That edge was back in her voice. I have always been wary of women who preface anything with “I don’t want to fight” and I was right to be wary.
Diane told me that she thought it was a miracle Anna was sane at all after what she had gone through. Diane said that it was her opinion that Anna might not be sane in any other surroundings. Not much mental equilibrium was required out at Walker’s commune. They were more tolerant of eccentricity.
I told Diane I understood all that. I just wanted to see Anna. She might, I said, even want to see me.
The argument warmed up. Diane told me that I was hunting a ghost. Yes, Anna was alive, but not the Anna I had come looking for. I asked her how she could know what I was looking for, how she could read my mind.
“I know you, David,” she said. Her face had lost some of its control, and she looked older, more formidable. “You write these scenarios in your head. You have a problem with real people, real intimacy. Remember when I asked you to come? You couldn’t make it. If you didn’t owe it to me, you owed it to Ray and Holly, but you couldn’t make it.”
I hadn’t been expecting that one, and it hurt. In December of 1971, Ray and Holly had been driving to South Carolina to visit Holly’s parents for the holidays. A drunken kid in a rented moving van had slammed into them on the highway. Ray and Holly had been killed instantly.
Diane, traditional bearer of bad news, had called me. Diane and Holly had hit it off back when I first introduced them, and the friendship had grown since I left Newburg. She was almost hysterical when she called, and I knew she needed me; I needed to be there.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was in a bad way then. I was drinking twenty-four hours a day, and the world just looked black, chaos. When you called, I knew I should come, but I couldn’t. I was hallucinating, in and out of d.t.’s, suicidally self-involved. I was afraid of going to that funeral. Ray and Holly were just about the only friends I ever had, and their death seemed so … I don’t know … hostile, that’s not the word. I wasn’t in any shape to comfort anyone; I was dangerous to be around. I really am sorry.”
“I know.” Diane’s voice had softened. I think she recognized genuine remorse, the sound of arguments played out to unforgiving walls on solitary nights. “I was sick then too, and I hated you for not coming, but I understand now. I really do. I’m sorry I brought it up. But it’s part of the way you are.” She leaned forward to make this point, all earnestness, full of terrible revelation. I fidgeted, studied my sneakers.
“David,” she said, “you are good with dreams. You write beautifully illustrated children’s stories, because you are a child yourself. It’s wonderful, really. The world needs dreams, ideals. But sometimes the dream doesn’t mesh with reality. The reality can be unpleasant. Then you step back, you get a bee-stung look, you run. You don’t mean any harm, but the rest of us, well, the rest of us don’t have any place to go, and you’ve ducked under a rainbow, and maybe we feel a little abandoned. Maybe we feel betrayed.”
Diane was right, but I was beginning to feel schoolboy-reprimanded, and I wanted to get out, get moving.
“You understand why I’m telling you all this?” she asked.
I told her I understood. Then I asked her if she would come with me to see Anna.
“No, I don’t think so. My stomach isn’t what it used to be.”
4
Well, I got her to go. What I lack in charm, I make up for in persistence. I have a lot of bad-mannered endurance. I can engage in hours of shameless wheedling. Diane realized this and gave in quickly, sparing us both.
I wanted to go right away, but Diane said she wasn’t about to drive out there this late in the day. We drove out the next morning. The day was crystal bright, and an early cold snap had announced autumn in the veins of some unwary maples and poplars. Red and yellow flames dotted the mountainside, and the smoky air was full of change. I was nervous, and the clarity of the landscape, a riot of detail that seemed to offer every roadside weed and windblown leaf to my eye, crowded my mind, inspiring confusion and doubt. Maybe Diane and Kalso were right. Maybe I had no right to come booming back into Anna’s life, even if my motives were excellent. And they probably weren’t. I had had thirty-four years to acquire some slight self-knowledge, and the one thing I did know about myself was this: I was a master of rationalization.
Diane, slumped down in her seat with her arms across her chest, was no help. She wrapped herself in her green windbreaker and stared out the window, thinking her own thoughts, squinting against the morning glare.
