And that was true too.
* * *
—
When the food came I realized he had—of course—ordered the glass of wine for me, and I was glad he had. We sat in two chairs in front of the desk and we talked and talked, we could not stop talking. We talked first about having come to Presque Isle: William said, “What was I thinking? I was thinking we’d walk around little neighborhoods and see cute houses and see where Lois Bubar’s husband came from, but really, Lucy, what was I thinking? There’s not a neighborhood in sight and I can’t stand it here.”
We talked about Bridget: She had seemed sad and sort of contrite when she came over the few times since Estelle left, she did not chatter her head off, and William said that was awkward and made him sad, and it made me sad as well. We talked about our girls and we both thought they would be all right; they were already all right but when you have children you worry about them forever, and then we talked about William’s work. He said, “There’s a life cycle to everything. Including a man’s work.” He really did feel that he was done. “But I’ll keep going into that lab until the day I die,” he said, and I understood.
* * *
—
William stood up and said, “Let’s watch the news.” He turned the television on and we lay next to each other on the bed watching. On the local news, a policeman’s son had died of a drug overdose. There had been a car accident near the town of Jackman, a truck had turned over, but the driver had not died. And then the national news came on and the country, the whole world, was in disarray—and yet I felt a sense of coziness. Then William went into the bathroom, and when he came back out he sat down on the bed and said, “Lucy, maybe we should forget this whole Lois Bubar thing. I’m old, she’s older. I mean, what’s the point.”
I sat up and said, “Let’s decide tomorrow. Let’s drive back through Houlton on the way back to Bangor, and we can figure it out then. But I know what you’re saying.”
He looked around the room and at the window, which was now dark. “I hate this place,” he said. “So weird to think of Richard Baxter coming from such a place.”
“Well, your mother came from here too,” I said, and he said, “Jesus. You’re right.” And then William—running his hand through his hair—said, “You know, Lucy, when I was small my mother would get depressed.”
“Tell me what you mean,” I said. “I know she would speak of getting the blues. But she was always so cheerful when she said it.” I reached and turned the television off with the remote control. I added, “I remember her one time, though, her telling me she got depressed.”
William said, “I hated her after my father died.”
I tried to think if I had known that. “Well,” I said, “you were an adolescent.”
William tugged his mustache. “I sort of forgot, but I couldn’t stand her, Lucy. We’d have fights and she’d cry hysterically.”
“Fights about what?”
“No idea.” William shrugged. “Not the usual stuff. I mean it’s not like I was out drinking every night or doing drugs. I don’t know. But she would bug me. God, did she bug me.”
“She was upset because her husband died,” I said.
“Of course she was upset. I know that. I’m just saying that she was so needy.”
I turned so I was sitting with my legs over the edge of the bed, and, facing him, I said, “I remember you told me that was the reason you took the position in Chicago—to get away from her.”
William sat back down in his chair and stared into space. Then he said, “I wonder where she was when I was little.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“When I was small, she’d get depressed. Like she said, she’d get the blues, that’s how she put it. But I was thinking last night in that hotel room in Bangor, I was thinking how she put me in nursery school a year earlier than most kids went. Why did she do that?”
“Is that when you chewed on your collar?” I remembered Catherine telling me that when William was small he would come home from school with his collar chewed.
William glanced at me sharply. “It’s when I cried,” he said.
I waited.
“I’d cry every day at that place. And all the other kids were a year older than I was, they seemed huge to me.” He waited, and then he said, “Lucy, I would cry—and the kids would circle around me at recess and they’d sing, ‘Crybaby, crybaby.’？”