Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despairAlfred, Lord Tennyson
On Sunday morning Mrs. Pruitt came at a quarter to ten in her good hat, and Opal Henley came behind her in a tan Chevrolet with the heater going, and between them they got Clara’s father into his overcoat. He went down the front steps like a boy being taken to a recital, patient and puzzled, with his Bible under one arm and a length of braided black cord tucked into his collar. At the bottom he turned and looked up at the house, and then at Clara in the doorway, and said, “Is Evelyn coming?”
“She’ll come along,” said Clara. “Go on.”
Opal did not look at her. She had not looked at her directly since Saturday at the church, and Clara had decided not to mind it. She watched the Chevrolet back out of the drive with her father’s white head erect in the rear window, and when it had gone round the bend she let out her breath and found that it was relief. It filled her up like warm water. She had her father out of the house for three hours and nobody in it to be good for, and she stood in the open door being glad, and was ashamed, and went on being glad underneath the shame, as one goes on being warm under a wet coat.
She took her coat and walked across the yard.
The carriage house was cold as a cellar. The church had used it for twenty years as a place to put things that had no place, and the things were all there in the gray light from the door: stacked folding chairs, a rolled banner, the pipes of a dead organ laid along the rafters like a sleeping fish. Wade Bascomb’s sexton had carried the crate across from the vestry on Saturday evening and left it on the floor with its lid on. She did not open it.
The bench stood where it had always stood, under the north window, with a canvas tarp thrown over it and the dust of twenty years lying on the tarp in a soft pelt. She took hold of one corner and drew it off, and the dust went up in the slant of light and hung there. Underneath, the oak was as she had left it. A vise still clamped to the front edge, its handle turned down. A coffee tin of lead offcuts, gone gray, with the old red label showing in one patch. A scored place where she had once dropped a glass knife in a temper and her father had come out to see whether anyone had been hurt.
She laid her palm flat on the wood. Then she did nothing at all.
She stood there a long time. Somewhere beyond the wall, across the lawn, the organ began, and the congregation after it, thin and sweet and a quarter-tone flat at the top of the hymn as they had always been. She knew the hymn. She did not sing.
In the pocket of her coat, where her right hand went when it wanted something to do, lay a brass key the length of her finger. She took it out and held it in the light. It was a plain cheap key, worn to a soft shine at the bow, with a nick in the shaft where the locksmith’s file had slipped. A boy had had it cut for her in the spring of 2003 at a hardware store in Macon, and had given it to her in the parking lot with great ceremony, and she had put it on her ring and then on a nail and then in a tin. It had been in a tin on a shelf in Atlanta for two decades, behind a row of jars of colored powder, where she had seen it every working day and had never once taken it down.
She had taken it down on the night before she left Atlanta. She could not have said why. She closed her fingers over it, and put it back in her pocket, and stood with the other hand on the bench.
Lorenz would have said, Well? The glass will not cut itself.
The first day, he had not asked her a single thing.
She had come off the interstate at dawn on a Saturday in October with two suitcases and a tool roll in the back of the Buick, and found the shop where she had always found it, in a brick building on a side street off Edgewood Avenue, with a hand-lettered sign in the window and a cat asleep on the sill. It was two weeks before the month he had named. She rang the bell. She stood on the step with her hands hanging, in the clothes she had worn the night before, with her face washed in a gas station, and the old man opened the door.
He was ninety years old and no taller than her shoulder. He wore a leather apron over a cardigan, and his hands, which had once been the best in the Southeast, lay curled at his sides like two dry leaves. He looked at her, and at the Buick, and at the tool roll, and at her face. Whatever he read there he kept.
“You are early,” said Lorenz.
“Yes.”
“The cot is in the back. There is coffee. It is bad.” He turned and went in, and over his shoulder, in his dry furious Viennese English, he said, “The light does not care who is sad. Come and make it stand still.”
That was all. He never asked why she had come two weeks early, or what she had left, or whether anyone was likely to come after her. She understood by the end of the first week that he never would, and that this was the whole of what he had to give a person, and that it was a great deal. She slept on the cot among the sheets of glass, which leaned in their racks like pale sails. On the Tuesday night, when the others had gone, he put a piece of cathedral glass and a pair of cutters into her hands, and stood with his arms folded while she scored a curve she had scored a thousand times, and snapped it clean.
