The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  “I’ll have it all under control before we turn in tonight. O ye of little faith.”

  Sarah turned from the sink to smile at Robert. She was washing dishes. If approval did matter, Mom would give the ladyfriend an A plus.

  After finding space for the pies in Granddad’s fridge, he climbed the back stairs, ducking at the top where the roof began its steepest plunge. The second floor of Granddad’s house was warm and nestlike, the kind of place children loved because it harbored so many spaces impassable to adults. On a clear day, the heat of the sun penetrated the shingles and the plaster just beneath. At the top of the stairs, you could place a palm against the ceiling, or even one of the hefty beams, and feel that heat. On a summer afternoon, it was punishing; in the winter, it was a balm. The entire house needed better insulation, but Granddad had long ago made it clear to everyone that he would die in this house “as is.”

  In Clover’s room, the roof slanted sharply to meet the low frames of the windows. Beneath them, a pair of brass beds flanked the wall, foot to foot. Turo had closed the purple velvet curtains—legacy of Clover’s high school days—and claimed one bed, burrowing under the quilt. He was curled around his laptop, his face rapt and glowing. As Robert crossed the room, he closed it.

  “Working hard now, are we?”

  “We are. We are,” said Turo.

  “For the record, you continue to freak me out.”

  Turo smiled abruptly, as if friendliness were a patch on his thoughts. “In that case, dude, pay me no heed. As your erudite granddad might say.”

  From under the quilt, Turo’s phone rang. He pulled it out and flipped it open. “My mom.” He answered warmly, lovingly, launching into the strange language they shared.

  Robert sat on his bed and opened his backpack. He had work of his own, a paper on the blood-brain barrier. It wasn’t due for another ten days, but if he didn’t finish it by Monday, he’d be up against a wall in two other subjects. He had hoped that, by bringing Turo along for the weekend, he could keep an eye on his friend, put him under behavioral quarantine.

  After the “swimming pool action,” as Turo called it, Robert had gone along on two other MnMs. This was DOGS shorthand for Midnight Missions. The DOGS were big on jargon. Though Robert had begun to feel the exhilaration of acting out and getting away with the carefully choreographed mayhem, he was only semipersuaded that wreaking havoc on rich assholes’ lives would make a constructive difference in the way other rich assholes spent their money. Turo spoke of shame as a powerful and worthy political weapon, used everywhere from the civil rights movement to demonstrations against the wearing of fur, and that was just in the tame, pampered United States. He talked about Paris, Argentina, Chile. And now, every time one of the MnMs hit the pages of the Globe, there were letters from people cheering them on. Sometimes you have to break the law to shake the law, wrote an ecology student at Columbia who had helped revive SDS. A letter from a popular poli sci professor at Harvard, one of those gurus whose courses were like secret societies, had filled a whole column, concluding, To challenge complacency in the face of new technology is essential to our continued survival. Perhaps the methods of these activists aren’t entirely wise or their positions uniformly defensible, but they cry out in demand of a new, global patriotism we must all embrace. It is literally a matter of life or death. That letter got published in boldface. Turo had practically danced in the middle of Mass. Ave.

  He had never invited Robert to attend meetings of the “inner circle,” and frankly, Robert was relieved. Apparently, at one of these meetings someone had suggested a new target community in New Hampshire—but someone else had shot her down, pointing out that to cross state borders would call in the FBI. So long as their adversaries were suburban cops in fatcat Boston suburbs, they could keep up their work—though eventually, someone would be caught and go to jail. Probably soon. And that’s when they’d go big-time. They were already talking New York, forming a chain, ready to act on a larger stage. DOGS would become the new Greenpeace.

  “Quit if it makes you too nervous,” Turo had said, “but tell me this, friend. When you go off to med school, to pursue the healing arts, you’ll cut up a corpse first thing, am I right? So how do you think the work of saving anything begins? With work that breaks down the structure of things, calls corruption by its name, disembowels the status quo. That’s how.”

