by Mel Bossa
She devoted pages and pages of densely packed meditations to an acceptance of a theory of time and space, and the place of human life in that nexus, which was partly the result of her reading and partly what amounted to an almost Einsteinian speculation of the nature of the universe.
“Time is like the coils of a spring,” she wrote in one entry. “When the spring is stretched out, each coil is a graceful individual arc with an elegance of form determined by its beginning out of a previous accumulation of other arcs, reaching toward an apex or climax and gracefully curving back to end in a future accumulation of arcs. Each life is such an arc—separate yet connected. Each consciousness is such an arc too, only one of many undergone in varying shapes and circumstance and in several places by the same soul.”
A striking image, to show her belief in reincarnation—an unusual enough belief for a New England spinster daughter of a preacher yet not all that rare in her time. Yet, listen how later on in this entry she leaped ahead of all of her peers:
Our perceptions show that while years and days and hours are as rigidly marked off as the metal of a spring’s coil, yet that they vary, due to ourselves and our circumstances. Time passed in happiness races ahead, waits, then snaps back in an instant. Seconds can become years, but some years—especially passed in despair—can become as centuries.
Surely she had been ahead of Bergson with this understanding. But there was still a fuller synthesis to be made.
Being fluid like water, only finer by far, yet rigid like a metal coil, there are areas where the coil snaps back from being stretched to twisting—as it must recoil before being stretched again. Ideally, these are noted by the points of birth and death, when the soul clearly begins or completes an arc and the coil must be stretched again for the soul to relive. Yet there are other points within each arc—less noticeable than such monuments as birth and death, when the arc wavers, the stretching gives way, and in a trice the coil snaps suddenly shut. All sensitive people have noticed these times—we call them supernatural to explain them. Though they are natural enough, simply extraordinary by their manner of defying the natural tension of the arc of life. When we dream a dream that later comes true or guess a guess that is later proved so or feel familiar with a place where we have never been before and could not know, it is because of this minor relaxation of the coil back to its place of rest.
An exploration of ESP years before it was even recognized? I read on and discovered the clincher.
Material is carried from life to life, from arc to arc of the coil. The most energetic material always reoccurs. This the Hindus called Karma. It happens in our time and space as the most sudden and unsuspecting snapping of the coil before it turns and tenses again. That is how one life can affect the next—how the past can become a new present. If this energy is malevolent or irksome, we suffer; if benevolent, we take joy. As all lives are such coils intertwined and interconnected at arcs, when, for example, two or three or more of the coils snap to a rest at one time, a previous situation involving all of them can become a present situation.
That year and a half between Captain Calder, Constance, and me contained all the prerequisites of such a situation—great passion, inexplicable sudden attractions, inability to obtain full and lasting satisfaction through more conventional channels, isolation from the rest of society. It was, in short, what the Hindus would call a ‘karmic’ situation—a sudden snapping of the arcs of all three of our interrelated coils.
So Amity had synthesized it—or at least come to terms with it. And in so doing, she came to also predict:
If this has occurred in the middle of this, the nineteenth century after the death of our Lord, it means that such a situation has happened before; how else explain how we three could be so prepared for it, so ready to act it out, despite our ordinarily differing personalities, our wishes, our ideas, our customs and traditions? And if it has happened twice, it will happen once more—at least—some time in the future, long after I too am dead and forgotten. For no solution was achieved this time; no, only more crime and sorrow and foolishness perpetuated. So I believe it must happen again to once more have the opportunity for solution. Whether in twenty years or fifty or five hundred I cannot know. I have done what I could. I will go on doing what I can to understand all this, to ready myself and my soul for that next recurrence. For it is like a twist in the coils, a blot on the universal harmony, and it has to be eliminated once and for all, the twisted path made straight, the arcs smoothed, the lives made peaceful and prosperous.
That, then—after untold, undigested rehashings of earlier teachings—was how Amity had adjusted or, rather, how she had come to rationalize what had happened in her life. Yet hopeful as her writings were, they still failed to explain her suicide. Before I could reach that point, I had to read entry after entry in her increasingly crabbed handscript to make certain I understood what she had concluded. For with this volume of the diary, I began to have a faint conception that her life and the conclusions she reached about it were not only important to her but also crucial to me. As yet I could not—I did not want to—consolidate my thoughts on this. But when I came to her December 9 entry, I had to stop, short of breath, from reading it over and over.
December 9, 1873: I left the house for the first time in five years today. It was for the christening of my cousin Anthony Todd’s firstborn son. Ordinarily, I would not attend such an occasion, but all this past week I have felt something important for my life—not this one but the one to come after I have shed this body—will result should I decide to go to the church. Accordingly, I dressed in my best remaining clothes—although a funeral black—and had Saturn drive me.
Once there, it seemed I had been mistaken. Only the Todd and Rance families from New Bedford attended, and they all were clustered around the baptismal font. I remained as far back from them as possible, alert in all of my senses for what I felt might occur of importance to me.
