Braided Gold

by Glen Roylance

  Paul knew that these ideas were offered up by an extremist noted for his place on the liberal edge of traditional views. He also knew that the man was not without reproach by professional colleagues, yet his allegations possessed some inexplicable appeal to him. For some reason Paul admired this strident voice, ever willing to challenge the sacrosanct in an effort to foster untrammeled, objective thought.

  Sitting quietly by himself, Paul’s eyes focused on the altar at the front of the sanctuary. He had never partaken of communion and had attended only two church services so far as he could remember. He had known times of heightened spiritual desire, even an impetus towards this mystic part of life. And, on occasion, he had contemplated what it might be like to abandon his many misgivings about spiritual things and set aside his ridicule of those who had the ability to blindly believe. He had wondered if it might ever be possible for him to forget the hypocrisy and bigotry he had discerned within the ranks of the believers and to take his place among them. But despite these thoughts that reasserted themselves from time to time, he lacked the will to give the enterprise a try. Still, he wondered if there were some taste of life, some experience in thinking and feeling which had eluded him because of his determination to close the door leading to the world of faith. More than ever before, that doorway beckoned to him now, at this difficult juncture in his life.

  Paul continued to sit alone with his thoughts for a long time. It was as if he were swimming against the undercurrents of some invisible stream. He could feel the eddies of those currents drawing him inward to the center of some whirlpool which would surely transport him to an altered lifestyle. These feelings were not frightening, but rather warm and enticing, yet something within him resisted vehemently. Despite the enticement he could not, or would not, yield to them. At length he glanced at his wristwatch and was jolted back to immediate realities. Moments later he was again on the highway, driving back to Ann Arbor. It was so very important that he see Cathy before her surgery!

  Back in the hospital Paul waited impatiently for the elevator, but apparently there was a mechanical problem, bringing grumblings from those who had collected in front of the elevator doors. Time moved ever so slowly, and still the first-floor light did not illuminate nor did the doors open. He could wait no longer, and hurrying to the stairway around the corner from the elevators he ran up the five flights of stairs and down the corridor to Cathy’s room. There, to his dismay, he found her bed empty. He stood in disbelief, looking at the bed stripped clean of linen. His eyes darted about the room, then connected with Elizabeth, the other patient who had shared the room with Cathy. “What have they done with my wife?” he said with panic in his voice.

  “They took her into surgical prep an hour ago,” answered Elizabeth.

  “But she was scheduled for 11 o’clock!”

  “No, 10 o’clock. She was scheduled for surgical prep at 10.”

  Turning abruptly Paul dashed out the door. At the charge desk he made frantic inquiry, only to discover that the surgery was already underway.

  The passage of time now slowed to a virtual standstill for him. He sat in the waiting room, just off the sixth-floor surgical wing, absently flipping from page to page in the magazines strewn on the table to his side. Later his anxiety drove him to pace up and down the halls of the sixth floor, stopping regularly at the large picture window overlooking the hospital entryway below. The walkways were bright in the noonday sunlight and the evergreens were brilliant in their coloration. But the late summer flowers were gone, and the empty flowerbeds were now awaiting springtime and another season of life. To the south Paul could see the scattered buildings belonging to the sprawling University complex, and further to the south the Ann Arbor suburbs came into view. These spread in a half circle about the southern and eastern fringes of the campus. In the distant forested hills were the palatial estates of Ann Arbor’s aristocracy. To the north and west of the hospital were the rolling green acres of Forest Lawn Cemetery, and immediately to the west was downtown Ann Arbor.

  Returning to his seat in the waiting area Paul’s thoughts reverted to his conversation with Cathy that morning. He replayed her pleadings over and over, still surprised at the intensity of her feelings. He had been touched by the sincerity of her pleadings and wished that he might have made a better response. He would attend to this unfinished business when he was able to speak with Cathy after the trauma of her surgery had passed. How he yearned to feel her within his arms and to smell the perfume of her hair, to hear her voice, and to feel the security of her love. He refused to entertain the possibility of an unsuccessful operation. He needed her more than he had ever acknowledged to her or to himself. The morning had become afternoon and the sun was now dropping low in the western sky when a nurse quietly spoke to him. “Mr. Kirkham?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking expectantly at the young woman.

