Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  • • •

  I had bought myself a little red Toyota, and one morning a few weeks later I got into it and made the long drive west on Route 90 to the part of New York State where Patrick’s Uncle Austin lived.

  I had wrestled with this idea since it came to me, trying not to give in to it, but I was a wreck, and I needed to do something. The photograph of Patrick and his wife had awakened a part of me that I had been beating down for years. I felt—what was the word for it? I felt cheated. It was a feeling I hadn’t really allowed myself. Of course I was cheated! My life was about cheating myself out of life. I was paying for a crime. This was what remorse was, and atonement.

  I knew all this. It was a bargain I had made with myself. But looking at Patrick with his beautiful Sonia—this new Patrick who had a wife and went to benefits and sold his sculptures for big money, who stood there before the camera impeccably dressed and smiling—I felt I was seeing a stranger, someone completely unlike the man I had known, and the idea rose up in me that I had to find out who he was, and what path he had taken to reach that point. I had to reconnect in a way that was more meaningful than the hoarding of clippings in box.

  I wept over that photograph as I had wept over nothing else. All the furies of jealousy rose up in me and made me crazy. Jealousy and humiliation and rejection, as if it were he who had abandoned me. And in a way he had, I told myself unreasonably. Why did he never try to find me, never make one inquiry about what had become of me or where I’d gone? Weeping, I crumpled the picture in my fist until it was the size of a marble, and then I flushed it down the toilet, and after a sleepless night I dozed toward dawn and awoke with the confused idea that I had to do something, anything, and the only thing I could think of was Uncle Austin, who had been kind to me and fed me whiskey and said he knew Patrick and I were in it for life.

  It was a long ride, and not a pleasant one. I drove too fast, ticking off the dull green Thruway miles, frantic to be sitting at Uncle Austin’s kitchen table again, talking to someone who could explain to me who Patrick was.

  I left the highway after it crossed the Hudson, and began to drive south. I found Route 146 easily and followed it into Livingstonville, where I stopped for gas and used the bathroom. In the murky mirror I tamed my hair into a braid and put some blusher on my pale cheeks. Then I got back into the car and turned up the state road that led to Uncle Austin’s junkyard.

  When his house came in sight at the top of a small hill, I was suddenly afraid. I stopped the car at the foot of the driveway. What if he was dead? What if he refused to speak to me? What if Patrick was there? All these things were only too possible, and I decided I had been insane to come.

  Up the drive, I could see nothing but a pickup truck—fairly new, but nothing that a rising New York artist might drive. No Porsche, no Jaguar. I tried to imagine Patrick folding his long legs into a Porsche, but ever since Santo sent me the photograph, I hadn’t been able to imagine Patrick at all.

  I headed up the driveway slowly, ready to reverse out of there if Uncle Austin emerged with a shotgun: This thought was only half humorous. I remembered the rusty fence Patrick was so fond of, the tumbledown barn, the small house with its big porch and behind it the low, wooded hills that always reminded me of Maine. The house appeared freshly painted, but otherwise the place was exactly the same.

  I parked next to the truck and paused before I walked up to the porch. I had brought a bottle of Jameson’s. What I really wanted to do was open it right there and take a long drink of the stuff. As I hesitated, the front door opened, and Uncle Austin came out. He stood on the porch looking down at me. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  “Uncle Austin,” I said. I went up the walk, holding the bottle like a peace offering. “How are you?” There was no response.

  He didn’t move. Uncle Austin hadn’t changed much either. He wore his usual faded jeans and flannel shirt and old leather bedroom slippers. Even the slippers looked like the ones he had worn around the house back when Patrick and I used to visit. He looked no older, his hair hadn’t thinned, his eyes were encased in the same wrinkles. It was as if time had stopped. If only it had, I thought.

  His voice came again, gruffly. “What the hell do you want?”

