Claire Marvel

by John Burnham Schwartz

  “Misha’s just like a little dog,” she observed one fair evening in late June. Her voice was old New England, singsongy on the vowels. It wasn’t the first time she’d offered such an opinion.

  “Dogs can be trained,” I said.

  “Don’t be narrow-minded, Julian. Misha chooses to ignore us. It’s a sign of his independence and self-possession.”

  “Some of the world’s biggest despots are known for their independence and self-possession, Mary.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous. Come here, Misha dear. Come to Mother.”

  Lurching forward, Misha threw himself against Mary’s purple stockings and began aggressively rubbing. His purring, amplified within his capacious belly, was deep and undulating in rhythm.

  “I’ve always found feline mating rituals fascinating,” I said.

  Mary sniffed. “Don’t be cruel. Misha’s testicles were removed ages ago. It was a trauma I’m sure he doesn’t wish to revisit.”

  I bowed my head. “Apologies to Misha.”

  “I will relay them.” She stroked the cat’s obscenely arched back. “See what a little dear he is? Gus, there you are. I was beginning to worry.”

  Gus Tolland, in his seventies, dressed in a sage-green high-waisted suit of a bygone era, emerged from the house carrying a tray with a martini shaker and two glasses. A widower himself, he’d been the best friend of Mary’s husband. They’d been together now—drinking martinis, watching Hill Street Blues and Dynasty, and taking semiannual trips to Europe—for more than a decade.

  “Sure you won’t have a drink, Julian?”

  “No thanks, Gus.”

  He set the tray down on the low iron table and began pouring the clear diamondlike liquid evenly into the glasses. He spoke with a mild lisp and walked with a slight limp. His real life, Gus liked to say, began not on Beacon Hill, where he’d been born into a prosperous Boston family, but in France, where during the last months of the war he’d ended up playing clarinet in an Army band led by a gifted young jazz pianist named Dave Brubeck. They’d performed for the troops all over the European front; once they’d even opened for the Andrews Sisters. A lean introspective boy in youth, the war had woken in Gus appetites and joys he’d sensed in himself but never officially recognized. And now, decades later, with so much behind him, it was his privilege to have a martini and let his thoughts wander back: the band, on their way to a gig, getting lost in the Ardennes behind enemy lines; the jamming with Brubeck on the back of a truck otherwise filled with chickens. The girls! It was a piano, leaned on by the formidable derrière of a woman from Nantes, that had rolled over his foot and given him the limp. It wasn’t his intention to make light of the war—too many of his friends had died—but Christ, once back home and conscripted (this time for life) into the family law firm, never had he missed anything so much as the waking dream of those days, mornings when he woke hearing, over the drone of turbines and the brave whistling of homesick men, the constant rhythm and jump of jazz in his head.

  Mary said, “Gus, Julian has been amusing himself at the expense of poor Misha’s vanished testicles.”

  “Has he, now?” An eyebrow amiably cocked, Gus handed her a martini. His age-spotted hand shook, spilling some of the drink onto the grass. “Well then, I’d hate to hear what he’d have to say about me when I wasn’t around.”

  “Oh, a great deal, I should imagine.”

  They shared a private smile.

  Mary picked up her book again—P. N. Furbank on E. M. Forster—and Gus, hitching up his pants, sat down with his drink and his memories.

  Above our heads birds sang boisterously in the trees. The old trees, thick with leaves, on the old street. This was the beginning of the Golden Mile of manses that stretched almost to Fresh Pond Parkway. Longfellow had lived nearby, Hawthorne too. H. H. Richardson had designed houses for the rich. A sense of original privilege, of enlightened remove from the heedless, hectoring pace of the unreflecting multitude, persisted here as an embodiment of exalted New England stateliness and the founding ideals of Harvard itself. Ideals meant to be irrefutable, I supposed. A stateliness oppressive, it often seemed to me, for being so certain of its claims.

