LEE RECEIVED AILEEN’S LETTER SOMETIME DURING THE week of Thanksgiving, by design forming only the vaguest recollection of when it had come. Immediately upon seeing it, thick with meaning in its barely adequate envelope, by far the most conspicuous item of mail that day on the console in his landlady’s hall, his almost unconscious instinct was to treat it as though it were a bill, or a library notice, or a subscription renewal. Without examination he collected it into the papers and books in his arms, and upstairs in his room he left it, still interred in the pile, at the back of his desk. It wasn’t destined to languish indefinitely; in the past couple weeks, since his rededication to research, his desk had ceased to be the fossilized archive from which he’d spent months averting his eyes. Once again a patient observer—or, better, a time-lapse camera—would be able to discern a dynamic, if very slow, process of change. Heaps inexorably crept toward the ceiling, came down, seeded new heaps or were thrown in the trash. Library books shifted position, according to due date. Outposts of new growth had appeared on the couch and the bed—half-used notepads and half-read abstracts. Aileen’s letter would be gotten to, in its time.
Thanksgiving was the only American holiday that had ever captured Lee’s imagination, and in previous years he had always spent it as a guest in the home of one of his professors or classmates. His interest in the holiday’s historical underpinnings and his enormous enjoyment of the foods gratified all his hosts, and this along with the tradition of taking in strays had given him his choice of dinners for the past several years. But this year he’d been invited nowhere; he’d seen almost no one since the previous spring. And to his surprise, rather than feeling bereft, he fairly hummed with contentment. For the first time in recent memory, perhaps for the first time since meeting Aileen, he had purpose, and peace. He had always loved a university campus in summer, the mysterious abandonment of the medieval city, with just a skeleton crew of damned souls left to meet his few needs: a single heavy-eyed stamper of books, a single sleepwalking ladler of gruel in the one cafeteria. Now he found that the campus on a national holiday at the onset of winter was the purest distillation of that hush he’d first known in the summers. He drifted without constraint or anxiety through the math buildings, down the walkways of the quad beneath the ice-lacquered trees; he knew there was no chance he’d run into Gaither, the most pious of pilgrims, today. The library was not even on limited hours, but entirely closed, yet this setback failed to annoy him; it was another liberation. He walked downhill into town, the overdue book, which he had not finished reading, clasped to his chest, an unexpected reprieve. He would finish it now. He had gone out without a hat or gloves, and the lightless sky was bearing down with the weight of snow, but he didn’t feel assaulted by the cold. It entered him, an energizing column, so that his lungs seemed to fully inflate for the very first time. He imagined them gleaming. In town he ate a sodden “Thanksgiving dinner with full trimmings,” presumably surrounded by unloved solitary diners in the neighboring booths, but he didn’t notice. He was absorbed in his book. He’d struggled with it before; now its fine grains of meaning seemed to pour themselves into his mind, like filings toward a magnet. When he was walking home again in the early darkness, he was happy. He thought briefly of Aileen, understanding her to have entered an unknowable world of motherhood, as he had entered a world of scholarship. Their paths had diverged and would continue to do so, vectors obeying their laws. And he felt, as he had before on a very few, very precious occasions, an intelligence guiding his life. Not a God; he would never say this. But something blessedly Other than him, a calm orderliness, which had corrected and saved him.
And so it was with unease that he read Aileen’s letter, some handful of days after getting it. His unease didn’t arise from anything explicit; the letter hardly seemed to speak to him, and it never spoke of him. Apart from the very first line, the letter more closely resembled a diary, and after reading the first several pages Lee even flipped back—Dear Lee—to confirm that it was a letter, and a letter for him. He was disturbed, he realized, not by anything overt the letter stated but by everything it seemed to assume—by its implicit designation of Lee as the person not just entitled to but desirous of such disclosures. These were sentiments Lee wasn’t convinced a wife would share with her husband; why would Aileen want to share them with him? And such outsize, almost lunatic fervor for her child by Gaither; had Lee not decided to give up Aileen, had he failed to arrive at his benignant position, he might have been spurred to a frenzy of rage by this stuff.
