Eden Close by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online

when he had a home of his own, in Saddle River with his wife and child, someone else did the work, such as there was, in that new, immaculate structure: a cabinetmaker, a plumber, a lawn service to tend to the shrubs and bushes there. He doubts that anyone in his hometown would ever contemplate buying such a service, just as the women here, he knows, clean their own houses. At best, like the Closes, they might hire a boy to mow. There were always plenty of boys who needed the money.
    He should return to the office, of course. He looks at his watch. At this hour he would already be at his desk in a summer suit. There would be a pile of pink phone messages, and some would seem urgent. He would have about him an air of earnestness leavened by an unobtrusive wit he has learned to cultivate, fielding the puns that his boss, like a college sophomore, is so fond of. And he would feel a small pressure, around his shoulders and along the back of his neck, because there would be a deadline and surrounding it a manufactured sense of importance. Though he would not be able to escape, as he hasn't for some time now, a growing certainty that all the efforts of all the men, like him, in offices are merely an elaborate bit of theater, in which the principal
actors have so long and so thoroughly played their parts (like the actors in a long-running television series) that they are known to each other—and perhaps even to themselves—only as this character or that.
    He remembers, with a slight shudder, how narrowly he escaped accepting, from a woman in his office, an offer of a house in the Hamptons. He can think of practically no worse way to spend a vacation than with strangers in a town nearly as crowded as the city—or so it seems to him from here. He had thought of taking Billy camping in Nova Scotia, but Martha was being unaccountably difficult this summer, insisting that Billy not miss any of his expensive day camp and announcing that when camp was over she was taking him to visit her parents on Nantucket. Andrew likes his in-laws and thinks that Billy should visit them, and it was becoming too complicated to sort out when his mother had suddenly died and inadvertently solved the problem.
    He looks north over the cornfields and finds he wants to say the word
beautiful.
The word is strange on his tongue. It is a word he has not said in a long time, and it is all the more strange spoken beside this ruined house—this house, once loved, falling into disrepair. Both houses are now shabby in the sunlight, the back steps of the other nearly rotted out, the privet climbing wild over the sills. He sees a large crack in a kitchen window—from a branch or a bird? he wonders; not now, surely, from a child—and that a shutter has been blown from an upstairs window.
    Two women, two widows, living far from town, neighbors with a lifetime of history, but not women who liked each other much, he thinks, not women who called upon each other much for warmth or for talk. He sees now what he has been too preoccupied to see before—the obvious disintegration of two houses that have no men in them, houses patched up as best they can be by women of a certain generation who were never taught how to putty a window and who do not know the names of tools. They make their kitchens gleam, he knows, but if a shutter falls from an upstairs window, it is carried to the cellar and left to stand there.
    He will begin with the scraping and the sanding, he decides. The grass cannot be cut until it dries out, and that won't be until late afternoon at the earliest—although he should take a look at the lawn mower before then to see what kind of condition it's in. An oriole darts from among the thick foliage of the hydrangea tree. He wonders if the scrapers are still kept in the same black metal drawer in the garage.
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    H E HAS been scraping for an hour, and his arm is already sore, when she comes out the back door, gingerly making her way