Henry went through to the kitchen, and on his return he brought two unmatching wine glasses, filled to the top, trembling somewhat in his fingers.
We set our glasses down carefully and at the same time, both untasted, on the arms of our chairs. I don’t remember how the drink tasted; I don’t know what it was. Henry barely sipped it.
“Donna, my wife, is away for an indefinite period,” he said at last. “She has decided to spend some time on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. It’s not all that far away, is it?”
He waited not on me to reply but on himself to speak. “I believe she’s developing an interest in a pottery class,” he said. “There’s a flourishing folk art community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, perhaps you’ve heard something about it? . . . I believe she’s beginning now to find herself,” he said presently.
Cuchulain sidled up to him with the slipper. Henry stroked his head and then threw the slipper, which Cuchulain raced for.
“You can’t do these things overnight. Not when you’re making a relatively late start.” Henry raised his eyes to mine. “And it’s very important to her that she find herself before it’s too late.”
Here was Cuchulain back with the slipper, a small-sized pink-tinted one.
“She wanted a respite from being a faculty wife,” Henry said. With a grimace of deliberation he threw the slipper again. “And I’m sure she deserved it.”
“And when she comes back it’ll be of her own free will. I honor her wish. She knows that.”
Now Cuchulain was ready to let me take my turn. He pranced up with the slipper held in his jaws by the heel. It was a rather worn pink satin mule.
“I’m afraid I don’t know one pottery bowl from another,” Henry was saying humbly.
“No, Cuchulain. No, take it away.” I was not going to touch the slipper. How could any woman have done that to him?
Henry put out his arm and in a firm hand took the shoe from Cuchulain. “But the important thing about it is she’s surviving the crisis,” he said. “I know that much. I tell myself that’s the beauty of a major credit card. I know Donna is alive. Better than from postcards of the Biloxi lighthouse.” And he threw the pink slipper with great force, almost as far as the dining room table in the next room, without ever seeming to notice what object it was he threw, or the little glass he’d knocked off the arm of his chair, spilling the wine and breaking it. “She’s found Ray, now—a puppet maker friend, who’s given her another sort of respite. He’s homosexual.” Cuchulain brought him the slipper and he held it rigidly before his eyes—the little thread of pink ostrich waving from the toe, the inside sole stained with the print of a small bare foot. “I was slow to respond fairly when it came to Ray. But my wife used to tell me I never saw the joke in things. It isn’t a joke to hold yourself in. I want to go find where she is, bring her back. But that would be the stupidest thing I could do. In that Connie is not much like other women.” “She’ll come back of her own accord, don’t you think?” he suddenly asked me. “Wouldn’t you?”
Justine said, “I wonder how it was you happened to know her?”
“It was the most natural way in the world,” he answered at once my first personal question to him. “I taught her. The Romantic Novel.” He continued to look at me. Presently he said, [. . .] “It wasn’t until last night, when I had to prepare my exams, that I realized you would actually be going away. That very probably I should not see you again. It finally dawned on me—I realized how selfish I’d been allowing myself to become. You’d missed what the people who flock here to study in summer expect. . . I meant to make it up to you in some small way tonight, wondering if we mightn’t have dinner in a nice restaurant, take one walk through the Quarter—I hadn’t really thought ahead as far as the dancing, and only when we reached the door I remembered—my wife always took Mississippi visitors to La Lune. This was before she was interested in ceramics.”
“Henry, thank you! It was a great kindness. I liked coming along all those afternoons to the beach too. I’m glad I stayed with your course.”
“I’ve counted on you being here,” he said. “I wanted you to know—I wanted you to know, Rachel. That’s why I planned this evening, different from the other times—what I feel toward you is gratitude.” [. . .]
He set his jaw and was still. And I knew now that his whole present life, starting with the pedantry, the monotony of his linguistics lectures—for that was what they’d been really like—was one untiring effort at self-control, one long concentration simply on getting through the days and nights, on staying alive. Linguistics was his discipline. Just as waiting itself was his achievement. And so every day needed to be the same. I was afraid and ashamed now that his evening with me had given him a hard time by causing him to break this discipline for the sake of courtesy, that he’d hated the Quarter and La Lune, maybe even the dancing. I had let him forsake, for my last night, what was to him an unstopping necessity.
Now Cuchulain came offering Henry a book.
Henry patted his head. “Why, you’ve brought me ‘The Tower,’” he said, taking carefully a narrow book of bleached green with gilt bars on it.2 He showed it to me and then as if in a sudden resolve he got to his feet. “You might as well see the rest,” he said, leading the way, I bringing the book. We passed a china closet with four flowered tureens—the set Cuchulain’s water dish had come from—and the round dining room table of plain oak, with an open book lying on it where the chair was drawn up.
They entered the room at the back where the light had been left on. Cuchulain pressed in ahead and, suddenly exhausted with the joy of tonight’s reunion, spun around and stretched full length on the floor at the foot of a cot and at once lay asleep.
