TONY DIED ON THE last day of July. It was raining. He had been at Marian and John’s house for about ten days, staying in bed, getting weaker and weaker, but not approaching death. Or of course approaching, but death seemed still a long way off. Tony refused to go back to the city and the hospital. He wanted to die at John and Marian’s.
On the day Tony died, although she did not know it was the day Tony would die, Marian had left the house in the morning to buy some groceries. She was eight months pregnant. John was in the city, for he still worked then. Lyle was sitting with Tony.
As Marian drove toward town, the rain stopped and the sky lightened. She pulled off the road. There was a trail here, she
knew, that wound down through the woods to a stream. She felt she needed a moment alone.
In the woods it was dripping, but the ground was dry. She stood for a while on the bridge of logs that lay across the swollen stream, watching the water gush furiously beneath her. She stood there until the rain started again and then she moved off the bridge and under the cover of trees. The sound of the rain and the stream seemed unnaturally loud. Not unpleasant, just forceful. All that water pouring through the world.
When she drove back up to the house, she thought it looked different somehow: closed, and empty. And then she saw Lyle sitting on the stoop, the front door shut behind him, and her immediate thought was
he’s locked himself out.
She put the car in the garage but left the groceries in it and walked around front. Lyle didn’t get up.
“What are you doing out here?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s Tony,” he said.
“What?”
“He died,” Lyle said. “He’s dead.”
She wanted to ask him if he was sure but she knew she couldn’t. But in a way she didn’t believe him. So she asked. “You’re sure?”
Lyle looked at her. His face was so wet with rain she couldn’t tell if he had been, or was, crying. “He stopped breathing,” he said. “And his heart isn’t beating.” He choked a little and then there was no doubt that he was crying.
“Come inside,” she told him, almost fiercely. She helped him up and opened the door. In the foyer she held him, as best she could against her swollen stomach, and felt and heard him cry. She hadn’t closed the door and she looked outside, at the rain pelting the dark wet grass and the huge, thousand-leaved trees.
People shouldn’t die in summer, she thought, not when the world is this ripe. She held Lyle, who cried for what seemed like a very long time. She almost forgot what had happened, so disorienting was it to be holding Lyle in the foyer with the door wide open. After a while they sat on the bottom step of the front stairs. She got up and closed the door. There was a puddle of water on the stone floor.
“We should call John,” Marian said. “And the police, I suppose. Or the ambulance. I don’t know, who should we call?”
“I don’t know,” said Lyle.
“I’m going to call John. Will you sit here?”
“I think I’ll go back upstairs,” said Lyle.
“Are you sure?” asked Marian.
“Yes,” said Lyle.
“I’ll be right up,” said Marian. She went into the kitchen and called John. He said he would leave work immediately and get home as soon as he could. Marian sat for a moment at the table, with her head resting on her arms. Then she went up the back stairs. The door to Tony’s room was closed. She thought: Perhaps I should stay downstairs longer, but she felt like something had to happen, and it was up to her. She knocked on the door. Lyle told her to come in. She opened the door. There were two beds in the room. They had arranged to rent a hospital bed but it had not yet been delivered. So in the room were two twin beds, two antique wooden beds, a pair. Tony lay on one bed with an arm hanging down over the edge, his head thrown back. His eyes were closed. The pillow was on the floor. Lyle lay on the other bed, the way Marian imagined dead people should rest: flat on his back, his hands crossed on his stomach, as if he were assuming Tony’s death. She walked over to and opened a window. Then she sat down on the bed beside Lyle, put her hand on his.
“John is on his way,” she said.
Lyle nodded.
“I think I should call the police,” she said, “and find out what to do.”
Lyle nodded again.
“Do you want a drink?” asked Marian.
“Not now,” said Lyle.
Marian looked over at Tony. “Can I move him?” she asked.
Lyle looked at Tony. For a moment he didn’t respond, and Marian was about to pretend she hadn’t asked her question, but then Lyle said, “Yes.”
She stood up and tried, gently, to untwist Tony’s torso, model it after Lyle, but Tony’s stiff doll limbs would not cooperate. She got him as flat as possible and then covered him with the blanket, smoothing it over him. She could not bring herself to cover his face, which she touched with her fingers. His hair was dirty. Marian and Lyle had intended to give him a shampoo that evening.
