“You were right to lie to her, Fred,” Gail said. “You’re a realist. A grown-up. It’s nice to be married to a grown-up.”
They sat side by side in the squeaky wicker chairs. June bugs banged on the screen door, hungry for the light. Gail picked up Fred’s hand and kissed it, held it to her cheek, then returned it to his knee. Neither of them spoke. After a while Gail stood up. “It’s ten o’clock, I’m going to bed,” she said, bending down to kiss his forehead. “Come on up when you think you can sleep.”
He took her hand, held her back. He was still mulling over what she’d said. “A realist? You usually say idealist.”
“That too. You’re both. You’re Don Quixote with a brain.” He laughed and let go of her hand.
She wanted to add, You could have chosen a school that didn’t need to be rescued. That would have been just fine with me. But she kept the thought to herself, bent to kiss him again, and went upstairs to bed.
He sat for a while, nowhere near ready to sleep, remembering the hollow sound of their voices in their house at Mt. Gilead after the furniture was taken out and put in the moving van. It was a relief that Gail’s profession was portable. A graphic artist as good as she could be successful anywhere, make as much money here in Fieldington as she ever did—more than he did—and maybe, when she was ready, after she got her roots down, and he got things at school a little more squared away, whatever was keeping them from getting pregnant would stop happening, and they’d be parents again. “We’re going to stay right here,” he said to the empty porch. “This is the place for us.”
After a while he went into the house, tried to read; when that didn’t work, he turned on the TV, soothed himself with late-night blather, finally dozed in the chair. Near dawn when he went upstairs and got in the bed beside Gail, he found she was awake. He put his hand on her shoulder. That’s when she started to cry.
“Hey!” he said. He put his arm around her, cradled her head. “You said yourself it’s not so bad. And anyway, it isn’t going to happen. They’ll never let boys in here.”
“That’s not what I’m crying about,” she said. “Besides, I’m stopping.”
“I know,” he whispered, kissing her cheek. “I know, I know.” How safe things used to be, that’s why she was crying. For that. Before he had decided to be a head. Before they had learned that a car accident could actually kill their daughter. If I were a great teacher, a Francis Plummer, he thought, maybe I wouldn’t be a head.
“It’s like you’re out in space,” Gail said. “All alone.”
“But I’m not,” he said. “I’m right here in bed. With you.”
FAR WEST OF the Mississippi now, in the same dawn, Francis couldn’t sleep either. In this huge landscape where there were no woods, no little hills to wall him in, he felt released but unanchored too, much too restless to sleep. So he drove instead, went faster and faster. It was four-thirty in the morning, fifteen hours after his phone call to Peggy, and there was no other car in sight. Just a big semi up ahead getting bigger and bigger.
He’d promised Peggy he wouldn’t eat greasy breakfasts at roadside restaurants, so he was fasting, three cups of black coffee, that’s all, and the caffeine was throbbing in his temples. He zoomed by the truck and waved to the fat guy, pasty faced, loaded on speed, NoDoze, everything but sleep, who from miles above waved back, then blasted the air horn, a crazed hello in the early morning.
Now Francis was going almost a hundred, the car was beginning to quiver, and he started to laugh. Once when he was a little kid crossing the living room, past the black-robed glowering of his ancestor’s portrait above the mantel, and tripping on the rug, he heard his father mildly explain to a visitor, “Francis lacks coordination. And he’s so dreamy, he doesn’t always know where he’s going.” Francis, who at age fifty-five was still small, unathletic, and absentminded, remembered that now, so he pushed harder on the accelerator. Risk was the best revenge. When the car’s shuddering increased, he laughed again, surprised that he was laughing, that he wasn’t crying, wondered why he was speeding; he didn’t ever know anymore how he was going to feel in the next moment. He thought maybe he was finally living up to the romance the girls had built up around him, living a secret life they insisted on believing.
Signs, telephone poles, fence posts blurred by, and after a while he found himself wondering how it would be to steer for one of them, smash his car and himself, and go to sleep. The image frightened him more than the midnight ocean into which he’d fallen overboard and was drowning all alone. So he slowed his car way down, gained control of it and of himself.
Now he had only several hundred miles to go until Denver, where he would pick up Lila Smythe. He felt less regretful now about his promise to give her a ride; he’d had enough of loneliness. And there was something comforting about keeping a promise to a student, something solid and practical and helpful, about saving her the money it would cost her to fly. He hung on to that.
Three hours later, he saw the front range of the Rockies up ahead. Soon he’d be in Denver.
FOUR
With Francis farther and farther away and Siddy wandering in Europe, Peggy was remembering what it was to be alone. She was thirteen again.
The pale winter light slid through the window, showing the grease lingering on the tiles behind the stove. The kitchen smelled of the old linoleum her mother hated, which wouldn’t be there anymore if her mother hadn’t died giving birth to the stillborn baby who would have been Peggy’s little sister. Peggy peeled potatoes, alone. It was four o’clock, school was out, and her father wouldn’t come home till seven.
They’ll eat together, he’ll ask her questions about her schoolwork, he’ll wash the dishes, thanking her for making dinner, for being such a good daughter, then she’ll go upstairs to her homework: gray geometry, Caesar dividing Gaul, a history text heavy with graffiti left to her by an anonymous predecessor: misshapen human forms, huge heads, penises that look like guns. Her father would be downstairs in the armchair across the fireplace from the matching empty one. Soon she’ll hear his tread on the stairs, he’ll come into her room, shyly kiss her on her cheek—she would know he wished he weren’t so distant. Before going to bed, she’ll hear him crying in his room.
Then she was twenty-two, newly married, standing on a warm thick carpet, the color of roses. The walls of the big room were a bright clean white, and Francis’s father in a blue suit stood by the fireplace. He was smiling at her, standing under the portrait of John Plummer, Puritan Divine, black robe, white bib, round cheeks, stern, stable man, proud roots! The smell of roast lamb wafted from the kitchen. Francis’s mother’s in there with the black lady who helped, who called them by their last name while they called her by her first—all except Francis, who put a Mrs. before her last name, while his father rolled his eyes.
They’d just come from church. Peggy still felt bathed in the light from the rose window over the altar. Francis’s father turned to her, he knew she’d listen, and he talked about the sermon. “Unless I believe as a child believes,” he said, but she didn’t hear the rest. It’s not the words she wanted, she didn’t need to understand. It’s what in his eyes. More than belief. More than confidence. More than knowledge. A vast beneficence had been granted! He smiled at her. He was tall, he’s wearing a vest, there’s a gold watch chain across the front. His blue eyes shined with his belief. She loved those blue eyes!
More than ever lately, Peggy found herself talking to her father-in-law. She couldn’t see him, had no idea what the heaven she was sure he lived in looked like, but she knew all she had to do was open her mind to him. Their conversation was more intimate now than when he had lived in a real body on the edge of Long Island Sound in the house that Peggy loved so much. She was sure he knew now that the only reason Francis had begged her to join his family’s Episcopal faith when they were married was to please him. “I didn’t see that then,” she told her father-in-law, “maybe because Francis didn’t either.