The Quiet House on Catharine Street

Chapter OneQuiet House

The fan in the kitchen window has two settings, loud and louder, and Roberta has it on louder because the house gets close at this hour even with August done. She is at her kitchen table with a printout. The printout is the third pass of a Charleston shipping novel, 1820s, and she has been working on the same paragraph for forty minutes.

The paragraph is about a man who loves his wife. The author keeps wanting to tell the reader about it. Roberta keeps trying to make him show it. She reads the line out loud, soft enough that her voice does not carry through the wall to Mrs. Donato.

"He loved her with the kind of patience that only a sailor knows."

She crosses it out. In the margin she writes, what kind of patience does a sailor know, and underlines it. She has flagged this same trick four times in the manuscript already and the author has thanked her warmly each time and put it back in.

Her tea is cold. She drinks it anyway because she does not want to get up and make more.

It is one in the morning. The neon from the deli across the street is the green of a parking lot at midnight and washes the kitchen in a color that makes her house plant look ill. The fig tree in the yard is sleeping. She can hear her own pen on the page.

The house ticks. It does this at certain hours. Roberta has never figured out whether it is the radiator pre-firing for the season or the joists settling or something she made up to keep herself company. She used to tell David about the house ticks. He would say, that's just an old building, Bert, and he would say it the way men say things to women who are letting their imaginations run away.

She did not used to mind being called Bert. Now she does, retroactively. Funny how that works.

The next paragraph is about the wife. The wife is also a problem.

She gets up. She puts the kettle on and washes her cup while the water boils. Her ring finger is bare. She has been editing romance for seven years and she knows the gesture is a cliché but she does it anyway, looks at her hand the way the heroines do, only without the wistfulness. She is not wistful. She is the foreman of a small productive operation that is herself, and she has decided, out loud, several times in the last two years, that she does not need the decoration.

The kettle clicks. She makes the tea. Bergamot, two bags because she needs the leverage. She brings the cup back to the table and stands over the manuscript instead of sitting down. Standing is a trick she learned from a writing professor in college. If a paragraph is hard, do not sit down to it.

"She loved him with a quiet, abiding patience that knew no season."

Oh god. Roberta puts the cup down.

She reaches for her pen. She writes, Daria, we have to talk about patience. Patience is not a feeling. It is what you do when you are not feeling something you would prefer to feel. The reader does not need to be told that your characters have it. The reader needs to see them not feeling what they would prefer to feel and going on anyway. Please cut every instance of the word patience in this manuscript. I have counted twelve. We will replace them with actions.

She closes the notebook. She drinks the tea. The tea is hot and the kitchen ticks and a bus goes past on Catharine and she can hear it making the turn at Eighth.

She is, she realizes, content. It is not happy and not unhappy. It is what she has settled into over the last two years like a chair she did not know she had bought. She is alone in a clean house with work she is good at and a tea that is the right temperature, and the only person who would object to her being awake at this hour is not in her life anymore and has not been for two years.

That last clause is too long. She edits it in her head, splits it in two, drops the would-not-object. Bert, just go to bed.

She does not go to bed. She picks up her pen.

She sleeps for four hours and wakes when her phone chimes the eight o'clock alarm she set last winter and never canceled. The kitchen still smells of bergamot. The manuscript is where she left it. Daria has not changed her mind about patience overnight.

The doorbell rings at nine fifteen. Roberta is in pajamas and a robe, but the robe is the long one, so she answers the door.

Mrs. Donato is on the stoop with a paper bakery box.

"You were up late," Mrs. Donato says.

"How do you know that," Roberta says. She steps aside. Mrs. Donato comes into the parlor without taking off her shoes, which is a thing Mrs. Donato has decided she has earned. The shoes are flat and white and have a small embroidered flower on each toe.

"I could see your light," Mrs. Donato says. "And then I could not see your light. And then I could see your light again. I am eighty years old, Roberta, I do not sleep, I keep an eye on the block."

She sets the box down on the sideboard in the front room and Roberta hears the unmistakable shift of pastries inside.

"Sfogliatelle," Mrs. Donato says.

"You are spoiling me."

"You are too thin. I am medicating you with sugar, it is what we do."

Roberta laughs. She gets two plates from the kitchen and they sit at the parlor table by the front window where the light is best. Mrs. Donato unboxes two pastries with the seriousness of a person handling sacred objects. The shells are perfect. There is powdered sugar on Roberta's pajamas before she has even taken a bite and she does not care.

Mrs. Donato eats her pastry in three bites and a small sigh. Roberta is still on her first.

"My nephew called yesterday," Mrs. Donato says.

"Which one. Bobby."

"No, Frank. Frank the one who is a doctor."

"Oh, Frank."

"Frank has a friend. Frank says, Aunt Theresa, you would not happen to know anybody on your block who has a spare room, the friend needs a quiet place for four months while he does chemo, we cannot find anywhere in the city. Frank thinks I am a real estate office."

Roberta pours coffee from the carafe she made when Mrs. Donato sat down. Mrs. Donato takes hers with cream and three sugars in the kind of mug that means business.

"What kind of chemo," Roberta says, because the editor in her always wants the next noun.

"Prostate," Mrs. Donato says. She makes the sign of the cross with her sugar spoon, which Roberta has always found charming and a little theatrical. "Stage three. He has had surgery. Now they are doing the chemo to be sure. He is at his cousin's in South Philly with the four little ones and he cannot rest. The cousin said to him, Steve, you are welcome but the kids are who they are. Steve is forty I think, no, thirty eight. Divorced. The wife went to California a long time ago. He is an architect."