  “If you’ll follow me, please. Dr. Gordon would like to visit with you.”

  Paul followed the nurse out of the waiting area and down the hall to a private lounge. As she opened the door he spoke apprehensively. “Can you tell me anything about my wife’s operation?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Kirkham. I don’t have any information for you, but if you’ll wait here a few moments I’m sure Dr. Gordon will give you a full report.”

  Paul seated himself on an overstuffed chair clustered with other furniture pieces in the center of the room, and the nurse graciously excused herself. The lounge had the appearance of a well-appointed living room. No expense had been spared on the impressive furnishings. The carpet, the suite of overstuffed furniture, the polished mahogany table with its floral centerpiece, beautiful draperies, and an expensive-looking chandelier set the room off in distinct contrast to the sterile atmosphere of other areas in the hospital. The pastel colors were sufficiently subdued to produce a pleasant, restful atmosphere. Paul had waited only a few minutes when Dr. Gordon entered. He was still dressed in baggy, light-green operating room attire. His face looked drawn and his shoulders were slumped. Indeed, his appearance betrayed his unhappy tidings.

  Sitting next to Paul, the doctor drew his chair up close, and in a fatherly gesture he reached out and placed his hand upon Paul’s knee. Though he was a veteran of operating room ordeals, there was an unsteady tone in his voice. “We did our best, Mr. Kirkham. There was unexpected hemorrhaging during the final stages of the surgery – I’m sorry but we weren’t able to save her.” He continued to speak, providing additional details, but Paul did not hear. He could see the doctor speaking, his mouth moving and his facial expression conveying sympathy, but it was as if Paul were watching a silent movie. He heard nothing, nor did his feelings properly serve him. Somewhere within his nervous system a deadening sensation commenced, ever increasing until he was plunged into a psychological maze where he was conscious of little that transpired. As the doctor concluded Paul spoke numbly, somehow managing to summon the appropriate words of gratitude for Dr. Gordon’s efforts, but he would not remember these words nor many of the events that filled out the ensuing hours and days. There was no emotional resilience to cope with this turn of events.

  The thing Paul had feared, yet refused to contemplate, had invaded his life. The days ahead would move forward in rote, mechanical fashion wherein he would give only perfunctory attention to things that had to be done. Later, as time moved on, he would seal off the memory of these days, and to a lesser extent, the memory of Cathy herself – not as a discarded memory but as one that was too painful, too fraught with personal indictment to be allowed easy access to the stream of his consciousness. Just as Cathy’s remains were interred in the Forest Hills Cemetery, Paul also buried the memories involving her place in his life, lest they should plague him. He sensed that anything more than superficial remembering could potentially push him over a psychological brink. In the years ahead the scars left by these deep wounds to his psyche would affect his approach to living and his relationships with people. More importantly, they would profoundly
affect his perception of himself.

  The sun had sunk below the western horizon and the night was approaching as Paul finally left the hospital. The air was cold, and the foreboding feeling of winter’s imminence was apparent. He drove back to Ypsilanti without conscious awareness of his surroundings. The traffic was heavy and, at one point, slowed to a crawl because of an accident, but he was oblivious to it all. Not until Paul parked in front of the Willow Run row houses did he begin to perceive reality in some measure. With this perception, the beginning of that grief known only to those who mourn great loss commenced in earnest. He walked up the wooden steps and let himself into his apartment where he stood in the semi-darkness for some time before reaching for the light switch. Darkness suited his frame of mind better than did the light. The rooms he had left that morning now took on a new appearance. They seemed bleak and empty, stripped bare of the life they once sustained. Instead, these rooms now seemed possessed of some tangible sadness, haunted by memories of earlier days with happy and carefree moments. The apartment also seemed to be a silent witness, attesting to the cruelty Paul had inflicted upon the one he loved. Yes, Paul had been cruel to Cathy, and at this hour, on this day, he acknowledged it.

