Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘I know a very good remedy for jet lag. All you have to do is kick off your shoes and stand right here in front of me. Promised you a rub, didn’t I?’

  He started to massage her shoulders, gently at first and then more deeply, his body wiry against her, his thumbs pressing into points of tension.

  ‘You have nice hands,’ Helena murmured.

  ‘And as they say in the vampire films, you have a delicious neck.’ He kissed her on the nape, wound his arms round her bosom, caressed.

  It was pleasant, Helena thought from a long way away. Like being a child licked by tall grasses in a sunny field. He turned her towards him. His mouth now searched for hers, his tongue probed, too forcefully, as he pressed hard against her, rubbed. A shadow covered the sun. She felt cold, her skin clammy.

  The shadow took on a shape. A face, hazel-eyed, lips curling in irony. No. She chased it away, held on tightly to the man in front of her, saw through the fuzziness of proximity his curly hair, the line of a brow.

  He was unzipping her dress now, reaching for bare skin, manoeuvering her towards the couch. A taut light body covered hers. The shadow loomed larger, started to laugh bitterly, then turned away. Helena felt a gag rising to her throat.

  ‘No,’ she pulled away from Rafael. ‘No, please, I can’t go through with it,’ her voice broke with a sob.

  ‘Hey, lady. That’s not part of the code.’

  ‘I know,’ she was crying now. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘And what am I supposed to do with this straining erection?’ he growled. ‘Whoops, well it was a moment ago,’ he smiled suddenly, ruffled her hair. ‘You gonna tell me about it? I might be able to use it somewhere.’

  Helena tried to smile through her tears, ‘I don’t know,’ she mumbled. ‘It’s not you. It’s me.’

  ‘Well, that’s a rare enough beginning. But I know it’s not me. I’m the wunderkind of sexual sensitivity. Haven’t you read my PR? So what is it?’ his face was suddenly serious, as if he genuinely wanted to know.

  Helena shrugged, ‘I read somewhere recently that every sexual act, however new, brings in its train all others. Well, the baggage compartment was carrying the wrong luggage today.’

  ‘I like it,’ he took her hand, stroked it softly. ‘Though I didn’t have you pegged as Lady Broken Heart.’

  ‘Just a little crack.’ Helena grimaced.

  He had a reflective look on his face, as if he hadn’t heard her and was talking to himself, ‘I guess I had you pegged as an early sexual awakening and early blotting out lady. All that surface sexiness and then you blow cold. Sex in the family does that sometimes.’ He turned towards her, ‘Now that’s the version without the psychobabble. If you want the latter, it’s a $100 for a fifty-minute hour and the couch is right here,’ he grinned.

  ‘I think I’d better go,’ Helena said uncomfortably.

  ‘I wasn’t suggesting you needed it.’

  ‘Still friends?’ Helena asked realising it was important to her.

  ‘Of course. How could I say anything else to those wide velvety eyes? But watch who you try it on with again. This is some mean city,’ he squeezed her hand. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Helena was crying again by the time she had reached her room. With a fierce gesture, she kicked off her shoes and sent them flying across the room. It was ludicrous. Her behaviour was ludicrous. The feelings which overcame her were ludicrous. She couldn’t even sleep with a man anymore, a man she liked. All because of that duplicitous male who had taken a hold on her. And she had spent more time crying this blasted year than in the last ten put together. She was like some rudderless boat, the tears sweeping over her like storm waves, carrying her any which way.

  Savagely, she unzipped her dress, was about to pull it off when she noticed a red light flashing on her telephone.

  Message service, the notice beside the light said. She pressed the relevant number and heard a recorded voice telling her that an envelope was waiting for her downstairs. She was about to put her shoes on again when she thought better of it, dialled the porter instead and asked for the letter to be brought up.

  Minutes later, there was a knock.

  ‘Porter, Mam.’

  He handed her a thick manilla envelope.

  Helena stared at it in consternation, then recognized James Whitaker’s handwriting. She tore it open.

  Inside there was a wad of typed sheets and a quickly scrawled letter.

