The bookshop on State Street in Madison had a bell over the door that rang sweetly, and I stood under it that Thursday afternoon with my hat in my hand and the key to the car of my late wife in my coat pocket. I am Calvin Oates, sixty eight years old, a retired radio announcer, and I had come to meet the man whose voice had read to my wife Joan for six years from the dashboard of her car. The owner, a gray bearded man named Mr. Pruitt, pointed to the back and said quietly, “He is just setting up.”
He was a slight man of about seventy five, with white hair and round glasses, arranging folding chairs in a half circle in the poetry corner. His name was Abel Whitmore, a retired high school English teacher, and he turned when he heard me and put his hand over his heart. “You are Calvin,” he said. “She showed me your picture once. I have been asking everyone for weeks whether anyone had heard from Joan. I did not like to ask you. I did not know how to say it.” I sat down heavily on one of the folding chairs.
I told him as gently as I could. He sat down across from me and put his face in his hands, and for a minute the shop was quiet, except for the clock. Then he lifted his head and said, “Mr. Oates, I want you to understand what the recordings were. When Joan could not come on Thursdays, she asked me to read to her what I read to the group. She said she wanted it for the drive home. She said she could not bear for you to see her cry over a poem, and that she did not want you to feel you had to read to her yourself.”
A Thursday reader found in a bookshop gave one widower the afternoon to bring his wife back to him in Madison.
I gave my terms to Abel, in the quiet of the poetry corner. “Mr. Whitmore, I was an announcer for forty one years, and in the last two years my throat has left me. I could not read to my own wife, and she knew it, and she never said so. I would like to hear every one of the recordings, in order, with you beside me. And I would like to buy whatever book you are reading on Thursday, and to sit in that half circle, if you will have a man with no voice.” Abel took off his round glasses and wiped them.
He told me about the last recording Joan had asked him to make. It was not a poem. It was a letter of thanks, which she had dictated to him over the telephone, because her hands had grown unsteady, and she wanted me to hear it in a voice that was not mine, so that I would not have to hold it all at once. He had saved it for the right day. “She said you would find your way here,” he said. “She said you always followed a voice.” I laid my head back against the shelves and let the tears come down.
At that moment the bell over the door jangled, and in came Rory, the nephew of Joan, a thirty four year old with a gambling habit who had been calling me for weeks about her car. He had learned from the lawyer that the car held something. He ran straight to the back, snatched the small black drive on which Abel kept the recordings, and bolted for the exit, thinking it must be worth something. He got three steps. The group had begun to arrive, seven retired readers in cardigans and scarves, carrying their poetry books, and they filled the aisle like a hedge. The oldest, Mrs. Tate, held up her walking stick.
Rory stopped, with his chest heaving. Mrs. Tate said in her dry voice, “Young man, that is a memory, not a thing.” He opened his hand. The drive lay on his palm. For the first time he looked at me, and I saw a boy who had loved his aunt and had no one to tell. “I am sorry, Uncle Cal,” he whispered. “I did not know what was on it.” I took the drive from him gently and then put my arm around his thin shoulders. “Come and sit,” I said. “We are going to listen.”
The money consequences were quiet. The estate of Joan and me came to one million, four hundred thousand dollars, and the lawyer told me that Rory had no claim to the car, but I gave him the car anyway, with the condition that he enter a recovery program in Fitchburg, and he did. Abel declined every dollar I offered him. I paid the bookshop to keep the Thursday readings going, in the name of my wife, and I had a small studio built in the back room, where the recordings are now kept.
In the name of Joan, who passed in the spring, I started the Joan Oates Fund. It pays for audio libraries, reading groups and home visits for older readers who can no longer see the page, in Dane, Rock and Columbia counties. In the first year we placed four hundred and twelve audio players in homes and trained thirty volunteer readers. One was a retired farmer from Mount Horeb who had not finished a book since 1998. He listened to a novel in three weeks and asked for another.
On Thursdays now I sit in the half circle with the readers of the bookshop and listen. Abel reads. Sometimes Rory sits beside me, six months well, with a book on his knee. Last week, as the light went gold in the window, Abel finished a poem and put the book down, and he looked over at me, and said, “Joan would have liked that one.” I cleared my throat. I had no voice to answer him. I did not need one, and he knew it.