G.H.

5 October

 

We stand at the edge of a large lake, under a sky of shifting brightness, each of us weighted down with a suitcase. We know it is necessary to cross the lake to get where we want to go; we also know that, given the heavy case which must accompany us, and its fragile contents, a solo attempt to swim the lake is impossible. Our only practical alternative is to seek passage on whatever craft happens to have a berth. On Matthew’s opposite shore I stood—though he was gazing everywhere except at the promontory on which he could clearly see me. He was only trying to get to some knowledge of the Eyrie and its history, was all, and the only boat available was Mrs. Morel.

Who was seated at his dinner table, and possibly possessed of that same knowledge.

About which, therefore, Matthew enquired this evening. All in the line of work.

Mrs. Morel knew all about the Eyrie—hadn’t she been there countless times as a girl? “The Eyrie!” She was so excited by the mention of it that she waved her fork in the air and flung a moist glob of Welsh rarebit against the dining room wall. A little splat, out of her line of sight.

Sarah stared, bit her lip, mumbled an excuse, and fled the table. Matthew heard her sniggling in the kitchen, but his attention remained with Mrs. Morel, who was leaning toward him now, bringing closer her eloquence and faint stink of cat.

“But of course I know all about the Eyrie, Matthew,” she said as the rarebit slid slowly down the wall, leaving a lumpy golden trail behind it. “Poor dear Gardiner and I even talked about going there for our honeymoon, except that he said there were too many people there, so we went to Europe instead. There were even fewer people there then than later. At the hotel, I mean. Before they’d sold it again and made more and smaller rooms. Ralphie Firson still owned it then. All my friends used to go there, summers. But Ralphie got taken to the cleaners over that place, poor thing, quite like the Kestrels who built it, and Monsieur Calvados and the Barlie family who owned it before Ralphie. Yes. There may have been one more owner before Ralphie, and I get quite confused about exactly who came when, after him. But, oh, Matthew, you should have seen the delicious parties we did have there. Silk and perfume, and lovely music drifting over the ocean, and so many lights. We did know how to dance then—there’s nothing like that now. No romance at all, but then I suppose romance is only a matter of how fast you breathe rather than any particular air—I thought the air there perfectly winey, but poor Gardiner thought it smelled of money–he said it wasn’t romance but, um, excitement, dear, that made me giddy.

“Poor dear Gardiner never liked it there; to be perfectly honest, he never liked the people, my friends. He used to say that all those lovely young men walked around as if they had polo mallets up their—the backs of their jackets, I’m sure he meant. He was an artist, after all, dear, and bound to notice things like posture. And besides, coming from his background he really was most naturally uncomfortable and enraged. So we stopped going, and gradually lost track of what happened there soon after we married. Well.

“The people may have been petty, as he said, and the world spinning toward doomsday, as he said, but I always pointed out to him that there was nothing so very evil about a little innocent pleasure, that if the world really was headed toward doomsday and we couldn’t stop it, well, what was the harm, then, in dancing till the end?” Mrs. Morel leaned back in her chair and smiled.

“Yes.” His answer was impatient, the disappointed, meaningless agreement of someone understanding that what he seeks does not exist here. Further: that what he seeks may not exist at all. In the background of Mrs. Morel’s tripping patter he heard a distant, heavy-booted warning that she did not make, that was made by some taciturn soldier of his own honesty and devising: Can’t get there from here, sir, the place ain’t on the map. Due respect, sir, but where exactly d’ya wanta go?

Where, exactly? Had he really expected to march Mrs. Morel toward some bright peak of knowledge concerning the kind of windows that once glimmered in the Eyrie, or the moldings that once gleamed around them?

Architec’eral curiosity, sir? the solider snorted. Hell. Thought maybe we was goin’ to look for that big old guy, gave ya that cuppa tea.

Shut up, dammit! Fall back.

 

And as quickly as he’d trotted up, the soldier flipped him a grin and fell back. The whole exchange had taken no more than a moment—took place so rapidly, amid such muttered haste and with so much else going on that it was almost as if it never happened at all. He was just impatient. Nothing Mrs. Morel was saying was useful to him at all.

Then Sarah reentered the room, her lashes glistening with laughter, her eyes carefully averted from the rarebit hanging on the wall. A little innocent pleasure, Mrs. Morel had just said, and Matthew was shamed at his inability to share Sarah’s little pleasure, the silly innocence of her hilarity, shamed too that he should mourn the loss of whatever dry scrap of information it was he’d sought, when she in all her supple suppressed laughter passed before him. Dancing till the end. The words swooped around and around in his head as he looked at his wife, became a singsong mocking the difference between them, became, finally, a melody of desire.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“Was something the matter, dear? Did you choke? How awful!” Mrs. Morel had been so transported by memories of the Eyrie that she was only now returning, to discover that Sarah’d been gone.

Sarah only nodded in response, looking down at her hands so she would not see the wall. “You finished with your dinner, Mrs. M? So why don’t we have coffee in the living room for a change? Matthew, why don’t you and Mrs. M. go in the living room and I’ll can clear by myself, and bring in the coffee in a minute.” He heard her begin snickering again as soon as they left the room.

Prodigious in memory for any sort of public quarrel, especially one involving litigation, by the time Mrs. Morel reached the living room sofa, she was well on her way through a detailed recollection of M. Calvados’ s assorted legal travails.

“Wow. Imagine that.” Matthew nodded blindly and tried to grope his way back to his long-lost point, “But do you remember anything in particular about the place, like the way the rooms were set up, or, or fixtures, layout, room sizes, did you ever go through the entire building?”

“Let me see. I believe all the guest rooms were about the same size, and the room that had been the Kestrels’ had been turned into a private party room. On the second floor, that was. And of course there were servants’ quarters on the fourth. I never went up there, though.” Mrs. Morel gave the young man a look of piercing intelligence. “I feel, dear, that I’m not telling you what you want to know. Do you know what it is you’d like to know, Matthew, or is your curiosity just rather general? Why do you want to know about the Eyrie? Are they going to open it again? What fun!”

“Yes, I don’t know. Just general curiosity, I guess. Tim and I are going to be working on it. Trying to find space for shops and restaurants, you know, take advantage of the tourist trade down there.” Shifting slightly in his chair, “I didn’t have any specific questions, I guess, just wondered what you knew about it.” He’d begun his response as if stumbling against some bulky, unrecognizable confusion that now seemed broken, whisked away, replaced by a sidling craftiness, and a vague fright. “I was down there this morning with Tim and the guy who bought the place.” Pause. “Fact, I got there before they did, wandered around to the ocean side and found some French doors that were open, so I just walked right on in.”

“You don’t mean the French doors off the old ballroom, not that center pair?”

Queasy now, he nodded.

“Well, thank goodness someone finally fixed those. They were forever stuck. I never walked through those doors once in all the years I used to go there. It used to be, only the side doors opened.”

Matthew said nothing. And Sarah, most mercifully, brought in coffee, most mercifully said, “Sorry to interrupt, but if I don’t ask now I’ll forget again. Mrs. M., I got a call today from a man up in Boston, an art historian who’s working on a piece about Gardiner’s paintings. He was asking about one in particular, an early one called Decomposition in Blue. It was in that first big show of Gardiner’s, in New York, but it’s been out of sight for almost fifty years now. You wouldn’t know who first bought it, or where it is now, would you?”

“I most certainly would, dear. My memory’s been of no use to Matthew, here, but I’d be a good bit more befuddled than I think l am if I couldn’t remember who’d bought that one. I did. Dear, yes, it’s in my basement right now.”

“Your basement?”

“Why, yes, dear, my basement. Although I’m quite fond of it—perhaps I’ll bring it up again one day. That painting has a rather interesting story, you know. At the time he did it, Gardiner was young and not yet known, and in great want of money. I had ample finances, and wanted Gardiner. So l bought the painting for an outrageous sum, received his undying gratitude and a signed bill of sale—and then poor dear Gardiner very nearly resold my painting at that show. My painting. Well, Sarah dear, we had a most remarkable tiff over that.” Mrs. Morel’s glasses and three silver chin hairs gleamed merrily in the lamplight, but it was Matthew’s distinct impression that the eyes behind the glasses shone with nothing at all like mirth.

“But it ended very tidily, I must say. I agreed to smooth things over with his would-be buyer, and he agreed to marry me. No, dear, no, no,” she continued to Sarah, who seemed to be wedged between amusement and dismay and struggling to toss out some small conventional denial that of course that wasn’t true, you exaggerate, it wasn’t that way at all. “Not at all necessary. It worked out quite handily, as I said. We each got exactly what we wanted, at the time, and we turned out to be rather convenient for one another. Of course, we didn’t truly like one another, but that just gave it all a certain amount of passion. Quite a bit, sometimes. Yes. I don’t think I’m shocking you? Could I have another cup of that lovely coffee, Sarah?”

Sarah, still wedged, and smiling uncomfortably, poured. It seemed to her that the evening with Mrs. Morel was becoming stranger than usual. Not only was her guest discussing the intimacies of her marriage, but she had also just broken her own (unvoiced) prohibition against staying for a second cup of coffee. “Thank you, dear.” Mrs. Morel, having delivered herself of this tale, leaned back with a contented sigh into the sofa, and glanced about the room—at the paintings and photographs hung against the walls, the books shelved and stacked about, at the faded golds of the old India carpet and the palette of yellows with which Sarah had covered the wildly mismatched furniture.

“I always did like this room. It’s a bit–how shall I say?–shabby, and yet it’s quite cozy. Quite pleasant. Gardiner, poor dear, must have hated it.” Mrs. Morel smiled with satisfaction. “I intend no offense, of course, but then you were never inside our house before he died. That naughty little man insisted I keep all the furniture in the basement, so he wouldn’t have to be bothered with it. Utterly naked, that poor house was. But Gardiner thought furniture terribly bourgeois, so there you are.

