Twice Melvin

by James Pumpelly

  Despite this first and failed attempt at love, he will not raise the flag of defeat, his flight to Vermont offering more than the chance to rusticate. Making bold to prosper, the conflicts wrought by cloistered minds hold his interest. For all that’s been said of America’s opportunities, few of her fortunes were made by the sweat of the brow, he decides – and a good thing, too, since a pioneer he is not. In Boston he’d found no objective meriting the trouble of effort, but now he suffers the madness of enthusiasm; his clients going away convinced of victory, nursing within them the enmity already at their hearts.

  By nature nonchalant, he’s become punctilious, winning by the fright of detail; a record he’s building assiduously, wishing for the firm a prestige as becoming as his soon-to-be partner. Melody is his cynosure, his talents honed by her promise, her rarified sense of the man he can be leaving him breathless with expectation – expectation having its counterpart in an imposed obligation: Charlene. For even as he feigns an interest, his eyes are a valediction, his smile a pejorative, Charlene reducing love to the pittance of the mundane, the material, the bud of romance nipped by the mere mention of her name. As long as he’s the answer to her problem, she’s a fallen woman - one who may never get up. The ordeal of his best intentions has left her wounded. And himself, too; worst of all wounds being those of the heart. If it were not for Melody, he might just as well be considered posthumous. Expelled from the orchestra, he has no desire to reapply. He doesn’t miss the dissonance.

  But in Melody’s presence, music is a time machines, a love song taking him back to innocence. And if he can believe what he so ardently fancies, there are moments when she glimpses in him the face of Raphael. He imagines her lost in a reverie - one including him - her countenance brightening with a gleam of her former happiness. Perhaps pity is a path to her garden; or maybe compassion. She’s suffered enough from her own misfortune to have a wellspring of empathy for his. Maybe she’ll understand if he tells her; will think more of him if he admits the baby isn’t his; will think him saintly to have borne the public blame. Perhaps she’ll even apologize for having inquired, for having asked why he didn’t bubble with tidings. Not that she needs to. God, no! An apology from her would be like Jesus admitting a sin, the undoing of perfection, a profaning of His very worship.

  And therein lies the difference. He worships her.

  Oh, he wants to touch her, too; to feel the woman inside the goddess; but he wants the goddess to remain unmarred, to forever be his quest. Remove the aspiration, he reasons, and he’ll be but the animal he’s been before.

  Dreaming of Melody gives him a sense of belonging, of home; remembering Charlene, as though he has no home to go to. And in truth, he’s been everywhere but home of late, succored more by tavern hearths than the fire he’s tried to spark. But today is different. Halfway between the Boston of old and his new, Vermont estate, thoughts of Melody somehow hallow his waiting farmhouse - or perhaps it’s the falling snow on the gentle mountains as he crosses the Connecticut River.

  He can’t decide. But once he turns at his gate, makes the first tracks in the new-fallen snow, he’s certain of the change, of the gentle force behind it. After shaking the snow from his boots, he builds a three log fire the way Melvin had taught, ruminating on the evening Melvin spent with him here – and Melody – the memory casting doubts like shadows from the quickening fire. What if Melody had the same memory? What if she were here by the warming hearth, only to think of Melvin?

  “Melvin, my friend,” he says to the smoke-scented room, “you’re gone…and still you linger. We’re in different worlds, with a grave in between, and still you make your presence felt,” the sound of his own voice covering the knocks at the door until the caller begins to bang, a glaucous-eyed Simon Farley puffing on the ice-glazed panes in an effort to peer within.

  “Didn’t know they made snow tires for bicycles,” George quips as he opens the door, his irritation melting like the flakes on Simon’s parka. “What brings you out in weather like this?”

  “Has to get deeper than this, or be ice underneath, before my Schwinn knows the difference,” Simon showing himself in to pull a cane-bottomed rocker closer to the fire. “And besides, any effort was lost in my worry,” he adds with an air of mystery, “…my worry over you.”

  Reclaiming the comfort of his wingback, George remains silent, experience advising against reply.

  “Thought you might need some company,” Simon tries again, “what with your fiancée taking potshots at you,” this last aside, armed with violent significance, alerting George to the matters at hand.

  “Charlene?” Shrugging as if bored by the thought, George leans forward to thrust a poker in the fire.

  “Yes…and after the heart-to-heart I had with you in the cemetery the other night, I thought…well…I don’t know what I thought exactly,” Simon trails off, George’s silence having effect. “It’s just that we were alluding to love….”

  “Love?” George repeats curtly, a scream coiling tightly in his chest, “yes, well…it may not be for everyone.”

  “I’m sure you like apples,” Simon retorts with lock and key finality.

  “Who doesn’t?” George wary, settling back in his chair.

  “Why, no one that I know of,” Simon cocking his head as though George has asked the impossible, “but I chose apples because I want you to think of something pleasant…something you thoroughly enjoy. An apple just came to mind. I can imagine how it must be down in Boston,” he continues, the fire’s warmth inviting him to shed his parka and hang it from the cresting rail of his rocker, “…how a fellow might be perusing the aisles of a grocery store and chance upon an arranged display of hand-waxed apples cascading from woven baskets…and how that fellow might choose an apple from among the three or four he handles-“

  “Something wrong with that?” George quips, having done exactly what Simon is describing.

