this letter.

  Dear Mrs. Glade,

  This is to ask if by any chance you are the former Penny Young. I once knew a girl by that name who later married a Harrison Glade. I’ve not heard from her for many years.

  If you are not she, please forgive the intrusion, though if you’re related or know what became of her, I would appreciate hearing from you. If you are Penny, I wonder if you remember me. Thomas Westerly. I studied field geology with you in Wyoming in the summer of 1941, and after the session was over, you came back East with others in my car. You even spent a night in my family’s house before I took you to Greenwich.

  We seem to be neighbors. I found the name of Harrison Glade by accident in the telephone book. I have lived on the Island with my wife since my retirement in 1988. We live on Peach Street.

  I do hope that you are Penny and that you don’t mind my writing to you. Also that you are in good health and that the years have been kind to you. I would love meeting you again to say hello, if you don’t object to that.

  Yours sincerely,

  Thomas

  Was this letter sent? The draft begins on the same page with its introduction, so that if it was sent it would need to have been copied. Philip wonders. If it was sent, was there an answer? Did they eventually meet? Or did Thomas delay again until finally it was too late altogether? There’s nothing in this folder to give Philip a clue.

  LUCY WESTERLY: To Snowball, Fred and others

  Dear Snowball and Fred,

  Thanks for calling, Snowball, your good kind voice and Fred too. You never thought my brother would outlive you, did you? Of course I understand why you can’t come, I’m just so glad Fred continues to progress. How sad everything is now.

  We had the biggest dinner ever. It took Thomas’s death to bring such a dinner to this house. Then we went to the visitation in the funeral home. The big false gothic room with the rugs, vases, Victorian chairs, Thomas like a nineteenth century head of state in state. He looked as if he were about to speak, a piece of vagrant life in the midst of the freeze. I saw two things: my husband lying there dead, who was not my husband, and my husband lying there alive, who was not there. It dispelled fancies. Like what adventures you had been through since we saw you last. Drained and pumped, stretched and put into clothes. Your face powdered and rouge, all wrong. When you died your mouth was open so Mr. Gregory must have wired it shut. That must be why you look as if you’re about to speak. It’s your mouth trying to pop through the wires saying, Let me out. Thank you for your love. We must stand together.

  MELANIE CAIRO: To Dr. (not Parch) Saunders

  Probably I don’t like William Key though it’s hard to know. Whether his kindness is ironic or straight, his gentleness an island volcano in a southern sea. Last Saturday he looked at me. His upper lids cover half the irises making his eyes peek out as if they didn’t want to be seen. I saw my dislike of him in his look, which you’ll tell me (you psychiatrists) is nothing but his dislike of me.

  There will be no repeat of what happened last summer. The sad occasion, he can see the inappropriateness. I told him so this morning. The day is gray, the rain steady. He and Patricia came over from the Inn after breakfast. When I came up from the cellar with the laundry basket, he was in the kitchen. A moment just the two of us. I just wanted him to understand. We hadn’t spoken to each other in five days, and I thought it should be made clear. So I took the opportunity and said—this is what I said: William I just want you to know that as far as I’m concerned nothing happened last summer. He stared at me like a movie star. It irked me, Dr. Parch—no, Saunders (yes). That he should pretend to forget. He said, May I ask what didn’t happen last summer? That made me mad, and I grabbed the laundry basket and went on up, but you can see for yourself why I don’t like William Key.

  This evening we went to Gregory’s in the rain for the viewing. Somebody decided there should be a viewing and nobody had guts enough to say no, so there was a viewing. I walked with my umbrella and found myself with Patricia. Henry’s sister, William’s wife. I didn’t intend it. I have nothing against her, but I wouldn’t have picked her to walk with, and I thought it was accidental. Halfway there, however we had pulled ahead of Philip and Beatrice and she said, I want you to know William and I are getting a divorce.

  I wasn’t surprised. I suppose what happened last summer was a symptom if not a cause. Yet I was upset. It makes me sad to see the old statues fall, no matter what they’re statues of.

  Thought you should know, she said.

  No time to reply with the visitation then, old Thomas reduced to a corpse. We looked at it and sipped tea and introduced ourselves to strangers, and I was in the parlor looking down at Thomas trying to remember what he looked like when I felt William standing next to me. I thought he was going to speak but he didn’t. Just looking too while the rest of the room chattered with people. I thought of him getting the divorce and the two of us as outsiders in this family and now he’ll be cut off, leaving me feeling precarious like flapping in the wind with the cords snapping. His standing th
ere was a gesture. It was full of meaning. The problem is, I don’t know what the meaning was.

