The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “Poor Donny,” Father Snow said. “He led a fairly incoherent existence and then he died.”

  “But that’s because he was so typical,” one of the girls said. “And there is nothing wrong with that, absolutely nothing. But what was the matter with his teeth? He had like a high-water mark on his teeth.” The girls found the ensuing awkward moment quite satisfying.

  Father Snow blinked. “I love him very much.”

  The girls sighed. He seemed to them like a mollusk at that moment. He was hardly worth the effort.

  “Mommy,” one said, “tell the story about the night Daddy proposed.”

  “Oh,” Mommy said, “yes. He knelt before me and said, ‘Let’s merely see each other every day for the rest of our lives.’ ” She passed Arleen a cracker with a bit of foul and expensive cheese daubed on top of it. This was declined. “Almost thirty-five years ago now.”

  “Tell the whole story,” the girl squealed. “We love the story. Tell how Daddy ran over that man who was standing beside his disabled car on the highway that winter night, but Daddy didn’t stop even though he knew he’d very likely killed him because you were going to a concert. It was the night Daddy was going to propose to you and he didn’t want your life together compromised or delayed. You had your life before you!”

  Father Snow visibly paled.

  “It was Janácˇek’s ‘Fairy Tale’ that evening,” Mommy said. “Debussy and Beethoven were also on the program.”

  Father Snow looked very ill at ease. Mommy reached out and squeezed his hand. “If this happened,” Mommy said, “you’d be able to accept it, wouldn’t you? If it had happened, you’d understand.”

  Father Snow squeezed back. “Only if it had,” he said.

  “That story has not been previously aired in public,” Daddy said.

  The girls closed their eyes and hummed a little. They loved the story—the night, the waves of snow descending, the elegant evening clothes, the nonexistent girls, some stranger sacrificed.

  Father Snow drained his drink. “I’m going to make another batch of these if I may,” he said. He extricated his hand from Mommy’s and dumped more gin in the shaker, swirled it once and poured, without ceremony. Some situations simply did not allow for the sacralization of the ordinary, which he otherwise made every effort to observe.

  He swallowed and groped for Mommy’s hand again, recoiling slightly when he found it.

  “Do you think we could do something about it?” Mommy said tentatively. “Is it possible after all these years?”

  “Repent?” he said, his voice cracking. “Repent,” he said.

  Mommy looked at him with some annoyance. “Is that all? I’ve always thought that was a rather common thing to do.” She wanted to offer more cheese to all but her hand was trapped. “I do feel sorry,” she said. “We do.”

  “But the word is misunderstood!” Father Snow said. “The word translated throughout the New Testament as repentance is, in the Greek, meta-noia, which means change of mind. Meta means transference, as in metaphor—transference of meaning. Transformation.”

  “Repent,” Mommy said. “So unhelpful. So common, really.”

  “The English word repentance is derived from the Latin poenitare, which merely means to feel sorry, suggesting a change in the heart rather than in the mind. Poenitare is a most inadequate word that doesn’t reflect the challenge involved,” Father Snow said excitedly.

  “We’ve had a good life,” Daddy said, smoking. “Full. Can’t take that away from us.”

  Father Snow looked at his drink. The moment of exhilaration had passed. He was now merely drunk and again missing Donny. “Very difficult. Another way of thinking, a different approach to everything in life…” he said uncertainly.

  The cats came into the room and leapt up onto Arleen’s lap. The cats would do this to people they sensed hated them, and this amused the girls. But Arleen stroked them, first the one, then the other. From one’s side she plucked a bloodsucker the size of a swollen dime. She held it between her fingers, a fat full thing with tiny waving legs, and dropped it in the dish Daddy was using as an ashtray. From behind the ear of the second cat, Arleen snapped off another. Its removal occasioned a slight clicking sound. She dropped it beside the other one. The things stumbled around in the ashes in the little china dish. The attractive floral pattern that was so Mommy, that Mommy admired on all her china, was totally obscured. In this pretty room, this formal room with the silk shades, the portraits of ancestors and the lark beneath the bell jar.