Finally it did, although like all of life, in a manner at first odd to me. A boy about eight years old, dressed nearly in a serge suit, had been looking at me for so long that I looked back at him. He wasn’t merely curious or suspicious of me either, as I at first thought. When I glanced at him a second time, he smiled at me. I haven’t seen such an innocent smile in years, and it refreshed my soul to see him. I motioned him over and leaned my hand on his strong young shoulder to support myself during the preacher’s interminable sermon, allowing the boy to steal what I can with no vanity call admiring gazes at me. When the service had been performed, I gave the boy a small gift to bring up to the font. I felt it was he—this boy—I had come to see, to somehow impress, not my relatives. Then I left the church.
Once settled in the phaeton, I had new doubts. I was now certain the boy was the link I needed to my new life, though how he was I could not say for certain. Had I sufficiently impressed the boy, I asked myself. For I felt that was necessary above all. Then I spotted him on the vestry steps, looking out the doorway. I called to him, asking his name, thanked him for his service to me, and in a flash I decided to make certain he would always remember me. I gave him a shiny five-dollar gold piece.
As I thought, the boy was flabbergasted. I said one or two more words of little importance to him, then tapped the carriage side for Saturn to drive off. Returning home, I felt a new peace descend upon me. I am now certain this boy—this young Ralph Lynch—is my vital, my all important link to a future life.
There Amity’s diaries ended. Ended with a year or so left for her to live; ended with her suicide still unexplained; ended with too many blank leaves remaining in the notebook for me to be certain that she really intended that last entry to be her last words, her last writing, her epitaph somehow. Ended with her meeting my Grandpa Lynch as a little boy, a meeting he had remembered very well, never forgotten, which he had told me about and caused me to come to see Amity’s house for the first time, to live here again years later, and to bring Karen here so she might begin an affair with my cousi
n Chas Lynch. It ended so I could know after reading it that Amity had been correct, that her situation would come up again, a little more than a hundred years later, in Nansquett once more. And that Karen and Chas and I would replace and replay the roles of Constance and Eugene Calder and Amity, come back somehow in the great dice throw of existence to work out this awful connection all three of us had one more time—for good this time: to get that twist out of the coil, to reestablish a harmonious universe. And to do it all with one extraordinary advantage that none of them had had in their time—we had Amity’s story to read, Amity’s understanding of it to guide us, to keep us from falling into the same ghastly, wasteful, foolish mistakes they—and especially she—had made.
Chapter 17
“Don’t you see, Karen? If you do what you’re planning to, you’ll only be repeating it—betraying all those years of Amity’s suffering, ignoring the wisdom she finally accumulated out of that suffering for us!”
It was raining so hard outside the breakfast room, I almost had to shout to be heard over the downpour. Great sheets of rain fell in swirling gusts, splashing first against one window, then turning back to smash across another one. We were having a late-morning lunch—a silent, tense, desolate meal, until I decided to talk.
Karen’s raincoat was thrown across one chair, still dripping wet from our one quick walk down to her car an hour before. I’d helped her put the two suitcases she had packed that morning into the trunk of her MG, returned, repaired, from Chas’s Scituate garage yesterday afternoon. Nothing had been really said between us. She’d spent the night out, only coming back to the house at nine o’clock—awakening me in the turret library, where I had fallen asleep over some of Amity’s diaries. I was barely able to understand Karen’s words when she shook me gently and said she had to go to New York that day.
Then I understood all too well. Somehow the day before, Chas had demanded she make a choice. He’d persuaded her to come to him yesterday afternoon, persuaded her to stay over for the night, and persuaded her to drive away with him today: to leave me. And there she was, a little frightened but also very determined, standing hesitantly in the library, telling me she was leaving me without meaning any harm in it, as though she were telling me she was going to see a dentist or going to see a show.
I’d wanted to say something then: something angry and bitter and very cruel. I wanted to expose Chas, to show her the kind of man he was—if he could even be called a man. But I held back. I went down to the kitchen and brewed some coffee and, sipping from my cup, watched the rain begin to fall. Then I went upstairs again with a cup for her. I watched her throw clothing out of drawers and closets onto the bed and then fill up the two suitcases she’d received as a wedding present from an aunt in New York, and I never said a word.
Wordless still, I helped Karen bring them downstairs and put them into the MG. Then I walked a step or two behind her back up into the house and into the breakfast room, where we sat down and looked out at the rain falling heavier every moment, it seemed, whipping branches of trees almost to the ground.
