The Beggar's Pawn

by John L'Heureux

  He fought to be calm. He waited a moment and then he gasped for air but still his lungs would not work. He couldn’t draw a deep breath and yet, undeniably, he was breathing. But not the way he wanted to, needed to. He tried consciously to inflate his lungs and the air came in but not deep enough. There was a threshold he could not surmount. The light around him grew thinner, darker. His vision was clouded. He inhaled quickly, desperate for just one deep breath, but it eluded him, he could not breathe and he could not breathe and he could not breathe. He let out a low howl of despair. He fell back against the pillows, gasping, and then went unconscious.

  When he woke, he was calm again, and breathing.

  “You’re all right,” his roommate said. “It’s very scary, dying. You’ve got to get used to it gradually. It took me nearly a year.”

  David was silent, humiliated. He had never been afraid of death. It was after all just a return to the nothingness from which we came in the first place. Peace and quiet forever. But it was not peace and quiet that had terrified him. It was nothing: being nothing, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. He was just a dot. A speck. An amoeba. And he did not matter.

  “You’re lucky to have your faith,” he said into the dark, and in that same moment he decided he would never be tempted to belief. At least not from fear.

  * * *

  —

  MAGGIE HIRED A CONSTRUCTION company that tore out the pool and a landscaper who overnight created in its place an autumn garden, complete with mature rosebushes in late bloom. She had not consulted David on getting rid of the Sedgwick money and she did not consult him on getting rid of the pool. What mattered was that nothing be there to remind him of Iris, of her life or her death. It crossed her mind that she was acting like God, powerful and arbitrary, but she said no, she was simply acting as head of the family and she was doing it for love of David. If he lived. If he returned to her alive in body and mind. She looked around at what she had created, the grassy plot, the roses, the air of peace. No more drowning pool, no more self-inflicted nightmare.

  It was just another lovely garden, beautiful and empty.

  * * *

  —

  DAVID WAS IN THERAPY for two weeks and then he was sent home to recuperate. His brain was fine, more or less, and his speech was not badly affected, but his hands shook and he was unable to type. He had asked the handsome neurologist if the shaking would get better and he replied that maybe it would, maybe not: “Keep a happy heart,” he said, “and pray to God.” So that put an end to work on Gissing, David figured. He could now dodder on into senility without the guilt accompanying an unfinished book. He burned his research notes with only a small sense of melodrama and he quite calmly dumped the finished pages of his manuscript into the recycling bin. Sayonara, book.

  He liked to lie stretched out in the sun, gazing at the last of the late roses, yellow, salmon, cream colored, and white. He never mentioned the pool nor did he comment on the new garden. It was beautiful and comforting like Maggie herself and he was so humbly grateful he did not know himself. She had created a garden for him so that he could forget. There was no sign left of a pool or a drowning or a little girl in a purple bathing suit. For David, however, Iris was still there. And everlastingly dead.

  30.

  When Maggie finally told him about the Sedgwick money, David merely laughed and shook his head. We’ll live on love, he said, like teenagers in a storybook. No, Maggie said, we’ll live on love and our retirement money, and if we run short, we’ll borrow from our well-set-up children.

  It took more than a month for the lawyer to transfer the stocks and notify the children that they were now rich. Each of them responded at once and in his or her own particular way.

  Will was the first to write because by sheer chance he got the news before the others. He wrote longhand and sent his thank-you by Royal Mail.

  Dear Mother and Father,

  Burdened from the start with the yoke of Perfect Son, I was denied the freedom—so generously extended to Sedge and Claire—to explore the possibilities of a lifestyle free of the constraints of familial expectation; i.e., to exercise the nature and limits of my sexual drive (Sedge), to entertain a life lived outside social and academic conventions (Claire), or—and this is as much a problem of our time as it is of you in particular—to experiment with the comforts and solace of a religious faith. I actually tried to be the perfect son. I earned my PhD, I married young, in fact too young, and I fathered three daughters. I did all this for you.

  I am so happy to thank you for compensating me now—in this practical way—for all I missed while trying to accommodate your expectations. I feel extraordinarily blessed in my parents and in my marriage. Since news of your gift, Daphne has taken me back into the house and we have great plans for it. We are adding two new bathrooms and a guest room in case you come to visit. We are fixing up the attic room over the garage. The kitchen, already in progress, is going to be a model of British efficiency.

