She stirs again, her lithe little body stretching, seal-like.
—You’re stubborn, but at least you can run. Don’t know many ladies can run like that, Stone says.—You’re fast.
You look down at your feet.—Not as fast as I used to be.
You used to be a fast runner. You used to be a lot of things.
10:00 a.m.
Henry
YOU CAN’T COUNT HOW MANY TIMES people have asked why you and Marilyn didn’t bury Jack in Laurel Hill. There are no Chinamen in Laurel Hill, and no paupers. No stink of shallow graves, stale incense, or sour urine where the living indigent have lain. Flowers bloom in Laurel Hill.
—People like us don’t bury their loved ones in the city cemetery, one of your parishioners, a manager of a street-improvement company, admonished you, wagging his index finger as if you had blundered on an examination.
—Really? you replied.—It’s a cemetery. People like us bury their loved ones in a cemetery. What am I misunderstanding?
You spoke with a kind of spastic violence in those days, a rage that pushed people, well-wishers, away.
—They’re your parishioners, Marilyn warned.
—Meaning what?
—You’re supposed to shepherd them toward goodness.
—We’re Lutherans, you replied.—There is no shepherding toward goodness.
That street grader honestly thought you’d made a mistake. He assumed you and Marilyn had buried your son in the city cemetery out of ignorance. Even if that had been the case, which it emphatically was not, what good could his words have accomplished at that point? People are tactless.
According to Martin Luther, a man is simultaneously righteous and a sinner. Man’s will is a mule forever ridden by either God or the devil. There is no middle ground. A man is never not being ridden.
In the months following Jack’s death, you preached your way through the Gospel infancy narratives. The time wasn’t right for these passages; it wasn’t Advent. Your parishioners studied the floorboards: This man is talking about the Bible? Whose Bible?
—Intercalating, you said; you almost begged them—It’s the key to understanding Mark’s Gospel.
Intercalating is a showy word that means “sandwiching.” You have your two pieces of bread, and your meat or a hunk of cheese between. The Gospel writers carry out this sandwiching; they convey meaning by wrapping their stories in series of threes—pericopes, you explained as two elderly women in the front row punctuated your pauses with snores.
—Now, what purpose does this serve? you asked.
Quizzing might be why you lost them, your congregation members, their confidence trickling away year by year, pericope by pericope; you asked questions you didn’t need them to answer.
—The purpose intercalating serves, you said, supplying the correct response, is to overlap, intersect, and disrupt the different Gospel stories we have received. It’s a form of dismantling. We are pulled to pieces because it turns out that what we took to be the meaning of the infancy narrative, the birth story of the child called Jesus, is not the meaning.
—What is the meaning, then? one of the elders called out. No one ever calls out in the middle of a Lutheran service unless the situation is desperate.
You glanced up from your notes, bewildered; you had forgotten anyone was listening.
—I have no idea, you said.
Yes, you were frightening them, your parishioners; your grief, your barrage of questions, had begun to alarm them. You weren’t behaving the way a clergyman should. Even a clergyman who had lost a son. You were taking too long to recover. Marilyn pushed you to apologize. For causing them to lose heart, she said.
The following Sunday, you stood behind the pulpit, collected your thoughts, and declared:
—My problem isn’t you all. My problem is time.
Outside Irving Hall, a stray dog, a roly-poly puppy, no more than a couple of months old, darted across Post Street, and a bicyclist struck it. Its shriek reverberated through the hall. The cyclist cursed and pedaled on. Again your parishioners kept their eyes on the floorboards.
—Excuse me, you said, and ducked around the podium.
—He’s getting worse, one of the elders whispered as you strode outside into traffic.
The puppy was on the pavement in the middle of Post Street, rib cage rising and falling, left hind leg broken. Its tail thumped as you knelt. You blocked carriage and foot traffic for a heap of brown fur. Captured heat from sun on the pavement warmed your palms.
—I’m Henry, you said.—And who might you be?
The dog’s tail thumped harder.
—Richard it is, then, you said, and you hoisted him into your arms and carried him home. You belonged to that creature from the first moment you laid eyes on him.
Members of your congregation started holding special meetings to confer about your state, meetings to which they didn’t invite you. They convened a committee to discuss your condition. Grief run amok, they called it.
You didn’t care. You were busy keeping a basset hound puppy with a broken leg from jumping into your bed in the evenings. Distracted, almost ebullient, you tried to teach a neighbor’s child to walk Richard on a lead, but the pup’s exuberance intimidated him. Marilyn did not like Richard any more than the congregation did at first, and then all of a sudden she did. She co-opted him for her own, began sleeping with him nights.
Your congregation began handing you small assignments, easy tasks, projects no man of reasonably sound mind could muddle. You went ahead and muddled them. You almost enjoyed ruining things; you wanted to watch your parishioners’ reactions, their pity metamorphosing into alarm. They began cutting you off, distancing themselves, failing to include you in their usual goings-on. You didn’t mind. Being left out quieted your thoughts. It relieved your headache, the dull hammering at the edges of your vision, the knock that took the form of a single syllable repeated: Jack.
