‘If a girl’s a virgin, it can be proved by a doctor—’
‘Not a male. There’s no membrane to be broken. I’d had wet dreams, though not even those for a while. I was still healing from T.J.’s death. I don’t know why Cissie wanted to pin it on me. But she did. The Methodist minister’s daughter said it was a known fact I was always over at T.J. and Cissie’s. The fact that I hadn’t been there for nearly a year didn’t seem to occur to anybody. The only person to say the accusation was absurd was the rabbi’s daughter, and it didn’t do her any good to try to stand by me. Well. She’s still a good friend, married to a cellist, and she plays the oboe.’
‘What happened?’ Camilla asked.
‘I went to the local recruitment center and joined the army and was sent to Korea.’
‘Oh, Mac—’
‘False accusations.’ He spoke with controlled violence. ‘I was falsely accused of getting a girl pregnant. And then Frank and I were accused of collaborating with the Communists.’
‘But you didn’t—’
He rolled onto his back. ‘I did, Camilla. I bought the lies. America looked pretty smutty to me when I fled Nashville. And I was a P.K.’
‘P.K.?’
‘Preacher’s kid. Taught to believe what Jesus said, about giving up your coat, and turning the other cheek, and walking a second mile, and all that stuff, which, if taken seriously, is more or less what Communism ought to be and isn’t.’
A terrible ache ran down Camilla’s back. She eased her position against the tree.
‘I bought the lie about the U.S. being the only aggressor, entirely responsible for starting an unjust war. Part of the lie was true, but it was a twisted truth.’ He reached up, pulled a leaf off a twig, and shredded it. ‘I agreed to do some broadcasting.’
She caught her breath. Did not speak.
There was a long, dark silence. She thought she could hear Mac’s heartbeat, a rapid drumming. Finally he spoke again. ‘Anything that was said about Cissie and me was a lie. But there was a worse lie, which was at least partly true.’ He groaned. ‘Oh, God, Camilla, there was a girl. She was beautiful, straight black hair hanging all the way down her back. That strange flat—to me—Korean face with incredible dark eyes and lashes. I had never seen anything like her. I fell for her, and I believed that she loved me, that she truly loved me. The horror of it was that she believed, totally believed, everything she told me. There wasn’t an iota of cynicism in her. She was on fire with love of her country, and with the ideology she had been taught. Her religion. When she kissed me it wasn’t part of a plan of seduction.’
Again the silence came between them, so tangible she felt it dampening her palms.
‘Oh, God, she was lovely, and she loved me and I loved her. I caught her faith. At first her superiors thought our love could be useful, that she could use me for their purposes. Frank saw what was going on, and at night he would talk to me quietly, not pushing, not getting excited, but gently, and when I began to listen to him, to tell her what Frank was telling me, when she started to ask questions, they were angry. When I backed down from the promises I had made, when I refused to do the broadcasting, they gave her, I guess, a chance to change my mind, to go back to believing what she believed, and when I refused, when I tried to make her understand, they took her away. I never saw her again. I don’t know what happened to her. I couldn’t find out. I killed her, Camilla.’
‘No—no—you don’t know—’
‘I’d like to kid myself, but I don’t think she’s still alive. I was wild with anger and grief. She was my first wonderful experience of physical love, and it was blown to bits as though they’d dropped high explosives on us.’
‘Mac—Mac—I’m so sorry.’
‘Frank held me together, kept me sane enough not to return to the insanity that had gripped me. Camilla, it was a terrible time in my life. I am not ashamed of my love, because it was beautiful and real, but I am ashamed of what I started to believe, and my—my capitulation to the lies I was fed. And Frank suffered for it, too. When I refused to do what I had said I would do, both Frank and I were punished for my refusal.’
Sleep deprivation, she remembered Frank saying. What else was done to them?
‘It taught me the meaning of friendship. I would have been given a dishonorable discharge from the army if it hadn’t been for Frank’s intervention.’
