The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  There was a waiting list for this coterie, but Kendra’s mother had nobly donated her membership to E & F’s fund-raising efforts, sending herself back to the bottom of the list. She had procured from Farmer Xbox ten empty glass milk bottles, onto which she and two other crafty moms would decoupage self-portraits painted by the children. These bottles would be placed in a wooden carrying crate to be fashioned by Kendra’s dad, a weekend woodworker. This creation, along with the coveted dairy co-op membership, was expected to fetch a price higher even than the quartet of season tickets at Fenway or, possibly, the Fourth of July weekend at a seaside house-for-eight in Chilmark.

  The mom committee had just left Ira’s classroom after delivering this wonderful news. And in fact, if all the children had to do was create oblong self-portraits suited to fit on an old-fashioned milk bottle (though associations with the milk-carton portraits of the missing gave him a momentary chill), Ira was getting off lucky. Joyce, who taught the Oak Leaves, had been roped into helping make a quilt. Each child’s square would be rendered in ikat, a technique that one of the Oak Leaf dads would be teaching the kids. It sounded complex and messy to Ira, who preferred simple art projects like hunting down autumn leaves and collaging them between waxed paper.

  These were the projects he had stayed late to trim and pin on the wall that afternoon, following the auction project meeting. After he’d finished, he wandered outside to one of those flawless autumn afternoons when a low sun casts prismatic rays through naked trees. He walked down to the pond and sat on a log that functioned as a rustic bench. As he sat there, he heard noises in the undercarriage of the barn, the floor beneath the nursery school that still served as storage, which Percy Darling now shared with E & F.

  He turned to see Arturo, Robert’s friend, emerging. They were mutually startled.

  “Hola!” exclaimed Turo. “You’re a stealthy one.”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Ira.

  “Stowing the canoe. End of the boating season.”

  Ira expected Robert to emerge from the storage space as well, but he didn’t.

  After a gaping silence, Ira said, “So how’s life at Center of the Cosmos U?”

  Turo laughed politely. He sat down beside Ira. “The intellectual navel of the world. I sometimes forget to sit back in awe of myself.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.”

  “And you, how are you faring with your little ones?”

  Ira wondered at the boy’s formal diction, but he supposed it was a subtle reminder that however fluent he was, English wasn’t his first language.

  “When I sit here,” said Ira, “I think I’ve arrived prematurely, and undeservedly, in heaven.” Only not so secure, sniped Inner Ira. Hardly.

  “A complex heaven, this place,” said Turo.

  “All lasting pleasures are complex, wouldn’t you say?”

  This amused Turo. “No, I wouldn’t say that, but I’m no philosopher. And what do I know at my age, right?”

  Ira felt his butt growing cold on the log. He stood. “Probably more than you realize,” he said. “But humility is always the wiser approach.” He looked at his watch, though he had nowhere pressing to go. Anthony wouldn’t be home for hours. Maybe he’d go the gym, pick up ingredients for crab cakes.

  “Say hey to that roommate of yours,” said Ira.

  “I shall, I shall,” said Turo. “See you round, man.” He remained seated on the log while Ira returned to his classroom. Well now that was peculiar, the unwelcome voice in his head declared.

  10

  Where’s the iron maiden, dude!”

  “I told you to stay upstairs,” said Robert. “You’re going to wind up with a colonial nail in your skull.”

  Turo had followed him into Granddad’s cellar. Just as Robert had hoped, snow fell on the last day of classes before the break. How perfect was that? Back in October, searching for a can of stain, he’d seen a stash of skis down here.

  Hunched low, they moved carefully through the underbelly of the house, barely more than a cave. The floor was packed dirt, rocks protruding like the spines of primordial subterranean creatures. When Robert was little, he’d peer down the basement stairs in wonder and terror. Like Turo, he’d thought of dungeons: manacled prisoners and colonies of bats.

  He switched on the fluorescent strip over a workbench cluttered with tools. At the opposite end of the cellar, chinks of lamplight pierced the floor of the living room, between the old planks not covered by rugs. Granddad had never installed insulation down there—one of too many trivial things, thought Robert, that irritated his mom.

