by Holly LeCraw
THE IDYLL WAS OVER; the family descended in earnest. Preston, who could no longer speak, became agitated whenever he saw me, and so I began to keep my distance. May came more often to my place, but even though she said she was glad for a break, she was distracted, and I was distracted in turn, for my job was to hide the euphoria that persisted, even though I knew a man was truly dying. Isn’t a man always, somewhere, dying?
I was lurking around at the Bankheads’, trying to see May, trying to stay out of the way, and one afternoon I walked into the study, which I’d thought was empty. But on the loveseat Florence was sitting sideways, knee to knee, with Laird, who I now knew was her favorite. She was crying, moaning really, “I’m not a bitch,” in a way that I knew was not a response to anything Laird had said. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but as I began to back away, she opened them and saw me.
Florence and I didn’t meet each other’s gaze for some time after that; but then, I’m not sure we ever did.
BY NOW I KNEW the Bankhead house better than my own. Odd to think May and I had had only six weeks, beginning to end, but in that time I’d absorbed her as mine, and also the house; I knew every knickknack, knew it all as a museum of May. But now the house belonged to the brothers again, and any gesture of familiarity on my part—opening the correct kitchen cabinet for a plate, finessing the tricky deadbolt on the door to the cellar—rattled them, readied them for a battle they were primed to fight. Their incipient grief had to go somewhere. So the house they hardly visited was theirs, along with Preston and May, and these lowest members (as May would have it) nevertheless could be claimed by no one else, least of all me.
One day I went by after classes and found the tension in a new phase: Preston had been unconscious since the night before. May took me in to see him. His mouth was open, his brow clenched with insentient effort. I touched his waxy hand. He was May’s father, and I was sorry, and sorry too he hadn’t ever been what I’d wanted—but that was an old thought, one I was used to, and without any real grief. Why had I ever wanted anything from him anyway?
I wished that I felt more; but I had so much. I reached for May, for her hand, beside mine. I ached only for her.
We said good-bye in the mudroom. It was crowded with coats and snowy boots, fully alive again, but it also felt, in that moment, anonymous and private, a way station. “I want you to stay,” May said.
“You should be with your family.”
“I am.”
“I’ll come back whenever you want. But right now you all need to be together. They want you to themselves.”
Indecision in her eyes. She said, “You shouldn’t mind them.”
“I don’t.” I stroked her hair, pressed her gently back against the coats—felt her body known against mine, her mouth, her tongue—oh, it was laughable that anyone else claimed any importance, even Preston himself. And now here was the euphoria, which grew every day—our bodies together were a single artifact, iron, no, gold, durable and shining; I wanted to pour myself into her, make a new self, together we were entirely new—
“Jesus Christ.” It was Laird. May held me tighter, but I looked up and saw him standing in the doorway. Unlike me in the study, he let his gaze fall fully on us, with undisguised hostility, before he turned away. And all at once May and I were separate.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
I kissed her cheek, her temple. Touches. Her skin living and moving. “I’m going to go.”
“They said it could be in the next twenty-four hours. At least in the next two days.”
“Call me. Call me in an hour. Whatever’s happening.”
“They don’t know, though.”
“No, they don’t.” Her hair. So smooth. She leaned in to my hand. “It’s time, though, sweetheart.”
Her eyes began to fill. “I don’t think he’s ready.”
All I could do was murmur platitudes, clichés: Yes he’s ready, no more pain, is anyone ever really ready? I wouldn’t say he was going to a better place; but how useful the streets of gold would be right now! “He’s going to find what he wants,” I said. “He won’t want anymore.” The tears fell. “Oh, baby. Do you want me to stay?” Through the tears, she shook her head.
Is that what she did? Why don’t I remember each second, each portion of a second? Or was there more, more yes-ing and no-ing, more go and stay, the dance of touch and withdrawing touch, hating the nakedness of being alone—was there? Were we there five minutes or an hour? We were there among the coats and Laird came in, and in spite of him I should have stayed, God knows, should never have left.
