The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 18

  In Charleston, a stroll along the two blocks of John Street would lead you past restaurants and boutiques to a museum and an antebellum mansion. In Youngstown, John Street’s single block was a stretch of weedy lawns, crooked houses, and rusted chain-link fences. It didn’t appear to be the kind of neighborhood where people went strolling. The cracked sidewalks looked like strings of Morse code. The snow had all but vanished, leaving the neighborhood looking soggy and dispirited.

  The driving directions led to a two-story shotgun house with dun-colored vinyl siding, a windowless steel door, and a slanting porch. Corinne didn’t see either a mailbox or a house number. The nearest neighbor, also an unexceptional shade of tan, sat only a few dozen paces away. Neither structure matched the memory of her childhood visit. One seemed too small, the other too large. And she dimly recalled something darker in color—reddish brown, maybe, or maroon. Could her mother have sprung from a maroon house?

  “Is this it?” Andrei said. “There are no cars. Does he know you’re coming?”

  She hadn’t spoken in an hour, but then neither had he. They’d been listening to the Lions-Packers game on the radio, and the only voices they’d heard in the last fifty miles had been those of Dan Miller, Jim Brandstatter, and Tony Ortiz.

  “I e-mailed him,” she said. “I might not have been very specific about the time. He said he’d be glad to see me whenever I got here.”

  “And you figured, well, he’s old, so where would he be, if not at home?”

  “It sounds pretty ageist when you put it like that.”

  “What should we do?” Andrei said. “Do you want to call him?”

  “Let’s just knock on the door, like people used to do in historical times.”

  Andrei backed the sedan onto a strip of bare earth alongside the house—the nearest thing in sight to a driveway. They got out of the car and climbed the concrete stoop. The porch was so narrow that the two of them couldn’t stand abreast. The doorbell button was broken, but the tiny orange light bulb at its center was lit. Corinne turned one ear toward the door as she pressed the button. Inside the house, an electronic chime played a tune.

  “‘Camptown Races’?” Andrei said.

  “Doo-dah. Doo-dah.”

  An old white van turned onto John Street. As it slowed and halted in front of the dun-colored house, Corinne peered in through the windshield. At first she could see only vague movement, but then it became clear: Her granddad was waving to her from the driver’s seat.

  His door opened with the squawk of metal on metal, and he hopped out. His limp had worsened since June, but otherwise he seemed somehow to have grown slightly younger. Maybe it was his haircut—shorter than it had been at the wedding, so that it appeared sandy rather than white. It might be his clothing—a chambray shirt and jeans that fit him well and made him look hale and spry, rather than an ill-cut green suit that made him look gaunt and sickly. Or maybe it was only that, in June, he’d felt ill at ease in the presence of so many Catholics and his surly daughter.

  “Happy Thanksgiving, darlin’,” he said. He hobbled around the van, his stiff left leg lagging behind him. He carried a brown paper sack under his arm.

  “Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.” Corinne went to meet him and hugged him and gave him a kiss. “You remember Andrei.”

  Taking him by the arm, she helped him up the steps. There was scarcely room on the porch for all three of them. Granddad unlocked the door and led the way inside. He hung all their jackets in the entryway, and Corinne and Andrei followed him through the living room.

  She had expected a certain amount of untidiness, or even filth—he was a widower, after all, in his twenty-fourth or -fifth year of living alone in a squalid part of a run-down city—but she couldn’t find so much as a cobweb or dust bunny anywhere she looked. The house smelled mainly of roasting meat and apple pie, but also of floor wax.

  “Coffee?” Granddad said over his shoulder. “Got a pot all set up to brew. Just had to run out and get some Cremora.” He held up his brown bag, crinkling the paper.

  “Don’t go to any trouble,” Corinne said.

  But he seemed not to hear. “Didn’t know when you were coming, so I aimed for early, just in case. It’s chicken, not turkey. Hope that’s okay.”

  Corinne and Andrei traded looks behind his back. Whatever complaint Andrei might be thinking up, she had it coming, but he kept it to himself. She widened her eyes at him, a wordless plea. He let his head fall back. Hopeless resignation was as good as she was going to get, and she grabbed at it.

  “That’s fine, Granddad. Turkey’s so bland anyway, don’t you think?”

  “My pappy used to hunt ‘em. Good eatin’ then.” He laughed. “Nowadays I guess they call that ‘free-range.’”

  In the kitchen, Granddad pulled two chairs away from the table by way of invitation, and Corinne and Andrei sat down. Going to the counter, Granddad began pulling coffee things out of the cupboards—a sugar bowl, a handful of spoons, some surprisingly dainty china cups. He brought everything over on a tray. The cups rattled against each other as he moved.

  Corinne heard something gurgling. It was a familiar sound, though for a moment a misleading one. She thought she had to be hearing a washing machine in some other room. But when she glanced over at the counter and saw the gleam of her granddad’s old percolator, she understood. That churning, chugging, hissing sound. The murky reflections in the scuffed surface of the pot. The wash of darkening liquid inside the clear bubble at the top. The smell of coffee growing sharper and richer by the moment. These sensations were Granddad’s house.

  She looked at Andrei, studied his face for signs of recognition, as if her memories were not exclusively her own, as if the two of them had been here together as children. He smiled at her, fondly, a little absently.

  His phone rang, and he dragged it from his pocket. “Suresh.” He was already on his feet, already halfway to the back door.

  “Suresh from Atlanta?” Corinne said. “I thought Atlanta was all done.”

