Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  The other woman remained for a moment, still in her chair, in nearly a daze. He decided to rouse her by standing up from his desk. “You think about this California thing, Mrs. Lowry. About the boy maybe going to look up his dad. It’s pretty common.”

  Jane shook her head. “He wouldn’t.”

  “All the same . . .” Lieutenant O’Connor finished, and finally Jane stood up, and he walked her out to the hall. She was an attractive woman, he saw, and he wanted to make nice to her, because he pitied her situation, if not necessarily the woman herself; she and all these other white-collar swells, with their spoiled mixed-up kids.

  “Your address—475 Laurel. That’s an apartment house, right?”

  “Yes,” Jane said, looking ahead.

  “I had a case there when I was a rookie. Ground-floor apartment.”

  “That’s us,” Jane said, and looked at him. “You must mean the taxi-dancer thing.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Maybe twenty-five years ago, a little more.” Lieutenant O’Connor continued, “Nice big apartments. Guy had a whole darkroom in one of the closets. That still there?”

  “No. Not anymore. Not since we came.”

  “Too bad,” Lieutenant O’Connor said. “Make a nice hobby for your boy. When he comes back.”

  When Edward and Virginia came home, Emily’s postcard lay with the other mail on the vestibule floor. On the picture side there was a generic photo of a Minnesota lake, on the other, face up, her handwriting. Virginia fell upon the card, picked it up, and read it, still on her knees. She read it again, and then she handed it up to Edward. He read it aloud, expressionlessly, like a jury foreman announcing a verdict.

  “ ‘Dear Mom and Dad. I am going away for a while with Bill. It’s something we need to do. It’s very serious and important, but we are not in any kind of trouble. Please don’t worry. I love you very much. Emily.’ ” Edward’s daughter’s name came out of his mouth with a shudder, with an ache in his chest.

  Virginia stood up, unsteadily. “So that’s it,” she said. “They ran away together.”

  Edward nodded.

  “I suppose we ought to be relieved,” Virginia said, and she brushed her hands against her skirt.

  “I suppose we should,” Edward said.

  “But you know what? What it really does,” and her voice was rising, but then it fell off. “What it really does is make me a little mad.”

  “Because . . . ?” Edward said, thinking he ought to know what she was going to say, but somehow did not.

  “Because if she had the . . . the consideration to send us a card, she should have had the consideration to not do it in the first place,” Virginia said. “Does that make sense?”

  Edward thought about this for a moment, and said, “It makes, well, one kind of sense.”

  “I know this is all wrong, but I’d like to swat her one,” and then Virginia began to cry, to shake with great quaking sobs.

  Edward put his arm around her shoulder, which seemed to be the stooped and bony back of an old woman as the sobs traveled up through it. “I know,” he said. “I understand,” and he added, rather helplessly, “It’ll all turn out,” and Virginia said nothing in response to him at all.

  Somehow, that night, all of them—Jane and Virginia and Edward—slept easier. Edward had called Jane about the postcard, and after he had told her what it said and she had thought about it, she wondered if she had not preferred the uncertainty of the earlier part of the day to the knowledge the card had afforded them. For then—and the same feeling stole upon the Byrnes—there had remained the possibility that the children would simply return: that whatever circumstance had impeded them had removed itself; that whoever had taken them had released them or had been escaped from; that, for whatever reason you cared to name, the whole business had been an accident, a temporary mistake.

  But now everyone knew it was irrefutable and deliberate, a piece of childish willfulness grown huge and monstrous. Jane, Edward, and Virginia might go ahead and look for the children—try to find them so as to rescue and save them—but the children were intent on thwarting them; didn’t want to be saved. After Edward turned out the light in their bedroom that night and laid his head on the pillow to begin staring at the dark ceiling, he heard Virginia mutter, “ ‘Please don’t worry. I love you very much,’ ” and her tone was not far removed from sheer fury.

