“I can see that it has, Sal,” Joe said.
Rattled by her unexpected coolness, he walked away from her along a worn path that surrounded the violet house, while Sylvia LaMonte stood silently watching. Minutes later, he came back up the other side of the old greenhouse and faced her.
“I’m staying at the Best Western near Hyde Park,” he told her. “You can find me there if you need me.”
He didn’t wait for her to answer. Climbing into the rental car, he backed up slowly and retraced his path out of town, never looking back—not even in the rearview mirror—as he left.
Perhaps coming to Rhinebeck had been a bad idea. Then again, maybe it was time for the truth about his and Sal/Sylvia’s relationship to come out. Either way it would survive this latest set of occurrences in her life, or it wouldn’t. He took the feather from his pocket and held it up to the light. The red dot shone, caught by the rays of the sun.
Was Sal the reason he had it now? Was his very life’s path with Sal in the crosshairs of destiny? Her actions told him it could be. He placed the feather carefully back in his pocket and kept driving. The serenity of the valley now felt more like a façade covering the endless truths of this region’s storied past. This historical place, where people who had walked here long before he and Sal had faced their own tests and trials, made him feel somehow insignificant—small, in that way of powerlessness; powerless, in that way of his life being just another speck on the current mantle of this region.
Maybe he should never have come here, but deep inside, he knew life was unfurling as it was supposed to, although not necessarily as he wished it would.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Promise to Come Home
Sylvia LaMonte Kindle Michael found the Best Western Hotel near Hyde Park, arriving just in time to see her husband locking up the rental car to go inside.
Joe Michael looked up when he saw her, a slight upturn of one side of his mouth his only expression.
“Sal? Or is it Sylvia that I should call you now?” he said dryly.
“I loved ya the minute I seen ya fer the first time and I love ya now, Joey,” Sal said, sounding like the Alaskan woman he had married.
She threw her arms around Joe Michael’s chest and squeezed him so hard that he finally had to push her away, just so he could breathe.
“It’s been hard, Sal,” he told her. “Hard in many ways.”
Sal nodded.
“I never thought I’d care for another woman after I lost my family to that fire. Then, when I met you, you almost seemed to be too much woman for an old guy like me.”
Sal’s eyes softened as a slow smile moved across her lips.
“I was proud when you said you’d marry me, and I’m still proud to call you my wife, but if you—if things have changed—if you need to get away from what we have going, well—”
Joe took several deep breaths, closing his eyes as if to capture his thoughts before continuing.
“I can see how beautifully you fit in here,” he said. “And I could never fit in here—although I’d try if you asked me to. I would, Sal. I’d try.”
He watched tears well up in the eyes of the woman he had always thought of as tough as nails and too stubborn to bend to common human emotion.
“I’m ashamed of the way I was back there today,” Sal said, once again reverting to her base dialect. “It’s like this place does something to a person—takes over their spirit and keeps them from connecting with who they are inside.”
She looked up at Joe Michael, her eyes pleading for understanding. He looked deep within them in return, his puzzled expression revealing the uncertainty of not fully knowing this woman to whom he was married.
Was this why he had come here—to learn the truth? To see with his own eyes what his mind could not grasp?
“I can’t tell you that I understand when I don’t,” Joe Michael said.
He reached into his pocket, touching the feather, secure at its reassuring presence.
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t love you,” he told her. “There’s no question about my love for you and there’s no doubt in my mind about your love for me—but as Sal, my wife. It’s the fact that you are not just my Sal that—”
“I’m not going to try to force you to stay, Joey,” Sylvia said softly. “It’s not my place to help you decide. All that’s important to me is standing right here in front of me. The rest of it—well the rest of it threatens to destroy me just like it destroyed my Bert. If you choose to stay, I’ll be stronger for it, but if you can’t stay, then just know that I’ll return to Hoonah as soon as I’ve straightened out what should have been straightened out long ago. Then, I’ll be home, Joey. I promise you I will come home.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Oh! Deer!
Sal walked beside her husband into the Best Western and joined him for dinner in the motel dining room before retiring with him to his room for the night. It had been a long time since they had been truly alone.
Sleep came easily when it arrived, but not before they had spent all the time they needed savoring each other’s nearness. This time there was no pretense, there were no daily rituals to perform, and there was no worry about phone calls. There was no need for vigilance in case someone decided to drop in. There was just the two of them and the solace of their aloneness in the night.
Joe held her tightly and she let him. This was love. This was safety from the world—he her protector from all things outside themselves, and she his.
Morning came too soon and while Sal dressed, she told her husband about the dinner scheduled for this coming Saturday at the local golf club. Some of her old friends were planning a big welcome after having learned of her return to Rhinebeck. It would be an elaborate affair of feigned casualness so common to the area—one in which suggested sporting attire would serve as the barometer of the commonness so many wished they possessed, but were ill equipped to understand.
“Please come with me. It’s time for them to meet my husband,” she said.
He agreed, although reluctantly. But for her he would go in spite of his obvious discomfort at being in this strange place. Her smile told him he was doing the right thing.
