Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  “All those who believe in fairies and don’t want Tinker Bell to die will now clap their hands.”

  When Becky turned her face to the wall, he had gone on, helpless to stop himself, his voice harsh and bitter.

  “You’ve done yourself proud, Becky.” And he had turned to Alaine, who sat staring out at the Santa Clara Valley and trying not to listen. “Tell me, Allie. Have you ever heard of a young woman falling in love with an old poor man?”

  “God, Mike, what a thing to say.”

  “You’re right. We shouldn’t have come home.”

  Becky had cried out, “Your father is dead, Mike.”

  “Yes. That’s true. But he had a ball while it lasted, didn’t he? Ask Luis. God damn it—ask my mother.”

  Becky had buried her face in her hands, shaking her head. “Be proud, Becky,” Miguel had said, picking up his coat. “Be proud and happy and live to be a thousand years old. Only leave me alone.”

  “Have you even forgotten what you promised him?”

  “Did I promise something?”

  “Please, oh, please. It doesn’t matter what you think of me.

  But try to understand him. You made him a promise. Keep it, Mike. Or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

  “We Rineharts are pretty good at making promises, Becky. Were just not so very good at keeping them. Allie—let’s go.”

  “Don’t do this, Mike,” Alaine had said.

  He had felt a flaring resentment of her. Why couldn’t she understand? Why couldn’t she stay on his side? He had felt a blind yearning for Nora. Nora would understand.

  “You promised,” Becky had said again in a shattered voice. ‘“You promised to take his ashes to The Spur.”

  “You do it, Becky. Or better still, find Luis. Let him do it.” And they had parted that way and on the way back to San Francisco, Alaine had told him that he was the cruelest man she had ever known and he had told her to mind her own damned business—that she didn’t know what it was that lay between Becky Coulter and the Rinehart men.

  The road up to the house looked just the same. The garden was thicker, the trees taller. He thought of old Ben Shriker, who had designed the house. The way it looked now would please him. It had a look of belonging where it was, nested in greenery. A look of real peace. God, what a laugh that was. The House of Loners. Not one happy man or woman had ever lived in that house unless it was old Avery and even he was dead and buried and forgotten.

  He parked the car and walked across the gravel drive to the door. The door opened and Becky was there, her hands extended, ready to draw him inside.

  He was shocked at the change in her. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her body—that magnificent, glandular panther’s body, was heavier and matronly now. He had to stop and think for a moment and tell himself that Becky was forty-two now and a middle-aged woman.

  She wore flat-heeled shoes and frontier pants that would have been perfect on her long ago but were too tight now and the black cardigan hugged breasts that seemed to have been absorbed into her body.

  “Hello, Becky,” he said.

  She took his hands, both of them, and said, “I’m glad to see you, Mike. I really am.”

  Why did I come? he wondered. But he knew that he had had to come see her, that she was in some unreasoned way, a part of the search.

  They went into the living room and he noticed that she had changed the furniture. Everything was tasteful but nondescript. This was Becky’s house now. Everything that might have reminded him of Raoul or of the past was gone.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” she asked. “Sit down and I’ll bring you something. Have you eaten?”

  He drew a deep breath and said, “I could use a drink, Beck).”

  Her hands were nervous. “I think I have something. Let me look.”

  She was living without servants. Her fingernails were stained with soil. She saw that he noticed and said, as she searched through a nearly empty liquor cabinet, “I’ve been doing a lot of gardening. Believe it or not. I like it.”

  He waited.

  She said, “I have some Scotch. Will that do?”

  “That’ll be fine, Becky. Just plain water. No ice.”

  “I guess you’re used to not having ice. I understand it’s hard to get abroad.”

  “Yes.” He accepted the drink and took a long pull at it. She sat down opposite him with her hands folded in her lap.

  Presently, she said, “I read in the paper that you had arrived in New York.”

  That son of a bitch Ayula, Miguel thought. “It wasn’t a very newsworthy item,” he said.

