The Widower's Tale Read online

  Because I’d seen so much of Clover since her return to Matlock, weeks would go by during which I did not consciously notice this daughter’s resemblance to her mother; and then, whenever it rose to the surface again, I felt the familiar, vertiginous tumble of emotions: relief at the presence in the absence (that something of my wife remained) and sorrow at the absence in the presence (that my daughters would always remind me their mother was gone). And the ugly sense that I held a bottomless debt of repentance: for even while I’d maintained my solitude, had never come close to marrying again in the thirty-two years since my wife’s death, still that solitude had been ample with pleasure.

  When Poppy was alive, the barn loft was her dance studio. She taught little girls and women of all ages, even a few renegade “sensitive” men. Back in the no-hassle sixties, it was a cinch to turn your barn into a backyard business, to add a bathroom here, a tiny kitchen there. In fashionably rural Matlock, it became a fad. Several architects set up shop just out their kitchen door; art studios proliferated; for a few years, we had a local dairy store, the Mootique. (Trudy and Clover loved to visit those smelly cows and sample the eccentrically seasoned cheeses.) The Episcopal minister’s wife taught natural-childbirth classes in the barn behind the rectory—a place that had been used to store outdated prayer books and props for holiday pageants. She swept out the dust and painted a giant blue dove on the siding that faced the town green. On brilliant cloudless days, it took on a trompe l’oeil effect, as if you could see through the barn right out to the sky. Poppy called it “our very own Magritte.”

  I wonder if the zoning board of yesteryear devoted its meetings to getting high. Because all of a sudden, not long after Poppy’s death, everything changed. By the late seventies, well, good luck to you if you wanted to put so much as a spare bedroom over your garage! By the dawn of the new millennium, spaces zoned for commercial use had become as rare in Matlock as families with middle-class incomes. Which meant that Evelyn Fougère—E & F’s legendary progenitor and directress—found herself in a grand pickle when, at the end of a ten-year lease, she and her school were politely banished from the parish house of the Congregational church. The deacons had voted to take in a nonprofit organization that found homes for refugees from African countries where chopping your neighbors into little pieces had become a way of life. Many heated letters appeared in the Grange, but the CC deacons held fast to their conviction that the town must extend its evanescent goodwill much farther afield.

  According to one rumor, Evelyn’s persistence in attending the Episcopal church across the green from the CC had tipped the scales against her, but what was the point of parsing the verdict? She was desperate, and she did her homework. My barn, grandfathered as an “educational facility” thanks to Poppy’s classes, was the answer to her most secular prayers.

  I had kept Poppy’s studio exactly as she left it: the long mirror spotless, the barre polished, the festive Mexican rugs rolled tightly and stacked in a corner. After her death, it took a good ten years for people to stop asking me if they could rent or even borrow the barn (about the same duration it took for them to give up on me as the perfect partner for yet another nice, bookish woman who’d missed or been jettisoned from the marriage trolley). I knew perfectly well what people thought: that it was a shrine to my guilt. I didn’t care what they thought. I would have the studio cleaned every few months and visit just often enough to check for invading wildlife. Otherwise I never expected to see it altered. But Clover’s crisis changed all that.

  Evelyn Fougère had the nerve to pick up the phone, call me, and ask outright. (Whatever happened to the discretion of making such requests by mail?) “Percy, you’ve heard the news, I’m sure,” she said, “so I’ll get to the point. I need your barn. The children need your barn! I do not have to tell you how essential this school has become to the town. I know that sounds conceited in the extreme, but it’s simply a fact. You owe us nothing; you don’t even have a grandchild who needs a space—and believe me, I’m not above such incentives!—so all I can do is throw myself on your mercy … and maybe remind you of my longtime friendship with Clover? Remember the summer you rented us a pair of ponies?” Her laughter was nervous and imploring.

  I had been waiting for a pause in which to concisely, not too impolitely, demur—it did not help her case that she so readily addressed me by my first name when I had always been Mr. Darling to her—but then her suggestion of an “incentive,” followed by her reminder that she and Clover had been girlhood chums, set my rusty mental cogs in motion. Bargain with the devil! warned a shrill inner voice, yet it so happened that I had just hung up from another painful conversation with Clover, who’d told me that what she now felt certain she wanted to do (yes really really certain this time!) was “something with little children.” I had listened sympathetically, but forgive me if I also rolled my eyes, suspecting that what she “really really” felt certain about was that she should never have abandoned her husband and her own children. What she felt was nostalgia and remorse. But I’d kept these thoughts to myself.

