How did these pictures get inside their heads, if they were of things the men had never seen, never been told about? But they all knew, after a night of bad dreams they could see it in each other’s eyes; he had seen it in the way his father had bent over the broom, sweeping off the sidewalk in front of the store, counting the money into the till to get ready for the morning’s first customer. And silence, the silence that lay behind the words even when someone spoke, silence that had looked at and then turned away from the cruel necessities of women’s business. All the men, the priest included, had been grateful that the war of the altar flowers had ended, that this truce both grudgeful and admiring had been achieved.
And he, the butcher’s son, had been grateful, because by that time he had already begun sleeping with the dark-eyed widow.
In her kitchen, the night velvet behind the steamy windows, he sat leaning across the table toward her. She loosened another button at the front of her dress, and his hand fell of its own weight, almost without will, to cup her breast.
“You’re so stupid,” she murmured and smiled, her own eyes half-lidded now.
He knew she meant not just him, but all of them.
There was one more picture inside his head, that he turned his face down toward his plate to see, as though ashamed of this weakness. But he had to, so he could forget for a while, or long enough. Her heartbeat rocked inside his palm even louder now. His arm felt hollow into his chest, where his own pulse caught in time with hers.
Inside his head, in that other night, the doctor still wore his surgical scrubs from the delivery room. As he walked across the field behind the hospital’s parking lot, the high grass silvered by the moon. Carrying something wadded up inside the green sheet, something that leaked through red upon his bare hands. Until the doctor flung open the sheet from where he stood upon the high bank of a creek, and heard a second later the pieces drop into the water. He threw in the red-edged scalpel as well, and it disappeared among the soft weeds like the bright flash of a minnow. In that picture, the doctor looked over his shoulder at the hospital’s lights, face hardened against what he’d come to know about the business of women. The doctor and the priest were brothers apart from other men, and the same as all men. They all knew, but could not speak of these things.
He felt the widow kiss him on the side of his face. He looked up and saw her, and nothing else. Nothing at all.
She wore a black nightgown to bed, or what would have been black if her skin hadn’t shone so luminous through it. To him it looked like smoke in her bedroom’s darkness, smoke across a city of a thousand doors, the shadow across the crypt deep in the white stone where Our Redeemer was both born and buried.
The black nightgown felt like smoke as well, if smoke could have been gathered into his hands. He lay with her in his arms, her eyes closed now, the sheets moulded with sweat to his ribs.
“She likes it very much that way.” Her husband’s awkward English came from above them, from the side of the bed. “To be held, and held. just so.”
He turned his head and looked up at the dead man. The Cracow dandy. Half of the man’s face was gone, from the first bullet that had struck him in the eye, then the rest that his murderer had poured like water from an outstretched hand, feet spread to either side of the man’s shoulders upon the pavement. Not murder really, but a business disagreement between the Cracow dandy and his dark-eyed brothers; it was the business of men to know the difference. Just as it had been the business of the butcher, every other Friday, to ring NO SALE on the cash register and count again the thin sheaf of fives and tens in the plain white envelope that he set beside the Saint Vincent de Paul charity jar. So that the Cracow dandy, when he’d been alive, or one of his elegantly tailored associates, could come in, smile and talk to the butcher, and buy nothing and leave, the envelope somehow magically transported into the dandy’s coat pocket without his ever having shown his soft, manicured hands. Then nodding to the butcher’s son with the pushbroom and smiling, all of them knowing that this was how the business of men was done. So much so, knowledge passed from one generation to the next, from the old world to this, that he had known what to do without being told, to wait upon the rest of the day’s customers, to wrap chops and stew bones, and make change and finally lock the shop up, turning the sign in the door from OPEN to CLOSED, all while his father sat on the alley stoop and knocked back thimbles of schnapps with a heavy, brooding scowl on his face.
“I know,” he told the dead man. “I know what to do next. You don’t have to tell me.”
“You know . . .”
