Albert Chura is an early riser. Joyce awakens to the buzzing of his lawn mower. The days are getting longer, and already her room is filled with sunlight. Outside, the pale spring leaves have matured into a deep summer green. Ed’s white birches—he planted them along the front edge of the yard—are in full leaf. Once again Joyce has her privacy, after a long winter of feeling exposed.
She dresses and goes downstairs to make coffee. From the front porch, she gives Albert a wave. After he finishes, he’ll come inside for a cup. He always compliments her coffee, though she knows it’s nothing special. She simply follows the directions on the can. It seems a ridiculous thing to learn at her age, but widowhood is full of such lessons. Ed, who rose before dawn, always had his first cup alone in the dark. He’d put on a fresh pot when he heard Joyce on the stairs.
She sets out milk and sugar for Albert—she takes hers black—as he raps at the back door. “Morning,” he grunts, wiping his work boots on the mat. Albert is seventy-two, the age Ed would have been, and his boots look nearly that old. He wears what he always wears, green Dickie work pants and a clean white T-shirt that seems to have shrunk in the wash. It’s not unlike the uniform he wore as the high school janitor, a job Ed gave him out of sympathy or misplaced patriotism and helped him keep for thirty years. Albert was a decorated veteran; at Anzio he’d taken a bullet in the hip. Ed was 4F and, in Joyce’s opinion, unduly impressed by such things.
“Lot of stones this year,” Albert says, hiking up his pant legs to sit. Every spring when the snow melts, Joyce’s front lawn is littered with gravel. The pebbles are spread by the township crews for traction on icy roads, and the first hard rain washes them into her yard. Some years Ed had spent half a day raking them up.
“I need to reseed out back,” Albert adds. “Them kids tore it up pretty good this year.” Every winter Joyce’s backyard is a mecca for neighborhood children. At the first snowfall they show up in droves with toboggans and sleds. Their voices fill the air like birdsong, delighted shrieks as they careen down the hill.
He glances over Joyce’s shoulder into the living room, where she’s left a couple of large Hefty bags, old clothes she will take to Goodwill. “Spring cleaning, eh?”
Albert is handsome for a man his age; at least he still has a lot of hair. It is snow-white and worn in the style he’s favored since high school, an extravagant ducktail held in place with Brylcreem. Joyce hadn’t known him in school—he is several years older, her brother Georgie’s age. According to Georgie, Albert had been a hothead and a troublemaker. He dropped out in his final year, worked in the coal mines until the army drafted him. That he returned with a hitch in his step earned him some sympathy. When you came back wounded, people forgot for a time why they’d been glad to see you go.
It is the fact of growing old in a small town: you know everyone’s whole story, and everyone, like it or not, knows yours. Except for a brief period in her youth, Joyce has lived her entire life in Bakerton. When she looks at someone her own age—her neighbor Betty Bursky, for example—she sees the towheaded child Betty once was, the teenage siren, the young wife with too many children; the whole journey that landed Betty where she is now, widowed, morbidly obese, living with a dozen cats in a manufactured home on Locust Street, as though feeding a crowd is a habit she can’t break.
Albert stirs his coffee. There is a mermaid tattooed on his forearm, green and fuzzy like mold on bread. “I’ve been meaning to ask, Joyce. That bike of Ed’s is just setting in your garage. If you don’t have any use for it, I can take it off your hands.”
It startles her somehow to hear him use her first name. What had he called her when Ed was alive? Nothing. They simply hadn’t spoken. It was Ed who’d phoned Albert when something needed to be painted or trimmed or sanded or graded, the chores he could no longer manage. Presumably Albert had called Ed by his first name, too; when had that started? After they both retired, probably, and were no longer principal and janitor. When the school’s stiff hierarchy, like so much else, was made irrelevant by age.
“It’s a good bike. Shame for it to set there.” Albert is a keen negotiator, a wheeler-dealer, Ed used to say. When something breaks down at the house, Albert is a phone call away, but it is a call Joyce dreads. She overpays him, probably, but this is preferable to haggling. Talking about money embarrasses her.
