WHEN ELIZABETH HAD come to the window that late September morning, Val thought he could be, at that moment, the happiest man on earth. It was the first time he had seen her in so long. He wanted to call out to her but he only stared. Her hair hung down around her shoulders and the long white nightgown she wore made her look perfectly ethereal: an angel, a fairy. She was so beautiful.
Then he realized his lips were moving and he was talking to her and to himself. “Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth,” he whispered over and over.
He savored the sound of her name. By seeing Elizabeth and saying “Elizabeth,” he tasted her again and remembered her laughter, light and airy. He smiled for the first time in days and raised his arms up toward the window.
He added to his litany: “I am Elizabeth. Elizabeth is me. I am Elizabeth. Elizabeth is me.” Though his arms ached to hold her again, all Val really wanted was to tell her of all the terrible things he’d done, of all the lies he’d told her. Calling her his other self had been the one true thing. How else could he have treated her the way he did? He knew so well how to attack her because he knew so keenly how to hurt himself. And he’d discarded her heartlessly because that’s what he thought of himself. If only he could have fully believed in how she saw him. But then, just in that moment, Val saw his error.
Elizabeth was part of him.
All he really ever had to do was have faith in the part of himself that was her. That part would know how to fight as she did. That part would know how to see as she saw the world. And that part of him would certainly know how to love. Now he burned to tell her this discovery. He thought if he could just tell her that, and not even I love you, she would understand everything.
As she opened the window, Val thought he would have his chance. He stepped forward and was about to call up to her when Elizabeth climbed onto the windowsill. Her toes seemed to grasp for the ledge like a baby standing for the first time and trying to understand the strangeness beneath its feet. Her arms flew up just as they had done whenever she wanted to embrace him.
“Good God, no.”
She did it easily, bravely. He found himself marveling once more over her glorious strength. She did it like she knew for certain she could fly. And because she was certain, he was certain too. He fully expected her to catch a current of the morning air in the folds of her nightgown and come floating down to him like she would in his dreams. She would look at him with pity and forgiveness and love. He would weep at her feet.
He moved toward her so she wouldn’t have to fly so far. A truck hauling fruits and vegetables stopped to let Val cross the street. But the truck wasn’t the only thing that stopped. Now everyone saw his angel, and they swirled in an ocean of color beneath her. Some, like the uniformed sanitation worker with beefy arms and a face enshrouded in hair who jumped from his truck, looked up. Others, like the woman wearing the black trench coat and pumps and clutching the hand of a small boy, ran away.
Someone shouted and Elizabeth took flight. The hollow croak resonated in his chest and Val realized the cry was his own.
“No, Elizabeth! No!”
She seemed to slow on her descent, and he remembered the lightness of her body, how small and dear she felt next to him. Now she was again walking on the lawn with him in Westchester, and he remembered how she had warned him about caring too much about what others think. He would tell her she was right and not because it was something he thought she wanted to hear. He would say it because it was true. But he hadn’t listened to her and now because of his pride, caprice, and arrogance, Elizabeth, his angel, fell to earth.
Val didn’t hear the screams around him. He didn’t hear the car horns or, when they eventually came, the sirens. None of it mattered because soon they would move on without him and Elizabeth. He dropped to his knees and lifted her to him. Her head lolled to the right and fell against his chest. He held it there with his chin. He kissed her head, rocked her, and kissed her again. His arms ached with the pain of finally, finally, being able to hold her.
VAL STAYED IN bed and didn’t leave the apartment. He stared for hours at his blood-stained shirt and pants still hanging on the valet where he insisted Sebastian leave them. On his bedside table in a silver frame sat the photograph he’d taken with Elizabeth on Aunt Rose’s lawn. These things and her lovely letter were all that Val had left of her. Going to her funeral was out of the question. As much as he longed to see her pretty face again he stayed away from the open casket visitation. Her family and friends, including Kyle Townsend, newly returned, would point and accuse him. If they didn’t, Val would have asked them why they weren’t doing so. Kyle Townsend should have tried to have him arrested by now, but he hadn’t. But then Val realized these thoughts were just the vestiges of his ego kicking, making him think these people had him topmost in their minds.
