Lake People Read Online Free PDF Page A

to calm her nerves or to put herself to sleep. She was not a woman to alter her own rules. That man had forced her, I decided. Alexander McCaffrey had forced my dear aunt.
    That year, on a Friday afternoon after my courses in Boston, I boarded a trolley and rode over to the Pierce building. Just as Signe had walked up and down that street, I now paced there like an obsessed woman. When the bell struck to mark an hour’s time passing, I entered the building. I had practiced what I wouldsay. I told the woman working the front desk that I would like to speak with Alexander McCaffrey. As she flipped through a circular address reel, I became sure that she would say no man of such a name worked there. Yet she gave me directions to his cubby. It wasn’t but two doors down the hallway. He would be in the fifth desk on the right. “It’s the man who takes the orders from Kettleborough, New Hampshire?” I asked. She assured me that it was.
    In that hallway I lost what I would say, and I went back out again for fresh air. In winter, in our part of the country, a gray darkness settles early upon us. In that darkness, with the voices of the people passing before me somehow distant, I suddenly thought of Hjalmar. To die alone in this cold place, I thought. As it turned out, Hjalmar had died of cold, as Signe had worried he would. I learned this when, as Signe had said, I was old enough to not frighten myself with it. I also learned that when he had lost his apartment she had in fact asked him to live with us, and she had also given him a fair amount of money, both of which he had refused. That coat, I recalled when Signe told me the story, could have saved his life. Yet to regret giving it was something I was sure Hjalmar never did.
    I walked back into that building. I tapped the man’s shoulder, and asked him if he truly was Alexander McCaffrey. He had a head of soft, neatly brushed hair, and his fingers were long. The nails, I noticed, were clean and well cut. His top lip, which I imagined would be nothing more than a cliff that dropped sharply into his mouth, was round and full and deeply cleft. That face: he could have been a boy. He stared up at me as if he had been caught. How I must have scared that poor man. His secret was revealed, he must have thought with a terror. For the truth, I would learn, was simple: Alexander McCaffrey was a gay man, and only my aunt Signe knew.
    “I know what you have done to my poor aunt,” I said with conviction. And Alex, of course he lied.
    “Signe?” he said. “I do not know a Signe. Kettleborough? No, I’ve never been there.”
    His bottom lip slipped into his mouth and he sucked on it the way a baby might. Any passerby would have known he was lying. Yet I could say nothing in reply.
    In her last years, we packed Signe’s things and moved her into my family’s house on the hill. On good days she turned opera on in the kitchen and walked from room to room with her arms waving, as though from her own limbs the sounds came forth. On neutral days she read, and there were not many bad days, even at the very end. Into our house, along with her bags, I had also carried the bravery to bare all I could to Signe before she died, and to ask for all I wanted. What happened? I asked her one day, as she sat in her living room chair, her eyes open wide to the sunlight that poured in upon her. What I meant to ask was what had happened on that day that she had drifted so far out in the lake. What happened with Alexander to cause her to do that, I wanted to know.
    “My heavenly days,” she said. The words rolled fully from her lips. She clapped her hands together and I knew that in her mind she was drifting far away. “Go to the drawer,” she said after some time. I knew which drawer she meant; it was in one of the only pieces of furniture she had brought in the move, and it was where the catalog had been kept. “An envelope,” she said. “March fourteen I believe it says.” That date was my