The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

  After two hours—no beer, no talk, and the place was a frigging freezer—Robert helped Boots load the stuffed tires into the back of a van, along with a crate of extension cords. He felt cross-eyed with fatigue, his fingers numb. Boots wasn’t hostile, but he hardly spoke. The cooperative silence grew creepy.

  Once the van was loaded, Robert crossed the space to have a look at the banner, but it had already been folded. “Dowels in the truck?” Tamara asked Skunk. Skunk nodded. He wasn’t exactly loquacious, either.

  Just as unceremoniously as they’d all come together, they parted. Turo drove. “So where does this ‘big action’ take place?” asked Robert.

  “Won’t know till we meet tomorrow, back at the warehouse.”

  “It’s like we’re special ops, at risk of blowing our cover,” said Tamara.

  “I think special-ops guys know everything before they go in,” said Robert. “They are torture-proof. Which, come to think it, we are not. Or”—he glanced at Turo and laughed—“I am not. That’s for sure.”

  “I have input, but I’ve learned to go with the flow,” said Turo.

  “Oh, that’ll be the day,” said Robert.

  Turo hadn’t responded. As they’d cruised into town, the three of them had slipped into a sleepy inertia. Robert dozed off, barely waking when they dropped Tamara at her place.

  “Get your beauty sleep, friend,” Turo told him when they got home.

  He’d awakened that morning with a nasty sore throat and a cough. Turo had left a note on the kitchen table: HERE AT 5! Robert had groaned.

  He’d taken a hit of DayQuil and packed for the library. He had to study for his medical anthro exam and finish a draft of his lit paper, or he’d be screwed. Midmorning, he tried to call Turo but got his voicemail. “Man, I am wiped, and I’ve got this evil cold,” he said. “I don’t think I can make tonight.”

  When he took his next break, to buy a sandwich at the basement cafeteria, he checked his phone and found a text from Turo: B THR. NO OUTS.

  “Give me a break,” Robert said aloud. He texted back, b thr if i can. don’t count on me. Almost immediately, Turo replied, NEED CAR. Robert answered, SORRY. Enough of this textual Ping-Pong. He punched in Turo’s number; weirdly, he hit voicemail. Maybe this meant Turo was in a library. “Finally, man,” muttered Robert.

  At five, he felt his phone vibrate. Not without a hint of guilt, he put the phone in his backpack. Turo would have to save the human race without his help that night.

  Now he looked at the clock on his computer: only 8:15. His body felt like it was 3:00 a.m. Where was Turo now? On the lawn of some McMansion out in Ledgely? Down on the Cape? Why had they been meeting so early? Robert had to wonder if his appointed place in this MnM had been crucial; probably, all they really wanted was his car. All he did was follow orders. Anybody could do that. It was like the army. None of the men in Robert’s family had “served in the military,” as the press liked to put it. How weird was that? No war stories of any kind. Maybe he was a sissy at heart, didn’t have the guts to give in to whatever unpleasant work it would take to effect any positive change. Maybe he simply didn’t have the warrior gene.

  “You need coffee. So do I.” Her whisper, so close he could feel her breath on his ear, nearly knocked him out of his chair. Rosemary stood behind him.

  Robert laughed quietly at his physical panic. This girl was so stealthy, she should work for the DOGS. She was right: he did need coffee. But more than that, he needed distraction.

  He closed the computer, slipped it into his backpack, and followed her out of the reading room.

  The band was playing—by request!—“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.” Roughly two hundred adults dressed in silly, colorful getups were dancing to this undanceably interminable song, drinking together on the swings, and crowding around the silent-auction tables, trying to snare their fencing lessons or Red Sox tickets before the bidding closed. (Was that Jonathan Newcomb, venture capitalist, wearing the fake sideburns, bandanna headband, and ripped overalls?) Ira had bid three times on a gift certificate at Trader Joe’s, but he quit when the bidding reached twice the face value. He was still in contention for a year’s membership at the gym to which he and Anthony belonged. (They had secured this donation.) Last time he’d cruised by the table, he’d noticed that three separate people were vying for the equine massage. Go figure.