“Everything is going to be fine,” I told myself. I waited for Diane to finish talking to the lanky, long-haired boy in a cowboy hat who sat on the gate. I would have smoked a cigarette, but I had given them up six months ago, and now, bereft of vices, I stood by the side of the road smiling a thin, we-come-in-peace smile, hoping I didn’t look as crazy as I felt. As I watched, the boy jumped down from the wooden gate and swung the gate backwards. Diane came running back to the car.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He remembers me from last time.” She leaned back as I started the car again. We bumped over the weedy, deep-rutted road. “Anna is living with Walker, up at the main farmhouse. Over there.” Diane pointed out the window to my left. “They’ve got houses for those who have chosen their Dancer for the Life Dance, married couples. Those long wooden buildings are dorms, co-ed, but keep your sexual fantasies to yourself. I’m told the Dancers are a chaste, decorous lot.”
“Looks kind of run down,” I said.
“Faded glory,” Diane said. “Or at least it is supposed to look like faded glory.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are about seventy-five true believers ensconced here now. That’s nothing compared to what this place was like in its heyday, but that was Walker’s decision. Father Walker decided to keep a low profile. I think he noticed a certain change in the weather, a cruel wind from the heartland. You ask me, this place is intentionally seedy. The flock has reached a self-sustaining level, and it doesn’t need to advertise loudly. There are chapters of the Dancers of Divine Logic in every state, and a network of grassroots businesses and some not-so-grassroots businesses. There’s even computer software for reaching enlightenment. Put a floppy disk in your computer, and a series of questions will allow you to determine whether or not you are Divine Dancer material or not. You want Apple compatible? IBM compatible? Commodore? Of course, this is no easy road to nirvana. The program will tell you whether or not you have what it takes to join up, but it won’t get you to heaven. To do that, you have to see a mentor—names and addresses come with the software—and there are more expenses. The One True Path can look a lot like a toll road, but nobody’s complaining.”
I could see the white farmhouse looming large at the top of the hill, and it was becoming more difficult to follow what Diane was saying. Any minute now I was going to see Anna again.
And then I saw her. There was a pond next to the farmhouse, off to the right, probably the same pond in Kalso’s photo. Anna was standing looking out at the water. Her back was to me, but I knew it was her. Her hair was still long and dark, and her back very straight. She had this way of holding her body, attentive, ready to bolt. But I don’t think it was any single physical characteristic or combination that made me recognize her. I believe I have always been tuned to the quality of Anna; something in me resounds to her presence.
I stopped the car and was out of it, running across the field. I heard Diane shout something behind me, but I kept running. I shouted “Anna!” and waved my arms like an idiot.
Reality, as Diane had noted the day before, rarely meshed with my dreams. I didn’t expect it to.
That moment, however, was absolutely right, all the gods scribbling on my behalf, writing me into that clear, sunny instant of return. My beloved turned and squinted at me, brushed hair from her eyes. She was wearing a long, tan dress, very plain, with a high collar, and she frowned as I shouted her name again. Then she smiled, leap
ed in the air, shouting my name.
“David! David!” She ran toward me and I caught her up and spun her in the dizzy air and I found her face, her mouth, and kissed her, and moved away to touch her cheek with my hand, to stroke her hair, and she was laughing all the while. She looked no older than that first time I had seen her in the emergency room.
“Oh Anna, you look good,” I said.
She couldn’t stop laughing. Laughter always suited her, like song in a warbler’s throat.
I kissed her again, holding her tightly, inhaling the scent of her hair, remembering the way she moved, her sweet, empathic gestures, her grace and eternal awkwardness.
“Oh David, you came back. I dreamed you would. I told Walker about it, and he said the dream was a lie, but I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was true.”
And she hugged me again. I kissed her again.
The gods had written the scene, and I was invulnerable within that moment, and I sensed that and hurried nothing.
“Diane’s here,” I finally said. “I asked Diane to come.”
