Spring 2015
He has forgotten the spade. So he leaves both bars jammed underneath a stone and stalks back
up to the shed. Faintly, and then growing as he nears, he hears the telephone ringing again. They
will not be put off. He can just hear Susan arguing with her sisters, “Well, let me just try one more
time . . .” Was Susan like Patricia with her three sisters? Four sisters in each generation. Too much.
Patricia was the conciliator, the peacemaker in her family. And Susan herself will exhaust all chances
and beyond. Then the others. The two middle ones. And most vocally Jaimie, always the angriest,
always the fatalist -- and usually with a disgusting cigarette in her hand which he will not allow in
the house, at the house, anywhere inside or outside -- taking the opposite tact.
“Leave him go. Who cares. He’d just bring down the party . . .”
Still, he has been expecting this. His birthday. His first without Patricia. Bound to make much
of it. He picks up the spade and turns out of the shed. But then he jumps, brought up against his
own red face looking back at him. He has forgotten Patricia’s penchant for the found because here
he’s forced to stare at his own face in a floor-length, gold-framed mirror that she bought at the secondhand for two dollars last year some time. Some time before the inevitable.
Something for the rabbits , was how Patricia explained it.
“To scare or to primp?” He was dismissive at the time and now feels guilty staring at himself. He
had dismissed her purchase and was it the very next week she went into the hospital? Probably not.
That bit of timeline is too neat. She had responded with one of her be-that-as-it-mays. He looks at
himself in the mirror now and hears her. Then he scoffs and turns. He never cared for his own image
and trained himself in youth to not really look at his face while shaving. Red, scowling thing. Isaac
Stritch turns and shuts the door.
But gently. Gently. It has done him no harm. He walks back down the path with the spade, its
handle still slick from the linseed oil he applies to all the garden tools. He tries to dismiss his own
red face from his mind. But more memories crowd the morning. Faces and names summoned as if
excavated up from the earth.
Oh, Professor Stritch! You always look so angry!
And now the name Missy Misamore, always there like a ghost. Missy Misamore. A wave across
the Diag. A dread in his chest. And her words, always the words of Missy Misamore, like a recurring
spirit.
Oh, Professor Stritch! You always look so angry!
The phone fades now from hearing. He digs in with the spade and somewhere above him on
the summer porch he feels Patricia’s presence. But now Missy Misamore, too. She always said it
cheerily enough, cheerily as she always said everything. But she said it every damned time she saw
him. Cheerily. Bright scrubbed face, hair pulled back with a headband, pleated skirt. Timeless. One
of those students with her hand always in the air in class. Ready with a comment, usually inane.
Missy Misamore. The name comes back when all other students have been forgotten. Missy Misamore
hovers across time. He digs in with some distaste now and pries a small stone out of the ground and
places it on the wall of the herb garden. The name ruins a perfectly good morning. Or had it been
the phone call?
Oh, Professor Stritch! You always look so angry!
A car door slams above him and it startles Isaac Stritch again. Jumpy, he thinks, and what is the
matter with you? The incessant phone ringing. Voices from the past. He has a sense that a piano has
stopped playing though he does not remember a piano playing in the first place and perhaps it is
The Linnet's Wings