“All my wedding pieces, everything my mother gave me, all of it crammed in the basement. And then over the years I’d come across something I liked here and there. Over the course of fifty years one accumulates things, you know. So, after a time I began to rent storage space. And then he was gone, poor dear, and there was no reason for me to be without any longer. And so I had all my little treasures delivered–when was it? Two days after I put him in the ground. Oh, it was quite a project, I admit, and as you’ve seen, I still haven’t quite sorted it all out yet.”

Matthew scrubbed at the back of his head, as if to help his brain absorb the meaning of Mrs. Morel’s words. “You mean Gardiner never knew you had any of that stuff?”

“I don’t know, dear. I certainly didn’t tell him, and he certainly didn’t ask,” she snapped. “It would only have started an argument, and we had so many more interesting things to argue about.” At the recollection of which she smiled, and Matthew, retreating from further comment, continued scrubbing. He glanced at Sarah, who slid from the sofa onto the floor and began sharply readjusting pins in the black twist of her hair. Roll, tuck, jab. She looked up at Mrs. Morel as if she had finally found a small wisp of certainty to cling to. “But there were chairs in his studio.”

“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Morel was utterly unfazed by Sarah’s non sequitur, “Although he always maintained he only sat in them when someone else was around. Because people got so twitchy if he sat on the floor. I always suspected he sat in those chairs sometimes when he was alone, and just wouldn’t admit it.”

“But,” Sarah said, “but,” she lost a pin in her hair and was searching for it, “but where did you sleep, where did you keep your clothes, or, or eat?”

Mrs. Morel smiled and, lifting her teaspoon from her saucer, made a delicate downward gesture with it. A sugary drop of coffee splashed from the teaspoon onto the daffodil yellow of the sofa.

“You mean the floor, you slept and piled your clothes and ate on the floor?” Sarah’s long fingers darted furiously through her hair in search of the missing pin.

Mrs. Morel’s voice was gently chiding. “Gardiner wasn’t a savage, you know, Sarah. We had a bedroll and so forth, and we had a small table he made out of a piece of plywood he set on a few bricks at each corner. And of course, we used the closets.”

Sarah’s hands dropped from her hair; it fell loose down her back as she lowered and shook her head. She did not stand as Mrs. Morel rose to take her leave. Despite her protests that she could most certainly show herself out, Matthew followed her to the door, drove her home, and waited until she was in her house, as if to assure himself she was safely locked away from him.

 

He reentered the living room shaking his head, and mimicking Mrs. Morel.

“Gardiner wasn’t a savage, you know, dear, he was just run-of-the-mill insane.”

Sarah remained lumped on the floor. “It isn’t funny. I never really thought of them as couple of the year, but I didn’t realize they hated each other so much. To live in an empty house with furniture piled in the basement and junk stored all over the city, and she all the time waiting to put him in the ground so she could spread fifty years of crap all over the house. And he probably knew, too. He must’ve known. The little bastard probably got a big chuckle out of his rich wife being a champion bag lady, a big laugh about her having to squirrel it all away outside a house that belonged to her. And I’ll bet she knew he knew. People know things like that.”

“For God’s sake, sweetheart,” he said, exasperated by the knowledge that he should try to comfort her, but was too disappointed and irritated to try, “It’s only a little weirdness about furniture.” He threw himself down on the sofa, closed his eyes. He didn’t know what was bothering her, but he hoped it wouldn’t take too long. “Come on, honey,” he said as kindly as he could, and reached out for her.

She flinched and turned away. “It isn’t just ‘a little weirdness,’ and it has nothing to do with furniture. My God. To stay together all those years. No wonder he never let anybody in that house—it would’ve been like walking into some explosives factory with a lit match.”

Eyes yearning to close, Matthew shook his head. “Wait a second, Max–you heard her yourself, she said it worked out pretty well, considering everything. Why are you so upset? Because you didn’t know all this before? Because he died while we were out of town, all this happened when you weren’t here? That was almost a year ago, honey; what’s the point in getting upset about it now?”

“I couldn’t very well get upset about it then, could I? I’m upset because it still matters, because she’s living there now with all her junk and her sadness and her triumph, and probably no one can take that away. Oh, forget her.” She flung her arm in a wide arc, as if warding off encroaching despair. “It isn’t her at all, it’s us. I’m upset because you’ve been grouchy and moody ever since that raccoon came into the house, because you’re not sleeping– you can’t go on without sleeping, Matty, no one can, and I know you don’t want me to say anything about it, but I want us to do something, I don’t want us to turn out enemies, like Gardiner and Mrs. M.”

She pulled herself up onto the sofa beside him, fingered the coffee stain Mrs. Morel had left there. Sighed. “It’s everything. Things are miserable at work, everything. I don’t want us to be miserable, too.” And at this, she curled down on her side and her cheek met the coffee stain and she cried, her hair falling over her face so that the sound of her crying seemed to Matthew to come from some remote and hidden place. As if he were already losing her. He slid from the couch to the floor and knelt beside her, his heart pounding. He was lost from her face, couldn’t find any connection with her except the one she had refused before.

And so he ran his finger lightly down her arm; she shivered, but did not pull away. He promised he would get rid of the animal, promised to call animal control, the Humane Society, the nature center, the hardware store, anybody she wanted; he’d forgotten to call before, been so busy, but he would remember this time, he promised. Stroking her arm, “I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry.” And began      lifting strands of hair from in front of her face, whispering, leaning closer. “There’s got to be a face in there, I was sure I saw a face in there– there it is; I knew it was in there somewhere.”

With her face uncovered, she rolled over on her back and wiped the heels of her hands against the sides of her face. “I don’t think people were meant to cry lying down,” she said, and began to giggle, the hysteria of the early evening making a fleeting encore. “You get tears in your ears.”

“Not a major problem;, you can do something about that.” He began gently to lick away the tears.

“Turn off the lamp.  I look so stupid when I cry.”

He turned it off. “You’re not crying anymore, are you?”

“No.”

“Then I guess you don’t look stupid anymore.”

In the dark, she reached out her hand until she touched the pulse in his neck. She rested it there a moment, then let it slip down to the buttons on his shirt.

“That’s good,” she said.

 

So they solaced themselves on the bright yellow cover of the musty sofa, leaving their own golden stain perilously close to the darker stain left by Mrs. Morel. More solace afterwards in words of love, in apologies mutually offered and accepted with the clasp of salty fingers, in explanations sincerely given that explained nothing, only brushed further into the shadowed room the shadow of each being alone. Solace enough, as much as solace can do. I would little deny the virtue of comfort, only stress what each of them knew, as they gathered their clothes in their arms and went upstairs to bed—the sadness of distance between comfort and cure.

 

 

In the turnings of her sleep, in the night beside the crawl space, he heard her mutter, “Can’t walk, no room anywhere, goddamn flowers, can’t see.” A few minutes later she swiped a hand across her face, shook her head and said something that sounded to him like “scratching me.” He looked back at her from the bedroom doorway, wondering if, in her sleep, she heard the animal, knew Matthew was once more missing from their bed.

He wandered around the kitchen, opening and shutting cabinets and drawers as if seeking to discover in one of them the answer to his present dread: that the noise that woke him was not the animal in the crawl space but the scratching of some unidentified thing in his own mind.

Whatever it was, he’d heard it, and the little peace he’d made with Sarah, the little sleep he’d gained, had been broken–he’d heard it shatter when the scratching began. But here, downstairs, the noise and disappointment seemed less cruel, so that, after returning upstairs to feed the animal, after kneeling yet once more at that little door with bowls of food and clucking calls that were met only by darkness and draft, here, in his living room, he was going to stay.

He settled himself on the couch with a dish of strawberry ice cream, the newspaper, and a determination not to be distressed. He’d read, then, read and eat and make himself full and sleepy.

And it was quieter here and warm, and he was outside, on a soft-breezed spring day. He was playing tennis, concentrating on the ball, lobbing it high, back and forth. And somehow he can feel what the ball feels, swinging through the air, is somehow inside the ball, is the ball, the only one in play, the only one on the court. The players are old men with cloudy faces; they whack him back and forth, but their impact on him is without pain. He is sent smooth and high and alone, riding the air endlessly, in unique and perfect arcs: these glorious and good, and he solitary as God. But then other balls come into play–he sees one more game and then another, the air fills quickly now with more and more tennis balls and he is subsumed in a grand bouncing community, a boisterous but harmonious whole of wholes. And he enjoys this dizzy camaraderie, begins to forget he was ever alone. Back and forth, back through the fuzzy nations of the air, forth on the rackets’ gentle thwack. The motion goes on and on until one of the players, someone who’s been thumping him back and back so steadily, so pleasantly, suddenly whacks him hard—so hard that it hurts, so hard that he’s up high—too high, too far—so far that he’s shot right up through gravity, up and up and speedily away from all the others, far and farther so that he sees them dancing, swaying smaller, smaller and smaller.

Except that it’s he, Matthew, he himself who grows smaller and smaller, out there past the invisible shore of gravity and safe return. Now the air around him becomes harsh, uncertain, and he so bruised and buffeted by incomprehensible space winds that he feels himself raw and thinning. Thinning until at last what is left of his covering is rubbed off. And then he is nothing, nothing but the air that was inside of him, a mote of air in empty space.

And once he is only air, he begins to understand: that speck of interstellar dust, off there to his left, that speck is a tennis ball, is in fact the earth, and as it drifts slowly into focus he can see, more and more clearly, the tennis games. Everywhere on earth endless numbers of tennis balls arc, far off to the left there, far away. And he understands that he’s become somehow vast, encompassing all the tennis ball-earth and all of its games, has expanded so vastly that he has come, finally, not to exist at all. Infinite he is, and as inconsequential and alone as any tennis ball fallen lost and mud-covered behind an unpruned shrub.

