The Hawkman

by Jane Rosenberg LaForge

  “Is she all right?” Lady Margaret asked, turning in her seat to face Mr. Sheehan directly. He raised his chin and blinked slowly, as if to reassure Lady Margaret, and then he gripped the mound of fingers Miss Williams had created on her own lap. They sat so close together that Mr. Sheehan’s face was within a wisp of pressing against Miss Williams’s ear, as if he were finally to break his silence, if only to her. Lady Margaret turned away, freshly embarrassed. When she looked back on them again, once Christopher had started up the car, and they were on their way, she saw that Miss Williams had closed her eyes, not because she was fading but as if to concentrate on the scent of Mr. Sheehan.

  Lady Margaret wished her husband could have seen the two. They were odd and ill-suited for Bridgetonne; unable to care for themselves, or for each other, they were ill-suited for any place in this age, Lady Margaret mused. The world had not necessarily changed since the war; people were still cruel, and careless, and hateful of what wasn’t theirs. Except now, there were so many ways to hide that neglect; new charities, campaigns, and aid societies sprung up daily, in which one could conceal his false concern for the unfortunate. Had Lord Thorton listened to the dirge of Miss Williams’s breathing and Mr. Sheehan’s devotion to easing it, he might have seen that there was no need to hide from his responsibilities, and the opportunities he had missed to truly display them.

  At the registry office, the clerks were polite enough to assume that Lady Margaret was the bride, given the bouquet she was carrying. They were sensible enough to offer Miss Williams a chair as they fumbled about their books and files. But that was where their manners, or perhaps their confidence, ended. Through Mr. Sheehan’s silence, they struggled. He would only nod at the questions put to him. Christopher had brought the paper on which Mr. Sheehan had named his battalion, but the clerks refused that record as unofficial. When they demanded Mr. Sheehan speak, he walked back to where Miss Williams was seated and took up her hand, as if it contained the answers. He began and ended with her, and existed only so long that she was beside him. Lady Margaret asked if she, or Miss Williams, might attest to the facts of Mr. Sheehan’s residence first, and if questions to Mr. Sheehan were still necessary, that they continue the interrogation in private. That was highly unusual, the clerks protested.

  “For the love of God,” Sir Christopher admonished, “will you not respect the urgency of their—our circumstances?”

  “We are sorry, sir,” one of the clerks offered. “But we have never dealt with such a—this—these kind of—departures from the protocol, sir.”

  “So you should feel free to make up a new protocol, then,” Sir Christopher suggested, “as these circumstances require.”

  “Wouldn’t that call for,” the clerk stumbled, “for someone’s approval?”

  “You have mine,” Christopher said. “Now get on with it.”

  “Yes. Yes, sir,” the clerk agreed. “Yes, of course.”

  They were escorted into a room where the tableau the wedding party was preparing to make might be better addressed. Or contained, Lady Margaret thought. They were close to making a spectacle, and no one wanted that, surely. The room could have doubled for a chapel, with a dais at the front and center, but there were no accommodations for a congregation, only a single bench beside the entrance. Presumably the betrothed waited here for their betrothals. The room was dark, given its low ceiling, which appeared a hasty measure to hide the decay of the original roof, or a leak, or perhaps the squirrels and birds that had likely made nests in the rafters. The room smelled close, of dust baked on radiators.

  Two clerks took over the dais with their ledgers and stamps. Christopher placed himself between either man, and watched as they apparently pointed out the unconscionable blank spaces on the couple’s application. Mr. Sheehan sat beside his bride, his arm supporting her back as it alternated between setting itself straight, and curving with exhaustion. Between the dais and the benches was too long a distance for Miss Williams to have to navigate in her condition, Lady Margaret thought, should Miss Williams and her groom be permitted to approach, swear their oaths, and seal them with their signatures.

  “I am so sorry,” Lady Margaret said to Miss Williams, as quietly as she could manage. “This was supposed to have been dealt with.”