  I reached the porch and held out my hand. There was a pause, and then he took it limply, gave it a shake, and dropped it quick. This wasn’t going to be easy, but I hadn’t expected it to be. “I just wanted to talk.” I handed him the bottle. “This is for you.”

  He made a sound I couldn’t decipher, but he took the bottle and went into the house. I followed because he didn’t tell me not to, and we passed through the stiff little living room into the kitchen. Uncle Austin bent and put another log into the woodstove, moved things around with a poker, stood up again red-faced. The kitchen was very warm.

  “Do you mind if I sit down? Can we have a drink together?”

  “I don’t drink much no more.”

  “Then would you pour me one?”

  He went to the cupboard, exactly where I remembered, and took down one shot glass, then after a pause another one, and set them down hard on the table. He took out his jackknife and cut the seal from the bottle, looking at me when he was done. “I can’t believe you came here,” he said. He unscrewed the top and poured us each a shot.

  “Neither can I.” I picked up my glass and drank half. The whiskey burned going down, and I broke into a sweat.

  “What’s it been? Three, four years?”

  “Almost four. Last time I was here was in May of ’seventy-eight.”

  He sipped at his whiskey, then looked at his glass as if he would have liked to throw down the whole thing. “Before you walked out.”

  “Yes,” I said evenly. “Just a month before I walked out.”

  He sipped again, not speaking. I took off my jacket. It must have been eighty-five degrees in there. I didn’t remember him keeping it so hot. I wondered if he had been ill. I was so used to old people dying, I felt a rush of gratitude that Uncle Austin was still alive.

  “How have you been?” I asked. “You look well.”

  “I’m fine. Don’t you worry about me.”

  We were silent again. I drank down the rest of my whiskey, and he pushed the bottle toward me. I poured. The clock over the sink said 4:15. I was remembering the last time I was there, the May weekend of my twenty-sixth birthday, when Patrick and Uncle Austin had cooked spaghetti and meatballs for dinner while I planted some perennials out in front—hollyhocks, shasta daisies, a couple of peony bushes, and some ivy that was meant to twine picturesquely around the porch. I hadn’t noticed anything but bare dirt when I came in. Presumably it had all dried up and died years ago.

  “You going to ask me how he is?”

  It was a moment before I took in his words. “Patrick?”

  “Who the hell do you think? Are we going to talk about him, or are we going to sit here making idle chitchat all day?”

  Of course. This was why I had come. “No—yes,” I said, and I had to struggle to keep my voice from breaking. “Please. Tell me how he is.”

  “He’s better.”

  I stared at him. “What does that mean?”

  He stared back at me. “Do you remember, I used to have a picture of the two of you in a little frame over the cupboard there?”

  I hadn’t remembered, but now I did. A picture of Patrick and me on the porch, smiling, his arms around me in a bear hug. I looked where he pointed. “It’s not there any more.”

  “I broke the glass and took out that picture and burned it in my stove,” he said.

  I couldn’t look at him. I stared at the label on the whiskey bottle. Bow Street Distillery, it said. Dublin, Ireland. Since 1780. After a moment, Uncle Austin leaned forward across the table. “Let me tell you something. You listen to me now. You walked out on that boy, and all you did was leave him some kind of note. He loved you, he wanted to marry you—” Uncle Austin’s voice rose, and he pounded his fist on the table. “And you just
left him, as if he was your roommate, as if he was a pile of shit, a nobody. Do you hear what I’m saying? You left him, and you wouldn’t even tell him why. And do you want to know what he did when he got home from work and found your note—your fucking little note, whatever it said?” His face was tight with anger, his eyes narrowed; it was a look I had never seen before, and I had never heard him use such language. “When he figured out that you really weren’t coming back? Do you want to know what was the first thing he did?”

  I remembered that Tuesday in June, and how the weather was perversely glorious and sunny. As I had done a hundred times, I imagined Patrick reading my note when he came home from work. Beyond that, I could picture nothing. It was a blank. Patrick without me: the alien Patrick, the man I never knew. I leaned my head on my hand. “Tell me, Uncle Austin,” I said. “What did he do?”

