The Sight of the Stars

by Belva Plain

  The silence was sad, and somehow she had to break it. “I suppose you always had a dog, since you like them so much. Did you have one when you were little?”

  “Oh, yes. He used to sleep near my bed. His name was Arthur.”

  “That’s a fancy name for a dog.”

  “Yes, it is. My father found him. He had just been born, he and a lot more puppies. They were lying on the side of the road with nothing to eat or drink, so Pa brought them home and took care of them as best he could. Arthur lived to be very old, and I loved him.”

  “Your father had a kind heart, didn’t he? And I guess your mother had, too.”

  “She did.”

  “You look like your father in those pictures where he’s standing on the lawn, just about where we are now. I only saw one of your mother, though.”

  “My father had plenty of them, but when he moved here to be with us, he lost them somewhere, all but the one that you’ve seen.”

  “I know. She looks pretty in that big old-fashioned hat. What was she like?”

  “Oh, Emma, that’s a hard question. I was very young when she died, so how much can I remember?”

  “I remember things from when I was very young. I remember Dad smoked a pipe while he watched television, and he let me knock out the ashes.”

  “How did you enjoy your trip to Yosemite? We took all our grandchildren there, and before that, we took our children.”

  It was plain that he had changed the subject on purpose. He didn’t want to talk about his mother, though he talked enough about the horse called Whitey and about the grocery store. She had noticed that before today.

  “It was great,” she said. “I want to go back out west again to see the Grand Canyon and the Hopi reservation. We had some movies about all that in school, so I’m very interested in Native Americans.”

  “Indians?”

  “You’re not supposed to call them that anymore.”

  “Sorry. I do remember reading something about it. Have you read The Oregon Trail?”

  “Nobody reads Parkman very much, my teacher says. But I found it in a library, and I thought it was great.”

  “Well, you’re the second Emma who thought so. The first day I got to talk to my first Emma, she was reading it. It seems like yesterday.”

  “I know what you mean. It seems like yesterday that I was in first grade.”

  The old man smiled. “Ah, you’re a lovely person, Emma. I wish my Emma could see you.”

  “You were really in love with her, weren’t you?”

  “I was. I still am.”

  “And you never got a divorce?”

  “Whatever makes you ask that? Your father and mother never got one, either. Everybody doesn’t get one.”

  “No, but lots of people do. I’ll bet you half the people in my class have two sets of parents.”

  The old man shook his head. “I’m sure some of it couldn’t be helped, but not all of it. Not even nearly all of it. You have to—to overlook things, to be patient, forgiving, and not let anger—”

  He stopped and looked so serious, she thought, almost the way people do when tears are starting.

  She sat up, feeling suddenly uncomfortable and hoping he wasn’t going to cry, which would be awful. But no, he was smiling again.

  “Look around, Emma. Just look at this beautiful world. You’re a bookworm, so you’ll surely come across this someday: ‘Summer afternoon—summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.’ And then you’ll think of us two—no, three—you and me and Rusty. I love you, Emma. Remember that, too.”

  It was sort of embarrassing, but it was also nice for a person’s great-grandfather to say that. In a funny way, it sort of belonged with all kinds of other things here today, things like Rusty’s friendly wagging tail, or the white clouds floating.

  “Do you hear voices, Emma? They’ve come back. Let’s go see.”

  The house was asleep, but Adam roamed the rooms. It was as if he were restlessly looking for something and was unable to remember what it was.

  Then he went outside. It was a white night, when the moon leaks its brightness all over the sky and outshines the stars. Far off in the distance once occupied by level fields, all green and gold with grass and grain and scarce dots that each signified a ranch house, now loomed a circle of high-rise buildings with a cluster of suburban developments around them.

  Life moved. It changed in myriad ways. Young people lived together without marriage, and married people, with or without children, moved from one marriage to a new one, or to no marriage at all, without any trouble. Yes, life had changed and was still changing, no matter how an old man close to a century in age might feel about it.

  He wondered about that little girl today, eleven years old and so wise. If she were to live as long as he has lived, how would her world look then?

  Far off a dog’s bark carried through the stillness, and Rusty replied.

  “Hush,” Adam said. “You’ll wake the whole house.”

  The windows on the second floor were dark. In the main bedroom, Andy slept beside Bernice. Good people, they were, steadfast parents and citizens and friends. He felt glad that they were living in this house. Once he would never have believed that a person could love a mere house as he loved this one. Stepping back on the lawn, he gained a better view of it as it lay, long and gleaming, like some live creature resting in its nest of trees. Strange, he thought: We had wanted something very simple, and it is simple, yet it is known as one of the finest houses in the area. If Emma had ever thought about that, she would have been amused.

