by Melissa Hill
‘I have no idea. To be honest, I really wasn’t sure if he was alive or ...’ She looked away sadly and Leonie realised then that no, Helena didn’t seem to be aware of anything untoward. ‘I moved away from the Bay area a long time ago. Nathan used to live down by Pacific drive. He adored being near the ocean.’
‘So you two never actually lived at Green Street.’
‘Lived ...together?’ She gave a little laugh. ‘No, that would never have happened. We used to spend a lot of time there though,’ she said blushing a little. ‘It was my mom and dad’s place. I still had a key and used to go there sometimes when I knew they weren’t there. You see, my dad kicked me out right after I married my college boyfriend - ’
‘So you and Nathan were having an affair then?’ Leonie blurted before she could stop herself and Alex gave her a look. OK, so accusing a sixty-odd year old woman of infidelity probably was a bit heavy-handed!
Helena nodded bashfully. ‘I suppose you could say that. But you must understand, at the time ... well I guess it’s difficult to explain to young people these days but back then it wasn’t so strange, not for us anyway. And Eddie was no angel either. He knew what was going on of course, but I guess he didn’t really understand just how serious this one was.’
O – K. Leonie was finding it difficult and a little weird to reconcile the older woman sitting in front of her as someone who was happy for all intents and purposes to have an open marriage! But what did she know?
Helena seemed to sense her reaction. ‘Things were different back then, you see. I was a silly young girl and thought I could change the world, that we could change the world,’ she added, and as neither she or Alex seemed to understand what she was talking about now, they decided to just let her talk. ‘When I was growing up, the world was changing so fast and everything seemed so pointless and out of control… Our governments were corrupt – not that much has changed there – but it felt as though no one understood or even cared.’ Then she smiled, which made her face seem much more youthful. ‘But when I went to college, I discovered that there were lots of people who, like me, cared very much about what was going on in the world – thousands of like-minded people, and many of them were drawn here to this great city of ours.’
Bloody hell, Leonie realised suddenly; the laidback marriage to the college boyfriend suddenly making a whole lot more sense, Helena Abbott had been a bona fide hippie!!
She looked at Alex to try and gauge her reaction but her friend seemed too engrossed in what Helena was saying.
‘All of us decided to turn our backs on that world and create a new one, a kinder, more compassionate, freer world. At the time we really thought it was a revolution but I guess we were deluding ourselves really,’ she said with a shake of her head. ‘It was what Nathan had been trying to tell me all along but of course I wouldn’t listen. I was too immersed in this ideal of a brave new world, that somehow if we cared enough, we could change history.’
Leonie recalled how in the letters Nathan’s words had always sounded similarly touchy-feely and expressive, not at all what you’d expect from your typical macho male. But again, she supposed this made sense for someone who too must have been part of the hippie movement.
‘He was a very gentle soul,’ Helena said wistfully, echoing Leonie’s long-held impression of him. ‘A real romantic and we were besotted with one another. I suppose you could say it was love at first sight for me.’
For him too she thought, but didn’t want to admit to the woman that she knew too many intimate details about their love affair.
‘So as I say, I was married but at the time, that didn’t matter you see. Fidelity was another thing most of us eschewed in those days. Although in truth, Eddie and I were crazy for marrying back then. We were still in college and still really only finding our place in the world. I’d always been a worry to my parents so marrying some beatnik liberal with no prospects was just another way of rebelling I suppose.’ She shook her head. ‘As I say I was foolish, headstrong, and completely immersed in the cause.’
‘The cause,’ Alex repeated. ‘You mean the civil rights movement?’
Helena sighed, as if such things still weighed heavily on her. ‘That and many others, women’s rights, racism, segregation, any righteous enough cause we could think of really. But the big one, particularly round about sixty-six, sixty-seven was the war.’
‘Vietnam.’ Alex said, understanding.
‘But what about Nathan?’ Leonie asked then. Helena and her causes were all very well but she wanted to find out what had happened to the couple. Why was he writing to his old girlfriend now? What had happened since that had caused him to get in touch with her at their old love-nest?
‘When I met Nathan Reed I discovered what real love and real passion was like,’ the older women said, her cheeks reddening slightly. ‘He was completely different to Eddie, different to any other man I’d ever met really. Intelligent, loving, compassionate …I adored him.’
‘So what went wrong then?’ Leonie persisted, seriously puzzled. ‘It’s obvious from the letters that Nathan loved you as much as you loved him.’ And possibly still does.
At this Helena looked pained, and Alex gave Leonie another warning glance, as if to say ‘take it easy’.
‘Again you must understand how important, how all-consuming our hatred for this war was. Half a million Americans sent across the world to fight for something that few besides the government supported.’ She gave a short laugh. ‘Things don’t really change though, do they?’
OK, Leonie thought, we didn’t come here for a politics lecture. What did the Vietnam war have to do with anything?
‘I guess I should have been more understanding. Goodness knows Nathan never really had much of a choice, especially coming from a family like that,’
‘Much of choice...?’
‘I’m sorry, I’m not making much sense here, am I?’ Helena apologised. ‘Like I said, Nathan Reed was one of the gentlest, most compassionate men I’ve ever known. So to think that he could even consider going off to a place like that...’
