The Widower's Tale (5 page)

"What's your name?" I said impulsively, holding out my hand (and thinking, fleetingly, of my gaffe at TGO). "Mine's Percy."

He took my hand firmly, held it more than shook it. "Celestino."

"Well then, Celestino," I said, "make yourself at home. Seventy-three strangers I've never so much as shaken hands with are about to do the same."

I left him on the porch when the phone rang.

"Robert!" I said when I heard my grandson's voice. "I have something hilarious to recount." I went to the kitchen table and found, just where I'd left it, the town paper open to the police log.

Every Thursday for more than forty years, the
Grange
had arrived on my doorstep by 6:00 a.m., almost always before the
Boston Globe
. The paper had been through its ups and downs, but during the past few years its subscription rate had risen to record levels, since the latest editor in chief was a retired Pulitzer winner from the
Wall Street Journal
. (Yes, only in Matlock.) Which meant that the news, provincial though it was, would be delivered with efficiency, taste, and very few typos. (And that editorials, though eloquent to be sure, would bellow, COLOSSAL IF DODDERING EGO!) Yet there was still gossip, triviality, and quaintness aplenty. Christenings and confirmations (High Episcopalian) appeared on the same page as the obituaries--right across from yard sales and the scores of high school lacrosse games. Once, even Girl Scout and 4-H badges had been listed. Our resident columnist, holding forth for the past twenty years, called herself the Fence Sitter, though she was anything but. If opinions were underdrawers, she would be Fruit of the Loom.

When Poppy was alive, I saw the paper first, before I left for Cambridge. I would circle for her the funniest or most bucolic item I could find. When I returned in the late afternoon, she would have countered by circling for me another source of amusement. I would find the paper folded open to her selection, beside it my glass of red wine, on the long rough-hewn table in the kitchen. As I took my first sip, I would gaze over the lawn toward the barn and, beyond it, the glassy veneer of the pond. Even in winter, with all the windows shut tight and glazed with frost, I would hear the music, and sometimes Poppy's voice, strident or praising or keeping time in song. Poppy taught her lessons--always sold out, often with waiting lists--until the very day she died.

Left to raise our teenage girls, I kept many of our rituals intact--even those that hadn't involved our daughters. So I continued to circle my favorite item in the paper every week, to leave it displayed on the table. Perhaps I was hoping that when I came home, Trudy or Clover might have taken up her mother's side of our frivolous duet. But no. The paper would be in the garbage by the time I returned--or buried beneath a haphazard stack of textbooks and schoolwork, a plate of Oreos, a balled-up sweater. What a silly hope that was. I had so many silly thoughts and hopes about the girls back then--and no one to help me sort them out. Once, quite recently, when I hinted at regrets about those times, a much older Clover said, "Oh Daddy, you were deranged, and you deserved to be." Well, I thought unkindly, and you would know about derangement, would you not?

When the girls were small, I heard Poppy tell one of her friends, "I don't see how you could ever have a favorite when there are just two: one will always and forever be your first, the miracle baby, the one who paves the way, strikes out for adventure--the intrepid one, the one who teaches you how to do what nature intended all along--and the other, oh the other will always be your baby, your darling, the one you surprised yourself by loving just as desperately much as you loved the first."

Pursuant to such sentimental partition, Clover ought to have been the intrepid one, the maverick, and Trudy the eternal infant, the one to cuddle, to indulge your adoration. It did not turn out that way.

Poppy and I had named our daughters not by consulting our family trees but by following our passions and then our ideals. When Clover was born, Poppy and I still felt like newlyweds; in the hospital room, as I beheld this new creature, this bundled beauty, I kissed my wife and said, "Flower from a flower." We swept aside Rose, Iris, and Lily for a wilder, less pretentious cousin.

Not fourteen months later, our second child arrived the day after Jack Kennedy was murdered. Such a solemn, bittersweet occasion, that birth. "We must give her a strong, virtuous name," said Poppy. Tearful over the violence and calumny of modern times, we named her for the first woman who had lived in our ancient house, in what we fancied an era when goodness had been essential to human survival. Truthful and Hosmer Fisk had settled here, next to Hosmer's older brother, Azor. From records in the library, we learned that Hosmer and his bride struggled to grow potatoes, turnips, and pumpkins in Matlock's stony soil; four of their seven children reached ages at which they, too, could work the farm. Two lived on to have children of their own. Hosmer's descendants had persisted in our house for three more generations.

Over our friends' polite bewilderment, over our mothers' united dismay, we named our second daughter Truthful Darling. To us, it was a gorgeous, steadfast name, one that mingled courage and honesty with tenderness and love. Alas, it became a source of profound embarrassment to her the minute she set foot in school; even professionally, in her byline on dry articles in lofty medical journals, she has never used it.

Shortly before my retirement, Trudy had been appointed chief of breast oncology at the leading cancer hospital in New England. Her picture appeared in a national magazine, in an article about groundbreaking female physicians. There she was, my own daughter, the baby of the family, posed in her office, an expression of businesslike dignity on her face, a stethoscope sprouting like a silver orchid from a pocket of her white jacket. My phone rang itself silly. I heard from friends I hadn't seen in years--friends of Poppy's, that is.

Clover had led a much more varied life than her little sister--but that variety reflected a series of false starts, not bold adventures. After college (where she majored in sociology, a subject whose revelations she never shared with me), she worked as a waitress in a coffee shop, a gymnastics instructor, a ticket vendor in a Broadway box office, a clerk in a pharmacy, and, perhaps most memorably, as a uniformed parking valet at Boston's most expensive seafood restaurant, less than a mile from her sister's medical suite. Through her twenties, Clover lived with an equally eclectic succession of men, most of them with equally unfixed ambitions. And then she married a supremely decent fellow with a steady job as, of all things, an accountant. She met him when he kept her out of jail for having failed to pay self-employment tax for several years running.

