Firefly

by Linda Hilton

  He was off on a tangent, expressing what he thought must be Julie’s feelings, though she didn’t seem at all hurt that Hans had strayed. Maybe she just thought that, as a still unmarried man, he was free to indulge his lusts any way he chose. Morgan chided himself for putting his own opinion into the picture when he had only been asked for facts.

  “I’m sorry, Julie, I didn’t mean to rant and rave that way.”

  “But what you said is true. Women do accept their husbands’ infidelities. What choice do they have?”

  Julie Hollstrom still had a choice. She was not yet bound to this man she had promised to marry. Morgan, shaking his head to silence the insanities of dreams he could never realize, determined to make her aware of that choice.

  Don’t let her marry the bastard, insisted one of those crazy little insanities, one that wouldn’t be shaken loose.

  “Not all men are like that, Julie. From the day I met Amy, I never touched another woman. I never wanted to. I waited three years before we were married, and I never regretted it.”

  “Hans has waited six.”

  No, he hasn’t, Morgan wanted to spit out. Hans has just been biding his time, entertaining himself with the whores. And I’ll bet he never gives you a second’s thought while he’s lying with another woman.

  But when Morgan tried to phrase that vicious answer in more suitable terms, he looked at Julie and knew he didn’t need to. She understood completely.

  “You loved Amy very much, didn’t you? More than you think Hans loves me.”

  He felt awkward. He’d let himself get caught up in his old feelings again and said things he shouldn’t have. He lifted his coffee cup to give himself a chance to think, but the cup was empty. Even the dregs had dried, leaving only a dark ring on the bottom of the cup.

  “I can’t judge his feelings, Julie. I shouldn’t have said what I did, and I’m sorry for that. You asked me a simple question and I’ve made a real muddle of things. I should have said, yes, some men need sex on a regular basis and others do quite well without it. Some don’t seem to care who they have it with, others abhor the thought of touching a woman they don’t truly love.”

  “Like you and Amy.”

  “What Amy and I had was very rare. I don’t expect to see the like of it again. I never touched another woman. When Amy was pregnant and very, very ill, I didn’t ask her to submit to my attentions. I didn’t even have any desires then, because I knew she wouldn’t respond. Without that, it would have been nothing. That was the beauty of it, the sharing, the joy we had together.”

  She had never seen him like this and knew that it was the thoughts of Amy that lit his eyes with that golden emerald brightness. He loved his wife as much now, six years in her grave, as he had the day she died. No mortal woman could hope to compete with a memory like the one captured in Amy’s wedding portrait, much less the one that lived in Morgan’s heart.

  Julie, accustomed to disguising her emotions, carefully hid her disappointment. Some of it escaped, however, and Morgan did not miss the dimming of the hopeful spark in her eyes. Where there had before been a dream of a smile on her lips, now there was only patient resignation.

  He was about to apologize, for he had not realized how deeply his words wounded. He had given her a glimpse of the unattainable, a peek into a paradise she believed she could never enter, and now she faced her marriage, which he honestly doubted she anticipated with any great joy before, with a sense of loss, for it could never be what he and Amy had had.

  But before Morgan could frame an appropriate response, the man who had come Saturday with the boil on his face came again, knocking on the closed front door. Julie went to answer the summons, as if grateful for any diversion that kept her from confessing any more.

  Morgan watched her walk from the kitchen through the parlor and to the door. Her shoulders didn’t bow under the weight of her acceptance. As though she defied disappointment, she faced her future with a kind of pride. It made her all the more pitiable, all the more desirable.

  *

  He ran his fingers through his hair, squeezing the water until it trickled down his wet back. The breeze chilled him, warm as it was, for the water had been warmer, here on the roof all day.

  He shivered once, then reached for the towel he had laid on the warm tiles. When he had rubbed his hair until it stopped dripping, he dried his body with brisk, almost harsh strokes. Friction warmed him, and when he was done, he felt no urge to go inside. He liked it out here on the roof, under a dark, starry sky. Folding the towel to make a pillow, he lay down on the bare tiles and stared upward.

