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.

next,  ?

previous,  4 October   

The Entries                                                                                   

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.

next,   28 September

previous,   27 September       

The Entries

G.H.

27 September

He’d tucked his laptop under his arm and gone to the public library, to sit in the quiet and learn about the raccoon. An appealing course of action, sensible, logical, he thought—Right. I’m walking up a sidewalk, into a buildi ng, to find out about an animal. Though how else, not like I grew up somewhere out in the country—Nature was a Subject four weeks each summer at camp, you stayed on the path to be safe from poison ivy and  got points for sticking little red flags by squirrel tracks.

But settling his jacket on the hard back of his chair, squaring his shoulders, opening his laptop, he recovers confidence of purpose. From premise to conclusion, from ignorance to knowledge to action: a methodical approach. What we need here’s a little knowledge.

I surmise, unfortunately, that in this case, as in others, Matthew will be unable to make methodical use of the information he obtains: unable, that is, through some defect in his vision or education, to site his structure on the broad firm plain of the essential, rather than among the unstable, multiform hills of fact. And should Matthew site his structure among those hills, he will lose sight of, or perhaps forget, what he needs to know. Become lost. On occasion, of course, a wandering survivor will rediscover those broad firm plains, even reach them in time. That is one possibility. But in this matter of the raccoon, for example? For example: Matthew has been unable to see beyond the particular fact of the animal in his house—is, in fact, beginning to lose sight of other facts, and of the valleys of connection between them.

Perhaps his sleeplessness is causing this change in vision; perhaps a friend could call out to him that he is getting lost. But no one has—I have not—at least not in a voice loud enough for him to hear.

So he reads that the raccoon (procyon lotor) is an extremely adaptable mammal whose fossils date from the lower Miocene, and which presently roams around wooded areas in a vast territory from the south of Canada across most of the United States, to South America. It does not inhabit the northern Rockies, nor the Great Basin’s more arid districts.

That the raccoon’s salt-and-pepper fur is of excellent quality. That the sexes are superficially alike in appearance: rather pudgy, short-legged and bushy-tailed; but with their small, mobile, and nicely-shaped muzzles and neatly erect ears, they nevertheless exude a certain charm. That among the raccoon’s more notable characteristics are its agile forepaws, whose separated and flexible digits allow it to manipulate objects with a dexterity resembling that of primates. That it walks, as do both bear and man, on the entire surfaces of its feet. That it possesses a fine, sharp nose, keen hearing, adequate vision. And is capable of a range of sounds, from the soft purr to the throaty growl.

That the raccoon does indeed wash, or dunk, its food, though none of the authorities Matthew consulted could provide more than speculative reasons for this behavior. That the animal customarily lives near lakes and streams and is adept at taking its food from the water, but will also eat nuts, birds, grain, eggs—almost anything else. That it is primarily though not exclusively nocturnal and most often makes its home (not, by and large, a very clean one) in a hollow tree, denning up for the duration of the colder weather. A homebody, it normally ranges less than a mile from its den.

It may live up to eighteen years in captivity.

The raccoon mates in the late winter and early spring of northern climes; some sixty­ three days after conceiving, when the air is balmy, the year green, the female bears her litter into the world. And while some writers call the animal monogamous, and others polygamous, a third group consider it a normally solitary creature, wandering the world alone when not breeding or rearing its young.

Indeed, it is on such subjects as the animal ‘s solitude—its personality, one might say—that Matthew unearthed the greatest differences of opinion. One naturalist described a captive raccoon as ‘nasty’for growling and snapping at him, and the animal’s fellow captives as “markedly indifferent”; on the very same page, however, he confessed that the animals played together for long stretches during their captivity. W. T. Hornaday took a less complicated view, commending the animal as a “cheerfully persistent”creature that no amount of hunting could discourage, or drive “from its favorite haunts”; he endorsed it as “one of the most satisfactory carnivorous pets that a boy can keep in confinement.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica’ s expert described it as wily, intelligent, inquisitive, methodical, elusive, expressive of face, and so very able to look out for its interests in the face of civilization “that it can get along nicely well within the limits of cities of considerable size.”

Indeed.

In yet another source Matthew read an entry on the savagery with which a cornered raccoon may fight. And noted a list of the raccoon’s adversaries—among them humans, who have hunted the animal for its valuable pelt and edible flesh.

Matthew read and read, following links and comparing sources, intoxicated by the hot scent of information. From a stack of books he culled references to relations between raccoon and man. Members of the old American Whig Party were styled “coons” for their portrayal of William Henry Harrison, their 1840 presidential candidate, as a simple honest farmer whose homespun virtues were suggested by the emblem of a log cabin with a coonskin nailed to its door. (Harrison, of course, won the campaign, but died soon after assuming office.) From the1840 campaign on, opponents derided Whig policies as “coonery.” “Coon” became, in the nineteenth-century United States, a slang term for any man, but particularly one who was sly and knowing.

And the expression, “gone coon,” came from a common tale, of which Matthew copied Frederick Marryat’s version:

A most famous American marksman, Captain Martin Scott of Vermont, went out one morning carrying his rifle, and eventually spotted a raccoon perched high in the branches of a tree. The captain raised his rifle, took aim—but then the raccoon politely raised his paw to signify a moment’s conference. When the captain lowered his rifle, the raccoon inquired if the man’s name was Scott.

“Yes it is,” replied the captain.”

“Martin Scott, Sir?”

“Yes, Martin Scott.”

“Would that be Captain Martin Scott?”

“Yes,” the captain said again, and raised his rifle, “it certainly would.”

“Ah,” said the raccoon sadly, and nodded. “I might as well come down then, for I’m a gone coon.”

Charles Dickens, according to Matthew’s notes, refers to this as the story of the “colonel” and “that sagacious animal in the United States.”

Other expressions: “To hunt the same old coon,” from the animal’s vaunted elusiveness as prey. “In a coon’s age,”from the animal ‘s alleged longevity. A “raccoon bridge,” a log thrown across a stream, celebrates the animal’s agility; “to coon” means to creep, clinging closely. “To go the whole coon” connotes determined indulgence or pursuit; the same qualities may be indicated in deeming “coon oysters” those which no other species will eat. “Coonhounds” are a breed developed in the southeastern United States, where hunting the animal has been a traditional pursuit; it was perhaps because raccoon hunting was widespread among southern black Americans, another writer noted, that in the nineteenth century “coon” first came to be used as a deeply derogatory term for them, a vicious bit of verbal trickery in which those who hunted down human beings saw fit to deride their victims with the name of the animal which those same victims hunted out of practical necessity.

Matthew’s last notes came from the Oxford English Dictionary, whose preferred spelling is “racoon.” (American dictionaries prefer “raccoon”. And as I suppose them to be the   authorities here, the raccoon being native to this land, I cheerfully abide by their recommendation for this and other spellings.)

Matthew ‘s notes from the OED: Probable derivation is Powhaten (Virginia) Algonquin dialect, “aroughcoune’” or .”arathkone”, meaning—perhaps—“the scratcher.” French speakers in Canada call the raccoon· “raton laveur,” the little rat who washes. Raton also    means pet or darling.

