The Widow's Season (6 page)

She supposed it was foolish, to have gotten married so young. If she had lived on her own for a few years, she would have been more prepared for her present solitude. But two things in life could never be scheduled—love and death. And anyway, the foolishness of her youth was happier than all the calculations of her middle age.

Sarah put the portfolio down and moved on to David’s recent work in the bin, oil landscapes with fuzzy boundaries between trees, river, and sky. Here were the Blue Ridge Mountains that stretched east of Jackson, fold after fold of purple and gray. And here was Stuart’s Pass, cutting through the Alleghenies that slanted in the west. None of David’s work was abstract; one could always say with certainty, “Here is a cliff, here is a chimney,” but everything was subject to motion and change.

She stopped at a painting of a dark-haired man in his forties—David’s only self-portrait, and not his best work. The features were correct, but the mouth lay flat and empty. Only the eyes were alive, challenging her with a slight sense of humor. Staring into them was like opening a porthole on a sinking ship.

She turned at a creak of the stairs, and found Nate watching her.

“David did beautiful work.” He crossed the room and looked over her shoulder. “When we were kids he was always drawing—everything he saw—people, plants, things in the house. He said he’d be an artist when he grew up.”

Sarah nodded. “He was still considering it in college. But he didn’t think he could support himself as a painter. Or he couldn’t support a family.”

But there had been no family. No soft-skinned infants. No baby hands with dimples where the knuckles should have been. No orthodontist bills or college savings plans, soccer camp or music lessons. Only an increasingly dissatisfied wife, turning inward.

“I think it was a cop-out,” Nate went on. “People who sell themselves short always use the family as an excuse. He should have stuck with his dreams.”

Of course, thought Sarah. How easy it is to romanticize the life of the artist when you’re driving your Mercedes back to your luxury condo.

“He was a very good doctor.” She flipped past David’s portrait, into more landscapes.

“Yes, but there are lots of very good doctors around.” Nate wouldn’t let it go. “Painting was his gift. He should have kept at it.”

Should have, should have—her life’s mantra. She pulled out a landscape, the view from the back of their cabin. To the right, a fishing pole leaned against the railing of a short dock. To the left, the river disappeared behind a row of sycamores.

“Have you been back to the cabin?” Nate asked.

“Margaret and I went out there the week after the flood. I had a notion that I wanted to lie down on the last bed that David slept in. You could see where he had been the night before, the covers were just yanked up, and the sheets were poking out.”

Nate smiled. “David never liked to make his bed.”

“Yes, so I tucked the sheets under the mattress and straightened out the bedspread. I folded the covers down and fluffed the pillows. I guess it was sort of silly, but Margaret was great. She helped unplug all the appliances and empty the trash. David left a lot of stuff like apples and bread and milk, so we had to clean out the refrigerator. And on the easel there was an unfinished painting of geese on the river. One brush was still soaking in a jar of water, like he thought he’d come back in a few days.”

Why was she telling him all of this? Her shoulders trembled and Nate stretched out his arms, but she held up her palm. “It’s all right, I’m okay.” She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Do you think you’ll go back there again?”

She nodded. There was something appealing about the cabin’s solitary quiet, the retreat from Jackson’s manicured fishbowl. “I’ll have to go back, because I left David’s paintings on the walls, and I’ll need them for the exhibit.”

“I got your note about that. When is the opening?”

“In about three weeks, on the Friday before Thanksgiving. You should be getting a postcard in the mail any day now. Have you ever seen the local gallery?”

“No.”

“It’s not much compared to what you’d find in Washington or New York, but it’s nice enough. The owner, Judith Keen, used to be a curator at the National Gallery before she moved out here. She’s a friend of ours.”

“Acquaintance” was more accurate. Judith hadn’t even known that David painted until she came to the house in August on a condolence call. Normally Judith shied away from locals who pursued art as a casual hobby. They came a dime a dozen in Jackson—retired women who roamed cow pastures with brushes and palettes and folding chairs.

