The Found and the Lost

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Worthless? To you!” he said, fiercely accusing.

  “Well, what’s it worth to you?”

  “You are the mother of my child!”

  “Well?” Then, with a half laugh, “Well, that’s true enough.” She looked at him with a frank puzzlement that was a bid for frankness. “And you’re the father of mine. So?”

  “Come on,” he said, taking her arm again and setting off.

  She looked back at the steps and shrubbery of the house as if reluctant to leave them. “Aren’t we a block too far already?”

  He strode on, and she kept pace with him.

  “It’s past eight,” she said.

  “I don’t care about the play.”

  At the corner he stopped. Looking away from her, he said, “Your belief in me is the foundation of everything, for me. Everything. To violate that, to say as you did that I wanted you out of town, out of the way, so that—for my convenience—”

  “If I was wrong, I’m sorry.”

  “If you were wrong!” he repeated, sarcastic, bitter. She said nothing. He went on more gently: “I know I hurt you, Jane. I hurt you badly. I make no excuse for myself. I was a fool, a brute, and I’m sorry for it. I’ll be sorry the rest of my life. If you could only believe that! We put it behind us. We started fresh. But if you keep going back to it, if you won’t believe in my love, what can I do? Whose fault is it if I can’t put up with this sort of thing indefinitely?”

  “Mine?” she asked with simple incredulity.

  His hold on her arm tightened, enough that she said after a moment, “Lafe, let go.” He did not let her go, but relaxed his grip.

  She looked into his face in the pale light of the lamp across the street.

  “We do love each other, Lafe. But love, being married, even having Lily—what good is it, without trust?” Her voice, growing shrill, broke on the last word, and she gave a sharp cry, as if she had cut herself. She freed her arm and raised her clenched hands to her face.

  He stood alert and uncertain, facing her on the narrow sidewalk. He whispered her name and put up his hand to touch hers, tentative, as one might reach to touch a wound.

  She brought her hands down to hold her white shawl at the breast. “Tell me, Lafe. What you believe, truly, is that you have a right to do what you choose to do.”

  After a pause he said, gently and steadily, “A man has the right to do what he chooses. Yes.”

  She looked at him then with admiration. “I wish I was the kind of woman who could leave it at that.”

  “So do I!” he said with humor, and yet eagerly. “Oh, Janey, just tell me what it is you want—”

  “I think the best thing for me to do is go north. Go home.”

  “For the summer.”

  She did not answer.

  “I’ll come in September.”

  She shook her head.

  “I’ll come in September,” he repeated.

  “I’ll come when and if I choose!”

  They stared at each other, startled by the leap of her anger. She drew her arms close to her sides for warmth under the shawl. The silken fringes flickered in the foggy wind.

  “You’re my wife, and I’ll come to you,” he said calmly, reassuring.

  “I’m not your wife, if your wife is just one of your women.”

  The words sounded false, rehearsed.

  “Come on. Come on home, Janey. You got yourself all keyed up to this. Now you’re worn out. Come on. It wasn’t the night for a play, was it?” His handsome young face looked weary. “You’re shivering,” he said with concern, and put his arm around her shoulders, turning her to fit her body against his, sheltering her from the wind. They started back the way they had come, walking slowly, entwined.

  “I’m not a horse, Lafe,” she said after a couple of blocks.

  He bent his head down to her in query.

  “You’re treating me like Roanie when she shies at cattle. Gentle her down, talk a little nonsense, turn her round home. . . .”

  “Don’t be hard, Janey.”

  She said nothing.

  “I want to hold you. To protect you. To cherish you. I hold you so dear, I need you so. You’re the center of my life. But everything I do or say you twist around wrong. I can’t do anything right, say anything right.”

  He kept his arm around her shoulders and his body inclined towards hers as they walked, but his arm was rigid, weighing heavy.

  “All I have is self-respect,” she said. “You were part of it. The best part of it. You were the glory of it. That’s gone. I had to let it go. But it’s all I will let go.”

  “What is it you want, for God’s sake, Jane? What do you want me to do?”

  “Play fair.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what playing fair means.”

