The Tightrope Walker

by Dorothy Gilman

  "Actually," said Joe, pointing to still another motel with a CLOSED until memorial day sign, "we haven't any idea what we'll be getting into, Amelia. I think we should stop at L. L. Bean's in Freeport and pick up some camping gear just in case. I brought a sleeping bag but you didn't, and we may have to use the van." His voice was so impersonal—like Peary planning a trip to the North Pole—that I couldn't help but relax. "Good idea," I said briskly.

  They were having a parade in Freeport on this Sunday afternoon, with a high school band that marched along briskly, playing "Strike Up the Band" a little off-key, and a procession of men and women carrying placards that read vote for angus tuttle for u.s. senator. A small, amiable group followed the parade on the sidewalk bearing signs reading silas whitney for u.s. senator. There were a few balloons and friendly shouts but the only excitement seemed to be caused by the traffic jam, until the band disappeared down a side street and we were able to park and walk into L. L. Bean's. Whereupon I proceeded to acquire my first sleeping bag, as well as a pair of hiking boots, a flashlight, thermos, and collapsible drinking cup. I literally had to be dragged out of the store by Joe.

  Hours later we stopped in Anglesworth for a quick dinner, had the thermos filled with hot cocoa, and headed immediately for Carleton so that we would reach it before the general store closed. That, Joe said, was the place to learn anything in the country, and he was right. There were two gas pumps and a faded sign saying pritchett's general store, Simon Pritchett, Proprietor. Featured in the left-hand window was a placard reading vote for silas Whitney, in the right-hand window a sign reading vote for angus tuttle: evenly distributed among these were hand-lettered signs of Grange dinners, bookmobile dates, and town-hall meetings. We walked inside and found Simon Pritchett, proprietor, reading a newspaper behind the counter and the store otherwise deserted. He put aside his newspaper and walked toward us: we met at the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the room, which was engulfed by trade goods of the most incredible variety: boxes of towels and washcloths, snow boots and sleds hanging from the ceiling, blankets and shirts and sou'westers piled high, all of this crowded around a soda cooler, a penny candy counter, and a meat locker. Joe gave the man a pleasant smile and said, "Good evening."

  '"Evening," said the man, "can I help you folks?"

  "We're hoping you can," Joe told him. "My friend here, Amelia Jones, is looking for the place where Mrs. Hannah Meerloo used to live."

  "A very dear friend of my family's at one time," I added, seeing him look at me with a sharpened, warier glance.

  He was silent, mulling us over thoughtfully for a long minute. He must have decided at last that we were trustworthy because he finally nodded and said, "That'd be the place up for sale again by the summer folks who bought it three years ago. The Keppel place."

  "Keppel," I repeated.

  He nodded. "Down the road a piece, far as the fork. Bear to the right—that'd be Tuttle Road

  —and you'll find it on your left, near the river. Big place, can't miss the for sale sign on the white brick wall." Having spewed this out he looked at me expectantly, obviously waiting to learn what I was going to do with a closed-up house behind a white brick wall. I asked instead with a smile, "Did you know Hannah Meerloo?"

  "Know everyone In Carleton," he said cautiously. "One time or 'nother."

  "She—uh—died ... I mean, of course she's dead but—?"

  I stopped doubtfully.

  "Buried in the town cemetery," he said flatly. "Can't be deader than that."

  So that was that.

  Joe, seeing the expression on my face, stepped into the breach to ask casually, "And for how long did she happen to live in Carleton, do you recall?"

  "Fifteen, maybe eighteen years. She warn't no summer resident," he said with the contempt of a native in his voice for those who came only during the golden months. With a curious glance he added, "You one of these people tracing roots I hear about?"

  "Something like that," Joe said easily. "How much would half a dozen of these all-day suckers cost? And perhaps you could also direct us to the town cemetery?"

  "Fifty cents plus tax, and the cemetery's just across the road behind the Methodist church," he said, leaving me awed by Joe's clear thinking. No need to ask how" long ago she'd died; the cemetery would tell us.

