by Belva Plain
They had nothing to do, Miriam knew, but her father, with some thought in mind, had wanted to leave them alone.
She said the first thing that came to mind. “Your arm—does it hurt? I’ve heard that there’s pain even after—”
“Only a little. But David tells me it will pass.” He said ruefully, “The U.S. gives artificial limbs to its soldiers, but our side can’t afford to. Well, I’ll have to get my own and be thankful it wasn’t a leg.”
He leaned down to stroke the dog, who lay near him, keeping at it too long. And she knew he needed a reason not to speak, to cover the emotion that revealed itself by the twitching of his cheeks.
Questions, shreds of long-ago conversations, proud convictions, dark anxieties and doubts, lived on, humming in this silence. And remembering, Miriam knew that Gabriel, too, must be recalling these ghosts of the dead years, so that it seemed they were a presence in the room, like the genie in the box, awaiting the cutting of the string, the unpeeling of the paper, the lifting of the lid. She was afraid to cut the string.
After a while, forcing herself to speak, she made a soft reproach. “You never wrote. You could have got someone to do it for you.”
“I can write,” he answered quickly, evading the main issue. “I still have my right arm.”
“Are you different—changed?” she asked, and at once would have withdrawn the absurd question if she could have done so. The words were unclear as she had spoken them, for what she had meant was: Do you feel the same about me?
He took a different meaning from the question. “Of course I’ve changed. One couldn’t have gone through these last years without changing. I’ve seen men giving their last morphine to a wounded enemy, and—forgive me for this truth—I’ve seen men in savage rages cut out a wounded man’s tongue. You ask me whether I’ve changed?”
She twisted Emma’s sapphire round and round her finger, which had grown even thinner since the ring, too large to start with, had been given her.
“I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to ask you.”
“Yes … but I gave the wrong answer,” he said quickly. “I’m sometimes too irritable. It will take effort. I’m trying …” His voice faded.
“What will you do now?” she asked quietly.
He did not answer at once. He had scarcely heard the question. She was sitting so near him that he could see every grain of her amber skin. Here she was, his Biblical Rebecca, just as he had remembered. Here were the fine, flashing eyes, the dominant, haughty nose, and the contradiction of a mouth as soft as a child’s.
She opens her mouth with wisdom, and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
In Richmond she had come into his arms and laid her head on his shoulder. Oh, what a brotherly, mild embrace—not at all what he wanted, neither then nor now! Under the layers of bodice cloth, the foaming skirt, the silly hoops and wires, there waited … Not for him, though, but for that other, who wasn’t worth her finger.
He collected himself. She had asked him what he was going to do. Bitterness, the most intense he had felt since the wounding, went through him. What choices did he have? He tried to flex the fingers that were not there, and a fiery, jagged pain went through the arm that was not there.
At least it is the left, he thought. But had it been the right, could he have learned to form the letters with his left? And this puzzled him, so that he frowned, feeling the pressure of the frown on his contracted forehead, and imagined the fingers of his left hand trying to form the letters of his name: the initial flourish of the capital G, then the downward stroke again, a short upward curve, and now the slanted stroke of the small a. The paper would be lying to the right of his hand as he worked the letters across it, trembling and awkward as a small child in his first attempt at printing.
He came back to the present moment. She was still waiting for an answer.
“Why, practice law,” he said. “Try to pick up the pieces. And you?” He did not look at her, but at the floor on which the speckled light moved like confetti dots, as the sunshine quivered through the leafage at the open window. “David told me that he—that he will soon be free.”
“André, do you mean?”
“André,” Gabriel said, forcing the name.
“He is free already.” She thought her throat would burst. “He’s gone away. Gone back to Europe, I think.”
For a moment Gabriel did not speak. Then he said very low, “I’m sorry, Miriam.”
“Sorry? Why?”
“That you’re hurt.”
“But I’m not hurt, Gabriel! It’s I who sent him away.”
He looked disbelieving.
“Yes, yes, it was I! Because I knew, you see, oh, it took me too long to find out, but I knew it was all wrong, it was a delusion; such things can happen, can’t they?”
“And so it is all finished,” Gabriel said.
“Yes, finished! And I’ve so much I should tell you, that I need to say.”
It seemed to her now that she must beg forgiveness of this man for her stupid blindness, for not having seen him as he was, for not having understood anything.
“Forgive me,” she said, and wept.
She brought a footstool and sat before him; she took his hand, pressing its palm against her cheek, murmuring, whispering, letting the words rise to her lips without hesitation or shame, speaking to him in French for no reason other than that the words of love flowed softly in the lilting vowels of that language.
“Je t’aime … I love you. Oh, I’ve been so strange, not myself, I sometimes think; yet how can that be? But I love you.”
He stroked her hair. She felt the warm cup of his hand smoothing, smoothing, and, in the sudden silence, could hear his breathing, yet he did not answer. She raised her head.
