Safe Passage (24 page)

    
He moved against Cynthia for warmth, intending to get up in a moment, but instead he slept again, deep and dreamless. When he awakened, it was almost noon. He had not done that since he was a teenager. He heard Cynthia making lunch in the kitchen, talking to the boys.

    
"You should have gotten me up," he said, after dressing quickly and joining them. "I never sleep like that."

    
"I figured if you did, you must need it. I called over to your house. Tim O'Neal called his family, but they still don't have word on Percival. There's nothing you can do. Your father's having trouble with his eyes, but everyone else is there."

    
"He's never had blind spells two days in a row before," Alfred said. "They say it isn't stress, but it probably is."

    
"You hungry?" Cynthia asked.

    
He was. Another time, he might have felt ashamed for wanting food at such a time, but not now. "After lunch we can all go over there," he said. "The kids can't make it any worse. Actually it might be nice to have them around."

    
If Tim O'Neal had called home, that meant they would probably get the news today, one way or the other. It would be easier to have Cynthia and the boys with him when it came. Cynthia handed him a sandwich and smiled. He noticed that she was wearing the same blouse she'd worn the day they met, and though it had been eight months since then, her appearance struck him even now as remarkable.

    
She'd been standing by the coffee machine in the teacher's lounge that first day, much as she was standing in the kitchen now. She'd just finished counseling a student from his homeroom and was ready to tell him her impressions.
His
first impression was of the blouse—a bright, almost violent purple favored by students but never worn by teachers because very few women over twenty-one could get away with it. But on Cynthia it looked fine, a measure of her attractiveness.

    
Of course, it was not only the blouse but what was under it that impressed him, though at the time he'd tried not to think about that. He never involved himself with women he met at work. Still, he'd observed that Cynthia's skin seemed luminous against the purple blouse, and that her ordinary brown hair—short and brushed back from her face in a modest, businesslike way—had a particular sheen to it. Her face was round but with sharply defined features—not at all
pixieish
—and her eyes were an alert greenish gray. Having noticed those things, he tried to focus on her not as a woman but as a psychologist, a professional. Her manner was confident. He tried to listen but could not remember what she said. All through the conference his attention kept wandering away from the plight of his student to the enormous—even under the loose blouse-
esize
of Cynthia's breasts.

    
He became acutely conscious of trying not to stare. Still reminding himself that she was a colleague, not an accessible woman, he asked her to dinner. He stared at her breasts in the restaurant. "When you work with teenagers," she said later, you get used to getting the eye from the students and the teachers both. It's the first thing they deal with." He watched her being aware of his staring and was terrified that, when he took her back to his apartment as he planned to do as soon as they finished eating, she was not going to let him touch her.

    
What actually happened was that she refused to go back to his apartment at all, because she had to get home to her babysitter.

    
"Your babysitter?" When he picked her up, he had assumed the other woman in her apartment was a roommate.

    
"I have two little boys." He felt slightly sick at the idea of her having children, but his desire for her did not diminish.

    
Later she said, "I managed to accumulate a marriage certificate, a graduate degree, two babies, and a divorce all in a three-year span."

    
She was two years older than he was. He had never dated an older woman. He had never dated a woman with even one child, much less two.

    
He expected to forget her.

    
He could not stop thinking about getting his hands on her breasts.

    
It made no sense. He was not a casual person. He had been in love once before and anticipated that there would be consequences when it happened again. He wanted to place his affection appropriately.

    
He thought about her—he had never done this with any woman before—
durng
his classes.

    
It was unlike him to become obsessed with a woman's body, especially a woman who was—he knew this was uncharitable—disproportionate. He preferred ordinary, clean-cut good looks, though he was not averse to hidden treasure underneath. His first great love in college had seemed perfectly unexceptional clothed, but naked turned out to have voluptuous hips not nearly as narrow or fleshless as they appeared in jeans. He liked that well enough but had never been attracted to outward shows of cleavage or curve.

    
He could not get Cynthia out of his mind. They went to dinner and to movies; they chaperoned several dances at his school. Touching her breasts and later touching all the rest of her did not quench his craving. He felt as if he were diving into a lake with buried treasure at the bottom, aware of the potential reward but unable to hold his breath long enough to reach it and be satisfied. He came up for air and no sooner caught his breath than he was ready to dive again. When he was younger, he had sometimes felt this way about music. There were pieces he could not get enough of. He played the records over and over again while his parents were at work. When they came home he avoided that, not wanting them to think he was crazy, but he was restless, unhappy, until they left again and he could have the stereo to himself. Then finally, after days or weeks, his ear would grow weary, satisfied, and he would not need that particular melody so much anymore. But with Cynthia…there seemed to be no end to her. After a time he realized it had nothing to do with the size of her breasts.