  “Driving me crazy with hints and suspicions and accusations, is that playing fair? Is that your self-respect?”

  “Sallie Edgers,” she said in a whisper, with intense shame.

  “What,” he said flatly, and stopped. He drew back from her. After a long pause he said rather breathlessly, “I can’t live with this. With this hounding jealousy. With spying, sparring for advantage. I thought you were a generous woman.”

  She winced, and her face in the foggy pallor of the streetlamp looked drawn and shrunken. “I did too,” she said.

  Presently she began to walk forward, pulling the fringed shawl close about her arms and up to her throat. She glanced back after a few steps. He had not moved. She paused.

  “You’re right,” he said, not loud, but clearly. “It’s no good. I don’t know what you want. Have it your way!”

  He turned and walked away from her, the clap of his shoes quick and quickly fading. She stood irresolute, watching him. His tall, straight figure blurred into the blowing fog.

  She turned and went on her way, hesitantly at first, looking back more than once. The fog had thickened, dimming lights to blurs of radiance, turning buildings, lampposts, figures of people, horses, carts, cars, to bulks and wraiths without clear form or place. Before either had crossed a street the husband and wife were lost to each other’s sight. On Market Street the lights of carriages and cars, brighter and more frequent, made a confusion of turning shafts and spokes of shadows in the half-opaque atmosphere, and through this beautiful and uncanny movement of wraiths and appearances the voices of children were calling and crying like seabirds. War, the young voices cried, war, war!

  Virginia, 1971

  GOBS AND HUMMOCKS, RIMS AND forms of foam are run in by the November breakers and driven up the wet beach by the wind. Luminously white out on the water, the foam is dingy as it lies on the sand. When the great kelp trees of the sea-floor forests are battered by deep waves in storms, broken fronds and stems churn and disintegrate into a froth, whipped by wave and wind into lasting foam, that rides the combers and is thrown ashore by the breakers. And so it is not salt-white, but oxidizes to dun or yellowish as the living cells decay. It’s death that colors it. If it were pure foam of water the bubbles would last no longer than the bursting bubbles of a freshwater creek. But this is water of the sea, brewed, imbued, souped up with life and life’s dying and decaying. It is tainted, it is profoundly impure. It is the mother-fluid, the amniotic minestrone. From the unmotherly sea of winter, the cold drowner, the wrecker, from her lips flies the mad foam. And on the lips, on the tongue, it does not taste pure and salt, but bursts like coarse champagne with an insipid, earthy flavor, leaving a tiny grain of sand or two between your teeth.

  Crosswaves pile the foam into heaps like thunderclouds and then, receding, strand the heaps, one here one there along the beach. Each foam-billow, foam-pillow shivers under the wind, shakes, quivers like fat white flesh, inescapably feminine though not female at all. Feeble, fatuous, flabby, helpless mammocks of porous lard, all that men despise and paint and write about in woman shudders now in blowsy fragments on the beach, utterly at the mercy of the muscular breakers and the keen, hard
wind. The foam-fragments shatter further. Some begin to scud with a funny smooth animal motion along the wet slick of the sand; then, coming to drier sand, they stick and shake there, or break free and begin to roll over and over up to the dunes, rounding and shrinking as they go, till they stick again, quivering, and shrink away to nothing.

  Whole fleets of foam-blobs slide along silent and intent under a flaw of wind, then rest, trembling a little, always shrinking, diminishing, the walls of the joined bubbles breaking and the bubbles joining and the whole fragile shapeless structure constantly collapsing inward and fragmenting away, and yet each blob, peak, flake of foam is an entity: a brief being: seen so, perceived, at the intersection of its duration and mine, the joining of bubbles—my eyes, the sea, the windy air. How we fly along the beach, all air and a skin bitter wet and whitish in the twilight, not to be held or caught, and if touched, gone!

