The Widower's Tale (16 page)

The two of them shared an enormous hot-fudge sundae--a dessert that's hard to ruin.

"Tell Mr. Darling what you're going to be for Halloween," she said when they had finished sparring for the last glob of fudge at the bottom of the dish.

"I am going to be the Grim Reaper," said Rico.

"Oh my," I said. "With a scythe and a great black hood?"

"Yes, a scythe. Mom knows how to make one."

"A homemade scythe," I said, honestly impressed. "Well, please do not darken
my
door, young fellow."

Rico looked at his mother. She said, "Can we promise him that, Rico? I don't think so. The Grim Reaper visits
everyone."
She looked at me and began to chuckle maniacally. Rico looked confused.

I walked them back. I insisted on seeing them to the door of the loft.

"That was fun, Percy."

"Yes, it was." I'd meant to direct this remark at Rico, but he had run off already. I said good night.

In the dark, I drove to Matlock feeling as if I'd drunk that wine after all, the entire bottle, though all I'd imbibed was a glass of water and a cup of coffee that tasted as if it had been brewed sometime during the Reagan administration.

A few days later, I found myself furtively watching for Sarah as the Lunch Bunch spilled out of the barn. When I saw her leaving with Rico, I stepped outside, pretending to inspect the tree house. It wasn't quite finished, but Ira had hung from the lower framework a string of orange lights for Halloween. The visible parts of the tree house were being constructed with limbs pillaged--or pruned--from other trees: I recognized birch and sycamore among them. (Ira had made a habit of checking in with me after every sprint of progress on his project. He was never the least bit obsequious, and I had the feeling that if I'd told him I wished it would resemble a mosque or a burlesque hall, he'd have done his best to comply. I had also noticed, from glances out my back windows and remarks dropped into Clover's cheerful chitchat, that he and my daughter were becoming friends. Oh please not more than that, I begged the parental gods. Nothing personal against the talented pixie.)

I hailed Rico and asked him if he was in one of the groups entrusted with decorating the tree house. As luck would have it, he was; I drew him out about the furnishings he and his classmates were hammering together in the wood shop.

And then, as clumsily as one can possibly imagine, I turned to Sarah and said, "Would the two of you like to come for dinner sometime?"

Rico, whom I'd managed to interrupt, was still talking about the table they were making with Mr. Ira, how it would be painted in all the colors of the rainbow. Sarah stared at me so fixedly that I knew she must be struggling with how to decline my invitation.

"Excuse me for just a second," she said to Rico. To me, she said, "Yes. When?"

"Oh." I hadn't planned what to say if she accepted.

The day before Poppy's funeral, I kicked everyone out of the house: her parents, who'd flown in from France and were staying at the Ledgely Inn; my widowed mother, whom I banished to the Sorensons; and even Helena, who'd spent three nights on the fold-out couch in my study to be with the girls while I made arrangements. I had come downstairs that morning to find the two older women and Helena cleaning my kitchen and murmuring sadly among themselves. Poppy had been dead for four days. I heard our daughters' names on these women's lips.

When the three women looked up at me in unison, I was struck with a manic vertigo, the specific fear that someone, somehow, would take Clover and Trudy away from me, too. Before my eyes, my mother, mother-in-law, and wife's best friend became my adversaries. Their presence felt not the least bit consoling; it was stifling, suffocating, cunning, a covert invasion. I was on the verge of hysteria. My voice shook as I said, without greeting them, "By lunchtime, I require you all to leave. I wish to be alone with my daughters. Please."

None of them had argued. After breakfast, they made a rich, nurturing lunch (I remember Helena's ice-cold watercress soup) and set the table for three. They hugged the girls, one by one, as if in a reception line, and they drove away.