  “Oh, it’s quite all right,” Miss Williams said. She inhaled, as if to have the strength to speak. “No one remembers the details of their weddings, or so they say.”

  “I thought it was only the groom who cannot remember his wedding day,” Lady Margaret said, and she found herself trying to avoid Mr. Sheehan’s reaction, as she feared to read his face, even in profile.

  “No. In this, the bride and groom are apt to be equally forgetful,” Miss Williams said. “It’s why people never tell stories of their own weddings, only the others they’ve attended.”

  “I thought some of that was out of kindness—for the in-laws or for the sake of the marriage.”

  “Stories should not have to be cruel,” Miss Williams said. Lady Margaret was not certain what she meant. Miss Williams had never said much about herself; Lady Margaret perhaps knew less about the bride than she knew of the man Miss Williams was marrying. And yet, in those few words, Lady Margaret wondered if she might comprehend the mission Miss Williams had set out for herself; a mission she seemed on the verge of accomplishing.

  “I am sorry for that story my husband tried to tell,” Lady Margaret said. “That Emily Hobhouse—”

  “Please,” Miss Williams replied, as if the conversation had turned fatiguing. “There is no need.”

  “That business about South Africa, the refugee camps—Arthur takes that failure so personally.” Lady Margaret could not stop herself. “Each time he sees or hears of a lost soul in our midst, he thinks of South Africa . . . well, you can imagine.”

  “No,” Miss Williams said. “War is not for women to imagine. It is for us to weather its echoes and wrestle them into silence in our homes.”

  “And so we are engaged, with each generation,” Lady Margaret assented.

  “Then when we succeed, it is to the detriment of the next generation,” Miss Williams said. “Don’t you think?”

  Again Lady Margaret was puzzled at Miss Williams’s remark, for now she could not even be sure which topic—the failings of her husband, or of all men in general—they had been addressing. In pausing to consider how they had arrived at this conclusion, she could see how arduous it was for Miss Williams to carry on; perhaps it was the simple act of speaking, and not their conversation in particular, that the woman now found to be so tedious. So Lady Margaret nodded, gravely, as the subject seemed to demand such a response. Small beads of sweat, like clusters of seeds gingerly deposited, had arisen on Miss Williams’s forehead. In his pocket Mr. Sheehan found the monogrammed handkerchief Miss Williams had given him, and carefully blotted those beads out. He lifted her hair away from her neck, and passed the handkerchief over the moisture there. Lady Margaret felt the tremble that suddenly gripped Miss Williams from her shoulders to her toes.

  “I am so sorry for all this trouble,” Miss Williams said.

  “Oh, but it is an honor, really,” Lady Margaret said, and she pushed the bouquet into Miss Williams’s hands, so she might be reminded of something fresh and vital.

  Lady Margaret heard a door open and shut somewhere behind her.

  “We’re ready for you now,” Christopher said; he stood ready to lift the bride from the bench as Mr. Sheehan steadied her from the side. At the dais, one of the clerks was pacing, his concentration resolutely on his feet, it seemed. He could not lift his eyes to acknowledge them. He had donned a jacket, at least, and when he refrained from pacing, he patted down his hair on the sides and crown of his head.

  “What did you do?” Lady Margaret whispered to her son.

  “Nothing that Father cannot afford,” Christopher said, if only an ounce too smugly.

  B
ut he deserved to be smug, Lady Margaret reasoned, and they marched, the four of them in a row, Lady Margaret on Miss Williams’s arm, and her son on Mr. Sheehan’s. They marched toward the clerk and the pair of candles he had lit. The flames competed with the electric lights above. They should have been in a church, with a high ceiling, stained glass, and darkness for candlelight to reach through. There should have been the scent of roses and the cold feel of new gold in the palm of the best man, Lady Margaret thought. She could remember how the ring first felt on her own finger, and she had assumed it would be the same for everyone. Now she did not know if Mr. Sheehan even had a ring for Miss Williams, or if Christopher might be carrying it. It was one detail she had allowed to escape her notice, for how impolitic would it have been to ask after something so expensive?

