Oh William!, page 14
And then—suddenly—alongside the road was a couch. Sitting by the side of the road was a small couch with printed upholstery; it was just there, and there was a lamp laid across the seat. But the couch was sitting where another smaller road went off the Haynesville Road, and as we slowed down to look at this couch I saw the sign for the road and it was Dixie Road. “William,” I said, and he swerved the car onto this smaller road. The paper that Lois had given me said Dixie Road, last house, and as we drove down this road we saw no houses at all, and then we passed by one small house with a man standing in front of the house and he watched us drive by; he was old and he had a beard and no shirt on and he looked furious, I had not seen a stranger look at me with such fury since I was a child, and I was very frightened. The pavement ended and we passed by two small houses on our right and then after another long ride with no one around we found the last house on the road. It had been abandoned for years, it seemed. But it was the tiniest house I think I had ever seen. I had grown up in a very small house, and this one was much smaller. It was one story and looked as though it had two rooms. And next to it was a very small garage. The roof of the house sagged—it had been a flat roof, and the center of it seemed to be almost falling in—and the house was a maroon color.
And I could not believe it.
I looked at William and his face looked blank—stunned, I guess.
Then he looked at me and said, “This is where my mother grew up?”
I said, “Maybe Lois had it wrong.”
But William said, “No, I found it myself in my research. Dixie Road.”
We sat and looked at this place. A tree had spread its branches over the garage, and there were scrubby bushes that went up to the windows of the house.
The house was so—so—small.
William turned the car off and we sat in silence. Through the windows the inside of the house was dark; nothing could be seen. Only a little bit could I imagine people moving about in there. The grass had grown very high around the place, and saplings were standing close to it. Two saplings had even grown through the house, they came out of the almost-fallen-down roof.
I glanced at William and his face looked so bewildered, it made me ache for him. And I understood: Never in my life would I have imagined Catherine coming from such a place. Then he looked at me. “Ready?” he asked. And I said, “Let’s go.” And so he started the car and kept driving, the road was too small to turn around on, and it was a dead-end road, and at the end of the road, with much maneuvering, William got the car headed the right way and we took off. The man was still standing in front of his house looking furiously at us as we drove by.
The couch was gone from the side of the road.
“This is a horror movie,” William said.
Our plane was due to leave at five o’clock, and we drove along the road to Bangor in silence. We passed by a restaurant whose paint was peeled, it had obviously long been closed, but in square letters out front was a sign that said: AM I THE ONLY ONE RUNNING OUT OF PEOPLE I LIKE?
After a while I said, “William,” and he said, “What?” And I said, “Nothing.” Then I said, “William, you married your mother.” I said this quietly.
He turned his head toward me. “What do you mean?”
I said, “She was like me. She came from awful poverty and maybe a father—she was—I don’t know what I mean. But you married the same sort of woman, William. When you had so many different people in the world to choose from, you chose a woman like your mother. I—I even left my children.”
William pulled the car over to the side of the road. He stayed quiet and he looked at me. I almost looked away because it had been years since he had looked at me for such a long time. Then he said, “Lucy, I married you because you were filled with joy. You were just filled with joy. And when I finally realized what you came from—when we went to your house that day to meet your family and tell them we were getting married, Lucy, I almost died at what you came from. I had no idea that was what you came from. And I kept thinking, But how is she what she is? How could she come from this and have so much exuberance?” He shook his head very slowly. “And I still don’t know how you did it. You’re unique, Lucy. You’re a spirit. You know how the other day at that barracks when you thought you were flipping between universes or something, well, I believe you, Lucy, because you are a spirit. There has never been anyone in the world like you.” In a moment he added, “You steal people’s hearts, Lucy.”
William pulled the car into the road again.
I thought about this, and it seemed to me that as soon as I got into Mrs. Nash’s car that day, such happiness had overtaken me. “Oh Pillie,” I said quietly.
But William said no more.
And then William began to close down. I watched this happen. His face—it is odd—it is almost like his face remains but everything behind it retreats. You can see him going away, is what I mean. And his face got like that as we drove.
I said at one point, mostly to make conversation, “Ours is a very American story.” William said, “Why,” and I said, “Because our fathers were fighting on opposite sides of the war and your mother came from poverty and so did I, and look at us, we’re both living in New York and we’ve both been successful.”
And William said, without looking at me—he said this immediately—“Well, that’s called the American dream. Think of all the American dreams that weren’t lived. Think of that veteran with his car of trash we saw the first morning we were here.”
I looked out my side window. Then I realized that the man standing in front of his house on Dixie Road looking at us with such fury was old enough that he could have been a veteran of the Vietnam War, maybe that was his story. I have told you before how I barely knew about the Vietnam War; we were so isolated as I grew up, and I was just young enough to not know anyone who was in it. But when I went to college and met William this changed, and I said, now, “You were so lucky about Vietnam, William. To get such a good draft number. Think how different your life might have been.”
