“Are you dying now?” Ms. Pines looked concerned, and impatient — in case I was.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I was thinking yesterday about all the animal species that were on the planet when I was born and that are still around. Pretty soon they won’t be. It’s probably a good time to be checking out.”
Ms. Pines seemed puzzled. Who wouldn’t be? We’d been on the brink of a revelation. Possibly dramatic. Clearly she wanted to get back to it. She was operating on strong imperative now. Unlike me. “I…” she started to say, then stopped and shook her head, on which was perched her Christmas tam, which she’d forgotten about and that made her look ever-so-slightly elfin, but still dignified.
“I have dream conversations with my son Ralph,” I said. “He died in ’79. He’s forty-three in my dreams and a stockbroker. He gives me investment advice. I enjoy thinking it could be true.”
Ms. Pines just began, without responding. “My father, when we lived here, Mr. Bascombe, became distrustful. And very insular. He’d advanced at Bell by honest effort and genius. But it didn’t, somehow, make him very happy. His parents lived over a few blocks on Clio. But we never saw them. He hardly ever went out in his yard. Which made my mother more restless and unhappy than she already was. She believed she belonged onstage at the Metropolitan, and marrying my father had been a serious miscalculation. Though I believe she loved him. She had my brother, Ellis, and me to bring up, though. So she was trapped here.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” I said. Though it didn’t sound like anything white people on every block in Haddam didn’t have a patent on. We’re always environed by ourselves.
“Well,” Ms. Pines said. “Ellis and I didn’t know how bad it had become. We were quite happy children. Ellis didn’t prosper in school, but had a lovely singing voice, which made our mother dote on him. I did very well in school, which pleased my father. In that way it wasn’t so unusual for any American family.”
“I was thinking that,” I said. “Sounds like a story in The New Yorker.”
Ms. Pines looked at me with incomprehension. I was suddenly one of the in-limbo underachievers in Wall Township, who’d just made an inappropriate joke about the Compromise of 1850 and needed to be ignored.
“I’m not sure you need to hear this, Mr. Bascombe,” Ms. Pines said. “I don’t require to tell it. I’m happy just to leave. You’ve been more than kind. It’s not a happy story.”
“You’re alive to tell it,” I said. “You survived. Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?” I don’t, of course, believe this. Most things that don’t kill us right off, kill us later.
“I’ve wanted to believe that,” Ms. Pines said. “It’s the history teacher’s bedrock. The preparation for bad times.”
History’s just somebody else’s War and Peace, is what I thought. Though there was no reason to argue it. I smiled at her encouragingly.
Diaphanous mist rose off the scabby snow outside the window, making my yard look derelict and un-pretty. The house gave a creaking noise of age and settlement. A spear of pure, rarefied mid-December sunlight illuminated a square on the hickory trunk in the neighbors’ yard across the bamboo fence behind the potting shed the hurricane had damaged — the D’Urbervilles, a joint-practice lawyer couple. It could’ve been April, with balmy summer in pursuit, instead of the achy, cold days of January approaching. The inspector crows had disappeared.
Ms. Pines sniffed out toward the yard. “Well,” she said crisply. “I’ll make it brief.” (Why did I say I wanted to hear it? Had I meant that? Had I even said it? Something was making me suffer second thoughts — the hopeful ray of sunlight, a signal to leave well enough alone.) “My mother, you understand, was very unhappy,” Ms. Pines said, “in this very house, where we’re sitting. Our father drove out to Bell Laboratories each day. He was working on important projects and being appreciated and admired. But then he was coming home and feeling alienated. Why, we’ll never know. But at some point in the fall of 1969, our mother inaugurated a relationship of a common kind with the choral music teacher at Haddam High, who’d been providing Ellis private voice instruction.” Ms. Pines cleared her throat, as if something had made her shudder. “Ellis and I knew nothing about the relationship. Not a clue. But after Thanksgiving, my father and mother began to argue. And we heard things that let us know some of the coarser details. Which were very upsetting.”
“Yep,” I said. Still… nothing new under these stars.
“Then shortly after, my father moved down into the basement and out of their room upstairs.” Ms. Pines paused and turned her gaze around toward the hallway and the basement door. “He went right down those steps — he was a large, well-built man.” With her un-injured arm she gestured toward there, as if she could see her father clumping his way down. (I, of course, pictured Paul Robeson.) “He’d converted the basement into his workshop. He brought his instruments and testing gauges and computer prototypes. He’d turned it into a private laboratory. I think he hoped to invent something he could patent, and become wealthy. My brother and I were often brought down for demonstrations. He was a very clever man.”
I realized for the first time this was how and when the basement came to be “finished”—a secondary value-consideration for resale; and also a bit of choice suburban archaeology, plus a good story for an as-told-to project — like the Underground Railroad stopping in your house.
“He’d put a cot down there,” Ms. Pines said, “where he’d occasionally take naps. So, when he moved there, following Thanksgiving, it wasn’t all that unusual. He was still in the house — though we ate with our mother and he, I think, ate his meals in town at a restaurant, and left in the mornings while my brother and I were getting up. School was out for Christmas by then. Things had become very strained.”
“This feels like it’s heading for a climax,” I said, almost, but not quite, eagerly. It wasn’t going to be a barrel o’ laughs climax, I guessed. Ms. Pines had said so already.
“Yes,” Ms. Pines said. “There is a climax.” She raised the orangish fingertips of her un-injured hand up to her shining, rounded cheeks and touched the skin there, as if her presence needed certifying. A gesture of dismay. I could smell the skin softener she used. “What do you hope for, Mr. Bascombe?” Ms. Pines looked directly at me, blinking her dark eyes to invoke seriousness. Things had worked their way around to me. Possibly I was about to be assigned accountability for something.
“Well, I try not to hope for too much,” I said. “It puts pressure on the future at my age. If you know what I mean. Sometimes a hope’ll slip in when I’m not paying attention.” I tried a conspiratorial smile. My best. “… That I’ll die before my wife does, for instance. Or something about my kids. It’s pretty indistinct.”
“I hoped that about my husband,” Ms. Pines said. “But then we divorced, and I wasn’t always sure. And then he died.”
“I’m divorced,” I agreed. “I know about that.”
“It’s not always clear when your heart’s broken, is it?”
“It’s a lot clearer when it’s not.”
Ms. Pines turned and unexpectedly looked both ways around her, as if she’d heard something — her name spoken, someone entering the room behind us. “I’ve over-worked your hospitality, Mr. Bascombe.” She looked at me fleetingly, then past, out the sliding-door windows at the misty snow. She frowned at nothing I could see. Her body seemed to be about to rise.