Marrying Todd and having children seemed to cure her of her peripatetic predilections; I made the naive assumption that Clover had found her vocation in family. Leander and Filomena were the normal, healthy "perfect" set of New York City children, to whom my daughter appeared to be devoted. I have a photograph of them on their prosperous Brooklyn block, little Filo sitting in a stroller, clutching a stuffed penguin, while her brother, Lee, rides shotgun on some skateboard contraption at the back. Clover stands behind and above him, her smile grand, even grateful (Todd the photographer, surely).

Filo and Lee were six and nine years old--both, finally, in school for a good deal of the day--when their mother began to lose her way. I must speak in such hazy terms because she did not confide in me; only later, from Todd, did I glean any reliable information--though even he was not terribly specific. I thought he was simply respecting her privacy or, poor man, embarrassed. At any rate, I believed my daughter's life was just swell until the night, three years ago now, when Todd called me to say that Clover had apparently "run away." He stated this with so little panic that I laughed. And then he asked if she'd spoken to me. Was she even, perhaps, on her way to Matlock?

He had come home to find the children alone in the apartment. They reported that their mother had brought them home from school and, while fixing them a snack, had accidentally dropped a pile of plates, which smashed on the floor. She had begun to cry hysterically and then had shut herself in her bedroom. Eventually, she had come out with a suitcase, assured Lee that his father would be home within the hour, told him to stay inside with the door locked. She said she would return in a few days.

Five hours later, Clover turned up at Trudy's house. She stayed for two days, after which we talked her into returning home. What ensued was a horrendous month during which Clover slept a good part of every day and ate very little. Todd, whose composure rivals that of Mount Rushmore, became frustrated and impatient. Nearly every call he made to me began with "Has she told you anything?"--as if I would be my daughter's prime confidant.

Finally, under pressure from her sister, Clover agreed to see her gynecologist; Trudy had a theory that the emotional turmoil was biologically based, hormones gone haywire as Clover entered the "change of life," and that the problem might call for a pharmaceutical fix. The gynecologist, whom Trudy later branded a hyperfeminist charlatan, agreed that Clover was experiencing a traumatic "perry" menopause (whatever in God's name that might be). Instead of drugs, however, she prescribed an all-female therapy group. After four months, Clover announced that she needed to take a "sabbatical" from marriage and motherhood.

I heard only bits and pieces of this mortifying drama, much of it (to my shock) via young Robert, who was still in high school at the time. Often at first, and then only rarely, Todd continued to telephone me. I began to realize, from the jargon he used, that he was already consulting a lawyer.

And then, one February evening, an alarmingly thin Clover showed up on my doorstep: torrents of tears, no suitcase, not even a decent coat.

How hard I struggled to hold this daughter and console her, rather than shake her till her bones rattled, ask her what was missing in that brain of hers, why she seemed chronically unable to take responsibility for the lives of herself and her children. What kept her from becoming--and this was stunningly unkind, but it passed through my mind in the worst moments of the crisis--the sort of ubersuccessful, uberconfident, uberenlightened grown-up that nearly every other child from her generation raised in this town had become? Now, and the irony did not escape either of us, she was about to start looking after the freshest generation of these children, the charmed little darlings of Matlock.

Filo and Lee were now nine and twelve. They came north to visit their mother every other weekend, every other major holiday and school vacation, and for most of the summer. Over and over, their father drove from New York to the same pizza parlor in Hartford to deliver them to their wayward mother or pick them up again. Logically, I ought to have seen more of them than I would have if Clover had stayed put, but she tended to keep them close when she had them, as if to make up for her lack of presence in what I'm sure they regarded as their "real life" in New York.

As I spoke with Robert on the phone that evening--heard about his new classes, the apartment he was renting off-campus with one of his pals--I carried the phone onto the porch outside the kitchen. When I opened the screen door, a long cylinder toppled against my foot and rolled across the boards.

Half listening to Robert itemize his classes, I picked up the object: a cardboard tube, on which was written this note.
Dear Mr. Darling: Enclosed are the tree house drawings. I hope you'll be intrigued. I hope you'll approve! I am open to suggestion. Yours, Young Man Ira
.

Audacious, the pixie.

I returned my attention to Robert, though the scene before me proved yet another distraction. The pond, mimicking the sky, was already tilting toward a robust persimmon. The days might still be scorching hot, but they were becoming noticeably shorter.

Down at the barn, Clover was busy affixing a welcoming banner over the door. As she stood on a step stool, reaching as high as she could, I fought against the judgment that her short flowery dress was unbefitting her age. Clover had always been one of those spritelike girls who simply never stop being girls. And why should they? It's the girlishness that gets them what they need: everything except true independence, or what we used to call maturity. She was a puzzle, this daughter of mine.

Robert was describing an "ethnic studies" course with some trendier-than-thou title like Issues of Immigration in Modern Society--something to fulfill a certain necessary requirement, to help make him a well-rounded student--when I realized that Clover could use my assistance. I told my grandson I had to get off the phone. I called down the hill, "Hang on there, daughter!"

Considering all her shortcomings, all her failures, you might assume that I did not love Clover as much as I loved her sister. Wrong. Call me arrogant, facile, even ostentatious in my disapproval, but one thing about Clover that always touched me deeply back then, that moved me to private tears, was this: she did not blame me for her mother's death or for the mistakes I must have made in trying to become, thereafter, both parents in one.