All the Dead Yale Men (30 page)

Upstream the water was calm and it showed the fish had begun to rise: the rings formed with a gentleness, a precision of mathematics. And there, in that almost impossible delicacy, the mayflies like flecks of some god that decided to reveal itself for a moment, in that cool, oddly grassy perfume of the river, I thought, What is she going to do about the baby, related to the future of the Mackinnon family? But, of course, I already knew.

The grass made that
whip
,
whip
,
whip
on my pants as I went up to the car. Robert just walked, head up, shoulders square, Pia next to him, her hair so bright in the sun and in the glare of the river that I was left with a sense of mystery again, as though I had glimpsed things as uncanny as that blue light Jerry saw.

I put the picnic in the trunk. Robert got into the front seat. Pia in the back. No one said a word.

So we went up the road through what had been my grandfather's land, a deer going through the woods with an almost bouncing gait. Graceful and harsh. Neither Pia nor Robert looked at the deer. It just ran away and left them to their own thoughts.

Then we turned down the road to the stone house, which needed to be graded, and I had to keep one wheel of the car on the hump in the middle. Pia's silence was like a gas, or a hiss, or a physical presence, and I guess we were all afraid that if we started, if we spoke what was on our minds, we'd never stop. Or worse. We would say about five words and stop forever. Silence hiding the possibility of more silence: the worst there is. She didn't want the baby, or she wanted it but thought she couldn't have it. This only made the silence worse, or the worst silence is that one right after finality makes itself apparent.

The car went over a rock that was pushing up out of the road a little more every year and now seemed to be like the crown of some enormous head that was coming up out of the dirt. The Audi's undercarriage scraped as it went over it.

“That rock gets worse every year,” I said.

“I'll help you get rid of it,” said Robert. “We'll drill some holes and put in a couple of charges of dynamite. Nothing but chunks to take away.”

“You need to wash your face,” said Pia. She said this to Robert and then to me, and both of us went into the bathroom, one behind the other, using the pink bar of soap and the towel, which I threw in the hamper when we were done, a way to make all of this disappear, but as the lid of the hamper fell shut, that silence was there again.

I sat at the table with a drink and Pia sat there opposite me. Robert sat down, too.

“We're done,” said Pia to Robert. “You and me. I'm not having the child. You know that.”

Robert stiffened now, as he had with the garbage man.

“Do you think I'm to be discarded, just like that?”

She shook her head.

“You heard me,” she said.

I closed my eyes: if I could reach my father, my grandfather, my grandmother. What would they say? What advice? What wisdom had eluded me that I should be able to produce right here? In the midst of that sense of exclusion, as though time was darkness, Jerry's cry hung, that surprise and profound need.

“Please,” I said. “Please . . . ”

“Please what?” she said.

“Let's sleep on it,” I said. “We're tired.”

“That's all you've got to say?” said Pia.

“Maybe he's right,” said Robert.

“I just don't know,” Pia said. “I just don't know.”

She cried with a frank, easy motion.

They read their law books until late. Then we all sat at the table under the yellow light, the shape of an enormous creature, like a five-foot bat, swept around us as a moth fluttered up to the fixture. It was like someone dragging silk across our shoulders. A moth in the house.

“Good night,” said Pia. She put her damp face next to mine as she gave me that small, daughterly kiss, so soft, so much an expression of everything I wanted to protect.

“Good night,” said Robert.

Their voices came through the door of the downstairs bedroom, the one that had a door and a double bed, a vibrant buzz like a fly against a window. Did they talk about the law, lectures they'd have when school started, the river as shiny as foil? Still, I knew and they did, too, that not talking about some things is a way of really saying the most about them.

In the yellow light the moth came to rest: it landed on the
outside of the fixture, and in the lack of movement, in the disappearance of those enormous wings, the room was that much more silent.

That silence, or the not talking about it, made me realize, with a certainty like the one you feel when the sun rises, that I had missed something in the attic of the farmhouse. My grandmother would never have left a silence like that, not for the panicked descendents who needed to reach her.

IN THE MOONLIGHT
,
as I ran to the farmhouse attic, thea dust in the road was as white as flour, and the woods went by like a black wall, smeared by my own locomotion. I went up to the main road but thought, No, no, that will take too long. I don't have the time. Then I went into the swamp, which was not completely dry at this time of the year. Were the copperheads on those hassocks, those rises where scrub grew? Or were they in the water? I knew for sure that they were pit vipers and that they sensed heat. Well, I was hot, sweating, the moisture under my clothes even at night making me as wet as though I had been in the rain. And then my shoes filled with water, since it seemed more likely that the snakes would be on the semidry land, rather than in the brackish part of the swamp. The splash of the water, the glistening of it, silver as the moon, was like amniotic fluid. I pushed through the brush, came up to the road and into the scent of
the pines, then went across the field, the pond, the moon sliding across the still surface like a small round boat pulled by a child. Then up the stairs of the house, the creak of one step louder now than ever, the dust exploding as I opened the trunk and threw the notebooks on the floor, the check registers, the letters in that ribbon from a piece of lingerie.

My grandmother, dead these many years, was testing me. Or was it that she wanted me to be desperate enough to refuse to give up? Is that how she saw the world: desperation used as a tool, as a motivation?