  When the clock struck twelve, there had been, of course, no further word about anything; nothing to be hopeful about or even to speculate upon. But the meeting with the lieutenant had given them, if not a sense of purpose, some distractions: the rounding up of photographs, the searching of the rooms, the interrogation of friends. And the possibility of one distraction opened their imagination to others: Jane, for example, realized she had not played any music in the house since before her trip to Chicago, and determined to begin working her way through her entire record collection, albeit not at such volume as to make the phone inaudible. Virginia turned to prayer, understandably, although she would be the first to take umbrage at anyone’s describing this as a distraction, for it was indeed doing something—taking action, perhaps the only effective action possible—about the situation.

  Edward remained a little more at sea. He had found no reassurance in their meeting with Lieutenant O’Connor; had scarcely in fact been able to contain his livid despair at the police department’s indifference, its condescending and ineffectual response to their dilemma, not much more than paper-shuffling, make-work, and do-it-yourself detection.

  So although Edward slept that night, he also awoke many times; and on two of these occasions he thought he heard someone on the porch or at the door, and of course he thought it was Emily. Because she hadn’t necessarily meant what she said in the postcard, had she? Or had changed her mind. And of course he went downstairs and there was no one there at all.

  There is something called mother love, which is tender but girded by great fortitude, by a steely determination to protect and foster until the child can fend for itself, and thus moderated by a certain practicality which is soft-hearted but by no means soft-headed. Father love, or at least Edward’s love for Emily, may be somewhat different: It is a little awestruck, and since in Edward’s generation it is not much touched by the quotidian business of dressing and changing and feeding and supervising, it rather tends to remain that way. That this child is simply a child is glorious enough; that it is his child makes it doubly so. That it is a girl child, that it partakes of the beautiful and ineffable nature of woman, renders it a glorious mystery; and because it is his wife’s child—because it contains her, her youth reborn, captured and held in check, as if redeeming death itself—it is surely a species of miracle. It goes without saying that the girl child ought to be good; that she proves to be good—in her perfect and unself-regarding beauty, and her uncontingent love for the world in general and him in particular—is unfathomable, almost unbearable.

  This is not necessarily universal, and perhaps it only applies to Edward or to men like him. Even Edward himself would have to admit that while he adores Susan (who is prettier and steadier than Emily; and who never, of course, put him through what he is going through now), at some point after infancy or after her sister was born, she became something like her mother’s second-in-command, unfailingly responsible, helpful, and unflappable, and so a little too uncomplaining, a little too self-possessed, a little too invulnerable to meet his own deeply vulnerable father love on its own terms.

  With Emily, it is otherwise, and sometimes he wonders if Susan did not sacrifice something—perhaps willingly, as was her nature—so that he and Emily could be so very close. But now he has the other thing, and it is more than worry or agony. He looks at the empty porch, the empty street, and the darkened houses, and all he can conceive is emptiness, loss upon loss, nothing rather than something or everything or even anything at all. This is what Emily has left him; this is where his love, more foolish and heedless than anything he felt as an adolescent, has gott
en him.

  3

  IN THE MORNING, EDWARD AND VIRGINIA AGREED that Edward ought to go to work; that there was nothing he could usefully do at home (Virginia would go through Emily’s room; Edward was privately much relieved that he would not have to) and he could drop off the photograph at the police department and show O’Connor the postcard. Because they both thought of it, because he was kind and she was kind, he could even collect William’s picture on the way, and save his mother the trouble and perhaps the pain.

  When Edward arrived, Jane was up and cheerful, after a fashion. In the afternoon, she, too, was going to go to work for a couple of hours, and this morning she was going to play all twelve sides of Tristan und Isolde, and she was going to clean the house. She was going to carry a great stack of magazines down to the boiler room and let the custodian have at them.

  Jane invited Edward in and asked him if he’d like coffee. Edward said, “I’d better not. I just thought I might save you a trip downtown with Billy’s picture. For the lieutenant, or whatever he is.”