  The question arose, why did Patricia make such a point of telling me? With everything falling apart enough for paranoia I found myself with Patricia again on our way home. I protested their divorce. Isn’t there some less drastic solution to your problems? I said. I said how much I appreciated my own attachment to this family, what wonderful people and all the good times in Maine and Vermont, Michigan and River City. The importance of holding things together not to capsize when the wind gusts but stay the course, keep the boat steady, steer close to the wind.

  She was rude to me. You’ve got your problems and I’ve got mine. Mind your own, okay?

  Once years ago Henry told me an unbelievable thing about his sister Patricia when they were teenagers. It exemplified Henry’s libelous imagination. Since he never mentioned it again, I concluded he made it up, which I still think mostly. Nevertheless I remembered it when Patricia was rude. I thought I could check it out by asking her.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t want to betray his twisted imagination to her. That was right of me, don’t you agree?

  Dr. Parch, I appreciate this family more than its members do. The good parents, the bonds, the memory. Henry has no sense of it and neither does Patricia. But I do.

  I wish I knew who’s crying. It drives me bats.

  CHARLES WESTERLY: Diary

  Thursday, May 26. By flashlight in the tent while David groans. Saw my grandfather tonight at Gregory Taxidermy. Hardly recognized him stuffed, like a portrait, the identifying signs but no whole. As a result now I can’t remember what he really looked like, leaving me with nothing.

  The other thing was this damn Greta. Who came to the tent this afternoon like she intended to create a catastrophe from the start. Began by criticizing my letter, ridiculous, naive, what a fool she was not to kick me out on my ass for writing so asinine. Why did she come to the tent if that’s how she felt? To straighten me out, she said. I thought she was just taking the long way around and tried to make friendly talk about like her boyfriend and who had she fucked since I saw her last or was she still a virgin, but she gave me such hell I wondered what I was doing here with the rain coming down all over.

  Suddenly she gave a screech and lurched toward me, and I thought she was coming over to me at last, but it was only Freud out of the rain rubbing his wet fur on her leg. This made her laugh so hard and crazy, picking him up and hugging and drying, the poor kitty kitty, with all that love and laughing, that I figured she was okay, so I reached over and grabbed her. She gave me a shove (while the cat ran out into the rain again), which I mistook for horseplay, grabbing her again. She was wearing this green dress with bare legs, which I misinterpreted like everything else. She socked me pretty hard and tried to stand up but bumped into the tent so she had to bow down while yelling at me.

  All the time I thought she didn’t mean it because why would she come out to the tent if she did in that loose dress with those bare legs hugging that cat and laughing with all those gooey noises, and I thought yelling at me was just something a girl has to go through, a gesture of atonement before sinning so she wouldn’t have to say she didn’t resist. But it was pretty fierce and violent if it was just for show.

  I mean it was rough. I didn’t see anything but to quit. The insults. She said she was going to show my letter to her mother. What a dirty trick that would be. I said, You don’t dare. Another mistake. I’m going to show it to Mother and your father too, she said. I said, If you do that, I’ll tell everything I know. She said, Your letter speaks for itself. I’m going to show it to Philip and Mother and David and Minnie, and you won’t be able to show your face around here again. Well maybe it was weak of me, but I’m not a macho type, I can’t simply ignore that much resistance. I’m too sensitive for that. Okay, okay, I said, forget it. Forget I ever said anything. Forget it happened. You know, forget it!

  Finally she calmed down. All right, she said, look. I’m going back to the house now. I’m going to pretend none of this took place. But if you ever annoy me again about anything, I swear I’ll show your letter and tell my mother and your father and my grandmother everything. Okay?

  I tried to patch it up. No hard feelings? I said. But all she did was call me an asshole, the bitch.

  So I’m an asshole. Must be.

  PHILIP WESTERLY: Question and answer

  Mr. Gregory at the door, flower in lapel, black suit smiling, gums and dentistry, shakes your hand and suggests you through the door on the left.

  Victorian mountains and surf, a small boat with sailors drenched in slickers, gold twined mirrors. A piece of nose sticks up in the coffin. A smile flickers across his face, and there’s a joke stuck on the verge of his mouth.

  I have some questions for you.

  Go ahead.

  I’ve been reading your papers and would like to know.

  Unfortunately I’ve forgotten my papers.

  If you could identify certain people whose names I don’t recognize.

  By now I don’t remember them, which makes them unimportant.

  Should I talk at the funeral tomorrow, because I’d rather not?

  I don’t care.

  Did you ever get in touch with Penny Glade?

  I don’t remember.

  Would you like me to notify her?

  I have no opinion.

  I wish you’d tell me the joke which Mr. Gregory wired into your face.

