Sarah's Window

by Janice Graham

  "Yes?" he asked. The voice tried, unsuccessfully, to hide his impatience.

  But she did not know what to say to him, did not even know why she was there. Her shyness abruptly closed her down, the way it so often did.

  "You were looking for Dr. Lungstrom, perhaps?"

  She shook her head. For a second Dr. Sebestyen thought he had seen her somewhere before. But no, it was only that the face held such promise, such appeal.

  "Was there something you wanted?" he probed, a little more gently.

  "I'm sorry. I hope I'm not intruding."

  "Well, that's a beginning at least." His mouth softened a little, and his shoulders, once rigid and square, relaxed.

  "I just came from your lecture...." She hesitated.

  "Yes? And?"

  "I was very moved by what I saw."

  "Ah!" he answered in a booming voice, and his heavy eyebrows arched steeply. "You were moved!"

  Sarah sensed he was mocking her. "I'm sorry." She reached for her book bag. "I shouldn't have come."

  Her fair face seemed so earnest that he laughed.

  "Wait," he said, waving her back. "Tell me. How were you moved? What did you see?"

  She did not answer, but stood gripping the heavy bag with both hands, studying him warily.

  "This isn't a test." He laughed a little gruffly. "There is no right answer. But I'd like to hear what you felt. Not what you heard me say. I want to know what you felt." He motioned to the chair next to his desk. "Please, sit down."

  Sarah sat down on the edge of the chair, the bag between her feet. She looked down at her hands, and at that moment there flashed before her eyes the hands of the Demon Seated, and her nervousness faded.

  "I felt..." She hesitated, then continued very softly, speaking barely above a whisper. "I felt as if I had seen into the depths of another human being. That I knew this man in the only way he really wished to be known." She paused again, her eyes averted. "I felt like he'd done something I'd always wanted to achieve, but didn't know how to go about it." She looked up. "He found a way to voyage out of this world, didn't he?" She said this with complete assurance, and her eyes hung on his with intensity and directness.

  "I think he must have been profoundly lonely," she went on. "And hungry. I mean spiritually." She reflected again, and then said quietly and deliberately, "It's as if he were able to take up paint and canvas and without any inhibition whatsoever, without any shame, cast his soul."

  A long silence followed, and she looked down selfconsciously.

  When he finally spoke, Dr. Sebestyen's voice was low and gentle. "Are you an artist yourself?"

  "I paint a little. But just watercolors. Landscapes. My home." She was surprised that she could say these things to him. Behind his gruffness, she sensed a warmth.

  "Are you any good?"

  "I have talent," she answered matter-of-factly. She paused, then fixed him with a steady, unflinching eye. "But I'll never be great."

  "Ah, but perhaps your greatness lies in your sentience. Your feeling. It is a gift, you know, to see and to be moved. What would Vrubel and his kind do without people such as yourself? Who would see them?"

  She drew a great breath then, as one might after a confession, then rose and heaved her bag up on her shoulder.

  "Please, sit back down," he urged.

  "I can't. I have another class and I'm late already."

  "Wait, just a moment."

  He swept a large hand through his straight black hair, a gesture Sarah found strangely appealing. "If you're free this evening, there's a group of graduate students coming out to dinner. Nothing formal. The pizza place down on Massachusetts Street."

  "I'm only a sophomore."

  "That's not important. You'll be my guest. You know the place?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you come?"

  Once again she hesitated, withdrew into shyness.

  He added in a reassuring tone, "You'll sit next to me." Then he leaned forward in his chair, mocking her lightly. "And you won't have to talk. You can just listen. And watch us all."

  She smiled. "All right."

  "So you will be there."

  "Yes."

  "What is your name?"

  "Sarah Bryden."

  He rose with a jubilant, almost childish satisfaction on his face, and gave a stiff little bow, a gesture brought from the Europe of his childhood that resurfaced from time to time.

  "Good," he said, and held out his hand and she shook it. "See you tonight, Miss Bryden," and then he turned abruptly away and began to remove his jacket.

