The News from Spain

by Joan Wickersham

  In the last slow dance Henderson pulled you gently to his chest and you were one of the hugging couples. “I like you,” he said, low against your ear. “You’re my girl.”

  IN YOUR BED

  You replayed it over and over. He holds you. “I like you,” he says. “You’re my girl.”

  YOU ARE NORMAL

  Or if not quite normal, then at least pretty close.

  YOUR GODMOTHER

  “I’m so glad for you,” Mrs. Sturm said. “Tell me everything.”

  You did. About how Henderson was getting off-campus permissions now and coming over to your house, often, on Saturday afternoons. How much he liked your parents, and how much they seemed to like him. How your mother cooked for him: pot roast, spaghetti and meatballs, rice pudding—he said her rice pudding was his favorite dessert ever. How he teased your little brother and sister (he introduced himself to them using an outlandish false name, and refused to back away from it even when they shrieked at him to tell them the truth), and how they teased him about his accent (he was from Kentucky). How gentle he was when he petted your old German shepherd. How you and he went for long walks in the fields and woods behind your house, how the two of you never ran out of things to talk about.

  “He’s a nice boy,” Mrs. Sturm said. “A real gentleman.”

  This was an afternoon when the two of you were alone in front of her fire, an afternoon when you’d just dropped by, hoping to see her. Lily Joyce was home with a cold. You would not have talked this way if she’d been there. You wanted to tell Mrs. Sturm these things about Henderson: she would understand them. Lily Joyce was always trying to pry things out of you, but if you told her she would call it “the sappy stuff” and want more details about the kissing. “Has he tried to put his hand inside your shirt yet?” she would ask, in a voice that was impatient, excited, but also gruff and businesslike: if the answer had been “yes,” she would have had an entire set of campaign plans ready to unfurl and explain to you in detail. “Of course not,” you said, and you could see her rolling up the plans again and putting them away.

  You had talked to Lily Joyce some about the kissing—you had technical questions that you knew she would be able to answer—but you didn’t mention it to Mrs. Sturm. It was private; and your conversation with Mrs. Sturm was about something more. You didn’t use the word—neither of you did—but you were talking about love.

  “When I met my husband,” she told you, “I knew right away. I was very young. Not as young as you are, but young. It was my junior year of college, I was spending it in Madrid. He’d finished graduate school—he studied mathematics at Göttingen, did you know that?—and he was backpacking around Europe with a couple of friends. We met standing in line to get into the Prado.”

  Suddenly you were nervous. You were moved that a grown-up—this grown-up—would talk to you so frankly. But you had never heard of Göttingen or the Prado, didn’t want to interrupt to ask what they were, hoped she wouldn’t quiz you on them later. And though you dreamed about marrying Henderson, you didn’t expect to actually do it. You loved Mrs. Sturm for taking you seriously, but she was taking you too seriously.

  “I was intimidated,” she said. “He was older. So confident. He had so many languages—German, Spanish, Italian, French, even some Dutch. And so handsome! Unattainable, I thought, when he spoke to me. But he did speak to me. Smitten, he told me later. Right away he was smitten. He told me I was beautiful.” She smiled at you, and there was a silence. She wrapped her soft cream-colored shawl more tightly around her shoulders and crossed her arms, hugging herself.

  For some reason you expected that now she would say something about children, about how sad it was that she and Mr. Sturm didn’t have any. But what she said next surprised you.

  “Marry for kindness.”

  The front door opened and Mr. Sturm walked in.

  “Well,” Mrs. Sturm said. “This is a surprise.” She trailed a white forearm over the back of the sofa, and he came and took her hand.

  “Darling,” he said, and kissed her forehead. “A pleasant one, I hope.”

  “We were just talking about you.”

  “Sturm und Drang,” he said, and she laughed and so did you. You had heard him make this joke in math class, after he’d assigned an especially tough problem to solve. You could tell from the way she laughed that she had heard the joke before, too, and that she was protecting him from knowing how many times he’d already told it.

