by Richard Ford
MAE HAD DIED IN THE RED HOUSE. IN EARLY ’06, SHE’D SUFFERED “A bout of the breast-type cancer”—which seemed to go away. A small surgery, no chemo. They made their plans for August. Then very fast there was a new site in the spring, which brought down the onslaught—sickening poisons, enfeebling radiation, hair vanished. But no more surgery. Mae sat in bed on Sixth Street through the early summer, watched the Iraq war on TV, ate yogurt (what she could keep down), didn’t play the piano, didn’t offer her lessons, didn’t go out, became mottle-skinned, lost weight, rigorously demanded Boyce massage her back—which all of a sudden felt like cardboard with nothing behind it. She determined with complete certitude she was going to die, though Boyce assured her she very well might not, that the local New Orleans doctors were up on cancer. Slowly her hair grew back gray, though she kept it short now, where before it had been heavy and long and brown and luxuriant.
Mae’s English father, Jack Purcell, had been a poet and a church organist—a relative of the great Purcell. In London, he’d prepared for a career in pharmacy, but had met a West Kerry girl, who would not stay in England or go to America. If he loved her, there would be a move required. He could set up as a chemist in Ballybunion, play the organ in church, write his ditties—which he happily did. Mae, though—his prize—he sent away to relatives in Boston. She’d soon come to study music at Princeton, where she’d met slender, rather delicate Peter Boyce from New Orleans. Soon, the mother left the father and fell back in with her old footballer, Owen. “It was the way things worked in such backward places,” Mae said. She’d never taken to her mother. Never thought being Irish was anything. In America, she’d changed her name from Maeve to Mae, the way Polly had changed hers. She’d early on told Peter Boyce that her face—the standard, piano teacher’s plum pudding face—was too round when it should’ve been sculptured; the eyes “too apart,” an all-too-unkind mingle of her father’s muted English features and her mother’s brute, rural ones. Being Irish, she said, was “an underlying condition. A common and dismal accident of origin that foretold a mediocre end.” He had never agreed, thought she was handsome and earthy and beautiful in her way.
Though the minute she was sick, to Peter Boyce’s surprise, she embraced it all again—the Irish. “You come back for it,” she said, whether you ever wanted it before, or it wanted you. It seemed to please her for a little while.
After the new siege in June, Mae became sullen. She began to curse broadly—whereas before she hadn’t. She said withering things about, and sometimes to, the parents of her piano students, who complained about the lessons ceasing. She uttered terrible things about New Orleans, about Peter’s law partners and their wives, and all their friends. The pinks. She began staying in bed, listening to Rush Limbaugh, denounced her previous moderate politics as crap, supported the war, said she’d be voting for Bush, and might divorce Boyce if he didn’t shape up. “I’ve invented you, anyway. I’ve needed to,” she said—which he thought might be true. “I can, very well, un-invent you.” Her drugs were setting loose a depression, her oncologist Dr. Milly said (though Mae didn’t seem depressed). A husband needn’t take offense. Just go along with whatever. Drive to Maine. Things would improve. They’d see.
Early summer nights, though, Mae roamed their big house, flipping on lights, turning up the TV too loud—would sometimes be naked—making sounds (groans) he couldn’t interpret. She spoke to people who weren’t there. “Could you very kindly just not do that!” he heard her shout out from all the way upstairs, so he wondered was someone there. “Take the one at the top. The feckin’ top!” She went on. Another time, “And why is it, again? Just tell me. I’m not battling anything. Nor am I brave. Just tell me, you cunt. Because you’re desperate. That’s why. You’ve lost the feckin’ run of yourself.”
Still, old Milly told Boyce, her chances of surviving were well north of fair. Something else was besetting her. The drugs possibly.
WHAT BOYCE CAME TO FIND OUT, TOO LATE, WAS THAT MAE HAD stockpiled her pain pills—which had always made her slightly loony. She’d discreetly requested more and stronger as they were making plans for Maine. Later he understood, though not very well, that Mae had worked herself into a space all her own, and for reasons all her own—past bleakness and cancer. A place of controlling her fate. She’d actually never been in pain much. Milly simply hadn’t paid attention.
