I WANTED GLADYS AND I TO GO INTO THE POND WHERE we’d lost our daughter. I wanted some kind of healing to take place. I confused that idea of immersion with healing, I suppose.
Gladys was angry that she had gone into the water, and later told me it had felt like a sacrilege to her. She wouldn’t explain any further, but I think I understood. I hated being in that pond too, finding out it wasn’t deep, as if Ann’s death was all the more preventable in my memory now, which is absurd, but that was what I felt when I felt the shallowness of that water.
I remember us sitting on the ground, shivering next to each other, and me touching Gladys, and thinking that I finally knew that she and I would not make our way back to each other, ever. That whoever we had been, we were now something else, two people who did not fit together.
I sat there in silence. It surprised me when I was overcome with a sudden feeling of longing for Ivy, and shocked me when the very next moment I wanted Gladys, and pulled her to me, and told her we weren’t strangers. It was like a chant, we’re not strangers, we’re not strangers we’re not strangers. And it worked. For a few moments, it worked. But only for those moments, and these had dissipated before we’d returned to the car.
Gladys stood in the driveway and watched me and Ivy leave, not waving, not smiling, but looking somehow bemused. But I couldn’t read that face with any degree of certainty anymore. I didn’t really know her at all anymore. Or so I felt then.
I had told Ivy that we were going to Ontario, where I knew an old Quaker woman who had a farm. I told her we could go up there and live, and work the farm. This woman was named Muriel; I had met her down south when she was visiting her daughters—two chefs upstairs from me whose apartment was too hot, so Muriel had slept on my couch for a while. She had given me her address, told me she’d put me up anytime. She was a nice woman, a Quaker like my mother had been. She wore her white hair in a long braid down her thin back. I described all this to Ivy as we drove, and the more I talked, the wearier I felt. I felt I didn’t have it in me to go there, to go to a new place, to start up a new life with a woman named Muriel who was virtually a stranger, even if she had slept on my couch for a few months. But I would conjure the will; I didn’t know what else to do, and money was a problem. I had lived frugally and worked hard on a series of shrimp boats and managed to save some, but I needed to find work as soon as possible in order to feel right.
Ivy sat beside me in the car. “Gladys seemed happy for us,” she said. “But almost like a person gets happy after hearing a good joke.”
“I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about that.”
I drove on, drove north, going faster than usual, as if with speed I could get through my resistance.
Ivy said, “Traveling’s not something I ever thought I’d like so much, James. Now I got an idea of how you must’ve felt all those years driving into new places.”
It gets old, I wanted to say, but I didn’t. I didn’t have it in me to ruin her enthusiasm. The woman deserved to be traveling with a man who could look out the window and be grateful for the beautiful blue dusk. So instead I said, “Look at the sky over there, Ivy.”
She whistled appreciatively, then smiled over at me.
I drove on, and on.
* * *
When we found Muriel’s farm it was late morning, and up there the heart of autumn had passed and most of the leaves had already fallen. Muriel was out by the side of her house. I parked and got out of the car and she stood up with her hand over her eyes, peering out at us. She didn’t recognize me from a distance. Ivy was saying, “This place is sure nice,” and looking all around. I was looking at Muriel, as if I could will her to feel more familiar.
“James?” she finally said, and her hand came down. “The fisherman with the good couch! Am I seeing right?”
I went and shook her hand, introduced Ivy, and told her we were there to help her out.
“I do have to tell you this is a big surprise,” she said. “And a welcome one. Come in, come in.”
We followed her into the old white house. It was set way back from the road, and looked solitary and peaceful. Up close it looked like it needed a lot of work, but it had the feel of contentedness, somehow, not neglect. The feel of a house that was happy to be neglected, proud to fall into a kind of natural disarray, which I knew from experience was just the kind of house that responded best to being fixed up. A house with life in it, a house that seemed accepting of whatever shape you wanted it to take, a house that breathed as long as it was respected. On the porch a few cats slept next to a pair of men’s work boots that turned out to be Muriel’s.
She insisted on making tea and feeding us sandwiches. She said she had plenty for us to do, that we should feel free to stay as long as we wanted, that we shouldn’t look at her as a sad old lonely woman who needed our company, because she’d never been happier in all her life. But it would be nice to have us around, she added, and she certainly could stand some help. Her intelligent face was lined and lit up, radiant, as if she’d somehow absorbed all that brilliant color in the last of the autumn leaves.
Initially we worked outside: she had two cows, four goats, and a bunch of chickens. One coop had been torn up in a storm. The barn needed patching. The loft had been virtually destroyed by carpenter ants. All the work waiting to be done told me I was in the right place.
