All Things Cease to Appear Page 8

  Other women were always complaining, but she loved being a housewife and mother. Tending the children. Going outside come morning with the dogs. Climbing up the ridge through the high grass, her apron dappled with burrs. The fresh sun, the cold air. The feeling in her body of being used. The heaviness in her womb and breasts. Her thighs. God had given her a capable pair of hands. And she used them. She used her whole body.

  She loved the house, too. If she had to pick, it would be her kitchen she missed the most. That big old porcelain sink she never could get the stains out of. The pies and cookies she’d make—a quince pie sometimes, with apples and honey. The quince tree outside the kitchen door had been in the ground for a century, and in spring the boys tracked in the red petals on their shoes. The satisfaction she felt putting a meal on the table. It was in the small things, she knew, where life made sense. When she had a meal served and the boys would sit down, polite as nuns, and nod their heads with pleasure, the warm food filling them up, making them grow, making them happy. Well, there was nothing more satisfying in her mind than that.

  How do you evaluate a life? He had taken her with him; he’d made her. Lie down here next to me, he said. You’ll be all right. Stroking her hair, her damp head. Just start dreaming, that’s all you gotta do. Just let yourself go.

  And he’d touched her. Even as the fumes grew thick. I’ve loved you my whole life, he said.

  And that’s all she remembers. It was her last gift to him. Because in her life she was someone who gave. Gave, not took, and never asked for anything.

  —

  THE SHERIFF COMES first. Her boys stand outside, wearing blankets like cloaks. Her youngest crying, slapping his tears so nobody sees. They watch the men bring them out—first Cal, then her—and push them into the truck like bread in an oven. Sheriff Lawton with his clipboard, his eyes prickling—he’s not a man to show his feelings. He sets his big hand on Cole’s shoulder. Anything you need? he says, and her boy just looks at him. Who could answer that question? Even now she doesn’t have a clue. Death brings no revelations.

  Her boys wait, watching the truck pull out, the patrol car. The air fills with dust. Always there was dust in her house, no matter how much she scrubbed, and she scrubbed plenty. Dust on the surfaces, on her boys’ handsome faces, in their fingernails when she’d pull the covers up, on their cheeks as she bent to kiss them good night. They worked this farm. They worked this land. It gave them something in return. It gave you your strength, your will. You can never wash it off. You never should.

  —

  MARY LAWTON’S STATION WAGON pulls onto the grass. She gets out and stands there, shaped like a club chair in her big coat, round in the middle with skinny legs. Then she gets her bucket, mop and jug of ammonia and marches inside the house like a suffragette, ready to speak her mind. While she works, scouring the kitchen, tearing the sheets from the beds, she scolds the empty rooms. She doesn’t rush, relishing the clean smell, her accomplishment. Mary: her best true friend, her confidante. The only person she told things to. Because Mary knows this life, how it can cross you.

  When her work is done Mary sits on the steps and smokes and cries a little and shakes her head. Then she grinds her cigarette into the dirt, locks the place up and goes home.

  —

  TOWARD THE END, she’d had to find work. Any work, doing whatever. She wasn’t proud. The manager at Hack’s took pity on her and hired her for the graveyard shift, stocking shelves. When the rodents came out, that’s when she did, too. All the creatures of the night—skunks, opossum, Ella Hale. Cal didn’t like her working, of course, though only for selfish reasons. He said it wasn’t right, her going out late at night. As if he gave a damn. She should be home with her children, he argued. It’s money, she told him, knowing full well it was Cal who didn’t want to be at home.

  She remembers the drive into town on those long black roads. The feeling of it, the feeling in her. A kind of freedom. How she’d smoke two or three cigarettes one after another. Roll down the window, the wind like a shout, the whole world alive with cold. Then, in the parking lot, just sit for a minute, thinking. Put her hair back in a barrette, slide some gloss on her lips. Pull her flannel shirt down, smooth her jeans. She wore Cole’s roller-skating knee pads so it wouldn’t hurt when she stocked the low shelves. She could kneel down there for a long time, pushing in boxes of laundry soap, kitty litter, big bags of kibble.

