His “free moment from time to time” had quickly escalated into every Saturday afternoon. Paul would get his chores done around the house, pack a lunch, and load his electric tools and building supplies into the back of the pickup. He’d be back home by six or seven in the evening, exhausted but happy. There was no question in my mind that Luke was giving something back to Paul. Perhaps, by accepting Paul’s help with the house, Luke was easing my husband’s guilt about selling him out to Riccio. But I never sensed it was that simple or direct. They shared a friendship and a host of memories, complicated ties that had survived, and perhaps had been strengthened by, everything that had come between them. I never visited the house myself, and I wasn’t able to get much out of Paul about how the work was progressing. I knew it was bound to be an enormous task, but if anyone could help Luke pull it off, it was my determined, indomitable husband. So I was shocked when Paul came home early one afternoon about six months into the renovation and told me that Luke was abandoning the project.
“I don’t think his heart’s been in it for a while, really,” Paul told me. “In fact, he’s kind of gone in a whole different direction. Come on out to the truck and take a look.”
It was lying facedown in the pickup. At first glance it looked to me like just a pile of junk: a garbage-pail top, some broken pieces of dinner plates, a couple of doorknobs, and two dozen or so cedar shake shingles. But when Paul lifted it carefully out of the back and stood it on end, it became clear that it was meant to be an owl. A very large, ghastly-looking owl with eyes made out of two shot glasses.
“He’s been working on these during the week,” Paul told me. “Taking bits and pieces from all over the house. He finally walked me out to the barn this afternoon and showed me what he’s been up to. He’s planning to set up a gallery or something and sell these to the public.”
“You didn’t actually pay for that thing, did you?”
“Yes, I did. What was I supposed to say? He told me that he doesn’t need my help with the house anymore. He seems to really love putting these things together. And he has this whole kind of complicated philosophy about how he’s recycling our past—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. He’s nuts. That owl is just a piece of junk—literally. You’re not going to get involved with this crazy gallery idea, too, are you?”
“He didn’t ask me to. He seems to think he’s found the answer to everything. It’s all a little abstract, kind of cosmic, really. I couldn’t follow a lot of what he was trying to say.”
“He’s smoking dope again, isn’t he?” I demanded. “We can’t be involved with him, Paul. You know that. We can’t risk—”
“No. I know, believe me. But he’s still off drugs and he’s not drinking, or doing anything like that. He just seems to have found something he believes in. It’s harmless enough, I suppose. Though God knows how he intends to support himself by doing it.”
But Luke’s needs were modest enough. He lived in what had once been the servants’ quarters on the ground floor of the big house, using an old Jotul stove to heat the small back rooms. He seemed to subsist on brown rice, vegetables, and fruit that he purchased at a natural foods co-op market that had opened recently in Northridge. He spent his days scavenging items from what remained of the contents of the mansion—silverware and china that had been in the Barnett family for generations, chandeliers, fireplace utensils, his mother’s costume jewelry, old TV parts—and welded them together into bizarre pieces that were both whimsical and grotesque. He started displaying them in the front yard of the farmhand’s cottage that bordered River Road, where Paul had briefly lived. If he felt haunted or unhappy by this strange, hermetic existence, he didn’t let it show. He wasn’t broken or humbled, as I guess I’d hoped he might be, but I did feel he was uncharacteristically resigned. Though there was always that undercurrent of tension between the two of us, when he came to our house to visit he seemed more at ease with himself than I ever remembered him being before. It helped that Rachel was there. She was unabashed in her girlish love for Luke, and I believe he was genuinely touched by this. Once, as we were sitting down to dinner, she’d reached out and taken his hand.
“Would you like to marry me?” she’d asked him.
“I’d love to, Rach,” he’d told her. “But I’m afraid that I’m really not the marrying kind.”
