The Confessions of Frances Godwin

by Robert Hellenga

  “Just around the block, Mrs. G. What, you think I’m going to wreck it? That car needs to be driven, burn the carbon out.”

  “I’m making out a check for eight hundred dollars,” I said, “even though you didn’t really put in forty hours.”

  “You can’t stand it,” he said, “can you, to see someone who’s alive? You sit up here in your nice little apartment and look out the window at the nice little restaurant across the street and worry about where you’re going to put all your nice things and where you’re going to hang your nice pictures. While you’re waiting around for that old man to die. I never saw such an ornery sons-a-bitch.”

  “It’s ‘son of a bitch,’” I said, “not sons-a-bitch.”

  “Ma, he doesn’t mean anything. It’s just the way he talks.”

  “Shut up, Stell.”

  “Her name is Stella.”

  “Her name is what I say it is.”

  Paul appeared in the doorway with his oxygen tank, his half glasses on a cord around his neck.

  “Look who’s here,” Jimmy said. “Dead man walking.”

  “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “Dead man talking. Listen to that, would you. Prospero speaks.”

  Jimmy started to leave. Stella got up to go with him.

  “Where are you going?” I said to Stella.

  “I’m going with.”

  “You stay here, Stella,” Paul said.

  “Pa,” she said, “you’re both crazy.”

  That night, Friday night, Jimmy simply took the car. I hadn’t thought to hide the keys, which were on a key holder in the laundry room. But the car was gone, and the keys were gone. We wouldn’t have known it if Lois hadn’t called to say that our garage door was open.

  Paul was in slippers and a robe. He was in a hurry. He struggled out of the armchair in the window alcove—a chair that now seemed to swallow him whole—and took the stairs instead of the elevator. A train was going by, making a huge noise. There was an empty space next to the Cutlass Cruiser.

  Back in the apartment I heated a little leftover coffee in the microwave.

  Paul called the police and told them that the car had been stolen—I begged him not to, but I didn’t beg very hard—and was probably on the way to Iowa City. And that the thief, Jimmy Gagliano, was a convicted felon out on parole.

  Jimmy was pulled over at mile 284 on I-80, about ten miles west of the junction with 280, and taken to the Scott County Jail in Davenport, Iowa. I drove to Davenport and brought Stella back to Galesburg. We barely spoke, and she wouldn’t come in the house. She got into Jimmy’s truck, which was in the parking lot, and drove back to Davenport.

  “Sorry, Ma,” she said out the open window as she was leaving. “He didn’t mean it. But Pa was such an asshole about the car. Why couldn’t he just let Jimmy drive it around the block? He didn’t have to be such an asshole.”

  She called in the morning, but I refused to bail Jimmy out.

  We got the local Amoco Station to bring the car back from Davenport on the back of a truck.

  A week later Stella told the prosecutor that Paul had given her the keys and asked her to drive the car to Iowa City to burn out the carbon. There was no case. Jimmy was released.

  Paul started to worry, and by the end of the week he was convinced that Jimmy had been coming into the house during the day while I was at school. That he was rearranging things, moving things around, helping himself to a few things, like the pen from Lois.

  We had the locks changed. The locksmith told me that it happens all the time—old people wanting their locks changed, convinced that someone’s coming in and moving stuff around. Their children call and tell him (the locksmith) not to change the locks.

  We had an alarm system installed. Paul had to sign a three-year contract with ADT. There were sensors on the windows and the door. When I came into the house I had forty-five seconds to deactivate the alarm by punching in a code. Paul was afraid that someone could look in the window and see me punch in the code. He wanted me to hold my hand over the alarm keypad when I punched in the code. I had to register with the city. Another fifty dollars. I had to give the code to the cleaning lady, who’d worked for us for years, and to the hospice care nurse, and to Lois. Paul didn’t like this and wanted me to change the code every week, which I refused to do. We were allowed two free false alarms. Then a fifty-dollar charge for every false alarm.

