Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  “So they have that with them, I suppose.”

  “I’d imagine.”

  Edward’s gaze returned to the floor. “Wait a minute,” he said, and took his keys from his pocket. He reached down and inserted the shank of his house key between two boards, one of which easily lifted away.

  “Oh,” said Jane.

  “Every boy’s got one of these. I had one. It just came back to me.” Edward knelt and began to remove the items contained in the cache beneath the floorboard. There were six or seven men’s magazines whose bindings were in various stages of decomposition, as though from hard use; a half-empty box of .22-caliber rifle cartridges; two letters; and a bankbook. The letters, Edward saw, were from Emily, and he seized them, read them quickly, and passed them to Jane. “Nothing much in these,” he said.

  Jane read:

  919 Furness St.

  St. Paul, 5, Minn.

  June 6, 1968

  Dear Bill Lowry,

  Thank you for your letter. I know who you are. In fact, I remember you from a bunch of times. You were at my cousin Jim’s birthday party when he was 13, and I bet you didn’t even know I was there.

  Monica said something about you once, I don’t know why. She said you had a funny sense of humor and that you used to be sort of Ivy League, but not in a stuck-up way like you had to always be wearing a yellow button-down and a burgundy V-neck. Also, that you went to your Junior Prom with Sarah Jacobsen. My dad says there’s no accounting for taste. (Ha, just kidding!)

  I know about the Scholar. I have a lot of albums of that kind of thing, not just Peter, Paul & Mary, but the authentic stuff like Joan Baez. So I would like to go, but usually I have to be home by 10 unless it’s for something really special. My parents aren’t really strict, but that’s the way it is.

  Things are kind of odd around here right now, so why don’t you wait to call me (CA5-5382) until next week—or you can write again. I think letters are really kind of cool!

  We are very sad here about Bobby Kennedy. I was only in the sixth grade when JFK was killed, and I didn’t really take it in like my sister and her friends. So I kind of thought RFK would be our JFK, but it didn’t work out that way, did it?

  Stay cool!

  Sincerely yours,

  Emily

  Jane shook her head and then read the other. It merely read, “Dear Bill, Thank you for your nice letter. I am really looking forward to talking to you. Yours truly, Emily,” with the postscript “P.S. I know what you mean about RFK and everything. He (or somebody) could have been ‘for us.’ And now it is so sad to think we are alone. Do you know what I mean?” Jane let out a little sigh of what was surely pity.

  Then Edward handed her the bankbook. She opened it and passed it back to Edward, holding the last page open. “Cleaned out,” she said. Edward looked at the balance. “Not an inconsiderable sum for a young fellow,” he said.

  “He saved it all, I guess.” Jane shrugged. “I don’t know where he gets it. The impulse to . . . accumulate capital. His great-grandfather, I suppose. The rest of us were wastrels and spendthrifts.”

  Edward said nothing. “Perhaps we ought to check around the bed,” he suggested, and Jane nodded. As they moved, Edward asked, “Is there a rifle that goes with those bullets?”

  “No. I suppose he brought them home from camp. Just souvenirs. Charms. Fetishes.”

  “I imagine. I guess I had stuff like that too. In my secret place.”

  Edward and Jane now stood on opposite sides of the head of William’s bed, and Edward turned to the bookcase to the left of it and regarded its contents. “Quite a reader, your son,” he said. “Esoteric stuff. Buddhism. Identity: Youth and Crisis. Growing Up Absurd. My, my.”

  “He was always precocious that way. I thought it was fine—that he cared about serious things. That he was trying to understand.”

  “Emily is”—he had nearly said “was”—“rather that way too. Maybe more in a dreamy, sort of poetic way.” Edward turned away from the books. “I don’t suppose it makes for a very carefree childhood, though. Not like you’d like them to have.”

