by Ruth Wind
They ordered—a thick roast-beef sandwich, French fries and a cola for Mike, a spinach salad and hot tea for Heather. As the waitress departed, Heather remarked, "I met a someone on the train who was even more disgusting than you are in his addiction to sugar."
"Oh?"
Heather held up her hands and leaned over the table. "He drank cherry Kool-Aid for breakfast. Almost a quart of it. And he put three or four teaspoons of sugar in a cup of coffee."
Mike lifted his eyebrows and took a long swallow of his soda. "Who was this person?"
"Just a fellow traveler," she answered lightly. "It was nice to have someone to talk to," she went on casually, hoping to underplay her reaction to Ben. "The train was stalled for hours."
"Oh? How'd you pass all those long hours?"
"We played backgammon, as a matter of fact. He was an excellent player."
"What was this mysterious man's name, and when will you see him again?"
"Honestly, Mike. He was a stranger on a train. I'm sure I'll never see him again. But you might have heard of him. He writes Western novels."
"Oh yeah? What's his name?"
"Ben Shaw. I hadn't ever heard of him, but I don't read Westerns."
Mike's mouth dropped open a bit. "You met Ben Shaw on the train?"
"You know his books, then?"
"Yeah." Mike grinned and shifted in his seat. His blue eyes glinted. "I'm impressed, little sister. He's said to be quite a ladies' man."
Heather frowned. "He didn't seem like that type. He was a gentleman."
"Good. If he spent more than an hour in your company, he's done better than any other man in the last three years."
"It wasn't like that," Heather protested, but a little sting of color belied her words as she thought of the silky texture of Ben's hair and the feel of his full, sensual mouth upon hers. She swallowed to regain her composure.
Surprisingly, Mike let the subject drop with a tact that was rare for him. "Let's go over the numbers for the play. I've got the final-week jitters."
Heather appeased his doubts, as she did each season, with each play. By Friday afternoon, he would be a bear, roaring around the set, picking at costumes, scrubbing at nonexistent stains on the scenery and the floor. When the first applause sounded, he would visibly relax, and by the end of the evening his mood would be expansive and warm, and he would throw a party for the entire cast in his rambling Victorian home. It had been at just such a party that Heather had first met James. He'd been sitting in a window seat alone, as the party ebbed and flowed around him. That was a little over six years ago.
Resolutely Heather pushed the memory away and concentrated on stilling Mike's anxieties about the production.
Mike, for once, honestly felt no last-minute jitters. This whole play had a charmed air about it—the costumes and sets had fallen together perfectly. No one had canceled at the last minute, and all seven performances were selling out, three days before the first night. He voiced his usual worries and let Heather soothe him in order to give her time to let Ben Shaw recede from the conversation. As Mike thought of the name again, it took all his self-control to keep a grin the size of the Grand Canyon from spreading across his face. Ben Shaw, by damn! He nearly chortled over the delightful irony of it.
After lunch, Heather left Mike at the theater and walked downtown. She picked up some birdseed at a pet store and some tea at a specialty shop, then browsed and window-shopped down Fourth Street. On impulse, she stopped in a bookstore.
She wasn't sure what she was in the mood for, but after her rehearsal a long evening stretched ahead. Something engrossing and involving, she decided. No literature with dark themes or troubling messages or convoluted styles that would require careful unraveling, although she did read such books for the mental exercise. She paused at a collection of Longfellow's poetry and hesitated. Nope. Too thoughtful. She headed for the popular paperbacks and lingered there, picking up several and then restlessly deciding against them. She wandered down the aisle. A historical romance? She pursed her lips and skimmed the titles. Too many moments of longing, she decided. Heaven knew she had enough of her own.
When she found herself standing before the Western titles, she knew why she'd wandered into the book shop. She felt foolish standing there in front of all the melodramatic titles and briefly wondered what she would do if someone she knew saw her there. She would lie, she decided—say they were for a friend of hers.
