by Anita Shreve
Outside, the day is gray and raw, not unusual for the first week of December, but disappointing to Charles, who has wanted sunshine, some bright omen. He has planned his route—west on 95, north on 7—and it should take him just under three hours. He’ll be there before ten, but that’s all right. He needs to see the place, walk around, gather his wits before she comes.
He puts a tape, the tape, into the tape deck. He’s made a duplicate of the one he sent Siân. He has in his office dozens of rejects—tapes on which the sequence wasn’t perfect, on which there were gaps that weren’t acceptable, on which he’d put songs he decided wouldn’t do after all. At first he was tickled by the project, then he became obsessed. He sequestered himself each evening in his study with his turntable and his tape player, listening to albums and 45s he’d found in old record stores, sifting through his own albums. He spent hours with his Sony in quiet bars, hunting down old tunes on jukeboxes. Astonishingly Harriet did not ask him once what he was doing in his study in the evenings (what can she possibly have thought of the music emanating from the room night after night?), though she has mentioned once or twice that she is concerned about his “stress level.”
Then he actually sent the tape, the small player, and the headphones. It was the most reckless gesture of all, one he regretted the minute he watched Harry Noonan behind the counter at the post office toss it into the Priority Mail bucket. He expected the box back unopened almost immediately, dreaded going to the post office each day and finding the little pink slip announcing that there was a package waiting for him. He was positive, too, that the picture he sent along with the package, the picture of him holding the fish, was going to backfire. It was a terrible picture, but it was the only one he could find that showed him alone—without one of his children or Harriet.
He listens to the first song on the tape, Dion’s “A Teenager in Love.” He has tried, in the correspondence, for a tone of lightheartedness, and he sent the tape in the same vein, though he is certain—and he suspects this has been all too obvious to her as well—that his entire life hangs in the balance of her response. He has felt like a schoolboy, a teenager, with a teenager’s innocence and longing.
He is confident, too, though he understands this less well, that she has been there all along, all through the years, a kind of subterranean rhythm or current. He knows this because he has always favored women who looked like Siân—tall, small-breasted, blondish (and it has often puzzled him that he married a woman so unlike this image)—and he knows Siân was the first, the antecedent. And her name, her strange Welsh name, has bubbled up into his consciousness over the years, often when he has least expected it. In college, he roomed for a year with a boy named Shane, and he frequently slipped and called him Sean, the spelling different but the pronunciation the same as hers. He remembers, also, a client he had seven or eight years ago, a Susan Wain, and how he twice addressed correspondence to her, Dear Siân, without the accent, somehow transposing letters subconsciously from the last name to the first, but again echoing the antecedent. He hadn’t realized his mistake until the client pointed it out to him.
He knows as well that through the years he has been drawn to things Welsh, a subconscious draw, as if one were trying to find something lost in childhood—a piece of music, the shape of a room, the way the light once filtered through a certain window. He remembers reading Dylan Thomas and Chatwin’s On the Black Hill not too long ago, and another book, Jan Morris’s The Matter of Wales, and deciding that if he ever got to Europe he might begin with Wales and then make his way south to Portugal. (Though when he drives to the beach and looks out, he never imagines looking at Wales—it’s too far north, he thinks.) He will have to ask her, but he thinks he has remembered this correctly, that she has a Welsh father and had an Irish mother, both first-generation immigrants after World War II, and though there was no lilt in her own voice as there was in her father’s (he remembers the father’s accent vividly from that phone call he made when he had returned home from college: the strange vowels, the crescendo and sudden swift fall in the rhythm of the sentences), it was evident, looking at her (particularly on that first day at camp and, more recently, even in the photograph in the newspaper), that she had Celtic origins. It is in the shape of the mouth possibly, or in the high forehead, or perhaps it is the eyes with their pale eyebrows.