  Dear Helena,

  Hoped to give you this in person, but you weren’t in.

  A request on bent knees. Please, please, will you say or read something at the Service tomorrow? At the last minute we realised that there wasn’t a single woman amongst the gathering of tributes. Typical, I know, and hideously late, but it only goes to prove that in Max’s company you were a singular figure. I’ve already taken the liberty of adding your name to the program. Please don’t take the lateness amiss. Things have been chaotic at this end, to put it bluntly.

  We gather at 10:45 at St John the Divine (on Amsterdam and 112th St).

  I enclose a selection of possible material, which may or may not prove helpful.

  Give me a ring before midnight on 212 427 6310. Or in the morning before 9.30.

  Until then.

  Yours as ever,

  James

  ps Amidst the chaos, I forgot to forward the enclosed. About your prime suspect. I think you’ll now agree that there was nothing there to go on.

  Helena read through the letter twice with a sinking feeling. This, on top of everything else. She skimmed through the pages of photocopied poems: a lot of Walt Whitman; fragments of Thoreau’s Walden. Finally, she was confronted by two sheets of paper headed by the name Adam Stephen Peters.

  Reluctant to read them, she put them down on the nighttable and prepared herself for bed. Only when she was ensconced beneath the cool sheets, did she pick them up again, her curiosity winning over her sense that the last thing she needed, now that the moment for detective work had passed, was to immerse herself in the story of Adam’s life.

  The top paragraph read like a shorthand entry from Who’s Who.

  B. Los Angeles, 1952. Father: Max Peters (b. Eberhardt), lawyer. Mother: Eva Levi Peters. Studies - Anthropology, UCLA (BA 1973); Stanford (PhD 1978). Fieldwork Amazon Brazil with Yanomamo Indians. University Posts: Berkeley, Princeton (Associate Professor). Mar. Samantha Grey, 1979. Div. 1982. 1 child Janey Augusta.

  There followed abstracts, summaries of publications and a brief note on links with Green issues: nothing evident either pro or contra though work with Yanomamo borders on rainforest preservation.

  Helena gazed at those three letters ‘Div’ with incomprehension and then started to laugh. The laugh was not unlike a cry. It echoed through her like great repeated gusts of wintry wind scattering the mouldiest leaves, revealing the naked brittle ground beneath. God she was a fool. Her archetypal duplicitous male was a figment of her own prejudices. Not Adam, but in his place, a type. A type to prevent her from feeling what she had begun to feel, a barricade against emotion, against risk, against a nascent need.

  Within that barricade she could be strong, independent, a woman without baggage. Pierce the barricade and she shored it up with whatever came to hand, the sticks and stones and cobbles of more prejudice, of principles, suspicion, doubt - created a demon, even a murderer, anything to push away the emotion which threatened the tightly constructed armour which was her self.

  But there were other selves than the smoothly functioning, well-oiled, quintessentially independent Helena Latimer. She had glimpsed them, even been forced to confront them over the last months. She couldn’t control those so well and they leapt at her from the dark - the little lost girl looking for a father; the frightened brutalized child at odds with a sexuality which could only be assumed when it was contained, controlled. The yearning woman whom Adam had somehow found, awakened from the sleep of the senses.

  With a shudder Helena switched off the light. In her mind
she relived her relationship with Adam, saw how at every turn she had misconstrued, had behaved rudely, stupidly. She started mentally to compose a letter to him. But there were no appropriate words.

  ‘I mistook you,’ she could say, ‘assumed you were married, were using me for a little light relief. I was too English or too stupid to ask.’

  The words were at once trite and not quite true and they had at their base the premise that he would care, would want to see her again; while it was quite clear to her that if the roles were reversed, she would be filled with contempt for a man who had been at once so presumptuous and so ungrateful.

  Helena slept. She dreamt.

