Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  Two months later, after the hearing, William and his mother were driving home. It was a cold January day, the twentieth of the month, almost as cold as it gets at Lac La Cache. They rode in silence, not an angry silence, but one born of relief. William was, for the moment, in the clear. The court officials up north had agreed to have the matter—consisting of various counts of breaking and entering—transferred to the city, and there (with a little help from the fact that Jane’s father’s name still carried some weight, if only in the form of nostalgia, among the city’s legal community) it had been dispensed with. William was to finish school on good terms and thereafter either attend college or enlist in the service, the choice being up to him. Provided these conditions were met, his record would be cleared and he need never revisit the court again.

  So that was, if not a triumph, at least a conclusion; an end to the matter. But it was hardly worth exulting about, and so they rode in silence. William turned the radio on, and upon hearing the voices—and one voice in particular—issuing from it, Jane groaned. William tried to find another station, but virtually all of them were carrying the same broadcast. So they listened, even as Jane punctuated the air with sighs, sputters, and mild expletives. But William truly listens, and he hears.

  Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.

  This can be such a moment.

  We see the hope of tomorrow in the youth of today. I know America’s youth. I believe in them. We can be proud that they are better educated, more committed, more passionately driven by conscience than any generation in our history.

  We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment. We see tasks that need doing, waiting for hands to do them.

  To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit.

  To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves.

  Until he has been part of a cause larger than himself, no man is truly whole.

  As we measure what can be done, we shall promise only what we know we can produce, but as we chart our goals we shall be lifted by our dreams.

  No man can be fully free while his neighbor is not. To go forward at all is to go forward together.

  We have endured a long night of the American spirit. But as our eyes catch the dimness of the first rays of dawn, let us not curse the remaining dark. Let us gather the light.

  When the speech was done, when these and the other things in it had been said, William turned off the radio.

  “So?” his mother said.

  “It doesn’t sound so bad. It sounds like what anyone would say. Anyone good, at least. Maybe even Bobby. Or Gene,” William added quickly.

  “From him it’s all lies.”

  “You mean he doesn’t mean it?”

  “He doesn’t know what he means.”

  “I thought he was supposed to be smart. Or kind of . . . wily.”

  “It doesn’t mean he’s sincere.”

  “So he’s . . . a sort of hypocrite.”

  “It’s way beyond hypocrisy. Beyond meaning one thing and saying another. He doesn’t know how to mean anything.”

  “So he doesn’t mean anything. Anything at all.”

  “I think that’s it,” said Jane. “I think you put your finger on it.”

  Now many people believe that in the intervening thirty years, pretty much everyone has taken on the character of the new president inaugurated that day, Richard M. Nixon; that pretty much everything means nothing, or means no more than the particular construction put upon it by its speakers; that every life is a shabby, embarrassed thing, unwitting pretense outwitted by unwitted outcomes, by events.

  But we are a little inclined to forget, despite what the world, thirty years on, seems to have become, that we live still a village life: that the most raw and pertinent facts of our lives are recorded in the vital statistics of the town hall and the local press; that the most emphatic marks we leave on earth may well be initials inscribed in wet cement or the shade of a tree that we, now parents of children ourselves, took the time to plant. Our losses are constant but ephemeral, signified at most in moving vans and vacancies, one-way tickets and funerals. The world is yet something rather than nothing, and ourselves more the sum of our graces than the subtractions of our faults, by however scant a margin.

  4

  VIRGINIA DIED OF CANCER SEVEN YEARS LATER, in 1975. What she had felt beneath her heart the day of Emily’s requiem never went away, but persisted, as did Virginia herself for much longer than anyone thought possible once the nature of her pain had been discovered.

  It took a long time for Edward to find a way of living, and it was by a roundabout path. Not surprisingly, he begin to drink rather more, and also to sample some of his own wares, and in particular various sedatives. His life had made him miserable, so he turned to these palliatives, and then the palliatives made him miserable but since life had nothing to offer him, he turned again to the palliatives, and with a vengeance. After four years, he realized he had to stop—that he had managed to construct a new life far worse than the one that had been afflicting him—and with the help of a treatment program (these being something of a specialty in his part of the world), he did. He also found in it a way of explaining his life to himself. He became convinced that he had fallen into his affair with Jane (he had also convinced himself it was not really love that he had felt) as a result of his drinking.

  It was a little different for the children, for the next generation. Their time made great claims for the idea that this must be so; that these children were different from their parents as no children had ever been. Perhaps there was some explanation for this view in their respective histories. Consider, for example, the leadership of the nation and the society; how Roosevelt, the president that accompanied Edward, Virginia, and Jane into adulthood, was the embodiment of ennobling tragedy, whereas he who ascended to the office just after Emily’s death embodied nothing so much as tragic ignobility.

