Homecoming (18 page)

“Please, listen to me. I was as shocked as you were when we met here today. I’d given up trying to communicate with you after a policeman stopped me for loitering at your—and our—front door. Well, to be accurate, I had almost given up. So when Gran invited me today, I thought that maybe she had some news for me, some good news.”

“It’s too late for good news.”

“Why is it too late? I should think that after what we’ve been seeing here today, you’d realize that it’s never too late.”

“For you and me, it is,” she repeated.

“Don’t include me, Cindy. When I saw you holding Freddie today, I remembered—”

“I know too well what you remembered. And I have that, too, and more than that, to remember.” She wanted to hurt him, and in a strange, perverse way of which she was entirely aware and was unable to explain, she wanted to feel the hurt herself.

Andrew sat down. For a few minutes he bowed, holding his head in his hands, not speaking. He looks white, he looks thinner, she thought. He looks beaten, sitting there like that. Yet she still wanted to hurt.

“You’re bringing it all back,” she said, breaking the silence. “It’s indecent to do this to me. Haven’t you done enough?”

“That silly woman—do you think she meant anything, for God’s sake? I don’t even remember her name, if I ever knew it. I wouldn’t recognize her if I were to fall over her now.”

“You’ve told me that a few times before, I think. Are you going to leave this room, or are you going to sit here all night? I’m freezing, and I want to go back to bed.”

“I’m not leaving, Cindy. I’ll sit here all night if I have to. Go back to bed if you’re cold.”

“Back to bed with you in the room? You must be out of your mind!”

“Go. I’m not going to touch you. I don’t attack women. That’s not my thing.”

“Really? That’s interesting.”

In the bed again, Cynthia drew up the quilt and propped the book against her raised knees.

“How could you have?” she burst out.

“Cindy … I make no excuse. I guess in that crazy moment I just needed to feel alive again. I’d been dead for so long.”

“You
had? And I? What had
I
been?”

“Dead too. But I believe, I hope, that if you had done what I did, I would forgive you.”

Yes, dead, she thought. We had not made love for more than half a year. When your heart is broken, what’s left of you breaks too.

“I make no excuse,” he resumed. “I say again that I wronged you terribly, and I’m sorry. Yes, I was a little bit crazy.”

“Dead and crazy at the same time? Very unusual.”

He got up and stood by the bed. White and
thin, she thought again, like me. This has wrecked us both.

“You saw what happened today, and what else could have happened,” he said. “The world is a dangerous place. But we don’t stop living because it is.”

“A noble philosophy,” she answered bitterly.

“What else can I say, then, except ask you to try again?”

“I can’t.” She was trembling. “I can’t go back to what there was before. Now let me sleep. Will you go now?”

He shook his head.

“What are you going to do? Sit up all night?”

“No. I shall sleep on the floor.”

“Damn you. I’m going to turn off the light.”

For a long time she lay awake. The hurt in her chest grew with the suffocating weight of memories: the twins, the agony, the betrayal.

The clock on the stair landing chimed once. One o’clock. She had perhaps dozed for a little while; it was often impossible to distinguish between true dreams and waking dreams. There was no sound in the room, not even a rustle. He
had probably crept away while she dozed. She reached to the lamp and turned it on.

There he lay, asleep on the floor at the foot of the bed. He had removed his jacket and, in his fastidious way, much like her own, had hung it over the back of a chair. The room was too cold to be lying there on the floor in his shirtsleeves. From the easy chair in the corner she took an afghan, most likely one of those that Gran’s mother had knitted, and laid it over him.

He did not wake. She stood there looking at him. He lay perfectly straight, flat on his back, as people lie in their coffins. The wedding ring was gone from his left hand; it had been his idea to have a double-ring ceremony. He needed a shave. By the end of the day he always needed another shave.

It was odd to think that she was the only person in the whole world who knew everything about him, or as much as you can ever know about another human being. She knew that his eyes filled whenever there was a lost dog in a book or a movie. She knew that he carried a toothbrush in his attaché case, and that in private, at home, he often ate with his fingers.

