All the Dead Yale Men by Craig Nova Page A

though it was a creature, too, like her grouse, deer, and brook trout. Is pain a living creature, a thing that has evolved, too, and learned precisely how much it can exist before the host decides it is time to bring both of them, host and parasite, to an end?
    The notebook continued:
    I plan, of course, to burn this before I die. And I hope that I have the time to do so, since I imagine, given my history, that mine will be a slow, continually approaching death, like a snake, a constrictor taking his time over its prey, but then I think sometimes I should burn it right now, so that no one will discover my sad secrets, which, I guess, should simply disappear . . .
    When I was young, I was not beautiful, but when I was in my thirties, something happened: not beauty, but a kind of glow, something like that air that Jean Cooper carried with her: not only attractive but dangerous. How could I deny it when all my life I had looked away from mirrors and now found that something had snuck into the frame while I had been looking away? This thing, this presence, was the tug of life, the scent of it, the allure of a new perfume, unlike anyother in the world, that hung about me, for a short time, I thought, like a cloud of desire.
    So, I sat upstairs and looked out the window at this man, this McGill, tall, home from the First World War with a limp, in his thirties, too, and when I see him I feel more myself (a sure sign of foolishness).
    And, I thought, what does that have to do with anything, with duty, with obligations, with what one feels at three in the morning when a child won’t sleep and when you are so tired you can’t remember if you are alive or dead? Then you remember the sense of being bigger and wonder at the seduction of it.
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    The dust in the attic was infinitely golden, infinitely fine.
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    Now I have times when I am alone with McGill. I go out to the barn, since sometimes he has trouble measuring and figuring and getting the most out of the lumber Pop has bought. McGill, who has had trouble since the war, was a bargain, and Pop loves a bargain. But McGill needs help. Sometimes he can’t plan on the number of pegs he will need, or how to drive a piece of hardwood through a hole in the post and beam construction. I read, at night, about how barns are built this way. It makes me feel close to him.
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    You must do what’s right , my grandmother wrote to herself, as though she was both the prosecutor and the defendant. And, infact, I could sense this growing division between her objections and her desires. They made a sort of crackle that could almost be heard in that dusty attic. She told herself to go to the river and to sit by the water: it is eternal, she wrote, it goes on forever, and that is what you must concentrate on. The long term, the forever, since you are flirting with something that is far too intense to last and that, by its nature, the shortness and intensity, can’t be anything but dangerous.
    She knew she was going to have to pick up the pieces when this was over and she was good at that, although this, to be sure, was cold comfort.
    She sat with McGill in the kitchen, her hand on his. And, of course, her feet were bare on the kitchen floor against that polished pine, yellow as an intimate stain. Upstairs, he sat on the edge of the bed. She said she knew better than this, that her husband was a decent man, and she had tried to learn to write so beautifully, but it had come to nothing. When they were done, when they had touched each other and were sweaty, they took a bath together in her tub with lions’ feet.
    The light came down all buttery when I sat with my grandmother’s diaries, although it seemed to have a different color, still yellow, still weak, and in the sweetness of it I recognized my grandmother’s profound sympathy: she wanted to leave a moment