Affliction

15

IN TERMS OF THE SOCIAL FORCES at play, in terms of our native environment, one might say, my life was not different from Wade’s. We were raised alike, until I left home and went down to the university, where, if I was not exactly transplanted, I grew and throve as if placed in the sun and under the care of a more kindly and talented gardener than any I had known so far. Since that time, however, because of the similarity of our early lives, every thought, memory and dream of my brother Wade has brought with it the painful unanswerable question “Why me, Lord?” Why me and not Wade? In my dreams of Wade, in my memories and thoughts of him, we are interchangeable.

After all, I was no more or less adapted than Wade to the soil and climate we were both born into — stingy soil, rocky and thin, and a mean climate. By the age of eighteen I was as much a tough little lichen as he and should have shriveled, should have curled up at the edges and died at the university, as he believed he would, which is why it never occurred to him to apply to the university when he was eighteen. And later, in the affluent suburban town where I have lived now for almost a decade, I should have been, as Wade would have been, merely a curious exhibit of foreign flora at the local museum of natural history or a figure in a diorama depicting life among the less advantaged peoples to the north. Yet here I am, a teacher, no less, a veritable pillar of a privileged community, member of benevolent and fraternal orders, welcome guest in the white colonial homes of physicians, dentists, real estate brokers and auto dealers. I even attend church regularly. Episcopal.

It makes no sense. Which is why the question “Why me, Lord?” has plagued my adult life. It makes me feel permanently and universally displaced, as much here as up in the village of Lawford. As if I were Chinese in Switzerland or Welsh in Brazil. We struggle to change our place in society, and all we manage to do is displace ourselves. It should be a simple matter: it is what this country was invented to do — to change our lives. Lift yourself up by the bootstraps, young fellow. Make yourself upwardly mobile, my dear. Rise like cream to the top, m’ boy.

And in a way it is a simple matter, if, like most people, a person is intelligent, organized and energetic. Certainly most of the people in the Whitehouse family possessed those qualities, especially as children. After all, every year thousands, maybe millions, of good citizens do change their lives for the better, in terms of class, just as I have done, and as my brother did not. From log cabin to president: it is our dominant myth. We live by it, generation after generation. Do not look back, look ahead. Keep your eye on the sparrow, your shoulder to the wheel, your feet on the ground. That is what I have done; it is how I have lived my life so far. And it is how my brother Wade lived his life too. That is why I ask, Why me, Lord?

Why did I apply to the university, when no one else in my graduating high school class aspired to an education higher than that offered at hairstyling or welding school in Littleton? Elbourne and Charlie joined the army. Wade, who was a better student than I, on graduation simply turned his summer job with LaRiviere into a full-time job and considered himself lucky. Lena got pregnant and married. But I left our parents’ home in a radically different way than my brothers and sister, for reasons I still cannot name, and when I got down there to the university and discovered that I did not know how to talk or dress or eat in the acceptable way, did not know how to write or read or speak in class, did not even know how to smile, why did I endure such inadequacy and not go running home to where my inadequacies were regarded as virtues and skills? Wade, had he got as far as enrolling, would have been expelled in a week for brawling in the cafeteria or would have quickly flunked out. Why did I go on, to graduate school in Boston, to the study of history — that place where no one lives, where everyone is dead now — to become a teacher, of all things, when all I wanted, all I want now, is to be left alone? I am not ambitious, I am not bookish, I am not even unusually intelligent, and I have no special gift. So why me, Lord?

I asked it, of course, whenever I happened to see Wade himself or when he called me on the telephone. But I also ask it when I find myself seated at dinner next to the attractive unmarried woman poet from Chicago with the interesting new haircut who is visiting her older sister, who happens to be the wife of my ophthalmologist, a man who knows no one more suitable as a dinner companion for his sister-in-law than I. And I ask it in the middle of the high school parking lot as I watch my scrubbed well-fed elaborately dressed and coiffed students pile into their new Japanese cars and race away to the beaches, ski slopes and dance bars. I ask it when I read in my morning newspaper another account of the death of a child at the hands of her mother’s drunken boyfriend. I ask it while driving in my car when I come to the outskirts of town where the hills and forests begin and I turn my car around and head back south into town. Why me and not Wade — and why Wade and not me?