  So after letting Evelyn’s laughter dwindle to silence, I said, “Make me a proposal. And maybe I’ll make you one in return.” From her involuntary gasp, I knew that, in exchange for a five- or ten-year lease on my huge, picturesque, appropriately zoned barn, she would gladly hand over not just her firstborn child (a comely aspiring actress at Juilliard) but her island house in Maine. Instead, I secured a decent job for my confused, rootless daughter. And I agreed to keep the rent low as long as Clover hung on to that job. If anyone could keep Clover on track, it was the shrewd, creative, nurturing Evelyn. Maybe that’s what Clover needed: a boss who knew what made small children tick, how to make them happy, how to help them grow. Because that’s how I secretly saw my daughter—as a small child in the body of a forty-four-year-old woman.

  But a bargain with the devil it certainly was. All summer long, I refused to go anywhere near the barn, let alone set foot inside. I knew my resistance was petty, but I could not yet relinquish my need to preserve the one place where my wife’s spirit still reigned supreme. On many a day, I turned up Beethoven to drown out the whine of electric tools, the hollow tumbling of two-by-fours, the merriment of hardworking men telling lewd jokes in a foreign language.

  One day, while I was reading Trollope in Poppy’s old dressing room (from which I had no view of the architectural assault), I was startled by a quivering brilliance on the ceiling, the kind caused by reflections off jewelry or rippling water. I went to the window and looked down just in time to see the sections of that great, long mirror pass by, strapped faceup to the top of a van, hurling sunlight back at the sky. I was seized with a possessive panic, as if I had happened upon a burglary in progress. I made it halfway downstairs, at a clumsy gallop, before I realized that I had no use for those mirrors. Someone had taken the care to remove them intact; perhaps they would go somewhere they were needed. Perhaps they would once again reflect the limbs of young, supple dancers. It had not occurred to me before that my hoarding them in that deserted barn had been selfish.

  After I knew that the contractor had finished the taking away and begun the bringing in, I asked Clover about the rugs; I would find a good home for them, too. Poppy had collected the rugs over two trips we took to Mexico, one to cavort on the beach, one to see archaeological ruins. On the second trip, she was pregnant with Clover. The rugs were primitive, brightly striped and flowered squares woven with a soft, furry wool—perfect, said Poppy, for “barefoot work” in the winter.

  “Oh, Daddy, they were destroyed by moths,” Clover told me. “They fell apart completely when I untied them. We had to throw them away. I hope you don’t mind.” She searched my face—worried, I could see, that I might be angry.

  “I suppose they would be,” I said, speaking gently. “I ought to have wrapped them up, years ago.” What a waste.

  Why should I give a hoot about those old rugs? Why wasn’t my entire, loving focus on Clover, my oldest child, th
e one who needed my help—far more than I or anyone could give!—and who, right then, was genuinely excited to be the new assistant to the esteemed director of Elves & Fairies?

  That Thursday in August, as I followed Clover down the long slope from the house to the barn, I had to admit that she looked as proud of this fresh endeavor as I’d seen her look about anything since the first few years of her children’s lives.

  New grass already grew where stacks of lumber and the trampings of workmen had stripped my lawn bare. I noticed for the first time that the jumbled stones in the walkway had been evened out, that an apron of dark green rubber formed a subtle patio at the entrance to the barn. My driveway no longer petered off into dandelions and timothy but lassoed back on itself, forming a loop where parents could drive through to drop off and retrieve their progeny.

  Was I ready to face the mutation of my wife’s favorite refuge into a warren of crayon-colored nooks and crannies, where the closest thing to Merce Cunningham or Balanchine would be a game of musical chairs? And what if this were something I should have done long ago, by way of atonement?