I looked around for Diane, but she was nowhere to be seen, and I felt foolish. “I guess she went on up to the house,” I said.
“Diane will be all right,” Anna said. “Walker says she has a gift, the gift of forgiveness, which is the greatest of all the gifts. She is a good friend, don’t you think? She told me she was in love with you once.”
Studying Anna’s face, I found it hard to believe that she was thirty-two. Yes, there were some changes, but they were so easily reconciled with my memory of Anna that it might have been the memory that was at fault. She had the same clear, animated features, the same girlish, quirky ways, erotic and elusive, demon and waif.
“I love you,” I said.
Anna smiled and pulled me forward and kissed me long and hard. “I love you too,” she said.
We sat on the bank of the pond, and the air warmed under the enthusiastic attentions of the sun, and I told Anna how I had learned that she was still alive from Kalso. I asked her why she hadn’t let me know she was alive.
She shrugged her shoulders and pouted, staring into the green water. “You know those things or you don’t. It’s not up to me. It’s all figured out a long time ago.” Then she turned and smiled gloriously. “But I knew you would come.”
I was so glad to see her. I told her how things were with me, told her about my marriage and its failure. “I realize now that I married her because she was so damned attentive, cared so much for me. I really did her a disservice. She was a wonderful person, but I had no business marrying her simply because I couldn’t love myself and needed someone for the job. It was a greedy, selfish thing to do.”
Anna nodded. “Walker says even Jesus was selfish, and that is okay. Only death is unselfish.”
I told her how my drinking had gotten worse, almost killed me, and how I had stopped drinking and was now doing all right. I told her I wrote and illustrated children’s books. I promised her I would bring her copies of my books.
I asked her how she was doing, what had been going on in her life. She didn’t want to talk about herself. This evasiveness was nothing new. The Anna I had known had always lived amid secrets, borders that couldn’t be crossed, subjects that could not be broached. She was getting nervous, however, and stood up quickly. “Let’s go in the house,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
Her eyes were brighter and darker, and she looked at the pond. “I think there’s someone under the water,” she said. “I believe he has been listening.”
“Anna,” I said, feeling the shadow of the past, armed and murderous, “there’s nothing there.”
I put my arm around her shoulder. “You know that,” I said.
She looked at me and smiled. “Yes, I know that, David. I can’t believe you’ve come back. I’m so glad to see you.”
Together we walked arm-in-arm up to the farmhouse. Diane and Walker came out on the porch—they must have been able to see us from a window in the living room. Walker had a beard now, a fuzzy beard that made him look like a dissolute cherub. There was a fine net of lines around his eyes, and he had the manner of a man who has seen much and narrowly avoided cynicism. He seemed tired. But he smiled and said, “David Livingston. Anna has been telling me you would come. I didn’t believe her, which was foolish of me, for I have always known that Anna has the Sight. I hope you will come again.”
“Thank you. I will.”
Driving back, I said, “Anna looks good.”
Diane said nothing.
“Do you think she is sleeping with Walker?” I asked.
Diane turned and looked at me sharply. “What business is it of yours what Anna does?”
I studied the road. “I’m just curious,” I said.
“Why don’t you ask Anna then? I have never been an authority on Anna. I don’t know what she does, what she thinks.”
5
I had told myself that all I wished for Anna was happiness. If she was happy where she was, then I would leave her there.
She seemed very happy in her life. I drove out to see her every day. She worked in the kitchen, helping with the preparation of meals. She took her duties seriously, and I couldn’t get her to play hookey when she had chores to do.
But she did have plenty of free time in the afternoon, and the gentle autumn was designed for long walks and conversation.
Some of my questions were answered. She did, indeed, sleep with Walker.
“But she’s not in love with him,” I told Diane.
Diane had shaken her head sadly. “Jesus. How can you possibly know that?”
“Her manner isn’t that of a lover,” I said. “There isn’t any passion in the relationship.”
“Hmmmmmmm,” Diane said. She had little faith in my judgment in such matters.
