Antonia Lively Breaks the Silence (3 page)

Catherine froze, her eyes fixed on Wyatt. Her chest tightened as the coil of her despair wound tighter and tighter around her heart. “How is that even remotely possible?” she asked, but Wyatt, already passed out, didn't answer her.

Over those next few days, Catherine had wanted to ask him about his encounter with Henry, but she knew that pressing him would do no good, just as she had known that nothing positive could have come from a meeting between the two men. Like so many other discussions that should have happened and didn't, the right moment to ask Wyatt about his conversation with Henry had never come along. Time passed, yet the moment had never left her completely alone, or at peace. Though it had taken her some years to adjust to life in Winslow, she'd always found comfort in the distance that had separated Wyatt and her from Henry. Shouldn't leaving the city, she thought, have guaranteed that at least?

Once, a few weeks after she'd learned about Henry's relocation to Winslow, Catherine had brought up the idea of Wyatt's looking for a new position at a different college. “Um, go where, and with what exactly?” he'd asked. “Oh, you mean with my best-selling novel that everyone's reading? No, Catherine, I don't think so. This is our life. We might as well get used to it.”

Sometimes as Catherine crossed the bridge and drove past Henry's house on her way into the mountains, she liked to imagine what might have been rather than what was—that Henry had never taken her on as his advisee, that she had never brushed up against Wyatt in Penn Station. That she had never known what it felt like to hate a man as much as she hated Henry Swallow. Sometimes she liked to believe in a kinder, more benevolent spirit who had never tangled her fate up with Wyatt's or Henry's, a spirit that had worked through her and had cautioned the girl she'd been about the path she'd set for herself. Sometimes, like tonight, she imagined that she had listened to this spirit and that it had worked through her and that she was more prepared to meet her future—whatever it might be. A future where she and Wyatt were on their way to Henry's house for dinner at that moment. Once there, they'd laugh and reminisce about their days in New York, when they were younger and their potential seemed like something real. She pictured his stately old house on the hill, the rolling, manicured lawns, the mountains in the near distance. Like so many nights since Wyatt's death, she imagined Henry's house filled with light and music, the table done up with china and candles, the savory, delicious smells of a lavish meal. At the door, Henry, in an apron, would welcome them with a big hello as Wyatt handed him the bottle of wine and Catherine let go of his hand to take Henry's. Then she'd toss her arms around him, hugging him like the confidant and good friend he'd been, while Wyatt poured the wine into three perfect glasses, and they toasted one another, and friendship everlasting.

The Envelope

_____

It was a wildly hot, bright afternoon in 1988 when Henry Swallow stepped off the train in Winslow for the first time. He was fifty-six, years removed from the younger man who'd taught and mentored Catherine Strayed. Still, even as he headed to his meeting at the college, he couldn't help but look for her in the faces of every woman he passed. What would she make of his appearance in the town? Winslow was the last place on earth he ever imagined himself, yet when the position as director of the college's writing program became available, Henry's name was at the top of the list of candidates. He was suddenly free, with oceans of time before him: after several years of teaching at Columbia, he had resigned his position before the university could bring him up on charges of sexual misconduct—just as NYU had done years earlier. Perhaps love was more important than teaching, he reasoned, and he left quietly and without a hint of fuss or regret. But a man had to eat and to pay his bills and to live his life, and so to the utter bafflement of his friends and colleagues, and certainly to Wyatt and Catherine, Henry Swallow, the consummate New Yorker and renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning critic, abandoned his Upper West Side apartment and the city he loved, saying good-bye to an ex-wife, Joyce, and his only son, Ezra, for a new beginning in rural upstate New York. He bought an old yellow Italianate house out on Old Devil Moon Road, a place that came with ten acres of land and a glorious view of the mountains. He had chosen the house out of so many others, yet today as he stood gazing at Deadwood Library from his office window, he realized the house had chosen him. Once a beautiful house, half of it now lay in ruins.

