We’re here because of you.
At first, in the fog of his melancholy, the words took on an almost mystical meaning. They sounded monumental and loving. The next moment, though, he was irritated by them. It sounded like his daughter was indirectly blaming him for something.
They got Annie established at the workbench and she began to build her model. He and Dary stood next to a framed poster on the wall that declared success isn’t success unless you’ve failed, a motto that annoyed him because it had almost certainly been penned by a resoundingly successful person.
He asked Dary if she was aware Brian Donnelly designed real-life flying ships. “He would fit right in here, don’t you think?”
“It’s creepy to come here without kids.”
“Brian loves his kids. Did I mention he’s getting divorced?”
“Yup. Twice.”
While Annie was building her flying ship he stepped out into the courtyard. Though it hadn’t snowed yet, the cold had an edge of ice, and he tugged his scarf higher around his neck and his ears. There was another bundled-up man out there, his hands deep in the pockets of his caramel-colored coat, with only a strip of his face visible between the cream scarf hiding his mouth and a matching hat pulled over his brow. Gene joined him to look out over the half-frozen river, sluggish and gray. The land for the museum had been donated by the city some thirty years earlier in one of its attempts to revitalize the old industrial district, and Gene was perhaps one of a few people who recalled that the tannery where his father worked had been there on the other side of the river. You could just make out where the pits had been; the earth had filled itself back in over the years but not completely, leaving sunken patches of ground littered with dead leaves, windblown plastic bags, and other debris.
The man gave a slight nod of his head, which might have been a greeting or just his reaction to finding his solitude intruded upon. He pulled his scarf away from his mouth, and gestured to the land in front of them. “It’s a shame, isn’t it?” he said. He was young but tired-looking, his skin pale and his lips pale and eyes pale too. “Why don’t they do anything with it?”
“Someday they might,” Gene said.
“The museum could be twice as big. Then they could dump this whale and get a bigger one. Have you seen the one in New York? Now that’s a whale.”
“I don’t mind this one,” Gene said.
The man looked troubled, deeply so, as if Gene had said he didn’t mind child slavery or something awful like that. He pulled his scarf back over his mouth and returned to his sullen contemplation.
Gene didn’t remember when the tannery had finally closed, only that his father was dead by then. He didn’t know what had happened to the other men who worked there, whether they had picked up hours at the General Electric factory, or moved away, or become the next generation of sad jobless men. He would probably never get used to it, the way time spun everything around, making heroes out of villains and villains out of heroes. The tannery work had always been considered difficult and rugged and indispensable. But now it was said that the tannery had emptied Colton’s river of salmon. There had been public meetings, and public arguments, and public attempts to make companies pay a lot of reparation money. A group of cancer patients in the area with a similar, rare, deadly form of cancer was suing the company that owned the property in an attempt to gain access to private corporate records, and every time Gene heard about the lawsuit he felt terribly sorry for the plaintiffs, not just because they were dying, but also because their last efforts seemed so futile. What could they possibly learn, at this late hour, that would make their deaths any less terrible?
When he went back into the lab, Annie was waiting in line to load her flying ship onto the conveyor belt. He followed Dary into the viewing box, a platform raised a few feet above the cement floor and enclosed on three sides by clear plastic walls. Besides protecting them from being struck, it gave them an excellent view of everyone in the room.
“Ever notice,” Dary said, “how it’s hip in certain places to have a child as an accessory? I mean, if you’re a man,” she said. “There’s nothing novel about it if you’re a woman. We just did as expected.”
“Not you,” Gene said. “You didn’t do it the way anyone expected.”
She smiled an indulging smile. “You never did get used to the word donor. What was it you called him? The Donator?”
“You wouldn’t let me say father.”
“He doesn’t get a promotion he hasn’t earned.”
Gene thought he saw a rare opening. “Aren’t you just a little curious about him?”