Anna was happy in her new world, but there was a dark, troubled side. She was subject to paranoid delusions, odd, hallucinatory episodes. I came to recognize a certain waxy, wary expression that signaled the advent of one of these attacks. She would clutch my wrist and whisper urgently in a small, trembly voice, “David!” My heart would sink as I heard her announce that the hill we were picnicking on was hollow. She could hear voices underneath. “Hush.” She would listen acutely. I would try to comfort her, reassure her that there were no voices, no menacing creatures. Sometimes reason would prevail. She was aware that these episodes were not real. But sometimes the panic would get rolling, and I couldn’t do anything to calm her. I would take her back to the farmhouse, and we would sit on the sofa in the big living room, and I would hold her tightly until, satisfied that she was safe, she would laugh and talk of other things.
“Wow, I’m a baby,” she would say.
“I want Anna to see a psychiatrist,” I told Walker. I had been coming to the commune every day for fifteen days, and I was standing in Walker’s study, still shaky, but now righteously angry. Walker blinked at me, his expression unreadable, has hands folded in front of him on the desk.
“Please sit down,” he said. “And tell me why you think Anna will profit from going out in the world again.”
I didn’t want to be calm. I wasn’t calm. This phony avatar had been allowing Anna to grow steadily worse over the course of long years, benignly nodding his head, muttering platitudes about God’s will.
Two hours earlier, Anna and I had been hiking. Anna had become convinced that we were being followed. “Dead people are hiding behind the trees,” she told me.
I had brought her back down the hill, back to the safety of the farmhouse, but she had gotten worse in the long walk through the woods, and she was babbling incoherently by the time we reached the farmhouse. I was shaken by the force of this delusion. Anna’s demons may not have been real, but her terror was, and I had felt helpless, sick with pity. I calmed her down and went looking for Walker in a rage. I wasn’t going to let his smooth affability turn me around. I was prepared for a fight.
“Whatever Anna wants to do, that will
be done,” he said. “Does she want to go?”
“I haven’t asked her,” I said.
He raised his eyebrows, spread the fingers of both hands. “If she wants to go, she is free to go. She is not a prisoner here.”
“She may not listen to me. I was hoping she would listen to you.”
Walker laughed. He stood up and came slowly around his desk and put an arm on my shoulder. “Surely you know Anna better than that. What Anna decides to do, she does. You overrate my influence. Go. Ask her what she wants to do.”
I had turned away and reached for the door handle when Walker spoke again, a quiet, reflective voice. “There is no good for her in that world. Of that, I am convinced.”
I didn’t say anything, didn’t waste the time. I was preparing my arguments for Anna. I was aware of how stubborn she could be, and I expected a battle.
She agreed to go without argument. “Yes,” she said. “I have to go.”
“It’s your own decision,” I said.
“Oh no.” She shook her head. “There isn’t any decision to it.”
“I don’t think I understand,” I said.
Anna smiled, and her large eyes were bright, the eyes of a shy, nocturnal creature. We sat on the couch in the living room, twilight drawing the light from the room, leaching it of color. “No, you don’t understand. And yet, you are the thing that has happened. You are the beginning of it. I knew you would come. And so it will all come. I can’t run away. I have to go forward.”
I still didn’t understand, but I didn’t ask for further clarification. I felt a greater darkness shudder over the both of us. Was I wrong in coming here? Was I the adder in her Eden? Then my rational systems kicked in and I told myself that Anna was getting worse, that her hallucinations and phobic attacks could not be comfortably ignored.
I was doing the right thing.
I have told myself this again and again.
I didn’t waste any time, since I didn’t want either Anna or Walker to have a change of heart. I got Diane to come with me, and we picked Anna up early the next morning and drove her over to Romner Psychiatric Institute. Diane had arranged for a resident, a Dr. Moore, to see her. Anna’s old psychiatrist, Parrish, was still at the hospital, but he was now the director, having married the boss’s daughter, so he no longer hung around the emergency room chatting up new arrivals.
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