News From Heaven

by Jennifer Haigh

  In the same way, Marianne Blinn was a controversial hire. The other candidate, a recent Penn State grad whose uncle sat on the school board, had significant support. Marianne’s degree from a foreign university was viewed with suspicion. More than one board member argued that, as a doctor’s wife, she didn’t need the job.

  But Ed lobbied hard on her behalf, and Marianne Blinn was hired to teach French and Latin. Later a new course was added, introductory German, her native tongue. Each morning she was seen driving to school in her little Audi. (Foreign cars, in those days, were rare in Bakerton. Even now you don’t see them every day.) She was a tall, striking woman, dark-haired, with a single dramatic streak of gray she didn’t bother to touch up. This was a subject of much discussion at Ruth Rizzo Beauty, where Joyce reported each Saturday morning for her wash and set. I don’t know why she doesn’t do something with that hair, said Ruth as she scrubbed Joyce’s scalp. Lord knows she can afford to. Like every woman she knew, Joyce got a fresh perm every three months. (The frugal, the ambitious, and the hard up rolled each other’s hair at home.) Marianne’s hair was shoulder-length, twisted sometimes into a loose bun. She wore no lipstick, ever, just rings of black liner around her eyes.

  By all accounts she was a marvelous teacher. Still, there were critics. When parents complained that she graded harshly, Ed refused to intervene. The teachers are on the front lines, he told Joyce, as if she might have forgotten. The least I can do is back them up. Rebecca, a bright but erratic student, studied French with fierce intensity. In the evenings she barricaded herself in her bedroom with vocabulary tapes—recordings of Madame Blinn’s own sultry voice, duplicated in the school’s new audio lab. J’irai, tu iras, nous irons, vous irez. Each followed by a brief pause in which the student was to pronounce the words herself.

  Joyce never learned a foreign language. In high school she declined Latin verbs, but this had never seemed more than an exercise, a language spoken only by priests. Lingering outside Rebecca’s door, she’d felt a deep loneliness she remembered from childhood. After her father passed the citizenship exam, he’d insisted they speak only English at home, but late at night, after the children were in bed, he tuned the radio to a Polish station from Pittsburgh. One night—she was very small, five or six—she’d crept downstairs. Listening, she had felt forsaken. It had seemed in that moment that her father was a stranger, thinking and dreaming in a language she would never understand.

  In June Madame Blinn hosted a dinner party in her home for the handful of students who’d earned A’s each quarter. To Joyce, who’d kept her own pupils at a distance, it was a startling notion. The Blinns lived in a stately Victorian on Indian Hill, an enormous house for a childless couple. Dr. Blinn had bought it from the estate of Virgie Baker, whose father and grandfather had owned the mines. As a girl, Joyce had walked past the house on her way to school, peering through the thick hedge of lilacs hoping for a glimpse of a Baker. The fragrance of lilacs in springtime had followed her down the street.

  Joyce had planned to drive Rebecca to the dinner, but Teddy was running a fever; as he breathed into his nebulizer, he wouldn’t let go of her hand. Instead it was Ed who ferried Rebecca back and forth and was invited in for coffee and dessert. The next morning Rebecca raved about the Blinns’ huge dining room, the table big enough for twelve. (The couple apparently entertained a great deal.) Madame Blinn had cooked the dinner herself: a creamy leek soup (where, Joyce wondered, did you buy leeks in Bakerton?), a leg of lamb, crepes dripping with butter for dessert. Rebecca described these dishes in elaborate detail, and Joyce remembers thinking that her daughter seemed a little in love with Marianne Blinn. The night of the dinner she’d changed her outfit several times, as though dressing for a date.

  Joyce cooked with margarine, still does. They’d both grown up with it during the war, and Ed said often that he preferred the taste.

  After dinner with Eleanor, on her way home from the Commercial, Joyce drives past Albert Chura’s house. It is a small, tidy place, yellow brick, with an attached garage. The lawn is shorn and well fertilized, as dense and green as Astroturf. In the backyard is a huge aluminum shed, nearly the size of the Churas’ house.

