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School for the Blind

A Novel

Dennis McFarland

Part I

One

HIS LIFE’S WORK AND ambition fulfilled, Francis Brimm believed the only metamorphosis left him was a slow, affable decline toward death, and so at the age of seventy-three he returned to the town of his youth to retire. He had been a news photographer—a witness, a messenger amid the world’s fire and ashes—and he figured he had earned not only the right to let the world go, but also the poise to let it go with authority. He would read, write, sleep, visit the beach, fish, garden a bit, whatever he pleased—the pastimes, he imagined, of solitary old people of some accomplishment. The medley of images he assembled for this retirement included a cottage with a porch on which he might sit and muse over the prospects of the very next hour, but soon after he had settled into just such a place, he found himself absorbed in entirely different, unexpected ways.

Everything seemed to begin with the gulls that awakened him around 4 A.M. with their ethereal, light-greeting symphony, two or three mornings a week, out on the nearby golf course. The crying and cawing continued usually for about twenty minutes, during which Brimm, in a state of partial sleep, would open his eyes and see a pale radiance wash across the ceiling of his bedroom. At first he thought it some phenomenon of aging eyes (he’d had “floaters,” tiny shapes like pieces of lint, troubling his vision since his late forties), but soon a face began emerging out of these bursts of dull light on the ceiling, the face of a young woman he had once photographed almost fifty years ago in Normandy, and he knew that more than aging eyes was involved.

The cottage he’d purchased was on a quiet street in a turn-of-the-century neighborhood that abutted the golf course, and if you walked the short distance to the course’s highest point—what passed for a hill in this low-lying plain known as Florida—you could see the Gulf Coast town of Pines, spread out like an immense barge of colorful crates about to be launched into the bay. In the south end of town, near the college and the mouth of the Yustaga River, you could see the roof of the red brick house where Brimm had spent his youth and where his unmarried sister, Muriel, lived to this day. You could see the ugly college gymnasium with its two different architectures; the whitewashed armory, long used for theatrical events; and atop the entrance to the Creighton Tunnel, the olive-drab statue of the conquistador Hernando de Soto astride a horse. Everywhere you would see the pines for which the town was named, and behind you that was practically all you would see—the forest that was the protracted setting of Brimm’s new neighborhood, a few country homes (the Dills, the Tutwilers, the Coopers), an important county road, the winding Yustaga, and the Raphael School for the Blind, its stone tower rising medievally out of the evergreens.

“The French girl, yes,” said Muriel. “Of course I remember her. The collaboratrice.”

It was late enough in the day—after seven-thirty in the evening, in summer—for them to stroll to the top of the hill without rousing the fury of any late golfers. Brimm had walked a bit ahead; he stopped and turned to wait for her to catch up. She was older by five years, and she had recently cut her white hair very short, making her large gray eyes all the stronger. He had photographed her many times over the years, mainly because of the eyes, and watching her now, under the dome of near-twilight, her impractical shoes making her traverse the rough with her arms outstretched like a tightrope walker’s, he acknowledged to himself that he had always been a little in love with his sister. These days he found himself yielding to such sentimental, disagreeable truths like somebody who’d completely lost his mettle.

“Yes,” he said, “the French girl. It ran in Picture Post a hundred years ago. She’d had a baby by a German soldier.”

“That’s right,” said Muriel, reaching for his hand. “Hold me up, Frankie. I’m going barefoot.”

This he’d done before, held Muriel’s hand while she bent to remove her shoes. She’d always, always worn the wrong shoes, an excuse, he imagined, for going barefoot eventually. Muriel, unmarried, unselfconscious, removing her shoes: for some time Brimm had thought there was no longer any pure memory, only memories of memories, recollections of things once recollected. And some of them had gone so abstract, like this shoe-removing of Muriel’s, that you couldn’t legitimately call it memory—more like a vague recognition of something once known better.

“They shaved her head,” he said. “And marched her through the streets, carrying the baby in her arms. She was just a kid herself.”

Muriel, shoes in hand, stood erect and looked at him. “Francis,” she said. “There are tears in your eyes.”

He waved a hand at the sky and headed for the top of the hill, where there was a tee with a bench. The fairway stretched out toward town and the bay. Brimm watched a black dog digging in a bunker down to the right of the visible green.

“I don’t know,” he said after they were seated. “This thing is happening to me.”

