The Dawning of the Day (25 page)

Steve came so quietly through all this that he was in the schoolroom before she saw him. She looked up from her desk, and he was coming down the aisle. He smiled at her and didn't speak at once. His brown slacks and khaki shirt were freshly starched and ironed. Philippa felt at once mussy and smudged from her day in school.

“You look simply beautiful,” she said.

“Behold, the bridegroom cometh,” said Steve. “I could have come all scented up with bait instead of Red Maple. Maybe bait would be more virile.”

“Dead Herring No. 5?” said Philippa. “Evening in Hogshead? No, I like Red Maple very much.”

Steve sat on the edge of the desk. “I'll tell my niece. She gave it to me for my birthday, but she thought it would be wasted because I'd never get near enough to a woman to let her smell it.” He gazed toward the open windows as if he had all time to spare. Philippa made a forcible effort to resume her tidying. “You'll notice too,” Steve went on without hurry, “that I didn't take any chances. I put on a clean shirt. So if the Red Maple didn't work, the shirt ought to.” He looked down at her; it was as if certain elements were focusing themselves into one powerful whole.

“I've come to ask you to marry me, Philippa.”

She sat back in her chair, unable to speak.

“But before I can expect you to answer, there's something I have to tell you,” he went on quietly.

She answered as quietly, “Why should you tell me anything? I know that you're sincere in this.”

“Yes, and you know I'm thirty-eight, one of six children, and a good lobsterman.” He was not smiling. There was an edge of white around his mouth. Suddenly she felt a pang of tenderness and remorse that shook her with its strength; she wanted to take him in her arms. Whatever forces were at work in him, this was a moment in his life that was at once terrible and exalted. She was humbled by it.

She said, “Listen, Steve, what do you know about me? I'm a widow, thirty-one, I teach school, I have an eight-year-old boy.” She smiled up at him, wanting to take the intolerable edge off the moment. “You know, too, that I freckle in the Bennett's Island weather. But you know nothing whatever of
me
. I've lived a whole life before I came here. I know about love and birth and parting and death, the entire cycle of existence, but that part of me is as mysterious to you as—well, the universe. I've had all those very personal experiences with someone you don't know and can't imagine. So what you say about my knowing you works both ways; each of us knows only a tiny imperfect fragment of the other.”

“We've got a lot of talking to do,” he said.

“Let
me
begin.” She sat forward, laying her arms along the desk and lacing her fingers loosely together. She determined to keep them loose. Steve did not move. She hadn't known that he could sit so still.

“Sometimes people have been amused or made uncomfortable to find my husband was a minister,” she said. “They're the same way about clergymen as they are about undertakers. If a woman marries one, they think she has a queer, morbid streak in her; they set her apart from themselves.”

“Did that faze you?” Steve interrupted. “I don't believe it.”

She shook her head. “I could laugh at them, and Justin could understand them. They didn't matter anyway. We had our friends and we had each other. . . .” She put her chin in her hands and stared at him, wandering among her thoughts, seeing Justin and hearing his voice, yet fully conscious of Steve. “You would have liked him. You're something of the same sort. Wise about people, never shocked or surprised by anything that's within the bounds of human nature. It's the way a clergyman should be, and yet—have you ever noticed how some persons are so flustered and ill at ease in a clergyman's presence? They can't enjoy food, or talk, or joke. But if he weren't there, they still wouldn't be doing or saying anything out of the way. The biggest compliment they can pay is to say, ‘You wouldn't think he was a minister at all.'”

Steve nodded. “Was he that kind?”

“I don't know. I never heard it said. But there was always a crowd around him. We were at a little church outside Boston, and he was able to draw the young people to him without neglecting the older ones. The small children used to run to catch up with him and take his hand.” Her eyes went distant again. It was a blurred, yet bright scene; the drifts of yellow leaves on the lawn, the moving tree shadows blue across the white face of the church, the Sunday morning crowd, and Justin not quite distinct to her, a tall figure on the church steps in a black robe blowing in the October wind, the children running up the steps, laughing, and reaching for his hands. She had seen it so many times in sleeping and waking dreams, and always Justin's face was blurred, but the black robe, the yellow leaves, the moving shadows, and the laughter of children had been the same.

