Kathleen Valentine (9 page)

I feel like a narwhal sometimes—neither one thing nor another. A wife who has a lover, a mistress who loves her husband, following an instinct I do not understand.
"Stash," I whisper as he lies on top of me still trembling from his release. I lace my fingers through his thick curls now damp and wildly tangled. "Stash, I need to tell you something. Something I can’t believe myself."
He lifts his head and shifts off of my body, drawing the sheet up over my breast. His eyes are soft and bleary with sexual excess. "Tell me anything," he whispers.
"Stash." My voice shudders as I pronounce the words I never realized my longing for. "I think I’m pregnant."
He smiles and presses a kiss into my hair. "Good."
I am trembling uncontrollably now, now that the longed for words have finally been spoken. My throat clenches and my eyes burn. "I’m scared, Stash, I don’t know if it is yours or my husband’s."
He strokes my face softly. "You want it, don’t you? Whether it’s mine or his? You still want it."
I nod. "Oh, yes, I most definitely want it."
He rolls onto his back lifting me against him to lie half on top of him in the narrow, rumpled bed. He caresses my face and throat and shoulders with his big hands smiling and watching me with eyes so sweet. "Then I’ll do whatever you say, Christine. I’ll marry you or I’ll go away and never see you again or I’ll stay here and be whatever you want me to be. I love you, Christine, and I already love your baby no matter who is responsible for it."
I rest my head on his chest. "It seems so ironic after all these years..."
He lifts my chin and looks into my eyes. "Then I’ll be her father, or her dottering old uncle, or a character in a fairy story you tell at bedtime." His eyes flicker with the years of facing life head on. "You know," he says softly, "I knew you were going to get pregnant."
I stare at him my mouth opening but no words coming out.
"The mermaids told me," he says with a chuckle. "I just hoped it would take a little longer."
"Why?" I blurted.
"Why?" he laughed out loud. "So I could have the extraordinary joy of working at it a little longer. A woman like you comes along once in a man’s life if he is very lucky and I had nearly given up waiting."
"Oh Stash." I pressed my face into his chest and wept. What a strange twist of fate that our shared indiscretion had elevated me to such an extraordinary state of grace. "I love you, too, and as much as I adore Rob I do want this baby to be yours. Tell me what to do."
He drew a deep breath and I felt a sudden resignation. Whatever the outcome of a child would be, there would be loss—loss I hoped I could bear.
"We must think about what is best for this child." He touched my face and I realized painfully what this would cost him. "Our child," he said. "You and Rob are young and can give this child the world. And you both want a baby. It’s not that I don’t, Christine, I’d give anything to have a life with you and our child but at my age and with what I have to offer, what sort of life would that be?"
"That doesn’t matter, Stash," I whispered. But I knew it did.
"Have you told Rob yet?"
I shook my head trying to hide tears. "I want to. I really want to but I’m afraid."
"Christine," Stash turned my face toward his. "He will be very pleased. You really don’t know which of us is the father?"
I drew a deep shuddering breath.
"Okay, we both know she’s mine but she could as easily be his?"
And I realized what he was asking. "Yes," I said.
He nodded. "Then tell him. If he questions it then we will have to make hard choices but you and I both know he won’t. He’ll be overjoyed."
I nodded. The truth was I knew Stash was right.
"The question now is, can I still be a part of your life?" His voice was quiet and pained.
"For a few months then..."
"Yes, I know that. What I mean is, can I be a part of our child’s life? Or would that be hard for you?"
"Actually, Rob told me to invite you to dinner some time just this morning."
"Really?"
"Yes. He was fretting about me being in this part of town so much and I told him that you looked out for me. He was amazed when I told him who you were—we never talked about you before."
He chuckled. "That’s understandable."
"No. He remembered you from when he was a kid. He thinks a lot of you. He said he admired you."
Stash sighed. "That’s because he doesn’t know what a wife-stealing bastard I am."
"Stash..."
He chuckled. "I know. Did he tell you we’re related?"
"Yes. I was astonished. I had no idea."
"Well, the family never had much use for me or my mother."
"I talked to Aunt Priscilla. She told me about your mother."
He was silent for a long time. "You had a busy morning."
"She said she tried to help her."
"Too little, too late." His voice was surprisingly bitter.
"They’re really not bad people, Rob’s family." I tried to see his face but he had tucked me against his chest and was resting his chin on my head.
"Well," he said after an long pause, "I’m glad my child will have her rightful heritage."
"You keep saying ‘her’."
He chuckled. "It’s a girl. I can tell."
"How?"
"Trust me." He was still and I knew without seeing that he was staring at the narwhal’s horn.
"Promise me one thing, my love," he murmured.
"Anything."
"Promise me you will stay my precious lover for as long as you possibly can before inviting me to your husband’s home. Because, I tell you, as much of a bastard as I am, I won’t share a man’s table when I am making love to his wife." He lifted my face to his and began kissing me slowly, lingeringly. "Stay mine as long as possible, my darling, because when they day comes that I become the peculiar elder cousin who shows up for occasional meals and we give up all this..." His hands stroked me into shivering desire as his kisses burned through me. "... I will never make love to a woman again."
With my pregnancy confirmed, I told my husband. Sometimes, alone in the house with Rob at work and Stash busy at the Haven, I tried to convince myself the child was Rob’s. Maybe with Stash as my lover I was less tense, less obsessed with pregnancy. Sometimes it worked that way. How many times did childless couples adopt and then, with the pressure to reproduce relieved, find themselves pregnant? It could happen. But even I knew how feeble my rationalizations were.
And Stash was right—Rob was overjoyed. That alone seemed to make everything alright. Everyone was delirious. My mother sent boxes of baby clothes that she "just couldn’t resist". Rob’s mother shipped three different hand-crafted cradles from New Mexico. Audra insisted on taking me to the Chestnut Hill Mall to pick out designer maternity clothes from A Pea in the Pod. Finally, I let go of all my fears and guilt and self-flagellation and just drifted along in a cocoon of love and maternal contentment.
The auction came and went with great success. The funds-raised provided enough to replace the roof, add storm windows, and provide for basic maintenance for a year or two. With the auction past, stolen afternoons with Stash became less frequent and as my pregnancy progressed our lovemaking ceased but he loved to hold me in his arms and whisper stories of ghostly galleons and mysterious sea-creatures to the child, the girl-child, he insisted, in my belly.
She was born two days after Halloween, a week before Stash’s birthday. We named her Robin Lenore for the man who would be her father and the woman who was truly her grandmother. From the moment I saw her tiny, familiar face with glittering, dark eyes, and a mop of black ringlets, I surrendered my guilt. She was worth anything. Having this child, this exquisite darling who would be so loved by so many, was worth any price life would ask of me.
"She looks exactly like you," a nurse said as she placed the warm little bundle into Rob’s trembling arms. He looked down into our daughter’s yawning, sleepy face and fell madly in love.
Rob was still holding her, cooing and grinning uncontrollably, when Stash, bearing an armful of pink flowers, appeared. As utterly blessed as I felt watching Rob’s joy in his new little daughter, his happiness at seeing his long-lost cousin was nearly as profound. He rose and carried our baby to Stash, holding her close to his chest as he turned her for Stash to see.
"Want to see the most beautiful baby in the entire world?" he asked. And they stood there, the three people who filled my heart—Rob, tall and perfect and bursting with happiness, Stash, only slightly taller and equally perfect in all his imperfections, with the tiny person who had arrived to grace all our lives between them. I covered my face with a pillow and wept. Whatever the rules were, I realized, they had been worth breaking.
Stash became a regular presence in our house. Now he talked more to Rob than to me and, despite missing our lovemaking and quiet hours curled together, I was so in love with Lenore and so delighted to see Rob’s happiness that it didn’t matter. Perhaps it was the arrival of his daughter that quieted Rob’s usually volatile personality but it seemed his growing relationship with Stash softened a few of the sharp edges, too.