She had a small tractor that I rode around on under the gray sky, or the sometimes shocking blue sky that would fill me with hope. I would take it into my lungs, that northern blue Ontario air, and I would be able to stay focused for long hours on what I was doing, on where I was, and the hope would change to happiness. Ivy and I worked on patching up the barn together. It was when we were working hard enough that I felt especially good. I would drive those eight-penny galvanized finishing nails into the siding of the one wall and feel like nothing else mattered but how the nail went in. Ivy knew how to work quietly, which surprised me because I remembered Gladys talking about how she talked too much when they cooked. Also, Ivy loved to paint, and knew her tools, and she also loved to hammer and sand. In the evenings—the muscles in our backs so sore it was hard to swing our arms at first—we took walks with Muriel along an endless narrow road that was lined with tall pines. Sometimes we’d walk down to Superior, and stand looking out at what might have been the ocean. A few dogs would always follow us down there, which I liked. Muriel wore old dresses, big sweaters, and boots. From behind she could have been mistaken for a child were it not for the bright white of her hair. She had a spring in her step, and she’d kick stones. She loved the landscape passionately, and this was easy for me to understand, because a great clarity seemed to be the thing that held the place together. The clarity of rock, pine, water, road. When we were up there at Superior, the air felt scrubbed with cold light. The trees on that road dwarfed us. I appreciated the feeling that gave me because I had long ago arrived at the age where I felt my own smallness in the scheme of things as a comfort.
During the winter months we worked inside that house, painting, wiring, sanding, and fixing floorboards. Muriel loved it. She worked at various charities in the town most of the day, and had given us permission to do whatever we wanted when she was gone. “Go to town,” was how she’d put it. We got Muriel’s old Christmas decorations out of the attic and dressed that house up and the three of us had a white Christmas, sitting up half the night listening to her old radio, watching the fire and the lights on the tree, fifty old-time figurines skating and singing on the white cotton snow of the mantel. Ivy talked all about her childhood Christmases that night, but I knew she was glossing over the stories, and she didn’t mention Gladys in any of them. I found myself feeling grateful for that ability of hers to weed out the unsettling. Muriel listened and told some stories of her own, mostly about what Christmas was like during the Depression, how she and her husband had managed to create joy out of thin air.
January was the hardest month we spent there because there wasn’t enough work to pour ourselves into, and Muriel was always having neighbors over. Neighbors from a mile away would ride their tractors through the snow and sit in Muriel’s dining room around her table in their wool socks drinking hot rum and cider and talking about people they knew who Ivy and I didn’t know. Muriel always tried to invite us into these conversations, but mostly we sat in silence, listening, Ivy listening with her pure attention span and her natural ease, me listening with a growing restlessness, an unwanted knowledge that soon I’d probably be living somewhere else, because this wasn’t my home. Hearing the generations of history these people had shared told me it would not become my home.
Then, in March, after a dose of false spring, I was up late and looking out our bedroom window when I discovered a tire on the lower roof, and in the tire was what looked like a bird, a goose. The goose seemed to be sleeping. It was a moonlit creature, very beautiful, with white patches on its face, a long black neck, and a gray coat. A Canada goose. I had always been captivated by the pure noise of their departures, and their designs in the skies.
I supposed the bird was nesting, and I was right. Immediately I felt happy about this, that I had a view of a nesting bird I had always liked. The next day Muriel told me the tire had been used for years as a nest, that she had witnessed the births of hundreds of goslings. “You should see them when they have to jump out of that nest. The poor little things land flat on the ground, then start walking behind the mother toward the lake. It’s a long walk for those little goslings, but most of them make it. It just stuns me, the kind of hunger for life that nature packs into such tiny bodies.”
I watched the mother on her nest every night, and sometimes during the day I’d come in from the fields where we were working on the soil, and I’d watch the big, beautiful goose covering the eggs with her own down, biting it from her own coat and adding it until she developed a painful-looking bare spot on her underside. Sometimes she’d leave the nest and come back dripping wet. I’d watch her stand over her eggs, dripping water on them, then adding more down. A few times she looked toward the window, seemed to see me. She made a honking sound that I took as a greeting, though I knew it was more likely a warning not to come closer. At night she sometimes looked toward the window so intently I believed she was trying to find me, so I finally turned on a small lamp. Ivy never woke up, and for reasons that weren’t very clear to me at the time I never told her about the way I was keeping what amounted to be a kind of vigil.
But she came into the room one afternoon when I was at the window watching this goose fix more of her down over the eggs, and I looked away from the window quickly, and immediately felt resentful of Ivy’s presence. I couldn’t understand myself in these moments, but I knew enough not to be rude to her, knew it was my problem. So I said, “A nest of Canada geese on the roof.” She walked over and stood beside me and watched the mother goose for a moment.
