Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  Gran’s train left early in the morning, and she was gone before the girls were awake. At breakfast, Trixie asked her mother if Gran had gone back to New York City.

  “She doesn’t live there, Trixie,” her mother told her. “She lives in Buffalo, New York.” Buffalo, she said with a self-satisfied pop of air through her lips.

  In retrospect, Trixie could see how bitter and lonely Gran had been—she lived by herself, her husband long dead, in a sad, cold city. At the time, Trixie was disappointed by the revelation that she didn’t live in New York—Gran seemed less real after that—but now, considering, she gave her grandmother a little more credit. She had a consistent way of dealing with her disappointments, even if it was simply becoming more disappointed. Because now it was she who was disappointed, haunted, without family.

  She found herself heading for the University after all, aware that something had changed after this last visit from Hamish, but unsure what it was or how she should react. To lose herself in a book—such a reliable refuge from her memory reading had always been—seemed a nearly irresistible pull. She found the library parking lot, one of dozens connected by a baffling snarl of one-way paths, and pulled into a metered space. Inside, the building’s automated hush wrapped its arms clumsily around her; computers beeped behind the circulation desk, and the air conditioners—fooled by the sudden change in the weather—hummed in the walls. She paused on the stairs, blinded by the harsh light pouring onto the landing from the windows, and decided to head for the basement this time around, perhaps to look, as she had been fond of doing in years past, at maps.

  Instead, her interest was piqued by a stooped old man shuffling through a glass door she hadn’t noticed before, to the right of the stairs. His stunning white hair and beard reminded her of Colonel Sanders, gone to seed. The door closed behind him and she read: “Montana Room. Made possible by a grant from Mr. and Mrs. J. Doty.”

  She pushed the door open and walked in. There were about ten rows of stacks jammed into the tiny room, and the old man sat behind a compact metal desk. He looked up and smiled as the door shut behind her. He wore a name tag: “MSCM Library System: Nelson.”

  “If I can be of assistance…” he said, his eyebrow cocked as if he were kidding.

  “That’s all right,” she said. Her voice cracked.

  She hurried around the corner of a random stack, her heart racing. The smell of old paper folded over her, and she leaned against the cool metal of the shelves, breathing steadily. It was a good feeling, to lean here, so immediate and palpable that she could almost convince herself she had imagined the entire morning, from her dream to her encounter with Hamish on the hill. When she opened her eyes, she saw before her row upon row of old books: Along the Lewis & Clark Trail. The Indians. Chief Joseph. Along the Blackfoot. Montana history books. She reached out for The Indians and opened it to the title page. It read:

  The Indians.

  The SAVAGES’ customs and traditions,

  sought and recorded by DR. J. ALLEN WRIGHT,

  anthropologist and scholar.

  The publisher’s date was 1904, and on the facing page, separated by a leaf of onionskin, was an overexposed photograph of Dr. Wright himself, his hand stuck into his shirt like Napoleon. He wore a pince-nez and muttonchops.

  The following page was a photograph of a group of Indians, lined up as if for execution, in front of a massive tipi and a scrawny stand of cottonwoods. None of the Indians was smiling. The caption read, “Seventeen members of the SIOUX tribe posed after capture, eighteen hundred ninety.” This photo was not covered by a piece of onionskin.

  She looked closer at the group. They appeared ill: all were thin and several slouched under the weight of their possessions, which they carried in small pouches that hung from their clothing. A few of the women carried infants, none of whom seemed to be crying. Everyone looked at the camera with the same unflinching expressionlessness.

  Except, she noticed now, for one child. It held something in its hand, and its head was tipped back in laughter. Its tiny mouth was open, its eyes dancing. What it held was hard to make out. Something light-colored—a piece of bone? Cloth? It didn’t matter. This child’s happiness was a private, incongruous happiness. She wondered if her own grandchildren were happy, if she would ever know whether they were happy, then suddenly she recalled one of the last images she had of Schatze before she took ill. She was in their room, dancing silently, the folds of her skirt suspended between her fingers while Trixie stood in the doorway, watching her spin and spin. When Trixie said, quietly, You dance pretty, Schatze stopped, shocked, and fell to the bed with her dizziness. But the expression on her face before she knew that Trixie was watching, before she knew she would be ill with a disease from which she would never recover, was a child’s secret pleasure, was the smile on the face of this doomed Indian child.

  “Are you finding what you’re looking for?” She turned at the voice, guiltily shutting the book. It was Nelson, the white-haired man.

  “Oh, certainly.”

  “Of course. It’s just that few of our visitors know the extent of this collection.” His speech was full of unnecessary pauses: “extent…of this…collection.” It left her looking at him for an uncomfortably long time as he spoke.

  “I see.”

  “Are you from…Montana?” he asked her.

  “I grew up in Great Falls.”

  “And you were born…?”

  “In 1923.”

  “Ah, 1923! I would have had you born…much later.”

  “I should be flattered, I suppose?”

  “Ah, no. I should be…chastised. For my inaccuracy.”

