One night she was having supper at an Italian restaurant with a group from the company, plus some of their friends, sitting at a large, happily noisy table. They were eating pizza, a new discovery perfect for after-theater supper. The rough white tablecloths were still damp. Someone ordered a bottle of “red ink”—Chianti. Emma turned away from the person she was talking to as she heard her name called, and an older actress who had decided against joining them hurried across the crowded room. ‘Emma—’
‘What’s up?’
‘Your mother—Sophie—she’s trying to get you. I heard you being paged when I went into the lobby, so I took the call, in case—Emma, I don’t know what’s happened, but whatever it is, she’s terribly upset, and I think you’d better call—’
Emma rose. ‘Of course. Thanks, thanks for coming to get me.’
‘It sounded desperately urgent.’
Emma put some money on the table—‘I think that’s okay for my share—sorry I have to leave’—and hurried out of the restaurant.
Her room was on the fourth floor and she did not wait for the elevator but panted up the stairs, fumbled for her key, and ran to the telephone, turning on the light.
—Calm down, Emma. If Sophie is hysterical, you have to be calm.
Deliberately she slowed her breathing, waited for her heart to stop pounding.
Dialed.
Sophie answered.
‘Sophie, it’s Emma.’
‘Oh God, Emma, oh, two, both in one day, two, only an hour apart, two, both of them—’ Sophie’s words were barely distinguishable through her sobs.
‘Two what, Sophie? Slow down. Tell me.’
‘Telegrams. An hour apart. Both of them.’
‘Sophie. Tell me.’
‘Etienne. And an hour later, Adair.’
‘Etienne and Adair—’
‘Dead. Killed.’
Emma’s heart felt cold and heavy as stone.
‘Both of them. David won’t speak to me. He’s sitting. Like marble. He won’t speak. Oh, Emma—’
‘Louis? Does Louis know?’
‘He’s at school—he’s safe—I don’t want to tell him yet, not till David—’
‘Chantal—’
‘Marical got telegrams, too. Chantal is with her.’
Everard was overseas, driving an ambulance. Someone would tell Everard.
‘Emma—’
‘Oh, Sophie, Sophie—I’ll call you in the morning, first thing.’ She could not think. Her mind had gone dead. Automatically she reached out to dial Nik, but before she could touch the phone, it rang.
It was Chantal, cold and quiet. ‘Emma?’
‘Yes. I’ve just been speaking with Sophie.’
‘I’m with Maman in Connecticut.’
‘Good.’
‘Emma, if you can—if it’s possible—I think Papa needs you.’
‘How is it possible? I can’t leave the show.’
‘No, but—New Haven’s not that far. There are lots of trains. You could be back tomorrow afternoon in plenty of time for half hour. Emma, I think you need Papa. I don’t think you should be alone.’
‘I was just going to call Nik.’
‘Emma, please go to Papa and Sophie. Please.’
‘Does Nik know?’
‘I’ll call him. Ask him to meet you there.’
‘But—’
Chantal had hung up. Emma looked at her watch. Nearly one in the morning. Surely there were not many trains between New Haven and New York during the small hours.
Nevertheless, she left the hotel, went to the railroad station. To her surprise, a train was leaving in thirty-five minutes. She walked up and down the platform. Not thinking. Not accepting. No. Not Etienne and Adair.
Not Adair.
Her father was as Sophie had said. Sitting. Dry-eyed. Sophie was for the moment wept out, but her face was blotched and puffy, her eyes rimmed with red, her blond curls moist, limp. Emma hugged her and could feel Sophie’s chest heave with dry sobs. ‘Ah, Em, I didn’t think you’d be able to come—I’m so glad—’
Jarvis was there, sitting by his father. Looked up at Emma, his face haggard. ‘He won’t speak.’
Emma looked around the living room, dim and dull with only one lamp lit. Her father was sitting upright in a wing chair, his hands on the arms, staring into nothing. Emma pulled up a stool and sat at his feet. ‘Papa.’