My pocket knife was jaundiced in the light, yellow steel, and I held it in one hand and opened her trunk and then ran my hand along the one place I hadn't touched before, the underside of the lid, that cloth lining which appeared to be just covering the leather of the top. But now, under my fingers, the shapes were hard and had been disguised only because they had been packed in, above the lining, so tightly as to seem like a solid piece, but were really just pieces of a puzzle that hung together.

My knife ran along the inside of the top of the trunk. The lining came away like the gentlest shroud, and under that gray cloth and held in place by tape that was yellowing, too, were three notebooks. She wrote on the first page:

So, you found them. Of course, I am curious about whatever relations would take the time to look for these books or to be interested. And there is something else here, too, whoever you are. Now that you have these notebooks, it means I am speaking to you across a darkness of infinite scale. And what does it feel like for you to be at the edge of the infinity that separates us? Or for an instant, to sweep that dark curtain aside?

I can say that this moment is what makes us human, and the very darkness you confront will make you burn with a
light so heartbreakingly short, just a breath on the coals, but which (if you are like me) will be distinguished by caring for others. That is the best. The darkness you face is cunning and it knows that time is its ally, its devious, vicious compatriot, and that the two together can get people to do all kinds of things out of fear, out of terror, which, let me tell you, is not something to be sneered at. So, this is the moment of dark illumination, where all love is dark (because it is gone) and all fear is white (because it has been proved out). And as to who you are, if you are one of mine, you probably have the illusion of the strength of solitude, and I'd like to say that I want to embrace that hard, hard joy of being alone and making a decision. What you know in solitude can allow you to endure moments like this one, a combination of the wonderful and the horrifying.

But I wonder how you knew where the notebooks were? What hint, what clue? Or did you just go through the box, top to bottom? Are you one of those people who are methodical, or one like me, one who looks for the hint of a pattern in the way creatures live? That's my mystery, or the one I will not be able to resolve, not unless things are far more surprising than I believe. Here is what I believe: one day you will stand in front of this box alone. And the abyss will be between us.

Outside, an owl hunted with a rush of wings that instantly stopped, only to be replaced by a perfectly grieving shriek. A field mouse out too late. Then the wings, the rush of silence.

•
  
•
  
•

I have hidden these out of shame as I know they could cause someone grief, but after a while, when I knew what had happened, I thought that perhaps the truth, that dangerous
substance, will want to emerge, no matter what, and that it might one day be of some use. That is my hope.

We decided not to talk about it, Pop and me. That was best. After the paperwork for Chip and our grandchildren, if we had any, after Pop had tried to instill order into the chaos I had let into our house, we stopped the clock. It was as though nothing had happened. Still, I thought, while I was willing, at times, to say that what had happened to me was chaotic, in fact I thought and had to realize that it was not chaotic at all, but the item that keeps human beings flowing from generation to generation.

The boys were away at school. Chip and Jack, who died in the war. So, it was just me, alone at the farm, and Pop, who came for the weekends, although every now and then he brought the boys, too, but soon he stopped that altogether, especially when he told them that I had gone to Europe, and that women in their late thirties sometimes had the urge to culture. Of course he helped me, came up with the money, helped arrange for an apartment in Paris through his connections, and for a doctor, too. The doctor had such brisk, touching manners, and he treated me with an attitude that, I guess, would have been more suited to dealing with an American girl, a teenager, who had managed to get herself into this condition.

At first I thought it was some odd, physical missing of McGill. The first thing was a soreness and swelling of my nipples, but then I thought this was some physical ache, and that it always happened anyway, before I got my period, but the period didn't come. Not for two weeks, then three, then a month. I sat at the farm, in the fall, and watched the leaves of the maples appear as though they were filling with blood, just as my breasts began to swell and become warmer to the touch.
I was sick in the morning, but only Charlotte knew about that, but she was polite and restrained, although she left for me a light lunch afterwards.

Pop came to the farm and we sat in our coats on the porch. The wild turkeys walked across the grass. The hawks as they found the thermals. I worked in these books, as you can see in another one, included here: I tried my hand at drawing, too, and if you look at the pictures of raccoons, bears, deer, even copperheads and timber rattlers, which I saw as they looked for a den, they have, in their eyes, a longing, confused look, as though they realized that life is so brutal it cares for not one individual, but only all of them, and this means a lot of misery, if you are one that is not looked after in the pack.

•
  
•
  
•

My grandmother wanted to know if Pop could really go through with it, pretending to be the father of the child, but while he said he could, he had a faraway look in his eyes, something my grandmother thought was just the beginning, and while he was a man of tremendous perseverance, she wondered if this look and the impulse behind it wouldn't fester and make matters worse, especially if, after a couple of stiff bourbons, close to the top of a water glass these days, he might make a mistake . . . in front of the boys.

So, Paris.

•
  
•
  
•

Pop had rented an apartment on rue Buci. And he had been considerate, too, since it was on the ground floor, at the back, quiet and not one that I would have to climb five flights of
stairs, when heavy, to get the apartment at the top. The apartment had a room for a maid, a woman who was silent, dark, like a figure made of smoke, who drifted in and out. My French was sufficient, and we could talk about what we were going to have for dinner or lunch. I did the shopping at the open-air market on rue Buci, and across the street, where the butcher had his stall next to the one for the cheese seller, but when I brought these things home, the maid, who doubled as a cook, prepared what I had bought, although she set the table in the dining room for one and then ate her own dinner, a miniature version of what she made for me, in the kitchen, sometimes standing at the sink, sometimes at the small table there, with her glass of red wine and her constant, almost mechanical eating. I sat before the plate she left for me.