  “Yes, well, thank you,” Trixie said. “But right now…”

  “Of course,” he said, and disappeared suddenly. She replaced the Indian book and considered leaving, but before she could make up her mind Nelson reappeared. “I think…you’ll find this interesting,” he said, and handed her an oversized volume, bound in red.

  When he vanished again, she opened it. It was called Great Falls: Yesterday and Today, She opened to a random page and immediately recognized a photograph of the deaf and blind school, built when she was a girl, a few years after Schatze died. The building was brick and stood on a corner—one of the streets was Second Avenue, she knew it. A line of men stretched around that corner, wearing overalls and caps, and holding tools—shovels, trowels, pointed bricklayers’ hammers.

  Why, she could remember them building it. She remembered leaning on a crude wooden railing, peering into the dug-out foundation. Why, though? And then it hit her: her father. Her father had helped lay pipe. She walked past after school and waved to her father, laboring in the dampness of the foundation.

  She thought for a moment he might be in this photograph, and brought it closer to her face. But he wasn’t—these were just the bricklayers. She flipped to the index and scanned the names of businesses, philanthropists, and unions, and found what she was looking for: the United Association of Journeyman Plumbers, Gas Fitters, Steam Fitters and Steam Fitters’ Helpers. She turned back to the book and found their photo—a group portrait on a row of bleachers—and there he was, in the second row, third from right. Heinz Hoffman. Her father.

  * * *

  “I need some information,” she told Nelson, who was bent over his desk. “This book you gave me—my father is in here.”

  “That does not surprise me one bit.”

  “Do you have anything in your…archives about these men?” She showed him the photo and he nodded.

  “I just might,” he said. She followed him through a metal door at the back of the room and into another room of equal size, every inch, save for a small buffet-style table at the front, jammed with old paper. The room seemed to suck every last bit of moisture from her. Her hair stood on end. Nelson disappeared into a row of shelves, reappeared a moment later empty-handed, then entered another row and came back with a thick, raggedly bound book. “Please sit,” he told her. She did, and he gave h
er the book and left.

  It was a collection of union minutes for the year 1930. Almost every union in Great Falls was in it. She pored over it for several minutes—there was no table of contents—before she found her father’s union, and she read its minutes carefully in the secretary’s shaky hand, searching for references to him. She found several: Mr. Hoffman nominated Mr. Bland to chair the committee on rate reductions. Mr. Cavendish queried Mr. Hoffman on the subject of temperature-related expansion and contraction of copper pipe. And then, finally, she found this:

  Mr. Hoffman was absent tonight, owing to the untimely death of his eldest daughter, Katerina Ute. Mr. Bland moved to organise a sign-up for all those willing to take on Mr. Hoffman’s clients for a time. All present agreed to lend their services.

  I remember this, Trixie thought. I actually remember it—Mr. Bland must have been Uncle Roger, Roger Bland, her father’s friend. She remembered him coming to the house that evening, speaking to her father in a low voice. She remembered her father slumped in his chair, one arm hanging over the armrest like a scarecrow’s.

  For months, it seemed that nobody in their house spoke to one another. They were all recalling Schatze’s terrible pain, her ceaseless coughing. Her parents listlessly played chess, or sat unmoving with books open on their laps. Trixie stayed in her room for hours during the day, hiding beneath the sheets, speaking out loud to Schatze the way she often did when she was afraid in the night. Every morning for months she woke and looked over at the other bed, then remembered, and the day ahead, which once would have lain before her like an empty basket waiting to be filled, grew roots and rotted away before her eyes.

  And one morning Trixie awoke and the day was open to her again, and she imagined herself again doing the things she had done apart from Schatze: reading, swinging, listening to records with her mother and singing along, something her sister had never liked. She stood up easily, without, for the first time, Schatze’s absence crushing her back to the bed. She breathed the air and it didn’t sting. Before she went down to breakfast she lay her head and arms on Schatze’s bed and apologized. She sang her sister a song. Then she walked out into her new life, went down to breakfast and told her father it was time to take her sister’s bed away. Later that day, he did.

  She closed the Great Falls book, and wondered what she didn’t know about her parents’ lives. She wondered what they did all that time she was struggling to make a life with Hamish, how they passed the days together when she had gone to Marshall to assemble her various failures.

  They had died within months of each other; each was all the other had.

  These were things she would never know. In the parking lot of the library, she was stunned to find that evening had come, the sun glared so in the west that she could barely see to pull out of her space. She had overstayed her parking meter, though nobody had given her a ticket.

  If only they had talked to me, she thought driving home.

  If only I had asked.

  14

  Anita spent Saturday afternoon with Larry Hutton, but much of the time she was thinking about Paul. She supposed it was a fitting way to pass the day. She’d spent much of the past weeks with Paul thinking about Larry.

  She lay alone in Larry’s bed, in the little house by the creek. The house looked exactly like she thought it would: a yellow one-story in the shade of some trees, set back from the road by a wide, patchy yard and a dilapidated white wooden fence. A perfect place to conduct an affair, if such a place existed.

  He was in the shower. She’d been invited there, but had declined. The sounds of water were everywhere around her—his shower running in the next room, the creek murmuring outside, a lawn sprinkler. Larry had stepped out of bed after they made love and opened the window a crack—anticipating her need to breathe fresh air before it had even crossed her mind. That he was an unremittingly thoughtful lover took her by surprise every time they met, which by now was often.

