The Towers of Love (2 page)

“Oh, I don't know about that,” he said, smiling.

“Yes, it's true,” she said. “Because I've thought about it now and then, wondered about it, how it would have been. The trouble with us was that we were too much alike. People should marry opposites. You and I, growing up together—we were too much like brother and sister. We knew each other's glaring faults too well.”

“Do you really think so, Edrita?”

“I
know
so. How old were we when we gave up the idea? Seventeen?”

“Seventeen or eighteen, I guess.”

“Yes. The perfect age to give it up. We gave up the idea just in time, just before the age when people get too deeply into things—so deeply that they can never get out. Thank God we saw the light when we did. You're happy now, and I'm happy now. We'd never have been happy together.”

“Perhaps you're right.”

“Of course I am. Your mother was right about it.”

“What did my mother have to do with it?”

“Don't you remember? Well, it doesn't matter,” she said quickly. “We grew up, got over it. And we did the right thing. Bob gave me something you never could have given me.”

“What is that?” he asked her, looking at her.

She was frowning. “Security,” she said.

“Security? My God, I'm no pauper.”

“Oh, I don't mean that,” she said. “I don't mean
money
. Security isn't money. It's—”

“What is it, then?”

“It's—well, it's continuity, I suppose. Steadfastness.”

“And I couldn't have given you that?”

“Oh, what I mean is we're both too erratic. Don't you think? Both our families are too erratic. We're too much concerned with everybody being an individual. We're always flying off on our own, and doing what we want, and—”

“If by security you mean money—” he began.

“But security is
not
money, Hugh. My God, it just isn't. Oh, I know you've got money. I know you've just sold your business in New York for some fantastic sum, and you're rich in your own right now. That isn't the point. The point is—”

“What is the point?”

“Security isn't money,” she repeated. “It isn't just that.” Then she said, “Oh, I don't know what I'm talking about. I'm talking in circles. Forget it.”

They walked very slowly, side by side, saying nothing.

Then she said, “The point is that we're two old friends now, two dear old friends who've been out of touch for a while. Here I am, a Middle Western housewife, and here you are—a fabulously successful advertising man—”

“You're making me sound pretty glamorous,” he said.

“It
is
glamorous,” she said. And then, “You know, when I first heard that you owned an advertising agency, it surprised me a little. Years ago, you wanted to go to journalism school.”

“Oh, I gave up that idea a long time ago,” he said. “It just wasn't practical.”

“Well, advertising and newspaper work—they're pretty much the same sort of thing, aren't they?”

“Not quite the same,” he said, “but similar.”

“But you've enjoyed advertising.”

“Yes, very much,” he said.

“Tell me about it.”

“Well, I think it's one of the most exciting businesses in the world,” he said. “Oh, in the beginning, I guess I thought it was sort of the second-best choice. But there are rewards in any job—just in knowing you're doing a good job, for one thing. And I could rationalise and say that it really was the same sort of thing. Advertising is giving news—though it's news about products, not about events.”

“Yes. And advertising is so much more lucrative, isn't it?” she said.

“Well, there's that, too.”

“Isn't it funny how things work out?” she said. “How our dreams change? Or how they get changed—by circumstances.”

He said nothing. He was not only thinking how funny it was, the way things worked out, but also how strange it was that ten years of her life had gone by about which he knew almost nothing; that she had a husband whom he had met exactly twice—first at her wedding in 1951 and next, three or four years later, on Fifth Avenue in New York. They had encountered each other, walking in opposite directions down the street, on their separate ways to luncheon appointments in the city, had recognised each other, and had stopped to chat for a minute or two, saying, “How's Edrita?” “Fine.” “Give her my best,” “We're expecting in February.” “No kidding? That's wonderful! Well, be sure to give her my best.” “I will, Hugh, sure thing.” That had been all. And now she had a baby he had never seen, and lived in a house he had never been in. It was curious, thinking of that great gap of years—a whole third, perhaps, of her life—during which she had gone about the business of living, joining clubs, having the baby, giving dinner parties, taking trips, meeting people about whom he knew nothing, and would probably never know very much. Curious because, of course, for seventeen or eighteen years of their lives they had seen each other almost literally every day. Their houses were just half a mile apart, in sight of each other. When one of them had come to the front door, or turned on a light in his room, the other had been able to see it (that opened door, that sudden light), and there had been nothing of their comings and goings that both of them had not known. They had shared everything, had no secrets from each other.

