exactly innocent, but I let Paul show me the way, and it was like riding in a sports car with the top down. Like the little sports car in the garage that he never got to drive. Except a few times around the parking lot. There was barely room for the two of us and his portable oxygen tank, but we used to sit in it with the garage door open and keep an eye on the cars pulling in and out of the parking lot, and the people who walked by. Plato’s cave? Or the catbird seat?
But these were the sort of differences that hold two people together, like the gravitational field that keeps two binary stars orbiting around each other, or around their common center of mass. Like Sirius A and Sirius B.
The real problem, the real heartache, was more complicated. Paul did not go gentle into that good night. And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that we squandered most of that last year. And there was nothing I could do about it now. It was too late. The show was over. The gavel had come down. The verdict had been delivered. The final score had been registered at the scorer’s table. The manuscript had gone to press and it was too late for revisions. The deadline had passed.
I blamed Paul; I blamed our son-in-law, Jimmy; I blamed our daughter. I blamed everyone but myself.
4
Circles of Doors (October–December 1995)
We were married for thirty-three years. Where did the time go? I suppose everyone who lives long enough wonders the same thing. And they do what I’ve been doing. They look at old photos and wonder why the same pictures appear over and over again: Paul shooting the hog behind the ear; Paul and Pa and Michal with their arms around the pig carcass while my uncle pulls on a rope, like three men embracing the same woman; the enormous pile of leaves that the choir kids raked up in the fall; the garden after we’d planted it at the end of May and then after we’d put it to bed in October. But I was glad I still had the photos. The rakes had long spindly fingers.
After Paul’s divorce was final we sold the house on Chambers and bought a big shingle-style house on Prairie Street. When I think of “home,” that’s what I think of—Prairie Street, not the farm—though Paul kept on with the hog slaughtering till Pa had his first heart attack in 1978 at age sixty-six. Paul taught Ma how to drive so she could drive the Studebaker into town to the Hy-Vee or the library. He talked cooking with the women, learned to cook pierogis and borsht and even cheese babkas. He talked local politics with the men. My uncle was a brakeman on the railroad; Pa was a mechanical engineer and union steward at Maytag. Ma came to live with us for a couple of years after Pa’s death. Paul spoke at their funerals and served as a pallbearer.
Ma got to see a copy of Paul’s book, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Inner Life, before she died. She didn’t read it, but she kept it by her bed. The book received some national attention and Paul was invited to spend a semester at the University of Verona.
By the time we went to Verona in the fall of 1985 both my parents were dead, my aunt and uncle too. Miss Buckholdt had come out of retirement and was teaching a couple sections of Beginning Latin, and in 1995 Father Viglietti—who’d replaced Father Gordon—had been hired to teach two sections of Latin 3. The Latin program had been recognized by the Illinois Classical Association as one of the best in the state; I had received the Farrand Baker Illinois Teacher of the Year Citation and had published several translations, including a translation of Catullus XXXI, celebrating his return to his old home in Sirmio, in the New Yorker.
Paul was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 1995, just before the start of the fall term. Against the doctor’s advice he decided to teach that term. Two sections of Shakespeare I. Histories and Comedies. He was sixty-three years old; I was fifty-five; Stella was thirty-two.
By his birthday in
But these were the sort of differences that hold two people together, like the gravitational field that keeps two binary stars orbiting around each other, or around their common center of mass. Like Sirius A and Sirius B.
The real problem, the real heartache, was more complicated. Paul did not go gentle into that good night. And that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that we squandered most of that last year. And there was nothing I could do about it now. It was too late. The show was over. The gavel had come down. The verdict had been delivered. The final score had been registered at the scorer’s table. The manuscript had gone to press and it was too late for revisions. The deadline had passed.
I blamed Paul; I blamed our son-in-law, Jimmy; I blamed our daughter. I blamed everyone but myself.
4
Circles of Doors (October–December 1995)
We were married for thirty-three years. Where did the time go? I suppose everyone who lives long enough wonders the same thing. And they do what I’ve been doing. They look at old photos and wonder why the same pictures appear over and over again: Paul shooting the hog behind the ear; Paul and Pa and Michal with their arms around the pig carcass while my uncle pulls on a rope, like three men embracing the same woman; the enormous pile of leaves that the choir kids raked up in the fall; the garden after we’d planted it at the end of May and then after we’d put it to bed in October. But I was glad I still had the photos. The rakes had long spindly fingers.
After Paul’s divorce was final we sold the house on Chambers and bought a big shingle-style house on Prairie Street. When I think of “home,” that’s what I think of—Prairie Street, not the farm—though Paul kept on with the hog slaughtering till Pa had his first heart attack in 1978 at age sixty-six. Paul taught Ma how to drive so she could drive the Studebaker into town to the Hy-Vee or the library. He talked cooking with the women, learned to cook pierogis and borsht and even cheese babkas. He talked local politics with the men. My uncle was a brakeman on the railroad; Pa was a mechanical engineer and union steward at Maytag. Ma came to live with us for a couple of years after Pa’s death. Paul spoke at their funerals and served as a pallbearer.
Ma got to see a copy of Paul’s book, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Inner Life, before she died. She didn’t read it, but she kept it by her bed. The book received some national attention and Paul was invited to spend a semester at the University of Verona.
By the time we went to Verona in the fall of 1985 both my parents were dead, my aunt and uncle too. Miss Buckholdt had come out of retirement and was teaching a couple sections of Beginning Latin, and in 1995 Father Viglietti—who’d replaced Father Gordon—had been hired to teach two sections of Latin 3. The Latin program had been recognized by the Illinois Classical Association as one of the best in the state; I had received the Farrand Baker Illinois Teacher of the Year Citation and had published several translations, including a translation of Catullus XXXI, celebrating his return to his old home in Sirmio, in the New Yorker.
Paul was diagnosed with lung cancer in August 1995, just before the start of the fall term. Against the doctor’s advice he decided to teach that term. Two sections of Shakespeare I. Histories and Comedies. He was sixty-three years old; I was fifty-five; Stella was thirty-two.
By his birthday in
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