The Swan Thieves Part 20

At the same time, I have felt deeply my mistake in making this promise, because my wife's story is not one I would willingly put into your mind, with its lovely innocence, its hopes for the world. (This will, I know, annoy you, and you will see the sad truth in my a.s.sessment only too late.) In any case, I beseech you to save the following pages for an hour when you feel able to hear something terrible, yet all too real--and I ask you to realize that I shall regret every word. When you have read this, you will know a little more than my brother does, and a great deal more than my nephew. And more, certainly, than all the rest of the world. You will know, also, that this is a political matter, and as a consequence some of my safety will rest in your hands. And why should I do such a thing -- tell you something that can only dismay you? Well, that is the nature of love: it is brutal in its demands. The day you recognize its brutal natureJoryourse1J, you will look back and know me even better, and forgive me. Probably I will be long gone, but wherever I am I will bless you for your understanding.

I met my wife rather late in life; I was already forty-three and she was forty. Her name, as you may know from my brother, was Helene. She was a woman of good family, from Rouen. She had never married, not because of any ineligibility on her part but because of her care of her widowed mother, who died only two years before we met. After her mother's death, she came to live with her 317.

older sister's family in Paris, and she made herself as indispensable to them as she had been to her mother. She was a person of dignity and sweetness, serious but not humorless, and from our first meeting I was attracted by her bearing and by her consideration of others. She was interested in painting, although she had had little in the way of education in art and was more inclined to books; she read German and some Latin as well, her father having believed in learning for his daughters. And she was devout in a sense that put my own lighthearted doubts to shame. I admired her steadfastness in everything she did.

Her brother-in-law, an old friend, was my advocate in the courtship (although he knew too much about me, perhaps, for the good of my reputation), and he settled a generous dowry on her. We were married in the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois, with a few friends and relations in attendance, and went on to a house in Saint-Germain. We lived quietly. I pursued my painting and exhibitions, and she kept an excellent household in which my friends felt welcome. I came to love her very much, with a love that had perhaps more esteem than pa.s.sion in it. We were too old to expect children, but we were content with each other, and I felt in her influence a deepening of my own nature and a taming of some of what she doubtless considered my wayward earlier life. Thanks to her steady belief in me, my absorption in painting also deepened and my skill increased.

We might have lived happily forever in this way if our emperor had not considered it his right to plunge France into that most hopeless of wars, invading Prussia--you were, my dear, a girl, but news of the Battle of Sedan must be shocking in your memory, too. Then came the terrible retribution of their armies--and the siege that ravaged our poor city. Now I must tell you, and frankly, that I was among those whom all of this angered beyond endurance. True, I was not part of the barbaric rabble but was one of those moderates who believed that Paris and France had suffered more than enough at the hands of unthinking, luxurious despotism and who rose against it.

You know that I spent many of these last years in Italy, but what I have not told you is that I was an exile, removing myself from what would undoubtedly have been peril, until I could be certain of resuming a quiet life in my native city-- removing myself in grief and cynicism as well. I was in fact a friend of the Commune, and in my heart I have no shame about that, although I grieve for my 318.

comrades who were not forgiven by the state for their convictions. Why, indeed, should any citizen of Paris have endured without revolutionary response--or the strongest complaint, at least--what we had not sanctioned in the first place? I have never abandoned that belief, but the price I paid for it was so dear that I might not have committed myself to action had I known what that cost would be.

The Commune established itself on March 26, and there was little real trouble for my unit until the beginning of April, when fighting began in the streets where we were stationed. You would have been living in the suburbs already, and safe, as I know from questions I have put to Yves since my return; he tells me that he did not know your family until later, but that you went through the calamity unscathed, apart from deprivations none could escape. Perhaps you will tell me you heard shooting in distant streets, perhaps not even that. Where there was gunfire, I involved myself with taking messages from one brigade to another, making sketches of the historic scene wherever I could do so without risking lives other than my own.

