Winter Birds (13 page)

My own gifts in the kitchen were limited, though from childhood I had helped my mother with meals at the boardinghouse. On the night in question I prepared a potato dish Eliot liked, a tossed green salad, and a loaf of yeast bread that I had set to rise that afternoon. He never liked a great variety of food. He had his favorites and could be most pleased by repetitions of those.

I permitted him to eat before speaking of what was on my mind. From my father I had learned not to trouble a man at the dinner table. In my father’s case, he was most approachable after he had eaten his evening meal and retired to his chair in the living room. It was necessary, however, to catch him quickly, before he drifted off to sleep.

In Eliot’s case it was necessary to catch him before he retired to his study, for by this time I had already learned that when his door was closed, he was the only one who should open it. Like the hermit thrush in my bird book, Eliot sought privacy. As I have said, he was not a harsh man. He could be kind and gentle when he chose. Others perceived him as shy. I don’t know what he saw when he looked in the mirror, how he lived with himself, but he managed in his own way to give the impression of a contemplative serenity, a peaceful distance from the everyday business of life.

I struck at what I considered the right moment. It was late June at the time, and peaches were ripening in an orchard at the edge of town. I had bought a small basket of them and made a peach pie that afternoon. With the bread, potato dish, and pie, it had been a busy afternoon, but I knew that the occasion called for unusual measures. And it was almost as if fate was on my side, I had told myself when lifting the pie from the oven two hours earlier. It was a beautiful pie, one that could have been pictured in a cookbook. The crust was perfect, and the juice bubbling up through the slits on top appeared to be nicely thickened.

When I removed Eliot’s empty plate and set the slice of pie in front of him, his eyes flickered upward for an instant, as if searching my face for the cause of this unexpected addendum to an already fine meal. We were both still timid in our roles as husband and wife. Perhaps Eliot was having to remind himself of how it was done. In my case I was simply afraid of not performing well. I couldn’t help thinking Eliot must be comparing me to his first wife, though he had never even told me her name.

As Eliot ate his pie, I began my speech. I had planned and rehearsed it that afternoon as I did my kitchen work, but it had sounded better then than now. He listened but kept his eyes on his pie. I don’t recall my exact words, but I must have begun with something like “You must know that motherhood is the natural desire of most women.” I thought I detected an instant crease of worry on his brow, but I pressed on. Perhaps he was only wishing the pie were sweeter. I had started my speech and couldn’t undo it.

I was almost forty-three years old, I reminded him. He had turned sixty-one a week earlier. My desire to have children would not always coincide with the physical ability to do so. In fact, time was short. It was clear that he understood my meaning. He set his fork down, as if to answer, but I was not finished with what I had to say. I knew that he had already experienced parenthood, I said. Though his children, I thought, had hardly made the experience an agreeable one. I wanted very much to have a child of my own, I said, and I hoped that he would see this as a reasonable desire and a happy prospect for himself, too. I assured him that the care of the child would not be his burden, that I would see to its needs, that it would not be permitted to interrupt his work. I rushed on, abandoning the prepared script and stumbling over my words, repeating myself. During the whole of my speech, I saw before me a vision from twenty years earlier of my third grader Starr, whose shining black eyes met every day as if it were a present wrapped especially for her. I wanted a child like her. I wanted a star for the evening of my life.

I felt a thickness in the air when I stopped. The vision of Starr vanished. Eliot’s face showed a mixture of disapproval, awkwardness, and fear. Your work in the kitchen this afternoon has been for nothing, I said to myself during the long silence.

He spoke at last, with what sounded like great tenderness and sorrow. We should have discussed this before we married, he said. Had he known of my desire, he never would have given me false hope. He had not meant to mislead me. Children were not—this was accompanied by frequent pauses, sighs, clearings of the throat—something he felt he could . . . accommodate at this point in his life. Though he knew he had been remiss in not broaching the subject earlier, before I had formed and fed my dreams, he had hoped that I would find joy and fulfillment in helping him “nurture Portia and Alonso to adulthood.”