When he tries to scream that he’s here, goddamn it, he’s still here, there is just enough left of him to understand he no longer has a voice.

He has to wake up, then: it is widely understood that no one can dream his own death.

 

He sat for some minutes, doing nothing more than trying to slow his breathing, to understand where he is, the time, the meaning of the newspaper spread across his knees and the empty bowl balanced on the arm of the couch. He noticed that he was dressed, and tried to piece together the fabric of the last few hours to discover when, exactly, he’d dressed himself.

So minutely was his attention absorbed in this task that he heard no sound at all issuing from the crawl space, and did not hear, for a moment or two, my timid rapping at the door. And when he did, and came to the door to answer it, he wore the scowl of a Beethoven whose rapture of composition is violated by a servant’s interrupting thump on the floor.

“Yes?” A moment passed before he recognized me.

I apologized for disturbing him, but I had just happened to notice a most interesting article in the newspaper, concerning the Park River project? “The burial of the Park River? I know it’s terribly late to pay a call, but since you live just on the river’s banks I thought you might be interested—”

“Yes, yes, certainly am, great of you to stop by, please, come on in.”

“Thank you, but no,” I said. “I was just out walking, happened to pass by, happened to see your light on. But would you care to join me?”

“Yeah, sure, half a minute, coat and shoes. Be right there.”

As we left, I remarked that one of the chairs I’d spied in his living room reminded me of my favorite chair in the library at Netherwoods, a small armchair in which I’d spent many happy hours reading. He wanted to know all about the library, he said as we reached the corner and the wind lifted a scattering of cool leaves about our ankles—then no, not the library, yet; I’d started on a chronology of Netherwoods, the other morning when we’d met at the Eyrie. The history should unfold in sequence, he said.

“Well, I’ve already told you about the chapel, the oldest part of Netherwoods, at least two walls of which are quite definitely late Norman?”

“Yes, yes, remember that.”

So I continued my description of my ancestral home as best I could, apologizing all the while for my lack of architectural sophistication. “Most of it was laid out in the fourteenth century,” I told him.

“Ah? Terrific,” he said. “You know exactly when?”

I wasn’t terribly sure.

“Never mind, that’s fine. Go on. Please.”

“Well, the Great Hall was the center of the fourteenth-century part of the house, of course, lovely tracery windows, but a horrid draft.”

And so it went, the night, talking about Netherwoods. His itch to know about the house itself was unsoothable, but I begin to think it might be only a symptom of something more serious: walking this clear, star-patterned October night with him, I began to wonder if he is contracting a mild fascination. In the flush of which he wants to know not merely about the house in England or the ancestors who built it but the complete true history of me.

Interesting, most interesting. And certainly rather a turnabout. I hadn’t at all anticipated this, the night I sent the raccoon.

Nor had I anticipated how much I would enjoy his conversation, his interest; so much so that when he invited me to come back to his house for a few minutes to warm myself, I agreed, although, not so very many hours before that, I’d decided that becoming a guest in his house was a dangerous thing to do. I compromised by having only a single cup of tea and a bit of ice cream, staying only long enough for him to finish his glass of beer. We agreed to meet on Monday at noon, and then I left him to return to his night.

 

Sarah entered the kitchen the next morning with the newspaper under her arm and carrying a tray in which rested the beer glass, the tea cup, and the ice cream bowls gathered from the living room.  He looked up at her, then back to his bowl of yogurt and fruit.

“Must’ve been a really bad night,” she said after a slight hesitation, “for you to try drinking tea.”

He rose abruptly from the table to get himself more pineapple juice, moving with the exquisite self­conscious awkwardness of the unpracticed liar. “Stuff’s not as bad as I thought it was. Tea.”

He pulled his hand down the back of his neck, evading her eyes, urging on himself the notion that he hadn’t, exactly, just told his wife a lie.

As for the newspaper article I came to tell him about: it reported that the Park River (at various times and places also known as the Hog River and Little River), the Park River was subject, in certain portions of its length, to serious flooding, and that, in the twentieth century, after catastrophic flooding, several sections of it had already been channeled to control pollution as well as flooding. That the current work was expected be the last. Nothing in the article indicated that the part of the river that flowed behind Matthew and Sarah’s house would be changed in any way at all.

 

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G. H.

4 October

 

 

Indecision has clung to me like a wet shirt, and even now I find I’m a bit—what shall I say—in a state, but I am, finally, resolute as to the necessary course of this experiment: I must observe my subject from a nearer vantage point.

 

 

Extraordinarily unmoving streets for half-past seven in the morning. Still and gleaming, full of potential noon radiance and grass silver-frosted to prayerful erectness, but a morning so perfectly still and unmoving that the groan of his car door as he opens it—got to remember to oil this thing—is jarringly out of place. He throws a camera, clipboard, rolls of sketches, and his laptop into the front seat and heads for the expressway, and then the narrower roads that will lead him to the shore.

Little sleep the night before, and that little filled with the same unpleasant events and expectancies as the previous nights. Yes, but even so he feels surprisingly rested, even—despite the nature of this particular project—exhilarated as he sets off. Maybe it’s just having a new project, some excitement there, the relief of having any new work, or that the fall is rising toward its peak of color and the landscape of Connecticut has a burnished look, a mysterious evanescent lushness. In a few weeks, he knows, when everything will have drifted down, the once-mighty mountains, humbled down to hills by eons of wind, will stand leaf-stripped, gaunt and revealed in the true bones of their shape. But not now, not in this mellow golden distraction of light, amid these dazzling dying colors. Perhaps it is just the effect of these perceptions, or of moving so fast down still unfamiliar roads, but nothing now seems straight or clear. It doesn’t matter. He knows his way to Kestrel’s Eyrie.

It stands directly above the ocean, on a bluff at the end of a grand curve of cracked drive through a ruin of formal gardens. He makes further notes on the outbuildings, the placement of yet fine trees, the project refining itself automatically, reflexively in his mind as he brings his car to a halt before the pride and massive folly of C. J. Kestrel.

Entrepreneur and high-reacher after the good life, Kestrel had, by the late 1880s, magicked his father’s small business, transforming the bark and leaves of Hamamelis virginiana into an astringent called witch hazel, into a large and thriving nostrum and cosmetic concern.

From there the younger Kestrel branched out into various shipping ventures. In short, he became something of a local magnate. And, in the manner of the magnates of the time, Charles J. Kestrel had had built for himself what was quaintly termed a cottage. This cottage, a stolid New England fortress on a jagged rise above the ocean.

Perhaps as a tribute to the modest factory from which his prosperity had sprung, Kestrel had requested of his architect that his monument by the sea be faced with the same rough-hewn local brownstone thatas distinguished the paternal enterprise. Kestrel’s architect, while assenting to this filial tribute, also asserted the younger Kestrel’s independent spirit, or ambition, or ponderous sense of whimsy, in the four squat crenate corner towers, and in the spindly fifth center one that commanded a view of both entrance and oceanr The boarded windows were shadowed by deep, patterned arches, and the whole monumental excrescence, with its dark stone festoonery and heavily sprawled porticoes, seemed out of scale with the freshness of the morning air, the fey delicacy of the light. But Matthew now suspected that maybe old Kestrel’s architect had had more in mind than anyone dreamed, for monstrous as she was, this old dowager of his creation had stood firm against all storms.

By the time he’d circled once around the building, Matthew had already weighed its mass again, already begun to fit even more tightly to scale what he saw with what he knew. To sort out the new possibilities.

Herbert Vinca wanted to make of this a modem pleasure dome, a cruelly expensive inn with shops, restaurants, even a small theater. The usual spa, pool, tennis courts, and so forth. They would certainly be able to do all that, Matthew thought, if they approached the problem properly: Kestrel’s cottage by the sea already had the proportions of a small hotel.

Had, in fact, been converted to one, some four years after the Kestrels moved in, for after only three years in the Eyrie, Kestrel ‘s great flight in the rarefied air of the landed gentry had been terminated by a storm at sea. The waves had tortured and then ripped apart a ship carrying a sizeable crew and a small complement of passengers that included Kestrel’s only son—as well as a cargo in which Kestrel had invested too heavily, and had not, squeezed by debt and hubris, insured. Local legend credited the father with more despair over lost cargo than lost progeny; whatever he most mourned in private, the public fact was that the lost cargo and ship and the cost of the Eyrie together left Kestrel in bankruptcy, and the seaside cottage was stripped of much of its finery and sold to pay off creditors. Kestrel and his wife quietly disappeared, but his name remained on his monument. Kestrel’s Eyrie.

Matthew consulted his watch, returned to the front entrance, tried the lock, but found it held fast. He expected Timothy and Herbert to arrive at any moment, although in fact Katie had input the wrong time on Matthew’s calendar, and his companions would not arrive for an hour yet. After standing there for some minutes, he wandered around to the back, trying the doors as he went but gaining no access. At last he settled himself on the cold stone wall of the terrace above the ocean, to think about the building and both the problems and the opportunities it presented.

