Early Warning

Rosanna had sometimes talked about the storm of ’36 or some such year — Henry would have been three; he remembered nothing — when they first sent Frank to Eloise in Chicago because there was no school in Denby. Frank had supposedly gone through a tunnel of snow and nearly died, and two women saved him by buying him a berth in the sleeping car. Maybe, in those days, two women were always saving Frank. That same year, snow outside his future room, the addition where Joe was sleeping alone, had been up to the eaves. After this winter, Henry thought he could go toe to toe with Rosanna; he was in the most prepared-for-snow city in the world, and there was nowhere to put it. All they needed now, Henry thought, would be a nice ice storm to seal them in permanently.

In ordinary circumstances, no one would have said of him that he was a farm kid, not even his parents, but he had a farm kid’s plenitude of provisions — bags of flour, bags of rice, bags of dried beans, boxes of spaghetti, cans of tomatoes, a freezer full of chicken breasts and nicely trimmed steaks. He had wine, he had water, he had anchovies and several varieties of Italian cheeses; if he had to make himself pizza for a week, he could do it. He had a kerosene lamp; he had wood for the fireplace (he’d used about half of that, and he was careful to keep the flue clear — his colleague Nina had passed out several times, thinking that it was the dreary nature of her manuscript that was putting her to sleep, but it turned out to be her chimney leaking carbon monoxide into the living room).

He went into the front room and picked up The Poetry of Jean de La Ceppède: A Study in Text and Context, which had just arrived from Oxford for his review. Jean de La Ceppède was right up his alley now. In the summer, Henry had visited Aix-en-Provence and decided that medieval France was unbelievably alluring, and why had he not lifted his youthful gaze from Caedmon and Cynewulf and looked farther south, where the weather was better and the literature and history more complex?

But not only had Henry’s academic interests shifted toward France, he was also lonely, had been lonely since Philip left, now two years ago. Philip was in New York, and there was no reasonable hope of seeing him until spring break, seven weeks away. And even if he saw him, Philip had moved on. When Henry stayed with him for four days in October, they had gone out to the bathhouses every night, and while Philip ran joyously from room to room, partner to partner, disappearing and coming back, Henry sat at the bar, sipping gin and tonics, frightened, glad of his graying hair, his utterly straight outfits — khakis, sweaters, blue shirts. Though he had appreciated the wildness and color of the scene, though he had been flirted with, he would have grabbed the bar and resisted being taken away from it with all his strength. Philip, irritated and a little offended, had said, as if he meant it, that that emblematic medieval experience Henry had had as a boy, an eyeless white horse exploding in a ditch full of paleolithic refuse, was the key to his whole Weltanschauung: human nature is inherently evil and is never to be trusted. Philip was much more of a Romantic.

Once in a while, he wished he could call Rosanna and pick a fight with her, as he had done so many times in the past. “Ma,” she had hated that, but when he called her “Mom,” she said, “What are you, twelve years old?” When he called her “Mother,” she said, “I am not a nun,” and so for a few months he referred to her, only in her hearing, as “Mother Superior,” always smiling when she pursed her lips. Ma! Ma! What did you call a finicky maternal figure? She might have liked “Rosanna,” but none of them had dared. He’d wept when he saw her in the open casket, neatly dressed in her gray dress, with the pink sweater she had knitted herself and some black pumps. They had fixed her hair anyhow, not in the bun she preferred, and Lois had said, seriously, “Maybe we should fold up all the sweaters she made herself and put them in there. I hate to see them go to the Salvation Army.” But it had seemed too strange to do such a thing, and so they had gone to the Salvation Army — they were too small for anyone in the family.