Spirit of the Place (9781101617021)

by Shem, Samuel

  And her work to finish her thesis had stalled out. She couldn’t seem to find consistent time to work on it, and when she did she couldn’t focus. As if the Columbian Spirit, watching itself being documented, was casting its spell of breakage.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Orville said, coming into the kitchen. “I got jammed. But it’s only ten forty-two, so we still should have plenty of time.” He pecked her on the cheek. “How do you feel?”

  “Lousy.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Symptoms?”

  “The same. Same as Cray.”

  “Yeah, there’s a lot of that going around.”

  “He’s better. I’m worse.”

  “Sure you’re up to this?”

  “With your help, yes.”

  They pitched in together packing up the wine and cheese and munchies and utensils and napkins and soon found that they were way behind schedule. They couldn’t be late because Miranda was the only one with the key to the Joab Center house. Amy would be waiting for them there.

  Orville carried the heavy cases of Chardonnay and Beefeater gin and tonic and limes and armloads of Jarlsberg and brie and Stone Wheat Thins and Korn Kurls and Planters Peanuts from the house down the slippery, wet bluestone-and-grass path to the Chrysler’s famous trunk space. After several sweaty and buggy trips he took a break and leaned against the hood, staring blankly out over the fetid river to the barren-seeming mountains, starting to feel as he had all those years shopping with his mother in stifling department stores in Albany as she tried on hat after hat, shoe after shoe, dress after dress for some family function like a bar mitzvah or yet another cousin’s daughter’s wedding or an endless number of ferocious Selma and Sol anniversary parties. In those stores he felt that his heart would stop with boredom or even had stopped without his knowing it because his brain had gone dead first without its knowing it either.

  Up that river, he thought, Henry Hudson had sailed, duped into the fantasy of being on his way to the Northwest Passage to India, duped into imagining that the Furious Overfall was just around the next bend. Maybe it had even been right here, 375 years ago, right at this very spot that Hudson realized the shallowness of the water meant he had made a terrible mistake.

  Glancing at his watch, Orville realized that now they were late. The Worth Savers and Amy would arrive finding a locked door and no Jarlsberg. He looked back up the walk to the door. No sign of her. His irritation grew.

  Miranda rushed into the bathroom and threw up. Looking at herself in the mirror as she rinsed her mouth and washed her face, she wondered, Is it possible? After what he had told her, no. Should I tell him what I suspect anyway?

  Leaving the bathroom she was overcome with a confusion of strong feeling—worry and fear, hope and happiness. The power of it all—all at once—staggered her. Maybe I will tell him. Yes, right now.

  In the kitchen she saw that Orville had forgotten the punchbowl and cups. She picked them up and walked with difficulty to the door. She suddenly felt flushed and then light-headed. She leaned against the doorjamb. Looking out from the darkness of the old house into the bright noonday sun, she was stunned by how just plain yellow the forsythia looked, finally, just now, in bloom. Roses are pruned when forsythia blooms. Mother, when I was a girl, told me that, in her garden in Boca Grande—and with such kindness!

  “Damnit, Miranda, can’t you hurry up!”

  Smacked to attention, she looked up, seeing him standing at the car, his impatience obvious. She still felt faint, scared suddenly about falling. She heard, as if from a distance, the glasses go clink clinkclinkk against the punchbowl. She tried to keep standing, to hang on.

  “I’m coming,” she said firmly, and started walking carefully down the flagstones slippery with rain and mud from his repeated trips back and forth to the car, the slap of her bad foot muted by her taking care.

  He rushed up the walk to her, a pained look on his face.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see you in the doorway—I thought you were still inside.”

  He took the punchbowl and cups and offered her his arm.

  She didn’t take it. “Let’s just go.”

  They were late. Amy was in tears. Some of the Worth Savers had already come and gone. Not many stayed. Fewer gave. The benefit was a bust.

