by Kate Walbert
“He was nice,” I finally said.
“Nice?” Daphne said. “See, this is what you don’t understand. He wasn’t nice at all. Charming, yes. Debonair, yes. But nice? No. Not nice. Army. Entirely Army. I know these types. They spend their day shooting at targets and then read Machiavelli before lights out.”
She looked around the room: it was the kind of place where people write their names on the walls or carve their initials into the tabletops; it smelled like stale beer and cigarette smoke. A few other girls waited near the door for their dates and a table of men in midshipmen uniform sat morosely drinking beer.
“What are we doing here?”
“Waiting for our ride,” I said.
She waved down one of the waitresses and ordered coffee; then she lit another cigarette and leaned back against the grimy wall. Above her, the graduating Annapolis class of ‘49 smiled out in black-and-white; someone had put some money in the jukebox, and a song Rita used to love began. I put Rita out of my mind and concentrated on your father, his thick eyebrows and the way, when he stood, he cocked his head to one side, listening even when there was only silence. He had something quiet about him, something wise. He was older than the boys I was used to; we had learned that he was a lieutenant in the reserves, that he hadn’t been to any wars to speak of, that he had graduated from West Point some years back and gone to graduate school, actually, Yale Divinity, though it looked like, with the situation in Korea, he might be asked to go to war soon. In fact, he had said, it looked like he might be asked to go very soon, possibly within the month, and that it would do his heart good to have someone to correspond with. He said the word correspond as if it were somehow inherently funny, and I remember that Daphne laughed, understanding, and that I didn’t, imagining, instead, our correspondence and, our reunion, our embrace, because I had already begun to imagine your father as someone I might embrace in the way of Ruby and Sterling.
He held out a worn leather address book and asked us each to write down our names and addresses on one of the blank pieces of paper inside. “Corresponding with the enemy,” Daphne had said, writing. “Could be dangerous.”
“I hope nothing less,” he said, smiling, tilting his head some. Daphne passed the book to me and though I knew that he preferred her I wrote my name down anyway, and the address of my dormitory on campus. For some reason still unclear to me I also added my major, English literature, as if he would appreciate this far more than Russian history. He stared at our addresses for a moment and then shut the book, sticking it into his back pocket. Then he gestured as I’ve described and turned and walked away. When I looked back to Daphne to see what she’d say next, she seemed to have forgotten my presence, as if your father and I had left together. She was looking off into the distance, away from the stadium, blowing on her cold hands. Her eyes, that gray, even darker, were in tandem now with a sky that had lost almost all its color; it looked like snow.
“My mother was a Ziegfeld girl,” she finally said, then she turned to me. “She went nuts when I was born. Absolutely goddamn nuts. My father didn’t know what to make of her and so they, you know, committed her to memory, so to speak. I don’t even know if she knows where I am. Right now, for instance, she doesn’t even know where I goddamn am.”
I touched her shoulder; it seemed like the right thing to do.
“I bet she does,” I said stupidly. “I bet she knows.”
• • •
Bill and Charles eventually met us at the Comfy Couch and we ordered hamburgers and more coffee before getting on the road. We were all quiet on the drive back, the dark outside reflected inside. We dropped Daphne off at Bryn Mawr and Bill insisted on walking her to her room, though she claimed she could go alone and would prefer. As she got out of the car she told me she would give me a call in a few days and maybe the two of us could have lunch. Saint Mary’s wasn’t too far away and there was a trolley at the time. I smiled and said I had enjoyed meeting her; it was a natural reflex for me, politeness, and she rolled her eyes and told me we were friends, weren’t we? And I said, yes, we were.
Charles walked me to my dormitory and I let him kiss me good night because it seemed too much trouble not to. I was thinking of your father, wondering when he might first write. I suppose I thought of Randall, too; it made perfect sense. In some ways, I saw Randall in the character of your father, in his stance, the way he listened. I don’t know. I waited months for that first letter and it never came, of course. I forgot about him. I forgot about Daphne, whom I assumed had gotten involved with her Russian history prize, and the professor, and everything else in her life that would take priority over a friendship with me. I had plenty to do. This was my senior year. I had to study hard to keep my scholarship and I was on several committees, what else?
But one day, many months after the game, I walked back to my dormitory, one of several stone houses that had been donated to the college, to find Daphne in the living room, sitting on one of the floral couches as awkwardly as a child. It was already spring, brilliant the way springs were in Philadelphia. The forsythia had passed their prime, but the dogwoods and the lilac were in bloom and the windows were open in the living room and I could hear, in the distance, the sounds of other girls at their sports. Daphne looked odd inside on such a beautiful day, sitting in a ball reading as if it were raining and bleak. She wore a plaid skirt of some sort, and a loose sweater with big green diamonds.
“It’s me,” she said.
“Hi,” I said. I put down my books on the secretary and went in. “Hi,” I said again. I was glad to see her.
She looked down. “Recognize it?” she said, stretching her sweater out.
“No,” I said.
She looked up toward the composite photograph that hung in the hallway showing all the girls who lived in the house.
“Why does everyone look exactly the same?” she said.
