The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  Hans appraised me for a moment in silence, or seemed to. It was hard, because of his glasses, to read his eyes or even tell what they were focused on. Then he went upstairs without a glance in my direction.

  “Well, it was so nice to meet you, Wade,” Myra said. “Perhaps we’ll meet again.” It was the first time anyone had bid me goodbye before I said that I was leaving.

  “What’s Horlicks?” I asked Rachel on the doorstep. She laughed. “Some sort of malt beverage. Tastes like chalk. Horlicks is usually prepared with hot milk or hot water, but very few houses in Cape Town are air conditioned and ours wasn’t, so he got into the habit of drinking Horlicks ice-cold so it would cool him down at bedtime. Even here he drinks it ice-cold. Mom makes him a glass every afternoon and puts it in the fridge with a saucer on top. He drinks it every night at bedtime, which is always ten o’clock, but bedtime is not to be confused with sleep time. I swear he never sleeps. I’ve heard him up and pacing around downstairs at all hours. Sometimes he goes out driving.”

  Hans emerged from the house and, without a word to either of us, got into the Malibu and drove away, seeming quite jaunty despite his complaints in the kitchen. Rachel and I sat on the swing in the front yard. “He’ll be back soon,” Rachel said. About ten minutes later, Hans returned in the Malibu, and Myra came out, looking almost grim, and stood on the steps as she watched Hans get out of the car and open the trunk. She went to the car and got in.

  “Come see, Rachel,” Hans called. Rachel took my hand and we walked down the driveway to the back of the car. “We’re going out, visiting,” Hans said. “Would you like to come with us now that Wade is leaving?”

  “No, we’re going for a walk.” Perhaps a dozen dessert boxes were laid out on the floor of the trunk: on two, “black forest cake” was written, on another two, “lemon meringue pie,” on another, “pound cake with cherries.” Hans, pen in hand, took a small notebook out of his shirt pocket and flipped through the pages, pausing now and then to write names on the boxes—Halliday, Fitzpatrick, Boone. He tapped his lips with his forefinger, consulted the notebook and silently counted the boxes, pointing at each one with the pen. It looked as if he was about to embark on a dessert delivery route for people who were shut in because of age or illness.

  “Mom is exhausted,” Rachel said. “Don’t be gone too long.”

  Hans closed the trunk, hurried to the driver’s side, got in, backed the Malibu out of the driveway and drove off again.

  “He’s going to drop in unannounced on friends or even people they barely know until all the pies and cakes are gone. It could take hours. They never stay in one place for more than half an hour, but they bring a pie or cake to every house. They won’t be welcomed with enthusiasm. Polite tolerance, at best. But that won’t put him off. I went with them a few times. I was never more bored in my life. I would just sit there, praying that my father would show some sign that he was ready to move on to the next house. My mother seemed just as bored and just as eager to leave but, as far as I know, she’s never complained. To this day I don’t know what all these visits are about.”

  * * *

  —

  The next evening, Rachel answered the door and, when I followed her inside, I saw Myra at the dining room table, crying. “What’s wrong?” I whispered.

  “I kept my promise to her. Remember? I promised her that I would tell her when I lost my virginity. I told her that we slept together.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “Should I leave?”

  “No—please stay. Mom won’t say a word to you. Just pretend not to notice that she’s crying.”

  From The Arelliad

  SACRIFICE (1983)

  That summer seems so long ago—

  it only seems that way, I know.

  If he’s still young, I must be too—

  the world is old, but we are new.

  Wade says that he is going to be a writer—not that he is planning to be one, or hoping to be one. He is going to publish his first novel before he is thirty. He is going to make a living from writing fiction. He talks as if he can see the future and is merely reporting what he sees, which happily consists of him getting everything he wants. I don’t know if this is bravado or if he is fearless because he doesn’t see the obstacles, the dangers and the risks. Perhaps he doesn’t know that, for everyone, the deck is stacked against success and even survival, doesn’t know the cost of failure, doesn’t know that even his own mind might turn on him someday. Of course, no one knows that until it happens to them. Some don’t know it even then.

  I plunge into the page today, but not into Arellia. I think I’ve sunk into the future. Wade and I are living in some city far from Newfoundland. I have no memory of the house and yet I know my way around it. Time passes as it does in dreams, in jumps and starts, in jarring transitions. We leave the city but the house seems to move about with us.

  It isn’t clear how old we are. I feel older. Wade looks the same as he does now, but I can somehow tell he’s changed. It is a sad and silent house. We sit about and read, though I don’t so much read Het Achterhuis as silently recite it from memory as I turn the pages. Wade is into something new, reading intensely as if this book will prove to be The Book, the one that will release the words pent up in his head.

  We sat about the house like that,

  my parents’ house, when we first met.

  We faced each other as we read

  after we had been to bed.

  From time to time, Wade looked at me—

  I felt him look, I didn’t see—

  and then he went back to his book.