  “Nora Ames is very lovely, Mike,” Becky said, as though impressed that he should know a celebrity like the Love Goddess. “I’ve seen her on the screen. Is she really as pretty—“ Her voice trailed off to nothingness and in the stillness he could hear the ticking of a clock in the bedroom.

  Becky made another start and said, “Are you going south soon?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t made up my mind.”

  “The paper said you were going to work on The Green Hills of Home. I read the book. It was a wonderful story.”

  He smiled at her faintly, thinking that she was rather ill-at-ease with him and in her way was trying to break through the barriers and that he wasn’t helping her much.

  “How is everything, Becky?”

  “Everything is fine, Mike. Really.”

  “I’m glad for you.”

  “And with you, Mike?”

  “All right, I guess.”

  There was an awkward pause, and then Becky said, “You remember Allie Wylie, of course—“ She looked away in momentary confusion. “That was a foolish way to say it, wasn’t it—”

  “What about her?” Miguel was surprised at the calmness of his voice.

  “Nothing, really. I see her downtown occasionally. She and her husband bought a house in Tor Terrace. You remember Frenchman’s Tor.”

  “I remember.”

  “It’s a very nice residential district now.”

  Miguel regarded Becky blankly. How different she seemed, how pitifully banal and ill-at-ease. He looked down into the amber liquid in his glass, feeling numb.

  “Have you seen Alaine and Dorrie yet?” Becky asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Have you?”

  “Not for over a year.” She laughed a little and added, “I don’t get to the city often. I can’t seem to find the time now. The traffic is so bad and the trains are crowded and I just never seem able to get away. You know.”

  “Sure. I know.”

  In the silence he watched her and she looked away. “I’m happy, Mike. It’s very peaceful here now.”

  He caught her meaning and said. “Yes, it must be. Now.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Sure you did, Becky. But forget it. Have you heard from Luis?”

  Her expression changed. “You mean—you didn’t know, Mike?”

  “Know what? He never writes, you know that. And we move around so much—“ He looked at her, his dark brows knit. “What is it, Becky?”

  “Luis is dead, Mike. I thought surely you knew.”

  Miguel sat in silence. There was a tightness in his chest and throat.

  “When? How did it happen?” he asked.

  “I don’t understand too much about it,” Becky said. “It was a border raid or something like that. An incident, a reprisal. I don’t know. You knew he was a colonel in the Israel Defense Force?”

  “I knew he was in Tel Aviv in 1947. That’s all I know.” He put his glass down on the arm of the couch and simply sat for a moment. “How long ago, Becky?”

  “It happened last March, I think,” Becky said.

  “An incident,” Miguel said slowly. “Not even during their war.”

  “He remarried, Mike. A girl in Palestine. She wrote to me after it happened. And there was a letter for Raoul—“ Becky’s dark eyes filled with tears suddenly. “He had written it a long time before an
d asked her to send it to his father if anything ever happened to him. He didn’t know Raoul was dead.” Becky stood up and walked to the window. “The girl thought I was his mother—he never told her about Raoul and me. He even changed the way he spelled his name.” Her voice broke a little and she stood for a moment facing the valley before turning to face Miguel. She swallowed and said, “Would you like to see the letters, Mike?” She walked over to her desk and brought him the letters. Miguel read:

  Dear Mrs. Rinehart, It is with sorrow that I write to tell you that Lewis Rheinhardt, who was your eldest son and my husband, was killed in a border raid on the second day of March this year. He was a brave soldier and a kind and gentle husband and my heart will be forever filled with love for him. We were married nearly two years. Even though I could bear him no children because of the things that were done to me in the camps of the Germans he loved me with kindness and understanding. Forgive my so clumsy English. I cannot express myself properly. It may comfort you to know that Colonel Lewis Rheinhardt will always be remembered and respected by the people for whom he gave up his life. It was his wish that I should remain here and so I will never meet you face to face. But I shall always cherish the knowledge that I have a mother in the great country of my husbands birth. With respect and affection I send to you a letter that Lewis wished sent to his father if the hazards of his profession should end his life. I need nothing so please do not feel obligated to me in any way. It is the way Lewis wished it. Shalom aleichem. Maryam Rheinhardt (Mrs. Lewis Rheinhardt) Tel Aviv, 5th March.