“Okay,” Muriel said. She peered down the fairway, bringing a hand to her forehead. “I think that Labrador retriever may be mad,” she said. “Look at the way he’s digging up that sand trap.”

They both watched the dog in the distance for a moment. Then Muriel said, “Only, if it was nothing, why did you mention it? I wonder where she is today, that girl. I wonder what happened to the baby.”

“Okay,” she said, nodding. She cleared her throat, paused. “You see her,” she said. “Okay. I think I know what you mean. You mean you see her on the bedroom ceiling. Of course. At night I think—”

“I mean what I said. The gulls wake me up before dawn and then I see that girl’s face, as big as a … well, I don’t know exactly how big. But there she is, recognizable.”

“But I mean is it like a ghost?” said Muriel. “Like a projection? Or like a bas-relief?”

He stood, turned, and began walking away, down toward the strip of pines that separated his street from the golf course. He got through the trees and all the way to the house before he even thought about looking back.

Then, there she was, an old woman picking her way through the floor of pine needles in the dusk, barefoot. He waited for her on the porch step.

“You realize,” she called from the middle of the street, squinting at him, waving one shoe in the air in his direction, “that I might have been attacked by a rabid dog out on that golf course.”

When she reached him, she said, “Oh, well, Frankie,” and took his arm. “I’m sorry, but I think you should consider yourself lucky, really. I never see anything at all on my bedroom ceiling.”

“I am going home,” she said, releasing him. “You bet I’m going home. You’re in no mood.”

She walked to the red Volkswagen she’d had forever and threw her shoes in through the open window. (She called the car by name, Ruby—husbandless, childless, she made pets of practically everything, even the kitchen appliances. “Roo-bee, roo-bay, this little tiny car,” she would croon as she cranked the engine. “Bye-bye, roo-bee, roo-bay.”) “Get a cat, Frankie,” she called, once she was behind the wheel. “You’re much too alone here.”

“If I’d wanted to live with cats,” he said, “I would’ve moved in with you.”

“Then come to church with me on Sunday,” she said. “You’ve got to find some company for yourself.”

He rolled his eyes and hitched up his pants, pulling on his belt loops. “Church,” he said, wholly disgruntled.

She looked at him for a long moment. “I just realized something,” she said. “You’ve always been a hermit, haven’t you. All that world travel, all that mission … just a front, a way to be alone.”

“You make some headway,” said Brimm, motioning the car forward along the street.

“Come to church,” she said, smiling. “We’ve got a marvelous new preacher.”

He watched the old car until it disappeared around the bend at the end of the block, thinking suddenly that they hadn’t talked about what he’d called her over there to talk about. He had meant to ask her again about their father, about a certain Sunday when their father forbade a trip to the beach, and about several other things as well. He went inside the cottage and switched on the swing-arm lamp by his reading chair. He said aloud, “Dinner,” a word that so defeated him, he sagged into the chair and closed his eyes.

After a minute of blankness, he reached into a cardboard crate near his feet and pulled out the old Picture Post, which now fell open automatically to the famous photograph: the camera aimed straight down the village street, victory banners hung from the windows of the buildings on either side, the street filled with throngs of people—mostly women and girls in summer dresses, and a few old men—all moving rapidly forward over the cobblestones. The girl with the baby, the young mother, is the focus of all the others in the picture: they are marching her home after having publicly shaved her head. Everyone jockeys for position to get a look at her, to get in a jeer. Two gendarmes flank the girl, one with a leering grin. She herself, wearing a checked dress under a white apron, concentrates on the face of the swaddled baby in her arms—perhaps the baby is crying—and this priority, the baby, whose German father might be already dead, or imprisoned, or simply gone forever, seems to render the young mother impervious to the crowd’s amused scorn. How had she collaborated? Did she turn in Jews to the enemy, or merely fall in love with the wrong man? The photograph didn’t reveal anything new—it remained the same—yet Brimm noticed for the first time how gay the floral prints on the schoolgirls were, and how old-fashioned everyone’s shoes.