I knew he was straining for excuses. The word
nurture
had a hard, grating sound like a rusty plow. When one has a part in planting the seed, I wanted to tell him, his interest in the yield is greater. A hired hand may labor diligently, but his heart doesn’t yearn after the harvest with the same fervor as that of the farmer himself. Besides, from what I had observed of Eliot’s young plants, they were wild and stunted, the time for nurturing them long past.

He took his last bite of pie, then pushed his chair back. I rose to clear the table. I walked to the sink and stood there to hide my eyes. Before leaving the kitchen, he came up behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sophia,” he said. “I didn’t know.” He stood there a few moments, the weight of his hand as light as a breath of air. Then he turned and walked to his study. I heard the door close.

I had set a slice of pie at my own place but had not yet taken a bite. I scraped it off the saucer into the garbage can.

I didn’t cry. Even then I knew that life would do to me what it wanted. Tears couldn’t change the course laid out for me. I knew at that moment that my night would be a starless one. I comforted myself with the thought that at least I had a husband, a moon that was good and steady, though it sometimes waned to a mere sliver of light and many chilly nights was hidden behind clouds.

Chapter 10

Honor Is a Mere Scutcheon

A member of the duck family, the lesser scaup is ready at birth to take on the challenges of life. Hatched with its eyes wide open and a downy coat for insulation, the lesser scaup learns within the first three days how to dive to food, anticipate and escape danger, and make its own home
.

I cannot say why I mourned Eliot’s absence. I have often wondered if anything I said during those last four weeks found its way into his consciousness. If so, he must have known, as my father used to say, that there was more where that came from. He must have longed for death’s release. Perhaps some vague realization of what his life would be like if he survived snuffed out any desire for recovery. To live in the same house with the woman who had said the things I had said, to sit at the table with her, ride in a car with her, lie in the bed with her would have been a horrible confinement, enough to make any man let hold of life. Perhaps in reality I struck the blow that killed Eliot.

After his death I looked ahead to the years stretched out before me and knew it would not be easy. I had grown accustomed to his presence in my life. For thirteen years I had thrived as a wife, believing that I was finally like other women—desired, sought, and provided for by a man. I had given myself to married life, settled down deep into it as into a comfortable armchair.

Eliot had given me suggestions for improving myself—returning to college for graduate work, teaching freshman composition in the university, cutting my hair, buying a few new dresses, reading great works of literature such as
Paradise Lost
and
Beowulf
, joining a group of faculty wives in a water aerobics class, and so forth. It was my joy to take his suggestions, always spoken softly and tactfully yet always with assurance, as if he knew I would obey. I imagined myself as a new plant flourishing in the sunshine of his love. I felt fortunate to be his wife and fancied that other women, including Eliot’s college students, envied me.

When he died, I knew it was no more than he deserved for his evil heart and for his treachery against me, but I felt he had gotten off easily. Compared to my own injury, which I must now carry with me for the rest of my days, his one-time payment of death for the crime he had committed seemed a pittance. Still, he had suffered. What he loved had been taken away—his private sins and his public honor as the revered, reclusive college professor—and for this my sense of justice was somewhat satisfied.

And yet I missed him. There is no accounting for this. My days seemed long and hollow, the nights even worse. How a woman can miss a man and despise him at the same time is a mystery past all understanding.

The nights were often a cave where the dreadful images I had seen in Eliot’s study were drawn on the walls. I heard voices in distress calling out words I couldn’t understand. If I drifted off to sleep, it was only for minutes and never restful. I hated Eliot for destroying my peace, for his consummate selfishness. And I hated my own weakness in feeling lonely, in still remembering his gentle nature, in knowing that if I were offered the chance to wipe the slate clean, to erase what I knew now and restart my thirteen years of wedded ignorance, I very possibly would accept it. In ignorance there is indeed a bliss of sorts. In loneliness the mind is not rational.