  · 23 ·

  It was a few days before they got together again. All week long Cray had been revved up, champing at the bit for school to end, summer to begin. Miranda was still reeling from the encounter. She still felt sick and had gone into her “survival mode,” trying to do the necessities of food, clothing, shelter and (barely) tolerating a revved-up Cray. Orville, too, was overwhelmed, by summer accidents and real and phantom diseases. He had tried hard to show Miranda how sorry he was. He’d talked with her on the phone as often as possible, sent flowers twice with cute notes, and, once, one afternoon dropped by at Sixth Street School when Cray was getting out to say hi to them both.

  Orville went to Miranda’s for dinner later in the week. Cray latched onto him, hustling him into a soccer game and then running races and then to the river to skip stones and then back to the yard to dig worms for fishing. Miranda watched for a while before going inside to make dinner, putting on the water for Cray’s millionth plate of pasta.

  Eight months ago, when Orville was plunged into a sort of fatherhood, he’d noticed that being with the boy sometimes made him feel younger, sometimes older, sometimes both at once. Younger because he became a kid again to play with a kid. Older because clearly here was a member of the next generation, someone who could do things you could no longer do—from running with intense effort all day long through remembering everything down to the smallest detail to effortlessly pulling his legs up into a full lotus and walking along on his hands. Here was someone who would dare. The nostalgia, sometimes, was intense.

  Today, Orville felt older. Tireder. Is that what older is? he asked himself, living tired? Miranda, too, had sounded tired and gloomy over the phone, weak and worn, her spirit down.

  Orville detested worms and disliked putting hooks through them and throwing them to their deaths. So he told Cray he didn’t want to dig for worms. Cray argued. Orville held firm. Cray threw dirt at him and called him “Dr. Dickhead!” Orville asked where he got that word, was it from Maxie? Cray answered by chanting in an obnoxious singsong, “Doc-tor Dick-head Doc-tor Dick-head! Doc—”

  “Cut it out, Cray!” Orville shouted, fed up. “Just stop it!” Cray stomped off, but then came back to tease him some more.

  Miranda heard the chanting and came out. She told Cray to go in and eat his pasta while she and Orville took a walk. Cray refused and walked to the river and sat on a big rock—Miranda noted it was her “Promise-to-Selma” rock—elbows on knees, chin on hands. They left him there and walked up the dirt road beside the stream.

  It was late afternoon. The mid-June sunlight was casting the same low slant of light on the blades of grass as it had in mid-November. Same light, different expectation. It had rained on and off all day. The washboard surface of the dirt road was pocked with puddles. The June air was thick and portending, almost loamy, as if carrying trillions of tiny fistfuls of wet earth. To their right as they walked, Kinderhook Creek roared toward the trestle, ducked quickly under and out into the seeming freedom of the river.

  At a sharp bend in the stream, a soaring catalpa was in bloom. A rough-hewn bench sat underneath it. They were drawn to sit there too. The wet grass was a good green, but slippery. The footing down to the bench was treacherous. Orville took Miranda’s arm, and they walked slowly together. To both of them it felt like a pretty good start—the feel of the support, the feel of supporting. Promising. They sat under the catalpa.

  Catalpas, Miranda knew, had been planted all over Kinderhook County in the first celebrations of Arbor Day in the 1920s. This catalpa seemed to her even older. Every year it was so late with its leaves that Miranda worried
that over the winter it had died, many of its banana-like seedpods from the previous year hanging there dead. But it always bloomed in time for her birthday, three days from now, and—yes, it had. The white, lily-like flowers with their lavender insides and their single streaks of gold, perched on the end of long stems in groups of six. The blossoms would fade quickly, lasting only a week. Orville stood on the bench and picked a bunch, handing it to Miranda. They smelled the flowers. The bouquet, held afloat in the moist air, was a mix of jasmine, orange, and rose.