Helene did not share my sympathies. Her faith allied her strongly with the rights of the recently fallen regime, but she was tender toward all I believed; she asked me not to share with her anything that might compromise me, were either of us to be caught. In honor of this wish, I did not tell her where the brigade with which I was most deeply involved was bivouacked, and I will not tell you now. It was an old street, and a narrow one; we blockaded it during the night of May 25, knowing that this rampart would be of great importance in the defense of the area if, as we expected, the false government sent in militia to try to break us the next day.

I promised Helene that I would not be late, but during the night the need arose to relay a round of messages to our comrades in Montmartre, and I volunteered to take those messages, as I was not yet suspected by the police. I traveled without detection, in fact, to that area, and would have returned in the same manner had I not been caught and detained. It was my first encounter with the militia. My questioning was prolonged and threatened several times to become violent, and I was not released until noon the next day. I thought for many hours that I might well be executed on the spot. Again, I will not tell you the details of my interrogation, as I don't wish you to be privy to them, even eight years afterward. It was a terrifying experience.

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But I will and must tell you what is infinitely worse: Helene, missing me during the night and taking alarm, began to search for me at first light, asking among our neighbors until her apprehension finally persuaded one of them to take her to our barricade. I was still imprisoned. She arrived before the barricade to inquire after me at the very moment troops from the center appeared. They opened fire on everyone present, Communards and bystanders alike. The government, of course, has denied all such incidents. She fell, shot through the forehead. One of my companions recognized her, pulled her from the skirmish, and protected her body behind the rubble.

When I arrived, having run first to our home and found it empty, she was already growing cold. She lay in my arms with the gush of blood from her wound drying on her hair and clothing. Her face showed only surprise, although her eyes had closed by themselves. I shook her, called to her, tried to rouse her. My only, and pitful, consolation lay in her having died instantly--that and the belief that if she had known what was about to happen, it would have been in her nature to commend herself in that moment to her G.o.d.

I buried her, more hastily than I wanted to, in the cemetery of Montparna.s.se. Within days my grief was increased by the swift defeat of our cause and the execution of thousands of comrades, and especially our organizers. During this final extinction, I slipped out of France with the help of a friend who lived near one of the city gates. I traveled alone toward Menton and the border, feeling that I could do nothing more for a country that had refused its only hope of justice, and unwilling to live in fear of future arrest.

My brother remained faithful to me throughout this ordeal, tending Helene's memory and grave in silence and writing to me from time to time during my absence to advise me whether or not I might return. I was a small player in that drama and not, in the end, of interest to a government with much rebuilding to accomplish. I returned, indeed, not out of any desire to contribute to France's well-being but out of grat.i.tude to my brother and the wish to be of service to him in his afflictions. I discovered, not from him but from Yves, that he was losing his sight. Whatever a.s.sistance I could give him, and the dogged habit of pursuing my painting, were the only pleasures left to me until I met you. I was a wretch without wife, children, or country. I lived without the dream of society's improvement that must be the motivation of every thinking man, and my nights 320.

were a horror because of the death that had filled my arms with useless, cruel sacrifice.

The radiance of your presence, your natural gifts, the delicacy of your affection and friendship, have meant more to me than I can say. Now I think I will need less than ever to explain that to you. I will not demean you by insisting on secrecy--most of my happiness already rests in your hands. And, lest I find myself unable or unwilling to fulfill my promise and send you these truths about myself, I will close quickly by signing myself, heart and soul, Your O.V.

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CHAPTER 53 Marlow.

I'd paid particularly close attention to Mary's report that Robert Oliver had first met the woman of his obsession in a crowd at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and now I considered whether I could ask Robert about the incident directly. Whatever had happened there, whatever he had seen in her, had absorbed much of his attention--and probably shaped his illness--since then. If he had imagined the woman in that crowd at the Met--in other words, if she had been his hallucination, this would imply a rethinking of my diagnosis of Robert, and a serious shift in his treatment. Did he now paint from memory, whether he'd originally seen a real woman or not? Or was he still hallucinating? The fact that he was apparently painting a modern woman, glimpsed once, in nineteenth-century clothing, implied in itself some act of imagination, perhaps involuntary. Did he have other hallucinations? If he did, he wasn't painting them, at least not at the moment.

