What Happened to Sophie Wilder

by Christopher Beha

  “Of course I wouldn’t do it for you.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I’d thought you might.”

  She would come in the years that followed to cultivate an image of driving her parents’ old Jaguar to ask Beth to be her sponsor. She would remember the smile on Beth’s face, the joy shared between them in that moment. But she’d willfully set aside from those memories the fact that she’d originally meant to ask Tom. She’d set aside the night spent crying, thinking of that response that had stopped her short. You don’t have to do it. His real meaning had eventually become clear: Tom didn’t want her to be more like him and Beth, to ground herself in the soil of his life. He wanted instead to join her in unrootedness.

  Another forgotten disappointment returned to her now as she sat on Crane’s couch: Tom didn’t understand why they couldn’t keep sleeping together.

  “It’s a sin,” she’d said, still trying the word on her tongue.

  “But it was all right before?”

  “I wasn’t Catholic before.”

  “But I was.”

  “That wasn’t my concern.”

  “So you’re saying that what we were doing was wrong, and you just didn’t know any better?”

  She hadn’t been sure she was saying that.

  “I’m not sure I’m saying that.”

  It hurt him that she could even consider it this way. It hurt her, too, in fact. She didn’t know how to relate to the person she had been, a person who seemed still to exist and to follow her at times, asserting some claim. It wasn’t as easy for her as it seemed to be for the converts she’d read about. She couldn’t toss off her old life so easily. At the same time, the laws of the Church, set down by men descended in a direct line from the apostles, seemed the closest access one could have to the infinite simplicity. It was the only path she had thus far been shown.

  Tom had been ready to leave for a time. And why not? They hadn’t been seeing each other all that long; there was no reason their lives should already be decided, no reason that Sophie’s new faith should bring them together rather than divide them. Sophie had known all along that Tom had no great religious feelings himself, that it mattered to him only because it mattered to Beth. But her conversion was bound up in her mind with meeting Tom, and the change in her life seemed fundamentally to include him.

  In the end, he hadn’t left. But his patience had limits, and their early marriage was related to the line she’d drawn. Like a character from an old novel, he had proposed in order to get the thing he wanted, to possess her entirely. It hadn’t bothered Sophie to know this. They would have married eventually. What difference did it make if they did it sooner than their friends, who would spend their twenties living together, doing everything but taking a vow?

  So she had told herself then. But it all struck her differently now that Tom was gone. Now that he’d told her: I never really got the chance to live on my own. As if she had forced him to make this choice. You were the one who couldn’t wait, she would have said, if he were there to hear it.

  Sophie set the Bible back on the table and looked down. On the floor, partially hidden beneath the couch, was one of the manila folders that had been everywhere on her first visit, the ones she had tried to neaten up but that always appeared again spread out on the floor and the couch. She reached for it, intending only to set it somewhere, to straighten the place out a bit. But she no longer owed anyone her discretion, and once it was in her hand it was impossible not to open it.

  Inside was a thick stack of yellowed newspaper clippings. They seemed to be mostly from the early nineties, and they didn’t mean much to Sophie. When she closed the folder, she saw the number seven written on the front of it. The rest of the folders, lodged under the table and the couch, had numbers on them, too. It took her a few minutes of searching to find number one. It also contained newspaper clips, from a paper called the Columbia Daily Tribune. On the top of the pile was a small item, a few paragraphs taking up less than one column, beneath the headline “Columbia Woman Dies in Fire Near Fort Leon-ardwood.” Beneath the headline it read: “Son, UM Professor Husband, Survive.” The paper was dated August 13, 1983. The source of the fire, the article said, was unknown, but no mention was made of any suspicions about the cause. It was reported that William Crane, a professor at Missouri, was in critical condition, struggling for his life. It appeared that his injuries were sustained while searching in the burning house for his son. The police were calling the man a hero.

  Who would start a fire and then run inside to save someone from it? She had seen the scars, so at least that part of the story was likely true. Why hadn’t Tom mentioned that his father had saved him? Why would he not let even that act be counted in the ledger on Crane’s behalf?

  For it did count. That Crane had kept these clippings so close at hand for twenty years counted for something also, though she couldn’t say for what. Each time she put the folders away, they had reappeared. She imagined Crane spending his days going over these clippings, thinking about what had happened. It was a terrible thing to envision. She set the page aside and looked at the one that followed it in the pile. “Police Investigating Fort Leonard-wood Fire,” the headline said. The words below she read several times before they meant anything to her: “Autopsy Reveals Victim Pregnant.”

  The information settled slowly, and much had to shift in accommodating it. The words that Crane had spoken outside the hospital came to her: You’re not my daughter . Had there been a daughter, she would have been much younger than Sophie, just twenty now, perhaps a junior in college. Tom would have been old enough at the time to be told that he would have a sister. It just depended on how far along the pregnancy was at the time of the fire.

  Every sheet in this pile, and in the other folders throughout the room, held the threat of such awful revelations. Bill Crane’s whole story was in the apartment, waiting to be read. He had even put it in numbered order. And the story began just where one might have thought it had ended. The idea terrified and captivated Sophie. She closed the folder and slid it out of sight.