  They let her have a break, and usually she’d get something from the machine. Sit there in the plastic chair. Unwrapping the candy bar, taking her time to eat it. Then out into the cold night to smoke. Freight trains wailing. Nothing like a cigarette on a cold night. When she drove home it was just getting light, the fog an eerie tide rolling in over the fields. Like a woman returning from a secret assignation, she’d wearily climb the stairs, looking in on her sleeping boys. She’d undress in the bathroom, relishing the privacy, scrubbing herself with cold water, then climb into bed naked beside her husband, lulled by the cadence of his breathing, the stink of bourbon, and fall asleep as the room filled with sunshine.

  —

  SHE VISITS the boys at her brother’s place. Rainer and the Mexican woman. They will have to do what they can. The boys around the table, their fingers clasped in prayer, like men playing poker, hiding their hands and muttering the words they can no longer trust, Our Father, who art in heaven…Their uncle smiling with quiet pride, not wanting to let on how much he’s missing her, his only sister. They hadn’t spoken in five years, a quarrel between Cal and him over nothing important, just two grown men slobbering over their convictions. Her blue-eyed babies grown up so big, silently passing bowls of food, sneaking scraps to the dogs at their feet.

  She cannot cry now. Tears are not allowed. Only the strange gray light pressing down, a gray warmth like the fur of a new skin.

  —

  HER HUSBAND HAD STRAYED, but not her, she’d been loyal to a fault. She had run her soft hands across his lean frame, his long torso, ribs that reminded her of the hull of a ship.

  He had a physical grace, a kind of distinction that her boys now have. Maybe not Wade, who is stout and slow-moving, but Eddy and Cole certainly, with agile hands and long limbs like their father.

  You have this life and what you make of it. And what had she done? Wife and mother. Her life in the kitchen and other disorderly rooms, folding and shoving and ironing and scrubbing, and her one indulgence, the fine lemon-verbena cream she rubbed on her feet. She was a countrywoman, large-boned yet slim, strong yet aching—lonesome, neglected. She had loved him so hard and gotten her heart broke. Her mother had said not to marry him. He was coarse, lacking emotional fluency, an eloquence of the soul. He was rough with her, could make her feel small, vulnerable. But also protected. Alive.

  Life History

  1

  THEY WERE chroniclers of art. Historians, they admired authenticity. They responded to beauty, to the elegant mathematics of composition, the moody pulp that was color, the spectacle of light. To George, line was the narrative; to Catherine, it was an artery to the soul.

  She was a painter, a muralist. Mostly she worked in churches, broken cathedrals in remote corners of the city. The work had come to her by accident through an old professor from graduate school. Over time she’d developed a following and was well known among a particular few.

  They paid her little, but she didn’t mind. The pay was irrelevant.

  Her work was meticulous, ornate. Sacred. She had the hands of a nurse, careful and sure. She was a Catholic. She painted her love for God, her fear. At the end of the day her arms ached. She cleaned brushes, folded rags, the smell of pigments and linseed oil in her nostrils.

  She went to work in overalls, her hair pinned up in tortoiseshell combs. It was a cathedral off Columbus on West 112th Street with goblins and cherubs tucked in the corners. The smoke of burning candles. In the transept chapel, a wall painting of the crucifixion had been damaged during a storm. The roof had leaked and rain had run down over
the face of Jesus like tears. Was it an ironic accident, she wondered, or some portent of imminent sorrow? Often superstitious, she believed a divine subtext could be found under the meaningless shimmer of ordinary events.