One week later Sebastian brought the wood-encased Philco radio into Val’s room and turned it on.
“What are you doing?” Val lifted his unshaven face from the pillow.
Sebastian leaned over and adjusted the tuning with his slim careful fingers.
“Sir, the World Series is on. Game four. They’re at Ebbets Field.”
The voice of Red Barber, the Dodgers’ radio announcer, filled the space with his barking cadence. In the bottom of the ninth inning, when the Dodgers threatened to pull ahead, he seemed to be attacking the microphone.
“Wait a minute . . . Stanky is being called back from the plate and Lavagetto goes up to hit . . . Gionfriddo walks off second . . . Miksis off first . . . They’re both ready to go on anything . . . Two men out, last of the ninth . . . the pitch . . . swung on, there’s a drive hit out toward the right field corner. Henrich is going back. He can’t get it! It’s off the wall for a base hit! Here comes the tying run, and here comes the winning run! Friends, they’re killin’ Lavagetto . . . his own teammates . . . they’re beatin’ him to pieces and it’s taking a police escort to get Lavagetto away from the Dodgers! Well, I’ll be a suck-egg mule!”
The Dodgers won, 3–2. Val glanced over at his dresser and remembered the set of tickets sitting there waiting for him. He didn’t understand how they could still be there, or why baseball games still were being played. Why did the world go on, relentlessly it seemed, when Elizabeth was no longer in it?
But the fact of the World Series roused him in an unexpected way. He recalled the day in April—Jackie Robinson’s tipping of his cap, his stand-up attitude despite the epithets raining down around him. The man had seen and experienced worse as the season progressed, but he remained resolute, going about his business month after month until he had arrived at the pinnacle of his profession. When had Val ever done such a thing? But he was awake enough to recognize his chance might be there now. And if he did what needed to be done, the results would be important for others and not himself—just as Robinson’s actions meant more for so many others. It seemed right that the man who showed him what a life could mean would remind Val how his own life, even in its current state, could have meaning as well.
Because he knew a sacrifice had to be made, but was it really a sacrifice if what he would give up had no value to him? He had a hard time believing his life was worth living. Not when he awoke daily hoping to see once more the light of possibility, to find his soul unstained, to know that miraculously Elizabeth was alive, her heart unbroken, and he could go to the soup kitchen and see her tie on a yellow apron, push back her wayward curls, and smile, radiating her divine light. But the memory of her smile convinced him he would craft some sort of value for his life—he would mend what was worn and prop himself up. It would be fine enough for the moment he foresaw coming. It had to be.
Because the only light possible now would be emitted from the ones he saved with his last move, his greatest play. It would require he ditch everything he knew because the only way to help Cecily and Sam and Cecily’s baby would be to throw Mae a curve she’d never expect. She wouldn’t anticipate it because though she knew Val’s vanity so well, she cou
ld never understand love. Aunt Rose had been right about that. He had a lot to do, though, to prepare this move. He had to be about his business.
He pushed back the sheets and reached for the phone beside his bed.
THE OFFICE OF Lenny Potts, Val’s lawyer, looked out onto 7th Avenue. Val walked there with Sebastian and thought about how different the street looked and smelled in broad daylight. No one lingered. Everyone shuffled or strode at various speeds. The blare of car horns precluded any friendly shouts. The smell of oil and car exhaust snuffed out the scent of cooking from the restaurants.
