by Robert Clark
Their lovemaking is not as hasty as the day before, but still pointed, purposeful. There is something akin to a backlog in their relation—the love they had not made on the day they met in the Medical Arts Building, and all the days thereafter until yesterday. Then, the following week, the lovemaking (and surely that was the right word, for if they did not love one another at the start, they did by the end) becomes aimless, which is to say truly loving; propelled not by desire but by its own internal gravity, its being, its own forward unmoved motion. They do things neither had ever done before or scarcely even thought of, things undreamt in the mind of Harold Robbins himself, as Frances would have said, had she known, which she does not.
Edward does not speak to Jane of the matters that are weighing on him that day or on succeeding days. That is not to say they did not make themselves felt. Every time Edward leaves—more or less five days a week, around five-fifteen—she knows she is only borrowing him from Virginia, from the woman he belongs to. Yet what they have, what they make, is to Jane’s mind so much better than nothing or even the best of what she has had before that she does not begrudge this. The woman she was born to be—a woman like her mother at the start of her life—would not countenance this so easily; would probably find Jane a pathetic figure, sad and disreputable, living on the table scraps of another woman’s life.
Jane knows who she is (she is the beggar maid) but she is not disgraced, but graced; gifted, because with nothing left, not even her only son, she has Edward Byrne for ninety minutes at a time, as long as he will come, as long as heaven allows; and it seems to her that they are their very own heaven, that this is what they make when they make love, so it might well last forever.
So it is, when Edward does leave, she is content. She straightens the living room and the bed. She takes their glasses and their ashtrays to the kitchen and washes them, and as she does so, she sings a song of Bernstein’s: We’re neither pure nor wise nor good/We’ll do the best we know/We’ll build our house, and chop our wood/And make our garden grow.
9
ONE EVENING, PERHAPS A WEEK AFTER THAT FIRST Wednesday when Edward and Jane had been together, Virginia said to Edward, “You know, darling, I can’t help but notice you’ve been smoking more. I can smell it.”
Edward said, perhaps a little too suddenly, “Well, what can you expect? Under the circumstances? I’m a little nervous, to say the least.”
“Oh, I understand. And if you feel the need to smoke here, in the house, that’s perfectly fine with me.”
“That’s okay. I don’t really feel it outside of work. It’s awfully hard to concentrate then. With these other things on my mind.”
“Of course,” said Virginia. Maybe she should have detected something more than this, if not by way of physical evidence (for Jane and Edward have taken to having baths together. He loves to soap her white breasts, their tawny nipples and aureoles) then by his demeanor. But this has, if anything, returned to a more characteristic mode, more like that of Edward before Emily’s disappearance; more grave and taciturn, more preoccupied, but also more steady and unremarkable. He can even be cheerful, and he is affectionate toward Virginia. They make love with some frequency. Perhaps this defies expectations—that Edward ought to be consumed by guilt or find Virginia unappealing—but for the moment, libido has begotten more libido and love yet more love, or have at least made Edward adept at feigning them.
He is throughout all this time in a dream that feels as if he is awakening from a dream or breaking the surface of a pool in which he has been for a long time submerged; coming into consciousness, jarred awake and into action. And it was then, in mid-October, that Edward told Jane and then Virginia, “I think I’m going up north this weekend and see if I can find anything out about the kids. Put up some flyers. Ask some questions. I know O’Connor would say it’s pointless. But it’s better than waiting for the police. It’s better than doing nothing at all.”
Edward feels—as he has always felt—that he and Emily have a special connection, and that he ought to know her mind and its reasoning; know it better than her mother or her sister or her friends; certainly better than the police. He ought to be able to find her.
He also feels in a curious way that he understands the boy’s mind too: by spending time among his things; by recollecting the kind of boy he himself was; by, perhaps, making love to the boy’s mother.
All this solidified into a hunch, if not quite a conviction, that the kids had gone north, into the lakes and woods, where both of them had once gone to camp. He had another hundred copies of the missing-person flyer duplicated and he planned to distribute them around the border country of the north-central and northeastern part of the state. The police and sheriff’s offices, of course, already had them; have done, of course, nothing about them. Edward would go to the grassroots, to the bulletin boards of post offices, cafés, and grocery stores.
He left that Saturday morning before dawn and by nine o’clock he was in the country beyond the head of Lake Superior. By ten-thirty he had made three stops—a post office and two coffee shops—and he was feeling pleased with himself. When he asked if he might post a copy of the flyer, people of course said yes; were indeed deeply solicitous, helped him out with thumbtacks and offered him coffee. Edward was pursuing a good cause, and it made people feel good to help him further it. By lunchtime he had had a day’s worth of coffee, and distributed fourteen posters.
Edward had not bargained for the fact that a good portion of the businesses—bait shops, boat rentals, motels and rental cabins, three-point-two beer and burger bars—in this part of the world had already closed for the winter, their owners departed for warmer, more lucrative climes. The farther he drove north and west, the emptier the country became until there were fifteen or twenty miles between one disconsolate post office/filling station and the next. These were perfectly agreeable about posting his flyer and volunteering that, no, no one had seen anyone or anything related to the kids, but they sure wished him all the luck in the world.
