Five Questions

by Kitty B. Florey

  “Wynn,” he said softly. “Talk to me. Tell me about it.” He reached out tentatively, touched my hand. “Please. Tell me why you did that terrible thing to us.”

  I told him then, about Mark Erling and the Edna Quinlan Home for Girls and Molly McCormick, about my years of shame, about England and St. Clement’s. About my box of clippings and the visit to his uncle. About Kathleen. It was a complicated, freakish little story, but it was easier, now, to tell it. After all the years of concealing it, of hugging it to myself like a secret thorn—my private torture, my hair shirt—the story poured out as it had with Mark, in a rush. But sitting in the back booth of that bar on Prince Street explaining it to Patrick, babbling half-incoherently about my long agony and its ending, I think that for the first time I really comprehended what a malfunctioning human being I had been when I was young, and how giving up my child had unhinged me. I had done this not only to myself and Kathleen, but also to Patrick, this good, innocent, vulnerable man. I had inflicted a wound that nearly killed him. How could he forgive me?

  I underestimated Patrick. When I described seeing Mark in Maine, and then the meeting with Kathleen, he reached across the table to grip my hand. “My God, Wynn,” he said. “Life is so goddamn wonderful and strange.” Then he gave me a curious look. “But why on earth did you never tell me all this?”

  Other people had asked me this, but with Patrick I had an answer. “I was afraid you would despise me if you knew what I’d done.”

  “Despise you. Jesus, Wynn.” He shook his head. “What kind of monster did you take me for? Was I really such an arrogant bastard? You should have told me everything.”

  “What we had was so perfect, Patrick. I couldn’t risk it.”

  “If you couldn’t tell me this, then what we had wasn’t perfect. It was unreal. It was a dream.”

  We sat and looked at each other, and I knew there was truth in what he said. “We were so young,” I said. “We were so in love. I couldn’t stand the thought that you might condemn me.”

  “You never gave me a chance.”

  “I think it was just that I hated myself so much.” The memory of those last days in New York, when I lived in a cold fog of pain, nearly choked me. “I don’t know if I can ever make it clear to anyone else how I felt, how sure I was, how terrified. How worthless my whole life seemed. Now everything looks so lucid, Patrick. But then—I was crazy.”

  “You were,” he said. “That’s exactly right.” He squeezed my hand. “All these years, Wynn,” he said, and shook his head. “It was very hard for me. Thank God I had my work. I’ve worked like a beast, like a madman. That was one of the reasons my marriage failed. But otherwise, I don’t know how I could have gotten through my life.”

  Eventually he asked me about my life in Boston, my marriage. I told him my divorce would be final in September, and he looked down at my hands, touched my wedding-ring finger where there was still a mark. “You were married a long time.”

  “Yes. It was a long mistake.” I told him about the trip to Mexico, and the moment in the courtyard. I touched the beads at my neck. “He wasn’t happy either. He was seeing someone else by then. So when we got home from Mexico, I told him I wanted a divorce.”

  “Why then?”

  “Because it took me that long to figure out that I had only married him because I couldn’t have you.”

  “Wynn.”

  I looked down at our clasped hands. I said, “Patrick, I’m so glad to see you. You can’t imagine.”

  We stayed there until the place closed. Patrick said he drank a little now, on special occasions, but neither of us had really drunk much of the champagne. We walked down the familiar stony streets to the building on Mercer, near Grand, where Patrick had a studio on the ground floor and an apartment at the top. We took a freight elevator up six floors. His place was large, stark, nearly empty, with a view east over the rooftops of Chinatown and Little Italy on one side, west to the darkly gleaming Hudson on the other. His dogs, Dougal and Spark, black Labradors, came to greet us, and sniffed my shoes suspiciously before they decided to lick my hand.

  Patrick fed the dogs, and we took them out and around the block, and then we went back upstairs and stood before the huge bank of windows in his living room, looking out at the river. Behind us, in the kitchen, the dogs noisily slurped water from their bowls.