“We’d better go shopping for some casual clothes,” she told him.
“What’s wrong with these?” he asked, pointing to the nylon bomber jacket and canvas pants that were his usual attire.
“Nothing,” Sal answered. “Nothing except they are not contrived enough to blend in here.”
She laughed lightly at the use of the word contrived. Hadn’t she, the Alaska wilderness woman, become the snob. But what other word was there to describe the reality that only certain carefully thought-out images of casual would work for these folks, whose image and persona had been watchfully crafted since birth?
Joe squinted but didn’t argue. Sal knew what she was doing so he might as well just go along. He would dress to please her and he would do his best to complement her in this place so foreign to his soul. After all, hadn’t she done the same for him in their life up in Alaska?
They settled on a white linen, long-sleeved shirt for Joe and a pair of light colored slacks that had a perfect crease down the front. Sal also steered him towards a pair of soft Italian leather loafers, while choosing a long floral print dress in shades of light blue, over which she wore a matching cardigan sweater. A long lavender silk scarf wrapped loosely around her neck and a pair of taupe-colored flat ballet shoes completed her look.
“I thought I’d drive down to see the Vietnam Veterans’ wall while I’m here,” Joe told her, once their shopping was done. “The dinner’s several days away. I’ll be back in time.”
“I know you will, Joey,” she said. “Just meet me at the club at seven on Saturday. “I’ve already left word that the doorman should let you straight in and have someone bring you to my table.”
“Are you sure about this, Sal? Sure you want to be seen with me?” Joe said with such a straight face that it mad
e her laugh.
“Ya kiddin’ me, Joey! Not just sure, but proud to call a hunk a man like you ma man,” Sal laughed, sounding like her old self again.
“I love you, Sal,” Joe Michael said with uncharacteristic forthrightness.
“I love you too, Joe,” she answered.
~~~
Sylvia watched her husband walk back to his motel room through the rearview mirror of her own car as she slowly exited the parking lot of the motel. Once out of sight of the man she loved more than any other she had ever known, a glance in that same mirror showed that the furrowed brow and downturned lips of worry had replaced her smile.
She scrunched her left shoulder trying to loosen the tightness that was rapidly spreading up her neck, but nothing she did brought relief from the tension-induced cramping.
Life had been so perfect until Elzianne had shown up in Hoonah. Now the very essence of her content, her wonderful life with Joe Michael, was in jeopardy. If not for Elzianne bringing up the past, she and Joe would likely have finished out their lives without him ever learning of her past—a past that would not disappear, no matter how hard she tried to erase it.
It wasn’t in the way of deceit that she had kept it from him, but more in the way of having moved on to a life free from the constraints it had bound her with. He, of course, knew she was from New York, and he also knew that she had been married to Bert Kindle, and that Bert had met an untimely death. But the details of her privileged upbringing had remained with the past in a place that Sylvia LaMonte had been sure would remain eternally unnecessary to visit.
She had just about decided to pull over to work the knot out of her shoulder when a deer ran out from a thicket of brush alongside the road. When she swerved, the deer suddenly leaped over her car and ran uninjured off into a field.
Joe Michael was already halfway to Washington DC when someone found Sal’s car in the ditch. How long had she been lying there? Her watch said it was 6 p.m. The last time she had looked, it had been ten that morning.
“I’m fine. I’m fine,” she insisted, finally agreeing to let the rescuer drive her to the hospital for an exam after he pointed out that the blood on her face was dried, and telling her that she must have been there for some time. And, but for the goose egg on her forehead, she was fine as far as she or the doctors could tell, so by 10 p.m. she was back in her hotel room getting ready for sleep.
When her phone rang as she was getting her nightclothes on, Sylvia LaMonte saw that the caller ID said Williams, Mara. She stared at it quizzically, then deleted the call, not bothering to check the message. She repeated the sequence the next three times the phone rang showing the same caller ID. A fourth call was from a Michael, J and she deleted that one, too, before turning the pesky thing off for the night.
What was it with all these calls anyway? She put the phone in the back corner of her drawer so it wouldn’t bother her and went to bed.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Wall
Joe Michael’s trip to Washington D.C. was uneventful considering that he was an Alaska Native who had never been this far east. Perhaps his navigation of the busy freeways had been helped by the GPS on his rental car. A person didn’t need such devices in Alaska, where the ocean and mountains formed directional guides, and where the road system was so simple that it was almost impossible to get lost.
Whatever the case, he had gotten there without many wrong turns, checked into a motel near the nation’s capitol, and visited as many landmarks as he could work in before stopping at the Vietnam Wall of Honor on the last day there.
The monument, striking in its simplicity, served as a backdrop to the hundreds of people who were slowly moving past it. He couldn’t help but notice the contrast of life against the long, black, banner that held the names of 58,000 who had died in the service of their country. If the artist had foreseen this eventuality—the way that life had sprung from death—then she had indeed been wise beyond her years.
He started in the middle. He wasn’t sure why. Who among all these names did he know? A name popped into his consciousness. He searched for it, and it was there. Then he did the same for two more, before raw emotion overcame him and tears began to trickle down his cheeks.
