Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “Hey,” I said with a laugh.

  She was silent, holding me fiercely. I tried to step back to see her better but she wouldn’t let go.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Nothing,” she mumbled into my neck. “I’ve missed you.”

  “Well, I’ve missed you.” Gently, I removed her arms from around my sides and stepped back. She did not look well. Her face was pale, the whites of her eyes streaked with red. I laid my hand against her forehead; she felt warm to me, possibly feverish. “Are you sick?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Claire?”

  “You’d better go.”

  “I can take another minute.”

  “No,” she said firmly, almost pushing now, “you’d better go.”

  “Wait a second.” I put my hands on her shoulders and suddenly the energy seemed to drain from her. “Now tell me what’s the matter.”

  “It’s just … this is hard, Julian. This is really hard.”

  I tried to think of something about the future that would soothe her; a comforting truth. But none came to me. “I know,” I murmured. “I know.”

  Her grip tightened on my arms, but she said no more.

  I hurried back to the commencement area—where my father, by arriving four hours early, had managed to secure good seats.

  By now, nearly all of the thousands who’d attended the ceremony had dispersed to the undergraduate houses and respective graduate schools for the handing out of diplomas. Already the crimson-bedecked stage in front of Memorial Chapel stood empty as a prom hall at noon, and the festooned quadrangle with its hundred-year-old trees was but a sea of unoccupied chairs; the air, alive with jubilation just twenty minutes ago, felt sadly spent.

  I saw my family: my mother, conspicuously angled with her back to my father, talking to my brother-in-law Ben (a computer programmer in Silicon Valley); and, a few feet away, my father and Judith standing in easy silence with each other.

  As I approached them an old panic began to stir; ten yards away I paused as if catching sight of a ghost. Two years had passed since I’d seen my mother for twenty-five minutes in a New York coffee shop. Our last conversation—a New Year’s Day phone call—had ended with my request that she not bring Mel, her husband, to Cambridge for my commencement. She’d hung up on me (I didn’t blame her), and until just recently I had assumed she would boycott the event altogether. But here she was: hair dyed russet and cut in a Texas bob, waist a bit thicker—yet looking, even from this modest distance, visibly less careworn than when she’d been living with us. She claimed to enjoy her new life, and there was no reason not to believe her. What made the difference? It wasn’t anger I felt at seeing her, or even guilt, but rather an anxious bewilderment at my inability to muster any happiness on her behalf.

  “Well,” called my father. “There he is. The man of the hour.”

  “Hi, Dad.” I covered the last of the distance to them and my father squeezed my shoulder.

  “Quite a day.” His voice was flushed with pride.

  Judith reached out for me. “Look at you!”

  “Hey Jude.”

  She never failed to laugh at this tired joke. We hugged long and hard, which was the only way my sister knew how to hug. She was the giver in the family, a bank vault of loving-kindness in a world of emotional penny-pinchers. Occasionally I found this frightening.

  The hug ended only when Ben—decent, balding, brown-eyed Ben—cut in with a smile. He shook my hand warmly.

  “Congratulations, Julian.”

  “Thanks, Ben.”

  Then an odd silence among the members of my family, as if a crow were flying overhead.

  “Hello, Julian.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  For a few wary seconds we stood sizing each other up. Until—two forces capitulating—we leaned forward and I kissed her presented cheek.

  “Mel’s feelings are hurt you didn’t want him here,” my mother said.

  I stepped back.

  “Mom,” Judith warned. “You promised.”

  “Why not? Is this a temple? A place of worship? No, I won’t be silenced. How often do I get to see my son, anyway? So I’m going to tell the truth. Feelings have been hurt. Feelings. My husband is a sensitive man. A good man. He doesn’t hold grudges. Why should he? He was told he wasn’t wanted here but still he sends his best to my son on his day of celebration. Why? Because you’re my son, Julian. I thank God for Mel every day of my life.”