It is depressing, at least to me, to linger over such questions, and distracting. After all, this is not my story, it is Wade’s. I am but the witness, the compiler; I am the investigator and the chronicler; and I should get on with my work.

When we last saw Wade, he had left Margie’s warm bed and was plowing the town roads at dawn on a Sunday. You no doubt will have noticed by now that we often leave him there, perched up on the grader with snow blowing in his face, dreaming of his past or future, adrift on a wave of feeling that carries him away from his present life. That is a characteristic tableau for him, perhaps an emblematic one. He is alone, and while he is of the town and plays an essential role in its life, he is not in the town exactly, is not going intently about his private business like everyone else. Gordon LaRiviere, in pajamas, is seated at his kitchen table drinking coffee and balancing his personal checkbook, while his wife sleeps. Alma Pittman is dressed and making a pot of tea and wondering if it is too early in the season to shop in Littleton for the Christmas cards that she likes to have ready to mail to every taxpayer in town the day after Thanksgiving. Chub Merritt is down at the garage already, on his back underneath Hank Lank’s truck, fixing an oil leak. Nick Wickham has opened the restaurant, and his first customers, a pair of deer hunters from Manchester, have just shucked their orange coats and sat down at the counter, briskly rubbing their cold hands. While at the north end of town, in the drafty old house she rents from her ex-husband’s parents, Margie Fogg, naked, lies awake in her bed, pondering Wade’s suggestion that she marry him.

She has lived alone in this house for almost five years now, but she lived there with her husband, Harvey, and his parents for the previous five years as well. They had wanted children, she and Harvey, but had been unable to conceive one, and they had wanted their own house, but Harvey was a carpenter without much work and she worked part time then, tinting photographs of babies and graduating seniors for a Littleton studio photographer, and they could never seem to get enough money together for a down payment. Then Harvey fell in love with a twenty-two-year-old waitress at Toby’s Inn, and he left Margie, to live with the waitress and her two small children in a trailer out on Route 29, and six months later she had his baby. Harvey’s parents felt sorry for Margie and ashamed of their son and let Margie live on in their house, and when they decided to move to a retirement village near Lakeland, Florida, they took out a second mortgage on the house and let Margie make the payments to the bank as rent.

It was not a bad deal, but Margie was not happy in the big old house, a ramshackle colonial that got shabbier every year, as paint peeled, shutters fell, shingles blew off and the furnace broke. She repainted the downstairs rooms and closed off the second floor, so that she would not have to heat it in winter and did not have to go on sleeping in the same bedroom she had shared with her husband. His leaving her for the waitress had not afflicted her nearly as much as her in-laws supposed. Harvey had been a boastful insecure man, and from the start their sexual connection had been at best problematic. He wanted children, “a real family,” as he put it, and blamed her for their not producing any and consequently treated her as if she were depriving him of an essential right. It made him bossy and sarcastic and filled him with self-pity, which saddened her: she remembered Harvey Fogg when he was a teenaged boy, skinny and shy and eager to please, surprised and nervously passionate when, at nineteen, he discovered that she loved him and married her for it.

