The Gazebo: A Novel (15 page)

“No, we couldn’t,” she said, and she was crying now, too.

“It won’t end,” he said. “This won’t stop with death; how could it? I’ll always think of you, my love. And before I go, too, I’ll find some way that what we had—our time together—gets remembered. That it stays on this earth.”

They leaned into each other and sobbed openly, wildly, kissing each other, feeling their faces grow slick with tears, arms wrapping
hard around each other. “I love you, Martin,” she said to him. “And I’ve loved you since the first moment we saw each other right here in this very place.”

“With my swollen eye,” he said.

“And with my peach–colored dress,” she said. She paused. “What happened to those two people?” she asked him, thinking back over the decades—the enormous span of years they had spent both together and apart.

Martin paused. “They haven’t gone anywhere,” he said softly. “They’re right here.”

The church was packed. So many people came to Claire’s funeral in July that it was standing room only. Martin had heard of her death through Hush, and numbly he had flown in for the funeral, entering at the last minute and standing in the back so her husband would not see him, though even if he had, Martin didn’t know if Daniel would know it was him. Various people stood and said a few words at the podium, eloquently speaking about this ordinary yet extraordinary woman who had been born and raised and had died in Longwood Falls. He saw her children—her two
strong, handsome sons and her beautiful daughter, Alison, who resembled Claire so much that Martin was startled.

When Alison stood and began to speak, Martin held his breath for a moment. Her voice was just like Claire’s, though trembling and on the verge of tears. Claire’s daughter was already much older than Claire herself had been when he’d fallen in love with her.

“My mother,” Alison began, as she stood at the podium, “was an average person. Occasionally she would take a quiz in a women’s magazine: `How Perceptive Are You?’ `How Wild Are You?’ And her score would be … average. It always drove her a little crazy.” There was light laughter in the church. Alison smiled slightly, wiping at her tears with a handkerchief. “Of course,” she went on, “those of us who knew my mother well are aware that this `average’ business is ridiculous. Because who in this room is average? Who doesn’t have something that no one else has? Who isn’t an original?” Alison looked out over the congregation. “Like everyone here, my mom was an original. She used to design these incredible Halloween costumes for my
brothers and me. One year, Eddie went door to door in the neighorhood dressed as Michelangelo’s statue
David
—with a fig leaf, in case you were wondering.” More laughter. “I suppose she was a frustrated artist,” said Alison. “But she never seemed frustrated to us kids. She seemed overwhelmed, and harried, and funny, and amazingly patient. Other mothers always seemed a little overprotective to me, but Mom let us be kind of … free. And I’ll always be grateful for that.” Alison paused, the tears streaming down her face now. “Mom,” she said, “I’m sorry I was such a pain in the neck during adolescence. And I’m sorry that I didn’t always realize how much you had to offer everyone. Because I see that it isn’t just about what a person does in her life—some résumé or list of incredible achievements—or even about whether a person gets to live in some perfect way that they’d always dreamed of. It’s about whether or not you chose to put yourself out there so that other people could join you. Whether you were
generous
with yourself. And, as all of you know, my mom was. And I’m so, so sorry for all the years that I was too ignorant to see that.” Alison
stopped, taking a long breath, then she composed herself and continued. “And I’m especially thankful for these last few years, when I saw what my mom had to give, and I took some of it. As all of you here have taken some of it, too. She wanted that, she really did. Okay, so she wasn’t world famous, she wasn’t absolutely brilliant, she wasn’t out there in the `great big world,’ wherever that is. But she was in
this
world—our world. And we were all so lucky to be there with her.”

When Alison was done speaking, she quietly sat down beside her father and brothers, who reached out to embrace her. It seemed to Martin that there were endless tears at the funeral; they just went on and on. Eventually Claire’s casket was strewn with wildflowers, and then there were hymns, the entire congregation singing out as if in one voice.

Martin felt that he might fall over now in a faint, but he steadied himself against the church wall, listening to the music and letting the tears flood his face and stream down onto his shirt.
I am with you
, he told her silently, as he had promised.
I am right there by your side. And I will never, ever forget any of it—who we
were, what we did, and how we were two people who loved each other over time in the best way that we knew how
.