  MEN

  You were getting that men were strong and fragile, powerfully tempting and dangerous, gentle and mean, impressive and obtuse, in need of both placating and protection. Meanwhile the boys’ school kept ticking away with its own peculiar, habitual brutality.

  The day after spring vacation ended and all the boarders came back to school, a boy in your English class was crying. He was quietly but audibly sniffling, and his face was red and wet.

  “What’s the problem, Lederman?” the teacher asked. “Homesick?”

  The boy didn’t answer. The teacher stood up, came out swiftly from behind his desk, grabbed the back of Lederman’s blazer, and lifted him into the air. He carried Lederman—a small boy; he dangled like a kitten—to the door, opened it, and threw him out into the hall.

  “Stay there until you’re ready to start acting like a man.”

  No one spoke to Lederman after class, when the bell rang and he came back into the classroom with his head down to collect his book bag, so you didn’t either.

  There was a prayer you all said in morning chapel, right after the Lord’s Prayer. It started with Dear Lord in your wisdom guide my steps, and it ended: Make me strong and sound and more a man each day.

  THE NEWS

  One morning in Spanish Mrs. Sturm fainted. She was in the middle of las noticias, talking about one of her innocent, rustic, pinkly romantic festivals—something about bulls, as usual, bulls and flowers—when she suddenly said, “Oh,” and then folded sideways and slid to the floor.

  Several of the boys jumped up and ran to her. They stood around; they knelt; one boy very lightly patted her shoulder. “Mrs. Sturm,” he said. “Um, Mrs. Sturm.”

  You got up and went over too. “What should we do?” the boys were saying.

  Her eyelids flickered, and she made a series of soft, mewing little moans. “Oh … oh … oh.” She tried to sit up. “Oh …,” and her head sank down again.

  You didn’t try to help. You loved her, she’d been so good to you; but watching her lying on the floor, you felt no alarm, no sympathy. Only a cold disapproval at the whole performance. That’s what it seemed like to you: a performance. The graceful slump to the floor, the bewildered fluttery coming-to amid a group of worried, gallant males—this was one of your own secret fantasies for yourself. You would faint, Henderson would catch you, bend over you, revive you. You had imagined it, but you would never actually permit it to happen. You felt, austerely, that she could have chosen not to faint. You thought this sort of thing was controllable. You recognized this scene and deplored it. She was a grown-up; she should have known better.

  Two of the boys helped her to sit up, supporting her shoulders with surprisingly competent and unafraid solicitude. Someone ran to get help from the front office. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” she kept murmuring. You saw that her hair was coming down: the structure had toppled, not all the way, but it was listing, and some of the little puffs were unwinding and sticking out in tufts from her head. That’s when you recovered your tenderness for her, and your love; and you pitied her.

  The next day the science teacher taught math; and the assistant headmaster sat in the classroom during Spanish while you all did exercises out of the textbook. Mrs. Sturm was sick, you thought, and Mr. Sturm must be taking care of her. You were coming down the stairs to go to lunch when Lily Joyce grabbed you by the arm and pulled you into the ladies’ room. “Did you hear about the Sturms?”

  “Are they having a baby?” you asked, with a sudden wild lift of joy. Th
at would fix everything, you thought, without beginning to think yet about what it was that needed fixing.

  “No, no,” Lily Joyce panted. “She’s been sleeping with the boys.”

  “What boys?” you asked stupidly. You honestly didn’t understand what she meant.

  Lily Joyce lifted her arm and made a big circling gesture that seemed to encompass the entire school. “These boys. I don’t know who all of them are yet, but …,” and she mentioned a few names, mostly boys you knew by sight but had never spoken to. Then “… and von Bruyling,” she said.

  “That’s disgusting,” you said; but all of a sudden you believed her.

  “She’s fired,” Lily Joyce whispered, unlocking the ladies’ room door—you would both have to run, if you didn’t want to be marked down in conduct for being late to lunch—“and he quit. They’re leaving.”

