Second Sight

by David Williams

  Finally he stooped, scooped up the handles of the buckets, and crossed the lot back to the gate. She waited, tremulous, as he latched the gate behind him.

  “So it’s Mrs. Logan,” he said. “And that’s why you always chose to walk back to town.”

  “Yes,” she said, falling in step beside him, anxious, afraid, as he started back through the chicken yard. He did not look at her. She had the strange feeling that if she didn’t say something now everything would be lost, but she had no idea what to say.

  He crossed to the main entrance of the barn and threw open the big door. Inside, he flung the buckets into a corner, seized a pitchfork embedded in a mound of hay that had been thrown down from the loft, and began forking hay through the stanchions along the far wall like a man working off frustration. He still would not look at her.

  “David,” she said, “please don’t be angry with me.”

  He stopped then and thrust the fork straight down into the hay, still not turning around. She wanted to go to him, to touch that terribly stiff, rejecting back, but fear held her in place. Something rustled in the rafters overhead—a mouse scurrying between the joists of the loft floor, stopping, scurrying on. Behind her, the door creaked slowly shut, closing the room in a dim mysterious light.

  Finally he said, “Why do you come here? Why did you let me believe you weren’t married?”

  Was that an invitation to say what she really felt? She had no idea what he must think. Because of her unusual behavior in coming here she must seem approachable, but everything else about her must indicate she was not the kind of woman, married as she was, who would be receptive to advances from another man.

  “I—I was afraid you would send me away,” she said.

  He turned then. “Can you guess what it does to me to see you in that dress, looking so much like Pamela?”

  She felt faint under the impact of his eyes. She was ashamed not to have realized how the dress might affect him, but she couldn’t be wrong about how he felt, this couldn’t all be only because she looked like Pamela. There was more there than anger; the pain in his eyes was far too intimately connected to what she knew showed in her own: the need, and the yearning, to express the powerful uprush of feeling that lay just behind her thoughts.

  “Do you know what it does to me when you look at me like that?” he said. “When I see what I see in your eyes?”

  “It is in your eyes, too,” she said, and knew that she had ripped away a barrier, that they were more intimate now than they had been a moment before.

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s true. It’s more than I said. It’s not just because you wear Pamela’s dress. It’s not just because you look like her.”

  “I know.”

  “God forgive me, you’ve made me forget her.” Slowly, he advanced across the room until he was only touching distance away. “There is something magical about you. I have known you less than a week. I know hardly anything about you. But from the first, I’ve felt it between us. It’s as if I’ve known you for years, as if I’ve loved you for years.”

  The word was out, the word she had so wanted to hear him say. “Yes,” she said, “it’s the same for me.”

  She felt him drawing her to him, felt the whole length of her body pressing up against his. “Yes, David,” she said, “this was meant to happen,” and let herself be drawn up into the darkness of his kiss.