In the weeks since the fire, he'd only been back once to pack up some clothes and collect his typewriter, all of which sat in his small hotel room. He hadn't had the stomach to check the workers' slow, laborious progress or repairs. They told him it would take months, though he was sure it would stretch on and on, not because he didn't trust them but because everything in Winslow moved at its own leisurely pace. He had grown used to the town's glacial slowness but not to its overzealous neighborliness, the hellos in the morning and good-evenings at night, the door-holding, the well-wishing, the pleases, and the pardon-me's. For the first year, he made frequent trips to Manhattan, hating himself for how quietly he'd given in and left. His life and all that he loved was still there, going on without him, and the realization overwhelmed and saddened him. More than once, he wrote a letter of resignation, but then something happened—a family of deer in his yard on a snowy morning, a minor flirtation with a talented young writer, a good meal at the cafe—and he was renewed, vowing to fall in love with Winslow.

Henry turned from his office window toward his desk, where the novel, his latest review assignment, sat open and calling. While the writing was adequate, the story was less so, the plot empty of heart, the characters empty of life. He thought about Wyatt Strayed, the poor review he'd given
The Last Cigarette,
because that's what it had deserved, because that's what most contemporary novels that he read deserved. He thought, however egotistically, that he'd been doing Wyatt a favor. Though the guy had real talent, it just wasn't apparent in this incarnation. At least, that's what he maintained as he'd written the review and confirmed later as he saw it in print. His reviews were nothing if not fastidious and candid and, above all, true. Over time, they had achieved a certain pitch and majesty; he wasn't Henry Swallow for nothing. He had hoped, as always, that the writer understood this and that after the initial shock and disappointment wore off he'd find something in the review that was helpful, something that enabled him to see the flaws, the novel that should have been written rather than the novel that was. They never learned, though, did they? They just kept writing one awful book after another, he thought. Not Wyatt, however. No. Not Wyatt.

Sitting down at the desk, Henry picked up the novel and here, beneath it, was the envelope, still unaddressed. He sighed, glowering at it. He never addressed them, not until he arrived at the post office, and even then, after all these years, he found that his hand still shook whenever he wrote the address across it.

It was an early Thursday afternoon, the sun pinned high over his head, when Henry strolled out of Mead Hall. Even in shorts and T-shirt, he was drenched with perspiration by the time he got to the post office, a squat rectangular building on the edge of Broad Street. He waited his turn in line, asked for a stamp, then went off to write the dreaded address. Before dropping the envelope into the chute, however, where it would be sorted and, later, would make its way out to Osprey Point, Long Island, Henry stared at it, as though in shock. He was thinking about the girl, as he always did at these moments. Yes, there was also this, the sudden, inevitable arrival of memory and the weightless envelope in his fingers, this ongoing, despicable reminder of the last six years of his life.

How Happy I Was Last Night

_____

In the years between knowing him the first and second times, Catherine had heard various stories about Henry Swallow. She never sought out these stories—Wyatt offered them up to her without prompting. Since the review of his novel, he'd turned Henry into an unhealthy obsession and took great joy at any news of failure. While this pastime of his appalled Catherine, she knew she was powerless against it.

“He went to bed with a student. He's just so predictable,” Wyatt had said, disgusted. “Tell me something, Catherine: what girl in her right mind would sleep with that fusty parasite?”

His reaction upset her, yet she said nothing, her fear of discovery keeping her silent. Of course she knew what kind of girl bedded Henry Swallow, since at one time she had been one of his students and had learned everything there was to learn about him. This was ages ago, before she'd caught the tip of her cigarette on Wyatt's sleeve, before she'd married him, and moved to Winslow.

When they'd met in Penn Station, Catherine was on her way to visit her father in New Jersey, Wyatt to visit his parents in Connecticut. She was younger then and more likely to speak to a handsome young man with floppy blond hair and a fleshy mouth, a frayed copy of
The Sun Also Rises
under his arm. He was reading it, he said, because he had to.