No response.
She looked at Jarvis, who shook his head.
Emma pulled her stool closer, put her head down on her father’s knees. Stayed there, unmoving, eyes closed. After a while she felt his hand on her head. Still she did not move.
She did not know how long it was before she felt herself gently being pulled to her feet, and Nik had his arms around her.
She took the train back to New Haven, giving herself an hour to rest before going to the theater.
After the show Saturday evening, the stagehands broke the set. They would be opening in Baltimore on Monday for a two-night stand, then on to Washington. Emma took the train from New Haven to New York. She would have Sunday with her father—
She should see Marical, surely she should see Marical, old wounds opened again.
She got off the train in Greenwich and took a taxi to Marical’s house, dark and closed up at three o’clock in the morning. Huddled in her sweater, she curled up on a wicker love seat on the porch and dozed until she heard sounds a little before six. Cold, stiff, she got up and knocked on the door.
Marical and Chantal greeted her. Hugged. Wept. Made coffee and tea. Gave her breakfast. Marical’s face was pale with grief, but she was able to go through the motions of living, offer Emma more toast, jam, coffee.
Chantal said, ‘I’ll drive you into the city. The train service is awful on Sunday.’
‘Thanks. Thanks, Chantal.’
There was silence on the drive until Chantal said, ‘Emma, you have to forgive Adair.’
Emma looked at her in surprise. ‘I have, oh, I have. There was never a question in my heart about forgiving Adair.’
‘Do you think Adair was ever able to forgive himself?’
Emma looked out the window. The leaves were turning. Chrysanthemums were blooming in front of many of the houses. The roadsides were full of goldenrod. ‘Perhaps,’ she suggested tentatively, ‘we have to do the forgiving? If Adair can’t, well, we can.’
‘Can we?’
‘We have to.’
‘Does that mean forgiving Billy?’
Emma did not answer.
Chantal spoke in a small, chill voice. ‘If we have to do the forgiving for Adair, then we have to forgive Billy, too.’
Emma closed her eyes. There was a terrible empty space where Etienne and Adair should have been. ‘What is forgiveness?’
Chantal’s long fingers gripped the steering wheel. ‘It’s not forgetting. That’s repression, not forgiveness.’
Emma looked over at her sister.
‘Remembering,’ Chantal said, ‘but not hurting anymore.’
The company was tender with Emma, seeing that she had someone to eat with after the show, between matinee and evening performance. They went from Baltimore to Washington to Philadelphia. Nik called her every night. He would join her in Chicago.
‘Your father’s in rehearsal.’
‘How’s it going?’
‘They’ve done some recasting. Sophie has a small role. Louis’s at school, so she’s free to go on tour. It’s one way for her to keep close to your father, and it’s a funny little part and she’s quite good.’
‘Papa?’
‘I went to rehearsal yesterday. Sophie asked me to. It’s amazing, Em. Your father stands in the wings like a dead man and then he goes onstage and comes to life.’
She would see her father in Chicago. His play was dark on Monday, hers on Sunday, so she could go to the Blackstone Sunday night.
She had not yet faced her own grief. Her heart was still a cold stone inside her.
Abby
/>
My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?
O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.
But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.
Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.
But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.
PSALM 22:1–6
Abby was in France when Etienne and Adair were killed. She had been in France when Billy went in front of the subway train. The war separated people by distance as well as death. Emma had tried and tried to reach Abby by phone after the two telegrams, but could not get through. Wrote. Had no response. Evidently her letter hadn’t made it across the ocean, past the censors (was death censurable?), to the Auvergne. The only reason Abby could make her occasional phone calls, Emma learned later, was that she and Yekshek were friends of the mayor and she could call from his office.
From Chicago she wrote Abby again, this time receiving a reply full of warmth and love and compassion. But an ocean separated them. A war separated them. Emma’s own pain separated them.
