The Widower's Tale (15 page)

Ordinarily, I would have joined her, but I was tired and dismayed. I abandoned the cleanup and went upstairs. I turned on the fan in our bedroom and was about to take a cold shower when I heard Trudy calling me from down the hall.

She was sitting up in her bed, leaning toward an open window. "Dad, I think somebody's calling out there."

"Calling? What do you mean?"

"I don't know," said Trudy. "Just ... a voice."

The breeze had risen, and the leaves of the many surrounding trees made a clamorous shushing. Perhaps I heard what I thought was the call of a nocturnal creature, a fox or an owl; the woods of Matlock are, to this day, a wild kingdom by night, and the pond magnified its feral sounds. I listened, then whispered, "Perhaps it's your sister's young Romeo, hoping to spirit her away. Little does he know that she sleeps like a fossil."

In the half dark, I could see Trudy glaring at me. "Very funny, Dad."

The crickets were in full voice as well as the trees. I realized, as one does from time to time, how very loud the country can be in high summer.

"A cat, I'll bet you, sweetie. Go back to sleep. You have tennis tomorrow," I said. "I tell you what. I'll go check it out."

I made her lie down. I returned to the kitchen and listened at the screen door. Crickets, leaves, and the wind chimes at the entrance to the barn. I stepped outside and down the back steps. I saw the beautiful moon, reflected on the pond. I tried to listen harder. I heard a fox call: There we go, I thought.

I saw a light on in the barn loft. Perhaps Poppy had gone up there to avoid me. Well, I thought peevishly, irritated anew at the memory of our argument, let her dance the night away on her own. As for me, I felt as if I could sleep for a week. I sighed and returned to the house, pondering the question of how we would ever make amends with our new, conservative neighbors.

I took a cool shower and put on a clean pair of boxers. I aimed the fan at the bed and slipped between the sheets.

In the morning, I was awakened by Clover's insistent shaking. She and Trudy were in their tennis clothes, ready to be driven to their lessons in Ledgely. It was Saturday, and this was my responsibility, since Poppy ferried them to their various obligations throughout the week. She rose early on weekend mornings to spend a few hours alone in her studio. It was odd, though, that she hadn't been the one to wake me. Perhaps, suffering as I was from a colossal hangover, I had returned to sleep and did not recall that she had.

I rushed into my clothes and out the front door with my daughters. My head pounded as I made the drive to Ledgely without coffee, so after leaving Trudy and Clover at the courts, I drove to the Narwhal and begged a cup from Norval. In lulls between customers, we talked about the disastrous end to the dinner party. Perhaps we
were
a righteous lot. But then of course we rehashed our indignation over national affairs. We debated the pros and cons of Jimmy Carter. Poppy did not like the way he mentioned God so much. "Church. State," she'd say, making a vertical slash with one hand between the two words. "He's a good man, genuinely pious, but he's opening the door to a world of trouble."

I stayed with Norval long enough to pick up the girls at the end of their lessons without having gone back to Matlock.

When the three of us entered the house, I noticed that dishes from the party still lay about the kitchen, exactly as I'd left them the night before.

"Hey, Mom!" Clover yelled as she tossed her tennis racket onto the table. Normally, Poppy would have been making them lunch. "Hey, Mom, where are you? We're starving here!"

I was about to reprimand Clover for not putting her racket away when Trudy said, "Look, Dad, is that a swan?"

I followed her gaze out the window and, for the briefest moment, laughed. Trudy might need glasses, I was thinking as I saw quite clearly, with my excellent vision, that the white mass at the edge of the pond was Poppy's new Moroccan dress.

Perhaps at that very moment, the Minkoffs, who lived in one of the Three Greeks on the other side of the pond, were watching a policeman cover Poppy's body with a sheet. I did not witness this horrendous scene myself, but my imagination has had so much time to construct it that sometimes I'm convinced I was the one to find her.

Simultaneously, a police car was turning down my driveway. From the kitchen, I could not see this, either, but when I heard the doorbell, already I knew that something was urgently wrong. I forced the girls to go to their rooms before I answered the door. I remember saying to them, "Go! Now! Please!" They must have thought I'd gone mad.

I did not admit the young policeman but walked swiftly from the house and led him halfway across the lawn, nearly dragging him by an arm. That he allowed me to do so was, I knew before he spoke, a very bad sign.