  Yet I would not allow my good mood to be shattered by feelings of futile guilt. I retraced my attention to the image of that wretched Hummer—the automotive equivalent of a big-city cockroach—stuffed to the gills with corn husks. Someone in Matlock had a fine and devious sense of humor. Perhaps there was a God.

  When I muttered to myself, “Ethanol, anyone?” Clover turned around and gave me a funny look.

  I said, “Lead on, my dear.”

  Because the barn was set into the hillside descending toward the pond, one entered the loft from ground level on the side that faced the house. The old double door still served as the main entrance (though reinforced and painted that lurid purple). Above it, a faux-rustic sign bore the school’s wincingly adorable name. (Efforts by the school’s lone set of gay parents to change the name, because of its homophobic associations, had been squelched. Evelyn had published a letter in the Grange about protecting “authentic” fairies from the evils of political correctness.)

  “So, get ready!” Clover opened the doors dramatically, like that vapid young woman on Let’s Make a Deal, a show that Poppy and I used to laugh at together, only half watching, as we danced around the kitchen making dinner.

  Clover’s promise held: my admiration escaped me in a simple, wordless exclamation. It was, indeed, amazing. Evelyn’s husband, Maurice, was the architect given free rein—and when I saw what he had done to my barn, I understood why a small hush fell over any gathering into which he walked (and I understood, too, why they could afford a waterfront house in Vinal Haven and a ski hut in Vermont). The man was a master of light.

  Predictably, yet logically, a long hallway bisected the space, beneath the spine of the roof. The classrooms to either side were partitioned with walls containing doors and windows of widely varied dramatic shapes: not just the shapes you might expect (star, crescent moon, hexagon, diamond) but elegantly simplified silhouettes of a turtle, a bear, an owl, a howling wolf! There were new skylights, too, which admitted vertical rivers of light.

  “Good Lord,” I exclaimed, irresistibly moved.

  “You see? Isn’t it just heavenly? And it’s all super-safety glass,” said Clover, knocking on one of the windows. “Practically impossible to break.”

  Along the outside walls, shelves painted in a dozen shades of green and purple held plastic bins of wooden animals, silk scarves, pom-poms, crayons, miniature scissors … all the tutti-frutti paraphernalia of a childhood pictured in magazines. On the paneling between the skylights hung posters of wildflowers and exotic birds; on the floors lay soft multicolored mats; in smart blond shelves stood books with extravagantly artful jackets. From the angled ceiling of each room hung a fan. Swiftly yet almost silently, they stirred and cooled the air.

  “Good Lord,” I said again. “And to what slum did we send you and your sister for nursery school?”

  “There was no Elves and Fairies then,” said Clover. “There was just Mrs. O’Connor’s playgroup in the basement of the Artillery.” She turned to look at me. “Which was just fine, Daddy. We loved it.”

  She led me down the long hall toward the back; halfway there, to one side, I glimpsed an alcove holding three elfin toilets. The tiles formed a glittering mosaic of the sky: midnight blue and gold, van Gogh’s cosmos boiling with comets.

  I remembered then that Maurice’s firm specialized in art museums. He’d designed a wing at the Fogg during my final years at Harvard.

  “Come see the view,” my daughter urged.

  Filling the back wall of the loft, from my waist to well above my head, was a vast triangular window. Below us lay the pond as I had never seen it, for this wall had always been solid, opaque. I felt almost dizzy as I surveyed it—not because I have a fear of heights but because it seemed inconceivable that I could view this place I knew so well, better than almost any other place in my entire life, in a way I had never viewed it before.

  “How can this be?” I muttered.

  Clover laughed, misinterpreting something I hadn’t meant to say aloud. “How it can be,” she said, “how it came out like this, was through the incredible generosity of all the people who wanted us to get it exactly right. Not to mention you, Daddy. Without you, God knows where we would be. If we’d be!”

  I did not look her in the face, not wanting to share her raw emotion. Instead, I continued to survey the landscape stretched below me. I saw that the maples on the far side of the pond were already hinting at fall, a blush of orange in their crowns I would never have seen from the ground. I saw the roofs of the Three Greeks, a trio of Greek Revival houses that shared the opposing shore. I saw the pale hot summer sky as the wide plane of water so faithfully portrayed it. And for the first time, I saw the exact shape of the pond, not just as it is pictured on maps of the town but as it exists in nature: a paisley, an attenuated raindrop, a tear.

