by Jon Cohen
Iris, who never cried, knew that she was about to. Iris, who never let circumstances escape her control, trembled as she waited for him to refuse her offer. She closed her eyes because she could not endure it.
When she opened them again Louis was beside her. He had moved away from his window and across the room without a sound, without disturbing, it seemed, a single molecule of air within the shaded bedroom. As she watched his hand approach hers, she thought that it would be without weight because she was not sure if this really was Louis or a vision of Louis that she had willed across the room to her side. But when he touched her, she felt the warmth and substance of his hand and the trembling in his fingers that matched her own.
Louis looked down at Iris. He did not, as she had hoped, imbue her with physical qualities she didn’t possess. Nothing about her sparkled or shone or made him catch his breath. He saw her as she was. Everything Iris despised about herself, he saw. He saw, then dismissed all that he saw for the simple beauty of her gesture, for her brave and lovely attempt to rescue him. For Louis, it was as if Iris had defied the licking flames of the burning back room of the hardware store, had risked everything to pull him to safety. Although she didn’t know it, by risking all, she was transformed, yet unchanged. For this woman, he would walk out his front door.
“Well,” said Louis, trying to steady his voice, “shall we go?”
Iris squeezed his hand in reply.
Louis let her walk ahead of him through his bedroom doorway. He stepped into the hall behind her, then turned, looked at his bedroom for a long moment, then gently closed the door.
“Is it cool out?” he asked as they started downstairs. “Will I need a jacket?”
“A little cool, but I think you’ll be fine,” said Iris.
“Sounds to me like hat and scarf weather,” said Louis. “But then for me it always is.”
Iris looked up at him as he laughed softly. She smiled. “You’re going to be fine, you know that, don’t you?” She’d learned that the patients she’d cared for who laughed at their overwhelming frailty their first time out of bed were the ones who did best.
“I don’t know what I know,” he said.
“I’ll be right beside you.”
“It’s not like anything will happen. I’m just stepping outside a minute. Right?”
“Right.”
“People do that all the time. Right?”
“Right.”
“To hang up their laundry or pick up their newspaper or wash their car. That sort of thing.”
“I’ve done those very things,” said Iris, “and lived to tell the tale.”
They stood before the front door. “If my legs fail me?” said Louis, shifting.
“I’ll steady you.”
“If I faint?”
“I’ll catch you.”
“If I change my mind?”
“I won’t let you.”
“That pretty much covers it, I guess.” He put his hand on the doorknob.
“You want me to get that?” said Iris.
But he was already opening the door, opening it and then leaping through it as if he’d decided it would require an unstoppable propelled effort to cross the boundary between his known interior life and the life that waited for him outside.
Just before she shot out after him, Iris thought, This is how he jumped from his window, this is the kind of force he mustered and unleashed.
He got a few feet down the front walk, then froze. She caught up with him and took his arm in hers.
“Hey, hey. Easy now,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself—remember, you still have a broken arm.”
Louis was elsewhere. He turned and looked up at his window, then down at the tulip bed. He did it again, as if trying to establish the exact trajectory of his Wednesday flight from window to earth. At last he said, “I wonder what it would take to do the whole thing in reverse. Stand in the tulip bed and hop back up into my bedroom.”
“You made it, Louis. You’re outside.”
“Am I? I haven’t really looked yet.”
“Well, look. I got you. I’m right here.” Iris positioned herself for maximum strength and balance, like she did when she helped patients stand after they’d spent weeks in bed.
Louis turned from his house and faced the world of Waverly. He lifted his eyes slowly, staring first at his feet, then at the gray-white sidewalk just beyond the toes of his shoes, then at the fresh spring-green lawn that bordered both sides of the sidewalk. He lifted his eyes and took in the widening horizon of sidewalks and grass and trees, took in the deep black asphalt of his street, and the telephone poles that lined it, and the houses whose exteriors he knew so well from sixteen years of studying them in every slant of light, every dim night shadow, every subtle change of weather that played upon their windows and doors and black-shingled roofs. It was a world he knew, yet did not entirely recognize. Everything he saw now was within reach.