Our intimate life changed. Though he was as intense as he had always been Rob’s lovemaking became slow and sweet, more tender than I had ever known him to be. I loved him more than ever. Yet there were moments when I found myself longing for Stash.
I knew that the price of having Stash in our lives was my restraint. I felt greedy and wicked for wanting more than all I already had but I had no choice. Rarely, when Lenore had drifted off to sleep and Rob was occupied elsewhere, Stash would touch my face, or brush a kiss across my hair. But there it always ended.
Lenore adored him from the very beginning. Her tiny head would turn at the sound of his voice. She would stretch her little arms to him when he entered the room. She toddled into his hands with her first steps. It was a mutual love affair of grand proportions. Sometimes when I watched them together—he with his wise old gnome’s eyes and she with her tiny, sparkling pixie ones, I thought how could anyone not see the truth? But no one said a word.

Would things have changed over time? We never got the chance to find out. The mermaids sang one last time for Stash on a warm Spring day when our daughter was four years old. Rob was in New York on business and Stash came by with a little tea service for Lenore that he found in an import shop down near the waterfront. I spread a table by the lilac bushes and the three of us spent the afternoon having fairy tea in the velvety Spring air. Lenore was delighted with the new toy and made a great production of serving cake and tea to us. As the long shadows of late afternoon spread a chill across the lawn I invited him to stay to dinner but he declined. It was his night to cook at the Haven, he said, and besides there was a strange mariner who had shown up the last couple nights. Stash said he didn’t like the look of him.
Lenore gave him her usual fierce, loving hug and pecked kisses all over his big nose and cheek bones then turned her attention back to the tea party. We walked together to his truck and he slipped an arm around my waist. Shaded from view by a brilliant forsythia bush he took my face in his hands and kissed me.
"Kiss me again like you used to," I said, leaning against him.
His face crinkled into a smile. He was well past sixty now but the fire that radiated from him surrounded his head like a sacred glory.
"How did I used to kiss you?"
"Like a movie star," I said. "You used to take me in your arms and bend me sideways."
He laughed and tipped me effortlessly to the side kissing me deeply. "Like that?" he asked, lifting his head from mine.
"Don’t stop."
He kissed me again and then returned me upright.
"You’re an angel, you know," he said. "Even after all this time you kiss an old man like he was your lover."
"You are my lover, Stash." I hugged him hard and long snuggling into his enticing fragrance. He slipped out of my grasp, pecked my lips, and walked away.
By nightfall he was dead. A fight broke out. He had been afraid of that, they said, and he’d ordered two men out of the Haven. He would have no fights in his revered old shelter. But the shouting continued and he went outside to try to intervene. A knife was drawn and Stash blocked the body of the young mariner it was intended for. He never opened his eyes again.

Rob flew home immediately. The funeral was held, as it should have been, in the Seaman’s Bethel. The chapel was packed and more people crowded the lawn outside but all those faces were blurs to me. I remember little of the following days, only the black veil that enshrouded me. This was my punishment then. This was the price I had to pay for loving him so completely. This was the retribution for my sin. I could not bear this loss, I believed, I could not endure this pain. For the first time in my life I thought thoughts too horrible to tolerate, thoughts which I dared not acknowledge even to myself. I sat for hours cuddling our little daughter and thanking Stash, wherever he might be, for giving her to me for I felt that she was all that made life bearable now.
Days after the funeral I found myself driving to the Haven for the first time in years. I sat for a long time in the car trying to control my trembling, torturing myself with a Pandora’s box of tantalizing memories. Like a ghost I left the car and crossed the tender green of the Spring grass to the little church where two hundred years of those who went down to the seas came to beg for God’s mercy. It was dark and still now. Narrow shafts of light drifted through the tall windows illuminating cenotaphs on the walls bearing mute tribute to those whose lives had been lost. A solitary figure sat with bent head in a front pew. I slipped into the seat beside him.
"Miss Chris," he said smiling his sorry smile. "I knew you’d come back."
"Hello Eddie, it was so crowded in here before I just wanted to spend some time alone."
