a Perfect Stranger (1983)

by Steel, Danielle

  Well, have you come to your senses? He came directly to the point, and she fought with herself not to tremble at his words. It was ridiculous that at her age he should impress her, but she had spent too many years taking orders from him not to be impressed by the power he wielded, because he was her father and because he was a man. Have you?

  I'm not sure I know what you mean, Father. I still don't agree with your position. What I've been doing has not hurt John Henry, however much you may disapprove.

  Really? Then how is his health, Raphaella? It was my understanding that he was not doing very well.

  He's not doing badly. Her voice faltered and then she got out of the chair and walked around the room, finally coming to a stop to face her father with what was the truth. He is seventy-seven years old, Papa. He has been bed-ridden, more or less, for almost eight years. He has had a number of strokes, and he has very little desire to go on living the way he is. Can you really blame that on me?

  If he has so little desire to go on living, can you dare to take a chance with the little desire he has left? Can you dare to take the chance that someone will tell him, and that for him it will be the last straw? You must be a very brave woman, Raphaella. In your shoes I would not take that chance. If only because I would not be entirely certain that I could live with myself if I killed him ' which, I will add, your circumstances might. Or hadn't that thought occurred to you?

  It has. Often. She sighed softly. But, Papa' I love' this man.

  Not enough to do what's best for him though. That saddens me. I thought there was more to you than that.

  She eyed him sadly. Must I be so perfect, Papa? Must I be so very strong? I have been strong for eight years' for eight But she couldn't go on, she was crying again, and then she looked up at him tremulously, Now this is all I have.

  No. He spoke firmly. You have John Henry. You have no right to more than that. One day, after he is gone, then you can consider other possibilities. But those doors are not open to you now. He looked at her sternly. And I hope, for John Henry's sake, that they are not open to you for a long time. She bowed her head for a moment and then looked up and walked to the door of the little room.

  Thank you, Papa. She said the words very softly and left the room.

  Her father left for Paris the next day, but it was obvious to him, as well as to her mother, that some of what they had said to Raphaella appeared to have taken hold. Much of the fight had gone out of her, and finally after four more days at Santa Eugenia, and five more sleepless nights, she got out of bed at five o'clock one morning, went to the desk in her room, and pulled out a piece of paper and a pen. It was not that she would no longer fight her parents, it was that she could no longer fight the inner voice that they had spawned. How could she know that what she was doing was not hurting John Henry? And what they said of Alex was true as well. He had a right to more than she could give him, and perhaps she would not be free to give him more for many years.

  She sat at her desk, staring down at the blank paper, knowing what she had to say. Not because of her father or her mother or Kay Willard, she told herself, but because of John Henry and Alex and what she owed them. It took her two hours to compose the letter, which she could hardly see when she finally signed it with a last stroke of her pen. The tears were pouring down her face so copiously that it was only a blur before her, but the meaning of her words to him was anything but a blur. She had told him that she did not wish to continue, that she had given it all a great deal of thought during her vacation in Spain, that there was no point in their dragging on a love affair that had no future. She had realized now that he was not suited to her, nor to the life she would lead one day when she was free. She told him that she was happier in Spain with her family, that this was where she belonged, and that since he was divorced and she was a Catholic she could never marry him anyway. She drew on every lie and excuse and insult she could find, but she did not want to leave him with a single doubt about continuing. She wanted to free him completely so that he could find another woman and not wait for her. She wanted to know that she had given him the final gift of freedom, and if she had to do that by sounding unkind in the letter, then she was willing to do that, for Alex. It was her last gift to him.

  But the second letter she wrote was almost harder. It was a letter to Mandy, which she sent to Charlotte Brandon's address in New York. It explained that things had changed between her and Alex, that they wouldn't be continuing to see each other when she got back to San Francisco, but that she would always love Mandy and treasure the months that they had shared.

  By the time she finished both letters, it was eight o'clock in the morning, and Raphaella felt as though she had been beaten from midnight until dawn. She put on a thick terry-cloth robe and ran silently to the main hall, where she left the two letters on a silver platter. Then she walked slowly outside and across the grounds to a remote spot on the beach that she had discovered as a child. She stripped away the robe and the nightgown beneath it, kicked off the sandals she had worn, and threw her body into the water with a vengeance, swimming as hard and as far as she could. She had just renounced the one thing she lived for, and now she didn't give a damn if she lived or died. She had saved John Henry for another day or a year or a decade or even two, had freed Alex to marry and have babies, and she had nothing, except the emptiness that had consumed her for the last lonely eight years.

  She swam as far out as she could manage, and then swam back, until every inch of her body screamed. Slowly she walked out of the water and back to the bathrobe, and she lay down on it on the sand, her long lean, naked limbs gleaming in the morning sunlight as her shoulders shook and she sobbed. She lay there like that for almost an hour, and when she went back to the house, she saw that the servants had removed her two letters from the giant silver salver and taken them into town to mail. It was done.

