Reader, I Married Him

by Tracy Chevalier

  After another sleepless night, Teresa lay on the sofa as daylight dawned. The morning news was on: the austral dropping another 10 per cent, just as it had devalued by more than two hundred since she had left for America. She got up to change the dial, flipping past channels until she landed on a cartoon from her childhood. Settling her head back on a cushion, she sighed happily: she had forgotten the simple pleasure of watching TV in a language she could understand.

  Her mother appeared in the doorway. “I just got off the phone with your sisters,” she said. “We’ve decided to sell the business.”

  “Mamá, you can’t! That store is Papá’s life.”

  “The austral’s getting weaker. We lose more money than we make.” Her mother gave her a hard look. “That business is killing your father.”

  The high-pitched whine of cartoon voices was beginning to grate, adding an inappropriate comical levity to the moment. Teresa got up and switched the television set off. “But what are you and Papá going to do?”

  “Don’t you worry about that.”

  But Teresa knew her mother well enough to know that behind her gruff words she was putting on a brave front. There wouldn’t be much—if anything—left over from the sale of the business. Nor could her sisters be relied on to help.

  Mamá took a seat on the sofa. In a sudden gesture of tenderness, she patted her lap. Teresa, hesitant at first, curled up against her mother. “I’m so sorry, Teresa.” Mamá’s tone grew soft. “But there’s no money for you to go back to school.”

  Teresa already knew that. There was no question that she would have to give up her studies. Just as she could read the lines beyond that, to what her mother had not yet said: their roles would be reversed, and she would have to support them.

  “I didn’t like school anyway,” Teresa said. “I prefer work.”

  Any menial job she found here would pay a fraction of her waitress job back home—back there, she corrected herself. Teresa did some quick calculations, comparing her future in Buenos Aires to the one she had left in New York. Presuming her diner job was even still hers after her abrupt departure, she could pick up extra shifts that would just cover her own living expenses. But there would be nothing left over to send to her ailing father. Short of being patched up in a marriage to a greying old groom as Yuna had, she had few options.

  “Mamá,” she asked suddenly. “Did you love Papi from the start?”

  She was certain her mother would shoo away the question, but to her surprise Mamá looked thoughtful as she smoothed down the cover of the sofa’s armrest. “You learn to,” she finally said, “with time. And that produces its own kind of love.”

  Teresa thought of her mother’s uncharacteristic display of emotion about her father on the phone. She thought of Juan’s letter, the earnest words he had poured forth, and of her own selfish reaction to his romantic overture. He deserved better than the way she had treated him. He was a good man, one of the selfless ones.

  Her mother stroked her hair. “You need a trim, Térea,” she murmured.

  “Don’t worry about me, Mami,” Teresa said. “I’ll figure it out.”

  She knew that in a few minutes, she would have to rise from the sofa and shower off the previous night, ready to face the new day. But for now she lay in her mother’s lap, letting Mami run her gentle fingers through her hair.

  That afternoon, Teresa met up with Alejandra and the gang on one of their usual outings. They passed the mate gourd back and forth on a blanket in Las Heras park, the sky a lazy blue, the summer air hot and drowsy. She did not want to imagine ever having to leave this.

  From there it was on to dinner at the parrilla. Teresa’s teeth sank into the soft, buttery meat and she almost cried out. Here she was not met with resistance: the bife was nothing like the hardened steaks of New York. They passed the Malbec back and forth, each bottle running dry almost as quickly as it was poured.

  With her friends she went on to the boliche, where she met a tall man with wild bleached hair, wearing a white blazer with the sleeves rolled up. They locked arms and legs and then lips on the dance floor, his soft hands smooth against her skin, his tongue thick against hers.

  “Coming up for air?” Alejandra asked as Teresa left the dance floor.

  “And this.” Teresa held up a tumbler and drained the last of her rum and Coke. “He’s hot, no?”