  WHAT YOU SAW

  Early the next morning, when your mother drove you to school, the Sturms’ pale blue station wagon was turning out of the main driveway as your car slowed to turn in. You saw that the car was packed full with their things. He must have been driving, but you didn’t see him. What you saw, in the quick blur of their car turning away from yours, was her drooping head resting on her hand, and her pale forearm propped against the window.

  THE REST OF THE STORY

  You never knew it. Not all of it. But you got some pieces over the years.

  You heard more names, of more boys. Some were big muscled football players; some were small and childlike and scholarly. There was no pattern.

  You heard that Mr. Sturm had hanged himself. You had no way of knowing if it was true. You remembered him coming home unexpectedly that afternoon when you and Mrs. Sturm had been talking, and you wondered if he’d been trying to catch her with a boy, or trying to prevent her from doing something she couldn’t stop herself from doing.

  You thought of her saying, “Marry for kindness.”

  You graduated from the boys’ school and went on to another school, where you were happier.

  You heard that Big Lily had come home from the factory one day and found the young blond man—her husband—in bed with some girl, had thrown him out, had cracked up and spent time in a sanitarium, had come home and gone back to running the factory and a number of local charities as well. You heard that Lily Joyce dropped out of high school and married a gas station attendant and moved out west.

  You got a letter from Mark Henderson, followed by a visit. You were both seniors, at different boarding schools. He came to see you one Sunday and took you out for a drive. “I need to tell you something,” he said. “I feel really bad about this. I need to get it off my chest. I used you.”

  You laughed. “For what?” Those careful little kisses?

  “To get to a home,” he said. “I was so homesick. I wanted to eat with a family, around a table.”

  “That’s all right,” you said. “You don’t need to apologize.”

  “Yes, I do,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have acted like I really liked you when really I was just using you.”

  “It was years ago,” you said. “You were a child. Don’t worry about it.”

  Then he asked if you were seeing anyone. “Sort of,” you hedged. You weren’t, but you were afraid he might ask if you were interested in him.

  “I’m seeing someone,” he said. “A woman.” Then he said, “She’s a teacher. My dorm mistress, in fact. We joke about that.”

  So you wondered, then, though the idea of him and Mrs. Sturm had never occurred to you before.

  Many years later you heard he was back in Kentucky, working as a high school teacher. You wondered about that too.

  THE END

  You went to Madrid with your husband. You were in your forties. You stood in line with him at the Prado, and for the first time in years you remembered the Sturms. You told your husband. “What a terrible story,” he said. He was holding your hand.

  While you waited you looked around at the people standing in line with you. Parents with children, nuns, old men, a group of students shoving one another and laughing, all wearing the same blue cap. You saw beautiful women and smitten men. You thought about how lovers, or any two who fascinate each other, choose in rapture and ignorance.

  The line moved and you and your husband moved with it, slowly, toward the old building, where the people who’d waited longest were disappearing, being swallowed into its shadowy mouth.

  The News from Spain

  1

  This is why she can’t sleep. Asleep, dreaming, she’s moving. She runs down a street, comically, with no sound, chasing a car that has no driver. It’s in Paris, she thinks—or doesn’t think, she knows: in dreams you just know. Her feet barely touch the ground, just tap it every now and then, to launch her, floating, into the air. As a child, at the lake in the summer, she used to propel herself through chest-high water this way, leaping softly from pointed toe to pointed toe, great soft arching leaps anchored by the briefest contact with the sandy lake bottom.

  What would she do, in this dream, if she caught up with the car? That’s not the point. The car is there to lead her through the streets, a benevolent conductor. This way, it says. Now this way. Her legs, her feet, her toes, follow it without thinking, easily, an ease she doesn’t register in the dream.

  But it’s the ease that pierces her when she wakes up. The unnoticed, taken-for-granted ease, of muscles doing what she has told them—unaware of telling them—to do. Waking, her eyes are slitted, hot, leaking; her face is wet. The feeling of loss, of having something dangled and then taken away, is terrible. So is the self-pity, and the sense of danger. She spent a long time feeling sorry for herself, before she finally shoved all that aside. Even the smallest taste of that, now, the most delicate exploratory lick, feels dangerous, repulsive. Whatever you do, don’t go back there again.

