A Light in the Window (76 page)

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Authors: Jan Karon

BOOK: A Light in the Window
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What Cynthia and Dooley might be plotting, he couldn’t imagine.
Roberto had flown home, Andrew Gregory had houseguests, Miss Sadie and Louella were frazzled from all the gaiety and would hardly answer the phone, Esther had carried out her threat and gone fishing with Ray ...
Then again, maybe Cynthia and Dooley weren’t plotting anything at all. Maybe they’d forgotten. Hadn’t he forgotten Dooley’s birthday? And when was Cynthia’s? He felt a moment of panic.
Wait, there was the date—written on the wall next to his desk, his only graffiti since grade school. July 20. He breathed a sigh of relief.
He was convinced they’d forgotten.
At lunch, he saw Cynthia in her backyard, idly pruning a bush. And when he called home at three-thirty to see if Dooley was prepared for Miss Appleshaw, there was nothing in his voice that hinted at anything unusual.
He went home early, carrying the bundle of cards he’d received from the ECW, the Sunday school, Walter and Katherine, Winnie Ivey, Emma, Miss Sadie and Louella, and a dozen others.
As he went in the back door, he saw Cynthia going up her steps with something bulky under her jacket, glancing furtively toward the rectory. When she saw him, she averted her gaze as if he didn’t exist.
Had he hurt her feelings after that blasted peanut business, when she laughed at him and he didn’t laugh with her? He’d been pretty huffy about it, but why not? He’d gone nonstop for days on end and was flatly exhausted. Run here, run there, do this, do that, and then ... crawling down the middle of Main Street on his hands and knees into the bargain.
He pricked his finger. He checked his urine. Then he put on his jogging suit and headed across Baxter Park.
Panting, he sat on the old stone wall beyond the Hope House site, at the highest elevation in Mitford. How long had it been since he overlooked this green valley, the Land of Counterpane?
Since he came into the world, he’d seen a lot of changes, but the sight that lay before him had changed little. Over there, a river gleaming in the sunlight. There, a curving road once hewn out for wagons. And there, scattered among the trees, church steeples poking up to be counted.
He heard a distant whistle and saw the little train moving through the valley. Train whistles, crowing roosters, the sound of rain on a tin roof—such simple music had nearly vanished in his life, and he missed it.
But then, life was full of valuable things that somehow managed to vanish.
He was startled to remember the green and sapphire marble that, at the age of twelve, he thought was the most beautiful object he had ever seen.
He had kept it in his pocket, showing it only to his mother, and of course to Tommy Noles, who crossed his heart three times and hoped to die if he ever mentioned its existence to another soul.
Showing it around would have been a violation, somehow. He kept it, instead, a private thing, never using it in a game. But he grew careless with it, he began to take it for granted, and where he had lost or misplaced it, he never knew.
He had grieved over that marble, in a way. Not over the thing itself, but over the loss of its private and remarkable beauty.
Hadn’t Cynthia been like that to him? He had enjoyed the warmth and rarity of her nature, but he had never cherished her enough. Over and over, he had carelessly let her go, and only by the grace of God, she had not been taken from him altogether.
He remembered the times she had shut herself away from him, guarding her heart. The loss of her ravishing openness had left him cold as a stone, as if a great cloud had gone over the sun.
What if she were to shut herself away from him, once and for all? He stood up and paced beside the low stone wall, forgetting the scene in the valley.
He’d never understood much about his feelings toward Cynthia, but he knew and understood this:
He didn’t want to keep teetering on the edge, afraid to step forward, terrified to turn back.
He felt the weight on his chest, the same weight he’d felt so often since she came into his life and he’d been unable to love her completely.
Perhaps he would always have such a weight; perhaps there was no true liberation in love. And certainly he could not ask her to accept him as he was—flawed and frightened, not knowing.
He turned and looked up and drew in his breath.
A glorious sunset was beginning to spread over the valley, and across the dome of heaven, stars were coming out. He had stood on this hill, wrapped in his selfish fears, while this wondrous thing was shaking the very air around him.
He felt tears on his face and realized the weight had flown off his heart. Every cloud over the valley was infused with a rose-colored light, and great streaks of lavender shot across the upland meadows.
Dear God! he thought if only Cynthia were here.
But Cynthia was there—in the little house just down the hill and through the park. She was there, not in New York or some far-flung corner, but there, sitting on her love seat, or feeding Violet, or putting her hair in those blasted curlers.
The recognition of her closeness to the very spot on which he stood was somehow breathtaking. He remembered the long, cold months of the dark house next door and the strained phone calls and the longing, and then she had come home at last.
The very sight of her had sent him reeling—yet once again, he had closed down his deepest feelings and managed to keep his distance from the only woman, the only human being he had ever known, who would eat the drumstick.
He was amazed to find that he was running; there was nothing but his beating heart and pounding feet. He felt only a great, burning haste to find her and see her face and let her know what he was only beginning to know and could no longer contain.
“There comes a time when there is no turning back,” Walter had said.
He pounded on, feeling the motion of his legs and the breeze on his skin, and the hammering in his temples, feeling as if he might somehow implode, all of it combusting into a sharp, inner flame, a durable fire, a thousand hosannas.
Streaming with sweat, he ran past the cool arbors of Old Church Lane and across Baxter Park, desperate to see some sign of life in the little yellow house, to know she was there, waiting, and not gone away from him in her heart.
Her house was dark, but his own was aglow with light in every window, as if some wonderful thing might be happening.
He bounded through the hedge and into his yard and saw her standing at his door. She opened the door for him and held it wide as he came up the steps, and for one fleeting moment suspended in time, he sensed he had come at last to a destination he’d been running toward all his life.
Before the eleven o’clock service began, many of the Lord’s Chapel congregation opened their pew bulletins and read the announcements.
There would be a regional Youth Choir performance in the church gardens on August 1. The Men’s Prayer Breakfast would begin meeting at seven instead of seven-thirty on Thursdays, and would those who brought dishes to the bishop’s brunch please collect their pans and platters from the kitchen.
Directly beneath the names of those who were bequeathing today’s memorial flowers, they read the following:
I publish the banns of marriage between
Cynthia Clary Coppersmith
of the parish of the Chapel of Our Lord and Savior
and Father Timothy Andrew Kavanagh,
rector of this parish.
If any of you know just cause
why they may not be joined together in Holy Matrimony,
you are bidden to declare it.
Visit America’s favorite small town—one book at a time
 
