I’m getting out soon. The judge granted time served. So, Polly, I may see the lupines myself.
Polly gasped. She lay the letter down. This wasn’t like his other letters, those she read over and over. This was not a communication soul to soul, but a message from reality that she grasped instantly without need for contemplation to fully understand. It was an event, and a shock.
It was hard to know how to react. In movies, the glee of women was often expressed in pictures of a person running down streets or hills to spread good news, or jumping into the air and clicking heels. But her glee, at least for the moment, was sober, or even somber. She’d been so overwhelmed by the specter of time lost, both past and future, that the first thing that came to her was grief for the two years Robert had spent in prison for nothing more than being in the path of a pair of reckless vipers. She closed her eyes to try to change her mood—she must, before she wrote Robert back—but all that happened was that the light left the sky while she wasn’t looking, and when she opened her eyes again the windows had changed from being vitrines of trees in varying perspectives into dark gray blots on her walls. It was time to turn on the lamps. Her stockinged steps across the carpet sent up sparks. How was it that the rug was more capable of celebrating than she?
She ate her omelet and told Dick. She knew perfectly well he was nowhere to hear her. But she often talked to herself as if she were speaking with him. Dick would still want a total exoneration, both for Robert and to vindicate Dick’s position and crusade. The injustice done to Robert had broken Dick’s heart. She wondered how Agnes would react to the news of his freedom. Would she call? Polly hoped so. She’d written so many letters to Agnes but hadn’t mailed them. She felt both right and shy, and afraid to make the gesture. She was hoping the proximity of the Point would be the remedy. They were too old not to be friends. Fallings-out were for those who had time to meet new people.
These ideas were simple and clear, but there were others more subtle that she couldn’t easily parse or name. If she were versed in complexity, she might have understood that she felt uprooted by the change in her routine that would be generated by this shift in Robert’s status. She might have been able to admit that the central place Robert held in her life was made possible because of his captivity. Now she felt a hollowness that might have signaled abandonment, had she known better how to name her wounds. For the second time in two years she was being tossed into the unknown without her choosing it. It is good news, wonderful news, she told herself, and yet she felt loss. She loved their correspondence, and hated the thought of it ending. The quiet hours spent discovering who she was at the tip of a pen, and with him open to learning her, had been like nothing else she’d ever done in her life. This selfish thought pressed at her ribs, hurting her, and she pressed back with her hand. Could she be having a heart attack?
No. She’d seen a heart attack.
She stood up to walk around the room and to think.
What would become of him? She remembered Dick saying he wouldn’t be able to get a job. He was a felon, and there were rules for felons that made a normal life difficult to pursue. He’d sold his house. When he was released, he’d be alone without a place to live.
The habit of a lifetime of acquiescence wanted to defer the question to broader shoulders—but—but—in being alone, she’d developed a better understanding of her own intelligence than she’d ever had. She’d always been known for her thoughtful gestures, but they weren’t really a manifestation of morality, or idealism—they came of a sense of balance that was innate and simple, the same that made it easy for her to arrange flowers or place furniture in a room. She balanced what went on around her, too—she’d really have to correct Robert on that point, she couldn’t have him thinking she was good, not in the way Elspeth Lee had been. But she could be relied on to seek equilibrium.
Suddenly she wished to look in a mirror—to see her whole self as she appeared in the world. Her granddaughter Maddie told her she had a hump like a camel—a remark she knew was true when the DILs got cross with Maddie. How true, though? The largest mirror in the house—the only one that could offer a full view—was a horizontal piece of glass over the sideboard in the dining room. She could barely see the top of her head in it now. There was no other option, though, so she climbed onto a chair on her knees and then tried to step up onto the table, but that didn’t go well, so she got Dick’s cane and used it to push herself up on the chair first, and then one step higher onto the table. She stepped to the middle, just to the side of the chandelier and turned sideways. Yes, a hump, there it was, undeniable. She tried to straighten out, and could a little, but soon she was tired from pushing back against the inclination of her tendons and bones. The person she’d been for most of her life had disappeared, never to be seen again. How odd. She was an old, bent woman standing on a table, unsure of what to do. A person who’d spent her life among others, acting as a counterweight to ensure fun and peace, but was now so alone her closest friend was a prison pen pal.
She faced the mirror and closed her eyes. “Take stock,” she said aloud. Brother parents friends Dick children grandchildren—her people. The Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066; red and blue make purple; I before E except after C; Let me lift mine eyes to the hills from whence cometh my help; vous is formal tu is familiar—her learning. School college Philadelphia Maine—her places. What of her loves? Her passions? She’d once worshipped an older girl at school when she was a girl herself, and then a boy when she was a little older. For decades these loves had stayed with her as talismans, and she turned to them when she needed to remind herself of how high a person could reach. But while watching her children go through these stages, she’d realized that early love was more a figuring out of the self than a genuine apprehension of another. She was still figuring herself out.
It seemed to her that except for Dick and the children it was time to clean out her memory. Time for all ideas to go, all religion, politics, philosophy, science, every theory of mankind. What did she need of them now? Nature could remain, and memory. What did she need of anything else? The scent of her grandmother’s hallway, lemony and lavender. The poke of pine needles through her blouse. Wind on a mountaintop nearly sweeping her off. Sex with Dick—it had been fun. She’d read somewhere that children come from a man’s pleasure, not a woman’s. But during her pleasure, the children were made.
When she was so exhausted she was afraid of falling, she climbed down with Dick’s cane on the chair and then the floor. Ridiculously—she knew it—she spoke to him aloud. “Dick, what would you think of me asking Robert Circumstance to come live at Meadowlea?” Silence. No voice in her head, no reply. She tried to think how far Dick would go in realizing his ideals, but she simply wasn’t sure. He’d hadn’t given the children an allowance in college so they’d learn to budget their summer earnings, but he had paid for the tuition of the child of a cleaning woman in his campus building. That was money, though. Not proximity.
She went to bed and asked him again. She reached her hand across the mattress to touch his spot. “Dick, what should I do, tell me.”