  Sarah wanted to skip, to dance, to fly all the way back to her dorm, but she contented herself with a brisk walk. Her future unfolded before her as she sped down the lane. She would learn Russian, travel to the great wide sweeps of the Russian steppes, journey into the heart of a great continent to see for herself this Vrubel's work. She would write monographs on him, bring his work to the attention of Western scholars and make him known. Not just Vrubel, but others, all kinds of great artists she would discover because she had this gift for seeing.

  It never came to pass.

  Even as she had sat in the auditorium reeling from the impact of the Demon Seated, her destiny was being redrawn by the flight of a peregrine falcon over the autumn-brown sweep of the Flint Hills.

  CHAPTER 5

  As Ruth Bryden watched her granddaughter enter the hospital room and hurry to her grandfather's bedside, she felt a strange sense of vindication surge through her. She had known so much hardship and disappointment in her life that she was comfortable with nothing else. Good fortune seemed to her a precarious and fearful thing; any second she could be plummeted down the cliff, swept away in a rushing avalanche of unforeseen disasters. "You see, Sarah, I knew something like this would happen," she might have said. "This is my lot." Her eyes, constant wells of unhappiness, said as much.

  She tapped Sarah on the shoulder and motioned her into the corridor. Her old beige purse, discolored by the sweat of her palms, dangled from her elbow, and she poked around in it until she found a Kleenex and unfolded it with trembling hands.

  "They had to cut off part of his leg," she said, and her voice rose in a high-pitched whimper. She bent her head, and her shoulders heaved with sobs. She blew her nose, and her tired, pained eyes darted this way and that as she spoke. "His jacket tore... it was an old thing... you know the one." She blotted her eyes, but the tears kept flooding down her cheeks. "But his pants were those new ones," she spluttered, "and they just... wouldn't... it just chewed him up."

  Sarah had been listening in heart-sickened silence. She reached for her grandmother and took the woman's thin shoulders and drew her close, but Ruth Bryden did not like to be touched, and Sarah met with tense resistance. Even in the heart of an embrace, Ruth kept her back stiff, her face turned away.

  "I knew this would happen one day." She took a deep breath and broke free of Sarah's embrace. "He should've quit years ago. He was getting careless. He didn't used to be that way."

  She stuffed the soiled tissue in her purse and pulled another out of the cellophane package.

  "But he was doin' it for you. So you could go to college," she spit out bitterly. She looked back at the doorway to his room.

  "I don't know how we'll manage now." She sighed wearily, shaking her head. Then she turned and darted back into the hospital room, leaving Sarah standing mutely in the hall.

  Sarah returned to the university for one day, just the time it took to pack up her books and clothes and complete the necessary paperwork to withdraw from all her classes. She consigned her textbooks to her roommate, who had offered to cart them back to the bookstore and send Sarah whatever money they fetched in resale.

  But Sarah kept her art history book. It sits on a shelf up in her room along with the few books her mother had left behind. It is a strange collection—Charles Doughty's Travels in Arabia Deserta and a much-used Greek guidebook squeezed in between volume one of Anais Nin's diaries and a trilogy of
gothic fantasies by an obscure English author. At the end sits Sarah's book on modern art with a topographical map of Kansas marking the page on a Russian painter by the name of Mikhail Vrubel.

  CHAPTER 6

  Not long after that, Sarah got herself a job waiting tables at the Cassoday Cafe, about seventeen miles down the highway from Bazaar, just across the turnpike. Unlike Bazaar, Cassoday enjoyed a bit of a cosmopolitan reputation, was indeed a crossroads of sorts in the Hills and drew an occasional cyclist from Seattle or San Francisco. Folks were quick to say it figured in somebody's guidebook of recommended bike paths through the Great American Wilderness, although who put them on the map remains a mystery.

  Joy Bell was fond of saying Cassoday got into that guidebook because of her cafe, and it was true that the Cassoday Cafe had its charms. The faded signwall over the long, sagging porch read:

  CASSODAY CAFE GOOD FOOD AND GOSSIP ESTABLISHED 1879 and it tried hard to live up to that reputation. Folks around here didn't much care that the once spiffy crimson letters had faded to rose and the paint was peeling off the clapboard walls, because talk was never in short supply, and the food, although unpredictable, was a cut above anything you could get for miles around.