Suddenly, in this schoolhouse with this stranger waiting and listening, she remembered the first time she had seen him like this after they were married; she had stood across the street, waiting for him, and someone spoke to her, an old lady of the church. “You must be proud of him, my dear.”

“I am,” said Philippa. She was too consciously radiant, as if she were making a picture to touch an old lady's heart. But the truth was she had just received the frightening knowledge that Justin was not hers to keep. She had had, she supposed, what the older people of the church called an “experience.” But hers was the wrong kind, and she stood there trembling inwardly and fighting against the powerful, bitter sense of her own selfishness. The morning had been like the awakening into sense from a long and delightful dream.

“Come back,” said Steve. He touched her cheek with his forefinger. “What are you thinking?” He leaned down to her, his breath brushed her forehead. “He never held his own child's hand. Is that it?”

“Partly.”

“What happened to him?”

“He went as a Navy chaplain,” she said. “It happened on Iwo Jima. He was waiting with a wounded man for the corpsmen to come. It was a hand grenade that did it. But the wounded man lived. He wrote to me. Justin had protected him with his own body.”

“I used to wonder when I was out there,” said Steve slowly, “why it was. Why the man beside me, who had three children, and not me? Why did some rats come through a dozen messes without a scratch when some men who could have made the world a little better didn't have a chance?”

“I wondered,” said Philippa. “I wondered for years. I used to try to think what I would tell Eric. I could say simply that his father was a hero, but what if he ever asked me if it was right to be that sort of hero? Suppose he thought his father could have done much more in the world if he'd saved his own life, so his heroism counts only as a senseless, foolhardy gesture?”

Steve's mouth curved wryly. “You could tell him it's a matter of reflexes. Look at the people who jump off bridges to rescue someone. Some of 'em don't even stop to remember they can't swim. It's a noble reflex, anyway. Better than pushing someone off the bridge in the first place.”

Philippa laughed. “Well, so far Eric has taken it for granted. And by the time he does question it, if he does, maybe he'll realize that the same questions have been asked for a couple of thousand years. I suppose that ever since the beginning of Christianity people have been saying, ‘Why, if there
is
a God—'” She shrugged and spread her hands out on the desk and looked at them. “There's never been a guaranteed, ready-mixed reply to that. You have to leave it to time to answer you.”

“When you're a kid,” said Steve, “time gets in your way. It's too long to Christmas, too long to summer. But the older you grow, the more you count on time.” He stared out the windows at the wheat-yellow meadow stretching toward a white house mellow and assured in thesun. Without thinking she put her hand over his and held it firmly. “When you're grown,” he went on in the same low voice, “you can say to yourself when you're going through hell, ‘Five years from now, I'll be over this. At least I'll be able to live with it.'”

She said, “What happened after you were grown, Steve?”

For the first time he seemed conscious of her hand. He held it between both of his for a moment, then laid it gently back on the desk. He stood up. “That's what I came to tell you today,” he said. “I'm married, Philippa. I haven't seen her for ten years, and I don't know whether she's alive or dead.”

She was oddly shaken. She supposed she should have been relieved that he'd had a legitimate relationship with a woman, yet she was realizing that there had been a profundity to this experience that could still move him. But she would listen as objectively as he had listened to her, with no banal comments.

“Ten years ago,” she said. “That would make it during the war. Were you away from home?”

“San Diego.” He lit a cigarette, not nervously but with a deliberation as if he were gaining time. “I met Vinnie in San Francisco. The details aren't important. Except that she wasn't a pickup.” He gave her a somewhat diffident grin. “I was too bashful to pick up a girl. I'd never had a girl, in fact. I suppose that's one reason why this went so deep.”

“What did she look like, Steve?”

He didn't answer at once, but looked into the smoke.

