“You know,” Lucy said slowly, raising her hand and sort of drawing a small circle with her finger, “this is what I wonder. I wonder how many people out there are able to be strong—or strong enough—because of the person they’re married to.”
“Ay-yuh, I’ve been wondering that too.” Olive crossed her legs and swung a foot again. “I’ve been thinking about Henry. One could say he was my linchpin, because he was. And yet—” Olive shook her head slowly. “And yet I was able to get remarried and live a fairly okay life with my second husband, Jack. He was never Henry, but my life went on.”
“Because you’re you,” Lucy said.
Olive looked at her. Lucy looked slightly different, though Olive could not have said why. And then Olive thought that every time she saw Lucy, Lucy looked just slightly different. “Tell me what you mean,” Olive said.
“Well,” Lucy said, looking at the ceiling for a while and then back to Olive. “You are you. And Muddy was Muddy. And even though I know you had a difficult background, you still knew who you were. Or are.”
Olive considered this. “Go on,” she said.
Lucy sat forward, and then she sat up straight. “You know that Bob Burgess took the Matthew Beach case, right?”
“Oh yes. I even told him some things that were helpful,” Olive said.
“Right. Well, he told me some details, and honestly, I hope—now that the case is closed—they’re not confidential details—” Olive waved a hand to dismiss such a thought, and Lucy nodded and kept on. “My point is, we all know that the sister, Diana, came home to kill herself and she confessed to the murder of her mother. But my question to Bob is, Why at the age of sixty-five does this woman decide to kill her mother? That’s not young, Olive.”
And Olive said, “No, it is not.” Olive had wondered the exact same thing.
“And it turns out, this poor woman who had been abused for the first many years of her life—Olive, she had a really sad story—” Olive nodded. “The point is, this woman who had been abused so much in her youth suddenly decides at the age of sixty-five to kill her mother. Why?”
“And what is your theory?” Olive said.
“My theory is this: That in spite of everything in her life going wrong she was able to keep it together. She kept it together, Olive, until her second husband came home and said, I am having an affair with your best friend. And I want to leave you.”
Olive did not know that about the affair with the best friend. She waited.
And Lucy continued. “People are mysteries. We all are such mysteries. Diana Beach had so many problems, but she lived a life. She did. She left her first husband for this second one, and she was—apparently—a successful high school guidance counselor for years. And yet when that second husband leaves her for her best friend—” Here Lucy sighed and shook her head in a tiny way. “Well, the sense of betrayal that Diana had experienced, really since her earliest memories, must have just been too much.”
Olive thought about this. “Ay-yuh. I suspect you might be right.”
“Most of us have a few more reserves, though in truth probably not that many, but enough to get us through things. But Muddy and Diana just didn’t.”
Olive gave a big sigh. She was tired now. “Well,” she said. “That was the story of Muddy Wilson.”
*
After Lucy left, Olive realized she had forgotten to tell her that Charlene Bibber had a boyfriend.
*
Matt called Bob one day—this was a few weeks after his sister had died—and said, “Bob, I want to paint you.”
“Paint me?”
“Yeah. You know. Paint. I want to paint a picture of you.”
“In the nude?” Bob asked; he was alarmed. “No, I’m not doing that.”
And Matt laughed. He really laughed, and said, “No, Bob. The idea of you sitting in the nude is not attractive to me. But just come sit. Wear your awful jeans and that rumpled shirt you always wear.”
And so Bob sat for over an hour in Matt’s studio; no paintings had been returned to it, and it had an empty feel as Matt worked. Through the open window came the smell of two huge lilac bushes that grew below. It was strange to watch Matt; his face became different as he worked; he was inside somewhere else. “Need to do some sketches first,” he said, working with a stick of charcoal, and then he added, “I don’t want you looking at this.”
“No problem,” Bob said, holding up a hand.
“Put your hand back down.”
—
Matt wanted to paint the picture for Margaret—and this sort of killed Bob. “I like her a lot,” Matt said.
8
Three weeks after Larry had been hit by the car—during which time Bob, up in Crosby, Maine, was suffering over his love for Lucy and sitting for his portrait with Matt—Larry left the hospital in an ambulance and was driven back to the apartment he shared with Ariel; it was decided he would recuperate there, and Ariel said that Jim could stay in their spare room. The spare room was filled with books from Larry’s time in college, stacked from the floor to halfway up the wall, and there was a single bed that tucked itself beneath a sloping ceiling. Larry’s sisters showed up and sat by the hospital bed that had been set up in the living room, not unlike—except the place was smaller—where Helen’s bed had been when she was dying. The living room looked out over the East River; barges could be seen going back and forth.
Jim still wept quietly on occasion, though he tried hard to control his weeping now. But what he could not believe was this: Larry was kind to him! Larry was good to him!
Larry would say, “Oh Dad, you’re killing me, buddy. Man, you’re killing me, Dad. We’re okay now, do you hear?”
—
What Jim was experiencing was not unlike what a person who has fallen in love experiences—he was exalted. All his grief for Helen—and for his entire life, it seemed to him—came pouring forth in this new state for his son.
And he once more would apologize for everything he could think of—and there were many things—that he had done wrong with Larry. “I never should have sent you to summer camp,” he said, and he felt the truth of this go through him, the anguish that Larry had experienced at those stupid summer camps, because Larry had not been athletic, had been homesick, had never fit in.
But now Larry just watched his father and said, “It’s okay. You know why it’s okay? ’Cause you mean it.” One day he said, jokingly, “Dad, I should have almost died sooner,” and Jim just shook his head, he could not speak with the constriction in his throat.
—