Under the light of a student lamp the small room was in disarray. On the desk were piles of papers, and papers that had escaped from piles, jammed pigeonholes above. There were open books, open notebooks—everything was opened. Bulging manila folders were crowded into the bookshelves in and among the books, and had piled up on the floor under the dictionary stand. Books were lying open on the wrinkled-over, re-covered couch, where a bed pillow was punched in against the wall at the head. There was an alarm clock sticking partway out from beneath the pillow. On the strip of carpet lay a well-gnawed bone, one of a pair of Henry’s good shoes beside it, and with his chin on the other shoe, Cuchulain sleeping.
Henry stood looking down at his desk, at some written-over notes as if he were not really seeing them, only remembering them. No alarm showed in his face, no surprise at the whole row of books with the bleached green spines lying fallen over like dominoes across the back of the desk. They’d toppled a stack of bluebooks.
[. . .] “I’m hoping to get a little ahead now that Linguistics is coming to an end—a fresh look at the Red Branch with “The Shadowy Waters,” Henry said.3 Now he gathered the books and slowly, methodically stood them in a row again, as if performing that act for the hundredth time. “Some of my most treasured copies have got away from me, over the years,” he said. I set “The Tower” in its place for him at the end of the row. As I slowly performed this little act, his hand slowly came down and firmly covered mine.
I saw it, as if the shock of contact had made [me] psychic, beneath its summer tan, all marked over with the worn calluses and the scars and burns and still unclosed wounds of a terrible, long-enduring, almost killing life, which I had not even yet dreamed he led, until this moment. His hand, by not moving, by not leaving [mine], conducted such long and patient desperation that my own hand, in receiving it, could not have moved either, had I even wished to move it or tried to take it away. Both unmatching human hands stayed still, as if time had stopped.
There was a sudden high-pitched sound of startling eagerness, almost human. It was Cuchulain. All four feet in running position, he was having some dream.
I remembered that I must study tonight. “Last chance.”
“I think we might walk,” he said. [. . .] The tossed pink slipper, the untasted cherry bou
nce were left behind. As we descended the outside stairway, I could see where the house stood was really the end of the street, too; it stopped in a scattering of palm trees.
The streets through which Henry and I walked were dark and deserted. The houses stood dimly back, all windows were dark. Giant oaks made their presence known as if they breathed, they lined the way. Their limbs arched over Henry’s head and mine like a succession of gateways.
“Hocking County, Ohio, is a section of the country that lies very open,” Henry began in the dark. “You can get into it from any side, without any trouble. You can see where you’re going. You know where you are. All the roads are clearly and plainly marked. That’s where I come from. The country lies open, though the people living there may not by nature be so open to the stranger. It’s farming country, orderly country, very plain. Peaceful. It grows and yields well. It isn’t a wasteful country. It’s bountiful. And looks it. It looks peaceful.” Like Henry with his eyes closed, she thought in the dark now effortlessly in step.
There was for a while the sound of their walking.
“They were Amish, a long time back, my family. The Pauldings still cling to the land. My brother and his wife and family still own our old farm. It was my family’s dining room table that you touched as you went by in my apartment. They were quiet, plain people, people of peace. My father never used to talk much to me until after I had begun living away from home and would travel home for a visit, and then not until just the night I was leaving. And then his confidences would pour out. As I think back it makes me smile a little. Nothing with any reason for keeping back at all, nothing to be ashamed of, just the bare unvarnished facts. I used to wonder if he didn’t regret my knowing those later. But I think he was fond of me. And I was breaking away from the farm. I was looking for something farther away and harder to get, you understand. I was determined upon a good education.”
He told her that he’d put himself through the University of Wisconsin. “I happened to discover Yeats, reading through some of the stacks in the Library. I read the early and then the later poems all through the same one afternoon, standing up, by the window. I read—” His voice was so different from his lecturing voice that she was almost prepared to hear him recite the poem itself—“I read ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ standing up in the stacks, by the light of falling snow. It seemed to me that if I could stir, if I could take the next step, I could go out into the poem the way I could go out into that snow. That it would be falling on my shoulders. That it would pelt me on its way down—that I could move in it, live in it—that I could die in it, maybe. So after that I had to learn it,” he said. “And I told myself that I would. That I accepted the poem, the invitation.” 4
In the dark, she was uncertain if the indrawn breath she heard was his laugh. “And I didn’t know or dream that ‘Sailing to Byzantium,’ that changed my life, was a poem about old age—I was youth! Then, I saw other things—about the spirit and the flesh—about heart’s desire, and the hope of finding it, and not finding it—that it was about making something at last out of what you’d found. And now I think maybe youth and old age themselves are about those things. Growing old is ‘about’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium.’” He went silent. At a distance the ferry boat hooted. “The poem’s not so much ‘about’ growing old—growing old is ‘about’ the poem.”
“The poem’s simply what isn’t going to die,” he said, “And we are.”
“And don’t you know,” he cried, “I’d give it up, give Yeats up even, if she would come back again and ask me to?”