There were plenty of women, though. I would hear about them through Paul, Kathy, and others around town. Or I would see him with some girl beside him in his father’s old gas-guzzling Oldsmobile convertible, one of the last remnants of the good old days, wind whipping his hair back as he drove with one hand on the wheel. But none of these relationships ever lasted very long. I think women would fall for his go-to-hell good looks and think that, with the right amount of love and persuasion, they could bring him around. But they’d learn soon enough that Luke had no intention of changing, no desire to commit to anyone or anything. He was just what he appeared to be: a lone wolf who was probably happiest on his own, soldering together broken pieces of his collapsing legacy into “art works” that nobody in his right mind would want to buy.
“Do you, Robert Matthew Alden …” Father Timothy’s sudden change of tone brought me back to the present. I was embarrassed that I’d let my thoughts wander so far from the ceremony, and I forced myself to follow the rest of the proceedings attentively. Rachel, mindful of her grandmother’s directions, took forever leading us back down the aisle, dropping careful handfuls of rose petals in front of her as she stepped and stopped, stepped and stopped. I could hear her counting aloud, “One, two, three … one, two, three.” I walked back down with Paul, the two of us holding hands as we all shuffled along behind our dutiful offspring. As it turned out, Leslie and Luke walked down together, as well. Months later, Ethan would comment wryly: “From the beginning, I doubt any of us would say that it was a match made in heaven.”
There were about seventy or so guests at the reception in St. Anne’s annex. We saved on costs by making the dinner a buffet and doing most of the cooking ourselves. This allowed Bob, who loved bluegrass music, to be able to afford the only thing he’d requested for the wedding: a live band called Hard Times, from outside of Boston. It was a good choice. Like so many emotionally reserved people, the Aldens were enthusiastic and tireless dancers. Since Bob had started dating Kathy, we would often accompany them to contra dancing events up near Albany. It was a fun, invigorating, family-friendly way to pass a Friday evening, and I felt it let Paul relax and get out of himself.
“My, oh, my,” Barb said to me as we were carrying trays of lasagna out of the kitchen. I followed the direction of her gaze and saw Luke and Leslie locked in an embrace as the band played an up-tempo version of “Your Love Is Like a Flower.” They were moving at about half the speed of everyone else around them, and seemingly oblivious to anyone but themselves. I felt a real jolt watching them, the kind of vicarious thrill you sometimes get seeing movie stars make love on the screen. I could see, for the first time in a long while, what Luke’s sexual appeal might be. Although it was Leslie he was holding, I could almost feel the pressure of his hand on the small of my back and the warmth of his breath on my fingers as he raised her hand to his lips.
“Is that even legal in this state?” Ethan asked, coming up to Barb and me. I think every adult in the reception hall was staring at the slowly gyrating couple in the middle of the dance area. When the song ended, the band broke into whooping laughter as Luke and Leslie kept dancing. I looked away, upset with myself for getting so worked up, and when I glanced back again, they were gone.
But seeing them together like that put me in a peculiar mood: restive and unhappy. I felt frumpy in the green bag of a dress I wore and uncomfortable in the tight heels I’d sprayed white to go with it. I’d willingly volunteered earlier but now I resented the fact that I was forced to help in the kitchen, warming up trays, scraping off pots and pans, listening to the raucous thumping of the banjo and fiddle. Feeling overheated and exhausted,
I stepped outside at one point to get some air, the screen door closing behind me with a sigh.
“No, I’ve got to get back. They’ll be wanting to serve the cake soon.”
“What cake?”
“Oh … no … yes … please …”
“I’ve got my car. Let’s just go …” “I’ve got my car. Let’s just go …”
“I can’t, baby …”
“Yes, you can.”
Eventually, with Barb’s help, I found the rectangular single-layer wedding cake that Leslie had made. It was in the industrial-sized refrigerator, and it was beautifully iced with red and pink roses and a large-script “Bob and Kathy 4 Ever” across the center. I didn’t feel particularly sorry that Leslie didn’t get to see her younger, happy sister cut the cake she’d obviously put so much time and effort into. I thought then that she’d behaved in an unforgivably shameless and selfish way. I didn’t understand what loneliness can do to you, how longing can make you crazy. Leslie didn’t leave Luke’s house after that. They lived together in those cramped little rooms for the next ten months. But I began to feel bad when I heard from Kathy that Leslie had started drinking again. Luke asked her to leave, but she wouldn’t or couldn’t. She moved upstairs, sleeping in Mrs. Barnett’s old room, until that autumn turned so cold.
