Page 31 - 2017 WTP Special Edition

world like that when I’m old, at this world with all its violence, well then...
into each other, literally, while buying apples
at the farmer’s market. “Those lines mark the change from tragedy to comedy,” Peter had said. “The baby doesn’t die. She’s found by a shepherd and kept safe and ultimately restored to the king, her father, and to her mother, the queen.”
And here, Peter realizes, Agnes strays from the topic significantly. At the same time, she is point- ing to the marvelous, unanswerable question no one can answer, though many, Peter included, have tried. What made Shakespeare’s late vision possible?
“That’s why Shakespeare called it a romance then?” Helen said, twining her slender, freckled arms around his neck. “Because of the happy ending?”
Peter’s own father was nearing forty when Peter, his only surviving child, was born. By the time Peter was thirteen, his mother had died of cancer,
“Precisely why,” Peter replied, sliding the blouse from Helen’s shoulder to kiss her neck.
“Exit, pursued by a bear. That’s
how he o en felt leaving his father at the nursing home.”
By the time Peter finishes rereading Agnes’s es- say, it’s nearly five o’clock. He has a dinner date with Marianne at six-thirty. He plans to discuss with her the two prospective surrogates who’ve risen to the top of the list in the nearly fifty pro- files he’s read. Not that Marianne fully backs him up on this idea now. She remains wary; but Peter trusts, he believes, she will come around. She’s already agreed to help out during the first few months, and she’s begun to inquire about nannies—“My financial contribution,” she told Peter when she brought the nanny up, “should you decide to go through with this, and should it actually work.”
and his father, whose red hair grayed early, had arthritis in his knees and hands, and had moved as far up in the railroad hierarchy as he was ever going to. Now that the old man’s in the nursing home, he dwells on What Should Have Been.
Marianne moves much slower than I do, Helen used to say. She always has.
What’s gone and what’s past help/Should be past grief. Peter actually said these words to his father once, the context, though, he’s forgotten. “What in the hell are you quoting that mumbo jumbo to me for?” his father had said. And Peter had wanted
At five-thirty, Peter checks his email, just in case. But there is nothing except a memo from the de- partment chair reminding faculty to turn in grades by June first. Peter leans back in his chair, plucks
to say: ‘Because truth can be found there, maybe even solace.’
a dead blossom from the Christmas cactus which surprisingly continues to put forth more blooms. He arranges the exams in a neat pile and then stores them in a folder in his cabinet with Agnes’s ‘B+’ close to the top. Outside his window, the bou- gainvilleas in the courtyard bloom as brilliantly as ever. He switches out the light on his desk, takes one more backward glance, and closes the door.
Exit, pursued by a bear. That’s how he often felt leaving his father at the nursing home; he’d told Helen this, long after she, too, knew The Winter’s Tale almost as well as he did.
Helen had cried over these exit lines when he first read them to her in the weeks after they bumped
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