by Gian Sardar
Eva looks down at her hands. Small town. Rochester. She tries not to smile as she imagines this man in Luven with its one main street, called, creatively, Main Street.
Dr. Adams leans in conspiratorially. “It was one thing during the war—everyone banded together, you know. Comrades-in-arms.” He straightens and shakes his head. “Now it’s back to happy times, make money for yourself, forget your neighbor. Oh, the economy flourishes, but I think the cities suffer for it. The selfishness.”
“Well,” William says, “a tip from a neighbor, then. You should really try the Kahler. Avoid these crowds and eat some real food.”
Eva glances at the waitress in her stained uniform. Not once have they gone to the Kahler. Not once has he even suggested it. When has he gone? Ballantine.
“Honestly,” Dr. Adams says, “I did try it. I went in, took a seat, and learned they don’t serve liquor. If I’m paying for a prime rib, I’d at least like the option of a glass of wine.” He smiles at Eva. “One needn’t be an oenophile to feel that, am I right?”
The flush in her face is hot. The word, one she’s never heard, violently scoops out a place in her mind. She hates this word. She hates this man.
Dr. Adams continues. “Every fine restaurant should serve wine. But here,” he says, gesturing to the long counter, the swiveling stools, the thick sturdy plates with blue rims, the signs advertising ice cream, “here I don’t quite feel the same craving. Ah, well. Tell me, how is Claire? Someone remarked not long ago that you two have an extraordinary wine cellar.”
Claire. The name echoes with reverberations of a secret finally spoken. Eva catches William’s eyes flickering toward her. She stares at him and refuses to look away, even when his gaze has returned to Dr. Adams.
“She’s fine,” William says quickly. “And yes, we do have a collection.”
Claire, Eva thinks. Claire knows about wine. Claire would be a part of this conversation. Claire wouldn’t need a dictionary. You two, Dr. Adams had said. We, William replied. Those phrases, small and yet dense with everything. Ballantine. Mr. and Mrs. Ballantine.
“And her father? I understand he prefers the indoors these days.”
Now William laughs. “Yes, well. He’s got what he needs.”
“I imagine he does. That’s quite a house he’s holed up in.” He smiles. “Good, good. Well, I think I see a man who has just reached for his wallet. I’m off to stand behind him and hopefully get a seat in this”—he looks around him—“train car.” A laugh. “Mrs. Marten, pleasure to meet you. Mr. Ballantine, I’m sure we’ll meet again.”
With a nod William turns back to the counter. Their food is there, waiting. Eva stares at the crust of her apple pie, burned. “Ballantine?” she says quietly.
He shakes out some ketchup. “My company name is my mother’s maiden name. People assume my last name is Davis, but it’s not.”
“You’ve lied to me.”
“Eva, you’re probably the one person I haven’t lied to.”
She’s too angry to speak, too jealous, too inferior. But then suddenly the anger makes room for words.
“Real food, William? This train car, this is nothing? Our life is bottom rung?”
William glances over his shoulder. “Eva, let’s talk about this later.”
“Yes. Right before you return to your real life.”
His words are calm. “Even if you don’t see it, you are the most real part of my life.”
She says nothing, just scrapes the burnt part of the crust until her plate is covered with black.
Later she asks about his name, and William debates how much to tell, how much to reveal. In the end, he shares everything. The truth was, by the time the United States entered the war, William had a plan set in place. His graduate studies were nearing their end, and a switch to medical school became the answer. Ophthalmology, he’d declared, and began speaking of corneas and scleras and more grueling years. Some men were obvious in their methods of evasion—if you have the dough, you don’t have to go—but William had a reputation to uphold, status in the community, so when the time came, he said the truth to no one and vowed he would turn this dishonesty into the truth: He would be a doctor. A lifetime doing something he was interested in—though perhaps not passionately—was certainly worth the ability to have that lifetime in the first place.
None of this could be said aloud, however, not even to his mother, who cared not for duty or morality but prestige and standing. Once the Markhams’ son volunteered, that was all it took—the rest of the fur-clad circle practically anointed the couple, and before long, half of polite society lived in fear of telegrams, not quite sure why they’d allowed the men they loved to go off and fight beneath gray skies just because of the Markhams—whose son, incidentally, was shot in the hand months after shipping off and immediately returned home. And it had been the left hand, not even the right. But because William had just started medical school when Pearl Harbor was bombed, no one challenged his stateside footing or the fact that his arms were filled with textbooks rather than a carbine—though sometimes his father’s eyes clouded with unspoken judgment, as well as a confliction of relief. After all, he knew what it was to go to war.
No, there was no telling anyone William’s choice. He didn’t want to die—was that so wrong?—but there was no reason to shame himself or his parents in the process. So he studied hard and surprised himself—he liked the work, a blessed coincidence that eased his conscience as the war continued and men who were lucky enough to return did so in tattered form only. He struck up romance after romance, some with women who had mourners’ passions, sad women who clawed at him and clung to him and often called him by the wrong name. Marriage, despite his parents’ pressures and the glittery Junes and Julys of debutante balls, was a concept that had settled on his skin like grit, something that could be sloughed off by the next eager hand. Love would come, he thought.
