Eden Close (16 page)

He stands in front of her bureau, with his hands on the brass pulls of the top drawer. It is an oak piece, heavy and Victorian. He has never looked in this drawer, and it has about it, for him, a sense of the forbidden, a sense of the
child stealing into the secrets of the adult. His father had a similar drawer—has it still, Andrew supposes, having not yet tackled his father's bureau—which Andrew, as a boy,
did
investigate one night when his parents were at the movies. He must have been young, no more than nine or ten, for he remembers the thrill of discovering a package of Trojans and knowing they were, in some way, connected with sex, but not understanding (not allowing his mind to compose the picture) precisely how. And certain—he laughs now to think of it—that his father was merely keeping them for someone else.

The drawer slides noiselessly open as if it had been waxed only yesterday. The contents are precise and neat, rectangles and squares of differing sizes, arranged to fit in an intimate puzzle. Her spirit was not, he knows now, in her papers, which bear the mark of carelessness and neglect, but here in her top drawer—her treasures laid out as if she were saying to herself or to anyone who might open the drawer:
This is me.
There is an aging, ivory-colored satin nightgown, deftly folded in the left-hand corner, and on it a string of pearls with a diamond clasp, a gift from his father to her on their wedding night. There is a small pink quilted jewelry case behind the nightgown, and to its right a thin packet of letters, postmarked 1943 and 1944: letters from his father in France during World War II. In the right-hand corner are his own baby things: an infant's hand-embroidered playsuit, a pair of tiny brown leather shoes, a baby book with notes and photographs sticking out of it. He has seen this before. He remembers the night his mother brought it out to share with Martha when Martha was six months pregnant with Billy, and how complete he had felt then with his mother and his wife huddled together and with his child coming.

In the center of the drawer there is a cream-colored folder. It, too, is overfull and wants someone to open it, and so he
does. In it there are newspaper clippings, mostly of himself in his hockey uniform, and certificates and papers marking a boy's progress through childhood: a homemade valentine for his mother, a second-grade spelling paper with "100" on it, a letter announcing he'd made the National Honor Society.

He puts the heels of his palms on his eyes and rubs them. These were her treasures: a wedding night nightgown, mementoes of her only baby, the milestones of her boy's childhood. No secret love letters from another man; no mysterious rings with enigmatic inscriptions; no vials of tranquilizers; no risque underwear; no diaries giving clues to bouts of rage or bitterness. Though she has to have had an interior monologue he will never hear, she has put away the tangible evidence of the simple pleasures he has imagined for her. He sits on the edge of the bed and stares blankly at the opened drawer. What will he do with these things? he wonders helplessly. Where will he take them?

There is so much now he'd like to ask of and say to his mother, so much left unsaid these last dozen years, when his own life, his own self-centered concerns—his work, his lapsing marriage, his fatherhood—caused him to think of her less and less, as if she were not as substantial as she'd been, a memory already beginning to fade; and this house, paradoxically, receding further and further into the distance, though you could reach it today, on the thruway extension, an hour sooner from the city than a decade ago.

There was a time, when he was a boy, when he used to think that he could absolutely not survive his parents' deaths, that if they were to die together in a car crash, he, too, would spiral into nothingness. Now it is his son's death he cannot bear to think of or imagine, reading as he does with benumbed horror reports of children with leukemia or falling from open windows. When Billy was five, one of his classmates was struck and killed by a school bus while the mother
watched from her front door. The boy, who had been taught always to walk in front of the bus, had dashed behind it instead—no one knew why, except that he was only five—and the driver (a youngish woman with a spotless record, a mother herself) had backed up over him. For a week, the school had hired a psychiatrist to ride the bus with Billy and the other children in the event any of them should show disturbing signs that the tragedy had affected them too deeply. But it wasn't the children who needed the shrink, Andrew thought. It was the parents, like himself, who repeated the tale to each other and to their friends and colleagues over the phone, at the office or in their kitchens for days, as if talking about it endlessly would keep it at bay.