The second song is on now: “Angel Baby,” Rosie & The Originals. He loves Rosie’s nasal twang, is not sure they ever had another hit. Great slow beat on this one, though. For months after they left each other at camp, he and Siân corresponded. He wonders if she might still have those old letters—hers to him, he knows, were lost when his parents’ basement was flooded and everything that had been stored there for him was destroyed. He doesn’t now know why the correspondence ended; he suspects it began to seem more and more hopeless as the months wore on. He had thought and planned endlessly, he remembers, to find a way to see her again, and these adolescent schemes now seem comical and sad to him. However was a fourteen-year-old boy to make his way across three states to see his girlfriend? At that age, one was a prisoner of one’s parents. He certainly had no car, did not even know anyone with a car except for people his parents’ age, none of whom was likely to drive him to Springfield, Massachusetts, from Bristol, Rhode Island. If only he and Siân had met at sixteen, when seeing her again, seeing her continuously over the years, might have been possible.
He turns up the volume. He loves this one: “That’s My Desire.” He waits each time for the falsetto at the end, sometimes tries to imitate it himself. He remembers as vividly as if it were yesterday the agony of that final and irrevocable separation, the anticipation of that separation all that last morning of camp and, indeed, even the entire day before. If one week at camp were the experiential equivalent of a lifetime together, then the last day and a half has to have taken on, in the savoring of each minute, the totality of years.
He woke that last morning with a strange feeling in his stomach, a mixture of dread and guilt and deep sexual excitement. (Odd how clearly he can remember this—more clearly, it seems to him, than more recent events, from college or from seminary, or even from the early years of his marriage.) He’d had a counselor (what was his name?) who played 45s on a turntable in the boys’ dorm. Johnny Mathis at night to soothe the overheated psyches of adolescent boys; The Silhouettes and The Shirelles in the morning to wake them up. “Get a Job” was on that morning. He’d woken after a restless night, a night full of wild dreams and schemes, as if he were a prisoner of war planning their escape—his and Siân’s. He imagined hiding in the woods until all the parents had left, and then he and Siân would get on a bus. He had no idea where the bus might take them—he hadn’t been able quite to make that work, and that was the point at which he’d begun to panic: Where could they go? What would they do for money? How long could they hide out from their parents or from the police? He smiles now to think of that boy of his frantic and desperate imaginings.
He met her that morning in the dining hall. They’d sat at the same table all week. She was next to him, the bracelet on her wrist. She didn’t speak. He remembers that she was wearing Bermuda shorts and a white blouse, a sleeveless blouse. Neither of them could eat. She’d pushed her eggs around; he hadn’t even been able to do that. He’d sat with his fork in his hand, unable to speak to her in front of the others, unable to move. He wanted to touch the bracelet on her wrist, touch the hairs on her arm. To his right, on the other side of him, was his counselor (what was his name?), a big guy with a crew cut and a short-sleeved dress shirt that showed his muscles. They’d had to wear white shirts, he remembers that. He also remembers that his counselor had seemed unreasonably happy that morning, and Charles (Cal then) had formed an instant and lasting hatred for the man.
(It strikes him suddenly, as he engages the cruise control in his car, that the counselor was probably only a kid, a college kid then, someone he’d now think of as a child, and that at this point in time the man has to
be in his early fifties at least.)
There was a blue plaid tablecloth on the table, heavy white crockery at each place. Prayers were said before the meal, and then again at the end. Siân had pushed her chair back; Charles was paralyzed with confusion. All he could think was that he and she would never share a meal together again. Very shortly they would never do anything together again at all. He had to be with her, had to be alone with her again, before they said goodbye.
He stood and asked her if she had packed. She said yes, looked down at her feet. She was wearing sneakers, he remembers, and no socks. Though she was tall, she had small feet. White sneakers. White Keds.
All week he had been with this girl as he had never been with anyone before—not his mother, not his father, not his best friend, Billy Cowan. How could he allow this person to be taken away from him? And why could he find no words at that moment to tell her what he felt, what he wanted?