There were more of Ben's novels in the racks than she'd expected, and their covers weren't the same as the others. Instead of featuring Indians with war-painted faces or rough-looking cowboys, the covers of Ben's books often showed a single item or a simple landscape: a carved pipe hung with feathers on an embossed cover; a hide tepee in a snowy forest grove; a horse with ribbons in its mane; a field of cultivated crops with a hoe standing alongside. As she viewed these covers, Heather felt a ripple of excitement touch her and she licked her bottom lip.
Her impulse was to buy all of them and take them home to review, one by one. That seemed somehow dangerous, though she didn't probe too closely into the reasons. She wasn't quite sure whether she was more afraid of liking or disliking the Ben that would leak through his words.
After mulling over the selection, she picked two of the novels—the one with the tepee in the snow and the one with the farm scene. They were titled respectively A Christmas Tale and Finding the Circle. Intrigued, she carried them to the counter.
"Oh, you're in for a treat," the male clerk commented as he noted her choices. "These two are a couple of his best."
"Really? Have you read many?"
"Every one, I bet. I met him, too, when he signed his books here. He's a nice man."
Heather smiled. "Really? I'll look forward to my evenings this week, then."
"We have a lot more back there when you're done with those."
"Thank you." Heather smiled and picked up her sack. On the way out, she realized she'd forgotten to say the books weren't for her.
After the rehearsal and a light dinner, she settled down with her purchases. Amadeus flew to the coffee table at her feet, whistled merrily for a moment, then quieted as she began to read.
A Christmas Tale was a fictionalized account of the massacre at Wounded Knee four days after Christmas, 1890, told from the point of view of a Dakota Indian youth on the brink of manhood. The scenes were rich with descriptive detail and with the growing romance between the young man and a girl in his tribe. Heather read eagerly, unaware of the passing hours, engrossed in the flow of Ben's writing. The tape she'd put on as background music clicked off without her noticing; her tea grew cold. Amadeus flew back to his cage, tucked his head under his wing and went to sleep next to Peter. And still Heather read, horror mounting as she began to understand what would happen.
When the violence did occur, with soldiers firing on the tribe, the brutal scene was gruesomely described. Heather felt ill with it and threw the book down in disgust—it was unnecessary, she fumed as she stomped into the kitchen, to provide every grisly detail. If all Ben's books contained that kind of violence, she wouldn't read them.
She put the kettle on for more tea and dumped her cold cup, pushing the ugly scenes to the back of her mind. And yet, even as she puttered, she felt the evocative pull of the novel like a spell over her senses, thought of the gentle Indian narrator and his passion, his love for his tribe and the land and his woman. Surely he had to survive if he was telling the story, Heather hoped. Would his woman? What would happen then? She glanced over her shoulder into the living room at the book on the couch. The war scene echoed along her nerves painfully. Since James's death, she'd refused even to read newspapers unless it was the women's section or the comics.
The water began to boil. Heather made another cup of tea and carried it into the living room. She saw her sleeping birds and ignored stereo and smiled to herself. It was a good book; she couldn't deny that. He wrote well—better than he'd led her to expect, with his casual attitude, and she
liked what she could glimpse of the man through his work. She bit her lip as she paused in the middle of the room, her tea in hand. The violence might bring her nightmares back—but it might already be too late to prevent them. If the book had a redeeming end, maybe it would help allay those ugly dreams.
She was really so involved, she couldn't put the book away; that was the trouble. With a grimace of resignation, she set the tea on the coffee table, covered the birdcage, turned the tape over, and then, with a sigh, sat down to finish the novel.
The narrator did make it, and his woman with him, but so many of the other main characters were killed that Heather found herself weeping copiously, with an ache in her chest over the diminished lives of the people Ben had created with such grace and empathy. She was filled with unbearable sadness as she cried, burying her face in the couch.