“I want to marry you, Gabriel. I want a long, quiet, wonderful life with you. I want to be with you for every day that’s left to us. We’re young, we can still—”
He turned his face away and covered it with his hand. She thought she heard him say, “Now! Dear God, now!”
Then, in a stronger voice, he said, “Oh, my dearest, I can’t. How can I, the way I am?”
She sprang up. “What does that matter? Do you think I care about that? Or care about anything at all except …” She could not go on.
“I know you don’t. But I care. A one-armed lover, starting all over again at the bottom with nothing. That’s not the way I used to dream I might come to you.”
“You’re wrong, you’re stubborn, you’re wrong! Tell me—is there some other reason? Because of him—of André—perhaps you don’t trust me, don’t believe in me anymore and don’t want to say so?”
“I believe in you. I would trust you with my life.”
“Well, then, trust me with it!”
Gabriel stood up. She came close to him, asking not in words alone, but with her eyes and her encircling arms, “Do you love me?”
“More than the world.”
“Then take me. You can’t just walk away and leave me.”
The pressure of his arm was strong on her back. Yet, “See, I can’t even hold you properly. I can’t do anything for you. I couldn’t even give you a ring.”
“What do I care about a ring!”
“Don’t torture me, Miriam. Oh, don’t.” He stroked her blazing cheek. “I want … I wanted …” His voice shook. “But the way things are … Let me go.” And very gently, he pulled away.
She could not speak. All, all was unreal. Weak, almost faint, she held the back of a chair while Gabriel rushed into the hall. When the outer door thumped shut, she went to the window. Out of tearless eyes she watched him go down the walk and swing himself onto the horse. She could hear the clatter of the trot and see him to the end of the street. Then she let the curtain fall back.
From another window I watched another man depart, and it was sorrowful in its way, but this is different, this is my heart.
“What?” said Ferdinand, in his jolly voice. He must have been waiting in the
parlor across the hall. “Gabriel gone so soon? Is anything wrong?”
She answered flatly, “Only that I asked him to marry me.”
“You—wait a minute—you asked him, you said?”
“That’s true.”
Ferdinand’s face wrinkled with astonishment. He threw back his head and laughed in pure glee.
“You asked him? You must be the only woman in the world with nerve enough to do that! You and your brother! The two of you will never cease to surprise me with the outlandish things you do. And David will be so glad, so absolutely glad! Can’t you imagine? Tell me, when is it to be? Very soon, I hope.”
“He refused me, Papa.”
Ferdinand stared. “Refused! God Almighty! Rosa told me, she swore me to secrecy, she told me—” Rosa and her secrets!
“—that he’s been in love with you ever since—”
“Ever since before he lost an arm.”
Ferdinand was stricken. “I don’t understand. That shouldn’t matter, if it doesn’t matter to you.”
“Pride, Papa. A man’s pride, and he’s got too much of it. It’ll take a deal of talking to talk him out of it.”
Ferdinand put a warm hand on his daughter’s shoulder. His forehead wrinkled in distress. “I’m so sorry, dearest girl. You’ve been through too much in your short years.”
“A lot of it was my own fault, Papa, though some of it wasn’t.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Do? I’m going to talk him out of it. But right now I think, if you don’t mind, I’d just like to be by myself awhile.”
He stood aside to let her pass, and she went downstairs, out to the old side garden, that little spot where so much had happened in her life.
There, still, Aphrodite stood. The dove at her feet had been smashed, but Ferdinand had cleaned out the pool himself, and the water fell now as it always had, in two curving tiers, like flounces on a skirt. And she sat there, without moving, until her heartbeat slowed and her breath came quietly again. The water rippled and trilled; voices and noises came from the other side of the wall, as the life of the street resumed, the life of the old, old city on the brown enduring river.
Here her children had taken their first steps. Here she had made her first trembling visit to this house where her years as a woman had begun. And she remembered her father’s house before that, lofty in her sight as a palace, when, clinging to David’s hand and awkward in her fine new dress, she had come to this strange country. She remembered the strange languages learned on the heaving ocean, and the ship, and Gabriel the boy standing drenched on the deck with the shivering dog in his arms.
It had been a long, long way: up in the world and down, up again and down again.
“But I can do things,” she said aloud. There was a thickness in her throat which she swallowed, and then went on talking to the air. “I can do things. I’ve done so much I never thought I could. And I can make him change his mind. Yes, Gabriel, I can.”
A butterfly had settled on her wrist; its resting wings, erect as sails, were opalescent mauve. The common wood nymph, probably, she thought, surprising herself with this recollection from the frontispiece in one of David’s enormous books. The lovely substance of the living wings was patterned like Oriental silk. All is pattern, all life, but we can’t always see the pattern when we’re part of it.
She was able to smile. Hadn’t Fanny always said it was a good omen when a butterfly lights on you?
The little creature quivered, lowering its wings and fluttering from her outstretched arm. It flickered toward the shrubbery, wavered away, and was lost in the gold and silver dazzle of the afternoon.
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Copyright © 1984 by Bar-Nan Creations, Inc.
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