Sourland Page 34

  Just once, Matt had taken her along on a march to the state capitol building in downtown Madison, a risky venture since the leaders of the march had no permit and the National Guard shootings at Kent State had occurred the previous week. In the wake of young protestors’ deaths in Ohio emblazoned in headlines across the country and in that single, iconic photograph they’d marched—two or three hundred protestors of varying ages—as uniformed Madison police officers and Wisconsin National Guard soldiers lined State Street brandishing billy clubs and Mace, their faces obscured by tinted visors. Matt had instructed Sophie that if the police charged, to try to get behind him; if they began shooting, to get beneath him. He would shield her, he said. He’d spoken earnestly, sincerely. He’d been excited and frightened and exhilarated. Sophie had no doubt that they were in imminent danger, and that Matt would protect her from all harm. A strange reckless elation flooded her veins, a conviction of immortality she would never again feel in her life.

  It happened that the protestors were greeted with sympathy by a sizable number of Wisconsin legislators—the demonstrators were made to feel placated and respected and the dangerous situation was defused. They didn’t die! They didn’t even get struck by billy clubs, their heads and faces bloodied. This was the first time—as it would be the last time—that Sophie would find herself in such a situation, in a crowded, public place without any knowledge of what might happen to her within the next half-hour.

  Sophie checked the envelope from K. a second time—a folded sheet of yellow lined paper slipped out.

  Sophie—

  Come see me here. We need to meet.

  Now you are prepared.

  KOLK

  Next thing Sophie knew, she was lying on the floor.

  It had seemed that the floor—hardwood, and very hard—swung up to strike her, on the side of the head. Like a billy club the floor struck her, with vehemence, malice. She’d had no time to put out her hand, to mitigate the force of the blow. How many minutes she lay there, part-conscious, she had no idea. Perhaps no time had passed. Perhaps a very long time had passed. By the time her strength returned, she’d forgotten where she was. She could not have said what day this was. Or where Matt was, that he hadn’t heard her fall, and call out for him.

  Hairs on the back of her neck stirred in fear. Something seemed to be crawling over her skin. Feathery-light these tiny things were, and very quick. She brushed at them, blindly. Her skin was clammy-cold, covered in sweat that had partly dried. And so some time must have passed, the panic-sweat had partly dried. No! no!—she brushed at the crawling things. She was on her elbows now, lifting her head. Her dazed eyes saw that the hand-printed letter signed KOLK had fallen to the floor beside her.

  3.

  Matt? Where are you…

  Waking in the dark, frightened and disoriented.

  How many times, like one afflicted with a fairy-tale curse. Waking in the dark—calling for her husband—the absent husband—the no longer existing husband.

  Sophie would confide in no one.

  Nor would Sophie confide in anyone how on that November day when Matt had been hospitalized he’d wakened early to prepare IRS forms to send to their accountant in Hackensack.

  He’d known that he was ill, and would need to be hospitalized. He had not known when he’d be back home, to complete the forms.

  Sophie had wakened at their usual time—7 A.M.—and still dark—knowing that something was wrong. His side of the bed was empty. Carefully the bedclothes had been turned back, Matt had slipped away without her knowledge.

  He had not confided in her. Of course Matt would say, in his maddening way of brushing aside her concern, her anxiety—Look. I didn’t want to upset you.

  And so barefoot and curious but not yet alarmed Sophie sought out her husband downstairs—she guessed he’d be in his study, working at his desk—as she approached the room on the first floor of the darkened house there was Matt just emerging in T-shirt and shorts which was his nighttime attire—his expression was strangely intense, a small fixed smile, a smile of a kind Sophie had not seen before—in his hands that were trembling—Sophie saw this, took note of this, with a part of her brain that had become immediately alert, aroused, yet inarticulate—was a large FedEx envelope. (So Sophie told herself This is all it is! Something for the IRS.)

