The Widower's Tale (14 page)

Yet Poppy's optimism kept us giddy. Her charm brought us friends, her growing belly (for she would indeed be pregnant within a year) many extra sets of hands--to paint, plaster, paper, and then populate the interior.

A few years later, my parents retired, decided to sell their house full of books and move to an apartment. There was a signed first edition of
Finnegans Wake
that my father had always known could bring in some cash, yet there were other pleasant surprises. The greatest was that the collection of gardening books sequestered in the downstairs bathroom happened to include a rare set of illustrated horticultural guides personally annotated by a garden designer whose work apparently graces many of the most distinguished estates in Scotland, Balmoral among them. My father made the magnanimous decision to give us the proceeds of the entire sale. Both girls were small at the time, and I suppose he saw it as seed money for their education. Fortunately, he did not specify, so it went to shore up the crumbling barn and to build a modest, historically respectful extension on the kitchen at the rear of the house.

When I look back on life as we lived it in our much-trafficked, much-cherished home, my happiest memories are of the parties Poppy loved to give. At one time or another, every room contained and magnified festivity, celebration, from friends' book launches to the girls' slumber parties. Poppy's parties were the ones our friends and neighbors looked forward to the most. There were her traditional celebrations (Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year's Day, and a Winter Doldrums party she threw every year about a week after Valentine's Day), but more numerous and selective were the cocktail soirees and intimate dinner gatherings whose dramatis personae she strategized with military cunning. I loved watching her sit at the kitchen table with a notepad, a pencil, and a goblet of wine, poring through our address books and the local directory, rarely assembling the same group twice.

One night, I sat across from her, stealing sips from her wine as she quizzed me about my library colleagues. It was that delectable moment in early fall when the girls had just returned to school. Perhaps they were in second and third grades, their first art projects already taped to the cupboard doors (rubbed leaves, brutishly charming self-portraits). Both girls were thrilled with their new teachers, thrilled to be back with their friends all day long, falling asleep early and abruptly, as if drugged, so that the evenings we parents shared in private were just that much longer.

There was a pot of pasta cooking on the stove. The lid muttered above the boiling water.

"I am so longing to find someone for Bettina," said Poppy, referring to a friend of hers who'd been divorced for a couple of years. The split had seemed sudden and baffling to all their friends. "Surely you know someone agreeable, civilized and smart enough for Bets."

"As you know," I said, "the male pickings are slim at Widener."

Poppy gave me a sly smile. "Percy, I'm not entirely certain that Bettina is looking to meet a man."

It took me a moment to comprehend. "Well," I said prudishly. "Well then."

"Oh Percy, be modern for a change." Poppy reached over to tickle me under an arm.

"I wouldn't have the faintest notion which women I work with ... which ones ..."

"Are lesbians?"

I asked her if she was sure about Bettina.

"I don't even know if Bettina is sure about Bettina," she said. "But it can't hurt to test the waters, and at a table of a dozen friends ... no harm, no foul."

This bit of speculation led us to wonder about the intimate secrets of a few other people we knew, to recast alliances we'd never quite understood, and by the time the pasta was done, we were laughing ourselves silly. As Poppy poured out the pot into the colander, I stood behind her, leaning into her back, and said, "What would all our friends do without your machinations?"

"They would end up lonely and bitter."

"Then you'll have to live forever," I joked, and as I did, we both looked up at our conjoined reflections in the window above the sink, crisp against the encroaching dark. At that instant, steam rose from the colander and fogged the glass. Our faces vanished.

"Actually, they'd get along fine without me," said Poppy. "Me, you--none of us are indispensable."

"Is
indispensable," I said, piqued by a vague sense of gloom. I did not protest that I wouldn't have the faintest notion how to survive without Poppy. We served ourselves dinner and went back to planning the party.

After all these years, it stands to reason that all these parties, in my memory, would have blurred together--or vanished, like our faces in the kitchen window that evening. Yet many of them remain distinct, preciously so, when I set aside time to remember. They are like the cards in an old-fashioned library catalog. Many are brittle and yellowed, darkened at the edges, typed imperfectly, even altered by hand, but there they are to flip through at will. The one turned to most often would be the last.

