The Chastened Heart

The Chastened Heart

A Novel

Copyright © 2014 Robert Crooke.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

This book uses excerpts from previously published material:

Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy: Volumes 1 & 2, Inferno, Italian Text with Verse Translation, Notes and Commentary by Mark Musa. Published by Indiana University Press. Copyright © 1997 by Mark Musa. Used by permission.

The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, first published in the Atlantic Monthly and in Macmillan’s Magazine, 1880-1881, in book form by Macmillan (London) and Houghton, Mifflin (Boston), 1881, revised and republished by Scribner (New York), 1908.

The works of Henry James are in public domain.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-4988-3 (sc)

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2014918197

iUniverse rev. date: 10/20/2014

Contents

One

May 2007

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

May 2011

For Sean

But you must journey down another road,

he answered, when he saw me lost in tears,

if ever you hope to leave this wilderness;

—Inferno, Canto I, 91-93, Dante Alighieri

There were lights in the windows of the house; they shone far across the lawn. In an extraordinarily short time—for the distance was considerable—she had moved through the darkness … and reached the door. Here only she paused. She looked all about her; she listened a little; then she put her hand on the latch. She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a very straight path.

—The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James

One

May 2007

Tom Winslow smiled as he remembered tossing his gym shorts on the floor. Rising to slip them on again while Alice slept, he padded to the window for a glimpse of their meadow and the distant ridge marking the western boundary of Connecticut. The ridge-line had been pristine when they’d moved to Trent, 25 years ago, but a row of expensive homes now adorned its craggy face. In earliest sunlight the houses were blanched, white squares, like sheets hung out to dry.

It was the third Friday in May, and from what Tom could see, the weather would be splendid for Alice’s book event this evening at Shelby College.

He glanced as she rolled toward the vacated side of their bed and grew still again. A spasm of grief clutched in his chest as he followed the graceful line of her body beneath the sheet, and admired the girlish effect of her long hair splayed against bare shoulders.

On the night table near her outstretched hand lay his worn copy of her novel, The Chastened Heart, which he’d read three times, not counting the manuscript drafts. In his opinion, it was a magical work—a story of love and sorrow that cast a spell when you opened its pages. People were reading it by the thousands. Friends were recommending it, book clubs were discussing it, and a New York Times reviewer had offered perhaps the best description of its unique power—Enter this fictional world and you will feel that its author has appropriated your life, that somehow she has conjured her narrative from your own experience.

Even Tom had succumbed to this strange alchemy. Alice’s story, which was their story, more or less, had changed not only with each new draft, but again with each new reading of the published version—until he could no longer find the threads of truth from which her tale had been spun.

Now, as the sun came up full and strong on the distant ridge, the white houses vanished in the glare. Tom felt himself floating, as if between two worlds bridged by memory. He recalled a romantic young man with a beer in his hand, jammed into the crowded living room of a Beacon Hill brownstone in 1967. On a stereo somewhere in the room, Richard and Mimi Fariña were singing Pack Up Your Sorrows.

There was a girl talking with someone in the kitchen, at the opposite end of the house, and she was beautiful, with rich, brunette hair flowing to the middle of her back. He was unable to stop watching her until she caught him at it. Then, sufficiently embarrassed, he turned away to re-engage the party he and his buddies had driven from Providence to attend. But he asked about the distant pair engrossed in their private conversation.

Some guy from the Harvard Lampoon, he was told. Don’t know the chick.

Later that night, he noticed that the Harvard guy had left, and the beautiful girl had come into the main room of the house. She stood alone by the fireplace, not quite aloof from the party, not quite embracing it, as if someone so beautiful could be uncertain of anything.

He angled through the frat-party crowd, determined to reach her before anyone else did. She noticed his urgency and smiled. Her face was more beautiful the closer he got, and he could see the blonde highlights in her hair now.

What are you doing? Alice asked from bed, dispersing his memories.

Just looking. He turned from the distant mountains to see his wife sitting up and smiling. Her face was still beautiful, a slightly older version, perhaps, of the face that had smiled curiously in a Boston brownstone. That was the face he’d fallen in love with, but he’d come to love this older version better. It had the look of honesty.

Come back to bed.

Don’t you want coffee?

I want my husband.

He started toward her, as pleased as she seemed by this latest renaissance in their sexual life, which had undergone many phases of intensity and reversal over time. As he drew near, slipping off his gym shorts again, she laughed, sliding back down and pulling the covers open for him on her side.