There was a brief silence. Then in a cautious manner she said, “Curiosity isn’t the feeling. Maybe there’s something there, but it isn’t curiosity. It’s hard to imagine anything I could find out that wouldn’t seem, well, arbitrary at this point.”
“Who her father is is arbitrary?”
“Not completely. But it isn’t determining, either. Annie’s already who she is.”
“And what if someone told you they could give you an envelope and inside was everything you could possibly want to know about this person? You’re saying you wouldn’t take it?”
“That’s just a fantasy.”
It was Annie’s turn. She loaded her ship onto the conveyor belt and it climbed and climbed and then was launched by a pneumatic blast of air. It plummeted. It was remarkable how quickly it went down. There was no flying, only a swift falling and a soft upside-down landing.
“Brian would fix that in a jiffy,” he said.
“Hmm. Just like he’s fixing his marriage?”
“A marriage isn’t anything like an aircraft,” he said. “It’s not under any control.”
“You’re always telling me things I already know.”
He paused, trying to feel if this could be true. Maybe it was true some of the time, but it didn’t seem like it could be true all of the time. Besides, she was the one who had brought up Brian’s marriage in the first place.
“Why do you say things like that to me?” she went on. “Of course I know a marriage isn’t like an airplane.”
“But how would you know?”
16.
HIS DAUGHTER HAD violated their agreement not to get gifts for each other. It was an arrangement they had settled on after the NordicTrack episode (her idea) and the shoe rack (his), and by the time he discovered the broken agreement on Christmas morning, it was too late to do anything about it except to experience the implicit betrayal, because he had followed the agreed-upon rules in good faith and she hadn’t. He was still brooding over it several hours later when Annie took the digital camera out of the box and began to show him how to use it. He half-listened to the instructions, all the while thinking that when the time came to use it, he would still have to ask somebody for help. Then she informed him that to get the photos out of the camera he would have to put them into the computer, and he lost all interest. It was a bad design, too many steps, overly complicated.
But the gift of the camera, though ostensibly dismissed, continued to occupy his mind and without any warning, it became a source of pain. Because at the end of any other Christmas he and Maida would have retreated to the bedroom and laughed about it the way they had come to laugh about the NordicTrack every time they encountered it. That was the gift of it, the joke in their midst. It was a special, wicked pleasure you didn’t openly admit to and never stopped feeling a little guilty about—this enjoying your child’s lapses in judgment, her misbegotten ideas. The guilt was a necessary part of the pleasure, and what prevented it from being mean or awful was that the person who loved your child as much as you felt the same. It was the ability to share the feeling that rendered it harmless.
The real issue with the camera, he told himself, was that Dary was sneaky, and her sneakiness consisted of being inconsiderate under the guise of being thoughtful. He was the one who had conducted himself correctly according to their agreement. Yet some part of him whispered that he was a
bad father, that only a bad father would stick to a rule not to get his own child a present. He had failed to think beyond the given constraints; he was selfish and literal-minded. The fear that this might be true struck at something already weak, and he went around for the rest of the day carrying this dented organ within him.
In the evening he called Adele and told her he had to see her.
She said she was sorry, she had other plans, but she would meet him as soon as she could, which might be the next day or the day after that.
Right then he wanted to tell her he loved her. It was true, as urgent and true as the pain of missing his wife. But after he began to utter the words he thought better of it and tried to change them into something else: “I love y—”
“Sorry?”
“I love your—pie!”
She said she didn’t know what he was talking about.
The one she had made him for Thanksgiving, he explained. He had never thanked her properly.
“It was good?” she said.
“The best.”
“Not true.”
“It was,” he said. “The best strawberry-rhubarb in the state of New Hampshire.”
At first the practical side of arranging to see Adele confounded him. He was uneasy about someone spotting them together in public, but he was afraid she would take offense if he suggested a motel. She didn’t invite him to her apartment either, though he supposed there wouldn’t have been much privacy for them anyway, with her son and her son’s girlfriend hanging around.
