The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  “Things change, for God’s sake!”

  “Don’t go talking to me about change.” When I made no reply, her voice softened. “Percy, you want to believe, and so do I, that Trudy will cure me—but maybe she won’t. Chances are good I’ll be dead in five years. I have to make plans for Rico.”

  I wanted to tell her that under such unthinkable circumstances I would be a father to Rico; I could be just as good a father to him as this Gus fellow, this guttersnipe who had spirited Sarah to city hall like Hades abducting Persephone. (My mind grappled backward. When had this marriage taken place, what day?) And then I remembered Rico’s remark that Gus was “younger.” Despite all of Sarah’s protests when we had been in the throes of passion, of course my age mattered. It mattered very much.

  “I have one more question, and then you can go take your nap,” I said.

  “As if I could possibly rest after this.”

  “Does Trudy know about Gus?”

  Sarah hesitated. “Trudy was incredibly generous to me when I thought I had no coverage. She helped me think things out, my options. I was desperate. I didn’t want to go to any other hospital, to a doctor who … Percy”—her voice broke and, God help me, I wondered if the sob was feigned—“Trudy is one of the most amazing doctors I’ve ever met, and I know—”

  “Did she meet him? Did Trudy meet Gus?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Trudy may be your daughter, but she’s my doctor.” Her voice had hardened again. “And you know what? For that alone, I will always be grateful to you.”

  “Sounds like I’m already part of your past. Receding in the rearview mirror.”

  Sarah burst into tears, the grief as genuine as her rage. “All I care about now is the future,” she sobbed. “You want to give me something? Give me the eighteen years that separate us, Percy. Give me those years, just that many, in which to raise my son. Hang on to the decade or more that you’ve got left, fine, squander those years whatever way you like, but let me live to be seventy. And God help me if I’m half so patronizing when I get there.”

  Stunned as I was, I realized that finally I’d heard Sarah cry—because I had made her cry. Before I could think of anything else to say, she hung up.

  Ironically, I turned seventy-one the following week. Clover slipped a card into the mail she left on the table. Trudy e-mailed to ask if I had plans. Norval phoned to ask the same. I told them both that I did have plans. I spent the night of my birthday eating sausage pizza in front of World War II. Mrs. Miniver, to be exact. I needed to witness nobility and courage (intensified by such fine British accents), since I possessed not a whit myself.

  17

  Robert was packing for the weekend when Turo walked into his bedroom. “Have I got a surprise for you.” He sat down at Robert’s desk and opened the laptop. It glowed to life. Turo clicked and typed furiously, then spun the chair halfway around. “We are on YouTube, dude.”

  “We?” Robert took Turo’s place in the chair.

  “The DOGS, man. Look.” Turo reached over Robert’s shoulder, moved the cursor, clicked. The enlarged video became a mosaic of pixels. “You need a better machine,” muttered Turo.

  Nevertheless, Robert saw right away that someone’s shaky hand-held camera had captured, by day, the “action” at the swimming pool in Ledgely (the banner pulled back, the roadkill bobbing in the water). At the far edge of the pool, near the top of the screen, two or three sets of shoes walked back and forth. Abruptly, the scene shifted to the lawn they’d covered with bottles in the shape of a giant footprint. It had taken a week for Robert’s right hand to recover from the ache caused by anchoring the necks of those bottles in the half-frozen turf. (Their hands had been gloved—a cautionary order—but this did nothing to soften the stress on his wrist and forearm.) Again, the footage, a few scant minutes, had been shot by day as people milled around. The third scene was one that Turo hadn’t described to Robert: a large powerboat, propped up off-season in someone’s secluded driveway, had been wrapped entirely in … “Toilet paper? Is that toilet paper?” asked Robert.

  “About a hundred rolls.”

  “Jesus, wouldn’t you say that’s wasteful?”

  “Makes quite a statement. But I wasn’t in on that one. That was down in Cohasset.”

  Robert absorbed this news for a moment. Did the DOGS have chapters or—what was that creepy CIA term—cells? Turo was evasive or jokey whenever Robert asked for such details. (“We are legion, my friend,” he’d said in an ominous whisper when, after the pool MnM, Robert had asked outright how many people were involved.)