  “Not a thing…not a thing. And that’s my point - or part of it. For everyone – and that includes you, Mr. O’Malley – everyone should be able to savor the sweet crunch of a ripe apple. It’s just that some of us…well…”

  “Well, what?” George prods, an unvoiced judgement in his eyes.

  “Well…some of us are just more fortunate, I guess. Here in Vermont, we pick the fruit right off the trees. In fact, we can even choose the tree from which to make our selection. And that’s how it is with love, too. Don’t you see?”

  “As a matter-of-fact, I don’t,” George capitulates, “although your allegory makes me want to.”

  “It could be the same apple – whether it’s displayed in the big city grocer’s, or still hanging from the tree; but the enjoyment of that apple, it seems to me, must surely be more complete when experienced in its natural environment.”

  That Simon could be referencing Melody is more than George is willing to dare; but to be sure, he redirects. “And just what did you mean earlier when you said Charlene was taking potshots at me?”

  “Like I said, I came out here because I thought you might need some company, continue our graveside chat - entre nous, of course.” Simon gazing at the crackling logs, fumbling in his shirt pocket for a frayed and folded notebook page, then tendering it in the direction of George. “There’s nothing like a good book for company when a body needs a friend…or maybe a poem. I-I composed one for you…thought it might speak to your hurt, your anger…or maybe to both. Just This Abides I call it. Hope it helps-”

  George reaching to take his gift - comprehending, at last, the purpose of Simon’s call. Unfolding the crumpled page, he reads the neatly printed lines aloud:

  Old chapel bell, toll true tonight,

  Ring round my hurting heart,

  An ancient spell to set affright

  The ghost who stole my part.

  Sway slow and true your iron sides

  To brush the midnight skies,

  Till darkness drips from whence it hides

  To wa
sh my mournful eyes.

  Old chapel bell, be clear of mind,

  On you I yet depend;

  Though beats in you a heart in kind

  With cold forsaking friend:

  The lips that sealed a wedding vow

  Beneath your belfry there,

  And you rang then, as you do now -

  Yet now I’m much aware;

  That all who answer to your call

  May come in joyful quest;

  But you and I know that’s not all

  In truth your tolls behest.

  Your hardened heart hangs ever cold

  Above those chapel doors,

  A clanging cold, a banging bold

  To deafen promise goers;

  Till once beyond your iron lip

  A pledge is soon forgone,

  And Libra’s scale begins to tip

  Unfairly then for one.

  So chapel bell, toll true tonight,

  Ring true to wiser ears;

  Ring out with harsh and bitter slight

  The pain of bygone years.

  Sway slow and true your iron sides

  To celebrations past;

  Till ringing still, just this abides:

  One truth, one love to last.

  Only the fire offers comment, a whiff of smoke, as George rises slowly from his chair. Rummaging among books on the mantel, he finds what he’s in search of. “I, too, composed something on the subject…only the subject isn’t Charlene,” he clarifies, voicing his scribbled lines:

  I hold you in the arms of dreams,

  caressing you with wild imaginings.

  Light as unknown trouble,

  my feet run certain to your being.

  Where orange water drinks the dregs of day,

  I grasp the silver cup of empty night;

  and bearing it expectantly,

  am never friend to disappointment.

  You ask of me remaining days….

  I surrender, knowing well that

  night is more eternal thing;

  that dreams have life beyond the sun.

  Farewell to shadowed world

  made stark in glare of light;

  for silver cup of empty night

  is calling –

  Calling me, filling me;

  Enchanting me with you.

  I hold you in the arms of dreams,

  caressing you with wild imaginings.

  With a flick of his wrist, George tosses both works into the flickering flames; each man appreciating the finality of fire.

  The gift of silence.

  Never confuse a single mistake with a final mistake.

  (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

  XXIII

  With Thelma’s march all but dead and buried, I let my worry fade like a misplaced memory - as misplaced as the Comptons appear to be, arriving from Kansas in the middle of a Green Mountain snowstorm. And on a holiday, too, with no one to greet them save George. George excels in his role as executor, his commanding presence, his evident interest in their affairs, easing the young couple’s move.

  “The old farmhouse I purchased was shoddier than yours,” he shares, fashioning hope from experience. “The old place hadn’t been occupied in years, and the lack of maintenance cried aloud at every turn.”

  “George is right,” I remark to A.M.. “He’s stretching the truth a bit, but he’s inspiring the Comptons, creating a vision of possibility, a glimpse of the future.”

  “Needs a nursery,” A.M. grumbles, “got to add on a wing, if I’m going to nest there.”

  “That’s called ‘connective architecture’, I believe; although I miss the connection between wings and your next incarnation.”

  “You’ll think otherwise when we meet again,” she snorts. “I’ll be a heart-throb, the beau ideal of every dashing young man in the county.”

  “I hope you’re mistaken,” I reply archly, feigning a fume, “I won’t be a dashing fellow, if you’re a heart throb.” Aunt Martha ignores my froth, donkey-tugging me to Old Faithful’s farm before another razz can fizzle.

