When We Were All Still Alive by Keith McWalter

When We Were All Still Alive by Keith McWalter

Author:Keith McWalter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SparkPress
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00


18

THAT WINTER THEY DRAW closer to the Webbers and their children, a daughter in college in New England and a son in the local high school, each named after saints. With the specific gravity of certain friendships, the two couples keep to themselves for a season, rarely mixing with the others. Sometimes Sarah is explicit about this, confessing that she prefers that a dinner or an outing include just the four of them. Conrad feels the same but would never say such a thing.

Night in the snow at the end of the year, the dinner cooking. The Webbers bring their son along; he’s grown tall and shy and skinny, a dark down on his jaw. The final recital of his years of study with a local pianist is approaching, and Sarah asks him to play. As they enter the library Conrad finds himself oddly embarrassed; the books on the shelves around them are a diagram of a thousand longings and past passions, clear as newsprint. The boy sits at his mother’s piano and plays some Debussy, some Chopin, his unblemished young heart finding its easy way onto the keys. The music itself is an unutterable intimacy, and the adults avert their eyes from one another. Conrad purses his lips as though to hold something in. The boy’s hands move over the keys and evoke the grownups’ own childhoods, the great continuity of care of which they are only the most recent vessels. The chords rise one last time like a tide, and then his hands lift in unison, and he primly stands, and they applaud.

In the short winter afternoons Agatha teaches Sarah how to knit, and they sit together in the sunroom making scarves and socks. She sometimes brings one of the Webbers’ big retrievers, who watches them intently, as though the yarn may be edible like the other things the humans handle.

Drawn as Conrad is to her, he can’t quite decipher Agatha; there’s a deep, carefully shuttered reserve to which no one is admitted except perhaps John, though Conrad doubts it. There is none of the convivial silliness that Sarah and Christine share, the spirituality that Meg confides, Becky’s carefree sensuality. Taller than most men and blonde and unconsciously imposing, Agatha is a serious woman, younger than Sarah, barely fifty, carefully composed in her dress and manner, almost masculine in her care with words, her decorousness, as though from a different era. She’d gone to business school and was once an advertising executive, but gave it up when the children were born, almost too late.

“John always wanted kids,” she explains. “I put it off as long as I could, then got pregnant primarily for him. I couldn’t believe I’d be a good mother, didn’t understand this dementia women get into over their babies. Then I had one, and I understood. I never went back to work. I couldn’t leave them.”

“I’m sure I would have done the same,” says Sarah. “But what about now? Stephen’s almost grown; you could go back now.



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