And then she’d spoken, a miracle, a deft slip through the knot of his inexperience: Would he like to play badminton? she had asked. They could skip chapel just the once on this last day and play badminton before the parents came, before they had to leave. Just the two of them . . .
There it is now. “Where or When.” The song. (Their song?) He’d planned it fourth, like a clean-up batter. The song is sung almost entirely a cappella. He listens to the whole of it, rewinds the tape, plays it again, as he almost always does. He plays the entire tape (fifteen songs) twice through, then turns the tape deck off. He chooses silence over the radio. He cannot focus on the news and doesn’t want to hear any other music just now. He hasn’t been able to read a newspaper in days, hasn’t watched a television program with any kind of concentration since he saw her picture. He has to get this meeting over with, he knows, if only to return to some kind of normalcy.
He follows the map, the directions that were sent to him from The Ridge. The town in which the inn is located is in northwestern Connecticut, close to the New York border. He finds the town, drives with the directions between his thumb and the steering wheel. The town itself is a New England classic, recently refurbished, he suspects, during the boom of the eighties, the broad High Street lined with eighteenth-century three-story houses, all white, all with black shutters, all set back from the street, with well-manicured lawns leading to the front porches. (From force of habit, he counts the number of For Sale signs—seven in five blocks.) The inn, however, is at the outskirts of town, on the edge of a private lake. He discovers the road just south of the town park. A discreet sign indicating The Ridge with an arrow—carved gold letters on dark green—tells him that he’s made the correct turn. He hopes that Siân, too, will see the small sign.
The houses dwindle in number as he drives; the inn appears to be at least five miles from the village center. The day is still damp and overcast, though not as dully as it was earlier in the morning. Driving through town, he noticed a liquor store and a deli. After he locates The Ridge, he wants to pick up a bottle of champagne, a six-pack, and some ice. He has the cooler in the trunk, put it there last night after Harriet went to bed. He is not quite sure exactly how this will work, but he somehow envisions himself and Siân sharing a glass of champagne together on the grounds of The Ridge, or possibly in his car, before they go in to lunch. He would rather meet her that way, would rather have a drink alone with her, than greet her for the first time in a formal dining room, with waiters hovering.
He reaches the end of the road, comes to a stone wall with an open wrought-iron gate. Another sign in green and gold announces that he has arrived. He turns into a twisting drive of brick herringbone. Bare plane trees line the drive at precisely spaced intervals.
He has always known that the mansion and the grounds, before they were an inn or a camp, were privately held. He remembers now that the money came from shoes in the 1920s and that the last owner, sometime in the early 1950s, died and willed it to the Catholic Church. He wonders if the church owns the inn.
The long drive takes him through a thicket of birches, then opens to a panorama of the main house itself, behind a maze of formal gardens. He slows the car to a stop.
It’s exactly the same. Nothing ever stays the same, he is thinking, but somehow this has done so. Amazingly, astonishingly, the estate is as he has remembered it.
He puts the car in gear, slips it into a parking space at the side of the inn. With some difficulty, as if he had suddenly aged, he steps from the car.
The house is a well-proportioned three-story building in gray stone, with wings to either side. The roof is slate, a greenish-gray, and the shutters at the windows are a faded pale blue, so faded and so pale they seem almost colorless, and he remembers with a clarity that startles him that they were nearly colorless even then, when the estate was a camp. They remind him now, as they cannot have reminded him then, of the shutters on French country houses in paintings and in photographs. The wings of the house are set at an angle so that they embrace a center courtyard of square, hand-cut stones. Frost and time have heaved some of the stones, and wisely no one has tampered with the uneven surface. In the center of the courtyard is the fountain—a patinaed bronze well with a graceful arc of water into which he tossed pennies and wishes as a child.
There are no signs in the courtyard or at the front door, nothing to indicate that the camp of his memories has been transformed into an inn.
