“That’s a definition of love,” she said.
“I agree.”
“Love—as a morality—makes me think of my current preoccupation with the Seven Deadly Sins—Pride Lechery Envy Anger Covetousness Gluttony Sloth.” She reeled them off, bang bang bang. “Which do you think is the most destructive?”
He looked at her, delighted. This was what it was like to be with her—these sudden coercive shifts of conversational weather—like being caught in an unseasonable act of Nature: a thunderstorm in January. “God,” he smiled, “I’ve never been asked that question…. But Envy, I think, though I guess what I really think is that no sin is singular. One sin loads into another, I mean—Envy into Covetousness, Gluttony into Sloth, Pride into Anger—”
“But don’t you agree that any single one of the seven sins could wreck a person’s life if it becomes an obsession?”
“Put that way, yes. Any obsession is lethal—”
The sound of approaching footsteps interrupted. Elsa, then, standing in the library’s doorway: “Dinner, Mister Shurtliff.”
During dinner, he told her again of his admiration for A Night at Dsiatzdavo. He spoke in some detail of the pathos of the story’s hero and heroine; and then he spoke of the style of the writing: that, to him, as a reader, the style produced the illusion of being a fine translation of a story authored in the first instance by a Pole or a Russian.
“Oh Morgan, you’re this writer’s dream of a good reader. I worked so hard to get that feel of translation. You encourage me to believe I succeeded…. I’m working on another strange tale, this one laid in China in the 1870s—”
“Can you tell me about it?”
“I’ll tell you a bit.”
The “bit”: Two crease-faced Chinese women grown old together at the task of raising silkworms—tending the charcoal fires that evenly heated the lofts where the silkworms’ reed cages were housed—perpetually providing the black caterpillars with fresh green mulberry leaves—the caterpillars spinning their cocoons, spinning, spinning—and after the cocoons were spun, the two old women harvesting the cocoons, then putting the cocoons in ovens and perfectly baking them, killing thereby the chrysalis inside (the smell of freshly baked cocoons a repulsive stench)—all this torturous labor performed in order to keep one old opium-smoking local Yuanling merchant, Lin Mung, supplied with the golden thread. Day after day after day, as the two old women toiled, they recounted to each other the dreams each had dreamt the previous night: the twist: that as they daily recounted their previous night’s dreams, they spoke word for word in unison, because the dreams they dreamt were the same dreams: always exactly the same dreams. “I won’t tell you the tale at the heart of each of their dreams,” Sylvia said. “I’ll make you wait to read it.”
“I’ll wait,” he said. And: “After we finish dinner, there’s something I want you to see. It bears a relationship to the dedication of the old Chinese women.” He stated what the something was: the living room mantel. He supposed it was her vivid account of the the old women’s laborings that made him think of the mantel and of how its anonymous creator must have spent his strength and eyesight carving the mantel’s lilies and leaves. “I won’t attempt to describe it. It has to be seen.” He did, though, tell her of the mantel’s Leigh origin—the mantel having been the visual wonder in the library of the house Maud had been raised in, which house had been built in the 1870s, which date fostered the calculation that the mantel was at least three-quarters of a century old. So Maud’s name had come up, and Sylvia’s interposed question—“When did she die, Morgan?”—and his answer, delivered in a way, in a tone, final: “Nearly two years ago.”
Then they talked of other things.
At dinner’s end, Sylvia thanked Elsa—“for the feast.” Elsa responded with one of her shy smiles and the royal collective: “We hope you will come often to dinner.” Sylvia said, “I will.”
In the living room, she stood before the mantel and for some while simply silently looked at it. Then, still silent, she extended her right hand and traced with a finger one of the ivy vines that ran across the mantel’s entire width, the stem parent to a profusion of singularly sized, singularly veined leaves. When, where her tracery stopped, where the tendril-vine curled away and was lost to sight (by visual intimation behind the mantel’s front), she asserted, “It’s alive”—then, with a kind of transfixed melancholy—“but nothing known about its creator, where or when he was born, where or when he died.”