  “You just had to do it, didn’t you, Mom?” Judith said bitterly.

  My father cleared his throat. “Well, why don’t we all get going? We don’t want to be late. Where to next, Julian?”

  But I was no longer there. I’d jumped ship. It was all Claire now. I saw her again as she’d just been, her troubled pallor and the fierceness of her embrace, her unhappiness. I began to imagine untold reasons, causes, illness or depression, things I’d done or not done, mistakes I’d made. I began to imagine loss. A feeling that threw a cloud over the bright day like a cloth over a portraitist’s camera, leaving me enclosed behind the scene, suffocating in my own darkness, unable to focus on anything through the lens but the image of her suffering.

  Abruptly I looked up. My family, four pairs of eyes.

  “I’m going to have to meet you there,” I said.

  “What?” Judith said. “Why?”

  “Meet us where?” said my father.

  “A close friend of mine’s sick. I need to get over to her house now and see her.”

  “Now?” demanded my mother.

  “It’s important.”

  “How sick is she?”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  “What about your diploma, Julian?” asked my father.

  “I’ll meet you there. I promise.”

  “This is entirely disrespectful,” my mother said angrily.

  “No,” disagreed Judith. “It’s okay.”

  Then I felt Ben’s hand on my shoulder. “Julian,” he said calmly, “just tell us how to get there.”

  I ran through the Yard and out the gate to Mass. Ave., up the double-wide avenue, the hem of my graduation gown flapping behind me like a mourning skirt. Past Hemenway Gym and the Law School, Nick’s Beef and Beer, Changsho Chinese Restaurant, left on Linnaean, right on Humboldt. When I finally stopped I was panting, standing with hands on my knees, damp with sweat. I pulled the gown over my head and bunched it in my hand.

  The street was still. Trees grew tall on either side. The houses were big and handsome with lovely gardens behind. Professors lived here, lawyers, at least one Nobel laureate. In these gardens in June there were inflatable kiddie pools, telescopes for stargazing, tricycles on their sides, chemistry sets.

  Their house was on the corner. Pale gray clapboard with black shutters. They had moved into it the week they were married. It had four bedrooms and two studies and a formal dining room and a living room big enough for the valuable paintings he already owned as well as those he intended to own, someday. There was a garden as big and lovely as any of the neighbors’ gardens. In it was a single magnolia tree and the beds of irises Claire had planted late last fall, soon after the wedding. They were in bloom now. I had seen them.

  I climbed the steps to the porch. On the days when he was in Washington, when she knew it could only be me, she left the front door unlocked. I want you to feel that you can walk in anytime. I want you to know that I’m always waiting for you. Today, though, as everyone was aware, he was not in Washington. Today on the stage he’d sat with the other distinguished faculty in full view, his hood brighter and more honorific, it seemed, than anyone else’s.

  The door was locked.

  I walked around the side of the house, past their Volvo station wagon parked on a rectangle of slate gravel, and into the garden.

  The irises were purple and white. They stood straight and full in their neat beds. The magnolia
was awash in white blossoms. The sweet fragrance reached my nose just as I saw her.

  Three wooden steps led from the back door off the kitchen to the grass. She was sitting on the middle one, her arms resting on her knees. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot. Her cheeks were blotched with color from where she’d been holding her face. Her only movement when she saw me was to lower her head.

  I was on my way to her. Then I stopped. Looking down at my hand, I found the graduation gown bunched there like a black rag. I let it fall to the ground.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  She shook her head. I had never seen anyone look as unhappy as she looked now, as sad and trapped.

  “Claire, you’re starting to frighten me.”

  “Julian, I’m pregnant.”

  She looked up then. Her face was brutally swift and clear. There wasn’t time to imagine the joy of it being ours. Her expression told everything. It was broken, without hope, and I staggered back as if I’d been punched.

  “Not his.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? How did this happen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean? Talk to me. How? When?”

