“Tell me,” I said.
And he did, glancing at me only occasionally as though he were still inside these terrors.
* * *
—
One terror: It was not nameable, but it had something to do with his mother. His mother—her name was Catherine—had died many, many years earlier, but in this nighttime terror he would feel her presence, but it was not a good presence and this surprised him because he had loved her. William had been an only child, and he had always understood his mother’s （quietly） ferocious love for him.
To get over this terror while he lay awake in bed next to his sleeping wife—he told me this that day, and it kind of killed me—he would think of me. He would think about the fact that I was out there alive, right now—I was alive—and this gave him comfort. Because he knew if he had to, he said, arranging the spoon on the saucer of the coffee cup—even though he would never want to do this in the middle of the night—he knew if he should have to, that I would take a call from him. He told me my presence is what he found to be the greatest comfort and so he would fall back to sleep.
“Of course you can always call me,” I said.
And William rolled his eyes. “I know that. That’s my point,” he said.
* * *
—
Another terror: This had to do with Germany and his father, who had died when William was fourteen. His father had come from Germany as a prisoner of war—World War II—and been sent to work on the potato fields in Maine, where he met William’s mother; she was married to the potato farmer. This might have been William’s worst terror, because his father had been fighting on the side of the Nazis, and this fact would visit William in the night sometimes and cause him terror—he would see very clearly the concentration camps—we had visited them on a trip to Germany—and he would see the rooms where people were gassed, and then he would have to get up and move into the living room and put the light on and sit on the couch and look out the window at the river, and no amount of thinking about me or anything else could help with these terrors. They did not come as frequently as the ones with his mother, but when they did come they were very bad.
* * *
—
One more: This had to do with death. It had to do with a sense of leaving, he could feel himself almost leaving the world and he did not believe in any afterlife and so this filled him on certain nights with a kind of terror. But he could stay in bed usually, though sometimes he got up and went into the living room and sat in the large maroon chair by the window and read a book—he liked biographies—until he felt he could return to sleep.
* * *
—
“How long have you been having these?” I asked. The diner we sat in had been there for years and was crowded at this time of day; four white paper napkins had been tossed onto the table after our coffee had been brought.
William looked out the window and seemed to be watching an old woman who was walking by with her walker with a seat in it; she moved slowly, bent over, her coat blowing behind her in the wind. “A few months, I think,” he said.
“You mean they just started out of the blue?”
And he looked at me then; his eyebrows were getting shaggy above his dark eyes, and he said, “I think they did.” After a moment he sat back and said, “It must be just that I’m getting older.”
“Maybe,” I said. But I was not sure this was the reason. William has always been a mystery to me—and to our girls as well. I said, tentatively, “Do you want to see anyone to talk to about them?”
“God, no,” he said, and that part of him was not a mystery to me, I thought he would probably say that. “But it’s awful,” he added.
“Oh Pillie,” I said, using my pet name for him from so long ago. “I’m so sorry.”
“I wish we’d never taken that trip to Germany,” he said. He picked up one of the napkins and swiped at his nose with it. Then he ran his hand down over—almost reflexively, as he often does—his mustache. “And I really wish we’d never gone to Dachau. I keep picturing those—those crematoriums.” He added, glancing at me, “You were smart not to go into them.”
I was surprised that William remembered that I had not gone into the gas chamber or the crematoriums that summer we went to Germany. I did not go into them because even back then I knew myself well enough to know I should not do that; and I did not. William’s mother had died the year before, and the girls had been nine and ten; they were in summer camp together for two weeks and so we flew to Germany—I had asked only that we take separate flights, I was that scared of us both dying in a plane crash and leaving the girls orphans, which was silly, I saw later, because we could easily have both died on the autobahn as the cars whizzed past us—and we went there to find out what we could about William’s father, who had died, as I have said, when William was fourteen; he died in a hospital in Massachusetts from peritonitis, he was having a polyp removed from his intestine and there was a puncture and he died. We went to Germany that summer because William had come into a great deal of money a few years earlier, it turned out his grandfather had profited on the war, and when William turned thirty-five he came into the money from a trust, and this was a source of distress for William, and so we had flown over together and seen the old man, he was very old, and met two aunts of William’s, they were polite but cold, I felt. And the old man, his grandfather, had small glittery eyes and I disliked him especially. The trip left us both unhappy.