  Paul wanted a German shepherd. I pretended to object, but we’d always had dogs when I was a kid, and we’d had a black Lab when Stella was growing up, Sparky. I could remember looking out through the little window, just big enough for a fifty-pound block of ice, that had been knocked in the back wall of the kitchen on Prairie Street, watching Paul as he dug a hole for Sparky while Stella knelt beside him, rubbing the dead dog’s neck. The hole wasn’t quite big enough, and Paul had to lift the body out and dig some more while Stella pushed her face down into the soft neck. So I didn’t have much enthusiasm for the idea, but I didn’t push back too hard. I picked out a mid-size German shepherd mix at the animal shelter. I had to tell them we had a fenced-in yard, which was true in the old house, or they wouldn’t have let me take the dog. Which I named Camilla, after the warrior virgin in the Aeneid, who could run so fast that when she ran through a cornfield the blades of grass turned to ashes, so fast that when she ran across the sea she didn’t get her feet wet.

  And, finally, a gun. This time I really did dig in my heels. But Paul insisted. I got my application for a FOID card out at Farm King, where they took my picture but then used the picture on my driver’s license for the card. A week later I bought a long-barrel .38 at the gun shop across the street—Collectors.

  “Odd choice for self-defense,” the owner said. “For a woman. The long barrel, I mean. Not a .38.”

  “It’s what my husband wants,” I said.

  I still had my father’s old .38, the one Paul had used to shoot a hog every fall. But something prompted me to get a new one, and in retrospect I have to wonder if I already had a contingency plan in mind.

  I took a firearms safety training class, offered one afternoon a week at the police shooting range out at Lake Storey. I hadn’t fired a pistol since I’d left home. My parents’ home, that is, so I was glad for the lesson. The instructor explained the Isosceles stance, which is what you see in cop shows, and the Weaver stance, which is the way I’d learned to shoot in the first place, and the modified Isosceles and the modified Weaver, with your gun arm locked instead of slightly bent.

  We put on ear plugs and I fired a hundred rounds with a .22 caliber and another hundred with the .38.

  He said the same thing as the gun dealer. “Odd choice for a woman for self-defense. You don’t need the long barrel, for one thing.”

  I told him the same thing I’d told the gun dealer. “It’s what my husband wants.”

  “Then he should be the one getting the lesson.”

  “He’s got lung cancer,” I said. “He can’t get out anymore. It’s a long story.”

  He waited, but I didn’t tell him about Jimmy. I fired another hundred rounds with the .38, using a modified Weaver stance, pretending to aim carefully, but spraying the shots around. My arm was sore.

  Paul kept the gun in a drawer of the bedside table, loaded.

  Camilla didn’t poop for three days after I brought her home, but after that she did everything that dogs are supposed to do: barked when someone came to the door, slept on a rug by Paul’s side of the bed, investigated the wastebaskets, licked Paul’s hand, waited to see what was going to happen next. But it wasn’t enough.

  Paul was never the same. He complained that I’d gotten rid of too many books. Where was the catalog of the Impressionist exhibition at the Art Institute? Where was Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of The Odyssey? What had I been thinking when I sold everything to the dealer from Springfield? And why hadn’t I organized the books that we did manage to keep, which I had shelved at random just to get them out of the boxes
. There were more boxes in the garage. But his number-one grudge was that I’d sold the piano. The piano had been in reasonably good shape when we sold it, though it was going to need some work, more than the man who tuned it could manage. I played through my limited repertoire—Bach, Brahms, Chopin, Gershwin—on the new Yamaha, but Paul complained that the sound was too thin, and we abandoned the plan to work up some Brahms waltzes for four hands.

  Paul’s colleagues from the English Department came to visit—the old guard, most of them older than Paul. They’d bonded at the beginning of Paul’s tenure and had traveled together over the years. No doubt they could see in Paul signs of their own demise, which didn’t stop them from confronting the mystery head on. “Life, like a dome of many-colored glass,” Ed Wilson, who taught the Romantics, liked to say, “stains the white radiance of eternity,” and you couldn’t tell if he was being serious or ironic, or something in between.