But the door opened and the air was cold and then I was in my car on the way home, exiled.
It was early twilight—it was, I realized, the solstice. Christmas lights were on the houses, Christmas music on the radio. Outside the liquor store a mile from my house, a life-size Santa turned slowly back and forth, waving, and at the turn to my road the neighbors had a sleigh with reindeer on the roof. Rudolph’s nose lit up, on-off, on-off, and I laughed aloud. Sometimes the holidays were sadness itself but here, just here, I could be happy, I could isolate it, hold it quickly to me. May was miserable, and so I shouldn’t have been happy; yet I knew she’d understand. On the plane I was glad, she’d said, because of you.
I turned into my long driveway, drove down through the trees, emerged around the bend and there was my house, silhouetted in the last of the light, the bare branches of the trees, my trees, black against the last blue edge of sky. I regretted my lack of decorations and thought that maybe I would wind some lights around the columns of the porch. Inside I had a tree, though, in my bare-ish living room, a tree May insisted I get, ours. That was a precious afternoon stolen: we bought the lights and cheap ornaments, we made paper chains and a ridiculous star with glitter. It was all May’s idea, a joyous regression and progression of playing house, and I pretended to indulge her, but now whenever I saw that tree with its kindergarten trimmings it filled me with that same euphoria. This is what you have now, and what is coming. I saw a life.
But the tree, the lights, reminded me. Christmas was also coming, and I too had a family, and I needed to call my mother. If Preston really went soon I might not make it home, even though my ticket was already bought; I believed, though, that she would understand. It was Nicky who would be disappointed.
I talked to my mother fairly often, if briefly. Neither of us were phone people much, but I liked it when she first picked up and I heard her voice. I suspected she felt the same. That was all we needed. We didn’t really share news. I hadn’t told her, for instance, about Preston’s illness. Possibly I’d never even mentioned him. Nor had I mentioned May. I hadn’t told anyone about May. I’d been holding my news of her, of us, like a prize, waiting to bestow it on the right person at the right time. It seemed like now was the right time.
First, though, I told my mother about Preston Bankhead. I tried to leave out my disappointments, his pettinesses; I thought instead of May and her grief, and realized that the man might become legendary anyway, and that that would be fine, that was as it should be. To my surprise I was crying. Then I told her about May. The order of things seemed clear and profound. If my mother asked about these strange laughing tears I would say no, they weren’t confusing at all, because an old man was dying, but I was a young man full of joy.
On the other end of the line my mother was quiet and then she said, “Preston is dying?”
Yes, melanoma, spread to the brain. Terrible, too young. I was still flying. Away from that house, my happiness was unfettered. But there was something—at the edge—“Why did you say ‘Preston’ like that?”
“You’re in love with Preston’s daughter?”
“Why do you know his name?”
“Preston has a daughter?”
“Yes! Yes!” The happiness again. I would sing it. Shout it. When this small trouble was settled.
“But you are Preston’s son,” my mother said. “You are his first son.”
I SAT AT THE FUNERAL. With Win and Divya, not the Bankheads, which was understandable, I wasn’t wanted (oh no, not at all), that was now a relief, a blessing. I watched, in the front pew, that row of blond heads. At the end, one dark. May turned and looked at me, her eyes pits of need.
A hymn, tunefully British, saints going to tea. Laird reading scripture. Too many eulogies.
“I thought there was time,” my mother had said. And, “He didn’t deserve you.”
Avoiding her had been difficult. May. She had called and called. She drove to my house and I stayed hidden inside. Because I wanted her too much. Because I was afraid I wouldn’t tell her.
“I fell in love,” my mother said. “In a little town. Called St. Annes. He was in seminary.”
I didn’t care. I didn’t want a story.