  “Oh, that’s very . . . sweet of you. To think of that,” Jane said. “Just let me look. They did one last winter for school.” Jane began to rummage in a drawer in the hall, and then moved down the hall to the living room, calling after Edward to follow her. “I’m a little scatterbrained. Forgive me.”

  “More than understandable under the circumstances,” Edward said, and looked around. He saw a little sofa, an impressionist print of some kind, and then he heard the music. “Oh, Wagner. Right?”

  “Tristan.”

  “I thought so. I spent time in Germany after the war. Not that they were putting on much music.”

  “I suppose not,” Jane said. She thrust her hand into another drawer and pulled out a five-by-seven print. “Here we are.” She regarded the picture. “You know, he already doesn’t quite look like this. He’s already . . . older, more grown-up. Or more composed or something. But I guess it’ll do.” She handed the photograph to Edward.

  He held it and looked down at it for a moment. “Ginny’s going to check through Emily’s room today. Rather daunting. With a teenager.”

  “I suppose I should do the same. But I don’t know if I can bear it. Not the mess . . .” Jane had stopped, and Edward looked at her and saw that a tear was running down her cheek. He had to stop himself from reaching out his hand to wipe it away.

  Instead, he spoke, very softly, and said, “You can wait. Until you’re ready. There’s no harm in it.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But it’s very hard, isn’t it? I suppose especially for you.”

  “I don’t know. I suppose it is. But I thought I was doing better. Until just now.”

  “You’ll do fine,” Edward said, and moved toward the door. “I ought to go.”

  “Well,” Jane said, “I’m sorry I couldn’t get you anything. Some coffee. Maybe you can come by sometime—maybe later—and have a drink. You. And . . . Ginny. We can—I don’t know—commiserate.”

  “Maybe we will,” Edward said. He put his hand on the knob of the front door. “Maybe I will. When I get done today. Just to see how you are.”

  “That’s awfully kind.”

  “Perhaps . . . I could help you. With Billy’s things. His room.”

  “That would be a tremendous favor.”

  “Fine. I’ll come around four-thirty or five, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “Maybe I’ll drop by home and get Ginny. Or whatever. I’ll see how the day goes.”

  “Wonderful,” Jane said, and Edward slipped out.

  Virginia opened the door to her daughter’s room. She could not say whether she or Edward had closed it, or on what impulse. The first thing she did was put up the shades, which were still down, and had been down since the last night Emily had slept here. Emily must have left them down when she rose the morning she went to the fair.

  Virginia looked at the alarm clock on the bedside table and saw it was set for five-thirty. Emily had told them she wanted to leave the house by seven, but this implied it had been rather earlier than that; and this thought caused Virginia to recollect that neither she nor Edward had, of course, seen her that morning. The last time either of them had set eyes on her—had hugged her, had bidden her to pray for them—was the night before she went away.

  Looking away from the alarm clock, Virginia noticed that the bed had been made. This was perfectly unremarkable. Emily always made her bed. So the fact that she had made it on that particular morning meant either she expected it would be an ordinary day or she had forgotten it was going to be extraordinary; or that she was completely aware of what she was doing and out of some sense of perverse consideration undertook to leave her room tidy before she walked out of it and out of their lives.

  The lieutenant had not been very specific about how they should go about the searching of the children’s rooms, but, in keeping with her observations of the bed and the alarm clock, she thought she ought to concentrate on what was different, on what might be missing. With that in mind, Virginia began with Emily’s closet and clothing drawers. Virginia was familiar in a general sense with Emily’s wardrobe, if only because all the laundry passed through her hands at some point, whether by way of the washing machine or across the ironing board. Now upon opening Emily’s closet, Virginia noted three or four obviously new dresses that she had never seen before, but these, she realized, must be booty from the job in the New Wave department. The clothing Virginia was familiar with—the dresses Emily wore to mass, the blue jumpers and white blouses she wore to school, the outfits she might put on for a family party or to visit her grandmother—was all as it should be, undisturbed.