She’d all at once, then, become completely fervent about leaving for Maine. The cool would be tonic compared to New Orleans (which did no one a bit of good). She’d become prettier, he noticed. “Rather like the ‘Girl With a Tinsel Scarf,’ don’t you think?” she said, referring to the old print her mother had kept pinned up in the house in Ballybunion. “It’s simple,” she said. “I just need to die to regain me youthful blush.” She told Peter she’d now display the full product line for Patty Parker, once arrived. For him as well.
In July, she ceased letting Milly come and was restless to be off, felt exhilarated. She now neglected to flush toilets, became hostile toward Boyce, and toward Polly, who came to visit but left shaken. Once, in the living room, standing naked alongside the baby grand she no longer played, looking starkly pretty and thin and self-possessed in her bobbed hair, she said to Peter Boyce, “You see, I simply haven’t lived enough in history. Didn’t capitalize properly on my music talent. It’s your fault, sweetheart. You’re a layered, privacy person. A man with measures and reserves. You think you’ll get to experience life over again. Whereas, I—I live as though I never lived it even once.” Neither was true, he believed.
THEY MADE THE DRIVE UP IN THREE DAYS. VIRGINIA. CONNECTICUT. Across the pretty bridge, leaving New Hampshire. She pointed out where the Bushes lived—“in everyday splendor and are probably there, now, being decent.” The red house was cleaned and readied for them. Fenderson’s wife had stocked the fridge, bought wine, polished the windows. Old Parker came politely over to say they’d be inviting them soon. He made no mention of Mae’s bobbed hair. They had their kids coming. And guests. It’d be a while. Just settle in. The month would fly by.
“I’m definitely feeling something lift off,” Mae said in the very first hour, seated at the back window, facing the lawn and the sea. “Some burden. So strange. Isn’t it, Pietro?” She sometimes called him that now, as she had when they were young. “Nothing’s quite fitted together for me for months. But just in this moment. It’s grand.” She was wearing loose-fitting, green cotton trousers. A coarse, brown homespun shirt. She was less large now—like a boy, he thought. “Chimera,” Mae said brightly. “We think it means something terrible and scary. But it really just means when things don’t fit right. Possibly that’s the worst there can be.” She smiled to him across the living room. He’d been bringing in suitcases.
“It’s how they taught us in law school,” Boyce said, happy for a close-to-normal exchange. “Logic, reason, rationality—it’s not discovered, it’s made up.” He smiled back at her. “You make things fit.”
“That wasn’t at all what I was on about,” Mae said, the smile gone off her features. She was already elsewhere, only seeming to address him. “You understand everything the way you understand them, my darling. It’s fine.”
IN THE EARLY DAYS OF AUGUST, MAE BECAME MUCH OF HER OLD SELF. Robust was her word, as if she’d gained back weight and stamina, which she had not. But cracking jokes, moving around the red house with spirit, humming in the bathroom, going to the village in the car, shopping, sitting in the gazebo, dialing Polly in Chicago, buying the Boston papers, going down to the Parkers’ little beach and gathering sea glass—she was as if restored. She slept more—though was still up all hours. She told Boyce she noticed in the village that people talked so much. In the market, they bleated and bleated on. It was epidemic. She sat at the old Kimball on the sun porch and played and sang along to the romantic Irish airs her father had written to woo her mother. “A complete bollix, it should be pointed out.” Irish was her outlook now. Much more than when she was a girl. She’d chang
ed completely once, and now would change again.
She wished also to make love—and often—which made him happy but also disoriented him and seemed a sign of something, since she was never much enthused before. He still massaged her feet and back where she hurt, put cream on her shoulders and arms as if she’d become young. They took walks down the road, past the little house, but didn’t venture close now. Boyce felt he wasn’t really performing anything helpful—just being conducive. Whatever was fostering her life, she was driving it.
On August twentieth, one of the foggy days when water on the bay was featureless and flat, and mosquitoes were about in the saturated air—the sort of day no one liked—Mae was expressing a craving for sweet white melons, found only at the farm stand in Warren. They could make it “a nice adventure,” she said. Later they could buy oysters at the monger and be home before dark. She’d sat in bed being pensive. She’d rarely talked about being ill since they’d arrived. “You wouldn’t deny an emaciated and sickly Spouse Mouse her wish, would you,” she said. “You couldn’t. A sallow, pretty girl like me.”
