Also—he wouldn’t let Agnes help him. Not even a little bit. Not like last time, when he’d been a boy who didn’t want to upset his father. Robert put his house on the market so he could cover his legal expenses, maintain his payroll, and give money to his mother while he was gone.
The plea deal was considered a fortunate outcome, though it was hard to feel anything but depressed about it. Robert would be in the state penitentiary at Thomaston for two years. For nothing. Polly was more sad than enraged. She couldn’t bear to think of him in that place. Locked up, when he should be building her pink wall with her.
But life went on. She didn’t want to become as embittered as Agnes was. Occasionally she and Dick went out, to old friends and safe places. When invited, she overcame her manners to ask a necessary question—were Seela and Archie invited as well? If so, she declined.
Dick often went back to work after dinner, and she walked down to the Sank. The evenings were full of bats and the calls of the night birds. Sometimes her mind vanished, and she became the black trees. She would like to think that was what death would be like, that you become one with the trees, but who knew? No one knew.
Lydia knew.
Polly had taken to thinking of all the dogs out there, alone, hungry, in pain, miserable. How did everyone not notice? But people had noticed, the shelter existed, and other shelters and organizations for animal welfare. She hadn’t noticed, was what she meant, not before now. What else had she missed?
She’d been raised not to dwell on such injustices, because dwelling made it difficult to be good company in the present. Perhaps it was necessary to dwell, though, even to be obsessive, for any real change to occur. Plenty of Quakers dwelled—the American Friends Service Committee, for example—and hadn’t that done the world a lot of good? When she got back to Haverford, she’d volunteer for something to do with animals—if Dick could spare her. Agnes would approve, though Polly hesitated discussing it with her, knowing it would bring on a lecture about vegetarianism. If you want to help animals, don’t eat them. They really appreciate that. Polly could supply Agnes’s lines from afar.
One night Dick came upstairs to bed with energy still in his step. He didn’t say hello but launched straight into a rant. He dwelled—it was his whole way of life.
“How have we ignored our prisons? We are no better than the Germans who lived among the camps. There’s no such thing as rehabilitation anymore. The conditions are monstrous!” He changed into his pajamas. He was at the age when wrinkles were smoothing out, and hair was disappearing on his limbs. Even his personal hair was nearly gone. “I believed that men were in prison learning a trade or studying law books to secure an appeal, but there’s virtually none of that now. Prisons are cages! I have never been so disgusted with this country in my whole life. I must work harder writing letters to the editor about it. People need to know.”
He looked at her beseechingly.
“Oh,” she was able to offer, “I have been thinking nearly the same thing, except about all the dogs being mistreated. That dog I found—and you saved—was only ten minutes from here. We all have scales over our eyes.”
He picked up the envelope of covers she’d turned down and slid in. “I think Robert has the stuff to endure it, though. And it won’t go on too long for him, anyway. I feel sorry for those poor bastards who are in for life. I don’t care what they’ve done, no one should live that way. It’s bad for the whole of society to have people made invisible. It weighs us down subconsciously. We know we are being cruel, and we have to push that out of our minds.”
His words stirred Polly deeply. Robert’s arrest and Dick’s disappointment at the lack of fanfare on his retirement—aside from the party she’d given him—had stripped him of a protective layer. Speaking of which, she still had to write to his chair to ask why the department had turned against him. She reached over and rubbed his bony shoulder, and he reached up and touched her hand.
After a moment she asked—“Do you think the dog was adopted by kind people?”
“What?”
“The dog. The one I found on Dump Road. Do you think he found a good home?”
“Yes, yes. It was a good-looking animal, didn’t you say?” He rolled on his side, lacing his hands under his cheek. “Okay to turn off.”
“I’m still dressed.” Not to mention sitting up.
“Well, get undressed.”
“That’s all right.” She clicked the switch and lay back. After a moment the walls swam with shadows. What if she slept in her clothes? What harm?
“I want to write Robert as often as possible,” Dick said. “I wrote him about visiting. Do you think he can get good books there? I’m going to bring him some books. The new Philip Roth, I think—The Human Stain.” His face was a dark drop of night.
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“I will. I will! I’ll go to the bookstore tomorrow.”
Which meant she’d drive him. “Good idea,” she repeated, a phrase that had kept him attached to her for sixty years. He had the ideas, or the acknowledgment of ideas. Credit didn’t matter to her. Peace did.
He fell asleep quickly, but she was restless and stimulated so she went on with the conversation.
ME: If we had it to do over, I’d want us to travel more.
HIM: I never became as famous as I’d hoped.
ME: I’d have taken Lydia to the hospital right away in spite of what the doctor said.
HIM: I wouldn’t have been so squeamish about writing my books for popular audiences rather than academic ones. In the end, no one thinks poorly of those who do so, if they are successful.
ME: I’d have been braver. I’d have insisted the boys have a dog. Or maybe several.
HIM: Believing in pacifism didn’t mean I was anti-Semitic.
ME: After everyone leaves, I’d love for the two of us to drive over to Campobello.
HIM: That’d be nice.
ME: I’d like to stay here until Thanksgiving this year. We can walk the trails under the bright leaves.
HIM: I don’t see why not.
ME: The main thing is to spend as much time together as possible.
HIM: Alwaysalwaysalways…
She’d invested in the spell of a promise by making especially significant words like always and forever. There was no such thing. To believe in nothing, to have no need of belief—that was growing up.
What would she give up for that sober maturity, where all was dispelled but the present? What would she give up to truly believe always was only an idea, and not even an intelligent one? Nature was right out the door, offering a daily example of flux and impermanence. What was the biological purpose of humans having such a vast capacity for denying reality?
She rolled over, her mind too active for sleep. Agnes got up if she couldn’t sleep, thereby forestalling the fretful thoughts that came when lying in bed. Polly agreed with the good sense of that method, but she couldn’t bear to leave Dick alone or risk waking him up. She considered what to think about, and naturally, her children clamored for attention. She tried not to think of them as she lay in bed, for she was bound to worry, or wish she had a second chance to redo particular decisions or respond differently to a question or an upset. But they insisted on being seen, even in absentia, and she opened her eyes and looked out the window, at the stars, settling in for a long night.