For us what was killing was how nothing had changed. We’d been waiting to be transformed, and now here we were, back in our old life.
25
Years before I’d given away an antique postcard that said, beneath a drawing of a pine branch:
For thee I pine.
For thee I balsam.
(I regretted giving away that postcard almost immediately. The recipient didn’t deserve it. Me in a nutshelclass="underline" I don’t regret a single instance of giving away my heart, but a novelty postcard with a really good pun? I still wish I hadn’t.)
Now I pined, and pined. I pictured myself: a pine tree. The trail of the lonesome pine. I saw myself green and leaning on the beach, inclined toward my unreachable darling. To be deciduous would be better. I could stand brown and brittle, and then naked, and then in the spring I would start over again.
Actually, that’s sort of what happened.
At the end of August we packed up the few things we’d brought with us to Holt. For the first time in our lives, we had not accumulated a single thing in a new country. We spent a few days in Suffolk, with Edward’s family, then a few days in London, then a few days in Boston. On September 5 we paid movers to clear out my vast storage space in Boston, all the things I hadn’t seen in four years, and we drove to Saratoga Springs. The rented house we’d arranged by e-mail months before (when Pudding was still alive) was in a bad state, with cigarette butts and condom wrappers and a fly-infested garbage can. The previous tenants had been smokers, and someone had tried to cover the smell with a quantity of Febreze, and then, when that failed, several spilled boxes of mothballs. Up until then we’d had good luck renting places sight unseen, so odds were it was time for us to land hard, but it felt like ominous luck. Moreover, the house belonged to a retired professor from the English Department who lived out of state, and I saw how quickly I could become a villain if I broke the lease. The movers arrived and unloaded our stuff into the house; we couldn’t figure out what else to do. When they finally left, I went upstairs to the bathroom and took the pregnancy test I’d been carrying around in my purse all day, and brought it down to the kitchen as it developed to show Edward.
Well, what do you know. This baby would be due in May.
26
But before this:
The day we left Holt we got up at 5:00 a.m. and drove to Holkham, the wide, bowl-shaped beach of Edward’s childhood and of our summer. On the way there, hares jumped along the side of the roads — early risers? going home to their burrows after a night of hell-raising? — and I prayed I wouldn’t hit one, that this wouldn’t be the first day I struck something living with a car. I didn’t believe in omens anymore, but still. We worried that someone else would have beat us to the beach. In England there’s always some preposterous superannuated sweetheart with a dog tramping along. But we walked through the scrub pines to the sand and then over the great expanse of sand to the water’s edge all alone.
The sky was peach and gold, a teacup of a morning, just enough clouds so as not to mock us. Why isn’t there a dawnish equivalent for the word dusky? That’s what the light was, beautiful and dawnish. We found a spit created by the receding tide. A spit curl, really: it spiraled around. We walked to the end of it. Edward had already removed the screw that kept the wooden urn shut. He took off the lid. The ashes were in a small white container like a film canister. We opened it up, and then we cast the ashes upon the water, hoping they would. . what? He wouldn’t return to us, but we hoped someone would. It was tremendously comforting. Fingertip after fingertip, we let him fly.
It probably sounds ridiculous to observe that I was at that moment already a day or two pregnant, as nearly as I can reckon it. If this morning appeared in a movie, I would spit on it for its nauseating symbolism, the author taking liberties with probability to Give Hope to the Audience. I’m a cynic. I’ve had to go back to the e-mails I wrote that afternoon, to Ann and Lib and my parents, to make sure that it all really happened.
So: I will report now that when it was done we turned back and walked to the car and passed by the first birder of the morning, a man in his sixties, and his grizzled dog. And that we got in the car and then decided to drive through the miles of parkland around Holkham Hall. We drove through the gates, past the pub we’d liked, and into the grounds.
Then Edward said, “Look!”
Huddled together under a nearby tree were about thirty does. In my memory they look slightly worried, twisting their heads over their shoulders — to look at us? wondering where everyone else had gone to? All our married life, Edward will say, Look, and point, and it will take me several moments: he has spotted the heron, the big brown hare, the cardinal so red it can only be called cardinal red. He grew up in the country. He sees the wildlife. I reflected on this truth as I watched the beautiful kaffeeklatsch of does worry beneath their tree. Then I looked to my right.
My God.
In the wide open, in a dip in the land, were hundreds of deer. Hundreds. Fawns, does, stags, everyone, in a giant herd, the stags marshaling the edges.
“Look,” I said.
The deer moved around one another. They shifted, but they didn’t flee. We could see another car stopped on the other side of the pack, and two people on foot. We bipeds held still.
“I’ve never seen a stag in the wild before,” Edward said. I said, “Well, then.”
Finally we drove away. We had to get on the road; it was time for the rest of our lives. On the other side of Holkham Hall, the mawkish entity orchestrating all of this threw in for good measure a clump of stags, fifteen maybe, standing behind a knoll, and when we passed by they ducked down like juvenile delinquents as though to hide. Their antlers still forked up.
I don’t believe in omens. Still, it’s nice to see Nature try her best to persuade you.
But if you ask me whether this felt like closure, I’ll tell you what I’ve come to believe:
Closure is bullshit.
27
We were lucky that Edward was standing in the grubby kitchen of our rental house in Saratoga Springs when I came down the stairs with the pregnancy test: we were lucky he was in the United States at all. I suppose I was aware that generally speaking, immigration to the States is no cakewalk. I have seen the movies about green card marriages, but we had been married three years, with pictures to prove it, no quickie job at the courthouse (cheap secular weddings being more suspect), but in fancy dress, with caterers. When we’d lived in the United States before, Edward had gotten short-term visas from the University of Iowa, first as a fellow and then as a teacher. We assumed it would be easy.
It turned out to be very complicated, very fraught, and very boring. Suffice it to say that having applied outside of the country, Edward was supposed to wait until the U.S. government agreed to grant him an immigrant visa. This would take at least six months. The U.S. government, recognizing the difficulty of a long separation, had invented a different kind of visa that would allow a citizen to bring a spouse or fiancé in the meantime. The wait time for that sort of visa was also six months.