Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  He could pretend that he needed the names and the social security numbers for the power of attorney. He could lie so easily. “And Grandmother’s name was Mary Fanny, right?”

  “Mary Fanny Lathrop. She was so small and petite. I took after her. The Lathrops were an old, old family. The Reverend Joshua Lathrop came to the Plymouth Colony in 1659. The Adgates, on the other hand, never amounted to much, and your father was such a failure I don’t know why I ever married him. He was handsome enough and good at sports, but he just never had any gumption. He got fired from his job with the State of Minnesota. He said his boss didn’t like him. Huh!” As Maria settled her leg back down, she gave a dry groan and tried to cough up some mucus. She hadn’t the strength to get it up, and her streamlined bird’s face poked and pecked, as if she tried to drink the air. Maria helped her sit up, and the recalcitrant mucus was an imagined presence, loopy and grainy in the room.

  His father had never said anything critical of her, at least never to him, as if it would not be good for a child to hear anything bad about its mother. That was no doubt what his father thought, and acted upon. He’d died at seventy-one, of an initial and massive heart attack after swimming thirty laps in a YMCA pool, leaving a wife and two other sons, who grieved for him, as did his colleagues and the citizens of the town. Richard had flown out to Minnesota for the services, and the fondness for his father was manifest everywhere. Not grave respect, but fondness.

  That evening Joyce had a tray sent up for him and for Maria—another kindness. Before they had their suppers, Maria fed his mother a few spoonfuls of the liquid food supplement, material she took with no interest and then lapsed back into something like sleep. Maria, whom he’d thought so young, was a grandmother. Her husband had a mariachi band, full-time. Her last name was Rodriguez, he found out by asking—no one in Arizona seemed to use last names. It was “Joyce of the Gardens, “ “Les of the Tradition, “ “Jerri of Home Care.” Except for the doctors, who had only last names. On the medication book on the night table Joyce had written, If Charlotte should expire, don’t call the paramedics, call me and then call Les at the Tradition.

  Expire: she said she wanted to die. It was shameful to think of the expense of her living on, but he did. This was inside, unheard, a lie only in its lack of expression. She, on the other hand, had always said everything that came into her mind, it seemed to him, though everything was twisted by a prior design. In that voice that went back to his infancy, so familiar its character could not be defined except that it contained the warmth of its self-confidence, she had always spoken. What power that voice must have had when she was young, when youth’s svelte tensions caused everything to be forgiven. Maybe that was why his father had married her, one of the reasons. He must have had at least some intimation that she, like his first wife, Jean, was not quite a person of “fine faith, quiet gentility, and unfailing goodness.” Maybe Addie Rosetta was like that, really. Maybe that was possible. But it seemed to him that what we do in youth, given external beauty, is to mistakenly create the rest. We want a companion, but we need an exotic, our opposite, a mystery, perhaps because it was our common peril and our fate to be born of woman, suckled and wiped and reassured by a woman.

  Her bird’s head turned to the right, to the left, only the nose having kept its weight of flesh.

  “Ah, she’s in pain,” Maria said, “but I’m not supposed to give her another one for an hour.”

  The beaked face turned left and right, left and right. “If I had one in my hand I’d give it to her now,” he said, and Maria immediately got one out of the drawer.

  “You said it, not me,” she said, putting the pill into his hand. He gave it to his mother, pushing it into her lips, with sip of Pepsi-Cola from a paper cup, and they watched her in complicity until she settled down in sleep.

  Soon after that he said, “I guess I’d better go. I’ll be back in the morning.” Maria looked at him and nodded, still in complicity, forgiving his sensitivity, or discomfort, or cowardice—some weakness or other to be forgiven of men.

  At his motel he poured himself an inch of bourbon in bathroom glass, and smoked a cigarette. He supposed this was a lie, too, a lie to his future. He began to formulate the details of the conference on sales, or on something, which he would use as an excuse to go back to New Hampshire. Surrounded by uncomforting lies, he could hear his own voice plausibly explaining to everyone his reasons for leaving. Business, you know. Business, my dears.

