more.
In the early morning, when the snow had almost stopped and dark of night had eased up a bit, the highway patrol had gone looking for victims of the storm. They found my Chevy racked up against a tree, totaled, the car and the tree and damn near me, and there was no evidence I’d tried to stop the car on the icy, crusty, snowy road. So they knew I must have fallen asleep. It happened sometimes. Well, that was all bullshit. I had a broken leg and I was half frozen, but the important thing was that I’d realized in the middle of the night that dying was preferable to telling my father about the Jesuits and me.
Epiphany. It was the only true moment of epiphany I’d ever had. Naturally, as it developed, my father knew the truth of what I’d tried to do that night. It was there in his eyes, the burning fires of unquenched despair, like beacon fires on a dark and treacherous shore beckoning me home, home. He knew. He knew I’d had my go at suicide, the final Catholic sin, and it was one more thing he could never forgive.
Thank God there’s Val
. He actually said it to me in the hospital afterward. Not to insult me, nor to humiliate me, but just muttering to himself under his breath. And by then, having consciously tried to end my own life, having once chosen the void, having excluded my father from the decision-making process, I no longer gave a goddamn what he thought. That was what I told myself. That was my triumph.
* * *
I skirted the edges of Princeton, turned off onto the two-lane blacktop where I’d learned to drive my father’s Lincoln, and before I knew it the headlights were poking through the whipping curtain of rain and sleet, reaching into the darkness toward the house. The long driveway passing beneath and between rows of poplars was soft with slush sucking at the tires. The gravel turnaround was yellow and muddy, the rosebushes forlorn, as if no one had been home this century. The low gable-roofed stone garage sat glum and dark on one side of the forecourt. No one had turned on the welcoming coach lanterns to light my arrival. The house itself stretched out to the left, the fieldstones glistening in the headlights like pebbles at the bottom of a streambed. The house was dark and the night was black, impenetrable, soaked. In the distance the glow of Princeton wavered pink in the rain over the treetops.
Entering the darkened front hall sent a chill rattling along my backbone. But when I flipped the switch the lights came on and everything was as it always was, the polished oak floor, pegged not nailed, and the cream molding and staircase, the olive-green walls, the gilt-framed mirrors. I went directly to the Long Room, the two steps up from the foyer, where we seemed to do most of our gathering when we returned home.
The Long Room. It had once been the main public room of the original eighteenth-century inn around which the rest of the house had been built, as was still evident from the blackened beams overhead, the scarred and scorched fireplace six feet high and ten wide, the pot hooks. But it had picked up bits and pieces over the years: the flowered slipcovers, the walls of bookcases, the enormous hooked rugs of mustard and scarlet, the coal scuttle, the mustard leather wing chairs drawn up around the stone fireplace, the yellow-shaded brass lamps, the bowls and copper pots of flowers, and at the far end of the room looking out toward the orchard and the creek, the easel where my father did some of his painting. The current canvas was large and covered with a dropcloth.
It was cold in the room, the damp chill seeping infrom outside. The ashes in the grate were dead and damp and smelled like autumn with rain dripping down the chimney turning them to mud. In the old days William and Mary lived in their own quarters and would have been bustling around, stoking the fires, greeting me with a toddy, bringing the place to life. But now William was dead, Mary had gone into retirement in Scottsdale, and
In the early morning, when the snow had almost stopped and dark of night had eased up a bit, the highway patrol had gone looking for victims of the storm. They found my Chevy racked up against a tree, totaled, the car and the tree and damn near me, and there was no evidence I’d tried to stop the car on the icy, crusty, snowy road. So they knew I must have fallen asleep. It happened sometimes. Well, that was all bullshit. I had a broken leg and I was half frozen, but the important thing was that I’d realized in the middle of the night that dying was preferable to telling my father about the Jesuits and me.
Epiphany. It was the only true moment of epiphany I’d ever had. Naturally, as it developed, my father knew the truth of what I’d tried to do that night. It was there in his eyes, the burning fires of unquenched despair, like beacon fires on a dark and treacherous shore beckoning me home, home. He knew. He knew I’d had my go at suicide, the final Catholic sin, and it was one more thing he could never forgive.
Thank God there’s Val
. He actually said it to me in the hospital afterward. Not to insult me, nor to humiliate me, but just muttering to himself under his breath. And by then, having consciously tried to end my own life, having once chosen the void, having excluded my father from the decision-making process, I no longer gave a goddamn what he thought. That was what I told myself. That was my triumph.
* * *
I skirted the edges of Princeton, turned off onto the two-lane blacktop where I’d learned to drive my father’s Lincoln, and before I knew it the headlights were poking through the whipping curtain of rain and sleet, reaching into the darkness toward the house. The long driveway passing beneath and between rows of poplars was soft with slush sucking at the tires. The gravel turnaround was yellow and muddy, the rosebushes forlorn, as if no one had been home this century. The low gable-roofed stone garage sat glum and dark on one side of the forecourt. No one had turned on the welcoming coach lanterns to light my arrival. The house itself stretched out to the left, the fieldstones glistening in the headlights like pebbles at the bottom of a streambed. The house was dark and the night was black, impenetrable, soaked. In the distance the glow of Princeton wavered pink in the rain over the treetops.
Entering the darkened front hall sent a chill rattling along my backbone. But when I flipped the switch the lights came on and everything was as it always was, the polished oak floor, pegged not nailed, and the cream molding and staircase, the olive-green walls, the gilt-framed mirrors. I went directly to the Long Room, the two steps up from the foyer, where we seemed to do most of our gathering when we returned home.
The Long Room. It had once been the main public room of the original eighteenth-century inn around which the rest of the house had been built, as was still evident from the blackened beams overhead, the scarred and scorched fireplace six feet high and ten wide, the pot hooks. But it had picked up bits and pieces over the years: the flowered slipcovers, the walls of bookcases, the enormous hooked rugs of mustard and scarlet, the coal scuttle, the mustard leather wing chairs drawn up around the stone fireplace, the yellow-shaded brass lamps, the bowls and copper pots of flowers, and at the far end of the room looking out toward the orchard and the creek, the easel where my father did some of his painting. The current canvas was large and covered with a dropcloth.
It was cold in the room, the damp chill seeping infrom outside. The ashes in the grate were dead and damp and smelled like autumn with rain dripping down the chimney turning them to mud. In the old days William and Mary lived in their own quarters and would have been bustling around, stoking the fires, greeting me with a toddy, bringing the place to life. But now William was dead, Mary had gone into retirement in Scottsdale, and
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