Seven Letters

by J. P. Monninger

  “Thank you for the metaphor, Robert.”

  He spread his hands to say I was welcome. In many ways, he was a perfect parody of a lawyer. I liked him. I felt I should ask more questions, but I didn’t know what was left to discover.

  “This will all take some time to transfer,” he went on. “Documents to file and that sort of thing. Are you in need of any money at the moment?”

  “Not in a significant way.”

  “Our firm could advance you something against your future holdings. Keep that in mind. We have all of your information. We’ll be in touch as soon as we have more to report. For the time being, you have a true picture of what was contained in his portfolio. I hope you’re satisfied. It’s not a curse, you know, to receive a bequeathal. Enjoy it. I’m sure that was Mr. Ferriter’s intention.”

  “Yes, thank you. I’ll do my best. Cans on a shelf. I will remember that.”

  I stood. Robert stood. He was at least six-three, I imagined. A button of his suit jacket caught on the edge of the table and clicked when he stood to full height. He smiled.

  “Pleasure meeting you,” he said, sliding the packet of information he had compiled across the table to me. “The keys to the cottage are inside the packet. If there is anything else we can do, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  We shook hands. As I left, nodding and smiling at the lawyers and assistants who nodded and smiled at me, the grandfather clock chimed four o’clock. I counted each chime. And when I stepped back into the Dublin street-life, the sound of the chiming would not leave my head.

  31

  I brought Gottfried to the cottage with me. He rode in the front seat of my rental. Seamus had insisted on driving me, or at least insisted on having Johnny drive me, but I answered back with equal force that I needed to do this on my own. Nora hauled him in and told him to let me do what I needed to do. In compromise, he told me I should take Gottfried to keep me company. I was happy to do that. I felt eager to get away, to be alone with my thoughts for a moment, and without much more argument they let me go.

  I remembered the drive and the directions easily. I hardly had to concentrate. When I steered down the grass path that led to the shelf of rock overlooking the sea—our shelf, where we had once lived as husband and wife—I realized at once that things had changed. For one thing, the drive was no longer dirt alone; Ozzie, or someone, had put in a proper gravel driveway so that mud and sliding grass would no longer be an issue. It was the first of a thousand improvements, I noted, because as soon as I had gone another twenty yards or so, I spotted the cottage.

  This was how Ozzie had dreamed of the cottage, I realized. This was how he had pictured it in his mind all those years before. His hands had finally brought it to life, etching its outline against the pale evening horizon, the sea a flowing skirt that spread below and spoke to the white cottage that we had planned to share.

  I began to cry. No weeping, no shouts of anguish. Instead, it felt as if my insides had given up something valuable and irreplaceable; I had misjudged him. I knew that simple fact with every inch the car covered. The promise of the cottage had at last been fully realized. It was a dream cottage, whitewashed with rounded windows, and a roof made of rushes and felt. Clean lines. Humble shapes and colors. A home on a hill overlooking Dingle Bay and the Celtic Sea.

  “He built this,” I whispered to Gottfried. “I think he built it for us.”

  I put my face against Gottfried’s soft head and hugged him. But Gottfried moved impatiently. He wanted to go find Ozzie. I swung open his door and he jumped out. I followed him. The scent of the sea moved everywhere. Gulls flew near the path down to the beach and the wind threw them back to land until they cut against it and darted seaward.

  I had seen no photos of the cottage transformation. Ozzie had remained silent and distant. I had sent him a Christmas card after our second year apart, wishing him well, sending good thoughts to Nora and Seamus and Gottfried, but the card came back unopened. He had disappeared from my life as cleanly as a surgical cut. And what had I done about it? I had assumed it was for the good. A grown-up decision. He had been a passion, certainly, but was he the man for me in the long run?

  Now I wanted to spit at myself. I reviled myself. I hated how I had boxed him in, made him into one thing so that I could persuade myself that I knew best.

  “It’s beautiful,” I whispered to Gottfried, but he was already sniffing down by the path, hoping, I supposed, that Ozzie would come striding up, his hair wet, his skin tasting of the cold, cold sea.

  It was beautiful. It was elegant and charming, a re-creation of an earlier time. I walked slowly toward it in the late light and felt myself coming home. Every inch, every angle of the building, spoke something about Ozzie. I pictured him here, working, working, working, slowly shaping this cottage out of the surrounding rocks and sod. I had doubted him. Meanwhile, he had been sitting on a small fortune. He could have hired builders, he could have had the building completed in a brief season, but that was not his intent. He wanted to build something with his hands. I knew now that it had been part of his reclaiming the goodness of life. Balance the cottage against an IED blowing children’s limbs into the trees on a bare Afghanistan plain. Find in the curve of the rounded windows the symmetry and calm the war had taken from him.

