The Confessions of Frances Godwin (9 page)

“Why do you pick these losers? Howard Banks, the visiting writer—I can’t even remember his name—who took you to New York. Brooklyn. I can’t remember them all.”

“Howie was not a loser. He was smart and he was fun and he was sexy and exciting, and he didn’t take any shit from anyone.”

“He got kicked out of school for cheating,” Paul said, “more than once, and he got arrested for breaking into the school one night and fucking with the bell system.”

“It was great,” Stella said. “In the morning the bells kept ringing every five minutes. Nobody knew what to do. Mr. Collins and the dorky assistant principal kept running up and down the halls shouting at everybody, trying to get us to stay in our classrooms. You should have seen Mr. Collins. His big moon face was as purple as a grape.”

Stella stopped talking and looked around. “I can’t believe we’re still fighting about Howie Banks,” she said. And then she said, “Merry Christmas,” and Paul told me to write a check and to get the money out of the credit union on Monday.

“Thanks, Pa,” she said. “It’s four thousand dollars.”

I wrote out a check and let the ink dry and handed it to Stella. She folded the check in half and put it in a wallet that she fished out of a black canvas tote bag, and then she was gone, and Paul and I were sitting next to each other on the couch. We didn’t say anything for a long time, and then Paul started to snooze and I cleared the dining room table and cleaned up the kitchen.

Can you imagine anything more sad? Even sadder than Vergil’s
lacrimae rerum
—the tears of things. I can’t. And yet I was able to step back from my own sadness, as I was wiping the counters, and observe it, as if I were watching a film, or reading a novel. And as I did so, I was aware of an undercurrent of joy. The kind of undercurrent you can sometimes hear in a Chopin étude or a Bach fugue. Our little drama was playing itself out against a background of joy. Our life together had been good. Sadness wasn’t the worst thing. What would have been really sad would have been if we hadn’t been sad at all.

5

Do Not Go Gentle (January–October 1996)

In the middle of January—Paul just back from his first round of chemo—the retired doctor who had lived in Loft #1 of the Seminary Street apartments from the time it was built died and his widow moved into the Kensington. We were on the waiting list and the Seminary Street office called. It was a beautiful apartment, with large windows looking out onto the street; “
proprio in centro
”
we might have said if it had been in Italy.
Right in the center of town.
A large living room, two bedrooms, two baths, walk-in closets in both bedrooms. Paul wasn’t impressed, till he saw the sports car in the garage. Under a tarp. The real estate agent and I struggled with the tarp. Paul wanted the car. The doctor’s widow didn’t want it. It had been sitting in the garage for thirty years. Paul hadn’t gotten his Mazda Miata, hadn’t gotten a Thunderbird or a Corvette. It was his bargaining chip. I gave in. He offered the widow the price of a new Mazda Miata, and she took it. It wasn’t a midlife crisis. It was a pre-death crisis. We put our house on the market.

Enjoy the elegance of this Victorian shingle style: Baccarat ­crystal chandelier, coffered ceiling and patterned parquet floor in dining room, four bedrooms, unreconstructed kitchen, side porch, balcony. Built in 1895. One of Galesburg’s premier homes.

We moved in February, before the house had been sold. I was teaching Roman Civ., and
Aeneid
ii, iv, and vi in Latin 4, plus an extra section of Beginning Latin, and Paul, still recovering from his first round of chemo, was on the phone every day with the young woman from the University of Illinois who’d been brought in to teach his classes and who had her own ideas about how to teach Shakespeare. So: it was a difficult time. Our first night in the new apartment was like a lot of first nights. Unsettling. Another milestone. Like your first night in your college dorm, like your wedding night, like lying in bed at night after the birth of your first child, like your first night at home after that child has gone off to college.

The piano, an old Blüthner grand with eighty-five keys, had been sold to a music store in the Quad Cities, traded, actually, for a good-quality Yamaha electronic piano. Paul and I had watched the men from the music store wrap up the piano and take it down the front steps, and then we had stood in the front window and watched them load it onto a smallish van.