And here Matthew finishes typing, looks up to reflect on what he’s learnt, learns (by the clock on the wall) that it’s one thirty and he is late to meet Sarah. Damn. And they’re supposed to play tennis this afternoon, too. Have to come back another day.

He dons his windbreaker, thrusts his laptop beneath his arm as he races for his car.

What can Matthew build, then, with this scribbled heap of information? Probably nothing, for the heap is too lumpily various to allow of comfortable summations or stable conclusions; for the complex raccoon no simple defining phrase—no “dirty rat” or “sly fox” exists. No. What Matthew has found here is a most peculiar animal, one about which naturalists edgily disagree; the very spelling of the animal’s name, indeed, is open to honest debate. This is an animal that farmers guard against as a destroyer of crops and poultry, even of buildings, so unrelenting is it when it has settled on a territory. An animal of senses so acute it can find an earthworm buried in the ground.  But yet is the same animal so elusive when pursued that men have troubled themselves to breed a dog to hunt it, merely in the hope of staying even with it, as it were, on the chase. An animal related to the bear, one said to make a “sweet sight” in the wild and a fine pet is also, somehow, the same animal that is perfectly capable of turning viciously on an adversary and drowning it in the nearest stream.

Oh yes. An animal that has come down to us in literary portraits as a being, even in Uncle Remus’s telling, of considerable wit and charm, a sort of urbane, fastidious nightthief. Confident and pleasantly self-depreciating, determined yet calmly fatalistic. On occasion dangerous.                                                    

 next,  27 September, cont’d.

previous,  Sarah’s Journal 

The Entries

Sarah’s Journal

Saturday. Matthew’s gone off somewhere. On errands, he said. I stopped at Mrs. M.’s and walked off with a smelly armful of her clothes, to take to the cleaners. That stretch of Farmington Avenue always depressing–the buildings squat and run-down, the signs look like broken teeth. And worse today, with soggy leaves in little mounds against the buildings and along the curb.

I nodded into the window at Pat’s bookstore because my arms were full and I couldn’t wave.

Pat’s just one of my stories for Matthew, she only exists for him because I told him about her. How I met her that spring morning, coming home from errands, walking along, tossing my keys high and catching them as they fell, tossing higher, walking faster in an upward spiral of rhythm, step/toss, step/catch, step/toss the keys higher, closer to sunlight, straight and brightly and catching my foot on a tipped slab of pavement, stumbling down.

Landing hard, hands and knees on pavement as the keys fell to rest just inside a low white fringe of plastic pickets around a tiny grass apron protecting an old city house from the dust of the street. And kneeling just inside the pickets, setting geraniums into very red rows, was Pat.

Didn’t hurt yourself, did you?

Oh. No. No, just turned my ankle, a little. Are those my keys there? Could I

By all means. Such a lovely morning? You new to the neighborhood? Pat Oakes, I run the Shop of Good News, bookstore up on Farmington Ave? Christian books, proceeds to the Universal Word of the Faith Church down Wethersfield Ave–you know where that is? Stop by the store sometime, I’ll give you directions?

Pat now standing, small, looking as if she’d been scrubbed thin, her hair stunned by chemicals into blonde immobility, her eyes green and glittery with deep, snaky intelligence. But her hand, wriggled out from the gardening glove, was warm, her smile friendly.

Glad to know you, dear. What’s your name?

And so the questions began. l told Matthew how the square of grass had seemed much too small, forced us to stand too close. How I stepped back onto the grey civic safety of the sidewalk. How Pat had followed. How long it had taken for me to escape, the keys sinking jagged edges into my hand. Going amid sociable smiles and waves.

And then, after nodding into the window to Pat, I decided not to tell Matthew I saw her, I won’t come home with another story for him, offered up like a living thing on the altar of our closeness. Forget it. No more little stories about Oh, I saw Pat, or the man at the liquor store said the wine was almost too dry. Forget it.

What does he tell me? His day, he crumples up like junk mail. Nothing much, The usual, Hectic, Slow. One word, maybe two. And now there’s this thing in the crawl space and he’s walking the streets all night, where does he go, and doesn’t want to talk about any of it. At least to me.

So there I am on Farmington Ave, my knees almost buckled under the weight of wanting to curl myself down on the curb between two parked cars, and cry. But I stayed on my feet and kept blinking, forcing myself to notice the intensity of the colors that were coming through the screen of tears. Which I wasn’t about to let fall. After the cleaners I went into The Hive, plopped myself into a booth and ordered myself some cinnamon apple tea.

No, I won’t tell him anything about my morning. I’ve told him too many mornings. Lying in bed, walking down the street, almost anywhere. All my stories, the ones anyway I’m willing to tell. The  ones about me and Beryl. Painting my hair with streaks of peroxide when we’re fifteen, or building a treehouse in Berry’s backyard when we’re nine, way back as far as we could so we couldn’t can’t hear the shrieking at her house from before her parents’ divorce . or my mother’s weepy silences that no one was ever brave enough to step in. I sat in the Hive, wiping my nose with paper napkins, sipping scalding tea and thinking maybe what he likes about these stories, about me and Berry, is that the passion of friendship is voluntary, like it is with lovers, like it can never entirely be with  family.

On Cape Cod one weekend, in a cold drizzle walking Race Point beach, I held his hand and told him what it was like when I went off to college. How I worried about Beryl, stuck on the lumpy rock of home, with no fancy grades to ship herself off. How I’d sit talking on the phone to Berry, scrunched up in the closet of that barren little dorm room, so I could escape the wail of Clare’s country music, the endless tales of loss. But then one day I jumped up in excitement, dropping the phone into one of my boots and making half my clothes fall down because Berry told me she had a new job in a florist’s shop—window displays, flower arrangements, cash register, how she really loved working in this shop—and by the way, she’d quit school.

I told him all this, clutching his hand on that drizzly beach, telling him these stories, my throat aching with the remembering and with the effort of speaking over the noise of the ocean.

My throat aching from not crying in the Hive, today, swallowing tea and thinking how he’d listened so carefully, like he knew it wasn’t just me shutting out Clare’s stupid music, it was an intimate almost secret thing, giving him my l ife to imagine, my separateness before we met. And then, sitting there in the Hive this morning I pushed the empty teapot away from me and saw fully, for the first time, how empty is the other side of the scale, the side where his stories should sit.

My side’s weighed down with details not just of my life, but mine as it’s tied to others, like Berry. I told him that soggy afternoon at the beach how the following year at school, in another closet, I jumped to my feet and knocked down all the hangers and clothes again when Berry told me how the old lady who owned the flower shop wanted out, had offered to let Berry buy the store—and would finance the purchase. And Berry was terrified but she did it; before her twentieth birthday owned the business.

And then the old lady—meaning so well, only trying to help—called the local newspaper, and the next day a reporter called Berry, asked to do an interview: Park Street’s Youngest Merchant, that sort of thing, he said.

I told him all this at Race Point beach, it was deserted, I was squeezing his hand and the story came out in spurts.

The photographer who came along on the story was the reporter’s friend, up for the weekend from New York. Gerard. I told Matthew how suddenly all I heard in her phone calls was Gerard, his letters, his visits—Gandhi, Superman, and Washington combined couldn’t live up to this billing.