  Chapter 27

  When she left Spain and returned to San Francisco, the days seemed endless to Raphaella. She sat by John Henry's side for hours every day, reading, thinking, sometimes talking. She read him parts of the newspaper, tried to unearth books that once pleased him, sat in the garden with him, and read books of her own while he napped more and more. But each hour, each day, each moment, dragged past her with lead weights attached to them. It seemed to her each morning that she would never get through one more day. And by nightfall she was exhausted by the effort it had taken, just to sit there, barely moving, her own voice droning in her ears, and then his soft snore as he slept while she read.

  It was the life of slow torture to which she felt condemned now. It was different than it had been before she'd met Alex the previous year. Then she hadn't known anything different, she hadn't had the joy of fixing up a room for Mandy, hadn't baked bread or puttered in the garden or waited impatiently for him to come home, she hadn't raced laughing up the stairs beside Mandy or stood looking at the view with Alex just before the dawn. Now there was nothing, only endlessly bleak days during the warm summer, sitting in the garden watching great puffs of white clouds roll by overhead, or sitting in her room late at night listening to the foghorns bleating on the bay.

  Sometimes she was reminded of her earlier summers in Santa Eugenia, or even summers she had spent away with John Henry some ten years before. But now there was no swimming, no laughing, no running on a beach with the wind in her hair. There was nothing, no one, only John Henry, and he was different, too, than he had been a year before. He was so much more tired, worn out really, and introverted, so much less interested in the world beyond his bed. He didn't care anymore about politics about large oil deals with the Arabs, or about potential disasters that in his earlier life would have been so intriguing to him. He didn't give a damn about his old firm or any of his partners. He really didn't care about anything, and he was querulous suddenly if the least little thing went wrong. It was as though he resented everything and everybody, hating them finally for the agonies of the past eight years. He was tired of dying slowly, he told
Raphaella one morning. If I'm going to die sooner or later anyway, then I might as well do it right now.

  He talked constantly now of wishing it were over, of hating the nurses, of not wanting to be pushed around in his chair. He didn't want to be bothered by anyone, he insisted, and it was only with Raphaella that he made the supreme effort, as though he didn't want to punish her for the way he felt. But it was obvious to everyone who saw him that he was desperately unhappy , and it never failed to remind Raphaella of her father's words. Maybe he'd been right after all that John Henry needed her full attention. Certainly he did now, even if he hadn't before. Or maybe it was because she had nothing else to do now that he only seemed to need her so much more. But he seemed to swallow up every moment, and she felt obliged to sit with him, to be near him, to sit and watch him while he slept. It was as though she had made one last commitment, to give up her whole life for this man. And at the same time it was as though John Henry had finally given up his will to live. Raphaella felt that weigh on her more now too. If he was tired of living, what could she do to make him want to stay alive? To infuse him with her youth, with her own vitality, with her will to live? But her life was no happier than John Henry's. Since she had given up Alex, there was no longer any reason that Raphaella could see that justified her existence, except as a kind of life-giving serum for John Henry. There were days when she thought that she couldn't bear it anymore.

  She almost never went out anymore, and when she did, she had the chauffeur drive her somewhere so that she could take a long walk. She hadn't been downtown since returning from Spain earlier that summer, and she was afraid to wander in the neighborhood, even in the evening, for fear that somehow, somewhere, Alex would be there. He had gotten her letter the day before she had left Santa Eugenia, and she had sat terribly still for a long moment when the butler told her there was a call from America, wanting it to be Alex, and yet fearing that at the same time. She didn't dare refuse the call for fear that it was something about John Henry.

  So she went to the phone with her heart pounding and her hands trembling, and when she had heard his voice at the other end, she had closed her eyes tightly and tried to fight back the tears. She told him very quietly and calmly that she had come to her senses here at Santa Eugenia and that there was nothing more to say that she hadn't already said in the letter he had just received. He had accused her of being crazy, said that someone must have pressured her into it, asked her if it had anything to do with something Kay might have said in New York. She assured him that it was none of those things, that it was her own decision, and when she had hung up the phone, she had cried for several hours. Giving up Alex was the most painful decision of her lifetime, but she could no longer take a chance that her divided allegiance would kill John Henry, nor would she continue to deprive Alex of all that he deserved to have with someone else. In the end her father and Kay had won. And now all that remained was for Raphaella to live up to it for the rest of her days. By the end of the summer she saw the years stretching ahead of her like a series of bleak, empty rooms.

  In September, as John Henry began to sleep for several hours in the morning, just to keep herself busy she picked up the manuscripts of the children's books again. She chose the one she liked the best, and, feeling silly for even putting it together, she finally typed it and sent the final version to a publisher of children's books in New York. It had been an idea Charlotte Brandon had given her, and it seemed vaguely foolish to even do it, but she had nothing to lose, and even less to do.

