The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  “So what do we think, Celestino? Should we project a big image of Hendrix onto the tree, set up a sound system blaring out his greatest hits?”

  “No audio,” said Robert. “Clashes with the band.”

  Arturo leaned against the tree. “What band?”

  “They’re called, get ready, Never Smoked Never Surfed. NS Squared. They’re like four dudes in their early fifties who made truckloads of money doing stuff with other people’s money but always wanted to be onstage. Now they are. In Matlock, if that counts.”

  “Money talks. I guess it plays the drums, too.”

  Robert shrugged. “Yeah, but Clo says they’re surprisingly good. And free, because one of them has a kid in Ira’s class. They’ll play all those covers our parents like to dance to. Beatles. Temptations. You know. Blood Sweat and Tears. Earth, Wind and Fire. Elvis One and Elvis Two.”

  Arturo groaned.

  “Speak for yourself, Mr. Girl from Ipanema.”

  Celestino envied these boys their friendship, but it also seemed like a play to him, a script they followed to secure themselves in a place they knew.

  Arturo startled him by reaching out and shoving his shoulder. “What’re you thinking, Silent One?”

  “That I am behind on my work.”

  “I see no lawns to mow or gardens to tend.”

  “I am caring for Mrs. Connaughton’s house.”

  “Gone to someplace swanky like Boca Raton,” said Robert. “Hey, Turo, doesn’t that mean Rat’s Mouth? Could be a new nickname for Mistress Lorelei, who’s back on Granddad’s shit list. He is wicked sorry he agreed to that house tour.” He turned to Celestino. “Cool place, though, huh? Her house is the rich big brother to ours.”

  Celestino nodded. He noticed that Robert claimed ownership of his grandfather’s house. Inheritance: another thing to set him apart.

  “Go have a look,” Robert said to Arturo. “It’s like stepping back in time.”

  “Yeah?” When he saw the look on Celestino’s face, Arturo poked his arm again. “You are too paranoid, amigo!”

  Celestino had no choice but to follow Arturo toward the house.

  Inside, once Celestino turned off the alarm, they removed their boots and set them in the copper tray. In the living room, Arturo whistled. “Razzle-dazzle, Paul Revere.” He examined the paintings on the wall, the antique fire tools, the china figurines. The many pieces of silver had been removed from the mantel and shelves; Celestino had spotted them, wrapped in plastic, packed in a crate, hidden away in the cavelike cellar.

  “Don’t touch the lamps,” he told Arturo. “Some are on timers.”

  “Won’t touch a thing. Won’t leave a fingerprint! Promise.”

  The cat leaped out from the kitchen and hissed. Arturo jumped back and laughed. “Puss, you’re a fierce one.”

  Celestino went about his jobs, ignoring the cat. It followed him from room to room. As he pinched spent blossoms off the geranium, he could hear Arturo’s footsteps above him.

  He returned to the kitchen to refill the watering cans and take them to the second floor. Arturo stood in Mrs. Connaughton’s bedroom, looking out the front windows at Mr. Darling’s house, the barn, and the pond. It was a wide and beautiful view, the kind you might see on a postcard.

  “The things some people take for granted,” said Arturo. Abruptly, he turned around. “But hey. Now that I have you alone. Have you tracked her down yet? Did you follow my advice?”

  Of course he would ask. Perhaps this—his curiosity about Isabelle, both helpful and meddlesome—explained his following Celestino through Mrs. Connaughton’s house.

  “I saw her, yes. Sunday.” Celestino watered the African violets and cyclamen on the dresser.

  “Saw her?”

  Celestino finished watering. He could have turned around, but he didn’t. “We ate lunch together.”

  “I’m so glad. I’m optimistic for you, dude. I am.”

  It was clear that Arturo expected something. Gratitude? Friendship? What did this rich, intellectual boy need from him?

  Celestino returned to the kitchen and took the flashlight into the cellar. It hadn’t rained or snowed in the past two days, but he would let nothing sabotage the trust he’d won from Loud. When he came up into the kitchen, he found Arturo seated in a kitchen chair, the cat purring on his lap.

