The Widower's Tale

by Julia Glass

Laurel held the packet of Azor Fisk’s letters, letters probably written in the house she’d loved so much. Except that women are more often keepers of the flame, they might have turned up in Laurel’s house as readily as mine. She simply held them.

  “Don’t you want to have a closer look?”

  “Not here.” She gestured at the plate of butter curls. She clutched the letters to her bright blouse.

  “I named a daughter after this woman,” I said. “In tribute to her apparent virtue.” How I wished Poppy had been there to appreciate the irony.

  “Are the letters …”

  “Racy?” I said. “By the standards of the time, perhaps. But that’s not something I’d be qualified to judge. They’re not exactly John and Abigail, not a pair of poets. But all the same. Remarkable how well ordinary citizens once expressed themselves.”

  “My God, Percy.” Laurel was breathing quickly. “Put them back in that box. Here come our salads.” Our fingers touched as I took the packet of letters to put them away. I felt, briefly, the electricity between the two neighboring households carried forward in time to ours. I thought of how tactlessly I’d shoved aside Laurel’s amorous advances that long-ago night in my bedroom. How little respect I’d had for her loneliness, the way she’d been willing to risk her dignity. I had to wonder if I would soon learn such desperation myself.

  Laurel leaned forward over her salad and whispered, “Did you tell anyone else about these letters? Former colleagues at Widener?”

  “No. Laurel, it’s been my intention to give them to you since the police gave them to me nearly a month ago. You wouldn’t talk to me.”

  “So they’re a bribe.”

  I thought carefully about my answer. “In a nutshell, yes. Though nuts come in many flavors. Walnuts do not taste a thing like almonds.”

  I learned that Laurel would be moving into Dorian Van Otterloo’s charming cottage on Quarry Road. I told her that I’d bought a house in Vigil Harbor. She was surprised that I would leave Matlock, but I could also tell that the news made her secretly glad. Once we’d consumed our Indian pudding and I had paid the check, I suspected we would never see each other again. And she would not be sorry.

  The Matlock police believed that Laurel had given me her security code and that it had been easily accessible to anyone poking around my study. They knew that even aside from his hobo encampment in my cellar, Arturo had stayed in my house, as a welcome guest, several times. Two of these three things were true. The evening she’d plied me with cucumber sandwiches, Laurel had given me a slip of paper with her code and told me to keep it in a secure place, just in case she ever needed to send me into the house while she was away. Forgotten in a pocket of whatever trousers I’d worn that day, her code had gone through the wash, emerging as a nugget of pulp.

  It was Teacher Ira who, in a frantic call the day after the fire, told me that he feared Celestino could be blamed, along with Robert. (We did not need to wait for the next week’s Grange to see Ira’s and Robert’s pictures on the front of a newspaper; the Globe was happy to oblige—along with the painful caption One DOG leashed; catcher is beloved preschool teacher in Matlock.)

  Ira, who got my cell phone number from Sarah, reached me at Trudy’s house, where I drove after my failure to stop the police from apprehending Robert. I realized how brave he was to call me when, nearly hysterical, he began by saying that he’d never meant to harm Robert. I told him that it wasn’t his fault; I should have had doubts of my own about the other boy.

  Then he told me that he was terrified for Celestino. “I know he had nothing to do with this. He was used, like the rest of us. I’m so afraid he could get deported.” Desperately, Ira had been casting about for any connection to Tommy Loud. I told him there was little I thought I could do, but I would try.

  Laurel was the one who might have connected those dots; fortunately, she didn’t. But Loud was shrewd; even as a child, he’d put me in mind of a weasel. I placed a call to his office and spoke to his mother. I would be needing someone to take down the carcass of the incinerated beech tree. How about the nice young fellow who’d worked at Laurel Connaughton’s place?

  Happy gushed freely about the “terrible, terrible, terrible news.” But as for that particular fellow? “He’s not with us anymore. We can get you an A-one crew, though, can have ’em there tomorrow.”

  Oh dear, I told her; I couldn’t locate my calendar. My life was in such chaos! Falsely, I promised I’d call back. Let Fougère deal the coup de grâce.