  Uncle Austin finished his whiskey and poured himself another. “He got in that truck he used to rent and came up here,” he said. “It’s a wonder he made it without cracking up. Going off the road and killing himself. And when he got here, he was a wreck. He just stayed overnight. He told me what happened, and then he came outside with me and helped me haul some stuff. He hardly said another word. I know he didn’t sleep that night. I heard him up till all hours. He was like a zombie, like a crazy man. I could hardly talk to him. And then the next morning—do you want to know what he did?”

  I couldn’t say a word. I just nodded.

  “He went back to New York and began to hit the bottle,” Uncle Austin said. “He didn’t tell me much about this, but I knew what he was doing. I’d call him at night sometimes, and he’d be half out of his head with drink.” He reached across the table and gripped my arm. “I’m not talking about a couple of friendly drinks with his pals. I’m talking serious boozing. He drank himself into a stupor. Listen to me, girl,” he said, digging in his fingers. “He went on a binge. And he didn’t come out of it for a long time. I’m talking a long time. He didn’t come out of it until not that long ago.”

  He let go of me and leaned back in his chair, drank down the shot, poured another, and sat there in silence, looking at it morosely. I rubbed my arm, trying to believe what he had just told me. It was another thing I couldn’t imagine: Patrick as a drinker. For the first time in all those years, I understood with perfect clarity that I had done something not only to myself but to him.

  “He kept working,” I said.

  It came out sounding defensive and whiny, and I expected Uncle Austin to lash out at me again, but when he answered it was in a different voice—less belligerent, maybe a little drunk at that point. “Sure. After a while, he did. He worked on his sculptures, and he drank. He could escape into those big hunks of metal, and he could escape into the booze. I suppose it’s a mercy he had some kind of outlet.”

  I thought about the first photograph of Patrick I’d cut from an English art magazine: unsmiling, in profile, standing beside one of his massive works. If I went home and looked at it again, would I see that he was a suffering man?

  “I’m sorry,” I said, but the words evaporated in the hot air of the kitchen, they were so small, so meaningless. I looked out the window at the fresh green of the sloping hills, the white sky. A bead of sweat ran down my back. Neither of us said anything. I wondered if there was any more to say, and I looked over at Uncle Austin, thinking maybe the heat and the whiskey had put him to sleep, but he raised his head just then and said, “Do you remember the first time you ever came to this house? How you asked me about adopting Patrick, what it was like just out of the blue to have a kid around. Remember that?”

  “Yes. I said you were amazing, the way you just took him in, took care of him. Became a father to him.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what’s bloody amazing. It’s how Patrick turned out a sane man after what happened to him—his parents being wiped out, overnight. Just gone. And nobody but his rough old uncle to care for him. He was a mess, that kid, when I got him. He was five years old. He wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t let anybody hug him or even touch him, he didn’t want to eat—and he did these daredevil things.”

  “What things?”

  “He had this little bicycle, with the training wheels, and he would ride that thing into the road, right across Route Sixteen in the traffic. Or he’d light matches—he had an unholy fascination with fire. And he used to run away. I’d go out in the truck and find him half a mile down the highway. I had to watch him every minute.” Uncle Austin picked up his glass and sipped. Then he tossed down the rest of it, wiping his mouth on his hand. “Jesus, the kid terrified me, and that’s the truth.”

  “How did it end?”

  He thought for a minute. “It was like he made up his mind. He got interested in the rusty junk in my yard. He started helping me work with it. And pretty soon he was acting like a normal little kid. He started first grade, he brought friends home, he got hooked on baseball. But I’m serious, Wynn, for a long time I thought the boy was done for.” He smiled a little. “I thought he’d end up in the bughouse, for sure.”

  I took heart. He had called me by name. He was becoming more like his old self. I started to say something, but then, suddenly, Uncle Austin leaned forward out of his seat and slammed his fist on the table in front of me. “And then you go and do it to him all over again!” He sat back down. “By Jesus, I didn’t think he’d survive it a second time.”

