And soon enough, another envelope, containing her ticket to the United States, will be in the mail to my daughter, Clementine, wherever she may be. I will ask my correspondent to inform my lawyer of her whereabouts. Because I will have discharged my debt to my correspondent, he will do what I request. He is, above all, a man of honor. As for the expense of the ticket, my daughter will be directed to give no thought to the cost. Everything will have been paid in full.
What will she return to? The violets and the little pepper plant on her windowsill I have watered for the last time, perhaps excessively, in hopes they will survive long enough to greet her when she returns. When she emerges from customs at JFK, she will recognize, with puzzlement, her name inked on a placard, held by my attorney, a Mr. Albert Hale, to whom I have entrusted these instructions: He is to bring her to his offices for the unsealing of the will, and when she is ready he will explain the disposition of the estate. I have expressed my wish that he do so with utmost gentleness, and with utmost gentleness accompany her to the apartment, which she will enter for the last time.
She will find there that I have given nearly everything away. My room, always stark, is as I write this completely bare, without books, without pictures, without a radio even to receive the long sleepless broadcasts. My desk alone remains. As for her own things, they have been packed away in storage, where they await her. (I will not attempt to describe what it was to wrap each object, each garment, each book and photograph, and lay it in a box.) The sale of the apartment alone will net her a small fortune, to which shall be added the larger fortune of her inheritance.
On this desk, beside the violets and the pepper plant, she will find my last letter to her. It is brief, only the words necessary to express an infinite love and an infinite sorrow. I do not ask forgiveness. The only consolation I seek is release, at last, from the desire for consolation.
Unforgivable. What other word?
And this story I have told you, which is her story too, does she not deserve to know it? Does she not deserve to know the circumstances of her birth, who her parents were, that the man who has claimed her as his daughter is not her father? She does—it is her birthright—and yet she cannot know. I have burned the letters and the photographs, one by one. The only version of her story is the one you hold in your hand. You have read it, have heard me out, and for that you have my solemn thanks, but I ask you to burn these pages too.
I am told the seal of the confessional prevents you from seeking her out, even should you conclude she is in immediate danger. But I can assure you she is in no danger. My correspondent has given me his quitclaim: her safety and her freedom have been paid in full. Whether with me or with the girl, he wrote, he will be satisfied. I will be that satisfaction, as he has known all along. Should some impulse, however, goad you to seek her out, I have made certain that you will not find her. From the beginning of my confession I have dissembled her name. It is not Clementine Abend. I pray, Father, that you let this be the end of Clementine’s story, and of mine. As for the man who wrote you these pages, his name makes no appearance here either. He is not—was not—Daniel Abend. Of your charity, remember him.
April 2016
The cough of a crow in the distance brought Spurlock to his senses, although day had yet to break.
It was as though she had appeared to him in a dream: “I’m going to go now,” she had said, holding the package he had given her. Except he had not been dreaming. She had led him to this stone bench, she had accepted the package, and although she had said only “I’m going to go now,” something careful, almost pained, in her inflection acknowledged how long he had waited, how patiently he had kept the package, and the fact that they would not meet again. He watched her receding form until a bend in the cinder path took her from his view.
Come daylight, Nelson Spurlock would begin his journey home, the job done, his purpose accomplished. He would wait for the sky to lighten, he would rise from the stone bench and return to the hotel. There he would hire a taxi for the two-hour trip to the airport, the road straight through the flat midwestern fields. Until day broke, however, he would wait here. Though the crow coughed again, night held.
The stone bench was cold and seemed to drink the heat from Spurlock’s body, but the earth breathed the odor of a deep thaw, and all night a sleepless wind had tossed in the treetops. Spurlock had not slept either. Last night, when he’d lain down on the hotel bed, he’d felt such fatigue that he’d wondered if he would sleep through his midday flight the next day. Might he even sleep through the onrushing onslaught of Holy Week back at the Incarnation? As tired as he was, though, his eyes had not closed, and all night the sleepless wind had paced back and forth outside his window, scrabbling at it, as though pleading to be let in.