  “Great. Fine,” said Robert, “but then what are you wasting your time in school for? Why don’t you just tell the dean you’re taking a year off to fix our busted society?”

  Turo had snapped, “The one thing I am not doing is wasting my time. Any of it.”

  Robert didn’t really buy Turo’s corpse analogy, but maybe in the bigger picture he was right. Turo had something Robert thought he’d had but was maybe losing: doubt-free dedication. You couldn’t help craving a share. And sometimes, when Robert met someone new at a party or a political meeting on campus, he could see how impressed that person was to learn that he was Arturo Cabrera’s roommate. Awesome.

  Once Turo got off the phone with his mom, they spent a quiet, companionable hour clacking away at their laptops. Like Siamese twins joined at the soles of their feet, they lay full length beneath Aunt Clover’s comforters (turquoise with big purple daisies), scrunched low against the cold air seeping through the curtains. Turo muttered from time to time in Spanish, a scowl on his face. He told Robert he was being tortured by some bonehead economist who predicted a never-ending ascent in the stock market. Robert, meanwhile, tried to explain the mechanism by which new chemotherapy agents could scale the parapets of the human brain to hunt down malignant growths that had already done so. The human body was a miracle machine, no doubt about that—but sometimes, like certain individuals, it was stubbornly, blindly counterproductive. At one point, Robert stole a glance over his screen at Turo, who looked too unhappy to be doing anything other than schoolwork.

  But then Turo looked up. “Dude, I am famished. You smell that?”

  Someone was heating up the ladyfriend’s curry.

  They threw off their quilts and went downstairs.

  The kitchen had returned almost to normal. The dishwasher was mumbling away, and all that remained of Dad’s chaos was a stack of bowls soaking in the sink. Sarah was setting the kitchen table. Without a moment’s uncertainty, she opened drawers and cupboards, knew where to find forks and plates. Robert offered to help.

  “Fill water glasses?” she said. “Find another bottle of wine?”

  Granddad sat in front of the fire, playing a game with the little boy. It looked like vertical tic-tac-toe.

  “Hey,” said Robert.

  “Is for scarecrows and livestock, as I am constantly reminding you.” Granddad did not look away from the game, but the boy looked up, startled.

  “I’m Robert,” said Robert. “That game looks cool.”

  The boy stared at him. “Connect Four,” he said shyly.

  “This is my friend Rico,” said Granddad, “and he is whupping my prominent derriere.” He leaned forward and slapped his own backside.

  Rico laughed.

  “That’s good,” Robert told Rico, “because he needs whupping. Not just anybody can whup my granddad.”

  “He beat me once,” said Rico. “I’m beating him the fourth time.”

  “You go, dude.” Robert turned to Granddad. “The wine cupboard’s empty, except for some dusty bottle from Greece that looks hugely suspicious. You have a stash somewhere else?”

  Granddad thought for a moment, then sighed. “I left the wine at Sarah’s. A whole case.”

  “Hey, dry is good. Milk is good.” As Robert started back toward the kitchen, his mother emerged from Granddad’s study.

  “I’ll make a run to Ledgely,” she said. “Keep me company, Robert.”

  He stood still, excuses firing in the stubborn fortress of his brain. Why did he want to avoid this errand?

  “Get your coat.” She spoke in her doctor-knows-best voice. “Could you go warm
up the car? I’ll ask your father if he has everything he needs. He’s always short a pint of cream. Keys are in my purse up front.”

  The surface of the snow twinkled like mica. The moon, nearly full, leaned close through the branches of the pines that partitioned the house from the road. It was, mourned Robert, a perfect night to go skiing.

  He adjusted the driver’s seat and started the engine. His mother’s radio blared forth trumpets, something high-minded, baroque. Robert found a station with a live concert, blues from a club in New Orleans. Katrina, Katrina, and more Katrina. Now there was an outrage at which to aim your passions. He could do that instead; one group of students at Harvard had pledged all their vacation time to rebuilding homes in New Orleans. Maybe Robert would look into that, after exams in January. No way he could do anything over Christmas but work his tail off. Yet somehow those other students did it.

