Beyond the Bedroom Wall

by Larry Woiwode

  "She hated the guy's guts. Ach! I wondered if he felt the same way, possibly, and it showed. Ptoul" He fumbled with and spat at a brown bit of cigar leaf on his lower lip. "Oh," he cried then. “Oh, how my bad knee hurts and aches on me when I'm in a car like this and can't drive!”

  Who was this? When Charles got into Eglington, by commuter from Chicago, and found that his father was at the funeral home, he went directly there from the house and his father met him at the door and backed him into the foyer, shaking his hand so hard it hurt, and said, "Goodness, I'm so glad you could come. I wasn't sure you'd make it."

  "Well, of course," Charles said, seeing the gleam and ingenuousness of his eyes, and wanted to say there was no question about his being here when Laura had died.,

  "And you brought Katherine! How good of you!" His father took her up in a big hug, and Charles was sure that it was the first time he'd done this; and then later, as they stepped into the viewing room, Katherine whispered, "Oh, how beautiful she is!" and his father nodded in agreement, and then a tear tipped and slid down over the fatty circle beneath one eye. Charles couldn't have considered the possibility of beauty in such a setting, given his nature, his silence and solemnity in the presence of death, and would never have imagined his father agreeing with such a statement, and yet Katherine was right; Laura's face was a manifestation of peace, serene and composed, her skin so translucent it was as if life had left her flesh with her visible accord.

  Charles went to Ginny, who was in a chair at the front of the room, near the casket, her head bowed, and touched her shoulder and said, "Do you feel bad?" And was startled at his words. And then today, at the cemetery, he'd gone up to one of his step-brothers, who was standing beside a large gravestone off from the family group, as if to hide himself, and started to say, since his mother had died, "I'm sorry, I believe I know how you feel,” but no sounds came from his mouth. He tried again; his voice wouldn't work, his professional instrument gone, as if divisive parts of him were impaneled against its autonomy. The step-brother put a hand on his shoulder and said, "I understand. It's hard to know what to say at times like this."

  Charles didn't want to sleep in this bedroom, which hadn't been used during the weeks Laura was in the hospital, but felt occupied, and was cold, colder than any other part of the house, unnaturally cold, he thought, but his father said, "Oh, no, no! No, you have the room. I've been sleeping down in the basement for—I've been sleeping down there since the beginning of summer. You've got Katherine with you. You have it." And looked so pleading and constrained Charles couldn't refuse.

  He heard a noise from the kitchen now and got out of bed, naked, and on a vanity next to him, on a tray whose bottom was a mirror that doubled each object and made it seem suspended in space, were bottles of perfume, a compact, lipstick, a comb, cologne and body lotion, a snapshot of Susan; next to the tray, a hinged frame with pictures of Ginny at two ages, a statuette of a Balinese dancer, red, a hand mirror; a book. Ship of Fools, with a marker in it, a turquoise kerchief of linen-looking cloth, a piece of brown wrapping paper, a radio, a stack of library books with clear plastic covers. A three-tiered bookshelf beside the bed lined with recent books.

  On a desk across the room, on a green blotter, were orders for magazine subscriptions, food coupons, Laura's reading glasses in a turquoise case embroidered with floral work, a box of caramels, clippings of recipes, bottles of pills and capsules, pencils and ballpoints. Get Well cards, stationery, a box of comical cocktail napkins, a catalogue for religious articles, and, now that the room had been invaded, Katherine's barrette. A blue night light, a flat glowing disc, clung to a receptacle on the wall above the desk. The objects gathered around to give the days color and variety and reason and shape were unanimous reminders of her mortality now, but the network of nuances linking them, the personal hand that had arranged them, was still intact, and rendered them an eloquence he tried to comprehend.

  "Oh," Katherine said from behind in her low-throated, morning voice. "You're already up. You're up before me. Does this feel like home to you?"