It was a midsummer gathering of our closest friends in Matlock, with the addition of a couple who'd just moved in across the street. Poppy had met the wife while waiting for the P.O. to open its doors one morning. "Percy, you'll love her. A consummate book hound, this woman."

I would grill lamb chops. Poppy, who'd just discovered Middle Eastern cooking, had made a couscous salad. Back in 1975, no one had heard of couscous; that night our guests would rave about the odd combination of fruits, nuts, and exotic vegetables (Swiss chard!). On a recent visit to Harvard Square, Poppy had bought a Moroccan dress embroidered with flowers, white on white, its neckline loose and low. How she sparkled in that new dress, the snowy cotton setting off her youthful skin, brown as butterscotch.

I would have felt passionately in love with her that perfect summer evening--hot but alluringly breezy--if we had not quarreled in the kitchen before the guests came.

Clover was just shy of fourteen, about to start high school. She'd been spending a good deal of time that summer with a group of youngsters whom even I, the librarian nerd, could spot a mile away as the popular crowd. It was clear that she and one of the boys had paired off, were "going together," in the parlance of the day. Two or three times, I'd seen them holding hands and giggling--I'd take a deep breath and tell myself this was normal--but a few days before, one of Poppy's friends had called to report that while jogging along the nature trails behind the Old Artillery, she'd seen Clover and this boy engaged in "some rather heated kissing."

Poppy had asked me several times already what I felt we should do about this, and I had so far managed to evade any true discussion of the subject.

"I think it's time to take Clover for a visit to my gynecologist," Poppy declared, out of the blue, as she sliced oranges for sangria. "Just to have a talk with a grown-up who isn't one of us. Who can talk straight without making her fall through the floor in mortification."

I'd been tasting the mint sauce for the lamb chops and nearly choked. "Good God, Poppy, what are you suggesting? That we gift wrap a prescription for the birth-control pill? She is still a child!"

"Percy." Poppy regarded me with a sardonic sort of pity. "I am suggesting nothing of the kind. Quite the contrary."

"I wouldn't say sending her to a sex doctor will help her ... abstain."

" 'Sex doctor'? Percy, you've been hanging out too much with that Nathaniel Hawthorne guy. And I suppose you think just letting her loiter about with boys in the woods
will
help her 'abstain.' "

"We should speak with her directly. Specify limits. Make it clear there will be consequences if she ignores those limits."

Poppy had laughed. "Now that's sure to work. And I presume you mean that I should speak with her. Would you have the nerve? Or do you mean we should give her a list of anatomically specific rules and then, when she breaks them, lock her in a tower? Hmm. Last I looked, we don't actually
have
a tower."

"Shall we talk about anatomical specificity? I warned you not to leave that granola book on women's bodies lying around the living room."

"Oh for Pete's sake, Percy. If anything, that book will help our daughters make smarter decisions when it comes to boys."

"I rather doubt it," I muttered, crumbling dried rosemary over the meat.

Poppy made a faint noise of disgust.

"Listen, darling," I said, abandoning the lamb to put my arms around her, "isn't it your job as her mother to give her that ... straight talk? If we had boys, well ... but we don't."

Poppy freed herself and turned to look me sternly in the eye. "My job as her mother, right now, is to accept that I'm the last person whose authority she respects. I am not a fool."

"Don't be silly. Clover only pretends to see you as a square."

"Well, as it happens, I've already made the appointment."

I took a deep breath. The guests were to arrive in twenty minutes. "We will take up this discussion tomorrow," I said. "But let me tell you, I believe your plan to be rash, incendiary, and devoid of common sense." Before she could reply, I marched upstairs to change my clothes.