Then, a year before Harvey left her, Wade had come into her life — sort of. She had not intended or expected it, but they had become the kind of friends who are bound by unhappy marriages — they could talk to each other as to no one else of the hurt their marriages were causing them — and for a few months they sustained a jumpy distracted love affair, until both decided to try to save their marriages and broke it off. They were not in love with each other and knew it. Wade was in love with Lillian, he thought: he had already divorced her once and married her again, and besides, they had Jill now. And Margie, secretly, loved only her memory of Harvey as a teenaged boy. Sometimes she was afraid that the only man she could ever love would be a teenaged boy, shy and fragile, awkward in his passion and openly embarrassed by it. She found herself increasingly attracted to the boys who came into the restaurant, and though she hid her interest in them, she could not keep herself from lingering at their tables, talking and joking and teasing them about their clothes and hair, their sweet male pretensions. The boys thought of her as motherly but still young and sexual and flirted with her as they wished they could flirt with girls their own age or with their mothers. They said things to her that combined tenderness and bravado, and she made them think they were brilliant.

Later, when both their spouses had left them, Margie and Wade gradually resumed their old friendship, and the sex, licit now, was easeful and generous without the fervent anxiety of before. Once a week or so, they slept together, always in her bed. For Wade, it was not the way it had been with Lillian, fraught with mystery and often capable of astonishing him with the thoughts it provoked. Instead, it was what he assumed sex was for most people. For Margie, making love with Wade was slightly boring but necessary, and it always made her feel better afterwards, like exercise.

Marrying Wade, however, was something she had not thought about once, not in all the years she had known him, which might seem strange: she was a single woman in her late thirties in a town where such a woman was suspect, and Wade was the one man in town whose company she enjoyed. Wade was smart, everyone knew that, and not bad-looking, and he could be funny when he wanted to, and he worked hard, although he did not make much money, and a chunk of that went to his ex-wife. He drank too much, sure, but most men did, especially unmarried unhappy men. And he had that reputation for violence, his sudden bursts of anger. But most of the unmarried unhappy men she knew had that same reputation: it seemed to go with the territory. They were disconnected men, cut off from what calmed them — a home, children, a loving loyal woman who comforted and reassured them when everyone else treated them as if they were useless and expendable. Of course, Wade had once possessed all that, and he had still been violent, not down at Toby’s Inn, as now, but worse, at home and against his own wife. Remember, Margie thought, Wade Whitehouse was a wife-beater.

It was known, by rumor and surmise, the way it usually happens in a village, without the principals ever telling anyone. Lillian’s mother lived up in Littleton with her second husband, and people remembered that when Lillian was married to Wade she had left him several times for a week or two and had gone to stay with her mother. And people knew that there were three or four other times when she and Jill had left the house they shared with Wade and had stayed overnight in town at Alma Pittman’s. Later, on her return home, when out in public with her husband, Lillian had acted like a POW— dutiful but sullen, slow-moving, careful: most people, though they do not say it and may not even think it, associate this kind of behavior in wives with domestic violence. And when Wade and Lillian had got divorced the second time, rumors drifted back down from Littleton, rumors possibly started by Wade’s lawyer, Bob Chagnon, that the reason Wade got slapped with heavy child-support payments and lost the house to Lillian and could see his daughter only once a month was that he had admitted to having lost his temper on several occasions and hit his wife with his fists. Wade could have denied it: she had no proof: there were no medical records to be subpoenaed; and Alma had refused to get mixed up in marital problems, as she put it; her mother, after all, was her mother, and Lillian had wanted to spare her the pain of having to say in public what her daughter had revealed to her in secrecy and shame; Jill, of course, was too young to be questioned about it. Fortunately for all of them, Wade had simply hung his head and confessed that, yes, in the heat of a quarrel, he had hit her. People shook their heads sadly when they heard this, but they understood: Lillian was a hard case, a demanding intelligent woman with a lot of mouth on her, a woman who made most people feel that she thought she was somehow superior to them, and no doubt she made Wade feel that way too. A man should never hit a woman, but sometimes it is understandable. Right? It happens, doesn’t it? It happens.

Margie agreed. Lillian was a demanding woman, and Wade was a stubborn man: no wonder they came to blows. Margie herself was not demanding, however; and that was then, this was now. That was Lillian Pittman; and she was Marjorie Fogg. They were not interchangeable parts. Wade would never hit her.

