If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (21 page)

What had he been waiting for? A slaughtered bird?

When Cathleen comes back, she trips over the handle of the little leather bag tucked beneath her chair and he steadies her with his arm.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t walk in front of the train,” she says. “I’m barely in my own head.”

She pushes the bag back under the seat. It isn’t much more than a big pocketbook, he realizes, nothing possibly big enough for the many days she’d been planning to stay. He asks her if she’s forgotten her things at the farm. “It would be understandable,” he says. “Given what’s going on.”

She frowns, looks puzzled.

He points to the bag. “I just mean, that can’t be enough luggage for all those days.”

“Oh no, it isn’t.” She seems to hesitate. “I keep some clothes up there.”

“Right.” Of course she would.

The train comes to a halting stop at a dingy little station. The building’s brick is practically black, the windows either boarded or shattered. As far as Jeremy can tell, no one gets on or off.

“She told me last time it’s an impossible kind of grief,” Cathleen says as they start up again. “That people are always hurrying you past it. Telling you just to go get pregnant again. I feel bad sometimes that it never happened to me. It was so easy for us. I feel guilty about it.”

“I can’t believe the doctors have no explanation.”

“You know, she wasn’t letting herself think about there being a real baby, this time. She told me that. Christ, it was just yesterday. Right before dinner. Not even wondering about the sex. She and Colin had a pact not to talk about it.”

When the food cart comes through, they both shake their heads no.

At one point, his phone vibrates in his pocket. He lets it go, then checks. Rose. Just waking up, no doubt. “Not feeling very chatty,” he says to Cathleen as he puts it back.

“No. Nor am I. Was that her?” she asks. “Rose?”

“Yes.”

After a few seconds, she says, “I can’t tell, Jeremy. Is this something serious?”

He thinks for a moment. “Not really,” he says. “It’s not frivolous, but it’s not what you mean.”

She nods, turns to the window.

This is where they failed, all those years back, he believes. In taking care of one another when tragedy struck. It broke them, broke them all. The truth about his life can wait for a better time.

“I suppose neither of us has had much luck along those lines,” she says. “Finding true love.”

“Not yet maybe,” he says. “But there’s still time.”

It isn’t romantic jealousy he’s protecting her from now. It’s something else. Not that he’s found love with another but that he’s found love first. That he’s leaving this limbo they’ve shared for thirteen years.

The train makes another quick stop and this time a quartet of boys get on. To Jeremy’s surprise they settle in first class. “I hope to God they’re not too rowdy,” he says.

“I can’t believe anyone buys kids first-class tickets.” Cathleen checks her watch. Then, just a couple of minutes later, she checks it again. He can’t imagine her hurry.

“I was thinking we could have lunch somewhere,” he says.

Little furrows appear in her brow. “I’m sorry, Jeremy,” she says. “I should have told you. There’s somewhere I need to go.” One of the boys laughs raucously and another passenger shushes him. “I have to leave you at the station, I’m afraid. I’m heading the other way.”

He almost asks, “The other way from what?” since he doesn’t have a destination, no hotel room, nowhere he has said he needs to be, but he catches himself. It isn’t a mistake, he realizes. It’s a lie. “That’s fine,” he says. “I know my way around.”

“Maybe another time.” She’s looking down the open, empty corridor. He watches as her brow’s furrows begin to smooth, some knot of tension leaving her face. Gradually, the ridges vanish, the shadows disappear. A network of thin lines remains. Lines that weren’t there a decade before.

When she catches him staring, he smiles without much conviction, then turns to the window once again.

It doesn’t make any sense. There’s no reason for her to lie. Though it’s possible that she made an appointment, a rendezvous, while in the bathroom. It occurs to him that she may be protecting him in precisely the way he just protected her. The thought is an appealing one. Two lies told for kindness, a bookend to the parallel confessions they made years before.

Outside, the landscape begins to show unfortunate signs of civilization. Beige, concrete buildings spring up like the mushrooms he has studied all these years. Just as ugly, just as poisonous in their way.

“We’re going to be late,” Cathleen says, just as they enter a tunnel. “A little over fifteen minutes. Nothing to do about it, I suppose. Did you notice, Jeremy? I’m not afraid of tunnels anymore. Remember how bad I used to be?”

In the darkness, the glass has become a mirror. He watches her reflection as she checks her watch again, then begins to drum her fingers on the armrest. She’s clearly impatient to meet whoever it is.

The train stops.

“Dammit,” she says, looking toward the black window. “God dammit! We’re already late.”

“They’ll get it moving,” he says. He can’t imagine what’s gotten into her, the woman who normally would shrug and say
So, I guess we’re running lateish
.

She sits back in her seat and closes her eyes. “I just don’t believe it,” she says. “This train is never late.” She begins to take deep breaths, long and even. Labor breathing.

The train starts up.

