“I guess I don’t know,” I say. Though in truth I would love to be able to say Couldn’t happen, not on a bet, not this boy. Except what I do say is nearer to the truth. And just as quick, the silky-summery smell is gone, and the smell of dirt and stolid monuments has won back its proper place. In the quavery gray dawn a window lights up beyond the fence on the third floor of my house. Bosobolo, my African boarder, is awake. His day is beginning and I see his dark shape pass the window. Across the cemetery in the other direction I see yellow lights in the caretaker’s cottage, beside which sits the green John Deere backhoe used for dredging graves. The bells of St. Leo the Great begin to chime a Good Friday prayer call. “Christ Died Today, Christ Died Today” (though I believe it is actually “Stabat Mater Dolorosa”).
“I think I’ll get married again,” X says matter-of-factly. Who to, I wonder?
“Who to?” Not — please — one of the fat-wallet 19th-hole clubsters, the big hale ’n’ hearty, green-sports-coat types who’re always taking her on weekends to the Trapp Family Lodge and getaways to the Poconos, where they take in new Borscht Belt comedians and make love on waterbeds. I hope against all hope not. I know all about those guys. The children tell me. They all drive Oldsmobiles and wear tasseled shoes. And there is every good reason to go out with them, I grant you. Let them spend their money and enjoy their discretionary time. They’re decent fellows, I’m sure. But they are not to be married.
“Oh, a software salesman, maybe,” X says. “A realtor. Somebody I can beat at golf and bully.” She smiles at me a mouth-down smirky smile of unhappiness, and bunches her shoulders to wag them. But unexpectedly she starts to cry through her smile, nodding toward me as if we both knew about it and should’ve expected this, and that in a way I am to blame, which in a way I am.
The last time I saw X cry was the night our house was broken into, when, in the search for what might’ve been stolen, she found some letters I’d been getting from a woman in Blanding, Kansas. I don’t know why I kept them. They really didn’t mean anything to me. I hadn’t seen the woman in months and then only once. But I was in the thickest depths of my dreaminess then, and needed — or thought I did — something to anticipate away from my life, even though I had no plans for ever seeing her and was in fact intending to throw the letters away. The burglars had left Polaroid pictures of the inside of our empty house scattered about for us to find when we got back from seeing The Thirty-Nine Steps at the Playhouse, plus the words, “We are the stuffed men,” spray-painted onto the dining room wall. Ralph had been dead two years. The children were with their grandfather at the Huron Mountain Club, and I was just back from my teaching position at Berkshire College, and was hanging around the house more or less dumb as a cashew, but otherwise in pretty good spirits. X found the letters in a drawer of my office desk while looking for a sock full of silver dollars my mother had left me, and sat on the floor and read them, then handed them to me when I came in with a list of missing cameras, radios and fishing equipment. She asked if I had anything to say, and when I didn’t, she went into the bedroom and began tearing apart her hope chest with a claw hammer and a crowbar. She tore it to bits, then took it to the fireplace and burned it while I stood outside in the yard mooning at Cassiopeia and Gemini and feeling invulnerable because of dreaminess and an odd amusement I felt almost everything in my life could be subject to. It might seem that I was “within myself” then. But in fact I was light years away from everything.
In a little while X came outside, with all the lights in the house left shining and her hope chest going up the chimney in smoke — it was June — and sat in a lawn chair in another part of the dark yard from where I was standing and cried loudly. Lurking behind a large rhododendron in the dark, I spoke some hopeful and unconsoling words to her, but I don’t think she heard me. My voice had gotten so soft by then as to be inaudible to anyone but myself. I looked up at the smoke of what I found out was her hope chest, full of all those precious things: menus, ticket stubs, photographs, hotel room receipts, place cards, her wedding veil, and wondered what it was, what in the world it could’ve been drifting off into the clear spiritless New Jersey nighttime. It reminded me of the smoke that announced a new Pope— a new Pope! — if that is believable now, under those circumstances. And in four months I was divorced. All this seems odd now, and far away, as if it had happened to someone else and I had only read about it. But that was my life then, and it is my life now, and I am in relatively good spirits about it. If there’s another thing that sportswriting teaches you, it is that there are no transcendent themes in life. In all cases things are here and they’re over, and that has to be enough. The other view is a lie of literature and the liberal arts, which is why I did not succeed as a teacher, and another reason I put my novel away in the drawer and have not taken it out.
“Yes, of course,” X says and sniffs. She has almost stopped crying, though I have not tried to comfort her (a privilege I no longer hold). She raises her eyes up to the milky sky and sniffs again. She is still holding the nibbled egg. “When I cried in the dark, I thought about what a big nice boy Ralph Bascombe should be right now, and that I was thirty-seven no matter what. I wondered about what we should all be doing.” She shakes her head and squeezes her arms tight against her stomach in a way I have not seen her do in a long time. “It’s not your fault, Frank. I just thought it would be all right if you saw me cry. That’s my idea of grief. Isn’t that womanish?”
She is waiting for me to say a word now, to liberate us from that old misery of memory and life. It’s pretty obvious she feels something is odd today, some freshening in the air to augur a permanent change in things. And I am her boy, happy to do that very thing — let my optimism win back a day or at least the morning or a moment when it all seems lost to grief. My one redeeming strength of character may be that I am good when the chips are down. With success I am worse.
“Why don’t I read a poem,” I say, and smile a happy old rejected suitor’s smile.
“I guess I was supposed to bring it, wasn’t I?” X says, wiping her eyes. “I cried instead of bringing a poem.” She has become girlish in her tears.
“Well, that’s okay,” I say and go down into my pants pockets for the poem I have Xeroxed at the office and brought along in case X forgot. Last year I brought Housman’s “To An Athlete Dying Young” and made the mistake of not reading it over beforehand. I had not read it since I was in college, but the title made me remember it as something that would be good to read. Which it wasn’t. If anything, it was much too literal and dreamily so about real athletes, a subject I have strong feelings about. Ralph in fact had not been much of an athlete. I barely got past “townsman of a stiller town,” before I had to stop and just sit staring at the little headstone of red marble, incised with the little words RALPH BASCOMBE.
“Housman hated women, you know,” X had said into the awful silence while I sat. “That’s nothing against you. I just remembered if from some class. I think he was an old pederast who would’ve loved Ralph and hated us. Next year I’ll bring a poem if that’s okay.”
“Fine,” I had answered miserably. It was after that that she told me about my writing a novel and being a loner, and having wanted to join the LPGA back in the sixties. I think she felt sorry for me — I’m sure of it, in fact — though I also felt sorry for myself.