  Throughout the long day he had tried to find the words to explain to Julie that he had made a mistake. Whenever he had finally put together a speech that expressed his feelings accurately but stayed within the bounds of propriety, another patient walked through the office door. As soon as each crisis—and there were a dozen of them—had passed, then the words were gone, too.

  After a tasteless, greasy supper at Daneggar’s, he got Sam from the livery stable and rode out to Steve Baxter’s place to check on Peg and the baby. The ride, and the time alone, did little to organize his thoughts, but at least he was free of Julie’s unnerving company for those few hours.

  She made him feel so damn clumsy. When they worked, he moved with the old confidence, as though he had never been away from his work. And Julie fit in so well that he was hardly aware of her but as an extension of himself. All of that changed the instant he tried to talk to her as a human being rather than as his nurse.

  He was too tired to lie out here long. He wanted to curl up and go to sleep after a long day, something he could not do comfortably on the roof tiles.

  Inside, where the dim starlight did not reach, he groped his way to the bedroom. Everything was as it should be, he noted. The single bed, the little table, the photograph. He sat on the edge of the bed and reached for the portrait.

  “It never gets any easier,” he sighed. He touched the roses lying on her lap, remembering how she had pressed them in the Bible.

  He stretched out on the bed, propping a pillow behind his head and standing the picture on his chest. He stared at the sepia portrait, searching for answers to unasked questions. The longer he looked at Amy, the more he thought of Julie. She was a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. He didn’t think she loved Hans, yet she seemed determined to go through with the marriage.

  “I miss you so much, Amy. I miss you at night, when the day is over and I need someone to talk to. I try to talk to Julie, but every time I do, I feel like some fool kid again, just the way I was with you when we first met. My tongue falls all over itself and I can’t seem to stick three intelligent words together.”

  Talking to Amy was not a new experience. He had done it often, drunk and sober, privately and in public. He felt no more self-conscious about this conversation than any other, but he became aware of a painful new dimension to the monologue. As though she had come back herself, Amy’s long-ago words haunted him.

  “We were so in love in those days,” she had told him whenever they reminisced about the life they had left in Cincinnati. “And you hardly knew what to do or say.”

  He laughed, remembering it all again.

  “I must have looked pretty stupid to you.”

  “Oh, no, my love,” she had assured him, “for I was too starry-eyed myself to notice.”

  He stretched out on the bed, propping a pillow behind his head and standing the picture on his chest.

  “Well, I’m too old to act like that now,” he insisted.

  “Thank heavens! Once was quite enough. Besides, there’d never be anyone else like you, Amy. That’s why I’m so lost. It isn’t Julie’s fault; in fact, she’s very good. Not as good as you, but she’s only had a few weeks, so I can’t expect perfection. And she doesn’t nag. I thought she would, you know, especially about the booze. I haven’t touched it, except for that once, since she came along. You’d be proud of me. I’m proud of myself.”

 
The weariness was leaving him, replaced by a peaceful lethargy. Amy had that effect on him. He was so comfortable with her.

  “I think you’d like Julie. She’s, well, she’s not much like you, but I still think you’d like her. She’s not very pretty, not the way you are. She’s tall and skinny and she used to wear these eyeglasses that were always ready to fall off the end of her nose.” He chuckled and rolled onto his side, laying the picture down on the sheet beside him. “Then a couple of days ago she broke them, and now she doesn’t wear them at all.”

  The confusion returned. Puzzled, he stared at the sepia portrait, searching for answers to unasked questions, then looked up as though he expected someone to walk through the door. No one was there, not Amy, not Julie, not even Winnie.

  “I didn’t tell you everything, Amy,” he whispered. He couldn’t look at her now and kept staring at the dark doorway. “I kissed her. Twice. I couldn’t help it. I felt like absolute hell afterwards, but at the time I wanted nothing more than to go on kissing her. And more, if I’d been able to do more.”

  He pulled the sheet up to his waist, not because he was cold.

