The Bride of Catastrophe Read Online Free Page B

angry and hopeless, in pain.
    â€œWake up, wake up, can you be so deaf?” she asked her husband, shaking his shoulder.
    He sat up, bleary and irritated. Wasn’t this supposed to be her job?
    â€œI can’t, I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know what to do!”
    â€œWell, what do you expect me to do?” he asked. Why had she had to have this baby, if she couldn’t take care of it?
    But just then, Claire rested her head on his chest, and her crying calmed; she seemed to be consolable suddenly. Knowing how she’d have felt if she could have comforted the baby, she’d thought to give him this satisfaction. This was her instinctive intelligence, and she used it in this secret way.
    Ted had never seen himself have such an effect. He took the baby to his chest and made a low, manly sound, like an engine. And the baby was quiet, his little Beatrice, and Claire kissed him right over his heart. They were a family, it was like a miracle.
    They were alone together in the desolate dark … they held each other, and each promised, silently, to do better, to make it all work. Warm and drowsy under the feather quilt with him, she remembered a library book she’d loved as a child, about an orphaned girl raised on a farm, where privation and satisfaction went somehow hand in hand. The farm family awoke before dawn, stoked the fire, fed and milked the cows, cut the hay or tapped the trees, ate heartily and simply, and in the evening, settled back at the hearth while grandfather read aloud. Their floor was always swept, herbs dried in the rafters, days of work led to evenings of satisfaction, their children grew healthy and strong.
    The next weekend they took the Saw Mill River Parkway north into Connecticut, and when they arrived at the old house at the end of the long dirt road, she knew they belonged there. It had been somebody’s folly—built of fieldstone and heavy timber so the walls were two feet thick, surrounded by a “formal garden” utterly overgrown, and fifty acres of marsh and bracken, two wide meadows full of brambles, a brook running along at the base of the hill, an old root cellar with potatoes and squash still piled. They could see the sky through the barn roof, and it smelled sweetly of hay, of the farm in the library book where wishes came true. They crossed the brook on a log bridge and walked up the hillside. Claire bent down to touch the flowering blueberries, lifting the wax bells with her fingertips so he could see how many berries they’d have.
    Ted looked out over the fields, thinking of the work it would have taken to build the stone walls between them. Work makes the man. To go forward, in work, in marriage, one needed to be able to forget the past. He would begin by forgetting that day when he’d seen life coming at him with all its terrible decisions and had driven off the road. He’d been afraid of having a child who needed his guidance. If he had no answers to give, if he failed at fatherhood—that would be more than he could bear. But here was his wife beside him, and his little daughter, and it gave him courage: yes, he’d like more children, more soft little things like milkweed fluff, who flew to their parents for love. He’d borrowed against his inheritance and bought the place that day.
    *   *   *
    THESE WERE the people I was doomed to love! She, seething with an ardor entirely unfocused, smoking, smoking, her eyes narrow, her silence terrible: my first glimpse of beauty. And he, in one of those bursts of optimism that punctuated his despairs, was fitting the coop with chicken wire—his old T-shirt, faded red, my favorite color then and now. I squeezed into their embraces, to feel them wanting each other. Or, at least, how desperately they wanted what they couldn’t get from each other. Their passion swam along underneath us, we felt it move there, we never knew when it would rise up and