    
Winter passed and by spring they were spending entire weekends together. Sundays they took her boys to Wheaton Regional Park or the Smithsonian or the National Zoo. Both boys liked to ride the Metro. Alfred felt comfortable enough with Jason and Joshua, having grown up accustomed to little brothers whose hands had to be held and noses wiped. At the Smithsonian he pointed out dinosaur bones and Iron Age tools. At the zoo he told them everything he knew about polar bears and poisonous snakes, lifting their small bodies over the crowd so they could see. When they grew tired, he bought them frozen custard cones at the refreshment stand, then sat with Cynthia while they ate and, revived, ran free on the grass. The boys made him feel useful and content. Yet sometimes on these outings he found himself walking as close as he could to Cynthia, away from the boys, touching her shoulder and her hair while restlessness and desire grew in him. He knew that his voice remained steady as he explained why bears liked cold weather or the Wright brothers had so much trouble learning to fly, but his mind was far away at those times. He yearned to be finished with respectable activity, yearned for Jason and Joshua to be fed and tucked into their beds, and for Cynthia to be beside him, alone, in her living room, so he could touch her wherever he wanted to touch.

    
She told him that she never worked in summer, because she liked having the time to spend with her sons. The Board of Education offered psychologists either a nine-month or a twelve-month contract, and she always chose the shorter one. It occurred to Alfred that during the summer she could use some help paying her rent. Between classes, during breaks in his work, he began to toy with the idea of moving in with her. The little boys liked him; Cynthia's ex-husband lived in Ohio and didn't see them much. It would be pleasant enough to father Jason and Joshua in the daytime and spend nights making love to their mother. Cynthia said she wouldn't let any man move in with her unless there was some sort of commitment; she wanted no more confusion for her sons. He surprised himself by offering to marry her right away. She said no, it was a good idea to live together first, as long as they had the commitment. He moved in. They planned to marry next summer, because Gideon would be home from Utah and Percival would be back from Lebanon. Cynthia had little family and liked the idea that all the Singer brothers would be able to attend.

    
The thought of a wedding with Percival dead drained the joy from their plan. But now, sitting in the kitchen eating his sandwich, with the memory of their lovemaking and his sudden sleep afterward in his mind, he knew even the death of his brother would not drain his joy in her. It would not drain his joy any more than his mother's disapproval had.
Even the death of a brother.
God forgive him, but it would not.

    
He finished the sandwich and helped Cynthia clean the kitchen. Together, they readied the boys. As they drove to his parents' house, he steeled himself to his father's blindness and the possibility of bad news. There was nothing more he could do. But when they pulled up, music from the stereo boomed out onto the driveway—opera distorted by sheer volume—and he knew he should have come earlier.

    
Inside, Darren had put on old earmuffs to shield himself against the noise, and Merle had covered his ears with a pair of stereo headphones.
Izzy
, lost in thought in the family room, seemed to be oblivious to it. Simon had the TV on but couldn't hear and didn't seem to care. Alfred wanted to take the twins aside and point out that it was in bad taste to parody life in the Singer household before the crisis, but he could see they were too upset for an etiquette lesson, and the music was too loud to allow normal talk. He found his mother in the living room, sitting on a chair in the same fetal position she'd assumed the day before, looking out of the window.

    
"I see we're testing
Mefistofele
for its ability to deaden the auditory nerves," Alfred said, lowering the volume.

    
"Tim and Percival were in the same unit," she told him. "Tim was out someplace when it happened. The last time he saw Percival, Percival was in the building."

The music grew louder. A passionate whistling marked the final scene of the opera, in which Mephistopheles made his last-ditch pitch for Faust's soul, while the choir of angels prepared to sing him into heaven.

    
"You can't draw conclusions," Alfred said. He felt trapped, as if she would go on in this vein forever.

    
"Where's Dad?" he asked.

    
"Upstairs. Blind. I think he's taking a nap." She sounded bitter.

    
Voices drifted in from the other room. Simon was saying to Cynthia, "You think all this noise is going to blow the kids' ears out?"

   
 
"I don't know about Joshua," she told him, "but it would take more than this to damage Jason."

    
"We don't want any permanent hearing loss here," Darren said. "Joshua, take my earmuffs."

    
"Jason gets the headphones," Merle put in.

    
Cynthia laughed; the little boys giggled. The sound was better than the music. Alfred felt calmer, knowing they were there. A way occurred to him to distract his mother from thinking about Percival.

    
"Ah,
Mefistofele
he said
. "
I got my religious education from
Mefistofele
."

    
She looked surprised. "Oh, Alfred. You had no religious education."

    
"I did, really."

    
Even turned low, the music had its power. Alfred remembered his mother listening to
Mefistofele
during her pregnancies. She favored violent, troubled music then. Eventually she had told him the entire story of Goethe's
Faust,
on which the opera was based—the deal between God and the Devil to see who could win Faust's soul, the temptations Mephistopheles offered, which included Faust's love affair with Margaret. Alfred had especially liked the part where Margaret, mad like Ophelia after Faust betrays her, goes to jail for drowning her illegitimate baby. He liked her refusal to let Faust rescue her, her decision to die and be saved rather than live and be damned. As a child, he had always believed he would have done the same. But then again, in those days he had been capable of starving himself for the sake of his younger brothers.

    
"We used to have long discussions about this. Don't you remember?"

    
"I only remember being pregnant," she said. "I always hated finding out I was pregnant—except not so much with you, since you were the first. That's a terrible thing, don't you think?"

    
"I used to ask you if you believed all that stuff about angels and devils battling over your soul," Alfred said.

    
"And did I?"

    
"You always put it off on Dad. You said, 'I don't know if I do or not, but I'll tell you what Dad would say—he'd say it was nonsense.' "