Free Evenings at Five by Gail Godwin Page B

Austria was invaded”). A gifted linguist, he spoke fluent German, Hebrew, English, Italian (“When I had my Fulbright, I wanted to see if I could learn a new language after forty; my teacher was pretty, she lived on the Piazza Mattei, across from the Fountain of Turtles”). He could get by socially in French when they traveled, and could erupt with impressive spurts of Russian and Arabic should the occasion arise.
    He spoke a precise English, slightly British from his years in the Royal Air Force in Palestine. His foreign accent was not in the pronunciation of words but in his ornamental phrasings: even his recorded phone message danced with Rudy-ish melisma. He had a Shakespearean range of vocabulary and a richer command of American slang than Christina did. When a new situation called for it, he cobbled his own words: “the doctor removed two cancerettes from my face,” “Christina, you are turning into a curmudgeoness.” His after-lunch nap was his “tryst with Morphia,” who dyed her hair a straw blond and drove up each day from New Jersey. His tempo markings (“creepily,” “dreamily,” “elegantly,” “quite brittle,” “exploring,” “lackadaisical,” “amorous,” “relaxed with a bounce”) were drolly precise.
    He loved spoonerisms and his were top quality, often resonating with prophetic aftertones. His favorite, “The Cope palled,” was a prime example. When the Pope stopped calling every evening at five, Christina’s religious life took a turn for the worse. She no longer found assurance in the familiar churchly trappings. None of them provided compensation or explanation for what she had lost.
    The Cope indeed had palled.
    She and Rudy had started their life together in a two-hundred-year-old rented farmhouse in an upstate New York village chartered by Queen Anne. They sat in two orange plastic lawn chairs in the living room and put their glasses and the bottle of sherry on the deep window seat between them, until their ancient landlady dropped in one evening and saw the state of things and sent down two armchairs and a coffee table. They drank Taylor’s New York State sherry in those frugal days when they had thrown over everything but their work in order to be together: Rudy had left his ordered family life in Manhattan, and Christina had given up her tenure-track teaching job in Iowa. Rudy rented a not-very-good piano from a local dealer, and Christina typed on a shaky table found for ten dollars at a local antique store. The sherry was followed by a cheap Spanish wine at dinner. On one special occasion, Rudy dropped a bottle of Mouton-Cadet on the paved driveway of the farmhouse as he was getting out of the car. The image of his woeful face (childlike in its despair) as he surveyed the smashed bottle was graven on Christina’s heart.
    Now that Rudy was dead, Christina listened to him more closely than ever. There, the same two yards away from the cat-ravaged leather sofa (one of the cats had died young from heart failure), loomed his Stickley armchair. There was the tall Turkish pillow he used for propping up his back against chest pain. Only his kingly size was missing from the picture. The long face with the high forehead and thatch of white hair floated only in the gloaming of her memory.
    But now, at the ghostly cocktail hours, she hung on his every echo. No need any longer for him to growl “You aren’t listening!” because Christina was. Intensely. She heard everything that decorated his silences: the oil burner kicking in, the refrigerator (making more ice), a southbound jet gaining altitude after its Albany takeoff. The click of the surviving cat’s toenails on the pine floors as he made his proprietary rounds.
    “You
are
listening!” Rudy might now remark. And, always curious about her inner workings, he would want to know exactly what she heard.
    View of below from Christina’s study
    “I was hearing,” Christina spoke aloud to the empty chair, “something you