  Apart from Joy's little enterprise, the town wasn't too interested in drawing strangers to its dusty streets. There was a wind-washed two-room house across the street from the cafe that fronted as a makeshift dry-goods store, and a hand-lettered open sign hung crooked in the window even though most mornings the place was dark as a grave. Kay Potts's antiques store down the boardwalk from the cafe had been around for as long as most folks could remember, although it saw only slightly more profit than the dry-goods store. There were a couple of hitching posts out front but they were there only to keep the men from ramming their trucks into the porch and bringing down the roof. Occasionally Wayne Tonkington rode over on horseback, but he always tied his horse around back on the clothesline.

  Sarah knew the faces of her clients and the clothes they wore and who had to take what pills with his meals and who was diabetic and who was on a salt-free diet. She knew this as well as she knew the nicked-up tables and how Joy liked the chairs arranged, and the exact placement of the aging photographs on the walls: Billy Moon wrestling a steer, and Ethan Brown in his yellow slicker driving cattle down a ribbon of dirt road on a misty morning, and the sign over the entrance (removed from the old bridge at Cottonwood Falls) that read: "5$ Fine for Driving on More than 50 head of Cattle or 100 Sheep at one Time," and the one in the toilet (courtesy of Ray the Antique) that read: "Don't Squat With Yer Spurs On." Of a more recent vintage, placed conveniently next to the cash register, was the gallon pickle jar with a finger-smudged index card taped to the front that read: "Sarah's College Fund." Underneath someone had scrawled "Or Whatever." The fact that Sarah emptied it every Christmas and went on a shopping spree with Joy and Clarice up in Kansas City (they spent most of the little money there was on beer in a smoky Irish pub on the Plaza) didn't stop folks from contributing from time to time. Eventually that pickle jar entered into their myths and traditions, and no one really gave a darn if Sarah and Joy and Clarice (mostly Clarice) drank her college fund away every year.

  CHAPTER 7

  The people of Chase County generally take their pleasures in things close to the land. They time their festivities according to the cycle of natural things, and their gatherings are mostly of the intimate and familial sort. So when Clarice Blackshere decided to give an open house in honor of her daughter, Susan, and son-in-law, and even went to the trouble of mailing out invitations to friends and family and old schoolmates of Susan's— some of whom resided as far away as Wichita and Topeka—the event began to take on a certain importance about town.

  Of course, part of the draw was the old prairie mansion itself. Many of the guests who came that day had lived their entire lives in the county and never set foot in the historic Blackshere house. It was built of blocks quarried from Chase limestone, the same honey-colored stone that had been used to build bridges and churches and capitol buildings all across the country. Great stone columns rose in simple symmetry supporting wide, airy porches on the first and second floors. You knew by looking at it that the old house was proud of itself, of its oiled cherry moldings and leaded glass door and red-tiled roof. There was a porte-cochere where horse-driven buggies had once drawn up to be handled by barefoot boys, and young women in long rustling skirts had descended into the dust and mud, grabbing their bonnets back from the wind, trying to make believe they did not really live in this place that most people just passed on by.

  Clarice put her heart into the little party that afternoon, took particular care with the buffet (catered by Joy) and had an extravagant centerpiece of creamy orchids laced with red roses delivered all the way from Emporia in the snow. The old prairie mansion looked especially festive that cold January afternoon with huge logs blazing in the native-stone fireplaces, fresh pine garlands cascading over the doorways, and orange- and clove-scented candles flickering in every room.

  Folks started pouring in at three p.m. sharp. Ladies with rouged cheeks gawked as they shed their coats and patted down their hair, and men with calloused, work-hewn hands greeted their friends and neighbors with self-conscious laughter at the sight of one another in sports jackets and ties that had long ago fallen out of style. They felt as though they were glimpsing a trace of their county's history—peeking like voyeurs into the proud past of the Hills' first cattle baron, and there was a touch of stiffness and perhaps a little make-believe in their steps and their manner as they plucked Joy's buffalo wings from a platter and gazed up curiously at the 1860s portrait of Jacob Blackshere, Sr., with his foot-long beard and seer's eyes.

