Over all the accumulating years, and in spite of the distance that separated them, Andy’s old friendship with the Penns’ daughter Martha was still intact. They would sometimes meet and talk when Andy would happen to be in Cincinnati, or Martha would stop to see him on one of her visits to her parents’ graves in Port William. Now and again one of them would telephone the other, and they would talk a long time, exchanging news, and always speaking of the days they had known in common.
One night, seventy years after her parents were married, Martha called Andy and they spoke, as often before, of the circumstances of that marriage, of the Mountjoys and their long resolve. And then Martha told him something he had not known.
“After I moved up here,” she said, “my grandmother tried to get in touch with me. She called my school and left her number. I never called her back.”
Andy was not surprised that Martha had not returned the call. They were grandmother and granddaughter, but also they were strangers. Supposing that Martha had decided to call the old woman back or even write to her, what could she have said? Did our language afford the possibility of circumventing the years of silence by which the Mountjoys had kept to their decree that Mary Penn was dead to them and that Elton was nothing? Or supposing that, by some remarkable inspiration, Martha had thought of some cordiality with which to reply, would not that cordiality have been in effect a betrayal, a treason against her parents? Could any slightest acknowledgement of her granddaughterhood have surmounted the long dishonor paid out year after year to her mother’s daughterhood? Or, supposing that Martha had returned the call, what could the old woman have said to her? What language known to us might have encompassed a wrong so old, an atonement so long delayed, to speak to a young stranger an acceptable acknowledgment of kinship?
And yet old Mrs. Mountjoy, by that phone call of years ago, had conveyed at last to Andy a possibility he had not thought of before: Suppose she was sorry.
That thought could not have borne heavily upon Martha, who had dismissed it by an instinct undoubtedly proper, who was even under obligation to do so. But upon Andy, who had been a participant in the story but by then was merely a witness to what he had known and what he now knew, it fell with a palpable weight.
Suppose she was sorry.
On that night of his conversation with Martha, Andy may have been more than usually vulnerable to such a thought. He was, for one thing, weak and in discomfort from an illness. For another, the great industrial empire to which he and his family perhaps helplessly belonged, was again at war, imposing its will by the deaths of helpless old people, women, and children, and by the torture of prisoners. The imperial economy, based upon nothing but the overconfidence of the greedy and the gullibility of victims, was disintegrating, justly, but with unjust consequences to the misled and the helpless. It was this gigantic economy, incorporating gigantic oblivion and gigantic failure, that had laid waste the world that Marce Catlett and Jack Beechum and Elton Penn had stood for and hoped for, the world that they had offered to Andy’s heart and his thoughts half a century and more ago, and that he had accepted. After night had fallen, the suffering of the time and the world had drawn close to Andy, and his illness and dejection seemed to him merely a fit response.
And now the thought that, years too late, old Mrs. Mountjoy had been sorry, had repented of the hurt she had given and wished to take it back, and that her old husband also may have suffered the same too-late sorrow—that thought came to Andy as a command he could not refuse, for he had in the same instant obeyed it. He had begun to suppose. Until that moment such a possibility had been hidden by his assumption that to her death Mrs. Mountjoy had been steadfast in her anger. Until then she had been to him a wicked old woman in a tale learned in childhood. And now suddenly she was removed from legend and had become, in his imagination, only human, a fellow sufferer with Mary, her disclaimed child, and with Elton, her declared enemy. And all too late. “Too late,” Andy could again hear Elton saying with the blunt finality of the world’s mere truth.
As he sat on in the silence after he had hung up the phone, it seemed to Andy that the floor of creation had opened beneath him, and he had dropped into a limitlessness of heartache: of second thoughts too late, of the despair of undoing what had been done, of some forlorn hope, even, that could not be undone by despair or numbed by time.
Andy had often proposed to himself that joy, the joy of love or beauty or of work, could so abound in this world that it would overflow all of this world’s mortal vessels. But that night he was thinking of sorrow, filled suddenly with the apprehension of such hurt and sorrow as might overflow the capacity of the world, let alone that of a mere life. That there had been an immeasurable joy in the story of Mary and Elton Penn he had long known. But now its suffering also had been made present to him in an amplitude beyond the reach of his mind. He would never know even the extent to which its suffering had been unnecessary.
It seemed to him almost a proof of immortality that nothing mortal could contain all its sorrow. He thought, as we all have been taught to think, of our half-lit world, a speck hardly visible, hardly noticeable, among scattered lights in the black well in which it spins. If all its sorrow could somehow be voiced, somehow heard, what an immensity would be the outcry!
In the silent, shadowy room in the great night he was thinking of heavenly pity, heavenly forgiveness, and his thought was a confession of need. It was a prayer.
A Place in Time: Twenty Stories of the Port William Membership Page 28