Free October by Al Sarrantonio Page A

Eileen Connel had not only forced Danny Sullivan out of her house but out of her life, renouncing his name.
    Another picture, on the mantel over the fireplace. Lydia only, gazing into the camera lens with detached concentration. It is time to take a picture, someone, probably her mother, had told her. Stand and have your picture taken. And she had, as she did everything else in its appointed time.
    "Have you thought of leaving?" Kevin had asked her soon after meeting her, when her bland despair had become evident to him.
    "No," Lydia had answered; and though Kevin had laughed, thinking it appropriate, it had occurred to him that probably, up until then, she never had.
    "I'm back," Lydia announced with a touch of brightness. She set the tray down on the wide coffee table. Smooth dark wood. Tea scent overwhelmed the tinge of lemon polish.
    She sat beside Kevin on the damask sofa, poured tea, handed it to him. Her fingers, he remembered, smelled like lemon polish.
    He took the tea from her. "Thank you."
    "You're in New Polk to teach," she said matter-of-factly. She sat on the sofa so that she would not have to look into his eyes. "I read about it in the paper."
    "Yes."
    "You're going to teach Mother's work."
    Kevin sipped tea, put the cup and saucer down. "Yes.”
    â€œI knew you would."
    He didn't know what to say. He put his hand out for his teacup, felt her eyes on him. He turned, his mouth ready to speak, but no words formed. She was looking at him. The wan, blond, straight frame of her hair made her thin face, with her thin, long nose, the scatter of dry freckles like tears under the bridge, her paper-dry lips, the pale line of her chin, so close to the bone beneath, appear even thinner. Her fingers were long, slim. The nails were sensibly short, unpainted. When they played the piano, they struck the keys like twigs, did not caress them. Her music-making was sad but not accomplished—remote, perhaps meaningful to herself. He had always told himself that love for her had not grown in him because it was not meant to be. But it had been the image of her fingers on the white keys of the piano, playing Mozart or Brahms, the tiny pads of her fingers en-rubbed with lemon polish, the brittle, lonely sounds that had come out, that had kept him from loving her. . . .
    "I would have left with you that day," she said.
    "I know," he said, and suddenly the memory of the day that was the crux of his relationship with Lydia, with her mother, when he had first come face-to-face with himself, came back to him as if he had been immersed whole in it.

    He came a final time to research his Ph.D. thesis, to talk with Eileen Connel . She let him record her spoken words as notes. She did not like to talk about her work, but she had warmed to him, had opened a tiny lock to a tiny room out of all the large locks and rooms within her. His father had just died.
    She was forty-six years old, then. She was often forgetful, the Alzheimer's disease, unrecognized, just beginning to inhabit her. She let him into her bedroom-study on the second floor, a final secret unfolded for him. It was a room much as he had imagined it; she had spoken of it often; and in his mind, he had been able to construct its dimensions. It was different from what he had imagined, but later, he made a note that perhaps this was her writer's mind at work again, her genius for metaphor. There was one large window with a tree nearby; swimming sunlight washed over the walls. It was a cold day outside, February, but the sky was bright, high, cold, and blue, like many February skies in New York.
    She sat at her desk. The desk was populated with writing equipment. In the center an old Remington typewriter, almost laughable with age, but perfectly maintained. She had told him, elsewhere in his recorded notes, that there was a man in New Polk who had originally sold it to her and who repaired it when necessary. He cleaned it every two months. She had learned, after many years, to