  “I missed my period.” She paused to gather herself. “Last month, also. I hardly noticed then. But when it happened a second time, I panicked. I tried counting the weeks back but I couldn’t make them fit with how long we’ve been together. I couldn’t make them fit. I didn’t tell you because I was afraid. I took a pregnancy test. It was positive.”

  “Those tests can be wrong.”

  “I did it twice. It was still positive.” Again she paused, eyes narrowing as though she were groping in the dark for courage. “Yesterday my gynecologist did an ultrasound. I saw the baby, Julian. Its head and feet and hands. I saw its heart. He measured it and gave me the date of conception. It was April third, Julian. Two weeks before we saw each other that day in the Square.”

  It is a dream, a nightmare that keeps coming back. That day, street, garden. Noon, the sun high overhead. The perfect irises. The scent of magnolia. My graduation gown bunched on the ground like some corrupt flower. My unanswered question lingering in the air. Her hopeless face: she is crying again, sitting on the wooden steps.

  Her silence is her answer. She is crying so hard now that she’s fallen over on her side, curled into a ball. I am on my knees on the grass. And still she hasn’t uttered a word. Which is how I come to understand, finally, that she is going to have his child.

  And so I do the only thing that seems available to me under the circumstances, if I intend to go on living. I get up and walk away.

  PART THREE

  one

  THE YANKEE CLIPPER rumbled out of South Station and began its long run down the Northeast Corridor. In New Haven while the power was cut so the engine could be changed, I waited in the airless dark with the other passengers—students, businessmen, bleary-eyed young mothers taking babies to the relatives. When the train moved again it felt like a release, a slow breath toward life. Then we cruised until Bridgeport; until Stamford. There, I saw commuters standing on the cement platform, the mirrored peaks of office towers, and, in my mind, the leafy trees that lined Willow Road.

  The train pulled out. I was still on it. It was the end of June and soon I was in Manhattan, the Upper West Side, and once again my father was opening his door. He nodded, touched me shyly on the shoulder, and asked if I was all right.

  We fell back into it. Still in my head from that summer is the sound of his slippered feet going past my door on his way to the kitchen. Each morning he liked to be the one to make the coffee, set out the bowls and boxes of cereal.

  Sometimes as we sat reading the newspaper I’d feel his gaze light on me from across the table. I would glance up and catch him staring. Then an expression of mild embarrassment would obscure the habitual worry on his face, making him appear, for a moment, years younger.

  After breakfast one morning I was folding the bed back into a sofa when I felt his quiet presence in the doorway behind me. I had been staying with him longer than a month, and in all that time not once had we discussed the real reason for my leaving Cambridge so abruptly, despite my previously stated plans to remain there. I’d told him that I was hunting for a teaching job, and had already tapped all the possibilities in the Boston area. He’d accepted my explanation—or, at least, had decided not to question me about it; it was our common habit to respect each other’s privacy. Now he handed me the last sofa cushion, helped me to make the room neat, and said consolingly, “A job will turn up. You just have to be patient.”

  “I know, Dad.”

  “I never told you this. After college, before I took the job with Addison, I was offered an assistant editorial position with Harcourt. Just three months into it there were cutbacks and they let me go. I felt ashamed. I was broke. I had to live with my parents for a few months, until the next thing came along.”

  “That must have been tough.”

  Gray light came through the sooty window that looked out onto the air shaft. We were standing together without making eye contact. This was our way. We were two men in a little room, and what bound our love, it seemed to me then, were not our successes but our failures.

  “Well,” he said. “See you at lunch.”

  He was turning away when he stopped, his back and head straightening—as if deep in the landscape of his memory he’d just spotted something moving.

  “Are you still in love with her, Julian?”

  “What?”

  I had never told him about Claire. But he must have sensed something, if only half the story; in his face now I recognized the irrepressible hope that he felt on my behalf.

  “Dad, she married somebody else. She’s going to have his baby.”

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled.

  Quickly he turned and left the room.