“I used to love watching them fly in the autumn. I’d just lay on my back and watch and listen to their honks. They sure are some loud honkers.”
I was happy when Ivy left me there, alone, happy that the goose hadn’t turned to look at her, though I was not obsessed with the goose, not strangely attached as it may sound. I just felt the need to have something of my own, something purely interesting that I could observe with my own eyes, and my own mind. Muriel told me it took about four weeks for the eggs to hatch, and I was happy to learn that, glad to hear that the drama of their birth would take some time.
When I stood at the window, I could see far out into the fields, where the snow still layered the ground. From the attic window, upstairs, you could see Superior. I knew that when the geese were born they’d have to learn to fly down to the lake. I was already thinking of how I could watch them learn to fly, how I could study them as they swam and dove for food.
For a while there wasn’t much to see. I’d stand and make eye contact with the mother, and I wouldn’t leave the window until she looked away. Sometimes she held my gaze, or so it seemed, for a long time, and I’d find myself staring beyond her out into the land, thinking back to New Orleans, probably as a way to avoid thinking back further, but as a man learns soon enough, memory never walks a straight line.
In New Orleans, I’d met a hard-working woman named Nicoletta Graves. She held down two part-time jobs, one as a graveyard shift security guard, and one as a waitress in the fine restaurant where I first saw her. I wasn’t eating in that restaurant but delivering fish in the morning, which I did twice a week, and after I first caught sight of Nicoletta, on subsequent deliveries I lingered in that big kitchen, hoping she would come through the swinging door in her white uniform and meet my eyes. When she did, she smiled, and I took this as a cue to ask her how she was doing. Beg your pardon? she said, because I’d spoken too quietly. She stepped closer to me, looked up at my eyes. “How you doing?” I said again, holding steady. She said she was doing just fine, thank you, and smiled. It was not a smile that suggested she knew I was uncomfortable; I had never approached a woman this way before, mostly because I’d never had to. Her smile was easy, and her eyes unburdened.
A few weeks later, after several more of these easy smiles, I finally said to her, “What are you doing tonight?” and she said, “Tending to my kid and my nephew.”
I said, “Alone, or with a man?” and stepping closer because again I was too quiet, she said, “Pardon?” “You want company?” I said, and she said, “Depends on the company.” And I said, “Well, I’d like to see you again.”
Again she smiled and said, “You would, would ya.”
Later she told me she agreed to see me because I reminded her of her father. She was forty-two, and her father had been dead for nineteen years.
She was tending to the children alone, outside of the city in a house that looked small as a child’s toy when I first drove up. It was pale pink, with a gray metal chair on the lopsided porch, and my first thought was that I’d be too tall to fit inside the place, and my second thought was that the place could be taken up into the sky by a strong wind.
I had taken three showers before driving out to her place to make certain I would not smell like fish, which tells you my intentions were to eventually seduce her. Two nights before as I laid down in bed it had dawned on me that I hadn’t been with a woman in over two years. I can’t say it was a physical hunger I felt so much as a fear that I was turning strange that sent me toward Nicoletta Graves without my usual hesitations.
Nicoletta answered the door in a dress, looking prettier than I’d expected, and said, “Come on in and have some wine, the kids are almost asleep.” I walked in and we sat at her kitchen table in the smallest kitchen I had ever seen, small enough so that as we drank red wine I felt that we were huddled. I studied her as she stared out the window and said nothing, and I don’t know how to say why we were both comfortable in that silence, but I remember I wanted it to last, because I could hear her breathing, and it had been a long time since I had heard anyone’s breathing but my own.
She had some questions, however, which didn’t surprise me. First she wanted to know why I’d picked her out. I told her I couldn’t explain that, but that I imagined many men had picked her out before me. She said that was true, but she wasn’t used to someone like me choosing her. At the time she wouldn’t go on to explain what she meant by that. She also had the predictable curiosities: where was I from, had I been married, and if I had kids.
I have always been as wedded to truth as I believe a man can be, which is a trait that never served me well, because as most everyone knows this land of ours is built on lies; men keep jobs and wives because they’re willing to lie, and all of us are supposed to agree that a little lying is what you need to keep the American peace. I never accepted that, mostly because I knew I felt unable to discern a white lie from a real lie. I felt if I started lying, I might fall into a state of confusion and never return. I’d had truthful parents, parents who never even told white lies when they were drunk, or at least they managed to give me that impression, so telling the truth was an inherited habit of mine, one I couldn’t imagine breaking without effort before that night in Nicoletta’s house.
I said I was from Kentucky, originally, but had lived all over. I said I had been married, and that I had never had children.
This last statement came out of my mouth as if the words had their own will. The lie floated like a black balloon in the air between us, and stayed there all night, and a few times I was tempted to throw a dart that way, but I didn’t.