  When she walked into the café, ten minutes late, he rose from the bench inside the door, determined to embrace her. She allowed him to hold her, but her face was turned to the side.

  As soon as they sat down—or as soon as she had ordered a glass of wine, Celestino a beer—she began talking.

  “I’ve thought about you all week.” Her face was a mask of worry, not joy. “And here’s what I need to tell you—”

  “No,” said Celestino. “I need to tell you first. I need you to know that I understand we are more different than we were before. I know you are going away this summer, but before then I want us to know each other again. It will be different. I know this.” He wished he could say they would be enfants together, once more, but of course they wouldn’t.

  She sighed. “Celestino, you were my first. I wanted you to think I was worldly, that I was … a precocious seductress or something. I was in awe of how still you were, how nothing in this whole new world made you panic. How you listened, really listened, to everything and everyone around you. How much you were willing to sacrifice—your home, your family, your language—give that up so you could learn, have a richer life. Not money rich … you know what I mean. I fell for all of that.”

  He wanted to reach across the table and take one of her hands, but she kept them in her lap.

  “I thought you were so … profound. Graceful, even. And also—”

  The waitress came with their drinks. She asked if they knew what they wanted. Isabelle said, “Give us a minute,” and picked up her menu.

  Celestino knew what he wanted, and it wasn’t on the damn menu. “I should have come to find you sooner,” he said. “I did not realize how much I hurt you when I ran away. It was stupid on top of cowardly. You must have thought I didn’t care.”

  “Well, you could have called.” She buttered a roll. “But Celestino, in the long run it wouldn’t have made any difference. What I came to see was that in a way—without realizing it—I used you. I wanted to subvert my father’s pure intentions for you, I know that now. It sounds like therapy talking, and partly I guess it is, but I was headed straight toward hurting you. If you hadn’t gone.”

  “We were in love with each other,” said Celestino.

  “It felt that way, it really did. Oh God, it really did.” Isabelle blushed.

  Her hair was tied back this time, so that when she leaned down, staring at the table to avoid his eyes, he could still see her face. Her eyes were closed, her mouth set. “Oh Celestino, I don’t see how we can go back. This notion that we could be friends … I can feel that’s not what you really want. And I hate what I see of myself when I look back at who I was with you. Especially now, now that I know how much damage I did. Apologies seem so shallow. But I’m sorry. I am.”

  The waitress returned. A burger. A Caesar salad with grilled salmon. Dressing on the side. Water, please. Tap.

  “I’ve made you cry. Oh God.” She reached across the table then. She seized both of his hands. “I should have had you to my place, I was just …”

  “Scared. Of me. Of what I might do.” He should have pulled his hands away, but he didn’t.

  “No!”

  “You thought I would become angry and hurt you.”

  “That’s not true. I would always trust you.”

  “Why?” said Celestino. “I ran away from you.”

  “I see now that you did what you had to.”

  “No. We are here because you did not want me to see more of your life. Your furniture, your pictures, your kitchen, your—”

  “Stop. This isn’t fair.”

  “Why fair? What would be fair?” Now he did pull his hand
s away. He was careful not to raise his voice. “I am a day laborer, in the words of the newspapers. A lawn soldier, I have been called. I prune trees. I seed lawns.” He hesitated, already sorry he’d said so much, but he had to go on. “You. You are a university scholar who will go out into the world to save the poor children. Isn’t that how you see us?”

  “I’m incapable of saving anyone, not even myself,” she said quietly.

  When the food arrived, they stared across the table, not at each other but at each other’s dinner. Celestino noted the perfectly parallel grill lines on Isabelle’s fish. He willed her to eat first. Despite the day’s work—removal of a fallen tree—he had little appetite.

  Finally, she lifted her fork. “I’m sorry. I made it sound as if I’m to be pitied. I’m not. Not at all.” She cut into the salmon.

  Celestino waited for a moment, watching her. Then he ate: slowly, carefully, with his best manners. Looking at her again, he wished he could burn away the younger Isabelle, see her now for the very first time. She would not seem so different from the equally smart, equally pretty women who served him sandwiches and tea on their lawns.

