Her Dear & Loving Husband

by Meredith Allard

  They walked in silence until she asked, “Are you feeling all right? You look pale.”

  “It wasn’t a very good night. Until now. My night is much better now.”

  She blushed hot along her jaw, the pink a sharp contrast to her peach-like complexion. Just like Elizabeth. James couldn’t be-lieve that the beautiful woman walking beside him was so like his wife, though everything except logic told him she was. But he would have to deal with the logistics of that mystery another night. For now, he was happy to be near her however he could.

  From Derby Street they headed back toward the bay. He could hear the sleepy waves nudging the shore, whispering like close friends. When they turned down Turner Street they saw it—The House of the Seven Gables, also known as the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion. It was a grand looking home, similar to James’s, only this was larger, with five more gables. Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his novel inspired by the old house, called it rusty and wooden. It didn’t look very rusty, though it was very wooden. In front was a manicured lawn with precisely trimmed bushes, and on top was the clustered chimney Hawthorne described. The story reenactments had long since ended, but James and Sarah walked as close as they could.

  “It’s beautiful,” Sarah said.

  James sighed. That had been Elizabeth’s reaction the first time she saw their two-gabled house after it was finished. But that must be a coincidence, he thought. Thinking the house was beautiful would be anyone’s reaction upon first seeing it. He let Sarah look around, not saying anything, letting her see.

  “I only see five gables,” she said.

  “The other two are around back. Come here.”

  He took her arm and walked her to the Colonial Revival Garden where the salty air mixed with the scent of lilacs. They saw the rose trellises, a border of honeysuckle shrubs, delphin-iums, and sweet Williams, a splattering of pastels like a Monet garden painting with pinks, blues, white, and dashes of yellow and lavender. It was late autumn, Halloween night, but some blooms were hanging on until the winter cold shriveled them away.

  “Those are many of the same flowers you would have seen here in the seventeenth century,” he said. “The house was built in 1668. It’s the oldest mansion around here.”

  “Older than your house?”

  “By twenty-three years.”

  He pointed out the Nathaniel Hawthorne House on the grounds of the mansion. “The author Nathaniel Hawthorne was born there,” he said. “They moved the house so it would be on this property. His ancestor, John Hathorne, was one of the magi-strates who presided over the witch trials. Nathaniel added the w to Hawthorne because he didn’t want to be too closely connected to his ancestor. I don’t blame him. John Hathorne was a self-righteous, pompous imbecile who cared nothing about justice, only his own reputation.”

  James struggled to keep his voice even, light. He wouldn’t be carried off on a tangent remembering the past and forgetting that Sarah was beside him, there in the twenty-first century, not the seventeenth. He would stay in the moment, talk about events from that time as if he were a tour guide with the privilege of showing this beautiful woman with the dark curls and full lips around Salem, and he would do his job well. Sarah wouldn’t be sorry she spent this time with him. After all, he had nothing to be gloomy about. Sarah didn’t seem to have an adverse reaction to the house. She had asked to see it. She was reading about the Salem Witch Trials because she had a desire to know more. And he would help her learn, just as he promised.

  “You should also see Witch House, which belonged to Jonathan Corwin, another magistrate at the witch trials. There’s also the New England Pirate Museum. That’s not about the witch trials, but it has a recreation of a dockside village and pirate ship.”

  “I didn’t know pirates were important here. Whenever I think of Salem all I think about are witches.”

  “Me too.”

  “Will you take me to Witch House?” she asked. She put her fist by her mouth to stifle a yawn, and they both laughed.

  “Yes, but another night. Now I’m taking you home.”