Finally, avoiding the gaze of the clock’s red eye, Nelson Spurlock had risen from the bed and walked out through the town, under the solitary streetlight swinging over its intersection and across the tree-lined expanse of the town green, passing two students smoking on the steps of a monument. “I salute you, Night Walker,” said one slurrily, plunging his hand into a bag of chips held by his friend. Spurlock made his way along the streets of the college town, past slumbering nineteenth-century houses, sensing even in darkness the affably unkempt spaciousness of the Midwest.
He had not been aware of heading anywhere in particular, but he found himself at the split-rail gate of the arboretum. Beyond it lay the cinder path they had walked down the day before. “Why not?” he said to himself, and set off down the path through what he remembered was a sort of hummocky meadow to the stand of evergreens and the curved stone bench they enclosed. This was where they had sat side by side, the heavy envelope he had just given her resting on her lap, her hand palm-down on top of it. For a moment they had said nothing. A crow spoke in the distance, and she had said, as though in response, “I am going to go now.”
* * *
—
So it was over, he thought, the stone bench beneath him colder now than it had been yesterday, his brief mission concluded. Hardly brief, though, he thought, if you counted the eight years since she had appeared in his church. “Well, Nelson, I guess you should go now too,” he said to himself. But it was still night, and he would wait here, as good a place as any, for day to break over the state of Ohio.
Ohio, as the last letter had informed him. He had found it without looking for it. On sabbatical from his congregation, he had not stopped by the office for eighteen days. He’d tried, in an exertion of will, to make it for twenty-one days, three whole weeks, to find something else to do with his time, but one of his aimless walks through the city had conducted him to the church unawares. He’d hesitated only briefly. Oh, fuck it, he’d said, and gone in.
“Couldn’t quite manage, could you, chief?” said Mrs. Nickerson when he walked into the parish office.
“Any fresh horrors in the mail today?” he asked with strained jocularity.
“Nothing much, chief. The bishop called, wants you to nominate yourself for the Standing Committee. Mail’s on your desk. Nothing from the law firm. What happened to ‘you won’t see me for a month’?”
He’d asked Mrs. Nickerson to call him if anything had arrived from his wife’s attorney. The attorney referred to his client as “Ms. Pierce,” declaring that “her preference henceforth was to be known by her maiden name.” Maiden! thought Spurlock, but without bitterness. He supposed he should no longer refer to the lawyer as his wife’s attorney, if only because Bethany was no longer his wife. Soon enough, he’d been informed, the official decree of divorce would arrive in the mail “for his records.” Records of what? he wondered. There had been no conflict, no scenes in the lobby, no solitary sobbing embrace of a shower curtain. In fact there had been practically no discussion at all, just an acknowledgment, incremental and unspoken, that whatever had been was no more and quite possibly had never existed in the first place. Let th
e record show, thought Spurlock, still without bitterness, the nothing that was never there. His one demand had been to keep Perpetua, the cat, but in the end he had let her go as well.
* * *
—
Absorbed in his thoughts, Spurlock had thrown out the message from the bishop and picked up the next item in the stack on his desk, an old-style airmail envelope, the light paper a pale blue, the words Par Avion in the corner. Across the envelope’s face, a crabbed, arthritic hand had spelled out in blocky capitals a strange name and a familiar address:
MLLE. OPPEN
CHURCH OF THE INCARNATION
NEW YORK, NY
He called out to Mrs. Nickerson, “Do we have a Millie—no, a Mademoiselle Oppen in the parish records?”
There was a brief clatter of keystrokes before she said, “Not a one. Did someone send you a mail-order bride, chief?”
