lined up, but I don't think any of it is really that
pressing. All I can think of is T aft-Reardon. I have
to do those two 10-sec radio spots, to go with that
60-sec TV blurb-up I did for them last winter. The
10-sec things don't have to be synced, so I could just
as well do them here. I know what the Taft-R —
booth and equipment are like, and know I can make
as high a quality tape on my own recorder, which I
have here. But don't tell them that. Just say I have
my own recording facilities, won't be in the city for
two weeks, and if it's all right with them, could I
please do the tapes here, and would they airmail me
the copy so I can at least rehearse.
If anything else comes through, say I won't be
available for at least two weeks.
I've forgotten what ifs like to see so many trees in
one place at one time and they're all in color now. If
we ever make that fishing trip, we'll have to stop here
so you and Dad can reminisce. He'd like somebody
like you to talk to.
Love from Katherine and me,
Charles
He set the letter aside. He'd always told Bill he could do his work from anywhere in the world, and this would be his chance to test that; New York wasn't rewarding to him anymore, and he'd ceased to need the population and the pace of the city as goads. He hoped to collect enough residuals this year to make the down payment on a farm in Canada, or Maine, or upstate New York, or even Wisconsin or Minnesota, closer to home, where his heart made a more regular noise. He could see a big, white, many-porched farmhouse, with a gambrel roof, perhaps, plus plenty of dormers, and a ways from the house, in a broken-down horse barn, he'd build an inner shell that would leave the barn looking as it had, but inside would install a pair of recording studios outfitted with the best electronic equipment he could afford. There was a certain amount of greed and pride and envy and avarice and sloth and ambition and gluttony and other of the basic sins in him that he'd learned by now to watch out for; he and Katherine had been buying antiques and going to auctions in the countryside within a few-hundred-miles radius of New York, and their apartment was filled with pieces of furniture he hadn't refinished yet.
It seemed that the generation selling out at auctions or selling to dealers, those in their late sixties or so, was the last generation to care about the continuity of possessions; their families, their sons and daughters and grandchildren, seemed to want to get rid of the old pieces for the money they were worth now and get something new; have no family hanging heavy about them. Wood and fabric and leather and other natural materials absorbed the sorrows and joys of those who lived and moved among them or carried or wore them. Only a finish could be sanded away. A chair might reveal its entire history if touched and handled and listened to with enough patience, as an area of the earth could, or a body held against yours. And yet possessiveness and pride, along with their counterbalancing force, fear, were the real barriers to feeling. If you played with too many objects and appliances, you could come to think of the universe as a toy. In a perfect world you'd have whatever you wanted and I’ve with it without harming others or yourself. Charles knocked on the desktop with his knuckles. The spirit wasn't any more vaporous than oak or a skein of yarn or a bowl of colored agates. Links lost within the chain.
He pushed back and turned in the chair, and sunlight, coming through the open bathroom across the hall, spread over his legs and across the forearms of his jacket. He revolved his wrist, and his wedding ring sent a shaft of gold up through his right eye. He rubbed a knot of sensation under his chin that the light aroused. He missed his mother more than he'd ever be able to tell Katherine. Unless, to Katherine, the missing in him somehow so obviously showed, it had drawn her to him. He hoped not. He hoped they had a child soon and hoped it was a daughter. It seemed to him that a girl would be easier to love. It was a natural relationship for a man and wouldn't involve so much internal parental intervention. A boy, on the other hand, would make him feel he had to be a formed and formal entity, a father, and he didn't feel ready to be a father to any sort of son just yet. Maybe later, when they had their farm and could live the life they wanted in relative seclusion. He sighed. That might be years. He'd have to learn more and work hard in order to sustain such a place, meanwhile trusting that the right place would happen soon, and if it didn't, then maybe it wouldn't have happened for him no matter what and might not have been right for him if it had. Or for Katherine. He felt flexible enough now, at last, he was sure, to go at least halfway with her.
Still, he hoped it was a daughter. A girl wouldn't vindicate his mother's death, as he'd once thought; nothing would, in the way that his business and financial success, his period of analysis and reclaimed integration, the various stages and characters he'd passed through, his variety of experience in this multifaceted world of multiplying possibility (he was aware as he sat here of the curve of the earth and its tilt and spin), his marriage to Katherine and Katherine's radiance of character and sympathetic strength —in the way that none of this displaced her death: she was safe now, anyway, he felt, wherever she was, even as dust in the ground, and if she existed anywhere else in another state, then perhaps she looked down on him in smiling empathy. It was all he asked, and could do with less as long as Katherine was with him. Her love redoubled his and sheathed her in a luminous generosity he could only marvel at and never match. A girl might open up more of her to him, if he were able to watch a daughter of hers grow into the world and see how she made a place for herself. He hoped it was a girl and hoped she'd be saved these roller-coaster rhythms of his time and age.
He touched his ring and prayed.