“This is a mistake,” Paul had said, and I had thought maybe he was right, had thought maybe I should run out and stop them before they drove away. But I hadn’t. “It’s a done deal,” I said, and Paul started to cry. Just a little bit. Just a few tears. I had pretended not to notice.

More than two thousand books—eighty some banker’s boxes—had been sold to a dealer in Springfield. Another two thousand were in boxes in the garage. Paul’s old railroad desk, too big for the little “study,” was on the long interior wall that we shared with Lois. The movers had set up our bed in the bedroom, at the east end. Two windows opened onto the deck, but we were at the north end of the deck, so no one would be walking by our apartment. A sofa bed had been installed in the study, the rugs had been spread out on the floor, the furniture had been set in place. Everything else was in disarray. Lois was coming in the morning to help, and Sophia, my regular cleaning lady.

Lois called in the morning, before I left for school, and offered to do a shopping for us, and Paul asked her to get some scallops. He wanted to cook some scallops for supper that night, or if not scallops, then wild-caught shrimp. Cooking, for Paul, was a way of relieving stress, though he’d insisted on walking up the outside stairs instead of taking the elevator, and he was too tired. The cancer was announcing itself, making its presence felt. He was going to need oxygen pretty soon. His face was aging, the skin tightening over his cheek bones. His green eyes were looking larger and larger. He was losing weight. He sat in a rocking chair at the edge of the kitchen, wearing his favorite sports jackets—Brooks Brothers—and his Sulka tie, kibitzing while I tried to organize the kitchen.

There were no bread crumbs, no panko, but Lois brought butter and lemon. And we had a glass of wine while Paul told me what to do with the scallops.

Lois had bought enough scallops for all three of us. I sautéed them in butter, closely supervised by Paul, two minutes on a side, and we squeezed lemon over them and ate them on buttered toast. Delicious.

I got Paul set up at his desk with his Lincoln books and his Riverside Shakespeare, and for a while the new book and the NEH application seemed like real possibilities. Paul sent me to the college library for books and more books. The literature on Lincoln is enormous. Every item opened new doors, new corridors to be explored: Sandburg’s biography, the
Herndon Papers,
Charnwood’s
Abraham Lincoln,
journal articles that had to be photocopied.

Arthur Jamieson, a colleague from Knox’s Lincoln Center, stopped by once a week to chat. Paul wrote notes with Lois’s Mont Blanc roller ball, which he’d managed to hang on to, using one of his Clairefontaine notebooks with a deep red cover.

I transcribed them onto the computer. I don’t think of myself as a tech person, but I had mastered Microsoft Word, which had replaced Word Perfect. I set up function keys, and I created headings for the document map so Paul could move around the document freely.

The oxygen tank slowed him down. Once you start the oxygen, you have to keep on. The oxygen machine sat next to the door of the half bath. It had a very long plastic tube that could reach through the whole apartment, though it sometimes got tangled, like his shoelaces. If I wasn’t home, and Lois was out at the funeral home, Paul would have to call Cornucopia, the deli down below us, and one of the student workers would come up and untangle him. I arranged to have my lunch period free at the high school so I could check on him at noon. And Lois, of course, was always ready to help.

In the evenings we read Lucretius, in Rolfe Humphries’s fine translation; we read my translations of Catullus—and Paul knew enough Latin to ask intelligent questions about some of my choices
.
We read Shakespeare, too—Lincoln’s Shakespeare:
Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth.
Lincoln liked to recite the opening soliloquy of
Richard III
. He preferred Claudius’s “O, my offence is rank” in
Hamlet
to the famous soliloquies. And he kept coming back to Macbeth’s speech to his wife after the murder of Duncan: “Better be with the dead.”

What was Lincoln reaching for? What about Paul?