  The cigarette, burned most of the way down, had gone out in the ashtray. She lit another and smoked it while finishing her drink. Then she stood without thinking to refill her glass. How much is lost, she thought. As she finished her next drink, she thought about the night ahead. The couch was large enough to fit her spread out between its arms. She could have looked for a blanket or a pillow somewhere in Crane’s room, but she couldn’t bear to go back in. If she got cold, she would take more clothes from her bag. She turned out the lights and lay down in the darkness of this new life.

  2

  I LEFT FOR the Manse without knowing how long I’d been invited to stay. Sophie could have asked me to come away forever, to abandon Gerhard’s house and everything in it, and I would have done so without a thought. But I didn’t want to arrive packed for a week if she expected me for an afternoon. So I threw a single change of clothes and two books into a small duffel bag. I also packed the few things she’d left behind when she’d sped off in the cab.

  Sophie waited at the station in the driver’s seat of her parents’ old Jaguar. I’d forgotten about this car, which she’d had on campus when we were at school. It must have been at least twenty-five years old. I spotted it before leaving the train, but I waited a moment on the platform, pretending confusion while I calmed myself. She flashed the brights to let me know she was there.

  “It still runs,” I said by way of greeting.

  “When all else collapses.”

  We’d been eighteen, driving from New Hampton to New York, when Sophie told me that car was keeping her parents alive. She’d meant it seriously. Throughout most of her childhood it was the family’s only car. But a few months before the crash her father had bought a new one, which he’d been driving that night. Because it was so new, it was easily forgotten. Afterward, Sophie would see the Jag in the driveway and think: They can’t be dead; the car is right here. She would go outside in the mid
dle of the night and run her hands over the body, feeling its solidity. No dents, no scratches. They’re asleep upstairs, she would tell herself. I’ve had a bad dream.

  She wasn’t much given to mysticism, at least in those days, but something in her believed that her parents were safe somewhere so long as the car was okay. At the same time, she rejected this magical thinking, wanted to unburden herself of it, so she made shows of carelessness toward the car, driving recklessly, taking it out late at night and accelerating through the darkness into the tight turns of the winding roads around the Manse.

  We’d been stuck in unmoving traffic on a straight stretch of Route 1 in New Jersey when she first told me this. Even then I could feel her antagonism as she handled the car. I was never again entirely comfortable when she was behind the wheel, and that much was unchanged as she drove us from the station.

  “You left in a hurry,” I said.

  I hadn’t realized until then how angry I was at her for closing that cab door and disappearing so abruptly, and how scared I was that she might disappear again.

  “Something occurred to me, and I had to work it out.”

  “You could have worked it out in New York,” I said. “I would have loaned you pen and paper.”

  “That’s not really my medium anymore, as you know.”

  When I didn’t say anything she added, “It felt too nice being with you. If I hadn’t left, then I might have stayed forever.”

  “That wouldn’t have been so bad,” I said.

  “But I knew I had to leave. There was something I needed to do.”

  The Old Manse was about ten miles from town. It sat on a quiet road amid a long row of horse farms with tall, white fences and empty, green fields broken up by the occasional animal. I hadn’t been to the house in years, but everything looked the same. It was a white-shingled New England colonial with a large front porch, set on a smaller plot of land than its neighbors, but with a pool in the backyard and not far from it a small work shed that had been Sophie’s father’s home office.

  It was an oddly warm day, more like summer than early autumn, and the afternoon sun throbbed in an otherwise empty sky. Sophie showed me to the guest room, where I set my bag down unopened on the bed.

  “Do you want to go for a swim?” she asked. “It might be the last chance of the season.”

  “I didn’t bring a suit.”

  “You can take one from my dad.”

  We went upstairs, down the long hall to her parents’ room, which had never changed in all my visits. There was a blown-up photograph of Sophie at two or three years old framed on one wall and a photograph of the family together on the wall facing it. Sophie found a pair of her father’s trunks in the chest beside the bed and left me to change. The suit was short, with blue and white horizontal stripes. It was big around the waist, but I pulled the drawstring tight. I brought my clothes back to the room downstairs, where I quickly unpacked before heading outside.

  Sophie wasn’t out by the pool, but a pile of clean towels waited on a wrought-iron table between two Adirondack chairs on the deck. In the middle of the wall at the pool’s shallow end, an underwater light made the surface shimmer as though reflecting the sun. I stood at the opposite end, looking down at the light. Then I dove in.

  As soon as I passed into the cold water, I felt the swimsuit give way, slipping off my hips and down my legs. Rather than reach for it, I freed my feet with a scissor kick and swam toward the bottom, touching a hand against the pool’s dark tiles. I went on to the wall in front of me, to the light, following the upward slope as it shallowed. My lungs were empty before I was halfway across. The pain came first to my chest and then extended up to my neck, calling me to the surface for a breath. Another, stronger force kept me down, sending me to the light. I swam with quick, thrusting strokes and violent kicks, my movements graceless and desperate. Everything depended on going on. All at once the end of the pool jumped out at me, and I nearly crashed against the light. I pressed my hands forward as though breaking a fall and thrust myself up to the air, which only a moment earlier had seemed so far away.