I sat on that cold horizonless beach and told him the whole thing. How I knew something was wrong about this guy, I tried to tell Berry, Go slow, you haven’t had that much experience with men. She hung up on me for three months.

By the time she’d speak to me again she’d sold her shop, she and Gerard were living in New York, married, expecting a child. I tried to explain to Matt, over the salt wet wind of the beach, how I kept telling myself this business of Berry and Gerard would be okay, then, knowing all the time that it wouldn’t be.

When I went down to New York to visit her, I stayed, just to be safe, with my aunt in Yonkers. I helped Berry decorate the nursery that the baby, Megan, saw only a few times between hospital stays, during her eight months of life.

Remembering all this, this morning, in the stupid cafe, I felt like crying, like I cried on the beach with Matthew, and I had no warm hand to hold onto this morning, like I’d had then. Telling him how I arrived the morning after Megan’s birth, was getting off a subway car with a bunch of post­Christmas shoppers just about the time that Gerard walked into Berry’s hospital room, said, This is your fault, you little bitch, what the hell did you do? And grabbed her by her shoulder, It’s your fault this happened, how could you do this to me? And he started smacking her so hard across the face that she fell out of bed. By some miracle he didn’t break anything, though her face was horrible, her right eye swollen shut.

Gerard had this friend of his, Jeff, call me up in Yonkers that same night. Gerard’s left on assignment. In Vienna, he said. Jeff gave me his work number, but nothing else about Gerard—no address, no phone, no explanation. And I didn’t ask for any. I knew, Berry and everyone else knew, that Gerard wouldn’t see his daughter again. No one wanted him to.

In Berry’s hospital room the next morning, her mother kept turning her back and faking a cough so no one would see her crying; her father sat by the window like an unwatered plant. Here are the keys to the apartment, Berry told me, and her voice was thin and steady and terrible as a sharpened knife, Would you please pack up his things please and get his friend Jeff to take them away?

I slashed through every closet and drawer in the apartment, snatching up anything that looked un-Berry, stuffing it all into plastic trash bags, stopping only to call Jeff, tell him that if he’s not there in two hours to get it, I don’t care if you’re at work, I’ll throw it all down the trash chute, where your friend Gerard belongs. If you talk to him tell him his wife and baby will be staying there until Berry can find somewhere else to live, and she’s having the locks changed today.

Look, he said, l feel terrible about this, about Gerard, I don’t know—maybe he can’t—

Don’t you give me can’t, I hissed, Can’t is getting smashed to pieces by a bus as you’re running to the hospital to be with your wife and sick baby. Everything else is won’t.

Can’t was saving Megan. I watched the small feathers of her life fall and fall on Berry till I thought their weight would break her. I couldn’t stand the though of leaving Berry, I told Matt as we sat there huddled on that cold damp sand, So I decided to take a leave of absence from grad school. But Berry said No, the only way I couldn’t refuse: I know you’re here even when you’re not. Please don’t make me feel guilty about you, on top of this.

So I stayed in school, and that was when my Megan paintings began—Megan as baby, girl, and woman, sick, well, real, in dreamscapes—Megan, over and over. Those paintings Gardiner said were the first valid work I’d ever done. They convinced him I could paint, he thought they were odd, and some disgusting, but they got him excited about my work when I couldn’t have cared less. All I cared about was the paintings and getting through what was happening. Berry and Megan and the paintings, there wasn’t anything else, I told Matthew that day on the beach.

I left the Hive and headed home to get a little work in before I go to meet Matt, and as I walked I found myself thinking for the first time how Matthew and Gardiner and Mrs. M, my job, my work—one way or another Megan had brought them all to me. What does it mean, that my happiness comes from that? That she’s part of me now, like a nerve, connecting me to all the rest? But did I take that nerve from her, use it because l needed it, or was it somehow given? A gift, like the feel of her infant breath  on my cheek.

When the last breath fell from Megan’s body, Beryl’s mother told me, all Berry said was, Call Sarah.

But then Berry disappeared. A few weeks after the funeral, just the day after she drove back to her mother’s house, outside Boston, she took her mother out to dinner, thanked her for all she’d done. When her mother woke up the next morning, Berry was gone.

She stayed gone for almost three years, calling one or the other of her parents or me after silences of weeks or months to say she was fine, was waiting tables in El Paso, cashiering in a natural foods store in Park City, clerking in a gift shop in Little Rock, a drug store in Baton Rouge, another in Cincinnati, not to worry, she had to go, goodbye. Then a call from a new place, a florist in Valley Forge. The florist I knew, was a good sign. And so was Valley Forge: Berry was edging closer.

By then I was teaching, I told Matt on the beach that day, with the drizzle turning to rain so we had to run back toward the car—I told him how I called every florist in and around Valley Forge until I found the one where she worked, then on the first day of spring break drove down. It was almost closing time when I got there.. I looked in the window and there she was, arranging anemones and irises and ferns and looking almost peaceful.

Three days later she was in her same old battered yellow MG, the one she’d driven out of her life in Hartford, and following me home. I thought, when I got her here, how everything seemed rounding toward completion—some reasonable, of course not perfect shape. Gardiner, a.k.a. Rubin Teitelbaum, would have laughed himself silly if he’d heard me say those words, completion and perfect. And of course I know completion isn’t possible.  But still, Gardiner was more wrong that I was. His idea of completion didn’t have anything to do with love.

Just finished off old Io. When I took on these Metamorphoses illustrations I wasn’t much interested in the text: I took it for the money of course and then it was something to put in my portfolio. Also there was this little feeling about obliging Gardiner—which I would never admit to Matt—since Poundstone was sort of a friend of his. Was. But making these illustrations—each drawing seems to go into some dark terrain, you’ve got these powerful capricious gods and goddesses fiddling around in the lives of these poor foolish mortals and there’s all this mutability that’s so potent and dazzling and scary and seductive.

Anyway, I’m done with poor old doomed Io.

previous,  25 September, cont’d                                                                      next,  27 September

G. H.

25 September, cont’d.

She dispenses with any preamble. “Why weren’t you answering your cell? Look, I meant what I said at breakfast. We should call the Humane Society. Or animal control, an exterminator.   Whatever. I thought I’d start calling around. I’d be happy to, because this is just ridiculous. For God’s sake, we’ve got to get rid of it or you’ll die from lack of sleep.”

“Listen,” he reaches for a tone of reason—as if it were a ripe peach hanging, stretched for, stretched for—but too far, utterly out of reach—“We don’t even know whether the thing’s there or not. So what are we supposed to say, ‘Hi, there, we think we may have a problem. But maybe not. We may have a raccoon in our crawl space. Or not. So, got any ideas, guys?’”

“Approximately, yes.”’

“Approximately? Why not exactly? Look, I think it’s ridiculous to be calling people for help with a problem we’re not even sure we have. Let’s just give ourselves a couple of days to sort this out, we’ll talk about it later, okay? It’s not like losing two nights of sleep killed anybody, okay?”

She says nothing for what seems to him a very long time. “Okay.” And hangs up.

