Summer Hours at the Robbers Library

by Sue Halpern

  “I like you,” Kit said. “I told you. You’re a nice guy.”

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Wow what?”

  “I haven’t heard the ‘you’re a nice guy’ line since—I don’t know—college.”

  “Sorry,” Kit said. “I probably haven’t said anything like that since college, either. I’m—I’m out of practice.”

  He looked at her skeptically, squinting his eyes and pursing his lips. “You’re out of practice at what, blowing guys off?”

  Kit looked stricken. “No. No. Of course not. I’m out of practice at having people here. In the house with me.” There, she said it. She knew it sounded pathetic, but it was true. If he really was a good guy, he’d get it. Or at least try to get it.

  “You’re not playing the spinster card, are you, or the widow card?” Rusty joked, trying to put her at ease and realizing as soon as he said it that it was a mistake. Kit’s mouth had gone slack. Her eyes, too, if that was possible.

  “Cal’s not dead,” Kit said when she finally spoke. “Lucky me.” Her voice sounded uninhabited.

  “Oh, shit, sorry,” he said. “Foot-in-mouth disease. Chronic, apparently.” He flashed her an embarrassed smile that Kit didn’t acknowledge. She just sat there, watching the reflection of the blades of the overhead fan go round and round in her drink.

  “Now I get it,” Rusty said after a while, and when she didn’t ask what it was he got, said, “That’s why you moved here.” Said softly, but all in a rush, as if speaking quickly would make the ice he was skating on less thin.

  Kit put down her drink. “Actually, no,” she said, indulging him. “It’s why I left. Not that I had a choice.” Was this even true? What was it that Dr. Bondi was always telling her? That even when your back is up against a wall, you are not without options. “You can give up, or you can fight,” he’d say, and Kit no longer remembered if leaving was fighting or leaving was giving up. Certainly it was giving up the money, the “substantial gift”—gift—the Doctor was holding out to her if she’d stay. “Women do badly after divorce,” he explained, reaching for her hand as if she were a small, vulnerable child, and like a small, petulant child, she wouldn’t let him take it. “This is for your own good, Katherine. Divorcées”—he actually used that word—“suffer a major reduction in their standard of living.” Kit matched his pretend concern with pretend thankfulness, then turned around and divorced his son anyway.

  “A pyrrhic victory,” she told Bondi.

  “But a victory,” Dr. Silver Linings said.

  “Where is he—Cal—now?” Rusty said.

  “Cal?” she said, somehow surprised to be reminded they were talking about him. “Don’t ask me. I don’t know. Probably with his daddy.”

  “That’s different,” Rusty said.

  Kit shrugged. “Not really,” she said. What was different was talking about it. Here, in her house. Her house. In Riverton. Something she told herself she was never going to do.

  “I can’t,” she said suddenly, and firmly, as much to herself as to him. The tone of her voice had changed. It was brisk and a little boreal.

  “You can’t what?” Rusty said.

  “Do this. With you.”

  “Do what with me? What are you doing with me?” If he felt the chill coming off her, he wasn’t showing it. His tone was jocular. His eyes were playful, cajoling.

  “Talking,” Kit said simply.

  “Talking,” Rusty repeated. “Talking with me?”

  Kit nodded. “I can’t.” She had carved out this space for herself, carved it, it sometimes felt, with her bare hands. She had made it small and unaccommodating by design. No one else fit. No room.

  “Look,” Rusty said. “You have to understand. I like it here. In Riverton. I didn’t think I would, but I do. One reason I like it is that I like talking with you. I like you.” He paused, let it sink in, but not too deeply. “And I like Paddy. I like the Riches. I liked Carl. I like Sunny. I even like Evelyn. She reminds me of people from when I was growing up in Duluth. But the most important thing I like is me. I like me here.” He finished his speech, took a long swallow from the glass he had been clenching, topped it off, sank back into the sofa and looked at her expectantly.

