It was an effort for him to turn his head. "Hello, Wilson." He raised a hand. "Thanks for dropping by."
"You doing okay?"
"Could be better," he replied. "Could be worse, though, too."
Though I came here often, Creekside sometimes depressed me, for it seemed to be full of people who'd been left behind in life. The doctors and nurses told us that Noah was lucky since he had frequent visitors, but too many of the others spent their days watching television to escape the loneliness of their final years. Noah still spent his evenings reciting poetry to the people who live here. He's fond of the poems of Walt Whitman, and Leaves of Grass was on the bench beside him. He seldom went anywhere without it, and though both Jane and I have read it in the past, I must admit that I don't understand why he finds the poems so meaningful.
Studying him, I was struck anew by how sad it was to watch a man like Noah grow old. For most of my life, I'd never thought of him in those terms, but nowadays, when I heard his breath, it reminded me of air moving through an old accordion. He didn't move his left hand, a consequence of the stroke he'd suffered in the spring. Noah was winding down, and while I'd long known this was coming, it seemed that he finally realized it as well.
He was watching the swan, and following his gaze, I recognized the bird by the black spot on its chest. It reminded me of a mole or birthmark, or coal in the snow, nature's attempt to mute perfection. At certain times of the year, a dozen swans could be found on the water, but this was the only one that never left. I've seen it floating on the pond even when the temperature plunged in the winter and the other swans had long migrated farther south. Noah once told me why the swan never left, and his explanation was one of the reasons the doctors thought him delusional.
Taking a seat beside him, I recounted what had happened the night before with Anna and Jane. When I finished, Noah glanced at me with a slight smirk.
"Jane was surprised?" he asked.
"Who wouldn't be?"
"And she wants things a certain way?"
"Yes," I said. I told him about the plans she had outlined at the kitchen table before discussing an idea of my own, something that I thought Jane had overlooked.
With his good hand, Noah reached over and patted my leg as if giving me the okay.
"How about Anna?" he asked. "How's she doing?"
"She's fine. I don't think Jane's reaction surprised her in the least."
"And Keith?"
"He's fine, too. At least from what Anna said."
Noah nodded. "A good young couple, those two. They both have kind hearts. They remind me of Allie and myself. "
I smiled. "I'll tell her you said that. It'll make her day."
We sat in silence until Noah finally motioned toward the water.
"Did you know that swans mate for life?" he said.
"I thought that was a myth."
"It's true," he insisted. "Allie always said it was one of the most romantic things she'd ever heard. For her, it proved that love was the most powerful force on earth. Before we were married, she was engaged to someone else. You knew that, right?"
I nodded.
"I thought so. Anyway, she came to visit me without telling her fiance, and I took her out in a canoe to a place where we saw thousands of swans clustered together. It was like snow on the water. Did I ever tell you that?"
I nodded again. Though I hadn't been there, the image was vivid in my mind, as it was in Jane's. She often spoke of that story with wonder.
"They never came back after that," he murmured. "There were always a few in the pond, but it was never like that day again." Lost in the memory, he paused. "But Allie liked to go there anyway. She liked to feed the ones that were there, and she used to point out the pairs to me. There's one, she'd say, there's another one. Isn't it wonderful how they're always together?" Noah's face creased as he grinned. "I think it was her way of reminding me to stay faithful."
"I don't think she needed to worry about that."
"No?" he asked.
"I think you and Allie were meant for each other."
He smiled wistfully. "Yes," he finally said, "we were. But we had to work at it. We had our tough times, too."
Perhaps he was referring to her Alzheimer's. And long before that, the death of one of their children. There were other things, too, but these were the events he still found difficult to discuss.
"But you made it seem so easy," I protested.
Noah shook his head. "It wasn't. Not always. All those letters I used to write to her were a way of reminding her not only how I felt about her, but of the vow we'd once made to each other."
I wondered if he was trying to remind me of the time he'd suggested that I do such a thing for Jane, but I made no mention of it. Instead, I brought up something I'd been meaning to ask him.
"Was it hard for you and Allie after all the kids had moved out?"
Noah took a moment to think about his answer. "I don't know if the word was hard, but it was different."
"How so?"
"It was quiet, for one thing. Really quiet. With Allie working in her studio, it was just me puttering around the house a lot of the time. I think that's when I started talking to myself, just for the company."
"How did Allie react to not having the kids around?"
"Like me," he said. "At first, anyway. The kids were our life for a long time, and there's always some adjusting when that changes. But once she did, I think she started to enjoy the fact that we were alone again."
"How long did that take?" I asked.
"I don't know. A couple of weeks, maybe."
I felt my shoulders sag. A couple of weeks? I thought.
Noah seemed to catch my expression, and after taking a moment, he cleared his throat. "Now that I think about it," he said, "I'm sure it wasn't even that long. I think it was just a few days before she was back to normal."
A few days? By then I couldn't summon a response.
He brought a hand to his chin. "Actually, if I remember right," he went o
n, "it wasn't even a few days. In fact, we did the jitterbug right there in front of the house as soon as we'd loaded the last of David's things in the car. But let me tell you, the first couple of minutes were tough. Real tough. I sometimes wonder how we were able to survive them."
Though his expression remained serious as he spoke, I detected the mischievous gleam in his eye.
"The jitterbug?" I asked.
"It's a dance."
"I know what it is."
"It used to be fairly popular."
"That was a long time ago."
"What? No one jitterbugs anymore?"
"It's a lost art, Noah."
He nudged me gently. "Had you going, though, didn't I."
"A little," I admitted.
He winked. "Gotcha."
For a moment he sat in silence, looking pleased with himself. Then, knowing he hadn't really answered my question, he shifted on the bench and let out a long breath.
"It was hard for both of us, Wilson. By the time they'd left, they weren't just our kids, but our friends, too. We were both lonesome, and for a while there, we weren't sure what to do with each other."
"You've never said anything about it."
"You never asked," he said. "I missed them, but of the two of us, I think it was worse for Allie. She may have been a painter, but she was first and foremost a mother, and once the kids were gone, it was like she wasn't exactly sure who she was anymore. At least for a while, anyway."
I tried to picture it but couldn't. It wasn't an Allie that I'd ever seen or even imagined possible.
"Why does that happen?" I asked.
Instead of answering, Noah looked over at me and was silent for a moment. "Did I ever tell you about Gus?" he finally asked. "Who used to visit me when I was fixing the house?"
I nodded. Gus, I knew, was kin to Harvey, the black pastor I sometimes saw when visiting Noah's property.
"Well, old Gus," Noah explained, "used to love tall tales, the funnier the better. And sometimes we used to sit on the porch at night trying to come up with our own tall tales to make each other laugh. There were some good ones over the years, but you want to know what my favorite one was? The tallest tale Gus ever uttered? Now, before I say this, you have to understand that Gus had been married to the same gal for half a century, and they had eight kids. Those two had been through just about everything together. So anyway, we'd been telling these stories back and forth all night, and he said, 'I've got one.' So then Gus took a deep breath, and with a straight face, he looked me right in the eye and said, 'Noah, I understand women.' "