  Like a child he wandered from room to room as if in some expectation of a voice or an embrace. For some reason he found himself opening the door of the clothes closet. Here he stood for some time, looking at the clothes that had once been animated with the beauty of Cathy’s person. They now hung limp on their hangers. Paul removed the beautiful dress he had bought her for special occasions. How many times he had looked upon her with adoration as she wore it. He held the material in his arms and then pressed it against his face. He could smell the sweet essence of Cathy, left behind as a poignant reminder of what he had once held and treasured insufficiently. Paul was lonely – oh, so very lonely!

  Many of these hidden details of Paul’s life came forward without restraint or filtering as he made his soul bare to Claire during their travel to the Eagle Mountain area; this, as he prepared himself for a rendezvous with his painful past.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  It was a lot for Claire to digest. Paul had made no effort to gloss over his past nor did he excuse himself or justify coarse and ugly things he had done at Cathy’s expense. He was brutally frank about his failings as a husband and father. But his honesty did not change the fact that Paul’s journey to what Claire considered to be “noble manhood” was still very much a work in progress. While Claire felt impelled to reach out to Paul emotionally, this intimate glimpse into his complicated personality made her wary of him.

  Nevertheless, she determined that she would leave personal judgement of Paul to another time when circumstances were less delicate. Temporarily dismissing her uncertainties regarding their relationship she did what came naturally, the expressing of the compassion and sympathy Paul needed so very much at present. Still, the widened gap between their two worlds restrained their conversation as they traveled on to the Eagle Mountain steel plant.

  They turned north toward the Palm Desert area and continued on Highway 10 going east, which led all the way to Eagle Mountain. Most of the nearly three and a half hours of driving had led through an arid mountainous area which intermittently leveled out into a vast desert. The highway was now limited to two lanes and wound in and out through washes and gulches that could be treacherous in seasons of flash flooding. Some of these were so large that bridges had been erected to make them passable.

  Eagle Mountain was equidistant from two small neighboring towns some twenty miles away – Blythe to the east and Indio to the west. A road junction just a few miles from Eagle Mountain bore the name Desert Center. Here there was a sprawling grapefruit farm and a grape vineyard that provided employment for people who lived in this thinly populated area.

  The Eagle Mountain plant, a subsidiary of Kaiser Steel Mine Corporation, employed some three to four thousand men. Its operation was divided into two major enterprises, a large open pit mine where work crews blasted for iron ore and the refinery that converted the crude ore into pellets that were then shipped to the Fontana plant near Riverside, California. Charles was the primary manager at the open pit operation, overseeing the blasting crews as well as the men who drove large trucks with their wide-mouth buckets.

  Eagle Mountain was a company town, complete with company-owned housing and stores. Employees were paid the good wages essential to keep a labor force in this far-off corner of nowhere. Fortunately distances to the West Coast or Lake Havasu in Arizona were manageable, providing a fairly easy change of scenery for those who were willing to spend a few hours on the desert highways. If there was a prestigious part of town, it was Bald Eagle Street where homes were a little nicer, providing housing for company executives. It was here that Charles and Anna lived. Their residence on Bald Eagle, with its small fenced area to the rear, was the only home Michael had ever known. Eagle Mountain was his window on the world, with the exception of a few vacations he regarded as highlights in his young life.

  It was midday when Paul and Claire pulled into the driveway. With considerable effort Paul maintained his practiced image of self-confidence at this moment he had dreaded since receiving Anna’s initial phone call. During those hours prior to his departure for Eagle Mountain he had played the role of Paul Kirkham in the classroom and among students and colleagues, but his private moments had been laden with depressed uncertainty. Only in Claire’s presence had he felt safe to speak of the feelings that were tormenting him. He had purposely withheld this turn of events from Leo.

