The Widower's Tale (11 page)

Granddad said, "I negotiated a swap with Todd. I hope that works for you."

"Oh you know me," said Clover gaily. "I believe in the pleasures of the present moment."

"Well good for you, Aunt Clo, good for you," said Robert, standing up. He hoped she would miss the look on her sister's face. To someone who didn't know his mother the way he did, it would be easy to miss the compassion cloaked as dismay. She wasn't a pessimist, his mother, not at all, but she had a clearer eye than most, wherever she went, for the worst-case scenario. Robert had always assumed it came with her professional territory--though maybe it was the reverse: maybe her nature had led her to her vocation.

"Sit down, children," Granddad said loudly. He got up and went to the kitchen. He leaned his head through the door and called out, "Young people in there, we are ready now!" And in a moment, out came Clover's birthday cake, a most un-Siamese confection glistening with chocolate icing and candlelight.

Robert was pretty certain that what tipped him over the Harvard admissions bar was the essay he wrote about his mother. His grades were practically perfect, but that was true for many of his classmates at Newton South, his psychotically overachieving high school. He wasn't from Tulsa and had not the slightest ethnic tint to his blood. (Turo was half Filipino, half Guatemalan. His mother had drummed it into him, from the nanosecond they arrived in the States, that his exotic mongrel status was a key to open many doors. Not to mention borders: the guy had three passports.) Robert had played soccer (like who didn't?) and tennis and had been on the traveling debate team, but he hadn't been the captain or the director or the mastermind of anything extracurricular, or done anything admirably weird, like competitive skeet shooting or breeding llamas. Unless you counted the Lego workshop he ran one summer for kids at the elementary school. Doubtful. Had his grandfather's position as a librarian at Widener (one of about three thousand) made a difference? Also doubtful. Very, according to Granddad, who honestly seemed to believe that Robert was genius material.

His mother did not ask what he wrote on his college applications. She was a hands-off-the-small-stuff mother, not just because she was this medical hotshot and had no time to hover but because--and she told this to Robert himself, when he wondered once why all the other kids had karate and piano and chess club practically every afternoon in junior high--she believed children should be responsible for their triumphs as well as their failures. She also told him, as if it were a well-known law of nature, like gravity or centripetal force, that creative thinking blossomed in what others might see as idleness. (Later, he wondered how this applied to doctors, who weren't even allowed to sleep for about three years of their education, never mind be anything approaching "idle.")

"Do you
want
to take piano or karate?" she had asked him across the kitchen counter that day. He was eleven. "Say the word and I will sign you up for anything that strikes your passion."

Well, no, he had told her. Though maybe guitar. And the next week a shy, bearded guy had shown up one afternoon with two guitars. When Robert decided to quit, three years later, his parents had expressed no disappointment. They continued to let him steer his own course, though now and then they would throw out bits of general advice, most of it pretty duh in nature. Like "Actions speak louder than words." "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush." Robert's dad liked proverbs and sayings. He was the parent who clocked more hours at home because that's where he worked. He saw his clients in an office that you entered on the basement level. There was a magnet on his filing cabinet that read, GO OUT ON A LIMB. THAT'S WHERE THE FRUIT IS.

Once Robert reached the age when he was horny 24/7, he began to wonder how divorcing couples might interpret this witty little saying, attributed on the magnet to Will Rogers. Out of curiosity, Robert looked him up on Wikipedia, expecting to find out that, like most celebrities, Rogers had failed at marriage several times over. But no: he'd been married just once and had three children. So apparently the fruit wasn't sexual.

When it came to sex, drugs, and cigarettes, Robert's mother had an uncanny sense of timing in her habit of leaving "literature" on these topics lying around the kitchen. The words made less of an impression than the graphic pictures of lungs brutalized by smoking; of young men tattooed with cancerous lesions from AIDS; of other young men curled up in alleys, destitute, miserable, and lost to the world in a heroin fog. Robert would never know if his dutiful abstinence (well, of everything but safe heterosexual sex) was the product of his mother's leafleting program or his own nature.

When he'd arrive home from school, sometimes he'd hear the raised voices of his dad's clients--shrill arguments in that
You did too! I did not! You did TOO!
type of tone, always man versus woman--through the living room floor. He had never heard his parents argue like that. Maybe all those hysterical clients had the same deterrent effect on Robert's dad that the vice squad medical brochures had on Robert. Or maybe his parents just understood each other. Not that they never disagreed.

