The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  Paul had been thrilled when Stella had been admitted to the workshop while she was a senior at Knox, where she’d done well in a very active undergraduate writing program. She’d published a dozen poems in Catch, the campus literary magazine, and won several prizes for poetry, including the Davenport Prize. She’d put together an impressive portfolio. Paul read all her poems and was her biggest fan and toughest critic. He was not so thrilled when, at the end of her second year at Iowa, after she’d completed her course work, she dropped out of the workshop to go off to New York with one of the visiting fiction writers, though she herself was a poet. But he put a good face on this turn of events—the best face possible: “Nothing bad can happen to a poet,” he said. “Everything is material.”

  I was less sanguine. I couldn’t understand how anyone could be so careless about her future well-being. “How much experience do you need to be a poet?” I asked. But I kept one of her early poems on the refrigerator, replacing it with a fresh copy when necessary:

  This morning I saw the sun rise from the Fourth Street bridge;

  I saw a freight train curving west on the Graham cutoff

  and a switch engine backing into the classification yards.

  I was at the Outpost when the custodians came for coffee.

  I took my coffee to the Gizmo patio

  And started to write a poem about the man I’d seen from the bridge,

  hopping the freight train. I didn’t know where he was heading,

  I still don’t, but I’m going to find out.

  There was a light covering of snow, enough to make it beautiful and enough so we had to worry about Stella driving her banged-up Honda SUV on I-80. I went out to the kitchen to peel potatoes. Paul sat at the piano for a while and riffed on an old song in the style of Dr. John, with lots of flourishes and curlicues:

  Good and bad times,

  Honey, well that’s okay.

  Good and bad times,

  Honey, well that’s okay.

  It’s you and me babe,

  Till the end of my days.

  “Keep on playing,” I shouted, but Paul was tired. He lay down on the couch again and looked at the cartoons in old New Yorkers that had been stacked on top of the stereo speakers, some of them dating back ten years.

  I’d managed to bang the artificial tree down from the attic. One huge box and two smaller ones. The tree stood in the front window, unadorned; we were waiting for Stella so we could decorate it together.

  I read the poem aloud to Paul. He grunted.

  “Do you think she ever found out?” I asked.

  He didn’t look up, but I knew he was listening. “Yeah,” he said. “Straight to jail.”

  “I meant the man in the poem,” I said, “not Jimmy.”

  “The man in the poem was Jimmy,” he said. “At least he’s behind bars. Again.”

  I added another small log to the fire.

  “She drives a hundred miles from Iowa City every week to see him, that’s admirable. She says he’s doing really well in prison . . . He’s going to be in a Shakespeare play.”

  “Titus Andronicus?”

  “No,” I said. “The Tempest. Caliban. I think she does better this way than when they’re together. It appeals to the nurse in her.”

  “When did she ever want to be a nurse?”

  “I mean she likes to nurture. She’s got a big heart. Too big. I’ve always thought,” I said, getting back to the poem, “that the man hopping a train was Stella herself.”

  Paul grunted. “Yeah. And I used to think that nothing bad can happen to a poet. But that was before Jimmy.”

  I went to the kitchen and put the capon in the oven.

  Lois stopped by in the early afternoon. She was having dinner with Jack Banks out at the funeral home, but she poked her head in to say hello and to drop off a bowl of her famous cranberry relish with horseradish. And a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. And a small wrapped present for Paul. Paul wasn’t supposed to drink, but we opened the bottle anyway and each had a glass in front of the fire.

  Stella didn’t arrive till late afternoon. The capon was keeping in a warm oven. The water was ready for the potatoes. I was afraid to ask how Jimmy was doing in prison, but Stella told us anyway as we plowed through the capon and the mashed potatoes and Lois’s cranberry-horseradish relish. She listed the facilities—forty-six buildings on one hundred acres, three housing-unit clusters with fourteen housing units, a fifteen-bed health care unit; the courses he’d been taking in carpentry and cabinet building; the average number of daily inmates (1,515), et cetera, as if he were enrolled in a fancy liberal arts college. And she told us about their plans to invest in a used Kenworth T2000, or maybe a Pete 379 with a double box sleeper. She was going to go to truck-driving school, and when Jimmy got out, they were going to go on the road together, hauling produce from the west coast.