  *

  In a new jacket and shirt, he went down the carpeted hall from the bedroom out to the kitchen, and at the sound of his feet on tile Marie turned from the sink, her eyes dimmed with some inner perplexity. "Good morning," she said, and studied his face as if to fathom his waking mood. "Did you sleep well?" "Is Dad up?"

  "He hasn't slept for a week. I've been trying not to make noise. Have I much?"

  "Hardly at all."

  "There's coffee if you want."

  "Please. Yes."

  She poured him a cup and he sat at the table, facing her and a large window above the sink, and as she put the coffeepot back and started putting away dishes, passing in and out of sunlight, her shoulder-length hair changed from black to reddish-black to black again, and she moved from task to task in a way that reminded him of his mother or his grandmother on a sunlit day such as this. He couldn't remember which of the two, his past was so dense with them. Marie was less self-effacing than before, but was still dedicated to their father with an unwavering awe that had begun in childhood, and was going to stay home from college for a semester, perhaps a year, in order to help him adjust to living alone. Susan and Tim and Jerome had gone back to their jobs, and he and Katherine had reservations to fly out of O'Hare in the early evening.

  There were footsteps on the basement stairs, and Marie looked toward the hall door, looked at Charles, and then turned back to the sink, as if to forestall this; their father came into the room, his face haggard, dark pouches of fatigue beneath his eyes, and sat at the end of the table. Charles said good morning and his father nodded at him and looked away. Marie brought over a cup of coffee, and said, "How are you feeling?"

  "Better. I slept."

  He sipped at the coffee while his left hand, resting on the table close to Charles, remained clenched in such a tight fist it seemed he was about to swing; as soon as he relaxed it, his hand trembled where it lay. "What bothers me most now is Ginny," he said. "I'd always expected she'd live here. I woke up thinking of her."

  Ginny had decided to live with her older brother, Don, who was thirty, married and childless, and owned the house in Chicago where their mother once lived; her younger brother had just returned from the Air Force. Charles had met the step-brothers only twice, but when he saw them at the funeral home with Ginny, when all of them went up to the casket for the last time, he could tell from the way they moved with harmony in a group of

  three, stepped and touched and held and moved around one another, that they were brothers and sister so close they should remain together m a family as long as they could.

  His father said, "I suppose some provisions should have been made for her earlier, but Laura and I never talked about that. Maybe this is what Laura wanted. But Ginny lost her father when she was practically a baby, and she needs an older man."

  "Doesn't she want to live with Don?"

  "Oh, she wants both, I guess, and is torn. She and I got close this year. She came and asked what I thought she should do, because Don and his wife were begging her to come with them, so I said, 'Do whatever you feel is best.' Maybe I shouldn't have. She's so impressionable."

  "This way, she can decide for herself what she wants."

  "Yes. I told her no matter what happened, no matter how long from now it might be, this house was always open to her."

  "I'm sure that's the kind of support she needs."

  "I guess. I also suggested she might want to live with her grandmother—Laura's mother—in Chicago."

  "Wherever she decides, then, you'll know that's where she wants to be."

  "That's what's most important, I guess."

  "I'm sure she'll want to visit a lot."

  "Oh, I know she'll want to visit! That's not the point The point is— Well, it's selfish of me, I know, but I want her here with me all the time."

  "Good morning!"

  Katherine stood in the doorway in a flowered skirt and b
illowy-sleeved Cossack blouse of white silk that revealed her torso and brassiere, her hair falling from her tipped head over her shoulders as if for some vast mirror she arranged herself in, her carriage jaunty, her body fashioned from hard knocks into this present graceful one, her face and eyes aglow with such an earthly grace of good morning that Marie and Martin both had to smile at her.

  *

  In front of Charles was a list that began "meat loaf and brownies—Mr. Butson, Penny Link—ham." He was at the kitchen table, using the telephone book and one of his father's old Christmas-card lists to look up addresses, and Marie was across from him, writing out cards of gratitude; Katherine was putting together a lunch from the food that had been brought to the house—the dishes marked with white tape to identify their owners—and Martin was pacing from room to room with a restlessness that upset Charles and augured worse to come, he feared. His father would come to the door and say to Marie, "You did remember the Novotnys?”

