Noah's Wife (6 page)

“If I might be so bold as to ask,” says Mrs. McGinn to Noah's wife in a brittle tone, “what
exactly
does your husband think that we need saving from?”

Noah's wife leans quickly back. For a few heartbeats, she is silent. Then: “The old minister—” she starts to say.

“Yes. The old minister walked into the river. But that doesn't mean the rest of us will,” snaps Mrs. McGinn. “If we wanted to go to church, we'd go to church—but that isn't what we want. So if your husband is here to play the part of a hero, to shower us with truth and light, to bring us back to the proverbial fold, well—” she snorts. “We've got showers enough as it is in this town, and there isn't anything more truthful than that. So he might as well give up, and go back to where he came from.”

“I can't go home and tell him that,” says Noah's wife faintly.

“Then tell him something else,” replies Mrs. McGinn. “That is not my problem.”

Noah's wife apologizes. Soon after, she packs up her things and prepares to go. At the threshold she turns, hesitates, and finally speaks. “I wish that you would reconsider.”

Mrs. McGinn sniffs, believing this to be unlikely. It is only later, in the middle of her morning rush, that she wonders if
there might be a reason to climb up there after all. She pauses with a tray of pancakes balanced on her palm, her checkered apron slightly off-center, and looks into the gray faces of her neighbors. They bark orders at her and at her daughter; they change their minds halfway through their meals and then claim they are dissatisfied. They snap at each other, and when they are not complaining they are silent.

They weren't always this way, knows Mrs. McGinn. They used to be more patient. The whole place used to be so charming. That's what people loved about it; that's why the tourists kept on coming. She knows the change is due to the rain, but what she doesn't know is why it keeps on raining. Perhaps she
will
climb up that hill once more—not to ask for grace, of course, but to demand some answers.

T
here are many things that Noah loves about his job.

Here are some of them: making a patient laugh in the stale hospital room; planting stout yellow marigolds over fresh cemetery plots; soothing the infant on his forearm as they bow together over the baptismal font. He told his wife once that he loves infants best of all because he loves the way that they can transition from crying to laughing so quickly—their line between sorrow and joy is so thin. Noah claims that this is something infants know and adults have forgotten: the fact that sorrow can so easily be transformed into joy.

There are no infants in this town—that is one thing he has noticed. There are families with young children, yes, who must be bused to an elementary school fifteen miles away. There are a few gangly middle-schoolers and a pack of adolescents whose favorite prank is to plaster their neighbors' cars with mud late
in the dark and windy nights. But there are no infants. It is as if somewhere along the way everyone gave up, Noah has reflected to himself while making his daily trek from the heart of downtown to his church on the hill. It is as if when the rain started and didn't stop, the townspeople's vision of the future grew grayer and dimmer until they could no longer imagine it at all. They require every last ounce of their energy simply to endure the rain.

And it is impressive, he will admit, how they have managed to adapt. They have extended the awning over their sidewalks and stretched clear plastic tarps across the intersections so that they can walk the full half mile of downtown without getting all that wet. As the smaller shops have gone out of business and shut down, Mauro's general store has taken up the slack—his business sprawls across several storefronts, organized into sections: groceries, pharmacy, housewares, clothing, home improvement, radios and televisions. Last month, when the townspeople were informed that the trucks that carried mail and newspapers could no longer make it all the way into the hills (the roads were getting so bad that the route became too time-consuming), Mrs. McGinn held a town meeting and demanded that every citizen with a driver's license volunteer to help out. Every week one of them drives two hours out of the hills and two hours back, packing six days' worth of mail and papers into the trunk. Mrs. McGinn sorts the mail herself and stacks it on the counter in the diner for her neighbors to come and claim.

In Noah's stack this morning there are a handful of damp flyers and bills and a check cut from the church's bank account for his first month of service here. He also finds a letter to his wife (he recognizes the bold and angular handwriting of her best friend on the rain-stained envelope) and a brief note from the head elder at their former church. Noah stands just outside the diner while he skims the words, then he folds the paper carefully along the crease and tucks it into his breast pocket. He supposes he must answer later, although he isn't certain what to say.

Is he all right? the head elder wants to know. How has everything been going?

