Джон Макдональд - The Widow’s Estate

The other guests left at a little after eleven. Laura asked Cal if he would like a nightcap. He asked, tentatively, if there might be any cold beer. On her way to the kitchen she collected some of the dirty ash trays and glasses. When she brought the beer to him, he was bending over the fireplace poking the fragments of birch log into the bed of embers. The autumn wind sighed across the eaves.

Calvin Burch straightened up and put the fire tongs in the rack. “Compulsive fire-prodder,” he said with a slightly apologetic tone as he took the beer from her. He was a tall, thin man who moved abruptly and, quite often, rather awkwardly.

“So put another log on, for talking,” she said. She turned the lights out at the far end of the living room and came back to sit at the end of the couch. The new log burst into flame quickly, the silver bark crack ling. He sat beside her and they looked at the flames.

“Lollie,” he said, “when I got back from Japan, the wire was there and it was three weeks old by then. If only somebody in the home office had had the sense to...”

“It doesn’t matter, really. I had good friends here to help out. And... maybe I wouldn’t have been really aware of whether you were here or not. It racked me up, Cal. Terribly. That whole time is sort of a blur. They had to keep me tranquilized. I resented... the necessity of it. You know? An adult should be able to cope with anything, without crutches. How long does it take to get to be an adult? I’m thirty-two years old, Cal!”

He looked at her, his mood grave. He was aware of the pride in the lift of her chin, a defiance of life in her eyes. He could not tell her that in the flame-light she looked helplessly young.

“Cope? There are some things, Lollie, nobody is strong enough for. Certainly not a sudden, terrible thing like that.”

“You know, Mitch had a complete physical just two months before it happened. They told him he was in perfect shape. And he was so smug about it.” Her laugh was abrupt, without mirth.

“Even though I didn’t get the news until it was three weeks old, Lollie, I would have come east anyway if it hadn’t been for the damned negotiations on the new plant. I told you about it over the phone when I...”

“For goodness sake, Cal, stop feeling guilty! Don’t you think I’m capable of understanding?”

“I know. But it’s six months now. Almost six. The three of us were as close as people can get. You and Mitch were the best friends I’ve ever had.”

“I’m still around, Cal, dear.”

“It’s fantastic the way I keep both feet in my mouth.”

“I’m just teasing, Cal. Anyway, there is something I have learned in these months since Mitch died. People try very hard, but there’s no right way to say anything about a thing like this. And I’ve felt strange all evening, having you arrive the very first time I’ve done any entertaining, seeing me as the merry hostess or something, without a chance to talk to you. Until now.”

“They seem like nice people.”

“They are. But the evening wasn’t a success. I didn’t expect it to be. But I had to start some place, somehow. They all tried to seem as if they were having a good time, bless them. But all the other times they’ve been in this house, Mitch was here. So it made a strain. Next time it will be better.”

“Very tough for you, too.”

She shrugged. “I was on the edge a couple of times. Thelma made it difficult. She’s the big blonde. She’s real sweet and sloppy and emotional, and she genuinely misses Mitch. She hugged me once and just looked at me once, and those were the two times I was on the edge.”

“I wouldn’t have known it.”

“I didn’t want anybody to know it, Cal. Golly! I had enough of the public collapse thing. Tears are for private. I guess I’ve got too much pride to want to be a... pitiful figure. Maybe I am. I don’t want to advertise it any more, at least.”

“If this comment isn’t in bad taste, Lollie, I want to say you’re looking just fine.”

“Leaner. Honed down, sort of, I guess. Two months ago I was way down. Skin and bone. Now I’m in better shape.”

“I’m glad you’re... handling it so well, Lollie. I guess I knew you would.”

“And I? I don’t know. I was getting through one hour at a time. Now I’m getting through one day at a time. Grief is... is such a sneaky thing, Cal. You don’t know what to brace yourself for. I would never have guessed it would be this way. It seems to wait until you’re a little off balance. It doesn’t have to be what’s said. It can be a tone of voice, even. Then it isn’t any dignified business of the eyes misting up. It’s a raw, horrid pain, so you want to double over and hug yourself and howl like a kid.

“Last week I was coming back after driving Kit to her school-play rehearsal, and I saw a car exactly like the first one Mitch and I ever owned. Same color. I had to pull over to the curb and wait there about ten minutes before I could get going again.

“Do you mind if I ramble like this? I have friends, but I haven’t had anybody I could talk to just this way.

“There’s another part of it that’s bad too, and I couldn’t have guessed it. It’s a kind of... phoniness. I don’t know how to say it. You have yourself under a constant observation, and you watch how you are reacting. I find myself dramatizing the lone widow thing, so that when I’m shopping, for example, and I go in a place where they don’t know me, I feel just slightly put out, like some bit-part television-type getting surly because she isn’t recognized. I tell myself how brave I am, and when I handle something well, I feel proud and smug. Then I wonder if I’ve handled it too well, and that makes me doubt my own capacity to really feel and understand what’s happened to me. It’s a continuous self-appraisal that sometimes doesn’t seem... healthy.

“What I’m trying to say, Cal, grief isn’t a constant thing. When I laugh, I hear the sound of it afterward and feel like a dirty traitor. Sometimes, when I cry, I feel like a bad actress. And I know all the time that Mitch would be so terribly concerned about me, and at the same time sort of... amused. You can understand that.”

“Of course.”

“For the sake of the children. That’s a tiresome phrase, but really, it’s so horribly true. They’ve been a life raft for me. Without Kit and David, I would have indulged myself all the way in grief. I’d have sunk right down into the ultimate puddle of tears, gone without a trace.”

“They’re handsome children, Lollie.”

“And you don’t know how I resent them sometimes. Their hearts were utterly broken at first. They adored him. But they adjust so fast! A half-year is a long, long time for a girl seven and a boy nine, I guess, and it’s a good and healthy sign they’re able to adjust so quickly. But I keep wanting them to miss him more than they seem to. I want them to know their new captain wasn’t always the captain. They refer to Mitch as if he were lost in the mists of antiquity, for God’s sake!”

“Which leads to a temptation, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Lectures. Deification of the lost father. Demanding their appreciation.”

“I guess I’m doing that. Is it bad?”

“Only because it might substitute myth for what was a very good reality.”

“I wouldn’t want that, Cal. I wouldn’t want that at all.”

“I was taught my father was ten feet tall. It took me a long time to finally track down the reality. When I finally learned, on my own time, in my own way, that he had been an ordinary mortal, I was able to be more at home in the world. He was... a pretty good man, I guess. I was eleven when he died. It’s easier to live up to a man than a myth.”