Chapter 23: The Return

He had driven north in March, which is not spring in Vermont, which is not spring anywhere that matters, which is the month when the snow is still on the ground but has lost its conviction, has gone gray and granular and apologetic, the month when the roads are wet with melt and the sky is the color of pewter and the Green Mountains emerge from the clouds like old arguments that will not resolve, and Henry had driven north on I-89 with a suitcase in the back seat and a box of books in the trunk and nothing else, because he had sold the apartment on East 73rd Street and given the furniture to Goodwill and packed his life into a sedan the way you pack a movement into a case, tightly, efficiently, with no wasted space and no sentiment for the things that did not fit.

He had not called ahead. This was deliberate, was a choice, was the decision of a man who understood that calling ahead would create an expectation and an expectation would create an obligation and an obligation would create a structure and the structure would determine the shape of the return, and Henry did not want the return to have a predetermined shape, did not want to arrive inside someone else's plan, did not want Frances meeting him at the door with a casserole or Marion standing on the sidewalk with a wave or Cal leaning against the barn doors with a nod. He wanted to arrive the way a clock arrives at a clockmaker's bench, without announcement, without fanfare, placed on the wood by hands that may or may not have known what they were carrying.

The exit for Montpelier came at four in the afternoon. The capitol dome appeared first, the way it always appeared first, rising above the trees like a small golden planet that had settled into the valley and decided to stay, and Henry saw it and felt the seeing in his chest, a physical sensation, a tightening, the kind of tightening that a mainspring feels when the key turns, the coils compressing, the energy building, and the energy was not joy and not dread but something in between, something that had no name, something that occupied the space between wanting to arrive and wanting to keep driving, between the known and the unknown, between the town he had left at twenty-two and the town he was entering at forty-six.

He drove down Main Street. The shops were closed — it was Sunday, late afternoon, the town in its Sunday posture, quiet, inward, the sidewalks empty — and he drove past the co-op and past the restaurant on the corner and past Cal's woodshop with its barn doors shut and past Marion's bookshop with its lights off and he came to the clock shop and he stopped.

OSGOOD & SON.

The gold leaf was dull. The sign was legible but faded, the letters retreating into the dark green background, and Henry sat in the car and looked at the sign and the sign looked back and neither of them spoke, because a sign does not speak and a man sitting in a car at the end of a long drive does not speak either, not yet, not until he has looked enough, until the looking has done its work, until the eyes have reported to the brain and the brain has reported to the chest and the chest has decided whether to tighten further or to release.

He got out of the car. The air was cold. March cold, river cold, the Winooski somewhere nearby, swollen with snowmelt, and the cold was different from New York cold, was cleaner, was less hostile, was the cold of a place that was cold because it was Vermont and not because it was indifferent, and Henry stood on the sidewalk and breathed and the air tasted like pine and wet stone and distance.

He had the key. Frances had sent it to him three weeks ago, in an envelope, with no note, just the key, the brass key to the front door of the shop, and the sending of the key was Frances's way of saying come, the way Alistair's silence on the phone was Alistair's way of saying come, the way the sign above the door was the shop's way of saying come, everyone saying come in their own language, in their own register, and the key was the most eloquent of the invitations because it was wordless and functional and it fit the lock and it turned.

The door opened. The bell rang.

The sound stopped him. The bell, the brass bell from the ship's clock, the bell that Alistair had salvaged in 1983, and Henry had not heard this bell in twenty-four years and the sound was exactly the same and nothing was the same, the room was the same and nothing was the same, the smell was the same and nothing was the same, and he stood in the doorway and the bell's overtones faded around him like a question that no one had answered.

The shop was dark. He found the light switch and the fluorescents came on — not the bench lamps, those had their own switches, but the overhead lights, the ones that Alistair had installed in 1978, the tubes buzzing and flickering and then steadying, and the shop was illuminated and Henry could see everything.

The counter, the oak, worn smooth. The pegboard, empty. The two benches, side by side, each with its own lamp and loupe and set of screwdrivers. Alistair's bench on the left, closer to the window. Henry's bench on the right, the bench that had been built for him before he was born, the bench that had waited for thirty years, patient as a clock that has been wound but not yet started.

And on the shelves along the back wall, the clocks. He did not count them then. He would count them later, would find the number fourteen, would read the tickets, would begin. But on that first evening he did not count. He simply looked.

The clocks sat in their row. Some had cases of walnut, some of oak, some of brass. Some were large — the grandmother clock, the schoolhouse regulator — and some were small — the desk clocks, the carriage clock in its tarnished brass case. They were all silent. Not one of them was running. The pendulums were still, the mainsprings were either wound down or broken, the movements were seized or neglected or simply waiting, and the silence of fourteen clocks in a room is not the same as the silence of an empty room, it is heavier, is denser, is the silence of things that should be making sound and are not, the silence of a choir that has stopped singing, the silence of a mechanism that is present but not engaged.

Henry walked to the bench. He stood at the son's bench, the one on the right, and he put his hands on the wood and the wood was cold and smooth and the smoothness was the smoothness of use, of years of forearms resting and tools being placed and parts being laid out, and the wood had absorbed the work the way wood absorbs everything — oil and heat and pressure and time — and the work was in the wood, was part of the wood, was indistinguishable from the wood.

