by Kate Walbert
She had returned in early October, her favorite season, had swung her legs to the side of her bunk and attempted a smile when she saw Sterling at her cabin door. He had bribed a steward or something, he was explaining. Normally they don’t let anyone onboard until all of the passengers have debarked.
He held, what? Roses? Some sort of welcoming flower wrapped in green tissue. She took them and stood, unsure of whether to put them down or to keep them cradled in her arms. They were cold, still cold from the florist’s freezer; indeed roses, the peach ones, her favorite. She looked back at him. She had not seen him in over a month and he looked different, somehow, or perhaps he had always looked this way and she had never noticed. He was much older, already in his fifties, and had the stance of a constant thinker, a scholar: hands thrust into the pockets of his trousers, a padded suit-coat ineffective at hiding the stoop of his shoulders. He appeared not to have slept in a while. Was it already exam time?
No, he said, he just—
She put the roses on the bunk, then turned back to him; the word no, the saying of it, unnecessary. He had never asked her to explain.
You were a good man, she would have told him were he to appear now, at this moment, in her room in the Gramercy Park Residence for Ladies. He might hang back at the door as he would in the old days, having snuck past the housemother to climb in stocking feet up the long stairway, she leading him, her bracelets in one hand to stop their jangling. Shhh, she’d say, making more noise than he. Where had they been? Dancing, no doubt. They loved dancing. Up to Harlem or to the Snack Shack closer to Columbia, where the graduate students who hunkered over their beers called him Professor Jewell, a name, she told him, she liked the ring of: Sterling Jewell, she’d say. It shines, doesn’t it?
They had taken a livery down Fifth, asleep at this time of night, the new Washington Square Arch glistening in what might have been rain, what might have been weak snow. He put his arm around her thin shoulders, the two preferring to sit exposed rather than use the filthy horsehair blanket folded on the seat across from them. He had such long legs; what was called in those days a tall drink of water. But handsome, yes. A good man, a stern teacher, lecturing from a wood pulpit set in the center of the small auditorium, his pupils half-circling him as if he were a philosopher on Mount Olympus. She had come once, surprised him in the way that he liked, sitting in the farthest row back, her hat pulled low to her eyes, legs crossed. Of course the students could barely face him, so curious, as they were, about a grown woman in the back row with seamed stockings and a red hat, gold mesh covering her pretty face.
Sterling pretended not to notice. He simply talked, outlining his points with a yellow chalk on the high blackboard, gesticulating and then reaching, from time to time, for the pipe balanced on the edge of the wood pulpit. Perhaps she fell in love with him that day; she found his lecture oddly arousing. Afterward they walked through Central Park, sitting for a time by one of the larger ponds. He held her hand and said how proud he was to have her in the back row listening. She kissed him deeply. What she had been thinking she is not sure. She only remembers the kiss, that kiss, and the way his big hands went to her thin shoulders, each thumb caressing the bone, as if attempting to mold clay.
Was it that night they first went back to this room? She looks around it now from her place on the rose-covered sofa, still faded as it had been in Jeannette’s home; she has been unable to match the fabric, the store on Seventh long closed. The room is not so different, actually: the framed illustrations from Harper’s on the walls, the mannequin in the corner on which she once pinned all the newspaper photographs from the society columns: her hats worn by various dignitaries and ingenues. Where were those people now? Did they keep her creations on a bolster in the attic? Or was everyone already dead?
He had admired her career, saying he had not realized he was in the presence of such suspected genius.
He kept his hands in his pockets, jingling change.
“Suspected, to be sure,” she said.
“That’s all we can do with genius,” he said, hanging near the door. Behind him a sign stated the rules of the room in blocky, serious letters. The first: “No entertaining men under any circumstance.”
He had his hand on the doorknob. “Should I go?” he said.
She pointed to the sign. “You see the rules.”
He read them then turned back to her, pulling the chain across the lock. “Under no circumstance will I be entertaining.”
