“Did she? I never explained to her how I do it. She never asked. But, poor dear, she hasn’t any money, either.”
“I went with your daughter to the Monastery of St. Thomas this afternoon and spoke with Robert.”
“That sinner!”
“Why do you say that?”
“Have you ever heard of the sin of omission?”
“No.”
“Robert’s omitting life in that monastery. I suspect he’d rather be in jail, but he knew his father would prevent his going to jail, no matter what he did. I think some people want to be in jail, don’t you?”
“Shooting his father would accomplish two goals, wouldn’t it?”
“Splendidly!”
“I think I heard your son, the monk, actually saying something like he doesn’t much care if his father goes to hell.”
“Oh, we all felt that way about Donald. Didn’t you?”
“Didn’t know him.”
“Not a pity.”
“When Nancy was telling Donald their father was dead, she wept.”
“Nancy! I brought her up to be such a pretty girl and, for a while there, she was such a whore.”
“Was she?”
“She married her college professor, you know. What’s his name?”
“Tom Farliegh.”
“Yesterday you didn’t know his name. Today, you do. You see? You’ve learned something.”
“Not much.”
“I try to get his name around, in my own small way.”
“Rather a strange man, don’t you think?”
“Oh, he’s a darling. Very good to me. He publishes my poetry.”
“What?”
“Well, he gets it published. Under his own name, of course.”
Fletch sat forward. “What?”
“Well, you just indicated you wanted to learn something.”
“What are you saying?”
“That little book,
Fletch stared at the blue-haired lady in the corner of the Agnes Whitaker Home’s recreation room. “You do like playing with words.”
“Very much,” she said firmly. “Very much.”
“Ex-pired husband. With sounds.
“They’re good poems, aren’t they?”
“I think I believe you. The Poetry of Violence written by…”
“The few critics who reviewed the poems referred to them as that. ‘Poetry of Violence’? I suppose so. Poetry of Truth and Beauty. I don’t like labels.”
“Your writing those poems changes the meaning of them altogether.”
“Does it? It shouldn’t.”
“It changes the perspective.
“I don’t know about criticism. I know Tom needed to publish something, to keep himself employed at that university. His own poems wander around on black shoes like Donald. Never can get ahold of them. So verbose they should be verboten. Well, they are forbidden, essentially. Couldn’t get them published. So I gave him mine. He has my five grandchildren to support.”
“My God. Life is crazy.”
“Interesting thought.”
“Tom talks as if he wrote those poems!”
“He’s supposed to. It’s a secret, you see. Even Nancy doesn’t know. You mentioned perspective. Who’d publish the poems of a little old lady in a private mental home? Tom is a university professor. If he presents something to a publisher, at least it will be read. Right? I can’t help it if the world’s perspective is crazy.”
“When people are corrupt enough to oblige lies, you oblige them.”
“Tom’s working on the second volume now. I’m helping him. It’s very difficult for him, you see. When a person has to lecture almost every day in fifty-minute lumps, it must be nearly impossible for him to think in terms of a simple, concise line, each word pulling more than its own weight, a cadence that works in the briefest moment. Don’t you think?”
“I have no idea.”
“But you see, I, on the other hand, have lived more or less in silence. A silence so profound that when a sound, a word emerges into it, I realize it in the most complete sense, hear it, feel it, touch it, taste it, turn it over and over, in its isolation, in my isolation. Sound, to Tom, in his busy life, with five children, must be resisted, somewhat. Sound to me is cherished, and I coax it into fullness, into meaning.”
“Explored, exploited, explained, exploded,” Fletch said. “Expired.”
“I do think I’ve identified for Tom a previously unadmitted, shall we say? source of beauty. He’s getting the hang of it. Pretty soon some of these poems will be entirely his.” Louise Habeck looked around the recreation room. “And pretty soon it will be time for supper.”
“There’s a story I’ve heard,” Fletch said slowly, “that Donald Habeck was taking a turn for the religious.”
“Donald was always religious,” Louise Habeck said.
“No one else seems to think so.”
Louise Habeck shrugged.
“He was a liar,” Fletch said. “A paid liar, a professional liar. You yourself said you wouldn’t believe him if he told you he was dead.”
“A liar has a regard for the truth such as the rest of us do not have,” Louise Habeck said. “A liar believes that truth is somehow difficult, mysterious, mystical, mythical, unobtainable, to be pursued. I’ll bet you that while Demosthenes was wandering the earth, searching for an honest man, he was selling gold bricks on the side and cheating his landlords. To the rest of us, truth is as obvious, as common, as plain, as a simple poem.”
“Would you believe Donald would retire into a monastery?”
“Oh, yes. It would be just like him. Just what he would do. He was forever poring over religious tracts, books of sermons, proofs of this and that.”
“How could his children not know that?”
“They know nothing about him, other than what they read in the newspapers. Nobody did. After you read about Donald in the newspapers, you don’t want to know him.”
“Did he ever take instruction in any religious faith?”
“All of them. That’s how he spent most of his evenings. That’s why I never saw him. The children never saw him. Never knew him.”
“Listen,” Fletch said softly, “Donald Habeck had a mighty unusual lady we both know committed to a mental institution.”
“Yes,” Louise Habeck said. “Me. It was very kind of Donald, very correct. Living here is much nicer than living with him. I get to watch other people eat. All of the people here” —she waved her arm around the room— “are better company than Donald was. I come and go as I please. People give me rides. They talk to me, usually. I tell them stories about Peru. And Donald was right: I was buying rather too many washing machines and lawn mowers.”
“Have you ever been to Peru?”
“No, but neither have they.”
“Mrs. Habeck, your son is a monk who can’t find peace. Your daughter and grandchildren live in squalor. Your