But Aileen didn’t know she had been given up. Lee thought about this as he folded the letter; toward the end he’d been skimming, and he had no desire to read it again. The letter implied a remarkable intimacy—but the question remained, of what remarkable thing the intimacy implied in its turn. Nowhere was there mention of the future: Aileen’s, Gaither’s, Lee’s, or the child’s. Had Aileen articulated some clear expectation of him, Lee would have known to inform her of his decision to withdraw from her life. Instead there was this uncensored transcript of her most private thoughts, and now he wondered if this was her sign that she had withdrawn from him. Consuming ardor for her child by Gaither, no reference to a rearranged future. She didn’t know she had been given up, but it no longer mattered, because she had released him.
And yet the letter was so unrestrained, so avidly confiding, as if describing one passion as a means of encoding another—but could she so love Gaither’s child and also love Lee? Lee grew aware of a strain in his logic; to avoid thinking more about it, he forced the letter back into its envelope, and put it inside a textbook he almost never referred to, and put the book into one of the very deep drawers of his desk.
As November gave way to December, his existence achieved a complete transformation, as if the solitary peace of Thanksgiving had been the mere start of a growing alignment and amplification. Only musical terms seemed to capture this pleasant sensation. Everything from his morning oatmeal to the nib of his pen was caught up in symphonic concord, under the stirring control of a brilliant conductor. If it had ever crossed Lee’s mind before now to describe his relation to his life circumstances, he might have attempted metaphors of storm-tossed vessels or mismatched wrestlers or frost-nipped blossoms as unoriginal and ineffectual and disjointed as the conditions themselves. Now both his life and his image of it were harmonically pure. He fell asleep at strange hours and woke up completely refreshed; he ate whatever he had in his cupboard and found it delicious. He made singing progress in his work. He read the way he ate, wrote the way he slept, never seemed to misplace so much as a thumbtack in an apartment that had given over all its limited floor space to squared stacks of paper. It helped that the term had ended the second week of December, so that the other habitués of his house—rarely seen, always heard—were now gone. No longer did he find the second-floor bathroom door closed when he went to take a long-deferred piss after hours of inspired mathematics and tea or beer drinking. No more cattlelike feet on the stairs, heedless voices through walls, doors slammed as if intended to shatter his thoughts. He generically hated all his fellow tenants for how oversize and unself-conscious they were, but now the house was abandoned, as if the earth had been cleared by a plague. He only sometimes heard his landlady’s radio, as thin and querulous-sounding as she was, but her manifestations were so few and predictable he benignly absorbed them into his harmonized days.
The fact of Christmas came to his attention when his landlady surprised him with a knock at his door. Admitting her, after stuffing the tails of his shirt into his pants, he saw her swiftly assessing the state of the room: a fire hazard, but nothing she didn’t expect, even probably hope for, from her student tenants. There was no woman and no dissipation; she was satisfied. “Mr. Lee,” she announced, “I’m going to my sister’s for Christmas. I’ll be gone this whole week. I trust you to abide by house rules even while I’m not here.” It was only now that Lee realized she was wearing a coat and a hat, and he belatedly identified a noise he’d been remotely aware of as an idling car. She must have been on the point of leaving before she’d remembered him.
“Of course, Mrs. Winnick. I hope you have a nice time.”
“Do you celebrate Christmas, Mr. Lee?”
He knew better than to say that he didn’t. As he spoke, he offered up a wry prayer that today wasn’t Christmas already. “Yes I do, Mrs. Winnick. I’ll be visiting friends.”
“I hope you have a very merry Christmas, Mr. Lee.” For the first time, he was aware of a flicker of curiosity, even of cautious fellow feeling, on her part—from one solitaire to another. But of course she wasn’t truly alone; she had a sister to go to. Perhaps realizing this, she didn’t take it any further. She didn’t ask him, as she never had before, what faraway land he came from, where his family was. He was relieved.
“You, too, Mrs. Winnick. Merry Christmas.”
When she was gone, he was finally interested in knowing what day it was, to keep track of the time he had until she came back. He had not minded her presence in the house because he’d never imagined her leaving. Now he felt a frank thrill, as if Christmas were a holiday for him after all.
