Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  “Compelled?”

  “Compelled to follow . . . up . . . on any of them.”

  “Not even tempted?”

  “Oh, tempted. Sure. But temptation is just ordinary life. It’s just bread and butter. You just shrug. Confess whatever you yield to. Maybe avoid the occasion.”

  “The occasion?” Fields smiled. “Like birthdays, weddings, testimonial dinners?”

  “The occasion of sin. The situation that gives rise to the temptation.”

  “And I thought we were doing so well keeping Mother Church out of the discussion.”

  “I’m sorry. But it’s useful, really. You learn to stay out of the line of fire.”

  “So you wouldn’t trust yourself alone in the autoclave room with one of the three pretty nurses.”

  “It’s not a matter of trust. It’s a matter of avoiding . . . steering clear of potential trouble.”

  Fields put his hand on the bottle, shook his head, then shrugged, and withdrew it. “But suppose you think that all this time you’ve been dodging bullets quite nicely, when in fact you haven’t really been fired upon at all. That you just haven’t heard . . .”

  “The irresistible chord. Then I thank God I’ve been spared. I don’t need that. Not at my age.”

  “Which is . . . perhaps forty-five?”

  “Forty-four.”

  “And you talk like an old capon. When you’re scarcely middle-aged. When you could sire an entire brood in a couple of afternoons.”

  “It’s not what I want. And you said it’s volitional.”

  “Sometimes it wants us. And becomes what we want.”

  “I’m happy,” Edward said, and added, not as an afterthought but a conclusion, “I love my wife.”

  “Of course you do. I loved my wives. Both of them. Truly. I miss them. Especially now. In my dotage. In which I don’t mean to harass you.”

  “Of course not.”

  “But these are things worth speaking about, don’t you think? With a good drink, at the end of our labors. At the end of the day.”

  “Indeed,” Edward said. “It’s a good way to amuse oneself. Human folly.”

  “Oh, but it’s sad,” said Fields, without a trace of apparent sadness. “At least I always feel that way about it, after the fact. So melancholy and sadly earnest, the whole business. Deadly earnest, I suppose.”

  Edward was not thinking of these things as he drove to one hospital and then another the next morning, but his mind came back again to the boy and Emily. Midway between St. Luke’s Hospital and Miller Hospital, he seemed to recollect that once he had stood in the dark outside a girl’s house, and he had done this because she was an extremely pretty girl—even prettier than Virginia, he had to admit—and he had wanted to see her come out and possibly approach her.

  As he remembered this, Edward waited at the stop light at the bottom of Ramsey Hill, and recalled her and felt something in his midriff that could only be called a pang, although, try as he might, he could not remember the girl’s name at all.

  The light changed, Edward drove on, and wondered if this boy was having pangs for Emily. He marveled at the recurrence of this sensation in himself after so many years. It struck him that it was almost exactly like the feeling he had when he recalled something from the past that was lost to him and the combination of sweetness and futile longing catalyzed into something that went uncomfortably beyond nostalgia or sentiment; that if gone into deeply enough could turn to grief and even despair, not so much for any one person, but for everything he had wanted and that had failed to be. Not pangs of love, but of mourning, the one pretty much indistinguishable from the other, except by the time of life in which they struck you.

  Edward drove into the Miller Hospital parking lot, contemplating the absurdity of this boy’s having pangs for his daughter and of the pangs being a kind of precursor or proxy of what amounted to grief. And this seemed to Edward, as he got out of the car and went around to the trunk to get his cases, to be both ridiculous and dangerous: this boy feeling things toward his daughter that rightfully appertained to the old and the dead; his love wish that contained a death wish.

  16

  WILLIAM RODE WITH HIS MOTHER TO EMILY’S house that Saturday with decidedly mixed feelings. On the one hand, the whole thing was on account of him, him and Emily. But on the other hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted anyone—particularly his mother— intruding on his and Emily’s secrets and pleasures. And riding in the car with his mother at the wheel, with neither of them saying very much on their way to an appointment, was a little reminiscent of her taking him to the doctor or the dentist or a parent/teacher conference at school at which he would be talked about like a laboratory specimen and spoken to with a level of condescension scarcely fit for a toddler.