He rested the magazine closed in his lap, then reached into the box for a yellowed eight-by-ten of Muriel. On the back, in his own handwriting, “M.B., 1950.” Wearing some kind of Chinese number, sleeveless, and large pearls on her ears, her black hair pulled back, her arms crossed, she looks away to the right side, where a curved stem of a geranium plant enters the frame. You can see the darkly painted nails of one hand, and on the plain white wall behind her, her diffused shadow. Saint Muriel of the Pines, Brimm thought almost with affection, Muriel and her faith, Muriel and her preachers. Brimm supposed she developed attachments to men of the cloth because she failed to develop attachments to other men. It was one of the things that made the church so unsavory, all those lonely women gaping worshipfully at the pulpit, all that earthbound, fleshly reverence, all that confusion between ordinary secular neediness and spiritual longing. He held the picture closer to the light for a moment. It too revealed nothing new—only Muriel in her mid-thirties, youth lingering exotically in her eyes, and Brimm couldn’t think where in the world she might be standing.

Two

MURIEL HAD LONG AGO turned the back parlor downstairs into a bedroom for herself, forgoing the steep climb up to the second floor, and now, suddenly, after all this time, those upper rooms had begun to represent the past. She thought this odd and she blamed her brother Francis for it. She had never been the least bit taken with the past. Only with Francis’s return to Pines had such things begun to occupy her. She was pleased, generally, about his coming home, but on three or four occasions in the last few weeks, she’d found herself standing at the base of the old stairs, one hand resting on the pineapple-adorned newel post, gazing upward like some woebegone character in a Tennessee Williams play.

She considered herself a classical woman with classical, pragmatic sensibilities. She acknowledged her passion for good, attractive shoes and colorful clothes, and her love of cats as merely symptoms of her poetical self. These were harmless traits; they brought warmth. But this blossoming of the past, this creeping vine of memory that had taken root with Francis’s return was entirely another thing. Muriel felt certain that the apparition he claimed to be seeing on his bedroom ceiling was only a recurring dream, but if it turned out to be a sort of psychic or supernatural event, she wouldn’t be surprised. Something as dramatic as that would be required in order to jar Francis. It appeared to Muriel that some long-dormant part of her brother had begun to awaken these last several weeks, and she thought this made some spiritual sense. If Francis’s seventies were to be his era of feeling, of going back and sowing history with sentiment, that was fine and good. She was happy to observe it, even to help when she was able, but only as a kind of consultant, detached; she hadn’t intended actually to become any kind of player. What had pleased her most about his return to Pines was that having him around had initially had the happy effect of taking her out of herself. But now she was being taken into herself instead, and she didn’t like it.

Yesterday morning—the day of their evening walk on the golf course—Muriel’s book club had been assembled and the discussion had reached a lively peak when Francis telephoned to ask her many questions about their mother and father. Why had Mother never finished school? Had she and Daddy really met on a train? How exactly had their father, a physician, lost the better part of his arm?

“Frankie, I have company,” Muriel had said into the kitchen telephone. “You’re interrupting my book club.”

“There’s strength in many things other than numbers,” she said. “Now I must go.”

Muriel looked at her watch and sighed heavily, directly into the receiver. “Ned and Billie are staying for lunch,” she said. “Now you’ve flustered me. My mind’s not as agile as it used to be, Francis. I can’t have it leaping back to the nineteenth century when I still have lunch to do.”

“Why didn’t Father let us go to the beach that Sunday afternoon?” he said quickly.

And when she returned to the front parlor, Ned and Billie Otto, her good friends, were sitting in the two leather club chairs where she had left them, Billie now staring out the west window—at the blank white wall of their own house next door—and Ned clutching an old souvenir pillow with a picture of the Empire State Building on it, his eyes closed. When Billie saw Muriel, she brought her index finger to her lips and whispered, “Ned’s fallen asleep.”

Ned, unstartled, opened his eyes and smiled, setting the pillow carefully aside. The barrier between sleep and wakefulness, always permeable, had become for him a mere gauze through which he passed back and forth without ceremony. Muriel recalled that Ned had possessed a certain charm in his younger years, and she felt acutely disappointed that he had let himself become such an old man.

Attempting to pick up some thread from ten minutes earlier, Billie Otto began chattering. “I was thinking,” she said. “Isn’t it odd the way the British people say ‘in hospital’ and we say ‘in the hospital’? But then I thought, well, we say ‘in school,’ don’t we? We wouldn’t say, ‘My children are in the school,’ we’d say, ‘My children are in school.’ It’s almost the same, isn’t it?”

Ned moistened his lips with his tongue, a delicate, bright pink thing that Muriel would just as soon not be distracted by when she had something to say. “That was Francis on the line,” she continued. “He just said to me, ‘Why wouldn’t Father let us go to the beach that Sunday afternoon?’ and I said, ‘Frankie, for heaven’s sake, that was in nineteen twenty-eight.’”

