Her Dear and Loving Husband (11 page)

He looked at the sky and sighed. It was getting late for Sarah.

“May I escort you home?” he asked.

He offered his arm, which she accepted without hesitation.

“Take me to the House of the Seven Gables,” she said. “It’s near your house, isn’t it?”

“Are you certain?” He didn’t want a repeat of her terror from the night when he had only mentioned the Witch Dungeon Museum.

“I want to see it.”

He tightened his arm around hers. “This way,” he said.

As they continued away from the bay, down Congress Street, then Derby, he could see her watching him. He wondered if it was obvious by looking at him that he was an entirely different creature than her. Jennifer took great joy teasing him about wearing glasses when he didn’t need them, but there was a reason behind the Clark Kent disguise. He had been nearsighted and wore glasses when he was alive—they called them spectacles then. After he was turned his blue eyes turned black, the pupils fully dilated, like someone had used a black marker to shade his irises. The contrast between his nighttime eyes, ghostly pallor, and fair hair was jarring. He noticed people’s confusion, their eyes darting between his hair and his eyes, and he thought from their puzzled expressions that they were wondering why his eyes were so dark when the rest of him was so light. He wore the glasses to minimize the contrast, and it worked well enough. People no longer stared at him like he was a Picasso painting, his facial features too far to the right or misplaced on a diagonal somehow. 

Sarah was still watching him, which made him more concerned about what she saw. Would she still smile when she saw me if she knew the truth, he wondered? He knew he needed to tell her, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words. He didn’t want to lose the opportunity to know her because she was afraid of what he had become.

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 believe 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, delphiniums, 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 magistrates 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 everywhere, 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. Sarah 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 divorced.”

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 better. 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 champagne 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, certainly 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.