It was then that I broke the silence. I knew that to argue with her, to say anything directly touching the situation, would only harden her in her determination to go with Chas. I was shocked by her decision. Its suddenness after these weeks of relative calm—especially after I felt I had won her back—unnerved and disturbed me. She couldn’t have made the decision earlier—she’d seen so little of Chas in the past month, spent so much time with me instead. I suppose that was what had spurred him on, that and our encounter in his bedroom, which I had intended to humiliate and yet satisfy him: I’d succeeded only in humiliating him, in determining him on his vengeful course. Disappointed as I was, I refused to fall prey to his game—I would do anything before I would jump feet first into the role he had prepared for me: that of irate abandoned husband.
That’s why I talked about Amity, telling Karen what I knew of her and Captain Eugene Calder and Constance, repeating their story as Grandpa Lynch had told it to me, then as I had discovered it myself through Amity’s journals. I repeated almost verbatim the conclusions Amity had reached, her understanding of the situation, her prophecy of the future in that last volume, the one Karen herself had found for me. I talked as calmly and quietly as the noise of the inclement weather outside would allow, feeling as though I were telling a fairy tale to a sleepy, recalcitrant child but stressing it too, for she had to understand what was happening to her, so that by being aware of all of it, she could come to a more mature decision.
We sat there more than an hour. We’d finished eating long before. We lingered. Karen, I know, was waiting for Chas to arrive; I was trying to change our circumstances through her in that remaining time.
“So you see, Karen, we are Constance and Amity and Calder: you and I and Chas. The situation is too close to be merely coincidental, too filled with correspondences to be only an accident. Can you believe that, Karen?”
She looked at me for a second with an indefinable gaze, then turned away to the window, showing me her profile. Two strands of hair had fallen across her forehead, and she didn’t even lift them up into place. She was thinking, thinking hard; either that or not thinking at all—merely staring at me through the reflection of the glass.
“Well?” I insisted. “Do you believe me?”
“I don’t know, Roger,” she said, not to me directly but to my reflection, to the rain outside. “I don’t really understand what those people dead a hundred years have to do with us.”
“They have everything to do with us! It’s a pattern that repeats: like the pattern of waves in the ocean. Unless the pattern is broken, it’ll just go on and on forever. Can’t you see that?”
“Patterns. Can’t you think of anything else?” she said, sounding weary suddenly and unsure of herself. She was reproaching me for the first time since we’d met, and I was stung by it—oddly stung, since so much worse was in store for both of us if I couldn’t convince her to remain.
“No, that isn’t all I can think of. It isn’t all. You must know that.”
Karen stood up and went to the tallest of the half-dozen windows, nervously tapping on a pane, impatient for Chas to come, impatient for it to be done.
“What will you do now?” I asked quietly, trying to change the subject for a minute from my real concern.
“Go back to the reference room, I guess.”
“And Chas? What about him?”
“He said he has some friends who have an electronics repair business. They’ll hire him.”
“It will be difficult,” I said tonelessly. “You won’t have much money to live on, will you?”
“It will be difficult,” she replied, toneless as I was. “But everything seems difficult anyway. Roger? Roger, don’t hate me. Don’t think of me as a tramp or… I couldn’t bear to have you think that way about me. That I’m really only a tramp, that… Oh, never mind.”
“Karen, darling,” I said, getting up and going to where she stood, framed by the window, defined by the sheets of rain in the trees outside. “You don’t really want to go,” I said as gently as I knew how. I held her shoulders, breathing in her smell of fresh shampoo and rinse, and she didn’t flinch from me. “Chas wants you to go. But you don’t really want to. I know how he can be. I was once under his control. I was. When I was only a boy. I know how it is. I’ll help you to regain yourself, Karen.”
“You can’t know.”
“But I do. It was no different with me. Believe me.”
She half turned, half faced me, then turned back to the window, watching for him.
“The terrible thing,” she said, “the really awful thing is that I almost believe you when you talk like that—about us being Amity and her sister and that Captain. Not that I feel as though I was any of them—which of them would I have been, Roger? But this house, this town, it seemed so familiar, so already known to me, right from the beginning. Do you remember? It’s been like living in a perpetual déjà vu with n
o real sense of time passing all the months we’ve been here, restoring the house. Why else would that be?”
“I don’t know. Subconscious memory or something,” I replied.
“Everyone talks about us, Roger,” she went on, once more changing the subject. “I don’t mind for my sake or for Chas’s. But it makes me feel so bad for you when I know they’re gossiping and slandering you.”
“Then you do care for me. A little?”
“I wouldn’t have married you otherwise,” she said. “But it isn’t the same as with Chas. It’s almost as though you and I grew up together, as though you were my older brother, showing me things, teaching me.” She sighed. I wanted to say something but held back for a minute, letting her go on. “Maybe it’s because I never can feel time the right way here that I have to leave. Everything feels so vague here, so let loose from things that count, that ought to count. Maybe that’s why I’m doing this. Because it’s something definite in the middle of so much vagueness. I feel like I’ve been living in a dream with you, Roger. Right from the day you came over to me with that silly message on the call slip in the library. Like a very lovely dream, but a very strange dream too. Very strange, Roger.”