The Ottos looked at Muriel, then at each other. Finally Billie, possibly peeved at having her own remarks ignored, said, “I think you’ll have to explain, Muriel.”

“Well, don’t you see?” said Muriel. “The date just came to me. Just like that. How could I possibly have known the exact year?”

The room fell silent. Outside a cloud passed briefly across the sun, dimming and restoring everything immediately. Then Ned nodded and also said, “Oh.”

Late that afternoon, after the Ottos had gone home, Muriel drew the drapes and attempted to nap, but she lay in her bed for more than an hour, unable to fall asleep. She’d let the day go by without phoning Francis, and that meant he would be smoldering—she could smell the fumes clear across town. At nearly six o’clock, she turned on the bedside lamp and dialed his number.

To her surprise, he didn’t seem the least bit focused on her having failed to call sooner. It was a’ lovely evening, he told her, not too hot, and if she would drive over, they could have a nice walk on the golf course.

It was a fifteen-minute drive, five minutes longer than usual because the most convenient bridge across the Yustaga River had washed out in a recent cloudburst. All routes in that direction were familiar to Muriel, since she’d developed a variety of approaches to the Raphael School for the Blind during her several decades of service there in the school library.

Francis had been right, it was a lovely evening, and along the river, despite the bright flare of the sun, the air seemed pleasantly cooled by the water and the shade of the pines. On the old stone bridge that connected the county road to the smaller one that led into Francis’s new neighborhood, Muriel met a group of six or eight students from the Raphael School who were having an outing. The bridge was narrow, not much wider than one lane, and she had to proceed slowly. Briefly, Muriel was saddened at not recognizing any of the students; surely everyone she might have known was long gone from the Raphael School. But the children—teenagers, actually, a group of girls—looked decidedly cheerful as they walked in pairs across the bridge, the ones nearer the wall tapping their white canes against the stones. And then Muriel did see someone she knew, their sighted companion bringing up the tear, Joe Letson. How long it had been—five or six years at least—and she’d been fond of Joe, a kind, balding, middle-aged man who would frequently drop by the circulation desk with an amusing story. She waved enthusiastically as he passed the open window of the Volkswagen, but, oddly, he seemed so shocked to see her that he quickly averted his eyes to the glaring river, cutting off any possibility that she might stop and say hello.

The moment left Muriel rattled, and the rest of the way to Francis’s she was unable to resist interpreting it symbolically. That face from the past, so disagreeably astonished and unhappy to see her, seemed to signify just how friendly the past intended to be to her should she allow it in. She entered a dark, sheltered interval of pine woods and was angered to note that for an instant she actually felt afraid.

As she gained Francis’s street, she resolved to shake whatever gloom this was and to try to give herself for the next hour entirely to her brother. But then, right away, during their walk on the golf course, Francis had brought up that business about the “vision” on his bedroom ceiling.

“Consider yourself lucky,” she’d said to him, unable to take it as seriously as he did, and they’d had a less than cordial parting. “Come to church,” she’d told him, but it didn’t seem likely that he would.

Then today, after her morning coffee, she returned to her parlor-bedroom to discover that something about the large oval mirror over her vanity made her feel vaguely remorseful, a blurry kind of heartache she would later describe as adolescent, since it reminded her of a youthful, hormonal confusion in which one feels loss without being able to name what is lost. The mirror’s shape and presence, the fact of the mirror, had brought on the feeling, and not anything reflected in it. There was a word for that sort of thing, when an object irrationally triggered an emotion, but she couldn’t think what it was. The confusion was fleeting, but when she turned and walked through the front parlor into the hall, she stopped, placed one hand on the newel post, and began gazing up the stairs.

Annoyed, she collected herself and went directly to the back porch and called through the screen to Billie Otto.

A few minutes later, in Muriel’s kitchen, Billie asked, “What do you mean, this thing is happening to you?”

“Oh, goodness, that’s nothing to worry about,” said Billie. “You’re old, Muriel. It’s to be expected.”

It did not escape Muriel that she and Billie had practically duplicated a bit of yesterday’s conversation with Francis on the golf course, and she resolved to call him and tell him just how she felt about this invasion of the past he’d brought with him to Pines. But at that very moment, as if summoned, the telephone rang on the wall near Muriel’s left ear, startling her.

