Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick

Author:Elizabeth Hardwick
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781590174388
Publisher: New York Review Books

Up north, in Vermont, I knew two lonely men, furious with abandonment, shivering with ill-luck. One was left by his wife after twenty-five years and the other, after forty years of marriage, outlived his wife. Black, still nights, early snow, empty roads and half the summer houses boarded up, the furniture in icy sheets, the pictures leaving their blank squares on the dead wall, the shades drawn on a sunny afternoon in September, the houses waiting for June, when someone will come to lift the shades again, like pushing back a stone from the mouth of a tomb.

For the men—horror of mistakes in location, living like beasts locked in a stable. The friend betrayed by life was as pitiful as a leper.

We moved here for cheapness, for space to work, to get away from teaching, for the children, the air, the view.

Tell me, G., what is the worst. The quiet?

No, the worst was her feeling that she had done nothing wrong. Nothing wrong...

Had she?

She had done a great wrong. Over a dozen people suffered. I and our three children... They are grown, gone away, but they mind, yes they mind... His wife and his four children ... Did you hear? Four... My mother, her father... Her father was much too ill for this. He died from the devastation of our family...within a few months...

When I said to her, How do you propose to make a life on these corpses? She said, I can only try.

The man whose wife died, died just as they were making a new life, setting themselves in order. They had planned to go from the good to the better; they had retired to the loved summer house. With an improvident madness quite unlike their usual way, this couple, not knowing death was in the garden, raced after perfection. I would rather cook looking toward the south, she said, and so the kitchen was moved from the north. He fell in love with porches in the summer and determined that his heart’s wish was to sit on the porch all winter, and so foundations were laid, great glass windows lay glistening on the lawn and were finally set in place, long evenings over catalogues produced a beautiful Swedish stove, and the splendid new porch changed the shape of the old house, making it and the couple new and daring and full of light.

They were not alone. All the retired people labored and labored for perfection. Additions, new wings, roofs sliced off, stairways turned around, bedrooms on the first floor, trees cut down, trees planted. Profoundly difficult renovations undertaken to make life easier. The children’s inheritance was used up, but one day there would be the house, reshaped often out of childhood dreams and wounds of six decades ago.

And then the wife died, just when all was ready and in harmony.

The large, lonely house in the lovely, lonely northern town. The cold nights and the copper bottoms of the pans slowly losing their sheen. Nothing to smile about in the afternoons on the improvident sun porch.

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