  It was a farther walk from the House of the Seven Gables to Sarah’s place. James held his hand to the small of her back and gently pressed her forward. He wanted to take her hand. They were so near his house, he could bring her home, kiss her every-where, her lips, her hands, her neck. Everywhere. He could carry her to bed. With Sarah so near, he felt that everything would be all right again. He wouldn’t be alone anymore. He thought, from her closeness as she walked, from the way she glanced shyly at him, the way she smiled at him, that she was thinking the same thing. But none of that intimacy was possible unless she knew the truth. He was weakening from his determination to keep his secret from her, caught up in whiffs of strawberries and cream. He hadn’t felt alive in oh so very long. He thought perhaps he should just tell her. Would she even believe him? She might not mind. Or she might mind very much. But the more he considered it the more he decided he was not willing to take that chance. He didn’t want to lose this time with her, chaste as they were forced to be. The more he knew Sarah, the more he needed to be near her however he could. If his only role was to be her tour guide around Salem, he would accept the job gladly.

  He walked Sarah to her door, kissed the top of her hair, and though he wanted to stay enveloped in her sweet scent until dawn, he went home, keeping his secret safe another night.

  CHAPTER 9

  After Halloween James began taking Sarah home. At first they walked, but then the New England nor’easters began striking with more frequency and it became too cold, too wet, or too icy, at least for someone who had been living on the west coast in the sun for so long.

  During a particularly fierce November storm, Sarah walked away from the library pulling her scarf tighter around her neck and her wool hat closer over her ears. She was shivering, and she felt her jaw tighten and her teeth click. She turned to see James slow his step so he could follow beside her.

  “Still no car?”

  “Not yet.”

  No matter how close she pulled her heavy coat around her throat she wasn’t warm enough. He pointed toward the parking lot off Loring Avenue.

  “Would you like a ride home?”

  Sarah looked in the direction he pointed. She felt like she did that night in the library when he first offered to walk her home, unsure what to say. Since Halloween he had been very friendly, very calm. Not one melancholy moment, no jumping out from the shadows. She stopped counting the months since her divorce. She was tired of following an arbitrary rule she set up for the sole purpose of making herself more miserable. If she wanted to try things out with a nice man, then why shouldn’t she? Where did she get the one year rule from anyway? If anything, James had been too gentlemanly with her, keeping his hands to himself even when she didn’t want him to.

  “I don’t bite, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  With his hand on her lower back, he escorted her past the library and the dining hall, around the recital hall and the bookstore to the parking lot. He opened the passenger’s door to his Explorer and buckled her in.

  He got into the car, started the engine, and pulled onto Lafayette Street, then left on New Derby, right onto Washington, and a final left onto Essex near the Salem Inn. Sarah was pleased with herself because she finally, after more than two months, felt she knew the ins and outs of Salem, the byways and side roads that made navigating the small town easier. When you’re walking and it’s cold, you want to know the quickest possible way around.

  James stopped in front of Sarah’s house and parked by the curb. She didn’t want him to leave, so she started asking him about himself, hoping he would stay.

  “How long have you been a professor?” she asked.

  He laughed. “This is my first year at Salem State College.”

  “Have you taught anywhere else?”

  “University of Washington Seattle, Northwestern University.” He stopped, opened his mouth as if he wanted to say more, but didn’t. Sara
h stared ahead watching the rain hit the windshield in angry splats, listening to the rattling of the wind. She wanted to ask him what he was thinking, but then she thought she might not want to know. He didn’t seem threatening, upset, or even melancholy. Just quiet. Then he said, “Jennifer told me you’re di-vorced.”

  Sarah exhaled. She had asked him questions so she could spend more time with him. She didn’t mean to have to talk about herself.

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s true.”

  “I know it’s none of my business, but if you don’t mind telling me, what happened?”

  She could have given him a superficial answer. She could have said we grew apart, or we were young, or I didn’t know bet-ter. But, sitting next to him in the car, encased together against whatever was happening in the world outside, she felt close to him. She wanted to feel even closer to him, and she wanted him to feel even closer to her, so she spoke from her heart.