He was still trying to think of an unobjectionable place to meet when the idea of St. Mary’s came into his head.
He knew when he stumbled on it that it was irreproachable. If someone they knew happened to see them together, the church’s atmosphere of decorum would inoculate them from gossip. Not that he cared what the ninety-year-old parishioners of Colton thought. All that mattered to him was preventing gossip from getting back to Dary and Ed and Gayle.
On the appointed day, there was only one other vehicle in the parking lot, a pickup truck with a water cooler bungeed to the side and a pile of scrap wood half-covered in paint. On his way into the building he passed a man in a jumpsuit on a ladder taking down boughs of evergreen strung above the double doors. Gene wondered if a considerable amount of work had been done to the building since he’d last been inside, almost fifty years ago. His memory of the interior was that it was dark and crowded, the columns of the arcade intruding too much into the center of the nave, and the pendant lights with their ornate brass cages appearing too heavy for the cables on which they were suspended. He imagined Maida would have liked to have returned with him just to see what had kept them away for so long. What had they been afraid of? What did it matter if they had been married in the wrong place?
The lighting in the sanctuary had improved since the marriage ceremony, or at least since then the walls had been painted a clean institutional white, giving the impression of greater brightness. There were still pendant lights, but they lacked the ornate filigrees and they used fluorescent bulbs. The floor of the entire nave, except for the area around the main altar, was now covered in carpet, the same deep maroon that he and Dary had seen in the veterans’ hall. The overall effect of the changes was to make the sanctuary appear both more welcoming and less sacred, as if in removing the gloominess, the church had also been cleansed of some of its high religious mystery.
He sat in a pew to wait for Adele. Nearby, in one of the side altars, a carved figure of Mary held a baby Jesus. There was something odd about the statue. The baby didn’t look youthful. He sat perfectly upright, his full head of hair extravagantly coiffed in the style of aging men, and his eyes were dull and his expression sluggish. He looked about fifty years older than he was supposed to be, and Gene wondered if the statue had always been there. He didn’t remember it from the wedding.
Only then did the strangeness of his present endeavor come to him. A voice within said, What are you doing? Why are you here? Of all the places he might have met Adele, why had he chosen St. Mary’s? It was troubling, because it suggested a part of his mind knew something about him that the whole didn’t know. He wondered if he had come back because he had once promised Maida he wouldn’t, and now that she was dead and he could do whatever he wanted, it turned out he was just as vulnerable to the lure of the forbidden as everyone else. Did he want to betray his deceased wife? Of course not. But he also didn’t want her to constrict him in any way.
A door opened somewhere in the building and he stood and turned around, wanting the moment of their seeing each other to coincide so he wouldn’t miss the look on Adele’s face. But there was no one there, just the empty rows of pews.
He sat back down and picked up one of the books in the shelf on the back of the pew. It was a hymnal, not a Bible, and he flipped through another book and then another until he found one containing the Old Testament. He opened to Deuteronomy 30:14, the verse his cousin had read without much feeling at the wedding. He still remembered the way his fifth-grade teacher, Miss Gerta, had read the same passage. No, the word is very near to you, girls and boys, it’s in your mouth, and her own mouth had closed around the words as if it held something luscious inside. The class moved on—Miss Gerta told them to get out their notebooks and do a rumination, her word for a journal entry—but he forgot the classroom he was sitting in, and his face began to burn, and he felt that the words Miss Gerta had spoken contained a secret message about his body and its purpose. Later when he was in college he asked a chaplain if Jesus had ever been lustful. The chaplain gamely entertained his question, taking into consideration Jesus’s age, his exposure to human beauty, and whether arousal in itself directly opposed any single principle of theology. “A fish swims on the first and last day of its life, doesn’t it?” the chaplain said at last. Which Gene took to mean definitely yes.
Adele was late.