He walks to the window, drawn there by a tease of sunlight on the floor. Though it is still raining, the clouds are moving fast overhead, allowing the sun to break through here and there. The rain will pass any minute now, he knows, and he will go outside. He loves the earth after a fresh rain, has always loved it.

She will be waiting for him.

He checks his watch. Nine-oh-five. Less than an hour to go. He could tinker some with the gutter to pass the time.

He leans his shoulder on the window, his hands in his pockets, and looks over at the other house. A wash of sunlight, like the flight of a bird, passes over the roof and is gone.

He wonders where she would be now had the shooting never happened. If the rapist had not stolen into Eden's room, and Jim, in turn, not blundered after him, who might she be? Wild, as DeSalvo suggested? A married woman, with two children, mired in a loveless marriage? A waitress? A whore? Or would she have rescued herself—or someone have rescued her—so that she might be happily married now in
Boston? Or acting in Los Angeles? Or working, perhaps, in New York, like himself. Might they have met by accident on a street corner or in a bar?

As she is, he thinks, she's oddly pure—untouched, unmade.

 

H
E WAITS
by his own kitchen door out of sight, shaded by the screen. It is quarter to. Within seconds, Edith Close will open the door he is watching, make her way down the steps and enter the Plymouth. He checks his watch again, the tenth time in fifteen minutes, and as he does so, he feels faintly ridiculous. A grown man, hiding behind a screen door, unwilling to confront an aging, impotent woman.

He sees a sliver of pink cotton, a flash of gold on a wrist. Of course. Sensible woman. Edith Close has come around from the front of the house to avoid the rotted back stoop. With the sun behind her, he cannot see her face, though she seems not to glance in his direction. Eden won't have mentioned him, then. He didn't think she would. He watches Edith Close back her car carefully out the drive, as he has seen her do several times this week, as she does every day of the year, according to his mother's reports. Angled toward town, she puts the old Plymouth into first and heads south along the straight road to the nursing home.

Even though he could go now, he waits a bit behind the door. A thick peaceful hush settles over the two houses—or does he merely imagine that it does? He hears a buzzing; in the summer there is always a buzzing in the cornfields off in the distance and, closer, the continual hum and whine of insects in the weedy perennials, but this is part of the hush, the hush of two lonely houses set apart from town with only the whiz of a car or, seldom now, a human voice to rattle the quiet. He shuts his eyes and inclines his head toward the screen, listening intently, as Eden might do, this her only
world, as cacophonous and distracting as the noise of the city if only he could hear as she does, if only he could tease out the differing sounds and their meanings.

Edith Close will not come back for a sweater or a forgotten purse, he decides. She hasn't done so once this week, so why today? He lets the door slam, to announce his intentions, and walks across the spongy wet grass, soaking his old sneakers. Unlike yesterday, his walk is slow and deliberate, and when he reaches the rotting stoop, he picks his way up over it with care.

He raps once lightly on the door and almost simultaneously opens it. He enters the kitchen, unhurried, again nearly blinded by the gloom. Then he sees her, an image in a photographer's tray, emerging into focus.

Later that night, lying in bed, unable to sleep, or bending to the fridge for a beer, Andrew will recall again the swift surprise of her presence, her back resting against the sink, her arms folded across her chest. It wasn't that he hadn't expected her; he had known she would be waiting for him. It was that her proximity, after all these years, was deeply unsettling, as if a fragment of a dream, a dream he'd thought he lost years ago, had indeed turned out to be real.

 

"H
ELLO
," she says.

She is holding herself still, her gaze seemingly directed toward a window beside him.

"I wanted to see you," he says. He shakes his head. "To speak with you, I mean." He stands in the center of the linoleum floor, uncertain as to whether he should sit at the table, make himself at home, or not. She has not invited him to. Perhaps, he thinks, she has no sense now, as he does, of the awkwardness of a conversation conducted standing stiffly face to face. Though she cannot see him, he feels uneasy in
front of her. His arms and hands are appendages that seem no longer to belong to him. He folds them across his chest in unconscious parody of her stance.

