by Kate Walbert
Sterling’s breathing was labored; his words seemed to drift out of him and rise to the ceiling, pop. He was telling me what he believed I did not understand: that in fact I had just this day met Randall’s true mother and that Randall had never known. But of course I knew different. Randall and I would often read the letters that Randall had found in his father’s study: the few Ruby had sent from Virginia during what she called her unexpected sabbatical, and the one she mailed from Paris months earlier. Randall had included that letter in his package to me, folding it so neatly inside The Gardens of Kyoto that it was days before I discovered it—its lines perfect, as if they’d been traced with a ruler; the embossed crest of the Parisian hotel above the date. That letter he stole from his father’s locked tobacco box, I knew; The Gardens of Kyoto Ruby had sent to him on his thirteenth birthday, enclosed with a card. Dear son, it read, you have reached the age of truth.
The line he knew by heart, the rest of the note unimportant, he said. She had begged him never to tell Sterling, saying it would kill him; she had sent the book because it was partially addressed to him, because the illustrations were beautiful, because it had been given to her by a man she had met on a passage to Paris when she felt entirely lonely.
Randall burned the card almost as soon as it arrived; he kept the book, he told me, because it would have been a sin to burn that, too.
But should I tell Sterling? Should I reveal that yes, Randall knew, had known for some time? This is what kept me distracted. Should I divulge Randall’s secret, as Sterling, now, divulged his own to me?
“I imagine I resented the boy somewhat. I blamed him, after Jeannette’s death, for keeping me from Ruby. This was not intentional, but I believe it is how I felt. And I wish I could talk to him about it.”
Perhaps it was then that I noticed; perhaps it was later, just before Sterling snuffed the candle and we crawled out, single file. The point is I saw, as I’m sure Randall intended me to see, on the wall where Randall had written the date of his birth how he had returned to scrawl the year of his death, 1945. I don’t know what guided Randall to write in those four numbers, unyielding, heavy, random as any of the other numbers on the walls and yet somehow not. He had known. He had deemed it so, somehow, and it puzzled me then as it puzzles me now: what he was thinking; what he intended with this to show me.
· Book Two ·
1
I met your father on a cold fall day in late October, at a football game I had been invited to by another boy, Charles, who I knew while at college and liked well enough, in the way girls liked boys well enough to go to football games or dances or to Philadelphia for dinner. In those days you dated boys who were nice, or handsome. When they picked you up, they walked to the door and knocked; they came inside to meet the housemother and your best friends, if your best friends were downstairs waiting to see them. They chewed gum and offered you a stick; they had shined their shoes and wore pressed, crisp shirts and ties.
Charles was exactly that: another nice boy. He had just graduated from Annapolis and wore the standard ensign uniform: a deep navy blue, with thin lapels, and well-shined buttons, and a hat, of course. I can’t remember why he had entered the Navy. We probably didn’t talk about it. You didn’t talk about careers then in the way you do now: you simply tried to have fun. The war was over; the boys were home.
He took me to the Army-Navy football game. I understand now this must have meant a lot to him. He brought me a mum with blue and gold ribbons and slipped his arm through my coat to escort me down the campus walk. I wore heels, no doubt, and white gloves. I’m sure I had bothered with a hat and a hat pin, and had a scarf tucked around my neck. This was 1951. Girls were neat.
His friend was due to pick us up on the corner and we stood, a bit awkward in the cold. Charles had a flask of something tucked inside his Navy coat and he offered me a sip. I shook my head, though I wouldn’t have minded. Girls I knew passed by and stopped to chat; Charles continued to sip from his flask, and by the time his friend arrived his face, including his ears, exaggerated by the thin strap of his hat and the regulation crewcut, were bright red with drink and frost and perhaps the anticipation of the game.
I had been to a few football games with other boys, though I was not aware of the importance of this particular rivalry. We piled into the car, Charles in front with his friend, me in back with the friend’s date. She was a girl from Bryn Mawr who immediately told me she couldn’t believe she had taken the afternoon off for this, that she had a Russian history paper due Monday morning and that her advisor, a professor such and such whose name I believe she expected me to recognize, had nominated her for the department prize and that if the paper were no good she hadn’t a chance in hell to win it, and she had been working all semester, hell, she said, she had been working all year, all her goddamn life, to win the goddamn award because how was she going to afford graduate school without a fellowship and how would she get a fellowship without some kind of honors?
I had no answer to that. I can see me now, vacant and shrugging.
“Anyway,” she said, turning away from me, back to the window, “I told him yes. Bill, I mean.” She thumbed in Bill’s direction. “So what can I do?”
Bill seemed friendly enough, a likely counterpart to Charles, who I saw now had more of a wild streak than I had anticipated. I began to feel a bit uncomfortable in the backseat with Bill’s disgruntled date; Charles now drinking from Bill’s flask as well as his own. The familiar drive along the Main Line seemed precarious in a way that mocked my earlier anticipation. I had been eager to see the changing leaves, to perhaps stop somewhere for cider. I even thought of suggesting it. Now I said nothing, my gloved hands in my lap.
“So, you’re a liberal arts major, right? What’s the name of that school again?”
