by Robert Clark
So for Emily—as she stretched and tugged and fluffed her hair and sighed the sigh of her contentment that creation was so good that one creature might fit another so well—these things might be a mystery but they were not disturbing or puzzling as they were for William. Nor did what she had been doing with William conflict, as yet, with chasteness, for chasteness was not in opposition to the body, but belonged to it. It did not belong to the mind, whatever that was, nor was it meant to trouble the spirit. So the last thing in the world we might fairly say of Emily was that when she was in her body she had forgotten herself or what was important to her. But we also might say, from William’s perspective, that when Emily was in her body, she was a little out of her mind.
13
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING WEEK THAT MONICA REARDON felt she might be losing her best friend. Monica did not, in fact, have as many friends as she had persuaded the world to believe, and by her own private standard of true friendship—no secrets, not ever—she had only one real friend, Emily Byrne. Emily herself did not know that she held this status, for Monica’s air of certitude and self-confidence did not make it easy for Emily to entertain the idea that she might make such a claim.
Emily had been calling her infrequently, and when she did call, she was a little cagey with her, in particular about Bill Lowry. In truth, the more Emily saw of him and felt about him, the less she said about it to Monica, and by the middle of the week Monica imagined Emily disappearing from her life entirely, like a dot on the horizon, as she and Bill Lowry sailed out of sight on this voyage they were making together, as the sea and the sky swallowed them up.
Monica was perhaps being a little dramatic (a word adults had long applied to her, rather as they applied “impetuous” to Emily), because Emily had called her on both Sunday and Tuesday and told her that she had had a “friendly” time with Bill on Saturday, although she was somewhat unresponsive to further probing on Monica’s part. But right now, as Monica fretted, on this very Wednesday night, Emily and William were, as Monica suspected, being as secret as CIA agents, as Rosicrucians, as leprechauns. After a cursory visit to the Scholar—just long enough to down two mocha cappuccinos and note who was on the program—Emily and William were parked along the river, doing more or less what they had been doing Saturday afternoon, except that they were doing it not on William’s mother’s couch but on the gray seat of her station wagon, the vinyl clinging and peeling away from their flesh like octopus suckers as they wiggled and writhed.
Secrecy was at the essence of everything they were doing, and there were mighty imperatives at work: first, that it wouldn’t be a good idea for anyone to find out, especially Emily’s parents (whom Emily could no more picture imagining or fathoming what she was doing than Sister Mary Immaculata); second, that it wasn’t anybody’s business; third, that what they were doing was necessarily secret—it wasn’t a choice on their part, but essential to the thing itself. It was their thing, and if anybody else had been included, it would not merely be compromised but cease entirely to exist. And even if they had wanted to tell other people—really tell them—they could not have done so, for their secret was at bottom secret even from them. They could not say, individually or together, what it truly and really was that was passing between and over and through them.
When they paused in their kissing, they tended to talk about other secrets: to say things they would not ordinarily say; to confess things they would not ordinarily admit; and, when their talk turned to the larger world, to reflect upon its secrets, its hidden movers and hands. It was William who led the way, but Emily listened attentively, breathing the fog of their commingled breath while the moon poured down and the leaves and crickets hissed and clattered.
“If Goldwater had been elected last time, my mom was going to move us to Canada.”
“But he didn’t. He got pasted.”
“But he could have been. He was the nominee. It could have been close. Think about it. It could happen next time.”
“What could?”
“Phone taps, clamping down on free speech and protests. Escalation of the war. Secret files kept by the police. Dropping the bomb.” William spoke of these things not as happenstances, but outcomes dictated by the iron law of history that had the intransigent inexorability of suction, of water gyring down a drain. There was no escaping what had been ordained to happen next.
“I suppose,” Emily said. “Even the nuns say the war is evil.”
“Immoral. Illegal too.”
“But you think it’s not just the war. That it’s all connected.” No one at Emily’s house was much drawn to this kind of thinking, still less to the reflexive habit of believing that things are necessarily the opposite of what they seem. Yet while Emily lacked William’s fuzzy-mindedness and tendency to speculate much on the basis of very little, when she was confronted with the choice between something and nothing—between presence and absence—Emily chose something every time, just as she chose the body over the mind. What William offered her was consistent with that, and it was consistent with what they did between discussing it, with the two of them and the body and all the secrets it contains, the greatest of which is love. That one, love, was the one they were keeping from each other and even, until now, from themselves. Let us say it was on this night, or a little afterward, that William knew he both loved and was in love with Emily, love being a motion and a state of being, a verb and a noun, a restlessness that is also a refuge, a secret hiding place.