She put the back of her hand against his cheek, rubbing it gently.
‘Does this make you’—he paused—‘not want to marry me?’
She shook her head. ‘Oh, Mac, darling. I’m grateful to you for telling me.’
‘That I loved someone else—’
The words did not come easily. ‘I’m glad—I’m glad you told me.’
‘Darling,’ he said, ‘if you’re going to be my wife, I need to be honest with you about myself. I’m a pretty square guy. After we got home and I was with Mama and Papa for a while, and then when Frank and I went to seminary, I was moderately serious about a couple of girls, but I wasn’t the womanizer Luisa accused me of being, and it wasn’t until I met you that I knew—not just with my mind and body but with all of me, with my soul, if that doesn’t sound too corny, that I love you. Camilla, I love you. You listen to the heart of trees,’ he said, pulling her toward him until her head rested on his chest. ‘Can you hear my heart, darling Camilla? It’s yours.’
Camilla offered to cook at least one dinner.
‘Let’s do it together,’ Olivia suggested. ‘That will be fun.’
It was. Olivia helped shred and chop while Camilla made a delicate sauce, using some of Olivia’s homegrown herbs.
‘What a delight you are,’ Olivia said. ‘Art and I have always wanted a daughter, and you are everything we could have wished for.’
—I’ve always wanted a mother, Camilla thought, but could not say it and thus betray her mother. ‘You and Mr. Xanthakos—’
‘Art, lovey.’
‘There’s a peace in your house, a kind of serenity I’ve never known. You and Mr. Xan—Art—can be quiet together, and it’s good. I hope it will be that way for Mac and me.’
Olivia was busy chopping cilantro. Finally she said, ‘My dear, it does not come free, or without leaving scars. When china is broken, no matter how well it’s mended you can still see the crack. When bones are broken they have to be skillfully set, and sometimes rebroken and reset. One of my favorite cooking utensils is my rice cooker, which I’ll get out for you in a few moments. You’ll notice that it has a patch on the bottom from where I let it burn dry. We used to mend our pots and pans. Perhaps today we tend to throw away rather than mend.’ She looked at Camilla. ‘That’s not an answer to what I hope for you and Mac, but it’s at least a metaphor. When I think of Art and myself I know that our patches and glued-together cracks are visible, but they’ve held.’
Camilla asked, ‘Perhaps Mac’s going to Kenya the way he did was the first of our cracks?’
There did not seem to Camilla to be visible cracks in Olivia and Art. She loved the way they looked at each other, touched unobtrusively, a hand laid for a moment against an arm, a shoulder.
Mac, too, touched her inconspicuously whenever they were not alone, something learned from his parents that she treasured. She needed the reassurance of his hand, his fingers against hers.
Art was affectionate with her, far more overtly than her father had ever been, but never in any way that made her uncomfortable.
One Saturday morning when he was going over his sermon she took him in a midmorning cup of coffee, and he indicated a comfortable leather chair beside his desk. ‘Sit down for a moment, can you? I need to take a break.’
Camilla curled up in the big old chair, looking around the study, which was full of books, many, she thought, in Greek. Magazines and papers were falling off tables and extra chairs. There was a smell of leather and old books and the fresh coffee she had brought in, very different from the Church House coffee.
Art asked, ‘You and M
ac getting enough chance alone to talk? Olivia and I aren’t too much around?’
‘We have lots of chance to talk,’ Camilla said. ‘We’ve gone out to the old tree house. Mac told me about T.J.’
‘Thomas James. Tragic. He was a brilliant boy.’
‘And Cissie.’
Art leaned back in his chair. ‘I’m glad Mac told you. T.J. had the brains. Cissie had the smarts. It was a clever ploy, but it didn’t work.’
‘It sent Mac to Korea.’
‘Yes, and that was hell, but a different kind of hell than he knew here.’ He picked up a pencil, looked at it thoughtfully, and sharpened it with a penknife. ‘How much did he tell you about Korea?’
‘He told me.’
