Tallis' Third Tune

by Ellen L. Ekstrom

  “Can’t argue with that,” Freud sighed, throwing in his hand.

  I ran to the literature rack and spun it, hoping there would be a train ticket or anything that would take me back to Scarborough. There was nothing to help, and I looked around the Shop in desperation. Tears were starting to well in my eyes and I felt the lump in my throat as I choked back a sob. I reached into my pocket for a tissue and took out a marvelous, beautiful, perfectly oval stone. It was the color of my book, which the Proprietress now took out of the case and placed a gold star on the next to the last page. The star suddenly became iridescent and sparkling, as if alive.

  “Alice, if you please?” The Proprietress placed my box on the velvet square and opened it, looking at me from over her glasses. She jerked her chin towards the box and I placed this new object with the other two. “Now it’s done – or will be soon enough. Two wrongs definitely make a right!” Suddenly, all three began to glow and the light became a blinding flash so that when I was able to see again, I was back at Scarborough. The sun was setting and had stopped glinting off the windows. I glanced at Quinn and waited.

  “You know what my life was like, growing up – what with my parents, everything,” Quinn began. “My father controlled everything, from when I got up in the morning and what breakfast I ate, to who my friends were. I was pretty much forced into everything I did – except the attempt at ice hockey. Everything I wanted was taken away one by one until the only thing I loved was the music and the cello. I was able to lose myself and get away from everything that hurt.”

  “I always felt bad because I couldn’t help you.”

  “You did. You weren’t so much a faery princess as an angel – my guardian angel.”

  “Please don’t call me an angel – I’m far from that!” I cried.

  “You are! Don’t you see, Alice? You kept me sane and when we were together…”

  “Why didn’t you stand up to him? We might be married today if you had.”

  “You’ve got every right to resent me for that,” Quinn sighed, as he let go of my hands and moved away just a bit, looking at his hands, which were trembling.

  “I’m sorry – I’ve been holding that in for years,” I murmured and swallowed the lump in my throat, wiped away the first tears.

  “And I blew some pretty good opportunities to set things right with you,” Quinn said now, turning to look at me.

  “Well, that goes both ways, doesn’t it?”

  “Even so, I’m one fucked up guy. You have to know that. If we had got married, God knows what might have happened – it might not have lasted a year. And it’s all because of my father, I know that now.”

  “Quinn.”

  “Alice, he was a monster. He did things to me…”

  “Don’t tell me, please, I can guess. It will only make me sick to my stomach!”

  Quinn nodded. “It went as far as my mother, too. This wasn’t something we shared with our friends and neighbors. We didn’t talk about it then – we don’t today. If only I had had the courage…”

  He broke down. I embraced him as hard as I could and felt his tears on my shoulders, didn’t mind that he was squeezing the air out of me. He was safe with me and he knew it.

  “I wish I could have helped.”

  Quinn nodded and moved away, wiped his eyes. “It broke me, destroyed me. Now I’m so confused about who and what I am, Alice. My father taught me that what he did was normal. I was confused and ashamed. I saw how other parents acted with their kids, and there was Dennis and you. The love was so obvious and it was there. I wanted that kind of family, a place where I felt safe. Ever since I can remember, my father used me.”

  He paused and I drew Quinn into my arms. He leaned against me and again I could feel his tears, how he desperately tried to stay composed. I kissed him gently and touched his cheek.

  Drawing a breath, he continued. “That Christmas when I proposed and my parents and I argued was the worst. When I got home from your place, I unlocked the gun my mother kept in her study and thought about killing myself. Then I found my father and threatened him. He turned it around and threatened you, said he knew people who could ruin you and Dennis, said he’d send someone to your place – never mind. This is probably shocking you, isn’t it?”

  I shook my head.

  Not what I had done before.

  “I got the worst beating of my life when he followed me to the library and asked what I was doing. So I got on that plane as my parents demanded and I regretted it. Pretty soon, I started to forget and got lost in my studies and my work – but there wasn’t a day I didn’t think about you. I wanted to pick up the phone but I thought by then you wouldn’t care. Or you’d hate me.”

  The sky was darkening as if the sun was being extinguished. The shadows were lengthening. The wind now became bitterly cold and despite this, I needed to be away from Quinn – I was going to be sick. Whispering an apology, I slipped away to the women’s room and knelt over the ancient toilet as waves of nausea made me vomit for what seemed like forever. And then I wept.

  I don’t know how long I knelt in that stall but when I came out, the Proprietress handed me paper towels and a glass of water.

  “You weren’t supposed to know.” Her voice lacked its sarcasm and bite. It was a quiet statement, and one made with concern.

  “It’s not something people talked about then,” I said, wiping my mouth and then taking a drink of water. “He needs me and I won’t be able to help.”

  “He needs time and you can give him that.”

  “But that would mean…no.”

  “Which Hell is worse, Alice Rose?” the Proprietress asked quietly. “His, or yours?”

  It dawned on me, then. “Two wrongs make a right,” I whispered. “Why it has to be this way, I don’t know.”

  “Get back out there. He needs you.”

