CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1991

I pulled into our driveway in Port Saugus and parked the car around the side of the house so no one would think to drop by and ask where we’d been. Nothing looked the same. The weeds had grown up high around the porch, and the roof had gone green with lichen. Gray shingles littered the ground around the converted barn, and a thick fog was coming up from the river, erasing everything with it. I left the cardboard box on the porch and made my way through the wet grass to the oak tree where our beagles were buried, the little tags we’d left around their necks far beneath a blanket of yellowed leaves, their skeletons choked by hungry roots. I peered around the side of the barn, looking for any trace of our artist neighbor Jane, who was always good for an argument over a glass of bourbon. But her house had been painted a strange purplish color, and the Fiat wasn’t in the driveway. In the past, Jane had been closer to Susan, but I always looked forward to seeing her. Judging from the paint job, however, I assumed she’d picked up quietly and moved on. I was almost relieved. I didn’t want to think of her watching the house lights go on or imagining all the reasons why I might be here alone.

I hadn’t planned on setting foot in the converted barn. Over the years I’d grown to hate it even more than I had once loved it. It had become a sort of dumping ground for all the things Susan and I couldn’t find a place for. But it looked to me like the roof had been damaged: a large branch had been ripped off the tallest maple, perhaps in one of August’s more violent electrical storms. Apparently Dick Cassidy, whom we paid to look in on the place, hadn’t been doing his job.

Reaching under the planter near the front of the barn, I got the key out and opened the door. Everything smelled damp and neglected. The fallen branch had made a large hole in the roof, and rain had collected at the foot of the ladder. I could hear the slow music of drops spilling from the hayloft to the floor, but furniture from the old house in Lincoln was hard to make out in the flat light. I stepped between the rows, blundering through screens of invisible cobwebs, and ran my hands over the dropcloths and plastic covers, feeling for moisture. Everything was still dry, though coated in a thick layer of dust.

My mother would not have been pleased to see her treasures so neglected, but there were just too many to sort through. Carefully selecting furniture had been one of her favorite pastimes. She knew people who combed estate auctions and phoned her when they found just the right thing. When she couldn’t make it herself, my mother would enter her bid and spend all day waiting by the telephone eating petits fours with a startled look on her face. I had thought it laughable, even strange, until I’d offered my first bid at auction many years later and found myself remembering these little things; the way she’d sigh, study her sleeves, or straighten seams when something special, something she’d really wanted, had slipped through her hands.

Locating my toolbox, I pulled a sheet of plastic off a bookshelf and awkwardly climbed the ladder to the hayloft, as the quick shape of a swallow darted between the broken boards. I stood there on the wet floor of the loft, examining the damage. It wasn’t so bad. Once I’d cleared away some of the brittle branches, the hole would be easy enough to fix: I’d cover it temporarily with plastic and make arrangements to get it repaired the next day. Simple enough. But no chore is ever as simple as it seems. Sawing off the last difficult branches, I found a bird’s nest balancing on the rafter, the skeletons of four baby barn swallows nestled in the bottom, like prehistoric fossils my father and I had once found in the surface of a rock so many years ago on the Box Butte plain.

I stared at the few remaining feathers clinging to the inside of the mud nest like the last leaves on a branch, wondering what the plight of these helpless creatures had been. Disease, starvation, neglect? It was impossible to tell. I couldn’t bring myself to disturb the little tomb, so I stretched the tarp quickly over the hole in the roof and nailed it in place. I had just turned to go when something thudded against the plastic, leaving a spray of feathers in its wake.

Once, twice, three more times, this bird tried to break through before stunning herself or finally giving up. I touched a small puncture left by her impact and thought about my wife’s persistence. She had tried so many times to guide us toward a normal life where everything was out on the table. Susan seemed to have grown into someone more self-possessed than I had—and more driven. She spent hours and hours going over the children’s homework, monitoring their progress, encouraging them in every way possible. Night after night she had sat with Hank at the dining room table, correcting his college admissions essays. Soon it would be Mary’s turn; Susan had bought her all the latest college guides and test preparation booklets, which still sat in a pile by the door to her room. Mary’s lack of interest never seemed to discourage Susan. She had always been determined to give them everything a mother could provide.

I thought about how devastating it would be for her if I never came back. Early in our marriage she mooned constantly over an old Sam Cooke song she used to love: My baby done gone away and left me. She sang it over and over, secure in the knowledge that I never would go. Standing there in the gloom surrounded by all my mother’s furniture, I felt so guilty about what I was thinking of doing that I almost decided to drive back. Yet stepping out onto the lawn, and looking up at the old tired house, with all that flaking paint, I thought about the starts Susan and I had made over the years and how each one had seemed more like an end.