  Evelyn took his arm. “Heidi’s rounding up the other teachers, to introduce their projects. Are you ready to cue the tree?”

  “Light my fire, baby.”

  She laughed. “These Earth Shoes are killing me. I cannot believe I ever wore them for more than five minutes.” Over her ducklike shoes, Evelyn wore a paisley maxidress and a jean jacket with Joni Mitchell appliquéd on the back. She had long ago discarded a garland of fake daisies that made her scalp itch. Ira was feeling the same way about the thrift-shop jacket. Oh God, not fleas, he thought as he started toward the house.

  After an incendiary sunset, the sky had finally darkened. Maxwell’s dad had laid down all the extension cords that afternoon, anchoring and covering them to make sure no one tripped. Percy had been kind enough to let them use power from the house, since the tree was so far from the barn. He’d told Ira that he had other plans the night of the auction but would leave the back door unlocked.

  Ira had noticed Rico’s mom earlier; like a few other parents, she wasn’t in costume. Well, who could blame her? If you were going through chemo, what energy would you have to dress up as Sergeant Pepper or Janis Joplin? (One couple, the Plotkins, were sporting what looked like canary-yellow Dr. Dentons, with hoods, makeshift periscopes strapped to their heads.)

  Ira had watched Sarah as she wandered around the auction tables. She appeared to have come alone, yet he’d also noticed how often she looked up at the house. Percy had left lights on for Ira, so he wouldn’t have to stumble through the dark to flip the switch. Sarah probably thought that Percy was home but refusing to attend the auction. It was still a mystery to Ira, what had happened between those two; clearly, the news wasn’t good.

  He stood on the porch, waiting. A crowd began to gather for the live auction, timed to occur when people had drunk just enough to loosen their purse strings but not so much that they’d doubt their own decisions. Maurice Fougère, wearing bright pink Indian garb that made him look like a sultan ripped from The Arabian Nights, stood by the mike where the lead singer had, a few minutes earlier, tried mightily to channel Iron Butterfly. Evelyn stood beside him. Maurice had agreed to be the auctioneer. This Ira couldn’t wait to see. That thick French accent should make the spectacle extra amusing.

  Anthony stood near the front of the group below. He waved at Ira. Ira blew him a kiss. They’d agreed to bid on the Nantucket weekend (honeymoon?).

  Anthony was having a good time. He’d bought two fortune cookies, yielding strips of paper that read, Kookookaju! and Go ask Alice. (“Can I work here? Please,” said Anthony. “Definitely not,” said Ira. “One of us has to stay in touch with the real world.” “And that’s me?” said Anthony. Ira had kissed him, quickly but easily. “ ’Fraid so.”)

  The crowd was impressive. Clover had done a good job of roping in not just current parents but a sizable number of alum parents as well as members of the Matlock community seeking idle entertainment and maybe a few good deals on acupuncture or Swan Boat rides.

  Evelyn signaled Ira. Maurice spoke into the microphone. “Attention, my psychedelic friends! This is the moment when we ask you to cast all financial caution to the wind, in the behalf of our wonderful children!”

  As the applause began, Ira entered the house and went to Percy’s study. On the desk sat a power strip from which four extension cords snaked out through the window. Ira flicked the switch: four beams of light shot up into the branches.

  Black lights had been Arturo’s suggestion; he’d even told Ira where to rent the fixtures. The teachers had spent an entire afternoon cutting giant flowers, peace signs, and doves from heavy white paper. Climbing i
nto the tree house that morning, they’d pinned and hung the shapes throughout the branches. Now these ghostly silhouettes glowed and shifted in the breeze. The effect was ethereal and joyful. Perfect.

  Ira heard more and louder applause, the childlike exclamations of awe. There was something shameless about this degree of excitement over something so frivolous, yet here was a community of people who put the kind of value on their children’s lives that so many other people, sadly, did not. Ira could not discount the effect of the wine, yet in that moment he realized how glad he was to belong in a place like this. Because he did belong.

