In the Night Season (8 page)

N
ORA
S
PENCER
M
ICHAELSON SAT
in a meeting of other instructors of Sisters of Mercy School, trying to be calm about the fact that there were no answers to her calls home. She reminded herself of other evenings she hadn’t been able to get through—Edward sometimes took Jason to the store, or out in the woods to mock hunt deer. It was not unusual for him to do something to keep the boy busy. Only last week there had been no answer, and she came home to find them stacking firewood that Mr. Bishop had bought; she had called four times that evening.

When she could hold this fact in her mind, she could breathe.

But she kept feeling the clammy sense of violation over what had been in her mailbox two afternoons ago. It sent her spiraling toward panic. She clasped her hands in front of her, like a student, and tried to pay attention, tried not to think at all. If she could only attend to things, she might be able to speed the meeting to a close. This, she knew, was a hopeless fantasy. The meeting would drag on.

Lately it had come back to her, with a force, that she had quit teaching all those years ago for reasons more basic than her marriage to Jack Michaelson. Something about the life had exhausted her and
made her feel obscurely angry a lot of the time. It was an element of her makeup, a severity that the inadequacies of her students seemed continually to aggravate. She suspected finally that she lacked the necessary patience, except that wasn’t quite it, either; with students who were interested and working hard, she was more than forbearing; she suffered them almost to the point of indulgence. But so many of the students she encountered had already been ruined by other teachers, or by the culture they lived in, which seemed to value everything else over knowledge, and these students—ignorant, oddly cynical about life, often uncivil, and incredibly complacent about their ignorance—these students were so self-satisfied and aggressively obtuse that unvaryingly they made her feel a black desire to lash out, a smoldering rage.

It discouraged her. It made her long for some other task, some other way to spend her time. Though of course she was fairly certain there wasn’t anything that would serve to get her mind off the living she was doing now, with its loneliness, its meagerness, its endless worry.

Today, the usual heavy workload, the hours of concentration that had been required of her, had served to deaden the sense of unease, of trespass on her privacy, which she now felt along with all the rest. Oh, how she had wanted to tell Ed Bishop not to come see her and Jason anymore. There was Jason’s safety to think about. She had spent a bad long day yesterday, seeing images of her son receiving harm from strangers, men who were part of a sickness she was not up to fighting. She wasn’t up to any of it. Unhappy as the realization had made her, she determined to accept the truth and to act accordingly. Mr. Bishop would understand; he had said as much, on more than one occasion. She was alone; she must think selfishly. She drove home with the conviction that she could do what she had decided must be done.

But the moment had come, and she looked into those kind, dark eyes and heard herself convincing him to keep on…

Her mother and father lived in Seattle now—one of her father’s lifelong dreams; he had spent time there when he was first in the
military, back in 1943. They were so far away. It seemed more than the simple miles. Nora’s father was a man who kept all pacts with himself, and one of those pacts was that he would live on the edge of the Pacific after he retired from the air force.

Sometimes Nora thought of her parents as representing the luck people in love seemed to have, everywhere she looked.

Her last year with Jack had been so bad that she had contemplated a separation, since it had become nearly impossible to reach him, or find the way to talk to him, bring him around to being himself. She had come to suspect that it wasn’t just the business failing, or the venture into computers, which had siphoned more money away. Everything had fallen into question.

Once, that last fall before the accident, she watched him from the window of their bedroom as, below on the sunny, leaf-littered lawn, he tossed a baseball back and forth with Jason. When Jason missed a throw and had to chase it, Jack stared off at the turning trees on the other end of the field and seemed to mutter aloud, shaking his head and facing away from the boy. She wondered what his thoughts were, what he could be saying to the air, waiting for his son to retrieve the ball.

When he came inside, an hour later, she said, “Who were you talking to?”

“What?” He seemed almost startled.

“I was watching you from the window—you and Jason. Jason went to get the ball out of the forsythia bushes and you were—I don’t know. Disputing with—something. Who or what were you arguing with?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nobody. Are you spying on me now?”

“Spying on you.”

“Just leave me alone a little, can’t you? Give me some room to breathe, for Christ’s sake. I’m tired of feeling supervised all the damn time.”

“Jack, you’d tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?”

“Wrong?” he said.

“Okay.” She turned from him.

“No,” he said. “Wait.”

She faced him and said nothing for a space. Then: “Well?”

“Look, I wasn’t—you—I don’t know what you thought you saw.”

“I love you,” she said.

And he looked down. It was as if he did not want the subject of love broached at all. There had been times when—apart from her own growing doubt about her feeling for him—she had been ready to believe he was no longer in love with her. If it weren’t for the lovemaking. Those nights, in the room, in the quiet, when he reached for her, and they were lovers again, and he would once more be like the boy she had married, a little nervous, and tremendously careful of her, almost worshipful.

But toward the end, even this had begun to feel detached, almost automatic.

“Jack,” she said one night as they lay awake, not touching, “are you seeing someone else?”

“How can you ask that?” he’d said, apparently hurt.

“Something’s different between us,” she said. “You can’t tell me you don’t see it or feel it.”

“I don’t want to talk about this. Why do you have to pick at everything?”

“That’s not fair,” she told him. “I’ve gone along this whole year with you, not saying anything. Jack, what
is
it? What’s happening to us?”

“Nothing’s happening to us. Christ. I don’t know what you mean. I’m trying to keep us afloat, and we’re sinking. But it isn’t
us
. Stop badgering me all the time.”

“You feel badgered?”

“No,” he told her, getting out of the bed, moving to the other side of the room. He put a light on and got into his robe. “I have some work on the books to do.”

“What’re you keeping from me, Jack?”

He had glared at her. She almost sank back from him.