“My instructor met Hemingway once. It changed her life. Can you imagine being in the company of someone like that?” He told her then that he was in his last semester at NYU and was at work on a novel, which was also his MFA thesis. “My adviser loves it, but I still have a long way to go,” he said morosely. “She has this theory: that if I'm patient, the novel will tell me what it wants to be.” Your novel, Catherine said. What does it want to be? “It wants to be the death of me, I think,” he replied, laughing. Whom did he like to read? Who were his inspirations? “The Russians,” he said. “Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov, Gogol.” He spoke about them with deference. “I've read
Poor Folk
a dozen times,” he said, quoting the first line:
My dearest Barbara Alexievna—How happy I was last night—how immeasurably, how impossibly happy!

In the twenty minutes she'd been with him that first day in Penn Station, Catherine began to imagine Wyatt as being as talented as any of his literary heroes.

“I see the Pulitzer at thirty,” she said. “I see the National Book Award at thirty-five.”

“Why stop there?” he said. “How about the Nobel Prize at forty?”

Then her train was announced and Catherine had to say good-bye, even as Wyatt scribbled down his number and offered it to her. She took it without hesitation, although she was already involved with someone else. That day in Penn Station, she couldn't have known she'd just met her future husband; she wasn't one of those lucky women who bumped up against a man and said, “Oh, yes, you'll do.” As Wyatt often reminded her later, it took a great deal to get her involved.

At the gate to her train, she turned around—she thought she'd heard her name—and caught a glimpse of the back of him, the slouchy brown corduroy jacket with the beige elbow patches. He already looked like a professor, though he wasn't, not yet. He was just a man of twenty-five who worked as a proofreader at a law firm to put himself through grad school, while Catherine was a woman of twenty-nine, who was also at NYU getting a PhD in comparative literature, and wholly unskilled at romance.

That was before I met you, Wyatt, she now thought, leaving the bookstore this late Thursday afternoon and wandering into the relentless heat. By the time she got into her car, she dripped with sweat and sagged with exhaustion. Everything shimmered in the sun, and when she blinked, her eyes stung. Having been unable to sleep, she'd read away much of the previous night. While rummaging through a stack of old magazines, she'd come across Antonia's short story and reread it and thought again just how wrong Louise had been. She believed that while it did have dark and disturbing elements, a good reader, a sharp reader, would have been able to see beneath this distraction to the story's beating heart, the redemption flowing through it. The writing, Catherine believed, was a triumph.

She'd been surprised, of course, even irritated the previous afternoon to have found the girl at the door, smoking, the easy way she'd breezed into the house, as if it were already hers. Then the way Antonia had glanced around the room, judging, thought Catherine, the shabby furniture, the disheveled bookshelves, even as she gaily complimented it all. Had her show of friendliness simply been an act? Catherine wasn't sure, but she was sure about Antonia's irrefragable talent, which, she had to admit, was exciting to her. Wyatt, she knew, would have hated the story, not because it was terrible but, on the contrary, because it wasn't. When Catherine read it again, like before, it had moved her to tears, further proof of the girl's daring gift.

She had many questions she wanted to ask the writer—about the mother and the father, the town (Galesburg, Vermont), and the era in which it was set (the late sixties)—and wished she'd had the nerve to ask when she'd had the chance. There was one, though, that lingered: was it a story Antonia had heard, or was it something she had lived through? The story had so much heart, and this heart, it seemed to Catherine, did not belong to Antonia's narrator but to Antonia herself.