  The video was accompanied by a sound track of Peruvian pipes. “What’s with the music?”

  “Oh we have no idea who made this video,” said Turo, “but wait. Look!”

  Two pairs of hands held between them a huge hand-painted banner: GO FOR THE JUGULAR, DOGS! Fade to black.

  Turo said something emphatic, triumphant, in Spanish.

  “Made by an insider, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Nobody’s laying claim to it, but who cares?” said Turo. “We’re going viral—culturally speaking. We are multimedia. We are out there.”

  “Well, I don’t think the cops in Matlock or Ledgely—or Cohasset—would disagree with that.” Robert remembered the flurry of letters to the Globe. The DOGS were out there, all right.

  “Man, you are losing the fire,” scolded Turo.

  “Hey—let’s get going. You ready?” Robert closed the laptop and slipped it into his pack, sandwiched between a chem text with the heft of a cinder block and Love in the Time of Cholera. He threw the car keys to Turo. “It’s parked on Walker.”

  NPR was half presidential primary, half Eliot Spitzer mop-up. Nothing new under the miserly late-winter sun. They surfed stations, listening to a hodgepodge of music, talking about the summer ahead.

  Turo had an interview in New York as well. He wanted to work for an environmental law firm: part of his long-term plan to outsmart the system with its own tactics. He’d decided not to stay in Brooklyn with Robert but to crash with a friend at Columbia, a classmate from Exeter. When Robert heard this, he felt a twinge of release. Lately, he’d OD’d a bit on Turo’s monomaniacal passions. He’d started to reward himself for long hours at the library by playing squash with a guy he’d met in his psych class. He no longer worried if he came home at midnight to a dark apartment. Maybe Turo had learned to get by on two or three hours of sleep. That’s the only way Robert figured he could survive academically. Or maybe he was one of those rare geniuses who got his work done in a fraction of the time it took everyone else. Even during sophomore year, when two of their courses had overlapped, by spring he saw Turo less and less in Loker, the reading room they’d staked out as their favorite place to cram.

  Robert had begun to wonder if he wanted to continue living with Turo when they returned for senior year. Turo’s assumption seemed to be that if they both found jobs in New York, they could share a summer sublet. Robert was hoping to work for the NRDC or, failing that, a group whose lofty mission was to “save the Adirondacks.” His mother had offered him work at St. Matt’s, but if he was going to consign himself to a life lived in hospitals, he knew he’d be smart to stay away from them until it was necessary. She couldn’t disagree.

  She’d taken him out to dinner a week before, and as soon as they’d ordered their food, she had asked him about his “professional intentions.” She’d never been so blunt about it before, and Robert was startled. He’d almost wanted to ask if she didn’t trust him with his future anymore. But he could tell she was nervous about bringing it up, and she hadn’t mentioned Clara once, so he’d gratefully told her about his interest in psychiatry. She seemed surprised, maybe disappointed. She allowed that pharmaceutical advances made the field more exciting than it had been during her years of med school. Robert told her that pills had nothing to do with it; he wasn’t interested in becoming a glorified drug dealer. That made her laugh.

  When he mentioned that he’d be staying
with Uncle Todd in New York, she’d said, “Please give him my best. I miss him. Or maybe I miss his sanity. Speaking of matters psychiatric. The more time goes by, the more I think he held Clover together.”

  “What, she’s falling apart?”

  “That would be an exaggeration. I guess she still loves that job—thanks to Dad, which I think she forgets—but I gather from Todd that she has some lawyer buzzing around his lawyer about trying to split custody of your cousins: one semester of the school year with her, one with him. She’s deluding herself.”

  “You talk to Todd behind her back?”

  “How else could I talk to him? Listen, sweetheart. I was related to him long enough that I do not plan to drop him. He can marry five more times and I’ll still regard him as my brother-in-law. One day you’ll learn about how complicated family gets when people make rash decisions.”

  Robert flashed on her former reluctance to let go of Clara. What if he’d stayed with Clara for five years and then they’d broken up? Yikes. He said, “So what does Uncle Todd say?”

  His mother hesitated. “You know not to mention any of this to him when you’re there. Or, God forbid, to Filo or Lee.”

