The Man Who Walked Away A Novel

by Maud Casey

  “I will let the sun have its way with me,” she says.

  “That means she likes you,” Walter whispers to Albert.

  They line up in two rows: Elizabeth, Rachel, and Marian in the front, Albert and Walter in the back with the veteran. The Director leads and they follow, except for the veteran, who marches behind them, back and forth, back and forth, keeping an eye on the deep hole he dug in the garden until the Doctor comes out, takes him by the elbow, and escorts him inside.

  Miraculously, Albert’s body obeys him as he lifts his arms, squats, stands, squats, windmills his arms.

  “Not all of you are soldiers,” the Director says. “Pace yourself. You are not all soldiers like the veteran, but fitness is still the key to good citizenship.” Albert feels the muscles in his arms and his legs and his back, good citizens moving through the minutes and the hours.

  Ring (shadow, ring). And then it is time to dig in the garden, to gently pull without tearing the kale and the lettuce they will eat later for dinner, to put it in the basket, to smell the tomatoes on the vine for ripeness, to not step on the beans, to spread the manure someone has brought for fertilizer. “This is how it’s done,” says the Director, using his rake, while the veteran, who has returned, digs in his hole. “That is not for eating, Samuel,” as Samuel puts manure on his tongue.

  Elizabeth holds up her hands, dirt caking her nails. “Divine,” she says.

  “Certainly,” Albert says. He wants to be friendly to this woman who is being friendly to him, but it is also true—her dirt-caked nails, they are divine. That he pulls a head of lettuce up from the rich, moist earth and smells its roots; that he does not disappear; that he is here.

  “Here,” Elizabeth says. “Look here. This is it. The beautiful thing I wanted to show you.” She points to a bone with feathers pasted on it, lying on a bench. “My wing.”

  Sisters have a way of finding their brothers, even brothers who have been turned into birds, his father said when Albert asked him how the sister found the swan brothers in his father’s story. But even after his father comforted him, Darling boy, the prince with one swan arm made a life for himself, Albert felt them. He feels them now, underneath the tick-tock of the day, his beautiful feathers rippling uselessly.

  “I will not cry,” he tells Elizabeth, because suddenly he feels certain he will. Looking at the wing, its feathers plucked, suddenly he is afraid again.

  “Why would you? I’ve fixed it. I’ve put all the feathers back on,” Elizabeth says, looking as though she might cry too. “It is beautiful.”

  “It is,” Albert says. Darling boy, don’t cry. “It is beautiful,” he says, but didn’t she see that was the problem? The beauty of one’s hour made the pain of leaving it that much worse. “It is, but . . .”

  “Come with me,” Nurse Anne says, though the basket Marian is carrying is not yet filled. She takes Albert by the arm, her voice soft as the moss he put in his shoes. Here is your room, yes, right here, here you are, right here. “They can finish without us.”

  “Let’s wash your feet,” Nurse Anne whispers, leading him inside, leading him down the hall to his room. She sits him in the chair, then picks up his old mended shoes from the corner, letting them dangle from the tips of her fingers. She reaches inside one of them and pulls out the moss stuffed into the toes. “Very clever,” she says.

  “My feet are always clean,” he says, because they are and because he doesn’t want her to think they’re not.

  “I would hope so,” she says. “Still, the Director believes in warm baths and your blisters need soaking. Sit. I’ll be right back.” He sits in the chair and she is, as she says she would be, right back. She pours a pail of steaming water into a washbasin. “Ready?” she asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer, and the touch of her knowing hands as she places his feet, his beautiful feet, in the silky soft water and begins to scrubs his toes, brings another glimpse of his forgotten life, a similarly kind woman in a Friedrichsdorf boardinghouse with a hairpin shaped like a sword who once gave him walnuts and cheese.