“Saint Mary’s,” I said.
“I’ve heard of it. Small, right? Specializing in the men of the surrounding area. Finding them, I mean. Husband hunting.”
She laughed, her teeth large and slightly yellow. She was not a particularly attractive girl, though she did have beautiful eyes, grayish, that seemed oddly horrified by the words coming out of her mouth. I understand now she couldn’t help it; in those days to be a girl interested in Russian history was not an easy thing to be at all.
“English literature,” I said.
“What?”
“English literature. That’s my major.”
“Oh,” she said. She turned and stared at me. “And what are you going to do with that?”
“Perfect the art of dramatic presentation,” I said, mostly to myself, though I believe I might have won her over then. Or maybe she just got tired. She slunk back in the seat and pulled her wool coat over her legs. The boys in the front seat seemed to have entirely forgotten us, and we both turned and looked out our windows. In truth, the changing leaves were beautiful. We were driving through older neighborhoods, the houses paint bare, porches sagging. Men were out raking leaves, women, God knows where. A few yards had harvest displays, pumpkins and dried corn stalks. The day seemed newly washed; our spirits should have been lifted.
“How did we find our way here?” she said, turning back to me.
“What do you mean?”
“These morons. Some goddamn football game. I should be in the library, or in bed for God’s sake.” She looked at me.
“What’s your name?” I asked, because in truth I had not paid attention.
“Daphne,” she said. “Like the laurel tree.” And of course I had no idea.
• • •
Daphne and I became great friends. I’m not sure how this happened, except for the fact that the game was a disaster and we had no one else to talk to. By the time we reached the stadium parking lot both Bill and Charles were drunk. They weaved their way through the tailgating parties until they found their friends, all recent graduates of Annapolis. The men were singing Navy songs, girls like extra scarves around their necks. Daphne and I sat on two coolers and smoked ciga
rettes one after the other. She told me that she actually believed her Russian history professor was in love with her, which was perfectly wonderful since she was in love with him.
“Madly,” she said.
Of course he had a young wife and a couple of children and it was doomed. “Doomed,” she said. “Bill is my attempt at getting out in the world.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked at me, her gray eyes darkening against the clear afternoon.
“Have you ever been in love?” she said, in a way that sounds silly, now, but then seemed like the kind of question that only a girl studying Russian history at Bryn Mawr could come up with, a girl with gray eyes and big teeth and a way of constantly pulling her coat more tightly around her knees.
“Once,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Maybe?” she said. “Then you haven’t, of course. The thing about love is that there is no maybe. If you have to say maybe you have no idea what I’m talking about. No idea whatsoever. I mean, there’s no maybe with Professor Taylor. Gideon. That’s his name, for Christ’s sake. Gideon. I mean, even his name is perfect. And there’s nothing he doesn’t know, and he wears this sweater. I mean this sweater somebody must have made for him or something. His wife, for Christ’s sake. Maybe she knitted it when she was goddamn pregnant or before they got married or something. Anyway, this sweater is brown with these big green diamonds all over it. I mean, it is the ugliest sweater you’ve ever seen. Terrible. And it fits him all wrong. One sleeve is shorter than the other and the neck is too big and I think it’s even unraveling somewhere and he wears it. I mean, the point is, he wears it, do you know what I mean?”
I nodded, because I did.
“And he doesn’t just wear it sometimes, he wears it a lot.”
Daphne stubbed her cigarette out in the trampled grass and looked across the field. “I wish to God he’d stop wearing that sweater,” she said. “Maybe I wouldn’t love him so goddamn much if he dressed like all the other bastards.”
People were beginning to gather their things for the game. I wondered whether Daphne would even agree to go in. I wanted to stay out here with her, to hear more about, I don’t know, the sweater, but I felt I owed it to Charles. I was his date, after all, though he was in the middle of some kind of wrestling match with the other ensigns, entirely oblivious to my absence. But when the announcer started listing the opening lineup, everyone snapped back to life and Charles and Bill stood and walked toward us, their coats open, their blue uniforms muddied.
“Giddyup,” Charles said, and we stood.
• • •
I believe it was halftime, or maybe just a quarter break. Daphne and I had sat with the midshipmen’s dates in the stands. In those days, the midshipmen’s dates sat together with other invited guests, and the midshipmen stood, some distance away, singing and shouting and, from time to time, linking arms, swaying left to right, throwing their hats in the air, hoisting one another onto their shoulders. Charles and Bill had left us soon after we entered the stadium. We would look over at them from time to time, as if to watch the behavior of a particularly exotic pack of animals. Here were the things that boys cared about: allegiance, patriotism, alma mater. I barely knew Charles, so I’m not quite sure whether this was the real Charles, or a Charles that Charles believed he had to be in the presence of all the other men in uniform. They were a sea of blue, directly opposite the sea of gray, the West Point cadets. Some girls appeared to understand all this, and many of them stood to be like the boys, pretending they could follow along with the songs.