When the service was over, someone threw open the double doors, letting in the day. And it was at that moment that Daniel Clusker stood and looked directly at Martin, and Martin looked back. After a moment, Daniel nodded, acknowledging Martin’s presence, yet not saying a word. There was no anger there, no jealousy, just a silent acceptance between two men who had loved the same woman. After a few seconds, Daniel turned away, and someone embraced him. All around the room, people stood and embraced one another, unwilling to leave just yet, wanting to stay just a little bit more in the cool of the church and the hovering memory of this wonderful woman who was gone. But Martin Rayfiel could not stay. Before anyone else noticed he was there, he hurried out into the sunlight with Claire beside him, her hand in his.

T
HE LAST TAPE
was over. Martin seemed to sigh as he spoke the words at the very end, and then there was nothing, just silence. Abby reached over to shut off the cassette player, and then all she could do was gaze blankly out the window for a moment, where another dawn was rising over the square.

She was tired and terribly sad and lost in the story of all she had heard. But on her desk, Martin’s briefcase was still open on its brass hinges, and Abby could see that there were a few other items left inside: a recipe from Martin’s new cookbook, an announcement of a philosophy lecture his daughter had given at Cambridge, and, finally, a folded piece of paper of some sort. She opened it. It was a document, and at the top she read:
APPLICATION FOR U.S
.
PASSPORT
.
CLAIRE SWIFT
.
MAY
28, 1952.

So this was the paper that Claire had gotten notarized without a birth certificate all those years ago. Abby started to set it aside, on top of the pile of items she had removed from the briefcase over the course of the long night, but then she thought: Why was it here, at the bottom of the briefcase? All the other items had been in roughly chronological order, from the receipts at the Lookout Motel all the way through various announcements of the births of Claire’s grandchildren. Martin had been so methodical in the way he’d arranged everything; this oversight didn’t seem like him at all.

Abby studied the page more closely now. She read the details of the application, the information about her life that Claire had needed to provide, but everything seemed in order: date of birth, the address on Badger, the names of her father and mother. Abby read it all again, thinking she’d missed something, going over every word right down to the bottom of the page and the seal of the notary public nicknamed Hush, a man who had taken a personal risk and helped Claire get a passport, all because he believed in giving love precedence
over all else. Abby examined the seal, running her finger along the raised bumps.

And then she saw it. Beneath the seal was a signature, the full name of the man Martin had called Hush.

“Thomas Reston,” Abby read, and her hand immediately flew to her mouth. The notary public was Abby’s father.

All those years ago, her very own father had been so much in love that he had done a favor for another young couple. Abby couldn’t believe it; she had always thought of him as an unemotional man, and while her mother had tried to say that wasn’t true at all, Abby hadn’t been convinced. “Hush”—Tom Reston—had been wildly in love with a woman—Abby’s mother. So they hadn’t had a slightly dull, no–nonsense marriage; they had had passion, and overwhelming sensations and experiences that their daughter couldn’t begin to know about. But they
had
had them; that much she now knew. It was true that he was taciturn—hushed was the word—but he was more than that. He was more complex than Abby had ever fully been able to grasp, and the way he’d loved her mother, Helen—even the way he’d
loved Abby—had been private, quiet, but
felt
.

No wonder Martin had chosen Abby to tell everything to; no wonder he had insisted that she was the only one to whom he wanted to leave these belongings and this entire story. It was as though Abby and her father had shared an old friend and hadn’t known it.

Abby got up and started gathering the papers she’d spent the night removing from the briefcase. She tried to put them back the way she’d found them, even honoring Martin Rayfiel’s decision to leave the passport application at the bottom, but when she picked up the first pile to place it back in the briefcase she saw that one last thing remained. It was a small envelope, and it was addressed to Martin, in a handwriting that looked like Claire’s, though it was shaky, spidery, clearly written at the end of her life. It had been opened, and inside it, she saw, was a key.

Abby picked it up. The key was attached to a beaded metal chain with a tag on it that said
SWIFT MAINTENANCE
,
STORAGE ROOM B
. She held it in her hand, weighing it, just as several hours earlier she’d hefted the stack of cassette tapes.
Don’t ask the question unless you want to know the answer
.