  She was in a row-boat on a lake. The waters had the limpid clarity of turquoise. She could see the shore line, the droop of willows with cascading leaves. There was a figure on the shore. A tall man with tousled hair. He waved to her. She recognized him in the gesture. Adam. She reached for the oars, but they had vanished and a wind came up tossing the boat, carrying her in the other direction. The gusts grew fiercer, created a whirlpool. She was cold. Cold and wet. A hand was dragging her down. She was drowning. Max was down there. She could see his face. Bloated, ghastly. Terrible.

  Helena woke with a start. She was covered in perspiration. From the corners of the window blind, she saw a dim grey light. Suddenly a scene came to her from somewhere in her buried childhood. She must have been seven or eight. She had been sent home early from school for some reason. The house was quiet, seemed empty and she had walked up the stairs to her room to change. A voice beckoned from the bathroom. Dad.

  ‘It’s only me,’ she called back.

  He ordered her to him.

  He was lying in the bathtub, his hair shiny from the water, little droplets clinging to his face and chest. She had never seen him naked before, had never seen that pink glistening thing sticking up from his middle above the line of the water, had never seen that strange expression on his face.

  ‘Come in then. Time you had a wash,’ he said to her and when she demurred, he growled out the word, ‘Now!’

  She had undressed quickly, seen from the corner of her eye how his hand was round that stick. When she tried to find a space in the lukewarm water where their bodies didn’t touch, he pulled her down on top of him so that the stick was lying between her thighs, bright pink, throbbing, like the pig’s snout snuffling in the trough when they had gone to visit the zoo. She drew her legs together to shut out the sight of it, only to hear Dad moan as if she had hurt him. Then he went very still.

  She turned to look at him. His eyes were half closed, drowsy. There was something sticky on her thighs and scum rising to the surface of the water.

  Dad passed her the face cloth, leapt out of the tub. ‘Not a word about this to anyone, you hear? Not a word, or…’ With a lunge he pressed her face into the water, held it there until she was certain she was drowning.

  It was the drowning which had frightened her above anything else. The rest had made no particular sense until now.

  Helena glanced at the digital watch on the nighttable: 5.48. She rose slowly to shower the night off her. Odd, that that memory had come back to her now. As far as she could remember, nothing of the kind had passed between her and her foster father again.

  In retrospect, she realised that she had made certain she was never alone in the house with him. He was usually at work in any event. But he had never hit her, as far as she could recall, even though there had been bruising rows between him and Mom and he had walloped Billy over the ears often enough.

  By 6.15, Helena was sitting at the little desk and trying to decide if she should compose something for Max’s memorial service or read one of the passages James had chosen. She was rather taken aback at the notion that she was to act as the token woman. Perhaps that was what she had been to Max, the token woman in the monastic circle he had created. It had struck her as odd before, this lack of women, yet she hadn’t made much of it, only cherished her specialness.

  The thought had never before crossed her mind that Max might have been homosexual and now that it did, she rejected it. He seemed so far removed from things of the body, that the question didn’t raise itself with any credibility. He was old after all.

  But in the past, had there been anyone? Her preferred daydream took flight despite herself. Max and her mother, whoever she might have been. And after her mother, no one. Repentance. And redemption through asceticism.

  Suddenly Adam’s lecture came to mind, his attack on the language of loss and redemption, of sin and salvation. But Max belonged to that language.

  Helena began to write.

  ‘I first met Max Bergmann at a conference on the environment. He struck me as that rare thing: a being who was totally dedicated to, indeed a being who embodied, the very causes he stood for. He saw the planet as a vital organism, a vast feeling earth of which we humans were only one, if an important, part. Our role was to be its stewards, but more often we behaved as despoilers. And so Max flagellated us with the purist’s cudgel, but just as often, I suspect, he wielded it stringently at himself.

  ‘Over the years I came to see in him something of an ideal father, something of a saint…’

  Helena wrote for over an hour, attempting to capture the essence of her experience of and encounters with Max. Then she crossed out, redrafted, managing even to incorporate one of the shorter passages from Walt Whitman that James had provided her with.

