What Happened to Sophie Wilder (13 page)

They headed west, passing the subway stairs and then St. Agnes, throwing off routine together. In Central Park they walked beneath a cathedral of elm boughs through which fell panes of summer sun. An older couple went hand in hand in front of them, and Sophie reached for Tom, feeling a kinship with these two. She had the sense that she'd seen a picture of Tom's future. Or rather, a negative image of it, for he was nothing like his father. She wanted to tell him about her visit just to tell him this: you are nothing like the man; you will never be anything like him.

 

 

At school, her friends had taken Tom O'Brien for another diversion. Perhaps he had taken himself for as much when he sat down with her in the empty dining hall. Only Sophie had known that her break with Charlie was different this time. She had tested the limit, had always been testing, leaving and returning. Finally she'd broken through, and the limit was marked. But the act was irrevocable. She couldn't remember after the fact why it had needed doing, but she had been sure when she'd done it. It was like a secret told in a dream that one struggles upon waking to recover.

By the time Tom invited her home for Christmas things were “serious” between them, as she told her friends, though she wasn't taking anything quite seriously since breaking with Charlie and losing the child. She felt separated from her own life, unreal to herself. But she remembered their earlier stay at Beth's as a brief stretch of contented attachment amid all this floating, and she was hopeful as they drove down, looking forward to the two empty weeks ahead. She hadn't written anything all semester, the longest spell in years, since before her parents died. But Greg was happy with the collection they'd started putting together, and this counted for
something. Work was being done on the stories, even if she wasn't the one doing it. In the trunk was a bag of books. If she still couldn't write, she would spend those weeks reading.

On the first night, she lay down in bed with a novel, uncertain and tentative, as if taking up a new habit rather than doing something that had consumed her life to that point. She fought to give herself up to it, knowing that the very need to fight was a guarantee that the effort would be wasted. Each word came through clearly enough, but when she tried to relate it to the ones that came before and after, to make meaning out of this relationship, she couldn't sustain the thread. She chose another book and ran through the same process again. She was panicked now, which only made concentration harder. For the first time she worried that the change in her, the distance between herself and her own life, was permanent.

She turned to the shelves beside the bed and looked over the titles, going more carefully through them now than she had during her earlier visit. She had not read a single one of them. She chose Thomas Merton's
The Seven Storey Mountain
because the title was familiar to her. The book's story wasn't unlike hers in broad outline. Merton had lost both parents before becoming an adult, and he had followed that loss with years of wild behavior. A child had been conceived. But these parallels should not have been enough to keep her interest where everything else failed, especially since her own life interested her so little. What struck her instead were the odd asides, spoken from a different world. Early in the book, she read a line about the “pattern and prototype of all sin”: “the deliberate and formal will to reject disinterested love for us for the purely arbitrary reason that we simply do not want it.” This was exactly what she had done to Charlie with Max. It had not
been an experiment or a game or even a mistake: it had been a rejection of love. She had sinned.

Sophie would come in time to know all the famous conversions that had arrived by way of books.
Tolle lege
, a voice urged Augustine. Take up and read. St. Ignatius lay in bed, recuperating after his leg was shattered in battle by a cannon ball. He asked for romance novels to pass the time, but instead he was given a life of Christ. Later, on the rare occasions when she was asked to give an account of what had happened to her, she told the story in this way, tracing it back to the moment she came upon Merton's book. It was easier this way; it fit into people's ideas about her, and their ideas about intellectual respectability, to say that she'd been convinced by an argument on the page.

The truth was more difficult to explain. She continued reading because she found the book interesting, nothing more. There had been no change within her yet. When she'd finished—it took her most of a day—she looked at the other titles on the shelf. Not all of them were religious, strictly speaking. There were novels from the thirties and forties by French writers whose names were vaguely familiar. There were works of history and social thought. But it took only a moment of skimming to know that they had all been written from a Catholic perspective. It occurred to Sophie that an entire strain of human feeling and thought had been up until then utterly foreign to her. In the absence of stronger inclinations, it seemed worth getting to know. So she picked another book.

That week she learned about the difference between natural and revealed religion, between the God who could be approached through logic and the God who must present himself to us. She learned about the founding of the Church with Peter at its head.

What little she'd known of Christianity before came by way of writers like Milton and Dante. But Dante was Christian in the way that Virgil was pagan; it was a historical peculiarity one worked through to arrive at their timeless poetry. She felt as if she were visiting the modern Mediterranean armed only with Ovid as a guide.

Sophie's parents had not been religious—they lacked the feeling for it, what she would learn to call the
capax Dei
, the capacity to experience God—and so she had not been in many churches. When she and Beth and Tom went to mass in town on Christmas morning, the only point of comparison she had was St. Agnes, where she had gone with the Blakemans the previous three years. Christmas mass was a great performance there, a concert with professional singers accompanied on an enormous pipe organ. The Blakemans took this family tradition seriously enough, but gave no sign of real belief.

The church that Beth attended was small, the music amateurish but heartfelt. Where the priests at St. Agnes had been professorial, this one was a kind of tradesman. If you took away his vestments, it would have been easy to imagine him on a construction site or the back of a fire truck. He seemed at once to command the ceremony and to be an awed participant in it.

