I Dream Alone

by Gabriel Walsh

  The entire house was a bit like a neglected and unattended museum to the Axes’ past. Mrs. Axe did say she had driven out to the place sometime during the fall and winter on her own but hadn’t done so for many months. It looked as if she hadn’t paid the place a visit since she fired the ‘cleaning’ woman. The houses itself looked lonely, forsaken and unappreciated. If Mr. Axe had to be here alone and with no one to talk to he’d likely put a match to the place. Emerson wouldn’t dream of spending time here on his own. I got the feeling as I listened to him on the drive that he was not a happy traveller when it came to travelling to the house. Whether it represented a time in his life he didn’t want to revisit or just that it was so isolated I wasn’t sure. The Lord of the Castle was a scholar at heart and was most comfortable among his books and records or when people were listening to him expound on subjects that were intellectual in nature. Emerson Axe liked being alone provided there was someone nearby to praise his insight into relevant matters of the day.

  After digesting my whereabouts I was directed up a flight of wooden stairs by Mrs. Axe, to one of the bedrooms. As I proceeded up the stairs Mrs. Axe called to me and let me know that the room had a view of the ocean. Then almost immediately Mr. and Mrs. Axe followed behind me. When the three of us arrived on the upstairs landing, just like their accommodations in the castle, the Axes entered separate bedrooms.

  * * *

  When I had unpacked the few items I had in my small travelling bag I sat down by the window and took in the beautiful view. The sun was setting slowly, the weather was beautiful and, as I looked in the distance to the water’s edge I began to think about how I happened to be in this house this night at this time in my life. I opened the window and could hear the sound of the waves lapping against the shore, and the gawking cries of seagulls skimming the water in search of fish created a cacophony of images as well as a serious dose of confusion in my mind. Mesmerised by the sight of the ocean in front of me I thought of Ireland and that somewhere beyond the horizon my childhood and my family lived. I wondered if my parents, Paddy and Molly, were thinking about me. I still hadn’t heard from my mother or anybody else in the family. I had never in my time in Ireland ever heard or experienced a sister or brother of mine writing to each other. No one in my family wrote anything to anyone at any time and even though I was so far away I was essentially no different. It wasn’t that we were all shy and embarrassed about our handwriting or our inability to spell correctly. It was more likely that members of my immediate family had trouble expressing affection towards each other. Support and affection for one another wasn’t practised in my home. For all practical purposes my parents and my family were gone from my life. I didn’t write to my father and he didn’t write to me. While at home I didn’t feel wanted and now that I was far away and gone for such a long time I didn’t feel missed.

  Maggie was the reason I was staring out at the ocean from a bedroom in a beautiful house on the beach. Maggie took it upon herself to make sure I toed the line and kept myself out of everyone’s way. For the first few months she was the bridge that connected me with the Axes. Since her departure the Axes and I lived like three kinds of goldfish swimming about in a large bowl.

  When I thought about Mrs. Axe I didn’t seek an answer as to why she occupied so much of my time and thoughts. I accepted that I was happily tormented. I thought back to the beginning of the journey I had never imagined could exist. In Dublin, when I first met her at the hotel, I didn’t question myself about her becoming my legal guardian and agreeing to bring me to New York. This night, however, far away from the castle, I began to fear that her affection for me might evaporate and vanish. It was as though I had captured a butterfly in my hands and didn’t want to open them for fear that the butterfly might fly away from me. The bizarre memory of serving Maggie breakfast on the hotel floor of the Shelbourne in Dublin came into my head. That bizarre encounter had brought Mrs. Axe into my life and as I closed the bedroom window I was able to laugh and accept that Maggie Sheridan was in the cemetery in Dublin and maybe singing to her angels from the grave.

  I then took a quick shower and, feeling refreshed and renewed, I went downstairs to join Mr. and Mrs. Axe.