14
THERE IS A MOMENT, AROUND THE FOURTH OF JULY, when the summer reaches its apex and begins its long course of days, one much like another, hot and hotter; a miasma of light and fetid air through which, for all the intention and conviction we can muster, we can only drift half blind, the days a syrup through which we wade. Emily and William each had their routines—Emily in the New Wave department, William delivering prescriptions part-time for Frost’s Drugstore on his Raleigh—but the chief continuity in their lives was increasingly each other. Their usual Wednesday date was now supplemented by more casual meetings on other evenings and during the day on the weekends.
They spoke, too, on the telephone and sometimes at great length, for although love is supposed to stupefy its pilgrims or at least strike them dumb, they had become more rather than less articulate with each other. Where once the telephone could only amplify the mutual tripping-up, hem-treading, and general speaking at cross-purposes that afflicted their attempts at communication, now they could at least talk and make arrangements to meet, speaking one at a time and with almost total comprehension. And when they did meet, because they had begun to believe that they truly were being understood, they became more understandable—or so it seemed, at least to them.
With that confidence, Emily began to take William a little more in hand: to be firmer in asserting her own opinions and in feeling that William ought to assent to them, which he did, both sympathetically and eagerly, because to affirm what Emily said was to affirm Emily herself and thus the two of them and thus William himself. William in turn became less vague and more acute in Emily’s mind, his opinions more grounded, less nebulous and high-flown. That was doubtless because many of them were increasingly Emily’s opinions, or opinions of William’s that Emily had adopted.
Those differed less in substance than in the way they were stated. In politics, they consisted of whatever Emily and William believed Robert Kennedy had believed. Emily felt, with some justification, that as a Catholic, she had an inside track to this, and also noticed that William had a tendency to speak from the head—despite the general disorder of his thoughts—rather than the heart; to become incensed not by the pity of poverty, war, and injustice but by their asymmetry to the ideal or, alternatively, their connection to other more general nefarious patterns he or his reading had detected.
That extended to his attitudes to poetry, and here Emily also tried to bring his sensibility more into line with her own. She had never consciously thought ill of William’s poems—she
sensed that to have found a boy who cared for poetry at all was serendipitous—but conceived that the feelings these expressed might be put more subtly and precisely. As they stood, they had the quality of an inchoate ideological rant, a sort of incantatory stomping and flailing. It was as if William had received a disagreeable letter outlining the world’s condition and had torn it into little pieces and was now jumping up and down on them.
So it was that on the Friday after the Fourth of July, Emily was sitting in her room prior to going to bed, looking for a poem. She could not say whether she was searching for a poem which would suit William—rather as she might have chosen a necktie for her father—or one that expressed him, as a portrait might, or, better still, one that expressed them both, that described that zone of cross-hatching, of light and color, where the two of them overlapped. She was thumbing through a book she had of the Brownings, both Robert and Elizabeth, and simply stumbled across it, and it was one of his, surprisingly, rather than hers, and it was absolutely perfect. Then, as a kind of bonus, she came across a selection of their letters in the same volume; and these too were perfect. She marked two places in the book, kissed her parents good night, and went to sleep, deeply content, praying her prayers of thanksgiving.
That Saturday, after they had eaten the tuna fish sandwiches Virginia had brought them, they lay together on the lawn in Emily’s yard. William dug his fingers into the turf, idly combing and twisting strands of grass, and Emily read him the poem, which began, “Where the quiet-colored end of evening smiles/Miles and miles/On the solitary pastures where our sheep/Half asleep/Tinkle homeward through the twilight, stray or stop/As they crop—/Was the site once of a city great and gay/(So they say).”
You could not have heard Emily reading unless you were very close by, because Emily’s voice was a little small and because there was a slight wind that afternoon, moving the branches and singing in the telephone wires and even the grass they lay on. Add to that the singsong of the poem’s rhyme scheme, and Emily’s reading must have seemed a muttered chant, with the higher bell-tone of her voice tolling every few beats. You might well drift off to sleep.
But William was attentive, and more attentive as the stanzas went by and he understood that the poem was about a shepherd and shepherdess living in the overgrown ruins of a great nation’s capital that had been destroyed—indeed, destroyed itself—in the pursuit of glory and war. Now nothing was left but pieces of fallen columns and the shepherds and the sheep. There was a book William had read once set in the wake of a nuclear war, and the whole earth is uninhabitable, save for a bit of Australia, where the last man and the last woman are left to restore the human race, just the two of them.