  Robert groped behind the wide stone arch that anchored the kitchen hearth. “Jesus.” He coughed and spat, brushing at cobwebs now glued to his face. He pulled out two pairs of cross-country skis, one at a time. Hanging on a nail was a plastic shopping bag. Yes: boots.

  Turo toyed with a couple of the tools lying on the bench, then wiped his hands on his jeans. “Does anybody ever do anything down here?”

  Robert handed Turo Clover’s skis. They were sticky with years of residue, heating oil fused with dust. He hadn’t thought about boots for Turo. Robert’s mother had huge feet, so he could wear hers, but Clover’s would be way too small for Turo.

  When they hauled the skis into the kitchen, Robert’s dad was whipping cream. “Please take those outside! No spiders in my tiramisu!”

  “Great title for a memoir, Dad.”

  “Outside!” Flecks of cream covered his navy-blue sweater.

  It was the afternoon before Thanksgiving. Every surface in Granddad’s kitchen was occupied by bowls, cutting boards, heavy knives perched at perilous angles, cartons of eggs, loaves of bread, vegetables, cheese. Robert’s dad was making pumpkin tiramisu, vegetable terrine, and stuffing. It looked like he was planning to feed Afghanistan.

  Other dads had midlife crises involving cars or boats or the totally tawdry affair with some desperate younger woman, but Douglas Barnes had smothered his fear of old age in an avalanche of butter. Or that’s how Robert saw it. For the past year, whenever he went home to Newton, Dad got all tangled up in three or four complicated recipes at once, usually French. If he was rebelling against the “heart healthy” diet of Robert’s childhood, it didn’t seem to bug his mom too much. She joked that the cooking posed a greater danger than the food. More often than not, the smoke alarm went off, something got burned, and Mom had to stay up half the night washing every dish they owned. One time, a stray towel caught fire, and as Robert’s dad jumped up and down on it to extinguish the flames, three fancy wineglasses fell off the counter and broke.

  Robert paused at the door to the porch. “Has Granddad seen this mess?”

  “He’s in Packard, with his ladyfriend. When I finish this stage of the—oh God!” Something was boiling over on the stove.

  Robert stepped outside.

  To clean the skis, the two friends ran them back and forth through the snow. According to Robert’s father, Granddad’s “ladyfriend”—how weird was that!—worked at The Great Outdoorsman and had promised to pick up wax for the skis. Robert thought about the irony that he was now, in Turospeak, senza ragazza, while Granddad had apparently scored.

  The barn—the nursery school—was a dark void against the sky, though Robert could see, through a window, a red sensor blinking, technology on the alert even in the land of Play-Doh. Behind the barn glowed the pond. It had frozen just enough to hold the snow, the ice but a delicate skin on the water, like eggshell. Robert had hoped that he and Turo could go skiing by moonlight, if only to avoid the predictable awkwardness of the total family reunion. Once the wine was open and all the stiff, prickly feelings were squelched (like the “Oh that’s right, no more Todd” sensation), the danger was past. People acted happy, even if they weren’t.

  Robert groaned. “Oh man. Poles!”

  This time, he took a flashlight to the basement, sweeping its beam around the area where he’d found the skis. He tripped on a rock and fell into the space between th
e chimney arch and the rough mortared wall.

  He remained wedged in the space for a moment, cursing, waiting for the pain in his arm to subside. When he pushed himself up, his elbow made an impossibly hollow sound against the wall. A wooden cupboard door. Out of simple curiosity, he tried to open it, but it had no handle and wouldn’t budge. Probably a long-forgotten root cellar, an antediluvian fridge.

  When his foot struck something loose, he redirected the light. The ski poles had tumbled into the crevice between chimney and wall.

  “Robert? Can I get your help up here? Now, please?”

  Clutching the poles with one hand, the ladderlike stairs with the other, Robert climbed to the kitchen. His father stood at the stove, where three pots simmered. He looked like a lobster, his face aflame with the heat, his hands in red oven mitts raised, like claws, as if in defense.

