I nodded. There were hundreds of tiny, malformed apples in the McIntosh, each the size of a thimble. I didn’t know about grace, but I had nearly been swept under numerous times.
“I walk down to the pond every night because I think of her there. I sit looking at the water and I sense her, I really do. If I can only keep her in focus, hold her there, I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right.” She took a long drag. She was talking out to the orchard, as if the trees had come to stand in straight rows for the purpose of listening to her; I felt sure that even if I hadn’t been present she would still have been talking, to the grass, the birds, the possible spirits. I slunk back into the unyielding trunk of the tree. “I drove to Neenah today, to talk to Albert Satinga,” she went on. “Everyone says I have to get on with my life and keep busy, take a vacation, get a puppy, plant a garden. I smile and agree—God, I was so
well brought up it makes me ill. Inside I’m screaming at the advice. My sister signed me up for volleyball on Wednesday nights, and a counted cross-stitch class at the Sewing Center! She’s only trying to be kind, but I just wish they’d all leave me alone. Dan has been getting up at four o’clock and going to the Dairy Shrine—”
I could picture him in his basement office, his ceramic cow knick-knacks facing him on the desk. I wondered if he could work, if sometime months from now he might unveil an exhibit, a surprise to the community, a brilliant installation about the invention of the threshing machine. It was also conceivable that he might sit down at his office for a year and have nothing to show for himself. I had been afraid of Dan at first; after the days in the hospital I had not feared him less but I began to be frightened for him as well. He may have tried to look unflinchingly at the possibility of the endless dark hole, the hereafter, not so much for himself, but for his little girl. Most of the family would probably have hoped to find solace in the conventional images of heaven. Although I hadn’t yet visited Lizzy’s grave, it certainly would have had all the crudeness of the earth, of planting a seed or burying a hamster. Theresa had talk and inborn strength on her side: There she was, talking at me in spite of the knife slicing through her breast, and the fact that theoretically we had nothing to say to each other. I didn’t know if Dan could look into the abyss without falling in himself.
She was alternately wiping her face with her hands and dealing with the cigarette, which seemed conspicuous and awkward to her, something ill-fitting and new that requires an adjustment, like walking for the first time in high heels. I started to ask if someone was planning activities for Dan, but she didn’t hear. “Yesterday,” she said, “I just had to see Albert. It’s crazy, I know, but I had to. I left Audrey with my sister. I made an excuse about how I had to go settle with the insurance company and finish out a staffing at the office since I’m not going to work anymore this summer. I couldn’t wait to get up there, to see Albert.”
I was looking in on a private moment. It was not for me, Theresa resting against the tree, smoking and talking. I felt I shouldn’t look at her. It was logical that she should go see her old friend, Albert Satinga. He had been a priest at the parish church, as well as Theresa’s English teacher at St. Benedict’s High School. He had been in his middle twenties at the
time, stocky, she’d said, solid, with black eyes and what still looked like peach fuzz growing over his ruddy cheeks. At sixteen Theresa thought he was the most intense person she had ever known, that no one in Prairie Junction could hold a candle to the beauty, the faith, the poetry, of Father Albert. As sponsor of the school yearbook he had students on the roof, hanging upside down to photograph the gargoyles. Theresa, I knew, had worshipped him then, and she had merely loved him seven years later, when he was defrocked for several reasons, not least for passing out subversive literature to students,
The Catcher in the Rye
, for example, and no doubt most of all because he had been smitten by a confessor, sight unseen. He was fascinated by the nameless, faceless woman’s stories of life with a brute. For weeks he scanned the nave from the pulpit during the 6
A.M
. mass. Her voice was low, an excellent thing, he knew, in a woman. He couldn’t have asked for more one Monday morning, when a creature with unnatural blond hair, stiff as bristles, thrust her fragile, gloved hand into his already-in-motion priestly handshake and murmured, “Father Albert.” Four months later Albert left the church in disgrace and a year later his marriage, which had hardly begun, was over. Theresa tended him up to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Afterward, when he was out of the hospital, he went off to Red Wing, Minnesota, to learn how to repair band instruments. Now he was living in Neenah, Wisconsin, working at a music shop repairing valves and worn pads on clarinets and French horns, flutes and tubas.