An entirely illogical swell of pity moved in her throat.

I heard him get up
, said Marian.
I heard him walk across the room and fall
. Then she said something like:
We wasted so much time
.

You have been too proud
, Annette said.

And Aaron quoted, “A
man’s pride shall bring him low
.”

Shivering in the chill, she kept standing there.

Damn you. She was so angry. Damn you, she said without making a sound, while tears rolled down her cheeks.

In his sleep he must have become aware of her presence, for he opened his eyes, blinking into the lamplight. Startled then, he sat up.

“Is there anything wrong?”

“I covered you, that’s all.”

He was looking at her tears, while she looked at his hands. They were blistered and raw.

“Your hands,” she said.

“Rope burns. It’s nothing.”

“Have they been like that all day? Why didn’t you ask for something?”

“I don’t know. It seemed unimportant with so much else happening.”

“I have no Vaseline, but face cream should help for the time being.”

He got up, sat on the bed, and stretched out his hands. Her tears were still brimming, while, with soft fingertips, she anointed them.

When she was finished, he gave her a long, steady look, and took her into his arms.

“Damn you,” she said, and began to laugh.

“We’ll begin again, Cindy. We can have everything again. Believe me. Everything. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Darling, turn out the light. We’ve waited so long.”

A December sky, thought Annette, can be as deeply blue as any sky in May. So it was, in the morning as the house emptied out. In the front hall after breakfast they were gathering their coats and possessions.

“I was thinking,” Gene whispered, “about your friend Marian. You may think this is foolish, but you know, in a certain way, she reminds me of Susan.”

“Not foolish at all. A little tartness and a lot of sweetness. Yes, I see the resemblance.”

“Perhaps I will give her a call sometime. Invite her to the theater or something.”

Rather touched and a little amused by her son’s apparent shyness, Annette replied quickly, “Of course. Why not?”

They were loading the cars. Lewis and Daisy were to drive back together, while Cynthia was to go with Andrew. You had only to look at those two to know that they had slept together. Nevertheless, Cynthia, wanting to make sure that she knew, had hugged her and whispered, “Thanks,” in her ear.

Annette had winked. “Okay?”

“Yes, Gran, very okay.”

And so they all departed. She stood watching them roll down the driveway and down the road until they were out of sight. Turning, then, to look back up at the house, she was reminded of Robert Frost’s lines:
Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in
. Well, none of my people
had
to come here; it’s I who wanted to take them in. And she wondered whether it needed a tragedy to make people value
the treasures of home and love. I hope not, she answered herself, but maybe, sometimes, it does.

Back in the library she paused before her husband’s portrait.

“Well, Lewis,” she said aloud, “we’ve had a few troubles since you left us. They’re straightened out now, you’ll be glad to know. Oh, I’m not naive enough to think, for instance, that Gene and Aaron will become close, dear friends; their ways and paths are too far apart for that. But at least they accept each other now, so when they meet it will seem natural, and the children will not suffer from the poison of anger. And our sons are together again, thank God. Thank Him for Ellen and Lucy, for Andrew and Cynthia. Thank Him for everything.”

Outdoors, ice was dripping glitter from the trees, and the sun was brightening toward noon. The day was splendid.

“Come, Roscoe, let’s take a walk,” she said. “Come, boys. I’ll get my coat. Let’s go.”

Enjoy the following excerpt from
Belva Plain’s captivating new novel
,
LEGACY OF SILENCE
.
Available now in hardcover
from Delacorte Press

My mother’s lover said, “How beautiful you are! You look like Rebecca at the well.”

Did I dream that, she asked herself. My mother, Caroline, died before I was old enough to know her. And Eve almost never talked about Caroline’s lover. More likely, as I think back, it was Lore who told it to me.

She told me how alike they were, Eve and Caroline, with their black exotic eyes, and only twenty years between them, so that although they were mother and daughter, they were often thought to be sisters.