And, of course, it seemed equally strange to think that the same ten years had gone by in his life, and that his years were as unknown to her as hers were to him. He wondered how much the years had changed them both. Was it possible that they were still the same two people now that they had once been? When he had seen her first this afternoon, after all that time—not at all expecting to find her here, in Connecticut—he had had some trouble turning her face back into the face of the girl he had known ten years ago. Her hair was still brown and wavy, her nose was still straight and thin, her eyes were still heavy-lashed and dark, but there were so many new and different things about her. There was a new smile, and a new way she seemed to have of working her lips up and down over her teeth as she talked, new little nervous facial mannerisms and lines—not lines of age, really, but of something else. It was hard to define what the tiny lines meant. And there was a practised archness, a new lift of her eyebrows as she looked at him. She was still beautiful, but not pretty any more—the kind of prettiness, at least, that had once made her Queen of the Dartmouth Winter Carnival. Her beauty now was a wearier sort of beauty. Her face was thinner, under more cosmetics, and her short, fashionable haircut was not at all like the hair that had had to be lifted gently out of a coat collar when he helped her into a coat in the old days. He remembered suddenly how she had always liked to have him lift and arrange her hair over a coat collar. And noticing these new things about her made him wonder now what new things she saw in him. Then, as if she had been reading his thoughts, she said, “Hugh, you haven't told me if I've changed,” and her hand on his sleeve pulled him back and stopped him at the edge of the wood.

He smiled at her. “Everybody changes,” he said.

Her face, turned up to him, was serious. “Yes, but how?” she asked him. “How have I changed? Am I still beautiful?”

“Yes, you're still beautiful,” he said. “You're still Edrita Everett.”

She seemed pleased at this. “You mean I'd still make a good movie star?” she asked him, smiling.

“Or a good spy,” he said.

“But I'm older, sadder, wiser, aren't I?” she said.

“I guess we both are. Those grey hairs you spotted.”

“But you haven't changed much, Hugh. Not really. Not nearly as much as I'd thought you might.”

“You mean you really thought about it?”

“Of course. I've often wondered what you'd look like, if we met again. After all, we grew up together.”

“Yes.”

And, once again, she seemed to have been reading his thoughts. “We have so much ground to cover, don't we?” she said. “So much has happened. Some day soon we'll have to sit down and have a long talk. Fill in on the whole ten years. Go through them day by day.”

“Do you think we'd find them that exciting? Aren't you afraid we'd just bore each other to death?”

“No,” she said. “No. Would you like to kiss me, Hugh?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Your wife wouldn't mind, would she?”

“No.” And he couldn't help but smile at how quickly and glibly he had answered this question, and made up Anne's mind for her.

“Bob wouldn't mind. Nobody would mind.”

“Or even know,” he said, and kissed her.

They separated, and she said, “A brotherly kiss.”

And he said, “Yes.” Though it had not been a brotherly kiss, not really.

“Do you know why I asked you to do that? Because we always used to kiss each other before we walked into these woods together, when we were children. Remember?”

“In case we lost each other in the forest.”

“Yes, and it was always when we were on our way home. As we are now. It was a good-bye kiss. Now where's the path? There used to be a path through here.”

They started along the edge of the wood, looking for the path.

“When we had horses, I remember my mother cut a lot of bridle paths through the woods,” he said. “I wonder what's happened to them now? I suppose they're all overgrown.”

“Your mother could cut her way through anything, couldn't she?” she said.

“What do you mean by that? You sound as though you didn't like her.”

“Oh, I love her. Everybody loves your mother,” she said.

“I guess she is pretty magnificent,” he said.

“Yes, magnificent.”

“Have you been to see her since you've been home?”

“No, not yet,” she said.

“She'd want to see you, I know. Why not drop by?”

“Perhaps I shall.”

