Winter Birds (10 page)

That night—now some four weeks after the shooting—I went home and searched in earnest for the key to Eliot’s desk. He had purchased burial plots within recent years at a new cemetery on the outskirts of town, less than ten miles from South Wesleyan, where he had taught for the past twenty-five years. I knew the papers would be in a file folder somewhere in his desk. Eliot had always placed a high priority on organization. I also knew he had a life insurance policy, though I didn’t know the exact amount. In many ways Eliot was a frugal man, yet he could be extravagant when it came to his own comforts. I had a sudden vague worry that the insurance policy, relating only to the comfort of someone besides himself, might not be as generous as a prospective widow might hope.

As I walked from my car into my house that night and then through each room, I felt as if I were walking on a plane elevated slightly above the floor. My thoughts were strangely focused and uncluttered:
I must find the papers in Eliot’s desk, but first I must find the key to open the desk
. The logical room in which to hide the key was the study itself. I went to the door, opened it, and turned on the light. If I were hiding a key in this room, where would I hide it? This was the question I asked myself as I stood in the doorway. The hardwood floor had a naked look. The large oval rug upon which Eliot had bled had been removed and taken away to be burned.

“A foul and pestilent congregation of vapors”—thus Hamlet described the sky that had once seemed so clear and beautiful to his senses before his disposition was afflicted with distrust and melancholy. These words came to me now as I stood at the door of Eliot’s study. It smelled of death. This was a place I used to consider a scholar’s haven, a retreat from the ordinary cares of life, a quiet forbidden garden.

Because I was not welcome here, it held a certain mystery, and now that I was free to enter I did so timidly. With each advancing step I felt misgivings I could not explain. Perhaps, like Hamlet, I had by now “lost all my mirth” so that I expected only trouble at every turn. In many ways my husband had been two different men—one a benevolent friend, the other an exacting master. It was the frown of the master that I felt upon me now. I have read of birds that have two natures. Most often it is the less desirable one that dominates.

Having been closed up for weeks, the room did indeed seem to hold within its four walls its own collection of foul vapors. I walked over to one of the large windows and raised it. It was a mild night in September, with the faintest hint of the autumn to come to southwestern Kentucky. The heavy draperies moved slightly as the air flowed in. I walked back to the doorway and turned on the overhead fan, then walked to the far side of the room to open another window.

This is when I found the key. It was on the top ledge of the bottom panel of the window. I actually felt it before I saw it. As I pushed back the drapery and then released the latch that secured the window, my hand brushed against something small and metallic, something that moved. I knew it was the key to Eliot’s desk as soon as I felt it.

Eliot was obsessively neat. Sharing personal secrets did not come easily for him. I had attributed this characteristic to his background, for he had told me that his father had praised him only once in his entire life, when he had successfully defended his doctoral dissertation. Though the compliment was significantly diluted—“Finally, one of my sons has earned a doctorate”—Eliot felt gratified to know that he had succeeded in his father’s eyes where his brothers had not.

Nor did he receive much praise from his mother, who suffered from ill health during most of his childhood. Nor from his first wife, whose attention was likewise distracted by poor health. Never rebounding from the stress of childbirth, she died while Portia and Alonso were in first grade and kindergarten. Growing up thus in an ungenerous home, then losing his wife when he most needed her help with the children had taught him, I reasoned, to keep to himself, to guard his resources, to give in small amounts.

The fact that he would keep his desk locked, then, didn’t surprise me as much as that he would have hidden the key in such an unimaginative place. If I hadn’t run across it accidentally, I couldn’t help wondering how long it would have taken for me to find it. Perhaps that was the rationale behind the hiding place, however. Perhaps Eliot was quite sure no one would think to look in an obvious place like a window ledge.

As I stood before his desk with the key in my hand, I could not explain the foreboding in my heart. I knew, of course, that Eliot would not want me looking through his things. Even though I felt quite sure that he would never wake up again, would never know what I was about to do, I still feared doing something of which I knew he would disapprove. Generally mild-mannered and courteous, he had not rebuked me often, but those times were branded on my heart.