Lyle was sitting up, watching her.
“It was what he wanted,” said Marian. “To die here. With you.”
Lyle raised his shoulders toward his ears and shook his head, and then his whole body, in a soblike way. “I don’t know what he wanted,” he said.
Marian sat down on the bed and held Lyle again while he cried. This time was shorter, and she thought: Every time now will be shorter, fewer and fewer tears until there are none. But she was wrong. The arc of Lyle’s grief knew no pattern.
When he was finished crying this second time, Marian said, “I’m going to call the police now.”
“Yes,” said Lyle.
“Why don’t you come downstairs with me, and have a drink?”
“I’ll come down,” said Lyle. “In a minute.”
“O.K.,” said Marian. It seemed an awful thing to say: O.K. How could you say O.K. with Tony, dead, in the room? But she said O.K. It was O.K. for Lyle to sit there, if he wanted, a while longer.
She went downstairs. Her call to the police set in motion a great deal of complicated activity that involved the rest of the afternoon and evening, for death is complicated. Looking back on it, she saw the moments she spent in the house alone with Lyle and Tony’s body as the eye of a storm. There had been the awful activity of Tony’s illness and the subsequent difficult period of his mourning, but those hours in between had been so quiet and still, as if a hush had settled on them, on her and Lyle and Tony, momentarily, and then been blown away.
“THIS IS ODD,” SAID Lyle. “Usually she’s here waiting.” He and Robert stood in the parking lot of the train station, which, now that the train and the cars that had arrived to meet it had departed, was empty and quiet.
“Should we sit down?” asked Robert. There was an uncomfortable-looking bench, made from slabs of concrete, near the sidewalk where they stood. Beside it were several newspaper-vending boxes.
“No,” said Lyle, rather abruptly, and then, upon hearing his tone, he added, “I want to stretch my legs.” He began pacing, as if not to pace would prove him a liar. Robert sat on the bench and watched him. It was just beginning to feel hot. Robert stretched his bare legs into the sunshine, obstructing Lyle’s route.
“Sit down,” he said to Lyle. “Relax.”
Lyle paced a little more just so it would not appear that he was taking orders from Robert, and then sat beside him. “You seem nervous,” said Robert.
“I am,” said Lyle.
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” said Lyle.
“I’m the one who should be nervous,” said Robert.
“Why should you be nervous?” asked Lyle.
“About meeting John and Marian.”
“But I just told you how friendly and wonderful they are. You have nothing to be nervous about.”
“Then neither do you.”
“Yes,” said Lyle. “I suppose.” He leaned back against the bench. He actually felt as if he might be sick. It’s the train, he tried to tell himself, although he knew it was not. Nothing about who he was, or where he was, or whom he was with, or where he was going, felt right in and of itself, and the thought of him sitting here beside Robert waiting for Marian to pick them up and take them to the house suddenly seemed immensely foolish and frightening. He was wondering if there was time to cross the platform and take a train back to the city, when he saw a car pull off the main road and drive down the hill toward the station. It was Marian. He tried to say something but couldn’t speak. So he pointed at the car.
Robert said, “Is that her?”
Lyle nodded and stood. He was aware of Robert standing beside him, of Marian stopping the car in front of them, and her jumping out from it. She looked so animated and joyful, and for a moment, in the delight of seeing her again after so long, Lyle forgot his fears. It is all going to be fine, he thought.
“Oh, I knew you’d be waiting!” Marian exclaimed. “I’m sorry I’m late. Have you been waiting long?”
“No,” Lyle managed to say. “Not long at all. Marian, this is Robert. Robert, Marian.”
“Hello,” said Robert. They shook hands.
“We’re so glad you’ve come this weekend,” said Marian. She turned to Lyle. “And Lyle,” she said. “You—” She hugged him hard, rubbed his back. “It’s wonderful to see you. You look great.”
Lyle could see Robert standing behind Marian, watching them embrace. He was smiling in a way that Lyle didn’t understand, or care for, so he closed his eyes. Marian hugged him tighter, as if she had sensed he had closed his eyes, and he knew she had closed her eyes, too—it was a blind, tight hug—and then she pulled away.
