Wives & Lovers Read online

  “That little sour son of a bitch,” Henry muttered. “Who the hell was he, anyway? Who the hell asked for him.”

  Aunt Natalie said, “We asked for someone to lead us in a rosary. Be quiet.”

  “You know him?”

  “No. Please.”

  “I’m gonna find out who he is. Who his superiors are. They need to be apprised of the fact that he’s in the wrong line of work. The little stain.”

  “Keep your voice down,” Natalie said, “Please.”

  Brian took him by the upper arm, and Henry shook loose. “Don’t grab me like that.”

  “Will you please,” Natalie said.

  “Goddammit,” Henry said, low, beginning to cry. “That’s my mother.”

  “Henry,” Natalie said. “Elena would want you to stand straight.”

  He took the handkerchief out of his pocket again and dabbed at his eyes, then folded the handkerchief square and kept it in one hand, occasionally wiping it across his forehead. People began, tentatively, to come over and pay their respects, and talk about how it affected them to know Elena Hutton. Brian sat against the wall and watched everything. Henry decided, as everyone began to leave, that he wanted the casket opened, and no one could dissuade him. Brian moved to the entrance of the room while this went on—he wanted no part of it, did not want to remember Elena lying in that narrow satin-shiny space. Aunt Natalie and Norman stood with Henry and gazed into the open box, and Aunt Natalie sobbed. From where Brian stood, he could see only their backs and the open, padded lid of the coffin. He went out into the foyer, where the funeral director stood, quietly waiting to be of service. For some reason Brian felt sorry for him, so eager to help, so strangely apologetic in his motions. But neither man spoke. Outside, the sun was going down in a coal-colored nest of clouds. The weather reports were calling for more snow. Norman appeared in the entrance of the room, looking pale and shaky. He crossed to where Brian stood. “Jesus,” he muttered. “I don’t think it was quite real to me until I saw her there.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Brian said. “Please. For Christ’s sake.”

  The funeral director moved to the office on the left side of the foyer and entered, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “Look,” Norman said. “She led a nice rich lucky American life. She had more and saw more of life than most of us will ever get or see.”

  “Like you said,” Brian told him. “I still hate it.”

  Here were Aunt Natalie and Henry, teary-eyed, holding on to each other. Norman went to them and took Natalie’s other arm. They all walked to the doorway and Henry stopped, put his hands in his face, and wept. For a few seconds, no one moved, and then Norman put his hands on his father’s shoulder.

  “Dad,” he said.

  “I know, son,” said Henry. “I know. I wish Tom was here.”

  No one said anything to this.

  Henry looked back into the long prospect of the room, with the casket flanked by its escarpment of flowers at the far end. “I hate leaving her alone there.”

  “She’s not there,” said Natalie. “For God’s sake, Henry. Remember your catechism.”

  Henry shook his head, without looking at her.

  “That’s right,” Brian said to them all. “She’s not there. That isn’t her in there.”

  HE WALKED OUT INTO the cold with Aunt Natalie, holding her by the arm. There was a wind, now. Where the already fallen snow lay crusted, there had been some melting, and rivulets of water had come from the base of the mounds, forming ice in the cold twilight. They made their way unsteadily across to the two cars. Norman got in with Henry, and Aunt Natalie said she’d ride with Brian. When she and Brian were inside the car, she said, “I’ve heard from your mother.”

  Brian turned the key in the ignition, then looked at her.

  “She called from London.”

  “Dad didn’t talk to her?”

  “I asked if she would speak with him. No. That’s out of the question.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “As you know, she has her reasons, Brian.”

  He backed out after his father and followed him along the winding entrance road to the highway. The sun was below the stand of winter-bare trees to their left, and the branches looked like fretwork on the sky just above the dark line of the hills. “You don’t understand,” he told her. “I know more than you think I do. I was with her once, we were on our way into town to take me back to the dentist. I’d had a wisdom tooth pulled, and it ended up getting inflamed, and she took me back into town and we saw Henry with some woman, standing out in front of Littleton’s Tavern.”