We shared lunch in perfect, heartbroken silence. Trudy and I ate almost nothing; Clover ate two bowls of soup, much of the cheese, and devoured the entire loaf of bread. I had meant it when I said that I wanted to be with my daughters, unchaperoned, but after lunch they went upstairs, into Clover's room, and closed the door. It seemed clear they did not want my company, so I lay down on my bed, on Poppy's bed, feeling no purpose, no sense of time. I could hear Clover and Trudy together at their end of the second floor, speaking in low voices. The phone rang only a few times; every time, Clover ran downstairs to answer it. The first time, she came to the door of the bedroom, which I had left ajar. I'm sure she could see that I'd been crying, though she did not offer to enter the room or comfort me. I told her that unless the funeral director or the minister called, I wasn't available. Although we'd made a will, Poppy had left no directions about rituals in the event of her death. I buckled, without protest, when her parents requested a service in Matlock's Episcopal church, though we agreed on cremation. Her ashes would be buried an hour north, in Vigil Harbor, in the graveyard where her father's ancestors lay and her parents intended to wind up their days.

I must have fallen asleep before dinnertime; I slept until the following morning.

What a beautiful day it was: dry, almost cool, the birds singing their tiny lungs out in the trees around the house. I awoke without so much as a single merciful moment of amnesia. My eyes were still swollen, and I was fiercely thirsty. In the kitchen, I was stunned to find Trudy and Clover, sitting at the table eating breakfast, both dressed in black, hair studiously combed. Clover wore lipstick. Towering above their heads, in the center of the table, was one of the many flower arrangements that would not stop arriving.

Their eyes, like mine, were red, but they were composed. "Hi, Daddy," said Clover. She sounded years younger than the teenage daughter who'd begun to speak to me that summer with thinly veiled condescension.

I uttered the only word my mouth could form. "Daughters." This word meant everything to me in that moment: sun, moon, stars, blood, water (oh curse the water!), meat, potatoes, wine, shoes, books, the floor beneath my feet, the roof above my head.

I moved the tastelessly magnificent effusion of flowers from the table to a counter. I stared bleakly out the windows toward the pond. I knew that I needed to speak, to be reassuring, loving, protective, but no words came to my aid.

Clover made me a bowl of Cheerios. She sliced strawberries on top, slicing them the way her mother had taught her, between her hands with a small sharp knife. "You have to eat something, Daddy," she said. "Or you'll faint in the church."

I did as she asked. I sat at the table, a slovenly mess, not caring if milk dribbled on my robe. The slate floor felt like ice beneath my feet. "This is going to be terrible," I said at last.

"I know," said Clover.

"Do you really want to go to Aunt Helena's after? You don't have to."

"I think I do. I think we both do." I could see, and yet another part of my heart began to crumble, that Clover was trying on the voice and manner of a little mother.

I looked at Trudy, who hadn't spoken. "How about you, sweetie?"

"Yeah," she said, her voice dull.

"You want to go?"

"Yeah. I'll go." She stared into her empty bowl. The room became silent again.

I finished my cereal. Clover cleared away the bowl. Without guidance, she had made me coffee, too--ghastly, muddy coffee, but I was profoundly grateful.

Then Trudy stood up from the table and walked across the room. Beneath a very short black skirt, she wore fishnet stockings. They, too, were black, but they startled me.

"Sweetheart," I said, "I haven't seen those stockings before."

"They're Clover's." She stood facing me, her arms stiff at her sides. She had my fine, sand-colored hair, my large forehead and ears. Anyone would look at her features and suspect, without having met me, that she was a girl who resembled her father.

"I don't know if fishnets are the wisest choice for a funeral, sweetie." Why did I say this? What did I know? Why should I care?

"Well, maybe Mom didn't make the wisest choice, either," she said.

Clover stood by the kitchen sink, staring at each of us in turn.

"Oh Trudy, honey, your mother didn't choose to die. It was a terrible, terrible accident. Is that what you think, that she killed herself?"

"No," she said. "Of course I don't think that. I think she was totally drunk after your party where everybody got into that big stupid argument. She was drunk and she went swimming. Is that smart? What do
you
think?"

Both of my daughters seemed to have changed overnight, their behavior bewildering, alarming, dismaying. I felt as if I were having one of those dreams in which your most tender friends reprimand you or long-vanished traitors show up on your doorstep to tell you how wrong they were, how they want your love after all these years. None of it feels right or good. The world is widdershins.

"Daughters," I said for the second time that morning. I held out my arms. "I love you both like nothing else under the sun. Let's say whatever we want to say to one another, whatever we need to say, if that's what it takes to hold ourselves together."