  She should have been relaxed here. Their affair was out in the open now, and that was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? If she’d wanted to keep it a secret, she told herself, it wouldn’t have been difficult; she had an eternity of lunches to spend in Larry’s arms. But she played her hand in plain view and confessed quickly. It wasn’t even that hard.

  So why was she still in bed, and not in the shower with her lover? Why did she find herself wishing she was here without Larry, that this house was hers, this good life of austerity and independence her own?

  She felt around under the sheets for her underpants, and found them wadded into the crack between the mattress and blankets. She wriggled into them, picked her T-shirt off the floor and pulled it on. It was cold now. She went to the window and closed it, then sat cross-legged on the bed, gathering her hair at the back. In the drawer of the bedside table she found a rubber band, and tied up her hair. Also in the drawer were other things: a single earning, a barrette, a bangle.

  Of course he’d had other lovers. There wasn’t any reason to get bent out of shape about it.

  She stared out the window. There was his truck, the one he’d picked her up in when she called him this morning. She didn’t have her own car because Paul still hadn’t come home.

  Paul had called her, drunk, the night before, from somewhere loud. Who was he with? What was he doing? Don’t worry, he told her. He wouldn’t drive. Lars could drive him. Who was Lars? He didn’t say. By the end of the phone call he was crying, apologizing for nothing in particular, until he convinced her he was worthy of her scorn and she got angry. She intended to stay up all night waiting for him, and for half of it she did, feeding the fire of her anger with shovelsful of past offenses. Then she fell asleep face down on the kitchen table and woke up with sore shoulders and the beginnings of real loneliness uncoiling inside her. She made coffee, showered. Then, finally, she called Larry and told him to come get her. He didn’t ask any questions—only picked her up, bought her breakfast (their first time in public together since they became lovers, which she cruised through with indignant effortlessness), brought her home and took her to bed.

  And here she was. The rubber band and clothes cleared her head. She felt slightly more contained, wished for a bra. Had she worn one this morning? She didn’t think so. Another first. The shower turned off, and she listened to Larry push the curtain aside, pictured his body. He dried himself from the feet up. She thought of Bernardo, and his unfamiliar noises in their shower, and realized she had left the house locked before the old man had come in to eat. Tough. Let Paul come back and feed him. The weather had turned and their house still wasn’t fixed.

  She had to stifle the impulse to bolt for the door and go running half-naked into the street, in flight from this orderly home that wasn’t hers, this easy, understanding man who wasn’t her husband, a head full of junk she couldn’t rid herself of. The bathroom door opened.

  “Were you making that sound?” He was standing across the room from her, his towel wrapped carefully around his waist. His eyebrows rode high over his eyes, almost—but not quite—mocking.

  “What sound?”

  “A whine. Like water running through old pipes.”

  Her hand drifted involuntarily to her throat, which to her surprise was tense and sore. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He nodded, letting it go for a moment. He walked to the dresser, picked up his comb and ran it exactly twice through his hair, set it back down. He plucked a nail clipper from a small ceramic cup and went back to the bathroom. The door was open, and Anita counted the staccato clips—thirty, three per finger. He came back without the towel, opened the top drawer of his dresser, pulled out a pair of light-blue boxer shorts and slid them on. Then, without a moment’s hesitation, he came to the bed and sat facing her, cross-legged, so their knees nearly touched across the space.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “What’s what?” He said nothing in response and stared into her eyes until she had to hang her head. “It’s nothing. I don’t know.” />
  He took her hands in his, and she let him. He squeezed them. Then he put one down and ran the back of his hand over her cheek. She wanted to sink into the sensation, let herself become no more than the warmth of a hand on her face. But that quickly it was over.

  “We’re taking this too fast,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” she said suddenly. She looked out the window. Now there was a cat curled on the hood of the truck, a ratty-looking brown long-hair with black ears. “It’s not that.”

  “Anita.”

  “What?”

  “Look at me, please.”

  She did. His face was searching, electric with complete concentration. How does he do that? she thought. How can he focus like this?

  “It’s all right with me if you want to slow down. I didn’t expect you to call this weekend, you know. I expected to have to wait until Monday.”

  “You barely know me,” she said, surprising herself. “I’m married. Why are you bothering? I’m so much trouble.” She took his other hand back. “I just want to know.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not the problem.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “No. You told him, didn’t you? About us.”

  Was it that easy, she wondered, to read my mind? When she brought her face up to his she saw that it was truly pained, that this was important to him, that no matter what he was saying right now, he wanted her to stay here with him. This was a surprise.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  He sighed and let her hands go to rub his face. “You want to go back to him, don’t you?”

  “No!”

  “But you’re thinking about it.”

  “No, I…” What was the real answer to this one? For a moment she lost all sense of herself, all context—if she wasn’t Paul’s wife, then who was she?—and with that loss came a terror deeper than any love she had felt for Paul, any she imagined she might feel for Larry. She felt the bed, the house, dropping away underneath her. She fell back to the pillow and squeezed her eyes shut.