by Laura Brodie
“Yes,” said David, clearly pleased that they were in accord. “That’s what I thought too. But what do I know about fashion? You should wear whatever you like.”
When Sarah glanced back into the mirror she saw that she resembled a fire truck more than a flame. Her lips were carnivorous, her fingers bloody.
“Maybe on another occasion.” She had retreated to the bathroom in search of nail-polish remover.
“It wasn’t David’s fault,” Sarah explained to Margaret. “He told me I should wear whatever I liked.”
“But he wasn’t wild about the dress?”
“Not even a little.”
“So what did you do with it?”
“I gave it to Goodwill two days later.”
Margaret sighed. “I figured it was something like that.” She flexed her fingers on the steering wheel. “You know I liked David a lot. I admired him; everyone did. But it must have been hard to be married to a man with such a strong personality.”
“You think that I deferred to him too much?” Sarah smiled faintly.
“I think you are deferring to him still.”
Sarah felt that if she stayed in the car one minute longer she would break down, confess everything, collapse under the weight of the last five months.
“Message received.” She opened the car door and stepped out.
“The last stage of mourning is separation.” Margaret spoke quietly, as if she were talking to herself.
Sarah nodded. “Same as the last stage of marriage.”
• 35 •
In mid-March Sarah drove to the cabin for her final visit. The weather was dry and sunny, which she usually took as a good omen, but as clouds of dust rose from the gravel, she felt a slight foreboding. Here was the ditch where her tires had sunk three weeks ago; there was the tree that had shielded her from David’s eyes. Here was the long stretch of road where his flashlight had bobbed like a phantom’s lantern. In the face of these dark memories, nature was her only ally. At the foot of the driveway, rhododendrons offered purple nosegays, and when she pulled up at the cabin she saw forsythia in the backyard, shooting fountains of yellow sparks.
Inside, the cabin air was thick with its usual musty scent; the fireplace appeared untouched. But when she stepped out on the deck and trained her eyes upon the river, she made out a man in green flannel at the dock’s end.
“Hello!” she called, and David turned.
He approached over mounds of uncut grass bent low from weeks of snow, pausing at the tulipwood tree to push the chicken wire deeper into the earth. At the bottom of the deck stairs he stopped and looked up at her, his posture reminiscent of Halloween.
“We need to talk,” she said, and when she opened the door he walked past, into the cabin.
They sat across from each other at the pine table, Sarah squeezing her hands tightly in her lap.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said, about going away, and you know how much that appeals to me.” The slightest hint of a smile crossed David’s lips.
“But we can’t go together,” she went on. “It’s impossible. That was never more than a mutual dream.” She lifted her hands and hugged her arms around her chest. “It’s time for me to get on with my life.”
“How do you plan to do that?” asked David.
“I called our department chair yesterday and told him I wanted to get back to work next fall. He’s going on sabbatical, so he says that I can teach as many of his courses as I like. British literature mostly—Shakespeare through Dickens. I’ll have to do a lot of reading over the next few months.
“I’ve also decided to sell the house,” Sarah continued. “Spring is the season to do it, so I’m planning to put it on the market in another month or so. And this cabin. Too many memories.”
David nodded.
“Margaret has invited me to stay at her place for a while. At least until I’ve found another house. I think it might be a good idea, to avoid being so isolated.”
“It sounds like you’ve mapped everything out.”
“There’s one more thing.” Sarah stared at the table’s wood grain. “I’m going to see about adopting a baby from somewhere overseas. Not right away. It will take a while to work out all the details. But sometime in the next few years.”
She looked up and was surprised to see that David’s eyes were blurry. “I would have liked to raise a child with you,” he said. He pushed his chair back and stood up. “Things never work out the way you plan.”
David glanced around until his eyes settled on the easel. “I haven’t completed your portrait . . . I don’t need you to model, but it would help to have you around, so I can see your profile, and your hands, and your hair. It won’t take long.”
He’s stalling, thought Sarah. Still unwilling to let her go. She rose and walked to the easel, looking down at her unfinished self. Her features were expressionless, her acrylic hands cloudy. Outside the painted window, the world had not yet taken shape.
“I can stay for a few days,” she said. “Just until you’re done.”
And so for three days she stayed at the cabin, sitting on the dock and dangling her feet in the cold water. In the afternoons David painted while she read on the couch, poised so that he could see her face, and the color of her hair. It was strange, how slowly the portrait progressed. Her hands grew fingers, her fingers grew nails. The windowpanes filled with trees and clouds, but her face remained blank, impervious to the view.
Meanwhile, time moved at a geological pace. Across the river the limestone cliffs rose in gray and brown scribbles, each layer another monument to drought or flood. She watched the water carrying streaks of mud into the crags, and felt the real danger of being lulled back into dreams. She was reminded of the cicadas that had surfaced years ago, their brief intermission of activity after years of rest, brown shells left clinging to the pine trees. How well she understood the impulse to burrow, to live in fits and starts and long stretches of retreat. But she had to resist while resistance was possible.
