Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

Sie machen nur den Gang zu jenen Höh’n!

  Sie sind uns nur vorausgegangen

  Und werden nicht wieder nach Hause verlangen!

  Wir holen sie ein auf jenen Höh’n!

  Im Sonnenschein!

  Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höh’n!

  “It’s something about how ‘They’ve only gone out for a little while, for a walk, in the beautiful hills, and they’ll be home soon.’ That’s about it.”

  “Not bad,” said Jane.

  “So now tell me. What the translation says. To see how I really did.”

  “Okay.” Jane took the notes out of the record sleeve and laid the sleeve back on the floor. Then she read, “ ‘I often think they have only gone outside and soon they will come home again. It is a beautiful day, do not be anxious. They have only gone out for a long walk. Really—they have only gone out and they will be coming home now. Do not be anxious, it is a beautiful day. They have only gone for a walk in the mountains. They have only gone out ahead of us, and they do not want to come home again. We will find them, up there in the sunshine. It is a beautiful day up there.’ ”

  Edward said nothing and then he asked, “So it’s about . . . ?”

  “Children. Mahler’s children, I suppose.”

  “And do they come home?”

  “I don’t exactly know. It’s a poem, not a . . . newspaper story. But it’s hopeful, isn’t it?”

  “I suppose it is. Very apt. For us.”

  “And like Bernstein said, ‘Mahler foretold all.’ So maybe it’s a sign—don’t be anxious. They’re coming home.”

  “It would be nice to think so,” said Edward. “So let me see.” He took the sheet from Jane’s hand. He glanced at the top of it and saw the title. He looked at Jane and said, “This is about dead children, Jane.” He felt that a very cruel trick had been played on him. “I mean, you have a knack for these things. But this is a little close to the bone.” He handed her the sheet. “It really is.”

  Jane looked distressed, in the way she might have looked distressed many, many years before, before they were all ruined, as a child. She said, “They’re only songs, Ted. I thought you might think they were beautiful.”

  “I guess they are. But what did you think I’d think? How was I supposed to react?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the title. I was thinking of the words. The part that says they’re coming home. I thought it would be a sort of . . . consolation. Art can be a consolation, can’t it?” Jane had begun to cry, silently, two paltry tears running down her face. “It wasn’t meant to be, I don’t know, a prediction.”

  “You just said, ‘Mahler foretold all,’ ” Edward said. “Or did I hear that wrong?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of it that way. I just thought we could share it together. Like all the other music.”

  “So did you want me to cry? Or what?”

  “I never thought about any of that.”

  “So maybe you wanted to me to cry? Like LBJ or somebody?”

  “God no, Ted.”

  “So what did you want?” Edward stopped. “What is it you do want? You and your art and your sexy conductors? From me?”

  “Just to go on. Like we have been. Together.” Jane had now begun to sob, but she was able to add, “Is that so much?”

  “Go on together. Contemplate the beautiful and the true. You think this stuff is so important and profound, but really it’s just a lot of show, a lot of sentiment. Like the idiotic stuff the kids wrote in their letters. Like their silly poems.” Edward looked at Jane. “You want me to be serious. This music says the kids are never coming back. I suppose that’s what it boils down to, isn’t it?” said Edward, looking away from her, up and behind him; glaring at the framed print on the wall, the winter cityscape, the dirty snow. “That’s not pretty. That’s just cruel. To me, at least.”

  After a long silence, Edward heard Jane say, “As though you had the right to say that. As though you knew. You make one pathetic day trip up there to look for them and you think you can moralize at me. As though you were the martyr in this.”

  Edward turned back and faced her, although she was crying silently now and looking down at her hands. Finally she said, “Let’s just pretend I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean it. I got upset.” Now she was looking at him straight on. “Because really, this is all we have now.” She halted. “Or at least all I have.”

  Edward felt himself possessed by a great sense of purpose, although he could not say whether it was impelled by courage or fear. He said, “I can’t do that, Jane. I can’t pretend that, even for you.” He found himself rising, getting to his feet. “I have to go now. I really do.”

  11

  EDWARD KNEW, AS SOON AS HE BEGAN TO DRIVE, that he was giving up Jane, even if he did not know quite how this was going to happen. Nor could he say he was going to do it for Virginia, or even for Emily: It seemed to him that he had been in flight when he and Jane had come together and he had taken shelter there, and now he was in flight from that refuge; and what drove him on, now as then, was self-preservation, perhaps sheer terror.

  He wondered what the mechanics of extricating himself consisted of. Could he simply stop going to Jane’s, or did he have to make a speech? And if the latter was necessary, was it necessary for his sake or for Jane’s? Was it necessary simply because it was the right thing—the fair or perhaps noble thing—or because he owed it to Jane; because, in fact, he loved her—and if that was the case, why was he doing it at all? But that was the labyrinth which he was attempting to flee, and to examine it further—to try to parse the grammar of his and Jane’s love—only made him more lost.

  He called her the next afternoon from a pay phone at the state hospital in northeast Minneapolis. When she answered, he thought of mentioning this fact by way of lightening the mood, but that was scarcely his purpose. He quickly told her what he had decided, and she said, “Well, I’m not surprised. I suppose I’ve been expecting this.”