  Jane, 1929

  I AM LOOKING, LOOKING, I must look for her. I must find her. I did not watch as I should have done, and she is lost. My watch was lost, was stolen. I must go to little towns hidden deep in the folds of bare, dark hills, asking for the jeweller’s shop. The jeweller receives stolen goods, and will know where my watch can be found. I drive the Ford up roads into canyons above invisible streams. Above the rim of the canyons is that high desert where my mother lived when I was born. I drive deeper into the clefts of the high, bare hills, but it is never the town where the jeweller lives. Men stand on the street talking about money. They glance at me sidelong, grin, and turn away. They talk low to one another and laugh. They know where it is. A child in a black crocheted shawl runs away down the dirt street between the hills. I follow her, but she’s far ahead, running. She turns aside into a doorway in a long wall. When I come there I see a courtyard under shuttered windows. Nothing is in the courtyard but a dry well with a broken coping and a broken rope.

  Sewing brings the dream back. I sit at the machine and the rattle of the needle is like the rattle of the car on those roads in the canyons of the dream.

  Lily, did you drink your milk this morning?

  She went to get the milk from the icebox. She is obedient. She was always obedient, always dreaming. But I was not always kind, or patient, or careful, as I am, as I try to be, now.

  Sewing, I dream awake. I take her down to California on the train to Stanford, where the boy is. I find him there on the green lawns with his rich boy friends, and I say to Lily, Look at him, look at the lout, with his thick hands and his loud laugh, Will Hambleton’s prize bull-calf! How can he shame you? How could his touch be more to you than a clod of dirt touching you? Then I say things to the boy that make him shake and stare, and I strike his face with my open hand, a hard blow, and he cries and crouches and blubbers, abject. Abject.

  Then we’re in San Francisco not Stanford and it’s Lafe standing before us. This is your father, Lily, I say to her. She looks up. She sees him. He’s gone grey, half bald, he’s lost his supple waist, but a fine man still, a handsome man, wearing his years well. He looks at Lily the way he did when she was a baby, when he used to rock her on his knees and sing, Hey, Lillia Lillia, hey Lillialou. But his face changes. He sees her. His eyes grow intent. What happened to you? he asks.

  A dry well with a broken rope.

  It was Lafe who named her. I wanted to call her Frances or Francisca, for Mother and for San Francisco. Francisca Herne. It would have been a pretty name. But Lafe wanted his Lily.

  They say they’re going to build a bridge across the Golden Gate.

  Lily silly Lily little one, don’t go down in the well in the dark, come up, look up. You’re not the first girl Lily nor the last to Oh! but that she let him in! The second time! She let him in, let him in the house, our house! That she knew no better! What did I not give her, not teach her? How could I raise such a fool? Alone, in the woods, in the car, what could she do, his thick hands, his big thick body. She stayed in her room all day, she said she felt sick. I thought she had her period. I didn’t look at her. I didn’t think. I was busy at the post office. I didn’t look at her. And he came in the night, that night, scratched at her window, whined like a dog, and she let him in. She let him in. I cannot forgive her. How can I respect her? She let him into my house. She thought she had to, she thought he loved her, she thought she belonged to him. I know, I know. But she let him in, into this house, into her bed, into her body.

  He ought to marry her, Mary says. Face up to those damn Hambletons, she said. Face up to them? Make her marry him, make her lie down every night for him to rape her with his thick body with the blessing of the law? No. They bundled him back to his rich boys’ school. Let him stay there. He can boast there how he raped a girl and she liked it so much she let him into her room the next night. They’ll like that story, they’ll believe it. He’s where I want him, gone. But I don’t know where Lily is.

  Eyes say what’s the girl doing still in town. Showing already. Flaunting. Common decency would have sent her away. Christian morality. Child of divorce. Only to be expected.

  She walks among the eyes as if they did not see her, like a wraith. She is not there.

  She sent herself away, is that it? Is that where she is? Maybe she’s only staying away for a while. Maybe she’s hiding, hiding down inside, in the dark, where the eyes don’t see. But not forever. Maybe when her child comes out into the light she’ll come with it. Maybe she’ll come out with it. Maybe she’ll be born alive, and will be able to talk then. Maybe she’ll stop pulling out the hairs on her fingers and arms and thighs, the tiny, silky, hardly there hairs of a girl of seventeen with blond hair and fine, fair skin, one by one, till her skin is like a sponge damp with bloody water.