In short order, I returned inside and called upstairs that Clover and Trudy should stay there until I came back.

"Jesus, Dad, what's going on?" Clover called down.

"Just stay," I called back. Two words--two
syllables
--that I knew, even then, would have made all the difference in the world had I spoken them to Poppy, twelve hours earlier, instead.

The policeman drove the circuitous looping of country lanes that took us to the opposite side of the pond. We did not speak.

An ambulance was parked in the middle of the Minkoffs' lawn. This was an absurd sight. Beside it stood two men in white uniforms, facing the pond. Their arms were folded. Why did they look so relaxed? Beyond them, men in darker uniforms walked back and forth by the water.

Saul and Linda Minkoff stood on their porch, watching the various men on the lawn as if they were actors in a play. When I got out of the police car, they went inside. They were neighbors I did not know well, because the pond, like a small ocean, kept us apart. I recognized them from town meetings and the grocery store.

Poppy's naked body had lodged in the cattails. Like me, the Minkoffs respected the pond's varied wildlife and did not mow to the water's edge.

What flashed in my head was an illustration in a collection of fairy tales I had bought for Clover and Trudy, years ago, at the Narwhal. In the tale "Binnorie," a treacherous girl drowns her sister in order to marry the sister's sweetheart, and a traveling minstrel makes a harp of the dead girl's breastbone and hair. He travels by happenstance to the castle of the evil sister, where the harp, laid aside on a shelf, sings a ballad about the betrayal. Both girls found this story too frightening, so I would page past it. Yet my eyes sometimes lingered on the painting of the maiden lying drowned on the banks of the milldam, golden tresses wound through stalks of grass.

Half covered with a sheet, Poppy lay before me like a flesh-and-blood forgery of that illustration.

"That's my wife," I said stupidly as I joined the men who already knew this fact. As I have said, ours was such a small town. These young policemen had waved to Poppy when she rode her bike along our safe, pretty roads. Perhaps one or two of them had been among those who had given her warnings, never tickets, about the speed at which she drove.

One of these fellows asked if I wanted them to call someone. I asked them to call Helena. Understandably, but idiotically, I did not want to leave Poppy, so it was Helena who went to the house and told my daughters their mother was dead. As if hypnotized, I spent the afternoon dealing, almost calmly, with the police and their meek, provincial inquiries. By the time I arrived at home, several cars lined the driveway. I found Clover and Trudy at the kitchen table, Norval and Helena sitting close beside them. Helena--or someone, I never asked who--had cleaned and put away every dish from the party.

I was in Packard already that Sunday, at my favorite hardware store, throwback to one of those charming Robert McCloskey books I read to the girls when they were small. The warped wood floor wears a scatter of sawdust, ancient dusty tools and coils of rope hang from the rafters, and a freckled blond boy leaps to attention when you enter. He even calls you sir. (I like to believe that it will remain exactly so until the glaciers have melted away.)

I'd bought a special kind of oil I use for my rotary mower and picked up a few rolls of tape. On the way out, I bought an Eskimo Pie from the freezer (a clever source of bribes for impatient children, sheer indulgence for me). I was heading for my car when I saw the orange banner on the old mill, gussied up and spared from collapse, that now houses artists and a few craft boutiques. OPEN STUDIOS.

Well why not? I placed my purchases on the backseat of my car. I didn't even have to feed the meter.

The cavernous halls of the brick building were chilly as I wandered past the open doorways, each leading to a cornucopia of chandeliers, charm bracelets, tapestries, or some other form of elaborately creative effulgence. I tried to fool myself into believing that I was there to browse. I waved awkwardly at lonely artisans hoping for someone, anyone, to look at their frivolous wares. On the third floor, I found her.

I saw a plaque with her name,
Sarah Straight
, before I was able to look through the open door. Too late, I panicked at the thought that her work might be trivial, tacky, or downright ugly. What would I say? I've never been good at pretending I like what I most emphatically do not.

A slim shaft of violet light crossed the threshold, like a stray laser beam. I stepped into it and was, for a moment, blinded. Stepping aside, I saw the source of the purple ray: a large fan window that depicted, in brilliant, varicolored, varitextured fragments of glass, a landscape. A seascape, to be precise: marbled rough-hewn slabs of rock against a wide blue turmoil of sea, a stormy sky. The low afternoon sun was shining right through it.

"Percival Darling!" She'd spotted me before I spotted her.

