The Ice Storm

Then all one day because of ice they couldn't make it down the hill. Or up, James says, dabbing at a spill of coffee, crunching toast as if it had a spine. But he could work, at any rate, could concentrate on that book he's been reading, or meaning to, the flu— or was it famine?—of '49, some smoldering fact he's found in the cold ash of some war. Gusting upward, lobes and nose on fire, his whole face florid from the heart attack he's somehow never had, he sways, repeating: Oh, we'd get down just fine, I expect, but we'd never make it back, then goes into his room and shuts the door. Eva's hours have nearer ends. She heats the little disk the cat sleeps on; chips, until her hands are gone, the glaze off all the feeders for the birds; then writes two friends to thank them for the birthday chocolates they've sent. The word alone makes her stomach burn. Which is mostly what age is, she's learned, the senses sharpening backwards, keen to what they can't perceive, when to be wise means mostly not to wish for what you love, for what you love is pain: spices or coffee, gin bringing the evening light into your veins, good chocolates the grandkids ravish like a horde of crows. You stuff your bellies with tomorrow's ache, she can almost hear him bellow, nipping and pinching to make them squeal. Hot water with honey, one coddled egg, dry saltines: Oh, what difference does it make? She picks up the chocolates, breaks the seal. • He draws the blinds on a wall of glass, winces at the glare, drags his chair into the bright crevasse between his bed and bookshelf, takes a deep breath of air, and buries himself in one of the early wordy furies of William Gladstone, never a man for minor keys. Creak and tick of the burdened limbs. A creak and tick inside of him as he crosses his legs and then uncrosses them, shifts his weight to ease the stiffness in one side, turns a page like a summit he has climbed, and breathes... Think of it—twenty thousand books devoured in Gladstone's life, and of his own enough to keep an army of bibliographers occupied; a whole age and empire crammed into one man: spellbinding crowds until he couldn't stand, felling his million trees, filling six decades' worth of diaries because a life is owed as well as owned, time a gift of which a good man gives account; who would mount, night after night, a moral, high-rhetorical siege upon some poor Haymarket tart in whom ruin and beauty were one word, then go home and whip himself for a sin that, all the evidence suggests, never occurred but in his heart. • And has just one, pleasure spreading through her blood like a single drop of ink. She scours the stove and countertop, bleaches coffee stains off the sink, cleans leaf by leaf the emerald ripple and the paradise palm, both mostly dormant now, reaches high for the philodendron, huge since trained to climb, and pauses, remembering the calm of constant motion that her mother was— a beauty, men said, though it hardly seemed a part of her, looking out of her own face like someone on a train; and remembering, too, the child-high hedgerows alone the lane behind their house on Paddox Close, the slice of sky above growing wider as she grew, the little park with its central statue (who was it of?), which, last time she'd seen, weather had worried to a Swedish ivy sort of green. • Emma Clifton, Elizabeth Collins, P. Lightfoot— even the names of those women are there amid the parliamentary proceedings, bulldog scholarship, affairs of state. He lifts his hand like a weight to check his watch, little trembles traveling through his bones into the air as through plucked strings a sound. Two hours until the final round at Palm Springs, with its hairpin fairways, lacquered greens, and that great eighteenth in homage to Bobby Jones. What a character!—touring in his teens, retired at twenty-eight with nothing left to win, at forty storming Normandy with men half his age. Even his death was rare— syringomyelia—cane to brace to wheelchair without a trace of self-pity, regret, rage: We all have to play the ball as it lies. How much of a man's revealed in how he dies... Poor Owen, barely sixty, Dean of the College, a decent book on Kant behind him: two days of chest pain slivering into a lifetime's knowledge and all the old beliefs come flooding back, silly relics and rituals, griefs you're born into, some guilt you can't even name. "Ischemia," that's exactly right: blood lack. • Sweet pickles and white bread, salted ham, a soybean spread that is his one concession to his heart, two butter cookies, plum jam: she clicks across the polished floor through motes that rise and float like molecules of light, pausing outside his door, hearing the Mahler chorus to which he always cries, plays to cry, she suspects, as if even sadness could be planned. She takes the knob in her hand, sees, inside its shine, white tablecloths, crystal cut fine as jewels, and, and... and a man with American shoulders and vowels, that face so open it wasn't, like the ocean, and that tidal way he had of filling any space that wasn't taken, the table where she sat with friends, afternoons and weekends, classrooms, boardrooms, lecture halls, the very bodies of their children, in whose broad limbs he seems to sprawl. Was that what she had fallen for, talk of golf, and Oxford, and roast beef in that gray decade after the war, that it seemed so safe a fall? • There—where the strings go silent and that woman's whole soul is in her throat... Ahome can have but one composer. Wasn't that the quote? That long ironclad letter Mahler wrote to Alma, the most exquisite woman in Vienna, who packed away that cold contract, her party dresses, and her own precocious technique, and settled, if you could call it that, into the role of being Gustav Mahler's wife: I am not happy, and yet not unhappy. My ship is in the harbor, but it has sprung a leak. But he loved her; and she is in his music as surely as the God he never quite possessed nor fully lost, as surely as the daughter is alive inside this song, whose life it cost. Gladstone also had a daughter die at five. Odd, not to have thought of that before. And Mahler's sisters name was Anna, and Gladstone's sister Ann; and wasn't Mrs. Gladstone's family from Oxford, or near? Oh, William dear, she told him once,if you weren't such a great man,you'd be a terrible bore. • Was that a laugh or a sob? Mahler dies off into the long silences, polite applause, and weirdly reverential tones of golf. This could take all day. She lets go of the knob, backs away. • He looks up as if he's heard a sound— what was it called, that late-medieval game out of which golf evolved? He looks down: O'Connor's on the second tee, It must have started earlier than he thought, Steady head, steady head, that pro at Sea Pines always said. James lifts one hand above his knee, so palsied now he can't keep his cocktails quiet, as if every instant were a shock his body took. Think of a stake driven through your skull into the ground.