  Late one afternoon, several weeks into her restoration, an elderly couple came into the church. They were an odd pair. He appeared to be the woman’s attendant, a black man in a plaid wool cap and an overcoat, holding the woman’s arm. She was white and perhaps a good deal older, dressed in an outfit with a high ruffled collar, her shoes echoing across the terrazzo floors. He shuffled her along, their voices amplified in the emptiness. Together, with the man’s hand over the woman’s, they lit a candle, the wick igniting with the rasp of a secret.

  Catherine stood back, evaluating her work. She had addressed the detrimental changes caused by the rain and had matched the pigments precisely. The vibrancy of the original painting shone through. It might’ve been odd to think that she’d become intimate with her subject, but she had. She found herself wondering what He thought of her, His attaché to the living world.

  It was almost five, already dark. She hated the unyielding darkness of winter. Franny and the nanny would be back from the playground by now, and Mrs. Malloy eager to catch her train. A cold draft summoned her from the doorway as she pulled on her coat and scarf. Behind her, she could hear the old couple’s clattering approach through the empty sanctuary. They were mumbling to each other, words she couldn’t make out, and then the woman clutched ahold of Catherine’s arm. Alarmed, she turned around.

  She’s just saying hello, the old man said.

  But the woman offered only a troubling stare, her eyes fluttering like moths, and Catherine discerned that she was blind.

  Now, you know it ain’t polite to stare, the man told the woman. Let’s leave this nice young lady alone. He unclenched her grasp from Catherine’s coat and, in an awkward sort of dance, maneuvered her toward the door. The woman twisted around again, looking back at Catherine, and held her unseeing, terrified gaze.

  Catherine buttoned her coat. She needed to get home.

  Through the clerestory windows she could see the moonless sky. Leaving the balmy darkness of the cathedral for the swift cold air of the city she felt overcome, troubled by the interchange with the strange couple, the woman’s blindness. She walked home quickly, wrapping her scarf around her head, the people on the street hiding their faces, bracing themselves against the bitter wind.

  —

  IT WAS THE WINTER of 1978. They were living in a gloomy apartment on Riverside Drive, a short walk from the university where George was completing his doctorate and teaching two sections of Western Art Survey. Often, he’d told her, at the end of a slide presentation, he’d find the students asleep. This didn’t surprise her. Her husband could be dull. Since their marriage, it would be four years in August, his life, and hers by extension, had been controlled by his dissertation and the temperamental declarations of his adviser, Warren Shelby. George would come home from their meetings in a state. Pale, beleaguered, he’d retreat to the bedroom with a juice glass full of Canadian Club and watch reruns of M*A*S*H. In Catherine’s mind, the dissertation was an existential malfeasance, a relative from some foreign place, a hoarder of conundrums and neurotic tics, who’d moved into their lives and refused to leave. His subject was the painter George Inness, a disciple of the Hudson River School, whom she had come to know through an esoteric collection of evidence, the walls of the apartment shingled with index cards, scraps of insight and cryptic notations, postcards of Inness’s landscapes taped here and there (even one over the toilet) and an Inness quote that had been gone over so many times with a blue pen that the paper had ripped. Folding laundry or doing some mundane task, she’d read the quote again and again. Beauty depends on the unseen, the visible upon the invisible.