We were careful that evening not to mingle our disagreements, for another dispute lurked beneath all the talk of gynecologists and female maturation and--a foolish remark on my part--our not having boys. Earlier that summer, to my alarmed surprise, Poppy had begun to petition for a third child. Still shy of forty, she was feeling what I perceived as nostalgia pure and simple. Bluntly, I told her so, but she would have none of it. She suggested that we might have a son. Didn't I yearn for a son? (I did not.) "We'd name him after your dad," she persisted. She'd raised her eyebrows coyly and pointed to her belly. "Perhaps a tiny Alva is growing here already...." On seeing my stunned expression, she told me she was joking, but I became nervous, even reticent, when we were together in bed. I do not mind disclosing that during the fifteen years of our amorous relations, I cannot recall a dry spell of longer than a week.

That night's meal, which we served on the outdoor table, was one of our best. It was lovely to see some of our friends--like Norval and Helena Sorenson, who had been away in Vermont--for the first time in many weeks. We were tanned, ripe with contentment, rested. Over cocktails, the Sorensons announced that they were thinking of buying a pair of goats so they could make their own cheese. The rest of us, even Helena, shared a good laugh at the vision of scholarly Norval milking a goat.

Clover and Trudy were swimming; I let my glance stray from the guests to watch them dive from the raft, first Trudy, then Clover. My little mermaids, I thought with pride. As they made their way up the sloping lawn, I motioned them over. Some of these friends had known them since they were babies, yet they were both reserved with the grown-ups: polite but clearly eager to head indoors, become separate again. I realized that in a few months I'd be the father of not one but two teenage girls. Only fourteen months apart, my mermaids, but Clover had, just that year, shot far ahead of her sister in growth. As they stood close to me in their wet swimsuits, towels draped about their necks, Trudy's body still had the boyish lines of a kouros, while Clover, in a red bikini I'd never seen before, had crossed a delicate but obvious line. As they went into the house, Norval nodded toward Clover and said to me, "I think you're going to be in big trouble soon. That one just became a genuine beauty." His smile was more wistful than wolfish.

I glanced at Poppy; she'd heard him and would, I knew, use his words as ammunition when we resumed our debate.

The conversation was lively and smart--until, over dessert, we arrived at politics. In Matlock, back then, this was generally safe ground: we saw ourselves not as smug and cocooned in our moderate wealth but as enlightened, even embattled. Had we been religious, in need of a patron saint, small plaster statues of Eugene McCarthy would have adorned our sprawling lawns.

Talk had turned to the fiasco of our exit from Saigon that spring. There we were, privileged liberals going through the worn ritual of savaging Nixon and his cronies, the intertwining travesties of Watergate and Vietnam. These twin wellsprings of national shame still fueled our outrage; though nearly everyone was trying to quit, the cigarette smoke twined thick with smoke from the citronella candles.

I had just noted the long silence of our new neighbor, husband of the consummate book hound, when he made this declaration: "We'd have seen none of this infernal mess if we hadn't elected that Mafia puppet Jack Kennedy to the White House."

Had this remark been made earlier in the evening, when we'd all been sober, perhaps even if Poppy and I had been more complicit, I'm certain we would have steered the conversation down safer byways--but before we could rescue our guests from themselves, three of our dear friends were excoriating the new neighbor, who resisted the ambush at first with conviction and then with scorn.

Kip Lightman, who taught poli sci at Harvard, said to the neighbor, "So where did you move from again--Oklahoma? Let's talk about oil, shall we?"

"I was warned about people like you when we moved here," said the neighbor. "From Nebraska." He stood up from the table and almost physically lifted his wife from her chair. "It's clear we've entered a hotbed of radical righteousness," he said to her. She looked as if she wanted to cry.

Poppy tried to soothe the man, to assure him that we'd all had too much sangria, to let us please enjoy the grasshopper pie and change the subject. He stepped back from her conciliatory reach and said, "Thank you for dinner. It was delicious." He put his arm around his wife. "And we, by the way, have not had too much to drink at all." As he led her away, his wife turned toward Poppy and mouthed,
I'm sorry
. By then the poor woman was indeed crying.

The party broke up, moments later, with a sense of resignation and vague repentance. After we waved off the Sorensons, the only ones who had to drive, Poppy and I carried the dishes into the house without speaking. I was in the midst of loading the dishwasher when she announced that she needed to take a walk around the pond, to work off her "radical righteousness."