Another weird thing was that, because they were both so ethical about keeping their clients' lives private (at least when Robert was around), they almost never mentioned work. They talked about politics, friends, and families, and they genuinely liked to hear about Robert's schoolwork. Yet they gave him the same degree of privacy they gave their clients.

So they never saw the essay that went like this:

Imagine growing up the only child of a parent who strives to save lives every day--but who does it by making them sicker than they've ever thought they could stand. Imagine how she gets up while it's still dark and has her coffee and does her exercises and then makes breakfast for you and your father. Sometimes you are not even awake when she leaves for work, but the table is set and there's a note saying when she'll be home and what things you might need to know about your own life that day. When you're little, she's a doctor but still in training, so she's hardly ever home to cook your dinner, but she does her best to read you at least one story every day. Sometimes she comes home for lunch, just to hold you in her lap.

But by the time you're in junior high, she has her own office in a major hospital downtown. She juggles hundreds of patients, but now she comes home for dinner nearly every night. After dinner, while you do your homework, she works too: she reads journals, she goes over notes, but she also talks to patients on the phone. If you pass her study, you can hear her voice, quiet and calm. You know that almost all her patients are women. They have breast cancer. Some of them know they're probably going to die of their disease.

When you're seventeen, she asks if you'd like a summer job in her office. She explains that you'll be doing trivial tasks, like refilling the snack baskets and the refrigerator in the chemo clinic. Everything is miniature: mini crackers, mini bagels, mini packages of jelly and cheese. Tiny water bottles. The coffee and tea come in individual pods. It's as if the food respects people's privacy, too. You keep the copy machines filled, carry batches of patient folders from one station to another, empty recycling bins. The biggest challenge is boredom.

But here's what amazes you. Even though she spends most of her time behind the closed door of her office or exam room, you see your mother in action. You knew she'd be good, but you didn't know how outgoing she would be. At home she's more reserved. Everything she does seems carefully planned. In the hospital, she comes through the waiting room and says something special to each patient; she asks about their children or pets. She'll remember a dog's name. She tells them she's spoken with a doctor, refilled a prescription, ironed out kinks with their insurance. After she goes through, they're all smiling, even the ones who look so thin you worry they might actually break into pieces if they tripped and fell. For a minute, it feels like your mom is the president of a tiny, happy country.

Except that there's a lot of sickness there. The few times you enter the "suites" where they do the actual chemotherapy, you can't help looking for your mother. You see her talking intensely to people who have all these drugs going into their bodies through long tubes. It's like a sci-fi movie, like everyone's on a spaceship headed to a planet where you need to be vaccinated with these chemicals.

One day you are taking crackers to the kitchen by the chemo suites when something dramatic happens. An old man is walking along a hall pushing his IV pole. He groans and falls down. There's a huge crash, because of the pole, and he's curled up on the floor tangled in the tubes.

And like a bullet train, your mother shoots down the hall out of nowhere and practically throws herself onto the man. She pushes on his chest and breathes into his mouth. You've never seen CPR; it would look disturbing even if this weren't your mom. She calls out code words, for help, in a calm but incredibly loud voice you've never heard before. The old man is not her patient, but for now he is. Even when his doctor gets there, she continues to do this incredible work on his body: it feels like forever.

Then she sits on the floor and props him up between her legs. When a gurney comes, the old man clings to her like a life preserver. "I'll go with you," she says. She untangles his IV lines and straightens his shirt. She and his doctor help the orderlies get the man on the gurney. She holds his hand and talks to him. You never knew before that being a doctor could be so intimate.

Everything goes back to normal. You put the crackers in the right basket and the coffee pods in the right drawer. You realize that your own mother, who's biologically yours and yours only, could be Mother to the World. You see what's possible for you, and it feels amazing. Huge. It sounds corny to say, but it's true: you know now what inspiration means, what it means to live out your convictions. Now you'll just have to find out what they are.

Of course, in reality it wasn't so simple. That summer, as it happened, was when things started going wonky for poor Aunt Clo. The weekend after the I-love-my-yoga-instructor/I-might-be-gay explosion, she'd arrived unannounced in Newton. Robert's mother's life couldn't accommodate a whole lot of spontaneity, but this was her sister in a crisis. So she canceled a trip to be the pink-ribbon cutter for a breast-cancer 10K in Baltimore.

"Honey, just head out and do your thing. This is going to be messy," she told Robert after breakfast that Saturday morning.

And messy it was. That night, after Robert got back from hanging out at a friend's house, he found his mother and her sister together in the living room, his dad nowhere to be seen. Aunt Clover had been crying.

He waved awkwardly when they looked up, then went to his room. Later, he heard their voices rise in anger. He heard Aunt Clover wail, "You DO NOT know what it's like! You had that ABORTION because you couldn't deal with a little uncertainty! Maybe even ONE PERFECT CHILD is more than you ever wanted! Don't you DARE give me advice about being a MOTHER!"

Robert heard his mom shout the F word, which was something on the order of getting to see Halley's Comet.

Two days after that, Robert rode to the hospital with her, as usual, in their ancient but well-preserved Mercedes. If he got a ride home with her--which he did only half the time, because often she worked until seven or eight--that was when they talked. In the morning, they shared the car in harmonious silence, both sipping coffee, cushioned in the crimson-leather seats. On the Mass. Pike, he found himself staring at his mother's profile, her face calm, the way it always was in concentration.

He told himself that if she noticed, if she turned and asked why he was staring, he would dare to tell her what he'd overheard. He would ask her about the abortion. He was old enough, now, to love being his parents' one and only offspring, to see what a hassle siblings could be, but when he was much younger, he'd asked again and again for a little brother or sister, the way other kids asked for a puppy.

His parents had both told him that in a world so overpopulated, especially in a country where people's everyday habits were responsible for most of the destruction to the global environment, having one child was the most ethical choice. "And of course," his father said, "you get every bit of our love and devotion. You are all the kid we'll ever want or need."

As he stared at his admirable, moral, loving mother on that summer morning (the car windows open; no AC to eat away the ozone layer), he wondered something else: Had his father known about the abortion, and when was it? When Robert was two, or six, or ten? He realized, with a visceral sting, that even though he was almost an adult, his mother was still young enough to get pregnant. She could have had the abortion that very summer.... The more he thought about this chain of logic, the more painful and creepy it was.

But Trudy Barnes had been so wrapped up in her morning thoughts, or so focused on the aggressive driving of the other commuters, that she had not asked why Robert was staring. And he had asked nothing in return.

4

The day on which Robert, his pal Arturo, and the pixieish but undeniably talented teacher began to build the tree house was likewise the day on which Mistress Lorelei chose to flourish an olive branch and the day on which I met Sarah: for the second time, if one is literal-minded, but for the first if, like me, you believe that you have not truly met someone until you have looked him or her in the eye as a soul with a place in your future.

Jolted from a dreamless, fogbound sleep, I nevertheless recognized at once the percussive clatter of lumber beneath my bedroom window. My heart sank. This was a disruption that, with the final transformative batterings on my barn, I had hoped not to hear again at such close range. I'd fallen asleep deep in the brutal Australian outback with Patrick White's explorer Voss, and as I sat up, the splayed volume hit the floor. I staggered to the window and was about to yell some what-in-tarnation expletive when I spotted my grandson.

"Good Lord, Robert. Did I forget to expect this?"

He looked up, along with the teacher fellow whose name I had yet again forgotten. They smiled and waved. Arturo came around the corner of the house and waved as well.

"Hey, Granddad. Aunt Clo didn't warn you?"

The teacher called out, "Did we wake you?" Talented, yes, but not too observant. (Irving? Ernest? The name began with a vowel....)

It was nine o'clock. I groaned at the notion of my run, usually over and done by that hour. "Are you about to execute my tree?" I called through the screen.

"Negativo
, Granddad." Robert grinned. "I know all about creating domiciles that harmonize with nature."

He had a point. Robert had spent the summer after high school helping build a hotel in Costa Rica. An "eco-lodge." Halfway through that summer, he'd threatened to stay on for another year. Alarmed that he might dismiss college altogether, I asked if he was having doubts. He replied, "Who in their right mind doesn't?" So true! His parents seemed, as always, unruffled. (Back then, I harbored a secret yen to see Douglas Barnes, my son-in-law, suffer from an episode of indecisiveness, impatience, or ire. I had waited in vain for two decades.)

I changed into my running clothes and stretched out my cantankerous limbs. In the kitchen, I drank my glass of orange juice and forced down the large capsules Clover had cajoled me into taking. Fish oil and a lurid green pill whose name I could never remember. Something like spartina. (Ira: that was the teacher's name!)

As I stood in the kitchen giving myself a pep talk, shaking out my shoulders, pulling my knees toward my chest, I saw a pink envelope peeking coyly from under the door.

An out-of-season valentine? When had I last received one of those, even on the proper day?

My dear Percy,

First off, I have to tell you that despite my initial misgivings, I am so pleased to see that Elves and Faeries has found such a perfect new home!! The voices of little children at play in the morning are, I am surprised to confess, nearly as lovely as the birdsong with which they mingle. How wise you were, as well as generous.

Perhaps the spirit of youthful enthusiasm is contagious, for I find myself eager to have you over for tea or cocktails, the sooner the better, not just to discuss a plan I have to benefit the Historical Forum but to make neighborly amends. You have been correct about many things regarding our shared environment here, and I wish to offer you my humble apologies for calling in Hal last spring when we could have settled our differences without the interference of outside agencies!

Is tomorrow or perhaps even this very afternoon too sudden? 4:00? 6:00? You name the time. I am wide open!! (Do you like smoked salmon? Edgar just expressed me this very special treat, wild-caught in Alaska, and I am longing to share it.)

Please do call!

Warmest regards,

Laurel

Wide open? I had to laugh at that: a frightening vision indeed. Little wonder that her son, Edgar, had fled to the farthest corner of the country as soon as he could make his own living. His father had fled long before. Whenever I felt myself pitying Mistress Lorelei, so rich but so lonely, I had only to remember (would that I could forget!) the way she'd literally flung herself at me after her divorce. At the last Christmas party I gave, more than ten years ago, she had lured me upstairs to my own bedroom, insisting she had good reason to suspect the existence of a secret compartment or passage near the chimney. Since our houses were built in the same year, by the same housewright, I assumed she was looking for the twin to some feature in hers. She had knocked and pressed her ear to the walls for ten or fifteen minutes--very convincing, this ruse--and then she had pounced.

I cut off that conduit of memory, but I would answer her note. With the arrival of E & F, the diplomat's role was part of my new, godfatherly persona. (I shook free a fleeting vision of Condi Rice in one of her twee Barbie suits.)

I picked up the phone before I could change my mind. Thank heaven: her machine. "Percy Darling here. Why not this afternoon? I'll cross the Rubicon at five or so. Salmon sounds splendid."

Tossing aside the cotton-candy missive, out the door I ran, the vigor returned to my legs. As I passed and hailed the tree-house builders (pleased to have remembered Ira's name), I noticed, over the wall and through the line of maples along the driveway, Mistress Lorelei's Mayan gardener watching them intently. I waved to him as well. "Hello there, Celestino!" I called out.
His
name I could recall, though I had not laid eyes on him in a month.

I ran toward town and circled the green. As always when I passed the library, I felt a frisson of despair. On the front door was a poster, hand-lettered in Magic Marker, urging passers-by to stop in for a workshop--FREE! CHILD CARE AVAILABLE!--on building your own Web site.

This propelled me into a sprint.

The profession I chose, like the woman I chose, belongs to the past except in the minds of those who truly loved it and mourn its tragic demise. Even the educational path upon which it is based has become all but unrecognizable. What was once called library science now has a trend-driven hocus-pocus name, something like "informational studies." A library that is respectably up to date is no longer a temple dedicated to the guardianship of books or a sanctuary for the hallowed art of reading.

No.

A library is a zone of cyberkinetic values, a brain as viewed by the cold, lizardly pathologist: a numbingly gray place, of systems and wiring, of knowledge-related transactions that may or may not (preferably not, to many of my grandson's peers) require the use of books. A library is now far more like a bank than like a church or a museum--cause for rejoicing in the minds of the Orwellian clerks who service its needs. Ten years ago, Matlock's public library--a cathedralesque Victorian structure, built of red brick, its front door crowned with a stained-glass window depicting the warrior-scholar Athena--endured a so-called renovation. Perversely, all books were permanently removed from the vaulted central room, the tall shelves replaced by carrels containing Internet Access Stations and bins displaying movie DVDs. The information desk is now manned (womaned) by someone whose main job is to help you reserve time slots for the computers or guide you through the arduous process of "logging on." If you do not watch your feet as you pass through this room, you are sure to trip on the electrical cords that creep everywhere like kudzu.