His instant reaction to what she’d said was a wish to be in whole included by her in her melancholy. But, search as he quickly did, he could find nothing in her words, nothing in her inflection that might license him to tell her of this wish, which lack of empowerment, coupled with a fear of crowding her (she might flee) prompted him to behave and speak in a way consonant with the ordinary: “Let’s honor its creator by having a fire. It’ll be the first since the mantel’s installation in this room—an inauguration of sorts.”
She stood by as he displaced the fire-screen and opened the chimney flue (slight shower of soot) and applied a lit match to rolled-up wads of newspaper that were nested beneath thin splits of pine kindling. Licks of flame then as the kindling took, igniting in turn the logs that bridged the andirons. Against the spray of sparks, he returned the fire-screen to its guarding place. “I must wash,” he said, looking at his soot-soiled hand. “Shall I show you—so you’ll know?” Together, they went into the front hall and from there down the bedroom hall: “To Julia’s room,” he said. “It’s a more interesting room than the guest room.” He turned on the room’s overhead light and opened the bathroom door; then he left her and continued down the hall to his own room.
When she rejoined him in the living room, she said: “I couldn’t resist looking in Julia’s bookcase. I assume the books are hers—”
“They are.”
“She’s a highly developed reader. James and Faulkner and Turgenev and and and…all of Willa Cather’s novels.”
He decided to tell her: “Julia wants to be a writer.”
“Besides wanting to be, do you know if she aches to be?”
“I’m afraid so,” he smiled. “I think she has the necessary stamina.”
“May the gods bless and keep her.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to send her a copy of A Night at Dsiatzdavo.”
“Mind? I’m proud you want to.”
She declined his offer of an after-dinner drink. He poured a brandy for himself. They sat close enough to the fire to receive its cheer but removed enough from its blaze to not be overly warmed. Hannah deigned to lie in Sylvia’s lap and to purr, and from slit-eyes to closed eyes, to finally sleep. “Lovely to be before a fire with a contented cat on one’s lap.” She told of Tillie, her childhood cat. “Tillie was six years old when I was born; I was eleven when she died. Her death was my introduction to finality. We got another cat—Vera. Vera was sweet, and she lived a long time, but it’s Tillie I really remember.” He said it was a new experience for him, having a cat as a pet. Dogs had always been his animal companions. Dogs. The last dog, Ralph. He described Ralph, which memory led to a description of Ralph’s burial place in the dog cemetery of the recently relinquished Hatherton house…. Sitting autobiographically there, watching the logs burn to embers, they talked on, asking and answering, filling the gaps. No great revelations, but finding out, little by little. And there were some fine silences too, silences that felt natural and open, the last one, late in the evening—the expression on her face again so meditative—he broke with the intimate question: “What are you thinking about?”
She looked from the fire at him and met not so much his gaze, but the reach of its attitude. She must have felt its reach—she so conveyed that she had, first by a suddenness of flushed cheeks, next by a proud show of greater calm, as if she had been challenged and wouldn’t expose herself as a coward. She did though, then, hesitate, but in a mitigating way which bolstered his masculine intuition that he’d
gained an edge, a certain advantage. Quickly, not to lose it, he repeated his question, but this time in the more ardent, more accusing past tense: “What were you thinking about?”
“Chance,” she answered, hard. “Specifically—what Joseph Conrad said about the strange originality of the way Chance works.”
“And?” he forced.
“And about us. About our re-meeting at the Cleveland airport.”
Over these words, for the first time he touched her: bent forward and cupped her chin in his hand and ran his thumb over her cheek, and put a period on her spoken name. “Sylvia.”
She said: “We won’t rush.”
“No. I promise we won’t rush. I’ll leave it to you to set the pace.”
That ticking clock…She looked from his face to the clock’s face. “It’s after eleven. I’ve got to go, Morgan. You should know about me that I’m a compulsive early riser. I’m not happy with myself if I’m not bathed and breakfasted and at work by eight A.M. at the latest.”
“When is the best time to call you?”
“Noon. Or late afternoon. Those are probably the best times for you too.”