It was he, Francis, sounding simultaneously worn out and excited. “Muriel,” he said. “You remember that dog we saw last evening on the golf course?”

“Ha!” said Francis. “But what kind of bone? That’s the question. You better get over here right away.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’m having coffee with Billie and I’m not even dressed.”

“Come as you are, God won’t have you any other way,” he said—a wisecrack, since this was exactly the message of the glassed-in marquee on the lawn of Muriel’s church.

Three

HE CLOSED HIS EYES and a memory began to unfold in precise detail, vivid as a flag—not what he’d expected, not from the days after the war, nothing to do with the French girl at all. He was thirteen, and the Oberammergau Passion players came to town that year. At that young age he’d already formed his earliest enduring conclusion about God—a sort of big bang theory of accountability, simply that all calamity in the world was God’s fault because God after all had made life—and the play, to which he was taken by his mother, disclosed nothing to alter this view. On the contrary, the idea that calamity was God’s fault fit the events of Christ’s Passion like a Bowie knife its sheath. The Oberammergau Passion players would have had Francis believe that the Jews killed Jesus, but Francis had reflected on these events before and had come to understand Gethsemane as only a child could: everything that had befallen Christ was precisely what God (the Father) had wanted to befall Christ, and no amount of sweating midnight blood in the garden could change even the smallest detail.

In the dark armory, on whose stage only months earlier he witnessed a Cajun magician by the name of Jean-Louis Galhemo apparently eat a whole truck tire, his mother wept off and on during the last half hour of the Passion play, and once, when he innocently sniffled, she passed him a Kleenex. She’d handed it to him with a look of enormous empathy, and unmoved by the play, which had so far contained not a single amazing event, he felt demoralized. He crushed the tissue into a ball and tossed it back into her lap, snorting through his nose. The extremely thin Mrs. Brimm narrowed her eyes briefly, then straightened her spine and faced the stage, where, at that moment, Muriel, a high school senior and one among many in a crowd scene, was shouting, “Crucify him, crucify him, nail him to the cross!”

It was the custom of the Oberammergau people, wherever they went, to find extras from among the talent in the local communities, and Muriel, on hearing about the auditions to be held at the armory two weeks hence, had mounted a crash diet. She lost seven pounds, a loss visible only to herself, and won a part as a young townswoman in the famous scene where the Jews prefer the release of Barabbas, after which poor, frightened Pilate asks the multitude what he’s to do with this other one, the one called King of the Jews, and the multitude demands Christ’s execution. For ten days Muriel went about the house chomping on ribs of celery, chanting her one line, “Crucify him, crucify him, nail him to the cross!” as if it were a football cheer.

She also gave Frankie some inside dope on the play. She told him about how the people of Oberammergau, hundreds of years ago, had beseeched God to spare them the Black Death—about how they had negotiated with God, promising to develop this Passion play and take it to the corners of the earth for eternity. Frankie thought about calamity being God’s fault—the notion often found its way to the front of his thinking—shrugged his shoulders, and said, “But everybody else in all the other towns died.”

They were in Muriel’s pine-paneled bedroom at the corner of their old brick house. She sat on the padded bench before her vanity mirror; he lay across her bed. Next she turned to his juvenile face of stone and described how the enigmatic young Bavarian who portrayed Christ in the Passion play would pace backstage in silence, never speaking a word to anyone else in the cast, never for a second leaving his role.

“So?” Frankie said, rotating onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. “He’s probably just practicing his lines.”

“Most of them learned their lines by rote,” said Muriel, this bit of information a throwaway. “Most of them don’t actually speak English.”

Finally impressed, Frankie had sat up quickly and said, “You mean they don’t even understand what they’re saying?”

And all through the play, stoical in the fifth row of the armory, he kept thinking about this oddity and how, vaguely, it conformed to his sense of the play as a kind of charade that confirmed God’s treacheries. His mother had bowed her head, either in prayer or from an excess of passion. Christ was on the cross, languishing. Mrs. Brimm cleared her throat and lifted her head, facing the crucifixion in a resigned sort of way. She dabbed at her cheeks with the crumpled Kleenex, which she then dropped to the floor. Frankie looked down into the dark by his feet and watched the wad of tissue, freed from the constraint of his mother’s hand, begin slowly to open, to blossom like a damp, milky flower.