Somehow I pulled myself up and resumed my life. After Alonso’s trial I resigned from South Wesleyan in Hillcrest and moved sixty miles away to Carlton, Kentucky, where I began teaching at Tri-City Community College. I found that I was properly equipped to take up single life again, for I could change fuses, tighten faucet washers, and balance a checkbook. Like certain birds I have read about, I had been born with an independent streak. By the time I left home for college, I was well acquainted with hammer, wrench, and screwdriver.

Setting up a new home, then, posed no great difficulty. Physically, I was the same person as before. Emotionally, I was transfigured. A mind that has been shocked with corruption has new eyes. The world is suddenly a different place.

Even today I see the pictures. Though I had laid a fire and burned them to ashes, they yet rise again and again. It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but there are no words for such human degradation.

Right before he died, according to a nurse who saw it, Eliot’s eyes suddenly flew open, a look of overwhelming fear contorting his face. He stared wildly, as if at a hungry beast bearing down upon him, then closed his eyes and was instantly dead. What had he seen? What did death look like? This is what I ask myself in the nighttime, when Eliot’s terrified face rises before me in his last moment of knowing, and I press both hands over my thudding heart, fearful that my own moment has come, that I am about to see whatever it was Eliot saw. I place no confidence in deathbed stories of shining lights and angel choruses. I know that a great many things emit light—volcanic eruptions, chemical explosions, fiery collisions—and that swearing can sound like singing to someone who is not in his right mind.

The suddenness of death frightens me as much as the finality of it. Sometimes I wake at night and hear a voice that says, “You have only ten minutes left to live.” I look at the clock beside my bed, its steady ticks a slow cadence compared to that of my heart, and start the countdown. Now I have only nine minutes, now only eight, now seven. When I get to zero and am still breathing, I know that the voice was only mocking me, that my time has not come. Not yet. Maybe later tonight. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. I feel certain I will die in the nighttime. This waiting for death is no way to live, but it is the only life I have. I am not eager to give it up.

Many theories are tossed about concerning the nature of heaven and hell, assuming there are such places, which I do not assume yet in my idle moments cannot help considering. I have time to consider many things. I would accept this heaven: the perpetual repetition of pleasant memories from the years before I knew what I know now. I do not let myself imagine a better heaven than this, for I know I don’t deserve one. I would also accept limbo, a region of oblivion, in which all memories, good and bad, are forgotten.

“DIED. ULRICH INDERBINEN, 103, Swiss mountain guide known as the King of the Alps; in Zermatt, Switzerland.” Between the ages of twenty and ninety-five,
Time
magazine reports, Mr. Inderbinen climbed the Matterhorn 370 times. I wonder if by the age of 103 Ulrich Inderbinen was ready to exchange his memories of mountain climbing for the chance of heaven or hell. I wonder what his idea of heaven might have been. Perhaps a daily trek up the Matterhorn. Perhaps his concept of hell was a flat plain with no mountains to climb.

As for hell, my imagination is rife with potentialities. I have heard of the mythical king Sisyphus, who was punished in the afterworld by having to push an enormous rock uphill only to have it roll down again each time. This would seem like playtime compared to some of my ideas.

Could my mother have meant it when she cried out, “Oh, let me die”? This I heard from her bedroom in the middle of the night two weeks before she died, nearly five months after she had come to live at my house, or, more accurately, to die at my house.

Endlessly repeating the five months of my mother’s dying could qualify as a worthy hell by anyone’s definition. Expand it by three years—beginning with Alonso’s shooting of Eliot and extending through my mother’s funeral—and it would be a misery past enduring. Or distill all my sorrow to one five-minute segment in Eliot’s study, running the pictures over and over on a large color screen for eternity, and words like
misery
and
hell
are so weak as to be meaningless. With such possibilities of hell, no amount of suffering on earth could drive me to cry out, “Oh, let me die!”

But before all this—the shooting, my discovery of Eliot’s secret, my transformation into the woman I am now, Eliot’s death and my return to loneliness, Alonso’s murder trial, my mother’s final illness and death—before all this, I was not unhappy.