Who was this Mademoiselle Oppen, and what had he to do with her? Even as he phrased the question to himself, he was aware of not wanting to know the answer. Nevertheless, he peered once more at the envelope. In the lower corner the same crabbed block capitals spelled out:
AUX BONS SOINS DU PÈRE NELSON SPURLOCK
EXÉCUTEUR TESTIMENTAIRE DU DÉFUNT, M. DAVID EVERETT OPPEN
He did not know what aux bons soins meant, and he was executor of no one’s estate, certainly not this David Everett Oppen. Surely someone had erred. He would hand the letter back to Mrs. Nickerson. But he did not move. He stared at the envelope. For an instant it was as though the years had not passed at all, as though he’d awakened from a seven-year dream to find himself still staring at the sheet of paper that the girl Clementine Abend had first unfolded the day she appeared in the church. But she was not here, and the hands the paper trembled in were his own. And of course, the name was different. A pulse of relief spread through him, only to vanish as abruptly as it had arrived. The girl had found Spurlock because Spurlock’s name had appeared on a will, or rather a fragment of a will, that sheet of paper she had received in the mail, from her father. The fragment had said that any future correspondence would be addressed to Spurlock, at the church. And so it had been. Within weeks, Daniel Abend’s testament had arrived in its envelope. But Spurlock remembered Abend’s closing words: From the beginning of my confession I have dissembled her name. It is not Clementine Abend. I pray, Father, that you let this be the end of Clementine’s story, and of mine. As for the man who wrote you these pages, his name makes no appearance here either. He is not—was not—Daniel Abend.
* * *
—
Deliberately, Nelson Spurlock set the envelope on his desk, sealed, addressed to a Mlle. Oppen, the daughter of one David Everett Oppen.
As though to test its reality, Spurlock said the name aloud: Oppen.
Not Abend, but Oppen. That was his name.
David Oppen.
Daniel Abend (who was not—is not—Daniel Abend) is instead David Oppen.
* * *
—
For a moment, Spurlock shut his eyes. Behind his closed eyelids he looked out over a great congregation, pews occupied to capacity all the way to the back of his church, packed as they would be only for the funeral of a young person. They formed a receding trapezoid of faces upturned toward him in the pulpit, faces indistinct and backlit, the blare of sunlight from the avenue flooding in through the west doors. Over his shoulder, in the chancel, he sensed it, the body of Jessica Burke, shut in its coffin, the coffin covered with a white linen pall. Daniel Abend would have been among the congregation. Yes, on the day of Jessica Burke’s funeral, Daniel Abend would have been somewhere in the congregation, seated beside the doorman Itzal—Daniel Abend, who was instead David Oppen.
Oppen would be the last name of the daughter too. The sealed envelope on his desk made this plain.
* * *
—
“Are you feeling all right, chief?” Mrs. Nickerson asked when he opened the door to his office.
“Can you find a death notice or obituary for a David Oppen, in 2008?”
Another brief squall of keystrokes. “Oppen…Oppen…David Oppen, psychoanalyst, age fifty. A drowning. In France. Did you know him?”
“Children?”
“No children—hold it—yes: one child, a daughter, an Em Oppen.”
“Em Oppen…Can you find her?”
The keys clattered again.
“Oppen…Oppen. There are several: Em Oppen, M. Oppen, Emma Oppen, E. Moppen. An Oppen Emilie. Wait, no—it looks like they are all the same person, all twenty to twenty-five years old, all in the same place, somewhere in Ohio. A town called Sidon.”
“Twenty-five,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“She would be twenty-five. Just.”
“You know this Em Oppen?”
“I’ve never heard her name in my life.”
Mrs. Nickerson cocked her eyebrow. “Do I get to know what this is about?”
“Not if I don’t,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few days.”
* * *
—
Of your charity, remember him.
As Spurlock read again the last pages of Daniel Abend’s confession, the plane had begun to shed altitude. They would touch down in seventeen minutes (the pilot had announced) at the Akron-Canton Airport, two hours east of the town of Sidon and Sidon College, whose library website listed on its staff roster an Em Oppen, librarian and archivist, assistant curator of Special Collections. How rapidly, suddenly even, his itinerary had snapped into place. In his satchel, alongside a change of clothes and the airmail letter addressed to “MLLE. OPPEN,” Spurlock carried David Oppen’s written testament, the pages he’d read seven years ago and kept in his office ever since.