He wiped them away. Crying wouldn’t bring them back. Thank God it wasn’t his name up there, although it easily could have been. He began to tremble inside. Why had he been spared? Was the life he had led even as worthy as the lives of those lost might have been?
A woman brushed past him and touched a name on the wall. Who was she? Sister? Wife? Daughter? Stranger? A small child clung to her coat hem. Was that her grandfather’s name on the wall?
Suddenly he had to sit down. The wall was no longer a cold piece of granite holding an endless stream of the names of strangers. The wall was a living tribute to all who had given their lives in that war. These visitors were the roots it had sprung as it grasped towards life—expanding, embracing, broadening the consciousness of all who had come searching for each lone name of someone who had served his or her country with honor.
He put his head into his hands. Why couldn’t they have lived? Why had each of them had to die? Why had he been spared? Had he lived his life well enough to deserve to have escaped that wall?
He reflected on is own recent strife. It felt like nothing. At least he had lived. What could the lives of each of these soldiers have become? He held back from touching the names, as though touching them would pull him with them into the wall. Instead he bought a book of all the names from a vendor near the memorial. He might read each and every one of them—or not. But what he would do was hold them near his heart and within the safety of his own home. He could protect them there and shelter them from the countless eyes that wept at their sight.
He didn’t look back as he left. He couldn’t look back. If he did, he would lie there with them and never get up again.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Whose Chair?
It seemed like everyone from Rhinebeck was at the dinner Saturday. Sylvia LaMonte greeted them one by one as the guests arrived. Yes, of course she had missed them all—or so her words declared.
“Do say,” she replied, when someone mentioned that Elzianne was up in Alaska on a buying trip. “I’ve been wondering what she’s been up to.”
“It is so sad that the violet houses have fallen into disrepair.”
“Yes, an effort to set up a foundation to restore them would be a worthy project.”
She glanced at the empty chair beside her as guests seated themselves for dinner.
Where in the world was her husband?
She looked at her watch, trying hard not to show her uneasiness. She had just brushed a wrinkle out of her skirt when the maitre d’ arrived at her table and pulled out a chair for an elderly man who was wearing a white linen shirt and finely creased trousers.
“I’m sorry,” she said, leaning back to speak to the maitre d’, “but this place is reserved for my husband.”
Joe Michael stepped back.
“But, Ms. LaMonte, this gentleman assures me that he is your husband.”
“Well sir, I can assure you that although this person cuts as fine a figure as any girl could hope to attract, Mr. Bert Kindle is a good four inches taller and about twenty pounds lighter than this gentleman, so if you will be so kind as to escort him from our table, I will reserve this chair for the man it actually belongs to.”
“But, Ms. LaMonte . . .” the maitre d’ began.
Joe Michael did not wait for any further exchange. He had looked directly into the eyes of his wife and had seen no sign of recognition in them. The large bruise on her forehead troubled him, but she seemed otherwise fine and he would not make a scene.
Had Sal fooled him again? What was going on here? Was he losing his mind? Was she? The night in the motel had been wonderful, cementing their love forever—or so he had thought—but this was unexpected.
He took several deep breaths, imagining that the space around his he
art was open and free instead of tight and choking like it really felt.
He couldn’t have misread her the other night. The love they shared had been real. This was not real. He turned around and moved towards her.
“Sal? What’s going on?”
Her smile was as genuine as it was genteel.
“I’m so sorry to embarrass you, sir. You seem like a kind man, but I really must insist that you acknowledge that you are mistakenly here even after I have clearly told you that this place is reserved for my husband, Bert Kindle.”
The maitre d’ stepped back, taking Joe Michael by the arm and whispering into his ear.
“I believe you are who you say you are, sir, because it is common knowledge in Rhinebeck that Bert Kindle has been dead for several years. However, for the sake of decorum, please allow me to escort you outside so as to avert any further disruption.”
Joe Michael went willingly. At the door, he showed the maitre d’ his ID, including the picture of him and Sal that he had carried since their wedding day.
“Yes, it does appear to be Ms. LaMonte in this photo obviously taken during some type of travel adventure, sir, but this is not a matter I can allow myself to become involved in. I am simply the maitre d’. I do plead for your understanding.”
“She had a bump on her head . . .” Joe Michael said.
“Although it’s really not my place to say, sir, it is common knowledge that there was a minor accident, but that the hospital checked and released Ms. LaMonte,” the maitre d’ replied.
Joe Michael simply nodded before walking out the door and back to his car. He had pledged to stand behind his wife no matter what was coming down. He reached for the feather in his pocket. At least it was still there. Maybe he would wait here and talk to Sal after dinner. No. There would be too many people around. Maybe he would wait for her at her hotel. No. That seemed too confrontational. Maybe he would just disappear—get back on the ferry and cruise Alaska like he had for the years before meeting Sal. No. That had lost its appeal. He was older now. Ready for a more stable life. He laughed quietly. Stable life. What did he know of a stable life?
Feather for Hoonah Joe Page 7