An hour or so after he had arrived in New Paltz and had shown her the Granny-inscribed wine bottle, the Adult asked Nicholas to do a favor for her. She wanted him to clamber up into her backyard apple tree and cut off one of its dead branches. He gave her a skeptical look. Didn’t she realize that he was an art dealer, not a tree service? He was miffed. And he wasn’t dressed for the job, the sort of chore you’d ask your husband or boyfriend to do. But some complicated subtext had probably attached itself to her request, and he felt a roiling of curiosity. By the time she mentioned the dead branch, they had already had lunch and had talked about the relationship between Granny W.’s work and the famous road signs of Jesse Smith, now on display in several museums, and he wanted to close the deal and get home. Still, there was that gleam in her eye. The Adult had studied Granny W.’s bottle as if she were unsure whether she would purchase it—as if she were waiting for him to do this favor as an act of friendship, or masculine graciousness.
He unbuttoned his white shirt and took off his shoes and socks. The Adult stood on the perfectly mown grass in her running shoes and slacks and blouse, observing him with precise attention. As a boy, he had been an avid tree climber. What had happened to that prehistoric skill, now that he lived in Brooklyn? The proficiency had gone dormant, like all his other childhood aptitudes. Holding on to the handsaw, he made his way up into the tree, and he heard the Adult say, “Be careful.”
The dead branch, scaly and virus-ridden, was located about halfway up. The tree branches felt pleasantly rough on the soles of his bare feet, and when he reached the dead branch, after an easy climb past ripe autumnal apples about to fall, he realized that sawing through the dead wood would be effortless. He glanced down at Mrs. Andriessen, and then up at the sky. He began to work.
He had almost finished when he heard the Adult say, “Nicholas, I really do appreciate what you’re doing, believe me.”
Maybe he was tired, or feverish, but he heard her utter the sentence in blue, royal blue, the color of the northern lights and Granny W.’s inscriptions, and he felt himself spiral into light-headedness. The blue words, having entered his brain, had a sky-feeling to them, a spirit of clarity. But that was crazy. Spoken words had no color to them and never would, in this world. The first words spoken by God had been in color, according to the ancient texts, but who believed in that now? He gripped a branch in order to stabilize himself, to keep himself from swaying. The dizziness left him, but the blue, somehow, remained.…
He dropped the handsaw. The Adult hopped out of the way of it, though it had landed nowhere near her feet. Nicholas clutched a branch to keep himself from falling.
By the time he came out of the shower and had dressed, Mrs. Andriessen had brewed some espresso and was sitting in her living room reading Edith Wharton’s stories. “Want some?” she asked, glancing at him and holding up her cup.
“Espresso? In the afternoon? No, thanks,” he said, shaking his hands to dry them. He was still barefoot, because one of his socks had a hole in it, which he did not care to display.
She put her book aside, having placed a marker on the page where she had stopped, and rubbed rather violently at her forehead. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to climb up in that tree to cut that branch. But a few weeks ago, I had a dream about you, Nicholas. In this particular dream, you were aloft in an apple tree, and you were surveying the countryside. God knows how you got up there, but then you were sawing away at a dead branch, and I was down below, and when I woke, I thought: Well, maybe I should see to it that the dream is … I don’t know, enacted.” She said the last word with a slightly embarrassed inflection. “A person rarely gets that chance.”
“I used to climb trees,” Nicholas said. “When I was a boy.”
“Yes, I know,” the Adult said. “You once told me. Perhaps that’s what led to the dream.” She gazed at him quickly, as if a longer gaze would incriminate her. Mrs. Andriessen had a spooky way of suffering silently in Nicholas’s presence, but her reticence appeared to be impregnable. Now she looked over at Granny Westerby’s wine bottle. “ ‘Fear and love his loins,’ ” she read. “That’s a royal blue she used.”
“She told me that she painted it with the sky,” Nicholas offered.
“Did she actually say that? That she painted it with sky?”