I can only say that I felt there was no room for the real stories of my life in that kitchen. I must have felt that if I let them escape from my heart, the room would disappear, the stories would take over, and I’d feel emptied out and incapable of seeing this woman. I’d be unable to see much of anything if I let what I had lived come into the room; even stating the facts would be too much. So I sat there with Nicoletta, and I made up a life for myself, a simple life that allowed that room and woman to exist for me, and the longer they existed, the more I knew I had needed them for a long time, needed someone like her to help dismantle my isolation.
“Always wanted some kids, but it just never happened. I was only married for a few years, then went to Korea. When I came home it was clear things were bad with my wife. That’s all ancient history,” I lied. Then rushed onto the truth. “Anyhow, so I’ve moved around a lot, worked construction, welding, worked as a fisherman like I am now, a painter, a substitute mailman. Lived in all kinds of places.”
That was fine as far as she was concerned.
“I just wanted to hear ya talk a little more than you do at the restaurant,” she said. “Just wanted to make sure you were normal.”
We had almost finished the bottle of wine when Pie Pie Graves appeared in the doorway of the kitchen in a pair of white pajamas that looked new.
“I’m hungry,” she said. She was a sturdy-looking three-year-old child. She looked at me, unsmiling but not suspicious. “Hi, Mister,” she said. “Are you the plumber?”
Her mother laughed and said the plumber was coming in the morning. Pie Pie explained that their sink was clogged for a week and that it was disgusting. I told Nicoletta I could fix it, but she said no, she had too much experience with nonprofessional men saying they could fix things, she’d wait for the plumber.
Pie Pie ate some applesauce, sitting at the table in the dim light of that kitchen. She ate, and kept her eyes on me, and when I looked over, she’d look away.
“Back to bed now,” said Nicoletta, and the child didn’t argue. But a minute or so later she called out from her bed, “Hey Mister?”
“Sleep!” her mother said.
“Are you Italian?”
And then we were laughing together, her mother and I, and I called back that no, I wasn’t Italian.
Nicoletta said, “The new woman in the day care is Italian, or so she says. She looks about as Italian as my pet frog.”
“I’m Italian!” Pie Pie shouted.
“Go to sleep!” Nicoletta hissed back. “The day care lady, she’s got all these tiny kids doing some ancestor project. I told Pie to tell everyone she’s American all the way back, and we forgot the specifics. End of story, ya know what I’m saying? I got a black grandfather, and I don’t trust people with that information unless I get a real good vibe. Real good. We got a lot of racists in our midst, James, in case you never noticed.”
I told her I noticed. I told her I was a man who noticed a lot of things mostly because I couldn’t help noticing. I told her I’d noticed way back during the Second World War, when it was all just taken for granted. I noticed how the military treated their own black soldiers like animals.
“You were in that war too?” she said. “You’re older than I thought.” She smiled, like the fact that I had stepped into my fifties added to my quality of harmlessness.
I did not seduce her that night; I kissed her, and tried to feel whether or not she wanted me, but I couldn’t read her clearly; I felt no resistance, but no invitation, either. Because I liked her, and her house, and her girl, I decided I would wait.
Two nights later I took Nicoletta, Pie Pie, and Jack, Nicoletta’s nephew, out for catfish dinners. We sat in a circular booth by a window looking out at the crowded street. Jack was a thin boy with good manners and clear, happy eyes, like a child on an old television show. He asked me if I liked being “a laborer,” and said he was going to be a professional football player, they made a lot more money than “laborers,” did I know that? Didn’t I ever think of getting another job so I could drive a nicer car? “I never minded an old car,” I told him. “But you never know, someday I might go into law, or medicine.”
“Definitely,” he said, “you definitely should. It’s not too late,” he coached. “Never too late to go after your dreams.”
“Well, thank you,” I said, Nicoletta and I smiling at each other.
He was only staying with the Graves for a week, then he would go back to his mother, who had just had a new baby, Nicoletta told me. Pie Pie, hearing this, said to me, “You can sleep in Jack’s bed some night when he leaves.”
Again we laughed together, her mother and I, with an ease that continued to surprise me, but in the middle of that laugh something in me lurched forward toward the child in a way that was painful, and suddenly I wanted to look at her mother and say, I had a child, a girl, she was just about this age, and she died.
But I went on eating the catfish, my face hot. I was grateful when Jack started talking in detail about some linebacker on the New Orleans Saints.
