by Andre Dubus
In December after the summer which Hank called the summer of truth, when Edith’s affair with Jack Linhart had both started and ended, Hank sold his novel. On a Saturday night they had a celebration party. It was a large party, and some of Hank’s students came. His girl friend came with them. Edith had phoned Peter at the radio station Friday and invited him, had assured him it was all right, but he had said he was an old-fashioned guilt-ridden adulterer, and could not handle it. She told him she would see him Sunday afternoon.
The girl friend was nineteen years old and her name was Debbie. She was taller than Edith, she wore suede boots, and she had long blonde hair. She believed she was a secret from everyone but Edith. At the party she drank carefully (only wine), was discreet with Hank, and spent much time talking with Edith, who watched the face that seemed never to have borne pain, and thought: These Goddamn young girls don’t care what they do any more. Hank had said she was a good student. Edith assumed that meant the girl agreed with what he said and told it back to him in different words. What else could come out of a face so untouched? Bland and evil at the same time. Debbie was able to believe it when Hank told her Edith was not jealous. Sometimes Debbie stayed with Sharon while Hank and Edith went out. Hank drove her back to the dormitory; on those nights, by some rule of his own, he did not make love with Debbie. A bit drunk, standing in the kitchen with the girl, Edith glanced at her large breasts stretching the burgundy sweater. How ripe she must be, this young piece. Her nipples thrust against the cashmere. They made love in the car. Hank could not afford motels like Peter could. When Edith was in the car she felt she was in their bed. She looked at the breasts.
‘I always wanted big ones,’ she murmured.
The girl blushed and took a cigarette from her purse.
‘Hank hasn’t started smoking again,’ Edith said, ‘It’s amazing.’
‘I didn’t know he ever did.’
‘Until last summer. He wants to live a long time. He wants to publish ten books.’
Edith studied the girl’s eyes. They were brown, and showed nothing. A student. Couldn’t she understand what she was hearing? That she had come without history into not history, that in a year or more or less she would be gone with her little heart broken or, more than likely, her cold little heart intact, her eyes and lips intact, having given nothing and received less: a memory for Hank to smile over in a moment of a spring afternoon. But then Edith looked away from the eyes. None of this mattered to the girl. Not the parentheses of time, not that blank space between them that one had to fill. It was Edith who would lose. Perhaps the next generation of students would be named Betty or Mary Ann. Well into his forties Hank would be attractive to them. Each year he would pluck what he needed. Salaried and tenured adultery. She would watch them come into her home like ghosts of each other. Sharon would like their attention, as she did now. Edith was twenty-seven. She had ten more years, perhaps thirteen; fifteen. Her looks would be gone. The girls would come with their loose breasts under her roof, and brassiered she would watch them, talk with them. It would not matter to Hank where they had come from and where they were going. He would write books.
She could not read it: the one he sold, the one she had urged him that summer night to begin next day, helping him give birth to it while she gave up a son. When he finished it a month ago and sent it to the agent he gave her the carbon and left her alone with it; it was a Saturday and he went to Jack’s to watch football. She tried all afternoon. He needed her to like it; she knew that. He only pretended to care about what she thought of other books or movies. But handing her the manuscript he had boyishly lowered his eyes, and then left. He left because he could not be in the house with her while she read it. When she had read the other one, the one he burned, he had paced about the house and lawn and returned often to watch her face, to see what his work was doing to it. This time he knew better. All of that was in his eyes and voice when he said with such vulnerability that for a moment she wanted to hold him with infinite forgiveness: ‘I think I’ll go to Jack’s and watch the game.’
She tried to recall that vulnerability as she read. But she could not. His prose was objective, concrete, precise. The voice of the book was the voice of the man who last spring and summer had spoken of monogamy, absolved and encouraged her adultery, and in the fall announced that he was having an affair with Debbie. Through the early chapters she was angry. She pushed herself on. Mostly she skimmed. Then she grew sad: this was the way she had wanted it when she first loved him: he would bring her his work and he would need her praise and before anyone else read it the work would be consummated between them. Now she could not read it through the glaze of pain that covered the pages. She skimmed, and when he returned in the evening she greeted him with an awed and tender voice, with brightened eyes; she held him tightly and told him it was a wonderful novel and she thought of how far she had come with this man, how frequent and convincing were her performances.
He wanted to talk about it; he was relieved and joyful; he wanted to hear everything she felt. That was easy enough: they talked for two hours while she cooked and they ate; he would believe afterward that she had talked to him about his book; she had not. Recalling what she skimmed she mentioned a scene or passage, let him interrupt her, and then let him talk about it. Now it would be published, and he would write another. Looking at Debbie she wondered if Peter would leave his wife and marry her. She had not thought of that before; and now, with images in her mind of herself and Peter and Sharon driving away, she knew too clearly what she had known from the beginning: that she did not love Peter Jackman. All adultery is a symptom, she thought. She watched Debbie, who was talking about Hank’s novel; she had read it after Edith. Hank brought to his adultery the protocol of a professional. Who was this girl? What was she doing? Did she put herself to sleep in the dormitory with visions of herself and Hank driving away? In her eyes Edith found nothing; she could have been peering through the windows of a darkened cellar.