Fine and fine, Noah will reply. The questions posed are simple ones, but Noah can read between the lines. What the council of elders really wants to know—what they couldn't understand a month ago, when Noah volunteered to take the job—is why Noah came here in the first place, why he gave up his position and (most likely) his future with the most prominent congregation in the city in order to serve a community like this one: a community so stubborn, so disinterested, so taxing on the soul that it would drive a perfectly good minister into the river.

“That's not fair,” Noah had protested when someone on the council made this point during their selection meeting. “We have no idea if that's what happened. It could have been an accident.”

One of the elders had chuckled, his mustache trembling.
“Ha!” he said. “Noah! That's rich, isn't it? You already sound like one of them.”

“Seriously, though,” interjected the head elder. His eyes were green and vigilant. “Noah, what is this about? I can't believe that this is what you want. You have a congregation that adores you, you have a wife to consider. How does she feel about turning her back on the entire life that you have built together and being forced to start again from scratch?”

“This is my decision,” insisted Noah. “I meant what I said. That church needs a minister, and I'm determined to be the one to fill the position.”

There were several seconds of silence. Finally the head elder leaned back in his chair, and all the other men around the table followed his lead. Only Noah remained where he was, bent stiffly forward, his hands clasped so tightly together that his knuckles were turning white.

“I suppose it's decided, then,” said the head elder with a sigh of resignation. “You're expected there by the beginning of next week. They'll hold off on the burial until you arrive.” He scraped his chair back, stood up, and stepped away from the table. As the men filed out of the room, he approached Noah and gripped his hand. “I don't feel right about this, Noah,” he said. “But I trust in your decision. If you need anything, promise that you'll call.”

Noah had promised, but he has not been in touch since his departure. What else could he say to make them understand? He
cannot tell them that for months now he has been feeling restless and troubled, or that he has been postponing meetings with his congregants because he doesn't feel he has the energy to pray with them. He cannot admit that he has been walking through his services like an automaton, mouthing the words and mumbling the hymns without feeling any of the old emotion stirring in his soul. A change of scene will do him good, he believes; the challenge of a new church will restore his old enthusiasm and return to him the passion for his vocation. He needs this.

Should he have told his wife the true cause behind their relocation? Perhaps; but if all goes as he has planned, there will not be any need to. Why tell her that his confidence has been shaken if he himself does not know the reason why, and if it turns out that he can solve the problem on his own? He has loved her from the moment he sat down beside her on the whale-watching boat, when he promised her that they would make it safely through the storm. He loves her because when he made that promise, she fastened her gray gaze on him and she believed him. She has never stopped believing in him since.

Noah knows that this is what makes her so good at her work—this is why people clamor for her photographs of them. She brings out the best in people because she believes that it's there, even when she cannot see it. That moment on the boat was only the first of many times that Noah would be thrilled and also a little overwhelmed by her faith in him. When she accepted their move last month without question, when she packed up her things and turned her back on her past without
a murmur of complaint—once again, he found himself in awe of her.

He won't allow her faith in him to be misplaced.

And so with his mail in hand, he turns once again in the direction of the church, making his way through downtown to the hill. Outside the tattered city hall he pauses to observe a man he's never seen before attaching an oversized rain gauge to the side of the building. Once the gauge is properly secured, the man continues slowly down the road, pausing every few feet to inspect the water pouring out of gutters or running along the curb. He shakes his head and makes a note on the clipboard that he carries carefully sheltered below his black umbrella. This must be the man that his wife mentioned meeting, Noah reflects, and the one that he has heard people complaining about while checking out supplies at Mauro's general store. Only here two days so far, the stranger has made such a habit of inserting himself into the townspeople's conversations and harping on the importance of evacuation that he has already become something of a pariah. Noah shrugs and climbs in the direction of the steeple. Although he feels a little sorry for the man, at least this means that Noah and his wife are no longer the only new arrivals.