  “I’m not sure that’s available anymore. Of course, for William—given what happened between his father and me—I suppose he was going to be disillusioned early.” Jane pulled the drawer from the bedside table and put it down in the middle of the bed, and sat herself down next to it. “Maybe not disillusioned in the sense of jaded. Just serious. Very determined to get . . . at the heart of things. Does that make sense?”

  “Yes. I think I understand.” Edward sat down opposite her, on the other side of the drawer. “So what have we got here?”

  Jane handed him a photograph and he saw it was the same school photo of Emily that he had dropped off to the police that morning. Edward took it and looked at it. “In the drawer by his bed,” Jane said. “That’s kind of sweet.” Edward said nothing. He wasn’t sure it was sweet, but perhaps more on the order of the bullets in the cache, the talisman by which the boy took possession of Emily, the way he divined and conjured and controlled her.

  Edward saw there was a book in the drawer, close to him, on his side of it, and he picked it up. “Well, well. I had this.” He held it up. “The Book of Woodcraft and Indian Lore. Campfire stories. Animal tracks. Knots and whittling.” He opened the book and read, “ ‘When I was a boy I hungered beyond expression for just such information as I have tried herein to impart. It would be a great joy to me if I could reach and help a considerable number of such heart-hungry boys tormented with an insatiate instinct for the woods.’ ” Edward closed the book and patted the cover. “Indeed, indeed,” he said.

  “I think it was his father’s.”

  “But you still think it’s unlikely he’d go there—to California, to see him?”

  “I don’t think so. Maybe they went . . . camping. What with this book. And his equipment gone.”

  “Could be. I’d feel better if they had. Instead of San Francisco.” Edward put the book down on the bed while Jane continued to sift through the drawer, through pencil stubs and loose mints and coins flattened on the railroad track. “You know, it’s really a big thing when you’re a boy. The woods.” He smiled. “I suppose it still is. Must be. Because it’s real and you want to get back to it. Be an Indian brave or a trapper or Scott of the Antarctic. Whoever.” Edward was leaning back on his hands, sitting quite happily, and the dark impression of William that had struck him in regarding Emily’s photograph was being replaced by a kind of fellow feeling for the boy; by the notion that the boy was but a younger manifestation of himself. He began to want to report his sense of this to Jane, who was still rifling in the drawer, and he said, “You know, we think kids are so different . . .”

  But Jane held something up, and said, “Oh dear.”

  They both knew what it was. Any grown man or woman would: an empty foil envelope, a little over an inch square, torn open along one side.

  “I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised,” Jane said with a sigh.

  “I suppose not,” Edward said after a long pause. “I suppose it was Emily.” Jane nodded. “But I didn’t really want to know.”

  “It’s different with a girl. I know,” Jane added, and even as she said it, she knew it was the wrong thing, and that she was going to say another wrong thing. “I’m pretty sure he had never been with anyone before. He wasn’t . . .” And then she thought she had better stop.

  “I’m sure she hadn’t been either,” said Edward. “If that matters. If it’s either here or there,” he added a little sharply.

  “At least they took precautions.”

  “Oh, that’s a great consolation,” Edward said. He at last looked over to Jane again and said, “I’m sorry. This isn’t anyone’s fault.”

  Jane was looking at her hands. She said, “I’m happy you said that. I mean, the boy’s usually seen as . . . the culprit.” Jane stood up from the bed, and so did Edward.

  “I know,” he said. “And maybe that’s not fair. Or at least it�
�s more complicated.”

  They rounded either side of the bed, meeting at its foot. Edward might have put out his hands and rested them on Jane’s shoulders, to comfort her or to explain himself. But he just stood, close enough to smell her breath, the juniper berries and tart scent of what they had been drinking together, and said, “It’s silly. But I just didn’t want to know this. Not on top of everything else.”

  Edward came home to Furness Street a little before six. He had decided on the way that he would not tell Virginia everything they had discovered: that it wasn’t really material, that it was no surprise under the circumstances, that it would only hurt her. Everything else merely confirmed what Virginia had surmised from her search of Emily’s room. They had planned to run away, they had nearly nine hundred dollars between them, and they were perhaps planning on camping somewhere.