  Aunt Natalie stared at him for a long time. He could feel her gaze on the side of his face. “How old were you?” she said.

  “Thirteen.”

  “You knew, at thirteen?”

  “Hell, I knew at six and seven. I didn’t understand it, maybe. But, Aunt Natalie, he was kissing that woman. I’d seen that kind of kissing in the movies and I knew what it meant.”

  “So,” she said. “You learned early.”

  He knew how she really meant this: Tillie was someone with whom he had cheated on his fourth wife; and the time with Tillie had been spoiled by that, as much as it had been spoiled by anything else. When a relationship begins in and is soaked in dishonesty, the dishonesty seeps into everything else. That was how it felt. Tillie had distrusted him from the beginning.

  He watched the tail lights of his father’s car, and realized that his Aunt was crying quietly there next to him in the dimness of the front seat. She fumbled with her purse and brought out a handkerchief.

  “Men,” she said.

  She had never been married. She had spent most of her adult life, the years which constituted her own passage into old age, working for the university and living with her mother—watching over her, really, and being watched over by her. And like her mother, she was devout; she was also straightforward. “I guess you can’t help it, coming from that house.”

  “Believe it or not,” he said. “They were actually pretty good together sometimes. When he wasn’t out catting—” He stopped himself, and reached over to touch her wrist. “Sorry.”

  She nodded.

  “When he wasn’t cheating on her and coming home drunk and she wasn’t drowning her own sorrow over all of it, they actually had fun. They enjoyed each other. And we had fun. When we were together, all of us, and sometimes it—well, it didn’t seem like anything could be wrong, you know.”

  “And you were learning at your Daddy’s knee.”

  “Please,” he said.

  “Well?”

  They rode on in silence for a few moments. She folded her hands on her lap and looked out the window.

  “Mom stayed with him, remember.”

  “She did a good job hiding her pain a lot of the time.”

  “No,” Brian said. “I knew when she was suffering. We all did. So did you. But there were times when she wasn’t suffering, whether she admits it or not.”

  “Are you angry with her?”

  “Most of the time,” he said, “I’m angry with both of them.”

  Aunt Natalie didn’t react to this. He thought of Elena, and reflected that this elderly, friendly presence at his side was becoming more like Elena all the time.

  Once, at a family gathering, Brian had been talking about the work of Richard B. Leakey in the Olduvai gorge, the theories about the killer ape that had evolved into Homo sapiens, and Elena had interrupted him to say, “How does this square with your belief in, say, the immaculate conception or the transubstantiation?”

  “Gram,” he had said. “This isn’t about religion.”

  “I wasn’t asking you a religious question,” Elena said. “I was curious.”

  “I’m almost thirty,” he told her. “And I’m still waiting for things to come clear.”

  “I’m seventy-four,” she said. “Think what I’m waiting for.”

  Remembering this, he looked at Aunt Natalie,
and then reached over and touched her wrist again. “You okay?”

  “Just thinking,” she said with a little sobbing sound.

  Presently, she said, “I saw Tillie.”

  “Dad told me she came by.”

  “Such a beautiful young woman.”

  “It’s all over, Aunt Natalie.”

  “Poor boy. I am sorry.”

  Another few moments passed. He turned the radio on, wanting the news; he got static, decided that this was not the time, and turned it off.

  “Are you still seeing this other person?”

  “No.”

  “Does Tillie know that?”

  “I don’t know whether she does or not.”

  “What was the other person’s name?”

  “Rose.”

  “Rose.”

  “Look,” Brian said. “Forget her, all right? Rose is gone. I haven’t seen her for weeks. Rose is the person I ruined this particular relationship with, but she’s gone.”

  “Did you make her leave?”

  “It was mutual, Aunt Natalie, if you must know.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I like Tillie.”