They all got in the car: Lyle in front beside Marian, Robert in back with their bags. “We’ve got to stop at the fish market and the liquor store and then it’s straight home,” Marian said. “I hope you don’t mind. Do you eat fish?” she asked Robert.
“Yes,” said Robert.
“Good,” said Marian. They were waiting for the stoplight. For a moment no one said anything. When they had pulled into the traffic, Marian said, “And how was the train ride?”
“Fine,” said Lyle.
“Was it crowded?”
“Yes,” said Lyle.
“I think it’s such a lovely ride,” said Marian. “It’s one of my favorites, up along the river. Had you taken it before?” she asked Robert.
“No,” said Robert.
“Have you ever been in this area?”
Robert said he had not.
“It’s nice,” said Marian. “Especially in the summer. It’s a bit nowheres, so there’s not a lot to do, but I don’t mind that. It’s easy enough to go down to the city if you want to do something. Although, now with Roland, that’s become a thing of the past.” She laughed.
“How is Roland?” asked Lyle.
“He’s fine. He’s home helping John with the garden. Roland is our son,” she said into the rearview mirror. “He’ll be one year old next month.”
“Lyle told me,” said Robert.
Marian pulled the car into the parking lot of a small shopping center and parked. “Listen,” she said, “I’m going to just dash into Elmer’s for some fish. Would you two mind going into Kroegstadt’s there and getting some beer? Do you drink beer?” she asked Robert.
“Yes,” said Robert. “I like beer.”
“Good,” said Marian. “Then get some kind you especially like. John said to get a case. Here’s twenty dollars. Is that enough for a case? I’ve no idea.”
“We’ll pay for the beer,” said Lyle.
“No, no, don’t be silly,” said Marian. “Here,” she said to Robert, holding the money toward him. “Take this, will you? I insist.”
Robert didn’t know what to do. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Marian. “Please. I won’t forgive you if you don’t.”
John was trying to lay out the croquet court despite interference from Roland, who crawled behind him, uprooting each wicket as soon as it had been inserted into the lawn. It was a game, John realized, a game Roland played seriously, only sometimes emitting a
small hiccuping burst of pleasure. They played it for about twenty minutes, until Roland grew tired. Then John whacked a yellow croquet ball around the lawn, while Roland lay down on the other balls, as if he were trying to hatch them.
The croquet set had been a gift from Tony, who had been an excellent croquet player. He played a misleadingly casual game, swinging the mallet in one hand and holding a cocktail or a cigarette in the other, playing inattentively and recklessly until some moment late in the game when he would discard the drink or smoke and bring the game to a swift, and for him victorious, conclusion.
Poison! he would call out. Now I am poison!
John’s mother had divorced his father and moved to Italy when he was five. John had stayed with his father in New York. Tony was born a year later. He had an Italian father who was, as his mother herself used to say, “never really in the picture.” In the beginning John had spent several summers in Europe with his mother and Tony, but Tony had been just a baby then, so John had played alone at the Mediterranean resorts his mother frequented. After a summer or two of that, though, John’s father had suggested he might like to go to camp and John had agreed. Camp Phoenicia was very different from Club Azul but John had liked the difference. He was aware of the difference, even then. Sometimes in the hot pine American woods he would catch a whiff of the cypressy smell of Italy and think: Tony and Mother are on the beach. I am not like that, he had told himself. And then he would think of his dad in New York with Florence (stepmother) and Susannah (half sister) and think: I am not like that, either. I am here, alone, in New Hampshire, at Camp Phoenicia. In a way he had never lost that feeling of himself, for that had been the first moment he was aware of having a sense of himself,
of having figured out who he was. And John felt he had not changed in any substantial way since then. The intervening years were a clear pool of water, and he could always look back through them and see, and recognize, that boy, alone, in the woods.
One summer Tony had been sent to Camp Phoenicia. By then John was a junior counselor. Tony hated camp. He hated everything about it: the bunks and the sports and the cold lake and the food and all the other boys. He shivered all the time, and said he couldn’t get warm. He was sent home, all the way to Italy, after only two weeks. John felt as if he had failed: he was supposed to have looked out for his brother.