  I opened the door with a key from the packet given to me by Robert Smith. The door opened on easy hinges. I stepped through and saw the perfection of the interior. Another woman may not have found it to her taste, but its simplicity, its clean, unobstructed lines fit me in every molecule. One of the things I had loved about the Blasket Island stories was the description of the cottages. Like this one, they had been clean and spare, with bare floors, sometimes dirt floors, and a bright, useful fireplace against the back wall. Ozzie had carried out that motif to perfection inside the house. Five stick-back chairs ranged around a circular oak table. The chairs, I imagined, could be rearranged so one might sit by the fire. It was a cottage that contained incredible stillness, a stillness that could be interrupted by the gladness of the occupants. The sea outside waited and grabbed color from the tall grasses that ran down the hillside toward it.

  I had let this all go. I had let Ozzie go.

  I called Gottfried inside and ran a pan of water for him. Ozzie had left firewood beside the hearth. I found paper and crumpled it together and lit a fire. I squatted beside it, watching the flames climb. A foolish girl had once demanded perfection from her mate, had not been strong enough to stand beside him despite his goodness, his love of life, his appetite for living. It pained me to think of it; it pained me to picture her, so self-righteous, so certain of all that she knew. I added wood to the fire, and then, when I was certain it had caught, I pulled two pillows from off the bed and set them beside the hearth and spent a long time watching the flame push back the gathering darkness outside. Gottfried came and settled next to me. I put my arm over his shoulder. I could no longer cry.

  When I woke, I was hungry and thirsty and disoriented. Moonlight fell through the windows. I did not turn on a light. Instead I fed the fire more wood and stepped outside to give Gottfried a moment. As I waited for him, a voice came up out of a place in my heart. It filled me until I couldn’t contain it. At first it felt absurd, but then it gathered force and clawed its way through me, and it carried with it the force of the women in the Blaskets who keened for their men lost at sea, for their children who died in difficult births, for the old whose heads became as light and soft as the pillows that held them in their final beds. I cried out in a long, painful voice, in a voice that was only part mine, and I watched the clouds move over the moon and I heard the sea that listened and took my sound into its waves.

  SIXTH LETTER

  Théid mé suas ar an cnoc is airde

  Féach an bhfeic mé fear a’ bháta.

  An dtig tú anocht, nó an dtig tú amárach?

  (I went up to the highest hill

  To see if I could see the boatman.

  Will you
come tonight, or will you come tomorrow?)

  32

  I found his note by chance. I had spent a week alone in the cottage with no company except Gottfried. I had done little except sleep and make fires and take long walks. I ate without appetite. I read Yeats, as we used to read him together. Twice Seamus called, and once Nora, and I spoke with them calmly and rationally, although I did not feel that way. On the third day, Lawrence called, but I did not have the heart to answer. He left a warm message, wishing me well, hoping things worked out as best they could, and then he spent a few minutes filling me in on his appearance on Meet the Press. It had gone better than he imagined, better than he could have hoped, and his phone had lit up messages and requests for speaking engagements. It was amazing, he said, what an impact a single television program could have …

  I deleted the message before he finished leaving it.

  I talked to my dean, too, and my department chair. I arranged to shift the focus of my class to an online structure. I knew, as I spoke to them, that they understood I was about to do a terrible job finishing my classes. I couldn’t help it. I went several times to a B&B and paid a flat twenty-euro fee to tie into the internet. But I couldn’t lather up any enthusiasm for the coursework, and the students detected my state of mind. My courses limped to an uneasy pause.

  I searched the cottage, too, for glimpses into Ozzie’s life there. He did not leave much. He had a table where he kept bills and odds and ends, a bookcase with perhaps two hundred volumes of every sort, and an armoire with some of his clothes. I wore two of his flannels as nightshirts; the second one, the one I did not wear, I kept folded under the pillow where his head had laid, so that I could have more of his scent.

  I spent a day and a half researching everything I could about the loss of the Ferriter. I could find next to nothing; it had been one of many losses in that horrible migration of West Africans and Syrians and Eritreans from Africa to Europe. I knew little about the migration paths, the dreadful capsizings, the tales of children living on toothpaste. I recognized some of the pictures that had gone viral: a dead Syrian child facedown in the wash along an Italian beach, a horrid photograph of an open boat’s gunwale dipping into the waves, a photo of an ancient-looking grandmother staring steadfastly into the camera, her eyes empty and exhausted.

  Without truly meaning to, I formed a plan in my mind to go to Italy. At first the idea started as a buzz in the back of my head. Slowly I realized I could do it. I could travel to Italy and see what Ozzie had seen. I could ask about him and about the Ferriter. I didn’t have any illusion that I would be Nancy Drew, a shrewd girl-detective gathering clues, but I understood I had to go. I had to see whatever I could and I needed to do it now, before his memory faded in people’s minds. As much as possible, I needed my eyes to see what his eyes had seen.

  The day before departing for Italy, I discovered he had left a message on the upward-facing surface on the bottom half of the cottage’s Dutch door—the level board where you would lean your elbows if you looked out with the top half of the door open. I had opened the door a dozen times without noticing the small message left in black script. It was composed so that it resembled the wooden grain of the door and it said, I went up to the highest hill / To see if I could see the boatman. / Will you come tonight, or will you come tomorrow?

  I put my finger against the script. I didn’t cry. But I knew he had meant the message for me. He had waited for me here. I read the script and looked out at the sea. I read it over and over until it burned a spot in my memory that scalded me.