  Miguel looked up at Becky and said slowly, “She loved him. You can see that she did.”

  “Yes,” Becky said. “I was glad for him, Mike. Terribly glad. Do you believe that?”

  “I believe it.” Miguel thought about the woman who had written the angular script on the oddly shaped European stationery in his hands. His brothers wife. Maryam. Strange and exotic name. Luis, who was more Spanish and German than Jewish, had found where he belonged at last and then died fighting for it. Like Anson. For a moment, Miguel felt a deep pang of envy. Anson in the earth of Cataluna—Luis in the sandy soil of Israel. Was that the only real and final answer? Was death the only end of loneliness and grief?

  He unfolded the single, typed sheet of Luis’s letter to Raoul. The letter his father had never read.

  Raoul—I call you this at first because I write this to you as simply a man, and not your son. I am your son, of course. Blood of your blood and flesh of your flesh. But we never had it so while I lived and it cannot be that way now. But don’t imagine that I’m striking at you from the grave filled with any sort of rancor or bitterness. We, each of us, were simply what we were and we could act only as we were meant to act. In a sense, these past few years, I’ve become something of a mystic. Perhaps a fatalist. There are so many things I want to say to you, but in the end it comes down to this. If you had loved me as you loved Miguel—I might have been the son you always wanted me to be. But you did not and I could not be. Miguel was your son. Not I. I bear neither you nor Miguel any malice. I’m sorry, of course, as you must sometimes be, that you did not have love enough for us both. I know now that this is so and I no longer resent it as I did. About Becky. What you took from me was nothing. I don’t put it this way to be insulting or bitter. I never loved Becky. You knew it, and God help me, I could never hide it from her. I was hurt by your way of taking her, but when the hurt was gone and I was free of her, there was nothing but relief. I have been happy here with Maryam. In a way I’m sorry that you won’t ever be as happy as I have been. You will probably never know what it is to love a woman without a monkey of guilt on your shoulder. I say it that way because it seems absurd now that you can’t. The metaphor is apt. I’m sorry for you. I truly am. If it helps you at all to know that I have been really happy here with Maryam, I give you my blessing. You did not love me as a father and I did not love you as a son. I’m sorry about that, too, though it is a senseless sorrow for something that never was. I should like to write to Miguel, too, but I find I have nothing to say to him. He must feel that I informed on him, betrayed him once when I saw him making the same kind of mistake I made. One more regret. I did what I thought best. He didn’t love the girl. Not enough and not in the right way. One last thing, Raoul. You have always blamed yourself for Mother’s death. Don’t. She had a kind of pride you couldn’t understand. She was a woman who could not live forgotten. I understand it and perhaps Miguel can. People like you and like Becky are too practical to know what that land of lonely pride is. I have just reread this and the tone seems harsh. I don’t mean it to be. I am simply saying things to you that I must say if I am, for this one last time, to sign myself: Your son, Luis.

  Luis, he thought. Luis, my brother. How very different everything could have been if only we had been—what? Different, what else? Different if we had been different, what an ungodly redundant nonsensical thing to think. How could anything have been better with each of them as they were?

  “This was the only letter from Luis?” Miguel said.

  Becky nodded. “Before the war there were cards—you remember. But afterwards, nothing. Until this.”

  Miguel folded the letters carefully together and handed them to Becky.

  “So he found something good,” he said.

  “What he needed, I think. I hope so, Mike.”

  Miguel finished his drink and walked to the liquor cabinet for another. Becky followed him with her eyes.

  “Everyone needs to be loved, Mike,” she said pleadingly. “I needed it, too.”

  Miguel felt his lip curl slightly. “Does that explain what happened that night we were together here?”