Once inside the church he shakes his head to chuck the water from his ears and then he flips the switch on the wall for the overhead lights and looks to the ceiling to count how many bulbs are still burned out. The lights that work crackle slowly into action, and once they are lit he can see with satisfaction that
the building is not as dim, not as damp and musty and wrecked as it was when he first found it. Noah stands and stares for a moment, taking in a deep and thankful breath of air. He appreciates this church. He doesn't mind the disrepair. He loves that there is so much for him to do here. A swallow flies low from the altar through the nave, and when it brushes by his shoulder he ducks, a shadow of his famous smile flitting across his face.

Most days Noah likes to have his wife here with him, but as he walks through the church this morning he is glad to be alone, glad that the workers, too, are off for the day. The day before he had examined the warped sides of the pulpit and now he sets himself to the task of constructing a new one. He spends the hours until lunchtime cutting the boards and drilling screws into the wood, his spirit electrified by the power of creation. When he experiences the sensation of an object rising into being beneath his hands, he feels that this makes everything worth it—the roughened fingers, the blackened nails, the splinters that lodge in his palm just below the surface of his skin. Here, now, he can see the result of his efforts: he can see the change that he effects in the world, can see the level sides, the lines running through the lumber, the sturdy heft of the structure. It is on days like these when he feels as though he wouldn't mind changing careers to a carpenter or a construction worker, wouldn't mind if fixing up this church took him a hundred years so that he never had to preach again. He has always loved to work with people, but he's finding it much easier to work with wood.

He is quick to remind himself of his fondness for his
congregants to stem the tide of guilt that rises with these thoughts. People are so
interesting
, he reflects. If he has learned anything during his time as a minister it is that the human spirit can be broken in an infinite number of intricate, unpredictable ways, and while another (lesser) man would probably find the task to be daunting, he hopes that he will never tire of seeking out and mending that which is in need of repair. The only problem is that the rips and fissures in people—the broken hearts, the grieving souls—are so intangible as to sometimes seem unreachable. Over the years Noah has worked constantly, earnestly, inexhaustibly, and still both the task and the work remain invisible. Even if he
knows
(and he does! he tells himself—he does!) that progress is being made, still there are many, many moments when it is impossible to see it.

When his wife arrives with lunch, Noah is resting on the altar. She takes her seat beside him on the freshly scrubbed carpet, leans close to kiss his cheek, and hands him his turkey sandwich. When she smiles at him his gaze is drawn to the curve of her collarbone, a plain silver chain falling across the ridge. He stares over her head and imagines the space when it is finished, lit with candles and fragrant with altar flowers and full of congregants who turn shining faces toward him, waiting to be saved. Then she waves her fingers at him, laughing, and his attention snaps back to her. He grins sheepishly and takes his lunch. What he wants most in this world is to be the man she thinks he is.

D
r. Yu's father is pleased to discover that he is finally becoming skilled at the art of escape.

“Here, will you tie this rope around my hands?” he asks his daughter when she comes to check on him at home. “I'll bet you five dollars that I can get out of it in ten minutes or less.”

“I'm not tying a rope around your hands,” says Dr. Yu with a sigh, setting a grocery bag down on his counter. “For the last time, Papa.”

“April,” he coaxes. “Please.”

“No,” she says. “I don't approve of this new hobby of yours at all. I wish you would just go back to magic. What happened to pulling colored scarves out of your sleeves? That was innocuous, at least. It didn't land you in prison.”

“The art of escape
is
a kind of magic, my dear,” he explains. “Illusion and escape! They're one and the same!”

He has a shock of silver hair and thick, tortoiseshell spectacles. He peers at her, squinting, owl-like and calm.

“I don't know what that means,” she says. “But if you want to practice your card tricks, I'm willing to play along.”

Dr. Yu's father would like to ask her when it was, exactly, that she became so condescending—she was so mild-tempered as a child!—but instead he purses his lips and keeps his mouth shut. The two of them have been fighting more often. Any defense he tries to raise with respect to his latest escapades will only result in her bringing up the prison incident. Indeed, she is likely to bring it up whether he provokes her or not.

“Here,” he says, trying to sidestep an argument by distracting her with a trick. “I've got a penny and a half-dollar. Hold out your hands.”

She offers him her palms, somewhat resignedly, and he places a coin in each one. When she opens them again, the penny has been transformed into a quarter. Her expression is frozen and unimpressed, and her face doesn't change when he reaches into the front pocket of her white coat to retrieve the missing coin.

