Darling? (21 page)

Work cluttered his life. His days off turned to weeks off, until he had stopped going in to the office altogether—his secretary could handle most of it anyway. The old farmsteads were in demand, suddenly, as second homes, though he detested the type of man who was buying in—cocksure, more likely to demolish than rebuild. They reminded him of his brother, his big successful brother, and sensing their condescension, he found himself defensively explaining that he didn’t care for money and prestige, it was his kids that mattered, after all. One morning his secretary called to say someone had come in wanting to look at places “in the million-dollar range.” “A million dollars, and he was
so nice,
so thoughtful!” she sighed. As if no one had ever been nice to her before. Like all women, she looked at a man and imagined his bank account naked. “You take him,” he said, and drove north into the mountains, caught six sleek trout for dinner. Ralph Lauren bought the Atwater place, willow and all, and the boom began in earnest, but Steve had lost interest in real estate. They lived by borrowing against his inheritance, Theresa in a black boil of fury that turned to pure seduction when she was near a stronger man.

“Sweetie, I don’t know.…” His mother was always dubious about the loans, though it was she, he thought, who was wasteful, a wealthy woman throwing away her life on measures of thrift, molding the last bits of soap together into one bar, going from bank to bank every week to deposit a few hundred dollars and get a “free gift” until her attic was piled with boxed clock radios and toasters. She understood money no better than physics or philosophy, and she had long forgotten that her husband had amassed that fortune
for his children.
Well, Steve would have every mote, every cent that was left of his father. And, of course, his mother gave in and lent him another fifty thousand, chiding him, a few minutes later, for throwing away a perfectly good paper bag.

This time it was winter, there was a blizzard swirling upstate, no trains and even the Thruway was closed. He’d have to stay with his mother another day, and was surprised to realize how glad this made him, as if he was getting to stay home from school. He called Theresa, who said they were all fine—there was no power, but they were playing pioneers, had a fire in the woodstove, and the twins had braved it up to the barn to feed the animals.… It was romantic, really, with the winds battering the house and the five of them inside. Then she sent the kids out of the room and her voice turned to ice. “Alone here, with four little children in the snow, but then what do you care about us? You’re home with your
mommy.
”

“Treesa…” he said, but he recognized the blind, lost rage he’d heard in her voice when he first knew her, the feeling he’d been certain he could cure. She had turned toward him with eyes wide with grateful amazement, had taken him so deeply into herself he’d felt immersed, tangled undersea, until he gave in and breathed water, was drowned and transformed. Now he’d become the thing despised. She slept at the edge of the bed. If he brushed against her in his sleep, she curled into herself all the tighter.

“Treess it’s the snow, it’s not that I don’t want to…” This was the deepest truth. Even when he was there at home he wanted to be with them. He watched his children like a man looking in through a lighted window—he’d have reached in to touch them but he didn’t know how.

Theresa was silent, and he looked out to the wide double strand of lights over the Narrows—the Verrazano Bridge. If Big Steve could have seen that bridge! A steel garland, spanning an incredible distance in one exuberant sweep—just what he’d expected of the future, and here it was, right here now.

Steve slept, that night, in his childhood bed, as he hadn’t slept since he left home. In the middle of the night it was no different—
he
was no different—from twenty-five years ago when the future was still before him. It seemed he could still smell his father’s cigars.

At four
A.M
., though, he sat bolt upright, out of a nightmare. The test tube of phosphorus was still in the basement freezer, and the power was out, it would thaw. Five children had died Christmas night, trying to hide under a bed from a fire. He’d seen it in the paper and couldn’t stop thinking of them, so soft and trusting, certain of safety under their parents’ wing. He tiptoed into the living room, not to wake his mother, and dialed Theresa—he’d tell her just to throw the phosphorus out into the snow—but before it could ring he hung up. She was looking for a good reason to despise him; it would not be wise to tell her he’d hidden a bomb in her larder. He took a deep breath—without electricity there would be no heat: the phosphorus might thaw, but it was hardly likely to reach room temperature. He would let it lie, and as soon as he got home would dispose of it once and for all.