Whatever the case, by the time of his move to Greenhill with Kate, he'd been imagining the woman's face at least occasionally; after all, Kate had found a sketch of her in Robert's shirt pocket during their drive south. But if I asked Robert about his first sighting of the woman and included any information about the museum, he would know at once that I'd been talking with someone he was close to, and the pool of possibilities would be very small, then--perhaps a pool of one, since he already knew I had Mary's last name. He appeared to have confided in Mary but not Kate and was unlikely to have talked with anyone else at all, unless he'd had friends in New York to whom he might have mentioned 322.

his unforgettable first sight of the woman. He'd implied to Mary that he'd seen the stranger only a few times, but I found that difficult to believe, especially after viewing those powerful paintings at Kate's. Surely he'd known her intimately and absorbed her face and presence over time. Robert claimed he didn't work from photographs, but might he have been able to persuade a stranger to model live for him until he had enough material to work from for future portraits?

But I couldn't risk asking Robert any of this; if I revealed the extent of my knowledge to him, I'd never win his trust. My telling him I knew Mary's name had probably been an error. I did go so far as to inquire, during one of my morning visits to the big armchair in his room, where he'd first gotten to know the woman who inspired most of his work. He looked briefly at me, then went back to the novel he was reading. After a while I could only excuse myself and wish him a good day. He'd taken to borrowing crime thrillers from the shelves of well-thumbed paperbacks in the patients' sitting room, reading them with a kind of bored dedication when he wasn't painting; he chewed up about one a week, and they were always the crudest kind of potboiler about the Mafia, or the CIA, or murder mysteries set in Las Vegas.

I had to wonder whether Robert felt some kind of sympathy for the criminals in these books, since he'd been arrested himself with a knife in his hand. Kate had said he sometimes read thrillers, and I'd seen them on his office shelves, but she'd also said he read exhibition catalogs and works of history. There were much better books than those detective novels in the patients' sitting room, including some biographies of artists and writers (I confess I tucked a few of those into the shelves myself, to see if he'd pick them up), but he never touched them. I could only hope that he wasn't acquiring any further taste for violence, from tales of murder, although I saw no signs of it. He was as unlikely to tell me where and how he'd encountered his favorite model as to explain why he limited his reading to the very dregs of the sitting-room shelf.

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Mary's story about his first glimpse of his lady had given me another thought, however, and perhaps it was also her reminding me laughingly of the genius of Sherlock Holmes that made me hold that little tale up to the light again and again. I even called Mary one day and asked her to repeat the story as Robert had told it to her at Barnett College, and she did, in very nearly the same words. Why was I asking? She had promised to explain more later, and she would. I thanked her politely, acknowledging the installments she was sending and careful not to press her for a meeting of any sort.

I couldn't shake my feeling about that moment, however, and a Holmesian idea about it took hold of me--a particular suspicion, but also a sense that, on principle, one should go see the scene of the event for oneself. It was just the Met, and I'd been there many times over the years, but I wanted to find the spot of Robert's first hallucination, or inspiration, or--had it been falling in love? Even if there was no gun at the scene, no bit of rope hanging from the ceiling, nothing one could pull out a magnifying gla.s.s to examine--well, it was silly, but I would go, partly because I could combine it with a more important mission, a visit to my father. I hadn't been up to Connecticut in nearly a year, which was six months too long, and although he sounded cheerful on the phone and in the little notes he sent on his parish stationery (it needed using up, he said, and he disdained e-mail), I worried that if anything was wrong he'd never tell me by any of those media. And what might be wrong, if something really was, would likely be a drooping of his spirits, which he certainly wouldn't report.

