In the Field

by Rachel Pastan

  She stopped. Thatch had pushed aside his mug and was running his hands along the table’s grooved trim. His nails were thick and warped, bitten down to the quicks. They reminded her of the hard, opaque kernels of dried maize. “Jax was there,” she said. “Remember Jax? He’s just the same. Only with less hair. Do you remember when he tossed my lab? Oh, I was so angry! And you were so kind to me.”

  Thatch pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and began to rip it into pieces.

  “You were always so kind to me,” Kate said. “To me, and to everybody.”

  “That’s not what I remember.” He concentrated on the shreds.

  “My memory was always better than yours.” She smiled, but he wasn’t looking.

  “I’m as selfish as the next person,” Thatch said. He threw the rest of the napkin down, making the scraps scatter.

  The waitress set down their plates. The smell of the eggs and of the buttery toast made Kate’s mouth water, but Thatch didn’t even look at his. His face was red, and the whites of his eyes were veined with red, too, great bruised-looking hollows sagging underneath.

  “You couldn’t make her want to keep living,” Kate said. “Nobody could.”

  “You don’t know that,” Thatch said.

  Kate reached across the table and laid her hand on his. “I know you, John Thatcher,” she said.

  Apartment 4-C was meticulously furnished with a floral sofa and matching chairs, a plush rug, gleaming tables with imitation Tiffany lamps. Or maybe they weren’t imitation. Everything was neat, everything was clean and tidy. Indeed, there was something stilted and almost artificial about it, as though it were not really an apartment at all but a picture of one in an advertising supplement, or a room in a doll’s house. There was a small dim kitchen, a dining area with an oval table polished to a high gloss. The guest room with its white dresser and white wicker rocking chair had been painted a heartbreaking egg-yolk yellow. The bed with its handsome quilt looked out of place there—shoehorned in—where clearly there was meant to be a crib. The air felt frangible, crystalline, difficult to breathe.

  “It’s a very nice apartment,” Kate said.

  “Cynthia thought it was too dark.”

  “It’s not dark.”

  “She didn’t like the wainscoting.”

  Kate turned to regard the polished wainscoting.

  “She wanted to paint all the woodwork white, but the landlord wouldn’t let us.”

  “Ah,” Kate said.

  “She had strong feelings about color,” Thatch said hoarsely, haltingly. He sat down, not on the floral upholstered furniture but on a straight-backed wooden chair by the fireplace. “She painted the bedroom several times.”

  Kate sat on the edge of the sofa. The decorative trim dug into the underside of her thighs.

  Kate looked back at him as steadily as she could. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sure—” She shut her mouth and they sat together in silence. She thought of the plain joe-pye weed Cynthia had brought her so long ago. Some other Cynthia.

  No. The same Cynthia, before life had blighted her.

  The door buzzer broke in with its terrible racket. Thatch looked at Kate, his eyes glazed with terror. “That will be her parents.”

  Kate got up and pressed the button for the intercom.

  The cheerless couple behind the door was pale and stocky. Each had hair the same shade of iron gray. Their dark clothes were rumpled by travel. Kate would never have taken them for the parents of dark, willowy Cynthia.

  “John,” the woman said as she came into the apartment. “Oh, John.” She fell against her son-in-law and began to sob in great wet gasps.

  “Mother Henderson,” Thatch said, patting her clumsily.

  “You were always so good to our baby, John,” Mrs. Henderson said.

  They swayed back and forth, holding onto each other.

  CHAPTER 36

  You could not expect grieving parents to stay at a hotel. Thatch begged the Hendersons to take the master bedroom, but they refused. They did not want to put him out. Also possibly they did not want to sleep where their daughter had died, and who could blame them? Where they thought she had died. They believed her death to have been accidental, and nobody was going to tell them otherwise. In fact, Cynthia had died in the “guest” room on the incongruous bed, but no one was going to tell the Hendersons that either.