  There’s a bridge across the Golden Gate, a bridge laid down on fog. I follow a child, a girl running, out onto that bridge. Wait for me! Wait! I follow my daughter who was taken from me into the dark, into the fog.

  Lily, 1931

  THIS IS MY HOUSE. MOTHER owns it, but she says it’s mine forever. This is my room, with the window looking out into the big rhododendron bushes. That’s where he came in. The branches of the rhododendrons rushed and rattled around him, and he broke them, and my heart thumped so that I saw it moving under my nightgown like an animal. He tapped on the sill and tapped on the glass. Lily, Lily, let me in! I knew he truly loved me then.

  In the car in the forest in the night, that was a mistake. An accident. He was drunk, he had been drinking, he didn’t know. But when he came next night to the house, to the window, it was because he loved me. He had to go away because his father is hard and cold and ambitious, but he truly loved me. It was our tragedy. I love my room. I love to put fresh sheets on the bed.

  I don’t like to let Baby into my room. Angels come in with her. They stand at the window to deny my comfort. They stand at the door to deny his love. The angels won’t let me have my tragedy. They deny it all and drive him out of the room with their bright swords. Out the window he goes, scrambling, because he thought he heard Mother coming, and the last I see of him forever is one leg, one foot, the sole of his shoe. He didn’t lace up his shoes because he was in such a hurry, and the sole of his shoe gets pulled over the windowsill after the rest of him, all in a hurry because he thought he heard Mother, but it was only the cat in the hall, and the dawn had come with its bright swords across the sky. Into the rhododendrons he goes scrambling and breaking the branches. They’ll never let him back into the garden.

  I watch Baby Virginia with the angels in the garden. They’re often with her when she’s awake. I’d like to see one watching over her when she sleeps in her crib. It would be a tall guardian in the shadows watching her with a brooding face. I saw a picture like that in a magazine. When she’s running about the garden in the sunshine, when she goes out like a little soft bundle in the rain, then they’re there with her. She talks to them. Yesterday she said to one of the angels in the garden, looking up, her little face so puzzled, “What Dinya do?” I never hear them answer her. Maybe she does.

&
nbsp; We were sitting on the porch in the warm evening and the angels gathered and clustered so thick in the lower branches of the big spruce that I whispered to her, “Do you see them, Baby?” She didn’t look at them. She looked up at me. She smiled the wisest, kindest smile. The angels never smile even when they look at her. They’re stern. I took her on my lap, and she fell asleep with her little head on my arm. The angels left the tree then and walked away across the lawn, towards the hills. I think they come up from the sea, and go up into the hills. The light of their swords is the light above the mountains, the light across the sea.

  One leg, one foot, the sole of a dirty shoe thrown out of heaven’s window. There’s no heaven. I don’t go to church. Only when I’m tired of the angels, then I go to church with Dorothy to get away from them. Dorothy lets me have my tragedy. She is my true friend. If there was a heaven I could go there and be forgiven, all washed and washed away, and then I could have my tragedy. But the angels won’t let me, so I go to my room.

  No, Baby, not in Mama’s room. Let’s go to the kitchen, shall we, and make the pie for dinner. Would Baby like a blueberry pie? Would Baby Dinya like to help her Mama?

  “Boolybelly pie!”

  The angels won’t laugh. They won’t cry. I hide my tears for Dicky’s love from them, because they would throw my precious tears out the window like trash, like old shoes, to rattle in the rhododendrons. I save my love from them. My love, my love! A kicking foot on a windowsill.

  Last night Mother came into the room when I had done singing Baby to sleep, and I remembered how she was there in the room when Baby was born, standing so tall in the dimness, silent. But I never speak of the angels to her, that tall woman standing in the shadows with a brooding face.

  Jane, 1926

  AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. POOR Lafe, it sounds like he’s in over his head this time. I’d like to see this Santa Monica woman. He never had much sense picking women, except for me. And didn’t have the sense to hang on to me. At least he had the luck not to get tangled up again, till now. I liked thinking of him free. It wasn’t much, compared to what we had, but it was something. Now it’s nothing. I can’t live without her, he writes, besotted. How can a man like that be a slave to his penis?