His brain translates the buzzing of the phone into the conviction that the animal is there and won’t leave easily, as it had come, of its own obscure volition. Interesting question, volition, where is his in all this and where is hers, and why are they suddenly at variance—its like the petals of a flower in a time-lapsed film, opening, spreading away from one another and then falling off: beauty budded, blossomed, dead and meaningless, all in an eyelash of time. But he knows he’s evading the issue—which is? Is it the falling petals or the animal? Hot fingers of nausea clench his stomach. For the first time he sees his marriage as a separate being, fragrant, perfect, but fragile as an infant, that he and Sarah have created. A life long-for, treasured, and now troubled because—because of what? An almost laughable homeowner’s problem, the stuff of dinner party anecdotes? Because he is tired and irritable beyond anything she’s ever seen in him before? Because the semester has just started for her? Surely these are explanation enough. But the clutch of sickness convinces him that something else is going on, that he is in the grip of something he doesn’t yet understand. He puts his head down on the desk and waits a few moments, until the nausea has passed.

He comes home an hour earlier than usual, with an armful of daisies, and standing behind her as she sits cross-legged on the worn intricacy of the living room carpet, sketching something, he scatters the flowers around her—carefully, so the white blooms will not land on the work on her lap desk. As she laughs and tips her head back for his kiss, he bends down and tucks a flower in her hair. “Mrs. M. coming for dinner?” She nods. “We better hurry, then.” He helps her to her feet and begins sliding daisies into the neck of her shirt, nudging then gently around. “This is my first try at flower arranging.” She laughs again and on their way up to the bedroom pauses to make sure the front door is bolted.

The bed is covered in daisies, and any sound that may emanate from the crawl space they cannot hear above their own.

And then, in the small space left before they will have to prepare for their guest, he asks conscientiously about her work (her drawings for a new Metamorphosis translation), “I was working on Io—the one who gets changed into a heifer?—when you decided to start gardening on me. But I’m worried about falling behind.”

“Relax, Max, by the time Poundstone’s finished the translation we’ll all be using walkers.” And in this way he most skillfully, most completely eluded and further conversation about the raccoon.

Until dinner, when Mrs. Morel interrupts her own commentary about the late Gardiner’s—and Sarah’s current—colleagues to inquire about the animal. And having ascertained what the situation is, dredges from the frightening depths of her handbag a bedraggled notebook. After finding and studying the relevant page, she set the notebook down and resumed eating while she talks. “Yes. It’s right here, someone poor dear Gardiner once knew. Well, dears, his father had lived out West somewhere, as a boy—Michigan or Illinois or Idaho, some farmy state or other—and he had a great many dogs and cats.” Indicating vastness of quantity by a flourish of her fork, she propelled a fat, opalescent bead of salad dressing onto her spectacles and a bit of red lettuce into Matthew’s wine glass. Her vision impaired by the oily dribble, Mrs. Morel paused, frowned, then gave a gallant toss of her head before continuing. Matthew and Sarah avoided looking at one another.

“He also had,” she paused again, this time for effect, “a pet raccoon. Quite a large one, and frightfully clever. The raccoon, of course, was often in the house because he could easily get all the food he wanted there, and because he could climb up the bricks of the fireplace to the mantelpiece. And from there he would take glorious leaps down onto the back of any dog who happened by. Naturally, it wasn’t long before all the dogs learned to stay out of the parlor, and that smart little animal got the family all to himself every evening. Imagine how clever.”

Mrs. Morel’s tale meandered on for a bit, but Matthew turned tail, as it were, and hid behind the first available tree—by clearing the table, making and serving the decaffeinated coffee. And so managed to be where his wife could not see him as she confessed, laughing but irritated (because what was Mrs. M. getting at, asking so archly?), to having not yet seen the animal.

While Mrs. Morel’s frequent gracing of their dinner table over the last few months had never delighted Matthew, he had never found her conversation so irksome, nor the cat scent, now rising in heady waves from the late Gardiner’s black turtleneck jumper, so obscene and inescapable. Fortunately for him, and as was her inviolable custom, exactly nine minutes after being served her coffee, Mrs. Morel pronounced the dinner delicious and thanked them and declared she really must be getting home and no, dears, she really prefers to walk home, and will let herself out, and does so.

Matthew allowed himself only enough time for a deep breath before beginning. “My God, she really reeked tonight. If it gets any worse the Board of Health’ll cordon off the entire neighborhood.”

He could see by her look that Sarah felt the lash in this, but all she replied was, “I know. I was thinking during dinner that I should stop over there tomorrow and take some of her things to the cleaners.”

“Take her to the cleaners and leave her there.”

“Matty—”

“I mean it, Sar, she’s really been getting on my nerves lately. I don’t see why she’s got to be here for dinner all the time.”

“It isn’t all the time, it’s two or three times a week, just like we agreed when we found out she didn’t have a fridge and the stove was broken and she couldn’t cook, anyway.”

“Right, but we were supposed to figure out something better than becoming her permanent soup kitchen. We can buy her the fridge and then all we’ll need is an electrician with a head cold so bad he can stand the stench in that house long enough to fix the stove and whatever else she’s broken in that kitchen.”

“For God’s sake, you know she won’t let anybody but us into her house. You know I’ve tried a hundred times to get her to let people in to help. She won’t let an electrician in, or a house cleaner, or Meals on Wheels—you tell me how to fix this. I’d be just as glad as you would to get her out of our hair, but right now I just feel stymied. Anyway, you were the one who said it really wasn’t safe for an old lady to be walking around alone, up and back from Farmington Ave. at night. You agreed to all this, you know you did. Besides, Gardiner did a lot for me, I don’t think this is doing so much to repay him.”

“Gardiner’s dead, Sarah.”

He watched her chin jerk up as if the brutality of this were physical; she stared at him and he was horrified at what she saw: his narrowed eyes and jutted jaw, which slackened as he watched her rise from the table. “You’re being a perfect shit,” she pronounced, “sleep deprivation really does not suit you at all.” And carrying her coffee cup before her with both hands, as if it were the triumphal bowl of Argument Won, makes an impeccable exit into the kitchen.

Before him lay the aftermath of battle: the drying carnage of chicken bones, the scattershot of peas, the crusting stains of orange sauce that marked Mrs. Morel’s place at the table. Her cloth napkin was missing, and with dreary certainty Matthew knew that she had stolen it. She probably wrecked that stove on purpose. She and Gardiner, boy, they both were great at getting what they wanted.

For another moment Matthew considered this, then went into the kitchen and apologized, in general terms , to Sarah: that is offered an apology with the ensuing explanation that always begins, “I don’t know, I guess I’m just—”.   And perhaps because of the daisies and the raccoon and the tender shoot of justice that sprouted from his complaints, she is amenable to reconciliation, and thus a certain peace was reestablished in the house. Until, of course, the scratching noise began again.

And again the night opens into a dark and twisting corridor of doors through which any action seems unhinged from purpose or consequence. Rising from bed, feeding the animal and staring into its eyes, trying for sleep, failing, rising to walk yet another walk.

On which I follow, ever closer.

But he doesn’t notice. And doesn’ look at the houses, doesn’t play his game of redesigning them for their owners. He avoids the sight of a porch listing crazily with neglect and the heavings of too many frosts, or the cluttered whimsy of several Gothic revival rooflines.

