• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 905 0

once kept covert. Addictions, affairs, perversions. So much confession, yet America’s collective soul doesn’t seem to benefit from it. Peter De Vries, a writer that during his forties Clem particularly liked, once said that confession was good for the soul in the same way that a tweed coat was good for dandruff. A palliative, De Vries noted, not a cure, and Clem admired a layperson’s use of that distinction. Clem should read De Vries’s work again. He wonders if it holds up. The conventional wisdom is that such humor, dependent upon knowledge of an era’s social customs, has an expiration date. Yet Dawn Powell has come back and even Patrick Dennis, whose work Clem discovered because it nestled next to De Vries on the library shelves. He will ask Gwen to pick them up from the library, assuming they’re still in the library.

“What did the little girl do in her house, Poppa?”

“She lived there with a dog, a goat, and a horse named Charley.”

“Boo,” Annabelle says.

“Are you haunting me?” he asks, startled.

“No,” she says with a giggle. “The horse is named Boo.”

“Ah, of course, a horse named Boo. And she likes to—” He pauses, knowing Annabelle will direct the story where she wants it to go.

“Cook.”

“Cook. Your grandmother liked to cook.”

“I didn’t know her,” Annabelle says. “She died a long, long time ago.”

True, yet harsh, a reminder that twenty-five years ago, when Tally died, Clem was very much alone in his own house in the woods, without even so much as a horse named Boo. Gwen returned to school, after much melodramatic agonizing and self-exploration. It didn’t seem to occur to her that her father had lost his wife, much less that Miller and Fee had lost a mother, too. But Miller and Fee were adults. Young to lose a parent, but still adults. Miller was born an adult, and Fee became one more or less on schedule, upon college graduation, whereas Gwen—sometimes he feels he is still waiting for Gwen to become an adult. Anyway, Miller and Fee went back to their households, their respective partners and lives, while Gwen pursued and married a man so inappropriate that Clem felt as though he were watching a Restoration comedy that forgot to guide its lovers toward the proper partners at curtain. And now she is separated from Karl. Clem always thought Fee would be the one with a rocky romantic life.

Fee had come out just before Tally’s diagnosis, surprising no one, and she still lived with her first love, an instructor at Mills College. The match had overtones of Clem and Tally: Fee’s lover was significantly older, an academic. They were still together, although they had weathered a tough time, quarreling bitterly about having children. Interestingly, it was Fee’s lover, almost sixty at the time, who thought they should adopt a child. Chinese adoption was fairly new when this came up. But Fee thought it was wrong to become parents to a child if one didn’t have a reasonable belief of being there for all a child’s milestones. Oh, Fee, he tried to tell her. You can’t control that, no matter when you have children. Tally, a bride at eighteen, missed so much. Gwen’s wedding. Both Gwen’s weddings. Fee and her partner’s marriage in that first, brief window of legality. Annabelle.

Who has taken over the story, as he knew she would, allowing his mind to wander. “And they made pudding and soup and cake and doughnuts and chocolate jelly—”

Clem was fearful when Gwen informed him of her plans to adopt overseas. Could he love a child who was not his biological heir? What about developmental delays? Then Annabelle arrived, he looked at her—and all his fears vanished, just like that. He was heartened to discover that his heart had room for someone new to love. Because in the twenty-five years since Tally’s death, no adult woman has found a way there. Many have tried. When his two older children speak of him moving to a senior community, as they always call it, their selling points include “company.” This was exactly what kept Clem in his house. He didn’t want to deal with all those widows looking for companionship. He is happy as he is.