The Never
Happy Ending
Chronicle

Not every story finishes well. Some refuse to finish at all. They peter out at the edge of the lamplight, leaving only a smell of wet stone and the half-thought of a name. This volume is for those. The chronicle does not promise rescue. It promises only that someone, somewhere, sat in a small room and wrote your sorrow down in a careful hand, and that the writing did not flinch.

You will find here neither moral nor remedy. The reader who insists upon either is gently advised to close the book and seek their consolation elsewhere — in sermons, perhaps, or in the louder novels. What remains is for those who know that grief, properly attended, becomes a kind of company; and that the unhappy ending, faithfully kept, is itself a small dignity.

We are not in the business of mending. We are in the business of witnessing; and witnessing, when honest, is its own quiet altar.

— from the editor's preface

The chapters that follow may be read in order or at random. Each is complete in its incompletion. Each begins where another might have ended, and ends where a kinder author would have begun. Carry a candle, if you have one. The pages do not always remember their own light.

The lamps were lit early that year. By four the sky had the color of an old coat — rust at the seams, the lining gone — and the village kept its windows shut against a wind that did not so much blow as insinuate. Margaret Wren walked the lane to the parsonage with a letter in her glove and the sense, peculiar and exact, that she was carrying her own future home to be buried.

She had loved him in the careful, unstrenuous way of women who have read too many novels and learned to suspect their own enthusiasms. He had loved her badly, and only on Sundays, which she had mistaken for devotion. The letter in her glove was not a confession. It was a withdrawal, drafted three times and copied at last in her cleanest hand, the kind one reserves for funerary cards and resignations from genteel societies.

There is a particular grief in being the first to admit that the season has turned, and that nothing in the room has been warm for some time.

He was not at the parsonage. He was, as the housekeeper observed without inflection, "engaged in the south room with company." Margaret left the letter on the silver tray. She did not look back at the door, although she heard, as she closed the gate, a small laugh she had once thought belonged to her.

That was the lantern hour: the brief blue minute between four and the proper dark, when one can see, with terrible clarity, both the road one has come by and the road one will not be permitted to take. She walked home in it. She did not weep. The wind, which had been insinuating, became candid; and she allowed it the last word.

Dear —, the letter began, and stopped there for a fortnight. He could not decide what to call her. Dearest was a lie now, and Madam was a small cruelty he was not yet brave enough for. So the letter waited on the desk between the inkwell and a saucer of cold tea, addressed to no one and growing, day by day, more honest in its silence.

He had meant to explain. The trouble with explanations is that they require a listener who has not already decided. By the time he understood her, she was already on a train; by the time the train arrived, she had already, in the private way of disappointed women, finished with him entirely. The letter, then, was for himself: a confession dressed as correspondence, a reckoning addressed to the room.

What we cannot send, we keep; and what we keep long enough begins, in the end, to keep us.

He folded it at last on the eve of the new year, sealed it with a wax he had bought for happier news, and placed it inside the cover of the book she had loved best. He did not post it. He did not destroy it. He did the third, less honorable thing: he let it remain, so that someone, someday, opening the book at a careless page, might read it and feel briefly, on his behalf, the precise weight of a thing not done.

The book was sold, with the rest of the library, in the spring of the following year. The letter went with it. It is, presumably, still inside.

He mapped coastlines for a living and his wife, increasingly, for a hobby. She was a country he could not get the scale of. Each evening he would lay out his charts on the long table, and each evening she would pass behind his chair and place a hand on his shoulder, and he would feel, with a small and private dread, that she was already farther away than the islands he was drawing.

She did not leave him. That was the cruelty of it. She stayed, and read by the fire, and asked after his work, and laughed at the proper places; and somewhere between the asking and the laughing she had quietly emigrated. He could not have said when. There had been no quarrel. There had only been the long, civil retreat of a woman who had decided, without announcement, that she would no longer be available for hope.

One may live an entire marriage on the wrong side of the door, and never know which evening the lock was turned.

He drew her, once, in the margin of a chart of the Sound of Harris — a small, exact figure standing on a headland with her back to the cartographer. He never showed her. He never erased it. After her death, the chart was bought by a museum, and the figure in the margin was catalogued as "unknown female, possibly decorative."

It is, he supposed, the most truthful caption his work has ever received.

The sea did not give him back. That was the long and short of it. The villagers said the kinder things one says — drowned quickly, the cold is merciful, he would have known nothing — and his mother, who had buried two husbands and was therefore an authority, accepted these consolations with the grave courtesy of a woman who knew them to be lies.

She kept the lamp lit in the front window for eleven years. Not from hope — she was past hope by the second winter — but from a stubborn, almost theological conviction that absence deserved its own ceremony, and that the lamp was the only ceremony left to her. The neighbors, at first sympathetic, came in time to find it embarrassing. She did not put it out.

Mourning, prolonged past its allotted season, ceases to be grief and becomes a kind of devotion; and devotion, the village agreed, was no longer in fashion.

On the morning of her death the lamp was still burning. The girl who came to lay her out paused, uncertain whether to extinguish it or leave it; and decided, in the end, on a small superstition of her own. She left it lit, and closed the door, and the house, for some hours, kept its long appointment with the sea.

The lamp went out by itself, before noon, when the oil ran dry. No one saw it happen. That, too, seemed appropriate.

After the funeral the crows came back to the quad, as they did every October, and settled in the elms with the easy authority of an institution. The undergraduates, who had not known her, threw bread. The faculty, who had, did not look up. It is the particular gift of crows to attend the same griefs year after year without being asked, and without, in any visible way, being moved.

Her office was cleared in a single afternoon. Books to the library. Papers to the archive. The small framed photograph from her desk — her, at twenty-four, on a beach he no longer recognized — he took home, and put in a drawer, and did not look at again for a very long time. The drawer, he found, was a more honest mourner than he was. It kept her without comment. It made no claims.

The dead, if we are lucky, leave us a small dark place to keep them in — a drawer, a margin, a twenty-minute walk — and ask, in return, only that we go there sometimes, and not lie.

The crows are still in the elms. The photograph is still in the drawer. He goes there, sometimes, on the bad evenings, and opens it, and looks; and the crows, by some old arrangement, do not comment. That is the whole of the chapter. There is no further movement. There was never going to be.

This volume was set in Playfair Display for its titling and Crimson Pro for its body, with running heads in Josefin Sans. It was bound in dark cloth and stamped in gilt, in the manner of the better nineteenth-century imprints, and is offered to the reader without apology and without epilogue.

No happiness was added in the editing. Where a story seemed inclined toward consolation, it was permitted to fail in its own way, at its own pace. The editors regret nothing.

FINIS.