I’m not a Christian, but many times I found myself drawn into the chapel at Three Winds, to look again at the small painting of Saint Francis holding the dove. There are those who committed terrible crimes. And there are those who acquiesced. What I never knew was, what is it to acquiesce to the acquiescent? Sometimes a long time would pass as I stood there, so long that the fingers of colored sun that fell through the stained glass would shift to a different wall. No, not just to yield but, in one’s own way, to affirm?

Our last trip was to America. It was winter there, and I took his father’s fur coat out of storage, the Russian sable that he had brought with him from Leipzig. It smelled of the cedar trunk, but it was still beautiful. Wrapped in that fur that almost touched the floor, he was something strangely impressive, and people turned to look as he passed. The coat made him talk more loudly, as if he couldn’t hear himself in it, which drew even more attention. He refused to take it off, even indoors, and sometimes, as he was eating in the hotel’s grand breakfast room, a little bit of food would fall into the fur and lodge there, food that I would later try to brush off when he wasn’t looking, or when he had fallen asleep in the back of the taxi after a long day of walking. At those times, I saw how old he was getting, and a panic would come over me. How could I keep everything in its proper place? Shoes under the bed. Glass on the table. Dove in the hand. Chair by the door. Trowel at the ready. Cook in the kitchen. Sun in the sky. Leaf on the ground. Light on the lake.

It was too much, like one of those dreams where every time you turn, something else has moved behind your back. But he would always wake up, and, still sunk in that enormous fur, he would begin to talk again (to himself or to me, I never really knew), and I would go back to listening as usual, nodding now and then but otherwise not saying much, close to nothing at all, and everything was exactly as it had been between us, as it always would be.

The Husband

The Husband

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On a freezing gray winter ghetto of a day in March, her mother calls to say that the lost Husband has arrived. She doesn’t begin the conversation that way, of course. She begins casually enough, the way stories so often begin, stories of everyday life onto which is sprung a sudden intrusion: The other day the doorbell rang, though I wasn’t expecting anyone.