  In the morning Joyce said, “You know what Maria said to me? She said, ’They like each other! He ought to take her home with him.’ “

  In a special ambulance airplane? They smiled, knowing all the ramifications, a sort of cabal of relative youth.

  He told Joyce he’d have to leave tomorrow, wondering if she understood all about that, too. After a silence she said that she would have all of his mother’s possessions sent to him…afterwards.…There were also several cartons in the basement, in storage.

  “I’m grateful, for everything,” he said.

  “Oh, I know how it is,” she said. “My mother was in a nursing home. How she hated it! She couldn’t afford…we couldn’t afford…we both worked and couldn’t care for her.”

  It was as if Joyce, with her natural sympathy, considered him one of her kind, one of those people who cared without thought, without selfish reservations. He believed there were such natural people in the world—a society from which he was by nature excluded. Not that he didn’t do, in the end, whatever had to be done. But it was not natural to him. He was a creature of fears—of flying on commercial airplanes, of disagreements, of heights, of being trapped in small places, of the wounds of others. He was not enough separate from his mother’s pain and death, or from any wrong thing she might do. He was afraid of others making fools of themselves, or disgracing themselves. With him it was all fearful duty, but now he had done what, technically, had to be done here, and he would leave this place tomorrow.

  He sat at his mother’s bedside throughout the day. She had a sister and brother-in-law who had retired to Sun City, but when he suggested that he ought to call them, or see them, her rage was as simple as it had been at the idea of the “conservator,” or at her old acquaintance from Macalester. This was her younger sister who, she believed, had looked up to her as a child, and had betrayed her, as Nora had, by not properly adoring her. In her weakness her sudden anger, like the sore on her leg, seemed to have a life more vibrant than her own.

  Because he was her only child he had an authority over her he considered fraudulent. “My son,” she called him to everyone, and assigned to him superior qualities because of this. He had always been the only one who could tell her to cut it out, that she was wrong, that they were not going to do whatever outrageous thing she wanted everyone to do. He’d told Nora so many times that if you couldn’t say no to her you couldn’t stay in the same room with her. But Nora could never assume that right.

  He made out checks on her checkbook to her doctors, to the morally doubtful CAT scan outfit, to the Garden Residential Hotel, to her nurse’s aides, to a pharmacy for drugs and the useless splint—thousands of dollars of the few thousand left from N. P. Carter’s fortune.

  His mother watched him make out checks for the assorted bills. “If he knew what I’ve done with his money I’d be in real trouble,” she said. She couldn’t smile but she could give a quick laugh, more a cough. Maria had gone down to the dining room for her lunch, so they were alone.

  “But you married a saint,” she said, a hint, a twist in tone implying what she thought of saints. Pretty boring. The “but” implied an alternative—who else but Charlotte Clara Clifford? He heard those ancient voices, forever young: “Where there is life there is hope, and you have the life all right.—Kenny Davis.” “Here’s to ’Cliffie,’ may she always be as happy as she has always appeared to be.—Pearl Murray.” Those voices from the thirties, in their twenties. He saw again the ancient photographs of her youth, she smiling a smile collusive w
ith life, willing all possibilities.

  “At first Nora liked you a lot,” he said. “She thought you were a fascinating woman.” Why bring all that up? Wouldn’t he ever learn?

  “Puh!” she said. If she’d been able to she would have raised her arms and stroked her jewelry, implying superiority over and boredom with that other woman’s opinions. He seemed to hear all the voices that had ever asked, minds boggled, How can you do that? How can you say that?

  He told her that because of a business meeting, an important conference, and so on, he would have to leave tomorrow.

  “I want to die,” she said, her black eyes on him. “I’ve lived long enough. It would be best if I died now.”

  In spite of their long history it seemed strange not to believe such a statement.

  For the rest of the day and evening she was partly asleep, then in pain, then asleep again.

  When he came the next morning she was, with Anna’s help, trying to cope with mucus, and had no time for anything else. There was just not enough force in her percussions of breath. When he said that it was time for him to drive to Phoenix, to the car rental place where they would shuttle him to the airport, he kissed a place beside her fleshy beak and tried to say something to make his desertion more or less official and all right. “Things happen,” he said. “Go on going on, you know. To take care of things.…”

  He thought she signified goodbye. After all, no one could forbid his going. The two figures of the women were occupied as he left, and then, to them, he was of course gone.