Two other people stood nearby, Sunday strangers admiring Sarah's work.

She crossed the space between us, her hand held out. As I shook it, I realized that my own hand was sticky. "Oh dear," I said. "Eskimo Pie."

"Sticky hands I'm used to," said Sarah. As if on cue, Rico streaked past, riding a tricycle across the concrete floor.

"Please don't go anywhere," she said. "I mean it. Look around, or sit, help yourself to food over there. Just give me a few minutes with these people." She whispered, "I think they might give me a commission."

So I looked while Sarah had a quiet conversation with one of the strangers. Her windows were landscapes, all devoutly New England in their images and tone: autumnal hay fields, snow-laden pines, islands off the coast of Maine. I saw her writing in a notebook, giving a card to the man, shaking his hand. When he left, she returned to me.

"How nice to see you."

I laughed inanely. "I was across the street, at Conley's. I've been going there since ..." I skidded to a halt. It was clear to me that I did not want to tell her how many years I'd been shopping in Packard--shopping anywhere at all.

"Isn't Packard fabulous?" she said. "Last year one of my friends got a loft in this building and we came for a visit."

I found
fabulous
a curious word to apply to this rundown corner of the world, but I hastened to agree.

A bell, like a school bell, rang from below. "Is that a fire alarm?"

"No. Studios close in fifteen minutes," Sarah explained. "But stay; would you stay for a bit? The fruit and cheese shouldn't go to waste." She pointed to an arrangement of plates on a table, next to a pair of wine bottles, both empty.

"What if I were to say I'd rather have the wine?" I cringed to hear myself sounding so coy.

Sarah laughed. (How readily this woman laughed!) She said quietly, "I have a much nicer bottle in the back that I'd never share with just anyone."

"Thank you!" called out the straggler. "Your work is amazing!"

"Come back anytime," Sarah said. She crossed the loft and locked the door behind him. She closed her eyes and leaned against it. "These afternoons take a lot out of me."

"But you must enjoy sharing your work." I looked around. "Your quite impressive work."
Your breathtaking work
, I wasn't brave enough to say.

Sarah had stepped behind a curtain at the end of the wide-open studio space. She emerged carrying a bottle of wine and two colorful handmade glasses. "I'm glad you like it. Rumor has it your praise isn't easy to earn."

She set down the glasses and started to open the bottle.

"Oh dear. I was joking about the wine," I said.

Rico shot past us again, imitating a police siren.

"No!" I exclaimed when I saw that I'd embarrassed her. "What I mean is that I'd love to linger a bit--and I'll help myself to that Brie, since my daughter's not here to take it away--but I can't drive home if I drink. I'm very careful that way." She stood still, listening to me. Was she waiting for something?

"And surely you'll want to get back to your husband soon," I said.

"There is no husband. Thank heaven. As for 'getting back,' we live right here, Rico and I." She pointed at the curtain. "That's our lair. I'd show it to you, but it's all topsy-turvy right now."

"Topsy-turvy," I echoed vaguely.

Rico dismounted his make-believe cruiser and marched up to the table. He grabbed the largest bunch of grapes he could engulf in a fist and, while stuffing his small face, declared loudly and redundantly that he was hungry.

"Oh bunny, you didn't get lunch, did you?" His mother looked at her watch. I was prepared to be dismissed when she said, "How would you feel about an unfashionably early dinner at an unfashionably kid-friendly restaurant, Percy? May I call you Percy?"

"Of course!" I said. There were times when I embraced my elder status. This was not one of those times.

The next two hours, which the three of us spent in Packard's oldest eating establishment, a diner whose charming exterior belies its leaden, rather Paleolithic offerings, felt utterly bizarre yet utterly thrilling to me. Sarah, I learned in the harsh light of Mama Jo's, was neither as young as I had guessed nor as saintly as she seemed. She was fifty-one; had been married, young and briefly; had fled to France for several years, where she'd studied glass with "the masters"; had returned to the States and "run wild." (I asked for details about the masters but not the running wild.) Four years ago, on her own, she had adopted Rico in Guatemala. "I made a lot of mistakes," she said, "and then this little boy just up and saved my life. Tied me down. Which I used to think would kill me. And was I wrong." She mussed his hair, and I could tell he had heard this speech before, since it did not disrupt his confounding enjoyment of a hamburger that looked like a disk of macadam between two slabs of toasted Styrofoam.