But carrying the stoppered test tube out to the brook, he thought better. You couldn’t buy yellow phosphorus anymore. He ought to save it for the boys. And if Theresa left him—no, he might need it; he couldn’t bear to throw it away. So he took it across the log bridge into the woods and suspended it in between two stones in one of the old stone walls there. He never walked this way without thinking of the men who’d cleared this land, wrenched enough stones out of the soil to build these miles of walls, tilled it and worked it and nevertheless nature had overtaken it all. The fields were grown into forests now—oaks and maples and cherries whose new leaves and blossoms, deep red, translucent green, were stippled together in a pale haze in spring. Standing here now, he looked down over the house and saw the roof sagging on the western side where the weather hit it.… Rain leaked into the wall there, and the paper was peeling off: the bedroom smelled of mildew. The place was a morass of half-accomplished projects, things he couldn’t lift his heart to finish.… The bills were so overwhelming he’d stopped opening the mail. What did such things matter, anyway, in a transitory world? He still felt like a naughty child when he took out his toolbox, and when he saw men working in the open air his heart sank as if they were gods on a mountaintop and he only mortal. His father—but his mind flinched back from the thought of his father, and a plan sprang up instead: he’d dig a moat around the playground … the kids could swing across on a knotted rope …

Yes, he’d failed, failed and what of it? How many lives are misspent succeeding … amassing a useless pot of gold?
He
had lived for his children … in the anguish of his impotent love for them, watching them tuck their bears into bed at night, fluffy as chicks themselves in their sleepsuits, their downy heads on the pillow, their little starfish hands holding tight to his. His throat closed, he couldn’t think of such fragile creatures subject to life, fear, pain.

*   *   *

Katherine was thirteen; picking her up from school he switched to public radio: “Listen, a polonaise!” he said. “A polonaise is like … like dessert!” Her glance flicked away; she knew his favorite songs were “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” “Don’t Fence Me In,” tunes his father used to hum. Katherine had arrived at adolescence ungainly, cringing one minute and grandiose the next, embarrassed and, supremely, embarrassing, rushing from the room crying in gulps and snorts after the smallest criticism, her face covered with pimples, clothing so tight it seemed a plea for sex. She was taking after her mother, he thought, too sharp and aggressive, all claws and no womanly softness. He could hardly look at her, he was so disappointed—and she ignored him in kind. She sat down to her algebra problems and he saw over her shoulder that she had written
Isaiah
over and over in the margin. The name of a wretched boy who lived in a trailer in the valley, with whom she imagined herself in love.

“Why is it so foggy, out back?” she asked, looking up. “I mean, why out back and not in the front at all?”

Theresa sat across from her—she was taking a correspondence course, aiming toward a law degree. Steve had only discovered this when the first lesson came in the mail. Theresa took it from him with a look of defiance. She was figuring a way to escape him. This would be no mean feat, as she’d become a wraith, haunting her own house, her hair in tangles, her bathrobe cinched at her waist so tightly you could see she’d done it as she did everything—in a rage. And why? He had never been unfaithful, she had this house, these children, everything she’d wanted so long ago. What could be wrong, here in the sunlight, on a brilliant autumn day? A ripple of shame ran through him—it was his lack that left her longing. She would leave him: he thought of his father—he could not bear such a loss a second time.

“I think of fog as a spring thing,” Katherine went on, in her over-serious, teacher’s pet voice, meaning, “I don’t have to admire you, I see further than you do already; I’ll find my own way.” She took an encyclopedia volume into bed with her at night—she intended to figure everything out, to surpass him. Theresa looked toward the window, but blindly. Steve refused, as always, to look where Katherine was pointing.

“It—it can’t be smoke, can it?” she asked then, in a voice so uncertain—unlike her—that it cut, finally, through the spell they lived under, and everyone looked suddenly and saw an orange flame licking out of the woods.

“Fire,”
Theresa said—with shocked certainty as if she had always expected such a thing.

It was a drought year: the dry trees flamed over like torches one by one, passing the fire up the hill.

“Fire,” Katherine whispered, with a quiet thrill.