“Well, what do you say?”
Even the teachers had called him Mr. Hauser. In the beginning Joyce herself had. He hired her as the school secretary, and later, after they began dating, she carefully avoided addressing him by name. It would have been absurd to call him Mr. Hauser when the whole faculty had seen them together at the Legion dances, the Rivoli Theater, Keener’s Diner for a bite afterward.
As the school secretary, she was simply Joyce. Like the cafeteria ladies, the custodial staff, or somebody’s pet, she was thought to need only one name. Later, after she’d put herself through school and stood at the front of her own classroom, she truly enjoyed being called Miss Novak, the small formality like an umbrella in the rain. It distresses her to learn that her daughter, a college professor, lets students call her Rebecca, but she is trying not to be critical. How times have changed, Joyce says.
Later, after Albert leaves, she sees that he forgot to trim the hedges. Her own fault: she gave him several chores when one task at a time is all he can remember. He is a good worker as long as you don’t overload him. Ed used to joke about his forgetfulness, even gave him a nickname, Addlebert. It was a private joke, one of many between them; a complex web of shared silliness that, now that Ed is gone, means nothing to anybody.
It offends her slightly, the way the world has gone on without him. There was a television show he liked—something about military lawyers, she couldn’t make any sense of it, but Ed never missed an episode. All last summer he grumbled about the reruns. Then, the week after he died, a new season started. She could have cried at the unfairness of it, and did. You cried over the small things.
Her own memory is sharp, painfully so. She wonders when Albert’s started to go. Ed had blamed it on the drinking. Over the years Albert had been on and off the wagon. There had been times, more than a few, when he missed work or showed up soused, and Ed sent him home after a talking-to. A couple of students had seen him staggering, and the others pretended they had. The crueler boys aped his limp. Anyone else would have fired the man ten times over, but Ed could never bring himself to do it. He’s got a family, he pointed out. Albert’s all right once you get to know him. He’s not a bad guy.
Ed did all the hiring and firing at Bakerton High, though the truculent school board had the last word. As in many small towns, the system stank of nepotism, which got worse over the years as the mines failed and jobs became more and more scarce. There were twelve board members, most with several adult children. (Bakerton was a Catholic town.) Add in the nieces and nephews and cousins, and you had a school system with too many employees and fewer and fewer pupils as the young families moved away. It isn’t her imagination: Bakerton is aging before her eyes, the whole town subsisting on Social Security or, like Joyce, widows’ pensions. Her own daughter went away to college and stayed away; she comes back only at Christmas, and Joyce doesn’t blame her a bit. Rebecca would be miserable in Bakerton, though she was a happy child here, sunny and sociable, involved in school activities, a leader of teams. It was in high school that she became a deliberate misfit, proud of all the ways she didn’t belong. Ed blamed himself: it wasn’t easy being the principal’s daughter. It was true that teachers’ children were noticed and commented upon, their slightest misstep dissected in the faculty lounge. Poor kid, Ed would tell Joyce, shaking his head. At least she only has one parent in the system. Good thing you got out when you did.
Was it a good thing? Looking back, Joyce isn’t sure, though at the time the choice was nearly automatic. Ed made a good living; they didn’t really need her paycheck. She had two small children, one sickly and furiously attached to his mother. Teddy had been a babysitter’s nightmare. Each morning he’d wept bitterly, sometimes for hours, when Joyce left him with her sister. Dorothy kept track of his medications, his twice-daily breathing treatments, but she was a high-strung spinster undone by tantrums. After a few months with Teddy, she was a nervous wreck.
So when the school year ended, Joyce surrendered her classroom—the place where she’d been happiest, the job she’d worked so long and diligently to get. She was no longer Mrs. Hauser. Gone was the companionship of the faculty lounge, the cheery sound of the morning bell ringing the start of a new day. Gone were the shy, studious girls, her favorite pupils; the obstreperous boys who made her laugh; The Great Gatsby and Lord Jim and The Scarlet Letter, books she has always loved.