“Who was it you said you were, anyway?” she said.
“Just the messenger,” he said.
“Ah, the messenger.”
“I bring great tidings,” he said.
“Hail, thee.”
“Absolutely.”
He stood so close she could breathe his breath. Earlier, he had taken his pipe from his suit pocket and tapped its bowl against the wood pulpit.
“Sterling Jewell,” she said, because something had to be said, the air so thin she felt she might reel backward.
• • •
Outside, around Gramercy Park, the pear blossoms fall to the sidewalks, children rushing through to kick the blossoms like dry snow. Ruby has grown to love the sound of the children at this particular time of day. They have a school nearby, and they file into the park in two rows, their teachers in the rear determined to keep their lines straight, the all of them marching beyond the gates and then, what joy! breaking into chaos. She often watches from the window in her room, or from the bench in the park where she likes to eat her lunch. She packs a sandwich in her bag and eats in the sunshine; she slips off her shoes. Perhaps this day she brings the letter, holding it, staring at the name of the Parisian hotel in its modern font, its crest as sophisticated as her rejection of Sterling’s proposal, clever as the hat, the pearls, on the rail-thin pretty girl who sits on the park bench smoking, the girl you might have seen before, the one you think you recognize from somewhere but no, she’s just one of a hundred girls who look familiar.
9
The singing resumed just as Randall disappeared. The voices faint at first and then full and rich; not the voices of ghosts, but the voices of boys, a chorus of boys I suddenly realized were in fact singing somewhere just beyond the ballroom, their voices exaggerated by its hollowness. I followed them through the far door, finding myself once again in the east wing—the nurses’ desk dimly lit ahead.
The voices were coming from a small chapel in front of me, the kind of chapel often found in the homes of rich men. Its doors were propped open and inside, on what appeared to be a makeshift dais, a group of young boys in sweater vests, a glee club of sorts, sang “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place.” Odd to think of it. A wonderful hymn. I often heard it as a little girl, when we would go to the Methodist church to hear Dr. Billy preach a Sunday sermon. The boys sang the hymn beautifully, standing on the dais in front of a sign—draped from hand to hand of the crucifix—that read “The University Club.” They stood in a deliberate formation, holding music sheets and staring out to the men who lined the pews, an audience who, at first glance, appeared to be listening, though as I got closer it became apparent that they weren’t listening at all, that they were in fact mumbling to themselves, their own voices like the rumble of a dirty machine beneath the bright tones of the boys.
The men talked on and on—to their imaginary seatmates, or to the nurses who sat beside them, holding the hands of the few who blocked the center aisle in wheelchairs. One I couldn’t see in the front row suddenly began to shout what seemed to be the same unintelligible word again and again, though the boys did their best to pretend they didn’t notice. They looked like any boys will, like the boys I had at one time dated. They had bright red cheeks and watered-back hair. Their leader wore a brass whistle around his neck and a hat with reindeer antlers.
I don’t know how long it took me to notice your father. He sat in a tiny, circular balcony behind the crucifix, hidden by the elaborately carved wooden beams of the chapel. It was a balcony in
tended for one—perhaps the robber baron, I don’t know, or his mistress— and your father leaned over the scene from there. I believe I waved, thinking he might see me, might sprint down the rounded stairway to join me for the rest of the concert. But he did not; or if he did he pretended he did not. I looked away: to the University Club singers, to the backs of the once-soldiers hunched in their pews. When I could no longer stand it I looked up, again, but your father was gone; the balcony empty. In thinking about it, I suppose the balcony had a secret entrance, intended for viewing services discreetly, or uninterrupted prayer. Still, at the time I wondered whether I hadn’t just imagined him, as I had surely imagined Randall waiting for me in the next room.