Nice place to wait a minute, anyway, before they get here, listen to the ocean, the wind, people say the wind sighs, sings, hums, as if we could draw all of nature like a bow across the human shape, narrow it down so we can comprehend it. “Words of the wind,” words from a song on the radio, a singer singing about singing. No, trash in my head, don’t want that, a song about singing. Trash. Singers singing about singing—like architects making buildings that’re really statements about buildings. Statements have nothing to do with whether it’s good or bad—theory’s redundant, anyway, since all of it comes out of your head. My head to paper and computer to object standing on the ground—no, somebody’s need or desire to my head to the computer to something that stands, will stand on the ground after I do. A while anyway, and then time or somebody else’s need or neglect will tear it down and nothing left—stupid. Why even think about that on a morning like this, the gulls swooping and the sky so open and a couple minutes just to sit looking down at the ocean, the waves splashing up, a new job about to begin, everything really just about to begin, the sun so warm. Not tired at all, could sit here forever, but they’ll be here soon, some tricky turns getting here. Maybe they got lost, but they’ll be here soon.

And he thought of the windings of distance to this place, the familiar morning portrait of his street as he’d left it, the bad night he’d spent, yet again, being wakened again and again by the raccoon in the crawl space, how the evening before when Mrs. Morel had stopped by to pick up her dinner she’d said she’d made up her mind, would Sarah buy her that radio, dear, what does it cost, here is the money—how it was true, even a loony-tune like Mrs. M. could get lonely, how the first time she’d mentioned the radio he and Sarah talked about it, made love, made up a boyfriend for her, old Sir George Whatshisface—Hooper. How they’d made up the name, what the old guy would be like. Remembering this, not realizing the morning had gotten warmer, stiller, that everything now was warm and still and achingly bright—there was no realization of this, no words, because he was part of that warmth and stillness, that aching brightness, could not think or feel of it because he’d entered it.

So that he was genuinely surprised—but pleased all the same—when with throat cleared and courage clenched I approached him with a nod and a “good morning.” I begged his pardon, hoped I wasn’t intruding on his solitude on this splendid morning–it really was quite splendid, wasn’t it? We had a bit of mild chat about the breeze and the view, and then I suggested that it was getting rather bright in the sun, and “Would you care to come inside and wait there for your friends? The interior is most interesting.”

“Love to see it,” he laughed, “but the place is all locked up.”

“I think, actually, I’ve discovered a way in.” And I ushered him into the Eyrie by the French doors off the terrace.

“Funny,” he said, “I tried to open those doors and couldn’t.”

“Oh, yes? Well, there’s a peculiar little trick with the handle.” I confessed to having explored the building quite thoroughly. “I say, you’re not the owner, are you? You won’t have me arrested? I assure you I just looked about.” And he laughed at my mock anxiety and I promised to walk the premises with him, but first, “Would you mind terribly if I made some tea? Would you care for a cup? I know I’ve made myself frightfully at home here, unforgivably bold, but you see, when I was exploring the place earlier this morning I saw the tea things and I’m afraid gave in to temptation.” And so I brought him down to that cavernous old kitchen, where we chatted while I made the tea. He leaned against the dusty cabinets with the good-humored look of someone idly chatting up a harmless lunatic. He was of course curious about me, and after he’d stepped over to introduce himself I had no recourse but to mention my own name.

As matter-of-factly as I could, I choked it out.

And then his hand, extended to shake mine, fell slowly through the air, nerveless as a leaf; the blood of him fled his face. Well, I thought, trying to steel myself, Well, now, what did you expect after playing that asinine trick? You knew it would make this more difficult. Just press on.

“Are you feeling quite well, my boy?”

“No,” he said, “yeah, I mean it’s just so—I, I mean, my wife and I, we—”

“Yes?” I said, as gently as I could, my own heart leaping like a wild horse in a pen.

“We. A couple of days, nights ago. We were. We were joking. We made up this name. I mean, your name.” He sounded as if he could barely breathe.

“How very odd,” I said, my voice as light as a paper boat while pity and shame turned iron and lead and dragged me under so I could scarcely breathe. “Well, how extraordinarily odd.”

“Well,” I said, “Well,” I gasped, “I can only say, with the poet Archilochus, that

‘Nothing in the world can surprise me now. Nothing

is impossible or too wonderful. . .

Anything

may happen, so do not be amazed if beasts

on dry land seek pasture with dolphins in

the ocean, and those beasts who loved sunny hills

love crashing sea waves more than the warm mainland.’

 

“Of course—Matthew, is it? I have such a dreadful head for names—of course, Matthew, we know that Archilochus is referring there to a total solar eclipse that was visible in the Aegean in 648 b.c.e., but l think our little coincidence here is in its own way quite as extraordinary, don’t you? And yet, you know, I’ve always believed that prescience and premonition and telepathy and other phenomena that are not currently explicable, given the present limits of science, must someday reveal themselves to have perfectly simple sorts of explanations, don’t you?” All this blather poured out rapidly, with as much charm as l could scrape up and smear upon him, as if he were a cake and I were Cook, so very long ago, busy with some too-quickly-cooling icing.

And then with my most amiable smile l took up his hanging hand and shook it vigorously. “Now then,” l said, turning away to the tea things, “do you take sugar and milk?” And all the while I fiddled with cups and spoons, I spouted examples of the alarming and the dreaded that had, with the progressive revelations of science, become perfectly ordinary aspects of life. But all the same while, dinning in my head, were the lines I’d passed over from Archilochus’ poem:

. . . for Zeus, father

of the Olympians, has turned midday into black night

by shielding light from the blossoming sun,

and now dark terror hangs over mankind.

 

By degrees, as I nattered on, I saw him grow calmer, and at one point, when I made a mild witticism, he reached over and rather tentatively clapped his hand on my arm. I felt in his touch, and perhaps he knew,, that he was willing himself to produce this gesture for a far more urgent reason than fellow feeling: to reassure himself that our handshake, before, had happened: to confirm again my solidity, my bodily reality. A moment later he turned the course of the conversation and asked if I l had lived in the Eyrie—as if I had not already made the reverse quite clear. I told him no, and with a passing nod at truth said I’d just happened by and thought to take a look in, when l noticed the lock on the French doors was broken. It really was a monster of a dwelling, wasn’t it? Did he know that Kestrel had stipulated the place must have fourteen bedrooms, although he and Mrs. Kestrel had had only the one child?

Yes, he knew.

But he really didn’t want to talk about the Eyrie, he said; he knew enough about it already. Instead he began, hesitantly at first, to ask me questions. Where I’d come from, how long I’d been in the country—the stream became a deluge.

I laughed as I handed him another cup of tea and told him there would be time, plenty of time to answer him. “Do you propose to learn my entire life’s story in the next few minutes, my dear young man?”

“No, no, sorry, I’m being rude. It’s just, well, I hadn’t expected to see anyone except—never mind, not important. So. You’re from England.”

“England, yes. From the lovely countryside of Devon. Near the town of Winkleigh. I was born in a place called Netherwoods Park.”

“‘Sounds beautiful. What’s it like?”

 

And so I began. As I spoke, in the cool stillness of the kitchen, a bit of me strolled off, arms crossed against my chest, and turned, in amaze and amusement, to watch my conversation with Matthew. I’d been so apprehensive about approaching him, so alarmed at his reaction to my name. And yet here we were a few minutes later—he relaxed and inquisitive, so extremely curious about me, and I—I’d be recording an untruth should I say that I wasn’t pleased and flattered by his interest. It had been so very long since I’d spoken with anyone that having another interested in my life is a delightful novelty. Indeed, after years of an existence that had become dry and brittle with solitude, I suddenly felt myself expanding, becoming weightier and yet more pliant in conversation, quite as if I’d been an old forgotten sponge, and his desire to know me the easeful, transforming moisture.

And so we chattered on quite happily until we heard the great heavy door slam upstairs, and Timothy calling his name. Disoriented, a trifle embarrassed, perhaps, at having to leave the conversation so abruptly, Matthew excused himself with many apologies and made his way upstairs to the dining salon, entering it from one end just as Timothy and Herbert were entering it from the other. A profusion of tables filled the room; their round, dull particle-board tops so crowded together that they resembled meshed gears, and the three men had to wind their ways       around them to meet, in time, near the center.

Timothy looked at the empty tea cup that Matthew still carried in his hand and laughed in surprise.

“Hi, there–just make yourself right at home, why don’t you?”

“Don’t mind if I do. You get lost? I’ve been here,” he checked his watch, “been here an hour and ten minutes. Hi, Herb.”

“Hi, Matt, hello.”

“We’re only about five minutes late,” Timothy said. “You must’ve gotten the time wrong.”

“Nope, I didn’t. Katie did.” If Matthew’s speech was rather rapid and his face slightly flushed, he gave no sign of any irritation such as might be expected in one kept waiting for over an hour: “Katie’s taking a night school course in English poetry, Herb. She’s been screwing up appointments ever since she started learning meter.” Matthew’s magnanimity was charming;   Timothy laughed, but Herbert was consternated, his gaze fixed on the fine porcelain teacup in Matthew’s hand.

“Where’d you get the tea, Matthew?”

“Down in the kitchen, actually.”

“Here? You got it in the kitchen here? My God, how’d you make it? Here? I didn’t know anything in the kitchen was still working. Not still working? My God. And I’m very glad you could wait for us inside, very glad and all, but the doors should have been locked. Supposed to all have been locked anyhow. Tea.” Herbert rubbed his flummoxed head. “Supposed to all have been locked up tight as a drum.”

“I came in through the French doors at the back, just wandered around, and somehow wound up in the kitchen,” Matthew lied fluently. “The last owners must’ve left the pot I saw there, just a little electric kettle, probably for the family, I guess, and there was tea there, so I just, you know, made myself right at home. Did you want some tea, Herb?”

“No, no thank you. Electric pot? The electricity’s on?” Herbert shook his head. “Tight as a drum! Everything off. Shut off and locked up!”

Timothy gave his partner a bemused smile, pried the tea cup from Matthew’s fingers, and set it on one of the tables. He turned to Herbert. “You want to show us around, or should we let Matt do it?”

