by Lauren Groff
What? Grete says, looking at him. Dad, what?
The world merges, colors trembling. He feels Grete’s touch on his cheek. Abe, he says.
Oh, says Grete, and there is a shift in her, too. She pulls her chair as close as she can. Together, they close their eyes against the others, the sad food, the sapping cafeteria light.
If Abe were here, Bit might throttle him dead again: what appears to be sorrow is rage. Abe was bedrock; Abe was his world’s gravity; since Bit could remember, his father was his one sure thing.
Hannah’s room fills with dried wildflowers. The local florist is resourceful, faced with the exorbitance of imported goods. But the dusting of pollen makes Grete’s face puff up, and even Hannah stifles sneezes in her bed.
Jincy and the boys arrive, and Grete runs downstairs to meet them. Alone for a minute, Bit goes to his mother’s side. He crouches before her, inches from her face, his eyes watering from her rancid breath. I know you’re awake, he says. Open your eyes.
Slowly, one eye opens in its nest of wrinkles. Hannah blinks. Almost so softly that he can’t hear her, she says, I would prefer not to.
He gasps. He laughs. But the fury quickly settles upon him again. You’re no fucking Bartleby, he says. Her open eye narrows at him.
Jincy and the twins run in, and Bit is engulfed in boy-smells, the funk of filthy hands and breath. Look at this! Oscar says, opening his hand to show the delicate cog of an antique watch. I found it in the playground at school and saved it for you. Isaac had brought nothing, but not to be outdone, says, Look at this! and does a handstand in the middle of Hannah’s hospital floor. Look at this!, the twins say. See me! Jincy has never had a husband or long-term boyfriend: Bit is all there is. When the twins stay over, they start the night cuddling with Grete in her bed, but the morning finds them curled together on Bit’s bedroom floor, faithful as dogs.
Bit pulls the boys to him, where they rest, bony creatures. He looks at Jincy in the door. Unlike the rest of the world, whose good looks slowly and gradually declined into gray hair and wrinkles, her attractiveness has remained stable. What was mousy for a teenager has held steady and turned her striking for a fifty-three-year-old. The spirals of her hair are threaded with grays, and her face is rosy and unlined. She is pleased and bashful under Bit’s admiration. She leans over Hannah and kisses her, brushes her hair from the temple, whispers something. Though Bit strains to hear, he can’t make out a word of what she says.
Grief as a low-grade fever. His sadness is a hive at the back of his head: he moves slowly to keep from being stung. Things bunch together, smooth endlessly out. Astrid arrives; Grete leaps from the chair outside Hannah’s door, shouting Mormor Astrid, I so hoped you’d come! Doctors huddle around Astrid; Astrid marches into Hannah’s room and orders her to sit. A well of surprise in Bit as Hannah painfully pushes herself up. The old friends gaze at one another from across the room, and the way they had been once upon a time washes over him: tall and young in Ersatz Quad, honey and white, Bit tiny, gazing up at their indecipherable stretch.
The car ride back to Arcadia takes a century. The radio reports a thousand dead in Java, sudden sickness, quarantine. Bit turns it off, but Astrid turns it on again, snapping, Ignorance is no help to anyone. He blocks out what he can, the way the disease sets in suddenly, twelve hours and people are dead, a doctor calling it SARS-like, avian flu–like, nobody knows the vectors yet. At last Astrid consents to classical music. Bit is sure that he’ll be bearded and bleary as a hermit when he looks in the rearview mirror, but his eyes shine, his cheeks are flushed. He can still feel the doctor’s small bones under his hug; her violet scent hangs in the air. Call me as often as you like, she’d murmured. Here’s my number. A last flash of white teeth, and he wanted to carry her away with him.
In the calm of the Sugarbush, the sun is tinted green and the birds bugle in the treetops. Bit has to tell himself to not be angry at them. They couldn’t possibly know.
Home is the same. In the pantry, the same rows of glass jars are full of the same beans and grains. The workshed, all tools ranged at knee level for Abe. The path into the Sugarbush, half-choked with weeds. The firewood snaked optimistically around the house, a fortress, a windbreak, an embrace. The heap of the hills purple in the dawn. The way the darkness moves like a creature in the night woods. The woods themselves, tens of thousands of acres that Leif had reclaimed from abandoned farms long before land was valuable again. Abe’s same favorite plate left on the top of the stack. The same double depressions that his parents’ bodies have carved over the years in their mattress.