As for his drinking, Margie believed that it was immaterial, and besides, if he had a good woman to come home to, Wade would come home, instead of hanging out after work at Toby’s Inn till all hours with kids like Jack Hewitt and Hettie Rodgers. Instead, he would be home telling Margie jokes over supper and watching TV with her afterwards and making love to her in bed before falling peacefully to sleep. So it was possible that she and Wade could have a happy life together, certainly a life happier than this one they were leading alone.

They drove out together that Sunday afternoon to visit Glenn and Sally Whitehouse, our parents. It had stopped snowing, and the sky was bright blue, the snow blinding white and falling from the trees in fantails as the temperature rose. The woods crackled with the sound of distant gunfire.

The old Whitehouse place, as it is still called in Lawford, is less than four miles from town, out on Parker Mountain Road, and Wade rarely went there. He counted on seeing Ma and Pop now and then by accident in town, at town meeting or at Golden’s store or at the post office. That was enough, he felt, to keep him in touch with them, and besides, they never actually invited him out to visit, any more than they asked me. They knew better, after years of our finding excuses not to come, than to ask anymore. When the Whitehouse children leave home, even if only to move down the road, they do not return willingly. Our mother knew why, but our father would not. I often wonder if she hated him for having driven her children so far away. It has also occurred to me that perhaps he only did what she wanted him to do. Naturally, I have never spoken of this to Wade or Lena.

Wade pulled off the plowed road onto the unplowed driveway and parked his car by the side porch. The house looked abandoned, closed up, as if no one lived there anymore. There were no fresh car tracks or footprints in the snow leading to the road, and the windows were dark, half covered with flapping sheets of polyurethane.

Wade got out of the car and sniffed the air, but smelled no wood smoke. Margie got out and looked at the house for a second and said, “Are you sure they’re home? Did you call?”

“No. But the truck’s here,” he noted, and pointed at the snow-covered pickup parked at the side of the house. “Looks like they’ve stayed inside since the snow started.” His face crinkled with concern, and he hurried to the porch door.

They stamped their feet loudly on the porch floor, and Wade reached for the doorknob and pulled, but the door would not open. “The fuck?” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Door’s locked. That’s peculiar.” He tried again, but the door did not give. He stepped to the side, cupped his hands around his face and peered through a porch window into the dark kitchen, where everything looked normal — a few dirty dishes in the sink, coffeepot on the wood stove, Merritt’s Shell Station calendar on the wall showing November.

Margie came along beside him and looked into the room and said, “Do you think they’re okay?”

“Of course!” he snapped. “I would’ve heard.”

“How?”

“I don’t know, for Christ’s sake!” he said, and he turned back to the door and knocked loudly on it. In silence, Margie came and stood behind him. After a few seconds, they heard the door being unlocked at last, and when it swung open, they saw Pop standing in the gloom of the room, a puzzled look on his face, as if he did not recognize his son. He wore long underwear and a pair of stained woolen trousers held up by green suspenders, and he had a pair of ancient slippers on his bare feet. His thin white hair was disheveled, and his face was unshaven and gray. He looked elderly and fragile, and he said nothing to Wade, just turned and shuffled away from the open door toward the stove, which he bent over and opened, as if to check the fire.

“Pop?” Wade said from the doorway. “Pop, you okay?”

The old man did not respond. He clanked the door of the cold stove closed and walked slowly to the woodbox and started to pull out a batch of old newspaper and several pieces of kindling. Wade looked at Margie and sucked his lips against his teeth, nodded for her to enter ahead of him, and the two of them came inside and closed the door.

Silently, Pop built the fire, while Wade and Margie watched, their breath puffing out in small clouds in front of them. The kitchen was as cold as it was outdoors, but dark, and consequently it seemed colder. “Jesus, Pop, how the hell can you stand the cold, dressed like that?” The old man did not answer.

