The Sleepwalker(60)

“That’s exactly the point.”

I had to help her with the clasp that first time, but over the following weeks she learned to do it by herself. She didn’t really have places to wear it, but she liked having it with her. She kept it in her swim bag some days and in her school knapsack on others. And then there were the days when she just wore it around the house, an amalgam of mourning and dress-up.



I did keep it together at the funeral. I cried silently, as did Paige. Our father was handsome and stoic, and his voice never broke. The autumn sun gave the stained-glass windows a phantasmagoric glow.

And I did scan the sanctuary, despite the reality that I expected to learn nothing. Moreover, I understood that everyone present—and the small church was indeed packed—wanted to look at my father and Paige and me. (Of course, they wanted to see only the backs of our heads; none, I knew, really wanted to have to make eye contact with any of us as we sat in the front pew.) But I turned around and examined the crowd row by row whenever we stood and sang, and whenever Pastor Katherine Edwards welcomed another speaker to the pulpit. My father. Marilyn Bryce. My aunt. I watched Donnie Hempstead, wondering if it was possible that he and my mother could have had an affair. I decided it wasn’t. They hadn’t. But I was basing this solely on the way he stood beside his wife, Erin, and the proximity of their bodies. The way Erin discreetly held on to his elbow with her slender fingers with their impeccable nails. He was tall, like my father, with chestnut hair that showed no signs of either thinning or turning gray, and that immaculate beard. He was one of the few men in the church in a suit. A magnificent red-and-yellow necktie against a crisp white shirt. I recalled how different he had appeared the day he had been among the search parties out looking for my mother: the white T-shirt, the jeans, the way exhaustion and worry and intensity had all marked his face as he had stood beside Paige and me on the porch. In my mind, I saw my mother working with Donnie and Erin as she designed their aqua solarium. I imagined them in her small office in Middlebury or standing around a beautiful kitchen island, looking at plans. I envisioned the couple in their bathing suits, submerged to their shoulders in their hot tub. I saw my mother alone with Donnie in that tub. There she was sleepwalking to him. There he was taking advantage of her.

But this was groundless. I knew that.

And Justin Bryce? Again, unlikely. My mother would never have betrayed Marilyn. Besides, I’d read the jokes she had shared with my father about him. I rather doubted that Justin was her type. The same probably went for Donnie Hempstead with his nut-brown beard. If my mother had a type and it wasn’t Warren Ahlberg, I had a feeling it was probably a man like Gavin Rikert. Arguably—and this gave me pause—my mother’s type was my type.

I studied my father’s female friends from the English department at the college, the other scholars with whom my father might have been sleeping. And I concluded they were either asexual or settled in marriage. These, I told myself, were not the randy, erotically alive poets of Bread Loaf, the slender women who would take you by the hands and melt with you into the dew, the rugged men who would take you on the porches and Adirondack chairs beneath the nighttime August sky—though, in all fairness, I also told myself that I might be wrong. What really did I know of midlife sexuality? Or monogamy versus polyamory? Of extramarital relationships? I knew nothing.

Toward the back of the sanctuary I saw some of my friends from Amherst, including Erica, and at the very edge of the pew, beside the students he must have just met, was another traveler from Massachusetts: Lindsay McCurdy. The old magician had made the drive, too. I was moved.

And I spied Gavin: he was standing between the most distant of the stained-glass windows and the heavy door to the narthex. When our eyes met, he nodded almost surreptitiously so that only I would notice.

I listened carefully to everything my father and my aunt and my mother’s roommate from college said about her, wondering if I might find a bit of evidence in their eulogies.

But there were no revelations; there were no clues. Other than my father, no one spoke of her sleepwalking, and my father only used it poetically, expressing his hope that his wife’s ever-restless soul might now be at rest. No one spoke of her occasional bouts of depression. No one spoke of the bombshell from the Office of the State Medical Examiner.

Instead, people rather accurately captured Annalee Ahlberg’s eccentricities and talents and her creativity: her ingenuity as an architect and her inventiveness as a mom. Her friends would smile at Paige and me and tell us how much she loved being our mother. We had never doubted it: We had worn the Halloween costumes. We had felt firsthand the power of her embrace. And so we nodded at the stories, most of which we had known or had lived, and occasionally we even laughed through our tears. For most of my life, I had only heard Katherine Edwards speak in this church on Christmas and Easter. I decided that I had underestimated the pastor; maybe I had underestimated religion. Katherine made me want to come back on a regular Sunday.

At the end of the service, as I exited the church, I asked Gavin if he would be at the reception back at our home. First, however, my family—and only the family—was going to watch the mahogany box with Annalee Ahlberg’s ashes be placed into its spot in the cemetery. He reassured me that he’d be waiting at the house when we returned in half an hour.



One of my father’s poems compared wedding receptions with funerals. When I first read the poem, I had misunderstood it, assuming it was a predictable (and uncharacteristically puerile) dismissal of marriage. At my mother’s funeral, however, some of the couplets came back to me, and I realized that the poem was actually a rather astute appreciation of the unfair velocity with which time moved at these rituals for the immediate families. There were too many people for too little time. I would have two-and three-minute conversations with guests and mourners that really went nowhere, and we were all saying the same largely meaningless things: