by Ann Boaden
It always began in brightness.
He was home again, and a boy, and he and Amanda were in Narrow Lane, behind the house. The sea singing a long way off, like a sea in a shell. Mandy’s hand in his. Just the two of them, the beautiful little step-sister who, miraculously, loved him, and himself.
Then she was gone. He never knew how. But he could see her toddling down the lane, her white dress shining. He called to her, half-laughing, “Mandy! Come back here, you naughty!” And then dusk fell, and darkness, and he was afraid, and he called, “Mandy! Mandy!” and ran, stumbling because he was awkward and off balance, and always ahead of him, the white of the little girl’s dress.
Always ahead, always smaller. A moon at wane, a wafer, a slip of petal, a—nothing. Only darkness. And suddenly he was upon her, white and crumpled. And when he turned the little girl over to pick her up, it was the woman Amanda, and her face ran with blood. And someone said, “How could you do this to me?” and it wasn’t Mandy who spoke, it was himself. And Amanda said, “It’s all right, Marty,” and he wanted to hold her and kill her…
He woke sobbing.
And so, in America, he arranged his life to keep the dream at bay. Nothing given or risked. A life of shadows and safety. He settled in an Illinois river town, large enough for privacy, small enough for security. Held a mid-management job at John Deere Plow Works. Rented a room with the hard-working Lambricks, who put themselves and their boys to bed at ten o’clock every night and drove into town Saturdays to pay their bills. Joined the First Congregational Church, enough like the Methodist chapel back home for him to fit in, but larger, therefore less intrusive. Regular investments, a conservative portfolio. Regular tune-ups for the Oldsmobile. Annual physicals. Eight to five weekdays, golf Saturdays (weather permitting) at ten. One cigar after supper.
And in this life the dream came less often.
Then one Sunday he met Irene.
She was at church, she and her mother, the guests of friends. She wore a light straw hat that morning, and her face beneath it was pale and fine-boned. She and he looked alike, people said; hardly surprising; her family had come from a village close to his own home in Cornwall, and in that small boot of Britain neighboring means cousinship. She was a high school teacher. She read Milton and Browning, as his stepmother had done; wove them into conversations as elegant and deliberately paced as her stride when they’d walk along the river on Sunday afternoons in fall. He was forty-six, she two years younger. Safe ages. A safe and sensible friendship, based on shared background and present tastes. Nobody could wonder…or try to rearrange, as well-meaning church folk would do.
No risks.
And then, abruptly, things changed. One moment, one summer morning.
It was his vacation. He’d gone up to visit her in the Door Peninsula in Wisconsin, where she and her mother always spent Irene’s three-month school break. They were on an early walk, he and she, the new light just coming, and they saw the fox.
He came out of the woods, on lean legs that seemed too tall for his red switch of body. He was young, still gangly. He paused; they paused. Across the light that wasn’t quite morning they looked at each other, they and the little fox.
Irene did not gush; did not say how cute he was because he wasn’t cute. He was scruffy and bony and something had torn his right leg, so that red glistened against his fur and he went favoring the hurt. She spoke to him softly. “How dark your eyes are. You know everything and nothing, don’t you? And you are not afraid.”
And then, gently, she put her hand on Martin’s arm. And in that half-light the world dislimned.
The dream came back that night.
He cut his vacation short and went home the next day, their puzzled, courteous faces a white blur.
But after that the dream would not leave him. And now it was mixed with a small lame fox weeping like a child, and Irene’s face, calm and beautiful and shining in the night.
He began to spend his evenings sitting by the river, alone. The heft and sheen of it diminished and comforted him. The light would drain from the sky, and the river would keep it, and then it would be dark and lights from the Iowa shore would lance down the gently rucking water and he would get up and go home. It did not hold off the dream, but it made a soothing space between the day and the terrible night.
He would not see Irene again. When her first letter came, elegant and descriptive, deliberately asking nothing, he waited a week; wrote a few stiff lines—not sure about his plans for the rest of the summer…in and out, he expected. He did not answer the next letter, and the ones after that he threw away unopened. She stopped writing. He was relieved. Relieved and—lessened. He felt, those summer nights by the river, almost as if he were shrinking physically. His shoulder began to ache again.
And then one evening she came to him by the river. The light was going; there was a streak of sunset across the water. Her dress burned in the blue like a white flame.
“Irene,” he said, and made to stand. “What are you doing here?”
She said, “The Lambricks told me you were out. I guessed where you’d be. We used to….” And then: “What are you afraid of, Martin?”
Direct. Gently, inexorably direct. Yes. Partly, he had feared that.
He sat back and looked at the river. She sat down beside him. The wooden slats of the bench were hard against his shoulder. After awhile she said, “I’ll tell you what I am afraid of. I am afraid of growing old and ill and ugly and incompetent, and most of all of being alone. And of—something else. I think you know it.” She waited. Looked at the river, brightening in the darkening evening. Irene was good at waiting.
