2
Carl watched through the front window when Kathleen arrived. The cab was double-parked, and the driver was removing her suit cases from the trunk.
Carl was annoyed that his son had sent her over in a cab. What?-- he couldn’t make the short ride into the city to drop her off, couldn’t even tolerate stopping in for a few minutes to say hello. He never tried to figure out what Anna and he might have done while raising Richard to have led him to now be so disregardful of his parents. He simply stood at the window, pursing his lips and wagging his head in disgust.
His attention finally turned to Kathleen as she stood out by the curb and paid the driver. She seemed different somehow. She was seventeen now and would soon be off to college, but she’d changed in some way during the last ten months, since he’d see her last. Maybe it was in the way she was carrying herself; she seemed to move with more grace, seemed to have acquired a measure of poise. She’d had always been a pretty girl, with blue eyes and long natural blond hair for which other girls would kill, but before she’d always been awkward, as if apologetic for her appearance. She had always stood or sat with her chin slightly lowered, her shoulders sagged forward abjectly.
He opened the front door for her, and watched as she climbed the stairs, a large black suitcase in each hand weighing her down. His bad back prevented him from running down the stairs to help her with the cases. He met her on the landing, though, to relieve her of the luggage. She hugged him around the neck, joyously chiming out, “Gramps,” in a genuine way. That was what he’d always loved most about her: how she’d always naturally, purely conveyed her feelings; there was nothing fake or forced about her-- all was sincerity and sweetness, and she had been like that even when a small child; it was difficult at times for Carl to believe Kathleen was actually Richard’s daughter-- Richard so gloomy, his feelings lost in shadows.
From the landing, Carl paused to make a show of peering up and down the street, and then asked, “What? No boy friend?” This had been an old quip, carried over every year since the first year Kathleen had spent the summer, when she was eleven.
..Usually she would murmur “No” in an abashed way, but this year she said, “Yeah, but not with me.”
“Yeah?” Carl was surprised.
“Well, yeah.”
“Oh.” He wanted to say that that was great, but it didn’t feel right. So instead he said, “We’ll talk.”
They went into the house, and after Carl put her suitcases in the guest room, they sat down in the kitchen and drank coffee and homemade apple strudel that Carl had made himself from Anna’s old recipe.
When Kathleen asked about Anna, Carl explained that she was sleeping. “She sleeps a lot lately,” he said. “Maybe that’s a blessing.”
“It’s sad,” Kathleen said.
“No, it starts out sad. It gets worse later.” He was going to elaborate, to prepare her for the changes in Anna, but decided not to try. There was no way Kathleen wasn’t going to be shocked; she hadn’t see Anna in nearly a year, and so hadn’t lived through and seen, as Carl had, the day by day, disintegration-- to Kathleen it would seem one huge horrendous transformation.
“So you actually do have a boyfriend,” Carl said, deciding a merciful change of subject.
“Yeah.” Here she almost, but not quite, blushed.
“Is he a nice fella?”
“Yeah,” she said, but seemed unwilling to elaborate.
“That’s the most important thing. No matter what school or what jobs or how much money a person has-- as long as people have a good heart, everything else pretty much works itself out.” It was a statement of sage advice, the kind of thing he believed was expected of him.
Later Kathleen would go up to check on Anna. When she came back down, Carl was not surprised to see the distraught look on his granddaughter’s face.
“Was she up?” Carl asked.
“No,” Kathleen said. “But even while she’s sleeping, I can see the change. It’s very sad, and sort of scary. How could this have happened?”
“It’s life,” he said, wishing he could believe it was so simple.
Kathleen pursed her lips in determination.
“Well, we’ll see then. We will get her back on her feet,” she said. “I’m sure. You’ll see.”
But Carl already understood she was hoping for the impossible.
For the next two weeks Kathleen brought prepared and brought up all Anna’s meals. The girl would have made a wonderful nurse one day, Carl thought, if she so choose that profession. He watched as Kathleen sat at the edge of the bed, and dutifully spooned soup or broth into Anna’s tremulous mouth, all the while speaking to her of how nice the weather was outside, how bright the sunshine, how gentle the warm breeze, and how the trees stirred in it and seemed to be whispering.
In the evening, while Carl watched a ball game on television in the living room, Kathleen would sit at Anna bedside upstairs. She would read to the old woman. Anna, during her life had no favorite books or stories, but she seemed to enjoy hearing Kathleen read her Grimm’s fairy tales and some short stories by Jack London or Willa Cather.