So although the encounter was a trifle strange, they all smiled, and Herbert led the way through the Eyrie. He showed them what was and, rifling through a thick manila file now and then, told them as best he could what had once been; Herbert was meticulous in matters of property.

Pinball and game room, originally a salon. Wainscoted walls covered with peeling olive-drab paint and pocked from darts thrown wide of their mark, a ripped blue leatherette couch with rusting chromium arms, on one of which dangled the sharp-toothed remnants of a billiard ball rack. Fluorescent tubes, hung at a vague vertical alongside the door, daubed with the same fatigued green as the walls. Matthew heard a fine tinkling, as of a woman’s jewelry against a crystal sherry glass, from a wind chime made of seashells that some romantic soul had gone to great trouble to hang over a little plywood bar angled into the far corner of the room.

Matthew was thinking about the effort it had cost the wind-chime-hanger to drag a heavy extension ladder into the room and climb it, then nail a dirty piece of string into the high ceiling, all so that seashells might make their delicate tune amid the juke box wails, and shimmer through the grey confusion of tobacco smoke—thinking about all this to crowd out his desire to find me, to ask me all the questions pressing forward in his mind.

“This big room here was a theater, if you can believe that, a theater on the second floor.” Herbert talking.

“Maybe Kestrel wanted to be a patron of the arts.” Tim.

“Maybe he and Mrs. Kestrel just had wild fantasies. The last folks used it as a storeroom, as you can see. Yes, a storeroom.” Herbert.

Matthew stumbling over the rusted skeleton of a bed frame, fingering a pile of torn grey velvet curtains, climbing past an air conditioner clotted with dust to stand upon the stage, to stand and face the crowded wreck of the theater.

And it was there that he thought he caught a glimpse of me. But, no. I’d been following at too discreet a distance to be spied. I had no inclination to meet the others; I desired only to hear their conversation, to linger in this place in which I, very deliberately, happened to find myself. Matthew raised a hand and opened his mouth as if to speak, but no one stood at the door.

Timothy looked up at him and frowned: his partner didn’t seem to be attending to busi ness.·· “Hey, there, you look like you’re about to give Hamlet’s soliloquy.”

“No. I was just, I’m just wondering, Herb, about the right way to bring this place back to life. In the way you want. Lots of possibilities.”

They continued on, peeking into dumbwaiters, closets, rooms hastily partitioned up and rife with the dispiriting smells of stale sea air and unprosperous bodies. Slowly moving through    the rooms, passing down stairs and up again, talking, touring, photographing and measuring what they’d already photographed and measured, finally    reaching the cavernous basement kitchen, Herbert still flipping through his notes but glancing  around with a proprietor’s jealous eye. And then, still talking, still searching through his appraisals, his correspondence, his land surveys, he saw, approached, and carefully unplugged the gleaming electric kettle. Timothy looked at my not-quite-empty teacup, frowned thoughtfully as he looked at Matthew—who flushed slightly but kept his eyes on the tablet he was typing on.

Finally back up the steep metal servants’ stairs to the first floor. Again into the dining salon where sat Matthew’s empty tea cup. Which Timothy picked up and fingered. Matthew now fidgeting, anxious to leave. Work to get back to. Of course. But taking leave of Herbert was no abrupt process. Wasting time, time passing. Watching, smiling over his irritation as Herbert licked a pudgy index finger in preparation for yet another search through his papers for some recorded fact. Finally, finally heading for the front door, stopping every few feet so that Herbert could point now here, now there, to a panel, say, of frayed and heavy brown damask drapery behind which materialized a vision of profitable boutiques. As Herbert yammered and schemed and Timothy nodded soothingly at everything he said, Matthew looked, without realizing he looked, left off hearing, without noticing that he didn’t hear, began wandering without intending to, to the open French doors.

“Ah, yes, Matthew, yes. Thanks for reminding me. Why don’t we leave this way? Might as well go this way, so we can lock these doors. Thanks. Thank you.”

Timothy looked at Matthew speculatively, and Matthew shrugged with more nonchalance and humor than he felt. The top of his head seemed to rise up and fly away as he watched Herbert discover the lock on the doors to be perfectly intact and in perfectly good working order.

 

Certainly an error on my part, that.

 

next,   5 October

previous,    28 September

The Entries                                                                                                                  

 

G.H.

28 September

 

 

It was on this certain Sunday, some six days after the raccoon appeared, that Sarah and Matthew first spoke of me. As she later explained to Matthew, she and Beryl had spent most of the day on what they code-named “Project M.”—carting a protesting Mrs. Morel to a hair salon, then on to Westfarms Mall to shop for clothes. Matthew had arrived at Timothy’s place with the intention of reviewing work with his partner: while Timothy was in the kitchen making coffee, however, Matthew sank into the newly arrived sofa and instantly into a black sleep in which Timothy—knowing little, suspecting much, surveying his friend’s chalky skin and circled eyes—let him lie until it was time for them to drive back to Matthew’s house for dinner.

For the first time since the raccoon’s advent, there had been much laughing. Mrs. Morel had perched on a kitchen chair as the four friends cooked or pretended to help, regaling them with commentary on her day, and being teased in turn. (Timothy: “Whoa, devastating, Mrs. M. Bangs. You goin’ out to do a little man-killing?”) The laughter continued in the dining room as Mrs. Morel opined about the upcoming elections, but ended when she announced she was contemplating buying a television or radio.

“I could listen to the news that way, dears, and the house, why then, you know, the house would seem positively full of people, if I left that sort of thing turned on.”

That Mrs. Morel (she of the dead kitchen, she who considered any electrical device beyond the light bulb or thermostat hopelessly complicated, unnecessary, distasteful, and probably dangerous)—that she felt, though of course would not admit to, a loneliness so great that she would consider the companionship of radio or television to ease it: this was a revelation to astonish them all. After their guests were gone, Matthew entered the kitchen with wine glasses bouqueted in each hand to find Sarah standing at the sink, apparently too full of thought    to use the soapy sponge in her hand, and so empty of any sensation of movement around her that when he came up behind her and kissed her near the ear she was startled. And quite involuntarily squeezed the sponge into the air and squirted them both with soapy water. She gasped, but then he laughed, and so did she, and she threw the sponge at him, hitting him squarely, soppingly, in the chest. He threatened to get her for this, and she ran, and he chased her through the house until they reached their bed. Where she allowed herself to be gotten.

And it was later, at half-past ten, in a still, fine moment, that Sarah said into the quiet of the house, “I wish we could find a nice man for Mrs. Morel.”

“One way to get her off our hands.” He received a light slap to the chest. “Okay, okay. Actually, I was thinking that too, tonight–maybe it was her talking about getting a TV, or you and Berry getting her all fixed up. It’d be great for her to have somebody, but I’m betting there’s a serious shortage of antique Prince Charmings right now—let alone that special      guy who could get downwind of her and not gallop right back across hismoat.”

She refused to be deterred. “It would have to be someone courtly,” she said dreamily, amid strokings and ticklings, “somebody kind and patient and, and distinguished, you know—dignified.”

“Right. Also with enough sense to get her into some serious psychiatry–can you move your arm? That’s better—and a lot of patience.”

“Of course. But she needs more than that. Somebody, oh– impressive, someone she can tool around in society with, the way she did before she married Gardiner.”

“That kind of society vanished fifty years ago, Sar. I mean, have you noticed that even with old Gardiner dead, she’s practically a hermit? She’s really got nobody but the two of us.” An inspiration seized him, jerked him up. “Yes! I got it! I see who you mean.” He lifted a black lock of her hair and carefully formed of it an extravagantly drooping moustache on his face. “Rally, Mrs. Morel–your collection of local felines is too, too astonishing,” he drawled, using a most pathetic imitation of cultivated British speech.

“That’s it!” Sarah, too, sat up in bed. “That’s exactly who she needs, love. An Englishman. Maybe with a title, even!”

He cleared an odd tickle from his throat and refashioned the moustache. “Allow me to introduce myself, my dear Mrs. Morel. I am,” he cleared his throat again, “am—Lord Harold—no.. Too grand.”

“Maybe just a captain, Matty, a nice little Captain Somebody-or-Other. Lifelong bachelor and noted—”

“Noted authority on the carrier pigeon,” Matthew interrupted. Words not his own were beginning to come to him, faintly, so that he had to listen hard, over the strange sudden clamor of his heart. “No, that’s not right. This guy’s too elegant for pigeons. Something classier. Whooping cranes. I think it’s whooping cranes. Okay, Max, there you go. Sir Harold Whooper, noted authority on cranes of the same name.”

“Matthew. Don’t be ridiculous. Harold isn’t bad, but it doesn’t have enough—it doesn’t have the right ring. I ‘d rather have a more substantial name, like, like, I don’t know, like maybe Henry. And not Whooper. Too silly”

“Not Henry,” he muttered, listening and tryi ng not to listen to the words that were simply coming despite his own panicked volition. “No, not Henry. Not John. Somebody Whooper. What’s wrong with Whooper?”

“Are you falling asleep? You sound like you’re half-asleep.” She tickled him. “Not Whooper. It’s goofy-sounding. No dignity.”

The words came out slowly and tranquilly, as if of their own accord. “Okay, then. Make it George and drop the W. He’s Sir George Hooper.” He laughed abruptly, as if whatever inspiration had held him had now let him free. He sat up and cheered: “Sir George Hooper, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, nobody can.”

And with the second pronouncement of my name he felt a tingling, pleasant shock, as of running into cold waves, fast, on a hot summer’s day, and in the rippling of that water Matthew saw a glorious vision and stood up upon bed, waving his hand before him to seize what shimmered before his eyes. “I can see the society pages now, sweetheart. ‘Sir George Hooper was spotted last night escorting Mrs. Violet Morel to the opening of the symphony season at the Bushnell. Mrs. Morel, the darling of the uppity eyebrows, was tastefully decked out in black galoshes and a shocking pink muu muu. She swept down the Bushnell’s center aisle trailing her classic fragrance, ‘Cat Phew.’ By George, Max, I think we’ve got it’!”

