The Storm at the Door (32 page)

The Oldsmobile’s tires sing on the country roads, bound north. Eventually, thirty miles from town, they approach the Squaw Lake Diner. Lars steers into the parking lot.

Remember this place?
he says, his words slightly hollow of sentiment,
coming from a carefully considered script.
We came here on our first date all those years ago. I don’t think I’ll ever be as happy as when you held my hand that night. Come on, we’re going to order the same thing. Peanut butter and bacon sandwiches, remember?

What is she doing? Does she really think that Lars’s former love for her, now mutated into his private mythology, could persuade her?

I don’t know
, she says.

Lars has imagined the evening so often that he is prepared with just what to say if any possibility comes to pass: hesitancy, ambivalence, passion. But when Lars now delivers his reluctance rhetoric, it comes out not precisely as he has practiced. The words all rush at once and clog up on escape; the speech, by its middle, reduced to a slow drip that just barely manages to trickle through the dumb orifice in the center of his face. But by the end of his monologue, Katharine has reddened as Lars sputters,
we—can—find—the—courage—in—each other
.

Katharine doesn’t want his speeches or plans. What she wants from tonight, from Lars, is the opposite of plans. Here she is, trying to act on impulse, agreeing to this evening with Lars because of its imprudence. She wants, just once, what Frederick has allowed himself so many times: thoughtless movement into a night; a willfully cavalier confrontation with chance; the possibility of being, for the night at least, foreign to herself and her commitments. But already she is something else; already she is made into a character in Lars’s story of how he will be remade. She will later wonder if, at a younger age, she might have been able to muster belief in Lars’s visions for her. Romance, after all, had once seemed this way; a kiss had once seemed an opening to an utterly transformed future.

I won’t be part of some fantasy of yours. You’re a married man. I’m a married woman. This is ridiculous
.

As Katharine watches Lars’s face recalibrate to her new judgment, she does not regret what she has said, nor does she pity him. Instead she slumps with a friend’s feeling, a weighty empathy. His quivering, the compensatory bolding of the righteousness in his gaze: this ancient pain, which Katharine now inflicts upon Lars, as Frederick has so many times wounded her. Likely, Lars will argue with her. He will denounce her faulty reasoning and her misrepresented intentions. But the real sadness Katharine receives, which she wishes she could describe to Lars, is that no one has done wrong. It would be so much simpler if one were right, one wrong. But Katharine, like Lars, has only done what felt right for the moment, and in doing so passes to Lars a fire that Frederick has many times ignited in her, as others have set to Frederick. An ancient flame, a super-Olympic torch relay with a fire we have passed back and forth among one another, ever since some togaed ancient first invented heartbreak and kindled this ever-burning.

Lars is at least comforted to find he has language even for this, the darkest of the evening’s possible outcomes.

Ridiculous? I’ll tell you what’s ridiculous. Denying our true selves. How we live, that is what is ridiculous
.

You sound like you’re sixteen years old
.

Well, maybe a part of me has stayed at the age that I loved you
.

Could he actually mean this? In a way, she realizes, yes. Yes, at least in this present moment. Katharine, too, has known moments like this, in which all time is compressed into a simple story of thwarted love. Never mind what Lars must have felt when proposing to his wife; never mind his love for his children.
And never mind the other women he might have loved. For this moment, here in his Oldsmobile, Katharine is to Lars as vast as all things. If only it were as simple as that. If only we could remain that vast, capable of delivering what we seem, in these compressed moments, to offer one another.

I don’t think I’m hungry
, Katharine says.

Pitiable, deflated, the words that come from Lars when they return to the school parking lot finally come unrehearsed.

There’s no way I can convince you?

I’m sorry. I know I might have led you on. But it’s not as easy as you think
.

Lars searches his mind for other speeches, contingency plans he must have scripted and is now forgetting. But the truth, he sees, is that they are only what they are: two sad middle-aged parents, falsely hoping the fantasy that they had concocted at the origin of their adulthood could somehow mend them now.

Is it the sadness of this realization in Lars’s face? Or is it only her own desperation? Katharine plunges her fingers beneath the surface of what remains of Lars’s hair, and soon they are kissing.

No, not desperation. It is, instead, a curiosity. But Lars’s mouth on hers is just a mouth on hers. Katharine pulls away, and leaves.

Jillian and Louise are at full tilt when she returns home. They barely acknowledge her as they run laps through the rooms,
chasing each other in a shrieking conflation of rage and delight. Katharine walks to the kitchen table, where her husband’s papers are still where she left them. She sits.

Yes, the Frederick she loves perhaps exists only for moments at a time: an illusion, a false thing. But, sometimes, he has held her entirely. My grandmother pulls the pages out of the folder and reads.

In the soil of a New Hampshire forest, on a summer day of 2007, the words are no longer words, now only particles of ash. At a Massachusetts pencil factory, on a spring afternoon of 1959, the words are not yet words, only a few inches of charcoal in a rod. At the bottom of a milk crate in a cluttered attic, on a winter morning of 1976, the words fade slowly on yellowing paper. Inside the glow of a Franklin stove, on a July day in 1989, the words curl into one another, embrace one another with their sloping appendages, as they incinerate. Ascending the chimney of Echo Cottage in a plume of white, they could have been anything.

On a November night of 1962, in a solitary room at the Mayflower Home, my grandfather looks at the whiteness of the paper, on which he does not know what to write. For months, he has tried to worry out of his notebooks an intricate, irrefutable
argument, a plea, poetry. But he has awoken to something else. He was in a false place, he thinks now, a false place of words and reasons, of cause and effect.