  I dreamed about her. Lying in the dark on the sofa bed, weighing the unlikely odds of sleep, wondering if I’d ever see her again. Then the surprise of it, each time it happened. Sometimes the dream was so hushed and still it might have been invisible, and yet tiny fragments would drop off it, as though chipped away by the dull blade of my longing, and these I carried hidden in my pockets for days, to worry over in private. Like the moment when, sitting on the landing of the steps that lead from the back of her house to the garden, she turns to me and says she can’t move, her legs won’t work, she is too weak to make it down.

  I do not ask her why; I pick her up. That’s what I do. She is almost weightless. And I carry her, cradled in my arms, down the steps to the grass—until, all at once, the picture goes blank, I am awake, and those footsteps are my father’s, here in the white light of morning.

  two

  OUT RUNNING ERRANDS on Broadway one steamy morning, I ran into Toby Glickstein, an old classmate from the Cochrane School.

  “Missed you at the reunion,” he said, shaking my hand.

  Cochrane was the all-boys school on West Seventy-eighth Street, with a reputation for top-notch teaching and a student body made up of the city’s smartest young Jewish princes in jackets and ties. Toby and I had been on the debate team together, as well as delegates in Model UN (Malta for me, Pakistan for him). Cool we’d never been, in truth—princes, neither. But academically we had thrived.

  Still, that was ten years ago; I hadn’t seen him since. Physically he’d changed little: short, with small feet and hands, close-cropped wiry hair, and freckles. An enthusiast and a thinker. A tendency to squint gave him the myopic air of an entomologist or a stamp collector.

  We exchanged news about ourselves in the usual shorthand. I told him about getting my doctorate and my desire to teach, self-consciously making it sound as though I was currently weighing offers from several unnamed colleges in the Pacific Northwest. Then I asked him what he was doing with his life. Toby, it turned out, hadn’t strayed far: he was the Cochrane School’s deputy admissions director. Mrs. Hogan, the longtime director, was due to retire next ye
ar, he told me, and he thought his chances of succeeding her were good.

  Once, caught in a stupid seventh-grade dare, I’d managed to slip a thumbtack onto a chair on which the dreaded Mrs. Hogan was just lowering herself. My friends and I waited breathlessly for her cry of outrage, but to our disappointment and amazement there appeared no sign—not so much as a twitch of her thin lips—that the woman had experienced anything at all. Later, however, seeking me out in the crowded hallway between classes, she demanded that I shake her hand like a gentleman. When I warily obliged, she gripped me hard. To my shock I felt the sharp point of the tack puncture the tender flesh between my thumb and forefinger. “That will teach you!” she hissed in my ear, a terrifying smile never leaving her lightly whiskered face.

  “Speaking of retiring,” Toby said, “did you hear we lost Maddox? He turned sixty a few months ago and announced he’d had it. Moved to Florida as soon as classes were over.”

  This was news. Bill Maddox had been a legendary teacher at Cochrane for some thirty years. Taking his class on the American legislative process my junior year had been my first step toward a notion of what I might want to do with my life one day. The term had culminated in a trip to Washington, where Maddox, with his Georgian roots, proved to be incredibly well connected. His hands chopping the air, his good-ol’-boy drawl ringing through the corridors of the Capitol, he not only relished the chance to introduce us to the real-life figures who worked the levers of power but filled us with a reverberating echo of his own passion for the give-and-take of politics, the byzantine machinations and garrulous obfuscations of our great democratic experiment.

  “Maddox was the best teacher I ever had,” I told Toby. “Who could replace him?”

  “Somebody good,” Toby said. “I’m on the search committee and the pressure’s heating up.” He plucked a business card from his shirt pocket and gave it to me. “Keep in touch, Julian. And any ideas, let me know.”

  After he walked off, I stood looking at the card. It was beige, crimped in the center, still faintly humid from having spent the morning in his shirt pocket. Tobias Glickstein, it said. Cochrane School. There was a phone number.