“Don’t call me Max,” she said and pulled him back down, but already she was whispering, as if the musicians had finished tuning up and her eyes were  adjusting their focus to the auditorium’s dim light. “They make such a handsome couple, don’t they, sweetheart?”

He called her Max because she’d appeared for their first date wearing an old, green felt man’s fedora, which she intended, perhaps, as an emblem of severe bohemianism. So we are stuck with our names, and whatever associations they give rise to in the minds of others.

 

If anyone other than myself were to read this, he or she might at this juncture become a trifle confused, and might very well desire some sort of explanation. Not that there really is anything so very extraordinary here; most people are conceived of during the same act to which I allude above. Indeed, if one were to make, for the moment, the absurd assumption that I was conceived during that passage of love, perhaps the most noteworthy aspects of such a conception would have been that the parents began in laughter, and that so fluid and opalescent an admixture of gentleness and passion eased their physical act as is rare even for such young lovers as Sarah and Matthew. Moreover, had I been conceived in that way, this evening, it would have been with such generosity of impulse as, in my humble opinion, the dark-suited Freudian faculty could trivialize, but not explain.

And the world, really, is full of stranger conceptions. What is one to make of the poor starfish sliced in half by a curious scientist, a being whose two halves then become two wholes? Isn’t the severing in that case a form of conception, and possibly even a birth as well? Then, too, the ancients believed life rose spontaneously from the fertile mud of the Nile; some modern thinkers believe life on earth sprang from the fortuitous mating of lightning with certain particular, if unexceptional, chemical compounds. Had I been conceived as described above, it would have been a conception far less monstrous than the Minotaur’s, say, and fully as reasonable as deriving one’s being from the successful assault of a fishtailed sperm on a round-bellied ovum in some dark Fallopian alley. Well then.

If such had been my conception—in the intricate convolutions of Sarah and Matthew’s brain cells, amid the confused, rapid, innocent flexing and heaving and joining of thei r two discrete imaginations—would it really have been any stranger than the ordinary business of heaving buttocks and flexing toes, the joining of two discrete bodies by the absurdly sweet  means of their genitalia? However one might weigh the relative pleasures involved in each type of conception, who is to say which act would be stranger, more marvelous, more real? Are not passions and histories involved in both acts, and some thought, at least, in the one?

Again, and not to dwell too long on the obstetrical, would the heart be less nurturing than the womb, would the mouth be a less moist and mysterious passageway to the world, in the one case, than the usual birth canal in the other? Would such a carriage and delivery be any the less appropriate, less intimate, less real?

There are objections and protestations that could be raised against these arguments, of course, but they would be objections and protestations so bitterly literal and unimaginatively biased as cannot concern me here. No. For I am only concerned, after all, not with asserting my    reality but my purpose—which, for the moment at least, is to record what seems to have occurred      to Sarah and Matthew. Perhaps I am here for other purposes as well, purposes I do not understand—I certainly do not claim to be omniscient—but then few and fortunate indeed are the souls who know all the reasons for their being. I at least know enough about my purpose to know that I am blessed to have one.

I, at least as much as anyone else, know that I exist.

 

And if that existence had originated in the minds and on the bed of these two young people, it would still be as full, as potent, as enduring a reality as any more prosaically conceived being. Had I—let me propose for argument’s sake—in fact been generated in that act of love, by a sunny bolt of inspiration on those two fecund spirits, who is there can say—who is there dares say—that I would have been any less a being than he or she? And what would it matter if, under those circumstances, I came to be here? For here I certainly am, sitting in a perfectly solid chair, writing a perfectly ordinary English sentence that any literate person might read. Creature that I am, I lay my claim to an adequate mind, and a soul. I have lived long and wisely enough to conjure the scent of hyacinths while snuffling across the icy bleak of winter; I can make snap judgments, feel pain and anger and remember in my very bones the awful bewilderment of children; I have known hunger and doubt and great, oh, very great love—and these things would be enduringly real even had I had such a conception as this.

While the foregoing argument has been of course purely hypothetical, I felt it necessary to make, in light of certain circumstances that may arise in the course of this experiment.

In connection with which I must record that it was I, alas, who provided Matthew with my name. A whimsical interference with my subject (for lack of better term) that I will not attempt to justify now. It was a rash thing to do. Perhaps wrong. But in any case, it is done.

 

next,   4 October

previous,   27 September, cont’d.

The Entries

 

 

 

 

G.H.

September 27, cont’d.

 

 

Their days rejoined at Pepperomia’s, a neighborhood Italian restaurant. Sarah was also late, but her present mood, even as Matthew’s, seemed much improved, They ordered their sandwiches amidst her recounting of her morning’s accomplishment. Instead of following her narrative, however, Matthew followed with his knife the marble pattern of the plastic table top, guiding the knife edge along a galaxy of swirls that spun toward the narrow trench of an ancient cigarette burn; he murmured and nodded and couldn’t wait till she finished speaking.

“Don’t you want to know what I was doing this morning?” Asked with the impatience, the delight of an astronomer reporting on a new sight somewhere in the heavens–a discovery whose importance is unquestioned, whose meaning is unclear.

“Of course. Sorry. Where’d you go?”

”The library.”

“The library, huh? Why the library?”

Matthew methodically set his sandwich in its basket, and then with his fingers made a mask around his eyes. No, Sarah’s shaking of the head replied, I don’t get it. Her back stiffened, as if a hot trickle of fear were dribbling down her back as she watched him.

He gave up. “Our buddy? The masked intruder?”

She looked quickly at him, then away. “Oh. Why? They get in a new copy of ‘The Homeowner ‘s Guide to Raccoon Eviction?’” She studied her sandwich as if it were the subject of an important exam.

“I forgot to ask for that one.  Matthew slid to the edge of his chair, leaned toward her as if toward an enthusiasm that matched his own. “I though I’d sort of get to know the enemy, Sar. Find out what its habits are and all that stuff. Really peculiar little animals–did you know they’re related to bears? And they’re amazingly agile, like cats, the way they can get into places you wouldn’t think they’re small enough to get into. Farmers hate ’em because they’ll eat the eggs, the chickens, the corn, anything.”

She was nodding her head too rapidly to signify mere conversational agreement. “Really interesting, sweetie, really interesting. But I thought you wanted to find out how to make it leave, not write a dissertation on it. I mean,” she said, raising her eyes to his, her voice sliding higher, “it’s still keeping you up at night, isn’t it?”

He bent his head to an angle of rigid nonresponse, began rearranging the messy contents of his sandwich.

“Isn’t it?” she demanded again, but her voice was softer. He met her eyes only briefly.

“Look, it’s very nice to know all that stuff, but unless you just want to sell the house to get away from the noise, maybe we should find out what’s going on, get some more practical info.”

Their lunch as a vision of red: red plastic baskets lined with white waxy paper already sodden with the tomato-stained grease that had oozed from their sandwiches. Matthew observed that she had set her eggplant grinder back into its plastic cradle, having given the sandwich only the most cursory of attentions. He reached over to hold her hand. “I’ll research it a little more tonight.”

“Matty, for God’s sake you don’t need to do more research.”

“Well, what d’you want me to do, buy a gun and go in there and shoot it?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, we don’t have to do anything like that. I’m sure there are fifty different ways to chase it out of there.” She paused to aim her reproach: “You never called the Humane Society or animal control or whatever, did you?”

He scrubbed red drippings from his hands, threw the soiled paper napkin in his basket. “Listen, this hasn’t bothered you yet, has it? Okay, then, it’s my problem and I’ll take care of it. I just wanted to know what this thing is, I had to find out about it before I could do anything about it.”

The hot trickle of fear running down her back, for the last few minutes, had become a steady, scalding rivulet. “This is getting a little weird, you know? She rolled her napkin into a tight ball and looked down at it for a moment, as if it held some answer, then straightened up and tried to smile at him. “Sweetheart, this raccoon has been in our house what—six days now? And it’s not going away and we’re not doing anything to make it go away, and meanwhile you’re getting a little iffy from not sleeping. So I think we should just go ahead and call somebody and find out what to do, and do it. I know you’ve been so busy with work but—why don’t I just call now?” And as she spoke she was reaching into her purse for her phone. Because really this is as much my responsibility as yours, right? Not,” she stipulated, looking down at her phone, “that it’s such a big deal. I mean, this isn’t some legendary monster that can’t be vanquished unless you learn the secret spell or find the magic sword. Or something. lt’s only a little raccoon.” Matthew saw the face of her phone gleam with the dangerous sheen of a   weapon.

“Okay.” She was scrolling through her phone. I’ll try a couple of places while you pay.” She looked up at him. “Maybe I’ll call that nature center, Roaring Brook, first. It might be a good place to start.” Her hand was raising the phone.

He grabbed her wrist. “No.” His grip was neither violent nor terribly tight, but he did not let go. “No. I’m going to take care of it myself, okay? Just let me do it my own way.” His face was blanched and hard, immobile as a plaster casting, his eyes fixed on her face. She shivered as if through an unseen gap something had made its way into this place, this time, and spread about a chill. She jerked her head in response to a sound—on the wall a poster, whitewashed houses above Costa Smerelda—flapped as someone opened the door, then she shook off his hand as if it were a house fly.

“Fine. Suit yourself. You want to make some big Norse saga out of this, it’s okay with me. The stupid raccoon doesn’t keep me awake all night.” She walked out the door without looking back to see if he were following her.