  Then he went back inside to the music room, and stood looking at the concert grand for quite a while. After that he went into his home office, where he opened the deep drawer on the side of the desk. There lay a pile of his diaries, and he stood there, too, looking at them for quite a while.

  What good were they? They contained nothing of importance. Mere jottings of intensely intimate emotions, some thoughtful, some even humorous, some painful, they were of no use to anyone except to satisfy curiosity or to encourage troubling speculations. And with sudden resolve, he lifted the heavy pile of books, lugged it to the kitchen, and there began to destroy it.

  From the cabinets he took a few bottles of dark vinegar to stain the pages, after which he soaked them under the faucet until they were totally illegible. Into the garbage cans beyond the back door he threw them, and after that, returning to the kitchen, cleaned up every trace of the mess.

  After that, in the hallway that led to the stairs, he stopped to look at the collection of photographs that hung on the wall. They had been there so long that he never noticed them anymore. He had never seen any reason to display them, but Emma had liked them, so there they were.

  There was his father standing next to Whitey and the wagon. There he was again, the young father with Adam and Leo. Adam was smiling up at him, while Leo wore his supper-table face. There was Leo in a class picture, the only one with his head turned away from the camera.

  Now, suddenly, Adam realized that he was seeing something he had never truly seen before. He had seen it, but not truly. Why that had been, he was not able to say. He knew only that at this moment he was overwhelmed by it. For a long time he stood there looking at the faded photographs. And in accordance with his lifelong habit of collecting, quite without willing to, small scraps of quotations and of poetry, some words of Housman’s came to mind.

  And how am I to face the odds

  Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?

  Then he turned the light off, and summoning Rusty, went upstairs to bed. His exertions with the diaries had tired him more than he could have expected if he had thought about it beforehand. Yet he was relieved that he had done what he did.

  It seemed to him that the air outdoors was filled with the twitter of birds. Often a solitary bird will awaken at night and call, but this music was something one heard at dawn, so perhaps it was near dawn? I can�
�t tell, he thought, but anyway, it doesn’t matter. I could look at the clock, but I’m too dizzy, and the bed is so comfortable.

  His thoughts wandered. Simon had died in this bed. Poor Simon, he had not had an easy life. But he had had Rachel. Perhaps he had had Rachel before he had my mother? Perhaps he had hidden my mother away on a farm until she had me? I have no birth certificate. I never had one. So do I therefore not exist? If you don’t have a certificate, you don’t exist. Even Emma existed; the authorities had given her a certificate, and then Sabine had come to take care of her. And wasn’t Sabine a funny one?

  Light and dark are spinning across the ceiling. All the faces are spinning. They flash by and they recede. Children. Grandchildren. The living and the dead. Emma. Pa. Leo sits with Pa. No, across the table. Poor, frightened, ugly little boy. Ah, Leo, I’m not angry. Not anymore.

  I’m going to find you . . . Write a letter . . . My brother . . . Tomorrow . . .

  When they came looking for Adam in the morning, he was dead. He had died peacefully in his sleep without thrashing or struggling, the doctor said. “His heart simply stopped. It was time.”

  This was the first death Emma had known. Common sense told her that indeed it was time for Great-Grandpa Adam to die, because he was so very old. So she could not feel too sad, nor apparently did anyone else, except to say that Adam would be long remembered.

  Before and after the funeral, people sat around in the library that was filled with his books, and talked about him. They read aloud the newspaper that spoke of what was called philanthropy, and there were many letters to the editor.

  He was a quiet man, one wrote, and very unassuming. You would never know that he had any more than a couple of dollar bills to rub together in his pocket.

  He seemed to be somebody who would live, and ought to live, forever, another said. I keep thinking that he’ll turn up on a bench in the park tomorrow.

  Even the governor of the state had praise for him, for his important gifts and his small, private acts of kindness to people of every religion, race, and walk of life. He spoke of the splendid parks on either side of the river, the wilderness acres throughout the state, the hospitals, and the university in the city, the music program that he and his wife had instituted in its schools, the volunteer ambulance service that he supported, and half a dozen free nursery schools. Few citizens, the governor repeated, had ever done as much for the state as Adam Arnring had done.