I shrugged.
She looked back at me. “It’s his. Gideon’s.”
I had to search my mind to remember, and then I did.
“Your advisor,” I said.
“My lover,” she said, and I must tell you my heart raced with the word. It was spring, after all, and this was something out of Colette or Flaubert. Daphne stood and flounced across the room, plopping down on the piano seat.
“Don’t act so goddamned shocked. It does happen, you know. All right, so he’s married. But he’s leaving his wife.” She looked across at me. “Maybe.”
I sat next to her on the piano bench; the other girls of the house were elsewhere, sports, as I have said, or studying at the library or meeting with one of the endless clubs we were encouraged to join. I don’t know how it had happened, exactly, me going along with the activities they promoted for us. There were rules to follow and expectations, though most of the girls would be engaged by the time they graduated; if you weren’t at least pinned your education had failed, or at least this is what we were led to believe. A few made it quite clear they had no intention of marrying. Most of them had old lady aunts who were role models, women who had gone to one of the Seven Sisters and then on to graduate work in New York City or Boston. These women would come to visit from time to time, no doubt to buoy the spirits of their young nieces, whose spirits, to judge from their appearances, were in need of buoying: they were odd ducks, all told, girls who stayed in on Friday and Saturday nights, who had permanent library carrels decorated with optimistic quotations—missives on the rights of women from, say, Eleanor Roosevelt or Carrie Chapman Catt.
The maiden aunts appeared on certain Sundays, and the girls would invite some of us to join them for brunch. The aunts had names like Elizabeth, or Judith—full, beautiful names that evoked worlds we would never step into, worlds we had collectively denounced as too terrifying to even consider. We had made our choices and we twisted the pins on our lapels, or wrote the names of our boyfriends over and over again on the restaurant napkins, as if the boys were talismans against the threat these women posed: to live alo
ne in a big city, to step onto the sidewalk in heels and smart coats, hands up hailing taxis, ring fingers conspicuously bare.
• • •
Daphne played some scales, the long sweater sleeves she had rolled to her wrist slipping over her fingers.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She stopped playing and looked up at me, her gray eyes clear; it was that time of day when the lights should be turned on inside but are not, as if in refusal to acknowledge the coming night. It was also getting cold, the weak spring sun long since obstructed by the thick stone walls of the neighboring house. Our living room faced a stone wall where ivy grew over the mortar lines. I would often try to study in this room, my mind distracted, looking instead out the lead-paned windows at the stone walls, the branching veins of ivy.
“For what?” she said. “I’m perfectly fine. I’m exactly fine. He gave me his goddamn sweater because I told him how it made me cry in class and he said he didn’t want me to be so obvious. So obvious, he said, like he thought I would just run down to the podium and throw my arms around him and weep. He didn’t understand it at all, why it made me cry. He thought I meant something entirely stupid. Something so, I don’t know, girly.” She pushed back the sweater sleeves and folded her arms. In the dining room, a clock ticked loudly.
“We meet at a goddamn motel called the Enchanted Forest, if you can believe it. It’s one of those one-story ones where you can park and go in and avoid the receptionist all together, not that she would notice. The kind with dirty screens so you don’t even want to touch the windows, and sheets that prickle and the whole thing smells like mold because the enchanted forest is just a few goddamn pine trees that block all the sun. The place is always dark and so goddamn gloomy before, during, and after we make love I want to cry, even though it’s him, for Christ’s sake, Gideon.”
She drew her hands up to her face.
“What am I going to do?” she asked from behind them, and then she sniffled and wiped one of those long, woolly sleeves across her nose, looking at me like I might know the answer and of course I didn’t. I had no idea what she should do. None of the girls I knew would make love in a place called the Enchanted Forest; none of the girls I knew would make love at all.
She shook her head. “Look at you,” she said. “Look at this place.” She stood and walked around the living room, turning on table lamps, fluffing pillows. “And I thought the motel was gloomy.” She laughed, and I did, too. She had her back to me and turned around suddenly. “You know, I didn’t come here to tell you all that. I’m sorry. I didn’t, really. I’ll be fine. Gideon will pass me with flying colors, give me the history prize, and I’ve already got my admission to Radcliffe, anyway, and he’ll go back to his perky goddamn wife and that will be that.”
She smiled; she really did have a beautiful smile. “We’ll all be fine,” she said, in a way that should have made me wonder, but did not.
“Look,” she said then, pulling something out of her skirt pocket and walking back over to me. “It’s from him.”
“Who?” I said, because I saw now she had a letter of some sort.
“The enemy. Remember?”
She unfolded a sheath of paper and passed it over to me. The let ter was dated February 1952, Kumwah, Korea. My dear Daphne, it began, and my heart, immediately, floundered. I passed it back to her without reading further.
“It’s to you,” I said.
“Oh, don’t be such a nincompoop,” she said. “I’m sure he has no idea which one of us is which. He just picked some name and wrote. He’s probably picturing Debbie Reynolds.”
She pushed the letter back at me and I continued reading.