Especially not the rooflines. And here, with the small suns of the streetlights shining, he can see no stars. So he walks head down, heedlessly, rapidly crisscrossing Fern and Prospect, North Whitney and Elizabeth streets until they swing past like so many doors in the maze he has already entered—until he has no idea where he walks. Only that the image of the raccoon, as it had faced him again this night, always goes before him, and the sound of his feet on the leaf­strewn walks is the sound of the animal scratching.

Only a few more days, I think, a few more days.

previous,  25 September                                                                          next,  Sarah’s Journal  

G.H.

25 September

When Sarah woke he was sitting, slump-shouldered, on the foot of the bed, facing the crawl space door, a hammer in his hand. She watched him silently for a long moment; he did not move. Finally, softly, she said, “Hi.”

He jumped up, spun around to face her. “Holy shit, you startled me.”

“Let me guess. Either our little visitor is about to get whacked or you misplaced your toothbrush.”

He looked at her blankly. She nodded at the hammer. “Oh. This. I was just waiting for you to wake up so i could go in there and pry that board off.”

“You must be exhausted. Sweetheart. Need some help?”

“I’m fine. I’m just wonderful. I’m just jim-crackin’ dandy.”

“You need coffee.”

“I need sleep. I already put the coffee on, but you could bring me some while I’m doing this.”

“Of course. Sure you don’t need me to hold the flashlight or anything?”

“Nah. I think there’s enough light in here.”

“He watched her cast a dubious look at the pallid light that drooped in when she opened the blinds above the bed. He was intricately busy finding and putting on jeans, socks, and shoes, until she left the room—he did not want her to see the plastic containers inside the crawl space. He was sure she’d have wanted to talk about it: what time he’d decided to do it, had the animal eaten it, what they should do next—no. Not now, anyway. So, before he pried the board off he rinsed out the containers the animal hadn’t emptied and hid them under the bathroom sink. He saw nothing, heard nothing, as he undid his work of the night before.

A mile or so away, as Matthew and Sarah were beginning their breakfast, a crew was already at work burying another section of the Park River. South Main Street was cacophonous with the heavy machinery, vehicles crawled around the construction site in rutted paths, and from a distance the thrum of their engines sounded as the low growl of domestic animals at the edge of some disaster they do not understand. Matthew, sitting at the table, scanning the Courant’s account of a delay in the work, was stricken by the thought of the raccoon on the banks of the river, the disappearing banks, one displacement precipitating another. Right into my goddamn house. (He scanned the article on his phone, Mrs. Morel having arrived particularly early this morning.)

“Want to try this? Berry told me about it. Supposed to be good. It’s got bananas in it.”

Matthew jerked himself, with some difficulty, back to the present moment: materializing beneath his eyes was a steamy, farinaceous substance, pungent with artificial sweetness, horribly flecked with a drastic yellow. He pushed it back across the table to her. “Not only don’t I want to try it, I don’t even want to be in the same room with it.”

“You are not sweetness and light when you’re this exhausted.” She shook her head at the ashy discolorations beneath his eyes. “Poor love.” She picked up the bowl of cereal, sniffed it, then escorted it to the sink. She returned to the table, flicking back her long hair with the same twitch of distaste a cat might use on getting caught in the rain, but knowing it must nevertheless continue on. “So. What d’you think, you think maybe we should call the dog warden, or animal control, or whatever they call it? Maybe the Humane Society? We can’t be the only people this has ever happened to, they’ve got to know something. More than we do, anyway.”

“No.” Matthew was looking back down at his phone.

She waited. “No? Just ‘No’? As in, what? As in, ‘No, the problem’s solved now?’ As in ‘No, I have it on absolutely no authority whatsoever that they won’t know anything more than we do?’ As in ‘No, don’t talk to me about this now because I’m extremely snarky from lack of sleep?’ What ‘No?’”

“No, as in I’m snarky, as you put it, and this isn’t a problem and we don’t have to make a big deal about it, okay?”

“Okay, fine.”

Above the screen of his phone he watched her stand abruptly, fix each of them bowls of cold cereal, milk, and authentic bananas, and return to the table. She set his bowl before him, then began to eat in miffed silence. Contrition pricked him. He dropped the pretense of newspaper, sagged in his chair, rolled his empty juice glass listlessly between his hands. He knew she was watching him, but he was helpless, unable to speak, as if a stranger were asking for some unknown thing, urgently, in an unknown language.

“Do you think it’s still up there?” she asked suddenly, “I want to see it.”

“What am I, appointment secretary for the animal kingdom? Sorry, I’m sorry. I don’t know, go look.”

But the idea of her seeing the animal—for some reason he thought ‘witnessing’, not ‘seeing’ it—this brought him to his feet. The juice glass clattered to the table; as he snatched it up and stilled its sound he heard another.

“What’s the matter?”

He stood as rigid as the animal had stood in the flashlight’s beam. “Didn’t you hear that? That’s it, that’s him. Our friendly neighborhood fiend. Or I think it was—go, go on, take your look.”

Sarah walked quietly, rapidly, out of the kitchen and up the stairs, all the while making hushing motions behind her back at Matthew, whispering as he followed her that the squeak of his shoes on the bare wooden stairs would frighten the animal away.

“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing here?” And he grinned and placed his hands on her hips as she went up. And now he saw what an absurdity all his upset was. Embarrassing, really. As if he’d shouted out the contents of an infantile dream while sleeping on a crowded aeroplane.

In the bedroom doorway she stopped. Matthew could hear nothing now, and whether Sarah could or could not, she crossed the room with her head at a listening angle, opened the crawl space door, bent her head and entered. Gingerly pushed at a carton with the toe of her shoe. Paused, then backed out and closed the door. “I didn’t see him. You sure he’s still there?”

“I’m not sure of anything. Hope he’s not there. With the board down, now, he probably already took off. But if he’s still there, it’s probably just as well he wasn’t where you could see him. Or him, see you. He could be rabid. He might bite.”

“I don’t think—oh, my God, d’you see what time it is? I’m supposed to be at that curriculum committee meeting, it’s the first one and I can’t be late—I’ve got to run.”

And soon they were both gone, and the animal, this morning, unseen.

This hiddenness and other questions about the raccoon, and related questions, such as whether the burial of the river really was in some way responsible for the animal’s presence: these questions swarmed up at him as soon as he was in the car, undistracted, alone. Soon he would pass the construction zone, soon reach the haven of work. But the thought of work really provided no refuge: answered questions buzzed distractingly, circled laden with germs of apprehension. As he jostled over the torn and buckled pavement, he wondered if the burial of the river here would change its course behind his house. Not that that branch of the river could even be called a river, really. Most of the year it was a slow, shallow stream; only when it was spring-quickened with the rush of melting snow and rain, could you honestly call it a even a brook. But he’d miss the sound of it, if the heavy machinery sucked it dry, regret the loss of light trickling through the trees, pooling on the water.

The river had been, his grandfather told him, one of the reasons that the small house—the one Matthew still lived in—had been bought. The other reason had been that Matthew’s grandfather had once lived, in a much larger house, across the street. Of the house before part of the roof was raised to create the larger bedroom he now occupied—and whose room it was before it was his grandfather’s—Matthew’s memory was dark, but the stream behind it he remembered in silvered slants: while uncomfortably perched atop a boulder, dangling a vain line for fish; while his grandfather, on a bony folding chair in a rag of shade behind Matthew, chatted about the glory days of his grocery store, or about baseball; while his reading of a Hardy Boys’ adventure is interrupted by his grandfather’s shouting to Eddie to get his tuckus out of that tree Or Else.