  I cannot guess what prompts this sudden and overwhelming generosity, though I imagine it is connected to the tragic death of little Iris, but whatever the reason for it, I thank you and Daphne thanks you and of course our three girls will be eternally grateful.

  On the matter of spiritual solace, I hope you will be pleased to learn that Daphne and I are planning to renew our marriage vows in our local Catholic (to you, Anglican) church and we have discussed the possibility of trying for another child, a boy this time perchance.

  I have put aside my work on Yeats. I think that by its nature (runes, alas) its appeal was to a limited audience. I have decided instead to write a novel. The working title is The Perfect Son and I leave it to you two wonderful parents to prognosticate on how it will unfold.

  Daph and I are taking our Christmas holiday in Spain. Your generous gift has made a great and gracious difference to our lives.

  Your loving, imperfect son, Will

  Claire and Sedge responded with emails. Claire’s was brief in the extreme:

  Fabulous news! I’ll fly out to California next week to thank you. Love from your Chiara.

  Sedge went on at slightly more length:

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  You’ve outdone yourselves in generosity. Cloris was saying yesterday that we spend too much money, but I assured her there’s always plenty of money and, sure enough, now there is. I hope this great gift wasn’t made in haste and I want you to know that if you ever run short, I’m always here with money to spare and glad to help out. Cloris is, as she likes to say, over the moon now that she is pregnant and we are rich. This new marriage and this new money seem likely to last more than two years.

  With love, Sedge

  Maggie responded at once. To Will she wrote: Enjoy the money. We look forward to having The Perfect Son in hand. Love, Mother and Father

  To Claire she wrote: Cancel your flight, Chiara mia. We plan to be in Mexico for the next few weeks. See you at Christmas? Love, Misery and Poop

  To Sedge she wrote: No need for us to borrow from you yet. Hope everything lasts more than two years. Love, Mom and Dad

  With that taken care of, Maggie urged David to go out in the sun while she looked over the accounts. Life was simpler now without the Sedgwick fortune. The bills came in and she paid them and, as Sedge piously believed, there was always plenty of money. Or at least enough. Thus far. She quite liked being comfortably poor.

  31.

  It was a warm November day, sunny, with no warning that winter was about to descend on them. David was stretched out in his lounge chair by the new rose garden, doing his speech therapy by reciting favorite poems of Frost and Stevens and Emily Dickinson. “After great pain a formal feeling comes” and suddenly Maggie appeared beside him. “‘The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs,’” she said. “It’s my favorite Dickinson. I brought you a sweater. It’s getting a little chilly.”


  “You’re too good to me.” He took the sweater in his shaking hands and leaned forward to toss it around his shoulders.

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  “Just sit with me.”

  Maggie pulled her lounge chair next to his. They had entered a new relationship of easy dependence and open affection. And there was something more to it, something mystifying, they could not name.

  “It’s strange sitting here and knowing she’s gone.”

  “It’s sad.” She waited. “But we have to go on. Everybody does.”

  A tear came to his right eye, the weak one, and he wiped it away.

  She looked at him, an old man now, shattered. And she was left, alive and brittle still.

  There was no telling what surprises life held for you. Here was Claire, the mutt of the family, a successful actress in her forties. Sedge and Cloris were married and blissful in their first year, with Cloris pregnant. Perhaps a baby would make the difference and lift the two-year marriage curse from poor Sedge. And Will was back with Daphne, bitterly happy in Essex while she renovated the house and he tortured his academic language into the shape of a novel. And Dickens gone. And Iris gone. And Helen? Nobody knew. She had just disappeared from their lives as silently as she had entered. Poor Helen.

  But she and David were still here and she was not done yet.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said, “and you’re coming with me.”

  “Oh, I think not.”

  “I think yes. I’m not done with living, as it’s called, and you aren’t either. I’m not going to let you.” She waited. “And I’m all you’ve got.” She shifted her body closer to him and laid her head on his shoulder.

  “My sweetheart,” she whispered. “How are you? In yourself.”

  “Terrified,” he said. “But I have you.”

  She gave him a soft kiss on the ear. Something was happening. Their known lives were slipping away from them.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “I’ve been thinking of God.”

  “It’s not just the stroke?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “No,” she said.

  He went for a moment into one of his silences. “I think if there is a God, he must be you.” He shook a little. “Or the image of you.”