  In a church, Lady Margaret thought, there would have been music and the proper awe. It was how she imagined her own wedding to Lord Thorton, for Miss Williams was right; not even a bride remembers her wedding, she only recreates it from all the plans she made before that day. As she entered the church for her own wedding, Lady Margaret was struck by the pearlish haze over the congregation, the shadow that was Lord Thorton in his morning jacket at the altar, and the clouds that buffeted the shortest walk of her life, the last obstacle out of her childhood. She had always been certain of what she saw at that moment, even if it was only tulle and blurs of the people she would soon no longer have time to know. Now that all seemed helplessly artificial when compared to the bright relief of this ceremony. It was clear, so clear, under the electricity and beside the noise of registry business, which could overpower any words Mr. Sheehan might dare to utter.

  The clerk read from a piece of paper, an improvised service possibly—obviously, judging by the speed at which he read it. Indeed, he read so quickly that Lady Margaret forgot to look at her son as Miss Williams pledged her troth in her meager voice. The clerk slowed his speech when it came to Mr. Sheehan’s portion of the service; the paper suddenly waved and sputtered in his hands, as though it refused to be read. The clerk struggled with familiar syllables. And then Mr. Sheehan withdrew something small from his pocket, a ring that stayed on Miss Williams finger only because she made a fist of her hand. Otherwise it would have disappeared: into her palm or onto the floor, where the thin band and slight stones might not have made enough of a sound for anyone to trace it. Miss Williams lifted her fist for Mr. Sheehan to see that the ring had reached its proper destination, and as the clerk read the words Mr. Sheehan was meant to repeat, Mr. Sheehan kissed his bride’s hand, unbidden. And then he kissed her lips, before the clerk could sanction it, and they embraced. They did not release each other until Mr. Sheehan had finished whispering in his bride’s ear. “I will, I will, I will,” is how Lady Margaret thought she heard it, although she knew the truth of it rested solely in the bride’s imagination.

  Sixteen

  As if to demonstrate that she had not been done in by the morning’s events, the new Mrs. Sheehan would not allow her husband to carry her across the threshold. This was a disappointment to Lady Margaret, who had hoped to maintain at least this small tradition after the wedding. She had originally planned a luncheon party in honor of the bride and groom with champagne, garlands, and tea cakes rather than an unnecessary, towering confection that would feed far more than could be gathered for the event. But as the days piled on, Lady Margaret came to realize that any such arrangements would dangerously weaken the bride, whom she had come to admire for the manners she maintained in spite of her condition.

  “It is time to leave, Christopher,” Lady Margaret said, and she put out her hand for her son to take, so she might be helped into the automobile.

  “Yes,” Christopher said. “Yes.” Yet he did not immediately respond to his mother’s touch, and kept his glance on the door of the cottage, now shut.

  “Please,” Lady Margaret said, and she grasped his shoulder. With that Christopher turned to see his mother smiling at him. It was neither a smile of joy nor awe, as she regularly gave him when he was a boy or even a young man, before the war. Now her mouth quivered, her eyes switched about, as if his mother was struggling to stave off the emotions that he too was confronting. He did not care to name them, with their contradictions and impolitic nature. But he also saw pride in his mother’s face, in the dauntlessness of her expression, and he dipped his head and neck away, as that honor was so unexpected.

  “You’ve done all that you could,” Lady Margaret said. “Come on, then.”

  Sheehan felt a difference in the cottage before he could hear it: there was relief in its joints and beams and in the paint and floorboards. No more sounds of dithering, of footsteps and washcloths, soles and palms carrying out errands and bringing messages. The little house had exhaled, its organs gaining a reprieve. This was an unconfined silence, one that was ready for nature to fill. He felt himself leaving a mark on it as he drew the breath he needed, suddenly, to lift his bride and carry her into the heart of their new marriage. He thought of the swans she had spoken of as she responded, resting her head into the nape of his neck. She had lost so much of herself to the sickness. She did not seem real this way, so much less substantial in bulk and weight. But her breath was at his skin, pattering and faint.