Downstairs, he opened the door off the front hallway and entered her parlor, for only the third time in the year and a half he had lived here. The first time, he had been admitted to sign a tenants’ agreement (it stipulated, among other things, that he was barred from her rooms of the house). The second time had been just last month, when he’d received Aileen’s sister’s phone call, about the birth of the child.
In her kitchen he saw she’d unplugged her toaster and left the faucet dripping in case of a freeze. He’d imagined the radio here, but it was back in the parlor, a decades-old Gothic hulk he hadn’t even recognized as a radio his first time through the room. He turned it on and sat down in her old widow’s armchair, with its antimacassars and its ruptures of stuffing, to wait. He was surprised by how easy it was to invade someone’s home; he didn’t feel the least out of place, or even curious, among all the strange objects. Still, he didn’t consider retuning the radio to a more businesslike station; he didn’t trust he would ever locate her station again. It played only big-band standards, the music speckled by static as if in some aural way moth-eaten; it seemed to be broadcasting not across space but from years in the past. Between songs an announcer barked out the titles too quickly; this was the human noise that from his room he’d mistaken for anger. Finally the date was referred to, in the same frantic tone: “It’s Tuesday, December twenty-second—just three days until Christmas!!” It crossed Lee’s mind that the voice might have spoken these words in 1945. Was it Tuesday, December 22, in 1964? Again perceiving belatedly, he stood up and returned to the kitchen: there was a calendar here. And here the temporal mystery was decisively solved. December 22 was indeed a Tuesday, and in its square Mrs. Winnick had shakily written, To Elsie’s. In Sunday’s square, the twenty-seventh, the same hand declared, Home.
Back upstairs, Lee was distracted from returning to his work by the fact that he didn’t own a calendar, or a radio, or any other means by which he could keep himself tied to the passage of time. He didn’t even want to be tied to the passage of time; he only wanted an alarm clock to go off Sunday morning, warning him that his sublime isolation had come to an end. He could make chicken marks on the wall like a prisoner, one a day for six days, but on any of those days he might forget to make the mark, or forget he had already made it. The absorbing triviality of the problem annoyed him more and more; the flawless peace he’d envisioned with Mrs. Winnick’s departure already seemed tainted. He would simply have to leave his room once in a while to buy the newspaper, but he didn’t want to leave his room and didn’t want the newspaper. For weeks he’d lived perfectly balanced between desire and fulfillment. Now the petty obligation of timekeeping weighed on him, though he’d meant to keep time in the service of his own peace of mind.
He’d forcibly dismissed the issue more than once when the harsh bleat of the front bell startled him. He was doubly startled to realize that only he was there to answer the door. He sat very still, his heart banging, as if the downstairs caller might hear his quick breathing, scent the alarmed perspiration that had sprung up at his temples. It was the postman, he told himself, a Christmas package from a Winnick relation, it would be left on the porch—but when the bell rang again, more importunate somehow, he jerked upright and went down the stairs. Through the center of the three small, high-set panels of glass in the door, he saw the crown of a head: a pale crescent of brow slightly fringed by the very fine hairs that could not be drawn back, and the drawn-back hair itself, just its uppermost gloss. This was Aileen; he would have known her by the pad of a finger, a kneecap. He didn’t know if he realized this then or sometime afterward: that the peace of this autumn alone had been a fragile hiatus, not a new scheme of life. He felt it collapse as he opened the door, its almost noiseless downsifting, a weakness giving way, like the sighings of pulverized plaster within the walls of the house he heard on very late nights when only he was awake. There was wild combativeness in her expression, although she didn’t say anything; but her eyes glittered, as if she were ill. And he noticed a change in her skin: around the line of her jaw, it had softened, gone slack, the throat skin of a much older woman. A stain of fatigue doubled each of her eyes. He was overwhelmed by his longing for her, whether in spite of or because of these changes, he didn’t bother to wonder. Her pre-pregnancy slimness had not been restored but somehow overshot. She was severe in her thinness. Her hair was much longer. Behind her it had started to snow.