  Thinking how like her husband to be so zealous, to behave so responsibly. Determined to send their joint financial papers off well before the deadline to their accountant in Hackensack who would include them with other documents and send everything on to the U.S. Treasury. Sophie I will protect you! I promise. It was an ordinary morning Sophie wished to think and yet with that preternaturally alert and aroused part of her brain she saw unmistakably that her husband was looking exhausted, his face was ashen, his lips so pale as to appear blue and his movements tentative like those of a man uncertain whether he can trust the floor beneath his feet. And that strange rasping sound—a sound Sophie would long recall, as the surviving spouse—of his labored breathing.

  Yet calmly he spoke her name: “Sophie.”

  And calmly he told her, in Matt’s way of giving precise instructions that Sophie must not misunderstand or misconstrue, no matter how emotional she was to become: “Call FedEx to have a driver pick this up. I’m sorry, I need you to drive me to the hospital.”

  Or had Matt said, “I’m sorry I need you to drive me to the hospital.”

  Each way Sophie would hear. Like one entranced she would hear, and rehear. The surviving spouse would exhaust herself with just these two possibilities.

  I’m sorry, I need you to drive me to the hospital.

  I’m sorry I need you to drive me to the hospital.

  No ambiguity about the word hospital!

  Immediately Sophie knew, this had to be serious. Her husband wasn’t a man who went willingly to the doctor. Through his adult life he’d been indifferent, even careless of his health, as if there were something unmanly in taking caution. And now, that bravado had vanished.

  Sophie asked him what was wrong. He said, “I think—my heart.”

  I think—my heart. This too Sophie would hear, and rehear. A curious phraseology. My heart, I think would have been a more natural way of speaking but there was nothing natural about her husband’s behavior on that morning.

  There would be other mornings in Matthew Quinn’s life. Several more mornings in Matthew Quinn’s life. But this was the final morning, of the life Sophie would share with him.

  His heart! The previous summer Matt had had a bout of fibrillation—was that what the condition was called, fibrillation?—after protracted physical exertion in the New Jersey heat. Stubbornly he’d been mending their eroded flagstone terrace at the rear of the house and this time too he’d come to Sophie—rapped on the kitchen window to get her attention and said apologetically that his heart was behaving “weirdly” and he couldn’t seem to “catch his breath” and would she drive him to their doctor?—which of course Sophie did, calling the doctor’s office on her cell phone from the car; and from his doctor’s office she’d driven him to the ER of the hospital which was less than a mile away and he’d been given an intravenous drug and sedated and in the morning successfully treated for his rapid and erratic heartbeat and by midday he’d been discharged, Sophie had driven him back home. And so now Sophie had every reason to think that the same thing would happen again. Telling herself It’s a routine procedure. We have gone through this before.

  Hurriedly she’d dressed. That last morning of their lives together in haste assembling a traveling bag for Matt—underwear, toiletries—a clean shirt, socks—for possibly he’d be in the hospital overnight as he’d been the previous time. Sophie was chattering brightly, nervously. Sophie could not have said what she was telling Matt nor did Matt appear to be listening to her. He was fumbling to put on his trench coat—quickly Sophie came to help him. Strange to her, and disconcerting, that her husband was breathing as if he’d run up a flight of stairs.

&
nbsp; Matt was fifty-six. Not a tall man but giving that impression. He’d become soft-bodied in the torso and midriff, he was overweight by perhaps fifteen pounds, the young lean husband she’d married in Madison, Wisconsin, had vanished. His dark hair had become sand-colored and was thinning at the crown of his head. His somewhat small gray-brown eyes were creased at the corners with a fierce inward concentration.

  Sophie saw that Matt had washed his face and damp-combed his hair but hadn’t shaved. Metallic stubble shadowed his soft-jowled lower face like an encroaching shadow. She felt a stab of love for him—a stab of terror—for in love there is terror, at such times. She knew that if she went to kiss him he’d have stiffened, this wasn’t a gesture he would have welcomed right now. He wouldn’t have pushed her away but in his distracted state he’d have stiffened, drawn back. On his ghastly pale-blue lips a small fixed smile.