With all this in mind, I chose an upcoming weekend and bought two train tickets, one a round-trip to Penn Station from Washington, and the other a loop up to my hometown and back to New York. I splurged on a reservation for a night in a dingy but pleasant old hotel near Washington Square, a place I'd once spent a weekend with a young woman I'd half expected to marry; surprising, now, how long ago that had been and how much I'd 324.

forgotten about her, a woman I'd once embraced in a hotel bed and with whom I'd sat on the benches in Washington Square Park while she pointed out all the species of trees that grew there. I didn't know where she was now; probably she'd married someone else and become a grandmother.

I thought fleetingly of inviting Mary to go with me to New York but couldn't puzzle out what that might entail or how she'd take it, how I could solve or even bring up the matter of hotel rooms. It might have been appropriate to go to the museum with her, since Robert Oliver's past consumed her even more deeply than it did me. But it was too much of a conundrum. In the end I didn't tell her about my plans; she hadn't called in a couple of weeks anyway, and I a.s.sumed she'd get more of her account of Robert to me when she was ready. I'd call her on my return, I decided. I told my staff that I would miss one day of work to see my father, and then I gave the usual orders for Robert and my other worrisome patients to be watched with special care.

I went straight from Penn Station to Grand Central to catch the Metro-North New Haven Line; I'd have a long overnight with my father before my visit to the city. It's not a bad ride, and I've always liked the train, which I use for both reading and daydreaming. This time I read some of the book I'd brought, a translation of The Red and the Black, but also watched the early-summer scenery go by, the miserably damaged heart of the Northeast Corridor, brick warehouses, the backyards of railroad neighborhoods in small towns and city suburbs, a woman hanging up laundry in slow motion, kids on an asphalt school playground, a towering landfill with gulls circling above it like vultures, the glitter of metal sticking out of the ground here and there.

I must have drowsed, because the sun was lighting up salt water by the time we reached the Connecticut coast. I've always loved that first glimpse of Long Island Sound, the Thimble Islands, the 325.

old pilings, the marinas full of shiny new boats. I grew up on this coast, more or less; our town is ten miles inland, but a Sat.u.r.day in my childhood meant a picnic at the public beach in nearby Grant-ford, or a stroll on the grounds of Lyme Manor, or a walk along marsh roads that ended in some little platform from which you could view red-winged blackbirds through Mother's binoculars. I've never lived far from the smell of salt water, or its tributaries.

Our town, in fact, was built on a bank of the Connecticut River that the British would have taken by fire in 1812 had not the town's leading citizens hurried down to negotiate with the British captain, at which point the captain discovered that the mayor was his father's cousin and there was some quiet bowing and exchanging of home news. The mayor a.s.serted his general willingness to acknowledge the king, the captain overlooked the obvious halfheartedness of his cousin's declaration, and everyone parted friends. That evening the town gathered in the church--not my father's but a very old one that stands right on the water--to offer thanks. The towns all around them fell to the British torch, and the mayor took in and sheltered their citizens with what must have been generosity but also guilt. Our town is the pride of the local historic preservationists: our churches and inn and oldest houses are original--virgin timber, spared by the ties of family. My father loves to tell that story; I wearied of it as a child but never fail to remember and feel moved by it when I see the water of the river again and the cl.u.s.ter of colonial structures, many of them now shops full of expensive candles and handbags, in the old center.

The railroad came in only thirty years after the gentlemanly captain left, but it arrived at the other end of town. The earliest station is long gone, and there's a fine building from about 1895 in its place; the waiting room -- bra.s.s, marble, dark wood--has exactly the smell of furniture wax it had when my parents and I waited for the train that would take us to New York to see the Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall in 1957. Today, a couple of 326.

pa.s.sengers were reading the Boston Globe on the wooden benches I had loved before my feet could even reach the floor.