  And so at dusk on a warm May evening we wandered through the Carleton cemetery in search of Hannah's grave. It was a good cemetery, well-kept, with carefully weeded mounds punctuated by modest upright granite slabs, dozens of them in neat rows reaching back centuries. The sun was low and turned the grass a brilliant emerald green as it slanted through the huge old trees. Woven into the hushed silence were a few bird calls and the steady snip-snip of grass shears wielded by a boy at the far end of the cemetery. We strolled over to ask him if he could tell us where the Meerloo plot was, and after a moment's thought he pointed.

  And there it was, except there were two stones, very simple ones, side by side. The stone on the left read:

  JASON M. MEERLOO

  b. January 23, 1920—killed in France December, 1945

  "Good grief," I said, "he was only twenty-five, do you suppose he was husband or brother?"

  Joe pointed wordlessly to the bottom words, nearly covered by the ivy trailing over the stone. They read,

  BELOVED HUSBAND OF HANNAH.

  "Husband," I said automatically. The sun had withdrawn now and it was nearly dark among the trees. As I knelt beside the companion gravestone I switched on my flashlight.

  "HANNAH G. MEERLOO," I read softly. "Born May 27, 1925, died July 25, 1965 ..." So long ago, I thought, startled, and then I subtracted one date from another and said, "Joe, she was only forty."

  Joe was doing sums in his head, too. "It also means," he said, "that when she was widowed in 1945 she was twenty-one years old. Younger than you are now, Amelia."

  But I was staring at the inscription below the dates and the name. Puzzled, I leaned closer with my flashlight and pushed aside a tendril of ivy to make certain I was reading the inscription correctly, for below the date of her death were the words.., and so she went beyond the horizon into the country of the dawn ...

  Strange words.., strange and poetic and somehow familiar to me. "That's surely a quotation," I told Joe, concentrating the beam of light on the words and frowning over them. "Is it familiar to you?"

  He shook his head. "I like it, though. I think it means—" He hesitated and then he said very quietly, "I think it means there was someone left behind who loved her."

  It was at that moment, hearing him say that, and in that kind of voice, that I believe I fell in love with Joe. And so she went beyond the horizon into the country of the dawn ... Puzzling. Puzzling and somehow very personal and loving, exactly as Joe pointed out.

  "Come on," Joe said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "It's dark and getting cold and it's nearly eight o'clock. I think it's time we find a place to park the van, have some cocoa and turn in. I’m beat, myself."

  I turned and looked up at him and I said urgently, "But there'll be records, won't there, Joe? Newspapers keep records, don't they? And a death certificate somewhere?"

  "Tomorrow," he said. "Tomorrow, Amelia." And he helped me to my feet and firmly led me away from the grave.

  We found a deserted wood road, drank our cocoa and curled up in our sleeping bags inside the van, Joe on one side, and I on the other. I fell asleep at once, tired from two days of driving, waiting, and tension. I must have been asleep for several hours when it began again.... I was wandering through long empty cold halls, calling "Mother?" and looking into cold empty rooms, and then I was slowly climbing the attic stairs— slowly, slowly, as one does in a dream—and there she was at the top of the stairs, hanging from a rafter, turning, gently turning and swaying, my mother and yet not my mother, her face swollen and suffused, her eyes—

  I screamed, and screamed again, and—waking— opened my eyes to find the flashlight switched on and Joe struggling out of his sleeping bag
. "My God, Amelia," he said. "What is it?"

  I had long ago stopped crying following this nightmare but as usual I was shaking all over. "My God, Amelia," Joe repeated, staring at me, and he put his arms around me and held me.

  When I'd stopped shaking I said, "I had a nightmare."

  "So I gathered," he said dryly. "Talk it out. It helps, you know."

  Through clenched teeth I said, "When I was eleven my mother didn't just die, as I told you. She hung herself. And always—always when I have these nightmares—I see her. See her hanging there, her neck broken and—"

  He said incredulously, "She hung herself and you found her?"

  "Yes."

  "And you were eleven years old?"

  I nodded.

  "My God," he said with a shudder. "And you've had to live with this ever since?"