  A low stone wall with an iron gate surrounded Mary’s garden. Across the street stood a more recent building made of plain red brick—a general dorm for grad students, many of them foreign, who had nowhere else to stay. The dining hall was on the ground floor. During the long winter months when daylight was as scarce as wartime rations and the city was dark by five o’clock, I’d stood in my bedroom spying down through the windows at the big hall lit like a sunken stage. The stark wooden tables occupied by solitary men and women—grown students like myself—who routinely ate their dinners while reading.

  “Gus and I are planning a little trip to the Veneto,” Mary said.

  I looked at her. Her glass was empty and her eyes brighter and two gentle blossomings, like wilted rose petals under rice paper, had appeared on her cheeks.

  “When?”

  “We leave the fourteenth, I believe. Is it, Gus?”

  “Fifteenth,” Gus replied, swallowing the last of his drink. “The fourteenth’s Bastille Day.”

  “So it is! Of course, that’s France and has nothing to do with the Italians. Well, the fifteenth, then. We return on the fifth.”

  “Sixth,” said Gus.

  “The sixth of August. It’s a Palladian trip. I’ve always wanted to see the villas. And now we will. Won’t we, Gus? Not that you particularly care about Palladio. But we’re not getting any younger.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Gus said.

  “All right. I’m not getting any younger. Soon Gus will be hitting puberty. He’ll find Misha’s lost testicles and dance till the cows come home. Forgive me, Misha! Anyway, Julian, you won’t mind taking care of him while we’re away?”

  “Who, Gus?”

  Gus began to chuckle.

  “Misha,” Mary said sternly.

  I grinned. “I won’t mind, Mary.”

  “Thank you. I know I’m biased but he really is the best company. I’ve always found it impossible to be lonely with Misha around. I hope he’ll be the same comfort to you.”

  “Julian isn’t lonely,” Gus objected.

  Mary didn’t say anything. She just patted my arm and asked Gus to mix another shaker of martinis.

  As scheduled, they left on the fifteenth. Mary had written out a detailed explication of Misha’s daily regimen. Included were afternoon walks on the leash around the neighborhood, fifteen-minute “play sessions” with a catnip-filled mouse, and the addition of a special gravy to his Tender Vittles.

  So it happened that late one July afternoon I was once again sitting in the garden, this time with a copy of Karl M. Schmidt’s Henry A. Wallace: Quixotic Crusade, 1948 on my lap. Much of my summer had already passed like this. For it seemed better, or at any rate less worse, to sit alone in an old woman’s garden than to sit with sunbathing couples on the grassy banks of the Charles.

  The day had not gone well with Misha. First he’d managed to lose his catnip mouse—I suspected him of eating it—which meant that I was going to have to locate another before Mary’s return. Then he’d refused either to walk or be carried on his afternoon constitutional around the neighborhood, forcing me to drag him by the leash the entire way.

  He sat now, in the listless heat and fading light of late afternoon, on the lawn chair as on a throne, cleaning himself. Every pass of his paw over his fat pushed-in face represented a little sneer of disdain in my direction.

  “Misha,” I told him calmly, “you are a pampered piece of shit.”

  Glancing up at that moment, I felt the breath freeze in my throat. Claire was standing on the other side of the low wall in a blue dress patterned with flowers, her skin tanned, her dark hair streaked auburn by the sun.

  “Quite a beauty,” she said. “That cat.”

  “Actually, he’s Himmler with fur. How’s your father?”

  She didn’t rep
ly. There was a gate but she ignored it; I watched her step over the wall. The dress rose to the tops of her thighs before slipping back again to touch the thumb-sized indentations of muscle just above her knees. Her hair tumbled across her face. Her skin wasn’t pale as I remembered except where two narrow strap marks strayed across her shoulders and the delicate bones of her clavicle. Then she was over. Reaching Misha’s chair, she began to scratch him between the ears, and in no time had him purring like an opium junkie.

  “What’ve you been up to?” she asked.

  There was a breeziness to her tone that I didn’t believe, given the circumstances. You’ve been away seven weeks and four days without calling, I wanted to say. Do you have any idea what that feels like? Instead, I held up my library book on Wallace.

  “The usual?” she said.

  “What else? Now tell me how your father is.”

