Into That Fire

by M. J. Cates

  Then, on her first Saturday evening, Miss Sedgwick asked if Imogen did not require directions to a church for her Sunday worship.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Imogen said. “I don’t attend Sunday services.”

  “Oh. Are you a Hebrew, then? Lang is not a Jewish name, is it?”

  “Not always, but it is in my case.”

  “Then we must find you a synagogue. I’m sure there’s one in the area.”

  “There’s no need. My family’s not observant.”

  “But how do you tend to your spiritual life?”

  “My spiritual life is not something I attend to in public.”

  “Then you are utterly without moral guidance?”

  “No. I’m just without religion.”

  “Well, that’s—I find this very surprising. Especially in the daughter of an attorney, a man who must deal daily in matters of right and wrong.”

  Oh, Imogen’s father could be instructive in matters of right and wrong, all right. In public Josiah Lang was a liberal, a reformer, even a bit of a firebrand—thick with the union movement, representing several different organizations, the largest of which was the Chicago Teachers’ Federation. He was often quoted in the papers, asked to give speeches, and urged to run for high office. Which he would never do—if his life became any more public the truth about him would emerge, he would be disgraced, and Imogen’s family—her mother and her two younger sisters, anyway—would be destroyed.

  Until she was twelve, Imogen had imagined her father to be as close to a perfect human being as human beings get. He read to his daughters, sang silly songs to them, took them to Chicago’s wonderful beaches, gave them delightful gifts and, more than anything, enriched their lives with the gift of his attention. But that was before Imogen had seen him for what he really was, which rendered all her former happiness a lie.

  So maybe Miss Sedgwick was right, she considered, as she crossed the street—maybe I have been brought up in such a manner as to be without a moral compass. She had realized that Quentin wanted more from her, but she could not cut him off. She had needed his friendship too much—their common intensity of purpose—even after their actual ambitions diverged. Imogen was determined to be a psychiatrist, Quentin a writer. One of the first common interests they had discovered was their reverence for authors of great novels. They both adored George Eliot—he for Middlemarch, she for The Mill on the Floss. Reading with Quentin, sharing the unique peace and contentment that comes from absorption in a book, became one of her greatest pleasures.

  “Peace and contentment?” He looked a bit puzzled when she used those words to describe her experience of a good book. “I feel every good book is a challenge—one I’ll never live up to—so I can’t say it’s all that peaceful for me. But I’m glad it is for you.”

  Quentin seemed to think he would be a novelist, but Imogen secretly thought he was more likely to be a poet. She thought the few verses he had shown her were very good indeed. And the way he lingered over individual words, tasting them, savouring them, spoke to her of a jeweller’s precision, rather than the architectural scope of the novelist. It was true he could spin a lively anecdote, but that seemed to Imogen very different from inventing several hundred pages of human experience.

  She had led him on—she knew that. There had been a jewel-like autumn day, rare in Chicago, low sun casting long shadows, and everywhere the smell of burning leaves. They had arranged to meet outside the university library. The grass of the main quadrangle was still brilliant green, and yet one could sense in the air a metallic foretaste of winter. As she approached, she could see him sitting on the library steps, sunlight glinting off his spectacles. She was late; Dr. Gleason’s lecture on endocrine secretions had gone overtime, and then the streetcar had tangled with a horse-drawn cab, the cab slamming over on its side, the horse breaking free and galloping away down the street. She began telling him about the incident while she was still a good ten yards away.

  When she came to a stop at the foot of the steps, Quentin’s expression was odd, one corner of his mouth lifted in a half smile, eyebrows closing in on each other and yet not what you would call knitted. An amused, assessing look.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  “Sun’s in my eyes. And I must say you look beautiful at this moment—now don’t panic, it’s just an observation of the sort one might make on seeing a fine painting. The sunlight, your hair, your story, and the way you were coming across the grass toward me. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

  “Well, Mr. Goodchild, I’m sure I don’t know what to make of such words.”

  “Construe them any way you like, Miss Lang, so long as it’s positive.” Later they had a sunny little corner of the library to themselves, their books and papers spread between them. Imogen was memorizing the many bones of the hand, when Quentin said something under his breath and she looked up.

  “What did you say?”

  “Imogen.”

  “What?”

  “Imogen,” he whispered. “I was just saying your name.”

  “I see.” She went back to the lunate, the scaphoid, the capitate. She had nearly had them all but now she couldn’t concentrate. The rims of her ears were burning. She lowered her book again. “Why were you saying my name?”

  Now it was Quentin’s turn to look up, his pencil poised above the graph paper he preferred for composition. “Because it’s beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful and strange and evocative. Imogen—image, imago, magic, generation, imagination. Do you know what an imago is?”

  “Yes. Now stop, please.”

  “It’s the final phase in the development of a moth or butterfly.”

  “I said I know.”

  “Imogen.”

  “Desist, sir, or I shall quit your company this instant.”

  “Sorry. Yes, of course. Please don’t be annoyed.”

  “Mr. Goodchild, you can be very wearing.”

