Free October Light by John Gardner Page A

that’s all; always had been—even allowing for the way he’d gotten her all riled up, treating her like an animal, depriving her of her most ordinary human rights till she was trembling and shaking and so weak at the knees she’d been afraid, coming up the stairs backwards, protecting her face with her hands, that she’d collapse and fall on him, and serve him right (she was shaking again now, remembering)—even allowing for all that, it was hard to believe it was fifteen minutes past midnight!
    She put down the paperback, opened to her page, on the white-painted square-topped wicker table beside the head of the bed—higher than the bed, an awkward, foolish excuse for a table if ever there was one, wicker-wrapped legs angling out past a useless little shelf down underneath (the table, she was sure, was a remnant from the years her niece Virginia had occupied this room)—and got up to go over to the clock on the desk to make certain she was seeing right. She was, it seemed.
    It was a grayish-black clock made of onyx, or something made to simulate onyx—it weighed twenty-five pounds if it weighed one ounce—with ostentatious pitted gold pillars on the front, Roman columns, and Roman numerals so unevenly spaced it took study to be sure of what hour it was, let alone what minute. It stood in front of the mirror on the top of the closed oak desk, to the right of the glassed-in bookcase, level with her eyes. She couldn’t help noticing, looking above her blue plastic spectacle-rims at the hands on the clock, that her eyes, in the mirror behind it, were red, ruined by her weeping, and perhaps made redder still by all that reading. She was not a great reader, she’d be quick to admit—certainly not a person who ordinarily read trivia! That’s what he’s brought us to, she thought, and her lips and white, white cheeks began to tremble. By “us” she meant herself and her late husband Horace.
    Horace, her husband of thirty-five years, would never have read such a book as hers. He’d read only the finest literature, authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Dos Passos, and Thomas Wolfe. She had not read them clear through herself, but she knew, if only by the fact that he read them, that they were profoundly serious-minded authors, “heavy,” as they say, full of difficult philosophy and memorable prose and keen insights into human nature. It was wonderfully comforting, hearing him read her memorable passages just as she was drifting off to sleep, prose that rolled over her dimming mind like the ocean over tumbling wrecks at sea. Sometimes as he read he would choke a little with emotion. She would pat his elbow. Heaven only knew what he would think of her—gentle Horace Abbott with his mild gray eyes and soft dentist’s hands—if, standing, ghostly, at her shoulder, he should find her reading trash. Her eyes filled with tears, not so much of self-pity as righteous indignation, for she was thinking again of her television set, and, taking her embroidered hankie from the sleeve of her nightie, where she’d tucked it, she angrily blew her nose. “We’ll get even, Horace, you wait and see,” she whispered to the empty room. Her husband had been dead for twenty years—twenty years exactly this Halloween. Dead of a heart attack. Someone had been in the room with him; they were gone when she got there.
    Her niece’s car was still rumbling, down below, though Virginia was in the house now; the old woman could hear them talking. It was odd, she thought, that Virginia’d gone and left the engine running, eating the gas up at sixty cents a gallon; but then she remembered. Sometimes when they turned off the motor the car wouldn’t start again. Last Sunday afternoon when they’d come over after church (Sally’s church, not theirs; Lewis was an atheist), they’d had to work two full hours to get the old thing running.