Iris could hear his breathing go tight and shallow. “You had enough, Louis? You want to go back inside? You don’t really have to go over to Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea.”
Louis didn’t answer. His eyes darted over the landscape as he tried to relearn it, to get his bearings. He was Dorothy disoriented in Munchkinland. And as they had for Dorothy, hidden Munchkins slowly poked into view, Munchkins who in this case went by the names of Kitty and Francine and Bert and Bev. Kitty, in the next yard over, stepped out from behind a bush. Francine peeped around her white porch column, then showed herself completely. Bev and Bert, who’d ducked down in the seats of their station wagon when Louis opened his front door, sat up again and peered at him. Carl had not changed his position in his side yard since Iris had first appeared at the Malone house. He still held the garden hose and had by now created a small lake around himself. All of the rescuers were assembled and ready for whatever Louis might have in mind to do next.
They hadn’t figured on Iris. She felt their eyes upon her, although it was on Louis they were feasting. She wouldn’t allow it. She let go of Louis’s arm and stormed down the front walk. “Can I help you people?” she shouted. “You got some kind of problem?” She whipped her head back and forth, glaring at each of them.
Francine let out a yip and, clutching Minky, rushed into her house. Kitty lurched out of view. Bert gunned his station wagon and screeched off down the street, throwing Bev back up against her seat like a rag doll. He didn’t even turn up his driveway, but shot past his house as if Iris were in pursuit.
Carl momentarily stood his ground. Actually, it was more water than ground, which he finally realized and twisted off his hose before looking up and giving a wave to Iris frowning at him from across the street.
“Sorry, lady,” he called to her. “I had to see.”
“See?” Iris shouted back, about to tip over into a deeper anger. “What do you think you had to see?”
“That he was all right. That everything was okay.”
He waved again, this time to Louis who had raised his hand to give Carl the all-clear. “Thank you, Carl,” Louis called, “I’m fine.”
Carl took a length of hose and began to gather it around his arm. “Well, I’ll leave you folks to your business then.” He traipsed across his wet lawn and disappeared behind his house.
There was no one left on the street now. If anyone was watching, and there were probably many, then it was from the secret safety of a curtained window. Louis shifted his gaze to the yard next door to Carl’s: Mrs. Bingsley’s. He moved down the walk until he was at Iris’s side, where he stopped and continued to stare across the street. She was about to tell him again that he didn’t have to go to the azalea, that he’d done more than enough for his first time out, when she felt him tensing at her side. She reached out with her hand to stop him, because she suddenly realized what he was about to do; but he’d already begun to move, to gather momentum as he’d done before.
“Louis!” she shouted after him.
That’s it, he’s gone. Watching him ru
n, she was sure of it, that he was like an escaped prisoner made crazy by the world suddenly open to him. He’d run, keep on running as he tried to see everything, to smell and touch, to bring to his senses all that they had been deprived of for sixteen years. Iris stood perfectly still and watched, because she knew she’d never catch a man like that. Her thoughts flashed instantly forward, and she imagined herself standing where she was now and Louis running for the horizon, his scarf, lifted by the wind, straight back behind him, his figure receding in the distance before he was swallowed by the sun.
All this Iris imagined as Louis ran down the front walk, then out into the street where he veered left and picked up speed as he crossed to the other side. Iris understood then. Mrs. Bingsley’s azalea, he headed straight for it. Louis never slowed down; he looked like he was about to run right into the middle of the thing, immerse himself in the flaming red abundance of flowers. But he cut quickly to the side and stuck his hand out, moving as fast as before, and skimmed his fingers along the edges of the huge bush. Iris lost sight of him for a second as he circled behind it, like the moon orbiting the earth. Then there he was, careening into view, facing her now, his eyes wide as he moved back across Mrs. Bingsley’s front yard and into the street again. Iris stiffened as he headed straight for her. She heard him panting as he approached. He never stopped running, and as he passed her, she saw his hand jerk upwards toward her head. She squinted in anticipation of the blow. She hardly felt a thing, a fluttering above her ear, fingers in her hair, the warmth of his hand. She reached her own hand to the place where his had been, as she turned and watched him mount the porch steps two at a time and rush into the house, closing the door behind him. There was something behind her ear, something thin and soft behind her ear and tangled in a strand of her hair. Iris freed it, and held it in her cupped hand. She looked for a long time at the flower that Louis had picked for her from the azalea, the azalea she’d earlier confessed she had not even noticed. From the bush she had not seen, she now held a single red flower, unbearable in its beauty.