“It’s like here. Like the war and everything,” William said as Emily paused between stanzas, and Emily nodded and went on reading. She was getting to the part she thought William would like best, the part where the shepherd comes home from the fields to the shepherdess. It was, at any rate, the part she liked best:
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.
Emily paused a little longer than usual at the end of that stanza. She could not tell whether William had gotten it yet—what was being alluded to—and then she went on and read the last stanza:
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—
Gold, of course,
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best!
Emily stopped and looked up, not at William, but in the direction of the back of the backyard, towards the garage and the alley and the sun burning white-hot in the sky.
“You know,” William said, “it’s exactly like now. Here. Johnson and McNamara.”
Emily waited and then asked, “And us?”
“Yeah, and us.”
This last remark satisfied Emily that William indeed understood; not just the apocalyptic aspect of the poem, but the love that is counterpoised to it. Just then, William looked up to see that neither of Emily’s parents was in view, and put his hand on top of Emily’s hand.
They lay that way for some time, without speaking, for they had by now learned not only to talk to each other without stammering, but to let the silences in their conversation run their natural course, to neither trip over them nor step on them. Finally, Emily said, “You know, her parents—Elizabeth Barrett’s—wouldn’t let her marry him, wouldn’t let them be together. They waited and waited and her parents wouldn’t give in. For years.”
“For years?”
“Yeah. So finally she wrote Robert and said she didn’t know what to do. She asked him. She said, ‘Think for me.’” Emily opened her book again. “He wrote back and said, ‘All our life is some form of religion, and all our action some belief. In your case, I do think you are called upon to do your duty to yourself; that is, to God in the end.’ ”
“So what did she do?”
“She ran away from home. With him. To Italy.”
“Wow. So her parents went berserk?”
“Them and everybody else. It was a big scandal.”
“So did they make them come back?”
“No. Italy was a long way away. Like from here to California. So they just stayed there, like exiles.”
“Until everybody cooled down.”
“I’m not sure everybody ever did cool down,” Emily said. “And then after ten or fifteen years, she died.” Emily paused. “He lived for a long, long time. But he always was thinking about her. And them, together.”
“So it was like he wrote to her, that they were like their own religion to each other?” William said tentatively.
“Sort of,” Emily said, thinking that in fact this was a great insight, perhaps only a hair short of the mark. “But not in a selfish, conceited way.” Emily thumbed through her book and stopped. She said, “Yeah, there’s another poem, and he says—here it is: ‘All is beauty: And knowing this, is love, and love is duty.’”
“Like a cause. Like being for something.”
“Yeah. And being against war and greed. That’s kind of what the other poem says. About how love is best.”
“And wins?”
“And wins. Over all the generals and businessmen and politicians.”
At some point William’s hand had removed itself from Emily’s, although neither of them had noticed. It must have been when Emily was leafing through her book, and needed both of her hands free, and William’s hand just settled back into the grass like a butterfly and resumed what it had been doing, the picking and combing and stroking. That was just as well, for a moment later, Emily’s mother appeared before them, like a ghost or an angel. She knelt down, resting on her heels.
“So what are you two up to?” she asked.
“Reading. Poetry.”
“Who?”
“The Brownings.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” Emily’s mother said. “They’re very—” And happily Virginia did not say “romantic.” She paused and finally she said, “—beautiful. They’re very beautiful poems.” And Emily nodded.
Virginia stood up and before she walked away, she turned back to William and said, “It’s nice to see so much of you, Bill. You’re almost like part of the family. Emily’s father and I thought it might be nice to get to know your mother too. Suppose you both came over for a picnic. Next Saturday. Would you ask her if that would do?”
“Sure,” said William. “I’ll ask her right away.”
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nbsp; That Wednesday, Emily and William forwent their usual evening date and simply walked to the park. On their way out the door, William had told Emily’s mother that his mother would indeed be coming Saturday and would bring salad. This prompted an approving remark from Virginia and a friendly nod from Edward; and William could not help but feel that he did not mind Emily’s parents that much at all.
Tonight William had brought a little olive-green rucksack with him that he had bought at an army surplus store, and as though in sympathy Emily wore an oversize jacket of the same material. It was a cool evening, scarcely above seventy degrees, and promised to turn cooler. When they entered the park, they did not stop in the main area where the warming house and playground and ball field were situated, but continued through to the other side, into the tall grass and down the hill. This was a long, rather steep bank that ran down towards the railroad tracks and overlooked the river. You could lose yourself in it, unseen from either above or below, if you lay down in the vegetation, and this is what Emily and William did.