During times like this I’d try not to think of Gladys, of what she was doing, of how she had gotten through. When she came into my mind, which wasn’t too often anymore, it made my stomach feel knotted, and I’d had enough of that feeling. Of course when a man works specifically to block things out of his mind, they’ll get bigger, stronger. So as the little boy Jack talked on, and I looked at Nicoletta, the hollow of her throat, the fine dark eyes, the rippled hair, the face of Gladys was almost superimposed there, so that I had to rub my eyes.
That night I stayed at Nicoletta’s. In her bed by the window where she’d hung what could have been blackout curtains from the Second World War, it was clear to me that Nicoletta had something to tell me, and I her, and it would probably take us a long time to finish the conversation.
For over two years it was good to be with her. It was not a home, but it was company on a daily basis. I was forced to have some human interaction each day. I’m a man who can drift into solitude too easily, and I never particularly enjoyed it or knew what to do with it, other than work too hard and read books until my eyes stung and the real world blurred.
I still had my belongings in my own place, and once every so often Nicoletta and I would take Pie and spend the night in that bare apartment, Pie packing up dolls and clothes in an old-time red hatbox she used as a suitcase, acting excited like going to my place was a vacation, though all we did was play the board game Sorry and listen to the music from the downstairs apartment, which was live blues, and which we all loved.
Pie became attached to me, but I became more attached to her. More than I knew. I enjoyed talking with her as much as anyone. I told myself I loved her mother, but now when I think of those years I can see clearly that what connected me to that house was mostly the child. I knew as it was happening that she was somehow slipping into the space Ann had left behind, that I was turning back into a man who knew how to be a father. This should have felt like a betrayal, but it mostly felt good. I was tired of hating myself for Ann’s death. I thought I’d been punished enough.
I would sit out on the steps in the humid evening while Pie Pie played with her cars and dolls in the dirt under the clothesline. She was a girl who loved dirt, who made dirt seem clean somehow. She would sit out there and talk her endless talk about all kinds of things I knew weren’t true, things she got from TV and her own imagination. I knew this age well, knew how to go along and ask the right questions. These times on the steps were when I felt most at peace during those years, because the great distance between myself and that little girl, which was the same familiar distance I felt between myself and the world, was filled up with love, so that there were moments when the gap dissolved, when I’d rise from the steps and gather her up into my arms without thinking.
At night when Nicoletta slept beside me, it was not Ann I thought of, but Wendell. This surprised me, because I thought I was done with remembering him other than the times he’d flash in and out of my mind for no reason like a blinding light.
But there beside Nicoletta I wasn’t remembering him as he’d been, but thinking of him as he would’ve been had he lived. He would’ve still been a young man in his prime. He would’ve been in love with some woman, some beautiful woman he would not yet know how to satisfy, but she would wait, she would understand that he was a man whose body could learn.
They would’ve had a child or two, and he would’ve made a good father. (I felt certain I had always known that.) He would bring his children over to see me, and I’d hold them in my lap and press my lips to the top of their heads, and each time it would surprise me again how warm the top of children’s heads can be.
I would have a man to talk to, if Wendell had lived, a man I loved to talk to, a man I loved.
It was a new way of missing him, and I was both weary that I’d discovered it, and surprised that it had taken me so long.
I suppose it led to this dream.
I was living in a strange city overseas, everyone was speaking a different language, but no language I remember hearing when I was over there during the war. A tremendous feeling of homesickness overwhelmed the dream so that I felt like a boy, but clearly I was a man. I met Wendell in the street, and felt such tremendous relief I wanted to wake up, wanted to test the dream and make sure it was real. I tried to wake and couldn’t, so it was real. “Let’s go fishing,” I said. “My son,” I added. “Sure,” he said, and we walked along in what felt to me like a stream of pure joy until suddenly he stopped. He turned and looked in my eyes, and in his own eyes there was a message for me. At first I couldn’t read it. He began getting smaller now, shrinking, his eyes steady and looking at me. Now he stood beside me, clutching my leg. It began to rain. Then a woman came and placed him in my arms, and he was an infant, looking up into my face. His eyes had the same message, and now it was clear to me that if I couldn’t read the message in his eyes, the city would be bombed. I looked into his infant face, his blue eyes. You left me, so I died. I went to war without your love. I stumbled without your love. And then he was dissolving, pieces of his body merging with the air, and my own hands trying to grip him, trying to stop him from leaving, until finally there was nothing but a siren, and everyone running in the streets, the sky dark.
When I woke I was drenched in sweat. I opened the black curtains to a moon and looked out the window. Nicoletta sensed something. She sat up and turned to me in the darkness and said, “You all right?”
I sat up on the side of the bed and looked out the window. I said, “A dream.” I felt like any second now I’d weep, which I did not want to do.
“What dream?” She sounded irritated that she had to be awake. I had already noticed that the slightest show of weakness on my part made her angry.
I couldn’t say anything for a while, so I sat and held my head in my hands.