“Yes. And it was strange, just now, when I was up in that tree, you said something—about how you appreciated what I was doing, and when I heard those words, when I heard you say them, they were … I can’t explain it. They were blue. I heard them in color. I heard them in blue.”
The Adult leaned back and closed her eyes. “I’m not surprised. Do you know the origin of the phrase ‘royal blue’?” He shook his head, but she didn’t open her eyes to see. She seemed to know perfectly well where the gaps in his knowledge lay. She knew what he didn’t know. “It was a particular tint used in the fabrics set out to greet the visiting heads of state, royalty—in the decorative regalia, the canopies, for example. Royal blue was a color associated with the aristocracy and with hospitality. I don’t know if it’s related to the phrase ‘blue blood,’ but I doubt it. That particular phrase, as I remember, is from the Spanish. Do you know how a person would demonstrate blue blood?”
“No,” Nicholas said. Outside, the wind was coming up, and the trees beyond the yard swayed gracefully.
“By staying indoors,” she told him, turning toward him and speaking urgently. “By not getting a tan in the fields doing fieldwork, so the skin would stay white and the veins would remain visible. Also, the phrase refers to purity, freedom from … Arabic bloodlines. Which would have been considered an infection, in those days. In Spain. You know: the Moors.” She seemed bored by her knowledge, the length and breadth of it. “Isn’t that interesting? Considering recent events? Free of Arabic blood? Blue blood?”
“Daphne is pregnant,” Nicholas told Mrs. Andriessen. He stood up to pace for a moment. “She told me a few days ago.” He sat down again. Their conversations had, over the past year, acquired a stream-of-consciousness effect, two people thinking as one, although Nicholas knew that the Adult was usually thinking for both of them. Most of the time, he didn’t really know what Mrs. Andriessen thought, except when she cast her glances on him.
“Is she? Lucky you,” the Adult said. “Daphne pregnant again. She won’t have an abortion this time, will she? Will you? Of course not. You’ll have the most beautiful child, the two of you. Just a glorious thing. But everything changes now. Love is tested. Can’t go on as before. You’ll have weight, my dear.”
“Weight? I don’t—”
“No, no, I don’t mean that. You shouldn’t take me literally.” She reached out and touched his knee. “I meant ‘weight’ in the other sense.”
“Yes, I know.”
She leaned back. The Adult often gave the impression that she was both excited and dismayed by Nicholas. “Do you? Well. Here’s a little story. When I was a girl, we lived close by a Swedish immigrant family, the Petersons. They were the neighborhood laborers and lived in a coach house. He worked as a caretaker and she took in laundry. She also acted as everyone’s part-time nursemaid, if you know what I mean.”
Nicholas nodded, bewildered.
“They had a son, about my age, an angelic type, beautiful, and a prodigy, or so everyone said, though I don’t remember in what—maybe in everything. A terrible fate. Children like that catch the attention of the gods. He could draw and remember word for word whatever you said, and he had every athletic gift you could imagine: running, balls and bats, the works. Terrible! Also, he was manifestly smarter and more alert than his parents, and they were so proud of him, and he could sit down at the piano and play short Bach and Chopin pieces by ear, and no one even knew in that environment where he had heard them. Gustav, this boy’s name was. And then when he was ten years old, he developed a brain tumor, fate being what it is, and when he died of it, his father became so blind with rage and grief that he b
egan to throw all their worldly goods, everything they owned that could be picked up, out of the coach house window. He’d throw out the coffeepot and the lamp, and his wife would calm him down, but the next day his grief would return, and he’d break up a kitchen chair and throw it out the window, poor man, and then the radio and the kitchen blender and the telephone. Whatever he could get his hands on, anything that could be mobilized, he threw out that window. You’d see this little heap of household objects on the driveway. Some languages have a term for grief madness, but English doesn’t. Isn’t that a shame?”
Nicholas nodded again. What on earth was she talking about?