When Paul was especially agitated we read the copy of
Henderson the Rain King
that Stella had given him for Christmas, or, if the weather was clear and not too cold, we’d do some star hopping out on the deck with Stella’s telescope. I’d taken Astronomy for my science requirement at Knox, and we had the copies of Mike Lynch’s
Illinois StarWatch
and Terence Dickinson’s
Nightwatch: A Practical Guide to Viewing the Universe
that we’d given to Stella along with the telescope.

Paul wasn’t afraid of dying. It wasn’t fear that poisoned his last months; it was anger, and irritability. “Sixty-five years old,” he’d shout—though actually he was only sixty-four when he died—“and I can’t even untie my own shoes.”

“Why don’t you let me put in some new laces,” I would say. “Those laces are too long. That’s why they get tangled up when you pull on them, and they’re full of little knots.” But he didn’t want new laces; he wanted the old laces to work properly, and the new, shorter laces remained in a box on top of his dresser. They’re still there. His laces continued to tie themselves into knots till he couldn’t put his shoes on any longer and had to wear slippers or sandals with Velcro straps.

I came home at noon one cold, clear day in March and was surprised to find the garage door open. Paul, who was using a wheelchair now, had managed to wheel himself down to the garage and wrestle off the tarp that covered the sports car. He was sitting in the car, which was facing out, with his portable oxygen tank on his lap. I pulled the Cutlass Cruiser in beside him.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I want to drive around the parking lot,” he said. He was wearing a pair of leather driving gloves. “They were in the glove compartment,” he said.

The garage opened onto a city parking lot with entrances on Mulberry Street and Seminary Street and an exit onto Main Street. You could circle around.

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

“You’ll have to get a new battery first,” he said. “And change the oil, if there’s any oil in it.”

“Why don’t you call Jones and Archer. They’ll send someone over this afternoon, then we can drive around when I get home.”

“I want to do it now,” he said. “And I don’t want anyone else touching the car.”

“I grew up on a farm,” I said. “I know how to put in a new battery, but I can’t do it right now. George Hawkinson is coming to Roman Civ. to demonstrate the principles of the Roman arch. We’re going to start a model of the Pons Fabricius. Why don’t you take it easy this afternoon and I’ll put in a battery as soon as I get home.”

He wasn’t happy with this plan—there was no patience left in his system—but there wasn’t much he could do about it except call Jones and Archer (the garage on Kellogg Street where we had our Oldsmobile serviced), which he didn’t want to do.

“We’ll have to get more air in the tires, too,” I said. “We can use the pump we got for emergencies. If I can find it. The one you plug into the lighter. If there’s a lighter.”

A brown UPS truck drove past the garage. And then a semi backed into the loading dock of the furniture store to the north. The cab blocked the opening. We couldn’t have driven out even if the car had been ready to go. Paul started leaning on the horn, but no battery, no sound.

George Hawkinson, who taught physics, had a way of explaining arches and demonstrating bridge construction that never failed to engage my Latin students at all levels. It never failed to engage me.

How do you span a space? The Greeks depended on beams, which limited the space you could cover to the length and strength of your beams. Look at Agamemnon’s tomb at Mycenae! One long beam. The Etruscans had arches, of course, but no one else really explored the possibilities of arches till the Romans.

We rearranged the desks so everyone could see.

George already had his wooden centering, attached to a wooden base, on my desk at the front of the room. The centering would support the “stones” till the keystone of the arch was in place.

He constructed the arch by placing
voussoirs,
or wedge-shaped stones, made out of some kind of casting compound, around the wooden centering, dropped the keystone into place, and removed the centering.

The arch was very stable as long as you kept the wooden supports at the outer edges in place to contain the outward thrust. This is the key. An arch, unlike a beam, carries weight under compression, not tension. But you have to contain the outward thrust.

He invited one of the larger boys to press down on the top of the arch. The boy put a lot of weight on the arch without demolishing it. Impressive.