“Hm,” said Lorenz. It was the highest praise he had.
She told herself the Tuesdays were for the work. Every Tuesday night, from that one on, she stayed late at the bench until the street went quiet and her eyes ached, and she told herself it was only that the light was good, and the shop empty, and the old man asleep upstairs. She did not say what Tuesday had been. She did not turn on the radio. WKAL could not have been found from Atlanta in any case, a small station with its tower on a ridge ninety miles off, and it came to her in the second week that this was a mercy nobody had had to arrange.
She began to count that winter.
She did not know when it started. It was at one in the morning, she thought, in a rented room over a dry cleaner’s, with the window open an inch to the cold, and the street gone quiet below her. She lay and looked at the ceiling and found that she was counting: one, two, three, under her breath, to ten. And at ten she stopped, and lay in the silence she had made, and waited for something to fill it, and nothing did. She told herself it was a habit of the bench. It was not.
She took up cigarettes in the second year, though she had once told a young man, at a stone basin, that she never would; she bought them in packs of ten so that she would never have more than she could finish, and she smoked them in the stairwell behind the shop, on the third step, with her back against the cold brick. On Sundays she called her mother from the laundromat pay phone, and they spoke for twelve minutes of the weather and the hymns. Her mother did not once say her father’s name, and Clara did not ask. It was music, those calls, of what was left out, and she learned to play it perfectly.
And the key sat in its tin on the shelf, behind the powders.
Lorenz died in February of 2008, in his sleep, in the room over the shop, at ninety-two. On the last evening he had watched her at the bench with his ruined hands tucked into his apron and said, in the flat tone in which he gave a verdict on a color, “A half share is what you give someone you mean to see again.” She found him at seven the next morning, and sat a long time with his cold hand in both of hers, and when the will was read it turned out that he had left her the whole of it.
She wept that night, at last, on the third step of the stairwell with a cigarette unlit in her fingers, for the old man and for something that was not the old man, in the dry unlovely way of a person who has forgotten how. She did not think about what he had meant. She was good at that by then.
At half past twelve the congregation came out onto the lawn, and she heard the cars start. She came out into the yard, where the afternoon had gone thin and gold. Opal’s Chevrolet was at the porch. Mrs. Pruitt was getting her father out of the front seat by stages. Clara crossed the grass to take his arm.
“He was good as gold,” said Mrs. Pruitt. “He sang the second verse of everything. Wade asked after you.”
“I’m sure he did.”
Opal had come round the car. She stood a moment with her handbag against her chest, a heavy gray woman in a quilted vest who had kept the church’s books for thirty-one years, and she said, “Clara,” and Clara waited. Opal’s mouth worked. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s nothing. It’ll keep.” And she went back to the car.
Her father ate his lunch and went up for his nap. The house was as quiet as a held breath. Clara washed the plates and dried them and put them away, and she stood in the hall, and found that her feet had carried her to the study door.
It was at the back of the house, off the passage that ran behind the stairs. She had not been in it since the night she was twenty-four. On Tuesday, her first day home, she had seen it from the hall, the door standing shut, and had not tried it. Now she wanted, for no reason she could have given, to stand once in the room with the afternoon in it. She put her hand on the knob.
It was locked.
“Not today, Clara-bell.”
He was at the foot of the stairs. She had not heard him come down. He stood with one hand on the newel post, in his shirt and his pressed trousers, with the cord around his neck and the key lying at the base of his throat, and he looked at her with the whole of his old courtesy. It was the look he had used in the pulpit on a child who had asked a good question at the wrong moment. His eyes were perfectly clear.
“I only wanted to see it, Daddy.”
“I know you did.” He smiled at her. “Not today.”
She stood with her hand on the brass knob, which was cold, and she thought that she could have taken the key from him. He was seventy-eight and she was strong in the wrists. It would have taken a moment. She looked at his hand on the post, at the spotted back of it, at the knuckles like a row of old knots, and she took her own hand away.
“All right,” she said.
“That’s my girl.” He started up the stairs again with his hand on the rail, one step and a rest, and she stood and watched him go, and the key swung against his collar at each one. On the fourth stair he stopped. “Mind the third,” he said, without turning. “It speaks.”
At nine o’clock the telephone rang on the kitchen table, where she had left it face up beside the sugar bowl.