* * *
—
For the long taxi ride from Akron-Canton Airport to the campus of Sidon College, Spurlock stared across the landscape’s bleak expanse, the secondary roads sweeping past the highway at long, regular intervals, straight as oars. Could this be Clementine’s world? Not Clementine’s—Em’s, Em Oppen’s. What did Em stand for? Em for Emily? for Emma? for Emmanuelle? Or did her students call her Ms. Oppen? Yes, thought Spurlock, this was her world and had been for years now. A Sidon graduate herself (as the library website had proudly proclaimed), she was now an employee, having departed for no longer than necessary to complete a library degree, and no farther away than the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Since he had read the crabbed, blocky capitals of her name on the airmail envelope, the sealed envelope with its unknown contents, an urgency had propelled him forward, out of his office, toward the airport, toward Ohio. But now, however, all haste abandoned him, replaced by a dread and a longing to abort his journey. The taxi seemed suddenly to hurtle forward at alarming speed, now past flashing fields and silos, now into the leafy purlieus of the college town.
The feeling of wanting to turn back stayed with him, even after he had checked into the Sidon Inn. Though the afternoon was not far gone, his plan to deliver his letter this evening seemed to him suddenly impracticable. He needed to get his bearings. He should figure out where he could get something to eat. He would wait until morning to find the library where she worked.
He realized in the morning that he could hardly have missed it, the immense white marble cube standing out amid the earnest brick and stone of the other college buildings, like a spaceship in a used-car lot. Inside, he approached the circulation desk to ask for Archives and Special Collections. A student crowned in dirty-blond dreadlocks, neck tattooed with what looked like a morning glory vine, directed him to the fourth floor, then added with disarming chipperness, “I was just heading up there for my shift. I can take you there if you like.”
“Um, first I have to—” said Spurlock, overcome by the desire to flee. But flee where? There was nothing to t
he town except for a ramshackle main street, where leather-necked farmers docked their pickups outside the diner, and little swarms of college students, trailing cigarette smoke and patchouli, hovered around the lanterned patio of a coffee shop called Torrify! There was a used-book store and an old art deco movie theater operated by the college’s Film Studies Department. He didn’t know what he had imagined for her, but it wasn’t this earnest, threadbare place. “Actually,” he said, “that would be very kind.”
As they climbed the stairs to the Department of Archives and Special Collections, the student introduced herself as Cat and asked his name. “Nelson’s a cool name,” she announced, as though to reassure him. She explained that he’d have to leave his bag in a cubby outside the reading room, though he could keep his laptop. Nelson Spurlock did not have a laptop and blinked twice when Cat pointed to the stack of claim slips, “for when you want us to retrieve a title.” Spurlock muttered something about needing to get settled and to “check the holdings,” then felt himself blushing at the falsehood, but Cat merely buzzed him through a door into the small reading area, saying she’d be back to check on him in a little while. Spurlock found himself alone now, seated at a long table, in a book-musted stillness he had neither remembered nor missed since divinity school.
“Not a lot of business today,” Spurlock ventured to Cat twenty minutes later when she returned.
“There never is. Unless one of the profs brings a class.”
“Is Miss…Oppen in today?”
The name as he uttered it sounded like one he’d made up, but Cat replied, “Emmy? She should be. No requests?”
“No requests,” said Spurlock, adding, “Not just yet,” when he detected a quizzical edge in Cat’s expression. He could ask to see her, but he knew he would be unable to state a reason for his visit and resolved to wait, laying out the envelopes down beside him, where they suggested with plausible fraudulence documents for a research project. After what must have been two hours, Cat poked her head into the reading room. “I’ll be knocking off soon,” she said. “You sure there’s nothing I can call up for you?”
The Waters & the Wild Page 25