Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  Anyway, I really hope you would like to go next week and you can call me at 226-5385 or I can call you or you can even write me back.

  I think you are really cool and really pretty too and I bet we could have a lot of fun together.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bill

  Then Virginia reads the other:

  475 Laurel Ave.

  St. Paul, 2, Minn.

  June 8, 1968

  Dear Emily,

  It sure was great to get your letter. I got it this morning and now I am writing back first thing.

  I only went to the prom with Sarah J. because Jim asked me to invite her so he could go with Linda Olson without Sarah feeling put out on account of Jim having kind of made it seem like he wanted to go with Sarah before he started liking Linda. I’m not really into dances anyway. I like to listen to music by myself, the kind of thing you mentioned, and also to read about psychology and social problems. I don’t worry about how I dress or look, although I suppose I did a few years back when a lot of kids wanted to go around being fake surfers or Ivy League or whatever. I’m sorry I didn’t notice you at that birthday party, but that was four years ago and I was awfully young then.

  I know what you mean about RFK. We are really McCarthy people in our house, or at least my mom is, but we all feel terrible. And I always liked Kennedy better, even though my mom thought it was kind of a cheat for him to get into the race when he did—like he’d let McCarthy do all the work and waited until Johnson was out of the way.

  But I guess I think McCarthy is kind of, well, dry—good, I mean, but like a minister or something—and Bobby was cool and cared about the poor and the inner city and the farmworkers, not just about the war. And I know what you mean about JFK and the older kids, and how RFK would have been for us. But I haven’t said that to anyone before, just to you, just now.

  My mom and her friends—they’re all friends because they’re against the war—really feel rotten about it. But I guess they wonder mostly about whether McCarthy could beat Humphrey now, and if he can’t what they should do, because they like Humphrey even less than they liked RFK. In fact, my mom says Nixon and Humphrey are just Tweedledee and Tweedledum—that it will just be more of what’s happened with LBJ.

  Because you asked, I will wait to call until Wednesday, and then maybe we could go out Thursday, if that’s OK. And maybe I will write again just because you like letters.

  Stay cool.

  Yours sincerely,

  Bill

  Virginia puts the letters back in their envelopes. They have the smell of adolescence about them; of chewing gum and cheap cosmetics, of vapid sentiments. Then she sees a sheet of paper upon which Emily has copied out a poem in printed rather than cursive characters, as though to make a little poster. It is headed “For Bill—‘Love Among the Ruins’ by Robert Browning” and reads:

  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!

  Virginia reads this and it does not mean anything to her. It is but more childish nonsense—no more, it seems, than the troll or the disheveled rabbit that sits listing in the bookcase— and the best you could say for it is that it irritates Virginia, it makes her angry, which is a momentary alternative to her worry and horror. It is but another sign of the thoughtlessness and heedlessness which reigns in this room, in Emily’s life: Trivialities become profundities and that which ought to mean everything means nothing at all. She writes down verses for a boy she scarcely knows—who can scarcely know her—and leaves her mother and her father this room, its empty made-up bed and vacated dresser drawers, as memorial to their love, to all their labors.

  When Edward called her at lunchtime, Virginia apprised him of what she had found and not found in Emily’s room. She related this in the tone a doctor might relay a bad prognosis, but more in the manner of a curse, a scourge, or at least of confirmation of a heretofore ineffable dread. The prognosis was, of course, theirs: his and hers.

  For his part, Edward passed on Lieutenant O’Connor’s reaction to the arrival of the postcard, which was scarcely a reaction at all: He had nodded and said this, too, was par for the course; that they ought to be grateful there’d been no accident or foul play; that they could narrow their efforts down to simply looking for two runaway kids. And maybe, in addition to California, they ought to think about the north woods as a possible destination. Maybe the choice of postcard was accidental, but maybe it was a kind of signal. With kids you never knew.

  That was that, Edward told Virginia. Given his lifetime knack for judging what would suit Virginia at any given moment, Edward did not propose that she go with him to Jane’s house that afternoon, assuming he even consciously thought of it at all. He did think, as he drove up the hill about half past four, that a drink would be rather nice, and that he was not averse to spending a little time with Jane Lowry.

  When she answered the door, it seemed to him that scarcely any time at all had passed since he had seen her that morning; it seemed that even the exact same music was playing. She smiled and said, “Ted,” as though his arrival were a very happy surprise to her. She motioned him into the hall, and he quickly told her what the lieutenant had said and what Virginia’s search of Emily’s room had yielded. Jane frowned and shrugged, and brushed her hand against her forehead. Finally, she said, “Let me get us something cold. Gin and tonic sound good?”

  “Lovely,” Edward said.

  He was not sure whether he ought to follow her back to the kitchen, remain in the hall, or go make himself at home in the front room, where presumably they would take their refreshments; and then Jane’s voice boomeranged from the kitchen door, “Have a seat in the living room. I’ll just be a sec.”