He was happy with his life; promised the distinction of a doctor and interested in his field. But then, during a cold, slate-gray December, right as the world was about to flip to 1945, he and a few students visited the Mayo Clinic. There he saw a growing hospital, the first of its kind with integrated health care, single medical records, and tremendous advances in aviation medicine—but it was the town itself that stuck with him, and it was a feeling he couldn’t ignore, a splinter beneath a nail. Rochester was sewn to the hip of the hospital, and each step the hospital took, the town was forced to follow. Soon it would rise from the surrounding plains into a big city, William knew, and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, he felt a gnawing need to build, to stand before nothing and watch it rise into something. Maybe real estate and land development were in his blood. For the first time in his life he really wanted something, and it was a thrilling, desperate feeling.
“Development,” he said to his father, less than a week later. They were in Irwin’s den, all dark wood and power, while in the other room Isadora commandeered the placement of holly boughs. William spoke of real estate, of construction, of the clinic that was getting bigger every day. His father listened. “A parcel I looked at,” William continued, “only three blocks from the Plummer Building. I buy it and even sit on it for a year and I make a profit. Watch the grass grow and make money.”
Irwin simply stared at the pocket watch nestled in his palm, the gold fob draped over his hand. It was Tiffany with green enamel, inscribed inside with William’s grandparents’ initials and the sappy inscription Time stands still when you are near. Ironically it had stopped working long ago, but Irwin loved the watch and kept it on his desk, polished and always within reach. Palming it had become a nervous habit, something he did when he was in deep contemplation or too upset to speak. William stared at the fob, at the green ornaments along the chain. He was confused. He’d thought his father would agree with his proposal, had thought he’d be impressed that it was William who’d approached him with this, that f
or once his son was thinking as a Ballantine. Innovation. Progress. Advancement.
Eventually Irwin spoke. “James Guthrie lost his son,” he said. “His only son. Their name stopped forever in some Dutch village no one can pronounce. And here the Allies finally cross the Rhine and suddenly your itch to be a doctor disappears.” He looked straight into William’s eyes. “No need for medical school if the war’s about over, now is there?”
It threw William, being accused of the truth—though it had been the truth for only a while, then it changed. “I was planning on being a doctor. This—I didn’t know I’d want this.”
With one hand Irwin opened and closed the watch, again and again. At last he nodded. “Only someone used to an easy life would think he could escape war and let others fight the battle. Your mother spoiled you. I worried what toll it would take, on the kind of man you’d become.”
Then he set the watch on the desk, coiled in its chain, and said nothing more.
Davis. His mother’s maiden name, taken in a fit of righteousness when William left medical school and ventured to Rochester, scalded by his father’s words, determined to prove himself. He would not take the easy way. Not once did he enlist family connections or tell the investors who he was. Not once did he ask for help. Each month he sent his father checks to reimburse him for medical school, and each month the checks were cashed. Isadora tried in vain to bring William home—a dinner, a lunch, even just a meeting with his father: he was just angry, he’s softened—and yet each time William recalled the look in his father’s eyes and he refused, determined to prove himself more than a spoiled boy, determined to show he could be successful on his own. To do that, his anger, the great motivator, needed to be kept whole, shiny, and unscathed.
Within a year the company had grown, thanks in part to the end of the war and the return of servicemen who wanted nothing more than to settle down and raise a family, to quickly make themselves permanent on the earth after years of living with a toe on the other side. The Twin Cities were filling up, so people branched out into the country, and William’s company was right there, assisting in the slide to the suburbs. It was then William bought the little house he’d been renting, nothing fancy. Once more Isadora tried, this time telling him it was his father who wanted to talk. And though William’s anger had faded with the smoothing wash of a year, he wasn’t ready. There was just one more deal he wanted, and then he would go to his father, a check with the balance owed in hand.
But before that could happen, there was a last snowfall at the end of March 1946. A silent afternoon, a day of trapped, frozen trees and bone-white skies. A patch of black ice, William was told, blended right into the highway, a highway that long ago Irwin himself had had paved. For a moment his parents were in the air—a detail added by the stretch of smooth, untouched snow—and then, after what must have been a muffled landing, one tree was freed, released of all its ice and snow, a whole cascade of winter falling atop what was left of the car. The Bentley’s silver grille, still shiny even with the bark it had claimed, sat alongside the backseat.
At this, William let his anger grow stronger. Now it was aimed at God, whom William had never had a need for and now had even less, and at Irwin, for leaving him like a child tangled in his father’s clothing. The anger was sturdy and in place, denying grief, denying sorrow—until, that was, William went to his parents’ house and saw the last check he’d written, not cashed, sitting on Irwin’s desk alongside the pocket watch. And there, beside it, was a note, written in Irwin’s own hand, a blank envelope beneath: I am proud. Suddenly all William’s anger splintered into sadness, and before he could think he swept the note and the watch into the top drawer.
