It was October, 1954, at the Grand View Lake House, a year and months after I arrived here, driven with my baggage by my Aunt Molly. The nights were beyond autumn in Saratoga, and beyond even that by the woods on the lakeshore: cold into the marrow, the morrow, reading Finnegan, yes, carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! I was alone in my cottage, in love with my distant and absent wife, in love with my sixty-four-year-old aunt, thirty-four years older than 1, a woman who purports to know everything about love, although she has probably known only one man, and was married to him less than two years.

Alone in the cottage, yes, and didn’t the kerosene for the heater vanish entirely from the world? It did. Himself alone with that book. I put on my overcoat, muffler, hat, and one glove, the other hand free to turn the pages, and I kept reading, ranging through the book’s final pages, the glorious monologue of Anna Livia Plurabelle: Why I’m all these years within years in soffran, all beleaved. To hide away the fear, the parted.

Words alone, not always penetrable (like women with their mysteries; and how they do fill this life with spectacle and wonder), and I see my wife on a late summer day framing Molly in the lens of her camera, the now mythical cedar waxwing cupped in Molly’s hands as she sits in the first rocker in a line of thirty rockers on the Lake House veranda, the rocker just where it was when she first saw the waxwing fall from the tree. Molly turns her head toward me and when she sees me she looks at the bird and then at the camera and the smile is there then and Giselle captures it, that smile: the soft currency of Molly’s soul.

"We were up at Saratoga lake for three weeks," Molly said. "Mama was dead six months and it was a suffocating summer. We were sitting on the veranda talking about I don’t know what, and I saw that a new arrival, a good-looking fellow who had struck up a conversation with Sarah yesterday, was talking with her again. Then I saw a bird fly into a tree on the lawn, and it must’ve hit something, because it fell to the ground. I ran out to get it and picked it up and started to cry. The newcomer squatted down beside me and said, ‘May I see it?’ And I showed him this beautiful creature that he said was a cedar waxwing. ‘It seems to have an injured wing,’ he said. ‘We can help him.’ I asked how that was possible and he said, ‘We’ll keep him alive while he gets well.’ And that’s what we did for the rest of the week. We fed him and made a nest for him in the bird cage the hotel gave us and he became the pet of the guests. I loved him so, that little creature. Everybody came to my room to see him. We took him out of the cage and he did fly a little inside the room at the end of the week, but not very well. But on the tenth day he seemed ready and, when I carried him to the veranda, a dozen guests and waitresses came out to watch him go. I released him over the porch railing and he flew so well, right up into the same tree he’d fallen from. We were all so happy. He perched there in the tree for a minute and then he fell again, not injured, but dead.

"It was sad that the bird died. I cried so hard. But I’ve been grateful to it ever since, because that’s how I met Walter. The cedar waxwing introduced us. Walter picked the dead bird up and took it into the hotel and wrapped it in a handkerchief and put it on ice and we called around till we found a place, down home in Albany, that stuffed birds. We drove down together and gave the waxwing to the little man who said he’d never stuffed such a small bird before, usually folks only stuff the big ones they shoot, owls and hawks, or their pet parrots. I still have the bird. I always bring it when I come up here."

"Who is Walter?"

"Walter Mangan, my husband. He taught Latin in a boys’ high school. He died in 1937."

"And you miss him still."

"We were so in love. Nobody loves you like an Irishman. He read me poetry about the bird.

‘. . . A sparrow is dead, my lady’s sparrow, my own lady’s delight, her sweetest plaything, dear to her as her eyes – and dearer even . . . I’ll attend you, 0 evil gods of darkness. All things beautiful end in you forever. You have taken away my pretty sparrow, Shame upon you. And, pitiful poor sparrow, it is you that have set my lady weeping, Dear eyes, heavy with tears and red with sorrow.’

