The Widower's Tale (28 page)

But for a drowning, this entire institution would not exist: a macabre fact that did not occur to me, or did not seize my full attention, until I returned to work following Poppy's death. For sixteen years of ascending and descending those thirty granite steps, I had felt an invigorating awe at the scale of the place, underscored by the justifiable grandiosity of the letters engraved across its masculine facade. I enjoyed a commensurate pride (though I knew it to be silly) that my job within the walls of this monument helped give it a living purpose. Yet the very public tragedy without which it would never have been endowed or built was something I had acknowledged only in a distant, muted way.

Credit Mrs. Widener with an aversion to melodrama. Another grieving mother might well have chosen to dramatize her son's untimely death with murals of violent despair (how easily one could picture a scene a la
Raft of the Medusa)
or lengthy narratives describing the ordeal and fate of Harry, his father, and their fellow unfortunates. But Mrs. Widener was not tempted by such bathos. What she wished to commemorate was her son's life--brief but precociously dedicated to a connoisseur's love of books. Enter the undistinguished vestibule of the library and you must deliberately face left to see the plain marble tablet informing you that Harry Elkins Widener, class of '07, "died at sea" after the "foundering of the steamship
Titanic."
(I had always regarded
foundering
as a meticulously chosen word, restrained yet potent.)

The day I returned to work after Poppy's death, I had walked directly to the Memorial Rooms, in part to put off my reunion with colleagues--who must have been equally apprehensive, sitting in their cubicles behind what we called the porthole (the window in the padded leather door that divided our offices from the reference room). Standing before Harry's Gutenberg--and, behind it, the ropes demurely forbidding entry--I surveyed with new eyes the small salon bordered by the cases containing his books. There was the same portrait of a pale, waxen-looking Harry, over the hearth laid for a birch fire that no one ever lit, and the same empty desk with a vase of live carnations whose scent few visitors could ever approach to enjoy.

This was back when the room still looked into the ashen depths of twin air shafts. To view the flowering trees that surrounded Widener, one had to visit an exterior space. (My own cubicle, for my last twenty years, was situated with such a vista.) Harry's room was, in every sense but the literal, a tomb.

From then on, I made a point of visiting Harry when I arrived at work. I didn't believe in heaven, of course, yet I wanted to believe that Harry and Poppy were somehow together, belonging to the same nether region of memory--a limbo exclusive to the drowned--just as dictionaries of Latin and Japanese will share the same shelves of any library in the world. This superstitious logic was a source of consolation for which I forgave my most primitive self.

Sarah would meet me there in an hour. I had decided to give myself the extra time to visit my old coworkers--or the two with whom I remained loosely in touch--on my own. I was not quite ready to introduce her to everyone in my life--and now, when I thought of Trudy's casual question (did I know any of Sarah's "female friends"?), I realized that she must feel equally cautious. I resisted the notion that she was in any way ashamed of me.

I'd asked Sarah if she might like a modest tour of Widener, after which we could share dinner out at a restaurant. She had been delighted. She told me she'd passed through the Yard countless times--as tourists and casual voyeurs were still, surprisingly, free to do in this newly paranoid age--yet never had she passed through the library's doors.

I spent a pleasant hour visiting with Suzannah and Earl. Crowded into Suzannah's cubicle, we drank tea, and I listened to the latest rounds of gossip. The new occupant of my former cubicle was away, and I tried hard not to linger too long at its entrance. At four-thirty, I said my goodbyes and told them to come out to Matlock anytime. They were unlikely to take me up on that invitation, yet I knew that they liked me still and were glad to have seen me. Following Norval's departure from Widener, I had never formed another true friendship at work.

So I was in a rare, nostalgic frame of mind when I greeted Sarah back on the front steps and pulled her in out of the cold. I kissed her quickly beside the marble tablet mentioning Harry's death at sea. For the second time, I swiped my library card and greeted the security attendant, a woman who'd started there just before my retirement.

We made our way up the central stairs, letting the architecture lead us deliberately to the Memorial Rooms. I described to Sarah how, during the renovations just a few years before, when the air shafts were transformed into reading rooms, I and my colleagues had worked in the rotunda, a false wood floor mounted over the marble tiles, our computer connections snaking beneath; how, as drills and power saws and nail guns had fired all around us, we had maintained our concentration, marveling that none of the marble acanthus and oak leaves high above had cracked off and fallen on our eggish heads.

Sarah looked at me fondly. "What a rarefied life. Lofty, even."

"Sometimes I felt like little more than a highly educated errand boy," I said. Though there had been times when I felt like an ace detective, too. At the end of my tenure, I had been the reference liaison to the literature and language departments. The library's bibliographers (Ph.D.'s all) had once looked down on my tribe as a menial lot, but the Internet changed all that. We became, like it or not, the "vanguard" when it came to showing Harvard's professor class how to navigate, how to stay afloat on, the Nile of information that flowed to the library from uncharted domains far beyond the continent comprising our stacks. I was hardly the best at this navigation--I leaned heavily (and somewhat furtively) on a series of work-study students assigned to me over my final years--but navigate I did. Each day when I returned to Matlock, I sank gratefully into a life rooted in the past. The only electrical gadget I relied upon daily at home was my toaster.

I told all this to Sarah as we perused the glass cases showing Harry's days as a thespian, his secret code for recording transactions on books, and the building of the library itself.

"My God," she said, "I knew I'd fallen for a weenie, but a Luddite?"

"Not quite. For which you may thank my grandson Robert." I'd half hoped we might run into him. In the two years during which we'd overlapped, he had favored studying here, rather than in Lamont, where most undergraduates gathered. I loved it when I wandered out into Loker, the main reading room, and found him in one of the chairs near the dictionaries of proverbs and aphorisms.