As if this was not enough, she heard a heavy scraping sound and raised her eyes to Louis opening his bedroom window. He poked his head out and said, “Thank you, Iris, for a lovely morning. Come back tomorrow?”
Iris couldn’t even answer him. She placed the red petals behind her ear again and nodded yes before turning on her short legs and walking unsteadily home along the exuberantly flowered streets of Waverly.
CHAPTER THREE
ARNIE AND Gracie, too, were walking. Arnie paused on the corner of Dickinson and Elm, and shaded his eyes to see better.
“What is it?” asked Gracie.
“Could’ve sworn I just saw my daughter turn up the street there.”
“Would that be so strange?”
“If that woman was my daughter, it’d be mighty strange. She looked drunk or something. Iris does not go off on morning drunks. Least not that I know of.” Arnie started walking again. “Though some mornings, in my opinion, she could use a good drunk.”
Gracie asked, “So how long has she been with you?”
“Two, three years,” said Arnie. “She moved out for a long while, then moved back in again when my LuLu passed away.”
They walked without talking for a time. Arnie stayed to Gracie’s right side, so his hook would be out of view. He’d tried to fit the thing in his pocket, but it kept snagging on his belt loops. She didn’t seem to care one way or another, but still, having a hook didn’t work to your advantage when you were trying to impress a lady
“It’s a terrible business, isn’t it?” Gracie said after they’d gone a block.
Arnie hesitated. She mean his hook? “What is?” he asked.
“Oh, losing your… having your husband, your wife just disappear. That’s how I’ve thought of Atlas’s death, as a disappearance. I looked the word up, you know, and it means ‘to go out of sight.’ For those first terrible weeks I had a sense that’s just what he’d done, gone out of sight, that he was always in the room I was about to enter, but when I’d enter it, he’d moved on to the next room. It was a very cruel sensation.”
Arnie nodded. Sometimes he’d had the feeling that LuLu was even closer than that. For months after her funeral, he’d suddenly awaken and know that she was in bed sleeping quietly beside him. In his longing for her, he was sure he could hear her softly breathing, he could feel the weight of her near him, smell the warmth whose scent had been forty years a comfort to him. He’d lie unmoving until he could not resist his need to reach out to her, and for him the cruel sensation was the cool of the empty sheets beneath his hand.
“You’re right,” sighed Arnie, “it’s a terrible business. I realized, when LuLu died, that that’s what it’s always been about—losing things. You live for any length of time, it all begins to peter out on you. I feel like one of the cars I used to work on. When I was a young mechanic, I saw myself as a big beautiful brand-new Packard, going down the road forever. And then, bit by bit, as the miles start to add up on you, stuff you don’t even pay attention to as meaning anything starts to go. You get a few dents, your engine begins to knock a little, your transmission fluid don’t move through you like it used to. Then Christ Almighty, one day you’re going down that road and your whole damn power train locks on you, and boy you’ve really had it then. I’m a junker now, and to tell you the truth, I ain’t so sure I’ll be passing the next inspection.”
Gracie smiled at him. “That’s the most colorful description of growing old I believe I’ve ever heard. I’m not sure I agree with your final assessment, however.”
“How’s that?” Final assessment. He liked the way Gracie talked, even though he didn’t always catch her meaning.
“That you’re a junker. Your parts may rattle a bit, but you’re hardly a junker.”
