Where or When (7 page)

 

November 30

 

Dear Siân,

Regarding your last letter, there is a wonderful story about Jack and Bobby Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. You probably already know it, but I'm going to tell it to you anyway. Reducing it to its essentials, the story goes like this. At a crucial moment in the negotiations, Jack Kennedy gets a telegram from Khrushchev that's fairly conciliatory and suggests that Khrushchev is going to back off. Just as Jack and Bobby are about to celebrate, however, Khrushchev fires off another telegram. This one is hostile and essentially tells Kennedy that he's changed his mind about backing off. What to do? Bobby has a brilliant idea. Ignore the second telegram, pretend they never got it, and immediately go on national TV, thanking Khrushchev for his humane gesture—thus ending the crisis.

Your comment about holding your hand will haunt me forever.

The enclosed device has many possibilities, but I hope you'll use it to listen to the tape I am sending with it. Sorry for the sound quality, but some of these songs are as old as I am. A number of them had to come off a jukebox.

I know you could order a similar tape with an 800 number and your credit card, but it wouldn't be the same. I tried for the time that might bring us back together, if only for a moment. My favorite song is “Where or When.” The B side of that record, “That's My Desire,” is a close second. This may mean nothing to you. There is a gap on one side where I screwed up. Just be patient. If you can't be that, just put it in the trash compactor.

We have a reservation for lunch at The Ridge for next Thursday at twelve noon. I'm including with this letter directions from your house.

I thought it unfair to meet for lunch and not allow you to know what I look like when I know what you look like, so I am sending along this picture. It isn't very good, but I don't have many. My daughter took it last summer when she and I were fishing. The fish is a striped bass. On Thursday at noon I won't be holding the fish, and I hope I won't be left holding the bag.

 

Charles

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was working in my office when I heard the familiar sound of the engine of the mailman's jeep, the squeak of the mailbox being opened, the firm slap of metal upon metal. It was a signal, as it almost always was, to leave my desk, as if I had been summoned by the outside world. Lily was at the house where she was watched during the mornings by a neighbor. Stephen was in the barn, working on the cultivator.

It was chilly as I walked out front to get the mail, and I was thinking that when I went back inside, I would make myself another cup of coffee. Inside the mailbox, there was a large envelope from my publisher, and inside that a smaller envelope, with my name on it. I took all the mail inside.

The envelope with my name on it was the color of thick cream; the ink was a dark navy. My name had been written in a beautiful hand, strong and large and steady. Simple, not pretentious. I thought: This must be an invitation. I remember I ran my finger across the ink of my name, as though it might have texture.

And when I read the letter, I thought:
Cal.

I saw a boy, a tall boy with soft brown eyes and a crew cut—and for weeks, even after we had met, when I thought of you I would see this boy.

I could see the lake with the wooden benches, a wooden cross, not ornate. I could see the length of you, the span of you from your waist to your shoulders, in your arms and in your legs. In those days, boys wore white shirts and black pants, even in the summer.

I could see the woods, a patch of woods, in the moonlight.

I went upstairs and put the letter in a drawer, under other papers, where it would not be seen.

I made my husband's lunch and called to him. I put on my jacket and walked to my neighbor's house, where I picked up my daughter. My life went on as usual. I put dishes in the dishwasher, held my small girl, ran my fingers through her fine blond hair. Stephen came and went, and there were long silences between us. There was a kind of tightness around his eyes, which was new to me. He had migraines—two, I think—from the time your letter came until I answered it.

Some nights, after dinner, Stephen and I would talk about the farm, replaying worn scenarios. There was my father, but we had borrowed from him already, and he had almost nothing left. There were more acres we might sell if we could find a buyer. It was the second year of a failed crop, an insupportable burden. Stephen had taken on another job, as a part-time instructor at the agricultural school.

After we had talked, however briefly, Stephen would go up to his office and shut the door. Often I would find him there in the mornings, asleep in his jeans and a sweater.

I didn't mind sleeping alone; in fact, I believe I welcomed it. But sometimes, waking in the middle of the night and walking down the darkened hallway to look in on Lily, I would have a hollow sensation within me, a certainty that I had failed with Stephen, a fear that my life would be defined by this missed connection. Stephen had needed me to fill his emptiness, to assuage the intensity of the black dirt and of his ties to the farm, but I hadn't been able to do that for him.

Stephen had always been secretive—a gentle man, but a hard man to know. Once when I'd asked him about the scar, that shiny seam on his jaw, he said he'd had an accident with a gun some years before I met him and that a bullet had grazed his chin. But when he told this fact to me, he averted his eyes, and I saw something in his face more revealing than the telltale scar. And always, after that, I was watchful.

Had I really ever loved my husband? I think I must have in the beginning, drawn as I had been to his reserve, his anomalous grace, and what I thought, mistaking silence for self-containment, was an appealing dignity. But love, I now know, is an imprecise word, a relative term. I believe you loved your wife, in your way. I believe Stephen thought he loved me.

I waited for the second letter and the third. I learned to listen more keenly for the sound of the mailman's jeep, and I began to anticipate the cream envelopes with the navy-blue ink. I tried to imagine who you were and what you looked like as a grown man, but I could not think beyond the tall, thin boy with the crew cut. I would take the letters you had sent and reread them in my office, trying to extrapolate from the boy, trying to feel who you might be. I wondered what you could remember and how it was you had developed such a clear hand. And in the mornings, before waking, I began to dream of you.