After the walk on the golf course with Muriel, Brimm had sat in his armchair, mused over the two old photographs—one from the Normandy village, the other, of Muriel, from somewhere else unknown—and eventually he’d fallen asleep. The vivid memory of the Oberammergau play had mixed, in sleep, with his dreams. When he awakened, he thought maybe he’d dreamt of the young French girl. Several arresting impressions lingered: long white banners snapping in the wind, a pale man in a military uniform, sunlight on water changing to cobblestones. But in some way the dream had also been about food, strewn as it was with children eating, and kitchen aromas wafting out of open windows.

He had eaten no dinner, and it was almost ten o’clock. He roused himself, drove his Jeep out to a joint on the county road, ordered a burger and fries, and didn’t return home until almost eleven.

The cottage greeted him in utter silence, and for a moment he wondered if the whole design, this return to the town of his roots, had been anything more than a sentimental scheme, doomed by its lack of specificity. His vision had failed him in regard to details. He had not, for example, imagined himself ordering food to go at a lively bar on the county road, then eating it alone in his car in the parking lot. Certainly he hadn’t imagined himself standing in the dark at his living room window, as he’d taken to doing lately, hoping to get a glimpse of the beautiful young Cuban woman in the house next door. Objectively he considered neither of these shameful acts, yet he couldn’t deny that shame was precisely what he’d felt while doing them, and especially right afterward.

Before bed, Brimm read from a book of stories by Anton Chekhov given him by Muriel, selected by her for improving his mind. It seemed to him that Chekhov was overly concerned with old men and young girls, and the stories were rather dry and understated. Yet Brimm also found that they had a good cumulative effect, and he read for almost two hours. When he finally went to bed, images from a story about an old man dying at sea haunted him and kept him awake: a corpse wrapped in sailcloth, resembling a carrot, slid off a plank into the deep. “Blessed be the Name of the Lord,” intoned a priest. “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.”

It was warm, humid, and despite the night’s windlessness, the awful stench of the paper mills up north had traveled down the coast and mixed with the more usual bay scents.

“About this face,” Muriel said to Brimm in a fragment of dream, “does it speak to you?”

He threw back the covers, rose from the bed, pulled on his trousers, shirt and slippers, and went back into the living room. He opened the front door and stood for a long minute staring out through the screen. He moved onto the porch and walked to its edge, where he could get a look at the sky, which was overcast, but with a moon up there somewhere brightening everything. “Oberammergau Passion players,” he said aloud. That was something he would like to have a picture of—Muriel in her teens, on stage in a religious melodrama. He could almost hear Pontius Pilate speaking his tragic lines with great biblical and cosmopolitan dignity, followed by the multitude of locals shouting back at him in their boorish, gluey Southern drawls.

On one side of the cottage stood the big white colonial house, now completely dark, where the beautiful young Cuban woman lived with her scientist husband from the college. On the other side, piny woods, and more woods out back. Down at the end of the block, where a path led through the pines and onto the golf course, an incandescent streetlight still glowed, though the better part of its light had long been eclipsed by an intruding pine branch. A quiet, lonely place—a place, Brimm had noticed, popular with college kids, who parked under the pines on weekends. He had seen the cars (there were never more than two at a time), and though in the dark it was impossible to see anything other than the cars themselves, Brimm had sometimes stood on the porch or at a cottage window watching for long stretches, as though these vigils might connect him somehow to whatever liveliness went on inside the cars. It was no wonder he felt ashamed, since these acts of voyeurism, and of isolation, were the acts of a lonely man. Wasn’t it, after all, shameful to be lonely? Shameful to have ended up lonely?

Part of the problem, he realized, was that he hadn’t managed to become the least bit interested in doing any of the things he’d imagined himself doing. He’d been to the seed store, for example, spent a fortune on seeds, but the preparation of the soil and getting down on one’s hands and knees in the dirt—it all seemed like something he should hire someone to do. He’d purchased a rod and reel, which now stood in a corner of the garage, but he hadn’t yet organized a tackle box. Organization was what seemed to daunt him. The idea of most things amply appealed, but the required arrangements always raised the question of whether the reward could possibly justify the effort.

He scrutinized the sky again, which reminded him suddenly of a black-and-white shot developing in the tray, just as the first gray starts to fade in, before any specific shape materializes. As he stepped off the porch and walked into the dark street, he told himself, I have had an original thought, and he resolved to tell Muriel about it.