He put the letter in an envelope and sealed it to take upstairs, and saw that his father had gone through his billfold; there was a pile of credit cards at the back of the desk, the combination to a safe, a key, a bank card with his and Laura's signatures on it, photos of Ginny and Susan, and of Laura with two of her sisters, some stamps glued together, and a piece of folded paper that had taken brown stains along its edges from the billfold. He unfolded the paper and saw;
A DESERTED BARN
I am a deserted barn,
my cattle robbed from me,
My horses gone,
Light leaking in my sides, sun piercing my tin roof
Where it's torn,
I am a deserted barn.
Dung's still in my gutter;
It shrinks each year as side planks shrink.
Letting in more of the elements,
and flies.
Worried by termites, dung beetles.
Maggots and rats.
Visited by pigeons and owls and bats and hawks.
Unable to say who or what shall enter,
or what shall not,
I am a deserted barn.
I stand near Devil's Lake,
A gray shape at the edge of a recent slough;
Starlings come to my peak,
Dirty, and perch there;
swallows light on bent
Lightning rods whose blue
Globes have gone to
A tenant's son and his .22.
My door is torn.
It sags from rusted rails it once rolled upon,
Waiting for a wind to lift it loose;
Then a bigger wind will take out
My back wall.
But winter is what I fear,
when swallows and hawks
Abandon me, when insects and rodents retreat,
When starlings, like the last of bad thoughts, go off,
And nothing is left to fill me
Except reflections —
reflections, at noon.
From the cold cloak of snow and
Reflections, at night, from the reflected light of the
moon,
Happy
Birthday to You, Dad!
All My Love, Tinvalin!
Charles refolded the poem and put it back. It loosened the roots of so many fears in him—or, Scares the shit out of me, as he thought—that he had to leave the basement and go upstairs. He addressed the sealed envelope and put it with the notes of gratitude to be mailed. Katherine wasn't in the kitchen and he couldn't see or sense her anywhere close. She was the most difficult woman to keep track of, or so it seemed at times, and then she'd appear as if from the edge of dream into the center or his consciousness and add order and dimension each moment she was there.
He sat down across from Marie, gathered up the two lists, and opened the telephone book again.
meat loaf and brownies — Mr. Butson
Penny Link — ham
flowers — senior class
telegram — sympathy, Wm. Hollingsworth
Mr. & Mrs. Bob Novotny — pie, flowers, transportation
The list began in his father's hand—
"Pardon?" Charles said. Marie had asked him a question and was now studying him with troubled eyes.
"Remember all that stuff we used to do when we were kids?"
"What stuff?"
"Oh, you know." She wrinkled her nose.
"Sort of," he said, and it was Jerome's voice that came from his chest. The meter of Marie's speech always made him feel she was talking in a telegraphic language; their childhood sex.
"Wasn't it awful?" she said.
"Oh, I don't know. I read or heard somewhere that it happens in about sixty or seventy percent of families where the boys and girls are anywhere close in age." He'd heard this from his analyst. "I think it's something you grow out of."
"Wasn't it a sin?"
"We were just kids." Or you were, Marie,
"Somebody told me it was a sin once."
"Who?"
"The oldest Mitchell girl, when we were back in Hyatt that time."
"When I was in high school?”
"Yes."
"You mean, Alix Mitchell?" His voice went high.
"Yes."
"I used to date her!"
"I know."
"Why did you tell her anything like that? No wonder she acted the way she did! She was jealous!"
There was a murmur of laughter from Marie, and Charles remembered standing on the high curb of the curving slab of cement around the house, the slab supervised and troweled by his grandfather, while the Mitchell girl, who lived in the house now and was a year older than he was, stood below him on the ground so he could reach to kiss her lips; he didn't grow above five feet until he was sixteen, and then just six inches above; Grandpa Jones.
Mr. & Mrs. Bob Novotny — pie, flowers, transportation
The list began in his father's hand, regular and neat, and after the first five entries became so ragged it was almost unreadable, and then Marie's hand took over, and the sight of this and of the next names on the Ust, Phil and Lou Rynerson, shadowy figures out of the past, along with Marie's fears and the lines of Tim's poem still echoing in his mind, formed burning lines behind each eye, and then the print in the telephone book stirred and slid to one side.
Katherine came up from behind and ran a hand up his neck under his hair, and said, "Why don't we stay on a bit longer? At least a week, say. I'd love to see more of the fall here. Wouldn't you?"
*
When Charles woke the next day, close to noon, he saw out the bedroom window that his father was in the yard raking leaves. It was colder and the branches of the trees seemed more bare than the day before. After lunch, his father told him to get ready to see the town. "It's chilly," he said. "And we'll probably be outside a lot." Charles put on a jacket and went out into the long pine-paneled porch off the kitchen, to the glass of the storm door. The fifty-foot willow at the edge of the lawn was still bright green, the streamers of leaves cascading down from it swaying in the wind like a woman's hair, and beyond was a panoply of pure yellow-gold—beech and maple leaves lit by the sun, a trembling insubstantiality to each leaf. How young I feel, he thought, and rubbed an itch on his nose that seemed to originate inside the thought.
His father appeared, and they went out the door and were halfway to the car when he said, "Oh, That's right. Just a minute. I was—" He went into the house and came back with the stack of library books, four of them, from Laura's bedroom, and shifted them from hand to hand as if to give them to Charles, and finally said, "I have to return these. Laura checked them out before she left for the hospital." And then did give them to Charles.