  I put my head in my hands. Was this the news I had come for? That I had not only destroyed my daughter, I had nearly destroyed the man I loved? All the horrors of the last four years washed over me again as if they were brand new. At the same time, there was a curious justice about being there and, finally, talking about it—even in being condemned. Maybe this was what I had needed all these years—someone besides myself to tell me I had done wrong.

  I looked up at him. I had to ask. “Will you ever forgive me?” He just stared at me. The smile was gone, and the leprechaun twinkle in his light brown eyes—Patrick’s eyes. He sat there impassively, his fingers curled around his empty glass. “I didn’t mean to hurt him, Uncle Austin,” I said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Forget me. It’s him.” He kept his unblinking stare on me, and I realized he was very drunk. “Forgive you,” he said, his voice thick with whiskey. He let out a bark that I suppose was meant for a laugh. “Not bloody likely, missy,” he said. “Not bloody fucking likely.”

  • • •

  I found a school for disturbed children north of Boston that would have been a half-hour commute from my apartment. The headmistress was very nice, but they didn’t have an opening, and if they did, they preferred teachers with master’s degrees. I checked M.A. programs in art therapy in the Boston area; there were several good ones, but it was too late to apply for the coming fall, and none of them offered summer courses that sounded right. Finally, I began volunteering twice a week at a program in Somerville, doing after-school art projects with the younger children and teaching oil painting to seventh-and eighth-graders.

  I fell immediately back into the rhythms of teaching. And my students were so easy! After St. Clement’s, dealing with a bunch of American public-school kids was like a perpetual picnic. I wrote to Rachel about it, and she replied, “You mean you don’t have to watch your back? Nobody’s tried to knife you this week? You’re in paradise!”

  Gradually, while my students worked, I got into the habit of sketching them—quick, impressionistic little drawings that were all I had time for in between making the rounds, critiquing their work, helping them out, keeping a lid on the goofing off. But from time to time they would settle down and get involved in what they were doing, and then I would perch somewhere and draw.

  At first the sketches went badly—they were almost as inept and depressing as the painting I had attempted. Gradually, though, I got to like what I was doing, and the kids began to take an interest, too, complimenting me on a good likeness, complaining when they said I made someone’s nose crooked or ears too big.<
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  The whole experience—the teaching and my drawing—was a shaft of sunlight in the dark and tangled garden that was my life, a paradise indeed, and I began to look forward to those Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons as I hadn’t looked forward to anything in a long time. I was reminded of the first months after I returned from the Edna Quinlan Home, when I had had such a hunger for people’s faces and couldn’t stop drawing and painting them. I wasn’t sure, this time, why the sketches of those absorbed, healthy young faces gave me so much satisfaction. Partly they filled my need to make art, and partly they came out of my delight in my students and in their work. But I think that drawing was also something I turned to in sheer desperation after Santo and the photograph, after Uncle Austin and his anger; it was one way to survive all that, and to diminish the image of Patrick and Sonia, the woman who had led him away from alcoholism and despair, the woman who had made him forget me.

  I taught my classes through the end of the school year, and when June came I taught in a Cambridge summer program—oil painting for teenagers plus a class for adults. In the fall I went back to Somerville, but by then I also had two private students: an incredibly talented fifteen-year-old named Justin, and a young mother named Margery who worked diligently and made progress but mainly just needed to get out of the house and away from her two toddlers once a week.

  I was walking home from a class one November day when, crossing Harvard Yard, I heard someone call my name. At first I thought I had been mistaken. I hardly knew anyone in Cambridge. But the voice called again. I turned, and there was Alec Gunther, my old beau from college.

  Rather awkwardly, we shook hands. Then we walked across the Yard together, and ended up having coffee in a place in Harvard Square. It was a dusky late afternoon; Christmas carols played over a loudspeaker.