she made out the title:
Emma
. She answered, “No.”
And, though there was much in the aftermath to regret,and a harm that would never cease, Betty remembered these days—the open fields, the dripping eaves, the paintings, the law books—as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.
Deaths of Distant Friends
T HOUGH I WAS BETWEEN MARRIAGES for several years, in a disarray that preoccupied me completely, other people continued to live and to die. Len, an old golf partner, overnight in the hospital for what they said was a routine examination, dropped dead in the lavatory, having just placed a telephone call to his hardware store saying he would be back behind the counter in the morning. He owned the store and could leave a clerk in charge on sunny afternoons. His swing was too quick, and he kept his weight back on his right foot, and the ball often squirted off to the left without getting into the air at all; but he sank some gorgeous putts in his day, and he always dressed with a nattiness that seemed to betoken high hopes for his game. In buttercup-yellow slacks, sky-blue turtleneck, and tangerine cashmere cardigan he would wave from the practice green as, having driven out from Boston through clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion, I would drag my cart across the asphalt parking lot, my cleats scraping, like a monster’s claws, at every step.
Though Len had known and liked Julia, the wife I had left, he never spoke of my personal condition or of the fact that I drove an hour out from Boston to meet him instead of, as formerly, ten minutes down the road. Golf in that interim was a haven; as soon as I stepped off the first tee in pursuit of my drive, I felt enclosed in a luminous wide sanctuary, safe from women, stricken children, solemn lawyers, disapproving old acquaintances—the entire offended social order. Golf had its own order, and its own love, as the three or four of us staggered and shouted our way toward each hole, laughing at misfortune and applauding the rare strokes of relative brilliance. Sometimes the summer sky would darken and a storm arise, and we would cluster in an abandoned equipment shed or beneath a tree that seemed less tall and vulnerable to lightning than its brothers. Our natural nervousness and our impatience at having the excitements of golf interrupted would in this space of shelter focus into an almost amorous heat—the breaths and sweats of middle-aged men packed together in the pattering rain like cattle in a boxcar. Len’s face bore a number of spots of actinic keratosis; he was going to have them surgically removed before they turned into skin cancer. Who would have thought that the lightning bolt of a coronary would fall across his plans and clean remove him from my tangled life? Never again (no two snowflakes or fingerprints, no two heartbeats traced on the oscilloscope, and no two golf swings are exactly alike) would I see his so hopefully addressed drive (“Hello dere, ball,” he would joke, going into his waggle and squat) squirt off low to the left in that unique way of his, and hear him exclaim in angry frustration (he was a born-again Baptist, and had developed a personal language of avoided curses), “Ya dirty ricka-fric!”
I drove out to Len’s funeral and tried to tell his son, “Yourfather was a great guy,” but the words fell flat in that cold, bare Baptist church. Len’s gaudy colors, his Christian effervescence, his hopeful and futile swing, our crowing back and forth, our fellowship within the artificial universe composed of variously resistant lengths and types of grass were all tints of life too delicate to capture, and had flown.
A time later, I read in the paper that Miss Amy Merrymount, ninety-one, had at last passed away, as a dry leaf passes into leaf mold. She had always seemed ancient; she was one of those New Englanders, one of the last, who spoke of Henry James
Emma
. She answered, “No.”
And, though there was much in the aftermath to regret,and a harm that would never cease, Betty remembered these days—the open fields, the dripping eaves, the paintings, the law books—as bright, as a single iridescent unit, not scattered as is a constellation but continuous, a rainbow, a U-turn.
Deaths of Distant Friends
T HOUGH I WAS BETWEEN MARRIAGES for several years, in a disarray that preoccupied me completely, other people continued to live and to die. Len, an old golf partner, overnight in the hospital for what they said was a routine examination, dropped dead in the lavatory, having just placed a telephone call to his hardware store saying he would be back behind the counter in the morning. He owned the store and could leave a clerk in charge on sunny afternoons. His swing was too quick, and he kept his weight back on his right foot, and the ball often squirted off to the left without getting into the air at all; but he sank some gorgeous putts in his day, and he always dressed with a nattiness that seemed to betoken high hopes for his game. In buttercup-yellow slacks, sky-blue turtleneck, and tangerine cashmere cardigan he would wave from the practice green as, having driven out from Boston through clouds of grief and sleeplessness and moral confusion, I would drag my cart across the asphalt parking lot, my cleats scraping, like a monster’s claws, at every step.
Though Len had known and liked Julia, the wife I had left, he never spoke of my personal condition or of the fact that I drove an hour out from Boston to meet him instead of, as formerly, ten minutes down the road. Golf in that interim was a haven; as soon as I stepped off the first tee in pursuit of my drive, I felt enclosed in a luminous wide sanctuary, safe from women, stricken children, solemn lawyers, disapproving old acquaintances—the entire offended social order. Golf had its own order, and its own love, as the three or four of us staggered and shouted our way toward each hole, laughing at misfortune and applauding the rare strokes of relative brilliance. Sometimes the summer sky would darken and a storm arise, and we would cluster in an abandoned equipment shed or beneath a tree that seemed less tall and vulnerable to lightning than its brothers. Our natural nervousness and our impatience at having the excitements of golf interrupted would in this space of shelter focus into an almost amorous heat—the breaths and sweats of middle-aged men packed together in the pattering rain like cattle in a boxcar. Len’s face bore a number of spots of actinic keratosis; he was going to have them surgically removed before they turned into skin cancer. Who would have thought that the lightning bolt of a coronary would fall across his plans and clean remove him from my tangled life? Never again (no two snowflakes or fingerprints, no two heartbeats traced on the oscilloscope, and no two golf swings are exactly alike) would I see his so hopefully addressed drive (“Hello dere, ball,” he would joke, going into his waggle and squat) squirt off low to the left in that unique way of his, and hear him exclaim in angry frustration (he was a born-again Baptist, and had developed a personal language of avoided curses), “Ya dirty ricka-fric!”
I drove out to Len’s funeral and tried to tell his son, “Yourfather was a great guy,” but the words fell flat in that cold, bare Baptist church. Len’s gaudy colors, his Christian effervescence, his hopeful and futile swing, our crowing back and forth, our fellowship within the artificial universe composed of variously resistant lengths and types of grass were all tints of life too delicate to capture, and had flown.
A time later, I read in the paper that Miss Amy Merrymount, ninety-one, had at last passed away, as a dry leaf passes into leaf mold. She had always seemed ancient; she was one of those New Englanders, one of the last, who spoke of Henry James
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