Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  He could think of nothing to say in response. He couldn’t even look at her.

  “Good night, guys,” Renata said, rising. She carried her plate into the kitchen and they heard it clatter in the sink. Then she came back through and went down the hallway toward the bedrooms. They heard her door close.

  After a moment, during which Tillie merely sipped her sherry and averted her eyes, Brian said, “There must be something we can do, Tillie. Some way to save it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Like I said, until the next time? It was cheating when we were first together.”

  “It’s been my doing,” he said. “It doesn’t have anything to do with anything else. My failure. I’m not blaming it on Henry or Lorraine or anyone but myself. Me. And I’m asking for you to forgive me. Help me.” His voice broke.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “I’m so sorry, Tillie.”

  “I said don’t.”

  He waited.

  She emptied the glass and then held it in her lap, turning it slowly in her lovely small hands. “I can’t, Brian. Not now. Maybe later but not now.”

  “I understand,” he told her. “If I thought there was a chance.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it now,” she said.

  She let a long interval pass.

  “I’m sorry about Elena.”

  “Thanks for coming.” His voice was louder than he had meant it to be. When he went on, he tried to soften it. “Elena would’ve been pleased.”

  “I didn’t do it for Elena, Brian. Elena’s gone.”

  “I thank you for it.”

  “I didn’t do it for you, either. Why is it that the men in your family have to see everything all the time as being about them? Why is that, Brian?”

  He said nothing.

  “You said Norman got in all right?”

  “I picked him up at the bus station.”

  “Tom?”

  “He’s in England.”

  “I didn’t think Lorraine would come back for it. Your father seemed to think she would.”

  “He was hoping.”

  “Poor man.”

  Brian kept silent, watching her white fingers on the glass in her lap.

  “I’m sorry, that sounded more sarcastic than I meant it.”

  “I didn’t hear it that way,” Brian said.

  “No, of course you wouldn’t.”

  Again, he was silent.

  “I guess that was sarcastic.”

  “Today,” he said, “I woke up wanting to call Elena and tell her what happened—that I’d lost her. I had the strangest sense that I should call and tell her that.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Brian. I’m sorry.”

  For a long time, then, neither of them said anything. They could hear Renata moving around in her room, and the strains of music coming from her stereo.

  “Will you be there for the ceremony tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  “Norman and I could come get you.”

  “I’ll get there on my own.”

  He kept still.

  “Henry was there with her through it all?”

  “All of it, yes.”

  “Poor man.” Now there was no irony in her voice at all.

  “I came in at the very end.”

  “I would like to have known her as a young woman.”

  He said, “I used to think that heaven would be that—we’d all be young at the same time, parents and children and everybody being kind—everybody home and happy.”

  She lay her head back, and closed her eyes.

  “I should leave.”

  “I’m so tired,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No.” He stood, and she did, too. They were facing each other, and he thought of kissing her, but then she moved with a kind of peremptory quickness to the door and opened it. The night air rushed in. He moved to the opening, realizing that he had been sitting there in his coat, someone on the briefest of visits.

  “Tillie,” he said. “I’ll do anything.”

  “We’ll see,” she said. “Maybe we’ll talk. I have to think it all through. I don’t want to do it on the basis of feeling this grief.”

  He stepped out onto the stoop and then turned to face her. “I love you.”

  She gave the slightest nod of her head. “Good night, Brian.” And then she closed the door.

  He made his way back to the car, got in, and for a very long time he sat there staring at the lighted windows of the place. He saw the lights go out. He saw the snow come from the western part of the sky, out of a wide coastline of advancing pearly clouds lighted by the half-moon. He drove home. On one side of the sky there had never been a clearer, colder night. The snow was arriving, sailing in on the wind, tiny flecks of icy glittering. He let himself into the dark house and moved through the rooms, turning lights on without being quite aware that he was doing it. There had been something so sad in the way she had stood there in the doorway, and he wondered if she had only been anxious to get rid of him. The only way for him to know for sure was to put himself in the way of whatever she would do; accept whatever pain or hope came from trying again. And then trying yet again. He stood in his kitchen and made himself a tall glass of whiskey, and held it up to his mouth—thinking just to relax, just to be able to sleep. The smell of it dropped down into his soul. It seemed that he had never wanted anything more in all his life. But then he poured it into the sink, turned the kitchen light off, moved totteringly into the darkened hall, and made his way to the bedroom. There, he lay down, still in his coat, in the quiet house. He was not drunk. She could not have supposed that he was drunk. And he had turned down having a drink with her. And she had let Renata leave the room. She hadn’t minded being alone with him. He began to cry, and lay crying quietly for a long time. There was, in all of the confusion, terror, and sorrow of the last few weeks, still, after all, some perdurable sense of helpless hope. In his mind’s eye, he saw his father sitting wakeful and ashen next to the sofa on which Elena Hutton lay half-conscious, a bundle of sticks under a blanket, a skull framed with wiry hair, dark eyes staring out.