‘I’m going to circulate,’ she said.
In the living room she found Jack, and took his hand. Looking at his eyes she saw their summer and his longing and she touched his cheek and beard and recalled the sun over his shoulder and her hot closed eyes. He did not love Terry but he could not hurt her, nor leave his children, and he was faithful now, he drank too much, and often he talked long and with embittered anger about things of no importance.
‘I hope there was something good,’ she said. ‘In last summer.’
‘There was.’ He pressed her hand.
‘Doesn’t Hank’s girl look pretty tonight?’ she said.
‘I hate the little bitch.’
‘So do I.’
Once in Iowa, while Edith was washing clothes at a launderette, a dreary place of graduate students reading, Mann juxtaposed with Tide, and stout wives with curlers in their hair, a place she gladly abandoned when she married Hank and moved into the house with her own washer and dryer, she met a young wife who was from a city in the south. Her husband was a student and he worked nights as a motel clerk. Because they found one for sixty dollars a month, they lived in a farmhouse far from town, far from anyone. From her window at night, across the flat and treeless land, she could see the lights of her closest neighbor, a mile and a half away. She had a small child, a daughter. She had never lived in the country and the farmers liked to tell her frightening stories. While she was getting mail from the box at the road they stopped their tractors and talked to her, these large sunburned farmers who she said had grown to resemble the hogs they raised. They told her of hogs eating drunks and children who fell into the pens. And they told her a year ago during the long bad winter a man had hanged himself in the barn of the house she lived in; he had lived there alone, and he was buried in town.
So at night, while her husband was at the motel desk, the woman was afraid. When she was ready for bed she forced herself to turn off all the downstairs lights, though she wanted to leave every light burning, sleep as if in bright afte
rnoon; then she climbed the stairs and turned out the hall light too, for she was trying to train the child to sleep in the dark. Then she would go to bed and, if she had read long enough, was sleepy enough, she’d go to sleep soon; but always fear was there and if she woke in the night—her bladder, a sound from the child, a lone and rare car on the road in front of the house—she lay terrified in the dark which spoke to her, touched her. In those first wakeful moments she thought she was afraid of the dark itself, that if she dispelled it with light her fear would subside. But she did not turn on the light. And as she lay there she found that within the darkness were spaces of safety. She was not afraid of her room. She lay there a while longer and thought of other rooms. She was not afraid of her child’s room. Or the bathroom. Or the hall, the stairs, the living room. It was the kitchen. The shadowed corner between the refrigerator and the cupboard. She did not actually believe someone was crouched there. But it was that corner that she feared. She lay in bed seeing it more clearly than she could see her own darkened room. Then she rose from the bed and, in the dark, went downstairs to the kitchen and stood facing the dark corner, staring at it. She stared at it until she was not afraid; then she went upstairs and slept.
On other nights she was afraid of other places. Sometimes it was the attic, and she climbed the stairs into the stale air, past the dusty window, and stood in the center of the room among boxes and cardboard barrels and knew that a running mouse would send her shouting down the stairs and vowed that it would not. The basement was worse: it was cool and damp, its ceiling was low, and no matter where she stood there was always a space she couldn’t see: behind the furnace in the middle of the floor, behind the columns supporting the ceiling. Worst of all was the barn: on some nights she woke and saw its interior, a dread place even in daylight, with its beams. She did not know which one he had used; she knew he had climbed out on one of them, tied the rope, put the noose around his neck, and jumped. On some nights she had to leave her bed and go out there. It was autumn then and she only had to put on her robe and shoes. Crossing the lawn, approaching the wide dark open door, she was not afraid she would see him: she was afraid that as she entered the barn she would look up at the beam he had used and she would know it was the beam he had used.
Driving home Sunday night Edith thought of the woman—she could not remember her name, only her story—caught as an adult in the fears of childhood: for it was not the hanged man’s ghost she feared; she did not believe in ghosts. It was the dark. A certain dark place on a certain night. She had gone to the place and looked at what she feared. But there was something incomplete about the story, something Edith had not thought of until now: the woman had looked at the place where that night her fear took shape. But she had not discovered what she was afraid of.
In daylight while Hank and Sharon were sledding Edith had driven to the bar to meet Peter. They had gone to the motel while the December sun that stayed low and skirting was already down. When he drove her back to the bar she did not want to leave him and drive home in the night. She kissed him and held him tightly. She wanted to go in for a drink but she didn’t ask, for she knew he was late now; he had to return to his wife. His marriage was falling slowly, like a feather. He thought his wife had a lover (she had had others), but they kept their affairs secret from each other. Or tried to. Or pretended to. Edith knew they were merely getting by with flimsy deception while they avoided the final confrontation. Edith had never met Norma, or seen her. In the motels Peter talked about her. She released him and got out of the car and crossed the parking lot in the dark.