  He hurried back through the kitchen to the porch, eager to get to the main event, to see the tree from below, as it was meant to be seen. As he walked through the back door, he heard the applause and the cries of delight rise still further; had Maurice started the bidding?

  No one was looking at the tree; even Maurice faced in the opposite direction. There appeared to be a pillar of fire in the middle of the pond—no, two. Flames rose from a pair of dark objects floating across the water from the opposite shore. Ira laughed. This was over the top; had Clover arranged this second surprise? Too much spectacle would distract from the auction itself.

  He had yet to reach the crowd when he saw the next two pillars of fire ignite. At first, it looked like they were in the middle of the sky, over Laurel Connaughton’s house.

  Just as Ira realized that the fires had nothing to do with the auction, light struck Laurel Connaughton’s house across its entire white façade. The first thing he saw was that the twin flames appeared to emerge from the two chimneys—or from objects that sat like crowns on top of the chimneys. At the same time, an enormous piece of white fabric, whiter than the house, seemed to fling itself down over the front of the house, stretching from the roofline to the rhododendrons flanking the door. Some people gasped; others laughed.

  Ira stood midway down the hillside, so transfixed that he couldn’t move forward, couldn’t look for Anthony in the crowd beneath him. He was aware that it had begun to disperse at the edges, that figures were running chaotically here and there.

  Anthony reached him and held his arm. Neither spoke. They were looking at the curious message painted on the banner, lit by a pair of footlights similar to those illuminating the upstaged tree house.

  FIDDLE-DEE-DEE, ROMANS:

  WILL YOU DANCE WHILE

  YOUR CHILDREN’S PLANET BURNS?

  “Romans,” murmured Anthony. “Romans?”

  “Nero. It’s a reference to Nero,” said Ira. “Oh my God.”

  People around them were talking rapidly into cell phones. Clover passed them, glancing tearfully at Ira. She ran toward her father’s house.

  That’s when a gust of lovely warm wind ferried a luminous tangle of sparks from one of the fires on the pond toward the light show at Mrs. Connaughton’s. It drifted into the edge of the banner, which appeared to recoil before catching fire. The word BURNS was the first to be consumed.

  The sound of sirens swelled rapidly; almost instantly, the flash of the fire engines pierced the trees lining the road. By the time the trucks drove in, the banner was a sheet of flame, yearning toward the shingled roof. The great columns of fire that had burned so fiercely at the outset—both those on the pond and those supported by the chimneys—had died down to quietly brazen embers. But the burning banner had a cause all its own, the fire a robust complaint, as if raging against the house itself.

  “Oh my God,” said Ira. “What if they can’t put it out?” In an attempt to stop trembling, he took Anthony’s hand. He let go when he saw Sarah running up the hill toward Percy’s house.

  Ira caught up with her at the back porch and said, more loudly than he’d intended, “He’s not home.”

  She looked miserable. Ira tried to think of something else to say, but both of them turned toward the neighboring house when their attention was captured by an odd noise, a grating and crumbling.

  One of the chimneys began to slump forward. Embers from the pyre resting on top poured like rough jewels down the steeply pitched roof; a large dark object fell to the ground. A new gust of wind ripped the entire flaming banner off the house and carried it, twisting, through the air. Like a gaudy specter, it passed over the fire engines, over the row of maples separating Percy’s property from Laurel’s. It loomed closer, rising steadily, still burning, until the crown of the beech tree, the highest point before open sky, snatched it from the air. Sparks rained down through the branches, and the tree house, its exterior composed so frugally of long-dead timber, caught fire after just a slight, suspenseful pause, along with the playful paper cutouts gleaming in the purple light.

  Celestino made himself a pork chop, with beans and peppers on the side. He turned on the radio, tuned it to the college station, based in Lothian, that played a strange jumble of music: jazz, hip-hop, sometimes a song from a musical, a piece of opera. You never knew what to expect.