  He watched the house, waiting. The one lit window framed his grandfather’s face in profile, against the roaring fire. His white hair stood up, all haywire. He was mussing it dramatically, probably bemoaning another defeat by Rico. Robert could barely remember being that young, but he could recall playing games with his grandfather: old-fashioned tic-tac-toe, on paper, or cards, Old Maid and War. Life, Monopoly—though board games came later. How old had he been when he began to suspect that sometimes—not always, but sometimes—Granddad was letting him win? Robert smiled at the thought of Granddad’s having a lover. Of his being a lover. Dude. He laughed.

  His mother was laughing, too, when she got in the car. “You drive.”

  “That’s funny?”

  “Your father is fussing with his turkey on the back porch, and I startled him so badly when I opened the door that he dropped it down the stairs. So he runs after it, grabs it up in his arms, looks at me, and says, in his awful Julia Child voice, ‘The guests will never know.’ He is the eternal optimist.”

  “Yeah, but this haute cuisine thing? Mom, he’s a maniac.”

  “Oh Robert, he’s having fun with it. And now I never have to cook. He seems happy even when he flubs a meal. He sees it like a domestic Everest, I think. Men, the eternal mystery.”

  Where the driveway met the road, Robert accelerated carefully in case there was ice (salt was verboten in Matlock). He felt his mother’s penetrating gaze. That “men” remark had been aimed in part at him.

  “So,” he said, “Granddad showed up at your office.”

  “It was odd, I have to say. I’m not sure either of us realized he’d never been there. Of course, why would he?”

  “Did he say lots of embarrassing things to Chantal and the nurses? I love his totally incorrect nickname for the hospital.” The true name of his mother’s hospital was the sum of an alliance joining three hospitals, each of which refused to surrender its identity. The new, collective name was like a freeway pileup: St. Matthew Sinai Mothers of Mercy—known to those who revered it as St. Matt’s, to those who did not as Matt’s Moms.

  “Actually, he behaved himself. I think he was mildly terrified. It’s a very different experience to hang around a cancer ward when you’re seventy than when you’re twenty. Especially when you’re healthy.”

  “Is he?” said Robert. “I hope so.”

  “He sees his doctors. Which is something for a single man his age. But listen, Robert. I don’t want to talk about Granddad. Granddad’s doing fine.”

  Christ, here it came. If he drove at the speed limit, and didn’t spin out on black ice, it would still take ten minutes to reach the wineshop in Ledgely.

  She turned off the radio. “Robert, Clara called me.”

  He groaned.

  “Can you tell me what’s been going on? I know you are studying hard, but I thought we had … I thought you’d let me in on anything important.”

  “I totally do,” said Robert.

  “Breaking up with Clara isn’t important? You’ve been together a year.”

  He turned on to the main road. A dark furry creature, raccoon or cat, bolted through the headlights. His entire body tensed.

  “Mom, I don’t want to talk about Clara.”

  “Well, sweetie, I do. Clara’s heart is broken. And you sound pretty emotional yourself. I liked her—I like her very much. She was devoted to you. For God’s sake, she came to our home for special occasions over the past year, stayed with us on the Cape that weekend before you went to Maine.… If nothing else, I’m going to miss her.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Mom. But you don’t know the whole story, do you?” He knew he sounded angry. What was the whole story? Was there a whole story? It was true that Clara had given up on texting and calling him after he told her he needed “some distance,” but if you could call this rupture a breakup, it was less than a month old. Who could say it was final?

  “What I am asking for is the whole story. Your side as well as hers.”

  Jesus, did she have to be so rational? Could he say it was none of her business? Not really, when he’d brought Clara into their life as a family. A lot of Robert’s friends complained about how out of it their parents were, how twisted their priorities. Robert felt sorry for them. Were his parents really that much cooler? If so, he was lucky. But now he saw the advantage of keeping up a wall, your life a separate thing from theirs.