The stadium was vast, truly cavernous, the sound of the singing and the cheering deafening. We were on the west side and the sun, low, suddenly struck us in shadow. A few of the other guests had the regulation blue wool Navy blankets and we huddled beneath them. Daphne smacked her hands together, blew on her fingers. When she suggested we duck out, I’m not sure where we were in the game, only that Navy was behind. The throng of midshipmen screamed at the players, their faces angry, flushed not as before, the tailgate pink, but a new, crimson purple. Sonofabitch, they shouted—we could hear them even from where we were—or, goddamn Kolowski. Goddamn Polish sonofabitch can’t carry a ball to save his goddamn grandmother.
We slipped out, taking the cement steps in a hurry, as if at any minute the entire stadium might collapse under the weight of all that shouting, the roar, the sheer volume. I remember breathing a deep breath once outside; then Daphne and I decided to walk around the stadium to get the last of the weak sunlight on the other side, the Army side. The thick stadium walls muted the sound of the crowd, though every once in a while we would hear the swelling, the roar.
“I think goddamn Kolowski must have done something right,” Daphne said.
“Either that or they’re tearing him from limb to limb.”
“Putting his head on the goalpost and parading it through the streets.”
“Declaring themselves kings.”
“That’s the thing about goddamn kings,” Daphne said.
“What?”
“They’re always just regular players who declare themselves kings.”
“Absolutely,” I said, not understanding.
“I’m a Communist, actually,” Daphne said.
I slowed down.
“I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not like that. They don’t eat their babies or anything. I’m just sick of the working people never getting to declare themselves kings. The goddamn Kolowskis of the world.”
I listened.
“Gideon says, because he has told us to call him Gideon, not Professor Taylor or any other honorific, just Gideon. Anyway, Gideon says the distribution of wealth will make it evolutionary. Communism. Like Darwinism. He says it’s just a matter of time. Like erosion.”
I nodded. “I don’t know much about it.”
“No,” Daphne said. “I suppose you wouldn’t.”
I felt wounded by this, even though it was clearly the truth, and suggested we stop walking and sit on one of the benches along the perimeter of the stadium. I wanted a cigarette, I said. My hands were goddamn ice cubes.
We sat and Daphne pulled her wool coat over her legs and I slipped off a glove and lit a match, Daphne cupping her hands around it to press her cigarette into the flame. There was little sun now, the day blustery; programs and trash blew here and there. The crowd’s distant roar seemed to cycle upward, toward the treetops and the maples whose leaves were mostly on the ground, dried brown, though one or two still held stubbornly to each limb. I’m not sure how long we sat there before your father walked up, or from which direction he came, or how he managed to so completely surprise both of us. It was simply like this: one minute we were alone on the bench smoking; the next minute your father stood in front of us in his Army officer’s uniform: pinks-and-greens, they were called. Quite striking, really: mauve trousers, a khaki shirt, and a dark green jacket with a cap to match. His hands were clasped in front of him as if for inspection, a curious look on his face.
“Two beautiful women who would prefer to sit alone when the greatest match in history takes place directly behind you?”
“We’re sick of matches,” Daphne said. “And history.” She blew her smoke out. “Anyway,” she said. “Aren’t you the enemy?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Whose side are you on?”
“The good guys,” she said.
“Then you’re absolutely right. You should avoid me at all costs. In fact, you shouldn’t be speaking to me at all.” He looked around. “You never know who’s watching. There could be spies in the trees.”
Your father smiled then, and introduced himself; I remember how impressed I was that he had a lieutenant before his name.
Daphne blew her smoke out. “Weren’t you too young for that war?”
“Which war?”
“You know, the one we fought to end all wars. No, sorry, that was the war before.”
“The one to make the world safe for democracy?”
“Was that it?”
Your father shrugged. He held out his fingers and scissored the air. “Aren’t either of you going to offer me a cigarette?”
Daphne narrowed her eyes. “What’s it worth?”
Your father sat down between us. He looked at me hard, then turned to Daphne. I’m not sure what he said then, but I know she laughed. I realized, in fact, that it had been the first time I had heard her laugh, a laugh that was entirely wrong for her, girlish and sweet, not the laugh of a Communist.
There was something about the ease of them; I felt immediately jealous, in a way that must have been an indication of how I felt about your father. They say this does happen, though you’ll probably find it amusing; the truth is I fell in love with your father at first sight. I know that’s an old-fashioned thing to say and saying it, now, makes me particularly sad.
“Daphne was just saying how she’s a Communist,” I said, trying to get his attention. Your father nodded.
“I wouldn’t expect her to be anything else,” he said, and I knew, quite suddenly, that he felt as I did, but for Daphne, not me.
• • •
I’m not sure how either of us made it safely home. Charles and Bill were furious about our absence, claimed to have been worried sick, though I’m sure they barely noticed. Navy lost, needless to say, and they sulked their way back to where we had agreed to meet them afterward, a restaurant called the Comfy Couch. Your father had left us some time before, saying he knew better than to be caught outside the stadium when the Navy boys unloaded. He made a gesture I will never forget, tipping his green cap to both of us, clicking his heels like he might just vanish into thin air instead of turning around and heading back toward the stadium. We walked to the Comfy Couch in silence and found a booth inside.
