Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  The bracelet was more problematic. I slipped it over my wrist. The diamonds twinkled up at me benignly enough, but I felt a quick, instinctive revulsion, and took it off immediately and put it back in its box. There were two possibilities. One was that Alec had bought me two gifts. But, aside from the extravagance, the bracelet was daintier than I liked and conservative in design—Alec knew my taste well, and it wasn’t for diamonds—and so the other possibility was more plausible: He had bought it for another woman.

  The window looked down at our small fenced yard, still deep in snow. I sat there numb, staring out at the blue shadows, the scrawny black trees, the fence crusted with ice. What I felt wasn’t the anger of a betrayed woman, or even relief that the diamond bracelet had made my task easier. My feeling surprised me: I was engulfed by regret. The bracelet was a revelation. Alec had been unhappy with me, more profoundly, urgently miserable than I had been with him—unhappy enough to turn to someone else. All the bad reasons I’d had for marrying him had backfired. I was supposed to find peace, and my life had been full of sadness and longing. I was supposed to make him happy; I had not only failed to do that, but I had underestimated him. Why, in my arrogance, had I assumed that our tepid marriage with its bland comforts could be enough for him? For anyone?

  We had salmon for dinner that evening; Alec had poached it with capers—I heard him humming along with Teagarden’s trombone while he cooked—and with it we were drinking a California fumé blanc that Alec was particularly fond of. It was a lovely dinner—all our meals were amazing—but I couldn’t eat. I thought of the first time I told Alec good-bye, in the coffee shop in Boston, and how he had laughed when I told him it was because of a sculptor I hardly knew. Now it was because I had tried to live a life I knew was a fake. How could I explain such a thing? What could I say? I drank some wine, twisted my hands together in my lap, and, interrupting him in the middle of a sentence, I said, desperately, “Alec, I think we should get divorced.”

  For a few long seconds he didn’t say anything. He took a bite of fish, chewed, swallowed, sipped his wine. Then he said. “How extremely odd.”

  I wasn’t sure if he had taken in what I’d said, or if there was something wrong with the wine. “What do you mean—odd?”

  “I’ve been wanting to say the same thing to you.”

  My clenched hands were trembling. “Yes, I suspected you were seeing someone.”

  “Really. And what about you? Is there anyone I should know about?”

  “No,” I said. My voice was unsteady. I got up and left the dining room, went into the living room across the hall, and stood by the fire. I was shaking, chilled to the bone. I thought I would never be warm again. After a minute or two, Alec joined me. I imagined him taking a few more bites of salmon, washing it down with wine, wondering what I knew, how I knew, being glad I had said what I said. My eyes filled with tears. He came over and stood next to me. “What’s wrong?”

  I faced him. “What’s wrong? Alec, we want to divorce each other. What’s wrong? Isn’t that enough?”

  “We can be civilized about it, Wynn. Can’t we? It’s a mutual thing, at least. Thank goodness.”

  “Yes, thank goodness for that.” I felt hysterical laughter overtake me. “That makes it all right. That makes it just fine.”

  Alec took me by the shoulders. “Wynn. Please. Sit here.” I wasn’t crying any more, but I was still shaking, and my teeth were chattering. I sank down on the sofa, and put my cold hands to my burning cheeks. Alec said, “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be so—” He gestured, looking for a word, not finding it. “I’m sorry,” he said again.

  He brought a cashmere throw from the study and tucked it around me. He poured us each more wine. He took my hands and chafed them between his until they warmed. “I’m sorry, too,” I said. “I’m sorry it stopped working.”

  We smiled sadly at each other, but there was a kind of exhilaration in Alec’s face, too. I remembered that he had another life, another woman.

  He sat on a chair facing me. “I did love you,” he said.

  “I know you did.”

  His gaze drifted to the fire. What was he remembering? Something good or bad? “But you didn’t love me,” he said abruptly.

  “I did.”

  “You never loved me enough, Wynn. You know that’s true. You didn’t love me the way I needed to be loved.”