  But when they arrived at Emily’s house, it was necessarily William who led the way to the door, his mother carrying the salad, covered with a shield of aluminum foil. Mrs. Byrne met them at the door, and William heard her and his mother exchange choruses of those chortling, bubbling, rumbling noises (like a water cooler or what he imagined an Aqua-Lung sounded like) that adults use to greet one another on first acquaintance. Then Emily’s mother led them back to the kitchen, and there they found Emily calling out through the back screen door to her father, who was just then stoking the charcoal grill.

  William’s mother set down her salad on the kitchen counter and put down a paper bag next to it. Emily and William watched her explain herself to Emily’s mother and watched Emily’s mother take this in.

  “Well,” Jane began. “It’s just something I threw together, and I brought the dressing separately so we can just toss it at the last minute. If that’s all right. . . .”

  “Oh, of course,” said Virginia, a little diffidently, or so Emily thought. Jane removed the foil, and they saw that what William’s mother had brought was contained in a mahogany-colored wooden bowl, shiny with what must be oil, rather like Jim Donnelly’s mother poolside at the tennis club. Then from the bag Jane fetched a small bottle that, Emily supposed, had once held capers or olives or cocktail onions, but was now filled with a viscous green liquid, not far removed, she thought, from something you might find on your windshield on a hot day of high-speed travel.

  “Just a few things,” Jane was saying. “Mushrooms, bacon bits, hard-boiled eggs, artichoke hearts.”

  “It’s very exotic,” Virginia said. “And here we’re only having hamburgers and wieners.”

  “Oh, it’s really casual, actually,” Jane said. “Exactly the thing for a meal alfresco.”

  Emily saw that her mother let this Gallicism or whatever it was slip by unexplained, and wondered if her mother was beginning to think that William’s mother might be, as her granny put it, a little grand, albeit in a curious fashion. For while she affected a folkishly plain manner of dress—a shift in bright orange, flat ballet-style shoes, and a rather shapeless, outsize straw bag—these were offset by a bracelet of clunky charms that must have come from Polynesia or Mexico and sunglasses, sunglasses with huge, almost blackly opaque lenses.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s delicious,” Virginia said. “Why don’t we step outside and see how Edward’s doing with the barbecue?”

  Virginia led the way out the back door and down into the backyard, Jane following, and Emily and William behind them like retainers. When they were sure the grown-ups were fully distracted, they looked at each other quizzically and shrugged.

  “Edward, this is William’s mother, Jane,” Virginia said.

  Edward took off his barbecue mitt and extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said pleasantly. Jane removed her sunglasses and shook his hand. “Bill’s rather a fixture here these days,” Edward continued.

  “But not an imposition, I hope,” Jane said. “He can be a little . . . relentless at times.”

  “Oh, no. Not at all. We’re used to having lots of kids around. Love it.”

  “You and Mrs. Byrne have—”

  “Please, Virginia,
” Virginia cut in, nicely enough.

  “Ginny,” Edward said, “and I have just the two, Sue and Emily.”

  Then Virginia, a little in the manner of someone presiding over a school assembly, said brightly, “Well, Edward. If you’re ready, I’ll bring out the hamburgers and wieners and you can set to work while Jane and I finish up the lovely salad she’s brought.” With that Jane and Virginia went back into the house, followed at a short distance by Emily.

  William now stood alone about ten feet beyond Edward, closer to the garage, and watched Edward watch the women go inside and then return to prodding and poking the coals. He hoped Emily’s father would not now commence to ask him questions or josh with him about sports. Happily, Edward continued to regard the fire bed absentmindedly, albeit as though it might at any instant somehow require great attention.