  As she approaches, Albert comes out of the shed. Recognizing her car, he waves her down. Local custom demands that she lower her window and make small talk for a few minutes. When they have exhausted the topic of her lawn—he agrees to come back Monday to finish the trimming—Albert says, “Joyce, have you ever seen my barn?”

  Oh, hell, she thinks, remembering what Ed used to say: That guy will talk your ear off.

  She parks and follows him into the shed, which is full of tools and equipment—a snowblower and several mowers, intact and in pieces; a lawn tractor, a contraption she believes is called a roto-tiller. In contrast to the tidy yard, the shed is dirty and cluttered, crowded with junk.

  “Very impressive,” Joyce says.

  “I like to have something to work on.” Albert points to an old bicycle propped against one wall, inverted, its wheels removed. “That’s my latest project. Not worth the effort, probably. It’s a piece of crap.”

  She notices in one corner a portable radio, its antennas extended. Beside it are several mugs and glasses, a plastic Pepsi bottle, round canisters of snuff.

  Albert follows her gaze. “I come out here when I need peace and quiet,” he says, and Joyce thinks of his wife, known to be a persnickety housekeeper. Joyce once spotted her at the foot of the driveway, spritzing the mailbox with a bottle of Windex.

  “About that bike of Ed’s,” he begins.

  “Sure, Albert,” says Joyce. “I don’t see why not.”

  Sunday morning dawns quietly, no lawn mowers humming. The neighborhood is populated with Catholics of Joyce’s generation, and out of piety or habit, they avoid doing chores on the Sabbath—at least any chores that the neighbors can see. Joyce can recall the stern text of her Baltimore Catechism: By the Third Commandment all unnecessary servile work on Sunday is forbidden. Young people, of course, have never heard of this injunction. From her kitchen window, she sees Andy Carnicella puttering in his backyard, dismantling a Weed Whacker. Andy is Rebecca’s age, and by the time they came along, the Baltimore Catechism had fallen out of favor. They’d been spared the endless memorization, the faith distilled down to hundreds of questions and answers Joyce had learned by rote.

  What is servile work?

  Servile work is that which requires labor of body rather than of mind.

  Her whole married life, Sunday had belonged to the crossword. Ed, the early riser, would have two pencils sharpened; over breakfast and again after church, they sat at the kitchen table happily filling the boxes, rising sometimes to consulting the atlas or the dictionary or the encyclopedia shelved in the den. Joyce hasn’t touched a crossword since September. Now she drinks coffee and scans the headlines and wonders how to fill the day.

  In the afternoon she goes down to the basement, a windowless corner Ed used as his workshop. Compared to Albert Chura’s cluttered shed, it is orderly as an operating room. Against one wall are a dozen cardboard boxes, neatly stacked. Another wall is covered with corkboard; there are hammers and handsaws and other items she can’t identify, all hanging by hooks. Three low shelves hold paint and varnish, various solvents, old coffee cans filled with hardware. Joyce peers into each one and touches its contents, the nails and screws and bolts and hinges her husband sorted carefully by size.

  She sits at the workbench Ed built, on an old kitchen chair he salvaged from a set they’d retired years ago. She has resolved to sort through one box per day. It is the opposite of servile work. It is labor of the heart.

  The boxes, for the most part, are unlabeled; there’s no telling what a particular one will hold: vinyl records, 78s and 33s; camera equipment, books that had overflowed the shelves in the den. In Friday’s box she’d found Ariel and Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. Ed had read the series years ago, all ten volumes; she remembered him lingering over Rousse
au and Revolution, slogging through The Age of Faith. Joyce had marked the carton DURANT. She would donate the set to the public library. It was not the sort of thing she’d ever read herself.

  Today she chooses a box at random. This one is too heavy to lift, so Joyce kneels beside it. Ed had suffered twinges of arthritis, but Joyce, knock wood, has no such troubles. Must be all those years of kneeling, Ed used to joke. His own knees protested; they had remained Protestant. Joyce had good Catholic knees.

  The box is filled with high school yearbooks, a decade’s worth of the Bakerton Banner. For most of his career, for no extra pay, Ed had advised the yearbook staff. A passionate amateur photographer, he made sure Bakerton had a fully equipped darkroom, something no other local school possessed. On schooldays it was used by the photography classes; on weekends, Ed went there to develop his own film. In summer he spent whole days in the darkroom. Often he rode there on his bicycle, his camera bag strapped to his back.