  Paul continued to work on Shakespeare’s Lincoln, but he couldn’t sit up on the tall stool at his desk and had to work at the harvest table. He didn’t have much stamina, and I could see that he was treading water, still reaching for a thesis, a big idea. Something beyond the facts, something beyond one-damn-thing-after-another. What was the problem he was trying to solve? The question he was trying to answer? The mystery he was trying to clarify? Not what or how or where or when, but why? Why did it matter? Why did anything matter? Who cared?

  As far as I know, Jimmy never came into the apartment, but he did come back into the house on Prairie Street, a week before the closing. I went over to the house to walk though it one last time and make sure everything was in order. He had ripped the chandelier out of the ceiling—the chandelier that I had rewired myself—and smashed all the crystal dangles, which sparkled on the dining room floor. I called the insurance company. I was so angry I could hardly speak. Connie said she’d send someone over. It was only four blocks away. I collected some of the broken dangles in a grocery bag for the insurance company, and swept up the smaller particles. Then I walked through the house. I realized what Paul was feeling because I was feeling it too, something deeper than anger. This old house had been our life. Once upon a time it had been our new house, after Paul and Elaine (Paul’s first wife) sold the house on Chambers, and I remembered how it had been when we walked into it the first time with the real estate agent, almost two years after we were married. Empty, but full of promise, full of the future, full of love making and Christmases and Shakespeare parties. Now it was empty again, waiting for someone else’s future to arrive. Upstairs in our bedroom I looked out at the street through the leaded glass windows, looked down at the lot next door and thought, for just a minute, that it was time to call Mr. Friend to till the garden. From my little sewing room in the back of the house I could see the leaves the choir kids had raked to the back of the lot and wondered if the Simpsons, the new owners, would cart them up to the garden and compost them around the tomato plants and the zucchini to keep the weeds down.

  I climbed the stairs to the attic, opened the windows at both ends and turned on the attic fan. I walked through every room in the house, counting the doors, but I lost count before I got to thirty and for a moment I was Paul’s high chaser of laughter, five or ten doors ahead, or five or ten doors behind. And then the bell rang. Connie from the insurance office was at the door.

  I filed a police report, but I didn’t give them Jimmy’s name, and I never told Paul what had happened.

  It was harder and harder to get Paul in and out of the car, even with his new light-weight oxygen tank, but we managed three or four times a week. We’d sit together, Paul in the driver’s seat—the cockpit—with the garage door open. The car never moved, but Paul didn’t need to leave the garage to drive farther and farther away. He was leaving me behind. And Stella, too. We heard nothing from Stella. Not a word. Not a phone call. Not Prospero and Miranda, I said to myself, but Lear and Cordelia.

  We did what we could to hold on to scraps of ordinary life. I did the cooking now, with Paul in his wheelchair at the edge of the kitchen, kibitzing. Paul had always done his own laundry. He liked his underwear folded in a certain way, with a kind of military precision. I had trouble getting it just right. But I managed.

  School started at the end of August. I’d get Paul settled in the morning. Lois would check in on him at ten o’clock, before going out to the funeral home. I arranged to come home at noon to fix some lunch and take the dog out. The hospice nurse came at two o’clock. I could usually be home by four.

  I’d take the dog for a long walk along the tracks, down to the college, then through Standish Park, then down Simmons Street and then home. The same route every day, but everything seemed fresh and new to the dog—every bush, every tree, every trash container, every strip of grass on the parkways, the old cross-ties that had been stacked by the bridge over South Street.

  I was teaching Catullus 2 on the day Paul died—Passer, deliciae, on the death of Lesbia’s pet sparrow. When we got to lines 4 and 5, one of my best students, Jason Steckley—the “son” in “Steckley and Son, Funeral Directors”—raised his hand: “Does this mean she lets the bird touch her, you know, her clit, with his beak?”

  The room became very quiet. Except for the sound of the lawn mower outside. I did a double take, looked at the lines again:

  et acris solet incitare morsus

  cum desiderio meo nitenti

  “Jason,” I asked, “What are . . . are you using for a crib?” I was pretending to disapprove and at the same time trying not to laugh. I couldn’t imagine myself asking such a question at that age, and in fact I didn’t think the lines supported this reading. I’d have to think about it. She offers you her fingertip to nibble and urges you to bite it sharply. Hmm.