“He loved me. He wanted to be better than he was. But he left, he couldn’t do it. He didn’t know you were born. He didn’t know he was your father. I was going to let you decide. I thought there was time.”
My mother had never apologized to me before, for anything. Her doing it now turned my stomach along with everything else. Her begging on the phone. Her becoming a different person. We are all now entirely different people. Preston has a daughter?
“Charlie, you look awful,” Divya whispered.
Yes I’m sure I do and I pushed out of the pew and headed blindly up the side aisle and out the door, through the snow to the woods beyond the chapel, slipping in my good shoes, and once I was in the thick of the trees I began to vomit, over and over and over, down to the bile.
And in the middle of this pure sickness, I understood. There had been a decision to be made, and now it was done.
I saw that if I told May I would become a victim, like her, of this stomach-churning fate. But what if I were the villain instead? Then the villainy would be the consolation. May hating me would be part of the sacrifice. Throwing myself on the grenade: that was the route I wanted. I would be the sickness. I would choose it.
I would end it, and tell her nothing.
Once the past had happened, once it was past, it seemed in stone to me. I was like my mother in that way. It was done.
I straightened up and slid, on my tractionless soles, out of the woods, away from the chapel, to my car.
I loved May. We were love. It was a thing that existed in its own time and could not be changed. And now I would be leaving that house. I would abandon it but I didn’t want to tear it down, to change the landscape of the past. I didn’t want May to know it was a place that never should have been built.
Neither did I care for her to know that Preston was a coward and a cad—old-fashioned, true word. I didn’t want to destroy that house either, that shrine, where she would still go for comfort. I would save her. Leave me that little bit of control. Leave me that.
So I made my decision and didn’t think about whether it was my right. I left the past. I started the car and drove away. I let the wood of that house we built petrify, transform, become hard and lasting. Whether we wanted to be or not, we were our parents’ children, and I was my mother’s son as well as my father’s. So forward, forward, forward.
Eight
The house—my own house—saved me.
It was lifeboat and anchor. I needed the tangible. I could believe only the corporeal. The walls around me, the house’s rising sturdiness on the hill. It seemed a loyal, patient entity, the immovable thing I could care about. It wasn’t a house of the past or even, oddly, of the future (as maybe it once had been) but of only the absolute present, of one moment and then the next, which was all I could face.
And so I let it become an all-consuming distraction. I needed an obsession, and the house was ready. It turned itself inside out for me, its own labyrinthine puzzle, becoming larger and larger the more closely I looked. It might have even overcome me, become another antagonist, if Win hadn’t been there. He too was loyal and patient, and gradually in some way my own house and Win Lowell became almost interchangeable: one was the other, each and together they were safety.
The house seemed steeped in the histories of other people, and that too was a help. Additions had been made along the way—a wing, a lean-to, an ell—making it thoroughly asymmetrical. It was filled with nooks and oddities that were decisions embodied. (Why was there an old knob-and-tube outlet in the crawl space under the stairs? Why were the windows in the kitchen different sizes? What had happened in the living room, where the wide-plank pine was patched?) My fascination was sudden and strange and deep: the house was a country I was ready to claim.
I was astonished at all the forms wood could take: clapboards, shingles, floorboards, banisters, crown moldings. Pine, spruce, hardrock maple, oak. Win taught me the patterns of the different woods, and I began to notice both the grains exposed in the house—the old gumwood cabinets in the kitchen, the attic stairs—and the chalky texture of the paint where the wood was painted. I would run a finger along the groove of a chair rail and think of the rough board before it was cut. I thought about how the shingles had been nailed on one by one. Sometimes I imagined all the pieces of my house flying apart and then coming back together as if drawn by a giant magnet. It moved me that the house had existed for so long before I’d ever known of it.
I began to buy tools. For the first time in my life, I read nonfiction with complete absorption—how-to books, handyman books, carpentry manuals. I learned how to hang doors. I bought a secondhand lathe at an auction, and, after dozens of tries, was able to replace a broken spindle in the staircase. I learned how to mud in sheetrock and how to plaster. After some hesitation, I bought a book on masonry and eventually, several summers in, repointed the chimney.