  “That’s disgusting, Arleen,” one of the girls said. They had no doubt that she had produced them fraudulently. Their pets, their darlings, could not possibly be harboring such things. “Are you a magician? Isn’t that unchristian?”

  “No, no,” Arleen said, ducking her head shyly. “I’m hardly a magician, I’m an adviser, a companion.”

  “Arleen’s no amateur,” Father Snow said.

  “A companion?” the girls said.

  “The woman can listen to anything and come to a swift decision,” Father Snow said. “I rely more on the ritual stuff. Words. Blah, blah, blah.”

  Arleen turned to Mommy. “You should get rid of them.”

  “The cats?” Mommy said. “Oh, I know, sometimes they spray.”

  “No, the girls,” Arleen said. “High time for them to be gone.”

  The girls gaped at her.

  “Your mother’s not well, you’re killing her,” Arleen said simply.

  Mommy looked at them. She looked as though she didn’t know what to think. Daddy rested his burning cigarette in the dish, then ground it out and lit another. The ashes moved with continuing, even renewed, effort.

  Mommy quickly spread more cheese on the crackers, wads of it, a bit more than was nice, actually. She stood up to pass the plate, tottering a bit.

  “Oh, do sit down,” one of the girls said, exasperated.

  She did, abruptly, looking puzzled.

  Father Snow said, “Clarissa, are you all right?” for Clarissa was Mommy’s name.

  “Dear?” Daddy said.

  She smiled slyly and gave a little grunt. It was all so not like Mommy. She swayed and slid to the floor not at all gracefully, entangling herself in the cord of a lamp and striking her head on the lintel of the fireplace.

  The girls clutched each other and cried out.

  Arleen moved to cradle Clarissa’s head, and Father Snow, with surprising sureness, crouched beside them both. He had quite regained his composure, as though for the moment he had put the old dead behind him and was moving on to the requirements of the quickening new.

  Revenant

  Cliff’s father had made all the arrangements for his own funeral and when he died his lawyer called and informed Cliff of the time and place, a small church graveyard on an island that held no associations for Cliff or, as far as he knew, his father, though the two of them had been estranged for some time.

  “The stone’s not ready yet. Deer Isle marble. No name, no dates, just the words And you, what do you seek?”

  Cliff said nothing.

  “It’s certainly different,” the lawyer offered. “That might be what’s taking them so long.”

  It was winter then. He was twenty-eight. For a year he had been working in the city at a publishing house, one of the best, and spending the weekends with a woman and her two-year-old son in a little house in Connecticut that her grandmother had left her. Her own parents had died some time before. She had no one either. Well, she had the child.

  The island lay in a frigid haze. Only two ferry runs a day were scheduled at that time of year—one left at nine in the morning and returned to the mainland immediately, and the other left the island at four in the afternoon. The crossing took forty minutes.

  Cliff drove into the hold, which was brightly lit with yellow bulbs. The light made everything colder. There were two new SUVs and a truck loaded with lumber and pipe. Cliff was wearing a suit and fine shoes with thin socks; he had dressed careful
ly for the occasion. He had a coat and gloves but they were more formal than warm. He should have dressed more warmly. He would have brought something to read but again he thought, My father has died. He did not want to be reading. The service would be at exactly twelve o’clock and would probably last no more than fifteen minutes. He had been told there was an inn near the ferry dock that served food, but the island did not do much to accommodate the casual visitor. There was no town. There was a golf course and a Coast Guard station and the beaches were rocky and mostly private. It was an island of estates invisible down winding roads.

  He tried to picture a woman at the graveside, a beautiful weeping stranger. He hoped for this, expecting some disclosure still about a life, his father’s, that was so unknown to him.