“What was the dream, James?” she said.
“It was . . . ”
“Tell me about it.”
“You go back to sleep,” I said, because the irritation in her voice was more pronounced.
“No. Tell me the dream.”
I said, “I had a son. I lied and told you I never had children, but I lost a son in Vietnam.”
I felt her hand on my back. She began to rub my neck; she was sitting behind me, naked.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m real sorry.”
But she didn’t even want to know my son’s name. She didn’t have a single question for me, and I sat wanting to be questioned, wishing she would interrogate me. But she just rubbed my shoulders and ran her hands through my hair, and finally it seemed the dream had left my body, and we slept under the warm breezes that came in through the window, our hands entwined.
A few nights later in bed I asked her why she never had any questions for me. Why she didn’t want to know about who I’d been before she knew me.
“We don’t have that kind of love, James. We’re not young enough to do all that again, are we? You haven’t asked me too many questions, either.”
She was right. It was true it wasn’t that kind of love, but it was also true that I wished that it was. I was not young, but I was young enough to hope for that possibility. I wanted to tell her, at the very least, about the dream I’d had while sleeping beside her, because in some way I felt she had brought the dream on. A part of me knew I was thinking of Wendell because I was with a woman, and it was good, and Wendell hadn’t ever had a real chance with women. He had been a boy with girls, never a man with women. Never had he experienced what for me seemed like the center of life. With Nicoletta, I’d come to realize the truth of that.
I wanted to tell her about what Wendell’s eyes had said in the dream. I wanted to say to her, “I thought leaving him when he was fourteen years old was not that important. I thought by then he was on his own. He hardly seemed interested in me by then. What do you think?”
So I tried to tell her this, late one night when we shared a bottle of wine in the kitchen as we had the first time I’d been to the house.
“When you were fourteen, were you a child?” I asked her.
She laughed. “When I was fourteen, I was a mother. Or could’ve been. I was pregnant, let’s put it that way. And I was no child, James. I was a savvy little P.S. 454 bitch with my fake rhinestone ankle bracelet and pints of rot gut hidden in my bedroom.” She laughed again.
“Fake rhinestone ankle bracelet,” I said, in an attempt to enter her spirit of levity, but she heard it as the lie it was.
“James,” she said. “Just let it go. You have a life, right? A life to live. Today. Here. Don’t you? If you think for one second your son would’ve lived if you’d never left him, you got a mighty inflated opinion of yourself.”
I looked at her. I was struck by the wisdom of her words. It made me want to go out and take a walk.
Pie’s father, Nicoletta’s ex-husband of ten years, was a comedian. He was onstage at a couple of clubs in the city where tourists liked to go, and he traveled often, to cities in the East and Midwest. The first two years I spent there I saw him five or six times; his career was just starting to take off, and when he came by the house he had the excited air of a man on the brink of success. He dressed in what I recognized as expensive, understated clothes. When he spoke to me, it was with polite restraint, and in his dark eyes I saw a kind of confusion I recognized, and maybe it was just the confusion of a man displaced.
But when I watched him talk with Pie, or play with her in the yard, I felt sorry that she felt she had to perform in order to keep his eye. She had a whole personality she would put on just for him, a Shirley Temple kind of act where she giggled and tossed her head and spoke as if she were much younger. She had lived with him for the first two and a half years of her life, and clearly he was inscribed in her heart for good, and she would break her back trying to tell him that. I could see that he had a man’s typical impatience for children, a man’s typical ambitions.
As for Nicoletta, when he came around she grew tight-lipped. But when his back was turned, she studied him, and when he left she’d say things like, “That sonofabitch didn’t even rinse his glass out. Am I still his maid?”
With that kind of passionate anger still inside of her, it shouldn’t have surprised me when he began to come around more and more, shouldn’t have surprised me when Nicoletta explained to me one morning in a coffee shop that she and him were going to give it another try.
“I have to say I’m surprised,” I said.
“Well, so am I.”
“Are you sure about this?”
“Yes.”
I looked out the window. I couldn’t feel much of anything, or make myself think.
“I still want you as a friend,” she said.
But we weren’t friends. We’d never been friends. We were lovers. To her credit, she reached out and put her hand on my arm and said she knew that probably wasn’t possible.
But it was the thought of Pie Pie that made me unable to turn from the window to look at Nicoletta when she asked me to.
“You got a lotta stuff at the house,” she finally said.
“I’ll get it today.”
“You can still see Pie, of course. You’re like an uncle to her.”
“You mean like a father,” I said. “I’ve been like a father to her, not an uncle.” I turned to look at her.
Nicoletta lowered her eyes, then looked up.
“You can see her once a week or something,” she said. “Like we’re divorced.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Like we’re divorced. Let’s get going.”