Art was silent for a long time, nodding slowly, affirmatively, as he looked across his desk at Camilla. ‘It is terrifying how untruth can be taught. Mac and Frank and the others were put in schoolrooms with the great blue-and-white flag of peace covering one wall. And taught. At first it was mesmerizing. And then there was the girl. He told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘When the instructor accused the U.S. of starting the war, Frank pointed out that it was odd that the North Koreans were already in Seoul. Mac heard. Dazzled as he was, he heard. Thanks to Frank’s steady clear-sightedness, his gentle persistence, the scales fell from Mac’s eyes. He tried to speak to the young woman, out of love, out of naïveté. It was a bad time.’
Art put down his coffee cup. ‘Enough. It serves no good purpose to dwell on that time. It is fitting that you should know about it, but now you and Mac need your own lives. There are other things as grievous as—No. Not now. Olivia and I are more happy than we can say that Mac has found you. That you have found each other. Now, before you set a wedding date, Mac must find out what he is going to do next.’
FIVE
Camilla went back to New England to teach summer school. Mac returned to the seminary to take courses and to look for a job.
Every week or so Art or Olivia would call Camilla, and she felt that she was beginning to understand, at last, what it was like to have parents.
“Parents,” Raffi said, “are a liability. They mess up their lives.”
“Not always,” Dr. Rowan said. “Some manage to work through their griefs and betrayals into real love.”
“Name somebody.”
“Your grandparents.”
“I never knew my grandfather. He died while Mom was pregnant with me. They were really good together?”
“Yes. They went through the grinder and they came out and put themselves back together.”
“They did?”
“Yes, Raffi.”
“But I thought they had it pretty easy.”
Luisa looked down at her yellow pad. Smiled. “Love is never easy, Raffi.”
“Who else?”
“My brother, Frank, and his wife.”
“Do you think my mom and dad can make it?”
“From what you’ve told me, I think your mom is working hard to keep things going.”
“Thessaly.” Raffi was contemptuous. “My dad made her change her name to Thessaly. Her real name is Esther.”
“Maybe Thessaly is a better stage name.”
“If two people make it, is it just an endurance test?”
“Sometimes.”
“Is it worth it?”
“If it’s no more than an endurance test, probably not.”
“Is it ever?”
“Oh, yes. It is worth it.”
“Why?”
“When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you make it?”
Again Luisa laughed. “With husbands, no. With friends, yes. I’ll see you next week, Raffi.”
“But you still think marriage is worth it?”
“Yes. I do.”
Camilla and Mac were to be married the following spring. It was a year of separation, with Camilla in New England, Mac in New York, Camilla working on her doctorate, Mac getting a master’s degree at the seminary, with occasional trips for interviews. In January he accepted a call to be rector of a small church in Georgia, and they were able to make plans.
Camilla was completing her course work for her Ph.D., and her dissertation topic on aspects of non-linear time had been accepted, with Professor Grange enthusiastically behind her. They were not, never could be, quite back to their pre-Rose enjoyment of each other’s company, and she was glad that they were both leaving the college at the same time. He had accepted a permanent post at the University of Chicago, and his wife had been offered a position there, too, in the history department. Camilla was beginning to realize that Grange’s wife was as respected in the academic world as her husband was.
Chicago. What irony. Rose and Rafferty were not in Chicago, but in Paris, where Rafferty was on some kind of commission that would keep him abroad for at least a year. They came home fairly regularly on brief trips. Rose was having the house redecorated, and needed to check in with the decorators. Still, they were based in Paris, and that was a relief to Camilla, and not only because of Red Grange. Rose seemed to do best when she and Rafferty were traveling.
In order to get closer to Mac, Camilla audited a couple of courses in the religion department. It was a world of which she knew absolutely nothing. One class she dropped after a few sessions, because the professor found a conflict between religion and science. If that was true, she and Mac would be in trouble, but he seemed excited only when she talked to him about the vastness of the outer universe, and the equal enormity of the universe of sub-atomic particles.