“I’ve thought about that my entire life,” William said. And then he said no more.
It came to me then that I had possibly taken something from William by being the one to go in and see Lois Bubar. That had I just waited a few moments and thought it through, and had him come with me, she might have been just as pleasant to him as she was to me. This thought bothered me as I watched William driving with his face closed down. I thought how the first thing he had said was: “Does she want to see me?”
And I had had to tell him no. And his face, that slight bafflement that crosses it sometimes. I thought: Here is one more woman—in his mind—who has rejected him. And I thought once more of the nursery school teacher who had never picked him up again after having made him feel so special. And then I thought that maybe he had been sent to the nursery school because his mother had told his father about the baby and their marriage had trouble in it, and maybe Catherine had not been really capable of caring for him at that time. This made some sense to me.
So I said to him, “William, I’m sorry I just ran out of the car and was the one who got to see her. I should have had you come with me, I just ran right out—”
He glanced over at me and said, “Oh Lucy, who cares. Seriously. Who cares that I didn’t see her. I was scared and you were trying to help.” After another minute he added, “I wouldn’t worry about that. Sheesh.”
But his face remained the same.
We pulled into the airport parking lot, such a huge and empty parking lot. It took us a few turns to figure out where to drop the car off, even in all that emptiness, and we got out our suitcases and headed inside the airport. It was even—to my mind—stranger than it had been the night we flew in. It was small. But it was foreign, this is what I thought as we went into it. There was no place in it to get anything to eat. It was midafternoon.
As we walked through the airport—we had not yet gone through security—William said, “You know, Lucy, I need to just go walk for a bit.” And I looked at him and said, “Okay, do you want company?” And he shook his head. “Leave your suitcase with me,” I said.
But I was hungry and there was no place in the airport to get food, so I went—with both our suitcases—back over the little bridge to the airport hotel and I walked through the double doors and saw right away that their restaurant was closed. Open at 5:00, a sign said. I gave a huge sigh and turned around to head back, and I thought to myself: When does anybody in this state eat? And just as I thought that I saw the fattest man I have ever seen. He was coming through the double doors that I had just come through, and he had pushed one of them open but this was not enough space for him to get through. He did not seem old; he may have been thirty, I do not know. But his pants went out on the sides of him like a ship almost, and his face was buried into itself. I let go of one of the suitcases and I pulled the other door open for him and he smiled in a way that seemed to me to be ashamed, and I said, “There you go,” and he said “Thanks” with a kind of shy smile and he went up to the front desk in the lobby.
I thought as I walked back to the airport—I thought: I know what that man feels like. (Except of course I do not.) But I thought: It’s odd, because on one hand I think I am invisible, but on the other I know what it is like to be marked as separate from society, only in my case no one knows it when they see me. But I thought that about that fat man. And about myself.
From a window in the airport, I saw William as he walked around the huge parking lot: He walked up one side until I almost couldn’t see him, and then I saw him walking back down the other way, and as I watched he stopped walking and he stood shaking his head again and again. And then he started walking once more.
Oh William, I thought.
Oh William!
As we sat in the seats in the airport, I noticed William’s face again. I recognized that expression so well: He was gone. He said to me, “You tell the girls what happened, I don’t feel like it.” And I said that I would do that. We boarded the plane; it was a small plane and we could not find room to put our luggage above us, so the attendant—a pleasant young fellow—took it from us and said we could get it planeside, meaning when we got off the plane they would have it on the jetway.
William sat in the aisle seat because his legs are longer than mine, and we spoke about various things—he spoke in a flat tone, once more, about the fact that Lois Bubar had not wanted to see him—and then we settled in and the flight was not long. As I looked out the window at New York City, I felt what I have almost always felt when I have flown into New York, and that was a sense of awe and gratitude that this huge, sprawling place had taken me in—had let me live there. This is what I feel almost every time I see it from the sky. I felt a rush of tremendous thanksgiving, and turning to William to say this I saw that he had one drop of water coming down the side of his face, and when he looked at me fully he had another drop of water coming from his other eye. I thought, Oh William!
But he shook his head in a way to let me know that he wanted no comfort—although who does not want comfort?, but he wanted no comfort from me—and as we waited for our bags on the jetway he said nothing and he had no more tears. He was just gone, as he had been increasingly since we drove to the airport at Bangor.
We pulled our suitcases to the taxi stand and William got into the taxi ahead of me and said, “Thanks, Lucy. Talk to you soon.”
But he didn’t. He didn’t talk to me soon.
Riding over the bridge—in the back of my own taxi that evening—I suddenly remembered times early in our marriage in our Village apartment when I had felt terrible. It was about my parents, and the feeling that I had left them behind—as I had—and I would sometimes sit in our small bedroom and weep with a kind of horrendous inner pain, and William would come to me and say, “Lucy, talk to me, what is it?” And I would just shake my head until he went away.
