After You've Gone. Jeffrey Lent
in place and one at a time restrung the instrument. Then sat and did his best to tune the cello. It was not quite right, but close. There was satisfaction. Small to some perhaps.
He went out for his supper and returned and the fall dusk was settling in, the windows holding an array of light from the sky, water, and buildings in a multiple of glimpses and reflections extraordinary and radiant. He sat and watched the last bit of day lingering and lengthening—not a draining of dusk into dark like home. Odd word, he thought. Home.
He stood and turned on the gooseneck lamp on his writing table and tipped the metal neck so the flood of light went up the wall and went and studied the drawing of the basket of cod for a short time. But he knew it so well he could see it always and nothing new was revealed tonight. Out loud he said, “You ask too much.”
The third evening together on the crossing, Lydia Pearce had ended a discussion of particular frustration for them both by asking, “Henry, what do you want?”
He had not been able to tell her.
Olivia would have known. And that, perhaps, was the problem. Not that Lydia did not know but somehow he suspected his dear wife was still too close. Perhaps her spirit in his memory and sense of honor. Or perhaps he was frightened of this young woman who so strangely resembled everything he’d spent his life’s work upon.
Six
O God whose mercies can not be numbered.
The deaths of his wife and son produced a series of stunned blurred relentless days and nights leading toward the double funeral after which Henry felt battered and marooned as upon a pinnacle of loosely stacked roofing slates, the rush of people suddenly receded, the press of which he’d ridden in perverse energy that while it was occurring seemed what life would now be like, until it was done and he was utterly alone.
He will swallow up death in victory.
A sullen morning with low wet woolen skies above the tower of Trinity Episcopal Church, the early promise of May abated for several days. Henry upright and rigid with a daughter either side of him, flanked by granddaughters and alert sons-in-law. The other front pew held Doyle and Mary and Olivia’s bachelor brother Quincy and the two aunts and Mary’s mother, a collapsed crimped woman in a wicker wheelchair.
The two coffins under their palls.
Like as the hart desireth the water-brooks
So longeth my soul after Thee O God.
The nave filled behind them, the scent of damp wool and undoubtedly compassionate small dashes of perfume sifting in waves. The lilies of resurrection flanking the alter. His chest constricted, his hands squeezed by his daughters, Polly weeping silently but for the shudders against him.
Raised in incorruption.
The rising and singing and sitting again. Henry did not sing. The prayers. He kept his eyes open upon the two caskets, his hands now furious as if his fingers would rend and shatter themselves.
And now shall he lift up mine head
Above mine enemies around me.
Incongruous, somewhere in the ranks of pews behind him sat four young veterans of the American Field Service as well as their officer, the same man who’d recruited Robert from Cornell. Met the evening before at the vigil, the man who for five years Henry had entertained the possibility of meeting and the words he might say—words sucked out of him, gone. Perhaps it was the moment, as likely the presence of the other young men, ambulance drivers. The words in that letter late autumn of 1916:
Robert, alone with the other drivers, is an honorable man in a place utterly shorn of honor & humanity. None envisioned what they’d encountered, few quailed. Robert wasn’t fearless, we all work in great fear. But the work must be done. His wounds are such that I speak with great confidence of his recovery. I shall, I swear upon my soul, return your son to you whole. Most sincerely, diddly-do.
Six months later with sunken cheeks and skin like wax Robert hobbled off the train on crutches, his rasping wheeze from the effort accentuating his appearance that stopped Henry even as Olivia rushed forward, Robert’s head raised then a bit over his mother’s shoulder to meet his father’s eye, a solemn cold appraisal as if battle had already been joined. Or joined again. The morphine still a secret but not for long, Robert caring less about the crushed tops of the glass ampoules, the syringe rinsed with alcohol and rubber tourniquet left on the glass shelf below the medicine cabinet in the bathroom. Home a month and the wicked little roadster appeared. I was a volunteer, Robert explained to his father, but I still got paid. And now? And now what? Olivia long into more nights than Henry could recall, listening, talking, responding, defending. Time, she’d said. Over and over. Time and patience. Cajoling. Excusing was what Henry thought but knew better than to say. And did not need to because Robert felt it from his father as a current, a pulsation. Blown off the motorcycle with its sidecar carrying a French officer from a dressing station outside of Verdun, back, back toward the lines and the field hospital, the mortar Robert said heard as a sudden shriek and the Frenchman was pulped, the machine destroyed, Robert some time in the mud before the regular ambulance convoys tried again after the shelling, the mist of gas already dissipated, the gas actually missed, unrecorded, no one aware of it during that empty hour, a sudden change of breeze sweeping it over him as his lungs gasped for air against the blood seeping from his leg. The gas only realized days later in the hospital outside Chantilly. He was fortunate, all the nurses told him. One night after Olivia was in bed Robert had come in late smelling most clearly of sex and gin and sat with his father and told him this, adding the nurses took a special interest in reviving all of his functions at which Henry rose silent and left the room.
In my father’s house are many mansions.
The night the past autumn of early dark when he sat with crossed legs and folded arms as for the first and only time in their marriage Olivia stood before him in the house otherwise empty, her eyes glistening wet with rage and held tears and spoke in a deadly chill voice just hours after the final shouting between father and son. You. I’ll no longer stand for you to blame Robert or myself. I was never outside my bounds as mother. You think I coddle him but I don’t. It’s some blameless place in your own mind you’ve cultivated for years and years—it’s your own poison Henry. How did he fail you? When? Better to ask yourself how you failed him and still do. You assail him at every opportunity. This anger, this vitriol Henry. When he was missing and then word came of his wounds, I listened to you and remained silent, thinking this is what a father does, this is how he copes, how he expresses his own fears. Even as we huddled together and I knew your fear as real as mine there was that anger of yours seeping through. It felt like contamination. I prayed, Henry. I prayed to spare him and prayed for your understanding and each prayer as heartfelt and heavy upon me as the other. And here he is returned to us. Not what he was but then, what was he, to you? When was he ever enough, just Robert? What do you know of what he should be? Henry, tell me. When I see you unable to extend a portion of the compassion and hope that you give to all these young women but not your own son? Oh you put a roof over his head, you allow him meals, you ask nothing from him. Except every moment for him to be otherwise. From what exactly, Henry? From yourself? Is that all you have to offer a son? Henry, he loves and admires you, but he is not you and never will be. Can’t you allow him that? Can’t you see he’s lived and seen things we can’t begin to comprehend? The vitality has been sucked from him and each day you remind him of that. I’m sorry to say this Henry but you’ve disappointed me. At his age, would you have done what he did? And if not, Henry, why not? Why not ...
Grant to all who mourn a sure confidence in thy fatherly care, that, casting all their grief on thee, they may know the consolation of thy love. Amen.
For the first time in his career he skipped all the graduation festivities and the commencement itself, excused graciously by those few he chose to offer his intentions to, and then, those days alone and silent in his small upstairs office in the house, increasingly aware that his absence was noted almost certainly exclusively by himself, save for the three students who expected him to present their special commendations and