A place like that.
All of sudden, Leonie’s heart sped up and took off like a galloping racehorse. And her thoughts whirled in a thousand different directions, as just like that, she got it.
In this place … sometimes I wonder if I’ve wasted my life, if I’ve ever done anything good. Sometimes I feel so alone, and scared of what tomorrow will bring … Sorry doesn’t do justice to not being able to see your smile one last time…
And she understood that right from the beginning, she and Alex had been completely mistaken in their assumptions about Nathan’s whereabouts, they’d been completely mistaken about everything!
Those letters hadn’t as they’d suspected, been written recently from a prison cell. Instead they’d been written from somewhere very different, another part of the world, and in a completely different time.
‘Nathan was a soldier in the Vietnam war?’ she gasped, and Alex looked from her to the older woman, shocked.
Leonie could guess what she was thinking. The letters certainly didn’t look that old, indeed they didn’t look aged at all, the way you’d expect forty-odd-year-old documents to look, apart for the old-fashioned ink handwriting. But she recalled now, they’d also been wrapped in cellophane and carefully tucked away in the back of a dark dusty, cupboard, hidden away from the world and from elements for who knows how long …
Helena nodded. ‘Talk about opposing ends of the spectrum. He’d not long enlisted when we first met, although he didn’t tell me that for some time. His family was military so it was expected almost. It was so hard to reconcile, you see. My kind, gentle Nathan going to a place like that and becoming involved in such terrible things… I went crazy when I found out. I just couldn’t understand why he would want to do such a thing, but the truth was he didn’t really understand.’
Things are getting harder and crazier here now and I just don’t know if I can cope any more…
Leonie was finding it hard to square lovely gentle-sounding Nathan Reed as a soldier. ‘What do you mean ‘he didn’t really understand’?’
‘Well, he wasn’t one of us, but I think he was still respectful of what we were trying to achieve. The problem was he felt the complete opposite. He truly believed that in the end the war would be a good thing for us all, felt that we needed to take a stand – against communism,’ she added for Leonie’s benefit, correctly guessing that she wasn’t terribly clued-in about that time. ‘As I said his family was military, still are.’ She looked away. ‘It’s very hard to explain the way we felt back then. We were both so headstrong and so sure in our beliefs … you don’t get that so much these days. Not to mention we were young, foolish and most of the time, completely scared to death.’
Leonie was still trying to get her head around such conviction. She knew that in those days many social movements had been hugely powerful forces for change, but it was still incredibly difficult to comprehend.
How could a couple who seemed to be so completely in love with one another be driven apart by simple ideology?
‘So what happened?’ she asked then.
Helena looked pained at the memory. ‘I tried everything I could to talk him out of it, to try and bring him round to my way of thinking. But there was no point. I only found out about his enlisting when he admitted he’d been called for a tour. He was an intelligent, educated man with the world at his feet and a great future ahead of him. I begged him not to go, to stay here in San Francisco with me, with us, but it was no good. He had to go, felt he was letting his country down if he didn’t. ‘I’m no draft dodger,’ he said, when of course most of my male friends were burning their draft cards in public.’
‘You said Nathan enlisted but what about your husband?’ Alex asked. ‘Wouldn’t he have been drafted?’
Helena smiled, sadly aware of the irony. ‘Eddie, like most of our kind, was a college student and exempt. Like I said, we were all so idealistic, thought we were all so brave and courageous, when really we didn’t have a clue. It took me a very long time to realise that guys like Nathan were actually the brave ones.’
Just please try to understand that no matter where I am, or what I’m doing, I’m always thinking of you.
‘So you two broke up when he went away,’ Leonie said then, guessing that this was the most likely scenario. But clearly, given the letters, the break-up had borne heavily on Nathan’s mind.
And the worst part of it all is you were so right. This is a crazy place, a crazy situation and I really shouldn’t be here – nobody should be here.
‘Right beforehand. Once I knew what he was and what he stood for – and I mean that as a reflection of my state of mind at the time, not now – I just couldn’t be around him anymore. I loved him of course, but I couldn’t approve of what he was doing, I didn’t want to approve. I guess that idea appealed to me too, the whole tortured love affair idea,’ she added with a self-effacing smile. ‘Like I said, back then I was a very foolish girl. He tried so hard to talk to me round, told me he’d maybe do one tour and then come back, asked me to wait for him, but I just wouldn’t listen. I’ll remember the very last thing he said to me though,’ she continued, the beginning of tears in her eyes, ‘and it was that, more than anything else that makes me certain those letters are mine.’
Leonie didn’t even need to ask. ‘And have you?’ she said, meeting the older woman’s gaze.
Helena nodded. ‘Of course I have,’ the older woman said sadly. ‘I forgave him a very long time ago.’
‘But Nathan doesn’t know that,’ she replied, ‘and clearly this is something he regretted very deeply, perhaps still does.’
‘But it was almost forty years ago! I would have thought it was long forgotten by now. It certainly is by me anyway.’