  Worse yet: he’d have relented and kissed her to humor her. His lips would be icy, against her skin.

  This had not happened. Yet Sophie felt the impress of the icy lips against her overheated cheek.

  Still the wave of love for him flowed into her, like an electric current. She could not bear it, how she loved this man: the connection between them, that was in danger of breaking. Suddenly it was a possibility, the connection might be broken. Such desperate love Sophie felt for her doomed husband yearning and insubstantial as a tiny flame buffeted by wind. Such desperate love, she had to hide her face from him, that he wouldn’t see, and chide her.

  She slid her arm through his—he didn’t resist, but leaned against her—surprising to Sophie, they were almost of a height as if the man who’d once been inches taller than she had become diminished overnight, aged.

  She led him through the darkened downstairs of the house and to the door that led into the garage. Telling herself Exactly as it was last time. So it will be this time.

  In the car driving to the hospital she spoke calmly asking Matt how he felt, if his condition was the same or if he felt worse. She asked him please to fasten his seat belt but he seemed scarcely to hear. In subsequent days, weeks, months the surviving spouse would see herself behind the wheel of the car which was not her accustomed place when she was with her husband for always her husband drove their car, not Sophie; she saw herself beside her stricken and distracted husband in their gleaming-white vehicle propelled forward by momentum as irresistible as the lunar tide or the sway of galaxies with not the slightest comprehension of where they were going or that their desperate journey was in one direction only, and could never be reversed. As time cannot be reversed. She would see herself as the bearer of Matthew Quinn to his grave. She would see herself as the person who betrayed him for never would he return again to their house. Never would he return to the life he’d so loved, in that house.

  If she’d known: that Matt had slipped out of bed in the middle of the night. That he’d spent hours on the tax forms, instead of waking her and asking her to take him to the hospital.

  Had he known how serious the fibrillation was? Or had it steadily worsened, while he’d worked on the tax forms?

  She couldn’t bear to think He risked his life for something so trivial! For our financial well-being. For me.

  Now he was gone from the house. The husband was gone, the husband would not return. Yet a dozen times a day she heard his voice—not as it had been on the morning of his departure but as it had been, before—nor did she hear his labored arrhythmic breath that had so terrified her—though the house was empty, deserted.

  Except for the surviving spouse, the house was deserted.

  The husband had vanished utterly in the way of the incinerated. Made not into soft powdery ashes but into coarse-grained ashes and bone-chunks “buried” in an aluminum container in a cemetery several miles from their house where for years they’d walked—for they were frequent walkers, hikers, bicyclists—they’d loved the outdoors in its more benign weathers—admiring the older, eighteenth-century gravestones and giant aged oak trees buttressed by iron rods like the fanciful drawings of invading Martians on the paperback cover of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. How innocent they’d been in those days! You could say how blind, how stupid. How utterly oblivious. Walking in the cemetery with no regard for what lay moldering beneath their feet.

  Now, they’d been punished for their blindness. The deceased husband, the surviving spouse.

  In a haze of anesthetized grief she’d purchased a plot in the quaint “historic” cemetery. At the open grassy area at the rear, where new graves were dug. Fresh graves, unrelenting. Matt’s “remains” were set beneath a small rectangular grave marker the crematorium provided. Set in frozen grass in what was called a double plot for which she barely recalled writing a check. In a kindly avuncular voice the funeral director had urged You might as well secure a double plot, Mrs. Quinn This is a practical step.

  The widow wished above all to be practical. You don’t want to embarrass, upset, or annoy others. You don’t want to become a spectacle of pathos, pity. The widow resolved that grief itself might become practical, routine. Though at the present time her grief was slovenly and smelly as something leaking through a cracked cellar wall.