He walked down the street to the path’s entrance and stood under the streetlight’s amorphous pool. He thought of Jimmy Durante, closing his television show, moving from one spotlight to the next, tipping his hat, saying, “Good night, Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are.”

On the path through the woods he kicked a beer can into the darkness, and when he emerged onto the fairway, he saw what he’d had in mind to see: sleeping on the gentle dome of the hill, a large gathering of white and gray gulls.

None of the birds stirred until he was quite close, and even then none took flight. Reluctantly, they simply stood and moved away, clearing a narrow trail for him to pass through. Briefly Brimm thought of Moses. Then he felt happy, imagining with his photographer’s eye the spectacle of an old man crossing through an ocean of gulls under diffused moonlight.

At the top of the hill he stood gazing at the sparse lights of downtown and at the isolated, shimmering pinpoints of light in the bay—shrimp boats, which, with the horizon invisible at this hour, seemed to float in midair. As he headed down toward the green and the bunker where earlier that evening he and Muriel had seen the dog madly digging in the sand, Brimm found himself again fixated by images from the Chekhov story: iron weights had been sewn into the sailcloth with the corpse, to make it heavier … soldiers and crewmen stood around with bared heads, crossing themselves and looking away at the waves … “It was strange that a man should be sewn up in sailcloth and should soon be flying into the sea,” Chekhov observed. “Was it possible that such a thing might happen to anyone?”

And that was when Brimm saw the bones, which appeared almost to glow in the moonlight, strewn about near the spot where the dog had been digging. “Quite a little cache,” he said aloud, stopping several feet from the edge of the bunker and then turning back in the direction of the path home.

As he entered the dark patch of trees near his street, he acknowledged that it was of course his own death, the prospect of it, that was at the bottom of his preoccupation with Chekhov’s gloomy story. He had never had a suitable picture for his own death, nothing that rang quite true, and now that he seemed to have found one, how unlikely it was: a coarse-white carrot-shaped cadaver flying through the air toward water.

Four

WHAT COULD BE SO urgent about an old bone Muriel couldn’t begin to imagine. When she arrived at the cottage, at almost ten, she found him in an agitated state and not a little bit exhausted. That was what agitation did to you when you were old. When you were young, excitement could bring a certain vibrancy, but when you were old, it only made you tired, as if the vehicle could no longer bear the load. When she saw Francis, the first thing she thought was how old he looked.

Earlier that morning, before he had telephoned, she’d hoped to sort out her thoughts, over coffee with Billie. Billie had a knack for putting things in perspective, probably a consequence of her long marriage to Ned, an affliction that made philosophical crises pale by comparison. (Muriel wasn’t sure that a philosophical crisis was what she herself was having, but it felt like one.) “You’re old, Muriel,” Billie had said over coffee, and that, for Billie at least, was the last word. It was typical of Billie to say something undeniably true, but it had left Muriel feeling dismissed, and later, while she was getting dressed to go over to Francis’s, Muriel thought Billie’s terseness on this subject, and on a few others lately, showed her less pithy than merely abrupt. She hadn’t even given Muriel a chance to tell about the strange business with the vanity mirror, or about the beckoning upstairs rooms.

After Billie went back home, Muriel forced herself to sit at the vanity as she brushed her hair and applied her modest makeup, mentally daring the mirror’s broad oval to conjure anything the least bit unusual. But then, when the mirror behaved itself, obeying her as it were, she felt oddly, keenly disappointed. As she went out through the front door, inserting her key in the lock and turning it, she thought she faintly heard her mother’s voice, suggesting that she, Muriel, needed to have her head examined. The echo of this imperative (one of her mother’s favorites) seemed to linger with her on the short drive over to Francis’s, and she bravely allowed herself to imagine going up the stairs and into each of the upper rooms of the old house. She thought this was, after all, the kind of exercise an analyst would put her through were she actually to go to one. “Where are you now?” she imagined the therapist (a kind, older woman) saying.

Muriel did this for each room, five in all, the answer always coming back the same. Empty rooms, precisely as she had expected. By the time she arrived at Francis’s cottage, she was in a much better frame of mind.

“Have you been drinking?” she said to him from the concrete walkway that cut his small front yard in two.

He sat, out of the already hot sun, in a rocker on the porch. “Come up here at once and sit down, Muriel,” he said to her, patting the seat of a ladder-back chair next to him. “I have much to tell.”