Then he saw the tiny whirl of a girl toddling toward him. She sped along not looking where she was going because she was too small to know any better. She would have collided with Val but he bent down in time, as though fielding a bunt, and swept her up in his arms. One of her thick black braids flopped over her eyes and she moved it aside with her little fat fist. She appraised him quickly—her shiny brown eyes darted over his face. She seemed to like what she saw because before he could say a word, her warm and chubby cheek pressed against his and she kissed him, leaving a sloppy spot of spit and joy on his skin. The gift of her, so perfectly exquisite, pinched his heart and made him grieve afresh. Tears began to clog his throat.
“I’m sorry, sir.” The father pushed his hat back on his head and showed Val brown eyes identical to hers. He reached for the girl. “Come here, Breena!”
She happily shifted over to his arms and she waved at Val when she completed the transfer.
“She likes to run,” the father said. He shrugged and adjusted her higher in his arms.
Val coughed before he could speak. “Oh, that’s all right, man! She made my day.”
When they walked away Val thought he heard a whisper within him: Life. Then a memory took shape in his mind—a sunny day in the Bronx, rolling knolls of grass—
“Are you all right, sir?” Sebastian’s arm on his shoulder scattered the thought. But Val knew it was important. He would find his way back to it again. There was work to do first.
“Yeah,” he said. He tilted his head in the direction of the building’s door. “Come on.”
Lenny Potts, the jacket of his brown pin-striped suit unbuttoned, opened the door himself, and led the men into a large conference room where a long polished wood table held several neat sets of papers. Val scanned the whole room and nodded his approval. He shook Mr. Potts’s hand.
“Thanks for coming in on a Saturday, Mr. Potts.”
“No, this is good.” He scratched his thick gray beard and waved his hand over the papers. “It’s good to have a day open. We can focus, get it all done fast, just like you want it. Have a seat. Let me get my secretary so she can take notes and type up any changes.”
Three hours later when they were done, Val told Sebastian he would make his way home alone. He walked west until he found the edge of the Hudson River. The sun on its autumn trajectory dipped steeply in the sky and bathed the bankside in a liquid golden light. A man with a wool felt cap pulled low over his eyes packed up his tackle box, nodded to Val, and waddled away with his fishing pole.
The memory returned then, just as Val stuffed his hands into his pockets and gazed into the muddy brown waters. He had been in the Bronx, and the grassy knolls were the grounds of Woodlawn Cemetery and he had stood on them before his parents’ flower-strewn caskets and heard the words that came back to him now.
“I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”
He remembered when he first heard them he had thought, How? How? And it surprised him now to think it never occurred to him to not believe the words. He’d just wanted to know what he needed to do to make them work, to make them ease the grief sitting heavy in his heart and help him walk away from the graves of his mother and father knowing he had not committed them to an everlasting darkness.
Now the words were with him again and he whispered them to himself, laying them out like a kind of bridge to uphold him over a deep cavern.
“‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’”
He didn’t doubt Elizabeth had known these words too. How else could she have been so bold going through the world radiating love the way she had? Most people would just as soon spit on each other as show the kind of love she’d held out for common strangers every single day. He had taken advantage of that. And the only thing he could do now to make it right called for him to crack himself open and prove the truth of the words he had written so shamefully in one of his letters—love mends. He would do it because her spirit called upon him to be better than himself. He would do it because she had shown him what was possible when one truly loved. Now he just needed a touch of her courage.
He watched the water’s strong current running busily, as though it had somewhere to be. A tiny brown tugboat, a red stripe painted on its side, floated past and pulled a great flat barge loaded with a backhoe and a crane. The sun on the river broke up in the ripples of its wake, and the pieces of light danced on the surface and disappeared.
He wouldn’t sleep that night or the next. Instead he sat on the roof of his apartment building. He pushed his overcoat collar up around his ears and waited for the midnight blue sky to fade into a flat gray coin and then for the sun to stain it blood pink as it crept over the eastern horizon. He stayed until it was high enough to warm him, to make him feel certain it would come again the next day, and then he would utter his prayer: “‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’”
He remembered what Reverend Stiles had said about listening for God’s voice. He was supposed to listen so he would know what to do. It was too late for that. There was no chance for him to hear, not now. And he wasn’t sure he would believe anything good there was to hear. But the words he prayed did comfort him. He had the sense he was running hard in preparation for a leap, like an athlete performing the long jump. Only he couldn’t see where he would land. The prayer helped him to know he wouldn’t leap into a void.