It was Tom Langlois, then a deputy, who found her wandering down River Road one night trying to keep her balance on the double yellow line. He knew enough—the whole town did by then—not to take her back to Luke. He drove her instead over to Alden Dairy. Kathy and Bob got her back into rehab. But, according to Kathy, she never really got back on her feet again after that. She moved to Florida, and from what we hear she’s still drinking.
“Not so much now that she can’t function,” Kathy told me a year or so ago. “But enough so that she doesn’t really have to feel anything anymore.” And Luke? He went on as he had before. He never mentioned Leslie when he came by to see us. I wonder sometimes if he ever thought about her, if he ever felt responsible for what had happened. I remember years before when he had warned me about Kenny: “It’s like you’re trying to help a bird with a broken wing. It’s a waste of time. Let him flap away.” It had seemed to me such a cold thing to say, even if it was true. It’s continued to reverberate with me because I’ve never really thought of Luke as someone who was troubled by pity, or regret, or any of the lesser sorrows. But then I’ve come to learn that most of the time you only think you know the truth about other people, even those you believe you know best.
25
Beanie was born a month after my mother died and nearly six months after Dandridge suffered another stroke, a major one this time. He was on life support for a week until Clara, believing that his “soul had gone on to God,” took him off. He was only sixty-nine, though he looked much older at the viewing: the leathery face, creased and frowning, seeming to withhold his approval and love even in death.
I thought Beanie looked a lot like my mother with her heart-shaped face and cleft chin. She has her hazel eyes, as well, flecked with little bits of gold. But she has none of my mother’s sanctimony or passive aggression. From the beginning, Beanie seemed otherworldly to me, dreamy and gentle. A changeling. Rachel, who was ten years old when her younger sister was born, thought of Beanie as her own, a living doll. She fed her all the stories and fantasies she herself had been raised on and loved. It took us all a while to realize how smart Beanie was. She never crawled. She just stood up one day and waddled across the kitchen. She didn’t traffic in nonsense words, either, but went right to “milk,” “car,” and “cat,” without dropping consonants or doubling syllables. She could count to twenty by the time she was two and a half. A lot of this, I think, is due to her amazing memory. When she was three, we found her confidently reading In the Night Kitchen aloud to her cousin B.J. She’d simply memorized the thing, page by page.
There seemed to be a lot to deal with that year, between our parents dying and 9/11, though Paul and I felt closer than ever. We’d been trying to have another child for two years before Beanie was conceived. Her arrival felt like a kind of blessing, a cosmic nod that we were on the right road, that we deserved all this hard-earned happiness. Especially since others were less fortunate. Bob finally closed down the dairy, selling off the last hundred or so head without telling anyone, even Kathy, until the outfit buying them rolled up the drive with their cattle haulers.
“Kept looking at them through Daddy’s eyes,” he told us one night about a month after they were gone. “Kept hearing him telling me all the things I was doing wrong. Dairying’s dead around here anyway.”
“What are you going to do?” Paul asked. “I bet Polanski could use you. He’s got more work now than he knows what to do with. Just give me the word.”
“Heck, no. I’m a farmer. I’ll be putting in feed corn for the time being. Pumpkins, maybe. I’ve got some other ideas brewing. You’ll see. We’ll be fine.”
