Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  There was nothing Friday, and Saturday dawned doubly hollow in the wake of the funeral, in the absence of word. Then the postman brought Emily’s letter at ten-thirty, or rather, with his big key, he opened the bank of eight letter boxes in the lobby and thrust it into the Lowrys’ niche together with a Red Owl supermarket flyer and a manila envelope containing Jane’s credentials for the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party convention on June 22.

  Somewhere in his heart, for the walls were too thick, the morning air too heavy, the postman too considerate to go around slamming things, William heard the postman’s departure, and ran into the hall, flung open the door, leaped over the four steps down to the lobby, and skidded to a stop before the letter boxes. He rooted in his pocket for the key, opened the little brass door, and beheld the letter. The envelope was yellow, and as he took it into his hand, he saw there was a border of looping daisies on the back. And above them was her writing, her address inscribed in blue ballpoint, the paper where her hand had lain while she wrote, the flap whose gum her mouth had moistened.

  William took the letter back to his room, cradling it loosely in his hands like a fledging he might too easily crush. He slit it open with the Swiss Army knife he had received from his father two Christmases ago and read and read again. It was more than he had hoped for, perhaps a little jocular in tone, a little sophomoric in its exclamation marks and interjections (although Emily had, in fact, just completed her sophomore year), but these were not defects but bonuses, traits that he would surely come to adore. She had suggested that, given the weightiness of recent events, he call her next week, but meanwhile, she wanted him to write back. She wanted more words from him, and now she had made him speechless with all the things that needed to be said.

  Jane awoke more or less at the time the mail arrived, and as she poured her orange juice and set the percolator up, her son ambled into the kitchen. She turned and regarded him, looked down to split an English muffin, and looked up to regard him again.

  “You seem chipper this morning.” She inserted the muffin halves into the toaster.

  “I feel okay,” he allowed.

  “That’s an achievement under the circumstances.”

  He cast his eyes up and met her eyes. He said, “I really believe everything’s going to be all right.”

  “Well.” She paused. “Bully for you. Really.” He said nothing in response. The muffin halves bolted up out of the toaster and she gave a start. She laughed. “My nerves. Everything’s like . . . a shot. You know?”

  “I know,” he said, and smiled at her.

  Jane collected herself, brought the English muffins and the jam to the table, and sat down. “So,” she said. “Did you win something? Or maybe it’s . . . yes, maybe it’s a girl?”

  At last he looked away, down and away, where she was used to his gaze being. He said, more quietly, “Maybe something like that. But better.”

  “Tell me about it when you feel like it. Just be careful, okay? Of you. Of her.”

  “Sure,” said William, and turned and strode down the hall to his room, a man with urgent and manifold labors before him.

  In his bedroom—a single window facing east into the gathering algaeous green of what will be a hot summer day—William Lowry is imagining himself for posterity, or at least for the purposes of the letter he is about to write. For this—walls bedecked with posters of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, Spider-Man, and Ben Shahn’s The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti; the desultory heaps of clothes; the works of Isaac Asimov and Ian Fleming, lesser quantities of the Lawrences (D. H., T. E., and Ferlinghetti), A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School, Alan Watts’s The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, and Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd; and, in drawers, cigar boxes, and under a loose floorboard in the closet, talismans, souvenirs, and fetishes (jackknives and pocket nailclippers, matchbooks, stones, feathers, bones, rabbit’s feet, pinecones, horoscopes, baseball cards, screws and bolts, summer-camp riflery badges, a penny flattened courtesy of the Great Northern Railway, and a pfennig courtesy of the Third Reich by way of the Third Infantry and the former Corporal Franklin Lowry—is the totality of him, or was until a half hour ago.

  It is so great in scope and yet so little in sum; a historical museum whose exhibits are largely composed, on close examination, of lint, nail parings, and pencil stubs. So what shall William tell Emily about himself? In William’s mind the matter of them has been until now entirely about her; her qualities and their contemplation. Assuming William has any qualities at all, would it not be really conceited to enumerate them?