“I mean that if you haven’t been drinking, you’ve been doing something else,” she said. “You look terrible.”

“Well, I’m not terrible,” he said. “In fact I’ve never been better. You can read all about it in the afternoon paper.”

“Something extraordinary has happened, Muriel,” he said, sliding forward onto the edge of his seat.

She looked at him. How was it possible that she could see in this creased, drooping countenance the excitement of a young boy as he barged into her pine-paneled bedroom, shouting some sad news about the mysterious poisoning of a neighbor’s cat, a tragic drowning in the bay, a train wreck? Calamity had always fascinated and thrilled him, the more colossal the better. The most gruesome of his photographs, expertly crafted, showed soldiers in foxholes with untreated wounds quickened by infection, sick or injured children in hospital beds, anguished women prostrate over coffins.

He raised his eyebrows, apparently impressed. “Four, to be precise,” he said. “Three vertebrae and part of a femur.”

“Well of course the police have been here and taken them away,” said Francis. “You’ve missed everything, Muriel. The reporters, the photographers, the—”

Francis gazed out at the pines across the street. After another moment he said, “I confess that I feel somehow … somehow chosen for this.”

“What on earth can you possibly mean by that?” said Muriel, surprising even herself with her sudden sharpness.

“I guess you wouldn’t understand,” he said at last, sliding back into the seat of the rocker and beginning to rock thoughtfully.

Muriel allowed a long silence to pass between them, and then, looking straight out at the street in front of her, said, “Don’t be so glum, Frankie. Of course I understand.”

He smiled at her warmly and began telling all that had happened—how he’d been unable to sleep and so decided to take a walk on the golf course; about the gulls sleeping on the hill; and about noticing but not paying any mind to the bones near the bunker. Later, back at the cottage and sound asleep, he’d been wakened at around 4 A.M. by the gulls, and when he opened his eyes the face of the young French girl was already fully formed (in color, he noted), strangely constant yet changing with every moment, like something seen through water. As usual, she lingered only for a few seconds and then was gone, always gone before he achieved full wakefulness. He had rubbed his eyes and listened for a minute to the gulls’ plaintive recital, then sat up on the edge of the bed.

“I can’t explain exactly how,” he said to Muriel, “but I feel that somehow she left me this insight. She imparted it to me.”

“Well,” he said, “that the bones I’d seen a while earlier were human bones. It hadn’t occurred to me until then. And I’ll tell you something else—”

“Wait,” said Muriel. “Don’t tell me anything else. How exactly did she impart it to you, Frankie?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s what I’m telling you—I can’t say exactly, but I’m sure that she was … instrumental.”

“Instrumental.” Muriel repeated the word, nodding. Then, looking at him pitifully, a bit urgently, she said, “Frankie. You didn’t tell any of this to the police, did you? Or to the papers.”

“Of course not,” he said. “Not about my girl on the ceiling. Don’t worry, Muriel. I haven’t sullied the family name.”

Relieved, Muriel rose to go into the house. “Well, I think I’ll make us some tea,” she said, an excuse for getting away from him.

On her way through Francis’s small living room, she noticed the cardboard crate sitting on the floor next to his armchair. Lying on top was an old Picture Post, opened to the famous photograph of the Normandy village street after the armistice. Muriel, bracing herself on the wide arm of the chair, knelt to the floor and examined the picture. “Yes, there you are,” she said to the young woman with the shaved head and the baby in her arms. But then, as Muriel lifted the magazine to get a closer look, she discovered beneath it a yellowed eight-by-ten of herself, in which she wore a sleeveless dress of black silk she’d bought in Chinatown while she’d been visiting Francis in New York. It had to have been forty years ago at least. She quickly put the magazine aside and took the picture gingerly in both hands, drawing it to her face and meeting, as it were, her own eyes. Suddenly she felt quite dizzy, laid it aside too, and pulled herself up off the floor into the chair as best she could. Francis appeared at the screen door and asked through the screen, “Are you all right?”

Muriel, slouched half in and half out of the big chair, heaved herself up straighter. “I’m fine,” she said.

And thank God he moved back away from the door then, because Muriel had just begun to notice how lovely Francis’s little room was—quiet, peaceful, welcoming—and though it didn’t entirely make sense to think of a room this way, she had just thought of the room as compassionate, which was something like the way she had felt looking at her younger self in the Chinese dress a moment ago, and she was about to cry.