Or else, orelse, orelse? Eddie singsongs down.

Or Else I’ll give you What For.

What for, whatfor, whatfor? Sings Eddie, his skinny legs kicking chunks of air.

What For is sweeping the kitchen floor, that’s What For, and maybe you mop it, too. And Eddie scrabbling his way down from the tree, his grandfather calling, Go around, little monkey, the other way, other way, Kahtscup, so you don’t fall in the river.

The river’s banks were ravaged now, by beer cans, condoms, plastic cups and other trash, but these you could clean up, these you could look beyond. Beyond even the light, the sound, the boy in his tree and the old man in his rag of shade was a sort of idea. That a river must have a source that you could follow it to, that it ran where it ran for a reason, abiding by its own necessary laws. Unless, of course, someone decided to dam it, or change its course, or bury it. And even then you couldn’t change its source.

But who is to know, really, about sources, how things come about, and whether causes really matter? The longing for explanation, the desire to know is, however, in some souls very great. It is also a craving demanding of satisfactions the world, most often, most resolutely, denies.

My subject, for example, this Matthew Goldsmith. From my brief observation he appears to be an ardent angler in the river of knowledge, a fearful and perhaps chronically hungry angler who becomes so tangled in speculation, so becoiled in the slippery filaments of first causes, cellular origins, that he often misplaces ready nourishment—the present moment, with its hangnails, glances, and tea-stained pots (with their own sorrows and glories) may simply be lost to him, it seems, exactly as if it were the detritus of a half-forgotten dream. Which, moreover, someone else may have dreamt. But in following the line back to causation he seems convinced that if only he can get it unsnarled he could deftly flick his wrist, make the perfect cast, and catch the fat fish of conclusion that will satiate. I suspect he rarely stops to consider whether the line is worth untangling, whether edible fish even swim in this particular stream. But perhaps these considerations are unimportant to him; perhaps the purpose of these speculative fishing trips is merely to get away? From what, I am as yet ignorant.

I see that I’ve begun to obtrude my own reflections into these notes and observations, something I hadn’t intended to do. But there they are. There, alas, am I. And as I am, most helplessly, an opinionated being, I suppose my I was bound to give a wink somewhere in this chronicle (I admit my affection for the pun, a low device but of admirable lineage). Having thus let my I loose upon the scene, and in the interest of making this record a more complete one—particularly as I contemplate a more active role in the events herein detailed, I may as well introduce myself. Well then.

My name is George Hooper. Some individuals, indeed, have accorded me the title of honor, and called me Sir George, although the pages of Debrett fail to ratify this. (The circumstances surrounding this omission are of no concern here, though I feel compelled to confirm my connection to the illustrious Sir Ferris Hooper, known to all literate denizens of England as Hooper of Malmsea.) I reside, at present, in the environs of Hartford, Connecticut.

My profession, if I may so dignify an amateur’s passion, is natural science; the work I completed most recently was a monograph on the effects that certain weeds and wildflowers of English origin have had on the plant ecology of the United States—as well as the reverse effect, of certain American originals now flourishing in England. But that is not the subject here, nor is the details of my life. Which has, in any event, been an exceedingly quiet one. I’ve traveled, of course, but most of my too many years have been devoted to rather undramatic pursuits. Reading and inquiry, none of it terribly systematic; long walks companioned, until recently, only by thought. Well. But now I’ve discovered a most compelling interest—intellectual curiosity or simple boredom or other factors have led me to—in short, I am now performing a very different sort of research. My first attempt with a human subject. The effects of sleep deprivation. And so on. On this young man. Quite without his knowledge, I must admit, and chosen quite at random: chanced upon as he, like me—like all of us, at least once in a while—was walking alone in the dark. Of course I understand there is a prevailing ethic of informed consent and so forth, but the design of the experiment is such—and at any rate, I intend the young man no harm.

Very well, then. This explanation, or introduction, if you will, having been duly entered into these notes, I can return to my subject.

Given the questions of his morning, it is not at all surprising that toward the middle of Matthew’s day of sketching and figuring, amid the rising of possibilities that he demolished with the next second’s thought—it is not at all surprising that somewhere between a parti and a phone call he saw a small masked face peer out between the carefully ruled lines of a set of schematics.   Not that these were anywhere in sight; they were old ones, carefully filed away, of their first residential job. A master bedroom addition for the Rivers. Rivers buried. The shadows of fleeing animals—

No. He was here, drafting ordinary lines. And therefore could shake his head and refresh the screen of his computer and will himself to hear, in the soft hum of the HVAC system, in the staccato of Katie’s computer in the carpeted middle distance—even in the beeping of the phones—the reassuring notes of an orderly existence. His.

For several more hours, then, Matthew felt, in all but total honesty, that any discordant note in the harmony of his mood derived only from the janglings of complex and unfinished ideas. At the end of these several hours, however, he chanced to look up and notice, through the doorway, a Wall Street Journal neatly folded on the edge of the conference room table. Which newspaper now unfolded for him his morning’s stolen paper, and so Mrs. Morel, his empty house, his wife rushed out, his unempty house. The animal thrumming and scratching on the dusty subflooring of the crawl space. The draft pushing its way out from under the crawl space door to become a late September wind flooding his house with cold, a wind rising up so far away he couldn’t even imagine the incalculable distances it had blown across nor for how long, such a long wind, long time—

His head fell off the fist it was resting on and the sudden loss of support woke him. What was he shivering for? Wasn’t cold here. And as if to demonstrate to himself that he was not only awake but firmly, comfortably here and could fend off, like Prospero, all harm-wielding spirits, he got up and paced the tastefully laid byways of his domain.

The Sturniday Building, home to Gordon and Goldsmith Architects, as well as other small concerns bold enough to venture into this part of the city, was the beribboned champagne bottle that had launched their firm. Matthew’s design work on the old typewriter factory had won the firm two local awards (fossilized in Lucite and on display in the reception area) and several columns of compliments in the local press (see clippings in rosewood frames, same display), which Timothy had used, quite skillfully, to chart their success. In other words, Timothy pitched, and Matthew hit. Timothy was pitching now, swaying from side to side beside his desk, talking on speaker, his arms invisibly winding up, for a potential client, enthusiasm and conviction. Matthew went quickly by: the pitches Timothy was throwing these days were for renovations rather than new construction—pitches Matthew had little interest in hitting.

Still, this place was good, a decent piece of work. The smooth curves and smartened brickwork betrayed no hint of the wretched interior he’d first surveyed, no drafty corner in which to kneel and finger a pile of miscast typewriter keys, misshapen symbols never kissed with ink to make a word. Never stroked on paper pulped from a forest full of trees risen among the fragrance of midsummer ferns and the rustlings of animals, never to go forth fresh and crisp on the world’s business, not even so much as to leap across a cheap leaflet urging parents to attend a meeting about the desegregation of the city’s schools—a leaflet never to find its destiny as a blurred and shredded element of the reeking, cat-soaked paper piles that graced Mrs. Morel’s living room. No, the miscast typewriter keys Matthew found participated in nothing until he came home that night and mentioned them to Sarah, and in due course the sculpture she welded of them sprouted in crooked metallic splendor in the lobby of the building. So that surely there must be some decipherable connection between that day and this, between seeing that Wall Street Journal lying on the conference table and whatever obscure impulse it was that was making him prowl the office like a hungry bear. But he couldn’t see the connection, couldn’t name the impulse. He didn’t know anything. He was tired.

