Various Miracles by Carol Shields Page A

love he had succumbed to ten years earlier in Rome, he announced to the audience, holding up a hand for attention, that he would be the first to take a vow of complete silence for the sake of the planet that had fathered him.
    Almost at once he regretted his words, but hubris kept him from recanting for the first twenty-four hours and, after that, a kind of stubbornness took over. Isobel met him at the airport with the words, “You went too far.” Later, after a miserable, silent attempt at lovemaking, she said, “I’ll never forgive you.” His children, clamoring to hear about his moment of heroism, poked at him, at his face and chest andarms, as though he were inert. He tried to tell them with his eyes that he was still their father, that he still loved them.
    “Leave him alone,” Isobel said sharply. “He might as well be a stranger now. He’s no different than anyone else.”
    She became loud and shrewish. When his silent followers arrived at their door—and in time there were thousands of them, each with the same blank face and gold armband—she admitted them with bad grace. She grew garrulous. She rambled on and on, bitter and blaming, sometimes incoherent, sometimes obscene, sometimes reverting to a coarse, primitive schoolyard Spanish, sometimes shouting to herself or cursing into the mirror or chanting oaths—anything to furnish the emptiness of the house with words. She became disoriented. The solid plaster of the walls fell away from her, melting into a drift of vapor. There seemed to be no shadows, no sense of dimension, no delicate separation between one object and another. Privately she pleaded with her husband for an act of apostasy. Later she taunted him. “Show me you’re still human,” she would say. “Give me just one word.” The word
betrayal
came frequently out of her wide mobile mouth, and so did the scornful epithet
martyr
.
    But time passes and people forget. She forgot, finally, what it was that had betrayed her. Next she forgot her husband’s name. Sometimes she forgot that she had a husband at all, for how could anything be said to exist, she asked herself loudly, hoarsely—even a husband, even one’s self—if it didn’t also exist in the shape of a word.
    He worried that she might be arrested, but for some reason, his position probably, she was always let off with a warning. In their own house she ignored him, passing him on the stairs without a look, or crossing in front of him as though he were a stuffed chair. Often she disappeared forhours, venturing out alone into the heat of the night, and he began to suspect she had taken a lover.
    The thought preyed on him, though in fact he had long since forgotten the word for
wife
and also the word for
fidelity
. One night, when she left the house, he attempted to follow her, but clearly she was suspicious because she walked very quickly, looking back over her shoulder, making a series of unnecessary turns and choosing narrow old streets whose curbs were blackened by fire. Within minutes he lost sight of her; soon after that he was driven back by the heat.
    The next night he tried again, and this time he saw her disappear into an ancient, dilapidated building, the sort of enclosure, he remembered, where children had once gone to learn to read and write. Unexpectedly he felt a flash of pity; what a sad place for a tryst. He waited briefly, then entered the building and went up a flight of smoldering stairs which seemed on the point of collapse. There he found a dim corridor, thick with smoke, and a single room at one end.
    Through the door he heard a waterfall of voices. There must have been a dozen people inside, all of them talking. The talk seemed to be about poetry. Someone—a woman—was giving a lecture. There were interruptions, a discussion, some laughter. He heard his wife’s voice, her old gilt-edged contralto, asking a question, and the sound of it made him draw in his breath so sharply that something hard, like a cinder