  * * *

  For dinner that night Mrs. Axe unpacked the basket of food she had brought with her from the castle in Tarrytown. Mr. Axe put out a few bottles of wine which he unhesitatingly and expertly uncorked as we sat at the dinner table. When he poured some into my goblet, Mrs. Axe warned him not to fill my glass. I had in a small way gotten used to drinking fine wines at the castle and it wouldn’t be an overstatement to imply that Mr. Axe enjoyed pouring his specially imported beverage to anyone in his company who appreciated, as he did, the fruit of the vine. This was very much in keeping with the evenings when Mrs. Axe was away in the city and Mr. Axe would call me into the dining room and have a small unscheduled wine-tasting event. He talked and bragged about wine as if he was talking about his ancestors in Scotland. Half of what he said to me about wine and its pedigree went in one ear and out the other. I could hardly remember drinking it much less remembering the French signature labels and the names of the areas in France it came from.

  After Mr. and Mrs. Axe had emptied the second bottle of wine they began to argue with each other about business transactions that had taken place earlier in the week. Mr. Axe reminded his wife that while she was away in Dublin certain individuals in the firm had messed up financial contracts and suggested she dismiss the people involved. What they were arguing and talking about was as foreign to me as the names on the bottles of wine. The in-house debate and discussion went on throughout the consuming of the food from last night’s party.

  When it came to the welcome dessert, in this case sherry trifle, I gobbled it up fast, excused myself from the table and walked out on to the beach.

  * * *

  The beach was deserted and for a minute or two I was confused about what direction to walk in. Each direction seemed to lead to a curve in the earth. As I stood almost awash in indecision, the sea water splashed over my shoes. I then decided that it would be better and more practicable for walking on the beach if I took them off. As I bent over to separate my shoes from my feet an elderly couple entwined in each other’s arms and a scraggy-looking dog walked pass me. The dog stopped and seemed to do a double take when it saw me. By then I was holding one of my shoes in my hand and for a moment I thought the dog wanted me to throw the shoe into the ocean so that it could retrieve it – but the animal didn’t show that kind of energy or enthusiasm and seemed more curious about my presence than anything else. As I stood motionless and stared back at the dog staring at me, the man, way up the beach by now, took his arm away from the woman he was walking with and whistled. The whistle rang through the night air and interrupted the momentary communication I had with the four-legged animal. The dog ran and quickly caught up with the whistler. Something about the dog seemed friendly and I decided that it had to be going somewhere so I turned and followed it. After a few minutes I lost sight of the dog and its people but at the same time I also realised that I had forgotten about Mr. andMrs. Axe back at the house behind me, arguing about business deals and maybe other issues they wouldn’t admit to.

  With my mind a bit clearer and not so laden down with what Mr. and Mrs. Axe were up to, I turned back and walked in the opposite direction. The beach and the night were becoming more and more familiar to me and the further I walked along it the closer my past seemed to follow me. The more my feet pressed into the shifting sand under me the lonelier I felt and the sadder I became. It was as if my entire past was a canvas on the water in front of me and I was being instructed by the observant moon in the sky above to form it, paint it and sign it. The first colour that clouded my eyes was religion. It had one dark dense colour and that was black. It seemed infinite and endless like the ocean in front of me. The thought of floating, swimming or sinking in it took my breath away and I felt helpless. All the rituals of observances came back to me like the
sloshing ocean water that caressed and followed my feet as I walked along the ocean front. As the night aged, the canvas of my past became clearer and I felt less frightened and more in control of it. In a broad and general sense I began to understand the seemingly ever present fear a bit more than I ever had in the past. Fear was a belief and a perception that had many shapes and dimensions. A bit like a ball of malleable putty that dared and challenged the hand that held it to shape and change it. The first change in my religious observance was when I stopped going to Confession. Although I had slowly been retreating from it in Ireland I was now in an environment that didn’t remind me so much of doing penance for anything I thought, said or did. Going to Confession and Communion faded away from me much quicker than I would have imagined two years earlier.

