The priest paused again before going on. “What I’ve been waiting for …” He started over. “Well, as you can see, she’s sitting outside there. She’s safe, which is miracle enough for me. I’ve been at loose ends for years. There is one thing, though, that I still have to tie up.”
Phil waited for him to go on, but Colin had stopped talking again and was staring at the altar. Clearly he was struggling to say something. This reunion with Jen was apparently taking its toll on the old man’s emotions, which was a sad thing, given the long years that separated the two of them now. “You two were in love?” Phil said, trying to give him a hand.
The priest looked at him for a moment before responding. “Yes,” he said, “I guess we were. It’s more to the point to say that we were falling in love, I suppose, which isn’t the same thing as being in love. We were deprived of that.”
“I’m sorry,” Phil said.
“You shouldn’t be. Maybe our loss was your gain, as they say. And anyway, the sun set on our lives a long time ago. I’ve forgotten so much of it. … It’s our fate, I suppose, that we’re doomed to forget what we felt in our best moments. The past, especially the distant past, fades away like a dream. You seem to think that Jen wanted to find me out of love, but I think she was looking for a fragment of her past that hadn’t faded yet. Just something to hold onto, to steady herself while she catches her breath.”
“More than that, I think. You’re selling yourself short.”
He glanced meaningfully at Phil. “In fact I’m not. I wasn’t entirely true to Jen, you know. There was another woman, to put it bluntly. Jen’s aware of that, by the way.”
“I suppose that’s your business,” said Phil uncomfortably.
“It’s your business, too. The other woman was your mother.”
The priest held him with his eyes now.
“Even when I was in love with Jen, I wasn’t true to her in my heart. I wish I could say that I haunted that well all these years in hopes of regaining my one true love, but part of my obsession was simple guilt. I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s true.”
“There’s a lot I don’t know about my mother,” Phil said.
“She told you nothing about your father. You and Marianne?”
Phil was surprised to hear him speak his sister’s name. “No,” Phil said, “not much. I got the impression there were hard feelings. All I knew is that he’d gone away, really. I never knew him at all.”
The priest nodded. “And you didn’t … despise him. You didn’t hate him?”
“If I didn’t know him, how could I?”
“For leaving?”
“Who knows why people leave.”
“I don’t think I’ve made myself clear,” Colin said, and he sat for a time, looking away, until Phil began to wonder if the old man had lost the thread of the conversation. He glanced at his face and saw a puzzled sadness in it.
The priest sighed, put his hand on Phil’s knee, and said without looking at him, “You’re my son, Phil. Your mother and I … you’re my son.”
49
“AND THAT’S ME on the left,” Colin said, pointing to the daguerreotype. “And this man is Alejandro Solas—Alex to his friends, of which he didn’t have many. I don’t suppose he had any when he died. This was the front porch of May’s house, your ancestral home, I guess you could say. It was torn down in 1942, during the war.”
It was hard for Phil to keep his mind from wandering. With a suddenness that shocked him, he knew that he had never really been indifferent to his father’s absence at all. What he had said a moment ago hadn’t been true. He had simply boxed up his anger and confusion and put it away. On one occasion in his life he had considered the idea of trying to find his father, although he had never even known his name, and when his mother had died, that information had died with her. He had no aunts or uncles to call, no mutual friends or relatives. His own last name was his mother’s property, not his father’s. And so the idea of knowing his father had merely been an interesting mental game, and his interest in it had dwindled in the years since his mother had gone.
He glanced out through the open door again, and saw that Jen was no longer sitting on the bench. He could see her in the distance, walking in the gardens. The last few minutes had changed his life utterly. A week ago he had been alone, his life routine, the past neatly organized and stowed away in a tower somewhere and padlocked. It was easy enough to live like a monk when the world lived somewhere else. But apparently the world would find you sooner or later, no matter how tightly the doors and windows are locked. And now the world—past, present, and future—had risen roundabout him once again, with its regrets and its dreams and, surprisingly, its hope. And not only his own past, but the entangled pasts of his mother and his father and now of the woman who walked in the sunlit gardens of this tranquil old mission.
“I don’t know how to … justify anything,” Colin told him, handing him back the photograph. “But I can tell you what happened if you’ll let me.”
“Yes,” Phil said. “I want to know. But I’m curious about something. Did you ever, you know, look in at us, at Marianne and me, even from a distance?”
“Often.”
Phil nodded. His throat constricted, and he found that there was far more sorrow in him than anger. “Go ahead and talk,” he said.
“Your mother and I weren’t married—I guess I should start there. Of course I hadn’t really thought of becoming a priest. Not seriously. When I found her again, after we parted, we were both alone in a strange world, her particularly. You and Marianne were … were the result of our comforting each other, I guess I would say. As I said, Jeanette knows this, because I just told her. My only defense for my behavior is to say that I loved your mother in my way. I was lonely, and I had despaired of finding Jeanette. On the night that you were conceived, an act of violence occurred for reasons almost too complicated to explain now. A man was shot and killed, another traveler. It was Alejandro Solas, and I can tell you that if he hadn’t been shot, it’s possible that he himself would have killed me—your mother, too, for that matter.