"I thought. Yes," she says elliptically.

A quick intake of air she cannot fail to hear betrays his nervousness. "So how are you?" he asks. It is an inane question, and instantly he regrets it.

She gives the faintest of shrugs. "I am always all right," she says evenly.

He searches for the next sentence as if hunting for a trail that will lead him out of an unfamiliar wood. All his choices seem lame.

"It's been a long time," he says.

She doesn't answer him. Instead she turns her head so that she is looking at him so acutely he wonders fleetingly if perhaps he has got it wrong—and she
can
see after all. Her stare is uncompromising. He tries to imagine what it is that she "sees": his presence must be to her a voice in a vast inky sea.

"Your mother is dead," she says.

Her words startle him. The sentence is bald, unadorned. Almost unfeeling. But he realizes that he likes the frank statement. Likes not hearing an expression of sympathy, likes not hearing the words
I'm sorry
for the hundredth time. The fact is a simple one: His mother is dead, and she has said only that.

"Yes. We had the funeral. Your mother came. Did she tell you?"

"She tells me ... some things. But you always did that."

"What?"

"Call her my mother."

"Well, she's..."

"Not."

He nods. He realizes she cannot see the nod. "Right," he says.

It will take some time to learn how to speak to her, he thinks. Everything must be in the voice.

"Jim died here," she says.

Another bald sentence, one that takes him by surprise. During his three brief visits to this house, Andrew has not thought of this fact, but, of course, he knows it is true. Jim died in this house, on the floor upstairs, and Andrew's father found him. He has a sudden, too vivid image of Edith Close being pressed to the ground by the ambulance attendants, of Eden with a bloodstained towel at her head, of his father with the rifle limp beside his leg.

"You have a wife and child," she says, her gaze sliding a few degrees off his face.

Perhaps it is having been alone for so long that reduces her sentences to this simplicity, he thinks. She has lost the etiquette of conversation, having had, he supposes, no experience with small talk. If it were T.J., or anyone else, the sentence would have been looser: "So I hear you're married"—something with a tone of familiarity.

"No," he explains, trying to answer her with equally honest sentences. "I have a son but no wife. We're separated. I live alone, and I see Billy, my son, on weekends."

"I won't have a son," she says.

She says it quickly, without emotion, though it brings him up short. He wants to say, too glibly,
Of course you will,
as he might to almost anyone else, but her statement rings so true he cannot form a reply.

He shifts his weight. He glances down at his feet, then looks at her again. He tries to take it in. All the years spent here. All the days inside this house while he was away; all the years, while he was in college, in the city, at his home in Saddle River. He thinks of what he has had—the grown-up toys and trinkets, the days filled with color and people and work, while she has had only this. Who can calculate, he thinks, even the accumulated weight of one single day: a hundred colors seen in a glance out a kitchen window; a dozen lives witnessed in one brisk walk through an office; the complex wealth of a meal with a wife and child. While her days seem to him, appear to him, impoverished by contrast—weightless, undistinguishable one from the other. Or is he wrong? Is there in her slow universe a life as rich as, even richer than, his own?

Yet for all his advantages, he has the distinct feeling of being at a disadvantage. There is a reality here that he is unprepared for—one seeming to have little to do with the minutiae of the life he has left behind. It is in keeping, he thinks, with the way he has been feeling lately, the way he sometimes does on vacation, the workaday world he has left on hold receding hour by hour so that it seems like something from another period of his life, so that he is no longer sure which
is
his real life, that or this. His world now, circumscribed by the two houses, far from the screening room and the noise of telephones, far from the Thai restaurant where he usually lunches and from the banter of men in offices, is this tiny piece of geography and the three women who have inhabited it for all of the nineteen years he has been gone.

He examines her. He is a voyeur, seeing what she cannot see. She is taller, he observes, but not very tall at all—perhaps five feet four or five feet five. Her arms and legs are slender, her abdomen nonexistent, like a girl's. Meeting her on the street, one would find it impossible to guess her age.