When he pressed in against her, she kissed him and pulled him on top. He felt her thighs tighten around him.

The phone rang.

He was chilled, dead weight.

Don’t answer it, she whispered.

He stopped moving into her.

Come on, she urged, holding the back of his neck and pulling.

But the phone’s insistent ringing broke her concentration now.

Maybe we better, she conceded. It might be Peg Harvey … or school.

He rolled off.

She grabbed the receiver. Hello? Will!

She turned away and sat up, with the sheets around her waist and her legs dangling off that side of the bed. Tom sat up too, listening to her end of a conversation with their son, who was in London on business with his wife, Nancy.

Yes, Alice said. They came yesterday. No. Your father. I was still at school. Yes. They’re beautiful. I love them. Oh?

And as Alice listened to some juicy bit of London gossip, Tom again pondered the sleek curve of her bare back, and the sweep of her hips, half-covered in bunched sheets. He kissed her shoulder through tumbled hair, then propped a pillow behind himself.

She glanced at him while listening intently to Will.

Ask him when they’ll be home, Tom said, gazing across the room at a window now glorious with sunlight.

Alice hung up and sat very still, noticing his copy of her book near the phone. They’re flying back Sunday.

How’s business?

Huh? Oh. Good … he says. Abruptly she stood, pulling that side of the bed sheet up to herself and facing him. It’s later than I realized. Peg’s due in forty minutes.

I’ll make coffee.

She nodded pensively.

Is everything okay?

She leaned over and kissed him. Yes.

Dropping the sheet, she hurried to the bathroom. The shower came on.

He reached across the bed for the book. Leafing through a few pages, he found his favorite scene—in which her two main characters decide to marry. Reminiscent of events in their past, the scene expressed its own truth about love’s enduring sorrows.

Aaagghh! she muttered in apparent discomfort.

The book closed in his lap. What’s wrong?

Nothing’s wrong! A stomach cramp.

You’re sure?

Coffee! You said something about coffee?

Yes.

But still he lingered, contemplating her picture on the book’s back cover. The photographer had captured the calmness of her smile in elegant black and white, but also a chilly tension in her eyes; a sign, perhaps, that literary success on her scale had its burdens—except that he’d seen this tension in her eyes before.

On a bright, May morning very much like today, he recalled, Alice had traveled down from Boston for his graduation weekend—after which she was to leave for a Columbia University fellowship earned on the basis of several respectably-published short stories.

As he took her bags and guided her from the train station to his rickety Volkswagen that morning, he noticed her face was sullen and pale. He wondered if she had the sense, as he suddenly did, of their lives diverging. On the way to his apartment, she mentioned feeling car sick. When he suggested, in obtuse helpfulness, that she visit his campus nurse, she glared. He turned on the radio. Tuned to the Aquinas College station, whose signal carried barely beyond campus, his Blaupunkt threw a blast of static. She groaned. He lowered the volume while she gulped fresh air at her open window.

The static faded in the middle of Pack Up Your Sorrows, and Tom remembered their disagreement over Richard Fariña’s novel the night they met. Published in 1966, days before its author was killed in a motorcycle accident, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me had been a brief, counter-cultural sensation. But she’d been right to argue, he now thought, that its blend of Kerouac and Pynchon was more cute than radical.

Arriving at his place on Exton Street, she quickly excused herself while he handled her luggage. Twice more that afternoon she locked herself in his bathroom, and he could hear through the door as she retched. Finally grasping what this was, he tried to discuss it. She refused. The cold tension in her bloodshot eyes told him they’d become strangers, somehow, in the same mysterious process which had made them lovers.

Then, on the evening before his commencement, as they finished dressing to meet his mother for dinner, he held her hands, kissed her, and asked her to marry him. She was shocked into silence.

I’m serious, he told her.

I know. She stared at the quiet street outside his living room window.

You don’t want to?

You knew I was dating someone when we met.

Though they’d never spoken clearly about this, Tom had harbored assumptions.

You know what, he said. I need some fresh air.

Wait. I’ll go with you.

No. He started for the door. I won’t be long.

We have to be downtown in less than an hour, she reminded him.

I’ll be right back.

So he left her in his apartment and walked quickly along Exton to a part of campus that had been cleared for expansion. Picking his way through a desolation of construction rubble, he came upon the skeletal frame of a dormitory high-rise being readied for next fall’s freshman class.