  He wanted to tell her the truth: that in the dark of one long night he had opened himself to the possibility of God and, like a great flood, love had come rushing in. Not love of God but love for her. And with it had come the conviction that all he would ever know of God was this love for her. It overwhelmed all doubt, it justified all hope, it was his beginning and his end.

  “Or you’re the image of him.”

  “Discovering God in your old age. And he’s me! What a sweetie!” She laughed softly and brushed away a solitary tear.

  “I believe in you.”

  She drew him up from his chair.

  “Come on,” she said. “Enough malingering. Rise up and walk.”

  He took a deep breath and looked around him. It was a lovely November afternoon, with no sign of chill to follow. They were alive and lucky to be alive.

  “God, what a day!” he said.

  “It’s almost enough to give a body hope,” she said.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  The spring semester of my junior year at Stanford, I had one class slot left to fill toward my English major requirement. At that time in my academic career I had taken enough of the department’s more arcane courses that I was eager to find one that offered a broader and somewhat less idiosyncratic view toward its particular subject. By chance I encountered one of my dorm mates in White Plaza, and as she was also an English major, I asked if she had any recommendations. “You have to take John L’Heureux’s class,” she answered without hesitation, and told me he was teaching a small seminar on the short story. When I began to explain that it wasn’t a subject to which I was especially drawn, she stopped me with a glare and said, “He’s the best teacher on campus. Go!”

  I went, and if any one decision has been largely responsible for who I am today, it was stepping into John’s classroom in the Main Quad. For the next ten weeks I learned how to read astutely and critically (a skill for which high school had left me ill prepared), and, though I didn’t realize it at the time, the groundwork was being laid for my future. Over the decades I’ve met many of John’s former students, and have discovered we’re all bound by the same affection, respect, and delight at our good fortune to have had him not just as a gifted teacher but as a wise and perceptive mentor. As our own group of a dozen or so sat around a conference table in a classroom in the Old Quad, the spring breezes relieving the room’s mustiness with the scent of citrus blossoms from the small grove outside its windows, John entertained, cajoled, demanded, challenged, advocated for his favorites (Flannery O’Conner, above all), dismissed lazy opinions, and encouraged us all to read with both objectivity and passion. His voice had a distinct timbre, a slightly raspy tenor that would fall an ominous octave or so when you were put on notice that your judgment was suspect, and would rise whenever he laughed, with the puckish sense of humor of a born mischief-maker. We were all more than a little terrified of disappointing him, whether by being lazy or obtuse, but his classes were clearly the highlight of everyone’s week.

  I got to know John much better the following year, when he became my thesis advisor, which led to frequent meetings in his office. Those hours were a delightful mix of department gossip, John gently ridding me of the remnants of my Midwestern yahooness, and his criticism of my thesis-in-progress. Whatever I’ve learned about writing and editing, I learned in those sessions. My topic was postwar fiction, and he informed me early on that he had little use for the writers I had chosen as subjects. “No one is going to be reading these people in twenty years!” he’d say impatiently, but humored me all the same. (He was, in fact, mostly correct about that.) His editing of my drafts was so insightful that he’d have me laughing when he pointed out egregious examples of my enthusiastic undergraduate pretensions.

  The year after I graduated I returned to the Bay Area for a short vacation and had dinner with John. “Well,” he asked me during the course of the meal, “what are you planning on doing now?” I’d been working as a paralegal for the past few months, a job I enjoyed, and replied, “I’ll probably go to law school.” The look John gave me could serve as a perfect dictionary illustration for “askance,” and he said firmly, “No! No law school. You should be an editor. I’ll write you a recommendation for the Radcliffe Publishing Course, and then you should look for a job in publishing.” I was taken aback. At that point in time, the idea of becoming an editor was about as inconceivable as becoming an astronaut, but John proceeded to explain why it would be a good fit for me.

  Forty years have passed since then; I’ve worked at five different publishing houses, edited hundreds of books, worked with dozens of remarkable authors, and had the kind of gratifying career that, all those year ago, I could scarcely have had the imagination to conceive of on my own. I’ll never know what John saw in me to urge me down this path, but scarcely a week passes that I don’t consider what my fate might have been had I not had the privilege and pleasure of his friendship.

  John passed away in April 2019, after a long struggle with Parkinson’s. He capped a remarkable career of over five decades with four stories in The New Yorker; his collected stories, The Heart Is a Full-Wild Beast (A Public Space); and this final novel, The Beggar’s Pawn.

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