They drove most of the way to the Vinca’s country club in silence until Matthew, by way of making amends, started talking about their tennis partners. Sarah granted him, at first, only piqued responses, but he could see that she was reluctant to prolong their quarrel, so that by the time they entered the barren, immaculate cage of the courts, Matthew and Sarah were hand in hand and deep in speculation about whether Marjorie’s latest teacher might have effected some improvement in Marjorie’s game.

The answer was no. Marjorie, as small and glossy as Herbert, and as tenacious and energetic a player, was, even after this latest and most expensive course of tutelage, unable to control the ball. As in their three previous matches, Herbert’s bouncy agility could not, unaided, carry the day and, as they had before, Matthew and Sarah won in straight sets. As they had before, the Vincas pressed Matthew and Sarah to return with them to their house for a drink; this time, Matthew and Sarah accepted the invitation. Perhaps because of the weight of social and business obligation, or perhaps because the burden of being alone together seemed weightier still. Their stubby green car trailed at perplexed distance the Vincas’ sleek silver one, as it shot through the lushly colored suburban hills. Sarah prophesied in tones of dismal confidence that they’d get lost on their way back home.

Once arrived at Herbert’s, they followed him into a deeply brown, heavily furnished den, where Sarah and Matthew were instructed into the billowing folds of a leather couch of buslike proportions and grace. Herbert began tending bar; Marjorie had vanished, at some point in the procession, to check on the health and whereabouts of her two teen-aged sons, her three dogs, and her mother’s helper, a sinuous young woman named Lila Wolff.

In the interval of Marjorie’s absence, Herbert stoppered Matthew and Sarah’s hands with drinks, and then released from his sound system a wild torrent of bathos; bracing himself against the mahogany bar, he blared over the music his hopes of making yet another fortune with Kestrel’s Eyrie. Matthew’s attention to this was only marginally required, and the livelier segment of his intellect, in a battle against sleep, engaged itself in a merciless critique of Herbert’s grandiose modern house. Sarah’s inattention to her host was accompanied by a knotting and unknotting of fingers, a writhing turmoil of flesh that was, perhaps, representative of her state of mind.

And somehow Marjorie and the dogs are in the room, have been for some time, and more liquor poured, and Herbert drinking quickly, steadily, and the music weeping loudly now, and Herbert’s voice rushing recklessly before it. Radiant Marjorie. Dogs barking. Everything confused and loud, even Marjorie’s sparkling silence, even Matthew’s laugh that comes from high in his throat and indicates he isn’t listening.

As Herbert rapidly becomes ever more drunk and gloriously repetitive, his verbal tide now in a loving wash over the strand of his life’s successes—business deals struck money made sons born bets won vacations Cote d’Azur cars bought fabulous purebred Rottweilers fabulous–flooding unbroken over Marjorie’s shimmering silence, over Matthew and Sarah’s politely bobbing inattention, until such time as Herbert drops to all fours and begins to bay and snap in imitation of his favorite dog treeing cats.

 

Something in Herbert’s bare-toothed, mock and throaty menace abruptly rousing Matthew.

Who stands and says, “Oh, my God, Herb, that reminds me. Our neighbor’s coming over for dinner tonight—old lady, friend of Sarah’s.” He looks urgingly at Sarah, who also stands. “She keeps a thousand cats,” Matthew continues rapidly, earnestly, like a man trying to talk his way out of a traffic ticket, “you just reminded me. Anyway, thanks for everything, Herb, we’ve really gotta be going—I’m cooking tonight.”

“Don’t mention it, not at all,” Herbert says as Marjorie helps him rise from the loam-toned rug and all make their way to the door, “Not at all. Cooking, are you? You’re cooking? Marge, d’you hear that, Matt here is cookin’. A modern marriage, no less, a nodern larriage!”

Male and female, moans and giggles drift down from the upper reaches of the house.

Marjorie’s smile becomes so all embracing as to suggest imminent beatification, her eyes refusing all but the worldly trouble of a flaw in her manicure, at which her fingers nervously pick, and she recedes from the doorstep farewells to send a cry toward whatever heaven exists somewhere at the top of the stairs.

“Ms. Wolff,” she calls in a voice bright but perilously thin and creaky, as if weakened with rust. ”Ms. Wolff?” To no reply, she tries again, in that voice that has a rusted toy’s insistent gaiety, still, and hope, “Ms. Wolff? Are the boys disturbing you, Ms. Wolff? Maybe we should start dinner now, Ms. Wolff, what d’you think?”

Rustlings, laughter, soft closing of a door, a sultry female voice. “Be right down, Marge.”

And Herbert meanwhile saying, “Good, then, I’ll plan on meeting you and Tim at the Eyrie this Friday, Matthew? Excellent, this Friday, the Eyrie. Excellent. Good. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.” And Herbert’s drunken hand patting Sarah’s shoulder, slipping down to squeeze her buttocks. She angles away, saying nothing: Herbert is so weighted with bourbon, he can barely stand upright alone.

Then bumping down the back roads toward town. A silence, into which Sarah finally says, ‘Tm going to talk to Rosita on Monday. I wonder if it isn’t bothering them, some of them, that Gardiner recommended me to Poundstone to do the illustrations. That somebody else didn’t get to do it. I got so upset with you today–maybe I’m really upset about other stuff, like at work. In the department. I feel like people are saying stuff about me in some language I don’t know. But why? I studied with these people. I’ve worked with them for a year—it feels like they’re, I don’t know, like they’re my enemies.”·

“Look, Poundstone was a friend of Gardiner’s—no one in that department would’ve risked working with a friend of his. You know every single little one of them couldn’t wait to spit on Gardiner’s grave, and he would’ve done a happy fandango on theirs if he’d had the chance. Why would they mind?” He had the window down and his left hand out, free for the moment of the task of steering the car. His voice brushed as lightly, restlessly over her worries as the wind rushed across his hand.

“Who knows? They might still resent that I got it. Or something. Something funny’s going on there.” Matthew saw her staring through the darkness at the hillsides speckled with unfamiliar houses, as if in one of them rested the one who could answer her question. She  sighed. “Anyway, thanks for getting us out of there. You sure did it quick enough—you jumped up like Herbie’d dumped a bucket of water on your head.”

Tighter curves and bends in the road, headlights on the trunks of trees. Matthew brought his left hand back to the steering wheel, frowned.

“Talk about drunk,” Sarah was saying. “Let’s never go over there again, okay?” She shifted in her seat, as if Herbert’s fat, kneading fingers were about to assault her again. “I don’t mind playing tennis with them once in a while, but if Herbert’s going to–going to do dog imitations every time he has a few, 1 don’t think I can take it.”

Mournful music, a man growling beneath a hollow tree, growling and snapping, drowning his adversary in the nearest stream—Concentrate. Steer the car, just watch the road.

“—Especially when he gets drunk so fast. Probably so he doesn ‘t have to deal with what’s going on upstairs.”

What’s going on upstairs, Noise, Darkness, Easy to get lost here, lose the road, Follow, uphill then down, follow the scudding leaves of autumn, abroad in autumn looking for shelter, close the window, hum of tires on narrow road, throaty hum, range of noises from soft purr to throaty growl. Uphill upstairs

Connect. “What d’you mean, what’s going on upstairs?”

“I mean Lila and the boys, dummy, didn’t you notice? The noise upstairs? I think Marge must know about Lila and the boys, I can’t imagine why she doesn’t just fire her,”

Simple problem, simple solution, Away from curved roads, hollow trees toward stronger lights, vigilant troops of houses, straighter ranks of streets, Almost home, almost home safe in the well-lit rows, Everything as it was. Reaching out to hold the firmness of her knee, “Maybe it isn’t so simple, Sar, Maybe Marge can’t fire her, maybe old Herb won’t let her,”

Sarah responded with a hand lightly stroking his, as if mopping up an overflow of imagination, “My God, you think, Herbert and the boys are sharing Lila?” She paused, “Maybe,” And then she laughed, “Well, if it’s true, it just goes to show you never know what goes on in other people’s houses,”

”Nope,” he said, “you never do.”

Perhaps because of the darkness, or a certain amount of fatigue, or perhaps distraction, there was a moment as he opened the door when he thought he saw on the chair in the front hall the figure of an old man slumped inside a too large raincoat. No. Only some clothes Sarah had thrown there, to bring to the dry cleaner’s shop.

Sarah walked past him and into the kitchen. “Boy, do I ever not feel like cooking. What do you think? Burgers and a salad? Honey?”

“—in a minute. I, I’m just going to put some stuff away.” He carried the clothes back upstairs, and as he entered the bedroom heard the raccoon movi ng uneasily, persistently, in the crawl space. He made no move to open the crawl space door; instead, he sat down on the edge of the bed and, holding tightly to the bundle of Sarah’s clothes, only listened. When he finally rose to go downstairs his arms were stiff from clinging to the bundle.

 

Nothing he’d learned as he sat the library that morning indicated a best course of action, so that later that night when he woke to the sound of his key fumbling in the lock, the sound of the door scraping open, the sound, the sound from the dream that wasn’t a dream that the sound didn’t come from—when he woke up to the sound of the raccoon that was also the sound of his dream, he could think of nothing else to do but what he’d done before.

He brought it food. He decided, as he unlocked the crawl space door, to keep it open, to see the animal, make some sort of contact with it. But after a few minutes of crouching near the bowls, peering into that dim wedge of space that gave out no sign of the animal except the merest flicker of movement behind the broken vase, he gave this up. What would it accomplish? He didn’t want the damned thing for a pet, for God’s sake. He stood in the dark room, feeling exhausted and helpless. No point in returning to bed, only to listen: he had to think of something to do. Go down to the kitchen and get a glass of milk, quieter there, think there.