  Edward sat down on the little sofa, first leaning back and then forward, with his hands on his knees and his feet set flat and evenly placed on the floor before him. It was the waiting-room posture, designed not for relaxation but for springing to one’s feet and offering a handshake, and he spent much the better part of his days in it. Thus positioned, he might be expected to take up a magazine (Life and The New Yorker sat before him on the coffee table), not to read but to occupy his hands and eyes, lest it appear when his quarry finally came to him that the waiting had in a way inconvenienced him, that he might in fact have anything better to do than sit right here and inform himself of the contents of this particular weekly organ of news, opinion, and culture. And so he did, and although the copy of Life he found was an old one, from twelve weeks ago, with Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray on the cover, this was of no import, one magazine being as good as another.

  In point of fact, after he had been sitting for a moment, Edward found himself first diverted by and then nearly absorbed by the music, which was familiar to him, not just from that morning but from past hearings. You might imagine that it could not fail to be, for its chief quality was of circling, overlapping repetition, of one theme dipping and rising, flooding and ebbing, advancing a step and retreating back upon itself.

  Jane came in, bearing two tall glasses already befogged with condensation. Edward took his, thanking her, and said, “Still working on your Wagner, I see.”

  “Well, there are six LPs to it. Comes in a box with a big fat book.”

  “An all-day sucker, so to speak.”

  “Exactly. Though it’s almost done, I think. Maybe one more side.”

  Edward drank. “That’s where the big lady in the helmet with horns dies of her agonies or something.”

  “Nearly. It’s the lovers in this case. Tr
istan and Isolde.” Jane sat down opposite him in an easy chair.

  “It’s very beautiful,” Edward said, with a faint note of apology in his voice. He paused as though to listen for a moment, to give the music—now scaling another crescendo from which it would slither back in a minute—its due. “To tell the truth, I can understand it a little. I was an intelligence officer in Germany.”

  “A spy? Really.”

  “No. Just a translator. Newspapers and documents. Pretty stupid stuff. After the surrender. I’d picked it up in college.”

  “Still. How clever of you. And me with my schoolgirl French.”

  Edward shrugged and changed the subject. “That’s quite a hi-fi, too. With the separate speakers and so forth. It’s a . . .”

  “KLH . . . ” Jane said, as though she were not quite sure about the reliability of this information.

  “It makes a beautiful sound.”

  “I suppose it’s an indulgence, but I love music. Mind you, since the primary season, I’ve hardly listened.”

  “Politics,” Edward said, and drank again, deeply.

  “But now it’s rather out of my hands. The election. Nixon and Hubert. May the worst man win.” Jane halted and also drank. “I guess I have more important things to think about now. I’ve been . . . overtaken by other events.”

  Edward nodded and Jane added, “At least we know they weren’t kidnapped or something.”

  “It’s good. In that sense.”

  “But then I suppose you just worry about what’s going to happen to them now.”

  “That,” Edward said, and drained his glass. “That, and just trying to find an explanation.”

  “Of why they did it?”

  “Yes. That in particular.”

  “But maybe that’s a little inexplicable. I mean, teenagers . . .” Jane stopped. “Oh, let me get you another.”

  Edward thought about it, but not for long, and nodded. “Thanks very much,” he said and continued, “Oh, I know it doesn’t really help find them either. But you—or at least I do—you have to wonder why ever she—they, I suppose—would do this.”

  Jane looked at him, and Edward thought she was going to touch him and maybe call him Ted again. Instead, she looked down at her hands, at the two empty glasses she was holding. “Why they would do this?” she said. “Want to do this for themselves, for their own sakes? Or do you mean do this as in do this to us?”

  “I don’t know. Both, I guess. It seems like they have to be connected.”

  “I don’t know either,” Jane said, and walked away towards the kitchen.

  Edward was by now sufficiently relaxed that while Jane went to the kitchen he really did sit back on the sofa and lose himself in thought a little, and in the music; and he did indeed catch a little of what was being sung, although—with his college classes and his tour of occupied Germany more than twenty years behind him—he comprehended it in a very piecemeal fashion. He heard, for example, Tristan say something about ein heiss-inbrünstig Lieben, aus Toddes-Wonne-Grauen jagt’s mich, which he understood correctly to refer to a species of enduring, flaming love.

  It was rather a shame he did not understand more, because the answers to the questions he and Jane had just been putting to each other were there right in front of him. For example, what clearer explanation of what drove the children to do what they had done than that very line of Tristan’s, which we might render “the ardent, indwelling love that has chased me from the blissful horror of death”? And as to where they had gone, is there a better answer than Wo ich von je gewesen, wohin auf je ich geh’: im weiten Reich der Weltennacht. Nur ein Wissen dort uns eigen: göttlich ew’ges Urvergessen—“Where I had been for all time and where forever I shall go: the vast realm of universal night, where our sole knowledge is but divine, eternal all-forgetting”? But these are scarcely consoling answers, so perhaps it was just as well that Edward did not hear them.

  Jane came back with their replenished glasses, set them down, and seated herself again. She said,“So what’s your guess, Ted? Tell me, really.”

  “About where or about why?”

  “Take your pick.”

  “Well, as for where, maybe the cop’s right. There’s the north, but California seems pretty obvious.”

