The Summer Without Men

at least between my parents. Direct confrontation, of any kind, had been extremely rare. “But he admitted it.”
    “No, he didn’t confirm or deny it.” My mother pressed her lips together. “He found it very difficult, you know, to talk to me about anything painful. He would say, ‘Please, I can’t. I can’t.’”
    As she spoke, a mental image of my father came abruptly into my head. He was sitting with his back turned to me, silently watching the fire, a book of puzzles at his feet. Then I saw him lying in the hospital bed, a long skeletal figure adrift on morphine, no longer conscious. I remembered my mother touching his face. At first, she used a single finger, as if she were drawing his features directly onto his body, a wordless outline of her husband’s countenance. But then she pressed her palms against his forehead, cheeks, eyes, nose, and neck, squeezing his flesh hard like a sightless woman desperate to memorize a face. My mother, both tough and blighted, her lips pressed together, her eyes wide with urgency as she began to grasp his shoulders and arms and then his chest. I turned away from this private claim to a man, this possessive declaration of time spent, and I left the room. When I returned, my father was dead. He looked younger dead, smooth and incomprehensible. She was sitting in darkness with her hands folded in her lap. Narrow lines of light from the Venetian blinds made stripes across her forehead and cheek, and I felt awe, only awe in that instant.
    In response to my silence, my mother continued. “I am telling you this now,” she said, “because I sometimes wished he had risked it, had thrown himself at her. He might, of course, have run off with her, and then again, he might have tired of it…” She exhaled loudly, a long shuddering breath. “He returned to me, emotionally, I mean, to the degree that it was possible for him. It went on for a few years—the distance—and then I don’t think he thought of her anymore, or if he did, she had lost her power.”
    “I see,” I said. I did see. The Pause. I tried hard to remember sonnet 129. It begins, “Th’expense of spirit in a waste of shame,” and then the lines about lust, “lust in action.” Somewhere the words “murderous, bloody, full of blame…”
     
Enjoyed no sooner, but despised straight;
    Something, something … then:
     
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
    “Who was she, Mama?”
    “Does it matter?”
    “No, maybe not,” I lied.
    “She’s dead,” my mother said. “She’s been dead for twelve years.”
    *   *   *
     
    That evening, as I turned the key in the lock, I felt a presence on the other side of the door, a heavy, threatening being, palpable, alive, there, standing just as I stood, its hand raised. I heard myself breathing on the step, felt the cooling night on my bare arms, heard a lone car engine start up not far away, but I didn’t move. Neither did it. Stupid tears rose in my eyes. I had felt the same weighted body years ago at the bottom of the stairs at home, a waiting Echo. I counted to twenty, delayed for another twenty beats, then pushed hard at the door and turned on the light switch to face the reasonable emptiness of the mud hall. It was gone. This thing that was not a superstition or a vague apprehension, but a felt conviction. Why had it returned? Ghosts, devils, and doubles. I remembered telling Boris about the waiting presence, invisible but dense, and his eyes had lit up with interest. That was back in the days when he liked me, before his eyes went dull, before Stefan died, the little brother, who leapt and crashed, so smart, O God, the young philosopher who knocked them out at Princeton, who made them quake, who loved to talk to me, to me, not just to Boris, who read my poems, who held my hand, who was dead before he could visit me in the hospital where he had been, too, landed, too, on his flights to heaven and drops into hell. I hate you for what you did, Stefan. You knew he would find you. You must have known he would find you. And you must have known he would call me and that I would go to him. For half a second, I saw the pool of urine on the floor mixed with watery feces staining the floorboards. No.
    Stop thinking about that.