by Thomas Lynch
So it was with Mary De Dona. Much as she’d appeared, she disappeared. She simply wasn’t there when Adrian returned from his banishment in England. “You lovely man,” is how she addressed the letter she’d left for him with Father Concannon, which thanked him for “his tenderness and generosities” and gave no further details about her plans or whereabouts. She left brief farewell notes for his children too, in the rooms she’d done up for him in their new residence.
“I couldn’t tell you, Adrian, I haven’t a clue,” the priest insisted under questioning. “She turned in her keys and resignation and drove off smiling and waving goodbye, that miserable hound in the backseat of the car.”
Adrian was not surprised. He’d come home from West Yorkshire with a finished manuscript, a determination to leave the church, a sense of new message and purpose, and a new place to live in Findlay, Ohio.
He thought he caught a glimpse of Mary De Dona or someone who looked strikingly like her once while he was watching a movie in a hotel room in Minneapolis. Adrian watched and waited for the credits, which listed her name as Sasha Black. Then he lay back on the pillow, fell asleep, and dreamed cinematic dreams. He would search on the Internet but never find her.
He was suddenly worried about missing the boat. He’d lost all track of time somehow.
He jogged back to the car where Gloria was just finishing a cigarette. She pressed it out in the ashtray and started the engine.
“Anyone home?”
“No one, nothing there.”
“Too bad,” she said. “You’ve come all this way.”
“Oh well,” Adrian said. “Another time maybe.”
She backed out to Pilot Hill Road and drove Adrian back to the ferry docks. He gave her a hundred-dollar bill and thanked her for the tour.
“But it’s only thirty dollars.”
“Buy a little cheer for the birthday party.”
“That’s really good of you,” Gloria said, folding the crisp note into her shirt pocket.
“May I ask you,” Adrian said, leaning back with one foot out of the car, “may I ask you, Gloria, did you ever find yourself, like ever, in those fifty-eight years, you know, married to Bob, did you ever wonder, What the hell am I doing here? you know with the kids and the work and the routine?”
“No,” she said without hesitation, “never once. I was just so glad to have him home, safe, after the war, I’d missed him so. And I thought, I always thought, what a beautiful man, what a good man he was. So I can tell you, we had our hard days, sure. But no, I never wondered about being with him. I wish I were with him now. I can still feel him.”
There was a catch in her breath. Her hands dropped from the steering wheel of the old wagon. Adrian said nothing.
“The young these days are so unhappy, so impatient, so full of expectations. All we wanted was to survive it. To be together. To get through, Bob and me, you know, and for the children…Nowadays they just want too much. Whatever they have, they think there must be more. They want so much they don’t know what they want.”
She was staring at a point in the middle of the steering wheel. She caught her breath again.
“Yes, yes, I suppose that’s it.”
Adrian wondered what it was he wanted. He had long since lost hope of a woman who could love him like a wife would and love his children like a mother. That mix of passion and sacrifice seemed quite impossible to him now. Not because such women did not exist, but because he lacked what it was they wanted. Though he’d had housekeepers and nannies and tutors and teachers and therapists for his children; though he’d had no shortage of memorable sexual partners; there had not been nor would there be, he now knew with certainty, anyone like Gloria in his life and times—a woman who would mourn and remember the boy he had been, the man he was, the old man he hoped to be, who would love him and outlive him and keep him alive in the daily lives and times of his people, his children and his children’s children. He could feel the wave of sadness rising in him that he knew, if he did not move, would overtake him.
He closed the car door and made for the ferry.
“Safe home,” she shouted after him.
Boarding the boat, Adrian blew kisses.