But as he went on into the afternoon, as he penetrated deeper into a land the rest of the world seemed intent on fleeing, he wondered if he was merely an object of pity. Both Virginia and Jane had visibly warmed to him (were in fact more ardent) when he told them his plan, and he had passed not a few minutes of the day’s driving lost in erotic fantasies of him and Jane. But now, as the population thinned and the woods grew thicker, there was less and less to do; it was harder to escape the aimlessness and even futility of the course he was embarked upon.
He wondered what the waitresses and filling station attendants and postmasters who took his flyer, who looked at him with a deep gaze of compassion and then seemed suddenly to avert their eyes from him, truly thought of him: if they wondered what sort of man it was who could not keep a sixteen-year-old at home, by force if not by pure affection; whose hearth was so cold, whose fatherly gravitas was such thin gruel, that she would prefer to shelter here, where pretty much no one wanted to be.
By the time he was just fifty miles southeast of International Falls, he had had enough. It was six o’clock and the sun was going down. He had stopped at a filling station/café/post office/trading post (this last indicated by the availability of beer, fish lures, automobile deodorizers, and jerked meat products) at the junction of the highway with a dirt road leading to a place called Lac La Cache, twenty miles distant. There were two men inside, one evidently the attendant/postmaster/cook, and he began to say what he had by now said three dozen times that day.
“I’m wondering if you could put this up on your board,” and here Edward held out the flyer. “We’re looking for two kids. One of them is my daughter, actually. We think they might have come camping up here. Late in August or early September.”
The man behind the counter looked at him in the way people had been looking at him that day. “Gee. You mean they’re missing? Maybe got lost?”
“Yes. Maybe someone saw them.”
“Well, I don’t know of
anyone. Of course, it’s late in the season. Not much of anybody around. And they’ve been gone all this while?”
“Well, this is just one place they might have been.”
“So they might have gone some other place? You don’t know?”
“Not exactly. But this seems likely.”
The other man finally spoke. “Oh, so it’s like they ran away. Or they didn’t say where they were going.”
“Yes. It’s like that.”
The man behind the counter looked at the flyer. “Girl looks awful young to be on her own.” Edward nodded, and the man addressed the other. “You seen anyone up at La Cache, Arnie?”
The other man took the flyer in his hand. “Now let me have a look-see here,” he said and studied the photograph. He said nothing for a time and then shook his head. “Seems to me there were a couple of kids end of the summer”—and here he paused again, and Edward moved a step closer to him—“that hitched a ride in with Fred Peterson, came into my place. That’s Nelson’s. I got a little store up the road here at the lake. Said they were going canoeing or something.”
Edward could not but interrupt. “Who’s this Peterson? Is he around? Do these look like the kids?”
The man behind the counter spoke first. “Fred’s away. Until next month. Down in the cities. Don’t know exactly where.”
The other man, whose feral aroma Edward had begun to take note of, continued to look at the flyer and then shook his head again. “I don’t know,” he said, saying this in a tone less of wonder or ignorance than of indecision about whether he ought to bestow a favor or make a discretionary purchase. Finally he said, “No, I don’t think so.”
“You’re sure?” asked Edward, his heart collapsed into his stomach. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah,” the big man said. “Those kids were meeting up with their folks. They said so. Bought some supplies. Some candy. And that was that.” He looked at Edward and shrugged. “Never saw ’em again. Sorry.” He stepped away from Edward. “Wish I could help. I truly do.”
“Well,” Edward said, “thanks all the same.” And then he turned to the man behind the counter. “Maybe you could get this Mr. Peterson to have a look at the poster when he gets back.”
“Oh sure. Anything we can do, we’ll do ’er.”
“Thanks very much,” Edward said. “We appreciate it.”
“Oh, no problem. Least we could do.”
The big man nodded, and said, rather loudly, “You take care now.”
Outside, as Edward went back toward his car, it was full dark. The moon was up and the stars had yet to begin filling in the sky. In the distance between the door and the car—ten yards—you might almost have gotten lost in the shadows and the rising chill. Edward walked a little farther, towards the place where the dirt road to the lake met the highway.
He stood and looked down the road into the darkness; across the open field—cleared decades ago by someone foolish enough to believe he could farm here—to the great wall of the forest rising in the north, a blackness always three shades deeper than the gathering night. Somewhere, beyond it, was Emily.
He now believed this with almost perfect conviction, and at the same time saw the impossibility of finding her in that immensity, in a country without light or limit. He thought there ought to be the sound of crickets, the pulse of the summer night, but it was too late for that. There was nothing but a little wind, and that was distant, far off in the trees. He bowed his head and cocked his ear and thought he heard voices in it, the singing of loons or perhaps the howling of wolves. He listened and for a moment he might have started to call back, to howl Emily’s name, but he merely began to weep.
Edward shuffled back across the gravel in the direction of the car and the amber flare of the windows of the store. He had thought his pain could set these woods ablaze, because there is so much of them and he wants so very little and would give up everything he has for it. But he is even paltrier than he imagined; and he is asking something from what, for all its infinite starlit desolation, is nothing at all.