  I didn’t argue with him. Of course it was true. I pulled the blanket up around my chin. I was calmer, beginning to thaw out. A CD was still playing in the other room, Chet Baker singing “Look for the Silver Lining.” It ended, and in the silence Alec continued. “It took me some time to figure it out,” he said. “That there was something in the way. I don’t know what it was. The sculptor? Somebody in England? Something else? I don’t know, I don’t even want to know any more. But something wasn’t there between us that should have been there. Or vice versa.”

  I took a sip of wine. At that moment, I wanted desperately to talk about it: about my child’s birth and death, about my flight to England and about Patrick—things I had never completely revealed to anyone. The terrible facts of the story pounded in my head. But this wasn’t the time, and Alec wasn’t the person. I wished Marietta was there, or Hannah. I wished for my father. I closed my eyes. Mostly, I wished for Patrick. The thought of him, there in Alec’s elegant living room with the fire crackling and snow falling softly outside the window, was suddenly as vivid as it had been in Mexico. Patrick. Where was he? What did he look like? What was he doing?

  “Wynn?”

  I opened my eyes. “A lot of things happened to me before I ran into you again that day in Harvard Yard,” I said. “Painful things that I blamed myself for. I was in a bad way.”

  When Alec answered, his voice was tight with irritability. “Am I supposed to sympathize with this?”

  I shook my head. “I guess not.” I wanted to say that this was not what I had meant to make of my life. Maybe I had intended to deprive myself of certain things, I had wanted to limit my pleasures, to renounce passionate love. But I hadn’t wanted to make a hash of it, and I certainly hadn’t wanted to make Alec suffer.

  He looked at me a long minute. “You really wanted a child.”

  “And you didn’t.”

  “It never seemed right.”

  “It might have helped.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. Who can say? I’ve never heard of a marriage that was saved by having a baby. Au contraire.”

  We were quiet again. A log shifted in the fireplace, scattering sparks. Alec picked up his glass, drank some wine, set the glass down. He sat back in his chair, his legs crossed, one elegant loafer dangling from his foot. He was wearing a pair of cashmere socks of the palest gold. He took another sip of wine. I could tell he wanted to say more.

  “What is it, Alec?”

  He raised his head. “There’s something I want you to know. I’ve fallen in love with someone. A woman named Annette. I met her at a conference. She teaches at a state college near Chicago.”

  “I’m happy for you.” I pictured a conservative woman in a suit, little gold earrings, a gold bracelet studded with tiny diamonds. “I think that’s wonderful, Alec.”

  She would be coming to Cambridge for the summer, returning to Chicago in the fall. She had a year left of her three-year contract at the college. Then she would move here permanently. She hoped to find a position in the area. It was all distressingly reminiscent of his first marriage, but I didn’t mention that.

  “There’s something else.” He hesitated, then plunged on. “Annette has two children, a boy and a girl. Ten and twelve.” His eyes softened. “And I think can handle that. I’m ready to have that in my life. Children. Family. You know?” He smiled. “I have to admit I surprise myself.”

  He got up to prod the logs with the poker. If he had hit me with it, he couldn’t have hurt me more. I felt a surge of anger. Suddenly I had no idea who I was talking to. My husband. Some man who liked good food and bought me extravag
ant gifts and wore cashmere socks, who wanted to be a father to some other woman’s children. I wondered if he knew how cruel his words had been. I watched him for a moment as he fussed with the fire. Then he smoothed his hair, took off his glasses and wiped them on his handkerchief. He turned around and faced me, put his glasses back on. “So that’s why I want a divorce, Wynn.”

  “Don’t you want to know why I want a divorce?”

  He just looked at me. “Not really.”

  “I think I want to tell you anyway.”

  Alec sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “It was in Mexico.”

  He looked up, interested in spite of himself. “Yes? I thought it was a good trip. I thought we had a pleasant time.”

  “I was there once before, long ago,” I said. “I was there with someone I loved deeply. And being there again showed me the difference.”

