Bright Flows the River

by Taylor Caldwell

  “You haven’t kissed me,” he said, like a complaining young boy.

  “And you haven’t kissed me, either,” she replied.

  Then she dropped on her knees beside him and laid her head against his chest and wept. He stroked the fine red hair, which was limper than he remembered; he stroked the white cheek, which was drawn and thinner. She did not cling to him. She just lay against him, crying soundlessly. But he was no longer afraid; the terrible crushing fear had left him. She still loved him.

  “Do you still love me, Beth?” His voice was hoarse and unsure.

  “Yes. Oh, yes. Always.”

  He took her face in his hands and kissed her as he had never kissed her before, slowly, gently, as James had kissed her. It was not the old kiss of passion, rough and demanding, but it was the sincerest kiss she had ever had from him. Her lips were still under his, then they began involuntarily to move and they kissed long and deeply and with a greater tenderness than before, a greater knowledge. Her salt tears ran into his mouth. He held her head closer to him, and now the grasp was a little fierce. Then again he held her off and looked at her earnestly and she saw something in his eyes that had changed also. The impatient light was not there. But there was something deeper, something stronger yet softer, and they were shining with moisture.

  “I’ve come back from hell,” he said, with a simplicity alien to him.

  “I know, my dear, I know.”

  “I must tell you about it.” He stroked her wet cheek. “Your nose is running. Here.” He wiped her nose with his own handkerchief. Then all at once they were laughing at the Bathos which could attend even the most tragic moments, laughing helplessly together, Beth rocking on her knees and he in his chair.

  “Get us something to drink,” he said at last, wiping his own eyes, and he spoke with much of his old command, and to her amazement she rejoiced at it. She ran into her kitchen, and she stood there for a few moments, looking about her, trembling, feeling a bursting of joy in her heart that was almost unendurable. “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it!” she whispered. She was dazed and weak, but with such happiness, a happiness she had never experienced before. The house was empty no longer; it was filled to its very rafters. She heard Guy poking at the fire and she squeezed her radiant eyes shut, and almost cried out aloud in her ecstasy. She was young as she had never been young. But it was not peace she felt; it was far more than that. It was life, vivid, shaking, victorious, exultant, and she wanted to dance.

  Guy had turned on her record player and was listening to the record she had left there. “One fine day, he will return, he will return!” She did not find it banal, embarrassing. She found it a fulfilled promise, without the ominousness of its context. For that night, she forgot all that she had been thinking before Guy had come to her. But it was firmly lodged in her soul like a drop of hard cold lead in seething red wine. The day darkened and she did not see it.

  As they drank their drinks in the comforting warmth of the fire Guy spoke of James and what his friend had done for him, and Beth nodded, her face soft and wistful, and she said repeatedly, “I know. He claimed nothing, but I knew he was helping you and that only he could help you. I tried—and failed.”

  Guy touched her hands. “You were too close to me. I couldn’t see the truth because your dear face got in the way. It all seemed to depend on what I felt for you—it’s impossible to explain. It was subjective. I had the thought that if I refused to do what you thought I should do, you would turn away from me—”

  “Like some silly, pouting woman who had been frustrated? Guy!”

  “Well, yes, I was stupid. I was using you to keep me from seeing the truth about my life and myself. I forced myself to believe that you had given me an ultimatum.” He smiled. “And I am no man for ultimatums, especially from a woman. I forgot the hundreds of times I had just about asked for your advice—and you had refused to give it, telling me that what I chose was my own decision and no one else’s. You see how cowardly I was?”

  “We’re all cowards in one way or another,” said Beth. “Never in the world would I try to force a man to make a choice—nor would I ever be guilty of destroying a man’s marriage. No one can destroy a good sound marriage; it takes the combatants.” She smiled again, and again that new expression was on her face. He looked at her earnestly, and with some trepidation.

  He had not as yet told her of James’s tragedy. For these hours, at least, he would not speak, afraid of spoiling this deep rapport between them. He only said, “Jim is getting married to Lady Emma tomorrow. He wants us to be witnesses.”