My father was waiting there for me, his tweed hat in one papery, transparent hand, his blue eyes bright and pleased when they found my face. He gave me a hug, a squeeze on the shoulders, and held me back for viewing, as if I might still be growing and he needed to check my progress. I smiled, wondering if he saw me with all my hair still brown and on my head, or with the flannel pants and bulky sweater I wore home from college, instead of seeing a man in his fifties, reasonably trim, in plain slacks and a polo shirt, a weekend jacket. And I felt that familiar pleasure of being someone's grown child. It shocked me that I hadn't seen him in so long; in previous years I'd come up more often than this, and I resolved on the spot to visit again much sooner. This man of nearly ninety was my proof of the continuity of life, the buffer between me and mortality--immortality, he would have said with a chiding smile, the clergyman in him tolerating the scientist in me. I had little doubt he'd go to heaven when he left me, although I hadn't believed in heaven since I was ten. Where else could such a person end up?

It occurred to me as I felt his arms around me that I already knew all the trauma that accompanies a parent's death, and knew also that the trauma of losing my father when the time came would be deepened by the earlier loss of my mother, of our shared memories of her, and by the fact that he was my last caretaker, the second to go. I'd helped patients through such pa.s.sages, in fact, and their grief was often lingering and complex; after I'd lost my mother I'd come to understand that even the quietest slipping away of parental presence could be a devastation. If there were more serious symptoms in a patient, some ongoing struggle with mental illness, a parent's death could tip delicate balances, break down carefully maintained coping patterns.

But none of my professional understanding could console me ahead of time for the eventual loss of this mild, white-haired man 327.

in his lightweight summer coat, with his mingled optimism and cynicism about human nature, his calm ability to pa.s.s his vision test year after year despite the doubtful glances of the DMV clerks. When I saw him standing in front of me now, eighty-nine this fall and yet so much himself, I was seeing both his presence and his looming absence. When I saw him waiting for me in his good clothes, the bulge of car keys and wallet in his pants pockets, his shoes polished, I felt as always both his reality and the thin air that would one day replace him. In a strange way, I sometimes believed that he would not be complete for me until he was gone, perhaps because of the suspense of loving someone at the far edge of life.

While he was still here, I hugged him back solidly--hard, even--surprising him so that he had to steady himself on his feet. He'd shrunk; I was now a head taller than he. "h.e.l.lo, my boy," he said, grinning and taking my upper arm in a firm grasp. "Shall we get out of here?"

"Sure, Dad." I slung my overnight bag on my shoulder, refusing the hand he stretched out for it. In the parking lot, I asked if he wanted me to drive, then regretted my request; he looked at me severely, humorously, and got his gla.s.ses out of the inside pocket of his sport jacket, wiping them with his handkerchief before putting them on. "When did you start driving with those?" I asked, to cover my gaffe.

"Oh, I was supposed to years ago, but I didn't really need them. Now it's a little easier with them on my nose, I'll admit." He started the engine, and we pulled magisterially out of the lot. I noticed that he drove more slowly than I remembered and that he sat peering forward; they were probably old gla.s.ses. It seemed to me that his stubbornness was one of the main characteristics he'd pa.s.sed to his only child. It had preserved and strengthened us both, but had it also made loners of us?

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CHAPTER 54 Marlow.

Our house is only a few miles from the station, set back in the historic part of town and a short walk from the water. This time, for some reason, I felt a pang when I saw the front door at the end of its short but melancholy row of arborvitae. It had been decades since I'd last watched my mother open that door; I don't know why that hit me harder than usual this time.

I covered for myself--nothing would have pained my father more than for me to mention such a twinge aloud--by noting how good the yard looked and letting my father point out the hedges he'd trimmed the week before, the gra.s.s he kept neatly cut with his push mower. There was the familiar smell of boxwood, pots of impatiens around the small front door. It wasn't a large yard, in front at least, because the seventeenth-century merchant who'd built the house had wanted it close to the street. The backyard stretched farther, into the ragged remains of an orchard, as well as into a kitchen garden that my mother had somehow maintained in her spare hours. My father still put in tomatoes every summer, and a few gnarled parsley roots burgeoned out among them, but he wasn't the gardener she'd been.