  I said it to be cruel, and I could see that it was. But he only smiled. “Well, I’m glad it’s mutual,” he said. “Of course, I managed to talk to Annette on the phone every day while we were there. Sometimes it wasn’t easy, but—” His smile intensified. “Not to be corny, but love always finds a way.”

  • • •

  I rented an apartment across the river in Boston, but until I could move in I slept in my studio at what I now thought of as Alec’s house. He and I were polite, cold, avoiding each other. Alec was gone for three or four days—to Chicago, I assumed—and when he came back we got together with our lawyers. Everything was amicable— civilized, as Alec had said. The financial settlement was absurdly simple: There was none. I had money of my own—not riches, but enough to live on. I stayed at Alec’s for a week, getting rid of old clothes, dismantling my studio, packing my things and arranging to have them stored. I called my students and told them there would be a short break. I couldn’t move into the new place right away, but when I finished my chores I became uneasy in that beautiful, alien house that was no longer part of my life, and on which I had made such a shallow impression. Packing up my worldly goods, I was astonished at how little I had. It occurred to me that for all those years, except for my teaching, I had been living Alec’s life. I was eager to leave and get on with my own.

  It took me a few sleepless nights to figure it out, but eventually I knew where I had to go and what I had to do. Another pilgrimage, I thought. Another journey.

  On my last night at Alec’s I set an alarm so that I would wake up very early. It was already mid-March, but winter lingered in New England that year: Snow had fallen while I slept, and I had to shovel the driveway so I could pull my car out. Sweaty, invigorated, my careful braid hopelessly frizzed, I was on Interstate 95 with a doughnut and a cup of coffee by seven o’clock.

  Driving, I was full of hope. At some point in that conversation with Alec by the fire I began to understand that I was dying of silence—of hoarding nearly twenty years, worth of pain and guilt. It was as if I’d been slowly creating a strange, twisted self-portrait, a painting so labored, so worked over, it was no longer recognizable. It had to be dragged into the light and looked at. It had to be drastically changed. It had to be started again.

  The roads were clear, but all along the highway, as the sun rose in the sky, the pure, cold light glinted off the snow, turning it gold. The weather was perfect for my mood. I headed north, and when I crossed the border into Maine I found a country station on the radio and sang those corny, tragic songs at the top of my lungs, all the way to West Dunster.

  Question Four

  Why Did You Return?

  There was a new Ramada Inn at the edge of town, on the site of what used to be a seedy motel called the Mountainview. The view was still there: From the window of my room, I could see Burbank Mountain. Once it had risen blank and forbidding against the sky; now a pattern of houses and roads wound between the pines: the work of Mark Erling’s family, who had bought large tracts of land, cleared them, and sold them off to developers back in the seventies. Fitting, I thought, that the first thing I should see when I came to town was the work of the Erlings. But I smiled as I looked up at that ravaged mountain. It seemed a good omen.

  I had come to West Dunster out of curiosity, nostalgia, and a certain need I couldn’t quite define. I wanted to see the town where so much happened to me, and where my parents had been well and happy. If I were going to start my life over, I had to see where it began.

  But I had also come in search of Mark Erling. During that last week at Alec’s, as I packed books and sorted clothes and lay awake in the guest-room bed, I went over and over the story of my daughter’s death and the last eighteen years of my life until all I could think about was confessing it to someone who would understand. I’d been unable to tell the people closest to me—Patrick, Rachel, Marietta, my father. But now it began to fill my waking hours, it invaded my dreams, it beat insistently in my head like an old song, and I thought if I could only say those words out loud, let the story pour out honestly and completely, then finally some of the pain would diminish.

  I knew what I would say before I was sure to whom I would say it. It wasn’t until I had pondered it for several days that I knew the person I had to talk to was Mark.