  “I hadn’t. Not really,” Edward said. “But it seems the only way.”

  “That’s how it seems.” Jane paused, and said something, and she herself could not say whether she said it out of spite or rancor, or simply as a statement. “You know, I never once asked you to leave her. Or even if you’d thought of it. Not once.”

  “I know.”

  “I suppose that was rather kind of me, wasn’t it?”

  “Don’t get into this now, Jane. For your own sake.”

  “And I won’t ask you if you love me,” Jane said. Edward thought he heard her sigh, but that might have been the noise from the wards, from the patients flailing in their agonies of loss—of seeing into too much too clearly—floating on their chains of Pneumanol. “I know anyway. You said so once.”

  “I guess I did,” said Edward. Then he said goodbye. He had a long drive home. He had done the first thing. Now he wondered about the second thing: about what if anything he needed to do in relation to Virginia, and in particular whether he ought to or needed to tell her. He wished he could talk this over with someone, and he knew that there was no one suitable except Dr. Fields. But that would mean admitting that Fields had been right: that Edward could indeed love so suddenly and so deeply, and then just as suddenly, just as deeply, forsake it entirely. He had supposed he would be and ought to be ashamed of himself for what he had done with Jane, and for many reasons, but not, until just now, for this one in particular.

  After she had talked to Edward, Jane went and sat on her bed, sitting upright with her feet on the floor, looking down, supporting herself with the palm of her right hand. Then she patted the bed once or twice, as if she had just finished making it up and was smoothing the coverlet. Although there was a telephone right there in the bedroom, she went to the kitchen, to the table, and sat down and called Frances.

  “I was wondering what became of you,” Frances said.

  “Come over. I’ll tell you everything. About my adventures.”

  “In Wonderland?”

  “
Through the Looking-Glass.”

  When Frances arrived, they circled the matter at hand for a little while. Frances said, “Well, I was rather beginning to think that you’d really done it: that you’d really gone to Canada. Or gone off to join Billy in San Francisco. If that’s where he is. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”

  “No. But I’m beginning to think they had the right idea all along. But I suppose I’d better stay here in case he changes his mind and comes back.”

  Frances let a suitable pause elapse. “At least until the election.”

  “You come over. We’ll watch the returns. We’ll fortify each other.”

  “You root for Humphrey. I’ll root for Nixon. It’s not like we’d be on opposing sides.”

  They went back to the kitchen, and Jane made drinks. After they were reasonably tight, after they’d agreed that a girlfriend was worth any six men, Jane told Frances everything. They finished the evening in the living room. Jane went to the record player and put on Candide, the very last song. She sang along: “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.”

  Jane put her hands on her hips and turned towards Frances, a little unsteadily. “It was our song. He didn’t even know it. But it was.”

  It took Edward four days to decide to talk to Virginia. He was not sure he was going to tell her about him and Jane, not exactly. But he needed to talk to her, to speak about things that were out of the ordinary: to tell her that he loved her. He had no doubt that he did, although it was undoubtedly not the same love as had been there before. It was not seamless, no longer twenty uninterrupted years of mutual regard not unlike, say, twenty profitable years in business together, serving the public while growing ever more content and comfortable. Nor, as he looked at her intently for the first time in nearly a month, could he say she was beautiful in the way he once would have said she was: prettier than Jane. For the whole of the autumn had taken its toll, from the last day of the State Fair onward, and there was gray in her pretty auburn hair, which itself seemed thin and drawn, like her face, like her arms and ever fretful hands.

  But he had determined to speak to her that evening, the last Sunday in October. He had rehearsed it. He had even spoken the words out loud while he drove the car that morning to the hardware store to fetch a new catch for one of the storm windows he was just finishing hanging.

  He went into the kitchen and faced her across the counter. He smiled and prepared himself to begin. And, as it will do whenever a man is trying to effect something crucial—as it did for William and then for Emily five months ago, just before the crest of summer—the telephone did something untoward. In this case, it rang.

  Virginia went to answer it. She listened for a while, and then she smiled and held out the phone to Edward. “It’s a sheriff’s department from up north.” She beamed. She offered him the receiver like a trophy. “They have news about the kids.”

  With that, his chance was lost, and he never did try to raise the matter again. It returned to where it had begun, to the chasm in his life into which he had that one time fallen, although it was scarcely forgotten.

  It is said—perhaps in one of William’s books, perhaps in one of Jane’s Mahler compositions—that the nothingness that reveals itself in agony is not a nothingness that is part of being, but a break in being, a crack in the existent. So that is Edward’s agony and that is where it rests, in the crack where this love came from, where its memory still lives. He will always remember it, if not at all times. It will be among the things he thinks of while he waits at stoplights, the things that in their enduring absence give him pangs.

  But now, as Edward takes the telephone, it seems they are all going to get their lives back; not their old ones, unaltered, of course, but lives that can be reasonably and even sometimes happily lived. They are going to know what happened to the children: what they did, if not why they did it. And they will have all the years that have been allotted to them in the future to decide what to make of it. All but Emily, and who can say what she might have thought?