The house was in danger, of course, not of spectacularly disassembling in a magic reverse cyclone, but of disintegrating piece by piece. Parts of it seemed to be held together with only varnish and brown age, so I felt a certain legitimate urgency. And Win never told me I was crazy to spend so much time. He knew what I was doing—knew, that is, that I was erasing May, or filling her absence. I never told him, or anyone, the rest.
“Where’d you go after the funeral?” he said once.
“West.”
He nodded, unsurprised.
I’d been gone three days. I’d been thinking of the Pacific, had made it as far as Iowa, a flat, white, unending world, close enough—and finally I’d been calm enough, or numb enough, to turn around.
I didn’t tell him that either, but if I had, he would have understood.
WIN WAS OF THE GENERATION that understood what ownership was, that had been raised to fix things, and the more intractable the problem the more patient, or stubborn, Win became. He decoded plumbing, wiring, collapsing cabinets, crumbling concrete. All was a series of rational steps, for everything had an explanation, and mysteries were solvable.
The only thing that really made Win irate was plastic. Luckily, there was very little of it in my house. Win would say, “You’re lucky, Charlie. I’d rather fix honest wear and tear than mistakes.” Or, “No one’s gone and ruined this place, Charlie.”
The largest job we undertook was shoring up the staircase. His directions were sure and instinctive. “Had to do this before,” he said. “Cellar stairs. Did it for my mother, summer after my dad died. Bad heart. He’d started it, and I finished it. I was seventeen. Didn’t end up pretty. But it was solid as a rock.”
These bits of information came out over the space of long minutes. His monologues were slow, but I’d learned that if I was patient, the words would accumulate.
“Later on I did it at my first wife’s parents’ place. That had to be a prettier job, you know. Boy was I sweating it. Had to pretend I knew what the hell I was doing. Think I fooled ’em. Hand me that level.
“And then had to do it over on Summer Street.” That was his and Divya’s house. “Thought that would be the last time.” He smiled at me, which I took to mean he was glad to have been wrong.
After a minute, I said, “What was your first
wife’s name?” I knew she had existed, but this was the first time he’d ever mentioned her outright to me.
“Girl named Jennifer King. Jennie. Beautiful girl. Love of my life.” He noted my face. “You can have more than one. I found that out.”
“Oh.”
“She was just a good, good-looking girl and we were in love, and you know, Charlie, I was cocky, I thought I’d dodged a bullet. No mediocrity for me. Found the perfect girl, was going to have the perfect life. I’d gone to Vietnam, I was back. I deserved it.”
The story, such as it was, could have ended there. Win spoke very completely: that is, every pause seemed like the end of a story. But he must have sensed I needed detail, and took pity on me. “She looked like a magazine ad. Blond hair, blue eyes. What they used to call an Ivory girl. We were married two and a half years, and she was pregnant. Six months along. January. Hold that right there. That end. No, just a finishing nail. Good.
“Driving on the icy roads, you know. Hairpin turn, that one up by the pond. Textbook. Hit a tree.”
“God, Win.” Did you say you were sorry? Years later? When a person was in another life? “I’m sorry.”
He nodded. He didn’t seem affected, but he didn’t meet my eye. “So your life ends one day, but you’re still living it. So you have to get used to that. I tell you, Charlie, thinking the universe is angry at you—that is its own kind of hubris, Charlie. No puppet master upstairs pulling any strings. You just have to get on with it.” Long pause for hammering. “I did some stupid things. Because I was angry. Then I stopped.” His tone had hardened with something both stern and long dead, and I knew I wouldn’t press, although it was hard to imagine Win and any sort of dissipation together. If I couldn’t respect secrets, then who could? “And then I met Div and straightened up.”