Hannah’s silence, lifelong, the same.
It would be so easy for him to fall asleep here, to succumb to bed, but Grete is beside him, her eyes narrowed with disgust. Snap out of it, Dad, she says. He breathes and lets home wash and wash over him and busies his hands with tasks—scrubbing the reclaimed floorboards until they shine, baking cakes, making beds—taking solace in the stupid brute motion of his body, letting it lead him through the hours.
Moments, somehow, hatch a week. Now the memorial service. So many people have come. He is dizzied, can hardly see.
The sun is too high, the wind too strong, the Pond smashing against the bank. People feel the need to touch him. Bit is a short man, but they remember him tiny: they pat the crown of his head, and he resists the urge to crush their hands. Hannah’s arm in his twitches. Someone he should recognize in a navy robe is saying an incantation. People say things about Abe: he was the secret strength of Arcadia, he performed a miracle by renovating Arcadia House in three short months, he kept the community going for another decade. And the organizing he did in his old age, the marches on Washington, the impassioned fundraising letters alighting in their mailboxes like stern gray birds of peace. Abe was true to what he believed. Abe, the unswerving one.
Some of the original Circenses Singers, old and flabby, sway under their newest puppets. Their voices are cracked with age, more powerful for loss of pitch. Bit is moved from numbness to hurt. This, he thinks, is what transported means.
He looks up the hill to Arcadia House. Erewhon Illuminations abandoned it after Leif disappeared, and Astrid has left it vacant for two years. Ivy is choking the windows on the west side. There are saplings in the gutters. Pigeons sit heaped on the roofline, buttoning house to sky.
Bit and Grete and Hannah are given an urn. They uncap it. A black smoke of Abe pours into the wind over the Pond. A gray film settles like grease on the water, the harder pieces of Abe falling down to be nibbled by minnows. To wash, molecule by molecule, into the water itself, to be drunk by deer and bears and the muskrats just now watching this strange congregation of humans from the dark safety of their burrows.
Afterward, the mourners mingle in the downstairs of Arcadia House and someone puts Handy, raspy and young, on the sound system. Hannah is an empty flour sack, heaped on a chair in the corner. Through the music, Bit hears angry whispers about the changes Leif made to the old Homeplace, the downstairs wing of bedrooms now opened into a great hall where cubicles had formed a labyrinth. If the Old Arcadians saw the glossy gutted upstairs, Bit thinks, anarchy would spark again in their tired hearts. Poor Leif; he was one who never minded change. For a moment, Bit’s eyes sting for the eccentric who lost himself in a super-high-altitude balloon three years ago. He stares through a window at the graying sky and imagines Leif still there, frozen and peaceful in the balloon’s cabin, his eyelashes iced, his smile on his blue lips, his body scuttling in the wind at the edge of space.
They come to him, the people he loved when he was a child. But they have gone grotesque. Erik is fatty as a doughnut, spinach stuck in his teeth, an engineer, the sole surviving child of Astrid and Handy because he made boredom his lifeboat. Midge is a bald crone, so tiny that Bit must bend to her: this is the last time she will come here from Florida, she whispers through the green mask she wears against disease. She is too old to suffer the train ride. Tarzan is now entirely crafted of leather, the same suede bro
wn from pate to hands. Simon has a toupee that had lost a corner of adhesiveness in the elements; when he kneels before Hannah, kissing her hands, his hair is like the black lid of a pot canted to check the boil within. Scott and Lisa shine with money. Regina and Ollie are baked by Bermuda sun into the perfect gold of their own cupcakes. Dorotka, blind now, has a rattail braided at the nape of her mullet that her lover tugs affectionately like the leash of a small dog.
The small, thin doctor from the hospital has come, and when she nears, Bit is glad. She is a new person: there is no weight of memory to her. There are cracks in the brown skin around her eyes. She kisses him on the cheek and disappears.
We feel so terrible for you, Little Bit, people whisper.
We loved your father so much, they whisper.
If there is anything we can do, they whisper.
They whisper, whisper, whisper. All whisper, save for D’Angelo, who shouts in his new voice of a Pentecostal reverend, God bless that old skinny bastard, Abe!, as tears course down his face, unlined and baby-soft, miraculously unchanged.