“May, your mother, was appalled by the violence. She was appalled by our having betrayed Jen, or Jen’s memory, by making love. And it turned out, of course, that she was unwed and pregnant in a world which was unsympathetic and foreign to her. She couldn’t live with me, nor did she want that. I stayed … hidden, watching the old well, waiting to finish what I’d begun so badly, so ineptly, so many years ago. If Jeanette hadn’t come to us this season, I wouldn’t have seen it through to the end, and that would have been hard. I don’t know what I would have done. Meeting my granddaughter changed everything, though. I didn’t expect that. I’ve been anticipating this meeting between you and me, though, wondering what would come of it, of us.”
“Granddaughter?” Phil asked, momentarily confused.
“Betsy. She’s full of spark, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is. I’m still a little dazed, I think. I didn’t know who you meant at first.” This was another adjustment, another sudden clarification. Betsy had a grandfather, both of them had family.
The priest gestured now, taking in the chapel, the mission. “This has been a good place to conceal myself, I suppose you could say. I was drawn to the priesthood as a young man, and the best thing that I could have done would have been to follow my inclinations from the start. May wasn’t anxious for me to be a part of your lives, which was hard. But maybe I was too easily persuaded to stay away, to simply wait here for a chance to help right some of the wrongs I’d caused.”
“Weren’t you tempted sometimes to let us know, me and Marianne?”
“Unbelievably tempted. When you were young your mother took you to play at Irvine Park on Sunday afternoons. You remember that?”
Phil nodded.
“I used to watch from some distance away. I think your mother knew I haunted the place. We only talked about it once. She and I rarely communicated in those years. I believe th
at if Jen had come through back then, say in 1969, which was a high-water year, the three of us might have come to terms with what had happened. But if you let things go on too long, there turns out to be nothing to come to terms with. Broken things have to be repaired quickly, or else the pieces get lost. I don’t mean to excuse anything, by saying that, but that’s what happened. Time passed, I guess you could say.”
There was another silence now while Phil tried to come up with something to say. But the truth was that he had grown up not knowing a father, which was a different thing from having known a father and lost him. The place in him that his father should have occupied was merely dark, and if he felt anything, he felt cheated.
Still, he found that he couldn’t summon any anger. He liked this man, whom he still couldn’t think of as his father. Maybe in time he would. He had quickly begun to think of Betsy as his daughter rather than as his niece. Being thrown together in the world brought that about. And yet when his mother and this man were thrown together, it hadn’t brought about anything but separation.
He recalled what Jen had said about regret, and what his father had said about waiting, and he said softly, “I think I understand you.”
“Do you forgive me?”
Phil nodded. “Yes,” he said. “We’ve wasted a lot of time, though.”
“Thank you. Yes, we have.”
Jen stood in the doorway now, and Phil gestured for her to come in, and the three of them talked—about the past, about Appleton’s glass curio and how it resulted in the upheaval in so many lives, about the dead man buried beneath the floor of the garage, about how Phil’s father had finally dug up the man’s bones and reburied them in the mission cemetery.
“I believe that the man who shot Alex was Hale Appleton,” Colin said, “although I have no proof. He too became a traveler, in order to pursue the memory of his own lost daughter. For years I hadn’t any sympathy for him, but I see things slightly differently now. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten less enthusiastic about playing the judge, I guess you might say. He’s quite capable of killing you, though, in order to get what he wants. He killed Alex to prevent him from getting it. Elizabeth Kelly works for him, of course.”
Phil nodded.
“She’s a very attractive young woman, but I doubt that she’s told you the whole truth about her interest in you and the property.”
“I doubt that she’s ever told the whole truth to anyone about anything,” Phil said.
“You haven’t seen the last of her,” Colin told him. “Appleton will suspect that you have his glass curio, his daughter’s memory, now that Jen has come through at last. How he’ll react, I can’t say, but he won’t be inclined to believe anything we tell him, especially not me. When you see Miss Elizabeth Kelly again, you might be wise simply to level with her. We might avoid some surprises that way.”
WHEN PHIL AND Jen had gone, Colin went out into the gardens. It was nearly dusk, and the rain had apparently been falling off and on, although there was no rain now. He walked in the shadows of the trees, smelling the rainy evening air and the wet vegetation. The orange trees were blooming, and the air was full of the smell of orange blossom. He had felt lucky only twice in the last fifty years, once when May had arrived, and then again when he had found Jen. But now he felt lucky again. His days of waiting on the weather were over, and for once in his life he was looking forward to the sunshine. There were things that he hadn’t told Phil, things that he would take to his grave. He said a few words to the silent afternoon, but the only reply was the sound of the wind in the trees.
At the southeast edge of the county park there was a little stand of oak trees with long, low limbs. Years ago he had watched Phil ride on those limbs, teeter-tottering with trees, and he wondered if Phil remembered that part of his childhood, or if it was lost to him. Betsy was still young enough to teeter-totter with a tree. That was something he would introduce her to at the first opportunity.