  "Yes."

  "They let us borrow their car."

  "I know,” she said. "I drove it home."

  "Oh, of course." And then a few minutes later he'd say, "You said you got the Novotnys, didn't you?"

  Besides the list in front of Charles, there were three other pages of names, some of them, from Pettibone and North Dakota, familiar to him (for these he used the Christmas-card list), but the majority from Eglington, and Charles wondered how his father and Laura had come to know so many people in a year's time; he and Katherine had lived in Manhattan for nearly three years and Charles didn't have more than a half-dozen acquaintances, none of whom he'd expect at his funeral. In what ways had his brothers and sisters branched out into their particular worlds over the years they'd been apart?

  On the morning of the funeral, all of them had gathered again at this table (for the first time in how long?) to have breakfast together, or at least coffee, in the case of those going to communion, since liquids were permissible now in the newer, lax rulings of the Church; grace was said, and Charles, who hadn't believed in much of the Church since he left for college, but usually went to Mass when he came home, to please his father, fell into the sign of the cross and the saying of the grace as if he’d been doing it every day, but he noticed that Jerome, across from him, sat with his clasped hands on the tabletop and stared around at them as if observing a pagan rite. What was on his mind then? His eyes were so considering and serene, and for some reason reminded Charles of their mother, and of a recent dream he'd had of her, the first he could remember in almost twenty years, since the one of blue china ("Amazing," his analyst said, when he heard this); she appeared with tatters of a sheet or grave cerements clinging to her, her hair in a dark tangle, a brown scarf about her mottled head, and stepped into this kitchen where they sat, in a smiling and mischievous mood, and kissed Martin and made him blush because he had another wife, and then disappeared.

  Charles's father came into the kitchen again, and said to him, "Have I ever shown you around town?"

  "No, we were just here that first Christmas, and then a few hours last summer when—"

  "Oh, of course," his father said, and left the room.

  Charles and Katherine had stopped on their way farther west on a vacation, and Charles's father had looked preoccupied and besieged and said that Laura was resting in her bedroom; the three of them were talking at one end of the long living room when Laura appeared at the other, in a housecoat and slippers, looking pale and diminished, at the borderline of an irreversible decision about to be made. She and Charles started toward one another and then both hesitated at the same time, as if to say, I'm afraid of it, too, meaning death, and then Charles went to her and took her in his arms.

  Martin came into the kitchen again with his hands in his pockets, jingling change, and said, "Have you seen my garden at Mrs. Clinton's?"

  "No," Charles said, "I—"

  "We'll have to go there, too, sometime. You'd like to meet her. She knows Orson Welles from way back when he was a boy and went to a boarding school here in town. It's since been closed down, but she has some wonderful stories about his early years."

  "He went to school here?"

  "This is no small place."

  Could it be a school such as the school in Citizen Kane? Welles was one of Charles's heroes, as his father knew, not only because of his mastery as an actor and director, but because of his voice, the envy of anybody who had to use his voice as a professional.

  "We could go see her any time," his father said, and left the room. Marie looked up and she and Charles exchanged a searching, brother-to-sister look, and then Marie's eyes shrank and took on a darker shade, and she shook her head and turned back to whatever she was writing. Charles saw that Katherine, at the sink, was studying them; she knew about their childhood. He began paging through the directory and his father came through the hall door. "Chuck."

  "Yes."

  "Come here."

  Charles followed him down to the basement, into the small, central, windowless room he used as an office, across the hall from a bathroom with a shower built of glass blocks; here were the bookshelves that once sat in the upstairs room of the old Halvorson house, with dark-colored novels, their dust jackets removed, arranged behind the glass panels in neat rows. A five-foot-high filing cabinet of oak stood beside the desk; a walk-in closet was lined with shelves that held condensed and book-club editions of books, and his father's collection of Reader's Digests dating back to 1931. His father opened a drawer in the desk, took out a metal box, set it on top of the desk, and opened it; inside were stacks of ten- and twenty-dollar bills bound with crisscrossed rubber bands of different colors.

