The Forms of Water

by Andrea Barrett

  Twenty-nine years, he thought, tilting uncomfortably as Henry took a corner too fast. Twenty-nine years of a routine as regimented and reassuring as that of Our Lady of the Valley. He could still remember his first days at the abbey, when he’d watched forty men file silently into the church and begin the chants of the Office, bowing and rising and singing in unison. When he’d entered the Order, in 1927, the old rules had still been in effect. The monks wore the old habits, brown for him and the other lay brothers, white draped with black for the choir monks. They lived by the old schedule, chanting matins in the dark of the night and then the other hours as the day unrolled, celebrating Mass after terce, working outside between none and vespers, retiring just after dusk.

  In those old days before the war and the reservoir, before he’d sailed to China, every minute had been full to overflowing and the ten years he’d been granted had passed like a long and busy day. In his memory it was always mid-April there, a month his father had hated for the mud and the frenzy of work but which he had come to love within the abbey’s sheltering walls. The gray stone of the buildings shining palely as the sun rose over Hollaran Hill and illuminated the morning mist, the haze of green in the orchard as the branches broke into bud, the reddish shoots of the peonies breaking through the winter mulch along the warm south wall—the colors were sharp at dawn and gentled as the day progressed, and when it rained the pond to the east of the garden was black and tranquil. Ducks paddled in the dark water and laid their eggs in a tangle of juniper. He had worked in the kitchen after he first took his vows; a few years later he’d been assigned to the greenhouse and the garden. The flowers that graced the altar each day had been his.

  There was no garden at St. Benedict’s, and he wasn’t allowed in the kitchen. His years there had passed like a single sleepless night, but still he’d had discipline, routine, certain meals appearing at predictable times, and a sense of community if not of common purpose. It had been like joining another Order: that of the old and crippled and confined. He and his companions had not taken formal vows, but they’d practiced them all the same.

  Poverty—they owned nothing; chastity—the women lived in a separate wing and mingled with the men only at meals. Obedience—the administrator ruled their lives more firmly than any abbot. Stability had been easy, they lived and died in the Home. And then there had been fasting—who could eat the food?—and the discipline of silence: to whom could one talk in the endless nights? Corporal mortification had come without effort, courtesy of their decaying bodies, and although Brendan tried to don street clothes each day, many of his companions lived in bathrobes as shapeless as habits.

  The van sped past Cobbs’ Hill as Brendan thought about the life he was leaving behind. Thousands of people had stood on that hill in their Advent robes, his friend Judson had said, back when he could still speak. A century and a half ago, they had stood there waiting for the Second Coming and prepared for their own ascensions. All day and all night they stood, waiting for a miracle that never came. And when the ground didn’t open and swallow the sinners, when the saints didn’t leap from their graves, the faithful had climbed down from that hill and trudged home brokenhearted.

  “They held their arms over their heads,” Brendan remembered Judson saying. “As if they were going to start flying any minute.” Judson had held his own arms in the air as he spoke, his pale blue bathrobe dropping away from his wrists and his eyes sharp with amusement. For thirteen years now he’d been as good as dead, and on the grass where the faithful had once crowded hip to hip, a group of teenagers were sunning themselves and tossing bright plastic disks to their dogs.

  Henry drove past the hill, past the park, down the ramp that led to the highway, and nothing happened. Perhaps they haven’t noticed yet, Brendan thought. Perhaps they don’t care. One old man vanished in one old van, which surely the people at the Home understood had been borrowed, not stolen, and would be returned. The tires hummed on the pavement, and Brendan saw billboards, road signs, digital clocks flashing white numbers, cranes, drains, a half-built bridge, cars, weeds, chicory growing in blue profusion, litter, grass, sky, storefronts, the back of a church, a lit cigarette spinning end over end, a dog running behind a fence, a flock of pigeons rising all at once, a canoe strapped to the roof of a truck, rocks, gravel, trees, clouds.

  Lord, he thought. Thank you for springing me. And he was about to be grateful for the ease with which they’d escaped when Henry turned left at the snarl where the highways intersected.