"Walter and I made love in a tent the first time. He set up his pup tent in the woods one night after supper, and went out to stay in it as soon as it got dark. I went down the back stairs and met him in the spot where we watched the birds, and Walter had a flashlight. We went to his tent and he loved me and made my heart bleed with joy . . . like . . . holy and blessed Jesus . . . like nothing else. There was never anything like that, ever before, in anybody’s life I’d ever heard about. Have you? I’d bleed every night if I knew we’d both feel like that when we were done. Wouldn’t you?"

"Yes. Maybe . . .

"He never came right out and asked me to marry him. We were walking on Pearl Street one day and he says to me, ‘How’d you like to be buried with my people?’ I said I’d like that just fine. But we didn’t marry then because I couldn’t. We married when I was able and we took a flat up in the Pine Hills, and I was never happier, ever. A year passed and Tommy fell crossing a street and broke his wrist, and Sarah got sick and couldn’t cook for Chick and him, so I went back home and ran things till Sarah could get on her feet. But she couldn’t. The doctor tried everything, but she was so weak she couldn’t get out of bed, and she wouldn’t go to the hospital. Walter got impatient with me after two months of it, me being with her more than I was with him. And we fought. He said Sarah was faking sickness to keep me there, that she never forgave me for taking his attention away from her that day on the porch. But I couldn’t believe that. Why would she ever do such a thing? Walter never meant anything to her. There was no sense to it. Walter said I should hire a woman to cook and keep house for two weeks so we could drive to Virginia to see his brother, and also break in my new car. He’d bought it for me, but I hardly drove it. It just sat in the alley on Colonie Street while I took care of Sarah. Sarah wouldn’t hear of hiring anybody, wouldn’t allow a woman in the house that wasn’t family, so I didn’t go to Virginia. Walter went with one of his friends from the school, and the friend fell asleep at the wheel and went over a ravine and they were both killed."

"I fell apart when I heard the news. I couldn’t do anything. Walter’s family took over and had his body shipped home. They were furious with me and none of his sisters even called me. They sent the undertaker to tell me where the wake would be."

"I went in and sat for the last hour of the second night of the wake and never spoke to any of them. They were cool to me, nodded at me when I came in, and one came over and tried to talk, Lila, the youngest who I always liked. But I didn’t say much, even to her. I just watched, and then when the undertaker came in to tell us to say good night to Walter, that he had to close up, I went and told Walter this was not good night, that we were leaving this place. Then I told his sisters, ‘I am the widow. He was my husband. I have my own undertaker, and he’s right there in the hallway! And there was Ben Owens, standing there with three helpers, waiting for me to tell him what to do, and I told the others, ‘I’m taking him to our home, and he’ll wake from there, and I hope none of you try to stop me because I have a letter my lawyer got me from the courts (I really didn’t have a letter; I made that up), and if you raise one finger against me I’ll have the police on you. I don’t know what you thought you were doing taking Walter, but a widow is not without her rights.’ They couldn’t believe it. They thought he was theirs. But he’d left them and married me, that’s what marriage is. And so Ben Owens put him in the coffin I bought for him and carried him out to the hearse and we went to our house and had the second wake. They didn’t come. They drove behind to make sure where we were going. They thought I was totally mad, but I was never saner in my life. And I sat up with him all night long and then at five in the morning I called Sarah to tell her what I was doing, that she could come to the church if she wanted, seven o’clock mass at St. Joseph’s, where we were married. And we had the mass, and Sarah got out of her sick bed and never went back to it, and Chick and Tommy came with her, and Peter would have too, but it was too short notice. And then we went to the cemetery, with Father Mahar saying the prayers at the grave. Us arid Billy and his mother, and all the Quinns, and a few neighbors who’d heard about it were all the ones that came, but then almost nobody knew what I’d done. His family came to the cemetery and stood off to one side and nobody talked to them. And then we buried Walter in the Phelan family plot, right next door to where I’ll be buried, not with his people at all. We always had too many empty graves in our family. We always prepared for death, never for life. So I did that for him anyway."