  “Jeez, Mom.”

  “Well, he certainly has no intention of making the kids split the school year. What a ridiculous notion. But he’s also convinced Moira to skip the big June wedding. I think they’re planning on eloping the week after your visit.”

  Robert thought about this for a moment. Why was it such a big deal? Did Clover actually harbor hopes of getting back together with her ex? He didn’t dare ask his mother this question. Everything she said about Clover made Robert feel hugely disloyal just to be listening.

  “I think you’re too hard on Aunt Clo. I get why you’re mad at her, but like, she’s the only sister you’ll ever have.” He saw the expression on his mother’s face and said, “Duh of the century. Okay. But she’s always been generous to me. And when I was little, I thought she was so cool.”

  “She is cool. She’s too cool. That’s her handicap, Robert. She’s a butterfly. All that style and flashy romance, or whatever you’d label her outlook on life, it doesn’t make for stability or, in the end, contentment.”

  Robert wondered what insect his mother would be. If the sisters were in Aesop, what would the fable be called? “The Ladybug and the Butterfly”? “The Earwig and the Butterfly”? Joseph, a fellow bio major, was crazy for insects. He told Robert that earwigs exhibited family-oriented behaviors. They were nurturers as well as workers. Ants and bees hogged the entomological spotlight, quite unfairly. You could actually blame Shakespeare for that, said Joseph.

  How strange it felt to set foot in Aunt Clover’s apartment when she no longer lived there. Turo went in with Robert, to use the bathroom and say hello to Lee, whom he remembered fondly from their midnight ski adventure. Lee and Filo had just returned from school, and their stepmother-to-be was out at the market. “She’s going to make paella.”

  “Cool,” said Robert.

  “If you like it,” Lee said grimly. Filo had turned on the TV.

  Turo looked around. “Great house you’ve got.” The apartment occupied two floors of a wide, bow-fronted townhouse. The street windows looked into the dappled branches of a sycamore tree.

  “It’s okay,” said Lee, “but Dad says the maintenance is too high. He says we’re going to look at houses in New Jersey. Moira wants a garden.”

  Turo gestured at the branches nudging the window; unlike branches in Cambridge, they were already leafing out. “Feels like Eden right here, man.”

  Robert carried his pack through the kitchen to the tiny back room where he’d stayed in the past. The twin bed was still there, made up with a new quilt in pastel colors; no more funky black chenille. A sewing machine monopolized the desk, and a bulletin board displayed new photos—obviously Moira’s. She was pretty in a totally different way from Clover: dark pageboy hair, tea-colored skin. She looked part Asian—but she was plump, just a little, which made her look more suburban than Far East exotic.

  Turo stepped into the room. “Gotta be off, man.”

  Robert walked him to the nearest subway stop. They made plans to meet up for the return trip; they wished each other luck with their interviews. Turo took the stairs that led down to the F train. He took them two at a time: as usual, certain of where he was headed.

  Back in the apartment, Robert looked around the living room and began to notice the absence of specific objects (an eclectic gang of pillows on the couch, a pink glass chandelier) and the presence of their replacements (a small dark sculpture of a generic father and child, a delicately flowered wing chair). The TV was off; presumably, Lee and Filo had gone to their rooms.

  Robert knocked on Lee’s door. His cousin’s room was painted navy blue, the walls a backdrop to posters of sports figures: Jeter, Favre, Nadal, Beckham, and a fierce-looking martial artist with a face twisted into a grimace and a leg raised toward the camera at an angle that looked totally impossible. “Dude!” said Robert. “Can you do that?”

  “I’m not even a brown belt. I’ll have to quit anyway, if we move.”

  “New Jersey has karate,” said Robert.

  “Tae kwon do.”

  “Sorry. But that, too.”

  Lee shrugged. He was lying back on his bed, an iPod tethered to his ears.

  Robert sat beside him. “So. How is she? Your dad’s girlfriend?”

  “Moira?” He shrugged again; did everything matter so little? “She’s cool. Tries hard to make us like her, so how can we not? Mom says that might change after they’re married. She says to prepare ourselves for if they have a baby.”

