A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [121]
It was true. From his room, Harrison had been unable to hear a sound.
“What Carl hadn’t told me was that Judy was pregnant. Within a few weeks, it became obvious to me. Perhaps it was obvious even before I realized he was visiting her bed. I heard her retching in the bathroom in the mornings. I could see her waist begin to thicken. One day I asked her. She said, yes, she was pregnant. I stopped short of asking her if it was Carl’s. I knew, but I didn’t want to hear it said aloud.”
“Nora,” Harrison said, “I’m so sorry.”
“That day, I realized that Carl Laski was a monster. For years, he had forbidden me to have a child. He had had his children, he said, and doing so had brought him nothing but heartache. He wouldn’t do that to himself again. Besides, he would always add, he was too old for children. But, you see, I wasn’t too old, was I? I had longed to have a child. And here was evidence that Carl had allowed himself to have a child with this . . . this schoolgirl.”
Harrison struggled to take in the reality of what Nora was telling him. A girl living in her house, a girl pregnant by her husband. He remembered the way in which Nora had spoken of Carl Laski just two days earlier: He was a wonderful man. A wonderful poet and a wonderful man.
Harrison had read the Roscoff book, and though he had not liked the work, he’d been persuaded that Laski had been, at the very least, a difficult and troubled man. But then Harrison had listened to Nora’s somewhat defensive and laudatory comments about her husband, and he’d begun to see the man anew: the wonderful husband, the good teacher. And now, like someone whose first hunch has turned out to be the correct one, Harrison saw the man finally for what he’d really been. A self-absorbed tyrant.
“I was furious,” Nora said. “I confronted him. He denied the child was his. He pretended surprise. Carl was capable of betrayal, but not of lying. He was absurdly bad at it. I threatened to leave. I think I actually packed a suitcase. I’ve never told anyone this.”
“I’m glad you feel you can tell me,” Harrison said, but he wasn’t sure if this was true. Last night, his feelings had been simple, pure, imperative.
“I said I would stay only if he got rid of her,” Nora continued. “That I would not live under the same roof, that I was tired of hearing them make love at night. That got Carl’s attention. I think he’d imagined that I hadn’t heard, hadn’t known. He said he would find her a place.” She took a breath. “And then he discovered he was sick.”
“The cancer,” Harrison said.
“He’d had a terrible sore throat for weeks. I thought he had strep. I urged him to see a doctor, but he wouldn’t go. He had an arsenal of herbal remedies. There used to be a place in town he went to buy them. He swore by them. But eventually, the pain got so bad, he finally went to the clinic at the college. They advised tests. The word terrified Carl. ‘Tests.’ He became a child then. A kind of willful and destructive child.”
Harrison imagined an old man raging, a kind of Lear.
“In the end,” Nora said, “it was I who had to find the girl a place. I visited the college and talked to the dean and told him she’d been living out of her car and now was living with us. The dean knew that Carl was sick. Carl was revered at the school. The dean said he would arrange to have the girl’s scholarship increased to include room and board. I didn’t tell him she was pregnant.”
Would the dean have known, Harrison wondered, that the girl and Laski had been lovers?
“And then Carl became very sick,” Nora said. “Howlingly, terrifyingly sick. He raged. He cried. He named every woman who’d been the inspiration for every poem. He confessed every sordid imaginary affair he’d ever had. He enjoyed it. He wasn’t looking for forgiveness. He was looking to hurt me because I was young and because I was going to outlive him. Some of the girls, he said, were only seventeen. He said he liked it especially when they were freshmen. I was merely one in a string—a long string, he