“Will you break your work routine and go with me a week from tomorrow—Sunday—to the country? We could leave around one; that would give you the morning to work. Up near Garrison, on the Hudson River—you like big rivers—there’s an excellent inn. Very good food. We could take a mountain walk, then have an early evening dinner. I’d have you back by nine. Will you?”
“That’s a very enticing invitation—”
“So?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Now I’ll take you home.”
“You needn’t. Just put me in a cab.”
“I won’t just put you in a cab. I’ll take you home.”
“I won’t fight.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
In the cab, pledged not to rush, they sat apart. Her calm was now of a kind august, like a fate. He was calm too—because of his belief in her: that now she understood the aboutness of his seriousness: that its syntax was love.
He left her at her building’s door.
“Good night, Morgan.”
“Good night, Sylvia.”
The interim week passed. He worked hard and well.
Sidney and Linda and Lawrence and Pamela came for dinner Tuesday night.
Wednesday evening, Julia and Caroline called from Bryn Mawr. Caroline was a verbal postcard. There was a ceiling leak in her dormitory room. She’d been assigned another room while the culprit pipe was being fixed and the ceiling replastered. An “angelic” Haverford guy had helped her move all her stuff to the second room. Must go now. Masses of reading to do. Good-bye…. “Everything’s normal with me, Morgan,” Julia laughed. She asked how he was, and Elsa and Hannah. She said she was looking forward to the long up-coming Thanksgiving weekend. “May I invite Bruce for Thanksgiving dinner, Morgan?” “Of course, of course. Bruce is always welcome.” Then she too signed off: “Good night, Morgan. A big hug to you.” “Good night, dear Julia.”
He telephoned Letitia and Lewis Grant to confirm that he would arrive in Cleveland the following Monday. Letitia, imperious as usual, informed him: “Your father’s coming for dinner on Monday, Morgan. He’ll spend the night, so we’ll have a leisurely evening with him.”
“Perfect,” he said.
Early Wednesday morning, he called Miss Sly at her office. “It’s telepathy, Mr. Shurtliff. I was just thinking to telephone you this very minute.” He posed his question: “May we meet for lunch next Tuesday at twelve-thirty at our usual restaurant?” She answered at once: “Yes. I’m eager to see you…. Good-bye for now, Mr. Shurtliff.” No politesse of brief chit-chat. He figured he had caught her at a busy moment.
He spent Friday evening with Geoff and Alan.
On Saturday he sent a bouquet of yellow freesia to Sylvia. Tomorrow, at one o’clock sharp. M. That was the message he wrote on the card that accompanied the blooms.
This was tomorrow, Sunday, November 8; a nippy but brilliantly sunny day, ideal for an outing in the country.
“Hello, Morgan. Thank you for the beautiful flowers.”
“Hello, Sylvia.” Her gray coat was collared and cuffed with Astrakhan fur. And she was shod in a pair of knee-high leather boots. “You look like a Russian countess.” And she carried a small, suede tote bag. “What’s in the bag?”
“Essentials,” she said. “A hairbrush and comb, a pencil, a notebook, and a pair of proper shoes to wear at dinner.”
Out of the city, driving fast, headed north to the Hudson Highlands, he told her where they were going to walk. “Opposite West Point,” he said, “on a remnant of the Sloan estate that includes a mountain called the South Redoubt. I represent one of the Sloan family heirs and have an anytime permission to hike the land.” (Always, since, whenever he thinks about the walk they took and about the dinner they ate at the inn, his thoughts come to rest on Sylvia’s conclusive words spoken as they drove back to the city: “This has been our day of unreckonable discovery.”)