  “Of course we shall.” Her voice was full of happiness. “I do so want to meet his Emma. He told me often of her—when we met.” She had her own reticences. Knowing Guy too well, she would never tell him of that gentle and warming encounter in her house, not even that James had ever been here. She had no urge to “confess,” for she felt no guilt and only a sweet memory of consolation and surcease from pain. But Guy would not understand. Beneath this new façade of reason and enlightenment still lurked the rigorous man, and in many ways, she was glad of it. A submissive attitude on his part would have been abhorrent to her. Part of his appeal for her was his innate strength. She had seen him weep, and knew that only a strong man can weep. She knew that later—in his pursuit of what he had chosen—he would be just as rigorous, and she desired that above anything else. Moreover, she had learned that emotionally men were frail and very sensitive creatures, far more so than women. It was that frailty and sensitivity which made so many of them towering geniuses, which enhanced their masculinity. Only the weak were afraid of emotion, vulnerability, and display of their own humanity. She kissed his hand and sighed. God did give women one advantage, she thought: We can understand men but they can never understand us, and perhaps that is for the best.

  But, what had he chosen? She said, “No matter what you have decided, my darling, I will always be here.” (Not entirely, she added to herself. I will never be broken again. I, too, have learned. I will bend, but I will not break.)

  “My decision? I thought you already knew that!”

  “You give me credit for too much intuition.”

  He jumped up like a youth, but she saw the evidences of his long illness. It would be months before he had recovered. She saw the exhaustion on his dark lean face. He went to his coat in the closet and brought out a sheaf of letters, and he laid them on her lap. “I am mailing them tomorrow. I want you to read them first.”

  She gazed at him with thoughtful trouble. “Are you sure you want me to see these? I see one is addressed to your—wife—one each to your son and daughter, and one to Mr. Lippincott, whom I met, as you know.”

  “I brought them to you because I want you to see them. It will save much talk and explanations, and I hate both.” He touched her cheek. “You always did talk too much. You’re as bad as Jimmy.”

  She smiled and lifted the unsealed flaps and read the letters. Her heart swam with elation and with joy. Yet each had asked only for the presence of the others four days from now. However, he did inform his wife that he was not returning to his house but would send for necessary clothing. Still, what was the decision? “These tell me nothing,” she said.

  “Oh, my God!” he said, with his old impatience. “Do I have to write books for you? These announce the finale, for Christ’s sake, Beth! I intend to tell my wife that I am divorcing her in New York State, that she may keep the house I bought and paid for and which I hate now, and I am telling my children that they are in their young middle age and they neither need nor will they get any more consideration, or money, from me. As for Hugh, I am going to right a wrong I did him, out of my contemptible self-righteousness.” He threw up his hands. “I thought this was all explicit to you, Beth!”

  “I am not a mind reader,” she said. “Dear as you are to me, your masculine mind is too complicated for a simple woman to follow.” Again she looked at him earnestly. “Are you certain, absolutely certain, you want to d
o all this?”

  “Christ,” he muttered again. “Must I spell it out like a teacher?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  In rapid and impatient speech he told her. “And, in addition, Emil is going to find some small and sound college, accredited, where I can do what I always wanted to do—become a doctor, so I can pursue cancer research. I thought we’d talked this all over months, years ago!”

  She laughed and shook her head. “No, we didn’t. Oh, you hinted, but I knew you weren’t sure. Your business, the banks. I gather you intend to throw them all over? This is a momentous decision.”

  “I certainly don’t intend to give up the business. I will remain in control, make the major decisions. I have good managers. As for the banks—they are going to be Hugh’s. He put up with me for years; he deserves some reward. I stood in the way of his marrying Marian Kleinhorst, by threats—it seems incredible to me now—how like my mother I am in many ways—and because Marian would not marry him, for fear of destroying him by depriving him of his damned life’s work. He can have the fucking banks.”

  “Guy.”