  Virginia listened to Edward summarize this, and then she reported that she had been on the phone to Monica’s mother, who had impressed upon her daughter the gravity of the situation and then put her on the line. “Monica said she was completely surprised, that she and Emily hadn’t talked much recently, that she was spending all her time with the boy. Afterwards, Pat told me she was sure she was being truthful—that Monica had already been complaining that she and Emily weren’t close anymore.”

  “So it wasn’t very helpful,” Edward said.

  “Not really. Did his mother talk to his friends? She should. He goes around with the Donnelly boy.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask her.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t.” Virginia, Edward saw, was looking not at him, but past him, over his shoulder. “You were over there . . . for what? An hour?”

  “Thereabouts. It took a while to go through the boy’s room. Kind of a rat’s nest.” Edward added, “She gave me a drink. We talked.”

  “How nice of her,” Virginia said. It had indeed been Edward’s intent to communicate the fact of Jane’s niceness, but that was not how it struck Virginia. “How nice of you. To take the time.” There was an edge, an inflection, to her voice that was quite alien to her, and Edward found himself wanting to say “This isn’t you,” but thought it might be better to let it pass. It did indeed pass, or rather it mutated into something else, equally uncharacteristic.

  “I just think,” Virginia continued, “that you ought to remember where . . . your loyalties really ought to lie.”

  “Well, of course I—”

  “Because I’m alone too. Not in the same way. But I’m alone here all day, with this awful thing going on.” Edward moved to hold her, to take her in his arms. But Virginia continued to look away, and then suddenly her eyes met his and he stopped right where he was. “And besides, you really should be careful. To be seen to be . . . overattentive to her. Her being a divorcée and so forth.”

  Edward wanted to say again that this was not like her and was indeed not worthy of her, that it was mean-spirited and snobbish, the very kind of thing the upper-crust Protestant women she had no time or patience for might say. But he did not say these things, even though he was right. Because this was not like Virginia, and it was not worthy of her, if only because she was not saying what she truly meant to say, or at least was not saying it well: that she had never been so frightened in her life, and that Edward’s parceling out of even an hour of his attention, no matter how well meant or even arguably necessary, towards someone else’s fear was an hour too much.

  So this was not like Virginia, but neither was Edward exactly like Edward. Nor was Jane the Jane she once had been. They were each altogether altered by what had befallen them. Crises are said to be occasions when one’s true character is displayed or when virtues heretofore only rehearsed in the abstract may be pressed into real service. But whoever could have envisioned what had happened to them? Whoever could have planned for it and responded in a fitting manner? What might be (what the hell would be, Edward was inclined to say at this point) the appropriate way to proceed?

  The children might indeed have gone to California, but their parents were definitely in the woods. They were lost and walking in circles. The ice-breath of the windigo—the frozen-hearted cannibal of the boreal forest—was on their necks.

  4

  THANK HEAVEN FOR PRACTICALITIES, FOR WORK and for errands, for the lawn that must be mowed and the laundry that must be ironed, for the meals that must be put on the table three times a day, no matter what. Thank heaven, too, that there are things to be done about William and Emily’s flight, or at least tasks that it entails, some of which may even be successfully completed.

  For example, on the lieutenant’s advice, Edward takes photos of the kids down to the bus depot to show to the ticket agents and drivers. No one has seen them, of course; there are kids traveling everywhere at the end of summer. This leads to feelings of defeat, but they are defeats resulting from having done something rather than nothing.