Most leave soon. They have work, family, trains to catch. Dylan and Cole and Jincy and their broods are the last to go: they have rented a bus together to save on gas. Only when Bit walks into the humid Green house of the courtyard, which Leif had enclosed entirely in glass a few years back, does he see the Amish. The courtyard is a strange place now, the air heavy and damp. A stream trickles, hidden by the ferns and mosses and overhanging mist. The dark bodies of the Amish have gone vague in the fog; from where Bit stands, they could be Puritans just stepping off the boat into the New World, fearful and awed to have earth beneath their feet again.
He doesn’t want these people here. They are too close to a kind of God he has never been able to believe in, a flesh-eating, stern-browed, whipping-post kind.
One of the bodies separates from the group, comes closer, then clear. When she approaches, her little face is a white saucer, features like berries bunched neatly in the center: blueberry eyes, cherry nose, strawberry mouth. She reaches for Bit’s arm, and he understands, as the woman’s face breaks apart, that she was the one to find his parents in their awful half-success.
She says nothing, just squeezes his bicep again and again. He bears it. He looks up through the vast branches of the oak tree, his old friend. Through the soiled glass above, a black cloud has gathered. The first drops bullet overhead. He can feel, just now, what it’s like for the poor ancient oak, sleeping under glass. No more burn of sun on its leaves. No scour of winter, no smash of storm, no relief when its own dead weight falls away.
Bit goes for a walk to be alone. The rain has stopped, but wet grasses cling to his ankles, leaves shiver rain onto his head. The Sheep’s Meadow is gone, replaced by a low sweep of birch trees pale as girls in the dusk. There’s a feeling of captured movement, a slight tilting down the hill as if in a breath they will regain their human shapes and stumble back into a run. Where the ground lips into the forest, there’s a small opening, Handy’s spot, and Bit can see Handy as he’d been a lifetime ago, cross-legged, hair bound by a strip of Naugahyde, face beatific and froggish.
Bit sits where Handy had sat so often. Instead of grace, however, he feels the damp ground seep into his pants. Well, he says aloud. Let it.
The sky fades from gray to inky blue. The moon, bright arbiter, waits for him.
In one hand, Bit holds his life: his students, faces cracked with interest; the brownstone; the dates with lovely women who keep his attention for a night, a week, a month, until they drift away; the parties, the gallery openings, the brunches with Grete in the park. The civilization of the city. His calm, unruffled life, his books, his friends. In this hand, his sick mother would move to a hospital in the city, where Bit and Grete could visit her every day, bringing flowers, ice chips, news. If there is quarantine, if the disease arrives, he has water tanks, he has food, he has Abe’s gun in the safe in the basement. They could wait it out.
In the other hand, he holds Hannah’s death in Arcadia, the place where his parents were so happy. Where he was so happy as a child. (Or was he? Best to distrust this retrospective radiance: gold dust settles over memory and makes it shine.) In this hand, Bit stays in Arcadia with his mother, cuts the gnarled toenails, washes her skin, remembers her medicines, feels daily the bone-aching worry of it all. He remembers the births he assisted when he was young, brushing the sweaty hair from the women’s foreheads and rubbing their swollen flesh. Here, he would be a midwife to his mother’s decay, Grete beside him, watching it all.
The latter is the heavy hand, the difficult one. It involves action. He has gotten used to sitting quietly aside, to watching. He palpates his anger like the edges of a wound. Does Hannah deserve such care after what she tried to do? What would her decline do to Grete, his daughter of the city, who has barely seen death, only a speckle of flies on the sill, a rat in a trap?
He wishes for a sign, but the night pulls its drawstring tighter and the wind hushes the trees to sleep. Two choices. To float as he has done since he was young. Or to dive in, to swim.
It is night. Funeral pies are on the counter. The four of them sit around the table in the Green house. Bit tries to take his mother’s bad hand, which shocks him with its lightness and coolness, but she snatches it from him with her good one. In the low glow of the kitchen chandelier, his mother’s face looks carved from soap.