Boyce was tired from having had a walk. There was food already in the house, melons in the village. Later, he wondered if he might even have understood. Without knowing.
He’d backed their car out the red garage while Mae got herself dressed. Though when she came to the side door, wearing pink flamingo slippers and her striped housecoat, her face was blotchy, as if something was exciting her. She’d put on lipstick. “I won’t be much fun, today, Pietro,” she said. “I’m a little blue, and I might turn on you. Set you quaking. I do crave a sweet melon, though. Could be the difference between life and a cruel, slow death for me. Bring us back supper, too. And hurry on. Sorry for the false alarm.” She wanted him to be in the car and driving away. Not turning back. She was mirthful—not blue—her fluffy foot on the stone step of the side door, her housecoat gapped, revealing a bit of white under-cloth and her pale thighs. She waved, shook her head when he waved back, easing their car into the road as she disappeared inside, hurrying through the rooms of the red house. Spouse Mouse.
FROM THE BEGINNING, WHEN HE BROUGHT THINGS FROM THE CAR into the Birney house, opening cabinets and closets, trying the cellar door, running the taps, airing the rooms—from the beginning Mae’s sudden absence had been bludgeoning; shocking for her to be missing, even from a house where she’d never set a foot down. Though for an instant, then, it became almost a relief, her absence a comfort, a presence. And then the abject gallows-drop of clear fact.
In the first days he simply walked the sparse rooms he and Mae had peeked in through the wobbly windows. The rooms seemed larger. He spoke words, his heart sometimes racketing. “Yes,”—to something. And “It turned out he liked it after all, though it wasn’t big.” And, “She had of course never been inside.” Addressing who? Afterward, he sat out on the granite step, calmer, smoking—indulgent, musing, self-conscious. He did not want to live something over again. She’d been in error there. Which didn’t mean it was all so simple.
ON RICH AUTUMN COLLEGE DAYS, THEY’D EMBARKED FROM OLD NASSAU on their “Driving America Tours.” Across the Delaware into the Pennsylvania countryside, mile on mile. Small villages, large ones, river hamlets, fields, farms, dams, factory husks—ruminating life like cartographers, the country foreign to them both. More than once they’d spied a house at the back end of some dusty cornfield—marooned, paint peeling, roof going, windows out. The family departed. They’d exit the car, walk the road, just to step inside over broken glass, beams opened where ceilings had fallen, floors rotted to open earth, laths shining through plaster. Then up the dangling stairs to bedrooms—ruined couches, cribs, stacked picture frames, piles of magazines, fixtures sawed off, a window, a view to the field, a small hill, a distant town with a water tower bumping the sky, vultures swaying, deer staring back.
They were much alike. They were evidence. To Peter Boyce, these houses solemnized possibility. Life to reclaim. In his young and loss-fretful way, he believed people could come back, their places waiting for them. “To abandon it all,” he said once to Mae Purcell, age nineteen. “A house must mean something.” He’d worked a triangle of window glass out of its dry glazing and spun it out into the air, down among the corn tassels. They wished to conduct serious talks. This was their purpose.
Mae rolled her eyes. She was short of graceful. Sturdy. A pianist with strong hands that could do an octave-two. Already smarter than he would become. “It’s utterly common in Ireland,” she said. Or-land, her way of saying it. “You see the world in terms of always having another whack, don’t you?” She turned away. “My mam’s great-gran got chucked out by a Welsh cattle drover. Pushed into the sea. Means something? Means nothing to me. You’d make a very good . . .”
“. . . I’d make a good what?” Peter Boyce said, eager to know what he’d someday make in her eyes. “What would I make a very good?” He loved her already, believed she loved him.
“I could say a priest. Or an old, conserving Englishman. I hate priests, though, and have mixed views of the English, due to me pap. Say a husband, then. All right? For somebody reckless and stupid enough.” This satisfied her. “You’d be rubbish as a farmer, for sure. You never know when you’re banjaxed.” It had been their way even at the beginning. The Birney house carried a memory of those afternoons. He hadn’t planned for it.