They’ve got us digging trenches and when we’re finished we get to live in them. Not exactly great compensation. The rations are pretty bad, and after two months here I dream of tomatoes. Yesterday I saw someone leading a cow toward the colonel’s barracks and decided that the time had come to introduce myself and to practice my Korean. Most of the other boys are Ethiopians. The Ethiopians are the best fighters and so that’s fine with me, but they tend to keep quiet and so I’ve taken to reciting the last World Series plays, inning by inning.
Anyway, I introduced myself to the colonel and he must have been pretty lonesome too because he invited me to dinner. This was the first time I had had fresh meat in months and I should have been delighted but the funny thing was all I could think of was tomatoes.
I remember our meeting at the Game and you and your friend were prettier than all the other cadets’ girls combined. You may write to me at the address below and that would be better than tomatoes. God Bless America.
Your friend,—
• • •
I folded the letter and gave it back to Daphne.
“You like him,” she said, stuffing it into the envelope. I wanted to ask her if I might look at the postmark and the stamp, if I might study the way he had addressed her name, but I did not.
I shrugged.
“I hardly remember,” I said.
She looked at me and put the envelope in front of us on the music stand.
“You be me,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“Write him back. Sign it ‘Daphne.’ He doesn’t know the goddamn difference. He wants a pen pal, that’s all. He doesn’t remember me from you from a hole in the wall. I don’t have time. I’ve got to study for my orals and figure out a way to get out of the enchanted forest.” She smiled. R20;You know what I mean?” she said.
“I suppose so,” I said.
“Anyway,” she said, “you’re the English literature major. I’m the Communist, for Christ’s sake. I can’t write a Communist killer. It’s against my higher principles.” At this she stood. “I’ve got to get back before dinner. I took the goddamn trolley and you know what that’s like.” I didn’t, actually; I never left campus except in a boy’s car, and then rarely. Mostly I stayed in the dormitory, or the library. Vacations I took the train back to Mother and Daddy’s house, though lately I had been avoiding even that, explaining to them as best I could how my exams required too much library research, how it would be better if I stayed at Saint Mary’s through the holidays. Since Rita’s death and Betty’s departure, I couldn’t bear the hungry way they looked at me, as if they each wanted to take a spoon and swallow me whole.
2
I have always pictured our Professor X—Randall’s and mine, and Ruby’s, I suppose—as a small man, bookish in the extreme, with an owl’s face and an urgent, hurried manner: a horticulturist employed at a midwestern university where a wealthy alumnus endowed a greenhouse on the roof of the university’s tallest brick building, poorly maintained until the professor’s arrival. The professor saw to it that the glass was newly caulked, and the greenhouse became a tropical alcove in the middle of a blizzard. There were times when three, four feet of snow lay on the ground and high above, over all of it, Professor X’s students walked about in their shirtsleeves, spritzing orchids with shiny copper watering cans, sponging palm fronds. He followed them, nervously cataloging, sketching. The students didn’t mind; they generally adored him in the way you might adore an eccentric uncle, one who shows up on your doorstep from year to year carrying gifts he’s gathered from his travels abroad.
Near-deaf from time spent in the trenches in France, Professor X survived the First World War, he would tell his students, by concentrating on the flora of northern France, sketching the shapes of leaves and the strange wildflowers that were so unfamiliar to him, a boy from Boston, that at first he felt like he had been dropped onto a separate planet. His hands shook, he said, from the shelling, but this had helped him find the line, since he knew about as much about drawing as he did about the flora of northern France.
In no time, he said—and here is where the students drew close, because they knew these stories, had heard them all before, Professor X’s deafness somehow affecting more than his ears. It was as if he lived in a world entirely without memory, so that every
time he told his story it was as if for the first time, the words disappearing once spoken into air.
His students loved him anyway; they drew close because here was the best part of the story, the hardest part, and it frequently brought tears to Professor X’s eyes.
In no time, he repeated, the other soldiers, the good men, started calling him Leonardo, after da Vinci; it was mild teasing, nothing cruel, he said; they liked me well enough, as well as they liked anyone.
Here Professor X might straighten his glasses a bit, for emphasis; he might pull the handkerchief from his breast pocket and wipe his forehead. He insisted on wearing a suit jacket in the greenhouse, though the students were more often clothed for the beach—you can imagine the temperature, not simply from the sun, but from the reflection from the snow. Professor X maintained his formality, though after hearing his story, a well-meaning student might take to calling him Professor Leonardo; this quickly abated once the student observed the panic in the professor’s eyes, his entire manner hobbled by such hubris.
Professor X kept a firm grip on his handkerchief and continued. Paper was scarce, so he would draw on anything he could, anything any of the other soldiers gave him. These good men took it upon themselves to help me, he said, to find me scraps so I could continue. Here he looked up at the throat of a particularly lurid orchid that hung from the metal transom supporting the glass. We were short everything—food, medical supplies, ammunition. I think they wanted us to fight the Germans with our teeth. We would have. Anything for honor.
In time the good men started bringing me the letters, he said. Letters taken from the corpses. They wouldn’t bring me the clean ones, no; those they would send on. It was the decent thing to do. But the bloodied ones, he said. Those they passed along to me.