The experience was a sort of sundering, but it proved, in the long run, to be mutually beneficial. Tony went on to cultivate his personality, which was very different from John’s, and John stopped trying to make Tony American, and masculine. For a while, as teenagers, they assumed they were opposites, not just different, and they had very little to do with each other. But as they got older and more complicated, the polar extremes they had so easily assumed grew uncomfortable and hard to maintain, and began to melt. As adults they found they were rather fond of, and fascinated by, each other.
John had whacked the ball down near the river when he heard Marian calling him from up near the house. She was holding Roland, and Lyle and a young man in shorts were standing next to her. They were all looking down the lawn toward him. Marian waved for him to come. He hit the ball as hard as he could and then chased it up the hill, passing it on the way.
“You’ve been practicing,” said Lyle. “That isn’t fair.”
“Hey,” said John, between pants. “It’s good to see you.” They embraced sincerely yet a little awkwardly, for they had never worked out the physical component of their friendship.
“This is Robert,” said Lyle. “And Robert, this is John.”
John and Robert shook hands. “Did you have a good trip?” John asked.
“Yes,” said Robert.
“Look,” said Lyle suddenly, pointing to the river. “There’s the river.”
“Yes,” said Robert. “I see it.” And then he realized that Lyle hadn’t really been pointing out the river so much as eliciting a comment about it, so he said, “It’s beautiful.”
“Yes,” said Lyle, looking around. “How’s the garden?” he asked John.
“I think I’ve outdone myself this year,” said John. “And I have to show you my wall.”
“Well, let’s see,” said Lyle.
“Don’t you want to come inside first?” asked Marian. “I should think you’d like to freshen up.”
“I’m feeling very fresh,” said Lyle.
“What about you, Robert? Why don’t we bring your things inside and I can show you your room. And get you something cold to drink. You look parched.”
“O.K.,” said Robert.
“I’ll be right in,” said Lyle. “I just have to see this wall.”
“Is the wall decorative or functional?” Lyle asked as he and John walked down the lawn.
“Why?” asked John.
“Why? What do you mean, why?”
“Why do you ask that question?”
“Because I want to know the answer,” said Lyle.
“It’s neither,” said John. “As far as I can tell.”
“Then what is it?”
“Maybe I should show you the garden instead. I don’t think you’ll understand the wall.”
“What’s there to understand?” asked Lyle.
“That there is nothing to understand.”
“It sounds very Zen,” said Lyle.
“It’s this way,” said John. He turned from the lawn and pressed himself between the fir trees that bordered it. It was hot and fragrant and unpleasant in the midst of the trees. On the other side of them was a small meadow Lyle had never seen, with some sort of grass that had grown so tall and thick it all fell over, backward or forward, like church fainters. A stone wall, about three feet high, curved across the meadow in the shape of an imperfect S. It was tapered, with large stones at the bottom and small stones—almost pebbles—on the top.
“See,” said John.
Lyle began to walk around the wall. He picked some of the smaller, round stones off the top, palmed them, and returned them to their places. “Where did you get the idea for it?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said John. “I just started building it and it happened this way.”
“It reminds me of something,” said Lyle.
“What?”
“I can’t think. Something about its shape, and the way that it defines the space. I’d like to see it from the air. How long have you been working on it?”
“Not long. Since the spring. March.”
“It’s beautiful.” Lyle had returned to John’s side. “It’s very druidic. We should come down here at night and perform some sort of ceremony.”
“What sort of ceremony?” asked John.
“I don’t know,” said Lyle. “Something with candles and drums. We should be naked. I’m sure something would happen.”
They were silent a moment, looking at it. “I should go find Robert,” said Lyle. “I think he’s a bit nervous.”
“How long have you known him?” asked John.
“Not long,” said Lyle.
“How did you meet him?”
“I met him at Skowhegan,” said Lyle. “He’s a painter.”
“Oh,” said John.
“We’re changing Tony’s study into a studio for him,” said Lyle. He knew he was saying too much too soon, but it was important, he thought, to mention Tony. For if Tony was talked about, included, he wouldn’t haunt them. “It seemed,” he continued, “stupid to let the room go to waste.”