The end came on the fourth morning. Rising at nine-thirty, she padded silently into the living room and discovered David at his canvas, scraping her eyes and mouth with a wet Q-tip. She watched her irises and lips retreat into a foggy cloud, and thought, See no evil. Speak no evil.
“It’s not right yet,” David explained when he noticed her standing across the room.
“It never will be right,” she answered.
She walked up behind his chair, wrapped her arms around his neck, and leaned her lips into his hair. “We’ve lingered here much too long.”
David placed his right hand over hers and pressed it to his chest. She rested her cheek on his head until she felt the tremors in his body settle into long, deep breaths. Slower and slower the breathing came, quieter and quieter, until she couldn’t tell that he was breathing at all. Then she felt his body stiffen. A vehicle had pulled into the driveway.
Sarah drew her hands away and walked to the front window.
“Oh God,” she murmured. “It’s a police car.”
She turned back toward the easel, but the room was empty. Outside, she thought she heard the creaking of the deck stairs.
Sarah took a long, shaking breath and opened the front door.
“Hey there, Carver.”
“Hey, Sarah. Mind if I come in?”
She swung the door wide.
Carver removed his hat as he entered. “I’ve been trying to reach you for a couple of days now.”
“Did Margaret tell you where to find me?”
“Actually I had my own idea that you might be coming out here.”
“Why’s that?”
Carver leaned against the kitchen island. “You know your neighbor Rich Haskins? I play poker with him about once a month, and I asked him last November how you seemed to be doing. He told me that you’d asked for the power to be turned back on at this place. That struck him as kind of strange. He didn’t think you’d be wanting to come out here in the winter.
”
Sarah felt the blood rise in her cheeks. “I hadn’t thought about Rich.”
Carver shrugged. “We live in a very small town.” He looked around the room. “I came out here myself last summer. Right after David disappeared. Did you know that?”
Sarah nodded. “I told you where to find the key.”
“Actually, the key wasn’t in that spot. But the door was unlocked, and the key was on the counter, right where David must have left it.”
“I think I’ll sit down.” Sarah took a chair at the table.
“That’s a good idea.” Carver paused at David’s easel. “I noticed David’s painting last time I was here.”
“He painted it three years ago,” Sarah said quickly. “When we spent a month out here together.”
Carver didn’t reply. Instead, he sat down beside her and together they stared out at the water. “This is the hardest part of my job,” he said.
“It’s all right,” said Sarah. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Carver reached into his pocket and placed something on the table—a brown leather object, weather-beaten and torn at one edge.
“What’s that?” she asked.
“You don’t recognize it?”
Sarah shook her head.
Carver lifted the object into his hand. “Some teenagers found a body four days ago. Washed up from the river, in the woods about eight miles from here. It’s pretty badly decomposed, but what’s left of the life vest matches the description you gave us last summer. And we found this in the pocket.”
He placed the faded wallet on the table in front of Sarah’s fingers. Slowly, she opened the leather flap, pulled out the plastic cards, and arranged them like a poker hand. A fading image of David smiled at her from his driver’s license.
“I liked David a lot,” said Carver. “He was a good man.”
His voice cracked, and Sarah saw that his hands were balled into fists on the table’s surface. She was amazed at her own sense of calm, a feeling almost of relief; one part of her life was ending so that another might begin. Placing her palm gently over Carver’s right hand, she murmured, “Do you believe in ghosts, Carver?”
He wiped his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“It’s just a question. Do you believe in ghosts?”
He cocked his head, as if expecting a trick.
“As a matter of fact I do.”
“What would you say if I told you that I’ve been seeing David’s ghost out here, in this cabin? That I come here to talk to him, and spend time with him, and he sits in that very same chair where you’re sitting now . . . Would you say that I’m crazy?”
She ended with a laugh, but Carver’s face was intent, studying her in silence. “I’d say you weren’t the first person to report such things . . . But if I were you I wouldn’t tell anyone else.”
Sarah nodded.
“I’ll tell you something more, that I’ve only told two other people.” He leaned toward her slightly. “I was with my father at the hospital when he passed away four years ago. He was eighty-two and full of pneumonia, so I knew it was coming. But when he died I sensed something, like his spirit was moving around that room, and I’d swear to this day that I felt a hand on me.” He reached up and grasped his left shoulder. “He always rested his hand on my shoulder like that, ever since I was a boy, and I sensed the weight of it in that hospital room. After a while it faded, like my shoulder was just heavy. But I know what I felt, and nobody can tell me that it wasn’t real.”
Sarah smiled. “It’s real for me, too—but afterward it feels like I’ve only been sleepwalking.”
She looked out at the river. “He’s here now, outside. I should go and talk to him.”
Carver shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t like the idea of leaving you alone out here.”
“This won’t take long.” She rose and opened the deck door. “If you’ll wait I’ll follow you back to town when I’m done.”
David was seated at the end of the dock, peeling a long sliver from the railing at his side. He tossed it into the water as Sarah sat down beside him.
“Carver brought your wallet,” she said. “They’ve found your body. I suppose there will be a funeral, now that there’s something to bury.”
David threw another strip of wood across the water’s surface. “I prefer cremation. Scatter my ashes in the river.”