  “Quite a performance,” Sophie said while I gasped angrily. She stood on the deck in a light blue robe, with a cigarette in her hand. She took a drag as she circled the pool to the deep end, near the place where I had stood before diving in. When she got there, she dropped the cigarette, which crackled as it went out on the wet deck. She took off her robe to reveal no suit underneath. She stood for a moment before me. Then she was in the water.

  I first saw Sophie naked a few days after Max’s visit to New Hampton. She and I had spent the night drinking in her room and talking about books. This wasn’t yet our regular habit, and it was unclear to me how the night would end. Eventually I fell asleep on her couch. When I woke she stood topless, changing for bed. Her dark, teardrop breasts hung loose from her body as she leaned over an open dresser drawer. She found a black T-shirt and put it on.

  When she reached for the button of her jeans, I considered letting her know that I was awake, but I didn’t make a sound. She shook teasingly as she slipped her pants over her hips. With both thumbs in the elastic waistband of her white cotton underwear, she pulled them down her legs in a single fluid motion. She gave a little jump when she reached her feet. Her legs splayed out in landing, and a few stray dark hairs peeked out between them.

  She turned. Her T-shirt had Mickey Mouse on its front, and her hair below matched the black shirt so closely that they seemed to be of a piece. She didn’t look embarrassed or surprised to find me watching her.

  “Go back to sleep, you perv,” she said.

  I rolled over on the couch, turning away from her. In another moment, the light went out. Even in the darkness I shut my eyes, like a child counting in a game of hide and seek. In fact, I did count quietly, holding my breath. Just as I reached zero she lay down beside me. She set her head between my shoulder blades. In a few minutes her breathing fell into a slow and regular rhythm, with the lightest hint of a snore on its exhale, and I knew she was asleep.

  When I woke, she sat in her armchair in the corner, wearing the same black Mickey Mouse T-shirt with a pair of blue and white striped pajama bottoms, reading a Thomas Bernhard novel—Gargoyles, I think it was, or maybe The Loser. She smiled at me as I sat up on the couch. Another month passed before we wound up in bed together.

  Now she moved quickly through the pool, though from where I was watching she appeared to do nothing to propel herself, like a bird that stays perfectly still while cutting through the sky. She seemed not so much a body as a shimmering trick of water and light. As she neared the wall I stepped aside, waiting for her to come up. Instead she executed a perfect flip turn, pushing her feet against the wall and shooting back from where she’d come. I felt suffocated, watching her swim away and remembering my own pounding chest. I wanted to pull her to the surface. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t going to drown. If she needed air, she would come up for it.

  Nonetheless, I felt relieved when she reached the other end. Even then she didn’t emerge right away. She dropped to the bottom of the pool, curled in a ball like a sinking rock. When she hit the bottom, she unloaded the spring of herself, pressing her feet against the tile and sending herself upward.

  In another moment she was back on the deck, hunched over with her hands on her knees, catching her breath. She picked up her robe and pulled it back on. The whole thing had taken only a minute. She looked down at the pool defiantly, even a bit angrily, as if I had told her she couldn’t do it and now she had proven me wrong. Her breath steadied and she reached into the pocket of her robe for her cigarettes. By the time she got one lit she’d circled the deck and settled in a chair.

  I swam to retrieve my suit, pulled it on, and climbed out of the pool. There was a second robe among the towels, and I put it on before sitting down next to her.

  “My father and I built this together,” she said, waving as if she might be talking about the yard, the house, the whole world a
round us.

  “Built what?” I asked.

  “This,” she said. She pounded a foot against the wooden deck beneath us. “It took a few weeks in the summer after the pool was put in. He romanticized physical labor, like Tolstoy with his threshing. Every summer weekend he spent shirtless out in the sun, landscaping or gardening. And he always wanted me to help. We built that shack over there, where he set up his little home office. But that year it was the deck. He circled the pool with his posthole digger, shoving it into the ground, twisting it in the earth to cut away roots, then pulling them out and tossing them aside. I followed, planting a post in each hole and pouring quick-set concrete from a big bag I dragged along from hole to hole.”

  “Seems pretty sturdy,” I said, and I gave the boards a playful kick. She didn’t smile.

  “My grandfather was a mason in central Pennsylvania.” She’d told me all this before, but I didn’t interrupt. “All through high school and college my father spent his summers outside, carrying stones. For the rest of his life I think he believed there was something insufficient about office work. Real labor was something done with your hands. I think he considered it a failing that his occupation didn’t yield tangible products. It earned him lots of money with which tangible products could be bought, but that’s not the same thing. Mostly, he was disappointed that he couldn’t pass on a trade to me. Three generations of Wilder masons. Not so long, he’d admit, in the stream of time, but something. That line of three had ended with his father. As far as he was concerned, shared work was the authentic basis for a father’s relationship with his child. It was an apprenticeship. A trade was passed along, and it could only be passed along in the doing of it. So the work had two products. You have a deck, and then you have the knowledge transmitted in making it.”

  “It’s nice to have those memories,” I said.