The worlds in which they began their lives could not have been farther apart. One was a stolid, dependable town near the shores of Lake Erie, while the other was Europe, bleeding its way
toward war. In the end, these worlds with their secrets came together, woven into a coat of many colors, as my mother’s lover might also have said.

T
he house, built of creamy stone, was square and substantial, made, as in all of Berlin’s prosperous suburbs, to endure forever. Its tall, narrow windows overlooked in various directions a sloping park across the avenue, elms, horse chestnuts, houses, hedges, and gardens; in its own garden, at the center, a rose bed had a sundial on a marble pedestal.

Here Caroline, while her poodle, Peter, lay under her chair, had often used to read or do her lessons. Now though, in 1938, there were to be no more lessons and no more examinations, for the university was closed to her, and her sole present problem was simply to decide what skill would be most practical for an emigrant. She was eighteen, but she felt much older, and she was
much older because people age in times of fear and danger.

“For you, it’s easy,” said her father, who was a doctor. “You can tutor, in English or French. There’s always a demand. But for me, all those licensing examinations in another language! And at my age.”

The vision of their radical departure from everything they had known, everything that had been normal, house, friends, and their very language, was sometimes too hard to bear, especially on a shimmering, mild afternoon. She stood up, closed her book, fastened Peter’s leash onto his collar, and crossed the avenue to the park.

Dry leaves, amber and faded red, lay on the walk. A windstorm earlier in the week had piled heaps of them beneath the trees, and into these Peter leaped and scrabbled with great yelps of joy. She stood and watched the scene: a girl and a dog in sunlight; change the girl’s costume and she could be a subject for Vermeer, who had painted in the seventeenth century, or for any painter in any century. It was all so
natural
, she thought again. And it was just this naturalness that made the heart ache. How was it possible, while so many terrible, unbelievable things were happening every day, perhaps at this moment, somewhere in this city? Somewhere.

“That’s a fine poodle you have.”

She had not heard anyone approach. He was a young man holding a German pointer on a leash.

“Don’t worry. Siggy’s gentle. He doesn’t fight with other dogs.”

“Peter doesn’t, either.”

Indeed, the two dogs had begun to sniff at each other, entangling the leashes.

“Funny creatures,” the young man said. “And yet some of us can’t do without them.”

“That’s true. We’ve had Peter for three years. He’s Peter the Second. We got him after the first one died.”

“I like his natural haircut. I always think there’s something pathetic about poodles who are decked out like clowns.”

“Oh, I agree.”

People said that the best way to start a flirtation—although she had never experienced anything like a flirtation—was to go walking with a charming child or a dog. In ordinary circumstances, this would have been a delightful little adventure. He was a very attractive person, well built, well spoken, with fine features, and only a few years older than she. But the circumstances were not ordinary. All this went through Caroline’s mind.

“Were you planning to walk farther?” he asked.

Yes, she had been. Usually, she went as far as
the pond, circled it, and started home. Sometimes she even went twice around the pond.

“Well then, do you mind if we go together?”

“Not at all.”

She had poise. She was known to have it. So no one could have guessed at her sudden excitement. He had such a beautiful face! His light eyes, under dark brows, were friendly, while his mouth was serious, as a man’s mouth ought to be. Yet she was at the same time aware that she was being foolish, schoolgirlish and absurd.

“Walter Litzhauser,” he said with a bow and extended hand.

“Caroline Hartzinger,” she answered, shaking the hand. And they walked on with the dogs on either side.

“This dog-walking is a new experience for me. My parents are away and I’ve been made responsible to take Siggy out for his exercise. I usually don’t have much time at home. I’m at the university.”

“I take Peter every day. He’s my own dog. He lives in my room.”

There seemed, then, nothing to say. She was thinking how odd it was that human beings, no matter how casually met, have to keep talking in order not to appear rude or indifferent.

“May I ask,” he inquired, “are you studying for the university, or are you perhaps already
there? I am not very good at judging how old people are, so forgive me if I—”