  “Let me ask you this,” Kit said, choosing her words carefully. “If, tomorrow, you got your old job back, or some job like it, would you be a different person than you were before?”

  She looked at him unblinking, with an appraiser’s eye, and saw past Rusty’s anxious expression to the jeweler with his jeweler’s loupe turning first her wedding band—platinum, flecked with diamonds the size of grains of sand—and then her engagement ring—Tiffany setting, round cut, VS1 clarity—round and round, millimeter by millimeter, looking for perfection, imperfection, she wasn’t sure which, only that he was judge and jury, until finally he offered her a price so high her first instinct was to talk him down, but she thanked him instead and took the check and called it her buyout.

  “I’d like to say yes,” he said after a long pause, “but I want to be honest, and I don’t really know. That’s the truth.”

  “I can appreciate that,” Kit said. So that was that. Even if there had been room for him, even if she had wanted there to be room—not that she did; she didn’t—it was folly. Given the chance, he’d go back to a life cantilevered on a stack of dollar bills. He’d look back on his time in Riverton as something sociological or anthropological, talking up their simpler way of life as if he had found himself among pioneers, living on the prairie, milking cows and churning their own butter. In the best case, he’d remember, with a certain amount of affection, the old guys who took him under their wings and, with a certain amount of amusement, the woman with the disorderly hair and catalog clothes, whom he kind of liked, believe it or not, even though no one he knew would understand. And in the worst case, he’d find ways to make fun of them all. Riverton would be the butt of his jokes, and after a while the jokes would get stale, and he wouldn’t remember why he thought they (the jokes, the people, the place) were funny.

  It was dark now. The wine was mostly gone, and Kit wanted nothing more, right then, than nothing more.

  “I can drive you back to your car,” she said.

  “I can walk.”

  “I know you can walk,” she said. “We established that.”

  As he rose from the sofa, he caught sight of a picture on the opposite wall and walked over to get a better look.

  “I have one of these, too,” he said, studying it. “Me and my dad at Lake Superior. I think I was three.”

  “I wasn’t even a year old when that was taken,” Kit said. “Lake Erie. He was killed a few months later.”

  “Brutal,” he said.

  “I never knew him.”

  “That’s worse,” Rusty said.

  “You think so? I’ve always thought it would have been worse if I had.”

  They stood there for a few awkward seconds, studying the photograph, and then Kit pointed to the door and said, “The doorknob is a little jiggly, let me get it for you,” and nearly pushed him through it.

  Part V

  The Marriage Story

  Atlanta was good at first. It brought me out of the unlit tunnel I’d been stuck in since I lost my first and all babies, and now that I was on the other side, Cal and I treated each other with acute consideration. Our life together was like that slapstick routine where two people get to a door and one of them says, “You first,” and the other says, “No, you first,” and the first one says, “You first,” and on and on and on and no one goes through. We’d say “please” and “thank you” for the smallest things and tiptoe around each other, afraid to offend or appear anything but healed and content. People who didn’t know us, new friends, would tell us how cute we were with each other and how in love we seemed; women would confide that they wished their husbands would treat them with such tenderness. If only they knew.

  I tried. I tried for years because what else was I going to do there? Cal w
as in the most intense part of his training, exhausted, distracted, and often absent from home so he could be exhausted, focused, and present at the hospital. His priorities were my priorities; they had to be. By default, it seemed, I had become the abiding, pliant wife the Doctor wanted me to be.

  At work, where the head librarian tried to keep us up to date on cutting-edge scientific research, we’d look at images from the Hubble Space Telescope projected onto an enormous screen, and I’d find my mind drifting, and then my body, as if I were out there in that vast, cold darkness, blessedly unencumbered by mind or by body. I’d listen to geologists talking about drilling into the earth’s core and wonder why they cared so much about what was on the inside when there was so much to be concerned about on the outside. Epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control came in to talk about population studies and mortality versus morbidity and my ears perked up: I was intimately acquainted with both. Then they would leave and I’d be back to sitting on a high stool in the middle of the reading room, answering the stray question when it arose, but mainly making sure no one was cutting out pages from the biochemistry textbook—it was a thing some enterprising premed students started doing to ensure their fellow premeds wouldn’t be able to do the assigned reading—or pocketing one of our overpriced academic journals. Think of a corrections officer in a prison guardhouse and you’ll have a good idea what I looked like and what I did.