It helped that Louise stepped in and insisted that Clara move down to Northridge to live with her and Mike shortly after the two of them got married. At first, I think we all assumed that Kathy was at the root of Clara’s problems. Things deteriorated pretty quickly between the two of them after Kathy moved in and began keeping house. Or not keeping it, actually. The big, rambling place was over two hundred years old, and Clara had devoted her life to its care. She’d been a great believer in the value of white vinegar—as window cleaner, drain freshener, floor wash, spot remover, ironing spray—so that every room, but the kitchen especially, always had a briskly astringent smell. She’d lavished on that house all the physical attention she was never able to bring herself to give her children: dusting, scrubbing, washing, ironing, beating the dust out of the carpets with Ethan’s baseball bat. I think this was her way of expressing love, at arm’s length and without sentiment: freshly laundered sheets, tucked in tight, the pillowcases starched and ironed.
But Kathy didn’t know the first thing about how to take care of a house, let alone a place that big. Her mom had raised her and Leslie in a series of furnished apartments, where the two girls slept on fold-out couches and ate boilable dinners or takeout. I had to show her how to change a vacuum-cleaner bag, how to defrost the freezer. Though I did my best to help her, I had a house of my own to take care of, a family to feed. Inevitably, the farmhouse began to show signs of neglect: a gummy buildup on the linoleum, filmy windows, dust collecting around the newel posts, mildew spreading on the shower curtain liners.
“Clara hardly speaks to me anymore,” Kathy confessed to me about two years after she and Bob were married. With Dandridge gone and everyone else married and moved out, it was just the three of them together in that enormous sprawl of a house. We were sitting in the kitchen having coffee, keeping our voices low so that Clara couldn’t hear. Claiming that her arthritis was getting the better of her, she’d moved into the small downstairs bedroom behind the kitchen where years ago she’d planned for Paul and me to live. She kept a small portable television going all the time, even while she slept. Now I could see its blue light flickering at the end of the hallway behind Kathy and hear the disembodied laughter of some morning talk-show audience.
“Did you have a fight?” I asked, though I had a hard time imagining that. Clara preferred to grumble and complain under her breath; it was Dandridge who had enjoyed lashing out and courting confrontation.
“No, nothing like that. She just seems to forget I’m here. Bob, too. She lies back there on her bed watching television all day. Though I’m not even sure she’s really watching it. She kind of stares right through it into something else. I’m sure she’s depressed. That she misses Dandridge and all the others. But she won’t even tell me what she wants for dinner, so I’m not going to try and talk to her about anything like that.”
“Do the girls know?” I asked, meaning Nelwyn and Louise, the daughters and therefore those whose opinions actually meant something. As in-laws we both knew that we had, at best, supporting roles in the overall
family structure.
“I told Bob we had to say something,” Kathy told me. “But I don’t think he wants to. You know he’s feeling like such a failure these days. I think he believes the least we can do is find a way of coping with Clara.”
“That’s crazy,” I told her. “If any of us could get along with her, it would be you. She took a real shine to you, Kath, you know that. No, I think you’re right. I’ve noticed how much vaguer she seems since Dandridge died. Something’s definitely wrong. You and Bob have done the best you could. I’ll talk to Paul about it.”
That night Paul called Louise, and then Nelwyn in Indiana and Ethan, who had recently moved up to Brookline with Barb and the kids, as soon as I talked to him about Clara. They all agreed not to let Bob know that they were intervening: what possible good could that do? Louise and Mike seemed more than willing to take Clara in. Mike was already pretty well established as an insurance broker and had inherited the ranch-style house from his folks. I knew he was hoping for a big family, and I think he envisioned his mother-in-law helping out with the kids when they came along. Of course, nobody realized how far gone Clara was at that point. I overheard a lot of the planning that was done over the telephone, my heart nearly stopping once when Paul said: “Well, we’d have her come here but …”
God, no! I thought, and luckily we didn’t have to. But I came to realize over the months that followed how much it ate away at Paul that we hadn’t tried to do more to help Clara. I think he felt that if he’d noticed her mental decline before it became so acute, he might have been able somehow to prevent it. He’d weathered Dandridge’s death without too much sorrow or regret, though I think it can often be more difficult to deal with the death of someone you didn’t get on with than someone you did. They say hate never finds a comfortable resting spot.
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