“Oh, thank God!” she says—as though for salvation. “Oh, thank God.”

When their eyes meet, her face falls slack. Her mouth opens then shuts. Caught. Unmistakably caught.

“You’re going right back, aren’t you?” he asks. “To Zoe?”

For a moment, his certainty fails, but then she nods. “Yes, Jeremy. That’s right. I’m going back.”

“Y
ou mustn’t be angry,” she says as they stand together in the chaos of the station, unsure and unfinished, a phantom version of lovers who don’t want to part. “Not at her. She meant well. It’s an impossibly personal time for her, but she didn’t want you hurt.”

“I’m not angry.”

Cathleen looks at him, appraisingly. “I believe you. Though you do seem upset. But I suppose we’re all upset.” Then her eyes open wide. “You can’t tell her you found out. Not ever. You know that, right?” She looks fierce, suddenly fierce—and he loves her for that. “She thinks she’s spared you pain. I know her, Jeremy. She’ll always be proud of this. There’s nothing she can feel good about today. Except there’s this—that she did something kind. For you. You can’t ever let on.”

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I won’t.”

And he doesn’t say more, though there is more to say. But he wants her to go. He wants her to hurry to the next train so it can carry her back to where she’s needed. He doesn’t want to slow her down explaining how he feels. That he isn’t angry. That he isn’t insulted or hurt at being sent away. He is overwhelmed—by his daughter’s kindness to him. By the kindness of them both. It’s so much more than he deserves. It breaks his heart.

“I’m so sorry, Jeremy,” Cathleen says, a hand on his arm.

“Me too.” Small words to cover a lifetime of all they might be sorry for, symmetrical, like wedding vows, like confessions.
I do. I do. I did. I did
.

“Where are you going?” she asks. “Do you need any help?”

He shrugs, shakes his head. “No. I used to live here, remember? I’ll figure it out. Just tell her… tell her I’m so sorry for her loss.”

Cathleen kisses his cheek. “Thank you for not making this a thing.” She hitches the little bag up onto her shoulder. “I’ll let you know what’s going on,” she says. Then she turns and walks away, hurriedly, as though late.

Her path is lined by pigeons pecking crumbs off the vast marble floor and Jeremy watches as one by one they fly into the air at her approach, then one by one descend and settle just behind her, when she has passed. As he stands there, admiring this spontaneous choreography, Jeremy knows that he’ll tell Rose about it when he gets home. He knows that she can help him understand why this seems so beautiful to him, why the sight brings tears to his eyes.

As soon as Cathleen is gone, he begins to walk himself, in no particular direction, no destination other than that one in mind.

… Divorced,
Beheaded,
Survived

W
ITHOUT QUESTION,
Anne Boleyn was the plum role.

Day after day, dusk really, in the time between school and dinner, in the small, untended yard behind my childhood home, there were fights over who would get to play her. Even the boys loved everything about being the Lady Anne. The telltale pillow under your shirt, long before the elaborate royal marriage. “Henry dear, I have wonderful news!” The twigs you could tape to your hands, just next to your pinkies, to show those extra fingers that she had. The fact that we all knew there had been extra breasts as well. The simple, distant weirdness of it all. “Ooooh, I’m a witch. I’m a sexy pregnant witch. And I want to be queen of all England!!”

My older brother, Terry, was undoubtedly the most convincing. Once, he stole a dress from our mother’s closet—a red-and-white Diane von Furstenberg wraparound so he could use the beltlike part to hold the couch-pillow baby, the future Queen Elizabeth, in place. “Oh, Hal,” he cooed to Jeff Mandelbaum from next door. “You don’t need that old Spanish cow of a wife of yours! With her sour little daughter. You just wait! I’ll give you that son you want and deserve. Right here, my sire.” With a pat to his lumpy middle.

Almost nothing beat watching him sidle up to Jeff, who was always our Henry, due to his heft, to the early growth of untended facial hair across his heavy jaw, and to the fact that he was the only one of the neighborhood boys who steadfastly refused to play a wife. “Oh, Harry, let’s go frolic in the meadow and leave these nasty courtiers all behind!” Then Terry would bump his swollen front against the damask tablecloth Jeff wore draped across his back, knotted in a bow beneath his chin.

It was almost worth giving up the role yourself just to watch Terry give it his all, and it might have been, if it weren’t for the execution scene. But the beheading was just too good not to fight over. Molly Denham, from the house behind ours, whose parents were both Jungian analysts, usually asked to be the anonymous executioner.

“Do you forgive me, My Grace?” she would intone from behind an old Batman Halloween mask, her voice as deep as she could make it, her straight yellow hair hanging to her waist.

“I do, sir. I do forgive you.”