Astrid waits beyond the point of comfort to speak. Ever majestic, she is now blinding in her authority. The midwives whom Bit knows in the city speak of her with reverence; it wouldn’t surprise him if somewhere in the world there were shrines with her picture, the way Arcadia had been stippled with colorful altars to Gandhi, Marx, the Dalai Lama. Astrid had her bad teeth pulled in her fifties, and the dentures finish her face the way woodwork finishes a room. She wears long, loose clothes in earth tones that she manages to make elegant. Helle would have been like her mother, if his wife had chosen to share her old age with Bit. But when Grete sits beside her mormor, leaning against her warmth, he sees how his daughter is a second Astrid, leavened with Hannah’s honey. It brushes him, the good feeling that he is sitting in a fold of time.
I wish you could stay, Astrid, he says, surprising himself.
The old Astrid looks at him, her face soft. She shrugs, says, Handy.
Handy is demented. He thinks at night that he’s in Korea, shouts things like Off to the Repo Depot for you, soldier! and Ash and trash! Everything after his early twenties has been expunged: Arcadia a golden hope perpetually growing in him, his experiments with the doors of perception only glimpses down a long corridor. After his fourth wife left him, only Astrid visits every day. Fat Erik comes three times a year. Old-people garage, Astrid calls the nursing home. But there is a pool, gourmet buffet spreads; it is its own perfect place, in its way.
Into the silence, Hannah speaks. Her hair is still soft around her face, though white. The black dress bags on her, the pearls as sallow as her skin. The only thing I wanted, she says, was to not be a burden. Quick and painless, how I wanted to go.
But the Universe called you back, Astrid says.
For no reason, Hannah says.
You find the reason, Astrid snaps. Finish with the self-pity, and move on.
Bit is so surprised he laughs. Grete begins to cry: So mean, Mormor, she whispers. Astrid ignores them. First, I have hired a nurse, she announces. She is beginning tomorrow. Luisa, her name, a fine lady. When more help is needed, we will hire more help. Second, she says, Ridley, you must talk today to your department and take the rest of the semester off. Third, I have talked to Grete’s school in the city and the school up here. All is settled. She may start on Monday.
Wait. No, says Grete. I have a life. I can’t be here. I have college prep tomorrow. Right, Dad? We have to go home.
Oh, yes, says Astrid. Your father has decided. I’m surprised he hasn’t told you.
I wanted to, he says, ducking from his daughter’s glare. But you were out for a run.
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br /> No, Grete shouts. I will not.
The strange new anger rouses itself in Bit, and he hears himself saying in a tight voice, Grete, outside, now. His daughter shuts her mouth. They walk through the ferns into the Sugarbush, Grete’s face blanketed with darkness. Dad, she says, turning on him at last. Isn’t this already traumatic enough for me?
Since when, Bit says, has this been about you?
I don’t have to be here. You could be here and I could go home and stay with Matilda. Or Charlotte. Or Harper, you love Harper, she’s a total nerd.
I’m going to need your help, he says.
She looks trapped. But what about my stuff? she says.
I’m heading home tonight, he says. Make a list. I’ll be back when you wake up.
What about school? I’m not going to any shitkicker school. They can’t be as advanced as we are. I’m doing precalc. I’ll be bored.
It’s only the rest of the semester, baby. Probably.
I can’t. I can’t, Dad, Grete says, her voice sharp. I can’t be in the house. She smells like she’s rotting or something. I can’t be where Grumpy fucking killed himself, Dad, I can’t do it. You can’t make me. I’ll run away.
She sees the way he winces. Like Mom, she says, watching him. I’ll run away.
Bit turns. He can hardly see the ground. How did I raise such a selfish child, he says, so quietly he’s not sure she heard him. But when he walks into his parents’ house, he can hear her sobbing, then the heavy front door of Titus and Sally’s treehouse slamming over and over again.
When the others have gone to sleep, Bit takes Hannah’s ancient car. For the first hour of the drive, he loves the violence of the wind through the open window, how it chases off his cloud of dread, but when it gets too cold, he rolls up the window and turns on the radio. Classic rock, apparently, is the music he loved in his twenties. He finds himself singing along in a voice raspy with disuse. The announcer comes on, then three chords that make Bit laugh with surprise: a funk-flavored song, Cole’s one big hit. He’d struggled for so long, had so many bands, and this success out of nowhere had shattered him. He stopped playing music and bought a nightclub. Now he writes monographs on Palestrina, of all things.