  Joyce selects a yearbook at random: BANNER ’75. She opens to the frontispiece, looking for the familiar verse: Go placidly among the noise and haste. Another private joke: each graduating class voted on a poem for the opening page, and for most of the sixties and seventies—to Ed’s amusement and despair—“Desiderata” had won the poll.

  She remembers enough Latin to know it’s a fatuous title. The poem, it seems to her, has little to do with desire.

  Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

  Joyce marks the box BANNER: another donation for the public library. Gratefully she turns out the light.

  On Monday Albert Chura trims the hedges. After they finish their coffee, Joyce takes him down to the basement. She points to the boxes marked BANNER and DURANT. “They’re pretty heavy. Do you suppose you can get them up to my car?”

  “Sure.” Albert eyes the stacks of boxes. “What’s in all them?”

  “I haven’t gone through those yet. So far it’s mostly books.”

  Albert’s eyes flicker. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Going through Ed’s private things?”

  “Someone has to do it.” Joyce has imagined Rebecca some years hence, flying back from France for her mother’s funeral. It seems unfair to make her sort through two parents’ possessions, forty years’ worth of memories in that house.

  After Albert leaves, she chooses a lightweight box, one she can manage on her own. She has never been comfortable asking for help. The other cartons had been closed carelessly, the cardboard flaps folded end over end. This one is sealed with packing tape, as though its contents might escape.

  Cutting it open, she understands why it’s so light. Nothing inside but photographs, piles of them. Ed’s hobby had vexed her in the beginning, since more than anything, she hated to have her picture taken. Early in their courtship she had submitted to the camera, her grim smile speaking for her: Get that thing away from me. Later, pregnant with Rebecca, she refused to be photographed at all. The children, luckily, were unself-conscious models, so Ed at last left her alone. Every few months she’d filled another album, Rebecca and Teddy at various ages and stages. The little orphans, Rebecca now jokes: their father invisible behind the camera, their mother hiding in the next room.

  But these aren’t family photos. They’re black-and-white shots taken in and around the high school. She recognizes certain classrooms, the library, the cafeteria, the gym. Yearbook discards, then: unknown teenagers with outdated haircuts. She is halfway through the pile when she spots a familiar face.

  Marianne Blinn is laughing into the camera, Marianne in a dark coat and earmuffs, her hair flocked with snow. Joyce stares at the photo a long time. Marianne clearly doesn’t mind being photographed. She beams as though the camera were a lover, or simply a very good friend.

  Joyce puts the photo aside. Beneath are more shots of Marianne. In her classroom, erasing the blackboard. In the cafeteria, holding a lunch tray. Sitting at her desk before a bulletin board decorated with snowflakes; Joyce picks out the words Joyeux Noel.

  Other shots were taken in summer: Marianne in a tank top and long skirt, astride a bicycle.

  Ed’s private things.

  Breaking her own rule, she opens a second box. This one, too, is sealed with packing tape. Inside is an untouched package of Kodak paper, and Joyce feels a momentary pang: photographic paper was expensive, and they were both children of the Depression. Ed had abhorred waste of any kind.

  Beneath the Kodak paper is a slippery stack of plastic envelopes, each filled with amber negatives. At the bottom is a pile of color prints—red-eyes, double exposures, decapitations, the sorts of mistakes that usually ended up in the trash. Why would Ed keep these? she wonders. Why on earth? As she sorts through the pile, she understands. The photos weren’t Ed’s but Teddy’s, taken with his new Instamatic the summer he was thirteen. It was, without question, the happiest time of his life, his weeks at Camp Aspire.

  They had driven him there in their old station wagon, a long drive on winding back roads since there wasn’t—still isn’t—a highway running north to south, an efficient route from Bakerton to western New York. Rebecca had stayed behind with her aunt Dorothy, so Teddy had the entire backseat to himself. He stretched out full-length, surrounded by his prized possessions—his Evel Knievel action figures, the toys he hated to leave behind but in a day would forget entirely, distracted utterly by sack races and scavenger hunts, his new friends, his counselor, Zachary, a young medical student he’d idolize the rest of his days.