But that wasn’t the dead man who spoke, who whispered, it was the widow with the dark eyes and the black nightgown, the stuff of smoke and silk, pushed above her hips. His hand passed from there to the curve of her thigh, and it felt like laying his palm upon his mother’s stove, if anything in the world could be both that soft and yet as hot as heated iron. Hot enough to burn the tongue in his mouth until he was as mute as dead men should be.
“Like this . . .”
He knew that her dead husband stood by the bed, an angel in an elegant suit. A Cracow dandy, a rose with splinters of bone for white thorns where his right eye and cheekbone had been. He felt the dead man’s fingers curve around his hand, the way his father’s had when he had first been shown how to bring the cleaver between the compliant ribs. Now he let the dead man cup his palm around the widow’s breast.
I’m not such a fool, he thought. I know all this. I was born knowing.
But he let the dead man show him anyway. Because that was what she wanted.
He knew that as well.
“Kiss her.” The dead man whispered in his ear. “While you hold her. Press tight and don’t be afraid. Be a man . . .”
I’m not afraid. He hadn’t been afraid the first time he had been in her bed—their bed—and he had looked over his shoulder and seen her dead husband with the ruined face. How could anyone lying in bed with a woman ever be afraid? And with her clad only in a nightgown of black smoke and silk . . .
That was what women didn’t know. For all their mysteries and secrets , for even the youngest girls’ knowing smiles—they didn’t know that when men trembled in this place, in the grave of desire, it was not from fear.
He opened his eyes and looked down. Looked down and saw what the dead man above him saw. He saw her with her eyes closed, lips slightly parted, her naked arms reaching . . .
For her husband.
His face burning with shame, he looked over his shoulder to the one who the dark-eyed widow loved, who she would always love.
“Don’t feel bad.” The Cracow dandy’s voice was the kindness of one man to another. “It’s not that she doesn’t care for you. She might even have loved you, or someone like you, if she hadn’t loved me first.”
“I know. I know that,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Here . . .
He no longer knew whose voice it was, that told him what to do. It could have been his own.
Like this . . .
Or hers. He watched his hand, or that of her dead husband, stroke her dark hair upon the pillow. She turned her face toward that touch.
And smiled.
“You see?” said the dead man. “Just like that. just like that. Just like that.”
He closed his own eyes. And kissed her. The tear between his lashes and her cheek burned like fire, if fire were salt.
As he knew would happen—as none of them told him, but he knew anyway—a year passed, from the time a sealed coffin was lain in earth, to the time when he knocked upon her door, his hands smelling of blood from his father’s shop, no matter how much he scrubbed them with soap and vinegar.
A year passed from the Cracow dandy’s death, he knew it had, but he still came and knocked at her door.
The dark-eyed widow opened the door just wide enough that he could see the others inside, the bottles of wine upon the table, and hear their bright laughter. She looked out upon him, standing there
in the darkness that came so early in the winter. She smiled with enough sadness to break his heart, then shook her head and silently closed the door. He could still hear the laughter and singing on the other side.
He turned away and saw the cardboard box at the curb, the box of her old clothes, for the trash collectors to pick up and carry away. All the black dresses that she had worn for the last year. The black with which she had mourned her dead husband. A year had passed and she didn’t need them anymore.
He knelt down and pushed his hands through the contents of the box. Until he found, at the bottom, something of silk and smoke. He drew it out and held it against his face, breathing in the scent that was part her and part the perfume of ancient roses that she had used.
He knew. He had always known. A year would pass, and she would forget about both of them, the butcher’s son and the Cracow dandy. She was still young, and a year had passed.
He heard steps running on the sidewalk. They halted, and he looked up and saw one of the youngest girls watching him without smiling, a coil of jump rope in her hand. It got dark so early, this time of year.
The little girl ran past him, toward her home and supper. He let the nightgown slip from his hands, drifting across his knee and a corner of the box like smoke, if smoke could fall.
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Document creation date: 18 November 2011
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Black Nightgown Page 2