  “I guess that’s where I’d go if I ran away,” Jane said, and laughed. “That’s what my husband did.”

  Edward smiled. “I suppose anyone would.”

  “Would run away? Or go to California?”

  “Go to California. As for wanting to run away, I haven’t the slightest.” He stopped and drank. “Particularly with Emily. She was the happiest, most . . . well-adjusted girl. . . .”

  “So you just don’t see her doing it at all?”

  “Not at all. Neither does Ginny. Maybe that’s what hurts—this delusion we were operating under.”

  “But you must understand how it is . . . to be young?”

  “I thought I did,” Edward said. “In fact, I thought being young was a pretty fair definition of happiness.”

  “Maybe. But maybe sometimes just the opposite.” Jane reached for the cigarette box on the coffee table and held it out. “Want one?”

  “Under the circumstances, what the hell,” Edward said, and took a cigarette. Jane extracted another for herself, seized the lighter that sat next to the box, spun the wheel with her thumb, and held out the flame for Edward. He thrust his face forward and drew on the cigarette. Then Jane lit her own cigarette, pulling deeply. “What I mean is, maybe it’s just as much a miserable time, being young. You, for example. Were you always happy then?”

  “No. I suppose I wasn’t. But then there was a war on, too.”

  “There’s a war on now.”

  “It’s hardly the same thing.”

  “It’s worse. It’s an illegal war. An immoral war. So you can’t even support it—not if you have any kind of conscience.”

  “I know, I know.” Sometimes Edward felt he had known Jane a very long time; that he might even say to her, in the gentlest possible way, “Please don’t start,” and she would understand it to be condescending in only the tenderest sense. “But it’s quite a leap, isn’t it? To say this thing that’s happening a million miles away is going to cause a perfectly happy—”

  “Who says anybody’s perfectly happy?”

  “Emily seemed awfully damned close.” Edward stopped, and after doing so realized that he did not quite know what to say next and that apparently neither did Jane. They both drank and then drew on their cigarettes, hoping the wind impelling the conversation might pick up again. But they remained becalmed, for Edward and Jane had unwittingly broached a subject—or the implication of a subject—that was as unpleasant as it was impossible to wish away: that if Emily, being happy or at least content and above all innocent and thus pliable, had become discontent, it must have been because somebody plied her; and it went without saying who that person might be.

  Among the virtues of deep convictions such as Jane was accustomed to hold about the world (if not about herself or the security of her place in it) is that it renders one pretty much immune to being affronted. So, rather than argue about Emily’s alleged contentment and William’s impact upon it, she proposed that she and Edward go forward with the task that Edward had earlier volunteered for.

  “I wonder if we shouldn’t get started on Billy’s room,” she said. “If you’re still willing.”

  “Oh, sure,” Edward said, and finished his drink and tamped out his cigarette. Jane did the same, and she led him down the hall, back into the depths of the apartment. They passed the kitchen, which bore, in Edward’s quick glance therein, a distinctly modern air, of terra-cotta and sans-serif typefaces, like an Italian restaurant run by Scandinavian folklorists. They went down the hallway, past what must be Jane’s bedroom, past the bathroom, and, at the end, where a nimbus of sun shone through a drawn curtain, they ended at the open door of the boy’s room.

  On entering it, Edward felt sad, for it was so clea
rly the empty room of a child, rather than the den of the malign influence he had so recently conjured. It had the fetid dishevelment that is unique to boys’ rooms: the Gordian tangle of bedclothes; the abandoned socks littering the floor like worm castings; the forlorn and croaking, terminally untuned guitar; the heaps of paperback thrillers that looked as much pawed over as pored over; the shabby hulks of model airplanes; the sun-blasted poster (once meant to express outrage or libidinousness or both) hanging flaccidly by a few shreds of yellowing tape—in sum, less a home than a squatter’s camp whose entire inventory of contents might best be handled with tongs.

  “Shall we start?” said Jane. “I went through his bureau. I can’t really say what’s missing. The laundry just sort of . . . accumulates. Then when it’s knee-deep, we just shovel it out and wash the whole lot.” She paused and looked up at Edward. “That’s not really fair. He’s generally tidy. For a boy.” She looked at him a little harder. “He’s a good boy, you know.”

  Edward looked back at her, perhaps less intently, but still much possessed by the sadness that had overtaken him. “I know,” he said. “Emily wouldn’t have liked him otherwise.” He was not sure this was quite the thing he ought to say, but it was what came out.

  “Maybe we could look in the closet. To begin,” Jane said.

  Edward nodded and moved toward the closet door. Inside there were perhaps four or five blue oxford-cloth shirts and as many pairs of khaki trousers as well as a blue wool blazer and a pair of gray flannel slacks. At the bottom, among the dust bunnies and upon the battered and gaping floor planks, stood a pair of penny loafers and a pair of blue canvas deck shoes with holes in the toes.

  “There’s not much here,” Jane said. “His coat and boots are gone. And all his camping equipment.”

  “His camping equipment?”

  “He sort of collected it. He’s hardly been camping, really. But he had a tent and a sleeping bag and so forth. A pack and a canteen. Even a hatchet.”