  “Now you’re scaring me,” she said. “What are you thinking?”

  “How does it matter? You are sending me away.”

  She put down her fork and knife. “I will feel guilty no matter what I do now. But I want you to have something.” She pulled her purse into her lap. She pushed a blank envelope across the table. He tried to ignore it.

  “In there,” she said, “is the name of an amazing immigration lawyer. He helped our housekeeper. He works for almost nothing. I worry that you’ll need someone like that.”

  He began to eat his fries.

  “Take it. Do not throw it away. I need to know you’ll have somewhere to turn if things get ugly for you. Because, in a minute, they can.”

  He smiled bitterly at the envelope. “Ugly,” he said. He realized that he had probably grown ugly to her. He could imagine the taller, better-dressed men who had kissed her, shared her bed, in the past eight years.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but I will go now.”

  “Please don’t,” said Isabelle.

  “What is there to stay for?”

  She had no answer to this, only a plea, a look of desperate sadness.

  “You will have a book to keep you company while you finish your dinner,” he said, gesturing at her bag. “If I leave now, I will catch the next train.” He opened his wallet and put a twenty-dollar bill on the table. He put on his coat.

  She stood when he began to walk away. She grabbed one of his arms and held out the envelope. “Take this. Do me one favor only and take it.”

  He took it. He folded it in half and pushed it into a back pocket of his jeans.

  16

  Sometimes I thought the mud would drive me mad. I share Mr. Eliot’s low opinion of April: it is indeed the most maliciously fickle month, but I am sorry to say that lilacs have little to do with it. Lilacs do not bloom in these parts until the cruelest month is a calendar page in the recycling bin. We may as reasonably expect a four-alarm nor’east blizzard as we may a respite of winsome blue skies—though such skies will mock what lies below: the earth dark and sodden, a stew of peat, sand, rotten leaves, and petrified long-lost mittens.

  Sarah soldiered on. She’d grown accustomed to the surprisingly widespread loss of hair—her limbs were slippery smooth as those of an infant—but she had begun to complain of a leaden sensation in her legs, of toes and fingers that prickled intermittently all day. “Like my nerves are cringing,” she said. Sometimes, when she ate, she would cover her mouth and gasp; food that was either too cold or too hot sent needles of pain through her teeth. Now the meal she liked best was a plate of tepid mashed potatoes alongside a grilled sandwich of cheese and spinach on soft bread.

  I remained her chauffeur on treatment days; how guilty my pleasure at knowing I would see so much of her and then, if she came back with me to Matlock for a rest, lavish her with tenderness. The weather was so awful that she no longer had the heart to banish me from the hospital. Once she entered Trudy’s funhouse of toxins, I would often read a book on one of the waiting-room couches. I had abandoned Henry James; I’d begun to find him, as Robert would say, a major downer. Craving a more picaresque source of entertainment, I turned to Iris Murdoch’s most farcical novels, their comedy dark, even diabolical. Poppy had loved Iris Murdoch.

  If I lurked about, Chantal would include me whenever she ordered lunch for “the girls.” Once in a while, Trudy would emerge and sit with me for a few minutes; I had not been invited back to the inner sanctum since Sarah’s first day of chemo. Trudy treated me gently, as if in her eyes I had suddenly become a certifiably old man. She would greet me not with a casual “How’s it going, Dad?” but with a sotto voce “Dad, how are you feeling these days?”

  “Put upon,” I told her that day in early April. “Mired in the muck, of my overly trafficked driveway and the ordeals of those around me. Although it occurs to me that I hardly ever see your sister.”

  “Clover’s wrapped up in her quest to move the children north.”

  “Still?”

  “She has a lawyer in New York now. I have no idea where she gets the money to pay him.” Trudy sat next to me and leaned close, speaking softly.

  “At least she talks to you,” I said.

  “No,” said Trudy. “What I know comes from Todd. He called because he’s worried about Lee. He says a teenage boy shouldn’t be the object of a tug-of-war. No one talks about it in front of him, but he’s old enough to sense that someone’s up to something. Todd says his grades are down.”