  I took my turn and snuck a look;

  I raised my eyes but not my head

  and yet he smiled as if he’d said,

  “I caught that look, you can’t fool me”—

  and just like that I knew that we

  were young, in love and meant to be.

  But now something is wrong. We’re home, Wade says, but not out loud. In the future, if that’s what this is, I can read his mind. The house has touched down like a plane and we’re back in Newfoundland, in Wade’s hometown. He frowned once when I called it nice. A tourist word. He couldn’t stand to hear it said of Petty Harbour.

  Across the way and up the hill, we see his parents’ house. He smiles until I say that no one lives there now—the last of the Jacksons left it long ago, just as he did for reasons he cannot spell out. He thinks of the books he has written that have caused a stir among Newfoundlanders who don’t know why he moved away. No one knows but me. Whenever we go back, they smirk at me, the woman he left them for, his high and mighty paramour who thinks the island second-rate.

  If they spoke to us, they’d say, “You went away, but you come back so we can see how successful you are, to look us in the eye and say, ‘I got away but you didn’t.’ ”

  “It’s not like that,” I’d like to say, but I never do.

  He had to get away from here to see it as it really is, to write about it. How often has he told that lie? The truth is that he had to choose between the place he loved and me. The truth is that, if not for me, he would have stayed. I was afraid that it would be too much to bear, the ever-present past, the street, the house, the hills, Cape Spear—the city would have been a constant reminder of all that was done to me and all that I did and should not have done.

  I was the one who had to leave, and I told him I doubted I’d survive without him.

  Is it too late to set him free? This place is so much in his blood, the city that I never loved, the seaside town where he was born.

  He will never fit in where we live. “I think of little things,” he says wistfully. “How I felt when the weather turned a certain way, the snow changing to hail so small I heard it clicking all night long against the windowpane.”

  He thinks of better ways to live—the children that we didn’
t have. We said we would but didn’t try. Why didn’t we? I am almost overcome by the feeling that we should have parted ways long ago because of things I know that he does not.

  Suddenly, it’s dark and dungeon deep. I didn’t know that I could sink this far down into the page.

  The fairy tale has fizzled out,

  as it was bound to do, no doubt.

  It had the most unlikely plot:

  boy meets girl who’s out of his league—

  adventure, mystery, intrigue—

  out of his league, out of her mind,

  out of this world, you know the kind.

  He bites off more than he can chew

  when he finds love with you know who,

  the one this tale is all about,

  the femme fatale, Rachel van Hout.

  The princess fooled the prince, you see—

  she wasn’t what she claimed to be.

  There was no damsel in distress;

  the princess was the villainess.

  The ending wasn’t hard to guess—

  I knew that it would come to this;

  no poison fruit, no wake-up kiss,

  no wistful smiles, no tenderness:

  Wade can’t save me and we both know

  he’ll die if he keeps trying to.

  Is this the life that has to be—

  presentiment or fantasy?

  His world is solid and fixed; mine shifts constantly. I love the way he looks at “me,” the woman he thinks I am, the one I wish I was. Until Wade, my only wish was to survive, to resist the urge to cease to be. When I convinced the doctors I was cured, it was me I made a fool of. I’m waiting for the downward pull—he’ll sink with me, I know he will, all the way to the bottom, the ocean floor from which no mariners return. I knew he would, or should have known. This is the end of the future. Time’s time is up.

  For him it might be for the best that he lose me now. I can’t just simply hope for the best. I did that once before but I can’t again; I have to choose or it will be too late. Should I do what’s wrong for me this time, so I can spare him and pre-empt the crime?

  Is this the life that has to be—presentiment or fantasy? Is this a broken heart I feel? I feel it, so it must be real.

  * * *

  —

  Arellia is any place in any time, the future merely one of its disguises. The two Annes drift about, not far from the yellow wood, unmindful of the failing light. Dark comes on; the things of night are stirring now among the trees. He’s watching them. He’s watching me, I know he is.

  I hear the roar of Claws von Snout—

  I must leave now, I must get out.

  WADE

  A couple of weeks later, as we sat at the card table, the place in my apartment that had come to be the one where matters of importance were discussed, she said, “I have to go away for a little while. Bethany is just out of hospital and can’t live on her own just yet. So I’m going to go to Halifax to help her get set up there, maybe help her find a job. Gloria’s husband, Max—he’s pretty rich—has kicked in some money for us.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “A month at the most. And then I’ll be back.” She came over to my side of the table and put her arms around my shoulders and kissed me.

  “I wish you knew exactly how long you’ll be gone,” I said.

  “I’ll miss you, too, you know.”

  “It seems so sudden.”

  “When you meet Bethany, you’ll understand.”

  * * *

  —

  When the day she had to leave arrived, I felt heartsick beyond expression, as abandoned as I used to feel when, as a boy, my father’s quest for fish made it necessary for him to spend the night away from home. Rachel seemed brisk, sensible and pragmatic, as if she’d departed for the mainland at the end of every summer of her life, leaving boys and men to pine for her return.

  “I’ll be home before Thanksgiving,” she said. “It’s too bad you haven’t got a phone.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “If I heard your voice, I’d miss you so much I couldn’t stand it.”