Then, somehow, her tears were no longer being shed for the fictional creations of a stranger who had been kind to her, but for the flesh-and-blood personage of James. With an acuity she tried to avoid, she saw his face before her, with its clear blue-green eyes, the hollowness below his cheekbones, the strong nose and fine blond hair. She saw it as it had been in laughter, the night she'd first met him, flirting and playing with her. She wept in self-pity for the love she had lost; wept, too, for James himself and the sensitivity that had been his undoing.
Eventually her tears burned themselves out, and she fell asleep.
The nightmare began as always, with a cold November evening. Heather hurried home from a class she'd been teaching. All around her, brown leaves fluttered to the ground. As she drove, she took pleasure in the colors of the leaves contrasting against the gray sky, and beyond, in the steel mill rising in black and snaky splendor like a finger of the past, its stacks smokeless because of layoffs. An insight about her composition on the steel mill struck her in the sudden way of creative thoughts, and when she reached the house, she ran to the little study she kept in an alcove of her bedroom to scribble some notes.
That done, she called out to James with high pleasure, wanting to share her news.
Here the dream shifted. The hallway between her bedroom and the workroom where James made the square cedar chests that made him his living stretched into a harrowingly long tunnel, with the door to his room at the end slightly ajar. Heather walked and walked and walked, and never got any closer to the door. She called James, and the deep silence of the house echoed in her ears, becoming a roar. "James!" she cried. "James!" Her hand fell on the crystal doorknob, then Heather jerked awake, awash in sweat.
She sat up shakily and covered her face with her hands. The old, familiar guilt that she'd failed the person that she loved the most hung in her chest—a thudding ache that went too deep to be released through tears. She sighed and got up.
In the bathroom she washed her face with cool water, then looked at herself in the mirror. For a few days, she'd actually begun to think of herself as a normal person again. The freedom had been heady and delicious, but she knew now that she wasn't normal, and that if she ever tried to forget, her dreams would surely remind her. Ben, for all his kindness and his own background of pain, couldn't release her from this prison.
Even if he could, the very fact of his background would force Heather to back away. Her conscience wouldn't allow her to become involved again with a veteran who carried scars she obviously wasn't equipped to soothe or handle.
* * *
Chapter Six
« ^ »
Thursday, Heather found it difficult to concentrate. She had a round of private lessons to teach to grade-school children—a task she ordinarily enjoyed. This morning, her mood was infected with both the nightmare and the spell of Ben's book. She would start a lesson, begin with the child playing the piece he was to have practiced over the last week, and something about the sky would call up a scene from the book. Heather would no longer be herself, but a Dakota boy, in love and at peace with the world. Like any good book, Ben's had left behind its aura.
The other aura—one that tangled with the other—was completely different. All day, she found herself caught in the ugly cycle of what if? What if she hadn't put so much energy into her work and had done more for James? What if she'd left his memories and pain alone to heal by themselves rather than pushing into his life like an angry marauder? What if she'd been better prepared to deal with the horror of his wartime experience? What if she hadn't been so shocked at his confessions?
I could have adjusted, she thought. He didn't give me a chance.
The dress rehearsal for the play was held at five-thirty. When Heather arrived, cold and irritated by the entire day, a stage hand gave her a small package. "What's this?" Heather asked.
"A messenger delivered it. He said you should have it today."
She frowned and looked the package over. It was wrapped simply, in brown paper, with her name scrawled over the front in a slanting, spidery hand. "Did he say who sent it?"
"Sorry."
Intrigued and puzzled, Heather carried the package to her small dressing room, where the costume she was to wear for the play had been hung. At the sight of it, she felt a little of her moodiness lift. How could anyone maintain a depressed attitude wearing a dress like that? She brushed the lush velvet with her open palm and smiled.
Sitting down at the dressing table, she opened the small package carefully. When the brown paper had been removed, a white box remained, still giving no clue to its origin. She lifted the flaps to find a wad of tissue paper, and she poked around with one finger, searching for the contents. Finally she encountered something small and hard and cold, and she drew it out: a ring.