  “The asparagus! In the colander, the sink! Can you please run cold water on it? So it won’t turn gray?”

  Robert tossed the ski poles under the table and saluted. “Asparagus SWAT team reporting.” Funny how Dad’s freak-outs were confined to the kitchen; even then, he hardly raised his voice.

  As Robert turned on the water, Granddad entered from the living room, behind him a bright-faced woman with thick, youthful hair, behind her a small boy carrying a small truck. Granddad surveyed the kitchen and said, “Am I hosting the latest cooking show? How grand of me.”

  The woman laughed as if she’d been tickled. She put one hand around Granddad’s waist; with the other she held her kid’s hand.

  Robert couldn’t help staring. The woman wasn’t precisely hot—she was too old for hot—but she was dressed like his way-cool freshman-year English professor (long swishy skirt, long swishy earrings, blue cowboy boots), and he could see that she got off on Granddad’s imperious humor.

  Robert waved from the sink. “Hey!”

  “Hail to your hey, young stranger.” Granddad crossed the kitchen and surprised Robert by kissing him on the cheek.

  Robert blushed. At the stove, the ladyfriend was introducing herself to his dad. The little boy stood by the back door, looking through the glass.

  Was Turo still out there?

  Now Robert was shaking the woman’s hand as he continued to hose down the asparagus (which looked sort of gray, despite the dousing). “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Straight.”

  “Please. I’m Sarah to everyone here and a ‘Mrs.’ to no one,” she said. “I’d make a terrible matron.”

  Robert nodded and smiled, unsure what to say. He turned off the water and searched for a towel to dry his hands. (When Dad cooked, all the towels wound up on the floor.)

  The little boy turned from the door, looking worried. “My school is all dark,” he said to his mother.

  “It’s vacation, Rico!” She lifted him onto her hip. “I’ll bet we can build a snowman tomorrow. We couldn’t do that at our house, could we?”

  Robert went back outside. Darkness had fallen fast, as it always did in November, but he could see the skis lying in the snow. The porch light illuminated Turo’s footprints; they looked like blue notes on a musical score, a melody curving round the back of the barn.

  Turo stood beside the pond, arms crossed against the cold. He stared at the houses on the opposite shore. The Three Greeks were lit from top to bottom, every window ablaze. “Cue the holiday kilowatts. Carnivorous excess and buckets of booze.”

  “It’s Thanksgiving,” said Robert. “Every house in this town is jammed with relatives. If you lived here, you’d have a million guests, too. Everybody wants to be here, nowhere else. It’s like a blender drink of Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, spiked with a few rich potheads and off-the-grid entrepreneurs.”

  Turo’s lazy smile caught the light refracted by the snow-covered pond.

  Without a jacket, Robert was shivering. “Hey. Come inside and be civil for a minute. We’ll figure out the boot thing, make our escape later on.”

  They climbed the hill. Robert saw headlights approach from the road, sweep through the tangle of branches surrounding the house. For an instant, the tree house was captured in silhouette, a black shape that mirrored the barn.

  His mom or Clover: either prospect made him uneasy. Only a month ago, he’d had nothing to hide from anyone.

  In the kitchen, Robert’s dad had turned on the radio and sang along—a sign that he was temporarily out of trouble, possibly because he’d recruited the ladyfriend as sous-chef.

  Robert paused beside her. “You cool with this?”

  “I am more than cool with this,” she said. “Years ago I worked in a kitchen. Just to make money, but I liked it. Oh—and I have your wax, whenever you need it. I can’t believe I remembered.”

  Robert wondered if she felt, on some level, like she was auditioning—as if she had to pass a family test, make them all like her. If so, she didn’t know Granddad that well.

  In the dining room, the table had been set—but not by Granddad. The grandmother Robert would never know had collected Mexican everything, and out it all came at the big, fancy dinners: the thick flowered plates, the cockeyed blue ceramic goblets, the napkins with sun-faded stripes. But there were flowers in actual vases—Granddad never did flowers—and the striped napkins had been folded into the goblets so they looked like origami birds.