  I’m taking it with me, need it for Saint Peter.

  Should I continue to read? Have I found everything you want me to find?

  I have no idea.

  Who’s been sobbing in the house all afternoon?

  I don’t know.

  WILLIAM KEY: Family discussion

  In the study after the visitation Patty came in. Do you want to read? Philip said.

  I’ve got a question for Mother, she said. I want to know what was going on when they left Chicago. Why did he ask if she would come with him to River City?

  You don’t want to ask that, Philip said.

  All right, I don’t.

  You can read Thomas’s account of their courtship, Philip said. It raises the question of when I was conceived in relation to when they got married.

  Hey good, I’ll read that.

  Henry came in. What’s this? More wallowing in Father’s remains?

  Patty said, We’re trying to decide what to ask Mother about these revelations in Daddy’s papers.

  No we’re not, Philip said. We’re not going to ask her anything.

  I want to ask about Father’s suicide note, Henry said.

  No you don’t, Philip said.

  Melanie came in. All you folks reading poor Thomas’s papers.

  We’re all in on it now, Philip said.

  I have a theory, Patty said. Mother had an affair in Chicago before we moved to River City, and when we moved she had to choose between her romantic lover and her family.

  I don’t believe that, Melanie said.

  Neither can I, Henry said. What do you think, William?

  I wouldn’t know, I said. It’s your family.

  Philip looked uncomfortable, as if he had lost control. I’ve got to pick up McKarron Balsam at the ferry, he said.

  Who’s he? Patty said.

  A shrunken head. A man of absolutely no interest.

  Oh.

  If you find anything pertinent let me know.

  What would be pertinent? Patty said. He didn’t answer.

  After Philip was gone, Melanie said, Who is McKarron Balsam?

  He’s the university where Thomas labored for twenty years.

  THOMAS WESTERLY: As read by Philip Westerly

  Late in the night after he had taken McKarron Balsam to the Harbor-side. Philip went back to his father’s files. The rest of the house was dark, everyone was asleep. For a long time he shuffled through pages in the narrow light of his father’s desk lamp. He found a typescript in a folder labeled OLD BILLS, TH
ROW OUT. The concealment aroused his interest. There was no title, no date, no page numbers.

  Five years ago. An evening in the Christmas season, I can still name the date. I’m driving home through suburban tracts north of town, an area of estates and country homes going fast for a reason that doesn’t need to be named. From a place that doesn’t need to be named. Worried, hurrying to find out what was wrong at home. I was taking a direct route, a dark road through the invisible affluence with large houses back behind lawns and shrubbery, marked off by walls, high hedges, fences. Mailboxes along the road, no sidewalks, perhaps a ditch.

  No streetlights, only the space which the headlights opened up ahead difficult to interpret since this road had no center line and only an occasional reflector to hint where pavement ended and countryside began.

  Going too fast, listening to the radio playing something I’ve forgotten. There was a dog in the road. Rewrite that: there was a spot of light in the middle of the road, which might have been a roadside reflector out of place before it turned into two bright spots like animal eyes, around which emerged in the light the gray and white furred shape of not a fox but a German shepherd dog.

  The dog stood broadside wondering what to do, body right, head left, looking at me, and I could not tell whether the dog was on the right of a road that curved left, the left of a road that curved right, or the middle of a road that went straight. The headlights of an oncoming car straightened the road, putting the dog between, a confused silhouette in the middle.

  I used to examine this scene often, reviewing its details, trying to produce a more coherent account. If I am to write this finally after five years, it’s no good if not true. If I can’t tell it without lies and excuses, I shouldn’t tell it at all. I should stop. It was impossible not to hit the dog. There was no time. The dog appeared, the car appeared, the dog was in the middle. The most coherent account is this: seeing my car coming, the dog trotted left into the path of the other car. I either remember definitely or assume I felt a natural pang for an animal in front of a speeding car, but it was the other car that would be the murderer. Then the dog saw the other car and whirled back into my path. Unable to stop, I veered right, taking a chance on the shoulder, which I could not see, a risk of skidding, overturning, crashing into something, but I hit the dog anyway, heard the thump, saw a flash of something fly as if the car had flung it into the air. The car bumped and jolted on the ditchy shoulder and regained the road full of shock and sorrow, still going fast. The dark place of the accident fell behind, and the ignorant taillight of the other car in the rear view mirror, and the question whether a civilized man would stop and drive back to see the dog he had killed, all of this perplexed by what seemed like a memory inserted into my mind after the fact of the thump not on the left but on the right, accompanied by an image of a skier jumping with ski poles through the light into the grass or the ditch.