  The camp was just over the state line, a woodsy spot, the small cabins built around a lake. In June and July it was overrun by Girl Scouts, but for three weeks at the end of the summer, it hosted kids with cystic fibrosis. Joyce had learned of the camp from Teddy’s doctor. It was, he said, a welcome break for parents: a brief holiday from medical appointments, the daily gauntlet of aerosols and nebulizers, the endless, hopeless work of clearing mucus from the lungs. The kids, too, got a break from overprotective mothers, a chance to make new friends. They were treated to a few weeks of vigorous, lung-clearing activity—swimming, hiking, canoeing—in the fresh mountain air.

  Of course, they got more than that. No one realized then that CF kids passed infections between them, that the camp’s equipment—the shared aerosols and nebulizers—were a breeding ground for bacteria, resistant strains that flourished in cystic lungs. Teddy came home with pneumonia. He spent the autumn at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, breathing through a respirator, visited daily by his camp counselor Zachary, a second-year resident at Children’s.

  It rained heavily the morning of the funeral, a cold downpour that soaked her coat in the short walk from car to church. Joyce scarcely remembers the long Mass, the droning eulogy—those details, mercifully, have been wiped from her memory. She recalls only the procession out of the church, the priest and the altar boys and finally the family following Teddy’s small casket. Outside the wind had kicked up, a dizzy spiral of snowflakes. The church steps were edged with white, the first snowfall of the year.

  As they stood waiting for the hearse, a tall woman approached Ed and clasped him fiercely. Joyce waited for the usual platitudes—He’s at peace now. An angel in heaven. But the woman said none of these things.

  Instead, on the steps of the church, she swore bitterly: Jesus Christ, Ed. The epithet was oddly beautiful in the low, accented voice of Marianne Blinn.

  Joyce stood there awkwardly, watching them. They were nearly the same height. Marianne’s cheek was pressed to Ed’s. Her eyes, like his, were closed.

  That day was like truth itself—colder than you expected, and full of surprises. In a year the Blinns would divorce, shocking the town. Dr. Blinn would retire and move to Florida, and Marianne would go back to wherever she’d come from.

  But that morning on the church steps, a fine snow swirling the sidewalk, Joyce wasn’t thinking of the Blinns. She was remembering Teddy at the window in his pajamas, looking out at the other
children sledding, an armada of yellow toboggans shooting down the hill.

  It is too late in life to open all these boxes.

  Joyce reseals them carefully, understanding—too late—why Ed had taped them shut: a protective impulse, a kindness to them both. Upstairs the kitchen is filled with a golden light. In another hour, the sun will set.

  Where did the time go?

  Albert Chura’s number is written in Ed’s neat cursive on the inside cover of the phone book. Albert’s wife answers the phone. “He isn’t here right now, Mrs. Hauser. Want me to have him call you back?”

  “Darlene,” Joyce says, “would you do me a favor? Give Albert a message from me.”

  She is sitting on the front porch when he wheels up on Ed’s bicycle. He dismounts carelessly and drops it roughly on the lawn.

  Joyce rises. She has rehearsed what she is going to say. I’m sorry, Albert. I’m not ready to part with it. He doesn’t give her a chance to speak.

  “Indian giver,” he says, and she smiles. It is a phrase she remembers from childhood, and for a moment she is grateful to him for easing the tension with a joke.

  “What are you laughing at? You should be ashamed of yourself,” he says, his boots loud on the porch steps. “A teacher! And here you are going back on your word.”

  He stands too close to her. His face is very red, his breath beery. He wears the alcohol like a subtle cologne, a fruity reek that seems to come from his pores.

  “I’m sorry,” she begins.

  “A teacher!” he repeats, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Ed was a good friend to you.” The words come out more softly than she intends. She is dismayed to hear a tremor in her voice.

  “Well, maybe so. But it was a two-way street. I was a good friend to him, too.”

  Joyce glances across the street. Betty Bursky’s windows are open. She wishes he would lower his voice.

  “I was trustworthy,” he says. “That’s hard to find these days. In them days, too. Hard to find, period, in this town.”