  Kate couldn’t bear thinking of Thatch shut up alone with the parents, the gauzy spider threads of their grief twining around him. She decided she would stay, too. She could easily sleep on the living room sofa. She didn’t ask if it was all right, just waited until the others had shut themselves into their rooms then put her head down and pulled the throw over herself. If Cynthia’s parents found her presence odd, they said nothing. As for Thatch, grief, guilt—a thousand pressing duties and responsibilities—filled every ounce of his being. Kate tried to relieve him when she could. She tended to the relentless telephone and shrilling door buzzer; made lists of who left which casseroles and fruit baskets; heated up food at mealtimes; put it away again; brewed pots of tea; found the carpet sweeper and ran it over the rug. In between, she listened to Mrs. Henderson’s baffled, frantic accounts of Cynthia’s ugly-duckling childhood: buckteeth and unmanageable hair and queer interests. When other girls were pressing flowers into books, Cynthia was slicing them open with a razor blade and drawing their insides. When other girls were reading Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Cynthia was poring over Mrs. William Starr Dana’s How to Know the Wildflowers. She preferred spending time in the woods to going to dances. “I’d say, Cynnie, why don’t we go over to Milford and buy you a new dress? But it didn’t do the least good!” Boys didn’t know what to make of Cynnie. Mrs. and Mr. Henderson let her go to Cornell because they didn’t know what else to do with her. But it had worked out better than they could have hoped. “She blossomed into a swan at last!”—that was how the stories ended, confusing fowls with flowers.

  Kate found these tales of a girl who sounded so much like someone she would have liked unbearable. Meanwhile Thatch roamed like a wolf or a wraith around the apartment, his face gaunt and gray, his feet scuffing across the carpet with a sound like dead leaves.

  The day of the funeral was sunny and mild, the blue sky feathery with clouds. The first daffodils were opening in the beds along the avenues, but the air in the church was suffocating with forced lilies and powdery sweat. The organ blared through the hymns Cynthia’s mother had selected, to which nobody seemed to know the words. Kate looked at the hideous wreaths and thought again of the jar of joe-pye weed. She thought of Cynthia saying, Of course, you must come to us. If Kate had agreed to convalesce in that yolk-colored room instead of going to the Sonnenfelds, how would her life be different now?

  But she would never have agreed.

  What had Paul said at Thatch and Cynthia’s wedding? I bet she majored in botany because she heard it was a good way to catch a husband. Kate had defended Cynthia to Paul, but that bare fact was cold comfort now. Because, in her heart, she had rejected Cynthia. She had looked down her nose at her and begrudged the space she took up in Thatch’s life. She had wished her ill, and ill had befallen her.

  The service dragged on. There were platitudes from a pastor who had never met Cynthia, a eulogy by a cousin who had come all the way from Chicago, another by a woman in a pillbox hat who didn’t identify herself. Scientists and their wives crowded the church, many known to Kate but many more unknown to her. Through all of it, Thatch sat, half a head taller than anyone else in the first pew, as stiff as a corpse himself. His own family—his widowed mother, his two sisters and their husbands, and a smattering of nieces and nephews—sat arrayed around him, but not too close. It was as though a force field separated the sphere he inhabited from their own dim world of cowsheds and fuzzy radio broadcasts about the price of milk. They could look sadly at him through the force fiel
d; they could tell him how sorry they were; but they could not touch him.

  There was no burial. Thatch had agreed to let Cynthia’s parents take the body back with them to the family graveyard near Yellow Springs.

  And then it was the next day. The Hendersons departed at dawn, leaving their sheets neatly folded at the foot of the bed where their daughter’s ghost perhaps still lingered. The icebox was crammed with beef-and-mushroom casserole, chicken-and-green-bean casserole, smothered pork chops. Cynthia’s sweaters and nightgowns still clogged the bureau, her skirts and coats choked the closets, the scent of her face powder slid out from under the bathroom door and dribbled along the hall. Thatch emerged from his bedroom looking as though he had not slept, wearing pajamas that hung on him as though he had borrowed them from an older brother.