  I nearly forgot the red rock. I had seen the rock a thousand times, but I had never turned it over to determine if Ozzie had been serious about stashing money there. I took Gottfried for a short walk and brought along a spade to pry the rock up. It was a heavy rock, about the size of a football on top but wider below, and it had settled in its place. Grass had grown around it, so I had to stand on the shovel blade to get its nose beneath the weight. Gottfried wanted to help, and I had to push him away so I wouldn’t cut his paws when plunging the blade into the soil. Using all my weight and strength, I turned the rock over. The hole beneath it was empty. If it had ever been Ozzie’s hiding place for money, it was no longer. I rolled the stone back in its place. Grass reached up to reclaim it.

  I locked the cottage. Afterward, I stood for a long time looking out at the bay. I knelt next to Gottfried and put my arm across his back. Will you come tonight, or will you come tomorrow? Everything I knew about love seemed sealed inside those words.

  * * *

  “It feels strange to talk to you via a computer like this,” I said.

  Dr. Kaufman nodded.

  “At first it is. But many of my clients prefer it. It’s better than a phone. At least we can see each other.”

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  She paused. She always paused rather than introduce a subject. It was my time, my topic. I sat on the edge of my bed in my Dublin hotel, laptop on my knees. I was flying to Rome the next day. I had said my goodbyes to Seamus and Nora. I had said my goodbyes to Gottfried. I was going to Italy without a clear plan, except that Milly, my kindest, dearest, sweetest friend, had agreed to meet me there if she could swing it. I would pay, I said. It was Italy. And I needed her. But even with her committing to meet me, I felt scattered and a little bit crazy. That was what I told Milly. That was what I told Dr. Kaufman.

  “Crazy isn’t really a useful word, though, is it?” she asked. “Probably less than politically correct. I don’t think we refer to people as crazy any longer. That’s behind us, thank goodness.”

  “I mean confused. Distraught. A thousand things.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  “I keep wondering if I am now a widow. Am I not a widow until he is officially pronounced dead?”

  “I think that is probably true. I don’t know, honestly.”

  “I keep wondering how to get the answer to a question like that. It’s extraneous to everything I’m doing, but I can’t seem to let it go. I even asked Siri, but she didn’t answer anything intelligible.”

  “Is it important to call yourself a widow?”

  “I don’t know why, but it is.”

  She didn’t say anything. I wanted to ask her to turn the screen so I could see the birds. I went on.

  “It feels as if I would have some standing in his life. Or in his death, I guess I should say.”

  “What meaning would that have for you?”

  “I don’t know. A social meaning.”

  “As in the approval of society?”

  “I know it sounds ridiculous. It’s probably just a way to feel I am still attached to him.”

  She stared at me. She didn’t say anything.

  “He left everything to me.”

  “You’ve told me. How does that make you feel?”

  “Horrible. Honored. Angry. Sometimes I feel it wasn’t fair of him to leave me everything. The rest of my life, I will have a part of him with me. I’ll never be done with him.”

  “Do you want to be done? A moment ago, you wanted to determine if you were his widow.”

  “I don’t know what I want. I miss him. I wonder if I didn’t make a terrible mistake in leaving him.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. She looked placidly into the screen of her computer.

  “That expression, You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone? It’s from a song.”

  “They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot,” Dr. Kaufman said, deadpan. It was uncanny to see her mouth a pop-song lyric. I waited for her to smile, but she didn’t.

  “Yes, that’s it. That’s what I wonder. I regret the way our marriage ended. I regret that I didn’t see him clearly.”

  “It’s always easy to second-guess from a distance. You acted on the information you had at the time.”

  “Did I? I had this remarkable man in my life, my husband, and I ran away at the first glimpse of unpleasantness. Of incompatibility. I had some sort of tidy
idea of the way my life should go, and I bent everything to fit it. That’s what pains me. I feel like I was a spoiled little girl who failed to see what was in front of me. I had a passionate love and traded it for a pair of slipper socks.”

  She waited. I felt teary and dizzy. I tried to remember when I had last eaten. I found it hard to keep track of such things. Milly would help me with that. She would take me under her wing.

  Will you come tonight? Or will you come tomorrow?

  “Do you know Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil?” she asked after a few moments. “If you haven’t read it, you should.”

  “Why? What’s it about?”

  “It’s a story very much like yours. A young woman who is frivolous and adulterous is carried away by her husband to a remote region in China. She is bored and listless and unhappy with her station. She yearns for her former life in society. Her husband is not the equal of the man with whom she carried on an affair. Her husband lacks the panache of her former lover. A plague comes and it attacks a local school—well, the whole area, really. Out of boredom she has gone to work in the mission school and there she begins to hear a different account of her husband than the one she has imagined on her own. To the nuns and health workers, her husband is nearly divine. He is a good man. The traits she has difficulty accepting in him are the traits that make him a tireless worker on behalf of the poorest factions of society. In time, she realizes she has fallen in love with her husband now that she sees him truly.”

  “What happens?”