“She knows you're here.”

“Yes,” she said, “I know she does. As a matter of fact, she called me and asked me to come to dinner to-night.”

“Oh, are you coming?”

“Here's an opening,” she said, pointing. “We can go through here.” And then, “No, I'm sorry I can't.”

“Can't you? Why not?”

She flashed a quick look at him. “I just can't, that's all,” she said. “I told her I was sorry.”

“Going somewhere else?”

“Do I have to have an excuse?” she asked him. “Other than that I can't?”

“No, I don't suppose so,” he said.

“What was the excuse I used to give you whenever I couldn't go out with you years ago?” she asked him, smiling.

“Let's see—well, one was that you had to wash your hair that night.”

“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “So let's say I have to wash my hair to-night.”

“All right. You win,” he said. And then, as he lifted a branch and started to duck into the wood, he said, “Better let me go first, Edrita, and feel out the path.”

“Don't snap twigs in my face,” she said. “Just don't do that. When we used to come here as children I hated to let you go first. You were always snapping twigs in my face.”

“I'll do my best,” he said, and he started into the trees with her following a little way behind.

“Hugh,” she said, “you've never had children, have you?”

“No,” he said, “we never have.” He stopped for a moment, briefly trying to locate himself in the wood. Then he remembered, knew which way to go, and started ahead again.

Every stretch of woods has a personality of its own, something about it that makes it particular and different from any other. This section, all through here, was second growth. Someone, long ago, before either her or his family's time, had for some reason cut down all the first stand of trees, or perhaps they had burned; no one knew. But anyway, where the wood was now, there had once been fields or pasture. You could tell because, walking through, you kept encountering old stone walls tumbling into disrepair and, in the deepest undergrowth, you sometimes came upon old twisted and rusting shards of barbed wire. Barbed wire indicated that cows had been kept here once, but you couldn't be sure. Rutted trails here and there were evidence of long-ago wagon paths which had, when you explored them, a certain rough symmetry to them and a kind of logic. They spread out through the valley in a pattern of city blocks. All of the more passable ones had been given names by the two families—the old river road was what they called one, and another was known as the old foundation road because it led past the crumbled remains of what at one time must have been a farmhouse. And there was the brook road, which ran alongside one of the river's tributaries, and there was the pond road and the willow road. They were coming up to the brook road now—so densely thicketed that only an eye that knew it would recognise it as ever having been a road at all—and the brook would be just beyond it.

It was a sunny wood, being new growth, and light spattered all through it between the branches of scrub oak and pine and birch and ironwood, and, underneath, it was a wood blanketed with moss and fern and fallen trunks of trees so overgrown with grass that they looked like (and he and Edrita had once pretended that they really were) Indian graves. And everywhere, among the fallen trees, the ground protruded with the round forms of rocks so covered with grey lichens that they looked soft as pillows, and the patches of earth between the rocks were apt to be wet and swampy especially now, at this time of year, in spring. Only occasionally in the wood, among all the new growth, was there a tall old tree, dead or dying, with hard pancake mushrooms climbing up its bark like jutting steps of a stair.

It was slow going through the wood, and each step involved a little test of the stepping-place. If this had ever been a pasture, Hugh thought, it must have been a very poor one, and perhaps this was why the whole enterprise with its complex of trails and roads had been abandoned and given back to nature, to make of it whatever random madness nature chose. Deep in the woods, in spring, they had gone on wildflower searches—he, his brother and sister, and Edrita—from the time in early spring (it was still too early yet)when the first red horns of skunk cabbage showed themselves above the ground. There had always been a great variety of wildflowers here: cowslip and lady's-slipper and arbutus and bloodroot, forked adder's-tongue, jack-in-the-pulpit, and wild yellow violets. Later on, in summer, you could find clusters of flamboyant tiger lilies along the brook's edge. He remembered picking the flowers and bringing them home in sticky, wilting handfuls, and his mother saying, “But they look so beautiful where they're growing, darling. Why do you pick them? They never last in the house.” And it had always seemed useless to explain to her that no amount of picking would ever deplete the store of flowers that bloomed, year after year, in the wood's vast garden.