  • • •

  Once, before she was married, she had gotten drunk, alone, at night, on a low cliff over a moonlit sea, along the rocky coast of Maine. It was during the time she had become so disillusioned with life in the city, and when time for her vacation came, she had wanted only to be alone, some place where she might hide away from the world, in an unspoiled landscape touched only by those sights and sounds celebrating the blessedly non-human elements of the earth. She had rented an isolated cabin close to the sea and spent two weeks in total solitude, reading, listening to Beethoven and Brahms and Sibelius on the stereo she had brought with her, feeling herself slowly restored by the unearthly quiet and the sense outside of the desolate coastline and the sea and ships moving toward distant destinations. One day toward the end of her stay, there was a storm, one of those unexpected, violent summer storms, bringing with it a churning black and yellow sky, abrupt and shifting winds, and relentless rain. That night she curled up in her chair in the cabin, reading Robert Penn Warren’s World Enough and Time, listening to the wind whistle and subside, surge and swirl through the trees outside. She was still drinking the wine she had opened for dinner, and she was not very far into the novel before she began to feel within herself the flicker of that profound emotion, the rising of the self to meet the beauty of the human soul in prose. The long, flowing sentences which seemed to rise right out of the heart, the celebration of the mysteries of humankind—it was the awareness of these things which she had found dying in herself in the city and which she had felt regenerating here in this quiet by the sea; and by eleven o’clock that night the storm and the book and the wine had all combined to lift her into a soaring high like none she had ever felt before. The wind continued to beat at the cabin—an occasional lunge rocking the windows in their frames—but the pelting of the rain against the panes had stopped when she put on her coat and boots to go out and look at the sea. The overcast had broken up enough to let the moon show through, turning the edges of the clouds a greenish yellow, and when she came out onto the edge of the bluff she saw the huge black mass of the sea heaving and smashing in explosions of white against the rocks below; and in her half-drunken exhilaration she had sensed the rocking of the waves against the lip of the earth communicated into her body in the only experience she knew that could compare with this: feeling him move against her, in her, like those waves rising and falling and smashing against the rocks protecting the shore. She felt herself rise and ebb, rise and ebb, battering and battering against the barrier until, his voice constrained in an agony of tenderness, she heard him say, “Jennie,” and the sound of her own name coming from him just at that moment carried her up and atop the barrier, and with a small high cry she was over and beyond, into that beauty and serenity on the other side.

  • • •

  It seemed hours before she was completely aware of herself again. She was lying on her back in the hay, the dress twisted up about her hips. David lay beside her, eyes closed, one hand tangled in her hair. It was very quiet. Thin slices of sunlight angled through the cracks in the walls; a rope looped down from a pulley suspended from one of the rafters. Something rustled overhead—a swallow fluttering around its mud-daubed nest. She watched it disappear into the opening. A moment later it emerged again and fluttered across the silent, cathedral-like space beneath the rafters to light on the sill of a small window near the roof. It poised there for an instant, silhouetted against the blue sky; then it flicked away and was gone.

  16

  * * *

  LATER, SHE WOKE on the bed in his attic studio, where they had retreated from the barn. She lay on her side, fully clothed, feeling the warmth of his chest against her back, the stir of his slow breathing in her hair, the weight of his arm, which lay across her so that his hand rested just beneath her breasts. It was warm in the room. The sun had gone down; beyond the skylight stretched the pale early evening sky. She stirred, turned in the embrace of his arm. He was still asleep. She was filled with a sense of wonder at what had happened, the sense that this was right, that she was at last where she belonged. She leaned down to kiss him softly. Then she disengaged from him as gently as she could and sat up on the edge of the bed.

  How many times she had sat in this room in her own time, wondering what it looked like in his. The walls were painted a brilliant white; the floor was bare red-brown wood. With a small thrill, she saw the lidded box in which, in her own time, she had found the sketches. Near a worktable covered with brushes and tubes of paint stood an empty easel. There was a small pot-bellied stove, its length of pipe a stark black against the white wall. He
obviously lived—slept—here, not, as she had thought, in the second-floor bedroom. That room, he had said earlier, he had entered only once since the day of Pamela’s death. The memory of “waking” in that room—the strange bed, the ticking of the pendulum clock—separated from her now only by this thin floor, stirred a tremble of wonder inside her.

  Across the room were framed canvases stacked neatly face to the wall. She went to kneel beside the canvases and turned one of them around. At first glance she thought it was an abstract painting: two blocks of color balanced against a background of brownish-black. Then, on closer look, she saw it was an interior, a dim afternoon room somewhere in Europe. The purple square at the lower right was the edge of a bed, only partially visible. The smear of white on the left was a set of French doors in the far wall, opening out onto a shadowy iron-railed balcony, beyond which a narrow white road receded down a hill and disappeared into the pale greens and browns of a vineyard on the opposite hills. The sense of silence, of peaceful afternoon, of lush and lovely landscape just outside, seemed almost to vibrate from the canvas. And yet even now it still retained the impact, the impression, of an abstract painting. It startled and excited her: this was 1899 and a very original way of applying color to canvas. But unless she was able to find a way to save him, he was never going to live to achieve the greatness already evident in these canvases. It was an urgency that would not give her peace: the need to save him, and not knowing how.