  With her touch, his white-webbed calluses and his cracked heels begin to soften; with her touch too comes the memory of disbelief. The people he encountered on the road never believed that he was clean even when he said he was. Even the kindest people doubted him. A tailor’s wife who offered him a straw pallet in the back of the tailor’s shop inspected his hands for dirt only to discover immaculate fingernails; a farmer who, though he had eight children, offered him shoes, was shocked to discover the splendid state of Albert’s impeccable feet; a wool merchant who gave him the scraps from his dinner was startled when Albert pulled back his large ears to reveal shining, clean skin. How could he explain to them that even when the roofs were laced with icicles, in the name of cleanliness he would take off his mud-caked pants to wash in a river? That even so he was never immodest. If there were people walking, even far away, even if they were only specks on the horizon, he would hide himself behind a copse of trees. He was clean as often as he could be; if he was not, there was a twitch in his right eye. Too much dirt, and the blood rushed to a place just above that eye and protested, beating there as if his heart had taken up residence in the wrong place.

  “It appears I have misspoken,” Albert says. He wants her to know he is grateful. We will help you to remember. She is helping him. “What I meant to say was thank you.”

  “No need to thank me,” she says. “But you are welcome.”

  There is a scraping and a shuffling at the door.

  “What is that?” he asks.

  “Only the veteran, eavesdropping,” Nurse Anne says. “Go away, brave man, this is not your room.”

  “I was not thinking it was,” a voice says, and then the scraping and shuffling disappear down the hall.

  But Albert does not hear. He is as silky as the water. The cleaning of his willing feet he always saved for last; for them he reserved the most special care. He would wait, fighting off the urge to walk as he waited for his shoes to dry by a river or a pond. Only one, or perhaps three, times he discovered himself suddenly in another town without shoes. The first thing he did was run a finger between each toe as if each toe were a tiny loaf of bread, like the ones Albert sometimes discovered left outside behind a bakery to cool; each toe delicious.

  The silky water and the caress of Nurse Anne’s hands make him sleepy. But he doesn’t want to wake up in such-and-such a public square or in the cold rubble of the cemetery, so he grips the edges of the chair until his hands ache so he won’t fall asleep and wake up somewhere else entirely. He wants this new life where love isn’t always somewhere else. He wants this new life where he is not merely a man who has appeared out of thin air but a man with a history.

  “I am not a vagrant,” he says. Though he had stopped bothering to tell people, it seems necessary to explain to her.

  “I never said you were.” The way she doesn’t even look up suggests it was the furthest thing from her mind and then, as if she were a magician, out of her apron pocket she pulls seashells! She places them carefully into his hand. They are still warm from her body and smell of her clean apron and—Albert holds them to his nose—the sea.

  “Where did these come from?” he asks.

  “My father brought them back to me when I was a child,” she says. “From the Red Sea. He wanted me to see the world.” She leaves out the rest—the way, after he’d shown her all of its wonders, her father had wanted her to leave the world alone; the way he’d insisted she marry her flatulent cousin, shouting, “Who else will have you?” when she refused. How could this be the same father who would joke that she would make a wonderful flâneur, her heart ticking like a clock as she wandered Egypt or Algeria? She keeps herself to herself now, always having considered modesty a virtue, always having believed it to be the secret of one’s own truest love for oneself. She never said to her father, for example, I always thought I would make a fine flâneur, the same way she never said to the Doctor when he once said to her, “You loo
k like my sister,” that she knew he did not mean a woman with a face more beautiful than his. He meant a woman with his face; he meant his unfortunate sister. This unfortunate sister’s face was the last face a handful of dying soldiers ever saw when she ran away from the flatulent cousin to join the front; to them, she was no unfortunate sister. To them, she was mother, darling, my heart. My heart is what the man who shares her bed now calls her. “We will make a new life,” he said, but when they drank a toast to their new lives she understood the moment was a pair of scissors, cutting her life in two. Half of it left behind in England, the other half yet to come. Once, she met her mother secretly in Budapest and they rode the funicular up into the Buda Hills, the Danube disappearing below them. They strolled arm in arm, making their way tentatively in their high-heeled boots on the cobbled streets. “Come back home,” her mother said, but it was too late. She was already on the other side of the river, far away, looking back on the moment as it happened.