  In stories, the freewheeling bad boy is always the one who has the most interesting adventures, the one whose transgressions make him whole, but I didn’t think it was going to work out this way with Jimmy. Neither did Paul. “Stella,” he said, “just because you’re a poet doesn’t mean you don’t have to think about money. It’s part of growing up. Look at Shakespeare. He wrote for money, don’t kid yourself. He did it all: writing, acting, part owner of the theater. And when he got enough he retired and went back to Stratford and bought the biggest house in town.”

  “Whatever I know about money I learned from you.”

  “Touché,” Paul said. “I’ll admit it; I don’t know a lot about money, but at least I’ve got some common sense. How much does one of those big trucks cost? My guess is over a hundred thousand dollars. Where are you going to come up with a hundred thousand dollars?”

  “We’ve got a plan, Pa, believe it or not. We’re going to work for Jimmy’s uncle in Milwaukee when Jimmy gets out. His uncle’s a produce broker.”

  “You want to go to truck driving school?” I said. My heart was sinking rapidly. “No chance you could get back into the workshop to finish up your degree? Then you could teach . . .”

  “I don’t want to teach, Ma. There’s more ‘material’ out on the road than in the workshop, that I can promise you. I’ve had it up to here”—she tipped her head back and raised her hand, palm flat, up to the level of her nose—“with workshop poems.”

  “Like white onions,” Paul said.

  “Right,” she said. “No bite.” They both laughed. “We wouldn’t try to buy a truck right away, but Jimmy’s uncle knows the people at Lincoln Trucking. They always need owner-operator teams, and the Lincoln terminal in Springfield—close to home—has got a full basketball court, a weight room, a movie theater, a spa, two good restaurants . . . We’ll need help with the financing, of course, when the time comes, but Jimmy’s uncle’s going to take him into the business.”

  “Jimmy’s uncle must be one hell of a guy,” Paul said.

  “He’s very supportive,” she said.

  “How does he feel about his nephew serving time for aggravated assault?”

  “Battery,” she said, “not aggravated assault.”

  “How’s the play going?” I asked, before Paul could make matters any worse.

  “Jimmy’s going to be a star,” she said.

  The man who has everything—in this case Paul—is usually the one who gets the best Christmas presents. Especially when he’s dying. That was fine with me, but I was annoyed that Lois had given Paul, in addition to the wine, a Mont Blanc roller ball that I’d seen in my Fahrney’s catalog for almost four hundred dollars. What did she think she was doing? Still trying to get his attention? Paul had had a brief affair with Lois while I was in Rome one summer with a group of Latin students from the high school. I’d never held it against him, had no right to, because I’d had an affair of my own, and we didn’t have the stomach for recriminations. What was the use? These affairs were like bone fractures that are stronger after they’ve healed than they were before. But over four hundred dollars? Not
even a proper fountain pen. It would disappear the first time Paul used it, like all his other pens.

  Stella gave him an autographed copy of Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, a first edition, from the Book Shop in Iowa City. It would be just the thing for us to read aloud together.

  My present was a photo album I’d been working on with Paul’s old single-lens-reflex Leica. Black-and-white, thirty-five doors in all. I copied out a little-known Sandburg poem, “Circles of Doors,” that was so different from his usual stuff that you’d hardly recognize his hand. Doors with knobs and doors with no knobs, doors that opened slow to a heavy push, like the big front door, so big we couldn’t find a replacement for the old wooden storm door, and doors that jumped open at a touch and a hello, like the door to the little balcony off our bedroom. French doors framing the piano, a shot of the little door in the basement wall that opened into a crawlspace beneath the side porch, painted white, the paint long chipped away. A shot of the open bathroom door, taken from the second landing, halfway up the stairs. Somehow the angle made the toilet and the sink look classy, romantic, glossy. And I hoped that Paul could hear me, whispering, like the speaker in the poem, I love him, I love him, I love him and sometimes only a high chaser of laughter, four or five doors ahead, or four or five doors behind.