Also branded on my heart are the five minutes of time following my unlocking of the desk.

There were six drawers in his desk, one of them a larger bottom drawer filled with folders, all neatly labeled with a black fine-tip fountain pen, the only kind Eliot ever used. This is the drawer I went to first as the most likely to hold important documents.

And this is where I found his treasury of filth. The labels on these folders were no doubt intended to discourage meddlers, for they were dry, innocuous things such as “Houghton Contract,” “San Diego Proposal,” “Othello Outline,” “ENG 503 Syllabus.” The pictures themselves were organized into categories and bore evidence of much handling. I sat in his chair and looked through the twelve folders, one time through each. I didn’t skip a single picture.

I saw pictures of unspeakable, unthinkable perversion, things I had never dreamed of, image after image of vile human pollution. My senses were stunned, not only by the pictures themselves but also by trying to follow the steps that led to their being here in my husband’s desk. Someone had thought of these scenes, then had planned their execution. Someone had stood behind a camera and taken the pictures with the express purpose of distributing them. Human beings had been used. Compared to the women in these pictures, those in the swimsuit issue of
Sports Illustrated
were Victorian ladies.

And how many other men besides my husband, I wondered, had received copies of these pictures, had prepared a sanctuary for them in the very homes they shared with wives and innocent children? And how had they been received? By mail? Had they exchanged hands in some clandestine meeting place? Had they been purchased in some den of evil? Did they come in sets? Did one look through catalogs and place an order? And how many other women had stumbled upon them as I had? Had they sat as I now sat, stupefied and past all grieving at such documentation of their husbands’ secret lives? There are no words to tell what such knowledge does to a woman.

This was the old-fashioned way of viewing such images. Today he could have concealed his vice by the use of a computer. But for all of his brilliance, Eliot had shunned electronic advances. He had often said he preferred doing his writing the way Shakespeare had—with paper and ink. He left to me the transcribing of his handwritten pages into typed form, which I did on a typewriter, first a Remington manual and later a Smith-Corona electric. After he died, I learned to use a computer.

And my intellectual, scholarly husband—had he never considered the likelihood that I would find these? Had he never realized that someone besides himself would someday be sorting through his personal papers in his absence? Had he never considered destroying them?

And then it hit me: I was holding in my hands undeniable evidence not only of a corruption I had never suspected but also of a selfishness of the greatest magnitude. No doubt he must have known that someone would discover his cache someday, that very likely I—eighteen years his junior—would be the one. But he was counting on being gone in a permanent sense whenever this happened, and, as the consequences of the truth couldn’t touch him then, he had refused to surrender his immediate pleasures for a mere eventuality.

Chapter 8

As the Gentle Rain From Heaven

The yellow-billed cuckoo, an unoriginal songster, emits a continuous call of kuk-kuk-kuk-kuk with no variation of pitch or rhythm. Though often heard, the bird is seldom seen. It likes to conceal itself among sheltering foliage to gorge on hairy caterpillars
.

And so it was twenty-five years ago that I sat in Eliot’s study and learned why he kept his desk locked. At the age of fifty-five I was educated concerning the depths of man’s depravity. I had lived among good and evil people for all of those years, had heard profane language, had seen cruelty enacted firsthand on playgrounds, in classrooms, in homes, on street corners. I had witnessed the telling of lies, had participated in the act myself, had seen hundreds of murders and adulteries portrayed on television and movie screens, had read true and fictional accounts of theft, conspiracy, drunkenness, betrayal, brutality, shameful conduct of every stripe.

Yet that night in Eliot’s study I felt as if a veil had parted between innocence and knowledge, as if every foul deed I had ever known before that time would have filled no more than a teacup compared to the flood that had now swept over me. I felt as a child must feel who suddenly wakes in the nighttime to sounds of his door splintering from the weight of a monster. Before the child can cry out, the door is down and the creature has leapt onto his bed and is mauling him. Overcome with fear, the child looks into the monster’s eyes and knows that death is better than living with the memory of this moment.