  Joyce was not at her desk. In the arranged chairs the old people silently watched large movements upon the grainy surface of the oversized television screen.

  At the airport in Phoenix he waited an hour and a half for his plane, and on the flight he was more edgy than usual, his anxiety a mix of guilt and superstition somehow based upon ironic justice. The wing of the 727 did its hydraulic metamorphosis for takeoff, and then solidified again for flight. Why did the engine noises change? Why should there be such turbulent shaking of the long tube in a clear desert sky? In place of anxiety he chose real danger—the dry cigarettes left in the squashed pack.

  The 727 landed at dusk at Logan Airport, in Boston, and he’d survived.

  The next day he called his mother across the time zones. Maria answered, and must have held the phone for her. “Keep those letters coming!” his mother said in a hearty voice. “Did you know my son visited me?”

  Maria took the phone and said with some embarrassment, “She’s a little confused this morning. Her lungs seem to be clearing up, though, and she took some real food.”

  “That’s a good sign,” he said. She would, with the force of life she’d been blessed or cursed with, live forever, beyond sanctions or boundaries, as always. Below their voices, in a wind of faint human syllables, was the xylophonic music of distance.

  Two days later Maria called him to say that his mother had “passed away.” It had happened on her shift, at 10:20 A.M., mountain time. Maria was so genuinely sorry she seemed, like Joyce, to want to elevate him into the society of the caring.

  His relief did not surprise him, only the purity of it. “Thank you, Maria. Thank you for calling,” he said in imitation of her sadness, in honor of her feelings.

  In the next few days, Les of the Tradition did his work, and the lawyer began his. Joyce called and told him how much the sending on of her possessions would cost, payable to UPS. In the dark room the cordless telephone occasionally queeped. One night he dreamed he answered it. “Dick,” his mother said, not strangely, because he knew that tone of worry or of her wanting something. “Dick, I don’t know where I am!”

  If he made any answer to her, to the images of his mother called up by her unchanging voice—youth to middle age, to the final beaked face in the dark room—it was beyond the space the dream allotted.

  It was that predawn time when the only light was the faint ghastly blue from the digital clock. His arm was over Nora, her woman’s solidity and softness as familiar and as strange as the fact that they had slept in the same bed for over a quarter of a century—he, a man and thus simple to himself, and this other creature in whose life he figured so astoundingly.

  Something had been lost long ago, something singular and pure. He lay awake for a long time, until the outer light grew behind the curtains and he knew Nora was awake. She was the only one there, in their bed, in the house where his mother would never again impose herself, to tell about the dream.

  “I knew she was dead, but it didn’t seem all that strange—you know how dreams are. I just had time to wonder where she was, myself, as if all that energy and ego had to exist somewhere.” He meant to make the dream sound curious, and interesting.

  “You should have stayed with her,” Nora said. “A few more days wouldn’t have hurt you that much.”

  How the truth could betray a mood.

  Nora knew that she had startled and hurt him. The circuits between them were manifold, and as alive as nerves. So she turned toward him and offered the comfort of her arms.

  There might or might not have been a time when he was singular, and pure, and brave. Perhaps that was the one nostalgia he and his father, unlike their rapscallion namesake, had never acted upon. They knew their very dreams were defined, in ways beyond understanding, by the voices of women.

  The Fisherman Who Got Away

  RICHARD ADGATE was at Romeo LaVigne’s fishing camp on Baie Felicité, Lake Chibougamau, Quebec, with two friends. They were three Americans of middle age, husbands away from their wives and families.

  His wife had been unhappy about his coming on this trip, but he’d been working hard, and how often had he ever done anything like go off fishing for a week? He’d asked her this with a defensive stridency she’d of course detected. She, the woman he’d lived with for more than a quarter of a century. He could feel what she felt. She couldn’t understand why on earth he’d ever want to escape her, who considered herself fair-minded and good to him. That he wanted to go away with two friends—pretty good friends—why? The children were grown and gone now, and she could easily have come, but she hadn’t been asked. How would he like not being asked?