Sarah had been surprised when Judith pitched the idea of a one-man show. The gesture seemed too sentimental for the high-brow curator, with her tight skirts and high heels and blouses all black and white like some sandy-haired version of Cruella de Vil. Her gallery was supposed to be a beacon in the wilderness, and the most David had ever done with his art was to donate a few paintings to local charity auctions. But Judith had oohed and ahhed so much when she saw the paintings in their house, praising David’s use of light, and insisting “I had no
idea
,” that Sarah had agreed, an exhibit would be a nice tribute.

She put the landscape back into the bin and stepped aside. “Find a few you’d like for yourself. And you should look through these photographs. They’re all from your family.” She lifted some albums from the bookshelves and placed them on the table beside the couch. “Would you like a drink? I’m going upstairs.” Nate shook his head and she retreated in search of Chardonnay.

An hour later Nate had chosen a dozen pictures and two paintings. One was an oil landscape with a barn and fence, beautifully done, though Sarah never would have guessed that the subject would appeal to him. The other was a watercolor of Helen, David and Nate’s mother, bent over a garden of daylilies.

“Yes, that one is nice.” She should have known that he would choose it. Helen was the great love of Nate’s life; beside her, all girlfriends shriveled to insignificance. She used to come to Virginia to flee the winters of her native Vermont, made so much colder after her husband’s heart attack. Many evenings while David was off at medical emergencies, Sarah and Helen had spent hours by the fire, comparing book-club lists, lamenting the state of undergraduate grammar, and sharing stories about the McConnell brothers.

Nate never knew how much his mother admired him, how she had marveled at his beauty as he grew from toddler to teenager, wondering how her body could have produced such symmetry. Sometimes when he exited a room Helen would raise her eyebrows at Sarah and say: “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” Keats’s line had a wonderfully ironic ring on those days when Nate was feeling sullen; his mother’s presence had a way of reducing him to sulky petulance.

If Helen had lived, Sarah now thought, Nate could have been the only son. He could have monopolized his mother’s attention, become her raison d’être. Or perhaps a dead brother would have been harder to compete with than a living one? Regardless, Helen had succumbed to breast cancer three years ago, leaving her sons without that point in the family triangle to hold them together. In the last year, the two brothers had scarcely spoken.

Sarah knew that it was a betrayal, to let Nate acquire this symbol of love between David and his mother. David had completed Helen’s portrait as a Mother’s Day gift, trumping Nate’s fresh flowers with these painted lilies. But Nate would treasure it; all images of Helen were sacred.

“Keep them for the exhibit.” Nate put both of the paintings back into the bin. “Just mark them for me.”

 

 

 

By late afternoon Sarah was helping Nate pack boxes of clothes, books, and videotapes into his trunk. His visit had been more pleasant than she expected. He had taught her how to start the Weedwacker, and had trimmed the entire yard. He had checked the fluids in her car, and had shown her where to pour the oil.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked as he stood beside his car.

“Of course.” She gave him an awkward hug.

And then he did a strange thing. He lifted his right hand and combed it through her hair, pulling her bangs back from her eyes and stopping behind her ear, where he cupped his palm and held her skull as if it were a brandy snifter. He tilted her head toward him ever so slightly and leaned forward, kissing her gently on her left cheek.

Before she had time to think, he was in his car and down the street, leaving her blushing on the curb. She hadn’t been kissed so tenderly in years, and the effect was wrenching. Her mind was caught between annoyance and puzzlement, wondering what sort of game he was playing. But her skin, still tingling with the soft pressure of his lips, whispered “More, more, more.”

What woke her at 3:13 that night? There was no thunder, no rain on the roof. All was quiet as she sat up in bed, her knees pulled to her chest. She knew she had been roused by a loud noise, some sort of crash. It sounded as if it had come from the basement.

David is in the house, she thought. He’s looking for something. Soon he’ll be coming up the stairs. He’ll turn the knob on the basement door and step into the kitchen with cold, damp feet. Wet indentations will sink into the rug as he walks down the hall.

