Free Attachment by Isabel Fonseca Page A

still-unresolved voice. But it wasn’t he who had faded; she’d finally figured that out. It was everyone else, including her. After his death Jean had withdrawn a little, hanging back, perhaps to stay or get nearer to Billy. Who knows if she wouldn’t have been wildly outgoing if he’d been around? The dead of course were undiminished, Jean thought, and the ghosts were all still alive, wandering along their garden paths. Certainly, on account of Billy, she simply couldn’t take any more: no more death.
    That’s it, she realized. That explained her dread of Phyllis’s visit: the possibility, now ever present, that her mother would come bringing the very worst news. Just as she had that snowy Saturday morning, after her night of hospital vigil beside her artificially breathing son, to tell Jean, at the breakfast table eating her cereal—Life cereal, in fact—that he was gone.
    “Come on, Mom.” Jean helped her up from the bench. “We’ve got miles more to go.” They turned and by wordless consent headed toward the famed lily ponds. They hadn’t gone far before Phyllis stopped again, before a towering tree—an Indian Albizia, sturdy, smooth, its trunk the warm gray of a Weimaraner. But it wasn’t the color that had arrested her mother. The tall tree was, in fact, two tall trees. A twisted vine, a vigorous Australian vine, had grown upward from the Albizia’s center, splitting the trunk to nest within it, entwining itself in the upper branches. “Symbiosis? Or parasitism?” Jean asked her mother, but Phyllis was completely captivated by this impossibly slow dance. The vision of eternal embrace made Jean think of “An Arundel Tomb,” the Larkin poem about a noble couple carved in marble, one she’d written about her senior year. She ran the end of it, or at least what she could remember, silently past her ear:
Above their scrap of history,
    Only an attitude remains:
    Time has transfigured them into
    Untruth. The stone fidelity
    They hardly meant has come to be
    Their final blazon, and to prove
    Our almost-instinct almost true:
    What will survive of us is love.
    It was “the stone fidelity they hardly meant” that pierced Jean now, forced as she was to think of Mark, entwined with his own Australian creeper; but to her mother she quoted only the famous last line. And she told Phyllis that the marble couple was holding hands. Her mother responded by squeezing her wrist, as if she didn’t want to presume to hold hands. Keen to dispel the solemnity of the moment, Jean reported something she’d read in Larkin’s biography, what he’d scribbled on a draft of the poem: Love isn’t stronger than death just because statues hold hands for six hundred years. She didn’t tell her mother another tidbit from the life, one that hadn’t struck her when she read it: that the poet liked his pornography. He would circle specialist outlets on his trips to London, usually “funking”actual ingress, losing his nerve. Schoolgirls and spanking, that’s what did it for Larkin, and a magazine called Swish.
    They stood there a while longer not talking, and then Phyllis said, “Have you been in touch with your father?”
    So here it comes. “Yes. I spoke to him, let’s see, about a week ago. Why? Any special news?” It was odd that Phyllis had said “your father,” not just “Dad.” She heard the wistful note in her mother’s voice—and it wasn’t the talk of Billy: on the contrary, communing with him was a refusal to consign him to death.
    Was Dad ill? But she’d have called, not flown for eighteen hours to tell her so.
    It was twenty years since their divorce. Could there possibly be someone new in her mother’s life? No, she’d have known. In Dad’s? Childish, of course, but the thought filled her with revulsion. No, no, and no. The parents were going to stay just as they were: plain divorced. So what was on her mother’s mind? Again she had the uneasy feeling of a preview, this one suggesting that time