For many years her small family occupied her completely. She was cook and laundress, chauffeur and nurse. She has never admitted to anyone—why would she?—that books have brought her as much joy as her children have, and considerably less pain.
In the afternoon her daughter calls. It is six hours later in France, nine P.M. on a Saturday night, and Rebecca is lonely. Joyce can hear it in her voice, or maybe it’s just a bad connection, hollow-sounding, as though they’re shouting across a frozen lake. Additionally, there is a delay on the line, a few seconds’ pause after each of them speaks, so they’re always interrupting each other. She listens as Rebecca complains about a difficult student, her officious landlady, a transit strike that makes her commute to the university nearly impossible. (The French, it seems, are always on strike.) Joyce worries, but doesn’t ask, about Rebecca’s phone bill.
It isn’t until the very end of the conversation that Joyce mentions Albert Chura.
“The janitor? We used to call him Prince Albert. I don’t remember why.” Rebecca pauses. “Why would he want Dad’s bike?”
Joyce starts to answer, but Rebecca interrupts. “Well, it’s not like you’re going to use it,” she says breezily, as if she doesn’t know (perhaps she doesn’t) that the words will sting. That Joyce never learned to ride a bike remains, even at her age, a point of embarrassment. Her parents had been poor and hadn’t owned such things, and by the time Joyce could afford to buy one herself, she had little desire to learn. Now, apparently, she is the only adult alive who’s never mastered this skill. (Her sister Dorothy, dead now, doesn’t count.) Ed loved bicycles and offered many times to teach her. I’ll walk behind you, keep you steady. Just like we did with the kids. For a while he badgered her, which made her even more determined not to learn. They had fought about it more than once, quite vehemently. It all seems stupid now.
“Prince Albert,” said Rebecca. “He and Dad were friends, right?”
Well, no: not friends, exactly. Albert had a way of lecturing Ed on mechanical things—once, the proper use of a pressure washer—that sounded slightly belligerent, as though he wanted it known, again and always, that he was the more competent man. Joyce didn’t appreciate this, but Ed had tolerated it with his usual good humor. He had an easygoing disposition and was not easily riled. Though occasionally, after Albert left, he’d seemed irritated. That guy will talk your ear off, he’d say, shaking his head.
“They knew each other a long time,” Joyce says.
“Well, maybe Dad would want him to have it. He loved that bike,” Rebecca adds, as though Joyce might not know this.
“Yes, he did,” Joyce says.
He found the bike the year he retired, in the pages of a catalog. It was a replica of one he’d ridden as a boy, red, with coaster brakes. At the time he owned a ten-speed with hand brakes, which squeaked no matter how often he replaced the pads. For many years, a bike with coaster brakes had been impossible to find.
He rode the new bike to daily Mass, where he served as a lector. (In one of the many ironies of their married life, Ed, the convert, turned out to be the better Catholic.) From the kitchen window, Joyce watched him pedal down the street. He returned exhilarated but winded from the effort. “It’s good for the old geezer,” he joked, huffing mightily. “Give the lungs a workout.”
He had quit smoking for the second time, and each morning he woke with a rousing cough. Listening, Joyce thought only of Teddy. It was almost more than she could bear to hear Ed straining for breath.
That evening Joyce sits through Mass—it’s quicker than the Sunday service—and eats dinner with her friend Eleanor Rouse at a new restaurant with an old name, the Commercial Hotel. The original Commercial went under when Joyce was a girl, and the second was destroyed in a fire some years ago. This new Commercial occupies the old Sons of Italy building, and Joyce hopes Dick Devlin can make a go of it. Bakerton, at the moment, has only three other restaurants: a pizza joint, a diner with bad coffee, and a Chinese takeout with a few tables in the rear. Every so often an unemployed miner would scrape together the money to open a new one. Within a few months, a year at the outside, the place would close.