  BEFORE

  December 16, 1994

  HENRY HADN’T DECIDED easily about the move. Having been through the upset and rancor of the end of his marriage, he longed for some sense of order and symmetry. With Lorraine gone, he had found himself rattling around in the house alone, and the days had begun to run together. He had suffered a couple of lapses with the bottle.

  So he had come home, and been taken in.

  Natalie was doubtful about the change, worried that his presence would be a strain on their mother, since Elena continued to concern herself with every aspect of the house’s management: though the old woman had slowed down over the past several years, she still insisted on cooking the dinners and doing the laundry, still bustled around the table while Natalie ate, making sure of Natalie’s comfort and refusing to listen to Natalie’s demands that she be more careful, that she stop worrying about everyone else and take it easy a little.

  “You’re the one doing the worrying,” she said.

  “Somebody’s got to do it around here,” Natalie said.

  “Oh, well, if it’s a job…”

  Natalie sometimes called her Lenie, because that was what her Aunt Viola had called her those years ago, when Natalie was a little girl and Viola would sit in the kitchen, the whole great bulk of her under an apron, complaining to Natalie’s mother about the aches in her old bones and the heartbreak of having children who refused to listen to her. Viola had lived to be a hundred, and now Natalie’s mother was almost that age.

  “Lenie,” Natalie said. “Please sit down. You’ll make yourself sick. Don’t let Henry do this to you. He’s a big boy. He can fend for himself.”

  “I never said I couldn’t,” Henry said. “I can get my own dinner.”

  “No, you say that but you don’t do it, and we end up doing it. We end up cleaning your messes for you. It’s alw
ays been that way with the men in this family.”

  “We’ve left the subject of dinner, haven’t we?”

  “Both of you be quiet,” said Elena. “I’d like it if you talk to each other at some level beyond the fourth grade, if you don’t mind. I’d like to see a little kindness between you. Humor me, if it has to be that. But do it.”

  She was indeed an impressive woman: completely self-reliant, intelligent and active, erect and still relatively youthful-looking, with her clear blue eyes and straight shoulders, her sculpted features and white, white hair. She was the one Henry had come home to. He could admit this fact to himself, as he could admit it to Natalie, who finally stopped making her objections in Elena’s presence, but continued, when alone with him, to voice them. “You’ve come back to be nursed by her and don’t think it isn’t obvious,” she said, as if he were not aware of this and as if knowing about it might have some bearing on his decision to remain.

  “Natalie,” he said. “Do you want me to leave?”

  She couldn’t go that far. “That’s for you to decide.”

  “Elena says she’s glad I’ve done this. I was over here a lot anyway, wasn’t I?”

  “She’ll work herself to death taking care of you,” Natalie said.

  “We won’t let her do that,” said Henry. “Besides, you know she’ll outlive us all.”

  “Don’t be glib,” his sister said. “She’s not as strong as she looks. You haven’t been here long enough to know what you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t want to make you unhappy,” Henry told her. “I wasn’t aware you felt quite this strongly against my being here.” Before she could answer, he went on: “No. That’s not true, really. And there’s no reason not to tell the truth. I’ve known how you felt about it.”

  “I know you’re hurting, Henry. But you have to lick your own wounds. You can’t depend on Lenie to nurse you.”

  “I’m not going to have anything to drink, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “That isn’t all that’s worrying me. I don’t want your unhappiness in the house. I won’t have you wallowing in it.”

  “Well, I promise that Elena won’t hear a discouraging word.”

  “And you needn’t be flippant about it.”

  He’d meant no such thing. “Really,” he said. “I’m serious.”

  “I’m worried about her, that’s all.”

  “Natalie, I won’t get in the way.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Henry. I don’t think you’re in the way.”

  Part of the trouble where Natalie was concerned was that she knew too many things about his marriage, the unhappy facts of life in his house—having had, all along, the confidence of Lorraine.

  Often, in his sister’s insistent green gaze he could read the subtle darkness of remembering; the signs that she was inwardly calling up his periodic unfaithfulness and neglect—his old weakness for alcohol, his failures as a father; all the rages and excesses of the last thirty-six years. But in the end Natalie never alluded to anything of this. She fretted and worried about Elena’s stamina, and nagged him about his general untidiness and lack of organization as though he were a teenager. And she bristled at the slightest indication, however unintentional, that he might begin to depend on her for any of the practical domestic things that he had once depended upon from Lorraine. He attempted to keep from irritating her and took up some of the chores that Elena had been paying neighborhood boys to do: cutting the grass, weeding the garden, making sure of firewood for the coming winter. He washed the cars, trimmed the rose bushes, painted the trim on the porch, and gradually his sister seemed to accept the new situation. There had even been moments of a kind of understanding between them.

  She had been there when, in the dim light of the foyer, he opened the first letter from Lorraine’s lawyer, reiterating in the coldest terms her demand for a divorce. Natalie stood looking over his shoulder and she murmured, “She means it this time.” Lorraine had waited until the youngest son, Norman, left the house to join the Navy. “I wouldn’t have thought she could be so cold about it,” Natalie said. “After so many years.”