—Don’t abandon them, Marilyn pleaded.—They’re your charges. They’re the reason you were called out west. The reason we were called out west. I moved out here too, remember?
Did she? It struck you, probably unfairly, that she’d never fully shown up. She’d left part of herself back in Gettysburg with her sister.
To your congregation, you were drying up, a madman dying of thirst on the banks of a river. At the end of one Sunday service, a visitor wearing a silk waistcoat approached. He asked, attempting to make conversation:
—So, how many children do you have, Reverend?
—How dare you ask that, you said, and you turned on your heel and walked away.
People should not ask questions about whether or not someone has children. They should not ask if a couple has them now, or had them earlier, or hoped to have them, hoped and failed. If the child is not visibly alive and kicking, gleefully picking its nose or loudly wailing, then people ought to keep their mouths shut. Don’t dig in soil whose contents aren’t known.
Your elders convened a special prayer meeting. They laid hands on your shoulders, something Lutherans don’t normally do, and they prayed, asking God to lift this terrible sorrow from you.
—And from Marilyn, you rasped; you had come down with laryngitis.—Ask Him to lift it from Marilyn. If He can help only one of us, let it be her.
Tears swam in your vision, not from what the elders prayed for or from what the prayer did or did not accomplish but from the sensation of plain hard-working hands placed on your shoulders and head, those rough, uncomplaining, well-meaning hands. When the prayers didn’t work, they offered counsel in private. One of them, a coal-shop manager who reminded you of your own father, now long passed, pulled you aside nearly a year after Jack’s death and whispered:
—Son, aren’t you over it yet?
Another elder, a dentist who the following year would have a dead child of his own to mourn, studied you over his eyeglasses and said, kindly:
—We’re worried you’ve lost your faith, Reverend, your trust in God’s g
oodness.
—I’m worried too, you said.
Everyone’s sympathetic the first three days after a funeral. The first three weeks, if you’re fortunate. After that, you’re pretty much on your own.
Every minute spent in Sergeant Sears’s inebriated custody is a minute lost from the day’s charge. You’re losing time, leaking time everywhere you move. There’s no sign he plans to release you and Kerr. He’s half asleep at the front desk, head nodding, though every few minutes he rouses himself and feigns an attempt at his paperwork. Softly he belches.
This could be your last year replanting Jack’s garden. It’s a full day’s work, digging holes for plants that don’t stand much chance, fashioning an oasis in the middle of nowhere. An oasis encircled by sandbanks. You don’t have a whole day at this point. You hardly have half a day. And Lucy will not be joining you.
You shouldn’t have assumed permanence. Shouldn’t have assumed she would just keep showing up when you needed her. Ten years is not enough time to understand a woman.
Twenty-two years might be pushing it also.
One year after you and Marilyn lost Jack, you told your parishioners:
—People would be surprised if they knew how many clergymen don’t believe in an afterlife.
A slate of apprehensive faces stared back.
Two years after you lost him, you declared:
—Everyone must navigate the holes in the fabric of the universe in his or her own way.
Three years in, you began abandoning your own sermons in favor of stringing together quotations from Luther:
Faith must trample underfoot all sense, reason, and understanding.
And: The fewer the words, the better the prayer.
And Luther again; Luther said it better than you could. Bewilderment is the true comprehension. Not to know where you are going is the true knowledge.
Four years in, you delivered your final sermon, a three-line monstrosity, and walked out before the end of the service. Four years in, you met Lucy Christensen.
Marilyn
ONLY TEN O’CLOCK?
Well, once these plates are done, the saucers will want stacking; that ought to take a quarter-hour. Once the saucers are done, the napkins will need refolding. You’ll limp along toward two o’clock; you’ll manage. An array of housewarming distractions awaits.
The Maria Kip Orphanage marks the third volunteer assignment you’ve had in as many years, and it’s a good one. It offers long hours, unending toil, and numerous opportunities for sacrifice. Not all the children pouring through the doors are true orphans. Maria Kip’s annual report, which you helped compile, describes the group’s mission as providing for the care and training of “orphan, half-orphan, and abandoned girls.” Half orphans have lost one parent, usually the mother, with the remaining parent lacking sufficient means or will to provide for them. Abandoned girls are casualties of poverty, left at the institution’s front door.
As the residents of Maria Kip reach their “years of usefulness”—another phrase in the report—some parents come back and claim them. For the rest, upstanding homes will be sought, homes that need workers. An older girl is more likely to find a place if she can scour and scrub and boil and bake and go after misbehaving youngsters with a switch. Call it preparation for wifehood.
A sound from the backroom intrudes. The players have started warming up on their tubas and trombones for the afternoon concert. Their toots and honks combine to form a comforting melody. Henry used to say that people who sang with instrumental accompaniment possessed less talent than people who sang a cappella. He was once part of a men’s quartet, though, so he was biased.