"He is an architect."

"Yes. With a firm. Or used to be with a firm. They have him on what is it, light duty. Frank says he is a nice quiet man. Frank has known him since college."

Roberta has eaten the rest of her pastry without noticing. Her hand is sticky. She wipes it on a napkin and then on her pajama leg because the napkin is not enough.

"Why are you telling me this, Theresa."

Mrs. Donato looks at her over the cup. The cup is Italian, white with a thin gold rim, and it makes Mrs. Donato look like a woman in a film who is about to deliver a piece of news that changes a marriage.

"Because you have a spare room," Mrs. Donato says.

"I have a spare room because I like having a spare room."

"You have a spare room because you have not had a guest in two years and you have a couch for guests."

"You can sleep on a couch."

"You can sleep on a couch when you are well. He is not well. He needs a bed. He needs a quiet house. He needs a kitchen. You are home all day, you are by yourself, you make soup like other people breathe. I am not asking you. I am telling you about it. It is up to you."

She sips. She sets the cup down. She straightens the sugar bowl by half a turn.

"It is a lot to ask," Roberta says.

"I am not asking."

"You are."

"All right, I am asking. But I am not pushing."

This is also a lie. Mrs. Donato pushes the way a tide pushes. You do not feel it.

Roberta looks out the window. A man is walking a small dog past the deli. The dog is wearing a red harness. Roberta does not know either of them. Catharine Street has been hers for nine years, since she bought the house at twenty five from an estate, with help from her father and a smaller mortgage than the listing because the kitchen still had its original linoleum. She has loved it the way some people love an animal. With her bones.

She has had four people inside the house in the last six months. The plumber, twice, for the same kitchen sink problem. Her mother, for one Saturday in May. Mrs. Donato, weekly. That is it. That is the count.

"What is his name," Roberta says.

"Steve. Moyer. Like the pitcher, no relation."

"Moyer."

"Yes."

"Theresa, I have a manuscript to finish by the eighteenth. I have a call with a writer on Friday I am dreading. I do not know where I would put this man."

"In your spare room."

"You know what I mean."

Mrs. Donato finishes her coffee. She gets up and takes her plate to the kitchen, which she also has decided she has earned. Roberta hears the water run. Mrs. Donato comes back drying her hands on a tea towel.

"Just meet him," she says.

"Theresa."

"Just meet him. Frank can bring him over for a coffee on Saturday. Saturday afternoon. You sit in the parlor like civilized people, you have a piece of cake, you say no thank you, and we are done. I have done my duty to my nephew and you have done a kindness to an old woman. That is all."

Roberta opens her mouth to say no and she hears herself say "fine."

"Fine?"

"Fine. Saturday. One o'clock. He brings a cake."

"He will bring a cake."

"Mrs. Donato."

Mrs. Donato smiles, and the smile is not triumphant. It is something more complicated. It is the smile of a person who has just done a small thing she has been thinking about for longer than she will admit.

"I will tell Frank," she says. "And I will leave you to your Saturday morning."

She crosses the parlor and lets herself out the front door. The door closes with the small thud Roberta has known for nine years. Roberta sits at the parlor table for a moment with the empty pastry box and the half cup of coffee.

She gets up. She goes to the kitchen. She washes the dishes Mrs. Donato did not get to. She puts the kettle on for fresh tea and she does not boil it. She stands at the sink instead and looks out at the fig tree.

The spare room is at the back of the second floor and gets the morning light. The bed is queen size, a white iron frame from her grandmother. The sheets are clean. The sheets are always clean in the spare room because no one ever uses them, and Roberta washes them anyway every six weeks. There is a small reading chair, a lamp, a print of a cathedral in Rouen she bought at a flea market when she was twenty six and has never decided if she likes. A window that looks over the yard and the fig tree.

It is a good room. A stranger could be all right in it.

Roberta closes the door. She stands on the landing for a second and listens. The house is quiet. The fan in the kitchen window is still on louder. She can hear it ticking against its own frame.

She thinks about the basement. She has not been down there in a month. She does not have a reason to go down. She makes a mental note to put a fresh bulb in the fixture before Saturday. If she shows him the house she does not want the basement to be the room where the bulb is out.

The basement is also cold, she remembers. It is cold even now, in August, when the rest of the house is close. She has noticed this for nine years and she has never thought hard about it.

She thinks hard about it for the first time, on the landing, in her robe, listening to a fan she should turn off. She thinks, I should turn off the fan. She does not. She goes down the stairs and into the kitchen and pours her tea and sits with her notebook open to a page where she has written, in block letters, in last night's hand, NO MORE PATIENCE.

The note is not for Steve Moyer. The note is for a writer named Daria who lives in a house in Asheville that Roberta will never see. But Roberta looks at it for a long time anyway. She underlines it. She closes the notebook.

She has, she realizes, said yes.

She has said yes in the way she used to say yes to David, which is to say she has said yes the way you agree to the weather. She has said yes the way her mother says the rosary, by reflex, with her mind on something else.

She is sitting in her own kitchen in her own house in her own life and she has just agreed to share the door of it with a sick man she has not met because an eighty year old woman she loves brought her sfogliatelle.

The fan ticks. The fig tree sleeps. The kitchen is full of a green light that is no longer the deli sign because the deli sign is off in the daytime, and now it is the green of the leaves through the back window, which is a different green entirely.

Roberta picks up her pen.

Saturday is four days away.