My father unlocked the house and ushered me in, and as always I was a.s.sailed by objects and scents with which I'd grown up, the threadbare Turkish rug in the front hall, the corner shelf that housed a ceramic cat I'd made in art cla.s.s once and glazed to look like those in my mother's book on ancient Egyptian art--she'd been so proud of my initiative, my eye. I suppose every child makes a few lumpy things of this sort, but not every mother keeps them forever. The 329.

radiator clanged and slurped in the front hall; it was distinctly not eighteenth century, but it kept the downstairs warm and gave off a smell I'd always loved, like scorched cloth. "I turned it on just this morning," my father apologized. "It's been darn cold for summer."

"Good idea." I set my bag beside it and went into the kitchen bathroom to wash my hands. The house was neat, clean, pleasant, and the floors glowed--my father had succ.u.mbed in the last year to my insistence on a housekeeper, a Polish lady from Deep River who came every other week. My father said she scrubbed even the pipes under the kitchen sink. That would have pleased Mother, I pointed out, and he had to agree.

When we'd both washed up, he reported that he had some soup to give me for a late lunch and began to pour it into a pan on the stove. His hands shook a little, I noticed, and this time I prevailed on him to let me fix our meal, heating the soup and putting out the pickles and pumpernickel bread and English tea he loved, warming the milk so that it wouldn't cool his tea. He sat in the wicker chair my mother had bought for the corner of the kitchen, telling me about his parishioners without mentioning their names, although I knew who most of them were anyway because they or their grown children had lingered with him for years: one had lost her husband in a car accident, another had retired after teaching at the high school for forty years and celebrated by having a very private but despairing crisis of faith. "I told him that we couldn't be sure of anything except the power of love," he said, "and that he was under no requirement to believe in a particular source of that love, as long as he could keep giving and receiving some in his own life."

"Did he go back to believing in G.o.d?" I asked, squeezing out the tea bags.

"Oh, no." My father sat with his hands tucked serenely between his knees, his watery eyes fixed on me. "I didn't expect him to. In fact, he probably hadn't believed in years, and his teaching just kept him too busy to worry about the matter. Now he comes to see me once a week and we play chess. I make sure I beat him."

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And you make sure he's loved, I added in silent admiration. My father had never shown the slightest disrespect for my natural atheism, even when I'd wanted to argue with him in high school and again in college, wanted to provoke him. "Faith is simply whatever is real to us," he always told me in response, and then he'd quote Saint Augustine or a Sufi mystic and slice a pear for me, or set up the chessboard.

As we made our way through the lunch and later some pieces of dark chocolate, my father's thrifty pleasure, he asked me how my work was going. I'd intended not to mention Robert Oliver to him--I felt vaguely that my concern for the man might sound unbalanced, unjust to my other patients, among other things, or, worse, that I might not be able to justify to him the actions I'd taken on Robert's behalf. But in the deep quiet of the dining room, I found myself telling him nearly the whole story. Like my father, I didn't mention the name of my parishioner. My father listened with what I could tell was genuine interest, b.u.t.tering his pumpernickel; like me, he loved nothing better than a human portrait. I told him about my conversations with Kate; I left out the fact that I'd gone back in the evening to Kate's house and had invited Mary to dinner. Perhaps he would have forgiven even those things, a.s.suming as he naturally would that I had Robert's best interests at heart.

When I described how Robert wore the same clothes over and over, changing them only long enough to have them washed; his dogged reading of books below his intellect; and his endless silence, my father nodded. He finished the last of his soup, set down the spoon. It slipped from his hand, clattering on the dish, and he put it straight. "Penance," he said.

"What do you mean?" I took a last square of chocolate.

"This man is doing penance. That's what you're describing, I think. He punishes his flesh and suppresses the longing of his soul to speak about its misery. He mortifies body and mind to atone for something."

"To atone? But for what?"

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My father poured another cup of tea, carefully, and I refrained from helping him. "Well, you are more likely to know that than I, aren't you?'

"He left his wife and children," I mused. "Possibly for another woman. But I think it wasn't that simple. His ex-wife doesn't seem to feel he was really ever hers, somehow, and neither does the woman to whom he went. He left the second woman, too, after a short time. And since he won't talk with me, I have no way of guessing how guilty he feels toward either of them."