She turned to Nik, to her husband, to assuage her grief, grief not only for her brothers but for her father, lost in his own pain.
They weren’t the only family with multiple griefs.
Nik had never met Adair, had never met Etienne.
Often when they were alone together she could let her pain ease, could relax in her love for Nik. But Nik had his own grief. He was deep in a play based on Everard’s army hospital experiences, but putting the David play away had been a death for him, a different kind of death from the one that took Adair and Etienne, but, nevertheless, a death.
They were staying at the Croydon on the Near North, in a room that had a Murphy bed, a couch, and two sagging chairs; a bathroom, a kitchenette, where she cooked for the two of them, and sometimes for other members of their company, or other friends in Chicago. Emma had never done much cooking; she was not like Sophie. But in their tiny, inadequate kitchen she found she enjoyed it, that she had a flair for it. Friends brought her a decent paring knife, a good colander. Puttering, making sauces, goulashes, salads, she was close to being contented.
When they went to see David’s play, her father seemed almost himself onstage; but Emma missed something in his acting, something only she would notice, an almost invisible drop in vitality. Sophie was indeed charming in her small role.
Emma had not seen her father for three weeks. When she went backstage she was shocked. Suddenly he looked old. He had lost weight. He looked at Emma and tears flowed down his cheeks. ‘Emma. Emma.’ She pressed her face against his, and their tears mingled.
‘Adair wanted Billy dead. And he hated me. He didn’t have to go into the army and get killed, a horrible death, he did it to punish me.’
Nik was sitting on a chair in the corner. He stood up, as though to intervene or to leave, then sat again.
‘Stop,’ Sophie said. ‘Emma is grieving, too. You aren’t the only one.’ She sounded unutterably weary.
David stretched out his hands in supplication, first to Sophie, then to Emma. ‘Why am I doing this to you, my daughter? I’m acting, even now … but I’m true when I’m acting. And then I’m emptied, drained, and I come home no more than a shell. Oh, Sophie. If only Adair had come home. If only he had forgiven me.’
Emma sat at her father’s feet. ‘Listen, Papa, please. We none of us knew what Adair was thinking before he died. Adair had a volatile temper, we all know that. But it hurt him to stay angry.’
‘It hurt everybody.’
‘I think he didn’t, Papa. I think he didn’t stay angry. I think when he got in the army and went overseas and saw all the horrors of war, things fell into perspective for him. I do not believe that he died with anger in his heart.’
David let out a long, slow breath. ‘You knew him better than anybody.’
Sophie said, ‘And even if Adair did die angry, Davie, that anger can be released and redeemed now. That’s what Bahama would say.’
‘My mother.’ David relaxed for a moment. ‘She had enough faith for all the rest of us poor sinners.’
Sophie turned to Emma and Nik. ‘Will you come to the Drake and have supper with us?’
‘No,’ Nik said. ‘Not tonight. Emma’s tired. Are you coming to our show tomorrow? Maybe we could have supper then.’
They walked back to the hotel through the crisp, autumnal air. ‘Em, I wanted to get you away.’
‘I know. Poor Sophie. Papa’s hard to reach when you have to grope through the dark.’
‘Everard told me that Jarvis was in there pitching, trying to reconcile Adair and your father. In the King David story it was Joab, but the animosity between David and Absalom over Tamar’s rape was too deep, and the civil war was started in earnest, Absalom fighting against his father and almost succeeding, so that David had to flee his holy city of Jerusalem.’
Emma realized she was holding her breath. She said, softly, ‘You’re still thinking about the David play.’
‘Well.’ He shrugged. ‘Has your father forgiven Adair?’
‘I don’t think that even comes into it with Papa. He’s totally preoccupied with whether or not Adair has forgiven him.’
‘For what?’
‘For not doing something strong and definite about Billy, maybe putting him in a mental hospital.’
‘Did he belong in one?’