It is in the nature of what happened next that it can't be conveyed in words. The few times Sophie tried to explain it later, even to herself, she fell back on cliché: something came over her; she walked out changed. It got closest to it to say that she was, for a time, occupied. After all her reading in the week leading up to that day, she thought of that occupying force as the Holy Spirit. But mostly she knew that it was something outside of herself, something real, not an idea or a conceit or a metaphor. Once it passed
on, she knew that her very outline had been reshaped by it, that this reshaping had been long awaited though she hadn't recognized as much. More than that, she knew that she wanted the feeling back. She would chase it forever if need be. Everything later followed from that. That was the part she couldn't explain to others. It couldn't be explained. It didn't come from books; it didn't allow itself to be argued for or against. In the remaining week of their vacation, she didn't mention it, though she fully expected that people could tell just by looking at her.

She had never entirely regained the feeling she'd had that day, but she still believed with certainty that it was real. She had to believe it, because she had built her life around it, and she couldn't accept that this was just another stage, just another life she might have chosen after the last one fell away. So she waited for that feeling to return. In its absence, she had her daily rituals. She had the form of faith.

 

“What's on your mind?” Tom asked as they continued through the park.

Sophie wanted to say she was thinking of him. Why didn't she think of Tom when she thought of that time? It had all happened under his watch. Perhaps she didn't think of him because he was still there. What she remembered, she remembered for its absence.

“I was thinking of our first Christmas at Beth's.”

He slowed a little in stride, as though she had placed an obstacle before them. “What made you think of that?”

Those days brought different associations for Tom. He would have in mind the conversation they'd had a few days after Christmas, while Sophie was still dizzy with light. He would have in mind the first and only time they spoke about his father.

Sophie had come upon Beth in the hall, looking at the photo of Tom on his mother's hip.

“She was beautiful,” Sophie said. It wasn't just something to say. The woman in the photo
was
beautiful, in the same way Tom was beautiful.

“I miss her every day,” Beth said.

“There was a fire?” Sophie asked.

It was strange to admit that she didn't know more than this. She should have by then, though they'd only been together for weeks. Beth seemed to think so as well. Sophie's ignorance suggested trouble to her, whether Tom's or Sophie's own.

“He was eight when the house burned down. That's when he came to live with me.”

Sophie might have asked anything then, and Beth would have answered. But she knew she ought to bring her questions to Tom. She had waited for him to tell her more about his parents, but he'd said nothing. Neither of them spoke much about the past. He knew about Charlie, of course. She had told him about the pregnancy and the miscarriage, though she'd let him assume that Charlie was the father. He didn't ask questions about her parents. He didn't ask questions about anything, really. She liked this then, and she tried to repay in kind.

That night in his room she spoke at greater length about her parents' accident and what it had done to her than she ever had to anyone before. Tom tried to comfort her while she spoke, but she didn't need comforting. She needed him to know how it happened and to hear it from her.

“Tell me about the fire,” Sophie said into his sweater while he held her against his chest. “Tell me about how your parents died.”

“My mother.”

“What's that?”

“Only my mother died in the fire. My father got out.”

She didn't know what to say. She wasn't sure she'd been lied to, strictly speaking, but she had certainly been deceived. The fact that he could let her persist in such misunderstanding suggested something worrying.

“What happened to him?”

“He left me to live with Beth. I guess he wasn't up for it. We never saw him again.”

“That was it? He just disappeared?”

“More or less.”

“Is he still alive now?”

“So far as I know.”

“Do you ever think of finding him?”

Sophie had never seen Tom angry before. Even now the moment passed quickly. But something important about him had shown itself.

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“We don't have to talk about it now,” Sophie said.

“I don't ever want to talk about it.”

Until then, she had liked that she didn't need to contextualize herself for him, didn't need to marshal the facts of conventional characterization, to expend the effort of making herself present from moment to moment. He already had his own idea of her, and he didn't notice how she sometimes flickered. But she had liked it only because it had suited this strange time in her life. She wasn't sure she wanted to commit herself to such a stance forever, and this is what he seemed to be proposing. Their lives, he seemed to say, had begun on the day he sat beside her in the dining hall. Nothing before then needed to matter. But her parents mattered to her, after all, even in their absence, and she wanted them to matter to him, even if he could never meet
them. The past could not be banished at will, even if they both wished for it to be. She was helped along in accepting his offer by the fresh recollection of what had happened in that church. A new life had indeed begun.

 

Sophie had honored the arrangement all these years, in spirit and letter both. Not only had she not asked Tom anything, she had resisted the temptation to ask Beth about Bill Crane, or to search for him online. It was this practice of restraint that kept her from looking through the folders in Crane's apartment. But everything seemed to have changed now.

“Tell me about your father.”

Tom let go of her hand but otherwise made no response.

“I'm your wife,” Sophie said. “How could I not want to know?”

“Ask him yourself, then.”

“If you don't want to tell me, okay. But don't blame me for caring about your life.”

Appeals to Tom's decency and reason were almost unfair, since he was the most decent and reasonable person she knew. She was near to apologizing, telling him he didn't need to explain himself, when he spoke.

“What did he tell you?” he asked. “About the past, I mean. About me.”

“Nothing,” Sophie said.

“He didn't say anything about the fire?”

“No.”

Tom paused for a moment, considering a proper angle of approach.

“They met in grad school in Missouri. My father was studying philosophy and my mother was studying literature. They were finishing their dissertations. He was
invited to stay on as an assistant professor. My mother did postgrad work until I was born. They got a little house out in the country, a rental, where we would stay for a week or two at a time over breaks, so my parents could write. That's where the fire happened.”