IN THE BOTTOM of the seventh inning in the seventh game of the 1947 World Series, a man named Robinson knocked a fly ball into left field allowing Billy Johnson to come in from third base and score, giving their team a 5–2 lead. But even Val in his fog knew it wasn’t Jackie Robinson. It was Yankees catcher Aaron Robinson. The crowd in the second tier of Yankee Stadium where Val sat with Sebastian near left field engulfed them. The deafening roar testified to the over seventy thousand spectators packed in for the event that afternoon.
But Val and Sebastian kept to their seats.
He’d chosen to attend the game because anyone who knew him knew he wouldn’t miss it. And he wanted for once to make himself easy to find. He sat hunched over, his hat low over his eyes, his hands in his coat pockets. The noise reminded him of how much smaller Ebbets Field was—just half the size of Yankee Stadium. It was also farther away, in Brooklyn, but Val had appreciated it more. The approach to Yankee Stadium wasn’t as inviting as the one at Ebbets Field. Instead of soft, welcoming curves, a great stone wall loomed large as the front of Yankee Stadium. Straight walls stunted all the other curves in the ballpark as well.
The mass of overcoats and hats made him feel invisible, and he wanted the kind of oblivion it offered. He felt Sebastian fidgeting and knew he was worried. Sebastian was a good man—Val didn’t expect him to be any other way. The directions he had given Sebastian earlier in the day would have made any caring person worry. Val had shown him all the drawers, locks, and inner workings of his desk.
“You know I haven’t been well lately, Sebastian. Mr. Potts will know what to do, but you may need to access this information. Here, this is a spare key for you, just in case.”
Val had tried to hand it to Sebast
ian, but he’d kept his hands clasped behind his back.
“Sir, I don’t think it’s necessary.”
“And I say it is. Please take this key, Sebastian. That’s an order.”
“Very well, sir.”
Sebastian had put the key in the pocket of his vest.
He’d been so unhappy about receiving the key Val wasn’t surprised when Sebastian insisted on accompanying him to the game. But then, sharp as Sebastian was, Val knew he hadn’t failed to see the .22 Val had taken from the shelf of his closet and put in the pocket of his coat.
At the top of the eighth inning, after two quick outs by Eddie Stanky and Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson came to the plate. Val watched him stand strong in the batter’s box and get ready to swing. He had remained hitless in the game so far. Val didn’t see why it should be any different and he was right. Eventually Robinson hit a fly ball out to center field and Joe DiMaggio caught it to put the Dodgers away for the eighth. Yankees fans were on their feet all over the stadium. Val’s seat rumbled beneath him.
“Dodgers are gonna lose this series,” he shouted in Sebastian’s ear. “Yankees pitchers are too good.”
Then Val realized—he should have known a lot sooner he would lose to Mae. She was too fast, too clever. That’s why he was waiting for Sam Delany to come after him. He wondered what was taking him so long. Or, more accurately, what was taking Mae so long to throw her switch. He figured once she knew she had lost Sam, Mae would tell him about Val and Cecily. He only saw the potential for the play when he found Sam and Mae together that night and it made him remember what Aunt Rose had said. But there was one more move Val could make, and he would do it for Sam’s benefit, and Cecily’s. The waiting, though, bothered him because he felt he was being cowardly. He was used to being a man of action, of taking charge of the field. But Elizabeth had shown him taking charge had nothing to do with fighting battles. He didn’t understand how to go to combat with both his heart and his head working together in full force. Mae had taken him down to prove it. But maybe he’d finally learned something.
Unforgivable Love Page 37