AFTER A WEEK IN THE HOUSE, BOYCE BEGAN SLEEPING POORLY, AND when he did sleep, he dreamed Mae was alive, and woke up sweating. After which lying awake induced unkind interrogations. What had he done wrong? Why, very much indeed, did she do this? Suicide was a clear choosing-to-go—not only an aggressive act of selfish spite. More an act of independence and disobedience. Mae had always helped order his thoughts. But they were disordered now. Things not fitting properly. A chimera.
He therefore began a routine—going to bed early, taking a glass of Stoli from the freezer, leaving a light in the stairwell, listening to the Red Sox and the CBC, reading ’til sleep found him. He’d brought only Mrs. Dalloway. A choice made at the last minute for length. He’d read it in college, remembered almost nothing. A party and some foppish man from India no one liked, except Mrs. Dalloway. Or was that the one set in Cornwall? Not much headway made, in any case—though she was scarcely an interesting woman to put in the middle of a novel. Conceivably, that had been the point.
Sometimes in his pajamas, he’d walk barefoot down and out into the yard and stand in the cold grass at two A.M. and listen, breathe in the sulfurous reek of ocean, the night humming. Something often crashed in the underbrush, emitting a gasp. Bird wings fluttered in the privets. Cars sped past on the state road. Staccato voices drifted up from the beach, then laughter. Wooden oars clattering. A foghorn. He was, he felt, entirely who and how someone would expect him to be in these moments. Alert. No need to invent himself. He recognized who he was here.
ARRIVING TO THE RED HOUSE EACH AUGUST, HE AND SHE HAD AT once adopted—and treasured—the formalities of instant residence. Suitcases popped open, windows thrown back to air the bug-spray tang out of closed-up rooms. Then putting beds in order, hanging their own towels, unboxing kitchen utensils. The eager, precise routines, followed by a calm-but-bracing exhale to the spirit of belonging-for-now. Then the first bottle of Pouilly from the cooler, the first-day sun going below the trees and the bay. The chime of church bells from the village. All of it very, very full. Some people are born full—which was how everyone at home thought of Mae. Too full, the Parkers would’ve thought and said privately. Noisy. Playing Vivaldi too loud. Handing out looks. Taking the piss. Now this was missing. The note she’d written for him, left on the dining room table—found when he returned with the melons (she must’ve laughed when he’d gone, and she was left busy with herself). “Better, you know, to die in a house you don’t own than one you do.” A joke to excuse everything. Which it did not.
IN THE SECOND WEEK, SOMEONE WENT INTO HIS CAR AT NIGHT, forced the glove box, took nothing, even loose change, b
ut inscribed, “Go way” on the trunk surface using a sharp edge. He rang the sheriff, who came but said it might’ve been there on the drive up. Another day when he came from mailing off probate documents, he thought someone had been in the kitchen, but couldn’t be certain. A different smell in the air. Sweat. Then one early morning before light, he’d heard a car door close and someone walking in the grass under his window. A metal “tink, tink, tink” that made his heart pound. He came down the lighted stairs in pj’s and pulled open the front door. Suddenly. He would never have done it in New Orleans—stood empty-handed to face an intruder. You got killed that way.
A man was in the rectangle of light cast onto the grass. A man he’d maybe seen in the village. He only knew shopkeepers, the postmistress, Giles at the Gulf. They never admitted knowing him. The figure in the yard wore a wet suit, carried diving gear—a metal tank (tink, tink, tink). A spear gun, flippers, and a mask.
“Goin’ fishin’. Okay with you?” The man spoke in their singsongy way—as if the two of them knew each other and now was the result of that. The man squinted in the light, smiling or scowling. “Wife useta live in your house,” he said, then paused as if Boyce had begun to say something. “Rentin’ here, are ya?” The silver spear gun had its spear loaded in.
“I used to rent the red house up the road,” Boyce said. “But yes.” The man was bowlegged, short, crudely muscled under his rubber suit. He was out of place here.
“Your wife died, didn’t she?” He wasn’t seeking permission for something.
Boyce’s eyes stung from sleep. “Yes. Two summers ago. She did.”
“Don’t mean to be particular,” the man said. His posture had changed. He’d relaxed. Causing someone discomfort made him feel more himself.