  “Well, all right, but you can be damned obtuse when you want to be, Beth. All right, I’ll remember your delicacy after this, unless you annoy me too much, which I suspect will be regularly. You’re not as gentle and yielding as you pretend to be with me, my girl, and I am sure you intend to take your revenge for those years of submission.”

  She laughed outright, she was so full of jubilation. “I’ll try,” she said. “We are going to have a very spirited—” She caught herself. He grinned at her.

  “Marriage? Are you proposing to me, woman?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.

  His face became somber. “All those years—wasted—when we could have been happy together.”

  “Oh, Guy. Nothing is wasted. If you had moved prematurely you would always have looked back, wondering, conjecturing, if you had done the right thing. Now you are sure. You are sure?”

  “More sure of this than I was ever sure of anything before.”

  He rubbed his chin. He had not shaved today, as yet. “It comes to me that I was never really sure of one damned thing I ever did, until now. Now, I am free.”

  She gazed at him steadily and knew that he had spoken the truth. He had always been confident in her presence, but she had known that he had not been confident at all, and was only justifying himself, or seeking reassurance.

  He was smiling and shaking his head. “You and my father, and old Jimmy. You are all of a piece. I don’t know whether to thank God for all of you, or to howl at Him.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Either way, it’s a compliment. Now, do stop rubbing your chin; yes, you have quite a beard. Go into the bathroom and shave while I put the dinner on. Oh, what a beautiful day this is!” Though it had been, in the beginning, the most dismal. The clouds had briefly parted; the sunset light was already on the hills. Beth gave him another drink. She had never heard him hum before, but he was humming when he took the glass into the bathroom. It was the dearest sound to her, that hoarse humming, and it told her all that she wanted to know. He was not realizing his weariness yet, though he would, and she was ready for it. She savored this new peace, this tremendous joy, this anticipation, this hope. Her man had come home. It was a turbulent homecoming, and it would always be turbulent, for which she was grateful now.

  In the bathroom, Guy removed his coat and looked about the small clean room with pleasure. Only in his father’s house had he felt this calmness, this emcompassing pleasure. He took out his shaving kit from the cupboard where it had always been, and opened it.

  Then he stopped, freezing.

  Among the blades and razors and tubes and bottles there was a strange and challenging thing: a gold cuff link in the shape of a six-pointed star, with a ruby, like blood, in the center. The Star of David. A Jewish symbol. He took it in his hand and stared blindly through the window, where the evening light was a silver glaze on the hills.

  At first he was numb, and then like a murderous tide rage rushed in on him, primeval rage, the lust to kill of a male animal whose woman-territory had been invaded by another male. He clenched his hands—one of which held the Star—on the edge of the basin. Jimmy. And Beth. Jimmy had been here; why hadn’t Beth told him in all these hours? Jimmy had used his kit, Jimmy, his friend! A man does not shave in a woman’s house unless he has stayed with her overnight—and slept in her bed, before the morning. Beth had not told him. Jimmy had not told him. He recalled, in fiery and flashing detail, James’s denunciation of his treatment of Beth, and there had been more than noble indignation in those denunciations, those crying adjectives of affection for a woman who was not his, those broken cries. There had been more than pity in those agitated condemnations—there had been tenderness and remembrance.

  “God, God,” he muttered, and the points of the Star in his clenched fist seemed to bite maliciously into his palm. His rage increased until it was a blinding redness before his eyes. In that redness he could see James in his bed, in Beth’s arms. The urge to murder was a wild burning in his mind. He moved convulsively. He wanted to rush out to Beth with the damning evidence in his hand, shouting hateful accusations, then taking her by the throat. His hands longed for her throat, they itched and twitched for it. He did not know whom he hated most, James or Beth, for this ugly deception while they ostensibly mourned for him. Mourned for him, the damned frigging hypocrites! Perhaps they had even laughed at him—