  Inside, Virginia set about finding Jane the requisite tools for her salad, and came up with a silver serving spoon and a carving fork that sat a little uncomfortably alongside Jane’s ethnic bowl. Emily was curious to see what “tossing” consisted of—probably, she supposed, some Isadora Duncanish dervishing of the lettuce. But her mother asked her to help carry the rest of the food out to the table. As she set the platter down on the little metal table next to the grill, she saw her mother and father exchange a series of microscopic eye-crinklings, imperceptible shrugs, and tiny mouthings. Moving back to where William was standing, Emily continued to watch them, trying to make out what signals were being passed, while William watched her and, assuming she was preoccupied with something a little grave, touched her gently on the hip and then removed his hand.

  At this point, Jane emerged from the house, bearing her salad bowl and Virginia’s wedding-silver implements. She approached the picnic table, already set with paper plates and napkins by Emily, and said, “Shall I just put this down here?”

  “Oh, anywhere,” Virginia replied, and added, “We’ll need forks, I imagine. I’ll go get them.” She set off and then spun around and asked Jane, “And knives too?”

  “Oh no,” Jane said. “You don’t need knives. It’s very informal.”

  Virginia nodded and went back into the house while Edward poked and turned the meat on the grill. Jane came over and stood next to him and said, “Is there anything I can do?”

  Edward, pulling back just half a foot or so, said, “Oh, no. We’re . . . I’m fine. Just sit down and relax. Pour yourself some lemonade.”

  Jane backed away and sat down at the picnic table, still regarding Edward. “Well, I’ll just go right ahead,” she said with a laugh, half directed toward him, and half toward no one in particular. She poured herself a glass from the pitcher that stood on the table. It occurred to William that he had probably never seen his mother drink lemonade before. Virginia returned with a fistful of forks and set them around. Edward announced, “I’ve just about got the first bunch ready if you want to come over with your plates.”

  After they had each gotten a hamburger or a hot dog from the grill, they all sat down again, Edward at one end of the table, William and Emily on one side, and Jane and Virginia on the other, with Virginia positioned between her husband and Jane.

  “Well,” said Virginia, and looked at Edward, who looked back blankly and made the tiniest of shrugs, and Emily realized they were not going to say a blessing. Her mother shrugged back and said, “Well, shall we?” and everyone began to eat. William and Emily listened to the adults coo to each other about the food in a sort of variation on the earlier greeting rite.

  Emily, and her mother, too, she suspected, worried that the conversation would not go well—that the adults would not have enough in common and that she and William would feel left out, pressured, or simply embarrassed—but she needn’t have worried. William’s mother was, if not adroit in social circumstances, gifted with connections and free associations that were fodder for talk. She had almost immediately announced that she had practically grown up on this very block, her best childhood friend, Anna, having lived just six doors down. Then she mentioned various people they must know in common, and indeed, Edward and Virginia were acquainted with some of these personages. Emily observed that Jane seemed to address herself chiefly to Edward while Virginia swung her gaze back and forth between them, as though one of them were about to slip away. During one particularly long exchange William’s mother took off her sunglasses and set them before her, the better to see Edward, Emily supposed.

  That had gotten them through the second round of hamburgers and hot dogs, and the bulk of the salad, which Edward ate with especially apparent pleasure. He remarked to Jane, rather merrily, as if his lemonade might have been fortified in some way, “So, Emily tells us you are a mover and shaker in politics.”

  “Hardly that,” Jane said, and looked up at Edward. “But I am going to Chicago. To the national convention. I’m an alternate, really. But still . . .” She was looking at Edward straight on, but then, as though she were forgetting something, she turned to Virginia, “. . . it’s nice to be included.”

  “It sounds very exciting,” Virginia said.

  “I suppose,” Jane responded, “although right now I really rather despair of the whole business.”

  Edward said, “Because of the assassination and the way the nomination’s going, I’d suppose.”