“How are you making out with your cleaning?” Eleanor asks. She’s been after Joyce for months to go through Ed’s closets, his camera equipment, the basement workshop where he kept his tools. You need closure, she likes to say. Her own husband died ten years ago, and she considers herself an authority.
“I dropped off three bags this morning,” Joyce says. That the clothes were mostly hers and Rebecca’s is not, strictly speaking, Eleanor’s business. “Tomorrow I’ll tackle those boxes in the basement. And Albert Chura is interested in Ed’s bike.”
“Oh, Albert.” Eleanor rolls her eyes. At one time she’d been the school nurse; she remembers a younger Albert, in his drinking days. “He’s always been a hoarder. A cheapskate, too. Let me guess: he didn’t offer you a dime.”
Joyce blinked. Until that moment money hadn’t crossed her mind.
“Rebecca called,” she says, changing the subject. “She wants to come visit in July or August for a couple of weeks.” It is apparently the time to get out of France, which every summer is overrun with tourists. Americans, Rebecca said with disdain. She has spoken this way since high school. It seemed absurd then—except for a class trip to Niagara Falls, she’d never taken a breath in another country—but to Joyce, who as a child collected cans for the war effort, whose brother marched in V-J parades, it was also perplexing and sad. Her own parents had come over from Italy and Poland, a fact she’s never advertised. As a teenager she was ashamed of their accents, and as an adult is ashamed of her shame.
It’s no mystery where Rebecca learned to disparage Americans. Her junior year at Bakerton High, Ed hired a new language teacher, a woman named Marianne Blinn. And more than either of her parents, it was Marianne Blinn who shaped the course of Rebecca’s life.
She was a doctor’s wife, and in a town with only two of them, that was enough to make her a celebrity. All of Bakerton knew the story of the Blinns’ courtship. They had married in Germany, where David Blinn was stationed, and after his residency came back to his hometown to live. It was considered a romantic story, in part because Bakerton was not generally a town people came back to. You were born in Bakerton and either escaped, as Joyce’s brothers had, or failed to. Ed Hauser was a rarity: he’d grown up halfway across the state and was hired for the principal’s job, over some objections, when no local candidate could be found.
In the same way, Marianne Blinn was a controversial hire. The other candidate, a recent Penn State grad whose uncle sat on the school board, had significant support. Marianne’s degree from a foreign university was viewed with suspicion. More than one board member argued that, as a doctor’s wife, she didn’t need the job.
But Ed lobbied hard on her behalf, and Marianne Blinn was hired to teach French and Latin. Later a new course was added, introductory German, her native tongue. Each morning she was seen driving to school in her little Audi. (Foreign cars, in those days, were rare in Bakerton. Even now you don’t see them every day.) She was a tall, striking woman, dark-haired, with a single dramatic streak of gray she didn’t bother to touch up. This was a subject of much discussion at Ruth Rizzo Beauty, where Joyce reported each Saturday morning for her wash and set. I don’t know why she doesn’t do something with that hair, said Ruth as she scrubbed Joyce’s scalp. Lord knows she can afford to. Like every woman she knew, Joyce got a fresh perm every three months. (The frugal, the ambitious, and the hard up rolled each other’s hair at home.) Marianne’s hair was shoulder-length, twisted sometimes into a loose bun. She wore no lipstick, ever, just rings of black liner around her eyes.
By all accounts she was a marvelous teacher. Still, there were critics. When parents complained that she graded harshly, Ed refused to intervene. The teachers are on the front lines, he told Joyce, as if she might have forgotten. The least I can do is back them up. Rebecca, a bright but erratic student, studied French with fierce intensity. In the evenings she barricaded herself in her bedroom with vocabulary tapes—recordings of Madame Blinn’s own sultry voice, duplicated in the school’s new audio lab. J’irai, tu iras, nous irons, vous irez. Each followed by a brief pause in which the student was to pronounce the words herself.