  The blacksmith’s house had been empty for months when I saw it; Daphne assured me that the rooms, once furnished, would look much larger. The only memento of former owners was a mason jar, on the tank of the baby-blue toilet, filled with sea crockery. On my third fretful night after moving in (pacing, rearranging, wondering what in the world I had done), I poured these ceramic tidbits onto my coffee table and examined them. Stripped of their patina, some bore the ghost of antique china patterns, hairline stripes or petals or scrolling, but most were plain, blunt, and yellowed. Like old teeth, I thought, shaking a few in the palm of my hand. I could not bring myself to throw this odd collection away, so I poured them into the bottom of a large glass bowl and decided that I would collect more.

  About a third of the furniture I owned had been destroyed by water the night of the fire; what remained just fit my reduced accommodations. As I’ve said, I don’t believe in destiny, but when the last of my chairs was assigned its new room, it felt like a puzzle piece clicking in place. My most valuable possessions, those kept in my former living room and bedroom, had survived. When I unwrapped the silver bowl that had lived on my mantel, I saw that it must have been polished by a Girl on the Go. This made me smile. Perhaps some of Matlock’s teens were raised right after all. I placed it on the kitchen counter, perversely pleased by the look of sterling on faded pink formica. I hung Helena’s sketch of Poppy above my couch. An alcove under the stairs would serve as my study; the desk I’d bought long ago at a Cambridge thrift shop wedged in precisely.

  Robert arrived near the end of July. His parents drove him up with a suitcase, two boxes of books, and a toolbox: surely less than they’d ferried to his dorm room when he started college. No one gave voice to such a comparison. We were awkward and polite, even bumbling, as I showed everyone to the room that would be Robert’s. Douglas bumped his head on the ceiling at the top of the stairs; Trudy kept up an obsequious patter of praise for the architectural details throughout the house, though they were paltry and wanted repair. Much of the charm we see in such houses is but a legacy of the builder’s necessary thrift.

  The conditions of Robert’s suspended sentence were many, and I intended to make sure that we followed them to the letter. He was not to venture beyond a fifty-mile radius of Vigil Harbor outside the company of myself or one of his parents; for at least a year, he was not to leave the state of Massachusetts, nor to set foot in Matlock, Ledgely, or Lothian. He was to have no Internet access except under my supervision. He was to report three times a week to work on the reconstruction of a public school that had burned in a town fifteen minutes away. As he no longer owned a car, I would drive him. I would drive him as well to meetings with his parole officer.

  In addition to the judge’s conditions, I determined a set of my own, largely related to housekeeping chores and shopping. Most necessary goods were available within a mile: groceries, pharmaceuticals, hardware, cold cash, as well as just about anything nautical in nature, from oars and life jackets to bracelets made of seashells. Come September, Robert would take two courses at a nearby state college. He chose courses in social work.

  I also informed him that, along with Celestino, he was to build me another magnificent tree house, this time with grown-ups in mind. “I will pay you both, but in return,” I said, “if this magnificent tree house, in this very visible location, inspires requests for further such projects—and I just bet you it will—then you will accept those commissions and share the profits with me.”

&
nbsp; “Granddad, I can’t imagine—”

  “And you will never argue with me when I am suffering a rare bout of optimism,” I said, “or when I am telling you what’s good for you. My imagination, for the time being, will be the boss of yours.”

  Gratifyingly, Robert looked as near happiness as I’d seen him in months.

  I thought of the way he’d always looked—satisfied, confident, if just a little wolfish—in the company of that girlfriend he had for a while. Assuming that she would never last, I’d paid her no special attention. Now, though my assumption had clearly proved true (could one blame such a young woman for fleeing trouble this deep?), I felt guilty in retrospect. Angry as I’d been toward Robert, I was sorry to see his life stripped of so many pleasures at once.

  Celestino had been living with me, already, for several weeks. I had given him the second-best bedroom. (Mine, the best and largest, looked out on the katsura tree.) He might have slipped through our hands if Ira hadn’t searched the Hispanic neighborhood of Lothian. It turned out that Celestino shopped at a greengrocer run by a Mexican family whose daughters were once Ira’s pupils. Oh, the invisible webs of the cosmos.