  Susan herself, a large woman, tall and heavy-boned with a delicately pretty face, welcomed the arrivals, taking their coats. Clarice stood at Susan's elbow, a little nervous, her eyes moist with pride. The baby, poor thing, had caught a cold and was running a fever, she explained, and had to be kept upstairs with a baby-sitter. John, they added apologetically, had driven up to KU's research library that morning and was expected any minute now.

  The afternoon slipped by, and they finished off every last one of Joy's buffalo wings and her crab salad and jalapeño dip, and at five o'clock, when John had still not appeared, the crowd started to thin. Folks dug their coats out of the pile in the back bedroom and shrugged them on with furtive glances to one another, and thanked Susan—her mouth strung in a tight smile—for the invitation. (By that time Clarice had broken down in tears and Joy was sitting with her in the kitchen with a box of Kleenex on her knees, trying to console her but mostly making sure she stayed out of the gin.) The departing guests hunkered down against the cold blasts of wind and hurried to their cars and pickups to turn on their heaters and speculate as to what the hell had happened to John Wilde that had kept him away from a party planned in his honor, a party folks had driven long distances to attend.

  Those who remained, however, changed the tone of that open house as if the old grandfather clock in the hallway had just struck the witching hour. Mostly it was a small crowd of friends close to Clarice and Joy who hung on, and when Billy Moon set down his glass and looked around the old parlor and said what a perfect dance floor it could be, Joy took the hint and dashed out to her pickup for her Garth Brooks tapes. Susan wished in secret they would all just go home, but she stood back while they shoved the chairs into the corners and the buffet table to one side and rolled up the carpet to bare the old hardwood floor; then everybody fell into a line dance. Wayne Tonkington emptied the last of the rum into the eggnog, and by five-thirty nobody gave so much as a passing thought to John Wilde.

  After a while, somebody slipped in some Jimmy Dorsey tunes, and Wayne and his lady-friend coupled off and others followed suit, and without even bothering to ask, Billy caught Joy by the hand and spun her into his arms. He held her bundled tightly to his chest, grinning behind his dark mustache as he whirled her around the room with his hand press
ed firmly to the small of her back. Sarah was surprised to feel a slight prick of jealousy as they swept by in front of her and Joy flashed a rapturous smile her way.

  The room was filled with music and chatter and laughter, and Sarah looked around for her grandfather. Ruth had taken the car home earlier, but Jack had wanted to stay to watch the dancing. She spied him seated on the edge of a folding chair in a corner clutching a paper cup of eggnog. One of his favorite songs was playing, and he was smiling wistfully, his foot tapping out the rhythm on the wood floor. He swayed a little—whether from the eggnog or the music, Sarah wasn't quite sure.

  There was a lull, and then strings and a French horn swelled, promising a slow dance. Billy appeared behind Sarah and swept her into his arms.

  "At last," he whispered with his lips touching her ear.

  "You could have had me earlier."

  "I like to keep the best until last."

  Sarah could still remember the first day she laid eyes on Billy Moon. She had been a senior and he all of thirty, and it was his first year teaching history at Chase County High. Sarah sat at the back of the classroom and doodled in her notebook, and you would have sworn she never once lifted her eyes, but she knew every move he made and could have told you how many times he walked up and down each row, and how many times he came within one foot of her and then turned and walked back to the front. She could have described with astonishing accuracy the colors of his plaid shirt or where he notched his belt, the scar on his hand from a bad rope burn and the Band-Aid on his thumb. She knew from the tiny white creases at the outer edges of his eyes that he had spent his summer in the sun—undoubtedly roping steers—and she knew she was hopelessly in love with him. She also knew he was a happily married man with two young kids and that every other girl at Chase County High was equally besotted.