  “I’ve had women, you know,” Patrick said, after a moment. “These years that I’ve been alone. I haven’t been celibate.”

  “I wouldn’t have expected you to.”

  “I tried to fall in love with some of them. I had good times, I got to know some great people, but I did not succeed. I couldn’t do it. And I didn’t really want to, I think. Didn’t want to put myself through it again. I had my dogs, my friends. I always had my work. Sometimes it seemed like enough.”

  There was a silence. I could hear one of the dogs grunt as he lay down somewhere. Then, outside, a car alarm whooped once. I heard my own pulse beating in my head. The room was lit only by the faint city glow from the windows. In that dimness, Patrick’s lean face was beautiful, his gaze was intense, his golden eyes were full of heat. He drew me close to him.

  “Will you stay with me tonight?”

  My heart turned over. “If you want me.”

  “I want you.”

  “How can you want me?”

  “Let me worry about that. I want you. I’ve always wanted you.”

  I said, “I thought I could let this go, Patrick. I thought I could come to New York and see you and that would be enough. I have so much in my life. I told myself I didn’t need you in it, too. But that’s not the way I feel now.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “I want to get it all back. What we had together. Do you think that can happen?”

  It took him a minute to answer. I could feel his breath in my hair. I waited, remembering how the story of his despair had poured out almost against his will, and how his anger had flared up. We had talked for hours, and yet I think we both knew there were things unsaid, maybe things that could never be said.

  Finally, he answered, “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not worth getting back. But maybe we’ll find something better.” He kissed me then, gently, and said, “This is the easy part, Wynn. Tonight. Afterward, who knows? At least, we can try. We can get to know each other again.”

  I ran my palm along the familiar planes of his cheek, his jaw, and touched his lips with my fingers. “I never stopped loving you, Patrick. Not for a moment. For what that’s worth.”

  “It’s worth something.”

  “I wish I could go back. Just rewind the tape and make it all different.”

  “You’ve got to let it go,” he said. “Give it up, love. You were young and foolish, you were badly wounded, and you hurt me, too. But it was a long time ago. Thank God you’ve got your daughter back. You’ve been given a second chance. We both have. My God, Wynn. This is an amazing thing—this is an amazing day.” He put his arms around me. I could feel his smile against my cheek. “Boofinka, wheemara, Wynnooka?”

  I buried my face in his shoulder. “Feek,” I said softly. “Humprammi.”

  We began to laugh, and suddenly everything was very simple, we were nineteen again, we were crazy for each other, and we collapsed onto the bed and began kissing, tearing at each other’s clothes. We stayed awake making love until dawn, and then when the sky turned pink and the sun began to illuminate the rooftops and the water tanks and the river, we fell asleep, with Dougal and Spark snoring on the floor beside the bed.

  • • •

  Kathleen and Nick were married that summer. For a wedding present—in addition to a large check—I gave them a framed print of my mother’s photograph of the doe and her fawn. The wedding was held in the Erlings’ garden on a perfect day, warm and dry—the kind of day I remembered when I thought of the Maine summers of my childhood. The garden was dense with flowers, filled with friends and the two families’ huge trove of relatives: It astonished me
that anyone could know so many people.

  Annie had told nearly everyone the story of how they found me, and I was treated like a cross between a beloved long-lost relative and a possibly scandalous curiosity. But people were very kind, even Annie’s elderly parents, whom she had warned me might be slow to warm up. Mark’s mother was too frail to make the trip from Florida; I was sorry, but a little relieved, too. I don’t know what she would have thought of my role in the ceremony. An improvised aisle was made down a garden path, and Annie and I accompanied Kathleen, each of us holding an arm, to the gazebo where Mark and Nick stood with the attendants, grinning at the three of us. Two of Kathleen’s friends sang a glorious excerpt from a Bach cantata. It was the most joyful wedding I have ever attended—except maybe for my own.