  “Look, Mom, we’re twenty. Nobody hooks up for life at our age. Or nobody we know. Not to say we won’t get back together. I mean, Clara’s being dramatic. We could be taking a break. That happens.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a break if you do not respond to her leaving your belongings in front of your apartment door in a garbage bag.”

  Okay, that had been major. That was, what, not even two weeks ago? Robert had intended to sit down and write her an e-mail that night, but Turo had lured him out again, on that MnM with the firewood. Part of the problem was that Clara suddenly felt so … far away. And he missed her less (her company, her wit) than he’d thought he might. What he missed most was getting laid. Cruel but true. The ratcheting up of their relationship that came out with the stupid ring scene—that had freaked him out. And now—calling his mom? A spasm of rage at Clara registered in his chest. What the fuck.

  His mother was talking about how she’d met Robert’s dad by the time she was his age. They had been freshman sweethearts in college. Such prehistoric news. “We were apart for a couple of summers, and maybe we dated other people just to test ourselves, but we knew that we had each found a good friend and soul mate. If we’d broken up, we’d have gone on to find other partners, maybe never looked back. But we knew that making the commitment to each other would accelerate our lives in other ways, make our path so much clearer. And it did.”

  “So this is like, what, the bird-in-hand approach to marriage? Or marriage is like, what, an HOV lane? Why would you want me to get married so soon? Oh, I get it. You can’t wait to be a grandma. Is that it?”

  “I did not say I wanted to see you get married soon. I am simply wondering if you’ve done something rash.” His mother spoke calmly, which only pushed him closer to the edge of fury.

  “Some guys in my shoes would say this is none of your frigging business.”

  “Don’t speak to me like that, Robert. As mothers go, I’ve always given you a lot of space, wouldn’t you say?”

  They had entered downtown Ledgely, where it looked as if every second and third cousin of every resident in a ten-mile radius had decided it was time to go shopping. The lot by the wineshop would be full, so Robert turned down a residential street.

  “Wouldn’t you?” she persisted.

  “That’s your stated M.O. Though it’s always made me wonder, Mom, whether it’s related to your never having more kids than me. Like, it’s easy to give a kid space when one turned out to be more than enough.”

  His mother gasped quietly.

  “Yeah, see what it feels like, Mom? That’s not my business, right? Or maybe it is.” Three blocks from the main drag, he found a spot in a dark lane of fancified colonial houses. He parked
and turned off the engine.

  “Robert. Are you telling me you’ve felt unloved?”

  “Jeez, Mom, of course not.” His voice cracked, as if he were still an adolescent. He opened his door.

  “Do not get out. I have something to say to you.”

  Robert forced himself to look at her.

  “I love and have always loved being your mother. Fiercely. Your dad would say the same about being your father—though that would be more obvious, right? My classmates at med school thought I was insane to willfully have a baby in the midst of it all, but I knew that if I delayed, if I thought a better time would come after endless residencies and studying for boards, and all that it takes to get where I am, then I would probably end up deciding to get pregnant when I no longer could.”

  The car was quickly growing cold, and Robert had left the house without gloves or a hat. He started to get out again, but his mom clutched his arm.

  “Wait.” She kept her hand on his sleeve. “I want to tell you what I see all too often in my practice. Women in their thirties, even forties, who thought they had all the time in the world to have a family. Even without cancer, they were probably fooling themselves. By the time they get to me, the grief they face is like a hurricane. A few go on to have babies, a few more to adopt, but a lot of these women are alone. They’ve passed up chances to settle down, and the regret I watch them battle, while they go through treatment … Robert, it’s ghastly. People ask how I can bear to deal with so many people I know are going to die from their disease, but sometimes that’s not the worst part of what I deal with. Regret—regret that devours people worse than a tumor—that’s the hardest thing for me to see in my patients.”

  Robert couldn’t look at her. What the hell was she talking about! “Mom, don’t project those scenarios onto my life. Or, Jesus, Clara’s life either.”