  Obedient to her will as always, I nodded and left the women’s room. Quinn was still sitting on the bench, not, as I imagined, standing at the cliff ready to throw himself off. He looked up and smiled as I approached and held out his hand.

  “Thank you. I’ve been holding that in for so long.”

  “Haven’t you told your mother?”

  “No – I’m almost ready for that. You know, I’ve always felt so ashamed, so different. And then I met you – I’d always been attracted to you, ever since we came from England when I was ten. I never knew what to say to you or how to act, but you had such a beautiful smile and your large eyes, your gentleness – I could lose myself and my shame just being around you. Then I knew all I had to do was say, ‘Hey! Alice.’”

  “And I waited for you outside my locker, hoping you’d come by and say hello.”

  “Here’s another confession – at first I wanted to be with you to annoy my father. Oh it did, believe me, he didn’t like it one bit! Then after we started meeting in the music room for lunch, and when we went on our first date, I knew that wasn’t the real reason. It was because I loved you. I couldn’t wait to see you every day, and when we made love…”

  My heart was pounding and I was breathless when he took my face in his hands and kissed me, perhaps one of the most intimate and passionate we shared.

  “I need your forgiveness, Alice!”

  I smiled up into his large eyes that were brighter now. “No you don’t; I’ve forgiven you a hundred times,” I whispered.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to hurt you again.” He cradled my head on his breast and said, “I want to be with you for the rest of our lives. I’ve never given up hope, but I need to figure myself out. I need to take care of my anger and my pain and I can’t expect you to take on the burden. I need time.”

  “How much do you want, Quinn?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated himself. “That’s why you should go ahead and marry him if that’s what you want. I can deal with it.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “The time isn’t right. Not yet. One last confession: when I go home next month, I�
��m going to meet with the Berkeley Police and tell them all that happened. It’s going to kill my mother, I know it. I hate doing this, but I can’t go on. And I’m going to get some help.”

  “You know that I will always, always be there for you no matter what. When you’ve sorted out things, give me a sign and I’ll come to you and we’ll take it from there. If it turns out that we cannot be lovers, at least we will be friends – I know that much,” I whispered as I kissed him.

  “I’m asking so much of you!”

  “It’s something I’m not afraid to take on.”

  He stood and pulled me up with him and we walked down castle hill with the sun barely a pink ribbon on the horizon. Back at the house, I curled up on the rug at his feet while he played the cello. Before we went to bed that night he played his rendition of A Time for Us again, singing the lyrics in Italian in his clear, bari-tenor voice.

  Going up, he turned me gently on the stairwell and whispered, “You’re not married yet, Alice!” before he kissed me.

  Our two nights together were nothing like those I had with Donovan. They were full of tenderness and love, passion born of love and respect and that made his revelation easier to bear. It made our parting less painful – and full of hope.

  I took the Ralph Vaughan Williams album from a cupboard in my living room in Gillygate and handed it to Quinn when he came to say goodbye after our return to York.

  “Here’s the sign. Return it and I’ll know we’ll both have a lot to talk about.”

  Quinn’s eyes widened at the sight of the album. “I gave this to you…you’re sure about this? Everything?” he asked.

  “It gives me, us, hope.”

  That hope, which had faded and died several times in my life, was reborn in me the day the record album arrived.

  Chapter 16

  The record album sat on a shelf for weeks while I made plans.

  “Why are you keeping it?” Donovan wanted to know when he found it and blew off the dust. “We don’t have a turntable.”

  “It’s a memento from a simpler time,” I remarked, looking up from my editing of a monograph. “Leave it.”

  Donovan's face screwed up in a frown. “Dear God in heaven, it’s that Vaughan Williams piece, the one you played over and over. Didn’t you ever get tired of listening to it?”

  “Leave it!” There was too much emphasis on the word ‘leave,’ and I grabbed the album from him and tucked it into a cupboard beneath the stereo.

  “As you wish,” he said in a sarcastic tone and walked across the living room to the liquor cabinet, pulling out his bottle of scotch and a glass.

  Three, I counted to myself. Three drinks and it was only eleven in the morning.

  “How’d the meeting go?” I asked, listening to the crackle of liquid hitting ice.

  “Wish you could’ve been there, Angel. The dig at Ephesus looks like it’s the next big thing. National Geographic is coming along. They’re also going to fund the exploration and dig of a nearby Crusader castle and I thought of you immediately for an historical authority for determining provenance – my department head agrees.”

  “Not that.” I scratched out a sentence so violently that it tore the page. “The Al Anon meeting you skipped.”

  “Well if you knew I skipped it, why’d you ask?” Donovan laughed.

  I tossed down the red pen so that it clattered on the table top. “It hasn’t been that long since the hearing and you promised the judge and your probation officer that you’d show up!”

  “This dig is bigger and better than Petra and it will make me in the community.”

  Now I leaned back in the chair and folded my arms across my breast. “Won’t mean a thing if you get thrown into jail, Donovan.”

  “So I’ll ask my father to talk to his friends at the courthouse.”

  “I’m sick and tired of your using the family name and wealth to get what you want and get you out of trouble. This isn’t a traffic ticket that can be fixed!”