He sat on the stool. Not Alistair's stool — his stool, the one at the son's bench, the stool that had been placed there in 1974 and that had held no one for twenty-four years, and the stool was cold and the seat was hard and the height was wrong because Henry was taller now than he had been at twenty-two, when he had last sat on this stool, when he had been a boy who did not want to be a clockmaker's son, who wanted to be something else, something faster, something that did not tick.

He sat there for a long time.

He did not go upstairs to the apartment. He did not call Frances. He did not turn on the bench lamp or open the drawers or touch the tools. He sat on the stool in the fluorescent light and looked at the shop and the shop looked at him and the fourteen clocks sat on the shelf in their silence and the bell above the door held its last overtone in the brass the way a clock holds its last chime in the metal, not sounding but present, present in the molecular structure, in the memory of the vibration.

At some point he slept. He did not intend to sleep. He put his head on the bench, on his arms, the way a schoolboy puts his head on his desk, and his eyes closed and the shop held him and the silence held him and the wood held the warmth of his face and his breath and the night passed.

---

He woke to the bell. The door opened and Frances was there, small, white-haired, in a blue coat, and she was carrying a bag from the co-op and she looked at Henry with the expression of a mother who has found her son asleep at a workbench in a clock shop on a Monday morning in March, which is an expression that exists nowhere else in the catalogue of human expressions, which is an expression made of relief and worry and recognition and the particular knowledge that a mother has when she sees that her son has come to the place she knew he would come to, eventually, when the mainspring of whatever he was doing elsewhere finally ran down.

"Your room is the same," she said.

"I know."

"You slept here."

"I fell asleep."

"At the bench."

"At the bench."

Frances set the bag on the counter. She took out a carton of milk and a loaf of bread and a block of cheddar and a bag of apples and she set them on the counter and the groceries were the groceries of a woman who had been shopping for one and was now shopping for two and the adjustment was visible in the quantities, the extra loaf, the larger block of cheese, the bag of apples instead of the three loose ones she usually bought.

"Your father is upstairs," she said. "In the apartment. He can't do the stairs alone anymore. Cal built a ramp for the back entrance. Alistair wheels himself to the shop in the morning and Cal or I wheel him back at night."

Henry had not gone upstairs. He had not seen Alistair. He had driven from New York and entered the shop and sat at the bench and fallen asleep and he had not gone upstairs to see his father, and the not-going was not avoidance and not cruelty, it was the not-knowing of what to do with the seeing, the not-knowing of how to look at a man in a wheelchair whose hands shook, a man who had been the steadiest man Henry had ever known, a man whose hands had been instruments, had been extensions of his will, had been the tools with which he shaped the world, and the hands were shaking now, were trembling, were the physical manifestation of a system losing its regulation, an escapement failing, a mechanism that could no longer control the release of its own energy.

"Go up," Frances said.

Henry went up. The back stairs, the ramp that Cal had built — he could see Cal's hand in the work, the clean joints, the smooth railing, the slight arc at the transition from flat to incline, a woodworker's ramp, a ramp built by a man who understood that a ramp is not just a surface but a passage, a transition, a thing that carries a person from one level to another — and Henry walked up the ramp and opened the door and the apartment was the apartment, small, two rooms, the kitchen and the bedroom and the bathroom, and the kitchen had a table and two chairs and a window that looked out on Main Street and Alistair was at the table in the wheelchair.

He was smaller than Henry remembered. This was the first thing. The smallness. The man who had filled the shop, who had occupied the bench the way a movement occupies a case, completely, fully, without wasted space — this man was smaller now, was contracted, was a mechanism that had been removed from its case and was sitting on a cloth, exposed, diminished, the same parts but less of them, the same structure but less of it, the same man but less of him.

"Boy," Alistair said.

"Dad."

They looked at each other. The kitchen was quiet. Through the floor, through the walls, through the building, the silence of the fourteen clocks rose from the shop below, the silence of mechanisms that were not ticking, and the silence was the third presence in the room, the unspoken thing between them, the fourteen promises that Alistair had made and could not keep and that sat on the shelf waiting for someone's hands.

"You look like your mother," Alistair said.

"I always have."

"The hands especially. Your mother's hands. Long. Narrow. I used to think they were wrong for the work. Too delicate. Not enough meat on the fingers. I was wrong."

"You haven't seen me work."

"I've seen your hands. Your hands are right."

Henry sat at the table. Alistair sat in the wheelchair. Between them, on the table, was a cup of tea — Darjeeling, the smell unmistakable, the smell of the shop, the smell of the bench, the smell of fifty years of mornings — and the cup was full, untouched, because Alistair's hands could not lift it without spilling, could not hold it steady, and the tea had gone cold and the surface was still and the stillness was the stillness of a thing that should be moving and is not.

Henry picked up the cup. He held it to Alistair's lips. Alistair drank. The tea was cold. Neither of them mentioned the coldness.

"There are clocks downstairs," Alistair said.

"I saw them."