  “Wrong turn!” Brendan cried. They had to go east, not west, along the path of the Erie Canal to Massachusetts. Henry was driving too fast, and they were not even launched on the Thruway yet, and already they were lost. Brendan’s wheelchair was parked behind Henry’s seat, and he couldn’t lean forward far enough to tap Henry on the shoulder. His left hand flapped uselessly in the air. “You’re going the wrong way!”

  “I have to make a few stops. Pick up a couple of things before we head out.” Henry turned on the radio and hummed along with the tune that suddenly filled the van.

  “We don’t need things,” Brendan said. He was amazed that Henry couldn’t feel the urgency, the absolute importance of leaving town that instant. “What do we need?”

  “A little road food. A couple of thermoses, lots of coffee, some blankets, maybe some sleeping bags—you know. Stuff for a weekend trip.”

  Henry hummed and drove, seeming each minute to be in a better mood. Behind him Brendan lapsed into silence and tried not to sulk. He had never, in his long life, made a weekend trip; he was in Henry’s hands and could do nothing without him and it was useless, he knew, to resist. Better to let go of his own will and to find some joy in surrender. He gazed at the maple trees lining the road, with their soft green leaves spread out like flounces. He peered into the windows of the passing cars and marveled at the faces. He thought how, at the Home, the aides would be loading the lunch trays and Roxanne would be finishing her third old man of the morning. He still felt the warmth of her hands on his back, and he knew that his success with Henry was due in part to her. Henry’s lust and longing had filled that room like a cloud and rendered him incapable of thought.

  Henry turned off the highway, drove down a road Brendan had never seen, and pulled into a strip of stores built so recently that the trees along the sides were no more than stems propped up by sturdy poles and wires. They grew melons here, Brendan thought. When I was Henry’s age. And potatoes and onions and cucumbers and squash.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” Henry said, and then he hopped out and vanished behind the bright facade of a 7-Eleven. He returned a minute later, frowning. “Do you have any cash?”

  “Me?” Brendan’s clubbed hands beat at his pockets. “Maybe ten dollars,” he said, considering what might be left of the thirty dollars he received from the Home each month. “Look in my coat.”

  Had they brought his coat? Henry frowned again, picked up the plastic bag containing Brendan’s clothes, and then threw it down without looking. “We’re a little low on funds,” Henry said. “We’ll have to think of something to do about that.”

  Brendan had given no thought to money at all, but he had assumed Henry would take care of whatever came up. Now he saw that their trip was going to require wits as well as luck, and for some reason this cheered him. They could move across the state like friars with their begging bowls, living on whatever came to them.

  Henry vanished into the store again and returned a few minutes later with a small bag and two huge plastic mugs that smelled of burnt coffee. He handed Brendan one of the mugs. “Here you go. This’ll charge you up for the trip.”

  Brendan bent his palms around the mug, which was capped and seemed to be insulated. He sipped through the tiny opening in the lid. The coffee was scorched and doctored with milk and sugar; he usually drank it black and he was prepared to dislike it. But the muddy fluid was hot and sweet and tasted wonderful.

  A police cruiser entered the lot behind them and nearl
y clipped the bumper of the van. Brendan bowed his head and sipped from the mug. It’s over then, he thought. Over before we’ve even begun. He’d had this coffee, different from any he’d had before, and a decade’s worth of sights from their brief drive. Those would have to be enough. He sang a psalm to himself and waited for the rap on the window, the head stuck inside the door. Henry started the engine and drove past the cruiser as if it were only another car.

  “One more stop,” he said, and Brendan lifted his head in amazement. The policeman seemed unaware of them. He had rolled down his window and was talking to a girl in a halter top. “One more stop,” Henry said, “and then we’re on our way.”