  “Thought you would want to be here when Melody arrives,” she brays, “see how she takes the news about George.”

  “You mean about Charlene, don’t you?” I suggest, admiring Faithful’s sweet-tart apple and fresh pumpkin pies, remembering our good times together. “It’s Charlene who has the new addition, not George.”

  “It’s Artie, smarty, and there’s nothing new about him save his name. Besides, Melody already knows about the baby. I’m referring to George; to George being let off the hook, so to speak; the old ‘plenty of fish in the sea’ metaphor-“

  “So the choices are infinite?” I interject – not that my effort is warranted, Melody turning into Faithful’s drive even as I’m turning the inference.

  “Look at Faithful, would you?” Aunt Martha gasps, wresting my gaze from the beauty knocking snow from her boots on the porch. “Look at her eyes, dancing with the frivolity of a waltz, the glow on her cheeks like candles burning golden over some gay gavotte. Sometimes, Melvin…sometimes I think it’s the most miraculous idea God ever had, expressing love through motherhood.”

  “Granted,” the easy swing of the heavy wood door, the big, rumpling hug following the removal of Melody’s coat, the rapid patter of affectionate exchange, all leaving me large-eyed for love. Faithful’s wrinkles, profuse about her eyes and mouth, move with a life of their own, crisscrossing and overlapping in seeming disdain of her powder, her smile the main distraction. And Melody.

  Leaning back in Faithful’s hungry arms, she displays her diamond, its very enormity exuding danger, its precarious suspension from the filigree chain emblematic of life’s fragility.

  “Vincent gave it to me,” she whispers, searching for sanction in her mother’s eyes, “…Melvin’s client.”

  “I-I know who Vincent is,” Faithful replies with uncertainty, “…but why? I mean, fortunes rise and fall like hemlines, so he must be prospering of late; but why would he share his fortune with you?” astonishment etched in her face.

  “Friendship?” Melody ventures, attempting to quell her mother’s shock, “in memory of Melvin’s friendship?”

  “Men don’t give each other diamonds, darling…but then again, it isn’t polite to return a gift, now is it?” Faithful’s chuckle all the approbation Melody needs. “Too bad it wasn’t given by George,” she adds, reluctantly ending her embrace.

  “George?” Melody echoes, as though aghast at the thought, “…George?“

  “Maybe Charlene wouldn’t have dumped him,” Faithful explains - Melody’s face as red as a sledder’s wind-chap.

  “Dump him? But-but why, Mother?”

  Interposing on the scene, Aunt Martha directs my attention to a car pulling up behind Melody’s. “She can ask him herself,” she says, “…infinitely more exciting that way.”

  “What’s he doing here?” I grouse, George’s tall frame emerging from his car.

  “Just you wait,” Aunt Martha’s mirthful tone putting me at ease. “You have a pleasant surprise in store, one to merit your approval,” George rapping loudly on the rear porch door as I ponder what Aunt Martha’s concept of pleasant might be.

  “George!” Melody exclaims, opening wide the door as though acknowledging his imposing stature, “we were just-”

  “About to have some warm apple pie,” Faithful breaks in, aborting Melody’s about-to-be-gushed admission, “…and a fresh pot of coffee. Would you join us?”

  “Be delighted,” their surprise visitor accepting Melody’s help with his coat, her slender fingers, playing delicately over the soft cashmere, part of the mise-en-scène his eyes don’t miss. “And pardon me for presuming upon your hospitality,” he adds, his wistful eyes following Melody - something Faithful’s eyes don’t miss. “What I stopped by for was…well, I was hoping Melody would be here. I want to take her to see the impromptu show on the capitol law
n.”

  “In a snowstorm?” Faithful incredulous, attending to the assembly of her percolator - one Melvin had bought her, insisting her antiquated drip pot be discarded - “and…and on Thanksgiving Day?”

  “Yes,” George affirms, accepting Melody’s offered chair, its timeworn arms embracing the old table as if Caesar is expected home. “Yes, the snow and the holiday spirit enhancing the show…lending it romance - if-if I’m using the word correctly.”

  “That depends,” Melody selecting an opposite chair as his eyes beg explanation, “…depends on whether you think the ‘show’, whatever it may be, is romantic; or, whether the picturesque capitol, the snow, the holiday, the gathering of friends, all make the recipe for romance…and damn the show!”

  “Melody!” Faithful exclaims, laughing as she joins them at table, pie in hand, “what would your father say if he heard you swear?”

  “I never knew him,” George intervenes, “but from what I’ve been told, he would be going straight for the cause, ignoring the effect,” Melody’s twinkling blue eyes acknowledging his aid.

  “That he would,” Faithful deftly knifing the still-warm pie into six large pieces, the aromas of flaky crust, apples, cinnamon and allspice, turning the sluggish percolator into a foe. “And if there were goings-on down in Montpelier when Caesar was here, he’d be the first to check it out.”

  “Why not accompany us, Faithful,” George clasping and unclasping his hands, then hiding them in his lap, “…if the coffee ever decides to brew.”