  “That was a long time ago,” is all she says.

  “The smell of the sea has traveled a long way,” Albert says.

  Layers of callused skin drift on the surface of the water in the basin. When she tosses the water into the sewer the river will carry the skin all the way to the ocean. “It’s true,” she says. “The shells carry their past with them.”

  How could she know that Albert has wanted nothing more than exactly that, to carry his past with him? She wraps his feet in a towel, holding them against her chest as if they were her babies, patting them dry. “You should rest for a while,” and he hears how tired she is.

  “Thank you,” he says again as she leaves, shutting the door behind her. He is so grateful for the tender way she bathed his beloved feet and for letting him hold her Red Sea seashells, a gift from her father whom she clearly misses as dearly as he misses his own.

  The scratch of hay he pitched in Aix, the stink of the ceruse factory in Brussels, the not-distant-enough roar of an avalanche somewhere, he cannot remember where, but it doesn’t matter that he can’t remember where because if Albert listens, he returns; his own father’s voice returns. His father’s face with its sunset scars returns to him. It keeps him still. It keeps him here when he falls asleep in the same bed to the sound of boots on cobblestones just outside his window. In his dreams he wanders off along the tight streets winding past the ancient amphitheater where the gladiators fought, through the ancient gate to the city, the arch underneath the giant clock of the church of St. Eloi as it tolls the hour—les armes, les jours, les heures, l’orage, les fêtes, l’incendie—but then wakes to find he is not somewhere else at all. Instead his mind shrinks from the expansiveness of dreams to fit inside his body as the ordinary world reveals itself to him again—footsteps in the hall; the cry of a young girl—“There are so many . . .”—and what there are so many of is swallowed as the girl walks farther and farther away, the bells and then the bells, the sweet, sweet song of bells. And love? It returns to him in glimpses.

  He discovered himself once, not knowing how he got there, on a bridge not far from home, and in the water lit by gas jets was the reflection of a strange man, and he knew the strange man was him. “Hello,” he said to himself, who said hello right back. He was no longer the child being scolded by his father for wandering away. Now he was a man whose large eyes were tugged down at the corners by sadness. He broke his own heart. “Help me,” he said, but the sad man only beckoned from the water, Come join me.

  Fire floated through his reflection. A tiny boat set aflame. Sometimes children set their dead animals on fire and sent them down the river; he and his friend Baptiste once tied a dead mouse to a raft of sticks and lit it on fire. Their dead mouse raft burned as brightly as the little bundle floating downriver in front of him; turning to ash, it floated up into the air. He threw one heavy leg up onto the parapet.

  “And love?” a voice asked. He thought it was his reflection speaking. He leaned over the parapet to listen closer and was nearly startled into the water by the laughter behind him.

  “You’re not talking to yourself. Turn around.” He pulled his leg down and turned to find a real live woman. She was dressed as though she had just come from a party—her face freshly rouged, her lips painted a luscious red. She erupted again with laughter.

  “I’m a mess,” she said, catching her breath. Her hair was tousled, strands of it escaping its loose braid.

  “No, no,” Albert stammered. “You’re not a mess at all.” Above him, another cool sliver of moon disappeared into another morning sky. “You are quite . . .” She looked so solid, so thoroughly there.

  “High praise,” she said, laughing still. Had she ever stopped? It was as though she had spent her life laughing.

  “Quite lovely,” he said.

  “Enough of lovely,” she said, smiling as she put her hand on Albert’s shoulder and stepped closer. Her breath smelled sweetly of cabbage and wine. “What about love?” She put her other hand on his other shoulder, swaying. “I’m a little drunk,” the woman said, still swaying, causing Albert to sway too.

  He looked over the side of the bridge to check on his reflection. Hello, myself.

  “Oh, I’ve looked there,” the woman said. When she laughed, Albert wished he could stay there, inside that laugh.

  She stepped forward, balancing on his shoes; it was then he noticed she wasn’t wearing any herself.