"It seems to me," said my father, dabbing his lips with a blue paper napkin, "that all those paintings are a part of his penance. Perhaps he is apologizing to her?"

"You mean the lady he paints? She may be a figment of his imagination, remember," I pointed out. "If he based her on a real person, as his wife believed, it was a person he didn't really know. And the woman he most recently left also seems to think he couldn't have known the mysterious lady well, even if she was real, although I'm not sure I agree."

"Isn't it in her interest to think so?" My father was leaning back in his chair, contemplating our empty lunch dishes with the same attention he usually gave to my queen's p.a.w.n. "Surely it would be horrifying for her to discover that he'd been painting over and over a live woman he knew intimately, especially given the nature of the portraits you described, the pa.s.sion in them."

"True," I said. "But whether his model is real or a hallucination, why would he need to do penance for her sake? Could she be someone real he somehow injured? If he's apologizing to a hallucination, he's in worse shape than I've thought up to now."

Oddly, my father said again what he'd always told me in high school, an echo of the line I'd been thinking of just a little while earlier. "Faith is what is real to us."

"Yes," I said. I felt sudden resentment--I couldn't return even to my family home, my shrine, without being pursued by Robert Oliver. "He has his G.o.ddess, that's certain."

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"Maybe she has him," observed my father. "Here, I'll get these dishes, and probably you'd like a nap after your trip."

I couldn't deny that the house was lulling me, as it always did. The clocks in each room, some of them nearly as old as the mantelpieces they sat on, gave off a sound that seemed to say, "Sleep, sleep, sleep." It was so rare for me, in the outside world, to get quite enough rest from week to week, and I never liked to waste my weekends napping. I helped my father clear up and left him with a soapy sponge in his hand, then climbed the stairs.

My room was reserved for me forever, and in it hung a portrait of my mother that I'd painted (from a photograph; I was not a purist like Robert) a year or so before her death. It struck me that if I'd known what was soon to happen to her I would have painted it from life, no matter how inconvenient that might have been for either of us, arranging sittings--I would have done it not because it could have improved the portrait (I hadn't been much good in those days anyway) but because it might have given us another eight or ten hours together. I could have memorized her face from life, then, measured its small irregularities with a brush held up horizontally or vertically, smiled into her eyes whenever I glanced up from my work. As it was, the portrait showed a neat, nearly pretty, dignified woman with a deep thoughtfulness on her face but none of the life and strength I'd known in my mother in real life, none of that flash of matter-of-fact humor. She wore her black cardigan and her dog collar, a formal smile; the photograph must have been taken for a parish newsletter or office wall.

I wished now, as I often had, that I'd painted her in the deep-red dress my father had bought for her at Christmas with my approval when I was twelve, the only clothing I ever knew him to purchase for her. She had put it on for us, put her hair up, and clasped around her neck the string of pearls she'd worn for their wedding. It was a modest dress of soft wool, fitting for a pastor's wife and for the pastor she'd recently become. When she came down the stairs for Christmas dinner, we had both sat speechless, and my 333.

father had taken a photograph of my mother and me, black and white: my mother in her rich dress and me in my first sport jacket, which was already getting short in the sleeves--where had that picture gone? I must remember to ask him if he knew.

My room was wallpapered in a pattern of faded brown-and-green stripes; the small rug looked freshly washed, I thought, a little too fluffy, and the wood floor polished--the Polish housekeeper. I lay down on the narrow bed I still thought of as mine and drifted off, coming to in the silence and realizing that I'd slept only twenty minutes, then plunging into a deeper sleep for another hour.

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CHAPTER 55 Marlow.

When I woke, my father was standing in the doorway with a smile, and I realized that the creaking of the stairs as he made his slow way up them had been my alarm clock. "I know you don't like to nap too long," he said apologetically.

"Oh, I don't." I struggled to one elbow. The clock on my wall said it was already five thirty. "Would you like to go for a walk?" I liked to get my father out walking whenever I visited, and he brightened.