“There you go,” he says. “It's called a scotch-and-soda.”

“Of course it is,” she says and sighs, rising to her feet. She doesn't blink when he reaches under the table and produces a vase full of wilting daisies.

“For you!” he says with a slight bow and a flourish. “Out of thin air!”

“Thanks, Papa,” she says. “Here—I should unpack these groceries.”

His daughter visits his house on a semiweekly basis, bearing dinners that she cooks and freezes and divides into parcels packaged in bright aluminum foil. She stocks his cupboard with cans of fruit and beans and she stuffs the shelves of his refrigerator with fresh produce. Whenever he opens the door for a can of beer (“That is how I get my whole grains!” he informs her with annoyance when she demands to know the balance of his meals), heads of lettuce roll out onto the floor and bounce with a wet smack against the bottom of the stove.

“No red meat?” he asks, half joking.

“You're not supposed to be eating it,” she replies. “I've told you.”

While Dr. Yu arranges the food in the cabinets, her father stays at the table, sipping a glass of grapefruit juice that she has poured for him, and practicing the effect of the detachable thumb. When she has finished, she resumes her seat across from him and then pulls a stethoscope out from the deep pockets of her coat, pressing the metal disc against his rib cage.

“Knock it off,” he says, pulling away. “I'm fine. If I wanted to see a doctor, I'd go to the hospital. Can't a grown man do what he wants with his life?”

“I didn't mind that you had found a hobby,” she says. She yanks the prongs of the stethoscope from her ears. “I was glad,
in fact, because I hated to see you so sad. I didn't say anything when you signed up to perform at the library, or when you started doing card tricks at bars. I thought: this isn't healthy, but if it makes him happy, fine. But I've got to draw the line now, Papa. You can't go around getting yourself arrested. Really—picking the lock of a cop car? What were you thinking?”

He shrugs. “It was right in front of the station,” he says. “I needed to get their attention. And anyway, sweetheart, that was days ago. I haven't done it again.”

“And you didn't even
call
me!” persists Dr. Yu unhappily. “I could have left the hospital, I could have come for you right away. Why on earth would you want to spend the night there?”

“Hush,” he says. “April, try to calm down. It wasn't a big deal.”

“Of course it was!” she exclaims. “You were
arrested
, for God's sake!”

Dr. Yu's father stands up from the table and strides toward the refrigerator, praying that his daughter has not hidden all of his beer again. He had not, for the record, intended to spend the night in prison. Yes, he had gotten himself arrested, but the whole point in doing so had been so that he could break himself out. He'd brought his lock-picking tools, his tension wrenches, his lump of lead. He simply hadn't thought the plan through; he hadn't realized that the first thing the police were going to do was to take away his belongings. The coat within which he had stored the tools was long and black, full of hidden flaps and pockets. It was an old magician's coat, he told the police when he saw one of them admiring it on the other side of the bars.
That was when they had asked him if he could show them some tricks.

Of course he could, he said, and he did. He was frustrated and bored and so he had gone in for some of the bigger effects: the suspension of one of the officers so that it looked as though he was floating in midair; the illusion of dismemberment; the first half of the Indian rope trick; and finally, a series of small escapes. He had the police handcuff him, tie his feet together, bind him to a chair, and then they watched him twist his way out. They applauded every time.

In retrospect, he has been studying books of escapism for long enough now that he probably could have found a way out of his cell without his tools, had he really wanted to. But it was more pleasant with the officers, he decided, away from home. He was relieved to have the opportunity to step out of his life, his house, his dreams—even if only for a moment.

Over the past few months, he has been making frequent trips to the library to check out books on the twin arts of illusion and escape. He stacks the volumes up around the edge of his desk, on the floor, constructing a small wall that he likes to think will help hold him in place as he pores over the tricks, the effects, the sleights of hand. He studies the diagrams and then tries to reproduce them himself, darkening the shadows with the flattened graphite tip of his pencil. The sketches never look quite as perfect or as professional as they do in the books, but this is the best way he can think of to memorize the many steps of the
tricks. The collection of drawings is especially helpful once he must return the books to the library. He has always been a visual learner.