  Before him lay a catalog of courses for a “business and vocational” school. You could study electrical engineering, bookkeeping, hairdressing, auto repair. Everything taught at the school seemed to be about fixing things, though not the things that Celestino wished he knew how to fix. But here was a section on landscaping and gardening. Shaping Public Spaces. Running a Nursery. Science of the Modern Lawn. Understanding Trees.

  Celestino liked to think he understood trees. Loud had even said so: “Hombre, you understand trees, you’ve got a friggin’ knack.”

  The day had been beautiful, and as he did on all the beautiful days this spring, Celestino had tried to absorb the pleasure of the sun, the first warm winds. There were no indoor jobs this week. Loud sent him back to Rose Retreat, the garden by the church. He’d already removed the salt hay, unwrapped the bushes, folded the burlap and returned it to Loud’s storage shed. He’d left the bushes alone for a few weeks, to let their canes loosen, relax into their natural posture. Today had been the best part: clipping out the deadwood, pruning back. Thousands of tiny new leaves, shiny and red as blood, had begun to assert themselves. Buds would form surprisingly soon. Roses, when they flourished, were a source of deep satisfaction. Celestino dug compost and lime into the soil, still faintly moist from the rainstorm several days before.

  The sound of the gate had startled him: two women. “Oh, hello,” the younger one called out. “We’re just looking. Is that okay?”

  Celestino smiled and waved to indicate that she wasn’t intruding.

  The two women were mother and daughter, searching for the right place in which to hold the daughter’s wedding that summer. They talked as they followed the circular paths. The mother wanted a big wedding, with more guests than the garden would hold. The daughter said she saw no reason to invite anyone who didn’t know her and her fiancé well.

  “Why do you want to pay for a lot of strangers to see me get married?”

  “They’re not strangers, they’re part of our family circle. Your father and I have known some of these people for years. This wedding isn’t just about you.”

  “No, it’s about me and James. And we can always elope.”

  “I’d call that an empty threat. That dress of yours in my closet tells me so. That registry list at Williams-Sonoma.”

  Celestino’s sister would be getting married in a month. He wondered if Marta and his mother were having arguments like this one, arguments about the details. It occurred to him that his own life lacked details—or the kind of details shaped by things like “family circles.” This made him think of the Christmas party the Lartigues had held for the French families, the ones with whom they shared their culture. He remembered the way that Isabelle had enfolded him into those parties, though he would never have belonged. He wondered if she saw those families still. In France, would she find yet another circle? For Isabelle, friendship was easy.

  After eating dinner, he went downstairs. Mrs. Karp had left him a note, asking him to hang the kitchen curtains she had washed. Celestino got the step stool out of the broo
m closet and slid the yellow fabric onto the rods, clicked the rods onto the brackets. Mrs. Karp went back to her TV show.

  When he returned upstairs, the college-student deejay was reading the news. “And this just in,” said the boy, deepening his voice as if acting in a play. “A major fire involving two historic homes in Matlock, continuing to burn as I read this news to you.” When the boy named the street, Celestino sat down on the nearest chair.

  The stunned revelers, those who had driven to the auction, had no choice but to walk the half mile back to the library parking lot; the shuttle bus that brought them over would never be allowed past the cordon of fire trucks and squad cars spilling from the two driveways onto the road in both directions. Ira wondered what it must look like to anyone driving by: a procession of shell-shocked people dressed as flower children, martyred rock stars, yellow submarines.

  Stranger still was the scene they left behind. Folding chairs and tables had collapsed. Tie-dyed tablecloths had blown into bushes. Lime-green paper plates had scattered in every direction; some floated on the pond like Day-Glo lily pads. The party tent, so painstakingly mounted over the cantilevered dance floor, had been caught in the deluge of pumped water and buffeted down the slope toward the playground, slumping over the miniature castle. The one exception to the mayhem was a row of gift baskets, sprouting colored tissue and ringlets of ribbon, that stood undisturbed on a table at the opposite end of the barn.

  Laurel Connaughton’s house had burned down to a heap of smoldering antique rafters and planks. Of the two chimneys, one still stood, pointlessly resolute. The other had shed bricks and leaned askew, like a tall man in a posture of defeat.