  “Not very well.” Her gaze settled past me, onto the front of the house. “Though his weight’s started to come back. He says he’s returning to work by the end of next week and damn anybody who tries to stop him. That means me.” She paused, holding her head very still. Tears had appeared from nowhere, floating in her eyes like pure light. “They say hair grows back differently after chemo,” she said. “Is that true? He had beautiful dark hair before. He thinks it’ll be white when it comes back. Is it true?”

  “I don’t know, Claire.”

  She nodded. On an impulse I reached out and took her hand. For a few moments she returned the pressure. Then, gently, she let my hand go. When she spoke again her tone was a few degrees harder; the shine in her eyes was gone.

  “I feel as if I should be wearing one of those skull-and-crossbones signs. I’m a danger to myself and others right now.”

  “Is that a warning?”

  “It’s a confession.”

  “What’s the point of confessing to me, Claire?” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice.

  “Because I trust you. I don’t know why. I just do.”

  I said nothing. Some light of my own was going out in my heart, like a beacon sinking into black water; and I stood watching it.

  She said, “You’re misunderstanding me.”

  “I think I’m understanding you perfectly.”

  “Listen, Julian. I loved our night together. You made me happy. Happier than I’ve been in a long time. But my father’s very sick. He may be dying. And if you and I were to get seriously involved now, with the way things are, I’d end up killing it somehow. I know I would. And you’d end up hating me.”

  “I would never hate you.”

  “Yes, you would. And then I’ll have lost you for good. Don’t you see?” The luminous cast of imminent grief was back in her eyes; hardly seeming aware of what she was doing, she reached for my hand. “And I don’t have the strength now, or the courage, to risk losing you for good. I can’t explain it. Just be my friend, Julian. Please. Be my friend.”

  nine

  YOU SIT WITH HER IN THE CAFÉ, back corner table, eyes rimmed with smoke, her hair pulled back in a velvet thingamajig, her fingers turning the pages of Georgiana Burne-Jones’ Memorials. Snippets she reads to you as, red and black ballpoints in hand, you methodically work your way through Professor Davis’ latest installment, easily a hundred pages (how can he write so fast?); and there is the persistent presence of her foot resting idly against your ankle beneath the table; and there is her voice reading, now and then in a quite credible English accent, the words of the still-living (at the time) wife for the dead husband-artist, words of sorrow and joy, proclaiming how every minute with him contained the life of an hour; and you have not touched her, you think, really touched her, in four months, ten days, and sixteen hours, and don’t know if you ever will again.

  ten

  A SATURDAY MORNING IN NOVEMBER and I stood bent over the gate to Mary’s garden, scrubbing at layers of rust with a piece of steel wool. Hearing a car horn, I looked up to see Claire’s red Volkswagen Bug pulling up in front of the house. I stopped what I was doing and went over.

  “Come for a ride?” Claire said.

  I held up the steel wool. “Can’t. I promised Mary.”

  “Come on.” She leaned over and opened the passenger door.

  “Where?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  We headed south, Mass Pike to the interstate. The Bug a vibratory instrument of surprising intensity; we had to shout to hear ourselves. At Providence we turned east, crossed the bridge past Fall River, then southeast onto a local road that ran through Tiverton. In a village called Four Corners we stopped to buy turkey sandwiches and bottles of cream soda. A gray-shingled shop sold homemade ice cream. An ironworks offered hand-forged gates and fire screens. A mom-and-pop travel agency advertised resort vacations in Tahiti, Aruba, Cancún. We went on. Into Little Compton, the houses turning progressively larger and the fields marked by gray stone walls. It had rained recently and the grass was green, the air fresh as a new continent. Wisps of cloud tempered the cool autumn sunshine. The road hit a rise and now we could see cows standing in acres of pasture stretching in gently undulating hills down to the river in the distance. Through the open windows we breathed in the whiff of summer camp long gone, bus rides and packed lunches and wet bark and lichen-covered stone, an old country of perpetual arrival. Around a series of turns the water appeared beside us as if conjured: a cabin hardly bigger than a doll’s house bore a flag proclaiming the Sakonnet Yacht Club, though no boats were to be seen.