  A phone rang. Clover went back down the hall. I heard her voice: “Elves and Fairies! Clover Darling here! May I help you?”

  “Good heavens, Poppy,” I whispered. “What a world.”

  “What a world indeed.”

  My heart seized as I turned around. Smiling at me from inside one of the classrooms was a pixieish young man, wiry and slight as a gymnast, his hair a compact yellow shrub.

  “Ira Schwartz,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you jump.”

  We shook hands. Churlishly, I withheld my name. Pointlessly, too.

  “You’d be the heroic, legendary Mr. Darling,” he said, cocking his head slightly. “I’m the new guy here, but I know all about you.”

  Rampant freckles, a coy smile: the perfect Puck. Then it came to me. I laughed. “Ah yes. You’d be the fellow who wants to turn my poor old tree into a high-rise hotel.”

  “Oh that tree, can I tell you … rarely have I met a tree like that. It’s so”—he shook his golden head—“so royal.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “But I assure you, Mr. Darling, that what I propose to do—and only if you’re willing—won’t compromise your tree in the slightest. Not one bit.”

  Down the hall, I could hear Clover involved in a conversation about toilet training (apparently now called toilet learning).

  I leaned toward the pixie and said, “Do you know why I’ve allowed my life and my property to be thrown helter-skelter by this endeavor?”

  Finally, I’d silenced the fellow. He regarded me unwaveringly, however, eyebrows raised, respectfully attendant. “Well,” he finally said, “I’d be curious to know, but only if it were my business.”

  “It’s not, but I’ll summarize. Family. Not money, not altruism, not—not—a nostalgia for the company of children.”

  He nodded, but his hands stayed in the pockets of his rather tight blue jeans. “Mr. Darling, I can take no for an answer.”

  “Young fellow, I’m not giving you an answer. I’m giving you a context.” I spoke cheerfully, not disdainfully.


  “I didn’t mean to confront you,” he said. “I’m sorry if it seemed that way. I guess I interrupted your tour.…”

  I looked at my watch, if only to give us both a graceful out. “My people will be in touch with yours.”

  It took him a moment, but then he burst into courteous laughter. “And my people will be ready to negotiate. I shouldn’t tell you this, but they’re softies.”

  He went back into his classroom, and I retraced my steps down the long, lovely hallway. Clover, still on the phone as I passed her office, made a desperate face, but we waved to each other. I blew her a kiss.

  Outside, the afternoon heat struck me like a mallet, and I decided it was time for my final naked daylight swim. From mid-May to late October, I swam virtually every day, rain or shine or fog, and I hadn’t owned a pair of swimming trunks in God knew how long. A week before, Clover had told me in no uncertain terms that I was to give up this habit; never mind that I made my way between the pond and the outdoor shower in a towel.

  I do not believe in ghosts. Yet undeniably, over the years since Poppy’s death, there were times when I swam in the pond and felt haunted: not by Poppy herself (that might have felt merciful, in a way) but by the doubts that I would never, ever share with anyone about the way in which she died. Swimming, for me, has always been a kind of meditation, not a form of exercise. The wild silence of “my” pond was a part of that meditation. Crickets, frogs, songbirds, peepers—each in its season—set the rhythm of my breathing and my brain. (I had learned to shut out the occasional distant mower.)

  Half an hour later, as I drifted placidly on my back, watching the clouds above me do the same, a whole new sound invaded my world: from open windows, the bantering of the teachers as they readied the loft—the school—for the inaugural gathering that night. Voices carry surprisingly far across water. Except for Ira, the would-be tamer of my tree, the voices belonged to women, all maternal in the extreme, blessed with sunny outlooks and sunny laughter to match. “Did you fill the sand table, Joyce?” “Oh, aren’t these new smocks adorable!” “I love watching the first-time dads scroonch down in the tiny chairs, don’t you?” And then the pixie spoke: “Do you suppose that if Dick Cheney and all those joint chiefs were forced to hold their meetings in preschool chairs, maybe we wouldn’t be in this ghastly war?” Uproarious laughter followed. One of the women said, “Ira, that is a beautiful thought.”