“When those airplanes hit those buildings,” she said, “on that day when you were up here a month ago, do you know what I did?” She didn’t stop to look at him or to wait for his response. “After you left, I took the mower out and mowed the back lawn, by myself. It didn’t require mowing. The grass had been cut two days before. But I had to do an ordinary task. I had to anchor myself to daily life. To make a routine, to recapture what I love about banality. Then I drove into town, late afternoon, and I gave blood. And what did you do, my darling friend?”
“I drove home, as you know,” he said. “It took a long time.”
“Ah, Nicholas,” she said. “Your foot is bleeding.” She reached out and took his foot in her hand and gave him an expression of sweet concern. From a pocket, she drew out a piece of cloth and daubed at a small bloody scratch on his instep.
She was beautiful enough to sleep with, he thought, and it wouldn’t exactly be demeaning or patronizing, but he wasn’t going to make that particular pass at her and take her into the bedroom and undress her and sleep with her underneath one of Granny W.’s signs. Another blue motto. It had been hung above the bed, a cryptic sentence: SORROW ABIDETH BESIDE MY JOYOUS HEART. He wouldn’t willingly give the Adult the Nicholas-treatment in that bed no matter what, even if there were no possible unforeseen complications—and there were always unforeseen complications. If he made her momentarily happy, she would no longer be herself. And if Mrs. Andriessen were no longer herself, she would not be interesting; she would no longer be the Adult but just like the rest of them, and he himself would lose his bargaining chips. Besides, some women simply required suffering. She was, Nicholas thought, one of those.
“Patricia,” Nicholas said, “I should really go.”
“Should you?” she asked, releasing his foot. “All right. I suppose you should.”
He and Daphne were walking around the Great Lawn in Central Park when the thought occurred to Nicholas that the woman he was holding hands with should marry him. Or—what was the wording?—he should marry her. “Make it official,” as they used to say. “Make an honest woman of her,” they also said. Most of the leaves had changed color and fallen by now, but a few clung to their branches, and he could feel a rough cooling in the air. He didn’t quite know why he and Daphne needed to be married; he just felt that they should be. They had known each other forever, almost since they were kids. What he felt for her was as close to love as he was ever going to get. Something stood between him and the full blast of it, but nothing he had ever done for anybody had brought him closer.
On the baseball diamonds, the groups of boys who were playing softball yelled and smiled and pantomime-slugged each other, coached and encouraged by their parents, mostly the fathers. It was getting too late in autumn to play baseball, but apparently no one wanted to give it up. One team, the Slickers, was wearing white uniforms with green letters, and the other team, the Backpackers, wore white uniforms with blue letters. One of the Backpackers stood at the plate, wearing his batting helmet. He swung at a pitch and missed.
He seemed to be about ten or eleven years old. Nicholas thought of Gustav, the story the Adult had told of him, and of the piles of household items lying in the driveway.
The boy swung again and missed. “Strike two,” announced the umpire.
“Something is wrong,” Daphne said to Nicholas. She reached for his arm.
“That boy isn’t watching the ball,” Nicholas told her. “He’s distracted.”
“Something is wrong,” Daphne said again.
The pitcher stood on the mound and studied the batter. Daphne’s hand dug into his biceps. “Ow,” he said. “That hurts.”
All at once Daphne bent over, winced, and then began screaming softly. “Oh god oh god,” she said, between deep breaths, and at first Nicholas thought she might fall to the ground in pain, but, no: she had sufficient resources to take his arm and to stagger to Fifth Avenue, where he flagged down a cab to take them both to the emergency room.
“We lost it,” Nicholas said to the Adult.
Mrs. Andriessen let the pause go on for a long moment until Nicholas found himself able to say something else into his telephone. “She had a miscarriage,” he said. “She miscarried.”
“No, not quite,” the Adult told him, rather firmly. “You both did, didn’t you? You both miscarried.”