“I just didn’t have the time or privacy to call him between the hospital and the funeral,” she was saying. “I don’t know how I got through the work of arranging the details, the coffin, my God, the dress, the shoes—my mother was hysterical for all of us, I think. I still feel as if I’m moving, that it will take a long time to come to a complete stop. That’s why I need to visit the pond, to get a grip. Every now and then I’d feel a moment of calm, hovering above the lunacy, as if I was somewhere between Earth and Lizzy. It was so strange, shopping for her, what color would she like, what fabric, as if she was going away to college.”
Imagine Lizzy going to college—for a split second I considered it a possibility in the far-off future, that she might return to go to Vassar or Smith, because a girl, no matter what was hindering her, couldn’t pass up that experience. I needed to leave the orchard and go home to Nellie and
Howard. Their censure and good intentions would be easy to suffer compared with this conversation that wasn’t meant for my ears and to which I could offer nothing. She bent down to put her stub in the dirt. “I had to go up there, out the main drag of Neenah to the instrument repair shop.” She lit another and threw the match into the bleached grass. “Alice,” she said, turning and looking at me for the first time, “sometimes I get the queerest feeling. It always lasts for just a minute. It’s—it’s that we are all as expendable as kittens. Do you ever get that?”
I was surprised and then appreciative that she’d directed a question to me and I nodded vigorously.
“God,” she said, shaking her fists, “I really hate that feeling.” She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket that seemed to contain no end of interesting things, and demurely blew her nose. She wasn’t exactly facing me, but she had changed position, her side, instead of her back, to the tree, so that an observer would have had the impression that we were having an interchange. “I went to the repair place, and I stood by the window looking in on Albert in the workroom lumbering around, pawing through the drawers filled with gaskets, you know, parts. He stuck his oily hand into a drawer and pulled out some sort of greasy pipe, turned it over and over, like coons do in the garbage. I kept thinking he was some kind of animal—I couldn’t help it. His red shirt had a white, ‘Albert,’ sewn in cursive on the pocket, like gas-station attendants have. Can you believe it?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She had become as extroverted and manic as I had become introverted and slow. She was not all right; she was like an animal herself, something that’s got a foot stuck in a trap and is going so wild it can’t figure out what limb is hurting. I wondered if she would tell the story to anybody she saw on the street, or sit down at Del’s, the diner in town, talking at everyone who came in for coffee, whether or not they wanted to hear.
“I looked at the sheet music until the woman in the shop was busy with someone else, and then I charged through the door, to the back. I put my head down on that greasy counter and I couldn’t stop, I just sobbed; I sobbed, ‘Father, forgive me, for I have sinned.’ ”
“You did?” I said, unable to suppress my astonishment.
She shook her head back and forth, exhaling a tremendous blast, her bottom lip jutting out so that the smoke went up into her face. “Old habits die hard,” she said, “especially old Catholic habits. I’ll bet he hadn’t heard anyone call him ‘Father’ in ten years.”
“What did he do?”
“I could tell he didn’t know about Lizzy. I thought someone might have called him. He was sort of in shock, I guess, seeing me in the middle of his workplace. I was crying my head off, bawling him out, screaming like a madwoman, telling him the repair shop had no business hiring someone as inept as he was, that he should”—she hiccuped—“be corrupting youth with good books and leading young girls to the Holy Spirit.”
She doubled over and coughed into both hands, and I thought, although she was several feet from me, that I should go thump her on the back. When she stood up she walked toward me holding on to a branch as if it was a guard rail. “I could never tell Dan about it, or my sisters. They thought he was lecherous. You’re the only person who really knows about Albert.”
It was folly to take the compliment to heart, but I couldn’t help feeling pleasure for a minute, in the secret, in her trust.
“I swear,” she said, “that even among the instruments, under his bright ‘Albert’ shirt and his strained pants—he’s huge, I mean he’s absolutely enormous—I swear that in the midst of all the grease and glue his holiness shines through. He’s fat, he needs a haircut, but you can’t help knowing you are in the presence of the Holy Spirit.”