10
I had every good intention of returning to the Veterans’ Hospital—the following day, the following week. And I did, in fact. Several times. I would drive up the winding road and park my rented automobile—an Oldsmobile that reeked of cigarettes— in the visitors’ lot. If it were a nice day, I might get out and walk the overgrown path into the garden. And if it were a rotten day I might do the same, a scarf pulled around my head. I would sit on the cracked cement bench near the tennis court, trying to muster the courage to again enter the hospital, to ask the nurse if she might retrieve Henry from his room, to tell him about you, to ask what he believed I should do. But I never did. Find the courage, I mean.
• • •
Several months passed. I let them. It was early spring, March. Forsythia—a whole grove—had blossomed by my cement bench, and I had returned to the hospital on that particular day, a glorious one, with the hope that your father might be well, again. Who could be ill in this weather? Who could be ill in spring? Perhaps I believed that I might forge a new truth from the stories I had already concocted, that I might will the stories real: your father in his red convertible—”Will You Marry Me, Ellen?”—written across its hood in shaving cream. That we would, in fact, somehow marry; that you would be born to the two of us, together.
And so I found my way back to the garden, where I sat for some time. I wore no lipstick, my hair returned to its natural red. You had begun to kick and you were suddenly more important to me than anything else I could think of. I had explained to the school that your father and I had married, that he had been sent away on another military assignment God knows where and that I would have to take the rest of the year off. I had not seen Mother and Daddy in months. Only Betty knew.
I had, truth be told, begun to tell these fictions that have been our history. Your history. Mine. I apologize for this. We are all owed the truth.
• • •
There is a garden in Kyoto, Koto-in, built by a warrior in the early seventeenth century, in the years when Shakespeare wrote, that can only be viewed through a window. The window hangs at the end of a long stone walk lined with maples that have been pruned in a way to filter sunlight onto the stones in the shapes of Japanese characters. Words formed at particular times of day, in certain seasons, are read and recited by the visitors to the garden as they walk the stone path, repeated in the way of Japanese poems, their authorship sometimes credited to the Koto-in maples, sometimes to the Koto-in stones. Other Koto-in poems remain unfinished.
The point is the visitor—intent on viewing the garden—follows the stone path to the window frame, hewn from these same maples, and finds a small, bell-shaped window drawn with shoji, the window locked and closed.
• • •
I tell you this because on that day that I sat on my cement bench on the lower terrace, just beyond a break in the box hedges to the Sound, I held The Gardens of Kyoto open to the garden at Koto-in. It has always been my favorite, the woodcut a single window shuttered closed, like one of those children’s books, where the reader might lift open the shuttered window to see a lamb in a pasture. But this window is impossible to pry open: the garden as much to the imagination as the endings of the Koto-in poems that are left unfinished, the ones interrupted by a sudden change of weather.
“Daphne?” Julia said. I recognized her voice in an instant and turned. She stood behind me in the same brown ensemble, her hair a blaze of sun.
“Hello,” I said. I couldn’t think of anything else.
She removed her brown sweater and placed it on the cement bench, then she sat down. “It gives me a chill,” she said.
The forsythia’s yellow was deafening.
“How long have you been here?” she said.
“I don’t know.”
She put her hand on my belly in the way that women do.
“It’s so terrible about Henry,” she said. “I tried to find you but no one knew where you lived.”
“Outside Philadelphia,” I said. I felt a dull cold against my bare palms; I must have been bracing myself against the bench, though in a deeper place I already understood.
“He was very sick,” she said, and I might not have been there at all for the way she said it, as if she were trying to convince herself. “Sometimes they are. Sometimes they’re very sick and sometimes they’re just sad. We know what to do for the sad ones. How to cheer them up. It’s not easy, you know.”
“No,” I said.
“But Henry. Well. He just couldn’t stay in his own skin.” She lit a cigarette. “It actually happens quite often. The hospital keeps it quiet. Out of the papers. God knows who would care.” She blew smoke out. “I tried to find you but no one knew where you lived.”
“Thank you.”
“Someone thought you might live in California, but that didn’t make sense, and then one of his friends from Korea. Mr. Tilsman?”
