Free The Confessions of Frances Godwin by Robert Hellenga Page A

around. “I can’t believe we’re still fighting about Howie Banks,” she said. And then she said, “Merry Christmas,” and Paul told me to write a check and to get the money out of the credit union on Monday.
    “Thanks, Pa,” she said. “It’s four thousand dollars.”
    I wrote out a check and let the ink dry and handed it to Stella. She folded the check in half and put it in a wallet that she fished out of a black canvas tote bag, and then she was gone, and Paul and I were sitting next to each other on the couch. We didn’t say anything for a long time, and then Paul started to snooze and I cleared the dining room table and cleaned up the kitchen.
    Can you imagine anything more sad? Even sadder than Vergil’s lacrimae rerum —the tears of things. I can’t. And yet I was able to step back from my own sadness, as I was wiping the counters, and observe it, as if I were watching a film, or reading a novel. And as I did so, I was aware of an undercurrent of joy. The kind of undercurrent you can sometimes hear in a Chopin étude or a Bach fugue. Our little drama was playing itself out against a background of joy. Our life together had been good. Sadness wasn’t the worst thing. What would have been really sad would have been if we hadn’t been sad at all.

5
     
    Do Not Go Gentle (January–October 1996)
    In the middle of January—Paul just back from his first round of chemo—the retired doctor who had lived in Loft #1 of the Seminary Street apartments from the time it was built died and his widow moved into the Kensington. We were on the waiting list and the Seminary Street office called. It was a beautiful apartment, with large windows looking out onto the street; “ proprio in centro ” we might have said if it had been in Italy. Right in the center of town. A large living room, two bedrooms, two baths, walk-in closets in both bedrooms. Paul wasn’t impressed, till he saw the sports car in the garage. Under a tarp. The real estate agent and I struggled with the tarp. Paul wanted the car. The doctor’s widow didn’t want it. It had been sitting in the garage for thirty years. Paul hadn’t gotten his Mazda Miata, hadn’t gotten a Thunderbird or a Corvette. It was his bargaining chip. I gave in. He offered the widow the price of a new Mazda Miata, and she took it. It wasn’t a midlife crisis. It was a pre-death crisis. We put our house on the market.
     
    Enjoy the elegance of this Victorian shingle style: Baccarat ­crystal chandelier, coffered ceiling and patterned parquet floor in dining room, four bedrooms, unreconstructed kitchen, side porch, balcony. Built in 1895. One of Galesburg’s premier homes.
     
    We moved in February, before the house had been sold. I was teaching Roman Civ., and Aeneid ii, iv, and vi in Latin 4, plus an extra section of Beginning Latin, and Paul, still recovering from his first round of chemo, was on the phone every day with the young woman from the University of Illinois who’d been brought in to teach his classes and who had her own ideas about how to teach Shakespeare. So: it was a difficult time. Our first night in the new apartment was like a lot of first nights. Unsettling. Another milestone. Like your first night in your college dorm, like your wedding night, like lying in bed at night after the birth of your first child, like your first night at home after that child has gone off to college.
    The piano, an old Blüthner grand with eighty-five keys, had been sold to a music store in the Quad Cities, traded, actually, for a good-quality Yamaha electronic piano. Paul and I had watched the men from the music store wrap up the piano and take it down the front steps, and then we had stood in the front window and watched them load it onto a smallish van.
    “This is a mistake,” Paul had said, and I had thought maybe he was right, had thought maybe I should run out and stop them before they drove away. But I hadn’t. “It’s a done deal,” I said, and Paul started