Wade looked into the living room and saw nothing amiss; the door to the bedroom beyond, however, was shut. “Where’s Ma?” Wade asked.

Pop struck a match on the top of the stove and lit the fire, then stood stiffly up and for the first time looked at his son and the woman with him. “Sleeping,” he said.

Wade unzipped his coat but did not take it off. Dragging a chair from next to the table, he sat down and crossed one leg casually over the other. “This’s Margie Fogg, Pop. You remember her, don’t you?”

Pop looked steadily at Margie for a second. “Yes. From Wickham’s,” he said. “Been a while.”

Margie crossed the kitchen and shook the old man’s hand, but his gaze had drifted away from her and seemed focused on some point halfway into the living room beyond.

“You want some coffee or tea?” he blurted, as if suddenly realizing that they were in the room with him. “Or a beer?”

As if joking, Wade laughed lightly and said, “What I’d like is to know how you and Ma are doing. I haven’t seen you in town in a while, and I was wondering.” His voice was high and tight, the way it always was when he talked to his father.

“Oh. Well, we’re all right, I guess. Your ma is fine. She’s sleeping. You want me to get her?” Pop asked.

Wade said yes, and the old man shuffled from the room. Quickly, Margie moved close to the stove and held her hands out to it, as the fire crackled and popped through the kindling. She unzipped her down jacket, then changed her mind and zipped it back up. Wade got a chunk of heavier wood from the woodbox and tossed it into the stove and stood next to her.

“Jesus,” he whispered.

Margie said nothing. She could see that Wade was frightened but knew that he did not want to say it.

“This house. Lots of memories associated with this house. Not much has changed, I’ll tell you that. Except that the place is getting more and more decrepit. They’re too old for this house,” he said.

Then Pop was back, alone. The bedroom door was still shut. “Where’s Ma?” Wade asked, his voice high and tight again, like a scared adolescent’s.

“She’s coming. I told her you was here.” The old man took the coffeepot from the stove and rinsed it out at the sink, handling it clumsily, as if he were unfamiliar with its shape and parts.

“Here, Mr. Whitehouse, let me do that,” Margie said, and she plucked the coffeepot from his gnarled hands and proceeded briskly to clean it out. Pop backed away, hesitated a minute, then brought her a can of coffee and set it next to her on the drainboard, where there was a half-empty bottle of Canadian Club.

Time passed, and still Ma did not appear. Margie got the coffee perking, cleaned the few dishes in the sink and put four cups out on the table, while Wade smoked a cigarette and moved restlessly around the room, from the window to the door to the living room and back to the table, where he sat down for a moment before jumping up again. He and Pop did not speak to one another, but Margie filled the silence by asking the old man a few questions, and he answered her slowly and vaguely.

“How have you been heating the house?” she inquired, as if idly curious. “Not with just this stove.”

“No. There’s a furnace.”

“You’re not using it today? It’s awful cold inside, don’t you think?”

“Yes. It’s … broke, I guess. Didn’t kick in last night. There’s an electric heater in the bedroom.”

“Maybe Wade can take a look at it,” Margie suggested. “Would that be okay? Your pipes’ll freeze. You’re lucky they’re not frozen already.”

“Yes. Fine.”

“Wade,” Margie said, “could you do that? Check the furnace? They shouldn’t be way out here with just this stove for heat.”

Wade looked at her as if he had not heard and said, “Yeah, sure. Listen, Pop, I’m going to see if Ma’s all right,” he said suddenly, and he moved toward the door. He hated the sound of his voice. Pop raised a hand, as if to stop him, then let it fall slowly to his side, and Wade left the room.

Wade hesitated briefly at the doorway, then crossed the living room to the bedroom, where he paused for a second and knocked lightly on the door. In a voice just above a whisper, he said, “Ma? It’s Wade. Can I come in?”

There was no answer. Margie had come to stand in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, while behind her, Pop, his hands buried in his pockets, looked down at the stove.