  In the early days, she used to think: Just give me five more minutes of movement. Not even dancing—just running, walking. Or not even that. I’d settle for a voluntary shift, a decision and then the tiniest action, to move a leg an inch, to shake a wrinkle out of a trouser leg. Just let me do that once more, and then I won’t ask for anything else. It was like a bereavement—she’d felt this way after the death of her grandmother. Just let me see her one more time, and that will be enough. You imagined that a brief restoration, granted with full knowledge of the overall permanence of the loss, would be sweet: the scratch that would make the itch stop itching. But no, she saw, each time she woke from one of these vivid, utterly convincing dreams. The itch just itched more.

  So she can’t sleep. There are pills, big, red, slippery. They deliver something that is not really sleep—it’s grimmer, more bureaucratic, doled out reliably regardless of individual circumstances. It’s mere unconsciousness, an ellipsis in time. But it’s dreamless. Every few nights, frantic and grumpy with fatigue, she asks her husband for a pill. “I need to be clonked on the head with the sledgehammer,” she says, and he smiles kindly at her and goes into the bathroom. He sits with her while they wait for the pill to work. She thinks he would feel it ungallant not to, though on the nights when she doesn’t take a pill she is alone in this room, struggling to sleep and struggling not to sleep. His bed is in the small room opposite the kitchen at the end of the hall. Decades ago, before their apartment was divided from several others that would have made up its original, generous sprawl, it had been a maid’s room. She and her husband have always called it “the den”—the earnestly rugged American idiom a delight to him.

  (Biographers, early in the next century, forty years from now, will write about this little room, speculating on whether he was already sleeping there before she got sick, suggesting that the marriage was already in trouble, that they were on the brink of separating, that he stayed on after her illness out of a sense of duty and guilt—but he and she will both be dead by the time these rumors become public. She, herself, would not have been able to answer this question, except to remark
that nothing was as clear-cut as that, either in their marriage or in any marriage, or in anything, for that matter. Sometimes before she got sick he’d slept in the den, saying he’d been working late and hadn’t wanted to disturb her. Sometimes he’d slept there with no comment. Sometimes he’d slept in the bedroom with her. Sometimes she’d slept in the den, either for the hell of it or because his snoring had awakened her in the night and she’d pulled the quilt from the foot of their bed and wandered down the hall—wandered! Such a vague, careless word, but still an active verb, an action that required volition and neurons and muscles to work together busily and efficiently, even while you were prodigally unaware of them—to sleep, in happy, self-righteous silence, alone.)

  Now her husband sits in the orange tweed armchair beside her bed while they wait for tonight’s pill to embrace her and pull her down. The water glass, half empty, is on the bedside table. The lamps are turned off. The pillows are in their right places, behind her neck and shoulders. “It’s like leaving on a trip,” she tells him. “When you’re on the boat and the luggage is all there too, and the guests have gone ashore. The responsibilities are all done—you just have to relax and wait for the boat to pull away from the pier.”

  “And drink champagne,” her husband says.

  “That’s right, you have to drink champagne.”

  “So you do still have responsibilities.”

  She smiles. “Poor you.”

  Speaking of boats—and maybe this is why she did—he is sailing tomorrow, on the France, taking the company on a six-week tour. She misses touring, misses Europe, misses going alone with him to museums and odd corners of cities and small, cheerful restaurants for late-night suppers. That private, small, lighted world you could find for yourselves in the midst of traveling. She misses, too, being in groups with him: being one of many in company class, or rehearsal, or at a large, crazy party given by some rich admirer in the lantern-lit garden of a villa—Fiesole, Neuilly—seeing him at a distance, his calm formality, knowing that she was the one who would be alone with him, behind a locked door, at the end of the night. Knowing it but never quite believing it was true. Running down a street, jumping with him into a taxi. “The getaway car,” he would say.