Keeper of the Light (21 page)

“Annie’s jewelry instructor says she’s the best student he’s ever had,” Paul said.

“Paul.”
Annie blushed.

Dr. Chase looked up from his cake. “Well, Annie’s quite bright when she puts her mind to it,” he said. “She could be anything she wants to be. She has the brains to do a lot more than twist little pieces of metal into jewelry.”

Paul glanced at Annie. He saw the shine of tears in her eyes.

Dr. Chase set down his fork and looked at his watch. “I’m going to have to run, kids.”

“But Daddy,” Annie said, “it’s your
birthday.
” Her voice came very close to breaking. Paul heard the splintery little catch in the huskiness, but her parents didn’t seem to notice.

Her father stood up and leaned over to kiss the top of her head. He nodded toward Paul. “Nice meeting you, Mr. Macelli. I’m sure we’ll all think of you the next time we see a good show of fireworks.”

Paul and Annie left shortly after dinner, and Annie was crying by the time they reached her car.

“Maybe I shouldn’t have come,” he said.

“It’s not you,” she said. “I always leave there in tears.”

“I hate them. I’m sorry, Annie, but they’re abominable.”

“Don’t say that, Paul, please. It doesn’t make me feel any better. They’re all I’ve got. You have your sisters and everyone, and I’ve got them. Period.” She opened her car door and looked up at the house. “He never has time for me. He didn’t when I was little and he doesn’t now.”

They spent the summer after their freshman year in New Hope, Pennsylvania, Paul living with a friend he’d known from high school, Annie with two girls from Boston College. Paul worked as a waiter during the day and in the summer stock production of
Carousel
at night, while Annie worked in a gallery, where she learned the basics of stained glass. It was a wonderful summer, both of them doing things they loved and spending their free time together. They were just nineteen, but Paul felt a maturity in their relationship. They talked about the future, about having children, little red haired Italians they would name Guido and Rosa to torment her parents.
“Guido and Rozer,”
Annie would say, in her Boston accent, which sounded strange to Paul’s ears now that they were no longer in New England.

They took leisurely strolls around the little town of New Hope. Annie fell in love with a small blue cloisonné horse she found in one of the shops. Although she stopped by the shop to look at the horse every few days, Paul knew she would never buy it for herself. So when he had finally made enough money, he bought it for her as a surprise. It cost him nearly every spare cent he’d earned, and at first she wanted to take it back. He insisted she keep it, though, and she wrapped it in a soft cloth and carried it around in her pocketbook, taking it out to show anyone she met. She named it Baby Blue, after a Dylan song.

Her parents visited her in mid-July, and for three days he didn’t see her. He finally went to the gallery where she worked, and he knew right away that she wasn’t herself. She had circles under her eyes; her giggle was gone. He hated the way her parents poisoned her.

“They want me to change majors,” she said.

“To what?”

“Something more useful than art.” She straightened a picture on the wall. “If I don’t change majors, they won’t pay for me to stay in school. But I can’t give up art. I’ll have to lie to them.” She looked at him. “I lied to them about you, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told them I’m not seeing you anymore. I never did tell them you were here. They’d never let me stay here if they knew.”

“But what about the future? What happens when we want to get married?”

Annie nervously wrapped a strand of her hair around her finger. “I don’t know. I can’t worry about that right now.”

“Would they disinherit you if you married an Italian?”

“I wouldn’t care if they did,” she snapped. “It’s not money I want from them, Paul. Don’t you know that by now?”

It was true she didn’t care about money for herself. She made her own clothes out of what looked like rags to him. She bought cheap shampoo that left her hair smelling like laundry detergent, and Paul could not go into the laundromat without thinking of her hair. Money was important to her only because it allowed her to help other people. She’d lay awake for hours at night, trying to determine who could use her money the most. At the end of the summer, she took the money she’d earned from her job at the gallery and threw a party for the kids at a nearby hospital.

Annie went off the pill just before they returned to school in the fall. She’d been taking it since she was fifteen. “It’s bad to be on it for so long,” she said. “I’m going to try this new sponge thing. It’s more natural.”

“I could use rubbers,” Paul volunteered.

“No, you may
not,
” she said. “You wouldn’t enjoy it nearly as much.” He knew better than to try to argue with her. Thus started Annie’s long line of peculiar birth control methods, and there were times he secretly prayed they would fail. He loved the thought of having a child with her, of strengthening the bond that already existed between them.

When they returned to school, Paul moved into her dorm, one floor below hers. The placid tenor that had marked their relationship in New Hope followed them back to Boston and lasted nearly until the end of the year. That was when her parents received some forms from the school and discovered that Annie was still very much an art major. When they called her at the dorm to confront her with the lie, it was Paul who answered the phone in her room. He unwittingly identified himself, thinking it was one of Annie’s professors calling. By the time Annie called her parents back that evening, they were in an advanced stage of fury. The phone battle went on for a good hour before Paul left the room, unable to tolerate Annie’s meek apologies. A few hours after she’d gotten off the phone with them, her mother called back. Her father’d had a heart attack, she said. He’d collapsed shortly after talking with Annie and was now in the hospital. The doctors were not certain he would pull through.

She wouldn’t let Paul go home with her, and she was gone a full week. She didn’t return his calls, although he wasn’t at all certain his messages were being delivered.

She was different when she came back to school. There was a distance between them which she wouldn’t acknowledge, making it impossible for him to fight. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Paul. I’m out with you, aren’t I? I’m talking to you.”

They went through the motions of their relationship—talking, going to the movies, eating together in the cafeteria, making love—but a part of Annie was missing.