Though Carl enjoyed Kathleen’s presence in the house, which gave him more free time to work on his birdhouses, he began to notice something. He thought at first that it was his imagination. Being around Kathleen seemed to sap his energy is some way. He’d always believed that if you were old being around young people kept you young. It was a common belief. But he was unsure now. Every time he saw her young face, every time heard her speak of her naïve hopes, he legs weakened and his back began to ache as it usually did in winter, not now in the dead of summer. Though he tried to convince himself that all this was just a product of his rambling old mind, it seemed very real to him.
One day, coming up from his work room, he was frantic to find no one in the house. He rushed out the front door, and mouth agape gazed up and down the street, but neither Kathleen nor Anna was in sight. He went back in the house, to the kitchen, and through the window saw them sitting on the glider in the back yard. Amazingly Anna was smiling and laughing and talking to Kathleen to the same way she had to him over the years. It was a miracle, he thought. It could be nothing but a miracle.
Later that day, to his further astonishment, he watched as Kathleen and Anna walked hand in hand down the street to the small corner store, where they bought ice cream cones, which they had all but finished eating by the time they returned home. He felt foolish now at the thought he’d been having lately about Kathleen; she certainly hadn’t stolen any life from Anna-- quite the contrary.
The three of them spent the evening in the back yard. Kathleen and Anna sat on the gilder and watched as Carl erected the pole on which he set the newly finished house for the purple martins.
When he was finished, Anna said to him, “Maybe they will come this time.”
“Yes,” he said, careful not to sound too hopeful.
Whether the purple martins came now was of little importance to him. His heart was warm, looking at Anna, so sure was he that she was returning to health and that they could continue on as they always had over the years.
3
That night Anna passed quietly away in her sleep.
At the funeral, three days later, friends assured Carl that it happened that way sometimes: they suddenly seem better, but it only lasts for a short while, and the next thing you know they are gone.
He would try to console Kathleen over the next weeks. The girl was so devastated. Her young hopeful spirit had been shattered. It seemed a shame that she had to learn the hard fact of life that though hope was always good it couldn’t cure everything. It was one of those things that once learned can never be unlearned, and from then on must be tolerated in our memories. He knew Kathleen would never be quite the same, and it saddened him that even that would change.
Richard and Holly attended the funeral, but he barely spoke with them.
In the church and at the cemetery he seemed absorbed as he looked at all their friends and family and wondered that there were so few left. The ones who were looked decidedly older than he had remembered them. The funeral director even had difficulty recruiting six pall bearers from among the guests; not enough of them were able-bodied enough to serve in the capacity-- old men with canes, stooped backs, crippled joints, having fought years of disease, tragedy and gravity, all in a slowly losing battle. In the end the funeral director was forced to go to next to the tavern and recruit two young healthy men, compassionate but utter strangers, to carry Anna to her finally resting place.
For the following week silence filled the house, except for the loud ticking of the cuckoo clock in the hallway between the living room and kitchen. Kathleen scarcely left the guest room. Carl waited in the yard for the purple martins to arrive. He sat in the glider and waited and waited, just as he had years ago, but so far had spotted not a one. The metal of the glider feel cold wherever it touched his skin. Sometimes he looked at the blue sky, at the white fluffy clouds slowly moving past. Some of the clouds broke up and seemed to vanish before they ever got anywhere.
One day he suggested to Kathleen that they do something.
“We just can’t mope around here,” he said.
They decided to go for a walk. As the strolled along Kathleen reached across and took his hand. He was amazed how soft and fragile it felt in his own hand, which was large and thick from years of manual work. She seemed, then, to start smiling again. First a tiny shy smile, and soon a toothy charming smile as she spoke of what classes she planned to take when she returned to school in the fall. He listened intently, hardly bothered by the pain that racked his knees each step he took on the sidewalk. His back ached him, too, and now there was a new feeling, a jabbing sensation in the side of his ribs, but none of it matter. He was so pleased to see she was healing.
He was distracted briefly by a distant sound, the faraway warble of a bird. He gazed skyward.
When Kathleen asked what he was looking for, he told her he though he heard a purple martin. Maybe they were finally heading home. It hardly seemed to matter any more.
They came upon the corner store, and decided to go in to buy ice cream cones. As they entered the store, he didn’t let go of her hand. He never noticed the solitary mourning dove they passed, pecking the sidewalk for food in the shade cast by the awning over the front window of the store, nor the tender coo it made as they entered.