  William had set himself the task of replying to Emily’s letter by the end of the day, by five o’clock when the post office closed, so that she would have it Monday (tomorrow was Sunday), and then he would call her Wednesday. He got the most elegant stationery he could lay his hands on, onionskin typing paper from the bureau in the living room, and set to work. There were, in the end, six drafts, excluding false starts and smudged or spoiled copies (William’s penmanship had a tendency to lurch, or, rather, drain off to the lower right corner of the page, as if towards a sump). The final version was penned in permanent blue Scripto ink and sealed in a #10 envelope; William had considered using one of the elegant blue-and-red airmail envelopes emblazoned with the motto PAR AVION, but feared some post office clerk might take the instruction literally and ship Emily’s letter to Furness and Victoria Streets by way of O’Hare or even Orly.

  He was finished shortly after one o’clock and the letter was mailed by two. Happy enough, he went to the main library to browse National Geographic, Evergreen Review, and Motor Trend, ate a late lunch at the Seven Corners White Castle, and arrived home at five. But alone, in his room again, sequestered with Emily’s letter and his various drafts of reply, he suddenly felt emptied out, false and hollow, although he could not say whether he was the cheat or the cheated, the liar or the dupe. Perhaps now he doubted with the same force that a mere hour before he had believed. Emily’s letter (already limp, fraying at the folds with handling) no longer seemed so straightforward, nor did his reply—which he had no exact copy of—seem an adequate attempt at whatever response it was the letter invited.

  William shuffled into the kitchen at dinner no longer the man he was at breakfast. After his mother pushed a hamburger patty onto his plate, she went back to the sink to continue washing spinach for the salad she was preparing for her friends, who were coming by to talk about the war, to count delegates, and to drink with her.

  William watched her in these preparations, and then, as he was about to get up from the table, she stopped and raised her finger in a gesture telling him to halt. She went down the hall to her bag and returned with two dollars and laid them before William. “Why don’t you go to a movie? Or do something with a friend? With Jim? Or whomever?” Her son looked up at her, and seemed to release a great breath he had been holding all that while, and smiled a smile of great relief.

  William got hold of his friend Jim without difficulty and within ten minutes, Jim’s ’60 Pontiac Bonneville pulled up, a hulking beast of decrepitude, oozing exhaust, thrumming and belching with carburetic dyspepsia, the chorus of “Judy in Disguise (with Glasses)” leaking from its inoperative power windows.

  They drove down the hill without a word, the radio and the fact of being in motion—of moving through space with the music—rendering conversation superfluous. Finally, as they stopped for a red light a block from the Orpheum Theatre, William said, “I think I’m going to go out with Emily Byrne this next week.”

  “That’s different.”

  William’s hackles rose a little at this response. “How’s it ‘different’?”

  “Well, didn’t you like Sarah?”

  “I never liked Sarah.”

  “I heard she kind of liked you, but you never called her after the dance.”

  “I never called her because I was only doing you a favor taking her in the first place.”

  “I think maybe I was doing you a favor, gett
ing you a date.” Jim put his foot on the gas and the car shuddered forward. “She’s kind of sexy. You could do worse.”

  “She wasn’t my type. Shit, she wasn’t your type either,” William said with a sense of having settled the matter. “And Emily’s . . .”

  “Sexy?” Jim whistled sardonically.

  “Not sexy. Not like . . . Ann-Margret.” William tried to get his tongue around the concept he was prodding at in his mind. “I mean that for me it’s like she’s someone you’d read about or see in a picture, in a painting.”

  There was a gravity in William’s voice whose earnestness Jim fully comprehended, but that also cried out to be mocked. Jim tried to find some middle ground. “We called her carrothead when she was little. But her hair’s kind of darkened down now.”

  William said nothing in response. He let his silence settle over Jim in warning, and Jim, now trying without much success to parallel-park the car, was flailing. Pulling out again, wrenching his neck over the backseat, and cutting the wheel hard, he said, “Look. I don’t really know her.” He set the parking break. “Good luck, okay? I mean, for real.”