  "I've been doing handyman work and odd jobs around town, and I've kept all the money I've made from them in here, in cash, and it's a good thing I did. I offered it to Laura and she said, 'No, no, Martin, that's yours.' Our bank accounts were in both our names, of course, so they've been frozen and will stay that way awhile, because of the legal tie-ups. If I hadn't had this put away, I would have had to borrow to get through this time. I might have had to borrow from you." He gave Charles a 'direct look. "Could I have?"

  "Of course."

  His father took something from the bottom of the box and put it in Charles's hands: paper, with faint lines over it, as though somebody had attempted a drawing, a few half-formed letters, and some words and phrases Charles couldn't make out. Then he realized he could read:

  yes, better

  is it on?

  nose — sometimes an itch

  now my face

  ice

  He looked up and found his father staring beyond him. "Laura wrote it in her last hours, in the hospital when—" He threw up his hands. "She couldn't really talk, it was so hard for her to breathe, and she wrote down what she wanted. I'd like you to have it."

  "What?"

  "I want you to have it."

  "But I—" Again his voice wouldn't work.

  "Yes. I'm giving all the drawings she did in her last year, those drawings of hers of children, to Ginny and her boys. I want you to have this."

  "But." Now Charles could make out, all around the! edges of the paper, "t.y.,ty.,ty.,” and realized it was an. abbreviation for thank you, and saw Laura as if shown her feminine center and source of strength.

  "She died a beautiful death. There was no pain at the end and never any struggle. Her breathing just got slower and slower and then all at once stopped, and she closed her eyes. That was her death. I was with her." He walked out of the room.

  Charles sat at the desk and stared at the scrap of paper, trying to find further meaning or more of Laura in it, but nothing else would appear. He closed the box and set it aside, next to the shell of the painted turtle his father had filled with cement and used as a paperweight. The desk was of oak and had sat under the stairway to the second story of the Halvorson place, and it was at this desk that his father graded papers or worked on his life-insurance files; the large roll-top desk in his office upstairs was res
erved for work on his book. Charles had last heard him mention the book two years ago; they were talking on the phone, long distance, when Charles said that he'd started seeing an analyst, because there were some portions of his past that seemed impossible for him to cope with alone (neglecting to reveal that when he read even a newspaper, every word in his periphery with "ide" or "ui" in it, jolted him with the possibility of suicide), and his father said, "Oh, I know what you mean about the past. I've been trying to work on my book again and I get all my notes and letters and materials up and out and organize them, and then get out my paper and sharpen my pencils and sit down at the desk, all ready to write, and then everything that's happened simply overwhelms me. I can't write a word. So much has gone over ;he bridge since then, there's no language that can hold it. It least not for me."

  And now there was more.

  Charles went upstairs and put the piece of paper in his portfolio on the bedroom chair, took some stationery out, and went back to the basement and sat at the desk. 'Dear Bill," he wrote. Bill was his agent in New York, a retreating, paternal man in his fifties, originally from Minnesota, one of the few people Charles liked to drink with, because Bill could handle his liquor even less well than Charles, who was tipsy after two drinks, and when Jill became drunk he wasn't mean or aggressive, as some drunks are, but lyrical about the north country that he md Charles both loved. Since they'd met—and their meetings were never wholly on a business basis—they'd been promising one another to go on a fishing trip to the Boundary Waters, Quetico-Superior canoe area of upper Minnesota and lower Ontario, near Rainy Lake.

  Dear Bill,

  I know I said I'd be back in two days, but my

  father has been acting so unlike himself that I'm afraid

  for him, and feel I have to stay on longer, at least a

  week, perhaps two. I realize you have some work