Free The Romantic by Barbara Gowdy Page B

the sky is such a clear blue I feel drawn upwards, as a blue lake can draw you.
    Sure enough, the footprints lead me to the O’Hearns’ house. The Richters’ house now. And there they are, Mr. Richter and the boy. Abelard. I own an old book, which was my father’s when he was my age, called
Peoples of the World,
and consequently I am surprised that the two of them aren’t wearing the short leather pants, suspenders and little Robin Hood hats that the father and son in the book have on. Abelard is dressed like any boy: blue jeans, brown jacket, brown cap. Mr. Richter, in a long black coat and black fedora, looks like a judge.
    I move along to the Gorys’ property, directly across the road, where I hope I’ll be anonymous among a gang of littlegirls tobogganing down a drift. Abelard does the shovelling, strong, fast throws. Mr. Richter sweeps what is left behind. The thought enters my mind that the Richters adopted a boy so he could do the hard labour around the house, and it is just then, as I’m feeling sorry for him, that Mrs. Richter comes out the front door.
    Although she is dressed nothing like the German wife in my book, she is nevertheless very foreign looking, very dramatic. Big for a woman, much bigger than her husband, and wearing a red-and-orange skirt and red shawl. No coat or gloves. It takes me a moment to realize that her hair, braided and twined several times around her head, isn’t a brown hat. She carries a tray holding two steaming glasses, and Mr. Richter and Abelard stop work and each take one. She sets the tray on the porch wall. Abelard removes his cap, he’s hot, and she ruffles his hair, which is the same dark brown as hers. While he and his father drink, she does a little dance step and swirls her skirt. She points to the pattern her feet have made in a dusting of snow, and there is a discussion, in German supposedly (over the screaming of the little girls I can’t catch any words) regarding these patterns. Abelard puts his glass on the tray and stamps out his own pattern. Mrs. Richter wraps him in her shawl and they embrace before she unspools him. At what he says next she claps her hands and throws back her head, and then she breaks into song: “La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” This I clearly hear. So do the little girls, who go silent. She sounds like a lady on the radio. She sings the same phrase again, no words, only,“La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” Abelard glances in my direction. He puts his cap back on and picks up the shovel. Behind me thechildren resume screaming and clambering up the drift.
    Mrs. Richter turns. She opens her arms at all the snow, and then she turns again and seems to be including in her delight the little girls, and me as well. In a burst of feeling, a kind of anguish, I smile back.

CHAPTER TEN
    Was Abel always saying “curiously enough”? Mrs. Richter thinks so. A couple of months after he died, she told me that she found herself using this expression all the time,“the way Abel used to.” She said,“You remember.”
    No, I don’t, although I pretended to.
    What I
have
noticed is how she and I and Mr. Richter seem to be acting like him in small ways, taking on his mannerisms and even his passions. He loved tree frogs and now so do I; I love their slim waists and gawky legs, I make special trips down to the ravine just to look for them. When he was nervous he’d pull on his earlobe. When he was listening to you, he’d cock his head to the right. Mrs. Richter now cocks her head. Mr. Richter pulls on his earlobe.
    The examples go on and on. How he shelved his books: the tallest top left, the shortest bottom right, an eccentric arrangement I have been driven to adopt. And his smoking! None of us smoked, but within a week of the funeral his father and I were puffing on Player’s plain, Abel’s brand, and I observed that Mr. Richter held his cigarette the way Abel used to, between rigidly straight fingers.
    As if his spirit flew piecemeal into the ether, and