Free The Confessions of Frances Godwin by Robert Hellenga Page B

to cry. Just a little bit. Just a few tears. I had pretended not to notice.
    More than two thousand books—eighty some banker’s boxes—had been sold to a dealer in Springfield. Another two thousand were in boxes in the garage. Paul’s old railroad desk, too big for the little “study,” was on the long interior wall that we shared with Lois. The movers had set up our bed in the bedroom, at the east end. Two windows opened onto the deck, but we were at the north end of the deck, so no one would be walking by our apartment. A sofa bed had been installed in the study, the rugs had been spread out on the floor, the furniture had been set in place. Everything else was in disarray. Lois was coming in the morning to help, and Sophia, my regular cleaning lady.
    Lois called in the morning, before I left for school, and offered to do a shopping for us, and Paul asked her to get some scallops. He wanted to cook some scallops for supper that night, or if not scallops, then wild-caught shrimp. Cooking, for Paul, was a way of relieving stress, though he’d insisted on walking up the outside stairs instead of taking the elevator, and he was too tired. The cancer was announcing itself, making its presence felt. He was going to need oxygen pretty soon. His face was aging, the skin tightening over his cheek bones. His green eyes were looking larger and larger. He was losing weight. He sat in a rocking chair at the edge of the kitchen, wearing his favorite sports jackets—Brooks Brothers—and his Sulka tie, kibitzing while I tried to organize the kitchen.
    There were no bread crumbs, no panko, but Lois brought butter and lemon. And we had a glass of wine while Paul told me what to do with the scallops.
    Lois had bought enough scallops for all three of us. I sautéed them in butter, closely supervised by Paul, two minutes on a side, and we squeezed lemon over them and ate them on buttered toast. Delicious.
     
    I got Paul set up at his desk with his Lincoln books and his Riverside Shakespeare, and for a while the new book and the NEH application seemed like real possibilities. Paul sent me to the college library for books and more books. The literature on Lincoln is enormous. Every item opened new doors, new corridors to be explored: Sandburg’s biography, the Herndon Papers, Charnwood’s Abraham Lincoln, journal articles that had to be photocopied.
    Arthur Jamieson, a colleague from Knox’s Lincoln Center, stopped by once a week to chat. Paul wrote notes with Lois’s Mont Blanc roller ball, which he’d managed to hang on to, using one of his Clairefontaine notebooks with a deep red cover.
    I transcribed them onto the computer. I don’t think of myself as a tech person, but I had mastered Microsoft Word, which had replaced Word Perfect. I set up function keys, and I created headings for the document map so Paul could move around the document freely.
    The oxygen tank slowed him down. Once you start the oxygen, you have to keep on. The oxygen machine sat next to the door of the half bath. It had a very long plastic tube that could reach through the whole apartment, though it sometimes got tangled, like his shoelaces. If I wasn’t home, and Lois was out at the funeral home, Paul would have to call Cornucopia, the deli down below us, and one of the student workers would come up and untangle him. I arranged to have my lunch period free at the high school so I could check on him at noon. And Lois, of course, was always ready to help.
    In the evenings we read Lucretius, in Rolfe Humphries’s fine translation; we read my translations of Catullus—and Paul knew enough Latin to ask intelligent questions about some of my choices . We read Shakespeare, too—Lincoln’s Shakespeare: Richard III, Hamlet, Macbeth. Lincoln liked to recite the opening soliloquy of Richard III . He preferred Claudius’s “O, my offence is rank” in Hamlet to the famous soliloquies. And he kept coming back to Macbeth’s speech to his wife after the murder of