  "I'm all right now," I told him. "I think you can go to sleep again now, I'm feeling better. It's over."

  "What do you mean it's 'over'?" he demanded. "Don't be polite, Amelia. Have some cocoa. It won't be warm but there's some left in the bottom of the thermos." He began rummaging about for the cup, the flashlight sending long cavernous shadows caroming up and down the walls of the van. He said, "Have you ever learned why your mother committed suicide?"

  I said politely, "Well—she gave up, of course. On living, I mean."

  "Yes, but she had an eleven-year-old daughter and a husband, didn't she? What kind of woman would be so careless about them?" he asked, bringing me the cocoa in a cup.

  I said dryly, "A woman with an infinite lack of capacity for living."

  "Were you close to her?"

  I thought about this while I sipped the cocoa. "Of course I wanted to be close to her but there always seemed such a high price to pay. Dr. Merivale said she looked on me as an extension of herself. Myself, I think when I was born she thought, 'Ah—at last someone to give me unqualified and total love.'"

  "Quite a lot to ask of a just-born infant," snorted Joe.

  "I know," I said sadly. "As it turned out, nothing I did was right because nothing I could do was enough."

  "Then what she wanted—surely—was total possession?"

  "Perhaps," I admitted. "There was—apparently," I added loyally, "some tragedy in her life."

  "There's tragedy in everyone's life, Amelia," he said sternly.

  "Because," I continued, '^just before the funeral I heard my father and my aunt Stacey talking in the living room. I wasn't supposed to hear, I was sitting on the stairs listening to them. I heard my father tell my aunt Stacey that my mother had never loved him, that he'd given up years ago trying to reach her, that she'd never stopped loving someone named Charles who rejected her and married someone else. She never stopped mourning him."

  "Did she try?" asked Joe savagely.

  I laughed in a hollow sort of way. "Not very hard, no. I think now, looking back, she had been in love with death for a long time. She liked graveyards, you see. I remember when I was very young, before I went to school, we used to visit them often. Not for stone-rubbing or collecting epitaphs but just to walk through them, and she'd stop and say to me in a special dreamy sort of voice, 'Just think, Amelia, all the people here were once alive, just like you and me, and one day we, too—.' She'd never finish the sentence but she made her point. Life, she would say with a sigh, was so very brief. And I guess she found it very pointless."

  Joe said harshly, "It sounds to me as if she suffered from an orgy of Victorian melancholia. Didn't your father know or care what she was doing to you?"

  "He was away a lot."

  "Was he away the day she hung herself?"

  "Oh yes."

  "So your mother knew you'd find her?"

  I looked at him sharply. "Why do you say that?" I asked angrily.

  "Because," he pointed out simply, "if she knew you would be the one to find her, it was the ultimate rejection for you. The ultimate abandonment."

  The ultimate rejection .., no one had ever put it in that way before, so bluntly, so honestly, with such a knife-edge clarity, but of course that was it, that was what had always mattered far more to me than finding her dead.

  "The ultimate punishment, too," I added quietly, "for not being enough to her." And suddenly the tears I'd not cried for so long overwhelmed me and I sobbed in Joe's arms, and gulped and sobbed some more, and finally, reduced to hiccups, I sat up and looked at him, finding him blurred through my lingering tears, and I smiled at him. "Thanks," I said. "I needed that."

  He laughed. "You're going to be all right, you know—that's the thing to remember, Amelia. In my book you're already okay. The absence of love is very prevalent in this world, and the word love is the most corrupted word in the dictionary. But patterns can be broken, you know."

  "I sure hope so," I said, and softly quoted Amman

  Singh. "A tree may be bent by harsh winds but is no

  less beautiful than the tree that grows in a sheltered

  nook, and often it bears the richer fruit "

  He stared at me gravely in the light of the torch beside us. "You're a very lovely, special sort of person, Amelia, do you know that?"