“I’m sorry,” she said and began to cry. “I miss you already. I wish I could have you both.”
I put my arm around her as we walked out of the diner; anyone watching would’ve thought I was the one who was saying good-bye.
Pie and I went and saw two movies together, and three times we went out for ice cream, and I took her to the dock where I worked just to point it out, just to give her more of myself. But driving out to that dock, I was hit with a forceful memory of Wendell. A memory of him when he was seven or eight, wanting to go watch me work down at the shipyard when I was a welder in Delaware. I told him I’d take him someday. I drove, trying to remember if I had taken him, or if I only imagined that I had. I drove half listening to Pie, but her voice somehow became part of my memory of Wendell. I decided that I never had taken him down there. I remembered thinking it would be dangerous, and not interesting enough for him. Or was it just inconvenient for me? Who had I been to him, really?
In the car with Pie, I had a few moments that were almost like panic, because I wasn’t sure about any memory I could pull up that concerned Wendell. I couldn’t make myself see his face clearly, much less hear his voice. Pie talked on. I groped after one clear memory of Wendell, and in that groping broke into a sweat. And finally, when I gave up, which was like being punched, I saw Wendell as clearly as if he had suddenly appeared in the road. Wendell as a baby, not a boy.
I decided to pull into an ice cream stand and get Pie a cone. I gave her money and she went up and ordered a cone by herself, and I sat in the car, and let myself remember another life, a life when I was still a boy, a boy alone with an infant. I had been overseas, never on the front line, but I’d seen enough suffering so that I had an understanding about life that Wendell’s mother did not. When she left me alone with our son, I felt almost relieved that I would no longer have to make conversation with her. I concentrated on Wendell. The other men I knew at the time were working and buying nice houses and raising families with wives who went to hair salons. Soon they were buying television sets. People I’d grown up with saw me in the market exhausted from sleeplessness and the shock of a life I’d never chosen, Wendell in my arms with his bright eyes and bald head and stained undershirts.
“You all right?” they’d ask me, but it was with suspicion in their eyes, not concern. They had never figured I’d turn out completely normal, I suppose. There were times during that first year with Wendell that all I wanted was to be someone else.
I had never known until that day in the car why it was that the loss of Wendell was in some way harder for me than the loss of Ann, even though I held myself accountable for Ann’s death, even though I had not forgiven myself. It’s morbid to compare the two, but I always did, in some faraway region of my heart. Maybe because he was a son, I reasoned, or because I had known him longer. But those explanations never convinced me. The reason I think his loss was harder was because he was mine, my baby. I knew what a mother knows then, not a father. It had been Wendell and me alone for the first three years of his life. He was my teacher, the child who taught me how to father. Ann was Gladys’s baby. I loved Ann more deeply that I could say, but Gladys and Ann, they were the real pair. Inseparable. Which was why I allowed myself to go to sleep at the pond that day. I knew Gladys never would, because I had seen Gladys stay completely focused on Ann for three years. Another man might have blamed Gladys for this reason, but I never did. That may have been because she so badly blamed herself.
Wendell was thirteen when Ann was born; he and I spent those long days together, just the two of us, throwing the baseball, or walking in the woods. He had my love of nature, my love of peace and quiet. In the car that day was the first time I remembered that about him, his love of quiet, how he would request, “turn it down, please,” when anything got too loud, how he had to leave the gymnasium at school during loud basketball games just to step outside and hear the quiet for a minute, as if he feared it would vanish, and noise would take over the world.
Pie got into the car with her cone that day, and offered me a lick. She seemed less familiar to me now, alongside the memories of Wendell. She was in first grade now. She appreciated our time together, but when I took her home, she was glad to see her father. She jumped into his arms. “Why can’t you live here too?” she asked me many times. “There’s room.” The adults laughed good-naturedly.
I left the explaining to Nicoletta. And I left Pie a long letter when I decided to leave New Orleans, a few months later, when I understood that she would, of course, be perfectly fine without me. I could too easily imagine her mother’s voice saying If you think she’ll fall apart without you, you have a mighty inflated opinion of yourself.
As I drove north I felt like I was driving myself out of a long dream, a long sleep. I was driving toward an idea of home, home to a camp in New York State where Gladys would be cooking a big meal or reading a book on the back stoop.
I loved a little girl almost like I loved Ann, and it tore me up again, Gladys.
And unlike Nicoletta, Gladys wouldn’t say, Just let it go.
Would she?
But Gladys wasn’t there when I pulled into town.