He looks out to the west wing, where the boys slept. He can see his room, the fourth window to the left on the top floor. He shared it with three other boys. A waiter in a black tuxedo emerges from the front door, nods at Charles, and makes his way across the courtyard to a door at the end of the east wing. A gust of wind comes from behind Charles, makes a swirl of dry leaves eddy in a corner. At a window on the second floor of the east wing, a curtain is drawn.
Charles hikes the collar of his navy wool coat, puts his hands into his pockets. A wash of light, the sun through a break in the clouds, moves swiftly across the facade of the house, then disappears.
The girl arrived first. She had her parents with her and one hard blue suitcase. She held the suitcase in front of her with two hands and walked from the car to the courtyard, where she had been told to go. She put the suitcase down beside her and stood near the front door, on the uneven stones. Her parents, curious, wanted to explore and left her alone. She herself was not anxious to explore; she knew that by evening the place would be known to her. She held her hands loosely clasped and stood quietly, watching the others arrive with their parents. She was wearing a blue dress, a thin cotton dress that fell just below her knees. She had worn the dress because her mother had insisted, but as she watched the others enter the courtyard, she saw that the girls were dressed in shorts and sleeveless blouses. Her hair which was long that summer, was pulled back into a ponytail, yet even so, she was uncomfortably warm. It was the beginning of summer, midday, and the sun beat down upon the courtyard. Overhead, the sky was a deep blue and cloudless. She was wishing that all the parents would leave so that she could change her clothes. She was thinking about a swim. There was a lake, she had been told, and a pool, and even if the lake was not for swimming, she knew it would be cooler down by the water’s edge.
When the boy arrived, he, too, was carrying his own suitcase, though he was tall enough and strong enough to hold it in one hand. He walked to the center of the courtyard, his parents behind him. His mother wore red lipstick and sunglasses with white frames. Her dress had a wide white collar, and she was having trouble on the stones with her high heels. His father was a tall man, with broad shoulders beneath his suit coat and a summer tan on his face and neck and wrists. His mother lit a cigarette, and even from across the courtyard, she could see the red lipstick mark on the mother’s cigarette. The mother examined the families in the courtyard and turned to her husband with commentary behind her white-gloved hand. The boy stood still, in the center of the courtyard. He had on a white shirt, the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and a pair of black chinos. He wore black shoes, dress
shoes, the sort a boy then would wear to mass. He had his hands in the pockets of his pants, and on his wrist she saw the silver glint of a watchband. There were perhaps twenty or thirty other people in the courtyard.
When he turned his head in her direction and looked at her for the first time, she did not glance away. He had soft brown eyes and a crew cut, and like his father, he had a summer tan. Her own face, she knew, was white; her skin would not brown no matter how much oil she used. The boy looked at the girl for a long time, and she thought that possibly he smiled—a shy, nervous, unpracticed smile. He looked at the girl for so long that his mother noticed and turned to see who or what had caught her son’s attention. And when the mother examined the girl—a frank stare of examination—the girl blushed finally and turned her head away.
Years later, I looked in the mirror and I thought: I cannot let him see this aging body.
In Africa, the sun had scalded my skin and left a residue of spots and wrinkles. I had a belly with a scar from a caesarean. My breasts were small, they had always been small, but there was no girl left; I had nursed two babies. My hair was graying at the sides.
Sometimes, when I was with you, I felt betrayed by my body.
When I drove to The Ridge, I played the tape loudly to drown out my imaginings. When I came into the parking lot, “Crying” was on, announcing me.
I saw the building with the blue shutters, and I thought: We were only children.
I emerged from my car, and I noticed, across the parking lot, a large American car, the sort of car I would not know, might not ever look at. The door opened, and a man got out. He had on a navy coat, a dark suit. His hair was graying, thinning at the top. His face had an elegant line. His body seemed elongated, and his gestures, as he shut the door, were poised. I was thinking of photographs of T. S. Eliot and of Scott Fitzgerald. I was thinking: Someone from another era, another decade.