“I’ll just go in and change,” she said, “and put the chicken in.” She wanted a warmer sweater and loafers. Slacks, if she dared take the time.
“Polly, will you please, for once, let all that be? I want to talk to you now.”
“I’m sorry, of course. Here I am.” It was wonderful to be needed at her stage of life, especially by him. She was as in love with him as ever. That was what the bridge ladies didn’t know. Nor would they believe her if she made the claim. They spoke respectfully of their husbands, but she’d never had the sense that they’d experienced the passion she felt. They even enjoyed being widows, whereas the prospect of that blighted state gave Polly a headache. So if she had the chance to be with him, she took it.
She and Dick—the Wisters—were not young, not young at all at eighty and eighty-two, but had stayed trim and neat and seemed to their three sons to still be their parents rather than a prompt for tours of retirement communities and discussions about how to split up the sticks of good furniture. They’d been married for nearly sixty vital years. Dick still stayed on top of world news, and Polly kept track of goings-on both in Haverford and on Cape Deel. They were often told how delightfully sharp they were, a compliment Dick snarled about in private. I’m old—not an idiot. He’d always been a progressive except when it came to fools.
A year earlier Dick had given notice that he intended to retire in the spring—now. “Out with the old, in with the new!” he’d crowed to Polly on the morning he went in to make his announcement. No one tried to talk him out of it, a stance he officially applauded for its realism, but Polly knew that had hurt. To add insult, his chair, Adam Waters, hadn’t wasted a moment before saying Dick could retire mid-year. Actually, why not ease up for the fall semester—not teach at all?
“Preposterous! Don’t I have a right to my blaze of glory, my swan song?” Dick bellowed when he came home that evening.
“You certainly do,” Polly said loyally, but she could predict how this would end, so she added, “if you really want to. But you could use the time in other ways.”
“I’m still viable! I have crucial ideas to impart! They’ll line up when they hear I’m leaving!”
“Of course they will. But what do you want?”
In fact, his students had been grating on him in recent years, a decline he attributed to changing times rather than his own enfeeblement, though his lecture notes were crumbling in their file folders. His sudden sentimentality was a by-product of the chair’s shoving him out the door. Dick puffed out his chest. Polly ached for him.
“I’ll show them!” he said, when there was nothing else left to do.
He’d been a professor of philosophy and ethics at Haverford, then Penn, and in spite of decades of clamor under his roofs with the children, he’d lived a life of the mind. Though he was often at home, Polly had to plot to get his attention, but she chose to be cheerful rather than bitter about it. She’d wanted more, so much more, all that was possible between two people, but her galaxy of what could be ended up as a constellation of bright moments when they’d been intimate. It was just enough to keep her in a constant state of yearning, which Agnes told her was the principle behind dog training. “You’re conditioned to please your master,” Agnes said crisply. Polly wished she could.
She’d given a party before Christmas commemorating his academic career, spent ages composing a toast, including sending it to Agnes for editing and suggestions. “Dick Wister is the last of his kind, so let’s raise a glass to him,” it ended. Hyperbole seemed forgivable under the circumstances, and the guests took her cue and whooped and applauded. As they lay side by side in the dark that night Dick touchingly said, “It’s true, I am the last of my kind.” She reached for his hand, and from there that old familiar coming together. It was as good as ever, if less gymnastic. Her friends, the merry widows, didn’t have that.
They didn’t have him. For better or worse.
In Haverford, Dick repaired—he liked a verbal flourish—to his study for the day, emerging only for meals. At Meadowlea he sat in the old horsehair chair at the desk in his study and worked in the morning when his mind was unsullied. After lunch he wrote letters and newspaper editorials, some of which were printed. Book reviews, likewise. Meanwhile he was putting together a volume of his best correspondence. He’d exchanged letters with some of the most famous thinkers of the twentieth century. Their biographers had come to him already, asking for a look at their exchanges. Surely a compendium of his own letters would be an important addition to the field of twentieth-century philosophy?
All this work seemed to Polly arduous for a man of his age, and the stream of rejections, which for decades he’d been able to inoculate himself against by means of his occasional publications and anecdotes about famous books that were overlooked in their own time, now chafed at his white-knuckled need for a final say and made him simply miserable. To buck him up, she’d suggested that until his next book came out he write a weblog to express his opinions. She’d read about them in the paper.
“Are you serious?” He frowned. “A weblog, on the computer? I’d be laughed out of the profession. And how would my ideas be protected from being picked up by other people?”
He’d adopted blog as a catchphrase rather than an activity. “Time to work on my blog,” he’d say for all kinds of transitions—when he repaired to the bathroom, for example. She was loyally amused. If what had come of her idea was one more private joke between them, that was a decent result as far as she was concerned. They had routines and exchanges stretching back to their earliest days when they were establishing their exclusivity. Her favorite was when she asked him, “Would you ever leave me?” The answer was Nevernevernever, spoken in a rush as if it were one word, the repetition of which cast, as repetition can, a spell over Polly that assured her she had the harmonic marriage she’d envisioned since she was small. The endearment was atypical of him, but she’d institutionalized it, attaching it to the end of many exchanges. Usually he responded by turning away, but sometimes he echoed her Nevernevernever. Afterward she felt a twinge of remorse for forcing him to affirm his attachment, but it was a reprise of some of the loftiest moments of her life. When they were courting, she’d believed they could have it all, but she’d long ago accepted that her youthful fantasy that each partner in a couple encourage the other to do better was not going to work with Dick. He had no inclination to ask for help or advice. He wasn’t averse to correcting Polly, though. Between him and Agnes, her path to perfection was well lit.
They turned the corner of their Pennsylvania fieldstone house and walked across the lawn. The spring-blooming trees had recently budded and unfurled, shifting their two acres from gray and brown to pink, green, yellow, and purple. During lilac’s brief season she was obsessed with the fragrant blooms, and went out into the cold dawn to soak her face with scented dew.
He pulled her to the middle of the lawn and began to sit down, pitching her off balance, and she flailed her hand to grab an ethereal railing. That was useless, so she thrust out a foot, steadied herself, and grabbed Dick back up instead. Her heart quickened.