In six months he was married to Claire. A genuine, deep affection, the closest to love he’d ever known—in fact at the time he’d thought it love—but also a continuation of the track, another reason for his father to be proud.
“I wanted to build my company alone,” William tells Eva that night in bed, after explaining everything. “That’s why I took my mother’s name. He always thought I had it easy.”
“Did you?”
“I did. He was right. Everything had been handed to me.”
“So what does it mean?” she asks. “That Dr. Adams knows her family?”
He brushes her hair off her shoulder and lets his hand linger there. “I don’t know. Her family, and mine,” he adds that last part almost reluctantly, “are who people talk about. I don’t want rumors starting up. I guess it means what it does; we have to be careful, we might not want to go there again, we should stay away from St. Mary’s.”
“But he knew—” She stops. Because I don’t want to hear you say it. “Her, and her father. Will tonight get back to them?”
He takes his hand from her shoulder, and she turns to him, watches him as he speaks. “Nothing happened tonight. As far as he knows, I was trying to convince someone to sell property. In public, in a diner. That’s it.”
Eva rolls onto her back, trying to understand. He comes from money. A lot, it sounds like. And she’d had no idea. And his wife? The picture Eva had of her, of this Claire, was average looking, maybe short and definitely dull. Now that’s changed. People born into society are molded. They’re never left average looking, and if they are, they’re trained in the art of compensation, be it in grooming, conversation, or seduction. Now the imagined plain girl who was lucky to be married to William is suddenly beautiful, cultured, smart, wealthy—no doubt the envy of many. Why would William ever leave that?
She thinks of his parents, his story. “William, do you believe your father’s watching you now?”
He glances at her, surprised. “No. That concept’s just for us. To not feel alone.”
“Your parents aren’t in heaven?”
“The only thing I know for sure is that they’re at the Lakewood Cemetery.”
She smiles. “There’s no name for our cemetery. It’s the graveyard. That’s it.”
“The Lakewood is the place everyone wants to be when they’re dead. Next to the lake, rolling hills, big trees. It’s ridiculous. You’re dead.”
“So no life after death at all? We just cease to exist?”
He rolls onto his side and rests his head on her chest. Through the window the moon is bright and full and low in the sky, snagged in the top branches of a sugar maple. “How would I know? Though I doubt it’s golden gates and fluffy clouds.”
“I believe my father watches me.”
“If you believe that,” he says, “then he is.” A smile before rolling over to turn off the light. After a moment, he goes on: “What I told you, tonight, I’ve never told anyone. That’s what you do to me.”
She smiles. “So I’m not your lesser half.”
“You’re my better half. In the cities, I’m who people think I should be. Here, with you, I can be me.”
Eva lightly runs her fingertips up and down his arm. “You escaping Minneapolis, me escaping Luven.”
“This is our spot. We can be us.”
—
I’ve never told anyone. His words, fixed in her mind, set loose a night that is unforgiving, summoning her to shadowed corners, to the barn where light fell in stripes through old slats of wood. When finally she wakes, the satin of her nightgown is damp and the nape of her neck moist.
William, beside her, has been awake awhile, it appears, leaning against the pillows, with the newspaper in his hands. “I wanted to let you sleep. Are you sick?”
“Bad dream,” she says, sitting up.
“About?”
He’s silent, waiting for more, and in the wake of his truth last night, Eva feels her own pressing in her throat, and before she can think better of it, she’s letting it spill forth. “My uncle. The things he did.” He lowers the newspaper, surprised, and she realizes what she’s done. “I’m not going to tell you this,” she says.
“Eva, what happened? This wasn’t just a dream, you mean?”
She looks away, toward the window. The day’s not yet taken hold, clouds still braced in pink. If I tell him he will go. The thought rips through her, and in a beat she knows he will see her as others have, the decayed foundation upon which she stands. But this is William. He wouldn’t, not him.
“Eva. What did he do?”
“Things. That was the dream. Him. His breath. His hands. The barn was always dark inside. These lines of light would come through. I used to try and count them.”
The words, barbed, never spoken, catch on their way out. Incredulous. Did she just tell him? She looks up and sees the sickness swirling in his eyes, deep and muddy, and realizes her mistake. Never should she have said anything. Those words, those horrible words, should have stayed anchored to the pit of who she is, only glimpsed by those men who say things to her they’d never repeat to others, who feign a loss of balance to brush against her or stare at her unabashedly, when for another woman they’d avert their eyes. Come sit by me, this seat is open. But William, he’d never seen this within her. And now he does.
He’s standing. Pacing. At the window, the light outlines his silhouette like an aura. “How old were you?”
He’s focused outside, and the fact that he’s not looking at her makes it easier to continue. “Thirteen. He stopped when I was fifteen. I don’t think he’d try anything again.”
William turns quickly. “He’s still around? This man?”
“He’s my uncle, where would he have gone? He helps run the farm, all of them do.”
“And you see him?”
“William, he lives in Luven. I can’t not see him. He visits work, he eats there. He’s a paying customer.” She pauses. “I just don’t like the way he looks at me.”
William’s words are slow, even. “How is he looking at you?”