  Paul and I were looking back. Stella was looking ahead. “All I want for Christmas,” she said, “is tuition money for the truck driving school in Iowa City.”

  Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was too upset. “You know,” I said, “I always read Ann Landers in the Register-Mail. It’s somebody else now—‘Annie’s Mailbox’—but it’s the same thing. Doctor Wallace, too. He went to Knox, you know.”

  “I know, Ma.”

  “I keep reading the same thing over and over, the same letters. ‘My boyfriend is a great guy, but if I get out of line he hits me sometimes. I know I deserve it, because I really know how to push his buttons. He doesn’t want me to go out with my girlfriends . . . ’ The letters aren’t signed, but half the time I can hear your voice, Stella. What’s the answer? Counseling? Get professional help? What I’m thinking is, get the hell away from this guy. What I’m thinking is, It’s as plain as the nose on your face. And what I’m wondering is, What are these buttons anyway, and where are they? What I’m wondering is, Where do these dopey girls come from? And why do they make me think of you and Jimmy and the guy from the workshop who knocked you up and left you in Brooklyn? It all goes back to Howard Banks. We practically had to lock you in your room that night.”

  Howard Banks, Jack Banks’s son, had asked Stella to the senior prom but Howard’s reputation was such that Paul had absolutely refused to let her go. That night—the night of the prom—Howard drove his father’s hearse into the path of a BNSF freight train in nearby Cameron, where the Burlington Northern tracks cross the Santa Fe tracks, killing himself and three of his classmates.

  “Howie? You’re still mad at Howie?”

  “If your father had let you go to the prom with Howard Banks you’d be dead now.”

  But Stella didn’t see it that way. “If I’d been with him he’d be alive now. He would have been wearing his seat belt.”

  “A lot of good a seat belt would have done when the train hit the hearse.”

  “Well, if I’d been with him he wouldn’t have tried to beat that train.”

  “Why do you pick these losers? Howard Banks, the visiting writer—I can’t even remember his name—who took you to New York. Brooklyn. I can’t remember them all.”

  “Howie was not a loser. He was smart and he was fun and he was sexy and exciting, and he didn’t take any shit from anyone.”

  “He got kicked out of school for cheating,” Paul said, “more than once, and he got arrested for breaking into the school one night and fucking with the bell system.”

  “It was great,” Stella said. “In the morning the bells kept ringing every five minutes. Nobody knew what to do. Mr. Collins and the dorky assistant principal kept running up and down the halls shouting at everybody, trying to get us to stay in our classrooms. You should have seen Mr. Collins. His big moon face was as purple as a grape.”

  Stella stopped talking and looked around. “I can’t believe we’re still fighting about Howie Banks,” she said. And then she said, “Merry Christmas,” and Paul told me to write a check and to get the money out of the credit union on Monday.

  “Thanks, Pa,” she said. “It’s four thousand dollars.”

  I wrote out a check and let the ink dry and handed it to Stella. She folded the check in half and put it in a wallet that she fished out of a black canvas tote bag, and then she was gone, and Paul and I were sitting next to each other on the couch. We didn’t say anything for a long time, and then Paul started to snooze and I cleared the dining room table and cleaned up the kitchen.

  Can you imagine anything more sad? Even sadder than Vergil’s lacrimae rerum—the tears of things. I can’t. And yet I was able to step back from my own sadness, as I was wiping the counters, and observe it, as if I were watching a film, or reading a novel. And as I did so, I was aware of an undercurrent of joy. The kind of undercurrent you can sometimes hear in a Chopin étude or a Bach fugue. Our little drama was playing itself out against a background of joy. Our life together had been good. Sadness wasn’t the worst thing. What would have been really sad would have been if we hadn’t been sad at all.