  8

  HENRY HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN HOW DELICIOUS IT WAS TO BE behind a wheel. The van handled well despite its size; the steering was tight and the highway was as smooth as a woman’s leg. He sped down the stretch between the plaza and the turnoff to Irondequoit, and when he caught the light at Titus he cornered with a small but satisfying squeal and then slowed when he heard his uncle gasp. Through the broad curving lands of his old neighborhood, past the culs-de-sac and the handsome houses and the islands planted with magnolias and bulbs, he drove smoothly, rhythmically, enjoying both the feel of the van and the sight of all he’d created in what had once been a melon field. Kitty used to tell him that he loved this first development of his the way another man would love a first child, and he knew, looking at the smooth green lawns, that she was right.

  His sense of well-being vanished when he saw Lise’s car parked next to Kitty’s in front of his old house. Lise, his oldest daughter, wasn’t speaking to him and wouldn’t answer his calls. More than her younger sister, Delia, she seemed to be unable to forgive him. She might have accepted his failure and financial ruin—she had made it through college, she had a job, she was safer than the rest of them. But when Kitty, on the night she’d cursed Henry and thrown him out, had called both Lise and Delia and told them it wasn’t just the way Henry had trashed their futures, nor the way he’d gambled everything on his foolish project and lost, but the lying, the cheating, the girlfriends—Anita, most of all—the girls had turned their backs on him.

  Anita, Henry said to himself, and he nearly groaned aloud as he parked the van and lowered his uncle to the ground. Useless for him to try to explain that Anita had also abandoned him. Lise and Delia had turned away from him, sped to their mother’s side and embraced her cause completely. Kitty, who wore the role of wronged wife as if she’d been born to it, hadn’t spoken to Henry in more than a month. He had hoped to find the house empty today.

  He wheeled Brendan up the flagstone walk he’d laid so carefully when the girls were young. “Does she know we’re coming?” Brendan asked.

  “No,” Henry said. His heart skipped several beats. The pachysandra around the beech looked ratty and dry and the lawn was riddled with grubs. The screens still leaned against the garage where he’d left them. One wheel of Brendan’s chair caught the corner of a stone thrown up by frost, and the fact that Kitty hadn’t had the stone replaced annoyed Henry enormously. His house was falling apart already, and by the time the bank auctioned it off it was bound to look hollow, haunted, unloved. Whoever bought it would have only contempt for the man who had let this happen.

  Brendan said, “Why don’t I wait out here?”

  “Come in with me,” Henry pleaded. “You haven’t seen Kitty in ages.” He rang his own doorbell and then stood behind the wheelchair, hoping his uncle’s presence might neutralize Kitty’s venom.

  His dog, Bongo, yelped and yowled inside the house. His daughter opened the door, stared at him, and then said, “Grunkie,” after a moment’s poisonous silence.

  Lise had cut her hair, and within its smooth brown frame Henry saw his own face reflected. She had his bumpy nose, which looked craggy in his face but was too strong and large in hers. She had his jaw, a bit too square, and his pale blue, almost lashless eyes. It pained him that she wasn’t more attractive, and he wished that Anita, or someone like her, would take her aside and teach her how to dress and wear makeup. She was almost aggressively homely, and in her refusal to decorate herself, in her blunt manners and sensible clothes, Henry saw his own stubbornness. Delia, dainty and feminine, so much resembled Kitty that he felt he’d had no part in making her. But Lise was his, so much like him that he both rejoiced and despaired.

  Lise stared steadily at him and then slipped her eyes to Brendan’s neck brace. “What a surprise,” she said.

  “Lise,” Henry said. “It’s good to see you.” His voice sounded false even to him and he winced as she helped Brendan over the threshold and into the house without another glance at him. Bongo hurled himself at Henry’s knees, sixty pounds of spotted mutt with a floppy pink tongue, and Henry scratched Bongo’s ears as Lise and Brendan chatted. Then Lise called, “Grunkie’s here!” as if Henry didn’t exist. Henry’s heart shrank and withered and burned.