  Alejandra looked over at the blazered man, standing expectantly a few feet away. “What about your chinito?”

  “He’s there”—Teresa blew out her cigarette smoke—“and I’m here.”

  Alejandra nodded in the direction of the man. “Then better not keep Simon Le Bon waiting.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I’ll miss you, Ale.”

  “What, tonta?” She tousled Teresa’s hair. “You’re the one leaving to get ass. I’m staying put.”

  Teresa kissed Alejandra’s cheek and let the man help her into her denim jacket. “You take care of yourself, you hear, negra?”

  “Igualmente, china.”

  The sky was a bright blue the next morning when Teresa rolled her suitcase to the entrance of Ezeiza. Her mother had touched her cheek before seeing her off. “Papi always said you were his bravest.”

  For the fifth time that day, Teresa reached for the back pocket of her jeans, to check that Juan’s note was still there. She remembered Juan’s first words: The sooner you stop caring so much, the sooner you can start to live. Over the din of honking taxis, the shriek of planes jetting for points north, and the thick exhaust of buses, she inhaled deeply.

  Savour this, Térea, she told herself. It will be the last time you breathe in the good Buenos Aires air.

  READER, SHE MARRIED ME

  SALLEY VICKERS

  IT WAS SIMPLY JOY at first. So often it is joy “at first,” would you not say? It is the “at last” we should judge our human dealings by. Yet who but the Great Judge is able to do that? I do not speak here of God, for about Him I remain a cautious sceptic. No, it is that other exigent imponderable, Death, towards whose kingdom I, Edward Rochester, draw daily closer, whose judgment I am most disposed to trust now.

  During those long months, when I searched vainly for Jane, I rehearsed all the blessed times we had spent together. Our first meeting that chilly winter afternoon, when, unaware of my identity, she aided me with the injury sustained from my fall and I teased her that she had bewitched my horse. The time she came in search of me, braving the wind and rain, and on finding me flew like a bird to my glad arms. The many times I found her sitting with that indefatigable knitter, good old Mrs. Fairfax (who was always so doubtful over our intended union), a book in her hands and that little burr, Adele, my foster child, idly content at her knee; most speakingly, the recollection of her at the wicket gate, standing beside me in the plain square of blond she had fashioned herself for a bridal veil, when, caught by some impalpable intimation of the coming doom, I delayed our entry into the church. A myriad such images lived on in my memory. And, threaded through them all, the luminous aura of elfishness which had so enchanted me. From our first encounter she provoked in me thoughts of other worlds.

  And there were few nights that passed unmolested by stricken consideration of what I might have done differently to avoid that terrible moment of revelation in the church. The shocking breach in the sacrament, the unlooked-for response to the solemn words, “I require and charge you both (as ye will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you know any impediment why ye may not lawfully be joined together in matrimony, ye do now confess it . . .” I would give half my life to undo that moment now.

  And then the recollections of that night of the final immolation, Thornfield Hall wrecked in a fire which had its own grim fitness. The fire of a passion so long unmet by me that it had finally to erupt into the world, destroying my foolish hopes. I knew there was a fatal logic to the collapse of all I had planned.

  I have told Jane I had thought
I had lost her for good along with everything else. What I could not tell her, then or now, was that together with the knowledge came a sharp sense of relief. The ruining of those ill-starred prospects was a kind of comfort. It had always been perilously thin ice I was treading.

  If you were to ask her, she would say that after the calamity I preferred a life of utter loneliness, that I had hated to be helped in my blindness, that I did not like to put my one sound hand into that of any hireling’s and it was only her arrival that induced me to be led back to a semblance of common humanity. I own that it was heaven to hold her slender body in my arms again, to feel the softness of her pale hair and crush in my own surviving paw her child’s hand. I never in my life saw such small hands. And when she came to me then, she was tender, oh so tender. And I, no better than the old lightning-struck chestnut tree in Thornfield’s orchard, how could that blasted ruin fail to relish the fresh touch of the encircling woodbine?