Gaither returned from his week of Christmas no less inexorable. He appeared not the least bit undone by his one-man encounter with the harrowing needs of a six-week-old child. The boy himself was apparently plumper, well rested, entirely clean, and encased head to toe in unfamiliar, ingeniously miniaturized winter gear that would have suited him fine in the arctic. The hand-me-down sleepers and buntings (from Nora’s Michael), soft and pilled, with their arctically useless appliqué work of duckies and bunnies, had been laundered and dismissively packed in a brown grocery bag.
The custody arrangement that Gaither proposed was exhaustive and, like all legal documents, absurdly anticipatory, embracing contingencies it was hard to imagine someone having imagined. But at its core it consisted of one very simple exchange: sole custody of John Gaither for a discreet, uncontested divorce. Aileen would not be summoned to court, her distasteful infidelities would not be publicized, and the assets with which she had entered the marriage would be returned to her in their entirety. But perhaps the most compelling aspects of the arrangement had been those not translated into impenetrable legalese but conveyed to Aileen vocally, by Gaither and his lawyer, in those lengthy, unimaginable sessions from which Lee had been gladly excluded—and which Nora had not witnessed either, as she’d been caring for John. Those sessions—or rather “conversations”—Aileen had endured without her own lawyer present, because she didn’t have one and wasn’t sure how to get one, and in any case the conversations were supposed to be prefatory—Gaither’s lawyer very nicely suggesting they simply “converse,” in a noncombat setting, with the fine aim of maybe avoiding the combat completely. Aileen emerged from these conversations in the way the frilled, superfluous margin of a fresh-molded plastic object emerges from the pressure between the two plates: the actual thing remained hidden from view, and what could be seen revealed nothing of the shape the thing took. To Nora, Aileen wept hollowly and left her son sleeping across Nora’s lap. To Lee she disclosed even less—but it was true that he hadn’t pressed her, hadn’t made the demands for disclosure that a real ally would.
Aileen also emerged from those sessions at the end of the process—not, as she’d thought, just a short way from the start. Gaither and his lawyer made it compellingly, doubtlessly clear that she stood a far worse chance in court. If she refused Gaither’s offer and fought, of course Gaither would have to fight back, and it was likely Aileen would not even get visitation. Gaither offered her all the visitation she desired. This was not spelled out in the agreement; spelling out visitation would limit it, to what was spelled, to the literal letter: every other weekend and every fourth week, for example. Gaither had no desire to do that. Aileen was John’s mother: that was a sacred condition that nothing would change. When she wanted to see John, she need merely call Gaither, and the thing would be done. If all went well, Aileen could have John overnight, even for many nights running, even for a week, for a month, for a summer—so long as she established a stable and wholesome domestic environment. Clearly such an environment was in Aileen’s interest as well and would be no trouble at all to achieve with the significant funds that she stood to receive when she signed the agreement. Everyone knew that Aileen wanted to get back on her feet, to stop living with Warren and Nora, to perhaps find an interesting job at the university, which she’d do easily, as the ugly details of her affair and divorce would remain under wraps. Gaither insisted on full custody only to obtain full control of John’s religious upbringing, and this was a point Gaither knew that Aileen wouldn’t dispute. After all, she was an atheist, as she’d never hesitated to inform the other congregants at Gaither’s church. And going to court for the right to impose atheism on a six-week-old child was a battle Aileen would certainly lose, with even worse repercussions.
What Aileen wasn’t told, and what she wouldn’t learn until after she had signed the agreement (her signature barely hers: the jagged EKG line of a faltering heart), was that Gaither’s lawyer was a congregant, too, a church member from a neighboring state. And Gaither’s new suits had been bought with church money, and little John’s arctic gear, and every other thing Gaither required to start a new life. Aileen learned all this later: ten months later, in October 1965, after her divorce, uncontested and discreet, became final. After she and Lee, bristling like cats in their new too-close quarters, booked University Chapel for the first Saturday in December and then learned from one of the Byrons, all of whom Lee invited—they’d had almost no one to ask—that Gaither and Ruth had been married at their church, in a packed-to-the-rafters service, the very week the divorce was announced in the “notices” section at the back of the newspaper. After Aileen understood that it must have been Ruth who fed John his bottles for that week of Christmas. After Aileen married Lee without John in attendance, because Gaither and Ruth felt that Lee was an unwholesome element, and after Aileen realized that without visitation written formally into her agreement, in fact she was not guaranteed visitation at all. After Aileen’s union with Lee, faltering even before its strained solemnization, began faltering more violently and after Aileen finally hired her own expensive attorney, with her own regained funds—not to get rid of Lee but to get back her son, no matter how little her new husband might want him.