  “Your feet,” he said, “are splendidly arched.”

  “Would you like to marry me?” she asked. She told him to meet her at her family’s house at four o’clock the next day.

  “I am drunk but I’m honest,” the woman said. “I’m honestly drunk.” She laughed and touched her luscious red lips to his, and he dared to dream that he was capable of keeping such an appointment.

  Was it an hour or a day later?

  He discovered himself in Verdun, walking a narrow street filled with bleating sheep, their bells clanking. Why had he ever thought he was capable of love? He should have a sheep’s bell fastened around his neck. When he discovered himself later, the sound of a cart carrying pine trees for firewood rattling by cracked his heart into jagged, useless pieces.

  “Fuck,” the veteran yells from the billiard room, and there is the sound of billiard balls crashing to the floor and then the gruffness of Claude telling him to stop. “It is not me,” the veteran says. “It is not my doing. It is not my doing at all.”

  Love was something from long ago. Love required staying in one place. Love required knowing where you were last night and last week and last year, where you would be tomorrow.

  What about love?

  Here is love: his father tapping the dying embers of his pipe into his hand and throwing them into the fireplace.

  It is time for bed, as if Albert were a normal boy who never disappeared at all.

  For a moment, it is as if he never did.

  There was the lamplighter and his father standing in the doorway, deep in a conversation about the need for more gas lamps in the neighborhood, or the most recent advancements in house drainage. Some nights, the lamplighter would let him accompany him on his rounds; he’d even let him hold his ladder when a ladder was necessary. Albert watched with fascination as the lamplighter used his rod with its metal U at one end to open the switch that turned the gas on. As the lamplighter lit the taper with a match, suddenly the dark street: illuminated. Later, back home, the sunset swirl on his father’s cheek: illuminated. His father settled into the chair in the living room that received him like a lap and lit his pipe, filling the cottage with the delicious bitter smell.

  His father struck a match, touching the flame to the gas-soaked taper, and the lamp’s light pushed back the night. ‘‘So,’’ he said, ‘‘you’d like a story.’’ Then his father waited, on the verge of the story. That moment before the story was as sweet as the moment the flame of the lamplighter’s match touched the gas-soaked taper in the lamps and lit up the dark street to reveal a rat scurrying under a shop; the cracked sid
ewalk; a cracked pile of dried horse manure.

  Albert’s body hadn’t been consumed by meningitis to become the sound of a body in agony like his brothers’; he hadn’t disappeared into pneumonia like his mother. He had lived.

  I’m still here, Albert thought.

  His father’s voice spun a cocoon around him and held him with its silky thread.

  Here, Albert, a story just for you.

  Listen.

  Always as if his father had pulled the story out of a hat—magic!

  For years, the prince with one swan wing lamented his lot. He wondered why he’d ever wanted to see the world in the first place; if this was the more of the world, he wanted to go home.

  What came next?

  You know what comes next.

  There was a magic dove. “Do you hear me?” she sang. “Does this ring a bell?”

  It did! He remembered why he set out. Walking over hill, over dale, the prince’s eyes filled with the whole wide world before him. There was so much of it! His legs were strong and solid; his heart brimmed with something he came to think of as the future.

  Ring (shadow ring).

  Does this ring a bell? The quick, sharp sound of love in Albert’s ears carries him forward. It carries him up and out of his bed; it helps him put on his shoes; it walks him down the hall to join Marian and Walter in the common room. He wants to explain to Marian about the face inside her face, in part because he would like to ask her whether there is one inside his face too, but he is still a little afraid of her and he isn’t sure he wants to know about his other faces.

  “You are doing very well this evening, Marian,” Walter says. “Perhaps Albert’s arrival has cheered you?”

  “We’ll see about that,” says Marian, but Albert can tell she means yes.

  “Hey, hey,” says Claude, the pouches of his face alert, opening up like a purse, as the veteran stands, pointing his finger in Albert’s face. It is clear he is not shooting love out of that finger. “And fuck you, too,” the veteran says.