He pitched the folded Journal into the wastebasket on the way to his desk, then dropped into his chair. Glancing out into the golden late September afternoon he began to follow the rising of a dead and brilliant leaf, thinking of the unseen wind that was lifting the leaf and how a man watching from behind a window could deduce that wind, affirm its presence through indirection, in the red dance of the leaf. How we rely on such deductions to reach conclusions: a leaf pirouettes and therefore wind, scratching noise and therefore   Pick up the goddamn phone, Matt animal in the crawl space. Light flashing on the phone and therefore a phone call. He stared at the phone.

Katie appeared, leaning against the door frame, mighty arms folded beneath the bolster of her breasts. The rings in her fleshy ears gleamed annoyingly, the spikes of her prematurely grey hair looked alarmingly sharp. “’Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep–/ he hath awakened from the dream of life—’ Percy B. Shelley. Call for you. Been a call for you the last five minutes. Sarah. Told her you were here but should’ve told her you were composing an ode to the west wind and couldn’t be disturbed. C’mon, Percy, what’s your problem? Pick up the goddamn phone, Matt, so I can get back to work. Some of us do work around here, you know.”

It was the first time in his life that anyone had accused him of sloth. Shame, sticky and hot, dribbled over his ears and neck in a red mess as he waited for Katie to lever herself from the door frame, to take her mocking smile and righteously cocked head to the safe distance of her desk, before he picked up the phone.

next,  25 September, cont’d.

previous,  24 September        

The Entries                                           

G.H.

24 September

It is possible that the noise the raccoon made entered Sarah’s dreams. It is quite certain That Matthew slept only briefly before the clawing woke him. This time, this second night, he rose from bed and grabbed a shoe and threw it at the crawl space door—a satisfying action, making a satisfyingly loud noise. But an action whose only discernible consequences were a black scuff mark on the crawl space door, and Sarah’s waking.

“Matt, my God, what is it?”

“It’s okay, Max, just me.” He stumbled back to the bed and sat on the edge, listening.

“Sweetheart?”

“Damn thing. Don’t worry about it. Sorry I woke you up, babe. Go back to sleep.”

“Are you kidding? What’d we do, board it in?

“Seems so. Shhh.”

He made himself count to fifty, one hundred, before moving. Quietly across the room to the night table, the flashlight in the drawer. Quietly walking back, unlocking the crawl space door. Sliding his thumb on the cool plastic flashlight button, waiting as his pupils contracted with the access of light. Turning the lock, the cold knob, urging the door ajar. And in the light the animal crouched for the thinnest of moments, for the thinnest of moments staring with eyes stained red by Matthew’s light.

And then gone.

Matthew took two steps but could see nothing. Nothing. Not wanting somehow to go further in, not wanting to turn around to retreat, he took a few steps backward. A rustling. He thrust his arm into a darkness that suddenly seemed enormous, swung the flashlight’s beam in wild arcs. Something moved again, thumped—in a whirl of rage he kicked at cartons, banged the flashlight against the sharply angled rafters, Eddie’s crutches clattered to the floor as Matthew slashed his light again and again through the small darkness, screaming, “Sonofabitch, sonofabitch, sonofabitch!”

Silence.

Chest heaving, he slammed the crawl space door, locked it, sat heavily on the bed. Only then did he become aware of Sarah, kneeling on the bed, watching him. Her hand came down gently on his shoulder. “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll get it out.”

He fell back onto the bed, clicked the flashlight off. “Brilliant, just brilliant. I boarded the damn thing in. Must have been hiding behind some boxes or something. Trapped myself an animal.” He yanked up the covers. “Have to figure something out tomorrow.” He draped an arm around her. “C’mon,Max, let’s get some sleep.”

“Exactly how are we supposed to sleep with this going on?”

He listened. Behind the wood of the low door, behind the plaster and lath of the wall, the animal, too, was still, listening perhaps for danger. So close, no more than a few feet away, maybe. Strange it would stay, but maybe not, it’s used to living close to other kinds of life, other animals in the woods. Maybe it doesn’t seem strange to him, having us lying here on the other side of the door. I mean, people come along, we build huts and factories, pyramids and skyscrapers and suburbs and slums—maybe to him that’s strange, he’s just trying to get on with his life, with all these bizarre barriers in the way.

The models of projects displayed in his offices were miniature wonders complete with delicately leafed trees and shrubs perfectly shaped and placed, as minute and artificial as the buildings they surrounded—the ones he’d designed. He shivered with revulsion and pulled the covers closer. Maybe his work was only artifice, too, only hubris transformed into mass and volume.

But people have to live somewhere; not many of them, in this country, anyway, if you gave them the choice, would want to live in tents and caves, and the people living in fridge boxes and under bridges, don’t they deserve better than that, don’t they? And what about the great buildings, the cathedrals palaces mosques museums temples—they’re structures of aspiration a longing for beauty prayers to the sublime—they should’ve been built, they should’ve, they express something of worth. Some of them, anyway.

After a long silence he answered her. “It’ll be quiet now, Max. C’mon, turn over—I’ll rub.”

His fingers searched out the knots of anxiety in her back, began rubbing them in slow circles until they began to come undone, until she fell asleep. Even then he continued, concentrating on the circles, on the orderly, shapely alignments of bone and muscle in her back, the circles slowing down as he falls into sleep. When the animal begins to rake its claws against the woods beside their heads.

This time when Matthew rose from bed he did not go for the flashlight or the crawl space door; he stalked down the hall to Eddie’s room. Heaps of their unfolded laundry and several of Sarah’s coats obscured his brother’s narrow bed, whose unmade refuge he sought. He pushed the coats aside, dumped the laundry to the floor. Closed the door to close out sound.

The mattress was cold, lumpy with age and too many bad nights, but he persevered, layering the coats over himself, molding himself to the form of sleep. Certainly this process was a familiar one, if rarely blessed with success. Try: to slip the rope from its mooring, to let the sails rise and fly like desperate, pent-up birds released, to shove away from the troublesome shore of wakefulness. Abandon knowing for not, sail resolutely away from islands of memory beckoning with their treacherous scents—his brother’s sweat on the uncased pillow, the scent of his wife on her coats: abjure resentment at having to leave her and their bed, ignore an ache now surfacing in the back of his thighs, as if from muscles seized between the desire to run and the grip of waiting.