Without its skin, the structure was a cut-away puzzle of rooms, stairways and halls, behind empty window frames. He’d been to the top once before in a burst of boyish curiosity. Now, with more purpose, he entered again through an open door frame.

As he climbed a central stairwell of echoing concrete, a dizzying view emerged of the leafy streets and fieldstone houses around his school. On the 20th floor, he stepped out across a concrete promenade to the edge of the building’s southeast side, from where he could see the greater part of downtown Providence—its neoclassic state capitol building, its gilded bank domes and white church spires—clustered at the basin of seven hills. He could see the red-brick Biltmore, where his mother would be waiting for them.

Standing near the edge of the concrete promenade, he stared out beyond Narragansett Bay to the thin blue distance of the Atlantic. Everything at this height was silence and stillness. He felt as if his life had slipped away, moved on without him.

Having come to Aquinas thinking of himself as a novelist, he was heading home to a more prosaic job as Long Island reporter for the Daily News. His stellar running career had ended in a bitter dispute with his coach after not quite three years here.

And five months ago Colonel Arthur Winslow, his spit-and-polished father, had kissed his mother and driven the short distance from their Bayview home to Deep Meadow State Park on Long Island Sound. There he parked, hiked up into the hilly woodlands, where the old cross-country course was, and blew his brains out with his service pistol. A man walking his dog the next morning found the Colonel’s frozen body on the trail.

Tom? said an edgy voice behind him.

He turned toward her. You shouldn’t have followed me.

It looks dangerous. Slowly she approached, holding out her hand. Step back a little.

He did as she asked. They stood together silently as the sun began setting.

It is a beautiful view, she said.

This Harvard guy, Tom said, clinging to one part of his past that hadn’t yet vanished in a hopeless future. I thought he wasn’t your boyfriend.

Did I say that?

A ‘friend’ is what you said.

She nodded gravely. All this time, you never thought to ask any more about him?

I’m sorry. I must have thought, ‘Alice would never let me make a fool of myself.’

She turned her head with a snap and looked at him. She was crying.

I suppose he’s working on some big-time magazine by now, he ventured.

She looked away again. The New Yorker, she said bleakly.

Maybe you want to marry him.

Shut up, she hissed.

You still haven’t said ‘yes’ or ‘no.’

She stared out on the city, apparently embarrassed by his insistence.

As he waited, Tom considered the wisdom of plans made in the wake of failure and betrayal. He accepted that honesty meant different things to different people, but assumed he knew the truth about himself. And, at least, she was starting to say what she really thought, even if he’d had to trick her into it.

Finally, she spoke. What about your novel?

What does that have to do with anything?

She pressed him, searching in his eyes. Will this newspaper job give you time to finish it?

Have you seen him lately?

She looked away again.

Just say ‘no.’ I don’t care if it’s true or not.

Oh, Tom.

Can you promise not to see him again?

Can you promise me you’ll finish your novel?

I don’t get why that’s important.

And that you won’t throw this up to me later? That you still want to do this with me, and it’s not just some challenge for you now?

Challenge? he said in disbelief.

Promise me.

Alice turned off the shower with a snap that sent a tremor down the pipes of their rebuilt farmhouse. Roused again from distant memories, still clinging to her book, Tom decided her version of the past was better than his.

How’s that coffee coming?

She stood in the bathroom doorway now, a damp towel around her body, beads of moisture on her beautiful face.

Yes, he thought, the photographer had gotten her perfectly.

Peg Harvey was running late when the argument erupted. She’d surprised Peter two months ago with her plan to spend their summer vacation alone. And he’d grown increasingly sullen, until this morning, when real anger flashed in his voice.

That goddamn book, he shouted, before retreating down into his carpentry shop behind a slamming cellar door.

Perhaps he’d been expecting her to change her mind? That would be just like Peter, she thought, mistaking determination for caprice. Peg also wondered which book her husband had meant, Alice’s, or her own unpublished manuscript. Perhaps it was both, except that she didn’t quite believe he’d read Alice’s novel.

Peg, on the other hand, admired The Chastened Heart almost beyond reason. She’d already hosted a book-signing for Alice here at her home, had organized a reading at the Trent Public Library where she served as a board member, and had arranged tonight’s private dinner for four, just prior to Alice’s appearance at Shelby College. But in its immensity, the success of Alice’s novel had overwhelmed Peg, upsetting the balance of what she’d felt in common with a friend, neighbor and teaching colleague.