  He thought of taking her into the nursery, to the separate beds. But her pulse flourished against him, as though she might turn to gusting wind and water, and she had wrapped her arms around his neck to secure her position. He slowly took to the stairs and heard nothing of the complaints the wood had made on those nights he paced and cowered. She warmed, it seemed to him, as he made his ascent, but in more than mere temperature. Her hair against his neck was thinner and softer, the skin of her face smoother, infinite in its responsive qualities. She may have been crying, with the wetness he sensed on his cheek. She may have been beaming a smile that chased away nightfall, the heat of her forehead against his ear and brow.

  In the bedroom, the darkness of the afternoon was making its first foray. The sun must have been slowed behind the trees at the college. He thought she was hushing him as he set her down on the bed, but it was herself she was hushing, as if her body was ceramic—a temporary arrangement of sand, glass, and paint. She sighed but said nothing, except to take up one of his hands.

  The room had not changed since before her illness, though now it felt immense. How far from her he stood, how distant from her hair, eyes, her face. “Come, come,” she said, and she pulled at him, a slight gesture, and yet her strength at that moment was considerable, unavoidable. He sat beside her obediently.

  “I will keep my eyes open, so you know I have not left,” she said.

  He put a finger to her lips so that she would not expend more than she had in sound and words, in breath and endurance—in everything she was and had been to him. He could see it receding in her, as if it were being drawn deeper into her body, somewhere inaccessible. Still, her neck and face remained flush as she looked at him. On the exposed skin of her arms and legs, she was pale, again, and shivered openly. They had agreed that morning to embark on a lifetime together, but in the glances they now shared, they realized that they had perhaps hours, or mere minutes, to accomplish it.

  “I know,” she whispered, and she hushed him this time, her hand upon his mouth. “Let me show you where to go,” she said, and took his face into her palms. “Look. Into my eyes. First, my eyes,” she directed him, and he could see the red rimming the irises within her eyes, as if her heart was beating just behind them. “See, see,” she whispered as her eyes changed again, the redness seeping into the intricacies of the irises’ coloration.

  “Watch,” she said, and her eyes began to lose all differentiation. It was as if she were bleeding there, where her heart had just been; Sheehan drew a breath as if in alarm and raised his hands as if to cover her eyes, to staunch the bleeding. But she shook her head, hushed him again, and held his hands tight, so he could not resort to hiding her, or hiding behi
nd his hands.

  “Just watch,” she commanded, and the blood found its way into more of her sight, into the whites of her eyes, but he could see this was not bleeding, not as he had known it. There was nothing to be caught falling into mud; nothing to be swabbed away. There was no wound, only a richness, as her eyes swept over his face. Her eyes had enlarged, amplified themselves, as if to draw more heavily on the light and his visage.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right.”

  She was breathing deeply, confidently, with more reserve than he had seen in weeks. Her lungs had been the source of her problems, the doctors had postulated. Sheehan imagined that what had sickened her lungs these weeks was moving to a new region—her eyes, her mind behind them—and this was what he was witnessing. Her lungs were free now, and she savored each draught she took: his wife, his love, suddenly repaired and infused with a different force, alluring but familiar.

  “I tried to tell you,” she said; her words mere vapors, he thought, as she released them into his ears. “But now, my hands,” she said. “Look at my hands.”

  The long tendons from finger to wrist were suddenly so pronounced, as if to suggest crow’s feet, the tracks they leave in wet soil after a night of scavenging. He ran his fingertips over the seemingly naked musculature of her hands, their skin-like shell, pale and endangered. “I tried—” she began, but he embraced her, whether to force the words out or prevent them from escaping, he could not say.

  Against his palm, the back of her head was hot, but her hair was silken, like rain that divides the times of the day in Ireland. He had forgotten that kind of rain—from before the war—the softness that melded into skin, that kept his hands supple and ready for playing.

  “My hair,” she whispered. “You feel my hair now.”