“Mom, I brought Dad home from the hospital. He’s all right, Mom. He wants to talk to you. Is that all right, Mom?”

She plays on.

Quietly: “Come on, Mary, let’s leave them alone a minute.”

The music swells under Wilma’s hands, swells to one of its climaxes. When she notices the shoes next to her again, they have changed from Jack’s shabby loafers to John’s shiny Oxfords. Fingertips light upon her shoulder. She shrugs them off, and continues the precise movements of her hands. “Wilma,” she hears her husband say. His voice is hoarse. “I suppose I couldn’t make you understand. What it was like for me then.”

Sixteenth notes cascade from her fingers.

“Although I always loved you!”

The notes are delicate, tempered, even.

“If you could just see. How lonely I was. How much I needed—to prove I was alive. After we lost Chase.” A pause. “And you, Wilma, you were not a comfort to me!”

The main theme reasserts itself.

A loud sigh. “Wilma, would you listen?”

She focuses on the movement of her fingers.

“It might have—I don’t know, Wilma, but you remember about the curse on this house? For God’s sake, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that I—that it was that! Because God knows I never intended—!”

Her fingers trip. She shakes her head, rights them, and continues.

“You know I’d change it all if I could. You know I never meant to hurt anyone. Least of all you, Wilma.”

Having reached the lower end of a forbidding passage, she lifts her hands from the keyboard. She looks up into the watery blue eyes of her husband, and sees reflected there all those ridiculous years of guilt, grief, subversion, penitence, following the Rules! When, all along, he had been hiding a sin more grievous than her own.

A decades-old dam breaks. And she begins to laugh. She cannot stop herself.

She collapses onto the piano, burying her head in her arms. She barely hears the footsteps running into the room. Is she laughing or sobbing? Circling around her, they can’t tell. “Mom, are you all right?”

“Wilma?”

“Wilma? Wilma!”

Chapter 80

Few crises are filled with more insecurity and sense of loss in a marriage than that involved when “the other woman” or her male counterpart breaks the sense of unity so important to marital solidarity.

—When You Marry, 1948

THE MICKELSON HOUSE
502 W. First Street, Pine Rapids
Friday, August 4, 1950

“Why did you want to know so bad?” he said, lighting her cigarette. They were standing together on the landing in front of the stained-glass window.

She smoked, hands shaking. She had begun imagining strategies for burning down the little bungalow. Perhaps she could succeed where Wilma had not.