The air was stirring a little as if they’d come to an opening space. There was a faint light of shells in front of our feet. A turfed embankment showed itself; there was paleness in the sky. Henry kept on in his straight line, past bushes that touched my waist, scraped my legs, up the slope. We came to a stop in the open. The place we, though it seemed almost without knowing it, stood on was broad and high. Gradually we made out the river, brimming not far below, full of night, running past us. He’d brought [me] here after all, as he’d promised. We stood at a point on its great emerging curve. At a distance unknown, faint, countless lights pulsed starlike in its outreaches of the city. A little jewel box of lights traveled across the space of profoundest darkness, as slowly, it seemed, as a planet through the sky. She knew without his telling her that it was the ferry to Algiers. We were somewhere on the stark cleanswept levee.
“In the meantime—in the meantime! Why shouldn’t people be merciful to one another?” At the sound of his voice rising so sharply, birds close by moved from thicket to thicket, as if following some rule of safety. It was a valedictory voice as if now they were leaving something behind them, as if it were the end of a story he had come to the end of now.
“Because it’s a thing we can learn, come to learn,” he said, while the air stirred now, coming over the water into our faces. “Don’t you believe? It’s not too much to try for, is it?” His voice through the stillness was once more lifted, almost like that of a young man. “It’s never too late, do you believe?” At the force of his voice, the birds rose and flew out over the water. It became an impossible blue. We could see one another.
In his exclamatory face there had come something I had not seen there before. He was looking down at my own face as if he saw something to love there.
“You have been reminding me of Beverly,” he said. “That must explain it—”
“Not to me,” she said, as desperately as he.
He was putting his arms around me. I had no power to keep me from holding just as tightly to him. I was embracing him too.
“It was your voice,” he said. “I only realized it when you spoke to me in the dark. It was like a miracle how you brought her back to me as she was in the beginning when we were just starting out together.”
“I can’t let you think that,” I said. “I couldn’t be like her,” I flashed out. “I couldn’t have done what she did!”
“She had a great deal of innocence about her—yes, and expectation, hope. It was what I could hear in your voice. We might be at our beginnings this very morning. Don’t you feel it too? Only stay close to me. You have restored me. You are so beautiful. I never knew this would [come] to me as long as Donna wishes to remain my wife. But I’m so happy! I’m so happy.” Henry protested to the (place) around him.
“Stay with me.”
I heard in his words and his voice what I had seen almost psychically in his hand—the desperation. Of course I loved him with a desperation of my own! I did not know what to do. What solved it, and I think it was the last thing I expected, was the sun coming up.
The mysteriousness of the dark and the dawn dissolved. So did every bit of the shadowiness that had wrapped us. [. . .]
The broad light of the sun ran us down, more brazen every minute, eye-hurting. Without speaking again we embraced each other so closely that the light could not get in, we were shields for each other and closing our tender eyes against the hard light.
The sound of some distant iron bell, ringing the hour from deep in the city, was laid on our middle-aged shoulders. Under the great spillage of heat and light, we left the river and walked on down the levee again, and soon into a paved street as if answering to the bell which continued to ring. By the time we reached a paved street, a cruising taxi was coming into sight, its headlights brownly burning. It reached us and, without being signalled, stopped, as though it were morning routine to round up strangers in the city of New Orleans who had lost their way in the night just ended. The driver reached back and opened the door, and Henry helped me inside. I flew home to the parsonage that evening.
In the margin is Eudora’s note to “cut most” of the paragraph above.
There are several partial pages with extra material for the flashback. Three follow below.
FLASHBACK
“What will it be like when you go back tomorrow, Rachel? Are you still living in the house where you grew up?”
“Yes, the parsonage.
It’s quiet between one Sunday and the next. Do you know that my mother and father live there side by side and they haven’t spoken to each other for twenty years? They can’t change anything, because Father is the Presbyterian minister.”
Under a streetlight I saw that he only nodded as though I had told him nothing to astonish him.
Presently he said,
OHIO5
“Once in a second hand shop I came across that poem in a beautiful little book to itself. Yeats had dedicated it to a woman artist, and she had painted pictures for it. I like to think of partnerships in imagination. They must share many clues and secrets between them. Like a good marriage. I had it for a while, that book—it was lost in one of my moves. I can’t call up for myself what the pictures were like any longer. The poem has absorbed them for me, as it’s absorbed so much.”6
Henry in being so preeminently a married man was that much the dearer to me, for of course I knew it was this that made him need me. What you could call my bringing-up can’t be blamed for what I did—the parsonage was part of what had left me. I think that I was simply afraid of great joy. It had never come so close to me before. I didn’t know what to do. Any more than Donna, with Henry disappearing in front of her eyes, knew what to do now. Does anyone know how to love? I stumbled into some bushes when I turned; my eyes weren’t seeing ahead of me. Henry brought me to my feet and then with his arm around me guided me down, from that bright levee top behind us.
Meanwhile There Are Letters Page 52