On the day I left for England, I was thinking about meeting you again after all those years. It was late, and I had not finished packing, and I knew that I should concentrate on that activity. Stephen was at the college. I had clothes out on the bed—sweaters and skirts, stockings and a robe. I looked at them and thought: I have to find the picture.

The attic was a cramped crawl space, an alcove into which I tossed things from time to time—the Christmas box, winter quilts, summer quilts—and tidied once a year. I could not stand up in the attic and so made my way, bent over from the waist, to the place where I had stored my trunk. It was a large, heavy wooden trunk that had traveled from Springfield to Dakar and back to this country and to the attic of this farm. In it were letters from my grandmother, scented letters on lavender stationery written in a small hand with purple ink. I had saved the corsages from high school dances, flat brown mementos in waxed paper, with the names of boys attached. There were diaries, ribboned piles of more letters, African sculptures in black wood, a grade school picture in a gold frame, a piece of cloth from Senegal I'd forgotten about, an oval photograph of my mother as a young girl that I took out and dusted off and thought resembled Lily and how I would put it on the piano in the living room for her to see.

Then, at the bottom of the trunk, there was the album of photographs, an album I had put together when I was fourteen. In it were three photographs from the week we had together, and I kept one. You and I are standing in front of the fountain, and again you have your arm around me. But the photographer (who was it, I wonder now—a girlfriend of mine? my mother? a counselor?) has caught us in the act of laughing or of moving apart, and our bodies and our faces are turned away from each other. Your arm is still on my back, and in the picture my eyes are closed, and I am smiling.

When I returned from England and saw the letter waiting for me, I became afraid. Stephen had put it on my desk, unopened. I did not think he would ever open a letter addressed to me, but I could not be certain. Already the correspondence would have been impossible to explain: Why was I writing to you at all?

I wrote you that I wanted it to stop, but I know I hoped you wouldn't hear me.

The package with the tape recorder and the headphones was sitting atop the mailbox, and I thought when I saw it that it must be visible for a hundred miles, even through the thick planking of the barn. I held it cradled in my arm as I walked into the house, thinking: I don't want this, I don't want him to send me gifts.

The photograph alarmed me. You didn't look at all like the boy I had been imagining. Your face was turned to the side. I couldn't see your eyes. You were wearing a windbreaker, and your hair was blowing from what seemed to be a stiff breeze. I could see that you were tall, or possibly, I thought, that was only the angle of the camera. Behind you there was a lighthouse and a cliff.

I hid the tape recorder and the headphones in the drawer with the letters. I went downstairs to make Lily's lunch. I put on my jacket to walk to my neighbor's house to get my daughter.

All the farms backed onto the dirt as onto water—a vast, inky sea. Some houses were not five feet from the black dirt; it seemed to run straight to the foundations, a dark flood. I was still often surprised by the colors of the houses—pink and aqua and mint green—and I thought they must have been painted that way to dispel the monochrome of the landscape. Behind most of the farmhouses there were metal barns in brittle pastels, and in the yards there was often wash on the line. It was a fine day, sharp and clear and cold.

Almost all of the farmers now were Polish. The Rutkowski farm; the Bogdanski farm; the Sieczek farm; the Krysch farm. St. Stanislaus was the center of the town. When I met Stephen, I had thought the life of farming romantic. I did not know how hard it was—how lonely.

The walk to my neighbor's house took only minutes. By many of the farms there were onion crates stacked like lobster pots. I liked the piles of onions at the edge of the black fields behind the houses; the piles were red and rust and a shiny, tawny yellow in the sunlight. At harvest, the eyes stung for days.

The farms had little privacy. They were exposed to the black plains, a geological accident. I passed an old graveyard with Dutch names, and beyond that a wooden barn in disrepair. Out of sight over the hill was migrant-worker housing—long, low, flat buildings, two windows and a door to each unit, gray cement blocks. Out in front of this housing was a rusted swing set the children never used.

I could not leave the town or Stephen. We had had a boy early, and after he was gone, I didn't think of leaving. Our son was buried in the Polish cemetery behind St. Stanislaus, where we had been married.

Lily was waiting for me with her jacket on, her nose pressed against the glass of the front door. We made the journey back to the house slowly. Lily played as we walked, picked up stones and bottle caps, treasures to save in the pockets of her jacket. She had soft, pale hair from her father, which I liked to feel with my fingers.

I put Lily to bed for a nap and went downstairs to begin the laundry. Stephen was sitting at the kitchen table, in early from the work in the barn. He wore his jacket still, was rubbing his forehead as if there might be another headache coming. I asked him if he wanted lunch. He shook his head no. I sat down, waited.

I saw a package, he said, on the mailbox. I meant to bring it in to you. Did you get it?

I said yes.

What was it? he asked.

Extra books, I said. I looked away.

He said, Oh.

I decided then that I would reseal the package and send it back to you. I thought that I would tell you again that this would have to stop. I tried to tell myself that the consequences might be severe, that already I had committed a kind of betrayal that would not be understood. But I did not reseal the package, and it remained hidden in my desk for days, untouched and unreturned.

On the night before you had asked me to meet you, Stephen was called away to a meeting at the college. I had put Lily to bed. I took the tape recorder and the headphones from the desk drawer and walked with them into the bedroom. It was a small room, in which a double bed was dominant. I had made a quilt, a white quilt with patches of rose and green, to give the room color and light, but it was always dark even so. There was just the one window, which looked out over the black dirt, and on the glass there were rivulets of a fine dust that had been disturbed by the rain.