  When the ferry began to move, he got out of the car and went up to the cabin. The steel of the floor was painted blue and the oak benches were highly varnished. There were four passengers and an enormous dark dog, a Newfoundland. There was a handsome elderly couple, the truck driver and, sitting with the dog, a young woman about twenty. They all looked at him briefly except for the truck driver, who was holding a paper cup of coffee but appeared to be sleeping. The girl was reading, and the jacket of the book she was holding said starkly The Poems of Yeats. After a few moments she put the book down and glanced at him.

  “ ‘The Cap and Bells,’ that’s a nice one,” he said.

  She smiled at him tightly and picked the book up again.

  He had always liked poetry.

  He sat quietly on one of the varnished benches. No one spoke but they seemed comfortable, at ease. He did not feel at ease. He thought for a moment that if they knew his situation they would be kind to him. Then he felt ashamed.

  It was black outside the windows. The crossing to the island was smooth and he tried to remain aware of it.

  Something struck the window. He stared, but saw nothing. The others, too, looked at the window. Even the huge dog raised its head, which looked warm and moist and trembled slightly, like something baking. When he had been a child, someone had told him that every dog’s heart was the same size, it didn’t matter how big the dog was. This had troubled him for years. He had never owned a dog himself.

  He closed his eyes and not long after heard the engine slow. He rose and went outside. He could see the dock ahead, the battered boards of the cradle shining greasily beneath a single large light. He went down and sat in his car. He found the directions the pastor had given him to the church and studied them again. They were not complicated. The pastor had not known his father but was in receipt of the cremains.

  A deckhand appeared and pulled the gates of the hold back. The sound of the engine rose as the ferry slowed and rocked against the boards. Cliff watched the docking procedure carefully. When the deckhand gestured to him, he realized he had been dreading this, leaving the ferry first, driving ahead of the others up the road.

  The car clattered over the steel plates and plunged up the road, skidding a little. The other vehicles followed. Within a few moments he had passed the darkened inn and, a mile later, the church and its attendant graveyard. Still, they followed. He should have turned toward the church, since it was the reason he was here, after all. He felt humiliated. The road branched and he bore to the left. The others followed, as though intent on tormenting him. Finally he saw the truck turn off. Wet trees lined the road and stone walls glittered through dead vines. One car turned down a lane but one still followed. His head felt illuminated. He saw a fox in the road and slammed on the brakes. The fox vanished and the car behind him sped by, the girl at the wheel, the huge dog filling the backseat. He pulled over and paused a moment. On the shoulder lay another fox, long crushed. But it hasn’t happened after all, came the incoherent thought, and he was frightened.

  —

  Cliff loved his work as an editor. He loved the old offices, the ruthlessness and formality of the meetings. He didn’t have any authors of his own yet. He had worked on a few anthologies and guidebooks and had one historical novel on the fall list. During the week he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast brownstone in the West Eighties. His room was small, had a bright worn Turkish rug on the floor, and the bed was high and narrow. A Steiff animal collection filled one of the shelves, and a vacuum cleaner was stored in the closet. The only breakfast provided was English muffins and strawberry jam and he couldn’t keep any food of his own in the refrigerator. He was always hungry. On the weekends he took the train to Connecticut and stayed with Ricky and the boy, Richard. He liked the idea of having an attractive family that he had not been responsible for creating.

  One of the senior editors seemed interested in his progress, a man named Franklin Woolf, but everyone called him Loup. He was erudite and viciously funny. You want to be the last to leave the room when he’s in it, one of the other junior editors warned Cliff, though he was eager to learn and knew he could learn a lot from him. Loup arranged to have him move into the midtown writing studio of one of the house’s venerable authors, who had relocated temporarily to Mexico. It was full of books and had good light and a kitchen, and the bathroom was his alone. It was a far better arrangement than the brownstone. The author was working on a “volcano” of a book but everyone knew he had stopped writing, that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody went to Mexico anymore to write books. The man was finished.