She was fascinated by an old, bearded professor emeritus who taught Hebrew Scripture, a retired rabbi who saw Scriptural time as being non-linear, and compared it to some of the astrophysical theories of non-linear time. ‘There are constant chronological difficulties in Scripture,’ he said, ‘if you are looking for time to work out in a tidy, linear way. It doesn’t. There are two Creation stories, which are amazing only in their closeness to what the scientists now tell us. Jump to the famous David story, and he enters in two separate ways. In one, David is playing the harp to soothe mad Saul, and in the other he is still up in the hills, minding his sheep, and no one has ever heard of him. Saul dies two different deaths. It is the story, the myth of the people, that matters.’
He and Camilla went out and drank coffee together and talked, each nurturing the other. If Red Grange had learned that her interest in non-linear time was becoming philosophical as well as scientific, he might not have been as pleased as he was with her dissertation topic.
When Grange left for Chicago he arranged for her to transfer to the University of Georgia in Athens, which was about half an hour’s drive from the little town of Corinth, where the church was. He had also talked to a colleague there, Dr. Edith Edison, who would take over as Camilla’s dissertation advisor.
She said goodbye to Grange with mixed emotions. She did not know whether or not he would see Rose again when her parents returned to Chicago. It was, she hoped, none of her business. She had her own life to live, and she wanted no part of theirs.
Camilla went to Nashville in early April. Rafferty had to be back in the States for a couple of weeks at that time, and the wedding was timed to accommodate his and Rose’s schedule, rather than Camilla and Mac’s. It was, as a matter of fact, not at all convenient for Camilla. She would have to go back to college right after her marriage, to finish the semester, give exams, hand in grades, before joining Mac in Corinth.
Corinth! Athens! Mac and Art laughed uproariously at what they considered the appropriateness of the Greek names.
Nashville was the glory of flowers Olivia had lamented when Camilla was there in June. Camilla was grateful for her few days alone with the X
anthakoses, time to get to know them better, and to reunite with Mac.
They spent hours sipping iced tea out on the screened porch, surrounded by azaleas, camellias, birdsong. Camilla was often with Olivia alone, because Art was in his office at the church, Mac with him.
‘So Mac told you about Cissie.’ Olivia was stretched out on a white wicker chaise longue, her tall glass on a table beside her.
‘How could anybody do something like that? Accuse Mac, when she knew it wasn’t even possible?’
‘You’re still very innocent, my dear.’
‘I don’t feel innocent.’
Olivia smiled. ‘People wanted to believe the worst of Mac. That was what hurt so, people wanting him to be guilty. And he was young, incredibly young for his age. I don’t know what Art and I could have done that we didn’t, but surely something. And we had not discouraged a tendency in him to run away whenever things got rough.’
‘Kenya,’ Camilla said. Olivia nodded, pushed her fingers through her silver hair. Camilla continued, ‘When my friend Luisa—Frank’s sister—blundered into the room in the Church House where Mac and I were, and said that he and Frank had met in Korea, the next day Mac told me he was leaving for Kenya.’
‘Yes. That is Mac. I’m sorry. He still had not come to terms with his experience in Korea. He was still overwhelmed with guilt, far beyond reason, and he was terrified of losing you. So he fled.’
‘That doesn’t make sense,’ Camilla said.
‘No. Fear seldom does.’ Olivia picked up a paper knife from the table and drew her finger along the blade. ‘When Mac finally told you about Korea it was a beginning of his acceptance that he was deeply ashamed, but also that what he had done was not beyond the realm of comprehension and forgiveness, and that he was going to be able to live a good and honorable life. I think he needed the year in Kenya to come to terms with himself before he could offer himself to you.’ She put the paper knife back down on the table. ‘Parents have a tendency to want to fix everything. To rationalize. To excuse. But we can’t fix it. We have to let be. I think Mac will make you happy. And Art and I will try not to interfere.’
A Live Coal in the Sea Page 10