Joyce never learned a foreign language. In high school she declined Latin verbs, but this had never seemed more than an exercise, a language spoken only by priests. Lingering outside Rebecca’s door, she’d felt a deep loneliness she remembered from childhood. After her father passed the citizenship exam, he’d insisted they speak only English at home, but late at night, after the children were in bed, he tuned the radio to a Polish station from Pittsburgh. One night—she was very small, five or six—she’d crept downstairs. Listening, she had felt forsaken. It had seemed in that moment that her father was a stranger, thinking and dreaming in a language she would never understand.
In June Madame Blinn hosted a dinner party in her home for the handful of students who’d earned A’s each quarter. To Joyce, who’d kept her own pupils at a distance, it was a startling notion. The Blinns lived in a stately Victorian on Indian Hill, an enormous house for a childless couple. Dr. Blinn had bought it from the estate of Virgie Baker, whose father and grandfather had owned the mines. As a girl, Joyce had walked past the house on her way to school, peering through the thick hedge of lilacs hoping for a glimpse of a Baker. The fragrance of lilacs in springtime had followed her down the street.
Joyce had planned to drive Rebecca to the dinner, but Teddy was running a fever; as he breathed into his nebulizer, he wouldn’t let go of her hand. Instead it was Ed who ferried Rebecca back and forth and was invited in for coffee and dessert. The next morning Rebecca raved about the Blinns’ huge dining room, the table big enough for twelve. (The couple apparently entertained a great deal.) Madame Blinn had cooked the dinner herself: a creamy leek soup (where, Joyce wondered, did you buy leeks in Bakerton?), a leg of lamb, crepes dripping with butter for dessert. Rebecca described these dishes in elaborate detail, and Joyce remembers thinking that her daughter seemed a little in love with Marianne Blinn. The night of the dinner she’d changed her outfit several times, as though dressing for a date.
Joyce cooked with margarine, still does. They’d both grown up with it during the war, and Ed said often that he preferred the taste.
After dinner with Eleanor, on her way home from the Commercial, Joyce drives past Albert Chura’s house. It is a small, tidy place, yellow brick, with an attached garage. The lawn is shorn and well fertilized, as dense and green as Astroturf. In the backyard is a huge aluminum shed, nearly the size of the Churas’ house.
As she approaches, Albert comes out of the shed. Recognizing her car, he waves her down. Local custom demands that she lower her window and make small talk for a few minutes. When they have exhausted the topic of her lawn—he agrees to come back Monday to finish the trimming—Albert says, “Joyce, have you ever seen my barn?”
Oh, hell, she thinks, remembering what Ed used to say: That guy will talk your ear off.
She parks and follows him into the shed, which is full of tools and equipment—a snowblower and several mowers, intact and in pieces; a lawn tractor, a contraption she believes is called a roto-tiller. In contrast to the tidy yard, the shed is dirty and cluttered, crowded with junk.
“Very impressive,” Joyce says.
“I like to have something to work on.” Albert points to an old bicycle propped against one wall, inverted, its wheels removed. “That’s my latest project. Not worth the effort, probably. It’s a piece of crap.”
She notices in one corner a portable radio, its antennas extended. Beside it are several mugs and glasses, a plastic Pepsi bottle, round canisters of snuff.
Albert follows her gaze. “I come out here when I need peace and quiet,” he says, and Joyce thinks of his wife, known to be a persnickety housekeeper. Joyce once spotted her at the foot of the driveway, spritzing the mailbox with a bottle of Windex.
“About that bike of Ed’s,” he begins.
“Sure, Albert,” says Joyce. “I don’t see why not.”