  I didn’t have the energy to admit to myself at first, let alone my weary husband, whose work was relentless, that my job was tedious. What was the point? We were where we were because of him. And what was my tedium compared with his? He was going to be a physician and I was just the physician’s wife; my work was simply a placeholder. Still, just as he was born to be a doctor, or raised to be one—because in Cal’s case, nature and nurture were indistinguishable—I had to believe it was the same with me: I was born to spend my days among books. It wasn’t noble or heroic like neurosurgery—I got that. But I also got that I loved Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. I loved Charles Dickens and George Elliot. I loved Mary Oliver, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, and Toni Morrison. And I loved libraries, because that is where I found all of them, and that was where I could hand them off to others. When I took the job at the science library, I told myself I was the kind of person who could find poetry in the periodic table, or see plotlines in the progression of cancer from one cell to the next. I tried to be that person. I wasn’t that person.

  Meanwhile, one by one, the wives of Cal’s male study partners got pregnant, as if pregnancy were on the rotation between nephrology and otolaryngology. I went to the baby showers, patted the bellies, cooed at the pictures, and learned to stop telling the truth about my own situation because people, even smart, educated people, seemed to think that my infertility might rub off on them. Then the babies started coming and there were playdates and clothing swaps and birthday parties, and my most generous interpretation was that those women simply forgot to include me. It was hurtful and isolating, especially because I couldn’t say anything about it. Compared with the challenges Cal was facing every day, my concerns seemed trivial. Try mentioning you felt left out when Lindsay didn’t invite you to Emma’s birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese to someone who just came off a fifteen-hour double lung transplant of a patient with cystic fibrosis who didn’t make it out of the operating room. You wouldn’t.

  Exhausted as he was, Cal was thriving at the medical center. Older doctors were asking to have him on their service; he became chief resident a year earlier than anyone had become chief resident before. At departmental get-togethers, his supervisors made it a point to pull me aside and let me know I was doing God’s work, not complaining when Cal missed holidays, not complaining when he was gone for days and nights at a time, not complaining when he got all the glory because, though all the glory was deserved, having a fixed address, clean clothes, bills paid, food on the table, and all the other things that passed in their world for domestic life were essential to the whole enterprise, not that anyone usually noticed. “Things seen and unseen,” one of them said, as if to console me by bastardizing Corinthians.

  It was the same with the Doctor, who wrapped strange thank-you notes written on pads of paper left behind by pharmaceutical reps hawking Viagra and Paxil around the checks he would send at Christmastime. In one, he said that he thought physicians’ wives should be beatified, which I took to mean that we were not. “There already is a Saint Katherine (more commonly known as Saint Catherine),” I was tempted to write back, but didn’t when I found out that her feast day had been removed from the Holy Roman calendar because none of her deeds and virtues could be verified.

  Cal was offered a neurology fellowship at Columbia and the joint neurology-neurosurgery position at UCLA, but when Emory matched their offers and threw in more support for his lab, Cal turned the others down, said he didn’t want to pack up and move his research, and that he was happy where he was, and as far as he could tell (not far, not his fault), I was, too.