"Certainly," he said. "Shall we go walk out Duck Lane?"

I knew this meant to my mother's grave, and my heart was not in it today, but for his sake I agreed at once, sat up, and began to put on my shoes. I heard my father make his way back downstairs, holding the railing, no doubt, and bringing both feet to each step before moving on; I was thankful for his caution, although I couldn't help remembering the quick thud of his feet coming down to breakfast or clattering back up for a forgotten book before he went to the church office. We walked slowly along the road, too, his hand on my arm and his hat on his head, and I could see on each side the beginning of summer, cool and shifting by the moment, bulrushes in the marsh, a crow rising out of them, some late-afternoon sun breaking over the neighbors' houses with the dates above their front doors--1792, 1814 (that one had just missed the British invasion, I realized, and the mayor's civil refusal to have his town burned).

As I'd known he would, my father paused in front of the gates to the cemetery, which stood open until dark, and gave my arm the 335.

gentlest pressure; we went in together past lichen-stained markers that bore the names of forgotten founders, a few with that winged Puritan skull at the top to warn us of the end to which we all come whether we've sinned or no, and then back to the more recent graves. My mother's sat next to a family named Penrose, whom we'd never known, and the plot was big enough to accommodate my father's presence once he joined her. I thought for the first time that I ought to decide whether or not to purchase a plot here; unlike them, I'd already opted to donate my body to science, then be cremated, but perhaps there was room to stick an urn between my parents; I imagined the three of us sleeping together forever in this king-size bed, my reduced self between their protective bodies.

The image wasn't real enough to me to give me any further regrets; what lowered my spirits was the sight of my mother's name and her dates, chiseled in simple letters on the granite, her too-fleeting years--what was the line from Shakespeare, the sonnet? Something, something-- "and summer's lease hath all too short a date."

I quoted it aloud to my father, who had bent to remove a branch from the plot, and he smiled and shook his head. "There's a better sonnet for this occasion." He threw the branch slowly but with sure aim into the bushes near the fence. "'But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,/All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.'"

I felt he meant me, his remaining friend, as well as my mother, and was grateful. I had tried in recent years to think of her at peace, not as I'd seen her in those last minutes, struggling against her departure from us. I wondered, as I often did, which was worse, the fact that she'd had to die at fifty-four or the way she'd gone. They went together, those two sad realities, but I never tired of trying to tease them apart, to extricate one misery from the other. I couldn't bring myself to take my father's arm as we stood there, or put mine around him, and I was very touched when he did just that for me, his skinny old hand gripping my back. "I grieve for 336.

her, too, Andrew," he said matter-of-factly, "but you learn that a person is not so far away, especially when you're my age."

I refrained from pointing out the usual difference in our perspectives: I believed the extent of my reunion with my mother would be the mingling, over millions of years, of the atoms that had composed our bodies. "Yes, I feel her nearby sometimes, when I'm doing my best." I couldn't say more around the fist in my throat, so I didn't try, and for some reason I remembered Mary, sitting on my sofa in her white blouse and blue jeans, telling me that she didn't want to see Robert Oliver ever again. There are different ways of taking grief in different circ.u.mstances; my mother had never abandoned me, except unwillingly, in those minutes that had const.i.tuted her good-bye.

We walked a bit farther up Duck Lane, and then my father indicated with a little pause and a shuffling turn that he'd had enough, and we ambled back to the house even more slowly. I commented that the neighborhood had remained tranquil despite the new expansion of the town to the west, and he said he was grateful for the presence of the river, which had prevented the interstate from coming any closer. The very quiet of the street worried me; how much company could my father have here, when we hadn't seen a single neighbor outside since setting out on our excursion? My father nodded, as if the silence around him was all to the good. At our own front walk, I paused to say something else I'd thought in the cemetery but had been unable to utter--not my longing for Mother but the other ghost who had haunted me there. "Dad? I'm not sure I've been doing the right thing. This patient I told you about."

He understood at once. "You mean, by questioning the people close to him?"