Only then did I realize that something had fastened onto my hand. Whatever it was had pierced the fleshy pad at the base of my thumb and hung there like a scorpion or eel, refusing to let go. I flailed my hand, trying to shake it free, but it held fast. Finally, I mastered my revulsion enough to hold the thing up to the lights of Nevers across the river. The part in my hand was a needle, connected by a short length of thin, flexible tubing to the cylinder of a hypodermic, the bore large, the plunger pressed home. Breathing deeply, I extracted the needle from my hand.
Though Oppen’s head was no longer in the water, the froth, pinkish, still trailed from his mouth. I pushed up his sleeve to reveal the tape where he had affixed the hypodermic to his arm, securing it in the vein, ready to be discharged when the moment arrived. I knew then that no breath would clear the froth from his throat, that my fingers, should I kneel beside him and press them to his neck, would find no pulse.
* * *
—
If I waded into the water and crouched on the other side of his head, I could get a better purchase on his body. At first I could not move him and sat for an impotent moment in the shallows. In the end, however, grabbing him beneath his armpits, I managed to haul him down into the river, across the shoal downstream of the Isle of Terns. Once past the shallows, the current took some of the weight of his body, little by little, until finally it suspended him in perfect equilibrium. A shift in the current lifted my feet from the sandy floor, and I was forced to cling to his body because together we had begun to move with the movement of the river. Seized with fear that we would be drawn out together, I shoved myself back from him, back-paddling until my feet regained their purchase on the riverbed. By the time I had steadied myself, the combined force of my shove and the strength of the river itself had pulled his body out into the current. It turned once, then sank beneath the surface.
* * *
—
The water had closed over it all: their three lives, Miriam’s, David Oppen’s, their unborn child’s. Somewhere else, far away, a lawyer would inform you—an orphaned girl—that your father had drowned in the Loire. With what sorrow or relief would you greet that news? Unbeknownst to you, you had been released from the lie that had made up your only reality. When you had heard the news, you would know only that you were alone—in reality no more alone than you had ever been, but now in possession of the fact.
As for me, standing on the riverbank, I was a shadow only—no, not even that. I was the shadow of something that had ceased to exist.
* * *
—
I returned to my house in the Morvan hills. Did I hope that you would try to find me again? Did I fear that others would now seek me out—detectives, investigators, officials bearing warrants? No one came up the road. You would not and neither would the law. Justice, I thought, had exhausted itself. It had no more use for me. It had spent me already.
* * *
—
For several days it rested on my table, the package he had consigned to me, addressed to a Reverend Nelson Spurlock, at the Church of the Incarnation. He had already affixed postage in the corner and had marked the package “Printed Material, Third Class Mail.” Such a package would take a month to arrive. (I saw how in choosing to mail it from France, he had built in a delay, sufficient time for you to return home, to learn what you were to learn from the lawyer. He had also, I knew, made it possible for me to read it.) If I sent it first class instead (I thought to myself as I cut the twine), if I sent it first class after I read it, the package would arrive in New York no later than he had planned.
“Father, you will not remember me. My name is Daniel Abend.”
So began his narrative. But that you know already. Along with this letter, has not the priest Nelson Spurlock brought it with him to give to you, the true testimony of that invented person, Daniel Abend? How queer it was to read it through, as though I too did not know how it would end. When I was finished, I sealed it in an envelope and sent it to the priest.
* * *
—
Soon after that, still unused to sleeping in this house, I had a dream. A week or two later, I had it again, exactly the same, just as I have had it ever since then, always the same. In it my daughter is alive again, still a child, and she and my wife have climbed the hill behind the house to look for blackberries in the clearings. From up on the hill they call to me. They want me to join them. Yves! cries my wife. Come look! And Miriam calls out, Papa! Papa!
I hear them, but I am detained below, though by what I do not know. When I do not answer, Miriam joins her mother in calling out my name: Yves! Yves! At first I am touched and mortified that she addresses me by name, but then I understand that my daughter alone is calling me, that she is alone, lost somewhere on the hillside. Papa! she cries out again, but I cannot answer her. Yves! she calls, but more weakly now, her voice the voice of someone who expects no response. I hear her but am paralyzed and cannot make a sound. Finally, despairingly, she calls out, Itzal! Itzal! Answer me! But she has already wandered to the other side of the hill, and Itzal cannot answer her. He is no longer here. Itzal has dissolved, as a shadow dissolves in darkness.
* * *
—
The years flowed past me, an old man and in time a sick one. Death, I believed, would be my next caller. I imagined him showing up, perhaps in the winter, out of breath, knocking the mud off his boots on my doorstep. “Yves, mon vieux,” he would say, “better late than never.” He will be welcome when he arrives, but he has not found his way yet. And so I wait for him. Each night now the dream returns like an enormous black bird. It alights again on my chest. It feeds once more on my heart.