  On George’s small fellowship, the apartment was barely affordable. They had few possessions: the wingchair they’d found at an estate sale, prickly with horsehair, its spent legs splayed like a drunk’s; the Persian rug that had belonged to his parents; the camelback sofa from her distant aunt, covered in faded celadon damask, that served to accommodate the rare visitor, usually her sister, Agnes, who’d stay a few days until the crowded apartment drove her crazy. The building had no elevator. She’d drag the stroller up five flights, holding her daughter’s little hand, and it could take half an hour to get upstairs. Finally, she’d twist open the locks and enter their cluttered, diminutive haven, every scrap of its splintery floors devoted to some indispensable child-rearing apparatus. Their bedroom was the size of a sandbox, the lumpy double bed jammed between the walls. Frances, who was three, slept in the alcove, the foot of her little bed piled with coats, hats and mittens that wouldn’t fit in the closet. The apartment’s only redeeming feature was the view, which reminded her almost exactly of George Bellows’s Winter Afternoon, the heartless blue of the river, the rusty milkweed on its banks, the white snow and banners of shadow, the ordinary mystery of a woman bundled up against the cold in a red coat. The river made her pensive and a little melancholy, and as she gazed through the dirty windows she would try to remember her original self—the girl she’d been before she met George and they’d married to save themselves, his name like a stranger’s dress you slip on and walk around in, before she’d become Mrs. George Clare, like her rapacious, chain-smoking mother-in-law. Before she’d assumed her alias as devoted wife and mother. Before she’d left Cathy Margaret behind—that heron-boned, spider-legged, ponytailed girl, now abandoned for more important tasks, like changing diapers, ironing shirts, cleaning the oven. Not that she was complaining or even unhappy; for all intents and purposes she was content. But she sensed there must be something more to life, some deeper reason for being, some dramatic purpose, if only she could find out what it was.

  —

  LIKE MANY UNSUSPECTING COUPLES, they’d met in college. She was a sophomore; George was graduating that May. With mannered indifference, they’d pass each other on the sidewalks of Williamstown, she in her bulky Irish sweaters and hand-me-down kilts, he in his ratty tweed blazer, smoking Camels. He lived in the mustard Victorian on Hoxsey Street, with a group of art-history majors who had already cultivated a stuffy, curatorial arrogance that, with just a glance, reduced her to the chubby girl from Grafton with gravel dust in her shoes. Unlike George and his tony friends, Catherine was here on a scholarship; her father managed a quarry just across the border. She lived in the dorms, in a suite with three monastic biology majors. This was 1972, she was nineteen years old, and in those days, the unspoken hierarchy in the Art History Department ensured that the few female students were decidedly underappreciated.

  Their first conversation occurred at a lecture on the great sixteenth-century painter Caravaggio. It had rained that morning and she was late, the auditorium a sea of brightly colored rain jackets. An empty seat caught her eye in the middle of a row. Apologizing, making people stand, she shuffled down to it, discovering that it was George in the seat beside her.

  You should thank me, he said. I’ve been saving it for you.

  It’s the only one left.

  I think we both know why you sat here. He smiled like he knew her. George Clare, he said, reaching for her hand.

  Catherine—Cathy Sloan.

  Catherine. His hand was sweaty. In just a few seconds an intimacy seemed to infect them like some contagious disease. They talked briefly about mutual classes and professors. He had a very slight French accent and said he’d lived in Paris as a young boy. An apartment like Floor Scrapers. Do you know Caillebotte?

  She didn’t.

  We moved to Connecticut when I was five, and my life hasn’t been the same since. He smiled, making a joke, but she could tell he was serious.

  I’ve never been to Paris.

  Are you in Hager’s class?

  Next semester.

  He gestured at the screen, where the artist’s name was spelled out in crimson letters. You know about him, right?

 
Caravaggio? A little.

  One of the most incredible painters in history. He’d hire prostitutes for his models and transform saucy street tarts into rosy-cheeked virgins. There’s a certain poignant justice in that, don’t you think? Even the Madonna had a cleavage.

  Up close, he smelled of tobacco and something else, some musky cologne. In the close room, the high windows fogged with condensation, she had begun to sweat under her wool sweater. He was gazing at her as one gazes at a canvas, she thought, perhaps trying to solve her riddles. Like most Williams boys, he was wearing an oxford shirt and khaki trousers, but there were stylistic anomalies—rawhide bracelets around his wrist, the black canvas slippers (from Chinatown, he later told her), the rain-splattered beret on his lap.

  Didn’t he kill someone? Over something stupid, right?

  A game of tennis. Apparently a very bad loser. Do you play?

  Tennis?

  We could play some time.

  I’m not very good—

  Then you won’t have to worry.