  “Calm down!” Donovan snickered. He knocked back the drink and poured another – this one bigger than the last. “I’m going to Turkey for the dig near Ephesus – want to come? We can use your expertise on the period.”

  “You’ve never asked me before. Why start now?”

  “I’ll be gone for several months. It’s been rough what with the accident and losing the baby. We haven’t really spent much time together and talked about things. We could use the trip for that, if you want.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t take too long, Angel. We leave at the end of the week.”

  He picked up the drink, took a pull and raised the glass to me, winking, as he left the room, whistling A Time for Us.

  “Do you love me, Alice?” he whispered as we said goodbye three days later. He was going to Turkey alone.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I waved from the stoop as the airport van pulled away from the curb, then closed the door quietly.

  “I lied,” I said to the empty room.

  I had decided my fate.

  While Donovan dug in ancient ruins and made more money for his building, I packed up everything I owned and shipped it to California. I turned in my resignation at the university and sent word to Harry that I was coming home. Late that night before my flight back to California, I started to feel more alive than I’d ever been.

  I fell into a blissful and comforting sleep and woke on the park bench across the street from the church in the village. Strangely, the sky was dusky and lights were going on the entire length of the high street. The Proprietress was closing the blinds and locking up for the night – something I’d never seen before. One by one, Joan of Arc, Sigmund Freud and Richard the Third, Marie Antoinette and Anne Boleyn, the other historical personalities and luminaries, left the Shop and dissolved as if into vapor as they walked down the lane, replaced by fireflies in turn. Even the train at the station went through the village without stopping and became a flickering light on the horizon.

  Only Dennis, my brother, remained in the village. Standing at the window in the Curiosity Shop, he turned and smiled as I gathered up my things.

  “You broke a few rules. It doesn’t surprise me,” he commented.

  I spun around, my brows knit together in puzzlement. “I did exactly what you told me I could do. As I thought of them, I relived moments.”

  “And you changed the ending to the story – several times. It’s been interesting.”

  “That would be an understatement, Denny!” I laughed.

  “How do you feel?”

  I paused, carefully slipping the garnet cross around my neck. “I feel like – I want to go home.”

  “Soon.”

  “But I feel like I am home.”

  “You get that way – it gets to you eventually and you want to scream. And then you just settle.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Oh, I’ve done this already; this was for you. I’ve stopped wondering, stopped worrying. You will too, in time,” he said, joining me at the table. He picked up one of my sketchbooks, pausing at the sketches of the prom dress, the fabric swatches taped to the drawings. “One last question.”

  “Not a question, but an answer. The two wrongs that made a right – Donovan and everything he did, and the professor,” I said as I shut down the laptop and started to load up the book bag. “The right was us – Quinn and me.”

  “I knew you’d eventually get it.”

  “See you around, Dennis,” I said, kissing his cheek. I wasn’t surprised that it felt cold and that he started to lose his robust color and age before me. Nor was I surprised when I glanced at my reflection in the window as I went out the door that I was a middle-aged woman. Turning back, I looked closely. The hair was now a white-silver that shimmered in the dusky light; the face was surprisingly unlined – there were a few lines around the mouth and eyes, what people call laugh-lines; the eyes were still large and luminous despite the eyelids gently folding ov
er them. I looked the same, but there was a difference. There was a tranquility, a softness.

  “Mighty fine, Alice!”

  Dennis winked and was transformed by soft showers of color and finally into a speck of light, a firefly, but that light dissolved to nothing at a slower pace. Peace continued to settle on me as I watched him leave.

  Out in the street, I took a breath and sucked in the early night air. I didn’t know where I was going but I started to walk up the street towards the church. With each step, I felt as if someone was pulling on me, shaking me. Then I felt as if I was floating, and then falling, I began to glide effortlessly until I was flying through the iridescent lapis stone, overwhelmed by the beauty of the color, the warmth. I never wanted to leave this place.

  The voices came to me slowly, gibberish at first, then as if they were underwater – or was I underwater? I couldn’t tell.

  I opened my eyes and looked at the doctor staring down at me.

  “Doctor Martin, can you hear me?”

  Of course I could! Why was he shouting?

  Other faces peered down at me; their expressions were all the same – of disbelief, of shock. The desire to sleep was overwhelming and as I closed my eyes, I drifted back to the village and found it empty. I walked up the high street and looked for my friends, but they were gone. A hundred fireflies seemed to light up the night sky. It had never been night before in the village. Again, I felt like I was floating, bathed in glorious light that changed brightness and hue, so beautiful I wanted to weep with joy.

  The voices came out of nowhere and I felt something cold on my forehead. When I opened my eyes, a nurse was checking my vital signs.

  “Don’t exert yourself, Doctor Martin,” she said kindly and patted my hand. “That tube is a bother, isn’t it?”

  I tried to nod but a tube going down my throat made it impossible to move without pain. Very weakly, and with great effort, I tried to point to the tube, trying to make a sign that I wanted it out. The doctor was at the bedside again and seemed to understand. He took the hand not running IV lines. “When I draw out the tube, Doctor, I want you to cough.”