Colin had driven into the park yesterday. On a weekday it was almost deserted. He had been surprised to find that it was largely unchanged from what he remembered. A fire had swept through the park in the 1980s, burning low and fast, destroying buildings and meadows, but sparing the trees. The hardy chaparral plants had grown up again, even more luxuriant than before, and the county had rebuilt the snack bar and the zoo and the boathouse out of river rock and rough-hewn timbers, in a craftsman style that recalled the early years of the century. The old-style buildings had lent a rare sense of disconnected timelessness to the narrow valley along the Santiago Creek, with its trees and its meadows. He thought of Jen, recalling how they had gone out there with a picnic on just such a deserted day a month before the trouble with Alex had begun, and he felt the pang of regret for that past time, when the world was new and full of promise.
Swept with a wave of nostalgia, he went into his office now, in back of the chapel. On his desk lay the trinket that he had picked up by the well at the old Ainsworth place on that last rainy night, after Jen was safe and his work was essentially through. He had already held it in his bare hand in a moment of weakness, afterwards telling himself that he would return it to her. Today he hadn’t returned it to her, although he had no real desire to hold it again.
At first glance it had appeared to be a piece of flower-shaped stone, something like a chunk of desert rose, but its petals were more distinctly petals than the heavy stone petals of desert rose, and its color was a translucent pink, like blood in water. The trinket contained a memory of himself as much as of her, which had been uppermost on his mind when he had first held it. There was something in the mere look of it that suggested it was a memory of the heart, so to speak, but he knew it was safer to live with his own notions of their love than to look too closely into an image of that love itself. But it was the only part of Jen that he would ever have, and he had closed his hand over it anyway.
He had found himself in Jen’s mind, in that grove of sycamores, near the well. There was lonely wind in the trees, and it was chilly, and the afternoon was full of unhappy anticipation. He had forgotten that part, the un-happiness in the air. In that living memory he heard himself speaking, talking of the importance of returning the curio to the church, as if he were engaged in a holy mission. There was something in his voice, though, that was too sincere, as if he was trying to convince himself as well as everyone else, and there came into his mind, or rather into Jen’s mind, a rising note of falsity that overwhelmed the rest of what he said, until Jen turned her mind away from him unhappily and thought of other things, and the memory of that afternoon faded like a played-out song.
He had dropped the trinket, which had seemed to have grown hot in his hand. What he had seen in the memory was his own evident weakness, which Jen herself had mentally and physically turned away from. There was no real point now in returning the trinket to her. She wouldn’t thank him for it. It was a fragment of a past better left buried. He picked the flower up with a gloved hand and walked from the office back into the chapel, where he unlocked the side door and descended the stairs into the darkness, hearing the sound of flowing water on the cool and musty air.
50
BETSY WATCHED MRS. Darwin knock on the antiques shop door, then stand back in order to look at the posted hours. She bent over, shouted, “Is anybody there?” through the mail slot, and then yanked on the door handle, rattling the door in its frame. She put her face to the window, cupping her hands across her forehead, and then hollered through the mailbox again. “They’re in there,” she told Betsy. “Two of them. They’re having some kind of argument, apparently. They haven’t seen an argument yet.”
Betsy glanced around in embarrassment, looking to see if anyone was watching. “Here he comes,” Mrs. Darwin said. An old bearded man approached the door, nodding and smiling. He opened it, standing aside to let them in. Betsy followed Mrs. Darwin into the shop, which was dim despite the sunlight outside and lamps that burned everywhere in the store. The place was an absolute clutter o
f stuff, piled so deeply in hutches and bookcases and on shelves that half of the merchandise was hidden from view.
Betsy had the sudden impression that she had entered a place of shadows, a place that reminded her of the high room in the water tower. And there was something in the air, a familiar pressure, a smell like rainfall on a dry street, that she identified almost immediately. Whether her inkwell was in the shop she couldn’t say, but there was something similar here. Elizabeth herself was nowhere to be seen.
The old man, leaving them to look around, walked back behind the counter and into a glass-walled office where he picked up a box off the floor and set it on a wooden desk. Betsy walked to the counter and looked to see what was in the box. The desk lamp illuminated it, revealing a handful of small objects. They were things like her inkwell. She could tell by looking at them, but her inkwell wasn’t among them. Mrs. Darwin rapped her knuckles on the counter.
The old man looked up, apparently startled, and then hurried out from behind the counter again. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I assumed that you’d want to have a browse.”
“We didn’t come to browse,” Mrs. Darwin said. “Where’s the woman who was in the store a moment ago?”
“She’s gone out, I’m afraid. Perhaps I can help you with something?”
“We’re looking for an inkwell. An old glass inkwell. It looks like the devil, like it’s been through Hades and back. The woman you were arguing with a moment ago has it, and we want it.”
“This was something she offered to sell you?” He frowned, as if he couldn’t make out why Mrs. Darwin was apparently upset.
Betsy wandered back toward the door, looking out at the street, at the fountain sparkling in the momentary sunshine. It was getting on toward evening, and she wondered how long till it was dark.
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