Go away from it all. Go. Into a dimly lit room where there is only a chair and a table and on the table a ball of string, large and lumpy with many different lengths and colors and types of string from packages. And you sit at the table and slowly undo the ball, carefully untie each knot. Over and over, knowing that if you persist you’ll get to the center of the ball, where there won’t be string but something else—possibly wondrous, certainly different. Pick apart each and every knot, green cord from the department store from yellow twine from the hardware store from fuzzy red string the man at the bookstore uses. You know this string is very old because it’s all faded, and because no one uses it for packages anymore and that is part of the point, the uselessness of these ravelly remainders of forgotten purchases, they should be pulled apart. Knot by knot by knot, not him, not here. No decencies of house and job and prudent car and terrific wife asleep in a bed you can’t share because a rabid animal has invaded your careful hoard of decencies. Knot by knot by knot. A pair of hands patiently working the old strings’ knots to be undone one by one, unraveling to the secret center where there will not be nothing. Not. See only this, only this, no sound, no cars moving on wet pavement to who knows where, see nothing, hear nothing only hands knots lights string.

It didn’t exactly work. Distantly, he heard, thought he heard, the scratching of the raccoon. Faintly, true, very faintly, but irritating still, like the sound of chalk squealing against a blackboard in the room he’s about to enter.

He enters late and sees Mr. Dubretsky, dubbed Fingers by his students, Fingers Dubretsky already turning from the blackboard, dusting chalk off his monstrous hands as he turns to face the Hebrew School class, as the sun falls in pathetic grandeur over the easeless roofs and telephone poles of the green suburban horizon. Fingers explaining the lessons to be learned from the story of Jonah and the whale. Sand pale, great-bellied Dubretsky hawking phlegm from his throat and telling the class God knew Jonah was on that ship, God made the storm so that Jonah would be thrown off that ship, and swallowed by that whale.

Oh, Matthew had dreamt about the whale’s insides, that night and others, those insides filled with hot bloody vomity things, things that smelled worse than the day the sewer backed up, that squeezed and tossed Jonah til he was so sick and scared he wanted to die and was afraid he would.

God arranged the whole thing, children, and God saw the whole thing, too, because God sees everything—sees Mr. Dubretsky gently adjust his kipa with his enormous spatulate fingers, sees Matthew lean across his desk to insert the icy tip of his ball-point pen through the orangey sunset cloud of Hillary’s hair so she will clutch at it and scream. God, children, knew that Jonah was a good man, He knew that as frightened as Jonah was, Jonah wouldn’t let the ship go down and the others die, just because of him. God sent the storm and the whale so Jonah could learn to face what he feared to do. To learn that we must answer to Him for what we choose to do.

The grey pouches beneath Fingers’ eyes are filled with a tender melancholy and deeply, anciently lined with the burden of expounding on Jonah’s fears and cowardice, his accountability and his rebellion.

So on the fourth day God made the whale vomit up Jonah, and he stood on the shore and was grateful even for the sand between his toes. His head was reeking of whale stomach but Jonah bent it anyway before God because Jonah knew at last, children, it was useless to try to run, he must do what and as God asks. So Jonah stood on the shore, and even though he wasn’t so happy about what God was saying, still he listened.

And Mr. Dubretsky, puffed and patient, sets before them in the dying light the harshly gleaming point. The meaning, children, is so: Jonah is a man, like all, responsible to Almighty God. And God can make the storm and the whale, but only Jonah can make up his own mind, to do what is right.

Heavy now with despair and exhaustion, Matthew came slowly to his feet, letting fall the warm protection of Sarah’s coats, blinking his eyes to clear from them the vision of sad-eyed Fingers Dubretsky, even now lurking in the deeper shadows of lamps and doorway and brushing his swollen fingers across the hairless bluff of his head and catching at his kipa—Matthew shook his head as if to elude the steady wheeze of Fingers’ voice, the persistent scratching of the animal in the unoffered shelter of the house.

Matthew shook his head to rid from it the worst of Jonah’s punishments, the most terrible pain of all: tossed, swallowed, vomited, and frightened as Jonah was, he still could not escape.

What the hell does it matter, what the hell does any of this have to do with anything, the damn noise, damn animal, what am I going to do?

Because even here the scratching reached him, even here it was ineluctable, and impossible to ignore. And it would reach him, he knew, anywhere in the house. He could sleep in the car, walk the abandoned street, check into some motel, but these choices seemed to him not only absurd, but more of an effort than he could will himself to make. Rubbing at his scalp as if to loosen it, he concluded at last that he was just going to be awake all night. Might as well be warm, then, and in his own bed with Sarah. And thus returned to the louder noise, the more easeful bed.

Sarah moaned and tossed in her sleep but did not waken. He lay beside her, trying to concentrate on the sound of her breathing, instead heard only the rasp of the animal’s claws. Okay. Okay. Why?

The reason the animal scratched, perhaps, was simply that it was trapped, was searching for a way out, in which case he’d have to wait until morning to go in there and pry off the board he’d nailed up. Other possibilities: it was sick or injured, trying to make a nest or some place to rest. Or hungry: searching for food.

Could be. Could do it. He’d give it food and if the thing was sick the food might give it the strength to go away, and if it was just hungry then food might keep it quiet. So Matthew could get some sleep.

With this sanguine reasoning as impetus, he descended to the kitchen.

Water, need that first. He filled a plastic yogurt container with tap water, then found himself stymied: he had no idea what a raccoon might eat. After hunting through the cabinets and refrigerator for some minutes, he dared a selection: an apple cut in chunks, a small can of tuna. He put the containers on a small tray and, going carefully so as not to spill or drop, he returned upstairs.

He heard a scurry, a thump as he opened the crawl space door. Come and get it, you little bastard. He set the bowls well inside. No sound at all.

In the continuing silence he returned to bed, stretched himself on the strength of modest hope. It would be all right now. He waited. A distant splashing of water, small circling of waves. Circling, circling silence. hands

He and Sarah were holding hands, a light Roman wind was blowing as they gazed at the facade of S. Maria della Pace when the animal clawed him back to wakefulness.

Considering the complexity of this experiment, I believe it is proceeding well. I now begin to contemplate the next steps.

previous,   Sarah Asleep                                                                                     

next,    25 September

The Entries

Sarah asleep

Something of the rhythm of lovemaking. Some random word spoken in the day, dropped to rise again and again tonight. Lemon verbena. Lemonver bena. Verb en a lemon a Lebanon lime. Metal wheels turning time turningtime turning time, sing me a story without any rhyme. Just the rocking of the train that’s all, just the rocking of the train ain n. From the echoes of Grand Central where we change and change the train to Berry’s Dad in Pennsylvania, just the rhythm of the train ain ain. Scratching circles on the tracks, the backs of tracks the backsof tracks. What was that sachet your Mom put in my suitcase, lemonwood, lemonweed, No, dummy, verbena. Whirring the wheels, scratching the tracks. I want to go to the front of the train, c’mon Berry, and then we’ll see the back of the train when it curves around a hill. What are these hills, Berry—Berry, why are the wheels so loud? I don’t like that the trains so loud and I’m too old to be so scared. Don’t sleep now, Berry, how can you sleep, the seat is scratching my ear. Isn’t it scratchy, isn’t it, how can you sleep? I’m scared but I should, too. Will, too. Sleep even with the scratchy seat and all the wheels so loud. Sleep until there’s Berry’s Dad and then the farm in Pennsylvania where there’s spotted cows that make the cream for ice cream. I cecream I won’t be scared I want to go to sleep away from the wheels and the scratching sound round and round and loud and loud. Shut my eyes so I don’t see the dark.

next,  24 September

previous,   Violet Morel’s Notebook     

The Entries