They scrambled up the steep earth-ramp of an old bridle path to a high narrow ridge of scrubby flatland very near the top of the South Redoubt mountain. Having achieved the ridge, they could go no further: the barrier of a cliff loomed in front of them. Panting a bit, they turned full around and gazed over the great scene before them. Color was the blue sky and the greens of conifers: pine and spruce and fir. The rest of the vast landscape—the wintry leafless forests and solemn fields and shallow marshes—looked unpainted. Far below, bedded in the valley, the Hudson River flowed, mighty, gleaming in the sun. On its distant opposite shore, West Point’s military buildings were small. A hawk soared into view. By such a bird, the ancient Greeks were awed, Sylvia said, breaking the silence, her eyes on the hawk. To sight a raptor in flight was believed fortunate: an omen of good things to come for the beholder. Could one wish on the hawk the same way one wishes on a new moon? The hawk flew lower, beneath them, searching the valley’s fields for prey. Oh, to be able to do that! To soar in the welkin and then descend and halt in the air and hover as the hawk was hovering now, its wings extended, motionless, its tail feathers a russet fan in the sunlight (how long could it remain perched like that in the air?), until it did then move its wings in rapid spurts, up and down, up and down, gaining speed, attaining altitude, soaring again above them. “Wish on it.”
It was as they retraced their steps on the old bridle path, back down the mountain’s long slope, that he told her: “I’m going to Cleveland tomorrow.”
“When will you be back?”
“On Thursday.”
“Will you see Zee while you’re there?”
He smiled. “Your Zee; my Miss Sly,” he said. “And yes, I’m going to see her. It’s all arranged. We’re meeting for lunch on Tuesday. I’d like your permission to tell her about us—”
“That we’ve become friends, you mean,” she cut in. “But you don’t need my permission. I’ve already told her. You make me wonder if I should have asked your permission—”
“No, no. I’m boundlessly glad you told her. I’m only surprised she didn’t mention to me that you had…. When did you tell her?”
“A week ago today. The day after I had dinner at your house.” She stopped walking and turned to him. “What I need to know is what it is between you and Zee that makes me feel left out. What is it?”
How could he, then, have laughed? Yet he did, helplessly, over the magnitude of her question, laugh! “Well may you ask!” Laughing, standing there, tall, he attempted, by means of flamboyance, to explain his laughter. “Our relationship—Zenobia Sly’s and mine—is so complex, so strange, so eccentrically marvelous, so thoroughly improbable, so peculiarly divine—”
“I’m dying of curiosity,” she flicked, snake-tongue-like—
The thing is: she was laughing too—because of the low, burlesque notion that had sprung tacitly between them that between him and Miss Sly there could be—of all conceivable
possibilities—a carnal connection!—the very idea!—causing their laughter, causing them as they stood there laughing and looking at each other to suddenly stop laughing and to step toward each other and with a Genesis velocity, to bodily collide and to kiss. To go on kissing. And then to separate, and to again stand apart, and in each other’s eyes, to be astonished—
“I hadn’t planned to fall in love,” she said. “I’m thirty-eight years old,” she said. “I liked my life as it was—”
—in his arms again, close, not kissing, close to tears.
“I promised you. I’ll leave it to you to set the pace,” he said, holding her. “All I ask is that you believe in me as I believe in you.” And then, crazily practical: “We have to keep moving. The sun will be behind the mountain in a few minutes. We’ll lose the light.”
Now they walked down the steep slope hand in hand, arm in arm, thinking, frowning, shining, being still astonished, talking in spurts—the way the hawk had employed its wings after it broke the long suspense of its hover—talking in a vocabulary that flew. Afterwards, he could never remember the sequence of what they said, only its inspiration, and the rapidity of the exchange, and the overlapping. He would, however, never forget how she dazzled him as, in a voice that sounded increasingly of wonder, she talked about the three Greek sister-Fates who preside over everyone’s life, over every single individual life—from birth to death: Clotho, distaff in hand, present at the moment one takes one’s first breath outside the womb; Lachesis, at her spindle, spinning the designate thread of every event and action that will run through the tapestry of each (individual) life; and Atropos, the eldest of the three sister-Fates, standing by, holding the shears with which she will cut the thread of life. “The Fates don’t consult the Fated; the Fates only decide,” (she said). So have the Fates decided about us? (he asked). Yes, though we don’t know their decision, and that we don’t know it is what creates our unsolvable human riddle: What will our penalty be if we buck Fate’s unknown-to-us decision? So in our ignorance, what do we do? (he asked). Oh, the only thing we can do: believe in each other, just as you said.
Matters of Chance Page 47
