October (9 page)

Davey turned, walked out of the cellar.

"You gonna let him get away with that, Davey?" Buddy whined. "You gonna let him treat you like that?"

"Yeah, you gonna do that?"
Backman
taunted.

Davey turned, walked back, threw a right at Nick's face, connecting on the cheek.
Backman
went down, landing on Brenda
Valachio
, who said, "Hey!" and pushed Nick aside. Andrea continued to laugh.

"All right, Davey!" Buddy said. "You got him good." Nick sat up, rubbed his cheek. "You're screwed, Putnam."

"Get him," Brenda urged, then laughed.

"Get him good," Andrea said. "Let's call the cops. Maybe we can wash their clothes."

Nick and Brenda broke into laughter. As Davey and Buddy left, Nick fumbled a small Baggie of white powder out of his pocket, letting the girls crawl their hands over him to try to get it.

"Jesus, Davey, I'm sorry I got you into this. You're in big trouble now," Buddy said. They left by the back door and made their way to the street.

It was getting dark. The streetlights were on, like sour lemon lamps lighting the falling leaves. Davey's beer buzz was gone. He turned up his collar, put his hands in his pockets; far off, he heard the tentative, dying wail of a police siren that abruptly died.

"Yeah," he said, "so what?"

As Kevin feared, Lydia answered the door.

"Oh," she said, almost a tiny gasp.

"I should have called."

"No," Lydia said. She looked at her hands. "Actually, I thought you were Dr. Carpenter."

"I'm sorry."

She was still looking at her hands. "Come in."

She had not changed. She still wore the kind of clothes Kevin remembered as "Lydia clothes," white-laced necks, long skirts, heavy materials. She was a thin girl who covered herself from neck to foot, navy knee socks, black pumps. It was a uniform of sorts.

She walked quickly in front of him, leading into the sitting room. "Would you like tea?" It was early afternoon. Kevin had eaten lunch only an hour before.

"Yes, of course," he said.

The house hadn't changed, either. It never would. In Kevin's mind it was a shrine, a museum. It reeked of lemon polish, dark rubbed wood, Queen Anne furniture, amber illumination, coolness. He had come here often just for the atmosphere, as if willing himself into this world. It was just before Lydia's father had left that he had first come into the house; but even then, it was obviously a place that Eileen
Connel
had created, a place she owned, fostered, tended like a garden. The house itself was as much a creation of her mind as her writing.

Lydia, too: was as much a creation of her mother as the house; indeed, she was so much a product of her mother's dominating vision that she had remained, a fixture in a house apart from the world, when her two brothers were long gone. Her mother's domination had become as oxygen to Lydia; like a gnarled root, she had taken her place among the Victorian knickknacks, the ponderously tolling clocks with slow pendulums, the dark wood, the dusty confines of small rooms and dim, sour light.

"Do you still take sugar?" Lydia asked.

"Yes."

They passed through the narrow hallway, through the mahogany-framed doorway, into the sitting room. The polished ebony baby grand piano was there on the right. Its white teeth grinned at Kevin, yellowing Mozart sheet music propped on its brow. He danced his fingers over the high keys, let the tone of the piano make him remember this room, this sound.

"Do you still play?" he asked.

"Yes." Her pale eyes came up to meet his briefly; the brief, sad smile. "She likes to hear it in the evenings." A catch of laugh. "She knows the sound of the phonograph, I can't fool her."

"You're expecting the doctor?"

Again her eyes met his, pale, flat blue. Her gaze lingered, perhaps with the thought in front of her. Mother. "She . . . had a very bad night. Her mind . . ."

"May I see her?"

"I'll get tea."

Lydia left him to the room. The furniture, damask, photos in gilded frames on the tables, Lydia, Eddie, and Bobby, the father absent. There had never been domestication in the house, Kevin knew; only living, and waiting for Danny Sullivan to leave for good. Eileen
Connel
had not hid her rejection of her husband; it had bled, with a kind of surety Kevin longed to understand, into the corners of the foundation and turned in on itself.

In the end, Eileen
Connel
had not only forced Danny Sullivan out of her house but out of her life, renouncing his name.

Another picture, on the mantel over the fireplace. Lydia only, gazing into the camera lens with detached concentration. It is time to take a picture, someone, probably her mother, had told her. Stand and have your picture taken. And she had, as she did everything else in its appointed time.

"Have you thought of leaving?" Kevin had asked her soon after meeting her, when her bland despair had become evident to him.

"No," Lydia had answered; and though Kevin had laughed, thinking it appropriate, it had occurred to him that probably, up until then, she never had.

"I'm back," Lydia announced with a touch of brightness. She set the tray down on the wide coffee table. Smooth dark wood. Tea scent overwhelmed the tinge of lemon polish.

She sat beside Kevin on the damask sofa, poured tea, handed it to him. Her fingers, he remembered, smelled like lemon polish.

He took the tea from her. "Thank you."

"You're in New Polk to teach," she said matter-of-factly. She sat on the sofa so that she would not have to look into his eyes. "I read about it in the paper."

"Yes."

"You're going to teach Mother's work."

Kevin sipped tea, put the cup and saucer down. "Yes.”

“I knew you would."

He didn't know what to say. He put his hand out for his teacup, felt her eyes on him. He turned, his mouth ready to speak, but no words formed. She was looking at him. The wan, blond, straight frame of her hair made her thin face, with her thin, long nose, the scatter of dry freckles like tears under the bridge, her paper-dry lips, the pale line of her chin, so close to the bone beneath, appear even thinner. Her fingers were long, slim. The nails were sensibly short, unpainted. When they played the piano, they struck the keys like twigs, did not caress them. Her music-making was sad but not accomplished—remote, perhaps meaningful to herself. He had always told himself that love for her had not grown in him because it was not meant to be. But it had been the image of her fingers on the white keys of the piano, playing Mozart or Brahms, the tiny pads of her fingers en-rubbed with lemon polish, the brittle, lonely sounds that had come out, that had kept him from loving her. . . .