Welcome to the next book,
These High,green Hills
CHAPTER ONE
Through the Hedge
HE STOOD at the kitchen window and watched her coming through the hedge.
What was she lugging this time? It appeared to be a bowl and pitcher. Or was it a stack of books topped by a vase?
The rector took off his glasses, fogged them, and wiped them with his handkerchief. It was a bowl and pitcher, all right. How the little yellow house next door had contained all the stuff they’d recently muscled into the rectory was beyond him.
“For your dresser,” she said, as he held the door open.
“Aha!”
The last thing he wanted was a bowl and pitcher on his dresser. The top of his dresser was his touchstone, his home base, his rock in a sea of change. That was where his car keys resided, his loose coins, his several crosses, his cuff links, his wallet, his checkbook, his school ring, and a small jar of buttons with a needle and thread.
It was also where he kept the mirror in which he occasionally examined the top of his head. Was his hair still thinning, or, by some mysterious and hoped-for reversal, growing in again?
“Cynthia,” he said, going upstairs in the wake of his blond and shapely wife, “about that bowl and pitcher ...”
“The color is wonderful. Look at the blues. It will relieve all your burgundy and brown!”
He did not want his burgundy and brown relieved.
He saw it coming.
Ever since their marriage on September seventh, she had plotted to lug that blasted armoire over for the rectory guest room.
The lugging over was one thing; it was the lugging back that he dreaded. They had, for example, lugged over an oriental rug that was stored in her basement. “Ten by twelve!” she announced, declaring it perfect for the bare floor of the rectory dining room.
After wrestling the table and chairs into the hall, they had unrolled the rug and unrolled the rug—to kingdom come. It might have gone up the walls on all four sides and met at the chandelier over the table.
“This is a rug for a school gym!” he said, wiping the pouring sweat from his brow.
She seemed dumbfounded that it didn’t fit, and there they had gone, like pack mules, carting it through the hedge again.

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