  We stuck it out in Atlanta for five years, and I convinced myself it wasn’t bad. There were perks. When the dean of the medical school, where Cal was now an assistant professor (and the rumor factory had him pegged to be dean himself one day), heard that “Cal’s wife” had left her job at the science library, he greased the skids for me (well, more accurately for “Cal’s wife”) to become the head research assistant for a multiyear project correlating demographic information with that morbidity and mortality data I was drawn to in my other job. We’d look at the census and phone books and birth and death records and map the progression of the flu through the country, identify where sexually transmitted diseases were most prevalent and try to predict where they’d travel next. It wasn’t Dickens, but in those numbers you could see the outline of human stories and even begin to color them in. I made friends with the people in my group, and would go out now and then with the ones, like me, who were not especially tied down by children or spouses. Cal and I were living largely parallel lives, though when we’d intersect, we were friendly and companionable. If you had seen us together, you would have said we were happily enough married. If you’d asked me, I would have said that we never argued.

  Cal’s mom died when we were in Atlanta. After the burial, the Doctor pulled Cal aside and talked to him privately in his office while I served crudités and lemon pound cake to the people who came back to the house, which had fallen into mild disrepair over the months Lydia was ill. (We didn’t know; the Doctor didn’t want to distract Cal.)

  “Thank you for coming,” I said over and over again, only to hear “She was a great woman,” and “You must be devastated,” to which I could only think to say “thank you for coming” again.

  When Cal emerged from his father’s office, his expression, which looked sad and tired going in, had flatlined. His mouth was fixed and rigid; his eyes were senescent, as if they had finally seen too much. His hands—his very talented hands—were squeezed into fists. The Doctor was close behind, and even though he had just put his wife in the ground, he looked jolly. One of his golfing buddies sidelined him, and I watched the Doctor’s face reassemble and become grief-stricken again. If this were Hamlet, he’d be Polonius.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Cal when I caught up to him walking angry laps around his parents’ pool. His fists were still clenched, and the rain, though only a drizzle, had flattened his thinning hair and was streaking his glasses. Though we had flown in on separate planes, we’d been together for an uninterrupted thirty-two hours, which was a record in those days. I pried his fingers back and held both his hands. Anyone looking out at us from the dining room window would have assumed I was consoling him; they would have thought Cal was overcome with sorrow. But it wasn’t that at all. He wasn’t sad; he was furious.

  “He just got me to agree to give up Atlanta and move back here,” Cal hissed. He sounded like a cat. An angry, cornered cat.

  “What do you mean?” I said, genuinely confu
sed. This was Dr. Calvin Sweeney, associate professor of neurology and neurosurgery, boy wonder. This was Dr. Calvin Fortune Sweeney—or, as his students called him behind his back, “Dr. Calvin ‘Always Good Fortune’ Sweeney”—who was expected to unravel the genetics of Parkinson’s disease and find the cure for Alzheimer’s and perform the world’s first brain transplant. (Well, maybe not the brain transplant, but the expectations for what Cal would accomplish were enormous.)

  “Just what I said.” This time his voice was uninflected, hollow.

  “Here? To this house?”

  “No, but close enough. It doesn’t matter where. He says it’s time to come back.”

  “But why? That doesn’t make any sense. You’re doing great things. You’re going to do great things.” How many times had I heard people say this to me about Cal? How many times did he hear it? No doubt the Doctor heard it, too.

  “He’s jealous,” I said. “That’s what this is, Cal. He can’t live with the fact that you are a star.” By now we were both soaking wet, and someone on the other side of the glass was knocking on the dining room window to get our attention.

  “He may be jealous,” Cal said, “but he’s proud, too. He wants more credit. He wants people to see that his hand is behind everything I accomplish.”

  “Well, it’s not. He doesn’t own you,” I said indignantly. “You’re thirty years old. You don’t have to do what your daddy says.” I didn’t bother to hide my scorn.

  “You don’t have a daddy,” Cal said. “You can’t understand.”

  I dropped his hands and backed away. “Nice, Cal,” I said.

  He could be cutting. Usually it was so subtle I could convince myself it wasn’t happening. Cal had cultivated this midwestern, gee-shucks, humble Mr. Nice Guy persona, maybe in contrast to his blustering father, maybe because it worked for him, so when he said things I found hurtful, it was confusing. It was like dissonant music: I didn’t know what I was listening to. But there was no mistaking this; this stung.