  “Dad was a strong, calm man,” Uncle Andy said. “He never let anything get the better of him, and never was ruled by his emotions. There was never any mystery about him. You always knew where you stood with him, and he concealed nothing. He was completely honest, and had no secrets.”

  I don’t know about that, Emma was thinking. He must have had secrets, because everybody has some. And emotions, don’t they mean what people feel? I think he felt a lot. The way he looked when he talked about the other Emma, the way he said summer afternoon, the way he looked at me, and even the way he loved his dog. I think you’re all wrong, Uncle Andy.

  Those were her thoughts. But when a girl is only going on twelve and is well brought up, she does not contradict the grown-ups.

  Epilogue

  A gentle darkness fell over the New Hampshire mountains as Emma and her husband, Charles, sat among the party guests in the pink and white garden.

  “This house was the cottage on the Snow estate, that huge stone place up there,” the hostess was explaining. “Oh, it’s different here, now that the Snows are dead. They were such friendly neighbors, a lovely couple, and we miss them. She was blind and he took wonderful care of her.”

  “He was a remarkable man,” the host added. “He spoke five languages—German, Russian, Japanese, and I forget what else. During the Second World War he worked for Army Intelligence, deciphering codes. He came from an old, distinguished New England family and knew enough about American history to write a book. In fact, he did write some books, very successful ones, translations.”

  “Snow really was a ‘character,’ ” he continued. “Lovable in a way and also a bit of a snob. He liked to be with prominent people, old-money types. And still, he had a big soft heart for the underdog. A lot of you must remember, don’t you, the time on Main Street when some boys were teasing a girl about her acne, and he got furious? I sometimes thought such rage didn’t seem to fit with the rest of him.”

  “Perhaps it did fit,” someone said. “He was a tiny, terribly ugly little man and he must have suffered plenty in his time.”

  “Well, maybe. But I don’t know.” The hostess mused, “He did have an easier life in some ways than most people ever have. Remember the story of the sulky?”

  Emma asked her what a sulky was.

  “It’s a one-horse cart that holds one person. It was a fashionable luxury way back in those days when he was a boy. Once when he was driving out in the country—I have an idea he must have been a loser in school and terribly spoiled at home—he saw a litter of puppies abandoned beside the road. So he took them home and called the favorite ‘Arthur’ after President Chester Arthur. We loved that story.”

  “The strangest, saddest story of all is his death,” the host said soberly. “He was writing a letter when he had a heart attack and fell to the floor. There were only a few words, something like these: Dear Brother, I am old and it is very late to talk about things that were so awfully, terribly wrong. I have been looking back at my life and seeing myself very differently. Now I want to tell you how sorry I am about what I said and how I hurt you on that day so long ago—

  “That’s all there was. The crazy thing is that he had no brother and had never had one.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” somebody else said quietly. “What do we ever really know about one another?”

  There was a silence. He’s right, Emma thought, looking up as the first stars gleamed through the thickening night. How can one human being see into another’s mind or feel his heart and judge him? In the end, we have only compassion to give.

  Once, in a book by Joseph Conrad, she had read some lines and promised herself to remember them:

  It is when we try to grapple with other men’s intimate needs that we perceive how incomprehensible are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BELVA PLAIN lives in northern New Jersey. She is the author of the New York Times best-selling novels Evergreen, Random Winds, Eden Burning, Crescent City, The Golden Cup, Tapestry, Blessings, Harvest, Treasures, Whispers, Daybreak, The Carousel, Promises, Secrecy, Homecoming, Legacy of Silence, Fortune’s Hand, After the Fire, Looking Back, and Her Father’s House.

  BOOKS BY BELVA PLAIN

  HER FATHER’S HOUSE

  LOOKING BACK

  AFTER THE FIRE

  FORTUNE’S HAND

  LEGACY OF SILENCE

  HOMECOMING

  SECRECY

  PROMISES

  THE CAROUSEL

  DAYBREAK

  WHISPERS

  TREASURES

  HARVEST

  BLESSINGS

  TAPESTRY

  THE GOLDEN CUP

  CRESCENT CITY

  EDEN BURNING

  RANDOM WINDS

  EVERGREEN

  THE SIGHT OF THE STARS

  A Delacorte Book / January 2004

  Published by Bantam Dell

  A Division of Random House, Inc.

  New York, New York

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2004 by Bar-Nan Creations, Inc.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit our website at www.bantamdell.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data is on file with the publisher.

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  eISBN: 978-0-440-33473-6

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