  With thoughts that were becoming as heavy as my head felt, I walked back to the house. When I approached it, a small light was on in the living room and another was on upstairs in Mrs. Axe’s room. Mr. Axe’s room was dark and I presumed he had retired for the night. With my head still filled with bags and buckets of self-pity and regret, I entered the house and walked directly to the kitchen where I discovered a bottle of wine left on the kitchen table. Had Mr. Axe been up and awake I would have thanked him. I uncorked the bottle and retreated to the sun deck and stretched out on one of the two chaises-longues where, with as much gusto as I could muster I began the ritual of drowning my thoughts and feelings. In almost no time at all I had consumed half a bottle of wine and rapidly reached the point where I couldn’t tell if time was going forward or backward. Way out in front of me the reflection of the shimmering moon on the water seemed to dance, spin and bounce in harmony with every thought that was spinning around in my head. If it hadn’t been for the sound of the waves hitting the shore I could well have been, thanks to the amount of wine I had just consumed, a random star flying about in the summer sky above me.

  While I gargled on the wine and mumbled incoherently about my life the screen door opened and Mrs. Axe stepped onto the deck. When she approached she didn’t look at me or acknowledge my presence but sat and leaned back on the other reclining chair that was next to me. If she hadn’t seen me I knew she had definitely heard me and because of that I didn’t acknowledge her arrival. I was a bit surprised that she was still up and awake. I took note of the fact that she was wearing a thick warm-looking bathrobe and appeared refreshed as if she had just emerged from a hot bathtub or had taken a swim in the ocean. I wasn’t sure she had noticed the now half-empty wine bottle that was situated on the small utility wooden table next to me, so I moved it out of her line of sight.

  Mrs. Axe stared straight ahead. “You don’t have to hide it, Gabriel,” she said.

  I felt embarrassed and trapped at the same time. I couldn’tthink of anything to say in my own defense so I remained silent. I was a bit unsure if my semi-inebriated state and the presence of the wine bottle had anything to do with her nocturnal attitude.

  After what seemed like an eternity but in reality was less than half a minute, Mrs. Axe broke the silence again. “Finish it off if you want. Emerson won’t remember he left it in the kitchen.”

  While I pondered her surprising instruction Mrs. Axe got up from her chair and walked back into the house. Before I could figure out why she was leaving or where she was going, she returned almost immediately with a wineglass.

  “I don’t like to see good wine wasted,” she said as she reached down and picked up the wine bottle.

  With my mind still in a tailspin I watched her pour some of the wine into her glass and begin to swallow it as if it was a lemonade or orange juice. She seemed to be in a celebratory mood and whether it was caused by the beautiful night air, the sound of the ocean pounding the shore or the fact that she might have won the argument with her husband I wasn’t sure. In any event she appeared to be, to say the least, calm and content.

  She stretched out and began to talk again as if our conversation hadn’t been interrupted. “You know, you shouldn’t pay any attention to what you hear going on between me and Emerson. We talk and argue but it’s not as serious as you might imagine. A good percentage of it has to do with business and, although you may not know it, our arguments are really discussions. It’s the way we function. And by the way, we didn’t plan on arguing in front of you.” She stopped talking.

  For a few moments I thought she was waiting for me to comment on what I had just heard. Although I digested the tone and content of her words, my instinct was very much like I had when I was first in her company: and that was to listen and hear but not to counter-argue or even debate the issue at hand. At the same time I realised that many things between us had changed since my arrival and I considered expressing myself, perhaps for selfish reasons. NeverthelessI didn’t know what to say in return. I wasn’t really confident she wanted me to respond or make any kind of comment. This evening was in many ways a reflection of what our relationship really was. There wasn’t a thought in my head that would have made sense even if I had replied. The back of my head felt as if it was peeling down my neck and falling away from the rest of my body. A silence fell over the deck and only the shaking reflection of the moon on the water, tied to the harmony of the ocean lapping against the shore, kept me from retreating further into myself.