  “She lives here now, though, right? You’d have seen the cracks if she were a phony, dude.” Robert was appalled to think that Clover had started an evil-stepmother smear campaign.

  “Whatever.” Lee sat up. “Want an energy bar or something?” He freed himself from the iPod.

  In the kitchen, Robert took a banana from a big cheerful fruit platter (also new), and Lee ate a bowl of dry multicolored breakfast cereal—which would have made Clover flip out.

  He had to stop superimposing Aunt Clo on this scene.

  “So your friend’s like kind of an extremist, isn’t he?” asked Lee.

  “Turo’s a believer in acting out your passions. He’s dedicated to saving the earth. I mean, you know, working for people who do more than just talk about the environment, the habits we have to change. Like that.”

  Lee chewed busily for a moment. “At Thanksgiving? When we were skiing? Like he wanted to connect me with some group down here.”

  “What group?”

  “They do recycling and composting and hand out stuff about saving energy. I’ve seen them in Prospect Park. I told Dad, and he says the soup kitchen’s plenty. Except I have to do that with him and Moira. So I was thinking maybe this summer, after I get back from Mom’s, I could maybe volunteer.”

  Was there no end to Turo’s zest for recruiting?

  “I think you’ve got enough going,” said Robert. “I mean, with sports and school. I worked my butt off starting about your age.”

  “You’re a genius, though. Mom says everybody doesn’t have to go to Harvard, that it’s a lot of money spent on mostly social connections. She went to U. Mass. and did just fine.”

  The sound of the apartment door spared Robert from deciding whether or not to defend his school.

  “Someone is shoveling again!” The scolding was loud but merry. Lee put down his spoon. Robert turned around. Here she was, the flesh-and-blood Moira, holding two shopping bags against her chest. Paper shopping bags. Doubled. (He had to stop superimposing Turo everywhere, too.)

  “Robert! The famously brilliant Robert!” she cried. “A banana? You must be starved!” There followed an awkward physical clash of putting down bags, hugging, introductions, covert assessments, offers of more food. Moira struck Robert as a happy-to-the-core, energetic, overtly maternal woman. She had a midwestern accent and
wore, under her coat, a close-fitting beige wool dress you saw only on women who work in business or finance.

  In a blink, she’d put a plate of M&M cookies on the table. Homemade. “I’m putting the groceries away, no argument,” she said. “But then I’ll put you to work. Can you devein shrimp?” she asked Robert.

  Weird but true: he liked her. Aunt Clo, in any context, would have loathed her on sight.

  Robert hadn’t laid eyes on Uncle Todd in two years. He looked exactly the same, except for more gray hair. TV handsome: smooth skin, ordinary features, like he’d stepped from an ad for a Camry or premium cable. Robert couldn’t help remembering Clover’s claim that her husband might be gay. Did the guy look remotely gay? Robert tried to put this out of his mind as they ate and talked.

  Todd acted completely comfortable with Robert—wanted to know all about Robert’s parents, about Granddad. Robert told him the big news: that Granddad had a girlfriend. He decided not to mention the cancer. When he’d last seen Granddad, they hadn’t talked about it. Robert had been afraid to ask. He knew his mom was treating her, but of course she told him nothing.

  “Kudos to Percy,” said Uncle Todd. “Fantastic news. It’s about time. Though I have to confess, your mom did spill the beans on that.”

  “He’s maybe thinking of selling the house,” said Robert. “Maybe moving in with her. He didn’t say so, but that’s my hunch.”

  “Wow. That’s even bigger news. Leave that house?”

  “It’s kind of huge for him, and she’s this stained-glass artist. She lives in her studio. I went once, with Granddad. It’s pretty weird to imagine him hanging around this funky loft all day.”

  Moira was in the kitchen, making dessert.

  “That house,” said Uncle Todd. “Clover and I used to have a fantasy we’d end up there. She called it the house of her mother’s heart. I don’t know how we thought that would happen. Well, obviously, it wasn’t meant to be. Either way.”

  “Guess not.” Robert glanced nervously toward the kitchen. How much did Todd and Moira talk about Clover? Because of the kids, maybe a lot. His cousins would now have three parents.