“It’s not a show,” Steve said curtly, dialing 911.

“We ought to get out of here,” Katherine said a minute later, though she was still entranced by the flames and didn’t move. She was right, Steve saw. If the wind shifted it would come right at them … and he took the boys by their hands while Theresa grabbed Stella up in her arms.

“We’re together, that’s all that matters,” he said as they drove away down the hill. He felt a strange lightness, a spring of hope … the past would burn away now, it would finally, really, be over, and hardship would bind them together so they could take strength from each other again.

“We’re safe,” Theresa corrected him. Later she would say they’d never been together, that he’d kept in his own bubble and imagined a happy family life because he couldn’t have made one for real. He pulled over and the fire trucks roared by, shifting gears for the hillcrest with a low growl that made Stella shriek as if they would eat her. The others knelt in the backseat, looking out the window. It smelled so good, of autumn and burning leaves.

Next day the smoke still curled up from the charred tree trunks and the stone fences stood out again on the hillside. The stone walls of the house looked more massive with the roof burned away. The devastation seemed fitting—it suited Steve’s sense that everything ends in dust, and he felt strangely lighthearted, because what really mattered, if so? “It’ll be good blueberrying,” he said, and saw his wife smile, tenderly, one last time. A relief to her, too—nothing to pack, nothing to fight over. The insurance renewal had been on his desk, among the other things he couldn’t bear to attend to. He heard a catch of sympathy in the Aetna woman’s voice, when she said, “That policy has lapsed…” as if it hurt her, too.

*   *   *

He awoke on his fiftieth birthday in his childhood bed, with the fresh scent of the sea blowing in. Fifty—he had feared—and expected—an early death, had never imagined himself living so long. Where his father’s footsteps had ended, so, he was sure, must his. It was ten years since he’d seen Theresa. He’d returned to his mother’s—he’d promised to care for her; though at seventy-five she was stubborn and vigorous, and the best he could do for her was to pretend she was taking care of him.

“Good morning, sweetie!” she said. She’d been to the bakery already, there were warm brioche and soft butter, and FedEx rang the doorbell and left two packages—a book on the life of the Amazon rain forest from conscientious Stella—he would add it to the high pile by his bed—and a nautical chart of the Narrows, from Stephen the third. This was how it had turned out; they knew him by his minor obsessions, the places his father still lived in his mind. He needed to keep his hand set on these things or he’d have floated away into space. To awake from the anesthetic of memory was intolerable; in the evenings, when the day had worn through it, he drank until it seemed to return.

“How nice, Mom. Thank you,” he said, sitting down with the
Times.

“This came yesterday,” she said, indicating a small package in brown paper, with Katherine’s return address.

“I remembered you liked chemistry,” the card read. A book called
The Periodic Table.
Yes, it was all memory. Katherine would call later, and put the grandkids on the phone; she never said anything of substance and somehow he was afraid to ask a question for fear of putting a foot wrong and losing what little he had of her. He set the book aside with a small laugh, or sigh—it was years since the periodic table had meant anything to him.

It was only then that he remembered the phosphorus, the test tube he’d hidden in the woods. The winter, the freezing and melting, would have cracked it, the dry leaves sifted over, and one warm day …

They’d never known what caused the fire. A hunter, careless with a cigarette? A broken bottle magnifying the sunlight on the leaves? No, he’d set it himself.
He
was the danger. Unwitting, of course, always unwitting. To see, to know, was more than he could bear.

“Schuler’s has fallen off,” his mother said. “Carl doesn’t do the baking anymore.”

Stephen looked out over the tangle that had once been the garden, where the butterfly bushes struggled now for lack of sun. The laboratory roof had collapsed under a snarl of bittersweet and Virginia creeper. The world he’d been born into—where explosive chemicals were sold from glass pharmaceutical jars, exotic animals sent between continents in crates—that world with all its possibilities was gone. The mercury was here, in his mother’s basement, with the few other possessions left after the fire. Stephen kept meaning to take it in on hazardous waste disposal days, but month after month some inconvenience prevented him.