  Kate, who had been only half dozing, sprang to her feet. “I’ll make some coffee,” she said. “Toast? Eggs?” She folded the throw and laid it across the back of the sofa.

  “No, thank you,” Thatch said.

  “You have to eat.” Kate moved toward the kitchen.

  “What are you doing here?” Thatch didn’t sound angry, exactly. He sounded tired and baffled and exasperated, though not necessarily at her.

  She turned and looked back at him. “I’ve been here all along.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Why?”

  “Because I’m your friend.”

  His eyes narrowed in his gray haunted face. Kate braced herself, guessing what he might say. It’s been a long time since you and I were friends. Or, Cynthia could have used a friend. At last he sat down heavily in the straight-backed wooden chair, where he had sat the first morning. “My mind doesn’t work right. The thoughts just flap around in my head.” He was looking past Kate, over her shoulder at a painting on the wall behind her: a glossy oil of hyacinths in a vase.

  “It’s only natural,” Kate said.

  “One of these days, I’m going to have to go back to work. See my students. Talk to my colleagues.”

  “You’ll be all right,” Kate said. “You’ll see.”

  His body jerked upright. “You’re talking as if you know. But you don’t have the slightest idea.”

  Kate stared back at him. “How do you know what I know about suffering?” she said.

  Silence rose up out of the floor, filling the space with its feathery fronds. Pale pink light fell across the sofa and touched the glass shades of the lamps, making them glow. Kate got up and went to the window. Three days ago she had stood out there, in that park, with the wide river behind her, looking up. What had she wanted? What did she want now?

  “Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day.”

  It was a beautiful day. New green grass sprang up from the earth. Traffic sounds and river sounds blended equably, and the trees held their branches up to the sky in intricate patterns, a lacework of shadow spreading out below. Kate and Thatch walked along the path without speaking for perhaps half a mile. They passed under a magnolia tree, its lustrous flowers like white candles in the branches waiting to be lit. Thatch stopped. Kate stopped, too, a little ahead of him, and waited.

  “I should never have married her,” Thatch said.

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Somebody else might have been able to—” He looked up as though addressing the canopy of leaves. “Someone else might have made her happy.”

  “She loved you, Thatch.” Tears filled Kate’s eyes as she said these words, catching her by surprise.

  But Thatch was shaking his head. “She wanted a family.”

  “She had a family.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  It was full morning now. Mothers were seeping into the park from all directions, pushing baby carriages or chasing shrieking children. One fat young woman with a tired face jounced a bundle in her arms. A thin one in a smart blue coat called out, “I told you a hundred times, don’t push your sister!” Somewhere, on one of their infinitesimal chromosomes, the urge to create new life had spread its jaws, bending everything to its will. That was how it worked—how it had to work: genes using people to make more genes. That urge was what had killed Cynthia. How Kate herself had been exempted, she had no idea.

  “I miss her.” Thatch’s words floated up to the unlit candles in the branches.

  Oh! Kate thought. Of course!

  Had she supposed that Thatch had regretted marrying Cynthia? That he had been making the best of a bad bargain all these years? That he would have traded his life for one in which he’d published a few more papers? Yes, that was exactly what she had thought.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  Thatch’s mouth twitched. He stood half in and half out of the shade of a magnolia tree, his shadow knifing across the grass. “Why didn’t you ever get married?” he said.

  Kate turned away and began to move down the path again. “Let’s keep walking,” she said.

  “Kate,” Thatch said.

  She halted.

  “I used to think you were stubborn and shortsighted,” he said. “That you’d regret ending up alone. But now I think you were just being practical. That you were smart.”

  Slowly she turned to face him. “I lived with someone for a time. It was like a marriage.”

  He stared at her. “In Cold Spring Harbor?”

  She shook her head: a quick, tense movement like a shiver.