And when I was Anne, I would then offer her my hand, to kiss and to hold as I knelt. Looking up to the sky, I would press my palms together, as if in prayer—or as I imagined people praying might do. Raising my own long hair up above the nape of my neck, I’d lean my head down over the chopping block—a white enameled lobster pot, turned upside down—and await the mortal blow from the black rubber axe that Molly swung.

It was all Johnny Sanderson’s idea. His father was a professor in the medical school and had started up at the university the same year my father joined the history department. Those were the days when there were still teas and formal dinner parties for new faculty, and my parents and the Sandersons had struck up a friendship of sorts.

Johnny was a year younger than Terry, a year older than me, and he was one of those kids who seemed to know a lot about himself before any of the rest of us had much of a clue of who we were. By that spring, when he was eleven, he knew for sure that he wanted to be a history professor, like my father. But instead of American history, his thing was Europe. He was a short, skinny boy who pretty much always wore brown corduroy pants and a gray sweatshirt. And he looked young for his age. People were always thinking he must be in my class—sometimes even younger than that.

I don’t know exactly what satisfaction Johnny got from having us act the thing out in my backyard time and time again. I think it must have been something greater than what the rest of us enjoyed, hamming it up as we laid our heads down on the lobster pot or moaned while giving birth to another of Henry’s brats. There was more to it than playacting for Johnny; a kind of intensity crept into his voice when we all gathered after school, had some juice and fruit or crackers, whatever my mother had around. A kind of edgy tension as he said, “Hey, anyone want to act out the thing again?” And he knew how to hook us all too, every time, rotating which kid would play Anne, having the good sense to hurry through the more boring wives—though he never let us wholly skip a single one.

“Off with her head!” Jeff Mandelbaum would shout at the afternoon’s Jane Seymour. “Off with her head!”

“Divorced, beheaded,
died
,” Johnny would correct. “The third wife died. No beheading. Jane Seymour died a natural death.”

He was the first of the many obsessive, bossy intellectuals I have loved and have lived to impress. Nothing pleased me more those afternoons than when, as Molly’s axe head hit my neck, Johnny Sanderson would burst into spontaneous applause or even sometimes say, “Great, Sarah. Really, really great.”

T
hat was the spring of fourth grade for me, 1973—the last months before Terry got sick, and then sicker, and then got better for a little bit, but then died in ’74, which shocked me when it happened, but now, thirty years later, it seems to have been as inevitable a conclusion as the strike of Molly’s axe.

T
o my own children, that long-neglected backyard is only part of Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house, where we go for Thanksgiving, for the Christmases we don’t spend with Lyle’s folks in California, for occasional weekend escapes from Manhattan, into Massachusetts. To see the leaves changing color. To celebrate a birthday. My mother’s seventy-fifth. My father’s eightieth. Events that for me carry an inevitably muted quality. My mother’s eyes dampening over her presents with what she swears are tears of joy. My father softly talking to himself, after the candles have been blown out, after his wish has been silently made, all alone on the back-porch swing.

The children are too old now to play out there much when we go up, though I used to watch them dart around the wild, thorny rosebushes in games of tag, and try unsuccessfully to hide from one another behind the lean Japanese maple. Sixteen and twelve now, Mark and Coco are four years apart—we had been two apart, Terry and I. And maybe it was superstition that made me wait that extra stretch of time before getting pregnant again. I don’t know. Lyle would have liked our children to be closer in age: “Keep the parenting years compressed.” But I put our second child off, and so my boy and girl were always just a little different from the pair we used to be.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the ways we try to protect our children. And ourselves. Three weeks ago, Mark’s best friend, Peter, was killed on the Long Island Expressway. That Sunday morning, I was making a special breakfast—French toast and bacon—because Coco had a friend sleeping over. The girls were still in her room, and Mark was lying on the living room couch, reading. Lyle was grading papers at the kitchen table, complaining about them as he did: “How can these children be in college and still be so close to functionally illiterate?” I had just pulled the eggs out from the fridge and held the carton in my hand when the telephone rang. It was close to ten o’clock.

“Can I talk to Mark?”

The voice on the line was a kid, but not a voice I recognized.

“Who’s calling?”

It turned out to be a boy I’d known for years.

“What’s the matter, Nick? You sound terrible.”

As he told me, I turned my back on Lyle, who was suddenly alert, watching me. I opened the fridge and put the eggs away. “There was this party…” I’d known about the party. Mark had thought of going, but had decided he had too much work. “I don’t even think they were drinking or anything… or not much anyway… The way I heard it, the other guy, I don’t know, I think someone said it was a truck, he might’ve been stoned or something. Nobody else was even hurt…”

The bacon on my stove crackled as Nick spoke. My back still to Lyle, I reached for a fork and turned over the strips. Lowered the heat.

“Are your parents there?” I asked.

They were.

“We’ll call a little later, Nick. Let me talk to Mark first. We’ll be back in touch.”

“Who died?” Lyle asked, before I even hung up the phone. I told him.