And the kitchen was quieter, if not still; even here he could hear the animal moving in the crawl space, could hear nothing else.

Well, what do you want me to do, buy a gun and go up there and shoot it?

Don’t be ridiculous. That’s awful.

Of course it was awful. Civilized people don’t do things like that. An animal, for God’s sake, a living thing. Yeah, so were roaches and tomatoes. Nobody thinks twice about poisoning roaches, nobody thinks it’s inhumane to slice a tomato, law of nature, eat and be eaten. Valuable flesh, edible pelt—no, valuable pelt, the website said, edible flesh.

Matthew drank his milk, rubbed his eyes. No one’s talking about that, for God’s sake, just getting it out of there, making it leave. Practical information, she’s right, need some practical information. Meanwhile, what? Sit here all night?

He placed his empty glass in the sink. He could think of no place else in the house he wanted to go. He left the kitchen, was halfway up the stairs when he realized how much louder the noise was here. And so he turned around, headed back down. Saw the old man slumped on the front hall chair.

It was his grandfather.

It was not his grandfather. There was nothing there. Nothing, dammit. Enough of this, get out of here.

And ran the rest of the way downstairs to grab his jacket and take a walk, before realizing he wasn’t dressed—in disgust and fury slammed the jacket onto the chair beside the front hall closet and returned upstairs for pants and sweatshirt, socks and running shoes.

And came back only minutes later, was midway down the stairs adjusting the neck of his sweatshirt. Saw the old man drooping in the front hall chair— It’s your goddamn jacket, dammit, jacket, not—

He was down the stairs with jacket in hand and out the door running hard.

 

The figure on the chair was his grandfather; there was no figure on the chair. Perhaps I should put it another way: that no solid, tangible object then occupied that chair is in some ways irrelevant, as time is unfixed, and as matter contains its own void.

The night was cold, but he was sweating lightly as he ran. Out of shape, bad for your mental health. He began to jog more quickly, rounding a hedge of scraggle-leafed azaleas at the corner of Norwood and some street whose sign was down and that he couldn’t immediately recognize when he heard the buzzing of a small plane and stopped.

Waited.

No impact. No flames, no accident. Everyone safe.

Panting, light-headed with relief and exertion, he resumed his pace and circled through the familiar streets, and so back home.

And he had been prepared, over these hours of this Saturday: the key sliding into the lock was a different key reaching into a different lock, at another time, in another light.

Very early on a December morning, Christmas vacation. He’d gotten a ride home, some guy in his dorm he didn’t know very well. They’d left after a party, driven through the night. He put the key in the lock, expecting that he’d find his grandfather already awake, already in the kitchen making himself a spinach omelette and humming something from Tosca. He opened the door ready to shout hello; he opened the door and found Nathan, in an enormous overcoat, propped crookedly on the chair in the dark front hall.

Matthew shouted No! and the duffel bag fell from his hand, moaned No, and went down on his knees and held the old man’s face, trying to grasp his death.

Nathan emitted a startled snort and a dank whiskeyish belch, and in the instant these fumes reached the heat of Matthew’s anguish and shock they ignited all in a blaze of rage.

That he, however, insisted originated only in the fact of Nathan’s alcoholism—a sad but safer, more spontaneous combustion. And even now, standing in his own house contemplating another, empty chair, Matthew blamed his flame only on those fumes. Nevertheless, precautions were required: he carried the chair out of the hall and set it in a corner of the living room; he went upstairs, and there, defying the sound of the animal, kissed his sleeping wife awake and made love to her.

 

By the time Sarah met him, Matthew’s only close living relation, beside his brother, Eddie, was his grandfather, Nathan: immigrant, retired grocer, tirelessly determined man. Arrived penniless in the United States, he’d become a modest success here, raising up his head in the damp grey confusion of Ellis Island without a word of English to describe what he felt but deciding there, at that moment, wrapped in a great wonder streaked with confusion and loss, that both this land and its language would be his. He had taught himself the strange new tongue by means of incessant conversation and reading any printed matter that came to hand, translating all things—from newspapers to the labels on wooden boxes of beans—out of fruit-stained copies of Russian-English and Yiddish-English dictionaries. He would, moreover, speak nothing but English to his grandsons when he came to live with them, for by then he had forgotten as much as he could of the languages of his youth (considering them symbols of a distant past to which he had no interest in returning), and had become both deeply patriotic toward his adopted country and vain of his command of English—which he allowed to march, however, only on subjects of the present, or of future times. Nathan, for instance, never referred to his eldest son, Louis, after receiving word of his death in Vietnam. Nor did he speak of his wife, who died some four years later, leaving him his younger son, Paul, and soon, Paul’s wife and then their children.

Quite as talkative and combative as his father, Paul was yet obedient enough to collude with Nathan in smothering the past in a pillow of silence. Pictures were removed from walls, the names of the dead excised from the family vocabulary. In so doing, Nathan paid full tribute to the potency of words, their ability to make the past breathe or cry out in pain—and so he persevered. Like Lot, Nathan set his sturdy body on a course across the desert to the future, and did not look back.

In due course, Paul became a professor of sociology at Trinity College in Hartford, and the father of Matthew and Eddie. Nathan’s love for and pride in his remaining son was loud, unremitting and genuine; Paul’s affection and respect for his ruddy, flamboyant father was as deep in him as bone: they saw one another every two weeks, after Paul moved to Connecticut, and throughout each visit they raged at one another steadily, inventively, and at impressive volume. The texts were various: whether or not Nathan should remarry (Paul thought yes, Nathan no. The same battle was waged over several women ), what kind of new car Paul should buy, how many coins Nathan should press into the grimy palms of his grandsons (Paul’s wife, Anita, an economist, was never consulted). Arguing, arguing, even as Anita shepherded the children out of Nathan’s over­-heated house, down the stairs, Matthew could hear the two of them fighting—

No. No, dammit. Just the damn raccoon.

 

The raccoon mates in the late winter-early spring of northern climes; some sixty-three days after conceiving, and when the air is balmy, the year green, the female bears her litter into the world. The animals play together for long stretches during their captivity.

Playing and singing, the four of them in the car, Paul and Anita, Eddie and Matthew, balmy air rushing into the car on the way from New York, mixing with their voices to sing rounds of Row, Row, Row your Boat. Gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream. Matthew taking the last chorus, piping after the other voices are still, the final Life-is-but-a-dream. In the car, in the car singing, phone ringing, they went in the car—

Enough.

Matthew turned on the light with a shaking hand and groped for the Scientific American, forcing himself to read the article he’d abandoned days ago. Forcing himself to comprehend.

What Matthew forced himself to disapprehend, the fugitive thought he willed to escape was, very simply, this: one autumn evening his parents got into the car and drove away and never returned. An Army friend of Paul’s late brother had offered to fly them down to Washington, where Paul was to read a paper at a conference, and where the friend also had business. The night was calm and clear but something happened and the plane went down and the parents never came back. An accident. That was all they knew.

And that was all: they were to walk on and on, Matthew and Eddie, in the shadow of this great fact looming desolate on the plain of their grandfather’s silence. Nathan had come across the street to spend the weekend with the boys, he was the one who answered the midnight cry of the doorbell. He simply remained in the house with them from then on. They went to no funeral or memorial service. He held them when they cried and rubbed their backs and promised them it would be okay, he would always take care of them. And he did. And that was all.

The deaths became their shared, unmentionable sickness, a virulence that grew in its own unending isolation. And because each of the three knew himself contaminated by it, he forbore, out of love and fear, from the words that might infect the others. Even Eddie understood, learned to keep his distance; his request to move back across the hall into Matthew’s room, once granted, his life went on much as before, save for troubled dreams from which he woke up soaked in urine and shame. Nathan settled into the house as if it were no change in his own life at all, or the merest switching of his bathrobe from one hook to next, and the boys didn’t notice when his afternoon mug of tea was filled instead with schnapps. Nathan changed no established routine of the household.

The pattern of Matthew’ s life suffered only the subtlest of internal changes, hardly detectable at all.

All things considered, the arrangement of the family, thus modified, worked quite well.

Nathan was then a stout and still vigorous man beneath whose loudness of clothing and voice lay immense good sense and quiet concern for the well-being of his grandsons. He did what he could for them, taught them what he thought was right, and acted in accordance with his own beliefs. Thus, he never spoke to his grandsons about missing his own house or his independent life, and managed to prevent them from visiting their mother’s Cleveland relatives because they refused to abide by his injunction of silence regarding his dead son and their own dead daughter, Anita.

Nathan was father to Matthew and Eddie as he had been to his own sons: generous with discipline and criticism, unstinting with praise and affection. Matthew and Eddie made their beds, did their homework. Nathan took them to Yankees games, fascinated them with the great  ball of string he’d saved, provided for their futures. He arm-wrestled with them and taught them how to buy fruit, cook good plain meals, play gin rummy. He encouraged them to love learning, exercise their bodies, respect themselves, and reverence what he called ‘The Divine Spark in Every Living Creature, Even Putzes’.  A believer who had no use for organized religion, he nevertheless made sure they showed up as usual for instruction at the synagogue, and set for them an example of delight in friends, humor, imagination , and taking care of others. He instructed them in the arts of ironing shirts, driving a car, pitching a ball, opening a savings account, and tallking to the parents of a date. He read to them, listened to them, and knew most of their worries, all their triumphs and friends. His greatest defect as a parent was his refusal to let them mourn or have a history.

Thus the boys grew, like the herbs Nathan kept in glass jars on the kitchen window sill, their fragrant heads casting shadows on his enormous ball of string—like those plants growing only in water, so grew Matthew and Eddie. Flourishing, unanchored.

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