He looked back up the slope to the house standing on the grass, high and spacious and beautiful. The screen door on the screened porch was propped open, and two of the screened windows on the second floor were open, he did not know why. He thought how good it would be to return to the house after his swim, to walk up the grass and go inside and sit in the big empty pine-smelling rooms and enjoy the warming up after the chill. Then they could talk, all he remembered that he wanted to tell them. He wanted to tell her about her arms swinging as she walked up to the house. He wanted to ask if they had ever quarreled. He couldn’t remember and he hoped not. He wondered if he was ever jealous, he thought probably not, and if she was jealous of him, he hoped not, for he did not think he had ever given her cause. He wanted to tell her he remembered the blueberry field and something after that, he had forgotten.
But not yet, first there was this. Only their heads were above the surface, laughing and encouraging him, as he moved gingerly in the bitter cold water step by step toward them. It was hard to move, while they waited with such generosity and welcome he could hardly bear his happiness. With all his strength he pushed on, while the ice kept rising. It rose from his ankles to his knees, from his knees to his groin and groin to hips. It seized him freezing around his belly. It crept up to his chest, it covered his heart, it clutched his neck. Then still rising still freezing it reached his mouth and filled his nose and closed his burning eyes.
NINE
The book ends. Susan has watched it dwindle before her eyes, down through final chapter, page, paragraph, word. Nothing remains and it dies. She is free now to reread or look back at parts, but the book is dead and will never be the same again. In its place, whistling through the gap it left, a blast of wind like liberty. Real life, coming back to get her.
She needs a silence before returning to herself. Absolute stillness, no thought, no interpretation or criticism, just a memorial silence for the reading life that has ended. Later she’ll think about it. She’ll put things together, make sense of her reading, and decide what to say to Edward. Not yet.
There’s a shock of terror in the return of real life, concealed by her reading, waiting to swoop down on her like a predator in the trees. She dodges it—not yet for that, either. The kids upstairs, who came back in the middle of the last chapter: it’s their time now. She hears them laughing and squealing. She puts the cover on the box, the box on the shelf, checks the rooms, the front and back doors, turns off the lights, starts up.
They are all three on the floor in Rosie’s room, Rosie in her pajamas. Dorothy’s and Henry’s faces are unnaturally red.
“Hi, Mama,” Dorothy says. “Guess what?”
“Henry’s in love,” Rosie says.
He is grinning, triumph overruling embarrassment.
“How exciting,” she says. “Who with?”
“Elaine Fowler,” Dorothy says.
“That’s news? Why, Henry’s been in love with Elaine Fowler for the last year.”
Rosie looks disappointed. Henry mumbles. “This is different.”
Dorothy says, “It’s moved into a new phase.”
“A new phase. How wonderful.”
“What did you do this evening, Mama?” Dorothy says.
Susan Morrow is startled. “Me? Why, nothing. I finished my book.”
“How was it? Good?”
She’s not ready for that question. But she’s back in the real world, where it’s time to discriminate and be responsible. “Sure,” she says. “It’s good enough.”
Later, her mind loosens and the book liquefies. It’s impossible to say when. Maybe when she’s in bed, the house dark. More likely earlier, subliminally when she closed the house or while talking to the children. It’s impossible to pin her thought to a time or unfold it in a sequence.
Still conscious that some frightening reality has been planted in her mind, she postpones it still, to dwell longer in the book. She remembers her pang for Tony in the last sentences like a stab of personal grief. The sharpness fades when she thinks about it, as such things do. The water scene at the end reminds her of something. But does she understand why Tony has to die? She looks back, sees the path leading to death, its shape through the woods. He was on the way to Maine, he gets there in the end. She likes the ending better than she expected to, but has no idea if it’s right, or whether it resolves the questions raised. That requires recollection and thought she’s not ready for, if she’ll ever be, for now she’s not even sure it matters. If she asks Edward, he’ll think her dumb.
Forgetfulness follows the trail of her reading like birds eating the Hansel and Gretel crumbs. The path from the beginning is obliterated with weeds. It has buried the bodies of Tony Hastings’s wife and child and will bury Tony too. She tries to remember things. Helen on the rock fifty feet down the road, poor kid. Helen as Dorothy, as Henry too. Ray the weasel, where did he come from? Remember Tony miserable looking up the slope to Husserl’s: what made you name the neighbor that? Tony, man of postures, she’s ashamed of her superiority as she sees him flip from one stance to another, looking to clothe a burning body when it was the icing water he needed. Susan as Tony.
She knows that mountain road as if she had been there herself. Sees it with the same clarity blind Tony saw the tree he shot. The clearing, the mannequins, the trailer by the curve in the road. And Tony staggering over the bulky body of Ray. But around such spots as these the acid burns, the pages crumple.
There’s a feeling of loose ends hanging, but she finds it hard to remember. She wonders what happened outside the story. Back at the camp: what tale did Bobby finally tell his men? Did they buy it? Would it matter? Louise Germane, left behind and forgotten, it’s just as well for her.
The house in Maine with its porch and screens looks like her house, which Edward visited at fifteen and again when they were married. All those screens. She sees Tony looking at it in his dim archetypal blindness, and she feels meanings around her which she cannot see. She wonders if they are real or only her imagination and how long it will take her, if ever, to know.
She wants to talk, she doesn’t want to talk. What can she say? She’s ashamed to tell Edward how blind she feels. If readers could simply applaud and writers bow. She can do that. She can applaud, she can honestly tell Edward she liked his book, and that’s a relief. Postpone the critique. She had fun and felt regret when it ended. That will please him. Would you recommend it to your friends? Depends on the friend. Would you recommend it to Arnold? Sure she would. It would serve him right.
The secret fright she keeps dodging in her mind somewhere: that’s her private problem. It has nothing to do with the book.
AFTER
ONE
Arnold is coming, and then Edward. Susan Morrow is tense enough to take her breath away. She feels the contempt of each for the other as if for herself. Arnold thinks Edward a failure, always has. When they last met, years ago by accident at a play in Chicago, Arnold bought Edward a drink. He slapped him on the back, talked of cultural values and judged him effete. Edward ignored Arnold’s objections to obscurity in art, avoided the contemporary, changed the subject to baseball, and judged him simple.
She does the work of her day, kids to the dentist, groceries, with plans to meet Arnold at O’Hare in the evening. Frightened by what Arnold may be bringing home to her, the possible terrors, she turns her mind to Edward, who comes tomorrow. The critique he expects from her, the questions he expects her to ask, which she has postponed.