If so, then the poor girl, she thought as she pulled up to the house. Had Antonia written the story as a way out? Was it about her own mother and father, her own tempestuous childhood? The story had touched Catherine in ways she couldn't begin to explain, at least not to her friends. If Wyatt had been here, she would have been able to explain it to him, because he knew her. Now sitting in the car, the broken air-conditioner pushing around the hot, stale air, Catherine felt again what she'd felt last night—that Antonia had reached down into her own life and, with surgical precision, carefully sliced back the skin to get at the dark matter of her girlhood. Not that Catherine had lived through anything as brutal as Antonia's narrator had, but the sentiment, the themes—of ownership, betrayal, and abuse—were just as clear. She sat in the car and looked at the cottage that sat a few feet behind the carport, in the far corner of the lot, imagining it filled up with light, the industry that had once been Wyatt's. She gazed at the opal blue wood, the navy blue trim and the opal blue door, these colors that she'd fought so hard for (Wyatt had no eye for aesthetics and had wanted the whole of it painted a dismal beige), willing the door to open and for Wyatt to step out. It was his cottage; she'd given it to him out of love. Now it was hers and she still had the unpleasant task of figuring out what to do with it. Finally, turning off the car's engine, she stepped out and thought, What if . . . ? In that moment, in all that silence, as the loneliness settled around her, Catherine thought again, What if . . . ? Then she climbed back into the car and headed out of the drive, the destination clear in her mind.

In the remaining daylight, the bony edifice of Mead Hall seemed to her less gloomy, the ivy a brighter shade of green against the stark red brick. Parking the car, she wondered if what she was doing was crazy, would seem impulsive. As she had no way of finding Antonia—clearly, thought Catherine, she's come to town to teach—she realized she'd have to start at the college. So here she was again, on campus, a place she'd sworn off, yet a place that also kept calling her back.

Glancing up at Wyatt's office now, she couldn't see a thing, because the sun's glare washed the window in orange. Still, she wondered if Henry had been at the window last night, and if so, why? The idea that it had been Henry left her feeling numb, and she thought twice about what she was about to do. Could she stand to be so near him again, to breathe the same air?

Though she hadn't spoken to Henry since the night he'd come to the house three years earlier, she had the misfortune of having to see him around town. Whenever she did happen to catch a glimpse of him, he was usually on his bike, or walking apace. He still had that sharp, clipped stride, which, she thought, was more appropriate for big cities than small towns. As she'd expected, he hadn't shown up at Wyatt's funeral, though a few days later he'd sent flowers and a condolence card. Then a few days after that she'd discovered a stack of books—advance-reader copies—on the porch.
Fiction is the only solace,
his note said. He'd always known what she liked to read, and she consumed the books in a matter of days. Yet it seemed to her that the real story lay beyond those pages, in the shadowy world she and Henry had shared for a time.

Through the steamy heat, she made her way into Mead Hall, up the stairs, past the bulletin board with its array of flyers—poetry readings, fiction and screenplay contests, grants—and headed straight to the writing program offices.

The administrative assistant, a graduate student named Bertrand, sat behind the desk, exactly where she'd last seen him a year and a half before.

“Hello, Madame Strayed,” he said in a still-thick French accent.

“Hello,” she said, and smiled. “Is he—is Henry in?”

Bertrand shook his head, saying, “He is in, he is out. I cannot keep track.”

“I was really looking for Antonia Lively,” she said. “Have you seen her? She came by my house yesterday looking for a place to rent and I didn't think about it at the time, but I have—”

“Yes, I know that she has been on the lookout,” he said, glancing up, his brow furrowed. “We all know she is looking, because,
entre nous,
that is all I hear about since she arrives.”

“I see,” she said, wanting to press him yet resisting. “Do you have any idea where I can find her?”

“Honestly, I do not know or care to know,” he said, excusing himself to answer the phone.

