Russell Banks - Affliction

It was still possible, of course, that the Jew Mel Gordon would jointly inherit the property. If that happened, one could only hope that on reading the deed, the fellow would come to the restrictive clause at the end and would decide to say nothing about it, would go right ahead and simply sign the deed and let it go at that, quite as if he were not Jewish or black. Damn. If this Gordon fellow had been black, none of this would have happened, would it? Anyhow, his agreeing to the restrictive clause in the deed might turn out to be somewhat embarrassing for the Association, mightn’t it? After all, you did not have to come right out and say it, and no one would be rude or crude enough to ask him, but everyone in the Association and everyone in town as well thought Mel Gordon was Jewish, which meant, of course, that he was Jewish. People are not wrong about these things. On the other hand, it was not clear that he was not Jewish, either, especially if he himself was unwilling to say so one way or the other. It didn’t really matter, though, did it? Times change, don’t they? This is surely not the sort of problem our parents had to face.

Wade pulled into the neatly plowed driveway and followed it down to the three-bay garage and parked. He got out of his car slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, and strolled around to the wide porch that faces the lake. The house is a large two-story wood-frame house covered with cedar shakes, built three years ago to look a hundred years old, as if indeed it were inherited.

LaRiviere had scoffed at the idea of spending so much to make a place look old. “If you’re going to spend a quarter of a million bucks on a summer place, it ought to look like something brand spanking new, for Christ’s sake.”

But Wade liked the way it looked, and he believed that if he had the money, he would want his summer place to resemble this one, a house where several generations of smart successful kindhearted people had come to relax and be together with their children and parents and grown brothers and sisters, a place with a wide porch facing the lake, lots of old-fashioned wicker rockers on the porch where you sat in the twilight and told stories of favorite summers past, old silvery cedar shingles, two chimneys made of local stone, a steep-pitched roof with wide overhangs that slid the snow off the house to the ground before it either accumulated so much weight that it broke through or got held up by ice at the gutters and started lifting roof shingles and doing water damage when spring came.

He knocked on the glass pane of the storm door with what he felt was authority, and the inner door was opened at once.

A blond boy about eight years old with a large tousled head and thin stalklike neck pushed the aluminum-and-glass storm door open about six inches and with great seriousness examined Wade. The boy wore flannel pajamas with action pictures of Spider-Man printed on them. In one hand he held a bowl of pastel-colored cereal and milk that was slopping onto the floor; with the other he held on to the door.

“Your daddy home?” Wade asked.

The boy studied Wade’s face and said nothing.

“Is your daddy here, son? I got to talk with your daddy.”

As if dismissing him, the boy turned away and let go of the storm door, and the breeze off the lake shoved it closed in Wade’s face. He could see into the living room, for the child had left the inner door wide open. Wade watched him trot to a television set in the far corner, where he plopped down on the carpeted floor and resumed watching cartoons and began to spoon the pastel-colored cereal into his mouth.

The living room was huge, open to the eaves, with a head-high stone fireplace at either end. A staircase led up to a deck, where several closed doors indicated bedrooms. Downstairs, there was a grand piano in a bay window, which instantly impressed Wade: he had never seen a grand piano inside a house before. When he thought about it, he realized that he had never seen a grand piano anywhere. Not in person.

He knocked on the glass again, but the boy continued to eat cereal and stare at cartoons as if Wade were not there. Finally, Wade drew the door open and stepped inside and closed the inner door behind him. “C’mon, son,” he said. “Go and get your daddy for me.”

“Sh-h-h!” the boy said, without looking at him. Then Wade saw that there was a second, smaller boy lying flat on the floor a few feet beyond him, his head propped up on tiny fists. He was blonder than his brother and wore underpants and a tee shirt and seemed to be shivering from the cold. He peeked over his brother’s shoulder and scowled at Wade and said, “Sh-h-h, will ya?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Wade murmured, and he started to leave, when he heard a woman’s voice above and behind him.

“Who are you?” It was a light tentative voice, the opposite of the boys’ voices and the snarls emitted by the bare-chested muscular characters on the television screen; Wade turned and looked up and saw a thin silvery-blond woman standing just beyond the balustrade of the deck above him; he felt for a second that he was in a play, like Romeo and Juliet , and the next line was his and he did not know what it was.

He felt his face redden, and he took off his watch cap and held it in front of his crotch with both hands. The woman’s face was long and bony but very delicate-looking, as if the bones underneath were fragile and her pale skin exceedingly thin. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her shoulder-length blond hair was uncombed. She wore no makeup but was wrapped in a dark-green velour robe that made her face and thin hands and wrists seem to be covered with white powder. Wade had seen her numerous times before, of course, but she had always been tanned, wearing jeans and fancy sweaters, and in winter she wore ski togs. Usually he had observed her at a distance, in town or at the post office. When Twombley was building the house and Wade was out here drilling the wells, she had come up from Massachusetts twice with her husband and sons, but they had strolled through the half-constructed buildings and down by the lake without stopping to speak to him. This was the first time he had seen her up close, and it seemed to him that he was seeing her under disarmingly intimate circumstances.

He stammered, “I was … I’m Wade Whitehouse. I was wondering, is your husband here? I was wondering that.”

“He’s asleep. We were up very late,” she said, as if she wished that she, too, were asleep.

“Well, yes, I’m … I want to say that I’m real sorry about your father, Mrs. Twombley.”

“Gordon,” she corrected him. “Thank you.”

“Gordon. Sorry. Mrs. Gordon. Jesus, I’m sorry about that. Mrs. Gordon, right.”

She gripped the rail as if for balance and said, “Do you think you could come back later on, when he’ll be up?”

“Well, yeah, I suppose so. Sure. I mean, I don’t want to intrude, you know, at a time like this and all. I just had a little business to settle with Mr. Gordon. I’m the local police officer, and there was something I wanted to speak with him about.”

“Something concerning my father?” She took several steps along the deck toward the stairs.

“Oh, no, nothing about that. Jeez, no. It’s a … it’s a traffic thing,” he said. “No big deal.”

“Can’t it wait, then?”

Wade thought, Yes, yes, it can wait, of course it can wait. It could wait until another morning, when she would be freshly wakened once again and this terrible thing concerning her father would have passed by; he could drive over here and talk with this fair woman at her breakfast table, while her husband and her children drove farther and farther north into the mountains, leaving her behind so that Wade could comfort her, take care of her, provide strength for her to draw upon in her time of affliction and grief, this intelligent beautiful sad needy woman who was unlike all the other women Wade had known and loved, he was sure.