The Cut-Glass Stand

They ate in the front room with the stove going and the door to the kitchen open so that the heat went back and forth between the rooms, and outside the wind came off the fields and pressed on the windows, and in the whole of that house there was not one sound that anybody had to make an effort not to hear.

Tessa Bright talked. She talked about Plattsburgh and the motel and a man at the motel who had been arrested for something she never found out what, and about the chorus at the high school, and about her mother, twice, and then stopped talking about her mother, and went on to something else. She had made the doughnuts with the last of the sugar in the house. She ate two, and told him he had eaten three, and this was true, and they both laughed, and the laugh went out through the front room and up the stairs of that house into the empty rooms, and it was, for about four minutes, a kitchen in which two people were having supper.

The cat was Verna Kelleher's cat and it was eleven years old and it was the only living thing on that place that had ever been given anything unconditionally. It was a heavy gray animal named Pete and it had never in its life been made welcome in the front room, because the front room was closed, and it came in that evening through the kitchen door and stopped, and looked at the fire, and sat down in front of it in a house where it had never once been allowed to sit.

It got up on the chair that stood at the end of the table — Tessa's chair, where Tessa was not sitting, because Tessa was at the stove — and from the chair it got up onto the table, and from the edge of the table it walked the length of the cloth toward the middle, the way cats walk, without hurry, examining everything, as if it had all the time there had ever been.

Tessa turned round with the pot in her hand and said, "Pete. Pete. Get down."

The cat looked at her and put out one paw and rested it on the rim of the cut-glass stand.

A pedestal dish of glass does not fall like a cup. It stands a moment longer than a man expects, and then it goes all at once, and it comes off a table with the sound of a very small bell struck once, and then struck again on the floor.

The cat was gone. The doughnuts went into the fire. Tessa Bright put the pot down on the stove and stood with both hands in front of her mouth.

Then she began to pick up the pieces.

I have to write down what was actually there on that floor, because the county has made a kind of joke of it for twenty-five years and the joke is wrong. There were not two pieces or three. There were fourteen, and one of them was a sliver no bigger than a fingernail, and the pedestal was broken clear across the narrow part, which is the one break in a piece of glass that cannot be hidden and cannot be repaired with anything a household owns.

Wade Kelleher came in from the kitchen with the lamp in his hand and stood over her and said, "Don't cut yourself."

She said, "It's the only thing."

"It's a dish."

"It's the only beautiful thing in this house," Tessa Bright said, and she was crying now, in the way that people cry who are not used to it and have promised themselves something, which is to say almost without a sound, and with her hands going on picking up the glass.

He got the shop light and they searched the floor for twenty minutes, on their knees, the two of them, in a house with nobody else in it, and they found thirteen of the fourteen pieces and never found the sliver, and that sliver is still somewhere in the floor of the front room of that house, and I have looked for it, and I did not find it either.

Then he sat down at the table with the pieces and he glued them.

He was good with his hands and this was his one accomplishment and he used it that night on a piece of glass, and he sat there until eleven o'clock with a tube of clear epoxy and a toothpick and a shop light on an extension cord, and Tessa Bright sat beside him on a kitchen chair with her arms on the table and her chin on her arms and watched him, and neither of them said anything for an hour.

What the county says about that is that it was funny: a man gluing a dish so his wife wouldn't know. I have sat in that hardware store and heard it said, and it is a good joke for a small town, and it lets everybody off, exactly the way the story of the hill lets everybody off, and I am not going to write it that way, because it was not funny at four minutes past eleven that night and it was not funny to the two people in that room.

At eleven o'clock he set it on the table and turned it in the light. It was whole. It was whole the way a bone is whole after a bad break: you could not see the break from a yard away and you could not look at anything else from a foot away, and the faint lines ran across the flat of it like the veins in a leaf, and there was a corner of the rim where a chip was missing and where you could see, if you looked, that something had been there that was not there now.

Tessa said, "She'll see the chip."

"There's no rim on it where she'd notice," Wade Kelleher said. "It goes in the back."

"It goes in the back," she repeated, and then she said something that neither of them ever told anybody, and that he told me, once, at the end of the winter, in about eleven words, and which I am not going to set down because it was given to me in the kitchen of the house it happened in and it was not given to me to publish.

What I will set down is the thing that happened after it, and it is the reason I have written all of this.

She reached out and put her hand on his sleeve. It was a small thing. She was nineteen and her hand was on his forearm through the cloth of a shirt and it stayed there for as long as it takes to say a short sentence, and he did not move, and he did not take her hand, and he did not take it away.

Then she took her hand back and stood up and said, "I'll do the plates," and did the plates.

At half past eleven he went out to check the barn, which did not need checking, and stood in the yard in the cold with his hands in his pockets, and the night was clear over the Hollow and the road came down off the shoulder of Barlow's Hill in a white line with the dark of the woodlot above it and the black of the single elm below, and he stood there for a long time, and then he took the sled down off its two nails and stood with it a while in the dark and hung it back up, which did not need doing either, and he went in.

And that was the fourth of March, and Verna Kelleher came home on the fifth, and after that night those two were never alone together under that roof again.

I want to say one thing about this chapter, and then I will go on, because I have to go on, and the county has been going on for twenty-five years.

The pieces of that stand are still in the house. She has it. It stands on the top shelf of the sideboard behind the gravy boat, wrapped in the same dish towel it was wrapped in the day it came out of the crate, and she takes it out, on occasion, and looks at it. I have seen her do it. She does it when she thinks nobody is in the front room. I saw it once, in the last week I was there, from the kitchen doorway, and I did not go in and did not say anything, and she put it back on its shelf and closed the door and went on with the evening, and I have not told anybody in that county about it, and I never will, and I am writing it here because it happened in a house I was living in, and because if a man is going to tell the truth about a thing he ought to tell all of it.