She buckled her seatbelt and turned on the radio and cautiously joined the traffic on the highway. But it was not a wreck she was afraid of. The music was bad: repetitious rock from a station for teenagers. It was the only station she could get and she left it on. She had a thirty-minute drive and she did not know why, for the first time in her adult life, she was afraid of being alone in the dark. She had been afraid from the beginning: the first night she left Peter at a parking lot outside a bar and drove home; and now when Sharon was asleep and Hank was out she was afraid in the house and one night alone she heard the washing machine stop in the basement but she could not go down there and put the clothes in the dryer. Sometimes on grey afternoons she was frightened and she would go to the room where Sharon was and sit with her. Once when Sharon was at a birthday party she fell asleep in late afternoon and woke alone with dusk at the windows and fled through the house turning on lights and Peter’s disc-jockey program and fire for the teakettle. Now she was driving on a lovely country road through woods and white hills shimmering under the moon. But she watched only the slick dark road. She thought of the beach and the long blue afternoons and evenings of summer. She thought of grilling three steaks in the back yard. She and Hank and Sharon would be sunburned, their bodies warm and smelling of the sea. They would eat at the picnic table in the seven o’clock sun.
She hoped Hank would be awake when she got home. He would look up from his book, his eyes amused and arrogant as they always were when she returned from her nights. She hoped he was awake. For if he was already asleep she would in silence ascend the stairs and undress in the dark and lie beside him unable to sleep and she would feel the house enclosing and caressing her with some fear she could not name.
§3
BEFORE Joe Ritchie was dying they lay together in the cool nights of spring and he talked. His virginal, long-stored and (he told her) near-atrophied passion leaped and quivered inside her; during the lulls he talked with the effusion of a man who had lived forty years without being intimate with a woman. Which was, he said, pretty much a case of having never been intimate with anyone at all. It was why he left the priesthood. Edith looked beyond the foot of the bed and above the chest of drawers at the silhouette of the hanging crucifix while he told her of what he called his failures, and the yearnings they caused.
He said he had never doubted. When he consecrated he knew that he held the body, the blood. He did not feel proud or particularly humble either; just awed. It was happening in his two lifted hands (and he lifted them above his large and naked chest in the dark), his two hands, of his body; yet at the same time it was not of his body. He knew some priests who doubted. Their eyes were troubled, sometimes furtive. They kept busy: some were athletic, and did that; some read a lot, and others were active in the parish: organized and supervised fairs, started discussion groups, youth groups, pre-Cana groups, married groups, counselled, made sick calls, jail calls, anything to keep them from themselves. Some entered the service, became chaplains. One of them was reported lost at sea. He had been flying with a navy pilot, from a carrier. The poor bastard, Joe said. You know what I think? He wanted to be with that pilot, so he could be around certainty. Watch the man and the machine. A chaplain in an airplane. When I got the word I thought: That’s it: in the destructive element immerse, you poor bastard.
Joe had loved the Eucharist since he was a boy; it was why he became a priest. Some went to the seminary to be pastors and bishops; they didn’t know it, but it was why they went, and in the seminary they were like young officers. Some, he said, went to pad and shelter their neuroses—or give direction to them. They had a joke then, the young students with their fresh and hopeful faces: behind every Irish priest there’s an Irish mother wringing her hands. But most became priests because they wanted to live their lives with God; they had, as the phrase went, a vocation. There were only two vocations, the church taught: the religious life or marriage. Tell that to Hank, she said; he’d sneer at one and laugh at the other. Which would he sneer at? Joe said. I don’t really know, she said.
It was a difficult vocation because it demanded a marriage of sorts with a God who showed himself only through the volition, action, imagination, and the resultant faith of the priest himself; when he failed to create and complete his union with God he was thrust back upon himself and his loneliness. For a long time the Eucharist worked for Joe. It was the high point of his day, when he consecr
ated and ate and drank. The trouble was it happened early in the morning. He rose and said mass and the day was over, but it was only beginning. That was what he realized or admitted in his mid-thirties: that the morning consecration completed him but it didn’t last; there was no other act during the day that gave him that completion, made him feel an action of his performed in time and mortality had transcended both and been received by a God who knew his name.
Of course while performing the tasks of a parish priest he gained the sense of accomplishment which even a conscripted soldier could feel at the end of a chore. Sometimes the reward was simply that the job was over: that he had smiled and chatted through two and a half hours of bingo without displaying his weariness that bordered on panic. But with another duty came a reward that was insidious: he knew that he was a good speaker, that his sermons were better than those of the pastor and the two younger priests. One of the younger priests should have been excused altogether from speaking to gathered people. He lacked intelligence, imagination, and style; with sweaty brow he spoke stiffly of old and superfluous truths he had learned as a student. When he was done, he left the pulpit and with great relief and concentration worked through the ritual, toward the moment when he would raise the host. When he did this, and looked up at the Eucharist in his hands, his face was no longer that of the misfit in the pulpit; his jaw was solemn, his eyes firm. Joe pitied him for his lack of talent, for his anxiety each Sunday, for his awareness of each blank face, each shifting body in the church, and his knowledge that what he said was ineffectual and dull.