  “The day after I graduated from Boston University I married a man I was never sure I loved, and I stayed married to him for ten years. I can remember watching him at our wedding, waiting at the end of the aisle in his black tuxedo and red carnation, and I knew even then, in the space of a hesitation, as if someone hit pause on a videotape, that he wasn’t the one for me.”

  “But you married him anyway.”

  “It sounds foolish now, I guess, but the invitations had been sent out, the cake was decorated, the guests were waiting, and it seemed like the thing to do, an expected rite of passage into adulthood.”

  “Your intuition was right.”

  “Too right. I don’t think my ex-husband wanted the divorce, but I had to leave. I felt stifled in my marriage, like I had been wearing my shoes on the wrong feet so long my legs became bowed. Now that I’m living here, free from the stranglehold, I feel like I’m finally stretching up straight again, like I’m standing as tall as I should.”

  “I understand what you mean.” Again, he looked like he would say more, but he didn’t.

  Sarah looked at her cat sitting in the window. “I should probably go inside,” she said. She didn’t want to go inside. She wanted to talk to him, see him smile, listen to him laugh. She felt like she should be there beside him, and she felt the light, fairy-like thread wrapping itself around them. But James didn’t ask her to stay. He opened her car door and escorted her to her door. Standing close together, she wanted him to kiss her lips, but she accepted a kiss on top of her head instead. It wasn’t what she wanted, but it would do. For now.

  After that night she began looking for him everywhere, on the streets, in the shops, on campus. She watched for him to come through the door past the metal detectors into the library, hoping to see him come out of the elevator from his office, giddy while she wondered when she might see him again. She felt the way she did when she had her first crush when she was thirteen, not knowing what to do with the nervous energy she felt like cham-pagne bubbles beneath her skin. She felt silly to be so infatuated with a man like that, especially so soon after her divorce. She had thought that part would stay dormant for some time. James had changed everything. She still had her concerns about him, he could be so distant at times, but she couldn't deny that he was always on her mind.

  One afternoon while Sarah was on her break, Jennifer walked up from behind and saw her writing in her clothbound notebook. When she shut it suddenly, Jennifer winked at her.

  “I bet you’re scribbling ‘Mrs. James Wentworth’ in that notebook. That’s why you don’t want me to see it.”

  Sarah laughed as if that was the silliest thing she ever heard. She wouldn’t admit, even to Jennifer, that she had thought about doing exactly that during dull moments in the library, something she did in high school with the name of boys she liked.

  James had awakened feelings in her that she had never known before. Unlike her friends, she had never been the kind to spend her life seeking romance. She had never been one to jump from man to man trying to find it the way others did. She thought romance only gave you unrealistic expectations, and what’s the point of expectations when you can’t achieve them? She had never known much romance in her life, not with boyfriends, cer-tainly not with her ex-husband. And when she looked at her friends’s lives, she didn’t see much romance there, either. Women love the fairy tale, she thought. They love the idea of the Romantic Hero with his unbuttoned shirt, his well-muscled chest heaving, the woman, who they imagine to be themselves, kneeling beside him, her dress this side of ravaged, revealing a bare shoulder here, a well-toned leg there, her billowy hair tossing in the breeze, her mouth an open O of ecstasy. But Sarah was too practical to retreat into imaginary worlds.

  Now, here was James Wentworth. Tall, gold hair, handsome in a manly way, a smile that, when he smiled, could clear away a stubborn storm hovering over the bay. His eyes were so dark, and where at first she found them intense, now she saw his kindness, his concern. Yet, though they spent hours together, he had never said anything that made her think he wanted more from their relationship. The way it was then, with him extending his arm, sometimes kissing the top of her hair, not even holding hands, seemed to be the way it was going to stay. So it was just as she always knew: romances, where the hero sweeps the woman off her feet, carries her to bed in the heat of passion because they can’t restrain themselves any longer, was a fantasy.

  “Sarah?”

  Sarah shook herself from the reverie that thinking of James had brought on. Jennifer smiled at her.