She sat and watched it. It rang four times. It had been three the first night, and they had both noticed, and neither had said so. On the fifth ring she picked it up.
“Hello, Daniel.”
“Hello.” The sound of his kitchen, the cupboard, the tap. “How is he?”
“He went up at one. He is tired. He is all right.”
“And you?”
She looked at the window, and at her own face in it, and at the dark yard, where the carriage house stood like a low boat against the stars. “I am cutting lead,” she said, which was not true yet and would be. “Tomorrow.”
“Good,” said Daniel, as one says it who has been handed a coin and is afraid to drop it.
She had met him in the fall of 2010, in a church in Decatur with a hole in its roof.
It was a small brick Methodist church with a good window, a Tiffany-school Annunciation in poor repair, and the vestry had hired the shop to take the glass out and the state had sent an architect to say how. He came into the nave on a wet morning in a raincoat that did not fit, with a clipboard and a flashlight and a tin of lemon drops, and he did not look at her at all. He looked up. For ten minutes he stood in the aisle with his head tipped back and the water running off his hair, turning slowly, and she thought she had never seen anyone listen to a room.
“It’s moving,” he said, to nobody. “The north wall. Hear it? There.”
She did not hear it. A minute later, from the ceiling, there came one small dry tick of settling plaster, and he nodded, and wrote something down. He was thirty-three. His name was Daniel Whitlock, and he had long clean hands and a tired kind face and the patience of someone who has learned to wait for things to say what is wrong with them.
It was the way Elias had listened to a caller, and she knew it at once, and the knowing went through her like a splinter under a nail.
She had been in Atlanta five years by then. He took her to lunch on the third day, at a diner with a counter, and asked about the glass, the lead, the chemistry of the paint, and nothing of the years she did not mention. At the end of the meal he folded his napkin in half, and in half again, and set it square at the edge of the plate with the tips of his fingers, and she watched his hands do it and thought, with a lurch of something that was not love and was not far from it: Here is a man who will never ask me to be the best thing he ever saw.
She had not known she was waiting for that. It was the reason she said yes.
It was in March of 2012, in the stairwell behind the shop, that she understood what she had felt in her father’s study.
That spring she had learned from a stray line on a county website that the station in Marlow Springs now sent its signal out over the internet, to anyone, anywhere. She had closed the page.
She had gone out at nine at night, tired, with a cigarette, and stood on the third step and lit it, and for no reason at all it came back to her: the rectangle of amber light on the carpet, her father’s low reasonable voice, and the thing that had risen in her chest while she stood there with her hands at her sides. She had called it grief for seven years. It had never been grief. She stood on the step with the cigarette burning down toward her fingers and said it in her head, in words, for the first time in her life.
I was relieved.
She had been loved by a boy so wholly that there had been no room in it for her to be anything less than what he saw. She had been twenty-four. She had never been permitted to be anything but good. And her father had put a stain on that boy, and in the moment before she could think to ask whether it was true she had been glad, as a person is glad to have a heavy thing taken from her, and she had run all night, and had told herself ever since that it was shame.
She did not weep. She finished the cigarette. She went inside and washed her hands and put on the kettle, and she told no one, and she did not ask herself the question that came after, which was whether the thing her father had said was true.
Daniel proposed that same night. He had come by to take her to dinner, and found her at the bench, and stood in the doorway of the shop with his hands in the pockets of his raincoat, and said, with great gravity, “I’m not going to kneel. I would like that on the record. I think I’d do it badly, and I think you’d hate it. But I would like very much to be married to you, Clara. I would like to be married to you for a long time.”
She laughed. It surprised her; it was the first laugh in months. She looked at him standing there in the door, with his dreadful coat and his clean kind hands in his pockets, and thought that it was the most honest proposal she had ever heard of. No one was kneeling. She said yes.
They were married in June in the garden of a friend’s house in Decatur, under a pergola, with twenty-two chairs. Evelyn came up from Macon by bus. She sat in the front row in her good blue cardigan, buttoned correctly this time, and wept without sound, in the way she had always wept, and when Clara came to kiss her she took her daughter’s face in both her hands and looked at it as if memorizing a thing she’d been told she would not see again. “You look well, Clara-bell,” she said. “You look rested.“
A card came from the parsonage the week after. Cream stock, a good pen. To Clara-bell, with love from Daddy. Nothing else. She put it in the drawer with the others.