  “In Missouri?”

  “In Ithaca,” she said softly.

  “In Ithaca?” he echoed, baffled.

  “Sarah Sonnenfeld,” she said.

  Thatch’s face wore a blanched, startled look. “The doctor?”

  Kate nodded. The smell of the damp air and the deep, sour river flooded her nose and mouth.

  Thatch looked bewildered. A little color had come into his face. “I didn’t realize,” he said.

  “No,” she said. Then she shrugged. “It’s been over a long time.”

  “Why?” Thatch asked after a minute. “What happened?”

  Kate had asked herself that question a hundred times, but really the answer was simple. “She lived in Ithaca,” she said. “That was where her life was. And I got the Missouri job.”

  The shadows of the magnolia leaves playing over Thatch’s face made his expression hard to read. “And since then?” When she didn’t answer, he said softly, “Ithaca was a long time ago.”

  Heat suffused her body. The years had slid away, rings forming in the trunks of trees, overstuffed lab notebooks advancing across the shelf. “Since then,” she said, “I’ve been working.”

  CHAPTER 37

  The plants in the greenhouse were half dried out when Kate got back to Cold Spring Harbor. The farm manager had been busy with other things and forgotten to water them. This was why she could never go anywhere. Ordinarily she would have gone looking for him to scold him, but she didn’t. For one thing, it wouldn’t do any good. She wrestled the hose into the balky nozzle, then moved along the rows soaking the pots. The soil was bone dry, but the plants were only slightly wilted. With a little luck, they would all recover.

  She’d been gone nine days, the longest amount of time she’d left her plants in years. New leaves unfurled from the lengthening stalks, and many interesting side shoots were sprouting. Speckles and stripes showed in a profusion of novel patterns. Kate was hopeful about this year’s crop, which she would transplant to the field in early June, giving it a good head start. Perhaps this would be the year she would finally have enough data to publish a comprehensive account of the movable genes.

  When the watering was done, she walked out to the cove. A chilly spring breeze lifted the bare branches as she followed the lane through the trees. To her right, clumps of groundsel bushes (Baccharis halimifolia) gave way to rushes and cattails sighing and swaying in the mud, and beyond that the open water sparkled. A company of
egrets—nine of them!—stood spread across the shallows: alert, patient, shrewd. Their white graceful necks curved down toward the water as, with steady eyes and sharp strong yellow beaks, they waited. Minutes passed. The birds were still and silent, yet awake to every ripple. She thought of Thea, slim and upright, walking through the rain. You didn’t stop, she had said. You didn’t give up. She thought of Thatch standing by the glittering river, the shadows of the magnolia branches playing over his face. Ithaca was a long time ago. “A long time ago,” she said aloud, and the egrets rose up with a whoosh of wings. She watched them flap away, queer white shapes against the sky.

  On the walk back to her apartment, darkness filled up the woods on either side of her. It spilled out across the path and rose up out of the grass, wrapping itself around her legs. The lighted windows in the buildings she passed looked remote and far away, yellow portals into strange worlds where people sat around tables passing bowls of food and talking about—what? Mortgages, vacation plans, how the dog had gotten into the garbage again? Her own window, as she approached it, was dark, but why should that bother her? She’d go up and turn the light on, have a bite to eat, open the letters that had come when she was away. It would be good to sleep in her own bed, wake up in her own home.

  But in the morning, she felt listless. She lingered over her coffee as the sun rounded the corner of the building, taking its rays with it. The apartment felt very quiet, though it wasn’t any quieter than usual. Every sound she made—every footstep, water running in the sink, her plate clattering onto the table—sounded loud and distinct, as though calling attention to the silence it was momentarily erasing. And then, once she got to the lab, she found it difficult to concentrate. Her thoughts, usually so quick and lucid, drifted glutinously around inside her skull. After a while she made another pot of coffee and went down the hall in search of Janice Gordon, the other woman researcher in the building.