The other day he found a box of his wife's colors and brushes in the cabinet below the kitchen sink and sometimes, when he is feeling particularly brave or inspired or foolish, he thinks about adding a few strokes of watercolor to his images. He goes to the sink and hunches down and stares at the paints between the pipes for several long minutes. Then he shoves the cabinet door shut and retreats to his office, where he shuts that door, too, and he rests his head on the desk and waits for the feeling to pass.

He cannot bear to touch the paints, or the perfume, or the pearls that are left still coiled on the armoire. He cannot bear to open the closet door and see her coats or her dresses and so he does not open it at all. He wears button-down shirts and corduroy slacks from his dresser and sometimes he wishes for his tweed blazer but it is in the closet and so what is there to do? He must live without it. What is one more loss, he wants to know, among so many?

Life is one big disappearing act. Things vanish all the time.

That was the whole idea of it, anyway, that was why he had been driven to the study of this art in the first place. As he watched her coffin being lowered into the ground he had not been able to stand the thought of his wife lying in it alone. He had imagined himself inside it with her, and his dreams for weeks afterward had been nightmares, visions of entrapment in
small dark spaces. He would wake right as his dream-self was on the verge of suffocation, and he would fling himself away from his pillow, his chest heaving, his nightshirt soaked with sweat.

Escape does not come as easily to him as illusion, however, and so far his efforts to free himself have been more difficult, more strenuous than they should be. What is he missing? He leaves his daughter and wanders back into his study, to sit himself down with his books and his drawings, to study again his sketches of the locks and the knots.

She follows him. He leans forward in his chair, suddenly too exhausted to work, his head slowly sinking down toward his desk. She stands towering behind him. She places her hand on his shoulder, curls her fingers around the knobby bones jutting through his sleeve. When did he become so small?

“You're not the only one who misses her,” she says. He doesn't answer. His elbow is crooked on top of a leather-bound book, his forehead resting on his forearm. His daughter hopes that he will fall asleep.

She pauses for a moment, listening to the rhythm of his breathing, and then she turns toward the door, leaving his study and heading back through the cramped, low-ceilinged hallway to the kitchen, the living room, the dining room. She examines the entire house with her surgical eye in an effort to determine exactly how well he is coping on his own. The bedroom is dark and stale. From the doorway she looks toward the rounded oak armoire, its mirror reflecting the backs of pewter-framed photographs lined in rows across its surface. In the gloom she can see
the quilt folded neatly at the foot of the bed, the sheets smoothed across the pillow. She steps closer to inspect the corners—tucked the way that her mother (and only her mother) knew how to tuck them. When her father made beds, the sheets were always arranged with quick and crumpled distraction. His end result looked like the work of someone impatient, someone who felt that he had better things to do with his time.

“Hey,” she calls out. When there is no answer, she returns to the study to find her father still bent over his desk. “Hey,” she says. “I was just in the bedroom. Have you—have you not been sleeping in there?”

He abruptly lifts his head and begins to turn the pages of his book. He doesn't look up. “I sleep on the couch,” he says. “I don't sleep in that room anymore.”

“But listen, Papa—”

“April, you don't understand. In thirty years I never slept alone in that room. I'll be damned if I do it now.”

He reaches for his pencil, lifts it and holds it poised above the text. “You can stay for lunch if you like,” he says. “I'll join you in a few minutes. Let me finish looking over this first.”

There is a painful, protracted silence, and then her footsteps echo down the hall and into the kitchen. After a moment he hears the sound of running water, a pot being filled and set to boil on the stove. While she opens the refrigerator, removes something from the vegetable drawer and begins to chop, he turns again to his work.

In this house, where everything reminds him of his wife, the
walls are closing in on him daily. Sometimes he imagines that the ceilings are sinking in with sadness, the furniture creaking beneath the weight of his ghosts. He feels trapped, and stifled, and old. White rabbits, flames, flowers, capes—the tricks are all well and good, but what he needs now is something more than the paltry task of slipping out of knots or fiddling with cuffs. He needs something much grander, more thrilling. He needs something that will get him out of here for good.