  Emily’s sister, Susan, and William and their cohorts did not have much use for tragedy, it having been so spoiled for them (even as, perhaps, they spoiled idealism for their own children). Nor did they have any truck with the concepts of “human nature” or the accidental. Everything could and must be explained, at least as some variety of curse—either deserved or unfairly inflicted. Thus did Susan take up Emily’s cause. The specific narrative changed over the years, but its denouement was always William’s fault: because he had controlled and oppressed her in the manner of the male sex; then because he must have introduced her to drugs; then because, in a variation of the first, he had abused her—mentally, of course, but also possibly physically—and she had stayed only because she was in terror or because, in the manner of victims, she had formed a perverse bond with her oppressor; finally because Emily was only sixteen (and a very young sixteen at that) and William was older—nearly a legal adult—and what he had done amounted to abduction and child abuse.

  Susan believed, as many people nowadays do, that every misfortune has an author, and that once you have dug down past mental illness, addiction, familial trauma, and incompetence, you will find evil—evil personified; an evil person who either is the perpetrator or who has in some manner impelled the perpetrator to do evil as his proxy. William fills this role convincingly enough for Susan, but perhaps only because they have never met. Indeed, were Susan to meet someone authentically evil, say, Arnie Nelson, she might be a bit disappointed; might find the devil cuts a rather unprepossessing, even pathetic figure.

  Susan meant well, but in all this—in her great efforts at displacement, at substituting explanations for happenstance, for replacing mere life with the machinery of history—her thinking would have been alien to Emily herself, who would no more have comprehended the new sciences and philosophies Susan was employing than her Irish great-grandmother. Surely
it had been easier for her parents, who grew up with so much innocence and therefore a surfeit of meaning in their lives, and who on that account perhaps did not feel the need to always grasp at meaning so hard. Perhaps a generation, like that of William and Susan, that feels a bit dispossessed of history will find that a history—shorn somewhat of the requirement to keep faith with it—is exactly what it craves.

  5

  FOR THE REMAINDER OF HIS LIFE, WILLIAM has been forever distracted. He is simply not very good at living. His heart is somehow not in it. He has been married and divorced and has two children and, although he believes they do not love him, in fact they do. It is merely that they detect the strong scent of failure upon him, of something a little like death on his hands. They would like not to be so wary of him, but they cannot but feel that to come too close would be to invite more sorrow than they are ready to bear.

  William has had troubles similar to Edward’s, but he has never been able to focus tightly on one particular avenue of self-destruction. He spent a long time talking to a considerable number of professionals about the course of his life, and of late had found some ease in a medication. He felt a little weighted, a little heavy, but the medicine kept him going.

  William’s current therapist had pressed him for a long time to try to establish a modus vivendi with what had happened at Lac La Cache and thereby to put it behind him. She proposed he might consider visiting the place again, the lake and the island, and she pressed this idea over the course of a year until, in the autumn of 1999, he finally agreed to do it.

  At their next session, after he had returned, she asked him how it had felt.

  “It didn’t really feel like anything. I mean, I could see it was the same place. I even found a couple of things we must have built or left behind on the island. The cabin was still there too. Pretty much the same. Same people own it. But it all seemed smaller, less real.”

  “But of course it was real.”

  “But not the way I imagined.”

  “Maybe because what you imagined really is imaginary. It’s not real anymore. It’s gone. It’s past.”

  “That’s very . . . apt,” William said and looked at her. He did not look at her most of the time. “But I feel like it ought to have felt real. That it kind of . . . dishonors what happened. Dishonors Emily. Or her memory. Not to be able to see it as it was.”

  “Which is not how it is now. Not really. Not it. Not you either.”

  William realized he was still looking at her and turned his head away. “I know,” he said. “I know. But I feel like I need to sort of embrace it before I can get beyond it.”

  “Which is good. Which is exactly right.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Well, if you’re willing, you could do something. A kind of exercise.”

  “For example?”

  “You could write something. To Emily. Like a letter. Tell her what you saw.”

  “Like she was still alive?” William was looking at her, and he did not avert his eyes when she answered.

  “If you want. Whatever way would make it real for you. That would allow you to say what you need to say.”

  “Okay.”

  William returned the following week with a letter he had written to Emily. He read it, and when he was done, he looked up at his therapist, a little slyly, he could not help but feel.

  The therapist was looking at him and their eyes did not part until she said, “You’ve made her very real. Like she’s still alive. Like she has a life.”

  “That seemed to be the way to do it. To make it real for me.”

  “So it was?”

  “I cried when I was done. I haven’t done that for a long time.” William turned his face away, as though in modesty.

  “Maybe you’re finally grieving. And then, after you’ve finished, you can move on. Be done with all of it.”