And than Abby slipped the key in her pocket. Why not? she thought. After all, she’d come this far.

Trembling slightly—whether from exhaustion or emotion, she wasn’t sure—Abby put the papers back in the briefcase and carefully closed it, shut off her desk lamp, and stood. She walked down the hall lined with framed front pages of the
Ledger
, but she didn’t leave the newspaper’s offices yet. Before she headed across the square and down a few streets to the offices of Swift Maintenance, there was still one more thing she needed to see here.

She stopped at the room called the library, which housed all the old editions of the newspaper, volume upon volume bound in green binding with gold embossed letters on the spines, since the paper had been founded in 1846. Abby climbed a rolling ladder and reached for the volume marked “July–December, 1998.” Flipping quickly through the pages, she found what she was looking for:

Mrs.
Clusker
. Abby shook her head slightly, and read on:

Abby flipped to the next day’s edition of the
Ledger
. There she read:

Below that came “Starrett, Harold,” and then, the following day, “Bradford, Norman,” “McLoughlin, Jenny,” “Michaels, Louis.” The
day following that brought “Kibbing, Mark,” “Lomax, Edgar,” “Santino, John,” and then Abby slammed the volume shut.

She stepped back and looked up at the wall of volumes in the library. Here lay the lives and deaths of Longwood Falls, neatly ordered and bound in leather.

All of it was true, and all of it was wrong.

Abby closed the door of the library, walked down the silent hallway, and then opened the front door of the
Ledger
offices, heading outside into the dawn. It was May 28 now, she realized, and it seemed to her like the first day of a new year. The town square was completely still, the grass wet, the gazebo shimmering. She walked right past it and headed down a sloping street, passing all the houses with the shades still drawn, people asleep in warm beds, or else getting up and standing at basins and starting their day. Nobody knew what really went on in anyone else’s house—or in anyone else’s life, for that matter. Claire
had
been those things that had been written about her in her obituary, but she had been more, too. In her death, Claire Swift had been known as Mrs. Claire Clusker, wife, mother,
grandmother. Certainly she had been admirable in all those roles, but they didn’t begin to touch on all the other details about her that had made her life unique. Abby hadn’t done her father justice; her father, in his role as editor of the
Ledger
the previous summer, hadn’t really done Claire justice in her obituary. He had run it, but there was so much more and he had known it but probably hadn’t known what to
do
with all he knew. As Abby walked through the same streets that Claire had once walked, passing Badger Street, and Conley Street, and the grade school, and the soda shop still known as Beckerman’s—as though she were going on a walking tour of Claire Swift’s entire life, a tour that might have traced the life of anyone who lived in Longwood Falls—she wondered how anyone could ever begin to understand the complexities and contradictions of any other person’s life.

Finally she stopped in front of the building that housed Swift Maintenance, a place she had seen for most of her life but had never noticed, just as she had never noticed this woman Claire, who had lived here the whole time Abby had been growing up, and whom
she had probably passed many times in the market, or the square. Claire’s children had gone to Abby’s school, a few years ahead of her, and she hadn’t known them either. The building, she saw now, was locked. Abby tried the key; it worked. With a squeak, the heavy steel door opened, and Abby stepped into a dim industrial hallway, feeling both anticipation and dread. She reached for a light switch; there was none. Groping along the wall, she made her way along the corridor until she reached a door. Dimly she could make out the words
STORAGE ROOM A
. She kept moving along the wall, and the next door she found was the right one. Again, Abby tried the key in the lock, and it, too, worked. She pushed the heavy door, and it gave, and Abby stepped from almost total darkness into almost total light.

The storage room was flooded with sun. The windows went from floor to ceiling, admitting the day. But what most astonished Abby was not the room itself but what it contained. For everywhere in this room were small, carefully crafted, beautiful sculptures: a lifetime’s worth, Abby thought to herself.