  He shuddered with his raw and primitive hatred, his jealousy, his rage and affront. He had felt this way only once before, when he had killed the Russian soldiers in payment for Marlene’s death. His roaring imagination conceived the lewdest and most lascivious pictures of James and Beth together—in his bed. He clenched his knees together and shuddered over and over. His breath was thick and choking in his throat; his heart was screaming in his ears. He felt mortally sick—and the urge to kill became stronger. In a moment, when he had his strength back, he would go to her and—

  He looked at the Star, the blameless Star. So he was in love with his Emma, was he? Yet he could take Beth as lightly as he would take a whore, and she had taken him as lightly as a whore would take a man. Beth, who claimed to love him, had forgotten him long enough to caper with another man, in lust and abandonment! He knew the passion of which Beth was capable. That she could feel that passion for someone not himself was intolerable to him. He leaned against the basin, out of very weakness, out of the weakness that only strong emotion can provoke. There was a taste of blood in his mouth. He did not know that he had savagely bitten his tongue.

  How carefully Beth had avoided telling him even that James had been in this house! Meeting him at the hospital, yes. Meeting him with Hugh Lippincott and Marian Kleinhorst, yes. Eating lunches, dinners with him, yes. But not this foul and unconscionable thing. The inexorable evidence was in his hand. He remembered, now. He had seen both cuff links on James’s shirt once, in the sanitarium. They had blazed at him in the lamplight, enormously increased. He had never seen them again. Did the bastard ever wonder where he had lost it?

  “I’ll kill—kill—kill—”

  Did the bitch know that this—thing—was in the shaving kit? Had she left it there to mock him, to laugh at him, to confront him with her vileness, her concupiscence? Had they both knowingly agreed to leave it there, so that they could shout their laughter at him to his face? All his gorge, his male pride, his outrage, struck him over and over like meaty fists, bent on destroying him. His whole body ran with an ice-cold sweat. When had they committed this crime, this heinous crime, against him? That bastard, that whore?

  And all this time, these weeks, he had been struggling to decide, to go home to her! What had they plotted against him? What could be the plot? Emma was dying—there was no doubt in Guy’s mind that Beth knew also, though he did not know how. Was Beth planning to marry that fucking Jew when he was free to marry her? More fool she. He heard himself laughing low and ho
arsely, and with gleeful hate and almost insane wrath.

  He turned to the closet to look for more evidence of their perfidy, more shameful evidence. If James had slept here, then he had used Guy’s clothing. He had used his pajamas. Even in his madness Guy did not think that this had been a plotted thing, an arranged thing. It had been spontaneous, like most crimes. He fumbled through the clothes, examining, in particular, his pajamas. Was there a crease here, a smear there? No, Beth was too fastidious. But one set of pajamas was out of place, as if hastily returned.

  It was this search that finally almost sobered him, made his flesh flush with red heat. He drew a deep and shivering breath. It was evidence of his complete turn of mind that made him start thinking, and thinking clearly. James’s agony that morning had been more than sincere. It had been devastating, prostrating. Still, a man can deeply love one woman, then turn to another for a moment’s variety. He knew himself well enough to realize that, he knew his whole sex. But Beth. Against all evidence, she was a loving woman, and she loved him, and loving women did not betray their men no matter their desire. That aspect of womanhood had always astonished him. That female constancy had been a wonder, a derision, a pathetic thing, to him. Beth, out of some terrible need, some awful hunger, had succumbed to seduction. Now it was only James he hated, this violator of his bed, this invader of his male territory.

  What had been her need? Mere lust? He knew that was not so. True, she had gone to bed with him the very night of the day they had met. But surely out of love, as she always said. Beth was no liar. Beth was no light woman. James, in a moment of suffering, had been a surrogate—For me, he said to himself. For me. But James had taken advantage of this sorrow, this weakness. He must kill James, not Beth. But he would never see Beth again.

  What stupidity had he been thinking these last days? He had been more than willing to throw up a life’s work—for a weak and stupid woman. His family, his property, his place in the world, for which he had worked so hard. For a woman, only a woman.