  At first, understandably, Celestino’s agreement to live with me was a matter of desperation, though he tried to hide his fear behind a façade of courtesy and diligence. Quite happily, I made use of his easy strength to put my new house in order. We spent most of our first days together engaged in physical work, which left us little breath or energy for conversation. But in the evenings, I compelled him to sit down at the kitchen table and let me cook for us. I tried not to interrogate him, yet I would need to know this young man if he was to continue sharing my roof. Whenever the phone rang, he would stare at it as if it were rigged with explosives.

  He’d been with me a week when I’d had enough of the servile cheer he wore, and not well, as camouflage. I handed him his cheese omelet, accepted his gratitude, sat down across from him, and said, “You know, I do feel virtuous for taking you in. I do. If there were a heaven, I’d be racking up the brownie points.”

  His expression tipped toward alarm. He sat still, hands in his lap.

  “But,” I said, “if there’s one thing I’ve learned this past year, it’s the truth of that old cliché, about no good deed going unpunished. You know it?” I did not care if he did, and he did not react. “So, Celestino, think me an angel, or a sucker, or an old man pining for company—none of which I am, by the way. Think what you want, but do me a favor.”

  We stared at each other until he said, “Yes. I will.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t ever agree to a favor till you know what it is.”

  This time his smile was genuine.

  “So this is what I’d like from you. Act like you belong here. Because then, eventually, you will.”

  “I understand,” he said.

  “Yes. But do you know what I mean?”

  I watched him consider me in a different light. At last he said, “I think I do.”

  “I suspect it won’t be easy for you, will it?”

  “No, but I will try it. I believe I have to.”

  “You do. Or we will both go out of our minds, I promise you that.”

  That was when, in our limited male fashion, we began to have real conversations, to shoulder open the heavy door between our lives. He began to surprise me, and I began to make him laugh.

  Anthony told me he knew nothing about immigration law; judging from what he’d read—and from the xenophobic climate of the times—he couldn’t imagine finding a way to redeem Celestino’s residency status. But when Ira had worried that Tommy Loud would think of Celestino in connection with the fire, Anthony laughed. “Now there’s a no-brainer. Name the guy as a suspect and risk turning the searchlight on your army of underpaid soldiers? I don’t think so. That raid this spring on the kosher meat plant in Iowa? All Guatemalans, by the way.”

  Not until Ira and I sat down with Celestino, in Ira and Anthony’s living room, did he tell us that he already had the name of a lawyer who might be able to help him. This was the fellow who arrived in Vigil Harbor the week Celestino moved in. He was skinny and bald, what remained of his gray hair grown painfully long and gathered in a most unsavory pigtail. He wore bulky shoes that made his feet look like paws and carried a canvas briefcase stained with coffee. “We live in a seriously paranoid, seriously fucked-up country,” he informed me almost as soon as he walked through the door. “That’s why I do what I do. My rayzon dettrah.”

  He met for an hour with Celestino, and then he called me downstairs. He described to both of us the long, delicate negotiations he’d begin on Celestino’s behalf. He guaranteed no happy outcomes. “Batten down the hatches. Keep your heads low and your powder dry,” he told us. “At least no one’s actively searching for you. You’re lucky there.” My idea of sponsorship for Celestino’s renewed education might work, but that, too, would take time. In the worst case, Celestino would have to return to Guatemala and start a longer process from that point. “We’re talking years,” warned Rayzon Dettra.

  “If I go back, it is not the very worst thing,” said Celestino. “But I would like to stay.”

  I understood that we would be seeing a good deal of this lawyer for some time to come. And even though he assured me that I need not worry about going bankrupt paying his fees—“You won’t find me knocking back Captain Morgan at that swanky yacht club across your harbor”—I wondered if there might be a tree house in his future.

  “Would you by any chance have a fine old tree in your yard?” I asked him as I saw him out the door.

  He looked concerned, not amused. “You’re crazier than me, man. I live in a walk-up in Somerville.”