“I can get money from my parents, Jack. We’re not going to starve. We can start over. I can go back to teaching school. Jason is old enough so he doesn’t need constant supervision and I’ve been thinking about going back anyway.”

“No—look—that’s not—I don’t want to talk about this.”

“But you’re carrying the whole thing alone. Why?”

“Look, it’s nothing—it’ll work out. Trust me, okay?”

“I love you,” she said again.

But he was already walking away, starting down the hall. “Don’t wait up,” he said.

“No,” said Nora, to the empty doorway. “I won’t.”

There were other exchanges like this, and during those months she often caught herself wondering how life might change, how time and circumstance would take them away from this difficulty. She began imagining other troubles, actually dreaming them up to look upon them. She had an old school friend whose youngest daughter had recently declared herself to be pregnant; the woman who ran the country store had learned that she had diabetes, and the man who Jack usually engaged to do his plumbing work was going through an ugly divorce. She would be thinking of these troubles and then imagine herself with them, or some version of them—there was so much suffering in the world, so much pain out there beyond the windows of her house.

It was as if she were looking into a possible future in order to console herself for present complications—the tricks her mind would play: she would see herself years in the distance, with Jack restored to his old confident self, bankruptcy and the terrors of failure behind him. She had begun to see her life in terms of daylight and darkness. A pall had settled over everything, and she spent wakeful hours in the nights, thinking of morning, of a dawn that would again be more than a glare along the edges of the low hills outside the window. In these odd, idle dreams of worry it was always she who was carrying the burden of misfortune, and Jack who kept having to seek a way to get close enough to help carry them. And eventually she realized she could not tell him any of this.

Nothing could have prepared her for the shock of finding out how badly he had depleted the insurance: cancellations for lack of payments, borrowing on premiums. It was as if he had abandoned her
and their son to whatever the world might do. She understood that he did not know he was going to be killed; he could not have supposed that anything would prevent him from restoring some of the borrowed money, fixing things, living past the difficulty. But the truth was that she had been grieving the loss of Jack for several months before he died—the man she had known and been passionate about once did not resemble the one who drove away from the house in the last afternoon of his life.

When these feelings washed through her, she tried reciting the Twenty-third Psalm to herself.
The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…

The lines soothed her, and sometimes they helped her sleep. They made it so that she could be patient with her son, whose face was his father’s, and whose reaction to the catastrophe had been so different from her own. She had sought some way to get down into his sorrow with him, to stop his withdrawal. It seemed to Nora that in her recent struggles with Jason, there were similarities to the arguments she’d had with Jack. Cause for sleepless nights and the sort of concentration which did not allow for the healing she needed, too. Just getting through the days required that she spend everything of herself. In the hours of the nights she lay restless, in a nervous kind of depletion, mind racing.

“Ms. Michaelson.”

At the opposite end of the long table, the headmistress eyed her with a vaguely curious half smile—Sister Agnes, whose round soft face was almost clownish, except that the blue eyes could turn to ice. As now. “Aren’t you listening?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’d like to get this meeting over.”

Sister Agnes was a woman whose demeanor was always humorous and rather friendly, even self-deprecating to an extent; yet she had a way of giving out little bitter doses of a capricious and cruel
temper. Always with a jolly smile. “I asked who has been put in charge of the Easter pageant and what the plans were, if any. We only have a little more than a month to get ready. And you know how flustered I get about these organizational things. I just have no talent for them. You haven’t asked anyone?”

“I’m sorry—I’m—I will—first thing in the morning.”

“We have also got to do something about the SAT testing this weekend. We don’t have a proctor.” Sister Agnes kept the blue steel gaze on her.

“I can’t,” Nora said. “I have to take my son to the eye doctor on Saturday. It’s the only time I can do it.”

The others at the table, two laypeople and five nuns, went on talking about the proctoring of the exams, and again Nora’s mind began to wander.

“Now,” Sister Agnes said. “Let’s see what else. We have to talk about the summer classes and registration for the spring athletics.”

Nora stood. “I’m sorry. I’ve really got to go. My son is by himself. As you know. I haven’t been able to get Mr. Bishop on the phone. I—I received that awful mail—” she trailed off. “It’s got me worried.”

Sister Agnes said, “Of course.” But there was little understanding or forbearance in the features—a mannish, round-jawed, grandiosely ugly face, still smiling, but with the faintest edge of the sardonic: the face of a well-fed peasant who has just been proved right about something. Some of the younger nuns called her “Nikita,” because she looked like the orotund former Soviet premier. The party chairman in a starched wimple and black veil. “I have received mail from the same group,” she said proudly. “I think it’s a badge of honor, and of course I know you do, too.”

“I’d rather not have it,” Nora said. The simple truth. It went through her with a chill that this statement, for all its honesty, could cost her the job.

“If you can’t stay for the whole meeting, I wish you’d simply not attend it at all,” Sister Agnes said. “We’d understand, I’m sure. We do understand, you know.”

The others were silent. No one moved.

“Sister Agnes, if I’d have known it would last this long, I wouldn’t have attended the meeting.”

“Perhaps you want us all to accommodate our schedules to yours?” She pronounced the word the English way: shed-ule. It was a joke. She kept the small smile, as if to say this were all a form of banter, and no threats or ill feelings lurked behind it. But there were the cold eyes above the smile.

Nora held back what she wanted to say:
Sister Agnes, shove this job up your un-Christian ass sideways
.

She looked down at her hands on the back of her chair and said, “I’m very sorry, really.”

“There’s nothing these sick, unhappy people can do to anyone,” Sister Agnes said, gently. “Remember, your church. Your God. ‘My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.’ And don’t worry about this silly meeting for one second. We know how hard you work, and we all know how difficult it is to raise a child in these times.”