Finally one night, very close to the end of the school year, Paul blocked her exit from his dorm room. “You can’t leave until you tell me exactly what’s going on in your head,” he said. He sat her down on his bed, while he sat on his desk, far enough away from her that she would not be able to seduce him into touching her to avoid talking.

“My father almost died, Paul.” She played with the silver bracelet on her wrist. “I caused it by making him angry at me, and I don’t know how much longer I’ll have him. He’s so frail now. I can’t bear seeing him like that. He said a lot of things to me in the hospital. He said he loves me… Well, not those words exactly. But he said I’m the most important thing in the world to him. He actually said that.” Her eyes misted over. “He said he doesn’t understand why I set my sights so low, that it disappoints him so much. ‘Art’s nice, honey,’ he said, ‘but you’ll never be Picasso.’ So I’m going to change my major. I’ve already filled out the forms.”

“Change to what?”

“Biology.”

“
Biology.
You have no interest whatsoever in biology.”

She shrugged. “I think I could get into it. It would prepare me for nursing or maybe even medical school. Some career where I could help people. And my father would be so proud of me.” She looked down at the bracelet again. “I’m going to give away all the jewelry I made.”

“Annie…”

“My father said you’re trying to pull yourself up in the world through me, but that you’ll only succeed in dragging me down with you.”

He wanted to throw something against the wall. “Do you believe that crap?”

“Of course not, but I feel like I’m killing him, Paul.”

“He’s trying to kill
you.
He’s trying to make you a little clone of his goddamned fucked self.”

She pressed her hands to her ears and he sat down next to her, pulling her close to him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Look, when you see your father, you get under his spell or something. It’ll pass in a little while and you’ll feel okay about yourself again. And about me. We’ll be in New Hope again this summer and…”

She shook her head. “I’m not going to New Hope this summer.”

He froze. “What do you mean?”

“I need to be by myself for a while. I need to think everything through.”

“Will you stay with your parents?” He could not bear the thought of her spending two months with them. She would be entirely brainwashed by the end of the summer.

“No,” she said. “I thought I’d travel down the coast. From here to Florida.”

“What do you mean, from here to Florida? Who would you go with?”

“Myself.”

“You can’t do that. What if your car breaks down?”

“I’m going to hitchhike.”

Paul stood up. “You have this all planned out, don’t you? You’ve been thinking about this for a long time and haven’t said a word to me about it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Annie, I can’t be apart from you for the entire summer.”

“Maybe it won’t be that long. Maybe the first week it’ll all come clear to me, and I’ll write to you every single day.”

He went to New Hope alone. He took a part in summer stock but was reviewed poorly, his first truly bad review ever. At first Annie sent him postcards daily from coastal towns in New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland. She’d write volumes in the little space on the cards, her handwriting squeezed together almost unintelligibly, telling him about the beaches, the water, the arcades. She was meeting lots of interesting people, she wrote, which disturbed him. How many of those people were men? She’d sign the cards,
I love you,
though, and he tried to relax, to tell himself she would come back refreshed and free of her father’s shadow. Little boxes wrapped in brown paper arrived for him several times a week and inside he’d find shells, a starfish, a seahorse. Annie and her gifts.

Suddenly, though, the gifts stopped, along with the postcards. He was sick with worry. After five days without a word from her, he called her parents.

“She decided to stay in North Carolina awhile,” her mother told him.

“Well, I…I was hearing from her just about every day and then the cards stopped…and I just thought.” He grimaced. He could imagine Annie’s mother smiling with delight on the other end of the telephone. “Where in North Carolina is she?” he asked.

“The beach somewhere. I think they call it the Outer Banks down there.”

Two more weeks followed without a word from Annie. He was in pain. His body literally ached when he got out of bed in the morning. He couldn’t imagine she would leave him hanging this way, that she would cut herself off from him so completely. He read her last postcard over and over again, and the “I love you” at the end seemed just as sincere as it did in the first one. Maybe her mother was lying. Maybe Annie was in Boston. Maybe she wrote to him daily and her mother intercepted the letters.

Then the note came from Kitty Hawk.

Dear Paul,

I’ve written this letter in my mind a thousand times and it never comes out right, but I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve met someone down here. His name is Alec and I’ve fallen in love with him. I didn’t plan for this to happen, Paul, please believe me. I left B.C. with thoughts only of you, but also with the knowledge that things between us were not what they once were. I still love you—I think I always will. You’re the one who taught me that receiving could be just as much an act of love as giving. Oh God, Paul, you’re the last person in the world I would ever want to hurt. I doubt I’ll return to B.C. in the fall. It’s just as well we don’t ever see each other again. Please, please forgive me.

Annie

He considered going to North Carolina to find her, claim her, but he didn’t want her on those terms. He became obsessed with thoughts of harming himself. He could no longer drive at night without being tempted to slip his car across the white line into oncoming traffic, and he’d sometimes sit for hours in his kitchen, staring at the blade of a steak knife, imagining how it would feel to draw it through the vein in his arm.

He quit the play and moved home for the rest of the summer, where his sisters clucked over him and his parents tried to force him to eat. They treated him like the sick, withdrawing addict that he was. Still, he could not stand it when his sisters called Annie a two-faced bitch.

He returned to Boston College a walking dead man. He tried out for the junior play, but Harry Saunders said he was “lifeless,” and cast someone else in the part Paul knew Harry had intended for him. He lost interest in acting altogether and switched his major to journalism. In November, one of Annie’s friends told him that Annie had married Alec O’Neill in North Carolina. O’Neill. He supposed an Irishman was preferable to an Italian in her parents’ eyes.