“Tilsie—”
“—said you had visited him once and that if you lived in California it would have been too far for you to visit. He thought maybe you lived in Manhattan.”
“Outside Philadelphia,” I said.
“Right.”
She offered me a cigarette and I shook my head, no.
“Of course,” she said. “I forgot.”
Eventually she placed her own hand over mine.
“No one deserves such a thing,” she said. And I didn’t know whether she meant me, or Henry, but either way I said, thank you.
• • •
We sat on the cement bench for a long while. At one point she stood and took her sweater from beneath her to wrap around my shoulders. “You’re shaking,” she said.
“Am I?”
“You probably need to rest. The whole thing is shocking, really. We were all shocked.”
“Yes,” I said.
She helped me up. I carried my handbag, The Gardens of Kyoto and the razors I had brought for Henry now tucked inside. We walked along the overgrown path toward the parking lot, passing under a trellis made of stripped branches, heavy now with budding wisteria.
“This must have been a beautiful garden,” I said. I wanted to say something.
“Yes,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a gardener, we heard, but no one ever comes around.”
I would like to tell you what else I remember, but that’s the most of it, and the rest makes me too sad to recall. Julia walked me to the parking lot, closed the door of my rented Oldsmobile, and leaned into the window. “Are you sure you don’t want me to telephone somebody? I could call someone. Or I could drive you where you need to go.”
“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m fine.”
“Yes,” she said. “I imagine you’ve had some time to get used to it.”
“A bit,” I said.
“I’m glad Tilsie finally found you. It didn’t seem right to bury him without his fiancé. We understood your reluctance to attend, of course. Some things can’t be faced.”
“No,” I said. I hesitated a moment. “Tilsie said it was a lovely service.”
“Thanks to your letters.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Tilsie didn’t tell you?”
“Of course,” I said. “I asked him to—”
“That’s what Tilsie said,” she said. “They were beau
tiful, Daphne.”
I sat behind the wheel and Julia leaned in. “You know, Henry told me the story. That time you came to visit. Afterward. He told me how he proposed: the restaurant you loved with those candles on the table in wine bottles, dripping down to nothing but the stubs. The whole thing. He made me promise I wouldn’t say a word and I remember I just laughed and said, who would I tell? But he said, please. A lot of men tell me their secrets. It’s part of the job.” Julia drew back and pulled her sweater more tightly around her. “You would have had a happy life, Daphne,” she said. “That’s how Henry put it. We’re going to have a happy life, he said, and even though I knew he was one of the sick ones I said I believed you would, because I did believe it.” Then she smiled in that way that women will to erase whatever terrible thing they have just said, and told me she had to get back inside. I pulled on my gloves, turned the ignition key, and drew the clutch into reverse.
“God bless you, Daphne,” I believe she said before I left. I don’t know. I know that my hands shook so hard I had to grip the wheel, and that you kicked and kicked, kicked in the way I should have kicked, should have lashed at the stupidity of them, of all of them who put him here. I should have torn my hair from its roots, howling. But I said nothing. I simply drove away.
11
Iago says, I am not what I am, and for this he is called deceitful, a villain. Odd, isn’t it? I have always found him to be the most truthful of Shakespeare’s creations. We are none of us who we are.
• • •
After I learned of your father’s death, I drove that rental car to the Sound, or to where the Sound met the shore, a park not far from the munitions factory. I sat for a time watching the seagulls, imagining what life we might have had if I had had the courage to tell him the truth of you, the truth of me, or Daphne. I called Tilsie and he met me in the park. I can still remember him hurrying over, wearing a tan raincoat, ringing his hands like some, God knows, guilty man. I told him I was Ellen, and that Daphne was for all I knew still in Europe or perhaps at Radcliffe after all. He told me how when the squad saw the article in Life magazine they held a mock ceremony for him, how someone fashioned a Silver Star out of a K-ration tin, looped it on a piece of leather bootstrap and how your father delivered an honorary address.