  “I don’t understand her, Amy. She’s a puzzle, and I think if you were here, you’d solve it for me. You always saw things so clearly; I made problems where there weren’t any. Am I making a problem now?

  “When she came to me today asking about men’s sexual needs, I gave her a whole bushel of tripe about how it was with you and me. I thought I could help her if I told her she didn’t have to settle for a bastard like Wallenmund, but I made it worse instead of better. She’s in love with him, and he doesn’t deserve her.”

  He punctuated those last words with an angry heave of the pillow. It thudded against the door, banging it open and holding it against the wall.

  “She doesn’t deserve three quarters of what she takes. Her father hates her, her mother despises her, her brother is an insufferable brat, and her fiancé is a monster. If I had any proof he was the one who beat up poor Maude, I’d kill him, I swear it. Julie’s a gentle person, like you. If she ever submits to him, it must be for a damn good reason. And guilt isn’t a good reason at all. What the hell did she do that she feels so guilty for?”

  But Amy’s smile never changed. And Morgan couldn’t resent her silence.

  “What am I gonna do?” he asked her. The very tip of his fingernail grazed the portrait’s lips. “I can’t change the way things are. I can’t bring you back, and I can’t stop the way I’m starting to feel about Julie. How could I boast to her about how faithful I’d been to you right after I’d kissed her? What a self-righteous hypocrite I am!”

  Angry at himself, Morgan blew out the lamp and flopped back on his bed. It was uncomfortable without a pillow, but he accepted the discomfort as a penance for his earlier display of temper. In the dark, alone, he clasped his wife’s picture to his chest and sighed. When he spoke again it was as though she had patted his hand or shoulder and urged him to calm down.

  “When I think of her with that…that maniac, I want to inflict bodily harm. I hate seeing her go home every day to that family of hers. She never complains, as if she expects the treatment she gets, but even if what I suspect is true, how can she still be paying for a sin nine, ten years old?

  “So what if the boy is hers? That’s biology, not theology. Obviously the father’s sins didn’t fall on the boy; they landed square on the mother’s shoulders, Julie’s. My God, she was only seventeen! Can’t they forgive her one mistake? They certainly have enough mercy for the boy. Hollstrom himself can’t do enough for the brat.”

  Was it Amy’s voice or some inner logic that alerted him to that important flaw in his theory? Would Wilhelm pamper the offspring of his daughter’s indiscretion? The boy was innocent enough, of course, but Morgan didn’t think Hollstrom was the merciful sort. He would blame the bastard child as much as its mother.

  All of which led Del to another, far more difficult question.

  If Julie wasn’t Willy’s natural mother, what else could she have done that left her bowed under such a mountain of guilt?

  It was Amy, calming one of his rages at Horace’s ignorance, who begged him not to judge others harshly before he had all the facts.

  “What facts? What does anyone know about anyone else out here? If this had happened in Cincinnati—which it wouldn’t have—Adam St. Rogers knew everyone and everything. But in Arizona, you’re right; I can’t judge her.”

  “Don’t judge yourself too harshly either, Del. You’re a human being just like the rest of us.”

  How often she had had to remind him of that. He had expected so much from himself, and when he couldn’t live up to his expectations, Amy was there to console him and remind him of his mere mortal status.

  “Human, mortal, imperfect. I’m all those, Amy, I know. And that’s why it hurts. I love you, and I can’t stop wishing you were here. But it isn’t enough any more to talk to you. Oh, God, Amy, I want Julie Hollstrom, and I hate myself for it. Not that it makes any difference. I don’t have anything to offer her, or any other woman for that matter. Julie needs, and deserves, so much more than I could ever give her.”

  The pain began in his throat, at the back of his tongue. He swallowed twice, but the lump stuck fast, strangling him so that his words came broken, some missing, some barely whispered.

  “I want…don’t deserve her…wish I could…damn, damn, damn, damn! I won’t cry, not sober…oh, God, why?”