  “I was writing about the dream I had last night,” Sarah said.

  Jennifer stepped closer. “I know you don’t like to talk about it, but if you want to confide in someone, you can talk to me. Maybe I can help.”

  Sarah nodded her thanks. She was so busy the rest of the afternoon she was surprised hours later when she saw the threat-ening darkness outside. The wind picked up, the trees rattled, the leaves whistled, and she dreaded walking home in that weather. Maybe she would have to buy a car after all. Then she saw Jen-nifer looking toward the door.

  “There he is. Your professor.”

  Sarah thought she saw James nod, but he was too far to hear. He stepped into the elevator and disappeared, a hint of a smile still lingering on his lips. Something about the way Jennifer watched him made Sarah pause.

  “Jennifer…”

  “Yes?”

  “You can tell me the truth, I don’t care, but…do you like James?”

  “Of course I like James. We’ve been friends forever.”

  “No, I mean, do you like James?”

  Jennifer shook her head, waving her hand in front of her face as if she were swatting a fly. She dropped into the swivel chair in front of the computer and clicked around in the card catalog. “Nothing like that. He’s an old family friend. I mean an old family friend.”

  “He’s not that old. He’s about my age.”

  Jennifer laughed. “You like him too. Only I think you like him a little differently than I do.”

  “I don’t think he feels the same way about me.”

  Jennifer spun around on her chair, startling Sarah with the suddenness. “What makes you think that?” she asked.

  “We’ve never been on a date. He’s never asked me out to dinner, a movie, even for coffee. Sometimes I think he’s inter-ested—something about the way he looks at me. When he kisses the top of my head I think there might be something more between us, but then he turns away and goes home. We’ve never even held hands. If he was interested he would have asked me out by now.”

  “He’s kind of old fashioned.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In older days when a young man was interested in a young woman they wouldn’t go out on dates like we do now. He’d visit her family, make small talk with the father, compliment the mother, have dinner with the family. Whatever time he had with his intended, the only way they could get to know each other was in front of everyone. He’s just trying to get to know you without pressuring you. He’s really quite a gentlem
an if you think about it.”

  “That’s sweet, and odd, I think.”

  “It’s a very old fashioned way of doing things.”

  “I didn’t know there were still men who thought that way.”

  “James does.”

  Sarah sighed. She gathered her loose hair and lifted it off the back of her neck, waving it to fan her flushed skin. The heat in the library must be on high, she thought.

  “I don’t know what to think,” she said. “In so many ways he’s almost too perfect. No man can be so amazing without having some fatal flaw. Tell me the truth—is he really some axe-wielding homicidal maniac when no one’s looking?”

  Jennifer laughed. “Of course not!” she said. But there was something in the way she swung back to her work, checking the bar codes on a stack of books as if that were the most pressing thing in the world, that made Sarah wonder if he really was a homicidal maniac after all. Sarah laughed at her own paranoia, thinking she must have been watching too many scary movies on television.

  Suddenly he was there, James, leaning against the librarians’ desk, taking her breath away. When she saw him, the angelic smile, the gold hair, the black eyes that should have looked like voids but looked instead like darkness reaching for the light, all her worries melted away.

  “Hi, Sarah,” he said.

  “Hello to you too, Doctor Wentworth,” said Jennifer. “Isn't this your night off?”

  “It is, but the weather’s pretty ugly out there. I thought Sarah might like a ride home.”

  “I’d love a ride home,” Sarah said. She glanced at the clock on the wall and saw she had another half hour on her shift.

  “Go,” Jennifer said. “It’s a quiet night. I’ll take care of closing.” She pushed Sarah out from behind the desk. “See you tomorrow.”

  When James parked in front of Sarah’s house she felt brave and invited him in. At first she was sure she made a mistake. He had such a strange expression as he looked first at her house, then at her. He looked concerned, she thought, or confused, and he took too long before answering.