  Their eyes were drawn to a shearing sound at a bend in the stream, where a knife-edge of moving water, hurrying along to make more river, had cut a scallop into the far bank, creating a ledge which looked, to Orville, like a miniature version of what the river had done to the bank of the Hudson at Columbia, leaving the high cliff of Parade Hill flanked by the two deepwater bays by the time the Quakers sailed in.

  “An escarpment,” Orville said. “You taught me that word, remember?”

  “I do.” The word had come up the day in the schoolhouse, the day they’d met. She did not offer this.

  “It was the day in the schoolhouse,” he said. “Remember?”

  “I do.”

  They sat still, listening to the rush of water, the light breeze on their skin rustling the new leaves of a weeping willow nearby.

  “I said I was sorry,” he said, turning on the bench to face her.

  “Accepted.” She did not turn to face him.

  “Why so down?” he asked. No answer. “You still feeling sick?”

  It was a perfect time to tell him that her period was late, and that she’d been living with the impossible fantasy that she was pregnant—sometimes full of hope that she and he would somehow stay together and Cray would have a brother or sister, and sometimes dreading that it would just lead to more grief with him. She thought to tell him, tried, a little, to bring herself to tell him, but no. Given the mess they were already in, to add that? No way.

  She took a deep breath in and let out a long sigh. “Some.”

  “Why so gloomy lately?” She didn’t answer. “Everything I try—I said I was sorry.”

  “And I said I accepted it. You did everything right. You were good.”

  He felt the jab. “And?”

  She turned, faced him, and said, bitterly, “You don’t yell at a person with a handicap to ‘Hurry up!’—”

  “I said I—”

  “Listen to me. You don’t yell out at them ‘Can’t you hurry up?’ Because you know what? They can’t. You don’t yell at them at all. You wait for them. You help them along.”

  “Guilty.”

  “I don’t want your guilt. I want to understand. How could you do that?”

  “You’re being a little unfair. I wasn’t even thinking about your handicap—at that moment I lost all sight of it, and—”

  “Okay. Maybe unfair. But. There’s something else going on here.”

  “How do you know? It was nasty but, I swear, innocent.”

  “After a lot of years of this, I’ve gotten to be a world expert on how people react. I can feel—in how people take my arm, my hand—what’s going on. What’s with you and my handicap? With handicaps?”

  He took this in. “Maybe I’ve gotten so close to you I’ve stopped seeing you as handicapped at all. I treat you as normal, as a physically able person.”

  “And you stopped loving me?”

  “Whoa! I love you because of your handicap? Come on!”

  “I keep wondering why you wanted me that rainy afternoon in the schoolhouse. I ask myself, What was it that day? What attracted you so much to me? Was it when I stood up and walked away from you across the room? I felt your eyes on me. Like sunlight on my back, on my bare shoulders. When I came back, you’d changed. Such love in your eyes! What was it, then?”

  “Just this incredible outpouring toward you. And yeah, it was something about your limp. Maybe your courage, your lack of shame, the contrast between your beauty and your disfigurement?” Why in the world, he asked himself, did I use that word? He went on, “It surprised me, too.”

  “Oh.” She looked away. “Too bad. Seeing you so vulnerable at that moment, I imagined that, maybe, it was that our wounds matched.”

  “Maybe, yeah.” He felt puzzled, then sobered. “You know, ever since that day, I keep feeling that you’re looking at me in—I don’t know—expectation? As if . . . as if you’re searching to find something in me that’s especially kind, open to helping you, helping my patients. Something endearing. As if you are always expecting the best of me. Expecting something that I don’t feel I really have. It’s weird.”

  “You took my arm on the ice outside the Quaker Meeting House. You do take care of patients, good care, Orvy. I’ve seen you. Though you dismiss it.”

  “But it’s as if you’re expecting to find even more caring in me, like I’m hiding it from you, like you’re asking yourself, ‘Where’s that caring guy?’”