  “He’s a boy,” I scoffed. “He wants to be an athlete. Perfectly normal.”

  “But Todd wants to get him into a good high school. It’s very competitive there, even for public.”

  These were pressures I’d never endured. I had not worried about my daughters’ education; I’d worried about their happiness. I suppose the two are related, in the long run, but I never thought about that. Perhaps this explained Clover’s plight; should I have pushed her to get better grades, so that she, like her sister, could have gone to an Ivy League school?

  “Well, I’ve never doubted Todd’s judgment,” I said. When Trudy agreed, I felt a twinge of betrayal. “Listen to us. Poor Clover.”

  “She does not deserve your pity,” snapped Trudy, though she spoke in a whisper. She placed her hands on her thighs, one of many practiced gestures to signal that she must move on. I’d come to know them all. “Okay, Dad. I just wanted you to know that Sarah’s doing beautifully. She’s very strong. Body and spirit both. Many women at her stage of treatment would be in far worse shape all around. I wanted you to know that, from me.”

  “Horse’s mouth.” I put my hand on Trudy’s white-coated knee. Our fingers touched, awkwardly, but I did not pull away. “Thank you, daughter.”

  “You’re welcome, Father.” She kissed me on the cheek.

  I went back to The Flight from the Enchanter, in which a capricious young woman becomes enthralled with two brothers. Ah, duplicity, I thought oh-so-smugly: there’s one concern I do not have.

  On the way out of Boston, Sarah slept. I listened to a classical station, content to have her beside me, belted in safely, gently snoring. Her head drooped sideways, displacing her makeshift turban. At the intersection of Route 2 and the turnoff to Matlock, I stared at her until the light turned green. Veins glowed blue and lavender just inside her naked scalp. I felt as if I were in love with every inch of her bloodstream, every pore in her skin.

  Because of the unforeseen ravaging of my long dirt driveway (which I could see would now have to be paved), I’d asked Tommy Loud to install a barrel of sand beside the mailboxes. I’d pull off the road, get out of the car, and strew several coffee cans’ worth of traction onto the mouth of the driveway. This was where the parents’ cars idled as they came and went, exacerbating the muck.

  Sarah woke as I performed this new ritual
. She was confused. “Where’s Rico?” she asked through the open door of the car.

  “At home,” I said. “Don’t fret.”

  She frowned. “Gus with him?”

  “Yes, your mysterious and reliable cousin, whom I seem destined never to meet.”

  She lay back against the passenger seat. I drove us to the front door. Though she tried to protest, I carried her into the house. Like a bride, I almost said. She fell asleep for another hour on the couch, and then I made her eat a bowl of noodle soup. “From a can,” I confessed. “But organic. The preservatives are grown in petri dishes blessed by the Dalai Lama.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Funny hurts right now.”

  “Then humor is off the menu.” I swept an arm through the air.

  I watched her eat. Even though I’d let the soup cool a bit, steam rose and brightened her face. Why not a bride? Why not a new bride, a new house? My glance shifted briefly to the mantel. The surface of the large silver bowl had reverted to an iridescent tarnish. Behind it I had tucked Maurice Fougère’s impetuous letter. It had been sitting there, unanswered, for over a month.

  When Sarah finished the soup, she asked to go. For once, I looked forward to releasing her, to being by myself, to pursuing my sudden scheme.

  As soon as I returned from Packard—where Sarah never let me take her farther than the door of her building—I retrieved the letter. It was six o’clock, but I had a suspicion that Fougère’s elves worked at his studio all hours of the day and night.

  The elf who answered the phone informed me that the master had just flown to Dubai; could an assistant help me? No, I said. The matter was personal. I carried the letter into my study and opened my computer. As I clicked on NEW MESSAGE and watched the blank sheet of virtual paper flash onto my screen, I felt as if I had no time to lose.

  Sometimes forbearance sneaks around behind you and gives you a rude, well-placed kick. Take that, you self-satisfied prig. Ha!