Throughout all this, Lee had been at best passive, as if Aileen’s loss of her son were the sort of arcane her-side-of-things situation, like a great-aunt’s estate, that a husband can comfortably view as no problem of his. At worst he’d been openly hostile. If he wanted a child at all, it was a child of his own. How could she possibly think he should raise Gaither’s son? Gaither cherished the boy, and, what seemed no less compelling, he paid for all the boy’s needs; to Lee this was lucky, for Aileen just as much as himself. He actually said this to her; for a man who had never imagined himself married, let alone cherished lofty illusions about the marital state, he was receiving a swift education in the effortless viciousness to which that state could give rise. But for all that, he was no less amazed by the other dark fortune he’d realized was his: Aileen actually loved him. He’d become indispensable to her. He had the power to force her to choose, between himself and her son, and insofar as he declined to assist her, encourage her, comfort her in her grief, he did this. Less with action than with the absence of action.
Might he have risked an appearance of sympathy with her, had he known that the stifled arrangement—Aileen three times a week permitted into the house she’d once lived in herself, to kiss and dandle her son, bottle-feed him and change him, shed her tears onto him while he napped, while her former husband taught classes and his homely new wife, the pious, self-righteous prig whom Aileen had so scorned did the cleaning or yard work, or read a book in the kitchen, but never left, never left them alone—was destined, as a result of her efforts, to come to an end? Gaither and Ruth did not want Lee in contact with John, and this suited Lee fine. Gaither and Ruth seemed to not trust Aileen; Lee didn’t think it was business of his. His wife, the woman he’d scolded for being married already, the first time they’d met, hated him, saw his traitorousness in its component parts (selfishness, cowardice) yet was still in love with him, and now also completely dependent—he was all she had left. And so he did not even give her the comfort of mistakenly thinking he hoped she’d succeed.
She hired the lawyer, who deeply regretted her signature on the agreement, as well as the year she’d let pass before she’d had “second thoughts.” But he was guardedly optimistic and sent a letter to Gaither’s lawyer stating that the agreement would now be contested. On her usual Tuesday, Aileen drove to her son’s, proud and frightened; the letter had been put in the mail on the previous Friday. There was a chance Gaither’s lawyer hadn’t gotten it yet or, if he had, hadn’t yet informed Gaither. By what signs would she know? Would Ruth be different, as she let Aileen in, would she not as she always did open the door without words or eye contact, promptly turning her back, as if Aileen were the maid? Or would Gaither be there instead, having canceled his classes, so he could lash her with Yahweh-like fury for her awful transgression?
She must have mounted the two steps to the porch in her usual roil of anger and dread and deep longing, to see her baby, to hold him, all this heightened, made even more clamorous, by her new sense of coming combat. This time she was ready. She pressed the bell, and as it rang through the house, she remembered herself, her pregnancy just beginning, sunk like a secretive stone in the house’s deep shadows, the drapes drawn against the blinding sunlight. If someone came to the door, she stayed still; no slit in the drapes for a caller to peer through, no danger that she might be discerned. The steps would retreat down the walk, and she’d again be alone.
Even before she’d noticed that the drapes were gone from the windows, she’d felt the tone of the bell hurtling somehow differently—unrestrained—through the house. She put her face to the window so quickly she smacked her brow on the glass. Inside was as dim as always, but she could see it was empty.
Lee had known then that the battle was won. Not because Gaither and Ruth had absconded with John, but because, once Aileen was back home and had sobbed several hours on the phone to Nora, she then sat in the kitchen for several more hours and sobbed all alone. She did not bring her grief to her husband. She had realized she shouldn’t.