  But for all his protests, he couldn’t stop the tears. He wiped them on the sheet, then yanked it from the bed. He got to his feet in a blind rage. Bent on destruction, he pulled the sheets from the mattress and dragged the mattress from the bed, only to trip on the tangled pile of bedclothes and fall on them.

  “Don’t marry him, Julie,” he begged, extricating himself from the sheets and walking to the door. The room was stifling, too hot, too lonely, too full of sadness. “Don’t leave me. Don’t you see how much I need you? Not like a rutting boar the way Hans thinks he needs you, and I can’t give you a farm and a big house or even children, but I need you so damn much.”

  The kitchen was dark as a cave, but he had stumbled around it often enough to know his way blindly. In the pantry, behind a sack of cornmeal, lay the other bottle of Horace’s scotch. Morgan found it, closed his fingers securely around the neck. It was cold comfort clutched to his naked chest and it sent a shiver through his body. He found a glass in the cupboard and carried it with his bottle to the table. As he sat down and reached for the cork, he realized with a sardonic laugh that he couldn’t indulge in his old vices the way he used to. Someone might come pounding on the door at any moment, and how would it look if the doctor answered that summons drunk and buck naked?

  “Three, four weeks ago I wouldn’t have cared. It wouldn’t have mattered either,” he told the dark house as he mounted the stairs again, bottle and glass in hand. “No one bothered drunk Del Morgan. He could sleep naked in his kitchen any time he wanted to, and sometimes did. Now he has to put his pants on. He has to be ‘respectable’, and ‘respectable’ doctors don’t sit naked in their kitchens with a bottle of fine whisky.”

  He remembered not to fall on the dismantled bed and eventually encountered his trousers on the back of the chair. He had to set the bottle down to pull them up, button the fly, and tighten the belt, but as soon as he was minimally decent, he picked up the bottle and walked out onto the roof.

  Stars dazzled him in a moonless sky. He picked out the summer constellations, Scorpio, Libra, the Great Bear as constant as ever. Cold, distant little lights always out of reach.

  He went back into the house, leaving the whisky outside, and dragged the mattress to the roof. Respectable or not, he wasn’t stupid enough to do without some comfort.

  “Don’t you remember how we used to lie on the riverbank and count stars, Amy?” He lay down on the bare mattress and cradled the back of his head on his cupped palms. “And how surprised we were to find so many more out here in Arizona?
The air is clearer here and drier, and the elevation is higher than Cincinnati, too. You know, I think maybe the reason I came out here was because I could see a lot of things clearer than in Cincinnati. And of course I was so afraid your father would take you home, away from me.”

  “Don’t you remember what he said to you the night before our wedding? You know he meant it. Daddy always meant what he said.”

  Amy’s remembered voice went on as clearly as the click of the crickets.

  “Daddy didn’t agree with your plans. We all knew he wanted to set you up at one of his companies or in the bank, but he knew you were too independent. ‘Stubborn as a Welsh terrier,’ he used to laugh about you, but he liked that in a man. And he knew you loved me. Me—not my daddy’s money.”

  “How I courted you, and courted him and your mother, too. Anything, just so they’d let me have you.”

  What Amy told him next was not something he recalled from old conversations. Yet it was her voice, with that soft southern Ohio drawl, just a bit husky as it always was when they lay together and talked in the summer dark.

  “Then court Julie, Del. The way you courted me. Do you think I like seeing you all alone and miserable? You need someone to love, to be loved by. If you love her, if you hate the thought of her with that other man, then go after her. Don’t be a quitter, Del. Don’t let me down. Show me the old stubbornness that Daddy liked so well.”

  “But she doesn’t love me the way you did.”

  “I didn’t love you at first either, darling. Don’t you remember that first picnic? You were such…such a string bean! All long legs and arms and that horrible moustache. I thought you the most clumsy oaf I’d ever seen. Then later, when you started spouting poetry at me, I began to wonder where on earth one of Daddy’s employee’s sons had ever learned Shakespeare. You were very forward, Del Morgan. Why aren’t you forward with Julie?”