  She heard him stir, and turned to see him looking at her from the bed. He smiled and held out his hand. She went to kneel at the edge of the bed, so that her head was on a level with his. “I love you,” she said.

  He took her head in his hands and kissed her. She felt emotion twist into a lovely ache in the pit of her stomach.

  “I fell asleep,” he said.

  “So did I. I woke only a few minutes ago. I was looking at your paintings.”

  He smiled. “And your opinion?”

  “They’re very beautiful.”

  “Hardly an unbiased critic, I trust.”

  “But truthful.”

  He kissed her again. “You’re very sweet.”

  She crept into his arms. “I’m happy. I love this room. I wish I never had to leave it.”

  “Do you have to leave it soon?”

  “No, I—I’ll be alone tonight.”

  He was brushing the hair back away from her face. “There is something magical about you,” he said. “What I feel for you is so strong it sometimes startles me.”

  “Don’t think about it. Don’t make me think about it. Accept it.”

  “I accept it. Gladly. I love you.”

  “And I love you.”

  “I’m glad. Because I am very serious. I was hoping for the right to ask you this before I knew your situation. But that doesn’t change how I feel. I am planning to leave this town very soon. Will you go away with me, leave your husband?”

  The possibility struck her with full force for the first time. There was nothing to prevent it. That was the answer—he would no longer be here, in reach of whomever was meant to kill him.

  He seemed to take her silence for hesitation. “I know it’s sudden. And soon. Probably too soon. But I sense you are like me; you are an unusual woman—else I wouldn’t feel about you the way I do. You and I are not bound by the world’s conventions. We’ll go away—to Paris, Amsterdam, it doesn’t matter. Come with me.”

  She thought about the enormity of it—to stay, and start a new life, in 1899.

  “You don’t love him,” he said.

  She thought of Michael—who, even if he could believe what was happening to her, would never be able to understand or to feel what it meant to her—and was saddened to realize it was true. “No.” Forgive me, Michael. “I thought I did when we were married.”

  “It would require leaving what is obviously a comfortable life for a precarious future, but—”

  She stopped his mouth with her hand, the force of her decision, the emotion it released, welling up in her. “Don’t talk anymore. I’ll go away with you, I’ll go anywhere you want, David. But soon. Now. Tonight.”

  He removed her hand, kissed it. “Soon. But not now. When Rachel and Charles are safely out of Hubbard’s reach, then we can go. I’m sorry if it seems I’m putting Rachel ahead of us, but I must. Once she is safe, my debt to Pamela is paid.”

  That rush of hope slowly died inside her. “I understand.”

  “You said you would be alone tonight.”

  “Yes, and tomorrow. He . . . he’s away on business.”

  “He leaves you alone very often?”

  “Yes. He’s in New York much of the time. He’s in the stock market.”

  “Will you stay with me tonight?”

  “Tonight and every night I can.”

  “I have to take the mare in to be shod in an hour or so. The smith is expecting me. Will you mind waiting here alone?”

  “Oh, take me with you.” The thought of seeing the nineteenth-century Chesapequa excited her.

  “Won’t it be dangerous for you to be seen with me?”

  “I don’t think so. My husband’s not here. No one else knows me—except the desk people at the hotel.”

  “Good. We’ll go together then.” He stood up. “I’ll see if I can find something to eat downstairs.”

  After he had gone, she lay back on the bed, thinking of Europe, of life with David in the Paris or Amsterdam of 1899, of steamships on the Atlantic, and carriages in the Bois de Boulogne, and endless fields of yellow wheat in the South of France. The enormity of what she had agreed to was a little frightening, but something deep inside her was sure that it was right. Something had been unlocked inside her now, some tiny key in the core of her being that had remained unturned until today. The memory of making love in the barn seeped slowly into her—the heat, and the sunshine falling onto the hay, her overwhelming pleasure at the soft insistent warmth of David’s mouth on hers, the hard length of his body forcing her down, his rough hands thrusting the dress up her thighs.