But I am not a child. I would choose the monster’s eyes, the mauling, the black memories any day over death. I would fight to the end. I can sometimes keep the memories at bay by looking around me, setting my eyes on specific things far removed from Eliot’s study, remembering that many years have passed, that it is now instead of then, that I am here instead of there. I sit up now and let my eyes travel around my newly cleaned apartment, taking in the wooden blinds, the round table where Rachel serves my meals, the television, my recliner, my bed in the far corner. I see other things: a bookcase filled with books I have not read, a lamp with a red shade, an artificial fern in a yellow ceramic pot, a framed picture of a soldier saluting the American flag. They are only things. They stir nothing within my heart. They were here before I came. They will be here after I go. They have nothing to do with me.

I see the door between my apartment and Rachel’s kitchen, the door through which I hear many things. Last night I heard Patrick read from the Bible again. It was a story about a boy’s lunch of bread and fish that multiplied itself to feed a crowd of five thousand.

I look toward the window I have come to think of as my bird window. No sign of activity there. I look at the other three windows and see that dusk is already beginning to sink into the trees in the backyard, filling in the spaces between them. A small table stands beside the recliner at my bird window, the
Book of North American Birds
sitting within easy reach. In addition to this table and the round one where I take my meals, there are two others in my apartment: the nightstand beside my bed and an end table beside the sofa where I now sit. I see several issues of
Time
magazine on this table. They are random back issues, but this is of no concern to me. I have come to view time as a circle that repeats itself. One can skip a lap of the circle without missing anything of importance. Or as waves of the ocean. One more or fewer makes no difference in the rolling expanse of the water. Today’s news is not to be prized over last week’s or last year’s. It has all happened before and will happen again.

I reach forward and pick up the magazine on top. “DIED: JULIUS DIXON, 90, rock-’n’-roll songwriter; in New York City.” When no cause of death is given, as in the case of Julius Dixon, I assume that the person’s time on earth exceeded man’s normal life span and he expired, simply put, of old age. Or “of natural causes,” as is often said.

I try to imagine what a ninety-year-old former rock-’n’-roll songwriter would be like. While spooning Metamucil over his All-Bran every morning, would he hum snatches of his biggest hits from the 1950s? Would he tap out the rhythms with the end of his cane?
Time
magazine reports that Julius Dixon’s first hit was “Dim, Dim the Lights (I Want Some Atmosphere).” Did he think of those words as he lay dying? Did he think the atmosphere was appropriate for a death scene? His most popular song was “Lollipop,” performed by a group called the Chordettes.
Time
describes it as a “buoyant” song. I wonder what Julius Dixon thought of his life’s work as he drew his last breath. I wonder if the memory of his song “Lollipop” played through his mind and gave him a feeling of buoyancy as he stepped from the shores of life into the waters of death.

When one is eighty years old, as I am, the handling of time is her greatest challenge. There is no place to rest comfortably. The present is an empty waiting room. The past is a narrow corridor, along which doors open into examining rooms too brightly lit, full of frightening instruments to inflict pain. The future is a black closet at the end of the corridor. No one knows what is inside this dark cubicle. The possibility of nothingness is a terror. If present, past, and future seem out of order in this analogy, it is no wonder. There is no tidy sequence of time when one is eighty and waiting to die.

One keeps wandering into the corridor without meaning to, then stumbling back to the waiting room, then later somehow finding herself stretched out in one of the examining rooms, stopping her ears with her hands to block out the echoes of time, starting up and groping for the door to get back to the waiting room, where there are windows, stacks of old magazines, and a television to fill the deadly silence. And always, always as one flees back to the present, she carries with her the knowledge that at the end of the long corridor is the black closet. It is unlocked, and the hinges of its door are oiled. They swing easily.