  “You didn’t like Tillie at first.”

  “No,” Aunt Natalie said. “I liked Marian.” Then she laughed. It came from her with the suddenness of a spell. She tried to talk through it, and failed, though he could hear that she meant to say she couldn’t understand why she was having this reaction, why it wouldn’t stop.

  He kept saying, “What? Tell me. What?”

  Finally she subsided, and managed to speak: “I know it’s not funny. But it—it just struck me that way: you weren’t even married to Tillie yet. Struck me funny.” When her voice hit falsetto on the last word, she burst into laughter again, and she went on for another minute. They were on Clooney Street before she could get control of herself. Finally, she cleared her throat. “You. And your father.”

  “He’s acting strange with me,” Brian told her. He hadn’t known he would say it. Something about her laughter had made him feel that he could confide in her.

  “I feel awful for him. He’s lost. He’s like a lost little boy.”

  “That’s how I feel,” said Brian.

  “I know.” She reached over and touched the side of his face. “Poor dear.”

  He pulled in behind his father’s car, and they got out. The porch lights were on, as was the spot light. The smoothness of the snow in the lawn made him think about the fact that this was a house where no children lived. Christmas candles shone in each of the upstairs windows. Elena had put them there two weeks before she died. Henry had paid some neighbor boys to shovel the sidewalk and part of the driveway. As at the funeral home, the shoveled snow had melted at its base, producing pools of water, which were all solid ice now. Henry led the way in, followed by Norman, with his duffel bag, Aunt Natalie, and Brian. On the porch, Brian turned and looked at the lawn. Norman stood next to him.

  “Look how undisturbed it is.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I used to love to run out and make my own trail in it. I still feel the urge. I swear.”

  “Nobody loves snow like you, Norman.”

  “Do you notice how the world seems—I don’t know—like it’s quieter?”

  Brian waited a moment. There was wind clicking the branches of the trees, and murmuring in the eaves of the house. “I guess.”

  “I mean there’s a quiet under all the noise.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “That hurt—seeing Dad like that.”

  “Me, too.”

  They stood there.

  Norman said, “Did you catch hell for smelling like whiskey?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Ironical, huh.”

  Their father called from the lighted foyer. “You guys just gonna stand out there in the cold?”

  They went inside. Aunt Natalie had put coffee on, and Henry was pouring small glasses of whiskey. He poured two. Norman gave Brian a look, then took his and drank it down.

  “You’re supposed to sip it,” Henry said.

  “You do it your way, and I’ll do it mine.”

  Henry laughed, and Natalie said, “I don’t suppose anyone wants coffee.”

  “I’ll have some,” Brian said.

  “I poured you a whiskey,” said Henry. “You don’t think this is for me.”

  The three men sat at the kitchen table, and then Brian got up and brought cups and saucers out of the cupboard. Henry and Natalie were drinking coffee. Norman poured another shot of whiskey for himself, and this time he sipped it. For a long time, they were quiet. Finally all of them were seated, with their coffee and whiskey. Aunt Natalie blew across the surface of her coffee and set the cup down. It clinked in the saucer, a tiny flourish announcing her intent to speak. “Well, it was a triumph of a life,” she said. “Somebody ought to say that.”

  She was the eldest, twelve years older than Henry, and almost seventy now herself. She looked around the room. “It’s going to be so strange.” She was on the verge of tears again.

  Henry put his hand on her shoulder, then took it away.

  “The best and kindest and most gracious soul I ever knew,” Norman said.

  “When I was nine or ten,” said Henry, “She broke her ankle. We were playing baseball in the yard, and we didn’t have a third baseman, so she volunteered. I must’ve told you all this story. She got a hit. God knows how. I mean she’d never swung a baseball bat in her life. And when she tried to slide into home, she broke her ankle. There were some guys working on a construction site nearby, and they took her to the doctor. What year was that? She had to be in her late forties or early fifties by then. Natalie, you’d gone away to school.”