  I continued to see Patrick. The Friday afternoon train from Boston to New York became a way of life. I wish I could say that love immediately conquered all, and that we fell right back into our old relationship, but that’s not the way it went. Some of those weekends were hell. All I wanted, ever, was for us to be together again, but Patrick wasn’t so sure. He had been alone a long time, he’d spent years doggedly forgetting me, doing his best to keep me out of his life. It wasn’t easy for him to let me in again.

  We discussed it endlessly, we argued, he gave me absurd little loyalty tests, I became sullen, he became angry, his anger terrified me. Separately and together, we wept. Once I slammed out of his apartment and sat in Penn Station in the middle of the night waiting for the early morning train back home. We didn’t speak for a week, and when we did he said it was all too hard, relationships were more trouble than they were worth, love wasn’t enough. I said he was being cruel, punishing me, being as judgmental and inflexible as he’d been eighteen years ago. You drove me away, I accused him. You’re a madwoman, he said. The next morning he was on my doorstep with an armful of yellow roses.

  One weekend we borrowed someone’s summer place on Long Island, and I spent three days reading thrillers on the deck while Patrick took long walks and watched the Yankees and the Red Sox on TV—both of us too sick of the subject, sick of our troubles, to talk at all. Another time, Patrick called me in Boston minutes before I left for the train and said don’t come, please, he needed a weekend off, he couldn’t face it, he had to have a rest.

  And of course he was still an obsessive workaholic, worse than ever, and I knew I had to learn all over again that his involvement in his work wasn’t a rejection of me.

  To complicate things, I had begun to paint again, too. The long-planned painting of Hannah and Jay in the garden was a failure, but I started it again, working on a larger canvas, making it harder for myself, forcing myself to deal with the problems of scale and composition as if I were a teacher devising devilish assignments. The second painting was better. I showed it to Patrick one weekend when he drove up Boston, and he said, “There’s something here that used to be missing.” He looked at a long time, and when he said, finally, “I think this is really good, Wynn,” I realized he had never actually said those words to me before. He had encouraged me, said he believed in my ability, urged me to keep working, but he had never praised one of my paintings. His words meant everything to me. I began to paint furiously, and maybe half the work I did during that time was pleasing to me. I started to think that maybe I was a painter after all, that life was returning to a part of me that had been numb. When I was working, I could hear my mother’s voice: You’re a painter, Wynn. She must have said that on a hundred different occasions, and for the first time I felt that she was right: That was exactly what I was. Painting, I began to like myself.

  But of course, on weekends when I went to New York I had to leave what I was doing, and Patrick had to do the same when he came to see me, and this didn’t make either one of us happy.

  Then there was Uncle Austin. We had agreed not to tell him the whole, long complicated story, but Patrick had called him and said I had returned, we had resolved our old misunderstanding, we were trying to make a go of things again.

  We drove up to see him; it was horrible. Uncle Austin’s anger was as fresh as it had been fifteen years before. He wouldn’t look me in the eye, and his scorn was almost palpable, something he seemed to take a fierce pleasure in. I could tell that Patrick’s obvious affection for me was incomprehensible to him and that it lost Patrick some of his uncle’s respect. The three of us ate pizza and drank beer together, but nothing changed: Uncle Austin still had no use for me. None of us talked much, and Patrick and I left after dinner, driving back to the city in a glum silence.

  I didn’t ever want to go back, but Patrick said we had to. “It’s important to me,” he said. “And it’s important to you, too, Wynn. Admit it, you’re fond of the old bird.” He pulled me into his arms, kissed me, smiling. “And he loves you, too, somewhere down there buried under everything else. You know he does. Come on—we’re going to win him over if it kills us all.”

  Patrick’s persistence paid off. On our next visit, things were a little easier, and the third time we drove up to see him, Uncle Austin had made a pot of pork and beans and bought an ice-cream cake from the supermarket. He told us stories during dinner, just as he used to, about his crazy relatives back in Ireland: his cousin Mary’s husband, Tim, had gone into hock to buy a ridiculous red sports car, Mary’s daughter’s boyfriend the out-of-work actor had taken a job as a stripper in a gay bar, cousin Arthur had been thrown out of the pub three times in one week. At first, he addressed everything to Patrick, doing his best to ignore me, but we all ended up laughing a lot, and Uncle Austin invited us to stay overnight up in Patrick’s old room where I lay in Patrick’s arms after his uncle went to bed. “We’ve worn him down,” he murmured to me. “It’s going be okay.”