Naturally, Alice had been wonderful throughout the past months. She’d taken time from her own increasingly harried life to read the latest drafts of Peg’s work, and to offer gentle, useful commentary, while showing some of the best pages to her literary agent, who’d rendered sound, market-based advice. Yet, even her friend’s suggestions had felt condemnatory, since Peg would never have found solutions of such simple beauty herself.

Just keeping writing, Alice had urged. All I know, I’ve learned by trial and error.

Peg had followed Alice’s advice and applied for a fellowship at the Long Valley Writer’s Conference in Vermont. She was still waiting to hear back. But with or without a fellowship, Peg knew, she was going to the conference next month—during the time she and Peter always vacationed—and even if she had to use half their vacation budget to pay the fees.

Staring at the silent, cellar door at the far end of her kitchen, Peg felt a flutter of compassion for her confused husband, remembering a moment last week when it appeared he might simply ask to come along with her to Vermont.

There’s a lot of trout in those mountain streams, he’d said.

But the last thing Peg wanted was to have her husband hanging around in a motel room, or in one of the writer’s cabins at the conference, waiting there every night like a dark cloud of judgment—the embodiment of her fear that nothing changes.

When she ignored Peter’s open-ended reference to fly-fishing in the Green Mountains, something became fully alert in him.

This Vermont thing, he’d said this morning. It’s not just about writing, is it?

No.

Are you even coming back after the conference?

Shocked by his directness, she whispered the words, I don’t know, and revealed an unbearable sadness to herself.

The Harveys’ moment of insight, then, was shattered by Peter’s angry retreat to the cellar. But now, Peg ran her coffee cup under the hot water faucet in the kitchen sink, and tried to recapture the clarity.

Why should it be so important to her what he thought about Alice’s novel anyway? Yes, he’d claimed to have read it, even though his unabashed preference was for histories and biographies, which he called the real facts of what happens. Was he not allowed what she’d spent a lifetime demanding for herself—his own opinion, the space to form it?

It wasn’t that he lacked appreciation of creativity. Peg considered him an artist in his own right, a successful building contractor with a keen eye for real estate, as a result of which they owned the nicest home in the oldest section of Trent—a pre-revolutionary Georgian—grabbed up cheaply in foreclosure, and refurbished, as he’d done with the Winslows’ Victorian farm house.

Finally, she realized how late it was. She called to him through the closed cellar door.

I’m going to work!

Waiting, briefly, for a husbandly response that didn’t come, Peg gathered her things and hurried out to her white Toyota parked in their pea-stone driveway.

She got in, tossed her bags on the seat beside her, and turned the key. But nothing happened. The engine was silent. For several moments, she stared at the quiet solitude of their beautiful house, which the early sun began fully to embrace.

At first, she thought it some trick of sunlight playing on the front door, an optical illusion. But no, it really was Peter, coming out of the house and walking briskly down toward her car, with a look of—what—satisfaction?

He was nearly on her now. She could almost feel the air outside her air-tight Camry moving in the wake of his purposeful gait. That look on his face—what was it exactly?

Might be the starter. He stood close outside the car. Looming over her, he cast a cold shadow where, moments earlier, sunlight had begun warming the metal and glass of her useless vehicle. Or the battery, he added.

As Peg sat perfectly still, staring at her house, Peter softly wrapped his knuckles on the driver’s side window, inches from her ear.

Instead of answering, or even looking up at him, she reached for the electronic button and pressed. She heard the coordinated snap of all doors locking. Then she leaned forward, rested her head against the cold steering wheel, and wept.

Tom poured two cups of coffee near the kitchen window and watched for Peg Harvey’s Camry. According to the girls’ arrangement, Peg drove to Shelby with Alice every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Alice drove them in the Winslows’ Range Rover on Thursdays and Fridays, when Tom worked from home on his column. But Tom needed the Rover today. The Hartford Chronicle had been acquired by a media conglomerate, and the new owners were sending a financial guy from Manhattan to meet with senior editors.

These are beautiful! It was Alice, calling out from the dining room. Aren’t they?

He joined her at the dining room table on which her best vase brimmed with roses. Very nice, he said.

She took a steaming cup from him. Are you worried about your meeting?

I survived the other cutbacks.

What does Bill Sanchez think? she said, referring to the Chronicle’s editor-in-chief.

That it’s just the newspaper industry.

She took a sip and checked her watch. Peg’s late.

That one didn’t make it. He pointed to a single rose, which had drooped so low overnight its head appeared ready to fall from its stem. Several petals already had.

Alice reached for the note that Will and Nancy had sent with their gift.