  I had scarcely thought of him all those years, certainly had never had any wish to see him. But of all the people who knew about that baby, he was the only one who had cared about her. About her. That little girl. Instead of about getting it over with, going on with our lives. The only one who knew that life shouldn’t go on as if nothing had happened. I remembered Mark’s phone call to me the night of the Junior Prom, and understood how extraordinary it had been that he had cared enough to ask those questions, that he had shed tears for that baby. I wish I could have seen her. He had been an unusual seventeen-year-old, and I assumed he would be unusual still, and that I could talk to him. And that I would finally have someone to mourn with.

  • • •

  The first thing I did was take a drive out Route 8 to Brewster Road.

  I hadn’t been back to West Dunster since my parents moved south over twenty years before. But Marietta’s sister Pat still lived in town, and Marietta visited her periodically. She had warned me that our old place had been drastically changed, the house covered with cheap aluminum siding, the barn made into a three-car garage. “Imagine the inside,” Marietta had said, sounding pained. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, and I had never wanted to before. But now things were different. I needed to see it.

  I turned the corner onto Brewster Road and parked the car so I could walk by and really look at the place. The sun had faded as I drove north, and it was a bitterly cold Maine day. The air was damp, threatening snow; it cut right through my heavy jacket and wool hat. I trudged down the road stamping my feet to keep them warm, went by Marietta’s old house—which seemed largely unchanged—and suddenly, sooner than I had expected, there was the house where I grew up.

  I remembered what it had been like walking home from that same corner every day after the school bus let us off, and coming upon our green-and-white house nestled there in the snow, with the trim red barn out back. A thread of smoke would spiral from the chimney. Sometimes my mother would be at the door watching for me, or my father would be making his way down the path from the barn to the house. I could count on the fact that inside there would be the smell of cocoa or hot apple cider. There would be warmth, peace, everything I loved.

  Now it was hard to believe it was the same house. I stood in front of the old place for a long time, shivering. The aluminum siding was brown and in bad repair, there were new, larger windows, and the front door that had always been so brightly painted was some indeterminate dark color. A ramshackle glassed-in porch had been added to one side, destroying the proportions. Out back, the barn was unpainted, peeling, seemed to be falling apart. The apple trees were gone, and so was the perfect hedge that had been my parents’ pride and joy.

  I was glad they weren’t there to see it, but the changes bothered me less than I’d thought they would—less than they both
ered Marietta. The house looked comfortable enough. Smoke still trailed from the chimney, the porch windows revealed a jumble of toys and ice skates and sleds, there were children’s crayon drawings and cutout snowflakes taped to the windows. I thought of my parents’ aversion to chaos and mess. Then I thought of the orderly, predictable life I had just left behind.

  I went up to the house and knocked on the door. A woman answered, with her finger to her lips. “Shh. I just got the baby off to sleep.” She spoke in a near whisper. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m really sorry to bother you,” I said. “My name is Wynn Tynan. I used to live here years ago. I just—well, I don’t really know what I wanted. Just to see the old place, I guess.”

  She was a dark-haired woman in jeans and a sweatshirt. “I’m Ellen Garner,” she said, holding out her hand. “You’d probably like to look at the inside. Come on in.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind? I don’t want to intrude.”

  “No problem! Please—come in. You look half-frozen. No, don’t bother to take your boots off. Really. It’s okay. Just please, please be very quiet. He’s got an ear infection, and it’s hell trying to get him down for his nap.”

  I wiped my feet on the mat as well as I could and stepped inside. I took in the cheap carpeting, the big TV, a wreath of artificial flowers, a wall calendar with cutesy pictures of kittens. Ellen led me, tiptoeing, through the living room. A woodstove blasted away where our woodstove used to be. My father had made us a wood box, a work of art with a hinged top and mitered corners. Now there was an untidy pile of logs, a film of ash everywhere, burn marks on the carpet. A dog snored softly beside the stove. The table in the dining room was littered with magazines, puzzles, a half-built LEGO fort. Crooked mini-blinds that had seen better days covered the windows. In the kitchen, the sink was full of dirty dishes, and a red-cheeked baby slept in a portable crib.