  Moreover, he had chosen to avoid responding to Leo’s phone message on Friday, asking that Paul drop by his office to discuss the meeting with President Michaelson. As yet, Paul was uncertain how much he would tell Leo about the unexpected developments in his personal life. He anticipated that the storm clouds associated with the Fairclough vendetta against him would likely test his relationship with this man who had been the most trusted friend of his life.

  Paul shut off the engine and turned to look at Claire. Sensing what was going on inside of him she touched him gently and smiled reassuringly. Together they walked up the steps to a modest frame house and Paul rang the doorbell. Immediately the door opened, revealing a handsome young boy who was grinning from ear to ear. He looked healthy and robust. Certainly there was no evidence of any life-threatening malady in his appearance. Michael was the image of his mother. His blue eyes and blond hair completed the nostalgic picture for Paul.

  “I thought you’d never get here,” he said with an exuberance neither Paul nor Claire had anticipated. “I’ve been waiting for you all morning.”

  “We’ve been looking forward to seeing you, too,” said Claire, equally as bright and cheerful. The phrase “love at first sight,” usually reserved for romantic contexts, easily characterized what she felt as her eyes swept over Michael.

  Suddenly Anna was in the doorway, opening the screen door for them. “Come in, come in!” she said. “I’ve prepared some lunch for you. Let me give Charles a call. It will just take a few minutes for him to get here.”

  Anna was slender and “homespun” as Paul had described her to Claire. Her hair was pulled back behind her head and tied into a bun. She wore a simple housedress, and yet there was beauty in her plainness. She was a woman in her late fifties, maternal in her appearance and immediately warm and gracious. As they stepped inside, Anna surprised Paul with an embrace. “It’s good to see you after so many years,” she said.

  This was certainly not the kind of a reception Paul had anticipated. He introduced Claire and then, without the melodrama that might easily have been part of such an occasion, Anna placed her arm around Michael’s shoulders, who was standing next to her and said simply, “Michael has been so excited about meeting you ever since we told him you were coming. He’s had his things packed for two days. You’d think he was taking a vacation instead of setting off for the hospital in San Diego.”

  Again, Michael spoke to Pa
ul as if they had been old acquaintances. “Momma said that you might take me to Sea World and maybe the Zoo. I’ve read all about San Diego in the school library.”

  Paul’s apprehensions had taken flight and he spoke warmly to Michael. “Of course, I’ll take you to see those things, and if Claire behaves herself we’ll take her along, too.”

  It had happened! Within a matter of minutes this unassuming and obviously bright little boy had awakened something in Paul he had never felt before. Here, in this most unlikely of places and in an encounter he had resisted for so long, he found an important piece of the puzzle that formed his life. This moment had brought him one step closer to that “completeness” which had eluded him since the days of his childhood.

  They sat in Anna’s living room and visited informally about many inconsequential things: the town of Eagle Mountain, the unchanging desert weather, the mining activities, and so on. The tone of the conversation was far more important than its substance. Both Anna and Michael were completely at ease with Paul, and curiously enough, Paul was at ease with them. It was the semblance of a family connection that he had yearned for without knowing it.

  Claire was her buoyant, ingratiating self. She quizzed Michael about the school he attended and found him eager to tell all. He spoke excitedly about his teacher who had left school at midyear to give birth to a new baby and of her bringing the baby to the classroom some weeks later for the students to see. He spoke of the school reading awards he had received and of the science project he had done with the telescope Charles and Anna had given him for Christmas. With eagerness he had gone to his room and returned a few minutes later with an impressive star map of the heavens he had prepared. He went on to explain that the desert was a wonderful place to study the stars because the sky was so clear at nighttime. It was not long before Charles arrived. Once again there were greetings and introductions.