She saw him adrift in San Francisco, skinny and straight as a bean pole in his blue uniform. The women in the railroad stations and bars must have fed their eyes hungrily on his island bloom; in the contrast between the strong, bony sweep of nose and jaw and the shy alertness of dark eyes, they would have seen a devastating mixture of maturity and innocence.

“She wasn't very tall,” he said at last, “and she had light brown hair, a little wavy. She wore it short when everybody else wore it long. She had brown eyes. Light brown and clear, like brook water. She had a kind of thin little face, like a kid, and yet too old for a kid, as if she knew and laughed at things, inside, that no kid should know. She wore the same old raincoat all the time and flat-heeled shoes. But it was funny, she'd never go out without her lipstick. She could pull a comb through her hair and put on her lipstick all in a minute and look dressed up, even with the raincoat.” He laughed, and he was not laughing at memories, Philippa thought, but at Vinnie; he had evoked her so that she was no wraith. Dead or alive, she was very much alive in the schoolroom at this instant. Philippa imagined the young Steve standing shadowy in a place where all the light was concentrated in a mirror. He watched the tawny image of his girl luminous against the darkness. The comb through the curly crop, the lipstick across the mouth, and the eyes smiling at him from the glass, brook water catching the sun and reflecting it back at him so he could only have a blind instinct as to what lay below.

He was speaking again. “She liked to walk at night in the blackout and the fog. She was crazy about the fog. She said she wanted to be lost in a Maine fog. She liked to cook spaghetti and drink wine with it, and have candles.” He smiled sideway, at Philippa. “I didn't blame her. The place looked pretty tough in a bright light. She had a lot of cultch around.”

“I like candles too,” Philippa said. “Perhaps I should warn you. And I'm not what my mother used to call ‘nasty neat.' What sort of work did Vinnie do, Steve?”

“It was in an office, but that's all I know. She didn't want to talk about it, even after we were married. She was an odd stick. It was always as if she didn't have anything but
now
, this minute, and the far future. She never had a day just passed, or a week or a year. I remembered afterward that she never once said anything about being little or having a family. There wasn't a thing to prove she wasn't born twenty-four years old into that rackety little flat on a hill in San Francisco. But she couldn't hear enough about
my
family and the island. I used to tell her she married me for what I came from, not for myself, and she'd grin and say, ‘Tell me again the names of all the boats.' She always started out by saying, ‘When we go home to Maine.'”

He stopped and went over to the stove. After he had tossed his cigarette into it, he stood there looking absently at the woodbin. Is this the woman in his bones? Philippa thought. Her hands were cold, but there was no way to get rid of the chill. She was tired, too. The night of the dance, the interlude in the dory, passed before her mind's eye in a swift and wearying brilliance. She remembered the red apples shining like jewels on the engine box and the quiet intimacy that had been theirs. Now Vinnie was a sharp and moving essence between them.

“What happened finally, Steve?”

“I was shipped out after a month. I'd made her an allotment and changed the beneficiary of my insurance. I hadn't told the family about her. We were going home together after I got back.” He turned and gave Philippa a direct look. “Sometimes you want to keep a thing to yourself for a while.”

“Too many fingerprints, too many people breathing on it—you think it will lose its brightness.”

He nodded. “Afterward I used to think if I'd told them about her, maybe if I'd started her off for Maine before I left, it might have anchored her. And then I'd have the weirdest feeling that she would have gone into thin air halfway across the country.” He was not a man feeding on memories after all; he seemed honestly puzzled. “She wrote three or four times a week for about six months. Then it stopped altogether. Things were tough where I was. I felt most of the time as if I was in hell with no claws. And I thought there was a mess with the mail. I kept writing whenever I had a chance, and I thought she was writing too, even if I didn't get the letters. I could see her in that flat, ruining her eyes by candlelight. She had these ungodly big old candlesticks she'd picked up somewhere, and she'd have them on each side of her while she wrote. Said they made her feel medieval, as if she was in an old castle in Italy or somewhere, with walls five feet thick, and ghosts moving around behind her back.”