  Another of my despotically arbitrary conditions was that both Robert and Celestino learn conversational French. The first morning that all three of us were to share breakfast as cohabitants, I went out for scones. I was waiting in line at my new favorite bakery, gazing at a bulletin board covered with notices about boats for sale, apartments for rent, music lessons, financial advice … when an artfully handwritten page caught my eye: Parlez-vous français? Mais pourquoi pas? I laughed. For a modest price, one Mlle. Madeleine Parquet convened twice-weekly groups at the community center.

  I found Celestino and Robert standing in the yard with their coffee, staring up at the tree. I called out from the porch, “Parlez-vous français?”

  They turned around. Robert frowned. “Granddad?”

  “Mais pourquoi pas, mes jeunes amis?”

  Celestino said, “Je parle un peu.” This would have stunned me had he not told me about the Lartigues.

  “Très bien. En fait, superbe!” I exclaimed. According to Poppy, my accent isn’t half bad.

  Last month, I bartered my weary Toyota for a used pickup truck. Robert had given me a condition of his own: they would build the tree house entirely from salvage. So now the three of us crowd together in our vehicle to comb beaches for driftwood and old rope, to search back roads for cast-off furniture and deadwood culled by storms. Robert calls construction companies and cajoles them into letting us haul off their scraps. Sometimes, driving through Ipswich or Gloucester on our scavenger hunts, we stop for fried clams or fish and chips. None of us aimed to live this life, but it offers us certain rewards.

  My new pal Daphne is a well-placed informant. We hit a bonanza when she gave me a tip that an old barn was being taken down behind a house she’d sold. Robert, Celestino, and I were there before the demolition crew.

  We returned to the house, with our third and final load, late that afternoon. We’d had nothing to eat since breakfast. While Celestino backed the truck down the alley connecting the street to our yard, Robert pulled sandwich makings out of the refrigerator. I went upstairs to use the bathroom.

  The phone rang. I sat down on the chair in my bedroom and answered. “This better be good,” I said. “I am dead with exhaustion.”

  “Percy, it’s Sarah.”

  I looked down at my arms, bl
ackened above the glove line. “Sarah. How are you feeling?”

  “Well, I’m in pain,” she said with surprising warmth. “There’s no denying that. But I’m glad this part is over.”

  A month before, she’d had her surgery: her left breast “cleanly” removed, as she put it. I had paid her a visit in the hospital, taking a box of caramels, a bottle of hand lotion, and two good novels with happy endings (all by request). She’d been drugged, but she was glad to see me. I did not ask if I could help in her recovery; I was tired of her refusals. I knew she had others to take care of her, even aside from He Whose Name I Would No Longer Mention.

  “My latest scans came back,” she told me now, “and the news is good. If I were to adopt another boy, I’d have to name him Ned. This week, those are the most beautiful letters in the alphabet. No Evidence of Disease.”

  Just as she had shared my grief and listened to my panic after the night of Robert’s arrest, I shared her happiness at this good news. I told her I was overjoyed. I was.

  After a pause, she said, “How’s your new life?”

  “Different. No doubt about that.” I told her that I was thinking of volunteering at the local library. “You could fit the place in my back pocket, but there’s one thing it has that Widener never did: children. Children who have to follow rules, that is.”

  She laughed—politely, as if she couldn’t wait to get off the phone. I made no attempt to mend the silence. Let her be the one to end our conversation. I noticed that the age spots on the backs of my hands were growing more pronounced.

  Finally she said, “What I’m calling about, really, is Ira’s wedding.”

  “Yes?” I said. “I’m going. As odd as it feels to be attending the wedding of two fellows, I do plan to be there.”

  “You don’t disapprove, do you?”

  “I’m told by Robert that I don’t, and I’ll roll with that.”

  In fact, my reservations about attending the ceremony, a smallish affair to be held at Rose Retreat in early October, had nothing to do with the sexual habits of the betrothed and everything to do with my anxiety about facing certain other guests. Sarah was one, but seeing her, possibly even on the arm of that conniving fellow, was not my greatest worry.