  Jane smiled at him. “Oh, yes. Exactly. I just don’t see how it can end well, as far as the war is concerned. Which is what concerns me most.”

  “Of course,” Edward said. Virginia glanced away. He added, “I gather you’re also on the front lines of the war on poverty and so forth. At work, I mean.”

  “Oh, yes. I guess I am,” Jane replied. “Of course, you can’t really accomplish everything you’d like. These institutions and agencies move a little slowly—”

  “We raise money for yours, I think,” Virginia broke in. “At church. Bingo. Bring and Buy. Sodality and so forth.”

  Jane said, “Of course. It’s very . . . good that you do. And important.” She said this with an air of familiarity with what Virginia was referring to, although Emily wondered how or why she would be.

  There was a pause and Virginia leaned over the table and lifted a sheet of waxed paper off another platter to reveal a bank of puffed-rice bars. William had two bars, and his mother took one. Emily noticed that although Jane ate hers, she did so as if holding it at arm’s length, at the ends of her fingertips, as though it threatened to stick to her teeth.

  When they were done, Virginia stood and volunteered to give Jane’s salad bowl a quick wash before she left. “Oh, that’s all right,” Jane said. “Really, you’re just supposed to wipe it out with a paper towel. To keep it nice and oiled.” Virginia nodded, a little uncertainly.

  Virginia stood with Edward in the front door and William eased around from behind them to join his mother. “I might come back later,” he said, “if that’s okay.”

  “Sure,” said Edward, and Emily, now standing just behind her father, nodded.

  “Of course,” said Virginia.

  The adults said their thank-yous and goodbyes, in more or less the same ebullient mutter they’d used to greet each other, and Emily walked with William and his mother to their car. Edward and Virginia remained in the doorway, and as Jane got into her side of the car, Virginia put her arm around her husband’s waist and guided him ever so gently inside. A moment later, Emily returned and began to mount the stairs, but she paused just below and listened. From the kitchen hall, she heard her father say, “Well, that was painless.”

  “I suppose it’s hard raising a boy by yourself,” Virginia allowed, as though she were excusing something in William’s mother’s conduct.

  “She’s fine. Interesting woman.”

  Virginia did not affirm or deny this. Instead, she was silent for a moment and then said very gently, “You didn’t say the blessing.”

  “Oh, that. I wondered if you’d mind.” There was a pause. “I just thought since they’re not Catholic, it would be a courtesy. It would
be ecumenical.”

  “I suppose. Of course, this is a Catholic house. It’s our house, and you could say the onus is on . . .”

  “You could. But these things are a little awkward, aren’t they? Both ways. Even for the kids. Didn’t seem like they said a word the whole time. But . . . but everything went fine. And now it’s done. And there you are.” Then they each went their separate ways, Edward to the backyard, Virginia to the kitchen, and Emily to her room.

  That night Emily and William returned to the park, to the same place on the hill they had been a few nights before. The grass was still flattened where they had lain. It was their burrow, their nest, their bower. They sat down and waited for the dark to come like a flood tide, for the stars to descend out of the sky.

  William said, “So do you think they liked my mom?”

  “I think my dad did. My mom, I don’t know.”

  “My mom didn’t really act like my mom. She acted more cheerful. She didn’t talk about politics and the war the whole time.”

  “Grown-ups always say to avoid talking about religion and politics.”

  “But they didn’t avoid them. Not really.”

  “It was my dad, I think, that brought them up,” Emily said. “My mom says sometimes he likes to put the cat among the pigeons. To stir things up.”

  “With my mom, things are always already stirred up. So they’d like each other.”

  “I think they did. Not that you can really tell. It’s like everything they say to each other is in code.”

  “Suppose there’s no code,” said William. “Suppose it’s all exactly like it sounds, and they never really say anything to each other. Or at least not what they really think.”

  “Maybe they’re just trying to be polite,” Emily said.

  William turned towards her. “I mean, your parents are nice, but today, they all sat there for an hour and nobody said even one really true, unphony thing.”