“He’s getting over her,” Astoria told me, just after I’d moved to town and started work at the library. “Otherwise he never would have been able to do it.”
This proved not to be the case. Even my most casual conversation with him — at the house, at the library — was peppered with references to My wife, Cynthia. Finally I told him: I know her name now, you can just call her Cynthia. This seemed to both alarm and please him, as if I were laying claim simultaneously to his memories and the burden of them.
So when someone knocked on the door a few days later, I assumed it was him. It was winter and I didn’t know what sort of conversation he might make. Instead, it was Caroline.
Messy people might wish their apartments clean when unexpected guests arrive. I wanted mine messy so I could do something, glance around nervously, shuffle newspapers to make room on the couch. If, upon my death, someone decided to turn my apartment into a museum, as Caroline did years later with James’s cottage, they’d have to bring things in. History is all in how you display it, what’s preserved: this is the lesson of Pompeii. Better to use the library, string velvet bank ropes in front of the tall stool behind the circulation desk, fan out my typed catalog cards in glass cases, frame the form letters to the thoughtless people who kept books too long and the hopeful people who returned them late but never paid the fines. In my apartment even the toothbrush was shut in the medicine cabinet. It was a toothbrush anyone might have owned. Everything was in its place, exactly, and there was nothing to occupy my worried hands.
Caroline sat down slowly on the sofa; I sat next to her and straightened the fringed throw that our weight had disturbed.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Well,” Caroline said. Her bright lipstick hadn’t quite made its way into the corners of her mouth. “Missus is … she had an accident.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “What happened?”
“That, of course, is the question. Something went wrong with her pills. She took too many of them, I guess.”
“On purpose?” I asked.
“Oh, maybe she forgot she’d taken it. We don’t know. She’d had a drink or two. No,” she said, suddenly sure. “Not on purpose.” Then she took a deep breath and told me this story:
Something had gone wrong with Mrs. Sweatt’s medication. That is, she took a quantity of sleeping pills — Caroline had been sure she’d thrown them all out — together with a quantity of vodka. In the middle of the night, as far as they could tell, she began to get sick and wandered — on purpose? thinking it was the bathroom? — into James’s room. For some reason he elected not to wake Caroline and Oscar but to help his mother get some fresh air. Together they stepped outside onto the front step, which because it was January was icy, and because it was two-thirty A.M. had not been sanded and salted by Oscar — Caroline explained that her husband was always careful about such things. James slipped and fractured his shin; Mrs. Sweatt tumbled into the bushes. By the time James had gotten into the house and woken his aunt and uncle, his mother was unconscious.
Now James was in a hospital in Boston. The doctors said they were surprised it hadn’t happened sooner — growing at such a rate guaranteed weakened bones, and almost any bone in his body was a candidate for breakage. Especially his legs, which grew faster than any other part of him.
“Oh,” I said. “I’m so sorry. How is Mrs. Sweatt?”
“She’s dead,” Caroline said wonderingly — and she made it sound as if she were (like Mrs. Sweatt) merely repeating something I had said, as if I were the one with sudden tragic news.
“Good heavens,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Poor Mrs. Sweatt.”
“We wanted you to know—”
“—I appreciate it—”
“—we wanted you to know that we’re not telling James. That she’s dead. Not right off.”
I looked at her. “How can you not?”
“We’ll tell him when the excitement is over.”
“It’s not going to be over,” I said. “His mother is dead.” The Stricklands’ extreme secrecy struck me as craven; they were as stingy with bad news as some people were with good.
“We’ve thought this over,” said Caroline. “We really have, Peggy. James was trying to save his mother, if only for one night. How can we tell him he didn’t?”
I didn’t know.
“So maybe when he’s a little better. When he’s up and around. Just not today, and not tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said. “I understand.”
“You’ll have to excuse me,” Caroline said.
“Yes.” I waited for her to get up. Instead, her eyes filled, and then tears rolled down her face. No other evidence of grief, just slow tears and an embarrassed smile. Then she set her wet turned-up hands on her considerable stomach, as if she intended to save her tears for some future use.
“We’ll miss her,” she said. Then she patted her face with the back of her hands.
“What will happen to James?” I asked.
“Oh, he’ll stay with us,” said Caroline. “He’ll always stay with us.”
“I know that,” I said. “What did the doctors say?”
“They don’t know. Get taller still, I guess. Bound to stop eventually.”
“The doctors said that?”
“No. The doctors say he’s healthy. They’ve said that all his life. For now, he’s still growing.” Caroline shook her head at this, as if his growth were some teenage notion he’d got ahold of, motorcycle riding or a wild girl. “That’s all they’ll say.”
“What have you told him? About his mother, I mean.”
“The truth,” she said. “Just not all the way. She’s tired, she’s gone for a rest. James likes you,” she said, and even given the circumstances, that trilled my heart. “Just be nice to him. I mean, I know you are.”
“I am,” I said. “I will.” I went to put my hand over hers, but couldn’t. “You’ll need help,” I told her. “Especially now that you don’t have—”
“Yes. Well.” She played with the fringe of the throw. “I just never saw it coming.”
“Never saw what?”
“Mrs. Sweatt’s problems,” she said. “She seemed so happy to me. She had James, she had plenty to do. You’d never have known she was the least bit sad.”
Not sad? To me she seemed the saddest person in the world, a woman completely perplexed by her life and its trappings. Being myself a sad person, I recognized that much. My own sadness isn’t something I admit to people. If someone asked, yes, I think I might. If someone noticed and inquired, I would explain — I think I would explain — that I am a fundamentally sad person, a fundamentally unlovable person, a person who spends her life longing for a number of things she cannot bring herself to name or define. Some people can. Some people are small reference works of their own obsessions and desires, constantly cross-indexed and brimming with information. They do not wait to be consulted, they just supply.
Others of us — and I include Mrs. Sweatt — do not. We are the truly sad, I think; just as in some religions, those who pray alone, who do penance and charity work alone, are the truly pious. Like the truly pious, we can recognize one another. Mrs. Sweatt and I were lonely, independent mourners.
But she was beautiful, and I was not. This is a vital difference. She grows more beautiful in my memory, looks more like James. True enough she is small and curvy and he tall and thin, but they have the same hair — though hers is blonder, by the grace of nature or science — the same upturned nose, the same pink pillowy lips. Young faces, much more alike in my memory than they ever were when alive.
They are both dead now, and I can make them look however I want.