Once, I blamed these changes on the computers themselves. (Through my decades at Widener, we classified and reclassified volumes again and again, enduring a series of achingly absurd systemic quakes, each christened with yet another acronym from MARC through OCLC to HOLLIS. Walls were ripped open to accommodate more cabling. Throughout our reading rooms, the bitter glow of screens began to clash with lamplight.) But such blame is naive, merely another form of condemning the messenger. In retrospect, I am forced to accept that an atheistic passion for the abstract nature of existence, a leaning toward the mathematical, would have led sooner or later to an antireverence toward all things bibliographical, a sort of baby-with-the-bathwater ethos. It is no coincidence that the first books were religious in nature. Word of God and all that. Since I stand firmly in the God-is-for-sissies camp, I follow the logic of this evolution with more sorrow than outrage.

You will assume that my house was filled to the rafters with books. Well, yes, there were quite a lot of books throughout, underfoot and overhead, tumbling out of my haphazardly placed bookshelves, stacked beneath chairs, beside beds, even in the bottoms of a closet or two. But I was never a "collector." My love of books is a love of what they contain; they hold knowledge as a pitcher holds water, as a dress contains the mystery of a woman's exquisite body. Their physicality
matters
--do not speak to me of storing books as bytes!--but they should not inspire fetishistic devotion. I kept no preciously glass-fronted cases, did not assign a room of my home to be an officially designated library, nor did I collude with antiquarian book dealers, haunt trading fairs, or participate in any bibliographic commerce other than spending too much money at the bookseller I have always favored in Ledgely. It was and still is called the Narwhal, a play on the name of its longtime proprietor, my dear friend and onetime colleague Norval Sorenson, who can still get me nearly any volume my heart desires and whose wife, Helena, became one of Poppy's closest friends.

Why did I, a robust red-blooded man born before World War II, become a librarian ... a profession that, in the mid-twentieth century, was scorned as the refuge of timid, bookish women and a handful of homosexual, sandal-wearing fops? I loved to read, and both of my parents were teachers. Mother English, father history. Really, it was as simple as that. In our house, in Montclair, New Jersey, there were bookshelves in every room, and every room's collection of books fell within a designated subject. All wars up to and including the Civil War occupied the living room; twentieth-century wars dominated the foyer and downstairs hallway. (My father, a fellow of pacifist temperament, taught history through teaching wars.) British fiction, my mother's first love, encircled the dining room table. There were cookbooks in the kitchen, of course, but European literature in translation crammed the breakfast nook, and up in my parents' bedroom lived biographies and memoirs. In the guest room slumbered science and the visual arts; a dozen gardening volumes held court in the downstairs bathroom. In my room, however, books toppled this way and that, as I pleased; my mother, wisely, relinquished her control beyond my door.

It was straightforward, then, the path I followed; I see it as proof of a happy childhood. Take that, Dr. Freud (Philip Larkin, too). And like so many people who find their calling early, I found my spouse early as well. I met Poppy at a party in Cambridge, the year I started working as a stacks page at Widener. I had been invited to one of those cattle-call cocktail gatherings at the home of the curator of rare books. There, nearly
all
books were housed in glittering glass-fronted shelves, where keys in the locks left one assuming that to open the cases without permission might trigger an alarm.

Knowing no one, I gripped my gin and tonic (too strong for me back in those innocent days) and pretended great interest in a case of leather volumes in languages I did not speak or read.

"Boo," said a girl from close behind me. "You are just pretending, aren't you?"

Genuinely startled, I said, "Pretending what?"

"To give a hoot about those books." She peered into the case. "I mean, Chaucer? Who really enjoys Chaucer?"

She was extremely pretty, the cheeky girl, and she knew it.

"As it happens, I love books. And Chaucer."

"Of course you love books. You're here at Rupert's. Which means you're at Harvard. So of course you do."

I was confused. "Well, then you're at Harvard, too."

She laughed. "I'm the daughter of people who used to be."

"Used to be?"

"Mm. Used to teach here. Now they teach in France. It's not so cruel there."

"Cruel?"

She laughed again.

"My father says Harvard is a difficult mistress, ready to betray you at the slightest lapse in protocol or devotion. If you make it here, you can't relax. Not for a minute. The peak of a mountain, he says, is always a perilous place to stand, no matter how sweeping the view."

Articulate though her speech might have been, I found it irritating, but at least someone was talking to me. I took a sip of my gin and felt its sting deep in my sinuses. I sneezed. "Well," I said, "in principle, I see what you mean. But I'm very happy here."

"Yes, that's because you're young. You're grateful to be here. And that's fine! That's exactly as it should be. For now. If you're smart, though, you'll see it as a stepping-stone, not a destination."

My eyes watered from the impact of my drink. "Who are you? Are you always this impertinent?"