  William and Jim got out of the car. They had not discussed what movie they would see. They had no reason to. It would be the same as the last time, three weeks before. They sat in the front row, practically blinded by the glass-beaded screen and the roar of the light. Then the bone rose in the air, became a ship wheeling among the stars, and then there was the astronaut, living as a dead man in the empty hulk, and then the black slab, himself meeting himself, and the child, whose bones were the stars from which, thought William, the first bone must have been made.

  He and Jim walked to the car, silent, stunned, as though in grief or wonder. To say anything would be not just inadequate but a kind of profanation of beauty. Finally, nearly at the curb of his house, William said, “You see, it’s that heavy.”

  “I know. I get it,” said Jim, and William got out, and the Pontiac lumbered away.

  5

  TO LOOK AT HER, EMILY HAD A CERTAIN QUIETNESS of demeanor; a smallness of mouth, a largeness of eyes, hair worn shorter than was the fashion, and a roundness in her features that made her look younger than she was. But Emily was known both to her mother and the nuns to be a little impetuous, “impetuous” being a term for juvenile conduct that was not delinquent or even worrisome, but bore watching lest it boil over into something more untoward. Now Emily was only “a little” impetuous and thus bore less watching than most, and in her father’s eyes she was nothing less than faultless.

  Still, Emily’s conversation had a habit of putting others unfamiliar with her somewhat on the defensive; of asking questions slightly too pointed, of delving into areas her interlocutors were not yet quite prepared to broach. Emily’s grandmother had a habit of greeting her with the salutation “Well, come over here and let me get a good look at you”; and Emily’s own approach to human relations embodied exactly this approach. Had she been a character in English storybooks of a certain time, she would doubtless have been portrayed as, say, a hedgehog with spectacles, albeit a winsome one.

  Emily was more self-possessed than William (who in that selfsame storybook would have been the mole dressed in clericals) and more so than many girls. But her self-possession was in no way founded on the full-fledged possession of a self, which, being the holy grail of all William’s self-pursuit, was both what drew him to her and would most deeply puzzle him about her.

  The sun was still high at seven o’clock, a glorious thing, and Virginia had prepared a supper of summer foods, and of things that she knew Emily liked, in honor of her first day at work at Dayton’s “New Wave” department. There was fruit salad with miniature marshmallows and hot dogs and baked beans, served on paper plates on the picnic table in the backyard. It had, effortlessly, the air of a birthday, minus the cake, and Emily was happy as Virginia knew she would be; happier still on account of having received a letter in this morning’s post. The entire occasion was warm but bracing; and although she had never given conscious thought to it, that was what Emily liked about these foods: the cheery shocks and mischievous slaps of sweet and sour against creamy and bland, of maraschino cherries and grapefruit sections and green relish and yellow mustard, their boisterousness amid the somnolence of meat and salad.

  Emily wore a bright yellow sleeveless A-line shift cut mid-thigh, and the shape of the dress and her demeanor suggested you might string her on a Christmas tree or hang her in a belfry and simply ring her. The dress was the first of Emily’s purchases made at the employee discount, which would tend to have the effect of returning to her employer virtually every dollar it gave her in wages, but money was not the point of Emily’s employment any more than charity was the ultimate end of her mother’s church and civic volunteerism. The dress, and perhaps one or two more like it, would suffice, as would the chance to pass the summer in a store (really a “boutique”) full of such dresses and girls wearing them and selling them to other girls.

  It was to be the last summer of such dresses in those colors just short of gumdrop in shade, closer perhaps to Necco Wafers or tiny Valentine candy hearts: pink, green, lavender, turquoise, and of course Emily’s yellow. They would never again be short in quite this way; every girl a little girl, every woman a teenager; nor would the motif of the dress—triangular, like stick-women’s skirts, like paper dolls—be so perfectly replicated in the hair, which itself was A-line, triangular, worn long with flips thrusting out like serifs at the feet of the “A.” Emily did not have the flips (she had no patience for rollers), but she had the rest: optimism, energy, and youth.