  Through the door to the living room, Robert saw his mother, still in her coat, holding her hands toward the fire. Granddad knelt beside her, prodding the logs. When she saw Robert, she came toward him so quickly that he took a few steps back.

  “Honey, I have missed you.” She hugged him tight and then, to his surprise, held him. Her coat was cold against his neck.

  “Hello there, Arturo,” she said when she let Robert go.

  “A pleasure to see you again, Dr. Barnes.” Arturo dipped his head in that ass-kissy, Ricardo Montalban way. He was incapable of being himself around parents. Or maybe it was a cultural thing, but Robert found it sort of skeevy.

  “Turo and I might go skiing,” he announced. “We have to get boots for him. Like, when does TGO close?”

  “You’re too late,” said Granddad. “Stick around and socialize. Let your mother in on where those tuition dollars are going, hm?” He winked. “We’ll find you a team of sled dogs tomorrow, whatever you require for manly exertion. Of which I do approve and shall partake, but not until the morning. Now I plan to drink and eat and lounge about like an emir in his palace.”

  “Dad, your palace looks amazing,” said Robert’s mom. “Look at Mom’s bowl.” She examined a silver bowl on the mantel as if she’d never seen it before.

  “Please do not elaborate on how amazing. After this infernal house tour, I do not plan on making spotlessness a habit. Or polishing silver. Take heed.”

  Granddad had opened a bottle of red. He poured it out into six glasses and offered them around. After he carried the remaining two glasses to the kitchen, he returned and sat on the couch next to Robert’s mom. She was clearly startled when he put an arm around her shoulders. He leaned toward Robert.

  “Talk of palaces brings to mind something remarkable I must share with you,” he said. “I have just, for the very first time, visited your mother’s kingdom in the hallowed halls of St. Matthew’s Ecumenical Synagogue for the Faint of Heart and Weary of Womb.”

  Turo laughed loudest.

  Robert’s mother rolled her eyes. “Dad.”

  Granddad continued to focus on Robert. “But seriously, now, I had no concept of your mother’s power. Benevolent in the extreme, I hasten to add.”

  “Dad, don’t make jokes. Hospitals are crazy places, nobody’s denying that. But we’ve got a pretty good operation, all things considered.”

  “I do not tease, daughter. I was genuinely impressed. You have a staff who think the world of you, patients willing to wait all day long for your care—”

  “Dad.”

  “Do not interrupt me. I had never honestly considered before how challenging your work must be, how much courage and steadin
ess it takes. Not the medicine, but the vulnerability of all those people who depend on you, daughter. How you hold them all together.”

  “Well, that’s a rosy picture, Dad.”

  Robert saw tears forming in his grandfather’s eyes. He wasn’t sure his mom could see this, because Granddad still had her pinned to his side. There was usually a jagged edge between them, so the emotions of the moment, or his Granddad’s, felt strange.

  “She’s dedicated,” Robert said quickly. “She doesn’t even see that anymore. She just is.” He laughed nervously.

  His mother regarded him with a bemused frown. “And I am being buttered up because …?”

  “Because you better not have forgotten those pies,” said Robert. “Like, you got the apple with the custard, right?” Other people’s mothers made kickass pies; his knew exactly where to buy them.

  She sent Robert to her car. When he returned with the shopping bags, Turo was excusing himself, saying that he had to go upstairs to work. “Unlike Roberto, I’ve been having a little too much fun this semester.”

  “Well, don’t miss dinner. Sarah’s made a vegetable curry,” said Granddad. “People may help themselves and eat in the kitchen. I’ve had a call from Clover, who’s stuck in traffic coming up from Connecticut. She’ll take the children straight to her apartment and join us first thing tomorrow.”

  Robert heard these logistics as he carried the pies to the culinary war zone. His father now stood over half a dozen bowls of puree in different shades of green, red, and orange. Decorating the wall behind the food processor (which the Midlife Chef had brought along) was an exuberant flare of … beet juice? Cranberry goo? “Yo,” said Robert, “are you really in charge of the main show tomorrow?”