In Gettysburg, the early years, the good years, he and three seminarians had formed a singing group. Night after night the friends harmonized, fingers snapping, as they stood in a half circle in the parlor. If you went for a stroll up the lane at sundown, when you returned home you could glimpse their silhouettes, youthful and slim, in your front window, backlit by round glass lamps, their lungs filling, Henry’s countenance as clear and earnest as a Yuletide messenger. You would wait for his friends to leave. Then, in the stillness of night, you would climb on top of your new husband in bed; you would find Henry in the dark, hands folded across his chest, lungs tired from all that singing. You’d rest your head on his chest, and though spent, he’d still sing you to sleep most nights. His fingers played with your hair as he serenaded you with old-time hymns, humming more than singing. Your skin absorbed his sound, the baritone reverberations. You both fell asleep before the songs ended.
A grandmother clock stands wedged in the corner of the hall. Has it slowed? Or stopped? Maybe that’s your problem. Maybe time hasn’t slowed, only this clock. Unfilled minutes are the enemy.
The plates? Taken care of.
The saucers? Someone should arrange and stack the saucers. That ought to use up a few minutes. But you already thought that. You’re circling the same terrain.
What would it feel like to be half an orphan? Or half a wife? It strikes you that one of the worst possible things that could happen would be to lose track of one’s spouse, to lose one’s husband like one loses a ring or bracelet. A woman should keep her valuables on her person at all times.
Wait. You don’t believe that. You don’t believe your own thoughts.
—You still have Penny, your neighbor Mrs. Chambers recently observed.—Don’t forget about Penny.
True. But your little sister has changed. She grew into an adult after you moved away. She developed a mind of her own, without your permission. She married a woodsman and followed him to the northernmost forests of Oregon. She never visits.
The trip is too far, she wrote you and Henry.
There exists such a thing as a train, Henry wrote back when you asked him to reply to her.
Ignoring each other is how you and Penny convey your love, your devotion, your bottomless familial need. Your sister stays busy pretending to be an old-time pioneer woman. She wears an austere bun. You know because she once mailed you a picture, a tintype of herself and her husband. She chops wood, slaughters pigs, sweeps chicken coops, and waits for her husband to saw down enough forest for her to see the sun.
Henry doesn’t saw down anything.
He used to beg. He used to plead. In the early days. He bought you bath salts, perfumes, all useless. To this day, they sit in a box in your closet, unopened. He thought you needed to feel better about yourself.
—No, you said.—No, I need to feel better about the world. And that is never going to happen.
He exhorted:
—Marilyn, I understand. I do. But we have to say yes to something. To what’s good, to what’s left. Let me comfort you. I need you to comfort me too.
—I can’t, you said.—I just can’t yet. I’m so sorry.
—We can have another child. Let me be with you. Dearest heart. Please let me try.
His urgings felt stilted, forced. His encouragements fell to earth, smashed to shards, to smithereens.
You did try once. Tried twice. Two and a half times, if you count the last fruitless effort. The first time, his hands fumbling at your breasts left you in tears. He stopped and just held you. The second time, Henry cried; Henry could not rise to the challenge. His straining exertion, hands fumbling at his member savagely as he tried to resuscitate it, left you so mortified you took his hand and moved it away from his body.
—Don’t, you said.—Just don’t. Not this way.
He covered his face and wept.
The last time, he paused just after he’d entered you. He was aroused, breathing slow and deep, hard as a newlywed. He went absolutely still.
—Where are you? he whispered, entreating.—Where did you go? Stay with me. Marilyn, look at me.
You couldn’t reply, couldn’t meet his eyes. Your innards were chalk. You turned your head.
Without another word he withdrew.
Couldn’t reply or didn’t reply? Henry would frame this question as one of th
e will’s bondage. But you are not a fan of Luther.
You saw a man, a physician. You saw several men, bearded and scientific experts. One diagnosed you with hysteria. A second called you frigid. Both descriptions infuriated Henry, who refused to take you back to either physician. You didn’t care for them either.
—She’s sad, Henry said.—She’s just sad. Someone please help us.
The third physician said: Your wife needs to have another child.
—Tell me something I don’t know, Henry practically shouted.
You rose and left the room.
Hypnosis didn’t work either. The fourth physician held a brass watch on a chain and swung it until you felt seasick and closed your eyes. He thought he had hypnotized you. He was the suggestible one, not you. He tried to uncover the root of the problem, to retrieve the traumatic event that your conscious mind had chosen to forget.
—I didn’t forget anything, you told him, opening your eyes.—I remember the event. My husband and I both do. It’s right in front of us.
The physician invited Henry into his study to join them. This doctor was younger than the others, and his eyes held sorrow; he would not last long in this business.
—There is something more here, Mr. and Mrs. Plageman, he said.—This is something more than ordinary grief.
You lifted your head.
—What right do you have to pair those two words together?
Eventually Henry stopped asking. Four years in, he up and stopped. A relief. In a way. He also left his church. He stopped asking and he stopped preaching, both in the same year.
You asked him why. Broaching the subject was not easy.
—What made you stop trying? you said.
He placed his leather marker in whatever he was reading and closed the book.
—I gave up, he said.
—You’re not supposed to give up, you replied.
The Half Wives Page 6