  With the book completed, Raphaella was once again haunted by her memories of last summer. Above all, there were times when she resented her father terribly, and she doubted she would ever forgive him for the things he had said. He had only relented slightly when she told him on the phone from Santa Eugenia that she had taken care of everything in San Francisco. He had told her that it was nothing she should be praised for, that it was only her duty, and that it had pained him to have to use such force to alter a course that she should have altered herself long before. He pointed out that she had disappointed him severely, and even her mother's gentler words left her, in the end, with a sense of failure.

  It was this feeling that she carried with her into the autumn in San Francisco and that made her turn down her mother's offer to meet her in New York for a few days when she was there on her way to Brazil with the usual horde. Raphaella no longer felt that she should do things like go to New York to meet her mother. Her place was with John Henry, and she would not leave him again until the day he died. Who knew if her months of ricocheting between her own home and Alex's had not in some way sped John Henry toward his death. It would have been useless, of course, to tell her that any speed in that direction would have been welcomed by no one as much as by John Henry himself. Now she almost never left him except for her occasional walks.

  Her mother had been vaguely disturbed at Raphaella's refusal to join her at the Carlyle and wondered briefly if she was still angry at her father for what had passed between them in July. But Raphaella's letter of refusal didn't sound as if she were pouting. It sounded more as though she were oddly withdrawn. Her mother promised herself that she would call her from New York and make sure that nothing was the matter, but with her sisters and her cousins and her nieces and their constant errands and shopping and the time difference, she left for Buenos Aires without ever having had a chance to call.

  It wouldn't have mattered to Raphaella anyway. She had no desire to talk to her mother or her father and had decided that summer that she would not return to Europe again either until after John Henry had passed on. He seemed to be living in a state of suspended animation, sleeping most of the time, depressed when he wasn't, refusing to eat, and seeming to lose whatever abilities had remained. The doctor told her that all of it was normal in a man of his age with the shocks he had suffered from the strokes. It was only surprising that the determination of his spirit had not been more acutely affected before. It seemed only ironic to Raphaella that now as she devoted herself to him fully he seemed to be at his worst. But the doctor told her that he might also get a little better, that perhaps after a few months of lethargy he might inexplicably perk up. It was certainly obvious that Raphaella was doing everything to entertain him, and now she even began to cook small gourmet dishes in order to tempt his palate and induce him to eat. It was a life about which most people would have had nightmares, but which Raphaella seemed not even to notice. Having given up the only thing that she had cared about and relinquished the only two people she had loved in a long time, Alexander and Amanda, she felt it no longer mattered to her what she did with her time.

  November disappeared like the months before it, and it was December when she got the letter from the publishing house in New York. They were enchanted with the book she had sent them, surprised that she didn't have an agent, and wanted to pay her two thousand dollars as an advance for the book, which they would have illustrated and hoped to release the following summer. For a moment she stared at the letter in amazement, and then for the first time in a long time she broke out in a broad smile. Almost like a schoolgirl she raced up the staircase with the letter to show John Henry. When she got there, she found him sleeping in his wheelchair, his mouth open, his chin on his chest, making a soft purr. She stood there for a time, watching him, and then suddenly felt desperately lonely. She had wanted so much to tell him, and there was no one else to tell. Once again she felt a familiar pang for Alex, but she pushed the thought instantly away, telling herself that by now he had found someone else to replace her, that Mandy was happy, and that Alex might even be married or engaged. In another year he might even have children. She felt that perhaps indeed, she had done the right thing for everybody concerned.

  She folded the letter and went back downstairs. She realized, too, that John Henry had known nothing about the stories she'd been concocting for the children, and he would find it very strange if she brought him the news of a book now. It was better to say nothing. And o
f course her mother wouldn't be interested, and she had no desire to write to tell her father. In the end there was no one to tell, so she sat down and answered the letter, thanked them for the advance, which she accepted, and then later wondered why she had. It was an ego trip that suddenly seemed very foolish, and after she gave the letter of acceptance to the chauffeur to mail, she was sorry she had done it. She was so used to denying herself everything she wanted that even that little treat now seemed out of place.

  Feeling annoyed with herself for doing something so silly, she later asked the chauffeur to drive her out to the beach, while John Henry slept away the afternoon. She just wanted to walk in the fresh air and see the dogs and the children, feel the wind on her face, and get away from the stale air of the house. She had to remind herself that it was almost Christmas. But it didn't really matter this year. John Henry was too tired to care if they celebrated it or not. Briefly she found herself dwelling on the Christmas she had shared with Alex and Mandy and then once again forced the memories out of her head. She seldom even allowed herself even those now.

  It was almost four o'clock when the chauffeur pulled the car up alongside the vans and the pickups and the old jalopies, and smiling at the incongruous vision she knew she presented, she slid into a pair of loafers she often wore at Santa Eugenia and slipped out of the car into the stiff breeze. She was wearing a little curly lamb jacket with a red turtleneck sweater and a pair of gray slacks. She didn't dress as elaborately as she used to anymore. To sit beside John Henry while he slept or dine from a tray in his room as he gazed sightlessly at the news on the television, there didn't seem to be much point in getting dressed.