  5

  Do Not Go Gentle (January–October 1996)

  In the middle of January—Paul just back from his first round of chemo—the retired doctor who had lived in Loft #1 of the Seminary Street apartments from the time it was built died and his widow moved into the Kensington. We were on the waiting list and the Seminary Street office called. It was a beautiful apartment, with large windows looking out onto the street; “proprio in centro” we might have said if it had been in Italy. Right in the center of town. A large living room, two bedrooms, two baths, walk-in closets in both bedrooms. Paul wasn’t impressed, till he saw the sports car in the garage. Under a tarp. The real estate agent and I struggled with the tarp. Paul wanted the car. The doctor’s widow didn’t want it. It had been sitting in the garage for thirty years. Paul hadn’t gotten his Mazda Miata, hadn’t gotten a Thunderbird or a Corvette. It was his bargaining chip. I gave in. He offered the widow the price of a new Mazda Miata, and she took it. It wasn’t a midlife crisis. It was a pre-death crisis. We put our house on the market.

  Enjoy the elegance of this Victorian shingle style: Baccarat ­crystal chandelier, coffered ceiling and patterned parquet floor in dining room, four bedrooms, unreconstructed kitchen, side porch, balcony. Built in 1895. One of Galesburg’s premier homes.

  We moved in February, before the house had been sold. I was teaching Roman Civ., and Aeneid ii, iv, and vi in Latin 4, plus an extra section of Beginning Latin, and Paul, still recovering from his first round of chemo, was on the phone every day with the young woman from the University of Illinois who’d been brought in to teach his classes and who had her own ideas about how to teach Shakespeare. So: it was a difficult time. Our first night in the new apartment was like a lot of first nights. Unsettling. Another milestone. Like your first night in your college dorm, like your wedding night, like lying in bed at night after the birth of your first child, like your first night at home after that child has gone off to college.

  The piano, an old Blüthner grand with eighty-five keys, had been sold to a music store in the Quad Cities, traded, actually, for a good-quality Yamaha electronic piano. Paul and I had watched the men from the music store wrap up the piano and take it down the front steps, and then we had stood in the front window and watched them load it onto a smallish van.

  “This is a mistake,” Paul had said, and I had thought maybe he was right, had thought maybe I should run out and stop them before they drove away. But I hadn’t. “It’s a done deal,” I said, and Paul started to cry. Just a little bit. Just a few tears. I had pretended not to notice.

&nbs
p; More than two thousand books—eighty some banker’s boxes—had been sold to a dealer in Springfield. Another two thousand were in boxes in the garage. Paul’s old railroad desk, too big for the little “study,” was on the long interior wall that we shared with Lois. The movers had set up our bed in the bedroom, at the east end. Two windows opened onto the deck, but we were at the north end of the deck, so no one would be walking by our apartment. A sofa bed had been installed in the study, the rugs had been spread out on the floor, the furniture had been set in place. Everything else was in disarray. Lois was coming in the morning to help, and Sophia, my regular cleaning lady.

  Lois called in the morning, before I left for school, and offered to do a shopping for us, and Paul asked her to get some scallops. He wanted to cook some scallops for supper that night, or if not scallops, then wild-caught shrimp. Cooking, for Paul, was a way of relieving stress, though he’d insisted on walking up the outside stairs instead of taking the elevator, and he was too tired. The cancer was announcing itself, making its presence felt. He was going to need oxygen pretty soon. His face was aging, the skin tightening over his cheek bones. His green eyes were looking larger and larger. He was losing weight. He sat in a rocking chair at the edge of the kitchen, wearing his favorite sports jackets—Brooks Brothers—and his Sulka tie, kibitzing while I tried to organize the kitchen.

  There were no bread crumbs, no panko, but Lois brought butter and lemon. And we had a glass of wine while Paul told me what to do with the scallops.

  Lois had bought enough scallops for all three of us. I sautéed them in butter, closely supervised by Paul, two minutes on a side, and we squeezed lemon over them and ate them on buttered toast. Delicious.