The sunlight pushed at the windows, shining across the door and the polished brass placard—
HENRY SWALLOW, DIRECTOR
. As Catherine, defeated, turned to go, the door to Henry's office swung open and there he was, his hazel eyes glittering behind his glasses, then dimming just as quickly. He blinked back the sunlight, against the sight of her, it seemed, and she wondered, as they stood there, if he'd been expecting someone else. A hush settled over them as she peered into his office, seeing a heavy wooden desk, a small stained-glass lamp (the same one, she remembered, that had sat in his office at NYU), a leather chair, and books, oceans of them lining the shelves and stacked about the floor. There was something else that caught her eye, something that shimmered pale and green on the surface of the desk, though before she could get a good look at what it was, Henry pulled the door shut. She felt the curious, inquisitive girl she'd once been awaken for a moment, wanting to ask him what she'd just seen. Then she took a hard look at where she was, and the girl's curiosity vanished, even as she shifted her gaze to him. His handsome, scholarly face hadn't changed all that much. At fifty-nine, he was still thin and well kept, his thick black hair bushy and peppered with gray.

“Catherine,” he said, “what a pleasant surprise.”

Is it pleasant? I'm not so sure, she thought. And how can it be a surprise when you just overheard Bertrand and me talking? Still, upon seeing him again, thousands of feelings swept through her, the least of which was anger.

“Yes, it's good to see you, too,” she said, her heart clenching at the lie. All at once, she wanted to flee but just as suddenly realized there was no point. Wyatt was gone; she had no ties to or allegiances left at the college. Even so, she didn't want her name associated with Henry Swallow's.

“I came here to talk to Antonia,” she said. “Is she in her office?” For a moment, Henry looked baffled, as if she'd spoken in tongues. “You sent her to me and told her my house was for rent,” she added. “Why would you do that?”

“I don't remember doing that, but if I did, then it must have been a mistake,” he said. “Plain and simple. She should have gone to the house down the block.”

She said nothing, and the silence between them grew, as if someone had come along and vacuumed up the sound. “It's so quiet,” she said at last.

“Amazing, isn't it? The moment I get used to the students, the term's over and they're gone. I almost miss them,” he said. “Luckily, the dead months don't last forever.”

The dead months—a term Wyatt had also used to describe summer, when the halls emptied of people and the campus went still. “I'll be blunt,” Catherine said, shivering, unaccountably frightened by Henry. Even more frightening than Henry, though, was the thought that he sensed the fear coming off her. She remembered how light and untrammeled she had once been around him, and how heavy and self-conscious she was now. It took every ounce of her forbearance to get through this moment with him, to take what she'd come for, and go. “I'd like to show Antonia the cottage. I didn't think about it yesterday. It's close to campus, and she can roll out of bed and get to her classes in minutes.”

“Her classes?” he asked, nonplussed. “She's not a student.” And there it was, that upsetting, all-too-familiar hubris in his voice, a defensive, insulting scoff.

“I know that,” she said, too sharply. “She'll be teaching. She came here to teach, right?” She came here for you, too, she wanted to say.

“She might teach a class for us in the fall, but she's here to work on a novel,” he said. “As far as the cottage goes, though, she just signed a lease on the Turner house down the block from you.”

“Oh,” she said, oddly dejected. “It's a lovely house. She should be happy there.”

“If you're really serious about renting the cottage,” he said, “I know of someone who might be interested.” He grinned, stuffing his hands deep in his pockets, which he always did when nervous. “As you no doubt have heard, I've been displaced,” he said. “I'm homeless, at least for the moment. There's just nothing to rent.” She knew he meant that there was nothing to rent that met his standards. “I've been searching for weeks.” She tried to smooth down her wrinkled skirt in an attempt at some self-possession, but it was useless. The curiosity she had felt when she was a girl was stirring again in the deepest part of herself, wanting to ask about the fire at his house and, beyond this, about Henry himself. She looked down and away in another failed attempt to regain her fortitude. She hadn't come to hear Henry's complaints; she'd come merely to find out about Antonia. Now that she had, she had no reason to linger. Yet there she was, lingering. Leave, she thought. Leave him to his troubles. They have nothing to do with you. “I don't need to tell you that summer is hardly the best time to make a home at the Tweed & Twining Arms. I'd love to find the architect who designed it. The walls! They're made of newsprint! I haven't had a good night's sleep in ages. Your cottage—”