He has planned on driving on to International Falls and spending the night there, and then heading back in the morning. But he steers the car southward, homeward, for the next five and a half hours. When he stops weeping, he thinks about the three women in his life, and how he misses them; how he feels tenderness and different species of desire for each of them; all of which might be called love, but most of all loss—of what he has already lost, is losing even now, and will yet lose.
Edward comes home a little past midnight, and when he gets upstairs to the bedroom, he sees that Virginia is sitting up in bed; that the sounds he has made in the house, so late and unexpected, have frightened her.
“I couldn’t stay up there. Out there. All night, I mean.”
“So there wasn’t anything?”
“Not a sign.”
Virginia patted the spot on the bed beside her. “Come sleep. You were very good—very brave—to go up there and look.”
10
IT WAS NOW THE THIRD WEEK OF OCTOBER, AND, and there was no pretending that summer was not over. The gutters of the streets were filling with leaves, and as Edward walked from his car to Jane’s door, the long and stark shadows of autumn fell upon him. His and Jane’s lovemaking seemed also to have changed rhythms, to be less characterized by sheer ardor and, it must be said, playfulness than by the need to keep warm, to sustain one another against the coming days, the lengthening nights. Sometimes they would lie in bed a long time simply curled together, and although sooner or later Edward would enter her, perhaps as they lay on their sides, face to face or with Jane’s back to Edward, and they would rock one another to climax, it was as a tiny shudder in their napping, in the long winter’s rest they were sleeping.
One afternoon, on yet another Wednesday, they were sitting in the living room, drinking (now scotch-and-water rather than gin-and-tonic) and smoking cigarettes. They were listening to a Mahler song cycle, which Jane called merely “The Mahler Songs,” thinking it was perhaps better to leave its true name unsaid. She had played it for him more than once, and Edward thought it was pretty and sad, dark in the way that Jane herself was dark. They were not listening with any great attentiveness. For Edward to make out the words—assuming he even could do so with his rusty German—would have been laborious, and the point of Edward and Jane’s time together was not labor but solace and rest.
Jane asked him, prompted by nothing in particular, “Do you still think about why they did it? I mean, their reasons.”
“Not really. It doesn’t really seem . . . either here nor there anymore. Not germane.”
“But it was all you thought about at first, wasn’t it?”
“I guess so. Why they did it. How they could do it.”
“To us. Funny. It sounds kind of selfish. On our part,” Jane said. “I mean to be more concerned with how they could dare to do this to us than with their welfare.”
“I wouldn’t say it was quite like that. It was more shock. Befuddlement.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. But I care less. Not about . . . them. About knowing. About understanding. I mean, didn’t they know how we’d worry? How we’d suffer?”
“I don’t think,” Jane said, “it’s a matter of their knowing. I think maybe they can’t even imagine it—that we’re even . . . vulnerable that way. That’s not how we seem to them. If you think back, imagine yourself thinking that your parents or your teachers or all these other grown-up authorities were privately going around weeping or being confused or insecure. Instead of being totally composed and assured. It would just have been beyond your ken.”
“I guess.”
“I had the strangest thought a while ago. I was thinking about demonstrations like the ones I’ve gone to. And they have them outside the White House all the time, and people are chanting, ‘Hey. Hey. LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?’ ”
“Very articulate, that one.”
“
It’s simple. Maybe even a little crude. In order to make a simple point,” Jane said. “Anyway, I thought, how does Johnson feel when he hears them saying that? About him? Does he hear it and wince? Does he lie awake at night crying? I can’t imagine that he does. I’d love to think he does, but I just can’t see it. But who knows? Maybe he does. But you just can’t picture a man in that position feeling anything.”
“So that’s how you think the kids see us?”
“Similarly, yes.”
“That’s very sad. For all of us.”
“But at least you can make yourself believe they really don’t intend any harm.”
“I suppose.” Edward put his arm around Jane and squeezed her shoulders. “They’ve done what they did. What they had to do. And I guess nobody ever intends any harm. I don’t.”
“You couldn’t hurt a fly.”
“That’s debatable.”
“You’re sweet as can be.”
Edward cocked his head towards the record player. “This is sweet. In a sad way.”
“The song? I suppose. It’s as sweet as things get these days. When they’re sweet at all.”
“So what’s it saying?”
“You tell me. You’re the German scholar.”
“Scarcely. And I bet there’s a translation. On the jacket notes.”
“Try it anyway.” Jane went to the record player and moved the needle back to the beginning of the song.
“Okay.” Edward screwed up his face as though this would in some way increase his comprehension, as though he might suck in the words like a strand of spaghetti. What he heard, at least in part, was this:
Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen!
Bald werden sie wieder nach Hause gelangen!
Der Tag ist schön! O, sei nicht bang!
Sie machen nur einen weiten Gang!
Jawohl, sie sind nur ausgegangen
Und werden jetz nach Hause gelangen!
O, sei nicht bang, der Tag ist schön!