The Fall of the Year
Page 24
Now suppose that late one night, many years later, the woman from that long-ago summer appeared at your hunting camp when you were there alone, and it seemed that night as if the war had never been and the intervening years themselves had been mere days, and that from this encounter came the single greatest regret of your life: a regret you could never acknowledge to anyone because of your position in the village and your vocation. But suppose that in the end, miraculously, the secret regret of your life became the greatest joy you had ever known, so much so that illness and impending death meant nothing
Here the last chapter stopped abruptly in the middle of the page. I looked up at Chantal. I was still not entirely sure what I had read.
“So,” she said. “Do you understand at last? What he said you would understand?”
My heart racing, I looked across the table at Chantal, her eyes shining in the candlelight.
“And yet,” she said, laughing, “you seemed only too ready to abandon me for the imaginary daughter behind the old woman’s curtain. How fickle! I can see I’ll have to watch you like a hawk, Frank Bennett. When it became apparent to me that you were beginning to show romantic interest in the apparition, it made me a little jealous. I decided I had to take measures.”
“I’m glad you did.”
She made that sibilant sound I loved, as I loved everything about her. “No doubt you’d rather be courting the make-believe apparition,” Chantal said. “Do you think she’d give you a kiss like the ones I just granted you? Or anything more besides?”
I laughed and stood up and went around the table and kissed her again. “Marry me,” I said.
“Ask the Fortuneteller’s Daughter.”
I glanced at Louvia’s gazing stone beside Father George’s “Short History” on the table. “I’m not going to propose to a rock.”
“Listen to me,” Chantal said. “Ask the Fortuneteller’s Daughter.”
Her eyes were as full of laughter and delighted irony now as they had been on the day I had first met her, in the patisserie in Little Quebec. And finally, as I looked deep into those laughing eyes, as blue and wise as Father George’s, I recognized her beyond any doubt, and I understood at last all that I had been meant to understand.
The Fortuneteller’s Daughter kissed me again, tenderly and fiercely and triumphantly, and said, “Yes, Frank Bennett. I have my father’s eyes. And my mother’s tongue.”
“And your own heart.”
“No,” she said. “That belongs to you. Now and forever.”
Then I blew out the candle and took Chantal by the hand and led her outside into the snow to return to our home in the Common and see what sort of match the fortuneteller and the unorthodox priest, the greatest scholar and third baseman in the history of Kingdom County, had made for us.
About the Author
HOWARD FRANK MOSHER is the author of ten books, including Waiting for Teddy Williams, The True Account, and A Stranger in the Kingdom, which, along with Disappearances, was corecipient of the New England Book Award for fiction. He lives in Vermont.