  As I made every effort to appear sober Mrs. Axe broke into my drenched thoughts.

  “You should know, Gabriel, and I don’t doubt that you do . . .”She hesitated as she usually did when she had some important announcement to make.

  The tone of her voice and the patience she took with her words convinced me that she wasn’t asking for a response from me. I watched her stare out into the distance and wondered what she was going to say to me. With her eyes fixated on the sea she began to talk again.

  “When we get back to Tarrytown I suggest that you take time off from bringing me my breakfast. Pat will take care of it – at least for the next month or so. She’s planning on retiring and I’m not sure what to do about replacing her.”

  Hearing this almost sobered me up. I wasn’t sure what she really meant by it and was a bit afraid of what else she might say. My nerves tingled with the feeling of rejection and I felt somewhat abandoned and practically helpless. The experience of bringing breakfast to her every morning was in some ways a private and magical ritual. I inhabited a little universe in my mind that made me feel special and wanted. Nobody in Mrs. Axe’s circle – including her husband – shared this moment every morning. I felt and believed that Mrs. Axe had venerated me above all others in her domain. Her business associates whom she presided over at board meetings were excluded from an intimacy that only my eyes saw before she tackled the day. The chore, which was by now for me a privilege, afforded both of us private time and a chance to know each other better. It was an assignment that I looked forward to every morning, even when I was attending high school. It was the only time whenMrs. Axe didn’t behave like the business executive she had to be during the rest of the day.

  As I was absorbing the shock of Pat’s potential departure and the discontinuance of me serving Mrs. Axe breakfast, she spoke again.

  “I know you know that I love my husband. I do love Emerson.” She then reached out for her glass, slowly drank what was left of the wine, bid me goodnight and walked back into the house. After a moment she returned to the screen door and called out to me. “I’ll leave the light on upstairs!”

  Why she said this or what she meant by it I couldn’t determine. Before I had a chance to respond she moved away from the door and headed towards her bedroom. I persuaded myself that Mrs. Axe was beginning to feel bad about what had transpired between us. Still, her silence made me feel she had gone from feeling sorry for me to reminding me that what had happened had been more of a mistake than a statement of love and caring. I had not been able to put the events between us into any kind of meaning that answered my emotional turmoil. Since the first event I found myself falling deeper and deeper into a dependency that I couldn’t define
or articulate to myself and even more importantly to her. When I wanted to express my feelings with words to Mrs. Axe I was not able to think of any. Paradoxically, the idea of defining my emotions only served to prevent me from doing so. Yet in an awkward way the emotional incapacity seemed to be safe and comfortable. I was actually comforted by the fact that I really didn’t know or understand the consequences of what my relationship with Mrs. Axe had become and that provided me with an excuse to believe that it would and should continue. The unknown and the confusion kept my desire alive.

  After about ten minutes or so I managed to lift myself up from the deck chair and retreat into the house.

  * * *

  The drive back to Tarrytown was a long and mostly silent one. With the exception of the odd comment from Mrs. Axe about the possibility of me attending college in the future and my working more often at the office, very little was said. I was hoping Mr. Axe would join in but he was nursing a hangover and his response and reaction to the little that was said was tepid to say the least. Mrs. Axe sat in the back seat and appeared to be half asleep while I drove. Once or twice I asked if I could turn on the car radio and was told I could do so if I kept the volume down. For my own sake I searched the radio dial but I wasn’t able to find a song or a sound that would have suited the atmosphere in the car. After few snippets of a classical sound and wanting to make an impression, I mentioned the name of the composer, thinking it would impress Mrs. Axe, but she seemed purposely withdrawn and even indifferent to my efforts to make contact. I then turned the car radio off altogether. Periodically when I viewed Mrs. Axe in the rear-view mirror her eyes were closed and she looked as if she was dreaming of being someplace else.