Daisies grew wild in the grass at their feet. White daisies that shimmered in the falling darkness. He reached down and pulled one up. “I—can’t, Irene,” he said finally. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t think you are,” she said. “I think you’re angry.”
“Angry?” Surprise drove him into speech. “I don’t get angry.”
“I think you did once, and it stays with you.”
He flared, “I wasn’t—it was—” and then stopped.
The deep mournful voice of a tug throbbed from the river. Like the ache in his shoulder. She said, “Was it to do with your sister?”
“With—her? Why would you think that?”
“Because I have been thinking about you. About your life. Because you never speak of her—and others do.”
“What others?”
“The people we knew back home. We didn’t live so very far apart, you know. She was greatly admired.”
The memory came, sweeter than the moon on the sea. Where they had walked that night. When the darkness of the war made it necessary and possible to say things, to disclose what you would never risk saying otherwise. You are so beautiful, Mandy, so strong and dear, everything I have ever wanted or wanted to be. Can you understand how much that means—when I’m not—when just to look at you is like—morning. Ever since you were born….
No Marty. And she had moved away from him. No you mustn’t….you really mustn’t, you know.
But I—what? What have I done? Mandy? I never—
It’s all right then, Marty. Let’s go home now. It’s all right.
“She was very young to leave home, wasn’t she,” Irene said. Her voice was even, conversational. She added, after a moment, “Much less nurse in London through the blitz, when she could have—”
He said, “Stop. Stop it.”
There was salt in his eyes, salt blown off the sea. It’s all right. It’s all right, Marty. The daisy petals were limp and shredded in his hand. Their scent, astringent and with just the sweet edge of decay, clung to him. Like the words, like the damned injustice of their forgiving, when there was nothing—
“It wasn’t that. It wasn’t like that. I only wanted—it wasn’t necessary.” He threw the flower away from him and got up.
She let a little space move between them, a space that felt like the rhythm of the brightening and darkening river, then she came beside him. With a finger so delicate he hardly felt it, yet shivered to the bone at its movement, she traced his shoulder that wasn’t right, that wasn’t like the other one, that made him run stumbling and off balance even in his dreams, that was the reason why he hadn’t been able to go to the war, the reason why it was Amanda, not himself, who had left home after that night, Amanda who had died before she was twenty, taking her beauty and her forgiveness into the holocaust that burned them both away. “It wasn’t necessary,” he said again. And then, “I didn’t need forgiving.”
Irene said, “Don’t we all?”
“Not for that!” He turned to her, violently. “You don’t know how it was—nobody knows. I—I never did— Never wanted—that. The thing she thought. I expect you don’t believe it, nobody would believe I only wanted to— If she had let me explain—but she was so stubborn. Going off that way. So bloody stubborn. I never wanted—” A sob tight as a fist came up in his throat and he turned and walked to the river’s edge.
After a long time she said, “What did you want?”
“To love her.” He had never spoken these things, the things that lay rough in his heart; he was astonished to hear himself saying them now, almost involuntarily, astonished and terrified and suddenly enraged. And it was the rage that said, “I didn’t want—to—have her that way! What I wanted was so much bigger–to love her—to be allowed to love her! No one understands—they make it—dirty—and—Was that so bloody wrong?”
A train blasted down by the river. When it had gone by, “Wrong? How could that kind of loving be wrong? Only—I think perhaps—you must try and do it better.”
“I tell you I didn’t—I knew you wouldn’t believe me.”
“No, Martin, I don’t mean that. Of course I believe you. No—what I mean is—you must love her now. And better.”
The race of fury halted. He said, “Love her now? But she’s—gone.”
“Yes but your grief isn’t. Or your anger. It’s burning you, shrivelling you. Martin, forgive her.”
Where the pain had been there was a sudden stillness. As if it had been siphoned out and left him empty at the center. He said the word, slowly and tentatively, as it were in another language. “Forgive….”
“She was young and she was wrong. She didn’t know. She did you a monstrous injustice. But now—you can’t explain, to her or to anyone. You can only forgive. Or hate.”
He said, “It’s not so simple ….”
“Oh, my dear, that’s just what it is. Simple and clear and terrible. But I—I think I can help you. If you let me.”
He had no answer; only the shudder inside himself, in the emptiness, like the shudder he still felt in the deformed shoulder she had touched.
After a time she said, conversationally still, almost clinically, “What I mean is this. I can’t—fix anything for you, but I can—I can love you. You asked what I was doing here. That’s it. I am loving you. I came to ask you to let me love you.” She let out a breath. It shook with what might have been laughter. “Ironic. We have both wanted the same thing.” And then, “Oh my dear, would it be—so hard?”
He thought it was the hardest thing in the universe. The pain of it, and of his need, and of something—something—piercing like a light far off, bent him. He looked down at the swift, swift, dark and bright river.