  “You’re not the first to remark on it. I wear on me too.”

  “Well. There you are.”

  At the time she had thought—she had chosen to think—that it was his writer’s mind playing with words again.

  Another time, just a few months ago, they had met at the cinema—they both loved Charlie Chaplin—and sat together and laughed together. When they came back out, the snow was four inches deeper and still falling in fat flakes that clung to their hats and coats. The Bijou was not far from Imogen’s rooming house, and Quentin walked her home. Supper would still be on the stove.

  When they reached her door, Imogen thought the proper thing to do would be to thank him, but he had neither suggested the evening nor paid for it. They were just friends who had been to the flickers together, so she turned to him and put out her hand for him to grasp and said, “That was a very amusing evening. I don’t know exactly why I love Charlie Chaplin but I know that I do.”

  “I know why,” Quentin said. “Because he’s always defeated by objects but never by people.”

  Imogen smiled. “I think you may indeed be a writer.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right.” He reached to wipe a snowflake from her eyebrow, ever so gently, with his thumb.

  “Mr. Goodchild.” She looked about to see if anyone had seen. “Really.”

  “Forgive me, Miss Lang. I forgot myself.”

  “Indeed you did,” she replied, but as she spoke Quentin said something else. Breathed it really, it wasn’t even quite a whisper. Three little words. Three words that once said cannot be unsaid.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. I was just thinking to myself.”

  “No, you said something, Quentin.”

  He looked around to see if anyone had heard her use his first name.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing. Really. You know I’m always talking to myself.”

  “I thought I heard—”

  “You didn’t. It was nothing. Oh, look at the time. I must go. I’ve go
t so much work to do before tomorrow. Good night, Miss Lang.” And he walked away, a thin, almost frail figure, who seemed to waver as the snow swirled around him.

  * * *

  —

  That was the last week of February. They had not mentioned the evening or his words again and, although Imogen never forgot them, she had been almost successful in keeping them out of her mind.

  But now it was the last day of May. Filthy patches of snow still steamed here and there but spring was definitely staking its claim. They had agreed to meet at Rush, even though Quentin was no longer a student there, because it was more or less halfway between their two locations. As she got closer to the college, she could smell the wet grass and soil, and then a trolley clanged by, replacing them with the odour of oil and steel.

  It had been an eventful month. May second was her twenty-second birthday and she couldn’t very well refuse her mother’s invitation to come home for dinner to Emerald Avenue. That had been a dull, uncomfortable affair. Her father had stayed away—the Teachers’ Federation contract was in play, and he was holed up in the Grace Hotel. Imogen knew that was not the real reason. The real reason was that she made him intensely uncomfortable, because she knew the truth about him and could not disguise her feelings about it.

  And Alice, her older sister, had stayed away too. She had become a lawyer, just like their father, and now worked with him in his Monroe Street office. It would have been easy for the two sisters to get together for luncheon, as the law office was not far from Rush, but Alice had never suggested it and Imogen—the younger by nearly ten years—did not feel it was her place to do so.

  Her mother had had Mrs. Bidwell, the housekeeper, bake a cake, and her two younger sisters, coltish adolescents, had dutifully been in attendance. They seemed to have no interests other than the fortunes of Mary Pickford and Mabel Normand, which made conversation impossible. Having raised his older daughters to be bookish, even scholarly, only to see Alice become a taciturn spinster and Imogen grow cold to him, their father had evidently decided to mould his younger daughters into marriageable young ladies—decorous and trivial.

  “You know,” Quentin had said to her once, “your father can’t be as bad as you make out or you would never have turned out to be who you are.”

  “You’re wrong,” was all she had come up with for a reply.

  Her mother had tried her best to perk up a little for this party. Perched at the head of the table, she smiled vacantly at her daughters, lines of pain radiating from the corners of her beautiful eyes. Rose Lang suffered from an ache so deep she gave no evidence of ever having lived without it. The most one could hope for was to distract her occasionally, come up with some way to entertain or charm her. Although Imogen had been good at this in her childhood, she’d grown tired of constantly struggling to appease her mother’s unhappiness. Rose remained a kind of absence, a needy creature disguised as a mother, who spent most of her time in her bedroom with the curtains pulled and the lights turned low, a martyr to her “migraines.”

  Of course, the migraine was really her husband, and when she was twelve, Imogen had discovered why. Alice also knew why, but behaved as if she didn’t. The two younger sisters had clearly been allowed to grow up in ignorance, which granted them, if not bliss, a good deal more happiness than either of their older siblings.

  “Twenty-two,” her mother had sighed, when the cake was brought in and the candles were lit. “Twenty-two and nearly a doctor. It’s quite a thing.” A thing, instead of an honour earned at tremendous cost. And nearly a doctor, because the actual graduation was still two weeks away.

  Not one of her family members was coming to the graduation. No doubt her father had made sure of that. He had not contributed a cent toward Imogen’s university education and, since he kept a tight grip on the household funds, her mother could not contribute either. Imogen had visited six banks, had sat across from six plump, mustachioed managers who had smiled indulgently and said no, they would not be lending money to a seventeen-year-old female who wanted to pursue a career in medicine.