  Three

  The

  Briar

  Wood

  1

  EMILY HAD GOTTEN ON THE NUMBER THREE BUS at a little before six, just after she mailed her postcard. William boarded four minutes later, opposite the Lawton Steps. He hoisted a green duffel bag up the steps, paid his fare, dragged the bag behind him through the aisle, and sat down next to Emily.

  “Hi,” William said.

  “Hi,” Emily replied.

  He leaned close to her and whispered in her ear, “I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Emily whispered back to him. Then they held hands, saying nothing as the bus rolled down the hill, into the rising blue of the morning.

  They had agreed they would board the Greyhound (final destination: International Falls and Fort Frances) separately, although this was a precaution that was scarcely necessary, for on this day there was a larger than usual complement of young people passing through the depot and traveling by bus to and from home, camp, vacation, school, or visits with friends and relations. Two more—neither remarkable, save that William might pass for college-age while Emily looked sixteen at a stretch—traveling separately or together would not make the slightest impression on anyone.

  Nonetheless, should anyone ask, they were brother and sister and were meeting their parents and younger siblings at Crane Lake for an end-of-season family camp-out. The rest of the family was already there. They had been finishing up their summer jobs in town and were thus joining Mom and Dad, and little brother and sister, a few days late. They would be bringing more supplies, and Dad—having decided this was a piece of equipment they really needed in their vacation arsenal—had given them money to buy a canoe in the nearest town, and they were to paddle it out to the campsite. Such enterprising, trustworthy, reliable children, anyone hearing this story would doubtless remark. Such a credit to their parents.

  Emily and William sat five rows apart and tried not to look at each other. They tried to read. William had brought a novel by Herman Hesse and its narrative had sufficient appeal to absorb him for some minutes at a time. But Emily had brought poetry—Gerard Manley Hopkins and Hart Crane, whom Sister Mary Immaculata was going to be teaching that fall, whom she would therefore be missing out on—and she was not making much sense of it, neither on its terms nor hers. Her present terms were, of course, scarcely terms at all, so unformed and unfamiliar were they: They might as well be traveling to California, to the south pole, to the dark side of the moon. They were on a wilderness expedition. They were homesteading on the frontier. They were fleeing for their lives.

  Emily wished she could sit with William. He, after all, knew why they were doing this and where they were going. But as the miles passed, as the fields and farmhouses gave way to mining country and the desolation, after many hours, became studded here and there with pines and birch and finally patches of deep forest, that mattered less. She was afraid, and yet her mood was not unlike what it would be if she had simply been returning to this country again for another session of summer camp: This, she thought, is going to be fun. Why should it not be? The forest was a curtain behind which they might disappear and do exactly what they wanted. And then she felt herself positively excited.

  The bus stopped for lunch some sixty miles south of International Falls, at a roadside café, and it was here that William and Emily got off for good. They ate their lunches at the counter, their bags at their feet, still sitting apart, finishing before most of the others. They left the café, turned into the county road that ran behind it, perpendicular to the highway, walked one hundred yards, and stopped, standing together at last.

  This was the part of their journey that William was most concerned about: the twenty miles to the water, to the end of the road, to Lac La Cache. They were either going to have to walk it (with William dragging the heavy duffel bag behind him) or hitchhike, and pe
rhaps risk questions, suspicion, and discovery. But walking seemed impossible—could they manage even half a mile?—and at the sound of approaching wheels on the gravel, William thrust out his thumb, and the pickup truck stopped.

  The driver, a middle-aged man in a white T-shirt, flung the door open and said, “Where to?”

  “We’re going to Lac La Cache.”

  “Oh, Lac La Cache,” the man said after a momentary pause, having flattened the word William had pronounced along the lines of “lock” into a firm “lack.” “Not much of anyplace else to go on this road. Well, put your stuff in the back and climb in.”

  With some effort, William shouldered the duffel bag into the cargo box of the pickup, and pitched in Emily’s somewhat lighter bag after it. Emily climbed into the cab and then William, although William wished it were he and not she who was sitting next to the driver. He felt, correctly, that Emily’s youth and sex were more likely to attract notice. So when the driver, having released the clutch and set off, spoke, William was sure to preempt any reply from Emily.

  “So, going camping?”

  “Yeah,” said William. “With our folks. They’re already up there.” William completed the rest of their story, including the purchase they were to make, figuring that would forestall other questions.

  “A canoe,” the man remarked. “Betcha Nelson’s ought to make you a good deal this time of year.”

  “Nelson’s,” William said.

  “The store. Only one in La Cache.”

  “The only one? But they have canoes?”

  “Sure. Don’t want to get stuck with ’em all winter. That’s why you ought to be able to get your dad a good deal. Nobody likes to sit on inventory. That’s where I’m fortunate. Being an independent professional. No inventory. Just my tools. My hands. My brain. Such as it is.”

  “You’re a . . . ?”

  “Handyman. Contractor. Wood cutter. Logger. Guide. All that.” The man took a cigarette from the pack sitting on the dashboard, put it in his mouth, and punched in the lighter. “You and your dad like to fish? I could show you some good spots. Muskies big as your arm.”