"Fourteen."

"I didn't count."

"Fourteen. I counted them. I count them every day. From the wheelchair. I wheel myself to the shelf and I count them and there are fourteen and they are all silent and I cannot fix them and the counting is the only thing I can do with them, the only interaction, the counting, and the counting does not repair them, does not make them tick, does not fulfill the tickets, but the counting keeps them in the system, keeps them on the register, keeps them from becoming forgotten, and a clock that is counted is a clock that is known, and a clock that is known is a clock that has not been abandoned."

Henry listened. Alistair's voice was the same — the Somerset accent, the careful diction, the sentences that sounded like they had been assembled the way a movement is assembled, precisely, each word in its place — and the voice was steady even though the hands were not, the voice was regulated even though the body was not, and the steadiness of the voice was the last thing that the tremor had not taken, the last mechanism that was still functioning correctly.

"I'll fix them," Henry said.

The words came out the way words come out when you have been driving for six hours and sitting at a bench for twelve hours and sleeping on your arms for six hours and you have not eaten and your back aches and your father is in a wheelchair with a cold cup of tea and fourteen silent clocks are on a shelf below you — the words came out without planning, without deliberation, without the careful assembly that Alistair's words had, without the precision, without the regulation. They came out the way a mainspring releases when the barrel breaks, all at once, unregulated, a burst.

Alistair looked at him. The look was the look that Henry had spent twenty-four years trying to read, the look that was not anger and not disappointment and not sadness but was all three or none of the three, and now Henry saw something else in it, something he had not seen before, or something he had not been able to see before, the way you cannot see a microscopic flaw in a pallet stone without a loupe, and the something was relief. The something was the feeling of a mainspring that has been coiled too tight for too long finally being allowed to unwind, the tension releasing, the energy beginning to flow, and the relief was in Alistair's eyes and in the slight change in his posture, a settling, a relaxation, the body responding to the removal of a weight that it had been carrying.

"Good," Alistair said. "Sit beside me. I'll teach you."

Henry sat beside his father. Alistair wheeled himself to the edge of the ramp. Henry walked beside him, slowly, the pace of the wheelchair, the pace of a man who had once walked through the shop with the quick decisive steps of a craftsman moving between tasks and now rolled through it with the measured pace of a man who had nowhere to go quickly, and they went down the ramp and into the shop and Alistair wheeled himself to the bench — his bench, the one on the left, closer to the window — and Henry sat at the other bench, the son's bench, and Alistair said, "Pick up the tweezers."

Henry picked up the tweezers. They were Dumont No. 3, anti-magnetic, the tips aligned to within a thousandth of an inch, and they sat in his hand the way a pen sits in a writer's hand, the way a bow sits in a violinist's hand, and the fit was immediate, was natural, was the fit of a tool finding the hand it was meant for, and Henry did not know this yet, did not understand the significance of the fit, would not understand it for months, for years, but the tweezers were in his hand and the hand was his mother's hand and the hand was steady and the fit was right.

"Now," Alistair said. "The grandmother clock. Take it from the shelf. Open the back. Tell me what you see."

Henry took the grandmother clock from the shelf. He opened the back. He looked at the movement, at the brass plates and the wheels and the pillars and the arbors, and he saw nothing, understood nothing, the mechanism was a mystery, was a collection of shapes without meaning, was a foreign language spoken by a machine.

"I don't know what I'm looking at," Henry said.

"I know," Alistair said. "That's where we begin."

---

Six years. Six years of sitting beside his father, of being directed, of being taught, of learning the names — escapement, pallet fork, escape wheel, mainspring, barrel, fusee, arbor, pivot, jewel, train — and then the functions, and then the relationships, and then the physics, and then the feel, the intuitive understanding that comes only from repetition, from doing the thing a thousand times, from the hands learning what the mind cannot teach, and the six years were the six years and the six years were also the twenty-two years before them, the twenty-two years of growing up in a clock shop, of hearing the ticking through the floor, of smelling the oil in the hallway, of watching his father's hands from across the room, absorbing without knowing he was absorbing, learning without knowing he was learning, and the twenty-two years of unconscious absorption were the foundation on which the six years of conscious instruction were built, and the foundation was deep, was solid, was the bedrock.

And then Alistair died. A Tuesday. In the apartment, in the bedroom, in the bed. Henry found him in the morning. The room was quiet. The shop below was quiet. The fourteen clocks were still on the shelf, still silent, and Alistair was still in the bed, and the stillness of the man and the stillness of the clocks were different stillnesses — one temporary, one permanent — but they occupied the same silence, the same morning, the same shop, and Henry stood in the bedroom and looked at his father and the looking was not looking at a dead man but looking at a stopped clock, a mechanism that had run down, a mainspring that had given all it had, and the stopping was not a failure but a completion, was not an ending but a fulfillment, was the natural conclusion of a thing that had been wound and had run and had measured its time and had now delivered its last tick.

He did not cry. He called Frances. He called the funeral home. He sat at the bench.

Six months later, he opened the drawer and took out the first ticket. Edith Calloway. Grandmother clock. Strikes thirteen at midnight. Customer distressed.

He began.