  In the end she had gone to Mason Kirschner, her mother’s older brother, who, having no children of his own, had always lavished gifts and attention on the Lang girls. Upon receiving Imogen’s formal letter requesting a meeting to discuss a certain “financial proposition,” he responded as if she were an old and valued client. She sat across from him in his office high above the bustle of Clark Street and laid out her plans: science degree at the University of Chicago, followed by medicine at Rush—and then a career in psychiatry. She would start repaying the loan in full, with interest, at such time as she had an MD in one hand and a job in the other. He agreed to stake her the whole way.

  Imogen had needed a moment or two to take this in. “You mean—you’ll lend me the money?”

  “I’ll have my secretary draw up an agreement right away. I know a good investment when I see one. And just between you and me,” he added, “your pappy is a damn fool.”

  * * *

  —

  Chicago’s usual mass of cloud cover had separated into continents that were now breaking into archipelagos. A shaft of sunlight warmed Imogen’s face as she crossed Harrison Street. She could feel the tremor of streetcars in the pavement.

  She stopped to check the time. Her watch told her she was two minutes late. Perhaps I could write to him when I’m safely settled in Baltimore, she thought—but no, that was the coward’s way out. She could see Quentin now. He was leaning against a Romanesque arch, head bent, book in fist, a hatless, gloveless figure intent on his reading. Imogen raised a hand to wave but he didn’t look up.

  He didn’t even look up when she was less than thirty feet away. You’d think the tap of her heels on the pavement would pique his interest, but very little came between Quentin and a book.

  “Mr. Goodchild,” she said, “you’re looking very scholarly today.” Despite her efforts to remain calm her heart had begun to race.

  Quentin met her eyes and said, “I’ve brought you something.” He reached into his satchel and pulled out a large book—a complete edition of Lewis Carroll, lavishly adorned with colour versions of Tenniel’s original illustrations. “Remember? You said the other week you wished you had your old Alice books, that you still thought about them quite often. I was browsing through James and Powell—you know, the shop on Woodlawn—and I snapped it up.”

  “It’s lovely,” Imogen said, “but you mustn’t give me presents.”

  “Hardly a present. It’s something you should have.”

  “Thank you. It’s kind of you. You’re always ki—” The sudden lump in her throat choked her.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She swallowed hard. She would not allow herself to cry.

  “Listen,” Quentin said, “let’s take the streetcar to Jackson Park. It’s essential to me that I see the lake today. I’m in the middle of writing a lakeside scene and—I don’t know why my memory fails me so often—or not my memory but my vocabulary. Not vocabulary either, really, it’s not a matter of the individual words. What fails me is the illustrative faculty, if there is such a thing in a person who can neither draw nor paint. A rendering faculty, I’d call it—although rendering rather smacks of Union Stock Yards, doesn’t it. Rendering.”

  “It might be better if we just go for a walk around here. I’ve something to—”

  “We can talk on the streetcar.”

  “No, I have something to tell you and I think it would be best to do so here. I don’t want to go far afield and then—”

  “But we see this old place all the time. Let’s go to Jackson Park. I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

  A streetcar clanged, and he pointed. “Look, if we hurry we can catch it.”

  “Quentin, I don’t want to catch it. Please.”

  At last, Quentin registered her mood. Excitement and good cheer vacated his features and were replaced by the first rough hints of dread. “You’re giving me bad news, aren’t you.”<
br />
  “Please,” Imogen said. “Let’s walk in the Kingsley garden.”

  Quentin followed her in silence around the east side of the building. As they stepped onto the little wooden bridge that led to the island garden, Quentin muttered, “Feels like the Bridge of Sighs…”

  It took only a moment to see they were alone. Several benches looked out on the pond, but Imogen didn’t want to sit. She took a deep breath, and turned to face him, clutching the book so she wouldn’t reach out to take his hands in hers.

  “Quentin,” she began, “this is very difficult to say.”

  He raised a hand to cover his mouth, a gesture she’d never seen him make before. He knows, she thought. He already knows.

  “It’s time we went our separate ways.”

  He dropped his hand and looked away. She saw his Adam’s apple rise and fall.

  “Your friendship has meant a lot to me these last three years. I enjoy your company, I value your opinion, I admire your intellect. You are the perfect friend, Quentin. But I’ve come to see that you want something more than friendship.”

  “And you don’t?” His voice quivered a little. “This has all been for nothing?”

  “No, Quentin. Not for nothing. I shall always treasure the pleasant times we’ve had together.”

  “Pleasant?” He turned to face her again, and his expression shamed her.

  “Much more than that,” she said. “I don’t think I would have been able to finish my degree without you. But I have to go to Baltimore to study psychiatry. I’ve been happy here—and I want you to be happy, but if we continue on this path— Well, will you be happy if, say, two years from now we are still discussing books and taking walks and nothing more?”

  His eyes were filling. Imogen had only seen a man cry once and that was when Laura died. She felt a strong desire to touch Quentin, to comfort him.