The light was growing dim and she was beginning to look like a specter herself. I was grateful she was talking to me instead of to the trees. “We went to the coffee shop down the road, and we sat across from each other with cherry sodas, the way we used to do in high school, on the sly. It could have been fifteen years ago; it was as if no time had passed. He made me do something I’d been afraid to do for myself. He insisted I tell him the story of Lizzy’s life, from the start to the finish. At first I panicked, thinking, I’m not going to be able to draw hers as a full life. I was terrified I’d find out—that her story would come up so very short, or I’d make her sound like a little saint when she is flesh in the best sense of
the word. But I started, from nearly after conception … God, I can’t believe it—I could remember everything, back to nearly every doctor’s visit, and hearing her heartbeat on that stethoscope thing. I went through the birth—I spared him no details, including delivering the placenta. The nurse wanted to save it so she could bring it to a Lamaze class that night. I said absolutely not, I wasn’t going to have my placenta in a bucket for a group of scared parents to look at. Albert sat on the edge of the booth, like he couldn’t wait to hear about her first tooth, for the sleepless night to be over, for the I.V. to be put in—remember the time she got dehydrated? Last year?”
It seemed years ago, decades ago, and now Theresa was going to talk at high speeds through the seasons, through the rain and sleet and snow, until she was briny and then moss covered.
“He made me write down the words she knew—there are fifty-six. That’s pretty good for a two-year-old, isn’t it? It took me hours to tell her story. Albert took the longest coffee break in the history of the Industrial Society and he’ll probably get fired for it. But it struck me, it hit me that Lizzy had a full life, compressed to be sure, but, but in its own way it was full of everything that we all experience, if we live to be one hundred. I realized that I could spend the rest of my days screaming because she won’t get to grow up, but Albert made me look at what was, at how mysterious and extraordinary she was, at what a gift we were given in Lizzy. He blessed me for the long work of grief we have ahead of us. He blessed me, Alice. He gave that to me, do you see? Don’t you see?”
I looked up from the job I was doing, picking at the bark. I wasn’t quite sure I saw. From the outside it looked as if Lizzy had missed almost everything. She would never fall in love at sixteen, or read
The Secret Garden
, or smell violets again, or eat cotton candy, or fly for the first time on a bike.
“When I was done Albert said, and there were tears streaking down his face, he said, ‘I’m going to miss that girl.’ He never met her! He moved over next to me and we rocked together, back and forth, just hard enough so that one edge of the booth came up like a swing set will, you know, that isn’t grounded in cement?”
What I could see of her in the dusk, in the glow of her cigarette butt,
startled me so much I choked on thin air. She was smiling at the sky, her mouth wide open in a fanatical grin, as if she were trying to beam all of her faith up to the dark, dry, invisible ether. She began to whisper, and I had to move closer to hear. “It was so strange, when I left him. I was driving way too fast. I knew that it was night, of course it was, but it was as if the highway, was—radiant. That’s the only word I know to describe it. It was radiant.”
For her sake I tried to picture a glowing highway, a ribbon of light all the way from Neenah to Prairie Center. “No one would believe me,” she said out loud. “I won’t ever tell anybody. I can’t tell Dan why I’m afraid to go on vacation. I’m afraid to leave, for fear she’ll come back and we won’t be home. What will she do if she finds we aren’t home?” She came closer yet, bringing her forearm across her cheek and mouth. “I just have to remember,” her voice trembling, “I have to remember the Holy Spirit. The anger, the regret, the fear—floats off like mist when I remember the presence, when I feel the warmth and the glow of the Holy Sp—”
“Where are you going?” I said. I had just realized that she’d mentioned something about leaving.
“Where are we going?” she repeated. “Ah, we thought Cape Cod at first, but then we decided it would be better to take the train out to Glacier and climb. Climb. Alpine meadows and marmots and snowcapped mountains.”
The gnats had found us, were flying at our faces, thick as snow. Theresa went into a frenzy, slapping her nose, her legs, her arms, her chest. “This is horrendous!” she shouted. “I’m going, these things are terrible. Audrey is doing the best of any of us. She skips all over the park shouting, ‘My sister’s in heaven, my sister’s in heaven!’ I bet she imagines heaven is like Disney World, with water slides and Coke and people dressed up as Big Bird and Minnie Mouse.”