Abby slowly circled the room, examining small figures that she recognized from Martin’s descriptions of them on the tapes, of Martin as a young man, and the one Claire had done from memory of herself as a girl reading a book. There were long–ago sculptures of Claire’s parents, Lucas and Maureen Swift, and another one of her sister, Margaret, as a teenager. But then Abby saw others that she didn’t recognize, works, Abby slowly realized, that Claire couldn’t have done as a girl and as a very young woman: a sculpture of Claire as a middle–aged woman, and one of her husband, Daniel, using a saw, and several of her children and grandchildren. There was a bust of Martin in later life, his face slightly weary and lined but still clearly, indisputably, the courtly, intense, elderly man who had appeared in the doorway to Abby’s office two days earlier, carrying a worn briefcase.

So Claire had been working steadily all these years; yet she hadn’t told Martin about it until the end of her life, when she’d sent him the key and let him find out for himself what Abby had now found out. Claire had just wanted to quietly get on with her work all
those years, much of it from memory, enjoying the moments she could steal here in Storage Room B. Martin’s work life had by nature been public, glorious, on display; Claire’s had been private, hidden behind a plain metal door in an industrial building on the edge of town.

It occurred to Abby that she now had enough material here, enough provocative, stirring substance, to go back to her office and get started. She would translate Martin’s spoken love story into something textured, a long article complete with photographs and documents and pictures of Claire’s sculptures. The article would present a bit of extraordinary local history, but it would do something else, too. It would show a real life lived by two people in this town and elsewhere, something that was rarely shown, because people’s lives so often were shuttered to the world. And in showing this life, Abby knew she would implicitly help Martin do what he had promised Claire he would do: find some way so that what they’d had—their time together—would be remembered. Which, she realized now, was exactly what Martin had hoped Abby would do when he had walked into her office.

To be remembered, and to have a life worth remembering: this was what Abby wanted for herself, too. Like Claire, she thought of herself as a good, fiercely devoted mother. And her father would probably be fairly impressed at the job Abby was doing at the
Ledger
, even if he wouldn’t have acknowledged it. But the area of love was still left unfinished. There was a man in New York City who had been trying to see what it might be like to love Abby. But she hadn’t allowed him to see. Unlike Claire and Martin, Abby had let herself be closed to possibilities. But it was the possibilities that made one’s life an astonishing story.

She wanted to be able to look back over her own life when she was much older and say: Yes, I did that. And that. And that, too. She wanted to have photographs to show for it, and letters, and papers, and an assortment of tickets and receipts and trinkets. Abby knew she would call that nice, handsome pediatrician Nick Kelleher back today; her daughter, Miranda, would be thrilled. Maybe she would take him up on his offer to drive up some weekend to see her. The distance between New York City and Longwood Falls wasn’t
nearly as daunting as New York City and London.

Now Abby thought of Martin traveling back and forth across an ocean each year, getting on airplanes to come be with Claire for just a brief time. She wanted to tell Martin how much she admired what he and Claire had done, what they had somehow achieved together, and what it personally meant to Abby. But she suspected that she wouldn’t have a chance to tell him—that he was gone.

If she knew Martin Rayfiel—and she was beginning to think she did—he would have left Longwood Falls by now. He would have traveled back to London to his restaurant and his wife and his circle of friends and customers. What’s more, she doubted he would ever return here again. He had given to Abby—to Hush’s daughter—everything that had belonged to him and Claire, and now it was up to her to do with it what she thought best.

She stood for a long time in that storage room, so long that eventually she heard voices nearby—people who worked at Swift Maintenance were coming in and starting their day, as people were surely starting to arrive at the
offices of the
Ledger
, too. Right now, Kim the receptionist was probably putting on the coffeepot and humming and sporting a neon headband, and someone else was probably sliding paper into the feed tray of the copy machine.

Still Abby didn’t move. She would have to go soon, but she didn’t want to leave behind the world she’d discovered in Storage Room B just yet. She lingered, bending down to peer closely at sculptures. One piece she found in a corner was smaller than the others, and Abby had to pick it up in order to see what it was. The sculpture fit in her hand like a little jewel box: the gazebo. It was impossible to say how long ago Claire had made it, for the gazebo never changed from year to year, but there it was, a perfect, inviting rendering of the eight sides and the pointed roof. Abby kept looking at the sculpture in her hand until after a while she could see the two of them in there, both of them so young, Martin with his dark hair falling into his face, and Claire with her pale skin, her summer dress, her smile. They were leaning together, as they always did, and they were laughing.