"I’ll go," he said beginning to stand."
"No." I caught his arm. "You’re probably the only person in the world I feel like being with right now."
He tried to smile but tears were spilling down over his battered face like seaspray on the hull of an old frigate. "He was one hell of a guy, huh, Miss Chris? Jesus, I liked that old bastard."
I nod. It is hard for me to talk about Stash. For years all my thoughts of him were for him and him alone. Sharing them with someone else is awkward. "I cared for him very much," I say and, realizing how tepid that sounds, add, "I loved him."
Eddie is looking at me, studying me with uncharacteristic frankness. Finally he turns his eyes to the cross suspended above the altar. "I saw you together one time," he says, a choke in his voice.
"What do you mean?"
"It was a couple months after you started working over to the Haven. Usually, y’know, I was working over to the museum or sittin in a bar somewheres in the afternoon. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t drink no more, oh, maybe a beer or two, but I like bein around other guys like me. You can understand that, can’t you?"
"Yes, of course, Eddie."
"But this one day I had to go back to the Haven to talk to Stash about somethin I forgot. He was always putterin around there durin the day. He acted like that building was a ship and he was the captain and only crew, he loved it that much."
"I know."
"I just didn’t pay attention to if your car was there. I sure never would have come in if I’d known but us old guys, well, we look out for each other, y’know?"
"I don’t remember..." my voice trailed off.
"No." He looked down hiding his eyes. "So, I seen Stash’s coat on his peg but he weren’t in the kitchen and so’s I walked down the hall to his bedroom—the door was only partways closed and it sure wasn’t like Stash to be in bed during the day. I was right worried." He took a deep breath. "I looked in and I seen him laying on his side in bed and it scared the crap outta me. That wasn’t like Stash at all. It was kinda dark in the room and, Christ, it gave me a terrible fright. I didn’t know what to think. He was so still with his back to the door and my legs was like rubber when I walked over to the bed, I didn’t know what I was gonna find..."
I hold my breath and shut my eyes.
"And then, ma’am, I saw you was there with him. You was both sleeping and he was holding you. God almighty, I took off outta there. I was so ashamed of walkin in on you like that."
I swallow hard, speechless.
He looks at me as though anticipating a rebuke. "I made damn sure nobody come near that place when you was there after that. And I sure thought Stash was one lucky son of a bitch. I’m real sorry, ma’am."
Somewhere inside me the most comforting warmth begins to flow. Someone knows. At least one person in all this world understands.
"Oh, Eddie, thank you," I whisper. I put my arm around his stooped shoulders. "Oh, you dear, sweet thing, thank you for telling me. It has been horrible trying to mourn for him in secret. You don’t know how good it makes me feel to know that someone else knows what I felt for him."
He smiles, the first real smile I have seen from him and we sit together in the silence.
"Miss Chris?"
"Yes."
"I’m going to clean his room out now. I was wonderin’ if there is anythin’ of his you want."
I hadn’t thought of that. I had always considered Stash’s many curious possessions to be like all the other oddities in the Haven. "Yes," I say, "I’d appreciate that."
Stash’s room was little changed from the last time I was there years ago. The notable difference was a bright and colorful collection of familiar artwork taped to the door of his closet. It featured lots of hearts, was done mostly in crayon, and was signed with a flamboyant, if somewhat awkward, "L".
But the bed was tightly made, the shades half drawn, a blue and gray plaid flannel bathrobe folded over the footboard. One of the slippers that always sat neatly beside each other had been kicked aside and I bent to put it in its proper place. I opened the closet door careful not to damage the art gallery—the scent of him overwhelmed me. I could not do this. I turned to leave then, impulsively, turned back and, leaning over the bed that had been my own haven in a time of need, I lifted down the narwhal’s horn. It was remarkably light and delicate feeling. How could something that appeared so strong and fearsome be so fragile? My throat clenched painfully with the thought.
I left that precious world forever.
I made arrangements with Eddie to have his belongings packed and sent to our house. I left the Haven and drove down the cobblestoned street without looking back.