"I would have left with you that day," she said.

"I know," he said, and suddenly the memory of the day that was the crux of his relationship with Lydia, with her mother, when he had first come face-to-face with himself, came back to him as if he had been immersed whole in it.

He came a final time to research his Ph.D. thesis, to talk with Eileen
Connel
. She let him record her spoken words as notes. She did not like to talk about her work, but she had warmed to him, had opened a tiny lock to a tiny room out of all the large locks and rooms within her. His father had just died.

She was forty-six years old, then. She was often forgetful, the Alzheimer's disease, unrecognized, just beginning to inhabit her. She let him into her bedroom-study on the second floor, a final secret unfolded for him. It was a room much as he had imagined it; she had spoken of it often; and in his mind, he had been able to construct its dimensions. It was different from what he had imagined, but later, he made a note that perhaps this was her writer's mind at work again, her genius for metaphor. There was one large window with a tree nearby; swimming sunlight washed over the walls. It was a cold day outside, February, but the sky was bright, high, cold, and blue, like many February skies in New York.

She sat at her desk. The desk was populated with writing equipment. In the center an old Remington typewriter, almost laughable with age, but perfectly maintained. She had told him, elsewhere in his recorded notes, that there was a man in New Polk who had originally sold it to her and who repaired it when necessary. He cleaned it every two months. She had learned, after many years, to change the ribbons herself.

"I used to write on a legal pad, in longhand," she told him, opening their conversation by noting his inspection of the typewriter. "That was when my husband was still here. Even though I had saved the money for a typewriter, he wouldn't allow me to have one. So I wrote on ruled yellow legal paper. For a time, I even used a fountain pen." Eileen smiled, a small blossom, coming, perhaps, from that secret little room where he had hoped to break the lock. "Don't look so shocked, Kevin," she added. "I never used a quill pen, for God's sake, or had to dip into a bottle of ink."

She turned her chair partway toward him, splitting her attention between him and her desk. As always, she refused to acknowledge the running tape recorder that lay at Kevin's feet. The chair was straight backed, severe, with a
doilied
blue pad on the seat. She wore a loose white sweater, what looked to be gardening pants—tan, large fitting—white socks, and loafers. So unlike Lydia. Her face was lined, full, the eyes tired, but when they concentrated on Kevin or on a question, filled with sharp focus. They were dark, slate-gray, speckled with green. When reading, she wore glasses, tortoiseshell, which magnified the tiredness in her eyes.

"What else do you want to know about my habits, Kevin?" She smiled, and for a moment he thought she was mocking him, but was, he realized, mocking herself. The walls were lined with books, carefully tended, dusted, green, blue, brown spines. Keeping her thoughts, Kevin imagined, from the outside world. Over her desk was a
small, narrow shelf enameled
white, supported by two cast-iron brackets sculpted in vines. The shelf held all six of her novels.

"How do you correct?" Kevin asked.

"With a pencil." She added almost petulantly, "I'm not a goddess."

"I'm sorry—"

She regarded him directly, and he felt now like a baby, uninitiated.

She said, quietly, turning in her chair to lean slightly toward him, both hands on her knees, "It's a mysterious process, Kevin. But it's not magic. It's a craft, like learning to carve, or make cabinets. When I started, I scribbled, like a toddler. The words, the tools, I fumbled them, didn't know how to hold them or point the blades. I got better as I worked. I wanted to work, which was the important thing. After a while, I found the handles of the tools, held them fast, made nice cuts with them." She leaned back, her hands moving with her up her thighs. "That's all there is to it." She stared at him for a moment, then put a hand to her forehead.
 
"I think you'd better go, Kevin."

"Please—"

She seemed distracted "I'm . . . sorry. I just think we should end this. I have nothing more to say to you."

A desperation, of which he was not even aware, rose in him.

"You have to—"

"No, Kevin."

"
You have to tell me what you know
!" The hand holding his microphone was shaking. He felt hysteria overtaking him, heard what sounded like another man's voice, frightened, obsessed, speak his words.

"Kevin—"

"You know! It's in your work, it overwhelms everyone around you, your children, it helped destroy your marriage—you know! It's like a secret knowledge, you're so sure of your- self so strong—tell me!"

He stood up, clutching his hands like fists at his sides. He felt on the verge of tears.

Eileen
Connel
rose and came to him. "Kevin," she said. She put her arms around him, held him, put his head to her breast. Remarkably, he felt her trembling against him.

"Oh, Kevin," she said. "If there's a secret, I don't know what it is. Something happened to me when I was a little girl that changed me. You already know the story." She hesitated, took a deep breath. "But I don't remember what happened to me. I remember the fire, I remember being helped from the cellar, I remember Jerry Martin's face. But I don't remember anything else." Her grip on Kevin tightened. "I can't help what I am. Believe me, Kevin, I'm still human."

Kevin was still shaking. "But you know yourself! Tell me how you know!"

"It's in me," she said gently, "it's in my writing, but I don't know how. Please stop, Kevin. Look what it did to your father—"

A spell broke between them. Kevin, suddenly mortified, drew away from Eileen
Connel
Her touch lingered, and then she stepped back, closed her eyes.

"Go now, Kevin."

The tiredness had returned to her face, her voice. She turned toward her desk, picked up a paperweight, a blue flower with wide petals imprisoned in clear, hard glass. She was an unreadable monument to him, the curve of her neck, her hard profile.

"Yes." He reached to switch off his tape recorder.