  Henry understood this as something his sister meant to give him: her sympathy, her plain family loyalty. “No,” he told her. “I guess I earned it. I’ll tell you—I—I’ve just never been able to find any peace. I spent thirty years working for the university, and the whole time I was clenched tight as a fist. I’d go home and I couldn’t stand the noise of my own house.”

  “Don’t ask me for sympathy.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, dear.”

  Natalie said, “As long as you know.” And then she kissed his cheek. A benediction.

  Life had settled into a pleasant routine: in the evenings, she would come home from her job at the courthouse to find him cutting the grass, or tending the flowers, or working in the house. Their mother would be sitting in her favorite wing chair in the family room downstairs, watching television, reading, or listening to music. She would have put something in the oven, a roast or a casserole; baking, which she had learned from old Aunt Viola, and after all these years she still baked her own bread.

  For Henry, these evenings ran together and became the memory of a single evening, an image of himself in the cool shade of the house, clipping the tall weeds from the base of the porch steps, concentrating only on the task at hand, feeling, at last, almost quiet inside, basking in the satisfaction of knowing that Natalie was due home, the anticipation of seeing her come down the street, driving slow, like someone looking for the right address. He heard the crackling of tires on gravel as she pulled into the driveway, mingled with the other late summer sounds—the shouts of children up the block, the soughing of wind in the tops of the softly shedding trees—and it was all so calming, this tranquil music of a September sunset. Natalie got out of the car, shut the door, and called to him. “Hello.” He waved, then watched her walk through leaf shade and sun, up to the house and in. The smell of fresh bread drifted to him, and he went on with his work.

  What is it about this one memory of a September evening that distinguishes it from other memories, and suffuses it in the light of peace? Is it part of some pattern he couldn’t, at the time, see? It seems possible that something, some element of goodness he hadn’t dared hope for adds up to this picture of himself in a sweet dusk.

  How deep his despair had been, to be coming home, almost sixty years old, having failed at almost everything. And what a beautiful surprise, to find a cessation of his pain, here….

  He thinks of this now, almost grasps at it, here where he now is—the badness of a deep winter afternoon, a fearful cold, sitting with his mother on the living room sofa, facing the big picture window with its jagged borders of condensation and ice, looking out on the snowy street, the desolate street. They are alone, now. Natalie’s a thousand miles away, in Disneyland, of all places. The snow swirls, tiny flakes; the whole outside is agitating with it. He’s been spooning little cooled teaspoons of tea into Elena’s mouth because her free hand shakes too much to hold a cup of liquid without spilling it. Her “good” hand, the left, is bound up in a cast. Her bony fingers jut from the end of it and are an unhealthy bluish-yellow. There are small places in the skin of her face that are of the same shade. Between sips of tea, she murmurs her gratitude; but she’s shuddering with something inside and is attending to it.

  She sighs and stares. “Ah, Henry.”

  “I’m right here,” he says.

  “I remember saying that to your Aunt Viola. I was fifty-something. She was two years younger than I am now. And frightened, you know—lying in the bed. She couldn’t move. I said, ‘I’m right here, Aunt Viola.’ My God, she lived another six years.”

  “Yes,” he says. “That’s right.” It’s all he can think to say.

  “I’ve become like you now,” she says, and smiles. “Dwelling on the past a bit.”

  “I’ve stopped that,” Henry tells her.

  “It’s cold in here.�
��

  “I’ll turn the heat up.”

  “No,” she says. “Never mind. I was somewhere else.”

  “Elena?” he says, looking at the extraordinarily fragile bones of her hand—thin as the bones of a bird.

  “I don’t feel so good, Henry,” she tells him. “I feel very strange.”

  When he moves to support her she makes a gesture as if to stop him; it’s as though they’re listening for some sound out in the blowing snow.

  “It’s easing off, now,” she says.

  “Should I call the doctor?”

  “I just felt a little faint,” she tells him. “Be still.”

  Last weekend she broke her shoulder in a fall on the stairs. One day after Natalie had departed for California with the three women she works with and the neighbor, Mrs. Eberhard—a package tour sponsored and paid for by the university. The day of the accident, Henry assured Natalie over the telephone that things were all right. The break was not serious. And when she called back, two days later, he told her their mother had come through this as she had come through everything else, and seemed to be mending as well as could be hoped for. “You go have fun,” he said. “We’re fine, here.”

  He didn’t mention that in the hospital Elena had begun to experience difficulty keeping solid foods down, because the doctor had said it could be part of the healing process—her body adjusting to the shock and to the medicines they’d given her to ward off infection. The doctor seemed fairly confident that the problem would correct itself, though he had talked about putting her on an IV and keeping her for a few days more.

  Elena wouldn’t hear of it.

  She was her own law, now, she told them. Excluding Aunt Viola, there hadn’t been much longevity on either side of the family, and to be still alert at her great age was to have graduated from any requirements others might wish to impose, for whatever reasons. She wanted to go home; she was in a tremendous hurry to do so. If this was to be her death, then she deserved the choice, at least, of where it would happen. “I don’t want to die in a place like this,” she said. “Please, son.”

  He said, “Who mentioned anything about dying?”