* * *
—
No one visits, no one except the fat Moroccan curate from the church in Préporché and the silent, whiskery woman (his girlfriend, I assume) who prepares my meals, what little I can eat. The curate drives me to my doctors in Decize, when he can persuade me to go, or he comes on Sunday evenings, just to drink my gnôle and smoke his disgusting Dutch tobacco. When the evening is mild, he brings me out beneath the walnut tree. He calls me Old Goat and Infidel and I call him Eunuch and the sun goes down. This past Sunday I told him I would not be keeping my doctor’s appointment this week, and for once he did not argue. I asked instead if he could mail a letter for me to the United States. “The old goat Levaux,” he said, “finally making amends to one of the women he ruined.” One likes to let the curate dream a little, no? The price of my gnôle, he knows, is his promise to let me die in my house.
God will forgive us all, he says, even the old goat Levaux.
Sad God, I say, with no one to forgive Him in return.
Is that, my child, what I am asking you, your forgiveness? David Oppen was right: it is unforgivable that we should ask such a thing from our children. And yet I have written you, knowing that the Reverend Nelson Spurlock will find you. You are reading this, so I trust he is there with you now. As for me, I must go. The night is far gone. My child, will you permit an old ghost to address you as he always did, indeed, as he always shall? Ma petite fille, ma Miriam à moi—adieu!
Yves Levaux
“Em,” he said, and she looked at him for the first time, the nickel gray of her eye bright with a suspended tear. “Em,” he said. “Em is for Miriam. Your name is Miriam.”
“Yes,” she said, “though no one calls me that.” She smoothed the sheets and folded them back into the envelope, staring for a long moment at the patch of grass between her shoes. The dew was gone now, but her shoes were still wet.
“It’s over. It is all over now,” said Spurlock, because he did not know what to say. The words passed dry and comfortless from his lips. He had wanted them to convey, if nothing more, that she was not alone on this stone bench. Instead, they hung in the air as though they had been spoken by someone else, someone trying to wake him, trying to tell him
it was late now and time to depart.
“It is strange—” she said at last, then paused and started again. “No. What I mean is, nothing is stranger—nothing is stranger than knowing that you’ve been allowed—that you’ve been permitted to live.”
How inert it had lain, Oppen’s testament, and for so long nearly forgotten on the top of the filing cabinet in his office. But maybe, thought Spurlock, its weight had served all along as a kind of mooring. It had anchored the tail end of a long string, a kite string stretching its curve to a minute fluttering at the edge of sight. But no, that wasn’t right, not exactly, because when he had set out in search of that remote point, a point named Clementine Abend, he had discovered that Clementine Abend was not Clementine Abend. Cut free, the kite string had gone slack and laid itself down in illegible loops, tangled on the ground.
“A thread,” she said.
“A thread?” said Spurlock, astonished that the kite string in his reverie might have been a shared apparition. She, however, had intended something else.
“That’s what it was, a thread. The codicil to his will was a thread.”
“The codicil—that paper you showed me?”
“The first document, the one I showed you—the codicil to my father’s—to David Oppen’s will. On the first day we met, at your church.”
“The day I called you Clementine Abend and you vanished—”
“I vanished because I sensed it—how the codicil was a thread. It was handwritten, unwitnessed and unsigned, so it would have been useless as a legal document. And anyway, all it said was that correspondence addressed to his daughter, his only heir, would be addressed to you, Nelson Spurlock, at the Church of the Incarnation.”
“Except—”
“Except the daughter was this Clementine Abend, this person I didn’t know, a name I’d never heard.”
“And you thought he must have had another daughter, that you weren’t his daughter at all.”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t think that. I never thought it, not for an instant. Because I was his only daughter. Everything else was impossible: that my father could have died, had in fact died, killed himself, and in France—a place he said he’d never go again. The apartment had been emptied and was under contract to be sold. It was like the whole world had been dismantled. But even then, even when the codicil appeared, with the strange names—this Clementine person, this Nelson Spurlock—I never doubted that I was his daughter, his only child. I bolted because I knew—knew and couldn’t acknowledge—that Clementine Abend was me. For some reason, for some purpose, I was this person whose name I had never heard.”
“But why would he send the codicil to you, especially after taking such pains to seal up his story, to disguise the names?”
“It would have been—yes, it must have been the last thing he did, the last thing before meeting Itzal at the riverbank. He’d sent the handwritten codicil knowing it would bring me to you, knowing you could put a face to the name he’d given me, even though that name—Clementine Abend—was one I didn’t recognize. Don’t you see? In the end, he blinked. He made it so that you could find me, if you saw fit—” For the first time, he felt the intensity in her voice turn to strain, and when she tried to speak again, it broke. He thought at first she had been seized by pain, so forcefully did she press the balls of her hands against her eyes, but after a moment, and a single shuddering breath, she wiped her hands on her jeans, her tears leaving two dark streaks on the fabric.
“It was done. It was over. He’d built his labyrinth and he’d hidden his secret inside it, but he’d built it around a thread, a thread for someone to discover and follow.”
“For you to follow,” he said, “back into it.”
“Yes,” she said, then, “No. Not back into it. Out of it. A thread to lead you to me, and the way out.”