  “Lise,” he said again, but she looked at him scornfully and moved away. When she was a tiny, bony child, she had sometimes looked at him in just that fashion. She went to her room and hid in the back of her closet whenever he punished her, and when he went up later to coax her out, her eyes glittered so coldly that he found himself apologizing and forgetting her misdeeds. She stood at the shelves near the staircase now, slamming books into boxes. The floor was littered with them, he saw—boxes of books, of pictures, of crystal and china and clothes. He had thought Kitty still had a few weeks before she had to move.

  Kitty came out of the kitchen, wrapping a goblet in white paper and saying, “Brendan! What in the world … ?” in the low, rich radio voice she’d developed when she went to work at the PBS station. Henry could remember when her voice had sounded like anyone else’s. One afternoon, during the summer that he’d turned twenty and had been working with a construction crew, he’d looked down from the roof of a cottage on Canandaigua Lake and seen on the beach below him a young woman with two little girls in tow. The girls were blond; the woman, hardly more than a girl herself, was black haired, creamy skinned, delicately boned. She looked like Henry’s mother, whom Henry could hardly remember. She spread out a blanket, settled the girls and the dolls they’d brought with them, and arranged a meticulous picnic: sandwiches cut neatly in half, grapes and peaches wrapped in a napkin, homemade cookies in a lidded box, and miniature versions of everything for the dolls. A baby-sitter, he’d decided, watching as she solemnly poured liquid into the dolls’ cups. Working for one of the wealthy summer families. The charmed circle she and the girls had formed on the sand looked like everything he’d missed in his own life. He had climbed down from the roof and dropped his hammer and told his foreman he was taking a break. Drawn by an envy so strong that it was already almost love, he had introduced himself to Kitty and her charges.

  “Is that your house?” she’d asked, and he would have given anything to have been able to say yes. The sweet, bland surface of her life enchanted him. She had two parents, two brothers, a dog and a cat; as he courted her, with a frenzy that excluded both his sister and his ailing grandparents, he saw a chance that he could escape his ragged childhood and make a stable family for himself. His dreams had worked out just the way he’d wanted. He’d married her and moved into the city and left Coreopsis behind; they’d raised two daughters and had picnics on beaches and vacations in the mountains. All along, until that wretched radio station had captured her, he’d thought she shared his contentment.

  And then one year, when the girls were half-grown and he was working day and night building the fortune he’d thought they both wanted, she’d signed up for some night courses and made friends with a group of women he disliked. She’d started volunteering at the radio station when Lise entered high school, and then somehow, when his back was turned, she’d become a stranger with a tangle of black hair and too much eye makeup and this voice—this husky, rippling voice—that rained over the city five times a week.

  There’d been times, in the last few years, when h
e’d been driving along the back roads searching for land and had heard her voice purring from the radio. Then he’d imagined that he didn’t know her at all and that he could go home and fall into bed with this frightening, exciting stranger. He’d imagined creeping up the stairs and coming upon her damp from her shower, her hair glistening with steam and her voice caressing him. But she kissed him absently when he approached her and then put a load of laundry in the drier or a chicken in the oven. She set her glasses on her nose and said she had papers to read, or she complained about his friends or his hours or his bills. When he made love to her, she looked out the window or twined her fingers in the fur of Bongo, who came and stood by them and sniffed and whined. She had pushed him away—on purpose? By accident? He’d never been sure—and then used the women to whom he’d gone for comfort as an excuse to push him out.

  Her face soured when she caught sight of him. “Oh,” she said. “You.”

  “Kitty,” he said. She looked dry, self-possessed, incapable of yielding. And yet he could remember a time, before the voice, when she’d lain down with him in the fields of Coreopsis.

  “Are you here for a reason?” she said.

  He stood behind Brendan’s chair and waved his hands over Brendan’s head, meaning, Don’t humiliate me. Don’t do this in front of my uncle; feeling, behind his hope, the weight of all the hard words she’d heaped on him the past six months.

  “We’re busy,” she said, disappointing but not surprising him. “We have things to do. I’m moving, in case you’ve forgotten.”

  Brendan cut smoothly and gently into her angry speech: “Where to?” he asked. He might have been talking, Henry thought, to one of the strangers at his stoplight.