  The great granite and stone interior of St. John the Divine reverberated with the mournful chords of Bach’s Adagio in D. The nave was a sea of strangers, men in impeccable suits, fresh faced youths, a smattering of elegant women, their brimmed hats shielding their eyes. Amongst their number in the front aisles, Helena recognized a few notables. She was grateful for James’s presence next to her, his familiarity in itself a solace.

  As the proceedings unfurled, tributes followed by music, followed by more tributes, Helena had a strange sense that Max was being taken away from her, becoming amorphous in the gathering tide of public respect. Her own comments, in comparison, seemed too personal, too intimate for this august gathering. But she persisted in them, her voice gathering in strength as the words she had written evoked Max’s presence for her and this in turn made her brave, confident.

  The words gone, so was he, dispersed into the great unfinished arches of the cathedral. Helena looked silently into the vast nave, found she was trembling, made her way back to her seat on shaky legs. In the sweep of music which followed she found herself feeling utterly alone, like a small child abandoned in a cavernous railway station; a child uncertain of its direction, afraid.

  The feeling lasted only for a moment. The service over, she was swept off by James, then by Rafael and a tangle of activity. But it left its residue, followed her home to London, to her house and her cats, made her aware that she now had to construct her life again stone by stone.

  Instead of going straight into the office, she worked in the garden. It was a maze of May colour. Bright crimson clusters of tulip, sweet-scented narcissi, vied with purple azalea and a late-flowering cherry. Helena weeded and trimmed and tied, willing thought away, until the labour dispersed it of its own accord. In mid-afternoon, she rode her bicycle to Kensington Park and jogged until she felt she would drop. Then she turned her attention to her interior, hoovering and washing, clearing tables and desks of paper and bills and envelopes, throwing away and filing.

  Order had to be created. A new order. With a little heave of the shoulders, she took a pristine blue folder, wrote the name Max Bergmann on it, and placed in it all his letters to her in chronological sequence, finishing with obituaries and finally the memorial service programme together with her own tribute. Only after she had done that, did she go to bed.

  The next morning, on her way to the office, she stopped in her favourite boutique on Kensington Church Street, found a dress in a vibrant electric blue with a matching fitted jacket, its shoulders slightly padded. She donned it straight away, pleased to
see a different Helena looking back at her, at least from the mirror.

  Her desk, when she arrived at the Paper, was a clutter of post and magazines. But on its corner stood a glass vase, crammed with white tulips. Next to it there was a bottle of champagne, a bow round its middle.

  Lynn and Carl hugged her in unison.

  ‘We thought you needed a little brightening up,’ Carl looked sheepish.

  ‘At least a little,’ Lynn chorused.

  ‘But don’t let it go to your head,’ Carl cleared his throat. ‘Editorial meeting, as soon as you’ve looked through your post.’

  ‘Yes Sir,’ Helena grinned. ‘Do I have five minutes or ten?’

  ‘Fifteen.’

  Helena began to sift the post quickly - the usual run of press releases, invites to press conferences and television screenings; a personal note from the Director of Friends of the Earth which accompanied a set of papers on Ozone depletion. At the bottom of the pile, there was a package which looked as if it might contain a book. It bore no stamps. Adam’s writing, Helena suddenly thought. Her heart skipped a beat. She tore it open with clumsy fingers.

  Inside, there was a loose-leaf folder and a letter. It didn’t bear her name or a signature and seemed to have been scrawled hastily.

  Since love’s logic is no longer in question, truth may as well prevail.

  I hoped to give you the enclosed in person, since I’m here for the opening of the German Art Show. But I’m told you’re away. I trust that’s not a euphemism.

  Whatever the case, once you’ve read the enclosed, I think you’ll understand why I may not have wanted to give it to you sooner or even at all. The sins of the fathers weigh more heavily on some than on others.

  The original of the enclosed arrived on the day before I learned of Max Bergmann’s death. It was addressed to ‘Max/ Seehafen. It is Max Bergmann’s journal.

  You know where I am should you wish to reach me.

  ‘Fifteen minutes, Helena,’ Carl’s voice interrupted the last line of the note. She put it down. A flash of foreboding prevented her from lifting the cover of the folder.