When she showed up, when we went to the pond, I should’ve told her then what I knew. I should’ve told her that I wasn’t thinking as much about Ann as I was about Wendell. I was seeing how he’d looked that day, sixteen, dripping wet, his girlfriend by his side. I was seeing him running and diving into the water. I was hearing his voice, still in the process of changing. I was seeing his wet boy face coming out of the water, his eyes closed, then opening and asking me if I was going to come in and swim.
Maybe if I’d looked at Gladys and told her what I was really thinking that day, she would’ve returned the favor. How could there be any moment of truth between us when I had withheld so much? And how could anything good come about in the absence of truth? I knew, thinking of this at that window in Muriel’s house, that I needed to see Gladys again.
I watched that Canada goose day after day, then watched the goslings hatch one gray morning. They were a handsome yellow color, and bright-eyed. I watched them for nearly an hour that morning. Ivy came in and watched with me.
She hadn’t noticed the distance opening up between us; at times I thought she was capable of deliberately ignoring it, that she insisted on not leaving the island of contentedness she had created for us. I had already left—if I was ever there. I felt her standing beside me, but I was far away, and whenever I looked at her, a knowledge that I’d used her would overwhelm me, so that I found it hard to say anything.
She had been my refuge. She had allowed me to figure some things out. She had made for me a warm place where I could stop and think back. Now I wanted to go back and see Gladys, not because I was interested in any kind of life with her, but because I wanted, somehow, to tell her what had happened at the pond. I wanted to explain my withholding. I wanted to tell her how I’d come to feel about Wendell, and to ask her what those years had been like for him, those years after I left, those last years of his life.
I watched the goslings line up and get ready to jump off the roof, then walked outside and followed them as they followed their mother down the pine-lined road toward the lake. I followed as if I were just another hungry goose, and before I knew it, Ivy and Muriel had joined me.
The day was blue, the sky seemed closer to the earth than usual, the sun was so brilliantly present I felt when I walked I was kicking pieces of light.
We watched the goslings enter the water. “Wheeooo,” they said. “Whee-ooo.”
Ivy said she had never seen anything so sweet in all her life, and when I looked over at her face, her eyes were teary, and she wouldn’t look my way. When Muriel walked down along the stony beach, Ivy said, still looking at the geese, “Don’t think I don’t notice we’re not like we used to be, James. Don’t think I’m blind, deaf, and dumb just because I know how to stay cheerful.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If I hurt you, I’m sorry.”
“You hurt me,” she said. “But I expected it all along. Part of why I came here with you was to push us into the future so we could lose each other. Because I knew it had to happen. I think it’s probably time you took me back home.”
She looked over at me finally, and smiled, and I wanted to change my mind about her, almost did change my mind, almost said, No, Ivy, I’ll come back to you, I’ll come back to that world we had for a while.
But I didn’t have the ability to return, and I knew it. We stood and waited for Muriel, then the three of us headed back down the road.
By the time we packed up our car the goslings still couldn’t fly. Both Ivy and I felt an urgency about leaving.
“I wasn’t lonely before you got here,” Muriel said. “But you can best believe I will be when you leave.”
“I’ll come back and visit you,” Ivy said.
“You’ll both be back,” Muriel said. “You won’t be able to stay away.” She smiled, and we got into the car. Ivy rolled down her window, and the two of them had their last conversation.
“You remember what I told you,” Muriel said to her.
“I will.”
“You remember that every day,” Muriel added.
I didn’t ask what Muriel meant. I didn’t have the right. I drove off, with Ivy waving out the window until Muriel was out of sight.
Ivy was quiet for hours. The land rushed by us, and a kind of bravery returned to me, a kind of optimism that I can’t help but feel when I’m on the road in a car, as if all the motion, which has always seemed to me like an illustration of how time flies, all that knowledge of the shortness of our time on earth just weeds out everything complicated in a man, weeds a man’s soul until what’s left is something simple and good. Because time was short, I drove with hope for everyone I knew, even as I knew the source of that hope would disappear when I stopped the car, when the world and time slowed down, became what it was.
Ivy was asleep, and didn’t wake up until I stopped for gas.
She looked at me, got out of the car, went inside to the rest stop, and returned with popcorn, which she sat between us on the front seat. We were careful to avoid each other’s hands now.
When I asked Ivy why she was so quiet, she said she had nothing to say. That was the moment when I recognized the loss of her, a necessary loss but not an easy one for me, either.
It was late at night when we got to Gladys’s, but a light was on. We sat in the car for a moment, and I wanted to say something to her as we looked at that light in the window.
“Ivy,” I said, “thank you.”
She didn’t say anything at first. She waited a while, then got out of the car, then just as quickly got back into the car.
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Don’t thank me for loving you, James. A person can’t help who they love, and you should know that by now. A person is absolutely helpless when it comes to who they love.”
She got out of the car again, gently closed the door, and walked toward the house.