Sunday morning dawns quietly, no lawn mowers humming. The neighborhood is populated with Catholics of Joyce’s generation, and out of piety or habit, they avoid doing chores on the Sabbath—at least any chores that the neighbors can see. Joyce can recall the stern text of her Baltimore Catechism: By the Third Commandment all unnecessary servile work on Sunday is forbidden. Young people, of course, have never heard of this injunction. From her kitchen window, she sees Andy Carnicella puttering in his backyard, dismantling a Weed Whacker. Andy is Rebecca’s age, and by the time they came along, the Baltimore Catechism had fallen out of favor. They’d been spared the endless memorization, the faith distilled down to hundreds of questions and answers Joyce had learned by rote.
What is servile work?
Servile work is that which requires labor of body rather than of mind.
Her whole married life, Sunday had belonged to the crossword. Ed, the early riser, would have two pencils sharpened; over breakfast and again after church, they sat at the kitchen table happily filling the boxes, rising sometimes to consulting the atlas or the dictionary or the encyclopedia shelved in the den. Joyce hasn’t touched a crossword since September. Now she drinks coffee and scans the headlines and wonders how to fill the day.
In the afternoon she goes down to the basement, a windowless corner Ed used as his workshop. Compared to Albert Chura’s cluttered shed, it is orderly as an operating room. Against one wall are a dozen cardboard boxes, neatly stacked. Another wall is covered with corkboard; there are hammers and handsaws and other items she can’t identify, all hanging by hooks. Three low shelves hold paint and varnish, various solvents, old coffee cans filled with hardware. Joyce peers into each one and touches its contents, the nails and screws and bolts and hinges her husband sorted carefully by size.
She sits at the workbench Ed built, on an old kitchen chair he salvaged from a set they’d retired years ago. She has resolved to sort through one box per day. It is the opposite of servile work. It is labor of the heart.
The boxes, for the most part, are unlabeled; there’s no telling what a particular one will hold: vinyl records, 78s and 33s; camera equipment, books that had overflowed the shelves in the den. In Friday’s box she’d found Ariel and Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. Ed had read the series years ago, all ten volumes; she remembered him lingering over Rousseau and Revolution, slogging through The Age of Faith. Joyce had marked the carton DURANT. She would donate the set to the public library. It was not the sort of thing she’d ever read herself.
Today she chooses a box at random. This one is too heavy to lift, so Joyce kneels beside it. Ed had suffered twinges of arthritis, but Joyce, knock wood, has no such troubles. Must be all those years of kneeling, Ed used to joke. His own knees protested; they had remained Protestant. Joyce had good Catholic knees.
The box is filled with high school yearbooks, a decade’s worth of the Bakerton Banner. For most of his career, for no extra pay, Ed had advised the yearbook staff. A passionate amateur photographer, he made sure Bakerton had a fully equipped darkroom, something no other local school possessed. On schooldays it was used by the photography classes; on weekends, Ed went there to develop his own film. In summer he spent whole days in the darkroom. Often he rode there on his bicycle, his camera bag strapped to his back.
Joyce selects a yearbook at random: BANNER ’75. She opens to the frontispiece, looking for the familiar verse: Go placidly among the noise and haste. Another private joke: each graduating class voted on a poem for the opening page, and for most of the sixties and seventies—to Ed’s amusement and despair—“Desiderata” had won the poll.
She remembers enough Latin to know it’s a fatuous title. The poem, it seems to her, has little to do with desire.
Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.
Joyce marks the box BANNER: another donation for the public library. Gratefully she turns out the light.
On Monday Albert Chura trims the hedges. After they finish their coffee, Joyce takes him down to the basement. She points to the boxes marked BANNER and DURANT. “They’re pretty heavy. Do you suppose you can get them up to my car?”
“Sure.” Albert eyes the stacks of boxes. “What’s in all them?”
“I haven’t gone through those yet. So far it’s mostly books.”
Albert’s eyes flicker. “Are you sure that’s a good idea? Going through Ed’s private things?”
“Someone has to do it.” Joyce has imagined Rebecca some years hence, flying back from France for her mother’s funeral. It seems unfair to make her sort through two parents’ possessions, forty years’ worth of memories in that house.