  They talked about this possibility for the remainder of the hour. William said he would try writing more letters. And at the end, his therapist made a suggestion.

  “Maybe after you’ve done that—after we’ve worked on it a little—you’d consider something else. To get some real closure.”

  “I suppose.”

  His therapist spoke slowly. Her voice seemed softer, more musical than usual. “I wonder if you’d ever consider contacting her family? Just to talk about this.”

  “To apologize?”

  “Not even that. Not with any expectation at all.”

  “There’s just her sister and her father. And what would be the . . . pretext? Why shouldn’t they just hang up?”

  “There doesn’t need to be a pretext. And maybe they need to talk about this too. Maybe they think about it, just like you do. It would be strange if they didn’t.” When William looked back at her, he saw she had cocked her head, her brown hair, to one side, as if she were thinking very hard, trying to help him. “You could just tell them you’d gone up to visit the lake. That maybe they’d like to know.”

  “I suppose,” William said, and he saw that she smiled at him just then.

  William did indeed write some more things, and then, one evening in early November, he decided to call Emily’s father. He had never met her sister, and had heard that she had a low opinion of him. But he remembered—from where, he could not quite say; perhaps the picnic they had all had together once—that the father had seemed affable, or at least relatively approachable.

  He dialed the number—he was pretty sure it was not the same number—and waited. It rang many times, and he was sure an answering machine would engage and he began to think what if anything he would say to it. But then a voice, male and a little tired, answered.

  William spoke. “Mr. Byrne?”

  “Yes.”

  “This . . . this is . . . William Lowry,” he said, very quietly, and then he waited to see what happened.

  After a time, the voice said, “Oh,” and then, rising and a little less hushed, “I see.”

  William did not know quite what to say, but knew he must say something before Mr. Byrne hung up or, worse, said something like “What can I do for you?” So he began, not knowing quite where he would end up, “I went up to Lac La Cache a couple of weeks ago. Just to . . . kind of remember. To remember what happened. To reflect on it.”

  “I see.”

  “Anyhow, I just thought maybe . . .” And here William found he had exhausted everything he could think of to say. He would have hung up himself, just like that, if the voice had not said something; and this thing in particular.

  “So you’ve been thinking about Emily, I gather.”

  “A lot. All the time.”

  “Me too, Mr. Lowry.”

  William did not know how to take this. He quickly said, “Please. Call me Bill.”

  “Of course. As you wish. Bill.” And then Edward said, “She must still mean a great deal to you. For you to have gone. For you to have called.”

  “Yes,” and then William added, “I just thought . . .” although he did not quite know what he thought.

  “It’s good that you did. That you called. That you went.” Edward paused, and then he said, “Did you know I went up there that fall? That I got within twenty miles of you two?”

  “No. I never knew.”

  “Oh, yes. But that’s where I stopped. Where I gave up. Right there.” Edward then added, “I always wondered what became of you.”

  “I always figured you must hate me.” William felt a kind of relief at saying this, or in being able to say it first.

  “I suppose I did at one time. We all did. Susan, of course. Even Emily’s mom.”

  “I heard that she passed away. I’m sorry.”

  Edward said, “It wasn’t that long after . . . the other. Not that there was a connection. They said the cancer would have started way before that.”

  “I’m still sorry,” William said, and then he seized the chance. “I’m sorry about all of it. I really am. I just wanted to say that.”

  There wa
s another silence, nearly as long as the very first one. “I know you are.” Edward paused again. “I’m not going to say anything beyond that. Not ‘apology accepted.’ Or anything about forgiveness. I’m not holding back. It’s just taken so long to get here. And it’s good enough.”

  “I understand. That’s fine. Really it is.”

  “It’s enough that we can just talk together like gentlemen, isn’t it? That’s no small thing.”

  “Maybe sometime we could have a drink or something—”

  “Oh, I don’t drink anymore. Can’t.”

  “I suppose I really shouldn’t either.”

  “But it’s a nice thought. It truly is,” Edward said. “When I was your age I used to have a lot of nice visits with a doctor friend of mine. I suppose he was the age I am now. It was during that autumn. It helped me get through it. It was a consolation.” Edward paused, and then he said, “He was a fine man.”

  William knew it was his turn to speak, but he felt no pressure upon him. Finally, he said, “I see.”

  “You end up keeping your own counsel,” Edward said, and then he added, “How’s your mother?”

  “Oh, she’s fine. Pretty happy actually.”

  “That’s good. You know, I thought of her the other day. I heard Leonard Bernstein had died. Not that recently, but news gets to me slowly. Anyway, she was very big on him. So I thought of her.”

  “She was. Still is, I guess.”

  “You tell her I said hello. You tell her I said—let’s see—” Edward stopped. “Tell her I said, ‘Mahler foretold all.’ That’ll give her a tickle. She’ll know what I mean.”