  And when I did think about it, I did start laughing. It was the sort of thing that if it got back to somebody’s mother and somebody’s mother complained to the principal . . . But we had a sort of tacit agreement that things like this didn’t get back to anyone’s mother. So I kept on laughing.

  I was laughing on the way home, thinking how I would frame the story for Paul, how much he would enjoy it, but when I got home, Paul was dead, and Lois was sitting on the edge of the bed. Camilla, on the floor, had not come to the door to greet me.

  “I’m here to help,” she said. “Just give me a job.” Then she added: “I already cleaned him up.”

  “Thank you, Lois,” I said, “but I’ll be all right.”

  “I want you to go deep into yourself,” Lois said, “and focus on your breathing. It’s hard, but I don’t want you to worry if your mind wanders. Don’t ask where it went. It doesn’t matter. Just bring it back to your breathing. In and out, in and out. You can’t go deeply into yourself if you allow yourself to be distracted. I want you to slow everything down. You don’t have to do anything else. I’ll be right here. I’ve already called Banks’s. They’ll do the removal after Dr. Franklin signs the death certificate, but you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Call them back,” I said. “I’ll call Steckley’s.”

  “Steckley’s? But I already told Jack . . .” Jack was Jack Banks.

  “I don’t care what you told Jack, you can tell him to cancel.”

  “But Frances . . . Why?”

  “Because Jack Banks is a Republican and Frank Steckley’s a Democrat. Paul wouldn’t want to be buried by a Republican. Besides, Frank’s son is one of my best students.”

  “But I already told—”

  “Do I have to call him myself?”

  “Of course not. It’s just that . . .”

  “Call him now. I don’t want their van showing up here. Call him from your place. I’d like to be alone for a few minutes.”

  “I know this is a difficult time—”

  “Out, Lois. Please. I have some things to say to Paul, and I’d just as soon you weren’t fluttering around here.”

  “I was just trying to help.”

  “You’ve been very helpful, L
ois. Now just go.”

  Alone with Paul (and Camilla) it wasn’t fear I felt. It was anger. I couldn’t shut it off, and I said some hard things.

  “Oh, Paul Paul Paul,” I said, running my hand over the stubble on his cheek. “We made a mess of things, didn’t we. We squandered our last months together, and now it’s too late to make things right. It didn’t have to end like this. The doctors gave you a year. Gave us a year. We had that year together. One year. Our last year. Twelve months. Three hundred sixty-five days, more or less. Time to slow down, time to sit quietly and not trouble the universe, time to let go. Ah, Paul, maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about now, but I know this: we squandered it, half of it. We wasted it. We flushed it down the toilet. You didn’t go gentle into that good night. You went cursing and bitching and blaming me for everything. It didn’t have to be that way. I did the best I could. But you were angry the whole time. I sold the house because I had to. What else could I have done? You couldn’t manage the stairs any longer. At the loft we’ve got an elevator. I had to sell most of the books, too, half of them. What did you want me to do? There was no room. I got five thousand dollars from that dealer in Springfield. It’s a lovely apartment with great high ceilings, but all you’ve done is bitch about your books and about the piano, and about the noise the trains make. Galesburg is a railroad town, for Christ’s sake. Maybe it was hardening of the arteries. That’s what Dr. Franklin said. He thought you might be bi-polar, wanted to put you on lithium, but you wouldn’t do it. You never played the piano anymore anyway, and Stella didn’t have a place for it. The Yamaha piano is perfectly nice. You didn’t have to cover your ears every time I played. And you couldn’t let up about Stella, could you, just because she wanted you to let Jimmy drive the stupid car.

  “And Lois was here. ‘I didn’t want to call you at school,’ she says, and she reaches over and touches your shoulder. You were wearing your new Egyptian cotton pajamas from Hammacher Schlemmer. ‘I cleaned him up,’ she says. ‘There wasn’t much. He’s hardly eaten anything in the last few days. I’ll take care of everything.’