  There is also the question of who ought to be told what the children have done and what explanation ought to be offered to the world at large. Among Jane’s acquaintances, Frances already knows and offers the kind of hearty support that only one who is truly unsurprised by everything can muster. Otherwise there is no one who needs to know except William’s father, and Jane will get around to calling him soon, one of these evenings, after the second or third round of drinks. There is, of course, the school to be notified, and Jane calls the registrar and says simply that William has been accorded a last-minute opportunity to spend the semester in California with his father, will attend school there, and will return in the New Year. The registrar wonders how the matter of taking the SAT and of getting William’s college applications underway will be dealt with. Jane says that they have all that in hand; that a semester’s worth of “masculine influence” is worth a great deal; and that, in any case, perhaps William (whose grades are not stunning) will take an “enrichment year” before college. This is the best Jane can do, and, she thinks, as she puts down the phone and reaches across the kitchen table for her cigarettes and coffee mug, it isn’t too bad at all, under the circumstances.

  Virginia takes a different approach. She calls the Convent of the Annunciation and makes an appointment with Emily’s adviser and favorite teacher, Sister Mary Immaculata. They sit in her classroom after the school day has ended with the door shut, and with Virginia’s fretful hands clasped and perched uneasily atop her purse, it is a little like confession. She explains that Emily (How can this be true? she thinks even as she begins to phrase it) has disappeared, has in fact run away, and there is a boy involved, who has presumably gone with her. They have gone to California, or at least gone somewhere camping. She and Edward and, yes, the boy’s mother too, have been to the police. A missing-person report has been filed, they have been investigating the matter themselves in accordance with police instructions, and the police lieutenant has told them that, really, this happens all the time nowadays and usually the kids come home; that they get bored or scared or lonely and they just come home. She feels very bad for the school, for Emily of course, and even for the boy and his mother. She tries to say these things with the air that they are temporary—that Emily will be back at school soon, that everything will be as it was—and not convey the fact that she has been more or less flayed, that her very skin feels sundered from her body, the very rawest and tenderest places open to the weather, to intrusion, to whatever the world pleases to torture her with.

  After she is done, Virginia expects that the nun will say something sententious and comforting, and indeed she does. She says, “This must be a great affliction for you,” and Virginia bursts into tears. After a time, she tries to speak. “I try to bear it—to let it be as God’s will—to just offer it up. But I can’t.” She halts and dabs herself with the Kleenex Sister Immaculata has produced from her desk drawer. “Because I don’t even know what it is. Where it came from—the whole thing—and where it’s going to finish. Or even if it ever has a beginning and an ending. Does that make sense?”
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br />   “I think so. It’s the feeling of great privation, of loss and emptiness. And so it feels very, very far away from God. Doesn’t it?”

  “Yes. It does. I guess.” Virginia begins to sob again. The nun hands her another tissue, and takes Virginia’s free hand in her own. It is an old hand, the skin glassy and drawn, weathered not by labor but by prayer, by taking on the world’s misery, Virginia’s misery and more, as its daily bread. “I’ll tell the other sisters,” the nun says. “ No one else, of course. And we’ll make it, Emily, part of our daily intentions.”

  “What about the other girls?”

  “We’ll just say she’s away. Which is the truth.”

  “They’ll think she’s pregnant. That she’s in a home.”

  “They’ll think what they’ll think. There are worse things.”

  Virginia gives the nun’s hand a squeeze and releases herself from its grip. “I suppose you’re right. And of course it’ll probably be over soon, just like the policeman said, won’t it?”

  “I’m sure all will be well.”

  Virginia mops her nose and eyes again and stands. “Well, I suppose I should go,” she says, and the nun stands too. She begins to move and turns back on one foot and says to the nun, “You know, I used to think that maybe Emily had a vocation. Isn’t that silly?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “For a while, when she was little, she was very keen.”

  “They often are. Most little girls. I wanted to be a nun and then I didn’t for a while. But here I am.”

  “Well, with Emily, I guess that wasn’t . . . in the cards. I suppose this just goes to show.”

  “Oh, I don’t know what this would have to do with it,” the nun says. “But, no, I never saw her as a religious. Her gifts are elsewhere. I saw her—I still see her—making beautiful things: writing or painting or music. And those are great gifts, gifts that serve God a great deal. More than most. But I think she might . . . chafe a little, being obedient to a rule, to a mother superior.”