  The point of land curved and narrowed. Into view came a ramshackle warehouse and behind it the haul poles and torn rigging of a fishing trawler. Claire stopped the car. The air smelled of fish. On three sides now there was nothing but water; on the fourth a cairn of broken lobster traps, a seagull sitting atop it like a sphinx.

  “We’re here,” announced Claire, as the bird lifted off, hovered, resumed its place, watching us one cold eye at a time. Other gulls circling now, reeling above us, piercing the air with their cries. She reached for my hand.

  We didn’t remain there long. The promontory wasn’t our real destination, I sensed, but some uncertain point of entry—sun and salt, breeze-licked whitecaps, a tidal pull into a past about which I knew little. Beside me in the car, staring out through the windshield as if the ocean itself were a celluloid memory projected onto a screen, Claire had a melancholy air. Something was overtaking her—as I’d seen it overtake her before, standing in the museum, lying in her bed. Her hand lay slack in mine until, rousing herself as though waking, she abruptly started the car. We drove back to the main road and stopped again, this time in front of a long gravel driveway.

  She got out and I followed. She walked quickly now, energized by some new spirit of investigation. The driveway ended at a white clapboard house with slate-blue shutters. Two large oaks fronted the property, at their feet brilliant-colored leaves like burning drop cloths. To the left stood a garage with both doors closed; to the right, bordered by Japanese maples, stretched a lawn as square and green as a croquet pitch. A beautiful place, yet forgotten. No cars rested in the driveway. All the windows of the house were shut. A bird feeder hanging from a branch by the front door was empty of seed; as we watched, a blood-red cardinal alighted on the aluminum perch, pecked in vain at the feeding hole, and flew off.

  “Claire, whose house is this?”

  “It used to belong to my mother’s parents.” Her voice was excited, girlish. She was right up close to the house, trying to see in a front window. “The living room was here. On Christmas Eve we’d gather around the fireplace while my grandmother told the story of Jesus in the manger. I’d sit on my father’s lap with my head tucked under his chin. What I loved was hearing how all the different kinds of animals stood together like friends.”

  Abruptly she stepped back from the window, her eyes darkening. “That was a long time ago. It looks different now.” She turned and marched around the side of the house.

  By the time I caught up to her she had reach
ed the low back porch. Again she was spying into the interior, this time through a glass-paned door cut into a large sunlit kitchen. From the top half of the door her hollowed-out reflection looked back at her; she had to shift her head continually in an effort to see through it.

  “What is it you’re hoping to find, Claire?”

  Without taking her eyes away from the door she said, “For my thirteenth birthday my father brought me a dog from the animal shelter. I named him Buzz because he was gold and black and small like a bumblebee.”

  Her tone was brooding again; her head drooped; she would not look at me. She cupped a hand over her image on the glass until it disappeared.

  “One morning about a month later I woke early and couldn’t find him,” she said. “The house was quiet. Too quiet. I went downstairs, and my mother was standing in front of the sink there. This door was open. It was supposed to be kept closed so he wouldn’t run out to the road. She knew that. I asked her if she’d seen him, and she turned and looked at me. I’ll never forget that look. She was telling me she knew. Then she started yelling. She said she was sick and tired of having to keep the door closed all the time, she refused to live cooped up like an animal for the sake of a dog, not on a beautiful summer day, and if my dog was too fucking dumb to be trained not to run into the road it was no fault of hers.”

  Claire turned to face me.

  “I found him a quarter mile up the road, curled against the cemetery wall,” she said. “He’d been hit by a car. Somehow he’d dragged himself. When he saw me he began to whimper. His hip was crushed and his stomach was bleeding. He died in my arms.”

  It was afternoon. We stood on the perfect lawn as the sunlight thinned and an autumn chill spilled ink from the woods behind the house. A pair of robins hunted for worms in the grass. Beside me Claire seemed mired still in that long-ago scene with her mother, the violation of a trust that could never again be set right. Her arms were folded across her chest and her gaze was fixed on nothing.