But now he knows death. The things he has seen. He does not belong here, perhaps. Perhaps it is only Canon’s fear that keeps him here. But he also knows that he belongs here or doesn’t belong here, just as much as he belongs among the living or the dead. This is merely what has happened. So he now has no plea to Katharine. He does not now know if he is guilty or guiltless. He has tried to make sense of things, to make sense of himself. He has tried to conclude whether the electrified notions just beyond the edges of his excitement are true, or if the truth is only the common sounds, muted tones. He has tried to figure out if there is power thrumming in the walls, or if Rita is right that there is only silence. He has tried to accomplish what those in his hospital are supposed to accomplish. Again, as with Katharine, as with his daughters, he has failed.

The whiteness of the room and of the paper. What else is there to say? This is how time passes now. The whiteness, the sounds of other patients, and the droning of something electric in the walls. The uncounted hours passing, punctuated by meals and movements of bladder and bowel. And though he doesn’t know what to write to Katharine, what else is there? At least for a moment now there are words with him in the room.

Five days later, the words are in my grandmother’s hands. They articulate themselves within her, one after the other, for the first time. For her remaining decades she will be able to navigate these pages from memory, almost as surely as she navigates her bedroom in the dark. But now she simply reads them.

Katharine has tried to convince herself that she is only a sane woman married to a sick man. She has tried to convince herself, again and again, but she has never been able to believe it, not really, not for more than a moment. The chaos of alternatives always overtakes her.

And here now, in her hands, is another.

My grandmother tries to remind herself of all she has suffered, and what she has learned. But, in this moment, with her husband’s strange and beautiful and desperate words, she can’t help herself.

The words, in the summer of 2007, are carbon in the soil outside Echo Cottage, just beyond where I sit on the upstairs sleeping porch, on which I have set up a portable table and a loose-legged wooden chair. It is the lake at its best hour, as the sun starts to settle. My parents are downstairs, visiting with relatives over sangria.
Beyond the screen windows, the lake presents itself at a seemingly impossible angle, somehow canted toward me, like the floor of a ballet studio in a Degas painting. It is the second day of what, despite its squeamish connotations, my family persists in calling a
three-day blow
, seventy-two hours of ceaseless wind, the whitecaps heaving themselves in linear patterns, whipping the lake’s surface into a mad cursive, as if the waves might, at any moment, arrange into legible sentences. On the table in front of me is a blank page.

At the top of a bookshelf in Echo Cottage, there is a picture of my grandfather, at about my age, dressed in his naval uniform, ready for the war. A few times this summer, I’ve held his portrait next to me in the mirror, and then considered our similarities. At the far side of my mother’s life, far behind this sunny summer with a family of her own, there is something dark but obscured, which I clearly resemble in superficial ways—and also, I know at twenty-five, in other ways too. One night, over sixty years ago, on the deck of a ship in the South Pacific, something in Frederick shifted and he could no longer eat. One night, four years ago, in my crumbling university apartment, something shifted in me, and I couldn’t sleep for four days straight. When I spoke with a doctor, just once, about my strange, objectless insomnia, her tentative diagnosis stunned me, as if she had just named a relative of mine she couldn’t have possibly known.
Bipolar disorder
, she said. Manic depression. My grandfather’s supposed affliction.

Frederick and I are at a great distance but we are also profoundly intimate, on opposite sides of my mother’s willful decisions and best efforts. Frederick presented my mother with the problems; my mother has tried to give her corrections to me.

My mother has told me that one night, when she was thirteen, she made a resolution, one of many in her life. I know not
to underestimate my mother’s resolve. Now in her fifties, she still possesses a formidable gift to come to decisions and then to remain faithful to them. Three years ago, for example, she decided to prohibit all gluten from her diet, and no trespassing gluten has entered her mouth since. When I was nine, she decided she could provide a better education than my oversize, work-sheet-papered elementary school, and she spent the next five years homeschooling me. And decades ago, during her father’s hospitalization, my mother decided that if she were to have a family of her own it would be different, clarified of her parents’ confusion. And, as ever, my mother kept to her resolutions; she and my father raised us far from her history, in a bright Texas house in which we would always be visible to one another.

But maybe resolutions and plans can never be shelter enough from the unforecastable meteorology with which chaos and history assail the present moment. I’ve also thought that through deliberate will and close consideration I could bring order to that discordant history. That, with enough effort, I could finally write our family’s story, the one I’d heard only in attenuated echoes. I’ve interviewed Frederick’s surviving acquaintances; I’ve read everything I can find to read about my grandfather, his hospital, and the affliction I may or may not share with him, a nebulous condition he himself may or may not have had. I still don’t know if whatever it is within us that flares and fizzles is an illness or just the way we are.

I scrawl the names
Frederick
and
Katharine
, and underline both twice. My inheritance? It sometimes seems there is only this: only the poor passing facts of what happened; only two people, Frederick and Katharine, who succeeded and failed, who found love and lost love, who woke and slept, who lived their lives. Beyond the facts of a few books and conversations, I cannot know
what my grandfather suffered in his hospital, or what my grandmother endured as she waited for him, what their stories could explain about my family and also about me. I can know only the letdown of a few weighty facts, and the coarse, loosely spun theories we weave to net that fall. The same is true of my family’s other side: the Blocks are from a Jewish shtetl called Bolbirosok, which the Nazis destroyed. Nothing and no one can unburn our history.