  But I did not ask or expect her to take me as a husband. As I admitted freely, I had betrayed her trust. Why should she give it again to a near-blind cripple whose honour had been impeached by his own folly? And, you see, there was this. I no longer wanted that kind of intimacy with her. The fatality that finally ended my first marriage had changed more than my physical appearance or my outward circumstances.

  Let me try to put down as best I can what occurred that night when Thornfield burned.

  When, having found my wife’s quarters empty, I fought my way up on to the roof, and saw her tall silhouette against the green and amber-streaked sky, all knowledge that the flames she had started posed a mortal danger evaporated. Suddenly, all that was present to me was the two of us, facing the people we had become on the very threshold of eternity.

  She stood there, in her white gown, upright and still on the edge of the battlements. Timbered walls and ceilings were crashing below us, but I swear I recall no sound other than the cracked note of my own voice.

  “Bertha,” I called. “Bertha, my dear.” And I believe, certainly I pray, that she will have heard none of the old harshness and revulsion in my tone, for I felt nothing at that moment but supreme remorse.

  She looked so lost, so bewildered, so childlike in her white gown. And the eyes she turned upon me that I had once admired were not those of a raving woman but the anguished eyes of a cornered animal, the whites gleaming her fear in the red glow of the rising flames. “Bertha,” I said again, trying for gentleness.

  She took a step towards me, her feet pitifully bare, and I saw that she was holding something out, as if it were an offering or a gift. I likewise took a tentative step, mindful that should she take fright and step backward she might fall. But she stood stock still, seeming to wait for me.

  I should have known what it was she wanted to show me. A coral, the kind that is given to young babies to jingle and cut their teeth on. A coral that had once been given to our child, born in our first years of marriage.

  No one, not even Mrs. Poole, not even that fool of her brother, Mason, ever knew of our child. She conceived when we had moved away from her family. We had settled first near their family home, in Jamaica, and I came to find them so unbearable I could see we would have no domestic harmony while they were an influence and nearby. Therefore, I took a house on the far side of the island, on one of the plantations that came with her dowry, and for the two years we lived there, with none of her family to interfere with us, we were all in all to each other.

  I was ecstatic when she told me we were to have a child. And I do believe that I attended to her as well as any woman could have wished. I was eager to ensure she had all she desired in good food, in soft clothing, in a comfortable environment and in careful nursing when the birth was at hand.

  The birth was not an easy one. Little Clara arrived after many hours of painful labour and my wife was quite drained by the process. Perhaps because of the birth, the child cried unwontedly and was sickly. She was a pale pretty-featured scrap but stubborn-natured with it and she wouldn’t feed. We hired wet nurse after wet nurse. Bertha, formerly so comely, so readily at ease with life, became shrill and distraught.

  I have heard since that childbirth can send a woman mad but at the time I was on my own in a foreign country with no one to consult. The child was fretful and wasting. And alongside the child Bertha wasted too.

  Hers is a superstitious race. She began to declare that the child was not her own, but a witch child, planted in the nursery. Her own sweet healthy baby had been stolen, she averred. And it was true: there was something elfin about the child’s form and face. Even a sane soul might have taken her for a sprite or a fairy child.

  Soon Bertha became so convinced of her own fantasy that she refused to see the child at all. I thought it best to establish the baby away from home, with the only nurse we had found from whom she would willingly feed. But for all this, Bertha did not recover. If anything, she became more frantic. She began to pace the room at night like a caged panther. Her weeping became histrionic. Often I found her wandering alone, wailing to the moon and stars, her nightwear drenched with sweat or dew, I couldn’t tell. Increasingly, for all my greater size, I had a struggle to bring her home. Finally, in desperation, I arranged for us to sail for England, praying that the purer air and more temperate climate would act as a salve to my poor wife’s wits. And not having any clear notion what else to do with her, I left our babe behind, with the fervent hope that one day she might join us.