  Becky flushed and looked away. “That was something else. Not love, Mike. Not for either one of us. I loved Raoul and he loved me.”

  “You have to believe that, don’t you?”

  “Because it’s the truth. That—time with us. Can I try to explain it to you, Mike? It’s troubled me for years—what you thought of me.”

  “You know what I’ve thought,” he said. “Of you and of me.”

  “Oh, Mike, Mike, you mustn’t blame yourself for what happened. And—Mike—it would be kind if you wouldn’t blame me, either.”

  “Somebody was guilty,” he said dryly.

  She shook her head and said, “The things you do to yourself—and to the people around you, Mike. It’s cruel. What kind of iron standards do you have, anyway?”

  “Standards? Me?” He laughed mirthlessly. “That’s the best yet. You can’t think of more than three commandments I haven’t written off.”

  “I mean it, Mike. That night was just—“ She shook herself, as though she were describing a narrow escape that some friend of hers, some acquaintance, might have had. “We were together too much. You were young and attractive. I was still young enough. It happened the way it did and I’m grateful to you for stopping when you did. But that’s all. It wasn’t love. I loved your father. Perhaps it was just that you were so like him—and young. That’s the only explanation I have.”

  “That was it? Just like that?”

  “Just like that, Mike,” she said sadly.

  “Glands.”

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “I do. It fits my iron standards better.”

  “Don’t fight with me, Mike. Please don’t. I want us to be friends.”

  What she said was true and it had the effect of making him feel that the walls were moving in on him. He felt suffocated in this house now, so full of Raoul’s unreturned affection for him. Becky seemed to read his mind.

  “Your father loved you very much, Mike. He loved you with all his heart.”

  “Don’t, Becky.”

  Her voice was relentless. It pierced his ears. “He loved you enough so that no matter how you hurt him he couldn’t stop.”

  “Becky. Don’t, I said. I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “Oh, Mike, what’s the matter with you? What is it that won’t let
you be loved?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Why can’t you let anyone love you?”

  “Alaine said that,” he said unsteadily.

  “The night Raoul died he called for you over and over again.” Becky stood up and took his arm. “He kept pleading with me not to let you forget your promise to him.”

  “No, Becky—I don’t want to talk about this. Neither do you.”

  “But I do. I have to. Can’t you see that? Please, Mike. Do that one thing for him and I’ll never ask you to do another. He loved you so much and he didn’t know how to tell you.”

  He felt a constriction in his throat. He had a wild impulse to run. God, he thought, I’m losing my mind.

  “I have to go, Becky,” he said. “I have to go back.”

  “Please, Mike. Stay and talk to me.” Her eyes were filled with tears. “It’s almost like having him back again to see you here.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  His voice was ragged and uncontrolled.

  “I’ll call you, Becky,” he said, wanting only to get away from the house, to get away from her.

  “Will you take your father’s ashes to The Spur, Mike?”

  He twisted away from her and opened the door. “Don’t bother to come out,” he said. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “Mike—“ Becky raised a hand as if to stay him. Then she dropped it to her side and smiled at him with sympathy. “There’s nothing wrong with being happy, Mike. I found it out. I hope you do, too.”

  He closed the door behind him and walked swiftly to his car. It was all he could do to keep from looking behind him and up into the sky to see if he were being followed.

  TWENTY

  He drove to Frenchman’s Tor.

  Right up to the last minute, when the road curved and he saw the neat, ivy-decked sign that said Tor Terrace, he had been sure he wouldn’t have the courage to seek Allie Wylie out. But when the time came he guided the car toward the hill as though there were not a thousand doubts in his mind.

  The road was paved, a main trunk road for a housing development spreading all over the ridge and the adjacent slopes. The stand of oaks was gone. A redwood-and-glass contemporary house stood where they had been. Miguel parked the car at the curb and sat for a time, smoking a cigarette and looking at the valley. He could hear children playing behind the high grape-stake fences along the street.