*   *   *

It had been a little more than a year since we’d come here to Port Saugus, bumping around in the tight halls trying to avoid each other. The children had sat outside on the cement wall overlooking the river, their heads hanging like prisoners. When it got dark, they drove us out of rooms by turning up the radio so loud I couldn’t think. Susan filled her time with walks along the river and trips to the library, while I attempted to caulk windows or visit stoneyards and antiques shops. I hadn’t actually wanted to be there: We’d scheduled the trip around the arrival of a truck bearing my parents’ furniture, which my uncle had returned to me after the death of his wife, Clara, my mother’s sister. I just wanted to sell everything, but Susan insisted on going through it together, deciding what to keep out and what to store away. She wanted things kept in good condition for the children. “Think of what it will mean to them someday,” she kept repeating, though they didn’t know my parents, or have any connection to that past. On the day the shipment arrived, I was off seeing a client who kept a house in the Catskills. When I came home in the early evening, Susan was frustrated but trying not to show it. My timing, in her eyes, was too impeccable.

“I could have used your input,” she said, dicing a garlic clove with an unnecessary amount of vigor. The kitchen was unbearably hot, and I wiped my brow on my sleeve. I had postponed my trip to the client’s twice in an effort to accommodate her. But I tried to keep the peace.

“Ah,” I said. “A lot of stuff?”

“A fair amount.”

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to help.”

“I picked out some nice pieces and had the boys put them in the living room. The rest they left in a horrible jumble in the barn.” I followed her down the hall and into the living room with a knot of dread in my stomach.

By the window, I recognized the armchair embroidered with bees that had once been my father’s favorite. There was also a mahogany side table, and my mother’s grand piano, which now dominated the entire living room. I turned my back on everything and took a deep breath, trying to collect myself. I could still see my mother sitting on that bench, her fingers fumbling over the keys as she desperately tried to turn sound into music. She had always failed.

“That’s my mother’s piano,” I said.

“Did she play?”

I didn’t answer because I couldn’t actually remember if she’d ever completed a song.

Susan came up and hugged me from behind, but I just stood there with my arms at my sides. “I know it doesn’t look quite right here,” she said, stepping away and tracing her finger over the smooth black lid of the piano.

“Then what possessed you to put it in the house? None of us even play and the kids have no interest now.”

“It’s a beautiful piano.”

“We have no use for a piano,” I said, aware of how stiff and ungrateful I sounded, “no matter how beautiful.”

She sighed and closed her eyes, trying to gather patience, then opened them slowly and said, “All right, we’ll get rid of it. We’ll use the money for the college fund.”

But it was the last week of our vacation, and I just didn’t want any more chores or responsibilities. I spent time making notes in the kitchen about what needed to be done when I returned to the gallery. I rarely went into the living room, but whenever I did, I noticed the children stepping around the piano carefully. No one had dared open the lid, and I had a feeling that conversations had occurred to which I had not been privy. My life had been filled with a certain amount of this—things that couldn’t be said around me.

All that month it was hot. Susan and I slept with a fan in the window to pull cool air in off the river, but that last night it was so sticky I couldn’t sleep. I poured myself a bourbon and slipped out the back door, letting the screen close softly, hoping the river might offer a bit of breeze. It was a brilliant evening. Stars littered the sky like the lights of some vast distant city, and for a moment I felt at peace with all things. I remembered mounting the steps of the Acropolis in graduate school, and the relief I had experienced gazing up at the Parthenon for the first time, at that perfect ancient symmetry. The chaos and smog of Athens had disappeared beneath me. The rightness of the building silenced my head, as the sound of the river did that night.

Inside the house, though, I could hear the children whispering in the dark.

“Do you think he sat in that chair?” Hank said.

“Who?”

“Him. Starkweather.”

“I don’t know,” Mary said. “It gives me this funny feeling, like I’m about to cry when I think about it. But it’s like I’m proud, too, of this horrible thing that happened, and I hate myself when I tell people about it, like I think it makes me special.”

A breeze moved through the leaves, and Hank murmured something I couldn’t make out. I heard the swirl of water down by the riverbank.

“I’ve done that too,” Hank said. “I’ve told people.”

“Not like I did. He hates me.”

“Dad doesn’t hate you,” Hank said. “He doesn’t think like that.”

“How do you know how he thinks?”

Perhaps it was the bourbon, I don’t know, but suddenly I saw it all so clearly. How could they expect to understand what I couldn’t understand myself? I wanted to hold my children, put their heads against my chest the way I never had been able to, comfort them as so many other more competent fathers would have done. But I couldn’t just walk in there and start talking about what had happened to their grandparents. To me, it had always felt like something to be ashamed of. I knew it had changed me, and yet I couldn’t remember who I’d been before.

When they were younger and the time had come for me to speak about the past, I hadn’t been prepared. After school one day, Hank wanted to know where my parents were. They had been writing letters in class, and several children had written to their grandparents. “What about Grandpa Bowman,” I asked. “Did you write to him?” I don’t know why I asked. The words had come out of nowhere. Hank, of course, had never known him and seemed mystified by my question. Grandpa Bowman, of course, was long dead and buried.

“Where is he?” Hank wanted to know.

I explained to him that all living things die, sometimes without warning. I didn’t get into it any more than that.

“Was it snowing when they died?” he asked.

How could he have known? “Yes,” I said. “It was so quiet and cold.”