Her mother’s heart began to fail in the spring of 2016.
It was slow. It came as a breathlessness on stairs, and a swelling at the ankles that a doctor in Macon named in a word Clara did not hear, and the Sunday calls grew shorter, because the breath ran out. By summer her mother was in and out of the hospital in Macon, a pale brick building with a view of a parking lot, and Clara drove down every Friday she could with Daniel in the passenger seat reading a book. They did not stay at the parsonage. It was never discussed. They stayed at a motel on the Eisenhower Parkway with a pool nobody used, and in the mornings they ate waffles from a machine in a room that smelled of floor cleaner, and drove to the hospital in the hot dawn with the radio off.
Her father met them in the hall each time, in his black suit, with his hands folded. He spoke only of her mother: the blood count, the medication, a draft from a window. He did not ask what Clara’s life was like, and she did not say, and Daniel stood beside her through these interviews with his hands behind him and said, “Thank you, sir,” and “Yes, sir,” and was kind to her father with such quiet persistence that Clara was nearly moved.
Her mother was sixty-six. In the first week of October, in 2017, the doctors said it would be days.
On Thursday the fifth, in the afternoon, her mother opened her eyes. She had been asleep for two days with her mouth open, her small hands lying on the sheet like folded paper, and she woke all at once, clear and bright, and looked at the ceiling and then at the window, and then she found Clara sitting beside the bed.
“You haven’t eaten,” said Evelyn.
“I ate, Mama.”
“You didn’t. You never did.” She smiled. She had lost most of her hair, and the set had gone out of what remained, and she had never in her life looked so much like a girl. Her fingers moved on the sheet toward Clara’s hand, and Clara took them. They were as light and as dry as the husks of seed. “Clara,” she said, “I—”
Her father was on the other side of the bed. He had been there since morning, in his straight chair, with a Bible shut on his knee, and Clara had stopped seeing him as one stops seeing a coat on a hook. He leaned forward and laid his hand on the blanket over his wife’s.
“Evelyn,” he said gently. “Rest.”
She looked at him. Her eyes went to his face and stayed there. Something moved in her, and Clara saw it go, a small sad wave across the water, and her mother turned her head on the pillow, back toward the window.
“Yes, Tom,” said Evelyn.
She did not speak again. At twenty past six the monitor changed its note, and a nurse came in softly and turned it off.
Afterward, in the corridor, her father’s voice went on above her head, arranging the hymns and the funeral home in the plain steady cadences he used for a committal, and she took what she had heard for love. It was only later, in a motel bed with Daniel breathing beside her, that she lay awake and set the two sentences side by side and heard what they had in them. Clara, I— and what she had not been permitted to finish. She put it away. She was a person who could put things away.
The funeral was on Wednesday the eleventh, at First Baptist, with the Shepherd burning over the altar rail in the morning sun. She sat in the front pew in a black dress a size too large, with Daniel’s hand around hers, and watched her father go up the pulpit stairs and give the eulogy for his wife of forty-two years in a voice that never once broke. Mrs. Pruitt wept openly. Opal Henley, in the third row, looked at the floor.
Clara looked once at the back pew. She had not meant to. It was empty, and had been all morning, and she turned her eyes forward and did not do it again. It had been twelve years. She had not thought he would come. She told herself that she was grateful, because she did not know what she would have done.
They drove home to Atlanta that evening, and on the Thursday she lay down on the bed at the front of the house in her black dress, with her shoes on, and the curtain drawn against the afternoon, and did not get up.
She did not know what time it was. Light moved on the wall. Somewhere downstairs the old landline, the one they kept in the kitchen because Daniel would not give it up, rang once and was answered, and she heard his voice low and level through the floor, three or four words and a long silence and one more, and then the click of the receiver set down. After that the house was quiet. A cupboard opened. A pot was set on the stove.
She lay with her hand flat on her chest, and she did not know why her heart had begun to go as it did. She did not ask. She counted, without admitting that she counted, to ten, and at ten nothing came, and she lay still.
In a while the smell of soup came up the stairs, onions and chicken and thyme, and the stairs creaked in their order, and Daniel stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves with a tray and a dish towel over his arm. He looked older than he had that morning. He looked as if he had carried something a long way in his hands and had at last set it down.
“Eat something,” he said.
He did not say anything else. He crossed the room, and set the bowl on the table by the bed.
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