  I looked at him, startled, and then—flippantly, gratefully—I leaned over and kissed him, except that when our lips met our arms somehow curved instantly, greedily, around each other and suddenly there was nothing of gratitude in the strange wild heat that rose in me. I gasped, "Joe—"

  He said questioningly, almost desperately, "Amelia—" and a moment later we were inside my sleeping bag, our clothes strewn across the floor and I was learning for the first time the new and exotic language of the body and there was nothing sacrificial about me at all.

  Thus was I deflowered, as the Victorians would say. Delightfully, lustily, willingly, and with much pleasure, in a black van with portholes in Carleton, Maine. No Aztec maiden, I.

  Later, smoothing my tangled hair, Joe said, "Let's never be careless with each other, Amelia, promise? Because, what happened just now between us is too important."

  "Yes," I said dreamily, "but when can it happen again, Joe?"

  He laughed. "Go to sleep, you wanton child."

  I giggled and closed my eyes and lay there, feeling the warmth of his body next to mine—how amazing life could be, after all!—and knowing that when we woke up we'd make love again. It was almost enough to make me forget Hannah, the Hannah who went beyond the horizon into the country of the dawn.

  And suddenly, just as I was slipping into a grateful sleep, I remembered the source of the quotation: it surfaced smoothly into consciousness, striking me full force, like a blast of lightning, so that I wondered how I could have missed it earlier. Except for the change in gender it was a word-for-word quotation from The Maze in the Heart of the Castle. They were the closing lines of the book: and so he went beyond the horizon into the country of the dawn.

  7

  "She must have loved the book, too," I told Joe incredulously the next morning at breakfast. We were seated at a diner in Anglesworth and it was ten o'clock. "I mean, it's been out of print for years. It's the most astonishing thing."

  "I've never heard of The Maze in the Heart of the Castle," Joe said, biting into his toast. "Are you certain the inscription on the gravestone is the same? It must be years since you've read it."

  "But it isn't," I told him eagerly. "I mean, besides rereading it once a year I bought a first edition of it in New York only last week. I would have shown it to you if you—if we—well, anyway, I found it in a secondhand bookstore and although I only thumbed through it I reread that same last page before I put it away.., and so he went beyond the horizon into the country of the dawn."

  "The book meant that much to you?"

  "It saved my life," I told him earnestly. "I was so very young, you know, and so clobbered. It gave me a kind of philosophy."

  "And what was it?" Joe asked, smiling faintly as he watched me.

  I considered this because, after all, what had it given me besides entertainment? "It gave
me a certain feeling," I said, choosing words cautiously, "and out of this feeling came the idea that maybe life isn't meant to be easy, that it's a kind of pilgrimage or testing ground, and we have to fight like warriors to live. I mean to live well."

  "Like warriors," Joe repeated, sounding interested.

  "But that isn't right, either," I said despairingly. "Oh I wish I'd brought the book with me so you could see for yourself. It's a wonderful book, Joe, he meets the Despas and the Wos and the Conjurer and then the Talmars, and he escapes them to meet the Magistrate and then falls in love with a girl named Charmian, who betrays him, and finally he meets Serena—oh yes and Raoul, too, who's Prince of Gait, and once he's reached the Gaits, you see, he's gone through the maze, he's free, and he and Serena..." I trailed off limply. "Well, I do wish you could know what I'm talking about."

  "I'm admiring you while you describe it," Joe said, grinning. "How did you come by the book?"

  I remembered that clearly. "My aunt Stacey sent it to me for Christmas just after Mother died."

  "So the book was published eleven or twelve years ago?"

  I shook my head. "It wasn't a new book when she sent it, which surprised me, because Aunt Stacey lived on the West Coast and usually sent new, glamorous, California-type presents. I thought at the time it might have been one of her books when she was young, except that the book was published in 1949 or 1950, I forget which. She must have bought it in a secondhand store because she'd heard something about it, or thought I'd like it."

  "As you certainly did," said Joe.

  I nodded and said solemnly, "I think I like this Hannah of ours very much, Joe."

  Joe brought me down from my trip by saying, "It's certainly convenient you like her, but we're here to establish whether she was murdered or not, remember? And it's Monday morning, and sometime today I'm going to have to call my answering service—"