They got into the car, his father at the wheel, and backed away from the house and coasted down the street, "That's Bob Novotny's," his father said. "He's the jeweler. This is Mrs. Gould's. Her son draws Dick Tracy, you know. He has a beautiful house in the country, just outside town. Maybe we'll drive by later. I did some repair work for his mother and then I worked on his grounds one afternoon, trying to get them in shape for the summer. He has a gardener, but it's too much for just one man to handle."
He turned and drove down a tree-lined street covered with leaves, and there was the noisy swirl and crush of them under the car. "This is Al Green's place. A nice house, don't you think? He's in the real-estate business. This is Ben Lenehan's office. He's our insurance man." They stopped at a red light suspended among half-leaved branches against the sky. "We'll drive around the square next. I think you'd like to see it."
Charles was a bit surprised that his father was being so talkative, but perhaps it was what he needed, and Charles decided to encourage it, and then forgot the decision the second it was made, he liked so much to hear his father talk; as a child and adolescent, and especially in high school, he'd been embarrassed by the way his father pronounced certain words—prairie as pray-ree, foyer as foi-yay, area as a-reea—but he'd learned in his work that if he could recall how his father pronounced a word, he was almost invariably right.
The square was the center of the town, a tree-shaded park with walks crossing it and a stone statue of a Union soldier, his musket at parade rest, above a fountain, plus a band pavilion set a little farther back. One-way traffic traveled over the brick-paved street past walls of four-and five-story brick buildings with long rows of arched windows with limestone sills, all of which gave the impression of being within an ordered, walled fortress that guarded its residents and outlyers well. "Most of the good shops in the area are right here around the square or just off it. It makes shopping so easy that way. There's the post office over there. This is the old Opera House where Orson Welles used to act. He did his first roles right there. He directed some of the plays he was in, too, or so Mrs. Clinton's told me." They turned off the square and went a few blocks down another street to a wood-frame house with a high foundation of fieldstone. "This is her place," he said, and shut off the car. "The Benedictine sisters live in this big warehouse-looking thing right next to her.
I put up their storm windows for them this fall. Fifty windows! Then I painted their kitchen, too." He got out and Charles opened his door and stepped onto a cushiony layer of colored leaves.
"Yes," his father said. "I should rake this soon. I do that, too. She's getting up in her seventies and is bothered by emphysema."
"How come you know so many people?"
"What?"
"How did you get to know so many people in town?"
"Oh, Laura got around a lot. She belonged to clubs and sewing and card groups, and the Church, of course. And then I did some painting and plumbing and repair work for the Links, our neighbors just across the way, and the next thing I knew, dozens of people wanted me to work for them. It seems there's nobody around who can do general repairs and carpenter work anymore, or nobody who wants to. I had all the jobs I could handle after school and on weekends and during the summer, and I could have had twice as much. I didn't care about the money, though it's good to have now, of course; it was mostly a way of keeping myself busy when Laura got so ill. I knew her time was up. I guess I knew it for a year and I think Laur
a's mother did, too. There were strange unpredictable ups and downs, but after that second operation she was never herself, never, and if I wouldn't have had something to do—with my hands, I mean—I would have lost my mind entirely."
They went up the drive to the back door and his father knocked on it, waited a few minutes, then knocked again. "She's probably lying down," he said. "She needs to rest a lot. We'll try later. I want you to see the garden anyway. I haven't been over for almost two weeks, because of— It used to be a lovely garden, I understand —well, you'll see—but Mrs. Clinton's husband passed away several years ago and she wasn't able to keep up with it herself."
He stopped behind the house, on a raised, domelike grassy area with a formal rock garden around it, and put a hand on a wooden lawn chair beneath a rosebud tree. "Mrs. Clinton said her husband would sit here for whole evenings and look over the garden and smoke his pipe. This chair was in her garage, all rotted and falling apart, and I fixed it for her and painted it the color she said it used to be, this green."
The yard beyond was enclosed on three sides by a line of brush and trees, and down from the rock garden were formal beds of flowers, many of them dying on their stems now, and beyond the flower beds a kitchen garden about sixty feet long, with its rows evenly spaced and in neat lines. There were more flowers to the right of it and beside them a hand cultivator turned upside down. His father said, "When I first came here, this was so overgrown with brush and weeds you couldn't walk through it. I told Mrs. Clinton I'd clean it out for her and keep her flower beds in shape—she makes arrangements of dried flowers—if I could have half the garden. She said I could have it all. Her flowers mean that much to her. It took me a month and a half just to get down to ground I could till, and I got the garden in late. I still have to clean off the rest of the right side there. That used to be a strawberry patch."
He went down a deep-worn path into the garden. "Oh, yes, look at these weeds. I'll have to get them out now, before they take over again." He bent to a row of onions and began pulling up weeds. Charles straddled a row of carrot tops next to them, and his father said, "Why don't you just pull up those few carrots that are left? And a few of these onions, too. We'll take them home to Katherine."
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