  The next day, before we left, I sat with Uncle Austin for a while on the front porch while Patrick took the dogs out for a run. I told him how glad I was to see him, how sorry I was that we had all been estranged for so long, how I had missed him, missed Patrick, how I hoped we could all be friends again.

  Uncle Austin didn’t say anything for a long moment. He looked older now, more frail; his hair was still thick and wavy, but he had arthritis in his knees and his eyes were clouded. When he looked at me there was wariness where there used to be a twinkle. Finally he said, “This is hard for me, Wynn.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m an old man, and it ain’t easy to change your mind when you’re my age.”

  He got up, painfully, and stood by the porch railing, his back to me, looking out over the field where, in the distance, we could see Spark running full speed, barking, with Patrick and Dougal behind him. Uncle Austin watched them cross the field, and then he said, “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t take up with him if you’re going to let him down. Don’t make me start hating you again.”

  “I won’t,” I said in a small voice. “I love him, Uncle Austin.”

  “Love.” He turned back to watch Patrick with the dogs. “You loved him then, too, didn’t you?”

  I cried all the way home.

  • • •

  Thank God for sex, Patrick and I used to say: Our lovemaking was always good, but at times it was also a peacemaker, a way to communicate, a consolation, a bribe, an incentive, a sleeping pill, a reward.

  And we loved each other: That was what was always clear, even in the midst of our worst turmoil, our stupid quarrels and justifiable anxieties. What we’d felt in our twenties was even stronger in our forties; it was just infinitely more complicated, and sometimes we almost forgot it.

  There was a day—one we’ll both always remember—when he and I were feeling wrecked after a long, harrowing discussion about trust and commitment and the difficulties of merging our lives. It was a warm Sunday in late summer. We had gone out for lunch but barely touched our food, both of us I think feeling tired and a little hopeless. There were still hours until my train, and I sat across from him, half reading the paper, half trying to think of an excuse to leave early. />
  Then Patrick said, “Remember your old bicycle, that I fixed that first time we went to Maine?”

  “My old rattletrap Schwinn?” I laughed. “Sure. I got that bike for my tenth birthday, and I loved it as much as I loved my cats.”

  “How long since you’ve been on a bike?”

  I thought about it. “Since just about then, Patrick. Come to think of it, maybe when I rode it down the driveway after you fixed the brakes was the last time.”

  “Me, too.” He jumped up and said, “It’s been too long. Let’s rent bikes and go for a ride.”

  He paid the check and we walked over to Lafayette Street to a bike shop located in the building next door to our old loft. I looked up at the fourth-floor windows, remembering a hundred things. “Patrick.” I pointed, but he refused to look. “That’s not a place I have much nostalgia for, Wynn,” he said, and went into the shop to see about the rentals.

  I stood in the street, stricken, and when he came out with two bicycles his face was stony.

  But we both cheered up when we got going. Even in the city traffic, it felt good to be riding a bike. We turned down Spring Street, heading for the path along the river, and when we stopped at a red light at Wooster, Patrick pulled up beside me and we smiled at each other.

  “Isn’t this great?”

  “I feel like a kid.”

  “You look like a kid. You look like you did that weekend in Maine,” he said, and leaned over to kiss me.

  We rode south on the path along the Hudson in the midst of a cheerful crowd of Rollerbladers, bicyclists, walkers, people wheeling babies in strollers. There were sailboats on the water, and a red-and-white sightseeing boat in the distance. New Jersey glittered, baking in the sun. We went to Battery Park and around the tip of Manhattan to the Brooklyn Bridge. We rode over it to Brooklyn Heights and stopped on Montague Street to buy pretzels and cold drinks from a cart. Then we walked our bikes over to the Promenade and flopped down on a bench.