  For a while my wife continued in her wild and unpredictable moods. But gradually, with kindly care and the changed circumstance, the fantasy of the changeling child seemed to recede. One day, quite humbly, she asked for Clara by name and I had to explain that we had left her in Jamaica, assuring her nevertheless that she was “in the best hands.” She begged tearfully for me to send at once for our child, but before I could arrange for the nurse to bring her to us a message came to say that little Clara had died of swamp fever.

  From that day my wife’s madness returned. At first, overwhelmed with grief, she let me approach her and I had some hopes that our shared sorrow might act to revive our former love. But soon a persistent fury set in, most often directed against me for parting her from her babe, but also against herself for failing her as a mother. I consulted private physicians from London. Discreet men who could be trusted to hold their tongues came to offer their diagnoses. But none of their medicines seemed to heal her.

  At first I regularly visited my poor deranged wife in the quarters I had appointed for her care. But as time went on, she became a perpetual reproach, a memory of my error, not in marrying her (though in my shame I came to think it was an error) but in disposing of the child. She seemed a living testament that too savagely proclaimed my guilt, and I confess that in my weakness I turned away in horror of it.

  The message recounting Clara’s death was accompanied by the coral that Bertha held in her hands the night of the fire. An offering, I think I said it seemed. But to what or whom? No god or fate had taken her child. It was I, Edward Rochester, alone who had done this thing.

  As I stood on the roof of the burning house, where I had kept my wife all but prisoner, from my inner mental flagration a saving spark of insight was born. “Bertha,” I said. “Forgive me.” At that moment I wanted nothing more than to be as we once were with our little child. She didn’t speak a word but stared into my eyes and in the light of the flames licking upwards I saw great tears run down the folds of her once handsome cheeks. To my dying day I will never forget that countenance which I had helped to ruin. Then she gestured, as if to thrust the coral at me. As I moved to receive it she turned, the pathetic child’s remembrance still clasped in her hands, ran swiftly to the edge of the parapet and threw herself down.

  When Jane found me in Ferndean, in retreat from my old life, she told me that she had come because, at a moment of crisis when another man was pressing her to let him make her his own, she had heard my voice calling her name. How could I tell her how devoutly I wished she
had gone to India with her stern cousin St. John Rivers? The idea of marriage to her now revolted me. I pleaded my infirmities. She insisted they only made me dearer to her. I hinted at a lost virility, hoping that a natural delicacy would prevent her enquiring further; she smiled as if she understood my embarrassment and forgave me. Oh, the scourge of that forgiveness when it was not hers but another’s that I needed to soothe my fighting soul!

  No argument would deter Jane from her conviction we should marry and complete the folly I had begun. Worn down by her persistence, I consented. What else could I do? It was true that I had loved her but for reasons I had not then understood. I had seen in her a refuge from my own inexperience and error. I had so roundly failed one woman that it wasn’t in me to seem to fail another now. She had held out against the idea of becoming my mistress. Now she held out against any idea that she should not become my wife. It was she who urged the renewal of the vows that had been so dramatically interrupted. She who led me to the nearby church, where she had organised with the parson that the banns be done away with, having been read already before. Ah, that seeming slightness concealed an indomitable will.

  I have come to question many things as the years pass. For one thing, I question the truth of that moment when she claimed to hear me call, for if she had heard any name across the ether it was not hers I cried yearning into the darkness but that of my lost child. From the spark of insight that emerged, phoenix-like, in my last fatal encounter with Bertha, there grew the blinding certainty that loss of that little child had bred my infatuation with Jane. With her girlish body and elfin looks she had come to seem to embody the daughter I might have had.

  And I see too, as my physical vision slowly recovers, that I was not alone in the misconception of my desire. For Jane would always have preferred me as I am now, maimed, under her control. In my full health and strength I was too much a match for her. Enfeebled and disillusioned and guilt-ridden as I am, she will always hold the upper hand.