  —

  One of the assistants died and most of the office attended the funeral. He was younger than Cliff, just out of Bard. He’d drowned, horsing around in some lake on a long holiday weekend, and now he was dead. Then, less than a week later, a beloved agent died from the complications diabetes often brings. That was a memorial service, and the first time Cliff heard Loup speak in such a venue. Although Cliff had not known the agent, he found Loup’s words moving, even thrilling in a peculiar way. He was by far the best speaker there. Life seemed sweet and carefree and cruel, futile, almost comprehensible. He could have described to no one what Loup had said.

  “Jesus,” Loup muttered to him afterward, “let’s go get a drink.” It was three o’clock in the afternoon and they went to the Carlyle. As they were handing over their coats to be checked, Cliff saw Loup glance at the Phi Beta Kappa key he wore as a lapel pin on his coat. A diligent student, he had graduated from a midwestern college of no great reputation. He wore the pin with some secretiveness but casually, as though it didn’t matter. And it did not matter, because he hadn’t gone to the right school.

  Loup bestowed on him the slightest of smiles. Cliff was too nervous to even get drunk. Later, when he returned to the writer’s studio, he removed the pin and threw it in a drawer.

  —

  Loup was going through boxes of manuscripts, a dozen of them that had been on his desk for a month. He was now disposing of them rapidly. He would pick an even-numbered page and give it his full attention. One page could tell him everything. Sometimes the decision was made on a single line. It was all true, what writers suspected.

  He called Cliff into his office and read aloud, “I looked out the window. I could not tell which were the thoughts and which were the trees.” He said to Cliff, “What the hell does that mean?”

  “I like it,” Cliff ventured. “It’s not bad.”

  “So give her a chance. If we don’t change her life, somebody else will.”

  —

  Loup and Cliff swept into memorial services together, two fine-looking men in dark coats. There were so many occasions, at least once a month, in cathedrals and supper clubs, in arboretums, in chapels, under bridges, in theaters. A dignified lament seemed almost perpetual, resting lightly over the vigor and flash of the city. There was nothing suspicious or extraordinary about the numbers, nothing particularly unnerving about the manner in which the usual course of nature was accomplished upon those taken. Surprises were not infrequent, although there were no suicides. The enemy agent appeared in its own time, arrived on its own schedule. A translator died in a domino car wreck in a dust storm on a New Mexico interstate. A po
et was murdered by his wife. The founder of an old, stubbornly prestigious quarterly collapsed, having just excused himself from dinner.

  And after the funeral it felt good to be drinking and talking, unfazed, strengthened, made alert by his attendance at these courteous rituals where Loup often spoke in his oblique, heretical, much-admired fashion, addressing those gathered in a courtyard holding flutes of champagne or standing barefoot in the verge of some gently receding tide or assembled in some vast prewar apartment—not every war bestows upon the time just preceding it such desirable architecture—or moteless, light-filled loft, where the faces seemed as idealized as masks, some but not many half barbaric with grief. They thought Loup was telling them they were still winning, for their hearts, though they might be cold or troubled or uncertain or even without honor, had not yet died within them. They were winning. The day belonged to them still, though tomorrow was promised to no one.

  On the weekends, Ricky tried to match him drink for drink. He increasingly arrived hours later than he had promised. The neat little house felt stifling to him. The boy’s face was flushed but he was sleeping, drugged with the heat, wearing only a dazzlingly white cloth diaper.

  “Why don’t you open some windows?” he demanded.

  “I kept the house shut up to be cool,” Ricky said. “Gramma did and it was always cool.”

  “It’s like being in an oven,” Cliff complained.

  “I guess I wasn’t thinking. I was just waiting for you.”

  He moved quickly through the house, noisily pushing up windows. They had to be held in place with sticks, cracked croquet mallets, the rungs of old chairs. That was how the old woman had done things. A fragrant breeze slipped in immediately from the meadow but did not mollify him.

  In the morning, they sat out on a redwood deck the grandmother was having built the month she died. Cliff had tried to finish the work himself and done it badly but Ricky didn’t seem to notice. She liked having breakfast on the ugly deck, which she’d made even uglier with pots of geraniums everywhere. Farther away, near the marsh, red-winged blackbirds swayed on the tips of tall grasses.