So I looked for him that day, too, but no luck. From there, I took Sarah to the reference room. I indicated the porthole, the door behind which I'd worked. She peered through it, but she did not ask to enter.

Throughout our meanderings, Sarah looked up constantly, remarking in a fervent whisper on the ornate, pastel-colored ceilings, so far overhead that people who spent days or weeks in these rooms might never notice them at all.

When we left the library to head to the restaurant, Sarah took my arm and thanked me. "Extraordinary," she said. "I have just one critique of that place."

"Which is?"

"Needs stained glass. Like,
lots
of stained glass."

We were frivolously happy through cocktails and a shared bowl of soup. And then it came up on its own, because Sarah mentioned that her cousin (would I ever meet this cousin?) had just come through a series of tests with good news: he did not have prostate cancer.

Perhaps she realized, too late, where she had led us.

"And you," I said before she could change the subject. "You've been checked out as well in recent months?"

"Last time I looked, Percy, I was not in possession of a prostate gland."

"Count me grateful for that," I said. "But I'm serious, and you're being cagey. What I am asking for is the assurance--from a bona fide physician, not your feminine intuition--that you are healthy. Now that you're on my list of people to worry about."

"Assurances are tricky things."

"Sarah." I put down my knife and fork. "Sarah, please. Make this easier for a man who was born in the era of the whalebone corset."

Her expression cooled. "Percy, I've always been healthy. I feel healthy. I think people obsess too much about the slightest symptoms."

"I'm not going to argue. Just tell me when you last went to the doctor and I'll leave you alone."

Sarah also set down her utensils. She sat back against the velvet upholstery of our booth and crossed her arms defiantly. She told me, clearly agitated by my persistence, that while Rico was insured through an assistance program, her own insurance had lapsed. It was from a job she'd held a few years back. "I cut no corners with Rico," she said. "And that's what counts. Okay?"

I sat back as well. "Sarah, that is not 'okay.' Not with me. Nor would it be with Rico, if he could understand such matters. You are his
one parent
."

"You mean, I'm all that stands between him and an orphanage, is that it? I suppose you think that having been widowed gives you some authority on being a single parent, right?" Sarah wore contempt on her face with frightening conviction. But then she closed her eyes for a moment and sighed. When she opened them, she said, in a low, careful voice, "Percy, we are not married. You know how I feel about you, but you don't need to give me a roof or a bank account or a--"

"Sarah." I reached across the table for one of her hands, but she withheld them both. "Sarah, what do you mean, your insurance has 'lapsed'? You need to look into that. Meanwhile, I want to give you a checkup at my doctor. May I do that?
Just
that?"

She looked angrier, at me, than I had ever seen her. "And what if I told you to mind your own business?"

"Then I would have no choice." I astonished myself by adding, "And then my heart would break."

Her expression softened, and she leaned forward. I was relieved until she said, "Percy, is this about your wife? About Poppy? Because you couldn't save her, you want to save everyone else you possibly can? You're terrified that at any hint of mortality for someone you love, it's your job to be the crusader?"

"That is a cruel thing to say. Cruel and presumptuous."

"Well, then I apologize. But let's look at
your
presumptions, Percy."

"I presume nothing. That is why I am trying to make you see reason."

The waiter hovered, covetous of our plates. I waved him away. I said, "If you care about Rico, you'll do this for me."

She looked offended, but I had cornered her.

"Percy, not many people could speak to me like that."

"And how about me? Am I one of those not-many people?"

"Yes, you are," she said quickly. "We will talk about this in the car. I want dessert, and I don't want it soured by talk like this."

"Very well."

Later, as I drove her home, she said she would consider my request. I called Dr. Fields and made an appointment for myself, on a pretext. I was not going to lose this battle. Perhaps Sarah was right. Perhaps it was Poppy I was trying to save. But what harm could I do by simply being careful?

9

As Ira hustled the last child into coat, boots, and backpack, he saw Clover hovering, waiting, holding a long paper cone. "Scoot, girl!" he said to Marguerite, aiming her like a padded missile down the hall toward Heidi, who'd redirect her out the door, across the yard, and into her mother's car.

He beckoned to Clover, who followed him into his classroom. She spoke in effusive bursts, as if winded. "Thank. You. From the bottom. Of. My. Heart." She handed him the flowers.

"Don't thank me. Thank Anthony." Ira unwrapped the bouquet--tiger lilies--and told her she shouldn't have. But he did not gush. He looked around until he spotted the one clunker of a vase they kept in the classroom.

After putting the flowers in water, he began the afternoon cleanup, mixing bleach solution to wipe down the tables, retrieving a putty knife he used to pry away globs of tempera and glue. Clover offered to help, but Ira told her he had his routine and would only be confused.

Clover sat on the reading couch by the window. "I'm sure I couldn't afford him," she said, "and he didn't give me any kind of slam-dunk scenario--I'm not stupid, I know this won't be easy--but he did say some hopeful things about my situation. If I could be more flexible."

"Hopeful is good. Flexible's good, too."
So is realistic
, put in Ira's unkind alter ego.

He scrubbed at a fuchsia stain where Lily had been painting. Lily refused to wear or make art with anything but pink.

Since Clover had confided every gory detail about her split-up, Ira had developed the sickening sense that to encourage further intimacy would be to put himself in the path of a potentially mammoth breakdown. Back in college, he'd had a couple of female friends who were smart and fun but equally needy--like his friend Sadie, who thought that just because he was gay, he was also a port in the dating typhoon. After graduating, they'd taken a summer share together in Hampton Bays--a perfect arrangement until the weekend she'd swallowed two bottles of pills (one of them his!).