Not a person in the family asked where Will had disappeared to. Well, except for her mother. (“Oh, Rebecca,” she said sadly, once she’d heard the facts, “you were a fool thirty-three years ago and you’re a fool today.”) But the girls behaved as if he had never existed. She suspected they were trying to spare her feelings — taking it for granted, no doubt, that she had been jilted.
One night when she had nothing to do she got in her car and drove to Macadam. She parked in front of Mrs. Flick’s house and gazed up at the second-floor windows. All of them were dark, though. Which was lucky, she supposed, because really it was the romance she missed; not Will himself. Still, she sat there a long, long time before she started her engine and drove home again.
She told Zeb, in one of their bedtime phone talks, that she thought the human life span was too long. “Really, I’ve finished my life,” she said. “I finished it when the girls got grown. But here I am, just hanging around, marking time, waiting for things to wind down.”
Zeb said, “Rebecca? Are you all right?”
“Define ‘all right,’” she told him.
“Where is your man friend?” he asked.
“He’s gone.”
“You ditched him?”
“Yes, but that’s not the problem. The problem is, I’ve outlived myself.”
“Well,” he told her, “remember what George Eliot said.”
“What did George Eliot say?”
“Or maybe it wasn’t George Eliot. At any rate: ‘It’s never too late to do what you want to do.’ Remember that.”
“What?” Rebecca said. “Well, of all the — Why, that’s just plain wrong! Suppose I wanted to… I don’t know; suppose I wanted to get pregnant! That’s just plain ridiculous!”
She was so outraged that she hung up, not knowing she was planning to. Then she regretted it. When the phone rang a few seconds later, she lifted the receiver and said, “Sorry.”
“I just remembered,” Zeb said. “It wasn’t ‘do what you want to do.’ It was ‘be what you want to be.’ I think.”
“I’m just feeling a little tired,” Rebecca told him.
“And I don’t even know for sure that it was George Eliot.”
She said, “Thanks for trying, Zeb.”
* * *
She might have thrown herself into work, but business was very slow these days. Three different people had called to ask if the Open Arms was in a safe neighborhood, and although she had assured them it was — with reasonable precautions, she said; using normal common sense — they told her they would have to think it over and get back to her.
Besides, how often could a person celebrate? How many weddings, christenings, birthdays could she applaud, for heaven’s sake? What was the purpose of it all?
Her New York Times collected in stacks and gradually turned yellow, untouched. Her New Yorkers drifted to Poppy’s room and she never asked for them back. She passed her New York Reviews on to Troy without giving them a glance; she told him she thought there was something perverted about book reviews that were longer than the books they were reviewing.
One morning the library phoned to say that her interlibrary loan was in, and she made herself walk over to collect it. But it turned out the book was so rare — a crumbly brown leather volume edged in flaking gold — that she was not allowed to take it home with her. She had to read it there in the reading room, the librarian told her. (This was the same librarian who’d arranged the loan in the first place, but she issued her edict in such a disapproving voice, with such a humorless, raisin face, that Rebecca couldn’t imagine why she’d once seemed a kindred spirit.)
She did try. She did settle at a table and pluck the cover open with the very tips of her fingers and leaf obediently through the brittle ivory pages. A Baltimorean’s Experience of the War for Southern Independence, the book was called. The author was a lawyer named Nathaniel Q. Furlong, Esq., who claimed to have known Robert E. Lee when Lee was still a private citizen. Years before the War, Mr. Furlong maintained, Lee had confided to him that he could never support a cause that would allow the slaves — the “heathen Africans,” in his words — to return to their native land and forfeit their one chance for Christian salvation. But when Rebecca managed to locate this passage (which was, she saw for the first time, of dubious credibility, written by a man whose boastful, unreliable nature revealed itself in every line), she wondered why she had found it so momentous back in college. She had just wanted to believe, she supposed, that there were grander motivations in history than mere family and friends, mere domestic happenstance.
She returned the book to the librarian, and she brushed the crumbs of leather off her hands and left the building.
* * *
Everything struck her as unutterably sad — even the squirrel with half a tail she saw bustling cheerfully down the sidewalk. Even Poppy’s daily routine: his ritual round of activities, straightening his room and brushing his hat and tuning in his TV shows, all intended to keep himself from sinking into hopelessness.
She knew her mood had something to do with the season. Autumn was when Joe had died. She couldn’t look at the poplar outside her bedroom window — the leaves so yellow that she would think she had left a light on, some cloudy days in mid- or late October — without recalling that shattered morning when she had emerged from the hospital in a stupor and taken forever finding her car and then driven bleakly, numbly down streets lined with radiant trees in every shade of red and gold and orange.
As a girl she had often said, about some potential disaster, “Oh, that can’t happen; it’s too bad to happen.” But Joe’s death had been too bad to happen, and it had happened even so. She had felt stunned by that all through his funeral — through the thready whine of the organ and the uncertain, off-key hymns and the peculiar poem Zeb had read called “Not Waving but Drowning.” She had sat through that funeral white-faced with shock. It appeared that nothing was too bad to happen. How had she ever thought otherwise?
Grieving had turned out to be not unlike falling in love. She had pored over Joe’s photographs, searched for the innermost meanings of his calendar notations, traced his dear signature on canceled checks. She had found any excuse to mention his name: “Joe always felt…” and, “Joe used to say…” It had troubled her that she could summon up no specific, start-to-finish memory of their lovemaking; only generalities. (He was a morning man. He liked to kiss her eyelids. He had a way of almost purring when she touched him.) She prayed for random moments to resurface. Once, driving along in her car, she was thrilled to recollect that he used to talk to the mirror while he was shaving. (“Ah, there you are, Joe. Ready for another glorious day of helping strangers get drunk together.”) She received this image like a gift, and clung to it, and waited greedily for more.
Her life, as she saw it back then, had begun on an April evening when she had stood on the sidewalk peering at the sign overhead: The Open Arms, Est. 1951. And now her life was finished, but here she was, still circulating among the guests, a solitary splinter of a woman in the crowd.
“Well, you know what they say,” Zeb had told her. (Zeb at twenty-two, full of callow assurance.) “God never gives you more than you can handle.”
“Who says that? Who?” she had asked in a fury. “Who would dare to say that?”
“I don’t know,” he had said, taken aback. “God, maybe?”