What a really awful thing I had done.
I had not thought of this until now. To deny my husband any chance of comforting me—oh, it was an unspeakably awful thing.
And I had not known.
This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it is too late.
When I stepped into my apartment that evening we came back, it was so empty! And I knew it would always be empty, that David with his limp would never walk into it again, and I felt unbelievably desolate. I wheeled my suitcase into the bedroom and then I went and sat down on the couch in the living room and looked at the river, and the emptiness of the place was horrifying.
Mom! I cried to the mother I have made up over the years, Mommy, I hurt, I hurt!
And the mother I have made up over the years said, I know you do, honey. I know you do.
I thought of this:
Many years ago, I saw a documentary on women in prison and their children, and there was one woman, a very large woman with a lovely face, who had her small son on her lap—he may have been four years old. The documentary was about how important it is to have children with their mothers, and this prison let the children visit with their mothers—at that time—in a new way. And this little boy sat on this woman’s huge lap, and he looked up at her and he said quietly, “I love you more than God.”
I have always remembered that.
I met the girls at Bloomingdale’s that Saturday. It was wonderful to see them, and to see all the other people there as well. Usually in late August one thinks of all the rich people of New York having left for the Hamptons, but there were plenty of the usual types: women who were old and stick-thin with their faces stretched and their lips puffed up. I loved seeing them; I felt love for them, is what I mean.
I looked carefully at Chrissy, but she did not seem pregnant to me. She laughed at me lightly and kissed me and said, “The specialist said not to do a thing or worry about it for three months, and it’s not three months yet, so I am doing what I’m told. So don’t you worry either.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m not worrying.”
We sat at a table and they said, “Now tell us everything!”
So I told the girls everything that had happened on the trip and they listened carefully. They were amazed by what they learned about Catherine, as I had been. Then I said, “Have you spoken with him?”
They both nodded, and Chrissy said, “But he’s being a dickwad.”
I said, “In what way?”
“Not communicative. You know how he gets.” Chrissy tossed her hair back.
“Well, I think he was really hurt.” I said this looking from one girl to the other. “Look, he got a double whammy: Estelle leaving him and then this half-sister who didn’t want to see him. He got a triple whammy, really. Because he also saw his mother’s house. You guys, that house was so—so—awful. I mean he had no idea she came from such a place. No idea at all.”
They had both seemed astonished—as William and I had been—when I had described the childhood house that Catherine had come from. “It’s just so weird, I mean the woman played golf,” Chrissy said. And I knew what she meant.
After a few more minutes, Chrissy, taking a bite of her frozen yogurt, said, “You know, we have a half-sister, Mom, and I feel really responsible for her. I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“How is Bridget?” I asked.
Becka said, “She’s in pain, Mom. It makes me sad.”
“Have you seen her?”
And the girls said that they’d had a date with her a few days earlier; I was surprised to hear this, and touched. They had taken her to a hotel for tea. “She was nice to us,” Chrissy said. “And we were nice to her, but she was sad. So it was hard.”
Becka said, “Maybe taking her for tea was dumb. But we didn’t know what else to do with her. We couldn’t think of a movie. Maybe we should have taken her shopping.”
“Oh God,” I said. After a moment I said to Chrissy, “Why do you feel responsible for her?”
And Chrissy said, “I don’t know. I guess because, you know, she’s my sister.”
“Well, it was very nice of you two to do that,” I finally said to them, and they only shrugged slightly.
Becka said, “I’m sorry I asked if you and Dad were getting back together.”
“Oh, don’t be,” I said. “I can understand the question.”
And Chrissy said, “You can?”
“Of course I can,” I said. And then I added, “We’re just not going to, that’s all.”
“Smart,” Chrissy said. And then she said, “It’s so strange to think of Grandma being this Catherine person you’re describing. I thought she was the most normal person in the world. I loved her.” And Becka said, “I did too.”
They spoke of memories of their grandmother then; they recalled her house and the couch that was tangerine-colored and how their grandmother would hug them. “She’d just squish me to pieces,” Becka said. “I loved her so much.” And I had to agree with them that it was strange to think of their grandmother having had this life that they knew nothing about, that neither I nor William had known anything about.
They asked me again about Lois Bubar. “But did you like her?” Becka asked, and I said, “Yes. Kind of. You kids have to remember, she had spent her life thinking that Dad knew about her. So really, given all, she was perfectly pleasant.”
“On Pleasant Street,” said Chrissy, and I said yes, on Pleasant Street.
Becka said, “This stuff is happening everywhere now. Because of those websites.” And she told us how a person she knew had just found out he was half Norwegian; his father turned out to be a different man than the one he was raised with. His real father had been a Norwegian fellow. “Literally the postman,” she said.
