After You've Gone. Jeffrey Lent
and the coolness of the spring earth enveloped him and then he left the broad walkway and crossed the front lawn, up the brick walk to his house. He’d thought Olivia might be waiting him on the porch as she often did these new days but the porch was empty. He went up and in, stopping in the front hall to leaf through the mail on the telephone table and, after a moment waiting for her to hear him, he called out her name, somehow already knowing, feeling the emptiness of the house. He draped his jacket over the stair rail and loosened his tie and collar with one hand as he walked down the hall, passing the dining room already set for three and into the kitchen. The note on the table was from the housekeeper Irma, addressed to Olivia, the time noted in the upper right corner, 5:15, the quiet remonstrance of invaluable help who knew she was. The roast should come out at six-thirty and rest before being carved. It didn’t matter that this was old routine—what mattered was the mistress of the house had not been there in person to thank Irma for her day.
Henry took a tumbler from the cupboard and shaved ice from the block in the icebox that stood next to the new refrigerator, went into the dining room to the cupboard built into the wall along the china cabinets, dug his wallet from his rear pocket and slipped out the small key, opened the cupboard and poured a hearty splash of rye over the ice, relocked the cupboard and replaced the key in his wallet.
Robert did quite well managing with bootleg whisky or bathtub gin.
It had not always been that way.
He carried his drink through the kitchen and out the back door where he wasn’t surprised to find the Dodge sedan in place under the hickory tree and no sign of Robert’s two-seat roadster. He took the first sip of his drink and went back inside, walking through the house and up the stairs, passing their bedroom with open door, the high bed made up neatly and the blinds up to let in the afternoon warmth, a pleasant room of dark wood and carpet, bedclothes, and wallpaper all varying shades of ambers. Down the hall past closed bedroom doors, the empty ones and Robert’s childhood room reclaimed these four years and at the end into the small room he used as his home office, the ceiling pitched to accommodate the attic stairs. He’d have preferred to sit on the front porch for this end of day libation but even with the respectful distance according himself and his home those days were gone now, save for the comfortable nest of privacy at the lake cottages.
Henry had taken the Temperance Pledge at the age of ten in the Freeport Baptist Church and silently renounced it five years later but the message was taken and held—even in the occasional raucous parties during the summer he was the measure of thoughtful restraint.
Which didn’t preclude him from enjoying his rye over ice before dinner. Or wine on festive occasions. And it hadn’t been the laws of prohibition that now held that restraint in even greater check. As he told himself not for the first time that he could serve as example for no one who refused to see him as such. But still. He would do what he could.
He sat at the small rolltop desk and wrote a short note to his mother, took a checkbook from the drawer and filled out the monthly check, addressed the envelope, his script as fine and even as the ruler-snap on his knuckles all those years ago had enforced, sealed the envelope and set it aside. From the window here he could see the poplars and the tennis courts—the game had ended.
He swallowed the last of the whisky-water and stood to pull his watch from his vest pocket when he heard the car crunch in over the gravel behind the house. Whatever jaunt Robert had enlisted his mother in had come to an end. Well and good and it would remain so. Henry was determined to be pleasant over dinner. Most times he was successful and the times he was not he always knew he’d lost whatever battle was being fought. Because it was a battle without winners.
He was halfway down the upstairs hall when the front doorbell rang. He’d expected to hear their voices and the slap of the kitchen screen door the other end of the house. And realized the automobile had been far too quiet to be the roadster. He set his empty glass on a side table and called “Coming,” as he made for the stairs and then the door below opened, no one bothering to ring the bell a second time and he cleared the second floor just in time to see his father-inlaw Doyle Franks and longtime family friend and physician Emery Westmore let themselves in and stand looking up at him, the men side by side, faces tightly drawn and silent.
Stricken, Henry thought.
Doyle said, “I can’t bear this.” Then pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and performed some ancient ablution across his features, not blowing his nose or dabbing his eyes but something both more and less vague. Raising a screen for an unbearable moment.
Henry arrested on the fourth step.
Emery Westmore revolved his hat in his hands by the brim, crown out, shielding his belly. He said, “They were motoring back on the Horseheads Road and there was a truck on that curve just before the Erie tracks.” He glanced down and said, “I’m sorry, Henry.”
And a world was gone, not changed but gone and he was already lost and sinking within when some stolen voice, something borrowed or brought up, the rasp of a timorous breast-broken crow. “What are you telling me.”
Later, so much later, he wandered through the house turning off all the lights except for one low reading lamp in the parlor with its frosted globe and tasseled shade to sit within a roar of silence pounding blood vessels in his ears—his very heart—and the mantle clock chimed one and he realized it was already the next day, the day after their deaths. Never mind sleep and rising in the dawn which he doubted would happen anyway. Last thing he’d turned off the scorched coffee in the percolator on the stove and realized someone, perhaps Irma, perhaps Olivia’s mother Mary, or any one of the faculty wives or friends who had drifted through the house as the news spread and those self-elected who came within their rights—someone had removed the roast from the oven and placed the covered pan in the refrigerator. Alice and her family had already boarded the overnight from Chicago and he’d managed to convince not Polly but her husband Jack to wait for dawn to set out on the drive from Utica and so sat in his parlor with the date to be carved already behind him and the gaping void already drawing before him but for these hours, at least these hours now, alone and silent within the emptiness of what appeared to be a fully occupied home.
He would, he thought, in time forgive himself even as he was already forgiven for his ugly outburst as Emery Westmore described the accident where it appeared the waiting truck had blocked view of the signal lights just beyond the curve and so also the rushing freight train as Robert swept around the truck as if there was no possible reason for it to be halted there or perhaps he simply thought it was going very slowly but the whistle from the engines pulling the hundred coal hoppers had long before been swallowed by the wind as the little roadster piled head-on into and then under the massive twisting steel.
“He was drunk, wasn’t he? On top of the goddamned morphine. Drunk and doped and driving his own mother and going too fast, isn’t that it? Damn it, Emery, tell the truth.”
But there was no truth to tell. After lunch Robert had made it most of the way through a round of golf at the Club and then wheezing and gimping had quit but his partner Fuzzy Chickering had sworn neither of them had been drinking. This, Henry knew could be true or not but even as he spat his viciousness he recoiled before it. For much as she loved her son and as she’d admitted to Henry after a single hushed late-night quarrel, also loved riding in the fast two-seater, Olivia would not have been persuaded, even on such a lovely day, if Robert was listing more than usual. In ways she worried about him more than Henry did but her indulgences were not foolish. Most likely, he knew, she was thinking the bracing motor car ride would be a tonic delightful with the afternoon, a better way for her son to fill that time than most others.
But now in the darkly hushed house there was no anger. Henry sitting alone accepted that in ways that would not last, that the days ahead would change and alter and fully reveal themselves to him but for the moment he was essentially numb to the death of his son. Not from anger and certainly not from having given up on him but a far more complex process of grief and relief, reconciliation and guilt, that extended back to the day in the spring of 1916 when the letter arrived, mailed from New York on the afternoon Robert was to board the steamer for France, already a member of the American Field Service Ambulance Corps, the letter timed so