  And so it was like that, not something he thought about every minute, but there was an edge, an incompleteness, that made him just slightly oversurprised when on the broad lake a series of ponderous golden boulders as big as houses suddenly appeared beneath his keel when he thought he was in deep water. He didn’t want to look down, to have the other world rise up like that to within an arm’s reach.

  He’d gone out by himself this afternoon in one of Romeo LaVigne’s rental boats, a seventeen-foot aluminum squareended canoe with a rock in the bow for ballast, and a four-horse Evinrude motor. Pete Wallner’s boat was a little crowded with three in it, and Joe Porter was getting a divorce and needed conversation, reassurance, or whatever; that was no good with three, either. It seemed unfishermanlike, Joe’s constant preoccupation with his problem. Or perhaps it was that a real getting away, a forever getting away, was antithetical to the furlough of a fishing trip. “She” was the word constantly on Joe’s lips. “She.” Her name was Lois, but it was always “she,” and in spite of the immediate unpleasantness, Joe was about to be free of her after all the years. There was a perverse sort of envy in his listeners, too, and Richard could only wonder what it would be like if there were no “she” to make him return, no tether of loyalty and pity and partnership.

  In any case, here he was, Richard Adgate, a man no better and no worse in his frailties than other men, he thought, forty-nine years old and quite alone in the suffering of his wife’s disapprobation. Her name, empowered by the years, was Nora.

  He’d been trolling around a small island a mile or two from Romeo LaVigne’s rather shabby log cabins, the only mancaused things in sight except for the Indian camp a couple of hundred yards away from the cabins—log frames with bright red and blue plastic tarps over them. Pete, who had a Lowrance sonar, had told him th
at the depth dropped to forty feet about fifty yards out from the island, and then to ninety feet ten to twenty yards farther out, so he trolled a medium silver Mooselook Wobbler on lead-core line, with about six colors out, hoping to find that small plateau and not get hung up too often.

  The July day was blue, clouds forming always to the southwest, growing, looking dark but not amounting to a rainstorm. The little island was covered by the narrow spruce, virgin spruce less than a foot in diameter, that was the dominant tree everywhere, and so thick you couldn’t push your way through them. There were a few birch and a few aspen. Mountain ash was a bush this far north. So far he’d seen a scruffy-looking red fox, a beaver, a sharp-tailed grouse with five or six chicks (the first he’d ever seen), a vole, ravens, unidentified ducks, a killdeer. This was the boreal forest, chilled and stunted most of the year by the polar winds. But in July the air was mild. The lake was warm on the surface, but a foot down it was forty degrees, and the lake trout (grise to the French) were not very deep.

  After a while, no fish taking the silver wobbler, he reeled in, shut off the idling motor, and let the mild wind and little waves tilt him and move him slowly to the northeast, toward a distant, spruce-black shore.

  He got his map from his pack and opened it along its folds to where he was, feeling the familiar small shock caused by a map’s ideal, formulated authority, its precision reflecting the wide, moving actuality of the lake and the distant, oddly shaped hills. Magnetic north was nearly twenty degrees west of true north here, a knife-sharpening angle. He balanced on his spine in the delicately balanced canoe, above the depths of another inhabited world.

  Some of the hills were steep as stairs, cut flat on top; others were rounded like normal hills. None were more than a few hundred feet high, according to his map, yet they had an uninhabited authority and bulk. In a certain light, like the mild sunlight of this afternoon, a superficial glance made this lake any of the lakes at home, before he noticed that there were no houses, no roads. From certain places outside the bay a buffcolored mine building could be seen, miles to the south, a narrow tower at least a hundred feet high, though it was difficult to tell at such a distance. On the way in they’d driven through the modern mining and lumbering town of Chibougamau, an island itself of neat houses and stores, familiar gas stations, municipal buildings and even parks, an outpost set in the forest that ran north to tundra and Hudson Bay. Of course, the winter here would be like iron, and seem to last forever; no wonder the little town seemed so defensively maintained and civilized. Even Romeo La Vigne, old voyageur that he was, and a friend of the Cree, moved back into town when winter came.