“Thank you for saying so. But you take a good look at me, which I don’t advise, you may change your mind.”
“Arnie, my dear, the beauty of being old is that one is unable to take a good look.”
They both laughed, and then stopped suddenly, their eyes briefly meeting. Gracie knew he was thinking the same thing. Imagine: I used to laugh like that with Atlas, and you with LuLu. A shyness and a slight sense of betrayal colored Gracie’s cheeks. Arnie fiddled with his hook.
They turned the corner onto Cedar Lane. “You getting tired?” Arnie said to break the silence. He hid his hook again. “You need to head back, let me know, ’cause I’ll walk your legs off. I’m used to it from walking my dog. Iris, she won’t go out with me anymore.”
“Oh, I’m fine, fine. I walk a great deal myself.” Truth was, she felt a buzzy ache starting up in her right knee. She didn’t want to head back, though. She hoped Louis wouldn’t—mind? And if he did, would he ever, in a million years, tell her? She didn’t feel his aloneness if she was in the house with him or out on her own doing errands. But when she went to the movies with friends, or to lunch, she never looked back at the house for fear he would cheerily wave her on. She knew that even at the height of his own loneliness, he would not begrudge her moments in the world. Not even these moments, with this intruder of the night turned suitor. No, Louis must have watched from his window as she and Arnie disappeared into the spring morning; watched and wished them well.
As if reading her mind, Arnie said, “Seems like a pretty good boy you have there, that Lawrence.”
Gracie looked at Arnie, to see if he was joking with her somehow. When she saw nothing in his face, she remembered that he was hard of hearing and had misheard a word or two last night as they drank their cocoa. Which way should she go? She didn’t want to embarrass him with a correction, especially when he’d just finished telling her he felt like an old junker. But then he’d be more embarrassed later when he learned Louis’s right name. Better do it now, she thought.
“Yes, Louis is a good boy. Too good sometimes,” she said, rather loudly.
Arnie cocked his head. “That two boys you got? Louis and Lawrence? Now, I met Lawr
ence. Where’s Louis live?”
She was in it now. “Actually, Arnie, it’s Louis who lives at home.”
“Louis and Lawrence?” said Arnie. “Both at home still? Boy, I bet that gets crowded. I know when Iris moved back in I couldn’t walk into a room of my house without bumping into her. Of course, she’s kind of hefty, built for bumping, you might say.”
Oh dear. Gracie kept trying. “No, actually, you see it’s just Louis and me at home. There is no Lawrence.”
Arnie got it then. Gracie saw the chagrin spread across his face. He touched her arm with his hand. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I shouldn’t have pursued it.”
And now he thinks Lawrence is dead! She wanted to laugh, or give Arnie a good shake. But she said, loudly and leaning close to what she hoped was his good ear, “Don’t be sorry, Arnie. It was long ago and far away.” An odd sort of sadness crept through her as she said the words. Well, in a way a child of hers had died: Beautiful Louis at sixteen, lost in a fire. She cleared her throat and looked away.
Arnie didn’t notice. His eyes were set on a different direction. “Gracie, it was good of you to come out with me this morning. I mean, me barging in on you last night, and all. I wasn’t sure, you having slept on it for a night, if you was going to want to see me.”
“I was glad to see you, Arnie.” She was, truly. Spring meant Atlas working in his garden. She was happy to have the chance to associate it with something else, like walking beneath the green overhang of maple trees with this new man.
“It’s strange for me, Gracie, to want to see you.” When she turned to him, puzzled, he stammered on. “I mean, what I mean is, besides LuLu I never much wanted to be with anyone else, to go on walks and such. But that’s the first thing I wanted to do this morning when my eyes popped open—get over to this part of town and see you.” Arnie couldn’t believe the words were leaving his mouth.
“You’re a sweet man, Arnie.” Gracie smiled. To think I could move a man to say such things. Me, the Widow Malone.
“Well, I don’t know about that.” Arnie shrugged.