  It was in going through Emily’s chest of drawers that Virginia saw items missing, or their quantities depleted: only a couple of pairs of socks and underwear; no jeans or shorts or sweatshirts or casual tops whatsoever; only two sweaters where there ought to have been at least four; and on the closet floor, no tennis shoes or the boots she had gotten for CYO camp last year.

  As her comprehension of these anomalies took shape—as she scanned the shelf in the closet and saw that the blue vinyl Northwest Orient flight bag that served as Emily’s suitcase was also gone—she felt panic rise within her. In part it must have been because these missing objects confirmed once more the message of the postcard; the fact of Emily’s intention; that she had weighed these actions before taking them. She had examined them and apprised herself of their consequences and decided to proceed. No one had stolen her away, no terrible accident had befallen her. That great evil had been averted, but here, in its stead, was this other evil, this other privation that was nothing less than Emily’s decision to deprive those who loved her most, who conceived and bore her into this world, of that which they loved most.

  Virginia has no heart to continue, but because she is Virginia, because what amounts to her love knows no bounds, she goes on all the same. She moves to the bookcase, to the nightstands on either side of Emily’s bed and their drawers. Emily is not a messy child, but in common with children and adolescents, her possessions are laid out without apparent system, accumulated in heaps, accreted in layers, not by theme or form, but archaeologically. Thus Virginia finds in one drawer, beginning at the top, a Robert Kennedy bumper sticker, various pots and tubes of makeup, and a strand of leather bootlace Emily wore around her ankle for the better part of the previous summer; deeper down, instructions for Tampax, a rubber-faced troll, and a Red Cross junior lifesaver swimming badge; deepest of all, scapulars, pop-beads, feathers, stones, and shells.

  On the other nightstand, there are books, and in the drawer, more books and papers: a slight and stern-looking volume titled The Colossus; an essay with the heading “Edna St. Vincent Millay” (marked at the top, in blue pencil, “A!”); various notices and handouts from school; and a box of stationery. Virginia picks it up and opens it. Inside there are two pens, one ballpoint and one fountain, some rubber bands, and blank sheets of paper. The topmost l
eaf shows faint impressions of Emily’s handwriting, traces of overlapping letters and words where she has borne down hard with her pen. There is another postcard just like the one she sent them. On the back there is a picture of a lake in northern Minnesota, the lake where she went to camp. In the box she also finds Emily’s savings account passbook. The last entry, made five days ago, records that the account has been closed and that the entire balance, $296.83, has been withdrawn.

  Virginia has been hoping that here she might find a diary or some record of Emily’s thoughts or plans, but at the bottom of the box she finds only two letters. She reads the one with the earlier postmark:

  475 Laurel Ave.

  St. Paul, Minn.

  55102

  U.S.A.

  June 4, 1968

  Dear Emily,

  I don’t know if you know that you know me. My name is Bill Lowry and I go to the Academy, but I hang out with a lot of kids from Blessed Sacrament. Jim Donnelly is a real good friend, and I know Mike Reardon pretty well, and I know you are friends with his twin sister Monica and you two are in the same class at Annunciation.

  I talked to you once, even though I can’t quite remember what I said, and I know we sat around in St. Clair Park with some other kids a couple of times.

  Anyway, I am writing you to say I thought it would be fun to maybe do something sometime. For example, there’s a place called the Scholar on the West Bank. It’s a coffeehouse and they have folk music (or folk-rock, I guess) and these coffee drinks with whipped cream and stuff in them. It’s almost all people from the U that go there, but you can be in high school and still go there even though almost no high school kids go or even know about it.

  I’ve had my license for a year and have a perfect driving record and we have a Buick wagon (feeble, but it goes!).