“But why would Itzal—why would Miriam’s father send his letter to you in my care? Why wouldn’t he send it to you directly? Surely he knew where you were.”
“His letter wouldn’t have made sense without the confession.”
“But still, he could have told you what he needed you to know, then directed you to me, in New York, to learn more.”
“There was too big a chance you wouldn’t tell me anything. Maybe if he directed me to you in New York, if I just appeared, the seal on the confessional would oblige you to keep your peace.”
“But isn’t that all the more reason why he would contact you directly?” Spurlock heard the insistence in his own voice: how badly he wanted to believe his presence had not been required in the unfolding of this plan, that he was a peripheral figure, a bystander.
“And anyway,” she said, “if he had told me to go find you, I wouldn’t have gone. After Hale, the lawyer, told me my father had killed himself, I didn’t want to know more. I wanted to unknow it all. Starting then, I was in flight. Itzal knew that if he told me outright, I just would have fled farther away. It’s like I’ve been swimming like mad away from a sinking ship so I don’t get sucked down behind it. The odds are bad, they say, for the children of suicides….”
The odds were terrible, Spurlock knew, but what wasn’t terrible in her story? “Why would Itzal have cared that you read the confession?” he asked.
She looked at Spurlock directly, and a glint, something like amusement, crimped the corner of her eye. “He did care.”
She went on: “For Itzal, it was no longer a question of telling me what really happened.”
“But isn’t that just what he’s done?”
“That’s exactly what he didn’t do. He sent his letter to you, trusting you would bring it, trusting you would bring David’s confession too. Maybe he wasn’t certain—maybe it was a gamble. What was certain was that he didn’t want me to receive the news alone. He wanted someone else to be present. He trusted that you would be here with me when I read it, so that we could wonder about it, talk about it, like we’re talking now. He could only send me the story if he sent me you as well.”
For David Oppen, Spurlock realized, the confession had served its purpose, the unburdening of a soul. For himself and for the girl, however, the confession’s purpose had become something wholly different, a purpose he could not have understood had she not appeared this morning in the arboretum. (He was aware now how much he had hoped she would appear, how this hope alone had steered him back to the bench where they had met the day before.) And appeared she had, just as she had years before in his church. Itzal’s final act had been to place that confession between them. What had been the reckoning of a debt, a closing of accounts, was now something living and shared, entrusted to their care, something (as she had put it) they could wonder about, could speak about, could hope in time to comprehend.
“He loved me, but there was no way out. There was no way out,” she repeated with a dry laugh, “and he took it. What am I supposed to feel about that?”
“Lost, for starters,” said Spurlock.
“Maybe,” she said.
“Maybe bereft, while you are at it.”
“What I feel is maimed.”
“Maimed?”
“Mutilated.” The dryness in her voice, he thought, was a dryness beyond tears. “I loved him because he was my father. And he loved me. And now he is dead and I am disfigured.”
Disfigured. The word, uttered flatly, seemed to Spurlock an emissary from a realm of irrevocable aftermath. Her expression too had taken on a flatness, and he remembered her profile on the day he first saw her, in silhouette against the limestone wall of the church as though cut there in bas-relief. What had struck him then as her otherworldly beauty, he understood now, had been in fact that mark of aftermath. He had recognized it because he had seen it before, in a thousand different inflections but always the same, in the faces of the drifters and the lost who had sheltered themselves in the Incarnation’s unlicensed sanctuary.
“Are we?” The idea, alien to anything Spurlock knew of love, struck him suddenly as true.
“I believe we are,” she said.
They were quiet for a long moment.
“Maybe—” said Spurlock at last, “maybe when we recognize our disfigurement, we get a glimpse—we see ourselves as God sees us, with love. In love.”
“As love, even.”
“Yes,” said Spurlock. “As love.”
Afterward, without intending to, without thinking, he had assumed his accustomed posture of prayer: elbows on knees, thumbs braced under chin, hands together, with his forehead pressed against the tips of his index fingers. He had not known he was praying, much less what he was praying for, until he felt her hand slip between his palms. The shock of it jolted him, but she did not pull away. After a moment of inner tumult—what did she want? what should he do? what comfort had he to offer?—all disquiet subsided, yielding itself to the current of an unfamiliar solace, the solace that merely being there together, in that instant, was enough. It flowed from her hand and circulated through him before flowing, changed, back into her. The silence, he understood, was hers to break, and for a long time she did not break it.
It was at that moment he noticed as though for the first time what he had noticed years ago, when she had first appeared at the church: the glint of gold about her face, a ring or rivet somewhere odd, piercing her brow or the hood of her ear. But what he saw was neither stud nor loop. It was in her eye, a foil-like flash or fleck in the nickel gray of her eye, struck (because her head was turned toward him) by the sun which had floated free of the horizon. The glint was just a feature of her face, unchosen, and because unchosen, irreducibly alien and beautiful—alien and unchosen and beautiful, he thought, as every face is.
The Waters & the Wild Page 29