Once the summer came, she thought, they would go up to Massachusetts and use the Finden house for a few weeks when her parents weren’t there. They’d take the Jeep to the lake and on the way back buy corn and fruit at the farm stand. Come fall, Eric would get back to his classes, she would finish her thesis. They might get married in a year. She would meet his brothers and sisters. His parents would come around, eventually.
The Day was a public Thanksgiving for the Mercies of Heaven in the Year that is past, Sam intoned. I laid aside the subject I intended and in the Morning I composed a sermon on the line in 1 Samuel. She wept, and she did not eat. A sermon on the Thanks offering, prosecuting that Observation, that a sense of Affliction was oftentimes a Hindrance to the work of Thanksgiving, but that it ought not to be so. My son died about Noon. My sermon in the Afternoon proved very acceptable, and reasonable, and serviceable.
Why you? Charlotte thought. Of all I’ve read and forgotten, why a pompous old preacher? Why not Whitman’s singing or blind Milton to keep an aging isolate company?
He rubbed his ear to her foot to relieve an itch. Sensing something was being given out that he was not a part of, Wilkie’s head came down off the sill and he pressed his snout into Charlotte’s lap.
They followed her into the front bedroom, settling on their blankets as she took off her cardigan and began to undress. It had been so much harder living here, all those years ago, at the beginning. Such tense awareness of being alone in the house, the day’s routines acts that she observed herself completing: her dress returned to its hanger, her shoes put back in their sleeve pockets hanging inside the closet door, the watch on the bedside table, cold cream on her face, the bedroom door shut. To forget a bit, the past and herself, that’s all she’d wanted then. To move unsurveilled through time’s ceaseless unfolding. The critical eye closed, the narrative intelligence laid to rest. Repetition’s welcome victory over event. Up at the sound of the bedside alarm, the school day a prevention of other thoughts, along with the work she carried home. And when, inevitably, retrospect intervened nonetheless, she knew, then as now, that others would consider her precious or sad or both, prey to a romanticism gone morbid. So her mother had thought until she died. So Henry still imagined. And who was she to catalogue the varieties in which love and comfort came in order to tell them they were wrong? She could only know what she had felt, say, on the afternoon during that long summer of theirs when they’d stood together in the Metropolitan Museum looking at a small picture by Daubigny, a painting of a village along a river’s edge at dusk seen from across the water, light and peacefulness so miraculously captured it produced in her elation. Before she uttered a word of praise, Eric took her hand and said that from whatever he read or studied, all he wanted was the power to describe how a human being could arrive at the lucid sympathy this man must have felt for what he saw. A lucid sympathy. Those were his words. As if he’d reached into her, discerned an emotional thought still unformed, and allowed it definite shape. Difficult not to think you could live a lifetime with another person and never be as richly acknowledged. To then lie with this man in the grass of the park, make love to him before dinner, to keep discussing painting after the food was cold and the time to catch a film had passed. What did they know of that?
Best she move on after that sort of thing. That’s what the landlord had told Henry when Charlotte asked him to phone and find out why the man hadn’t sent her a renewal on her lease or returned her calls. There had been the ambulance, after all, and the neighbors standing in the hall watching.
Half an hour, it had been, that she’d remained sitting there by the front window. She heard the bathroom door close and after a few minutes open once more, then Eric’s steps to the couch. Such a small apartment it was, just the two rooms. There couldn’t have been more than fifteen or twenty