It was made of delicate cast silver. Heather held it up in wonderment. Wound around the ring was a circle of dancing elves, molded in such perfect detail that a single knee and leg of one of the elves was even extended free. She touched the tiny leg in amazement. It was the work of a skilled and playful artist. Who could have sent it?
She did occasionally receive presents from members of an audience, although they came after she'd performed. One had never come before a show.
"Hurry up, everyone!" Mike called from the hallway. "We're about ready."
Hurriedly, Heather tried to slip the ring on one of her fingers. The only place it fit was on the third finger of her left hand, so she moved her wedding ring to her right hand and put the elves on her left. Then she quickly undressed and donned her costume.
Halfway through, she had to call for the seamstress to help her lace up the dress. "Good thing these women all had ladies' maids," she joked when Rose joined her.
Rose agreed. "But they'd never heard of zippers in those days, so count your blessings."
The dress rehearsal went well, and afterward Heather headed home. It hadn't been intentional, but when she'd played that evening, her fingers on the guitar had found the most melancholy chords. She had no appetite and no desire to sleep. Around her, the house echoed hollowly. For one brief moment, she thought of selling it and reinvesting, of living somewhere else. This house had too many memories—both good and bad. Sometimes the very air seemed to be infected with the past.
This thought made her feel even guiltier. At the very least, she could hang on to the house that had meant so much to James. It was a small thing and the only thing she had left to give.
* * *
The first showing of Twelfth Night was to be performed on Halloween—a fact that had worried a number of people involved in the production. There had been no way to exchange the times with those of other events scheduled at the arts center, so reluctantly Mike had agreed to keep the date. He peeked out at the gathering crowd Friday night with renewed hope. As he scanned the faces of the well-dressed audience, he was gratified to see a wide range of people—not only the usual core of wealthy, white supporters in their forties and fifties, but a generous sprinkling of youthful and brown-to-black faces, as well. The audience was animated, calling and chatting in the aisles, admiring one another's finery and catching up on go
ssip. Mike nodded to himself. Perhaps, after seven years, he was beginning to build a name for himself and his troupe. The lights dimmed slightly and he hurried into the hallways of dressing rooms below the ascending seats.
"Is everybody ready?" he called, clapping his hands. A flurry of yeses reached him. He checked to confirm the reality of their claims, then, with clammy hands, brushed the costume he wore for effect. He ran onstage and called to one of the flower girls selling long-stemmed roses to the audience. "Lady, be so kind as to carry a rose to my wife." The audience loved it. A good sign.
Now his only worry was Heather. He ran to her dressing room to find her fully costumed, looking spectacularly right for the period in her breathtaking velvet gown. Her long golden braid was wrapped with pearls and more velvet. "You look fabulous," he cried, kissing her cheek. "I wish you would think of taking a small part in one of these plays. No one looks more Shakespearean than you do."
She smiled dutifully, but under the makeup she was pale, and her movements were mechanical. Nightmares again, he thought. He would bet on it. For the thousandth time, he cursed his brother. Mike had hoped that the meeting with Ben Shaw would chase away some of Heather's self-doubt, cancel her long punishment. He'd glimpsed a new light in her eyes over lunch the other day—a light that was now gone.
Heather leaned into the mirror, mentally rehearsing the first chords of the opening piece. She adjusted the heavy cast-silver tree that hung from a strong silver chain around her neck. It had come that afternoon by messenger to the arts center. Again, there had been no note—just the gnarled tree, magnificently designed. In spite of the mystery of its origin, she couldn't resist wearing it. "Are you sure you didn't send this, Michael?"
"It wasn't me, I swear." He grinned through his beard. "You must have a secret admirer."
She nodded thoughtfully. The three-inch tree had the same kind of artistic detail and spirit as the ring she'd received the day before. She bit her lip as a fragment of conversation came back to her. Ben had called her Titania. Could he have sent the spectacular jewelry?