  Emily had picked up the letter from the hall table when she came in, a little breathless, and was more breathless still by the time she had shouted a greeting down the hall towards the kitchen, run up the stairs to her room, shut the door, and settled herself onto the edge of her bed, legs dangling. She examined the envelope, caught the thrust of his handwriting. The letter itself she read perhaps four times before she put it in her bedside drawer. He had written things about the assassination—could it have been only last week?—that made her sad, but they, too, were sweet, they were not sobs or wails of grief; they were tender.

  At supper, she ate and drank deeply, and her father regarded her as he might a daffodil that had erupted out of their fallow spring lawn. Her arms were bare, unmarked as yet by the sun or by anything at all save the tiny efflorescence of the vaccination scar just below her shoulder. He had seen the letter on the hall table when he had come home and he asked Emily about it, he who could ask Emily anything.

  “So who’s your correspondent? A dark and mysterious stranger?”

  Emily looked up at him and let her fork rest against the side of the plate. She smiled and said, “None of your beeswax.”

  “Come on,” Edward said. “Seriously.”

  “A boy,” Emily said, and she let the words settle with a kind of glug of a stone dropped into a still pool, and in the gap before her father spoke again, she swore she could hear water lapping at the edge of the yard.

  “Any particular boy? Or just your standard-issue boy—snakes, puppy-dog tails, and so forth?” Now the truth was, Edward could ask Emily anything, and he could press his luck as far as it would go: He could tease her.

  “His name is Bill Lowry. He’s a friend of Monica’s. And Jimmy Donnelly’s.”

  Edward turned to Virginia as though she were the family archivist and registrar of voters. “Is that anyone we know?” he asked, turning back to Emily.

  “I don’t know,” Emily said, and a moment later, having completed her researches and tabulations, Virginia added, “I don’t think so,” and continuing, asked Emily, “Where does he go to school?”

  “The Academy,” Emily said.

  “Oh, my,” said her father. “I suppose his father is a lawyer or a doctor or a player at railroads and such.”

  “I don’t think he has a father,” said Emily. “I mean, his parents are divorced.”

  Virginia lo
oked deeply at Emily. “How sad for him.”

  “So a broken home,” said Edward. “But presumably a good one.”

  “I suppose,” Emily said. “I know they’re Democrats.”

  Edward tilted his head. “Well, that’s rather charming, considering the school.”

  “And Catholics?” asked Virginia.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, nothing wrong with that,” Edward said. “And so he . . .”

  “Invited me to . . . a concert. Thursday night. Near the U.”

  “Nothing wrong with that either. And he wrote to extend you this invitation. Impressive,” said Edward. “So this is a string quartet or something?”

  “It’s folk music.”

  Virginia said, “So it’s a college crowd? With drinking and so forth?”

  “It’s a coffeehouse,” Emily said, now feeling a little pressed. “They serve coffee.”

  Edward put his hand on Virginia’s forearm as if to restrain her and smiled. “So there’ll be beatniks and poets?”

  Virginia broke in. “I don’t like—”

  “It’s okay,” said Edward, increasing his pressure on his wife’s arm. “More likely to be earnest, serious types. Penny loafers. Crewneck sweaters. Clean for Gene.”

  “I guess,” said Emily unsteadily, now not quite sure which way the consensus was tilting.

  “I think it’ll be fine,” said Edward. “What about you, Mother?”

  Virginia said at last, “I think it’s perfectly all right.”

  It was only Monday night, which meant that Emily was not due to hear from William for two days, and then, presumably, to see him the evening after that. But now she was sorely tempted to call him.

  Instead, she called her friend Monica Reardon, in order that Monica might talk her out of it. And Monica did not fail her, putting forward an analysis that was at once deep, elegant, and tidy: “You might think you want to call him, and you might even think he wants you to call him, and he might even think he’d like you to. But really, he doesn’t want you to—not if he thought about it.”