He decided he would kiss her when she arrived and that it would be a kiss of passion. In some peculiar way he felt it was his duty under the circumstances. He had a responsibility to continue resisting the Church as he had resisted it for most of his life. Years and years ago he had traded in God for a congenial questioning of the universe’s spiritual chemistry, and the answers he generated for himself were always magnanimous and reassuring: either there was no deity to speak of and the world was suffused with a quality that occasionally made itself felt as divinity, or the spirit that reigned was diffuse, pliant, and benevolent. That there was real goodness in the world beyond any god’s doing—this seemed to him more likely than the opposite possibility. And if in the end it turned out that what lay beyond this world happened to follow the particular shape the Catholics delineated, then he was counting on a loophole that would allow him to be saved by his devotion to his wife and child.
Now he wondered if it mattered that he was trading happiness with one beloved for happiness with another. Were some passions worth more than others, even if you felt that something essential about yourself remained consistent and true in the switching around?
He felt a faint thrumming in the floor, in his feet and his ankles, and then his head filled with the rich outcry of pealing bells. There was a bright opening tone followed by a dimmer succession, as if the later notes were plunged under a sea of molten metal. Miss Gerta had called this effect “riding the tail,” a beautiful name for what was really a melancholy sound. The bells chorused resoundingly once more, then faded.
It was now impossible to deny that Adele was significantly late. His eyes returned to the aging baby Jesus, who was perhaps old enough to have lived through the agony of lust. Just then, Gene remembered something. Adele had said she would meet him only if her son’s baby hadn’t arrived. So the baby had to be on its way, and his life was about to change yet again. At his age he had never expected a baby to enter his life. Yet he accepted the mystery of it—how in losing his wife, he had been given another chance.
He hadn’t prayed in years, but now his yearning for a n
ew life lifted the old impediment from his soul. He prayed for Adele and he prayed for the baby. He prayed for their life together, knowing it would require everything he had to give it. A devotional feeling surged in him and it wasn’t simply a devotion to her. It was a renewed devotion to his own life, because for the first time in a long time, someone needed him.
17.
ON THE SECOND-to-last night of the year, the Donnellys hosted an annual party for their friends. The Ashes attended every year and there were always familiar faces—the Harmons, the Luces, the Spectors, couples the Donnellys had befriended in Colton over the years—though the crowd also generally included some new faces drawn from among Ed’s colleagues or the women with whom Gayle did charity work. One year at the party (it had to have been at least ten years ago), Ed had joked that if he was asked to tell the story of his trip to China one more time, he was going to subject everyone to a slideshow of it next year. The remark was made in jest, but some of the guests nevertheless latched onto it with enthusiasm and promised to hold Ed to it the following year, which was how the tradition of the slideshow was born. But somewhere along the way the presentations had lost the puckish spirit in which they were conceived. The mishaps and misfortunes the Donnellys endured while traveling began to be presented as inevitably strengthening and nourishing to the family character. A wrong turn in Cuernavaca took them through a foul-smelling tunnel that led to a hidden spice market founded by the Incas, or an error in their hotel accommodations in north Cumbria resulted in their staying in the winterized barn of a local sheepherding family. Gene felt it had become almost obligatory for the assembled friends to appreciate the splendid trips the Donnellys had made to various parts of the world.
He considered bowing out this year. Annie had already decided not to go because the cousins had gone home. He’d heard nothing from Adele after she’d failed to show at St. Mary’s, and his inability to reach her since then had left him restless and anxious. Anything might have happened—maybe the baby hadn’t been born healthy, or some complication from labor was maybe keeping the mother in the hospital—but without knowing what it was, he worried that something else was wrong. He tried to remember the exact words of their last conversation. Had he made a misstep? Her silence gnawed at him, activating a part of him that was already insecure. But when he mentioned to Dary that he was thinking of skipping the party, she told him that he couldn’t because there was going to be a surprise.
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