The Storm at the Door by Stefan Merrill Block Read Free Book Online Page B

“Waltzing in Venice with you, isn’t so easy to do …” In the corridors, nurses pace beneath their cottony white hairdos.
Checks, checks, checks, checks
. High above the city of Boston, particles of moisture sing through the late summer storm. Just beyond Madhouse Hill in Belmont, a boy deduces an answer to a multiplication problem; a plump young woman half-tearfully gives up on waiting for lastnight’s date to call; a widow on Beacon Hill sniffs her milk, decides its time has passed. Clocks tick, people sleep, kiss, fight, make love.
    In Upshire Hall, Professor Schultz sits at his desk in the room from which he will soon be removed. He has been hearing strange sounds, as always, and he has been attempting to transliterate them. But there is that terrible sound now, something that cannot quite be transformed into letters, at least none that he knows. It is not unlike the ululation of Middle Eastern grief, but much, much deeper, and incomparably more horrible. One by one, this sound obliterates the unique sounds of each of those other things: the singing, the boy with his homework, the spurned young woman, every particle of rain.
    The wind makes violent demands upon the sheet; Marshall’s wheelchair nearly topples. But now all that keeps the sheet from its airborne ambitions is the grip of Marshall’s one hand. It promises to be as swift and as certain as physics, and it is. The wind takes the sheet; Marshall lets go.



1
    There is my grandmother, in the summer of 1962, twenty-seven years before she will climb into the attic, resolved to incinerate her husband’s words. Katharine sits in precisely the same spot—even the chaise lounge, with the avocado vinyl cushion, the same. The same lake spreads before her. Katharine looks at the lake with eyes that, in her early forties, have only just begun to blue with age.
    On the raft tethered fifty yards from the shore, my mother (now only a thirteen-year-old girl named Susie) play-fights with her two younger sisters. It is already August. Today is unseasonably cool, a foreshadowing chill: school will be starting in a month; soon they will return to their house an hour to the north, and prepare for winter. But now, her younger girls, with children’s obliviousness to discomfort, bolstered by their desperate desire that the summer continue, swim as if it were fifteen degrees warmer. Upstairs, Katharine’s eldest daughter, fourteen-year-old Rebecca, listens to music as she writes of boys or to boys. The day is crisp and blustery. Whitecaps have been heaving themselves across the lake for three days straight.
    Already August. Frederick has been gone for more than a month now. Several times, Katharine has had to abandon her unspoken beliefs about when to expect her husband’s return. And now, once again, she must reconsider the reset deadline. Amonth longer? Two? Just a couple weeks ago, Katharine felt certain Frederick would be home by the end of July. Now Katharine knows she must learn to discipline her expectations.
    To the left of the porch, two squirrels court manically, sprinting among the trees. A strong gust unleashes a battery of acorns, which thump against the roof. A loon, apparently complacent in the waves a hundred yards from shore, is suddenly seized by a notion and disappears into the water. Katharine thinks of how simple it seems it could be to become something else. Her cousin Joseph strolling contentedly up the path, her girls delirious with the sunshine, the new renter with her scandalously younger boyfriend in the Bristols’ place down the beach. Even the squirrels chasing each other in the woods. Why, Katharine wonders, must she be as she is? How did her life become this narrow and burdened? She wonders if anyone else has such thoughts, and wonders about Frederick, whether this notion would make sense to him.
Yes
, she thinks.
    Katharine tries to correct herself.
This is the danger of his illness
, Frederick’s psychiatrist has warned her.
This is why