  “If you were nine, it was 1951 and she was fifty-two.”

  “Good Lord. Fifty-two.”

  They were all quiet.

  “I never thought of her being older,” Henry said. “When my father met her, she was playing piano in this little movie house, for the silent flickers. Seventeen years old and she was doing it on the sly, telling her mother and father she was taking lessons. She was good on the thing, too. Natalie, what was that song she used to play that made you cry?”

  “‘I’ll Be Seeing You.’”

  “That’s it. Natalie would get tears in her eyes every time.”

  “When did she stop playing?” Brian wanted to know.

  “She never did stop, completely,” said Aunt Natalie. “I could still get her to play a polonaise now and then.”

  “I remember that,” said Norman, pouring more whiskey for himself. “Sure.”

  “Aunt Viola used to get her to play all the time,” Henry said. “Though Viola didn’t like a lot of different kinds of music. Remember how angry she’d get, Natalie, when Elena would hit the boogie woogie?”

  “Or the movie stuff—the music she played when the villain was chasing the hero. Doodily-oo, doodily-oo, doo-doo, like that. That used to send Aunt Viola up the wall.”

  Henry laughed, his eyes brimming. “She used to do those notes just as Aunt Viola walked across the floor. Aunt Viola would tell her she ought to be whipped with briars.”

  Norman poured still more of the whiskey, and offered it to Brian, who refused. He was worried about the drive home. But then he changed his mind and poured his own. His brother nodded at him, smiling. Brian drank the whiskey down.

  Their father was talking now about his father, whom he never knew. “Elena used to tell me stories about him, you know, but there were things I guess she never told anybody about him. She never got married again, and there were a lot of men who wanted to over the years.”

  “Nothing ever seemed to scare her,” Norman said.

  “Oh,” said Aunt Natalie. “There was plenty. Believe me. She just dealt with it.”

  “She knew how to contend with it,” Brian began. “I’d have a health scare and I’d think of her, and somehow—”

  His father interrupted him. “There is
n’t any bravery without fear. Fear is what the coward and the hero have in absolutely the same amount.”

  “Now is when Elena would tell us—with that sly smile, remember?—to open up our hymnals.”

  “She’d agree with what I said,” Henry told him. “She wouldn’t make light of that.”

  Aunt Natalie turned to Norman. “How long can you stay?”

  “Oh, I’ve got to go back after tomorrow.”

  “That was a nice turnout today.”

  Brian poured himself another whiskey. “Dad.”

  “Not for me,” Henry said.

  “I wanted to ask you something.”

  Henry simply stared back at him. Then: “Well?”

  “I just wondered—I wondered if I’ve said anything or done anything wrong.”

  Henry said nothing.

  “I have this—something’s not right, Dad.”

  “I lost my mother,” he said, simply, no expression at all in his face. “What—what the hell’re you talking about, Brian? Why the hell can’t you leave it alone.”

  “Then there is something. You’re angry with me about something.”

  “You’re both dealing with this in your own way,” Aunt Natalie told them. “And it’s a little difficult to accept it that Tommy and Lorraine aren’t here, either.”

  “Tommy sure ought to be,” said Norman.

  “Let it alone,” Henry muttered, pouring himself more coffee.

  Brian looked at his father and waited for eye contact. Aunt Natalie and Norman started talking about some of the people who visited the home, and when they got to the priest, Henry joined in. Henry was adamant that something should be done about the little shit of a priest.

  Brian said, “Dad.”

  Henry went on talking: “The son of a bitch is probably a pedophile.”

  “Dad,” Brian said.

  Henry looked at him and then looked away as Aunt Natalie remarked that she saw the priest say Mass once or twice a month. “His sermons are always so dry and academic. And I don’t think he believes democracy was the best development in the world’s history, either. The freedom of humankind doesn’t seem to interest him much.”