Read it again, Tom urged.

Okay. She held the note up and read aloud, slowly, without her glasses. Dear Mom, we spent hours in Covent Garden yesterday, walking from bookstore to bookstore. And everywhere we went, your novel was on display. Most of the stores are carrying it in their front windows, and the newspapers are filled with wonderful notices. Your publisher has started running ads, and everyone is talking about it. Our new client even mentioned your name the other day. Mother, you are famous.

Tom peered over her trembling shoulder. That’s your best review so far.

Moments later, wiping her tears, Alice removed the dying rose and cleared the fallen petals. She was tossing it all in the kitchen trash bin when the phone rang.

It was barely nine o’clock, but Tom tensed as Alice answered.

Hi Peg! Oh. No problem. She hung up. Her car won’t start, so, we’re going in Peter’s pickup. They’ll be here in 10 minutes.

Pouring himself a little more coffee, Tom noticed Alice’s pensive stare. What?

Your health insurance is so much better than the college plan.

He touched her shoulder. We’ll be fine.

Something may be happening with that thing on my uterus.

She was talking about a growth, which her gynecologist had monitored for years but resisted excising, since it was benign, and because its removal would have damaged the uterus itself. This had seemed like reasonable advice when they were trying for a second child. But they’d given up on that after two miscarriages.

Dr. Coben thinks it’s gotten larger. I’m expecting her to call with biopsy results.

Why didn’t you tell me?

I didn’t know anything yet. She spoke with a nervous edge. You’re worried enough about the paper.

Tom accepted the irony of feeling excluded by her reticence on his behalf. After all, he had his own secret—the disturbing phone calls of the last few evenings, each at precisely five o’clock, with no response when he picked up.

Alice moved toward him and rested her head on his shoulder. He could hear her deep, steady breathing, and could smell the warmth of her hair.

Life’s been good, she whispered. Overall.

You sound like you’re putting your affairs in order.

Don’t be silly. She lifted her head and stepped toward the window again. I’m just saying … we’ve reached the age when things start to happen.

Things always happen.

We run out of time to make them right. Alice stared at the quiet street in front of their house. We have to keep these jobs as long as we can.

Watching her from behind, Tom kept his own fears to himself. The industry that had employed him since boyhood was in decline. Worse yet, his calm second life with Alice felt threatened by the secret he’d been keeping—unexpected wreckage now washing in from their stormy first marriage. The earth felt like liquid again beneath his feet.

Peter’s blue truck pulled into their driveway and Tom came to his senses.

Alice grabbed her briefcase.

Tom walked with her to the front door.

Don’t forget, she said. Five o’clock at The Shelby Inn.

I’ll be there.

It’s very important to Peg.

They kissed.

She hurried down the walk. Tom followed slowly behind her.

Peg got out on the passenger side of the pickup, allowing Alice to squeeze in. Then, she called out to Tom with obvious irritation. Car trouble!

Tom waved to Peter, who waved back, but otherwise sat rigidly behind the wheel.

Reminds me of high school, Tom said, approaching the passenger side.

What do you mean? Peg asked.

The boys with the trucks always got the girls.

Peter heard the joke and smiled briefly.

Alice shook her head.

This old thing? Peg got in and slammed her door. The truck gently backed into the street. See you at dinner, she reminded him from her open window.

Over many months, while writing The Chastened Heart, Alice had grown accustomed to imagining her life in the third person. Even after finishing the book she’d clung to this objective frame of mind, and the comfort of processing the world at a safe distance. As a result, the gravity of real things had been subverted—cramps, biopsies, job security and health insurance had come to feel like weightless concerns in someone else’s story. Or so she’d thought until this morning, when the sound of Will’s voice brought her back to earth.

How’s Will? Peter asked, his truck speeding along Route 12 toward Shelby.

Good, she fibbed. He called this morning … from London.

Peter nodded with interest. London?

He and Nancy landed a new client.

A good trip then, he said, watching the road.

He says it was. They’re coming back Sunday.

Too bad they can’t be here tonight, Peg said, smiling briefly before turning her gaze on the passing greenery.

Alice had noticed the heavy makeup around Peg’s eyes—she’d been crying, apparently. And Peter’s manic grip on the steering wheel, his burly hands clenching and unclenching, evoked the image of a fidgety prize fighter. There must have been an argument, Alice thought, sitting in the edgy silence between them, estimating that 10 miles had gone by without the Harveys uttering a word to each other.

She was