Sarah watched the small bits of pine float downstream. “Remember what you told me you saw from the bottom of the river, at the moment when you were drowning? You said you saw me calling you back, telling you to come home? . . . I think that’s right. I think I wanted you back so that I could apologize for the last few years of our marriage.”
David shook his head. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
Sarah shrugged. “There’s always something to regret.” On the back of her left hand she traced the letters S-O-R-R-Y. “I was angry for a long time,” she began. “Angry at the world for not giving me everything I expected. Angry at you for getting on with your career while mine was going nowhere . . . You never did anything wrong—never drank or had affairs, or flirted with your students. I think I wanted you to do something wrong, just to bring you down to my level.”
“I’ve done plenty wrong—” David objected, but Sarah stopped him.
“Do you know the last act of The Crucible? When Elizabeth Proctor is talking to John? He’s deciding whether to confess—it’s a question of life or death—and she’s thinking about their marriage. She says, ‘It were a cold house I kept.’ That’s the line that came back to me, when you disappeared: ‘It were a cold house I kept.’ ”
“You blame yourself too much,” David replied. “I never helped you. After your second miscarriage, I put all my energy into my work, and I left you on your own. Too many evenings you were alone in the house. That’s a lot of time and reason to be angry.”
There was truth in it, thought Sarah. Truth and contrition, and maybe that was all she had ever wanted from him. “I’m not angry anymore,” she said.
“Neither am I.” David stared into his hands, and for a few minutes they remained silent, watching the river.
“You know,” he said eventually, “there’s somebody else who’s been calling to me.”
“Who?”
“Another woman.” David watched Sarah’s eyebrows raise, then he grinned. “It’s my mother.”
Of course, thought Sarah. How silly of her, all these months, to have imagined David as immeasurably lonely. The dead always had company, generations upon generations.
David took her hand, and for once his palm was warm as the sun spreading across them. He leaned over and kissed her cheek, so softly that she felt she could dissolve into his body, as if he had always been permeable; she had only imagined the boundaries of skin and bone.
“Good-bye, my beautiful wife.”
Sarah remained seated, watching the current, while David walked off the dock and across the grass. Only when he had reached the edge of the woods did she stand and look back. “David!” she called. “Wait!” He turned, waved, and was gone.
Another ten minutes passed before she left the dock, the sun tipping into the trees as she waded up the yard. Inside the cabin, Carver was on the couch, reading a National Geographic. He rose when Sarah entered.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I am ready.”
Afterword
The history of English literature is haunted with dead husbands. Sometimes they appear as ghosts, like the King in Hamlet, as troubled by his widow’s sexuality as by his own murder. Other times they appear as living men who have faked their deaths in order to spy on their wives. Chapman, Molière, Behn, and Steele—to name only a few—create husbands who leap from the wings when their widows take new lovers. Finally, there are the husbands who exist as figments in widows’ minds, because women have been encouraged, in conduct books and educational treatises from medieval days forward, to imagine their husband
s’ spirits as ever-present beings, whose eyes, joined by the eyes of God, see everything.
Acknowledgments
The idea for this novel grew from a favorite chapter in my dissertation on widows in English literature, and so first thanks go to the director of that project, Patricia Meyer Spacks. From there, many readers helped to shape the story. The inaugural members of the Southern Inn writing group, Chris Gavaler, Molly Petty, and Paul Hanstedt, read the first draft as it emerged chapter by chapter. Stephanie Wilkinson, Anne Davies, Beth Colocci, Kerry Humes, Marian Bouchard, Leigh Shemitz-Winters, Tinni Sen, Marsha Heat wole, Carolyn Capps, Michael Matin, Carol Howard, John Leland, and Laure Stevens Lubin all gave advice and encouragement; and Rod Smith, editor of Shenandoah, has been very supportive. Special thanks go to Rosemary James and Joseph deSalvo for their unflagging promotion of new writers through their work as co-founders of the Pirate’s Alley/Faulkner Society, and to Michael Malone, who chose The Widow’s Season for the Faulkner-Wisdom 2005 prize for Best Novel-in-Progress. The novel would never have been published without the combined efforts of Gail Hoch man, my agent, who saw the promise in the story and encouraged me to keep writing, and my editor, Jackie Cantor, who has been unfailingly enthusiastic.
Closer to home, my neighbors, Jeanette Coleman and Catherine Tomlin, provided free childcare that gave me the time to write, and I am always indebted to my husband and daughters, to whom the novel is dedicated.
The Widow’s Season
by Laura Brodie
READERS GUIDE
1. What are some of the meanings behind the novel’s title? Why do you think the author chose it, and how does the plot follow the holiday seasons?
2. Why do you believe the author tells the story both from Sarah’s and David’s point of view?
3. This novel stemmed from the author’s graduate dissertation on widows in English literature—in particular, a chapter about “dead” husbands (either ghosts or men who fake their deaths) watching their wives. Take a look at the novel’s epigraph, which comes from that study. Do you think that today’s widows still feel that their husbands are watching them? Does society encourage them to keep their husbands present in their lives?