  She was about to respond but suddenly felt flushed, then chilled, and fuzzy, so that as he went on talking she tuned him out, hearing only the tail end of what he was saying.

  “—because I’m a doctor?”

  “Because of what she told me about you.”

  “She?” He saw her go pale. He stared at her, stunned. “Selma?”

  “Yes.”

  “You told me you didn’t know her.”

  She bit her lip, trying to focus. “A little.”

  “And?”

  “We were both on a committee at the library. That’s about it.”

  “Why’d you tell me you didn’t?”

  She looked away.

  Orville had never seen her like this—unsure, embarrassed, as if she’d been caught in a lie, a secret. All at once he remembered the day he’d surprised her up in her attic, she at the steamer trunk with her wedding dress. He’d noticed how she quickly shoved a cardboard box away, back into the dark. Scomparza Moving and Funeral.

  “Oh my God!” He felt a rush of humiliation, then anger. “You’ve got her letters. In that box in the attic. You’re mailing her letters to me.”

  She weighed her chances of escape. None. It was over. “Yes.”

  For a long moment he couldn’t speak. “Unbelievable! I mean this is unbelievable. You and she—you were that close?”

  “No. We had a couple of heart-to-hearts, that’s all. After she died, the box arrived on my doorstep. No one was more surprised than me.”

  “You . . . You’re mailing me these letters, and I’m going crazy . . . I even read one to you . . . and all along you know? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I do not know what was in them. She sealed them all, wrote instructions for when she wanted each one mailed. I just mail them on the appointed dates.”

  “Great, great.” He shook his head. “But why keep it secret from me?”

  “I wish I knew,” she said sadly. “She wrote me a letter—it came with the box when it arrived—and said it was her dying wish and I had to promise to do it. I looked up in the sky and promised. Your mother was not subtle, and she was very convincing.”

  “How could you?”

  “At first I didn’t know you, and . . . well, from what she’d told me, I imagined I was doing a good deed, helping her to tell you all the things she never got to tell you and that it was helping you to mourn her, go through your grief. And then I met you, fell in love with you, and I wanted to tell you, tried to get up the nerve to tell you, almost told you, in fact, but each time I tried, I was too afraid. I was afraid I’d lose you, more afraid the more I loved you. The deeper we got, the less I could risk it. It . . . it would be the end.”

  “Jesus.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  Shamed, unwilling to show it, Miranda stiffened. The nail had been pounded in. The girl had grown around it to become a wo
man with a piece of steel in her soul. A voice inside said, Never admit weakness. Keep it secret. Take care. “The reason I look at you that way,” she said, choosing each word as carefully as a step, “is that I am asking myself ‘Where’s that caring guy?’ It comes from something Selma told me. She said that when she came home from her surgery that summer, when she was unable to care for herself, your sister and your father were not there for her. The only one who cared for her was you. You sat with her. Caring for her. She said to me, ‘Orville stayed with me. He stayed.’ So when the letters arrived, with her bizarre request—demand, really—I imagined that they were, well, love letters, from a mother to a son.”

  Orville was astonished, then awed, at this glimpse into Selma’s real world, Selma vulnerable and scheming. She saw him as so inadequate a son, that to her latest little friend she made him into a saint. It was all so pitiful, so damning. He said, “She lied.”

  “What?”

  “She lied to you. Big time. I ran like hell. Fast as I could. She never forgave me for it. Love letters? You want to know what’s in those ‘love letters’? Blame, ridicule, viciousness like you’ve never seen. And in every one of them, just about, she goes back to how I abandoned her.” He stopped himself, thinking, What irony—I’ve just convinced the woman I thought I loved that I’m not worth loving. Thanks a lot, Mom.

  “But why . . .” She could barely speak. “But why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what?” He felt himself sinking into a fogginess, a despair.

  “Why didn’t you tell me what was in the letters?”

  “Too humiliating. And I’d be damned if I’d let her in to ruin things. And guess what?”