He wants to come back to bed. He’s so, so tired. He wants to get under the covers and warm his hands.

“Enough.” She switched on her bedside light. She had to stop scaring herself with these morbid visions. David was not some clammy ghoul. He was a good man, and if his ghost was in the house, she should go to meet him.

She rose from her covers and reached for the terry-cloth robe that hung on her bedpost. As she tied the belt around her waist, she turned to face the open hallway.

There was nothing to be seen, of course. There never was. She walked down the hallway and into the kitchen, turning on every light. The furniture, the wallpaper, the carpets, all emerged from the shadows in their usual shapes. The patio door was locked; she always locked it now. That left only the basement door, waiting beside the pantry. It occurred to her that on the night of the memorial service, when she had seen David’s ghost enter the kitchen, she hadn’t thought to check the basement. She had been so drawn to the patio doors, so certain that he was standing on the other side, she had not considered that he might have gone downstairs. Now, with her hand on the basement doorknob, she wondered if she should hurry back to bed. Perhaps she should get under her covers and wait until morning; whatever was downstairs could be confronted in the daylight.

“Nonsense.” If something or someone was in her basement, she should know about it. She took a deep breath, yanked open the door, and stared into the darkness.

Something was rushing up the stairs, something that howled. She managed two steps backward before the object wrapped itself around her legs. “Grace.” She knelt and lifted the cat to her chest. “Did I leave you down there?”

The cat jumped from her arms and trotted down the hall while Sarah switched on the light and walked downstairs. As the furniture came into view, she spotted the problem on the opposite side of the room. A glass jar, filled with paintbrushes, had fallen off the shelves and shattered on the tile floor. She walked over and picked up the largest pieces, holding them gingerly in her hand. When she turned back to the stairs, she gasped.

David was watching her from the couch. His eyes were staring, his lips slightly open. His face looked unusually pale. It took two seconds for her to register that this was only his self-portrait, propped up against some pillows. Nate must have left it out, although it was strange—she thought they had been careful to put everything away. Looking down, Sarah noticed that her hand was bleeding. In her surprise, she had clutched at the broken glass.

“Shit.” She went to the couch and with her free hand she picked up the self-portrait and returned it to the bin, next to the painting of Helen and her daylilies. Then she walked back upstairs, turned off the light, and dropped the pieces of glass into the trash can. Bent over the kitchen sink, Sarah watched her blood mix with the water as it flowed down the drain.

At seven o’clock the next evening Sarah sat on her porch steps, trying to muster the enthusiasm to visit Margaret’s widows. She had dressed for the occasion, ironing a white blouse and crisp tan slacks, and what a shame it would be to have ironed for nothing. Ironing was such a rare event, done only because she envisioned the other widows in impeccable clothes—sixties-ish dowagers with light makeup and heavy jewelry, all trying to fill the empty spaces in their lives with conversation. God, how she dreaded the banalities to come, the insipid tenor of rich women’s angst. But if she didn’t make an appearance, Margaret would worry. She would think that Sarah was depressed or antisocial. And it wasn’t true—not this time. It wasn’t depression that held her back as she stared at the stiff leaves of her magnolia. It was a distinct fear that Margaret’s friends would look into her heart, measure the depth of her sorrow, and find it lacking.

Over the past few months she had come to suspect that she wasn’t truly mourning the loss of her husband. She was mourning the loss of an idea, a vision of how her life should have been. And that vision had not been swept down the river three months ago; it had been dying slowly over the past several years, with each small dream that she had abandoned.

Her dreams had never been overly ambitious. No—Sarah shook her head as she wiped a dead moth off the step beside her. She could not be accused of overreaching. During her first few years with David, living in New York, she had worked as an administrative assistant at a shelter for battered women. By day she had typed grant proposals and answered the telephone; by night she had stuffed fund-raising letters while watching TV. How righteous she had felt, and how incredibly bored. In her mind, the physical battery of wives began to blur with the economic exploitation of women such as herself, young idealistic females who did society’s dirty work of caring for the needy, earning minuscule salaries or nothing at all.