  “I’m sure it’s a personal call. His wife’s about ten months pregnant.” His phone was still ringing. “I’d better—” Swiping the phone to answer it, he let himself out onto the back porch. “Suresh? What’s the news? Are you a daddy?”

  Granddad was standing at the counter, spooning Cremora into a china bowl. “Ten months pregnant,” he said. “Must be a skosh uncomfortable.”

  “Must be,” Corinne said. “That’ll take a few minutes, won’t it? The coffee?”

  “A few,” he said.

  “I’ll just use your facilities, then, if it’s all right.”

  “Remember where it is?”

  It had to be upstairs. Otherwise, they would’ve passed it on the way into the kitchen. “I’ll find it,” she said.

  The stairs creaked under her tread. The wallpaper of the second-floor hallway was patterned with tiny white lilies on a field of purplish gray. She would never have been able to describe it, but now that she saw it, she recognized it instantly. In the master bedroom, her grandmother’s silver brushes and cut-glass atomizers stood on her vanity table, arranged as if by her own hand.

  There were two other doors, both closed. Corinne opened one of them and found a second, smaller bedroom with wood-paneled walls. The room had a deep chill to it, and a smell of stale linens and old glue.

  Just inside the door, there hung perhaps two dozen framed photos and newspaper clippings. She went in to take a closer look. The frames were mismatched, and some of the photos were too small for the frames that held them, and most of the yellowed clippings had curled and slumped against their corrugated backing boards—but for all that, the display showed signs of real love and effort. It was a wall of honor. Its object was Anna Grace Littlefield.

  Here she was in a simple white dress, standing before a piano. Here she wore a black gown and stood with an orchestra at her back. An Egyptian tunic, a doublet and hose, a robe à la française with wide panniers. A
black bob, a red pageboy, a pile of blond curls. There were reviews and interviews where her name was mentioned. Crobyle in Thaïs, Stéphano in Roméo et Juliette, Zerlina in Don Giovanni. There were pages from recital programs and college newspapers. She’d sung Die schöne Müllerin in San Luis Obispo, Hermit Songs in Minneapolis, Harawi in Omaha, Strauss’s Four Last Songs in Charleston.

  The stairs creaked. An uneven rhythm. It must be Granddad. Corinne felt as if she’d been doing something naughty, and maybe she had. Maybe he’d closed the bedroom door on purpose, to keep her out. On the other hand, he’d closed the bathroom door, too, and hadn’t told her which was which.

  They met in the doorway. He said, “You found it. I was just comin’ up to show you.”

  “The pictures, you mean?”

  Moving to the center of the room, he turned to admire the display. He shifted to one side, so that his stronger right leg bore more of his weight. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “Still to this day, I never have heard her sing.”

  “Really?” Corinne looked at him. “But you have all this.”

  “Let me give you a piece of advice,” Granddad said with a smile. “It’s good to be friends with librarians.”

  “Actually,” Corinne said, returning his smile, “I happen to know that already.”

  They stood abreast, gazing quietly at the wall. Corinne had seen all she wanted, but he had apparently not yet gotten his fill.

  After a time, he turned to her. “Do you remember when you came here to visit?”

  She nodded. “I was four or five, right?”

  He was looking at her. “You don’t remember why you were here?”

  “It wasn’t just a visit? For its own sake?” It occurred to her, a little too late, that they might have come for her grandmother’s funeral.

  “Annie—your mother—wanted to come back here with you. To live.” He sat on the edge of the bed. “She wanted to live here so’s your gran and I could take care of you when she went away to sing.”

  Corinne sat beside him. “And you said no.”

  He nodded. “We said no.”

  Moments passed. Corinne’s mind raced in many directions at once. Mama and Daddy had divorced in ‘eighty-five. Why had she never linked it up with that one visit to Youngstown? Why had she never guessed that the information was so asymmetrical? What else had she failed to notice? What other connections had she failed to make?

  “Why?” she said. “Why’d you say no?”

  “We thought, ‘Well, you made your bed.’ That’s what we told her.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Divorce wasn’t something people in our set looked on kindly.”

  Divorced in ‘eighty-five. Remarried in ‘eighty-eight. Corinne returned to the wall of honor and looked again at the clippings. Mama had sung her three opera roles—none of them leads, it appeared—in late ‘eighty-five and early ‘eighty-six. And then what? Nothing, until long after John Carter’s birth, when she’d begun doing college recitals.

  “As long as I can remember,” Granddad was saying, “Annie was always ready to be somewhere else. I think she thought she should leave home at twelve instead of eighteen. So I don’t think it would’ve been good for her to come back here. I think she would’ve been itching to get out again the minute she set her suitcase down. But what if we said yes? I always wonder. What then?”

  Downstairs, the back door opened and shut, and Andrei called out, “Hello? Where’d everybody go?”

  Granddad got up. “I’ll go pour that coffee. You ready, darlin’?”

  “Still haven’t made it to the little girls’ room.”

  He gestured toward the hall. “Next door along.”

  “That’s where I’ll be.”

  While she went into the bathroom and peed, he descended the stairs, his boots thumping on the treads. When she’d finished, she tiptoed back to the small bedroom. She looked for some progression among the opera photos, some sign that her mother had begun to despair, or to long for home, or something. But of course there was no sign of any such thing. Wherever Mama was in costume, she was also in character, aping or prancing or posing or simply waiting for her next cue.

  In one photo, though—the one in which she wore the black dress—there was something. An expression of hope, or wonder, or love. She looked like a woman who had never made a regrettable decision in her life.