What did she mean this time? What did she ever mean? “Daphne’s still in the hospital, Patricia. She’ll be there overnight. She’s going to be there overnight. She’s very weak. She lost a lot of blood.” How rare for him to repeat himself, he thought. He felt more of his composure slipping away, following the composure he had already lost. “I’m going right back over there.”
“Why aren’t you there now? In the hospital? Why are you in Brooklyn?” the Adult asked him. “Why are you at home?”
“I had to feed the cat,” Nicholas told her. “I had to feed Plankton.”
“The cat can live. You should be with Daphne now. You should be sitting next to her in the hospital and you should be holding her hand and kissing her on the forehead and on both cheeks. You should try to revive her. Poor thing, she’s lying in bed with no one with her, and she’s kissing the air. Desperate women kiss the air, did you know that, Nicholas? When they’re alone, they kiss the air.”
“They do?”
“Yes. Or you could always pray to Saint Anthony. He’s the saint of lost things. I was raised Catholic, did you know?” Another pause. “ ‘Dear Saint Anthony, please look around: something is lost that must be found.’ That’s the Saint Anthony prayer. It works. It’s the only thing in Catholicism that still works for me, that prayer.”
“It can’t be found,” Nicholas said. “It’s not lost. It’s gone.”
“They kiss the air, Nicholas,” she repeated. “My darling friend, you are such a dilettante with us. You have just watched us, all your life. You have watched us as we fell in your direction.”
“Us?” It was a habit, this repetition. Of course she was right.
“You should go over there right now, where Daphne is.” Outside the apartment something was stirring, perhaps just down the block.
At the foot of Daphne’s bed, Nicholas stood gazing at the pale green wall behind where she lay. He stared at the wall because it was so hard to keep his eyes on her. Inside and within the room were tubes and pipes and expensive stainless-steel machines, some of which were breathing softly, while outside the room, many floors down, Manhattan traffic beeped on like the errant sounds of children playing with toy cars and plastic noisemakers. Daphne, for the moment, was unwatchable: on her face had been placed an expression he had never seen before. Her skin had taken on a terrible pallor. He couldn’t stand to see it there. It hurt him every time his eyes swept across her. Every time he took her in, he felt as if he aged another year.
He approached her and tried to do as the Adult had advised: he kissed Daphne on the forehead and tried to bend over the sides of the bed so he could kiss her. When he bent over, he thought he would pass out.
Daphne did not open her eyes. “The next time you go to Alaska,” she whispered, “you can tell Granny Westerby about us.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“Yes, but we have a story now.” She opened her eyes to look at him. She did it slowly, as if it were a great effort—a terrible amount of work—to do
so. “Oh, Nicholas,” she said tenderly, almost with pride, “you look awful.”
“Do I?” he asked.
“You look all broken and sideways,” she said disconnectedly. The medications had started to affect her speech. Still, no one had ever used those adjectives about him before. Rather desperately, he turned toward the window, but there was no refuge there, either, not for him. He felt himself fading toward Daphne in an effort to comfort her. He lowered himself again and touched his lips to her cheek.
The Old Murderer
AN OLD MAN, a murderer, had moved in next door to Ellickson. The murderer appeared to be a gardener and student of history. Prison had seemingly turned him into a reader. Putting out spring-loaded traps for the moles, Ellickson would sometimes glance over and see his neighbor, the murderer, sprawled out on a patio recliner as he made his way through a lengthy biography of General Robert E. Lee. At other times he saw the murderer spreading bone ash at the base of his backyard lilacs. The murderer’s uncombed gray hair stood up in sprouts at the back and the sides of his head, and he would wave from time to time at Ellickson, who had delayed introducing himself. Ellickson would wave back halfheartedly. The murderer did not seem to care that he was being snubbed. He kept busy. Bags of topsoil weighed down the back of his rusting yellow truck. He unloaded them and carried them over to the garden beds. Ellickson liked the idea of having a murderer on the same street where he himself lived. A paroled murderer’s problems put his own into perspective.
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