‘Not all rapists are insane. But it might have helped.’
‘Would it have helped you?’
‘I don’t know. He might be alive now. Adair might be alive. But we can’t—we can’t rewrite the past.’
Nik walked, head down, finally saying, ‘It’s hard for me to let this play go, Em.’
‘Do you have to?’
‘I have to. But—it’s been such a habit, thinking about it, talking—’
‘I wish you’d go back to it.’
‘I can’t, Em.’
‘But you keep thinking about it.’
‘I woke up last night wondering what would happen when Abigail died. She’s older than David.’
‘Like most of the women,’ Emma said, ‘she just sort of gets dropped.’
‘It must have been a terrible blow for David when she died. I can see him rushing through the servants’ quarters after the servants have called him, and flinging himself on her. What would he say? Something from the Psalms?’
‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’
Nik looked at her. ‘I thought that’s what Jesus said on the cross.’
‘It was. But King David himself said it long before, in the Twenty-second Psalm.’
‘I don’t remember that—if I ever knew it.’
‘It’s there. David’s son Absalom has turned against him, taken his throne, his holy city of Jerusalem, raped his concubines, as Nathan the prophet said would happen. And David still loves Absalom, in spite of it all. He’s begged Joab to deal gently with Absalom, but Joab kills him, and David is wild with grief. So those lines are there, but maybe they’re too familiar to too many people as part of the crucifixion.’
Nik shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter now, does it?’
‘It does matter. It’s the kind of scene you’d really plunge into.’
‘No, Em. I’m happy working on the army hospital play. It’s going well.’
‘I’m glad, then.’
‘But I’m worried about your father.’
‘So am I. Oh, Nik, if Abby were here, maybe she could help Papa.’
‘But she’s not here,’ Nik said. ‘And she’s not his wife any longer. Sophie is. And Sophie’s doing all anybody can possibly do.’
‘Yes, I know. I just want—I just want someone to wave a magic wand and make everything all right.’
&nb
sp; ‘Many magic wands in your life?’ Nik asked.
‘I used to think Adair—’ She felt a great sob welling up in her chest and barely managed to force it down.
Nik put his arm around her, but she did not relax against it or she would have broken into a torrent of weeping.
As they walked, her breathing slowed, regularized. They stopped on the bridge over the Chicago River and looked down at the dark water.
Nik said, ‘You’re strong, my Em, don’t you know that? You’ve steadfastly refused to wallow in being a victim. You’re living your own life and living it well.’
‘You make it easy.’
‘You were already doing it long before I came into the picture. You make the audience feel you’ve been in the hard places with them, and that gives them courage to go on living their own lives. It’s what I hope to do as a playwright.’
‘You do. Without the lines, a player can’t do anything.’
‘Mostly life’s not very funny. The irony of it is, I write about tragedy best in comedy.’
They had reached the hotel. Went up in the elevator to their floor. Nik opened the door and turned on the lights, pulled the Murphy bed out of the wall.
—Tragedy in comedy, Emma thought, as she went into the bathroom to draw her bath.—Where’s the comedy?
When the news came of the train explosion that killed Edith and Inez it was more than could be comprehended. It was, Emma thought, somewhat like Abigail’s son Chileab’s death being overwhelmed by Saul’s and Jonathan’s. She cried for Inez. She cried for Etienne and Adair and for herself. For everybody.
One evening when Emma was lying in the Murphy bed waiting for Nik, looking with what was still amazed awe at his rings on her finger, he said, ‘It’s time for me to go home. I’ve overstayed the two weeks I gave myself.’
She did not want him to go. She fingered the sheet and the rather worn blanket.
‘Day after tomorrow, I’d better go back to New York.’
He was right. He had planned to be in Chicago with her for only two weeks. It was part of theater life, that there would be many times when their work would keep them apart. It would be hard for Nik alone in New York. If Emma would miss Nik, he would also miss her.
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