  After we’d gone to bed one last time, she left me so quickly that we parted without tears or drama, just an awkward severance.

  * * *

  —

  From Halifax, she sent me several black-and-white photographs that had been taken in ’75 in South Africa by—I was surprised to read in her letter—Fritz. In the photos, she was sitting or reclining on a piece of driftwood on a beach, dressed in a white blouse and a white skirt, her feet bare, her long hair draped across each breast.

  Then she wrote that she was knitting me a sweater, which she was going to give me at Thanksgiving if she finished it in time. Otherwise, it would be a Christmas present.

  So that I wouldn’t be caught Xeroxing at work a copy of what I knew would be mistaken for a love poem, I printed Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” by hand and sent it to her. In her subsequent letters, at least one of which arrived every day, she made no mention of the poem. She wrote that Bethany was “making progress.” If I hadn’t seen photos of Bethany in the albums, I’d have doubted her existence.

  * * *

  —

  A month went by, and then Thanksgiving, but Rachel did not come home. As I was not an official tenant, my mail was delivered to the super, who left it for me in one of the unmarked, unlocked, dented metal mailboxes on the wall of the lobby. In early November, I found a card notifying me that there was a parcel waiting at the post office. I hurried there and knew as soon as I saw it that it was from her because the outer wrapping was fashioned from the pages of magazines, the whole bundle secured with precisely applied Scotch tape, the flaps on each end expertly folded. I all but ran home with the parcel under my arm.

  I tore the paper to pieces and found a light-blue cable-knit fisherman’s sweater. It was accompanied by a note:

  My dearest darling Wade,

  We cannot be together anymore. It will only hurt you more if I tell you what has happened. I’m not coming home for Christmas. I’m not spending Christmas in Halifax. I hope you understand what that means. Please don’t write back to me, because I’m very sad right now. Don’t go by the house. My parents are mad with me for not coming home. Again, I hope you understand and I hope you like the sweater. I thought about you when I made it.

  Love, forever,

  Rachel

  My first thought was that she had had a breakdown, so strangely written did the letter seem, as if she had to write to me in telegram form using only as many letters as she could afford.

  It will only hurt you more if I tell you what has happened. I’m not coming home for Christmas. I’m not spending Christmas in Halifax. I hope you understand what that means. What could it mean, except that she was spending Christmas with someone she had met? I hope you like the sweater…Love, forever, Rachel. She knits a sweater for me while she’s sleeping with someone else? And then she writes a Dear Wade letter to send with the sweater that she knit for me? It will only hurt you more? Nothing could hurt me more than her breaking up with me in any fashion. Who sends a present to a person on the occasion of breaking up with them? Who goes on knitting a sweater for someone after they have moved on to someone else? I felt her casual dismissal and betrayal of me so keenly that I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

  Love, forever, Rachel ? “Forever”? Was this how things were done in her world? She might have had it in mind all summer long to break up with me after she went away. She may even have thought that I knew that we would end in some such manner, that we had tacitly agreed to stick to the rules of the game she assumed I knew that we were playing.

  Had her parents warned her away from me? Had they told her that, unless she went to Halifax to be the minder of her sister—Halifax, where she would
also be beyond my reach—they would cut off her living allowance?

  I wondered if, from the distance and perspective of Halifax and our time apart, she had come to think that I would never be a writer, could never be one.

  I told my parents, siblings, co-workers and friends that Rachel and her sisters had returned to South Africa to be near their parents, who had gone back to be near their parents, who were in their eighties and needed looking after. I couldn’t bear to admit to anyone that I was in such a state because a girl I had known for four months had thrown me over for someone she had known for, at most, six weeks.

  How could I have been so lovingly embraced and so callously disposed of by the same person?

  I worked longer hours than I had to, read even more books, no longer going out on weekend nights or on any nights, but sitting at the window that overlooked the parking lot, the light of my reading lamp the only light in the apartment. I devoured massive books of philosophy and history as if they might offer up the answer to the question of how I could have misread her affection for me so completely. But then, my parents, my brother and sisters had been fooled by her as well. I felt like telling them I suspected that I was one in a long line of men who wished Rachel hadn’t made such a good impression on their parents, but I stuck to my story that we had broken up because she and her entire family had gone back to South Africa. “She was the one, Wade,” my mother said, as if South Africa was just down the street from where I lived and nothing was preventing me from winning Rachel back but my pride.

  I drove past her house, hoping she had come home for Christmas anyway and I might catch a glimpse of her. I thought of calling the house and asking to speak to her as I’d done from pay phone booths before she left. “May I speak to Rachel?” I’d asked Myra, who always answered the phone. “You may but you can’t because she isn’t in.” You cawn’t. I couldn’t stand to think what she would say to me now. I thought of walking up the driveway and knocking on the door. In either case, I might at least find out if Rachel had come home. But I hated the thought of being told not to call or come by again, or to find out that she had instructed her parents not to tell me how to reach her.