  It was then, remembering the feel of his hands, that the thought struck her: what if he had removed the dress?

  The question seemed to drain all sound from the room. She was aware of nothing but this new fear sucking all her thoughts toward it. Would she have disappeared right before his eyes, thrown back into her own time? She would have to find that out—now, before tonight.

  She got to her feet and with trembling fingers began unfastening the buttons up the back of the dress. She untied the belt and draped it over a chair. Pulled her arms out of the sleeves. Listened. David was moving about in the kitchen, two flights below. She pulled the dress up over her head and dropped it on the bed.

  And snatched it up again, trembling at what she had done.

  If she did flash back into her own time, the dress would remain. She would be forever separated from him, on the other side of the time barrier, unable to alter his fate. But she was still here; she had been separated from the dress for only a second, but she was still here. Bravely, she loosened her grip on the dress; held it away from her; dropped it onto the bed again.

  Nothing happened. She was still here, in his attic studio, standing by the same bed; his canvases were still racked against the wall; his easel still stood beside the worktable. She sank to her knees and laid her head gratefully on the soft folds of the dress. Once she was in the past she could safely remove it and remain, just as she could in her own time. It was transportation, nothing more.

  • • •

  After they had eaten, they started for town, the mare fastened by a lead to the rear of the buggy. The sun had gone, but it was still light. They took the road down the hill and turned left along the lake. The buggy seemed to skim along the hard-packed road surface, the ground fleeing past on either side, in almost soundless flight. It was exhilarating—the cool air on her face, the clopping of the horses, the occasional outbursts of their breathing, the slap and rattle of the traces. At the bottom end of
the lake, they clattered across a wooden bridge, the one where she had first seen that carriage full of women. A few hundred yards beyond the bridge, they came to a crossroads and turned right, through hedgerows flanking grassy fields. Twilight was setting in; the pale blue of the sky seeped into a muddy green along the horizon. A house appeared in a clump of trees off to the left; she heard children’s voices drifting across the evening air, saw the white blurs of their figures: playing on a swing.

  Up ahead, she saw another carriage approaching. It excited her, as if the sight of it, unconnected to her in any way, finally proved she was really here, in the nineteenth century. It was drawn by two large horses, necks arched, prancing big-footed toward her. As the carriage approached, the horses shied a bit, tossing their heads, and she saw there were two couples behind the driver. The women, in large flowered hats, looked at her across a barrier of almost a hundred years; the men nodded and touched their hat brims; and the carriage passed on behind her, the sound of the horses receding to the rear. It was like finding herself suddenly in a movie, lifted from the audience and taken right into the story on the screen.

  They passed another house, closer to the road, and then another; and then the road widened, the houses became more numerous, set back on grassy lawns; and then David turned the buggy into what seemed to be a side street, between two buildings, and then to the right again onto a wide boulevard teeming with carriages and people.

  David smiled at her. “I suppose after New York, Chesapequa is restful to you. To me, even this is hectic.”

  “Oh, but it’s beautiful,” Jennie said.

  She was awed. She recognized nothing, though this was surely Broad Street, the main street even in her own time. But it was much wider and lined with huge trees, two and three stories tall. Another buggy, drawn by a prancing black horse, skimmed along in front of them; she could see the wide-brimmed hats of two women above the back seat. A larger carriage—a kind of omnibus, with a placard on the side reading HENRY HUDSON HOTEL—came out of a side street ahead and crossed the wide boulevard. Other carriages lined the edges of the street; on her right a young woman in a long dark skirt, a white shirtwaist and a straw hat, was being helped into one of them, a surrey with a flat fringed top. David reined the horse to a walk to allow a party of pedestrians to cross the street—ladies in long dresses and big flowered hats, men in derbies and straw boaters. The stately movement of the women enthralled her; she had again the feeling of being in a movie.