“Jesus Christ.”

“Car accident.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. Holy shit.”

I turned off the bacon. And kissed my husband’s motionless head before going in to talk to Mark.

“T
his is the part where Anne learns for certain that she’s going to die,” Johnny Sanderson had coached us, every afternoon. “No more chances. She’s doomed. You should show a little emotion at this point.”

And Terry would hold his face in both his hands, his shoulders heaving in enormous, racking, make-believe sobs.

But in real life, it was all silent hours. Vacant stares.

As soon as we learned Terry was sick, my house stopped being the daily gathering place. Everyone but me seemed to know what was coming. He stopped being the boy who would throw himself into anything that seemed like fun. And one by one the other children began avoiding us. We had played together all our lives, and then it ended. There was no more ease between us. Not even between my brother and me. I didn’t know how to speak to the quiet, solemn boy he had become. And he didn’t seem to need me, anymore.

I
sat next to my son where he lay stretched on the couch. “Hey, bud.” I took the book from his hand as I spoke, and lay it open on the tabletop. “Something’s happened, sweetheart. Something bad.” His face was still sleepy, unwashed, his brown hair a little messy.

I don’t know. Maybe Jeff Mandelbaum’s mother saw a different side of her son after my brother died. Could detect a new thoughtfulness in his eyes. Maybe Molly Denham cried herself to sleep for weeks. Maybe Johnny Sanderson’s heart was broken. I never knew. They never told me. Johnny did go on to be a history professor, like he always said he would. Made a name for himself at the same university where our fathers had taught. But maybe his life wasn’t exactly the way he’d always imagined it, because of what happened to my brother when we were kids.

My son’s face changed as he took in the news.

“He’s
dead
?”

I nodded. He shook his head.

“No. That’s impossible. Just yesterday…”

I nodded again; and he still shook his head. Coco had come into the room in her nightshirt. Just behind her, I could see her friend in pajamas holding a hairbrush to her head.

“What’s going on?” Coco asked.

“Nothing,” Mark said. “Go away.”

“Dad’s in the kitchen, hon. Go on—he’ll talk to you.” And grasping my urgency, she left; but for a moment her friend just stood there staring at us, the brush caught halfway through her hair. Then she too turned and walked away.

“Mom, he can’t be dead.”

I didn’t speak.

Can’t be. I know that feeling.

Can’t be.

But is.

I
don’t think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I’m stunned by that fact. It isn’t only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it’s the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there.

More than a decade ago, as soon as I thought Mark was old enough to ask me questions, I made the decision to put away the picture of my brother that I had carried from my parents’ home to college, in and out of my first brief marriage, in and out of the first apartment Lyle and I shared, and finally into our family home. I took it down off the bookshelf, where it sat between my old books—all the orange-spined Penguin classics, Shakespeare, Woolf, all that—and Lyle’s many chemistry texts. It just seemed to me to be too hard on the children, too hard on Mark particularly to have that happy boy face smiling down, and to know what had happened to that other boy. The lines between him and my own son were too easily drawn. I was afraid my brother’s face would become a fearful thing for them. And maybe for me as well, with kids of my own. So I put him in the dresser drawer I use for the few really fine scarves and gloves I possess, the softest place for storage I could find.

But of course the children have always known that I had a brother and that he died. A brother named Terrance, Terry. They know about him without my ever having had to tell either of them. Uncle Terry, he would have been. It’s family information. The kind that travels in the air that children breathe.

A
t Peter’s funeral, we lined up in a row, my husband, my two children, and I. Mark and Coco wore the dress clothes I had bought for Thanksgiving, which is fast upon us now. Another drive to Massachusetts. A family visit home. I’ll have to phone my parents, I know, and tell them what happened. I haven’t done that yet.

We never did call Nick back, the morning that we heard. And I don’t think Mark’s spoken very much to any of his friends since then. Not about Peter. He goes off to school, and comes right home. Heads straight for his room and closes the door. Coco’s asked me if he’s going to be okay, and I tell her that he will. And I know that he will. It just takes time, I tell her. It’s only been a few weeks. It’ll take some more time.

I forced myself to go up to Peter’s parents as they stood beside their son’s casket, and to say the things you say. Lyle came too, of course, and shook their hands. Mumbled something. Bit his lip. Stepped away so another family friend could do the same. I didn’t force the kids, but eventually Mark made his way over. The mother and father both hugged him, hard, and Peter’s kid brother shook his hand, with an empty expression on his face. Mark didn’t come back to us right away. He just wandered to a corner of the church and stood by himself for a while.

T
he truth is that sometimes even more than a day goes by before I remember to think of my brother. It’s only natural, I’ve told myself, time and time again. It’s human nature, I’ve thought—as though there’s consolation to be found in that. And maybe there is. Maybe it’s a gift to be able to let go of the remembering. Some times. Some things.