Although by the look on her face, Leonie knew Helena wasn’t quite telling the truth. Nathan was obviously someone she had loved very deeply, and forty years or not, it still hurt. How incredible that feelings should run so deep even after all this time and – no hold on she thought, as something struck her. Nathan might have written the ones in the box all those years ago, but he’d sent another only four months ago, the one Leonie had opened by mistake! Why?
Alex was circumspect. ‘Well Helena, I guess we’ve done our duty by returning these letters to their rightful owner,’ she said before draining her coffee. ‘What you do with them now is entirely up to you.’
‘No!’ Leonie exclaimed, momentarily forgetting herself. ‘I’m sorry, I mean, yes of course it is up to you what you want to do, but as you’ve already admitted you’ve forgiven Nathan, don’t you think you should tell him that?’
‘Leonie…’ Alex warned.
‘I’m sorry, but this is important. The guy is still writing to her for goodness sake!’ She was shocked at her own depth of feeling about this but all this time she’d sympathised with Nathan, for more reasons than one. She quickly explained to Helena about the most recent letter.
‘He’s still writing to me?’ Helena repeated, shocked.
‘Yes, and we still don’t know where he is, although we have a good idea –’
‘Well, we don’t actually know for certain,’ Alex interjected with a sharp glance at Leonie. ‘In fact, we don’t know what the hell we’re talking about, and we’ve already got it wrong on so many other counts…’ she added pointedly.
‘I suppose so,’ Leonie admitted crestfallen and more than a little ashamed now. She turned to the older woman. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t meant to be so pushy, it’s just … well we’ve been trying so hard to find you two that it almost feels wrong to just give up now.’
It broke Leonie’s heart to think that they couldn’t to pursue this to the end and find Nathan, now that they knew the truth about his letters to Helena. And so hard to believe that the ones in the box were that old, as never in a million years would she have guessed this from their appearance. But then she wondered how they’d come to be stowed away like that.
‘You said the apartment in Green Street was your parent’s place?’ she asked Helena. ‘How come the letters never made their way to you?’
Helena looked away sadly. ‘My parents … well my father anyway, pretty much disowned me after I got involved in so much trouble. So perhaps my Mom kept them for me … she died last year actually,’ she said, tears now brimming in her eyes. ‘Dad is a while gone now too. The moved out East and the years just went by, and somehow we never did manage to reconcile.’
‘She died recently?’ At this, Leonie’s ears pricked up. ‘So did your parents still happen to own the Green Street place then?’
‘Yes, when I heard they moved I figured they’d sold it, but then when Mom died, I discovered that it was still in the family. As the only child, it was left to me.’
Which explained the recent executor’s sale and the reason the letters never managed to reach Helena, Leonie mused. Had Nathan just taken the chance with his most recent letter on the off chance that Helena still lived there?
She didn’t know. And as Alex pointed out, it really was none of her business now – not that it had ever been really.
‘Anyway,’ she said to Helena now, trying to heed her friend’s advice, ‘Alex is right – it is up to you what to do now, and I suppose contacting Nathan could be nigh on impossible in any case so –’
‘It might not be that hard at all actually,’ Helena interjected. ‘In fact, there’s someone who – one way or the other – should be able to tell us exactly where he is.’
Chapter 32
That ‘someone’ turned out to be David Reed, a high-powered and highly decorated local senator who had served his time in both Vietnam and Korea, and who also happened to be Nathan’s brother. The Reeds were a very well known and respected political family in the Bay area and Alex recalled how Helena had mentioned that in view of his military background, Nathan couldn’t have done anything else.
‘I think I recognise the surname a
ctually,’ she said when Helena told them about Nathan’s family, who she planned to contact as soon as she’d read the letters, and perhaps felt ready to hear the truth.
Some years after Nathan’s departure she had divorced the hippie boyfriend and in the meantime moved to Santa Barbara and got married again to a man called Bob Freeman, hence the surname. But the second husband had died some six years before.
‘I’ll admit I kept tabs on how the Reeds were doing over the years now and again,’ she said. ‘Newspaper articles, things like that.’ But ominously, she revealed, Nathan hadn’t been mentioned.
Leonie was held rapt by the woman’s story and Alex wondered again why all of this seemed to mean so much to her. She herself would have been just as happy to deliver the box of letters to Helena and having learnt their story, left it at that and got on with her own worries. But for Leonie, it all seemed to run so much deeper.
When they bade goodbye to Helena in Union Square (finally leaving her alone to read her letters in peace) and returned to Green Street, Alex decided to broach the subject once and for all.
‘Seeing as we’re uncovering old stories, are you ever going to tell me yours?’ she asked, when they’d finished discussing Helena and whether or not the couple would ever be reunited. ‘I mean, I know you’ve had something else on your mind all this time, something other than those letters.’
Her friend looked at her and Alex momentarily felt guilty for raising the subject, particularly after what had been a particularly emotional few days for everyone. But it seemed that this time, and possibly as a result, Leonie was prepared to lower her guard. She looked away. ‘I don’t know where to start…and I honestly don’t know if you’ll believe me.’
‘Try the very beginning,’ Alex said with a sigh. ‘After everything that’s come to light lately, I really don’t think anything would surprise me.’
Dublin – Six months earlier
