The Most Dangerous Thing

addictions. He understands how difficult it is to quit smoking and change one’s diet, even when the consequences of inaction are dire. It’s the neglect that otherwise rational people allow-skipping annual exams, declining exercise, refusing to eliminate foods that cause them actual distress.

Tally was casual about her health, not that it would have mattered. No diet, no regimen, no amount of vigilance, no regular checkup would have yielded a different result in her case. She was stage IV at the time of diagnosis. It turned out that she had been experiencing abdominal pain for years and never mentioned it. And that she sneaked cigarettes in her studio. With the paint fumes and the little space heater-he’s surprised it didn’t go up in a ball of fire years ago.

Sometimes he wishes it had. Without her, of course. He considered the shed, Tally’s studio, his romantic rival in some ways.

“And Annabelle had a little house in the woods.”

Clem asked Gwen a few months ago if they should try to make the shed, which stands empty, a playhouse for Annabelle. “A little house in the woods,” he said. “A little house in the woods,” Gwen echoed, her face troubled. A little house… maybe it wasn’t the best idea. Or maybe it was. Maybe if one had a little house on the edge of the woods, children wouldn’t press farther into the real woods.

Not that Annabelle would ever think of walking through the woods, even with another child. Gwen wouldn’t allow it. Probably no modern parent would. Clem has always been skeptical of any pronouncement about how times change. Very few things about people have changed in his lifetime. Machines change, people don’t. Yet childhood- technology can’t change it, but technology has been used to plug all those beautiful, empty hours that children once had to fill on their own. What else can children do but stare at screens when the outdoors is denied to them, except in scheduled doses of sports practice and supervised playdates?

Do mores change? Attitudes about profanity and behavior have changed, but the real change is that people speak of that which was once kept covert. Addictions, affairs, perversions. So much confession, yet America’s collective soul doesn’t seem to benefit from it. Peter De Vries, a writer that during his forties Clem particularly liked, once said that confession was good for the soul in the same way that a tweed coat was good for dandruff. A palliative, De Vries noted, not a cure, and Clem admired a layperson’s use of that distinction. Clem should read De Vries’s work again. He wonders if it holds up. The conventional wisdom is that such humor, dependent upon knowledge of an era’s social customs, has an expiration date. Yet Dawn Powell has come back and even Patrick Dennis, whose work Clem discovered because it nestled next to De Vries on the library shelves. He will ask Gwen to pick them up from the library, assuming they’re still in the library.

“What did the little girl do in her house, Poppa?”

“She lived there with a dog, a goat, and a horse named Charley.”

“Boo,” Annabelle says.

“Are you haunting me?” he asks, startled.

“No,” she says with a giggle. “The horse is named Boo.”

“Ah, of course, a horse named Boo. And she likes to-” He pauses, knowing Annabelle will direct the story where she wants it to go.

“ Cook .”

“Cook. Your grandmother liked to cook.”

“I didn’t know her,” Annabelle says. “She died a long, long time ago.”

True, yet harsh, a reminder that twenty-five years ago, when Tally died, Clem was very much alone in his own house in the woods, without even so much as a horse named Boo. Gwen returned to school, after much melodramatic agonizing and self-exploration. It didn’t seem to occur to her that her father had lost his wife, much less that Miller and Fee had lost a mother, too. But Miller and Fee were adults. Young to lose a parent, but still adults. Miller was born an adult, and Fee became one more or less on schedule, upon college graduation, whereas Gwen-sometimes he feels he is still waiting for Gwen to become an adult. Anyway, Miller and Fee went back to their households, their respective partners and lives, while Gwen pursued and married a man so inappropriate that Clem felt as though he were watching a Restoration comedy that forgot to guide its lovers toward the proper partners at curtain. And now she is separated from Karl. Clem always thought Fee would be the one with a rocky romantic life.

Fee had come out just before Tally’s diagnosis, surprising no one, and she still lived with her first love, an instructor at Mills College. The match had overtones of Clem and Tally: Fee’s lover was significantly older, an academic. They were still together, although they had weathered a tough time, quarreling bitterly about having children. Interestingly, it was Fee’s lover, almost sixty at the time, who thought they should adopt a child. Chinese adoption was fairly new when this came up. But Fee thought it was wrong to become parents to a child if one didn’t have a reasonable belief of being there for all a child’s milestones. Oh, Fee, he tried to tell her. You can’t control that, no matter when you have children. Tally, a bride at eighteen, missed so much. Gwen’s wedding. Both Gwen’s weddings. Fee and her partner’s marriage in that first, brief window of legality. Annabelle.

Who has taken over the story, as he knew she would, allowing his mind to wander. “And they made pudding and soup and cake and doughnuts and chocolate jelly-”

Clem was fearful when Gwen informed him of her plans to adopt overseas. Could he love a child who was not his biological heir? What about developmental delays? Then Annabelle arrived, he looked at her-and all his fears vanished, just like that. He was heartened to discover that his heart had room for someone new to love. Because in the twenty-five years since Tally’s death, no adult woman has found a way there. Many have tried. When his two older children speak of him moving to a senior community, as they always call it, their selling points include “company.” This was exactly what kept Clem in his house. He didn’t want to deal with all those widows looking for companionship. He is happy as he is. Still women call, drop by. Since his accident, there has been a second wave.

Last week even Doris Halloran showed up on his doorstep, casserole in hand. Unsure of the etiquette, he had his daytime aide invite her in to share it with him, which she did with an almost frightening alacrity. Silly Clem. Doris wasn’t looking for a mate. She wanted absolution. She unburdened herself to him and left, seemingly happy. The casserole, whatever it was, might as well be called the misery dish, for once he ate of it, he could never be happy again. What he had always feared, what he knew but did not have to admit, had been thrust on him: Tim killed the man in the woods. He told Doris so before he died. She defended her husband’s actions to Clem, said she believed it was the right thing. “Think of the other children he might have hurt, that man.”

Clem has thought of them. He thinks about them constantly. Yet he still cannot persuade himself that these potential crimes entitled Tim Halloran to murder the man. And it makes him nervous that Doris knows. She was not there; her husband is dead. Clem has long lost track of Rick. Doris has little to lose by telling others what happened. Clem’s entire life could be taken from him retroactively. Everything he has done and accomplished-the career, the children, the grandchildren-would be wiped out by the fact that a man was murdered in front of him and he kept his silence for sheer convenience’s sake. Why? Because he knew the man in the woods didn’t count, that no one would miss him. It was the coldest, most inhumane calculation of his life. He can never make it right.

“And then I got on Boo and he ran and ran and ran-”

“Galloped,” he corrects gently. “Horses gallop. Or canter. But you can say run, too.”

“I want to ride horses. Daddy says it’s too dangerous.” Annabelle curls into his side, looking up through her lashes. That is Gwen’s look, Gwen’s wheedling tone, Gwen’s feminine confidence.

“Well, daddies get to decide such things. Daddies know a lot about danger.”

Father knows best. If they’re telling stories, he might as well go whole hog.

Chapter Thirty-one

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