Wade slowly opened the door a few inches and saw that the room was dark. It was as cold and damp as a cave, and his breath puffed out in front of him. The window shades were pulled down, but he could make out the furniture in the room, positioned where it had always been — the sagging double bed against the far wall, the bed tables and lamps beside it, the cluttered old high-top dressers that had belonged to Uncle Elbourne, Sally’s sewing chair and table by the window. Around the floor several articles of clothing were scattered, Glenn’s shoes and dingy bathrobe, Sally’s cardigan sweater, and on the floor next to the sewing chair there were a cut-glass ashtray spilling over with butts and ashes and a brown whiskey bottle and a tumbler with about an inch of whiskey in it.

Wade could see Ma in the bed, on the far side, where she always slept, covered with a heap of blankets. He walked to the foot of the bed and looked down at her. She lay on her side, facing away from him, and all he could make out was the outline of her body, but he knew that she was dead. He thought the words, Ma’s dead—when suddenly he heard a click and a loud whir from the floor beside him, and he leapt away, as if startled by a growling watchdog. It was the fan of a small electric heater coming on, and the spring coils began to glow like evil red grins behind the fan, and a hot wind blew at his ankles.

Stepping carefully away from the thing, he crossed to the head of the bed, where he could see the woman clearly. Beneath a mound of blankets and afghans, she wore her wool coat over her flannel nightgown and lay curled on her side like a child, with her tiny hands in mittens fisted near her throat, as if in enraged prayer. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was open slightly. Her skin was chalk white and dry-looking, almost powdery, as if her face would crumble to the touch. Her body resembled a feather-light husk more than an actual human body, and it seemed incapable of holding up the weight of the blankets that covered her to the shoulders and wrists. “Oh, Lord,” Wade whispered. “Oh, Lord.” He came forward and sat down on the floor, cross-legged, like a small boy, facing her.

Margie stood at the door, watching in silence, instantly comprehending. The room was icebox cold, and she could see her own breath, and she knew that the old woman had frozen to death in bed. She closed the door and walked slowly back to the kitchen, where Pop stood staring down at the stove.

“Coffee’s perked,” he said in a low voice.

Margie got a potholder and plucked the pot from the stove and filled a cup for herself and one for Pop. When she handed it to him, she said, “Mr. Whitehouse, when did she die?”

Holding the steaming cup in his shaky hands, he looked up into her eyes as if confused by her question. “Die? I don’t know,” he said. “She’s dead, then.”

“Yes.”

“I wasn’t there, I was out here most of the time. It was snowing, and cold, and the furnace wouldn’t kick in.”

“Did you check on her?”

“Yes, I checked on her. But she was asleep. She had the electric heater in there, and I had the wood stove out here, so it wasn’t all that cold. The cold don’t bother me as much as her, though. Which is why I give her the heater.”

“Don’t you have a telephone?” She looked around the room for one.

“Yes. In the living room.” He pointed feebly to the door.

“Well, why didn’t you call someone to fix the furnace? Wade or somebody?”

“Wade,” the man said, as if it were the name of a stranger. “I thought she was all right,” he went on. “I thought till this morning she was all right. I was … I fell asleep out here, and then I woke up and went in to the bedroom, but she didn’t wake up. So I sat in there with her for a long time. Until you and Wade come by.” He drew a chair out from the table with the toe of his foot and sat down and sipped noisily at his coffee.

“Are you sad, Mr. Whitehouse?” Margie asked.

He looked at his coffee. “Sad. Yes. Sad. I wish, I wish it was me in there instead of her.” He put his cup down and placed his large red hands on his knees. “That’s what makes me sad. I’m the one should’ve froze to death.”

Margie turned and walked to the sink and placed her cup and saucer on the drainboard. She reached over and grabbed the half-empty bottle of Canadian Club and a water glass and carried them back to the table and placed them next to the man. “You are right,” she said firmly. Then she left him alone in the room and went into the living room, looking for the telephone.