After Albert leaves, she chooses a lightweight box, one she can manage on her own. She has never been comfortable asking for help. The other cartons had been closed carelessly, the cardboard flaps folded end over end. This one is sealed with packing tape, as though its contents might escape.
Cutting it open, she understands why it’s so light. Nothing inside but photographs, piles of them. Ed’s hobby had vexed her in the beginning, since more than anything, she hated to have her picture taken. Early in their courtship she had submitted to the camera, her grim smile speaking for her: Get that thing away from me. Later, pregnant with Rebecca, she refused to be photographed at all. The children, luckily, were unself-conscious models, so Ed at last left her alone. Every few months she’d filled another album, Rebecca and Teddy at various ages and stages. The little orphans, Rebecca now jokes: their father invisible behind the camera, their mother hiding in the next room.
But these aren’t family photos. They’re black-and-white shots taken in and around the high school. She recognizes certain classrooms, the library, the cafeteria, the gym. Yearbook discards, then: unknown teenagers with outdated haircuts. She is halfway through the pile when she spots a familiar face.
Marianne Blinn is laughing into the camera, Marianne in a dark coat and earmuffs, her hair flocked with snow. Joyce stares at the photo a long time. Marianne clearly doesn’t mind being photographed. She beams as though the camera were a lover, or simply a very good friend.
Joyce puts the photo aside. Beneath are more shots of Marianne. In her classroom, erasing the blackboard. In the cafeteria, holding a lunch tray. Sitting at her desk before a bulletin board decorated with snowflakes; Joyce picks out the words Joyeux Noel.
Other shots were taken in summer: Marianne in a tank top and long skirt, astride a bicycle.
Ed’s private things.
Breaking her own rule, she opens a second box. This one, too, is sealed with packing tape. Inside is an untouched package of Kodak paper, and Joyce feels a momentary pang: photographic paper was expensive, and they were both children of the Depression. Ed had abhorred waste of any kind.
Beneath the Kodak paper is a slippery stack of plastic envelopes, each filled with amber negatives. At the bottom is a pile of color prints—red-eyes, double exposures, decapitations, the sorts of mistakes that usually ended up in the trash. Why would Ed keep these? she wonders. Why on earth? As she sorts through the pile, she understands. The photos weren’t Ed’s but Teddy’s, taken with his new Instamatic the summer he was thirteen. It was, without question, the happiest time of his life, his weeks at Camp Aspire.
They had driven him there in their old station wagon, a long drive on winding back roads since there wasn’t—still isn’t—a highway running north to south, an efficient route from Bakerton to western New York. Rebecca had stayed behind with her aunt Dorothy, so Teddy had the entire backseat to himself. He stretched out full-length, surrounded by his prized possessions—his Evel Knievel action figures, the toys he hated to leave behind but in a day would forget entirely, distracted utterly by sack races and scavenger hunts, his new friends, his counselor, Zachary, a young medical student he’d idolize the rest of his days.
The camp was just over the state line, a woodsy spot, the small cabins built around a lake. In June and July it was overrun by Girl Scouts, but for three weeks at the end of the summer, it hosted kids with cystic fibrosis. Joyce had learned of the camp from Teddy’s doctor. It was, he said, a welcome break for parents: a brief holiday from medical appointments, the daily gauntlet of aerosols and nebulizers, the endless, hopeless work of clearing mucus from the lungs. The kids, too, got a break from overprotective mothers, a chance to make new friends. They were treated to a few weeks of vigorous, lung-clearing activity—swimming, hiking, canoeing—in the fresh mountain air.
Of course, they got more than that. No one realized then that CF kids passed infections between them, that the camp’s equipment—the shared aerosols and nebulizers—were a breeding ground for bacteria, resistant strains that flourished in cystic lungs. Teddy came home with pneumonia. He spent the autumn at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, breathing through a respirator, visited daily by his camp counselor Zachary, a second-year resident at Children’s.