  Also her grief was demented. For often in the night she heard her husband. He’d risen from their bed in the dark, he’d slipped from the room. Possibly he was using his bathroom in the hall just outside their bedroom. Every sound of that bathroom was known to her, they’d lived together in this house for so long. In her bed on her side of the bed her heart began to pound in apprehension waiting for him to return to bed with a murmured apology Hey! Sorry if I woke you.

  Maybe, he’d have called her Sophie. Dear Sophie!

  Maybe, he’d have brushed her cheek with his lips. His stubbled cheek against her skin. Or maybe—this was more frequent—he’d have settled back heavily into bed wordless, into his side of the bed sinking into sleep like one sinking into a pool of dark water that receives him silently and without agitation on its surface.

  Often in the night she smelled him: the sweat-soaked T-shirt, shorts he’d worn on that last night.

  4.

  Soon then Kolk entered her dreams. Like the rapid percussive dripping of thawing icicles against the roof of the house. As she was vulnerable to these nighttime sounds so she was vulnerable to Kolk by night.

  In her dreams he was a shadowy figure lacking a face. The figure in the photograph, hand uplifted.

  A greeting, or a warning.

  She had believed that the man was dead. The actual man, Kolk.

  In their few encounters in Madison, Wisconsin, many years before they’d spoken little to each other. Kolk—was his first name Jeremiah?—had been one of Matt’s political-minded friends but not one of his closest friends and Sophie had never felt comfortable in his presence. There was something monkish and intolerant in Kolk’s manner. His soot-colored eyes behind glinting wire-rimmed glasses had seemed to crawl on her with an ascetic disdain. Who are you? Why should I care for you?

  He’d never cared enough to learn her name, Sophie was sure.

  It was said of Kolk that he was a farm-boy fellowship student from Wisconsin’s northern peninsula who’d enrolled in the university’s Ph.D. program to study something otherworldly and impractical like classics but had soon ceased attending classes to devote time to political matters exclusively. It was said that Kolk had an older brother who’d been a “war hero” killed in World War II. Among others in Matt’s circle who spoke readily and assertively Kolk spoke quietly and succinctly and never of himself. He had a way of blushing fiercely when he was made self-conscious or angry and often in Sophie’s memory Kolk was angry, incensed.

  He’d quarreled with most of his friends. He’d insulted Matt Quinn who’d been his close friend.

  He’d called Matt fink, scab. These ugly words uttered in Kolk’s raw accusing voice had been shocking to Sophie’s ears. Matt had been very angry but had said We have a difference of opinion and Kolk said sneering I think you’re a
fink and you think you aren’t a fink. That’s our difference of opinion.

  Sophie recalled this exchange. And Sophie recalled a single incident involving her and Kolk, long-forgotten by her as one might forget a bad dream, or a mouthful of something with a very bad taste.

  Or maybe it was excitement Sophie felt. And the dread, that accompanies such excitement.

  Matt hadn’t known. Sophie was reasonably sure that none of their friends had known. For Kolk wouldn’t have spoken of it.

  They’d been on a stairway landing—the two of them alone together—the first time they’d been alone together for possibly Sophie had followed Kolk out onto the stairs for some reason long forgotten but recalled as urgent, crucial. And Sophie had reached out to touch Kolk’s arm—Kolk’s arm in a sleeve of his denim jacket—for Kolk was upset, to the point of tears—his face flushed and contorted in the effort not to succumb to tears—and so Sophie who wasn’t yet Matt Quinn’s young wife but the girl who lived in a graduate women’s residence but spent most of her time with Matt Quinn in his apartment on Henry Street reached out impulsively to touch Jeremiah Kolk—meaning to comfort him, that was all—and quickly Kolk pushed Sophie away, threw off her hand and turned and rapidly descended the stairs without a backward glance and that was the last time she’d seen him.

  So long ago. Who would remember. No one!

  Sophie had been conscious of having made a mistake, a blunder—following after Matt’s friend, who was no longer Matt’s friend. Why she’d behaved so recklessly, out of character—why she’d risked being rebuffed or insulted by Kolk—she could not have said.