Clover came over and hugged me. Trudy went upstairs. For the next several days, I was afraid to be alone with my younger daughter. I knew she had not forgotten the night of her mother's death, her certainty that someone outside had been calling. And yet I could never find the courage, despite what I'd told the girls about speaking from our hearts, to mention that night to Trudy. That she had been lying awake, listening to a group of adults attack one another like petulant children, made me doubly ashamed. She never mentioned it, either.

After Trudy went upstairs that morning, after Clover went back to putting bowls and plates in the dishwasher, the phone rang. For the first time in days, I answered.

It was the secretary in the office of Poppy's gynecologist, calling to confirm Clover's appointment the following day.

"No," I said, "she will not be there.... No, there's no need to reschedule. Thank you." I hung up.

Clover turned from the sink. "What was that?"

"It's unimportant," I said. A lie, but also the truth. Poppy's death did for Clover what nothing else could have accomplished so well. It took the allure out of boys and sex--out of everything--for many months to come. Years later, she would make up for that loss, but in the short run, Clover lived as if someone had, after all, locked her up in a tower.

A few nights after my visit to Packard, Sarah and Rico came over for dinner. I promised burgers far superior to those at Mama Jo's. Sarah arrived with a pie for dessert and a DVD for Rico to watch.

We ate in the kitchen, and then I set Rico up with his movie--starring an animated sponge (good Lord)--in Poppy's dressing room. In the living room, I lit a fire. This time it was Sarah who did not drink. So when she flirted with me, I knew it had to be deliberate, and I was unnerved. She sat next to me on the couch, rather than in the wing chair by the hearth.

"I suppose this is our chance for grown-up conversation," I said.

"It's a place to start." One of Sarah's knees touched one of mine.

This agitated me so much that I got up, poked at the fire, then took the wing chair myself. We talked about the candidates, the upcoming primaries, and we talked about her stained glass, how she'd arrived at this medium through sculpture.

During a pause, she looked around the room. (I hoped the dust wouldn't show in the firelight.) Her eyes came to rest on the pastel portrait of Poppy that sits on top of a bookcase. It shows her, full figure in black leotard and red tights, arms raised to form a steeple, fingertips touching. It's not terribly good, but it was done by Helena, who took a few art classes at a nearby museum.

"Is that your wife?"

"Yes."

Before I could fret much about what I'd say next, Sarah said, "I know about how she died. How awful."

"Does Clover tell everyone?" Irrationally, I felt angry.

"Everyone seems to know anyway."

"One of the town's sordid evergreens."

"I wouldn't say that. Apparently everyone loved her. What I heard is that you're not the only one who still misses her."

What could I say to this? Was it a test to see just how much I
did
still miss her? Finally, I said, "I'm sure you don't intend to, but you make it sound as if there's a competition."

Sarah frowned.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I'm sorry, too. For you and your daughters."

"Oh, we've done all right, despite their being raised by me. They taught me that you don't pack sandwiches with mayonnaise in a brown-bag lunch. That Charlie Rose is better than Ted Koppel, because of the guests, not the hair. And that girls are smarter than boys. About everything. I taught them that you can survive having your sheets changed once a month or less. And that being able to drive a stick shift is not just useful but cool."

Sarah did me the courtesy of laughing. I told her all about Trudy, how she'd been a moody, secretive teenager yet a brilliant, driven student. I bragged about her recent promotion. I did not tell her Clover's history.

When she and Rico left--at eight-thirty, because it was a school night--Sarah kissed me on the cheek, but she held her lips there for several seconds.

I stayed up well past midnight. I felt as if my breathing wouldn't slow down enough for me to sleep. I spent a long time looking at myself in the mirror over my bathroom sink, in the harshest light. I wasn't ugly, not yet. I had a full head of silverish hair; my complexion hadn't burst into a doily of varicose veins. Since starting my retirement fitness program, I had lost ten pounds. I fancied that strangers might now describe me as solid rather than portly. My shoulders were broad, my posture decent. Perhaps I looked young for my age? At my last checkup, Dr. Fields had joked that I looked much better in person than on paper.... But really.