It rained heavily the morning of the funeral, a cold downpour that soaked her coat in the short walk from car to church. Joyce scarcely remembers the long Mass, the droning eulogy—those details, mercifully, have been wiped from her memory. She recalls only the procession out of the church, the priest and the altar boys and finally the family following Teddy’s small casket. Outside the wind had kicked up, a dizzy spiral of snowflakes. The church steps were edged with white, the first snowfall of the year.
As they stood waiting for the hearse, a tall woman approached Ed and clasped him fiercely. Joyce waited for the usual platitudes—He’s at peace now. An angel in heaven. But the woman said none of these things.
Instead, on the steps of the church, she swore bitterly: Jesus Christ, Ed. The epithet was oddly beautiful in the low, accented voice of Marianne Blinn.
Joyce stood there awkwardly, watching them. They were nearly the same height. Marianne’s cheek was pressed to Ed’s. Her eyes, like his, were closed.
That day was like truth itself—colder than you expected, and full of surprises. In a year the Blinns would divorce, shocking the town. Dr. Blinn would retire and move to Florida, and Marianne would go back to wherever she’d come from.
But that morning on the church steps, a fine snow swirling the sidewalk, Joyce wasn’t thinking of the Blinns. She was remembering Teddy at the window in his pajamas, looking out at the other children sledding, an armada of yellow toboggans shooting down the hill.
It is too late in life to open all these boxes.
Joyce reseals them carefully, understanding—too late—why Ed had taped them shut: a protective impulse, a kindness to them both. Upstairs the kitchen is filled with a golden light. In another hour, the sun will set.
Where did the time go?
Albert Chura’s number is written in Ed’s neat cursive on the inside cover of the phone book. Albert’s wife answers the phone. “He isn’t here right now, Mrs. Hauser. Want me to have him call you back?”
“Darlene,” Joyce says, “would you do me a favor? Give Albert a message from me.”
She is sitting on the front porch when he wheels up on Ed’s bicycle. He dismounts carelessly and drops it roughly on the lawn.
Joyce rises. She has rehearsed what she is going to say. I’m sorry, Albert. I’m not ready to part with it. He doesn’t give her a chance to speak.
“Indian giver,” he says, and she smiles. It is a phrase she remembers from childhood, and for a moment she is grateful to him for easing the tension with a joke.
“What are you laughing at? You should be ashamed of yourself,” he says, his boots loud on the porch steps. “A teacher! And here you are going back on your word.”
He stands too close to her. His face is very red, his breath beery. He wears the alcohol like a subtle cologne, a fruity reek that seems to come from his pores.
“I’m sorry,” she begins.
“A teacher!” he repeats, shaking his head in disgust.
“Ed was a good friend to you.” The words come out more softly than she intends. She is dismayed to hear a tremor in her voice.
“Well, maybe so. But it was a two-way street. I was a good friend to him, too.”
Joyce glances across the street. Betty Bursky’s windows are open. She wishes he would lower his voice.
“I was trustworthy,” he says. “That’s hard to find these days. In them days, too. Hard to find, period, in this town.”
Joyce stares at him.
“I’m not saying Ed owes me anything,” says Albert.
Yes, you are, Joyce thinks. That’s exactly what you’re saying.
“The way I figure, we ended up even. So.” He nods once, decisively. “Keep your goddamn bike.”
He stomps off muttering and cursing, into the sunset like the hero in a Western. Calmly Joyce watches him go. Ed’s bike lies in the grass like an abandoned toy. She lifts it carefully and rolls it toward the garage, one hand on the handlebar, the other on the seat.
I’ll walk behind you, keep you steady. Just like we did with the kids.
More than anything in life, she wishes she’d let him. That she’d smiled for the camera. That she’d said yes. Life was gone before you knew it; how foolish she’d been to refuse any of it. In a couple of months Rebecca would arrive from Paris. They would rise before the neighbors and practice in the driveway, hidden by Ed’s birches: fresh cool mornings, dew on the grass. Her daughter would get a kick out of that. It was just the sort of project she’d enjoy.