Sarah's Window (7 page)

It was Robert who brought Susan over to their table, because Robert didn't dance but he loved to show off his Anglican wit, and Susan was a good audience. With her long scarlet nails curled around a glass of scotch, she shot dry repartee right back at him. But Susan had her eye on John, even though he didn't pay her much heed that evening, was too busy moonwalMng across the dance floor with a black-haired gamin to appreciate her many qualities. She called him a few days later, and the next time he saw her, in her own natural setting, sitting in a booth at the Ritz grill with a vase of lilies towering over her shoulder, glancing impatiently at the slender Rolex dangling from her wrist, he felt himself whisked silently and painlessly along that old Wilde current.

Susan Blackshere, National Merit Scholar and Phi Beta Kappa, had graduated summa cum laude from the University of Kansas, gone on for her MBA at Wharton, and immediately taken up a high-paying job with a prestigious Kansas City brokerage firm as an assistant portfolio manager. The fact that her father, although deceased when Susan was only five, had seen fit to make her trustee of her own estate upon her majority, and with title to a little land and more than a little wealth, showed either extreme folly or extraordinary insight on the part of the old man. The latter turned out to be true.

John was quick to recognize how Susan's many qualities complemented his own. She was cool, tempered reason to his energy and animation. When he tended to leap blindly ahead, she would calmly reel him back, settle him down, and start him off again. She was almost five years older than he, and she was the first woman he had ever met who held his attention past the third date. Her physical attributes were certainly not lacking, but their lovemaking was only a preliminary hurdle to be negotiated so they might proceed to the far more stimulating realms of the mind. For John, who had never had difficulty finding women who wanted to sleep with him, it was only natural that he confused this cerebral infatuation with love. It would take many years for that other side of him to be awakened.

John took Susan home to meet his parents one Saturday evening in June. Kansas summers are notoriously muggy, and that evening, like most summer evenings, the Wildes kept to the cool confines of their bay-windowed sitting room while Nancy's pot roast simmered away in the kitchen. John had taken the club chair while Susan stood at the bar next to Armand, who was ceremoniously mixing Bloody Marys, which they always drank in the summer, although John never really liked the drink much. Susan, it turned out, was truly fond of them, liked a sharp dash of Tabasco, which she boldly requested from Armand Wilde while she rattled off a complicated formula for managing the withdrawal of retirement funds. What John liked above all was the way Susan seemed to just step in and take over for him, like a human shield. She deflected all that terrifying focus of attention that had dogged him since his childhood. Now, for the first time in his young adult life, he sat in his parents' home, drank a gin and tonic instead of a Bloody Mary, and relaxed.

When Susan turned in mid-conversation and, seeing there was no seat beside John, lowered her long legs to the floor and settled comfortably at his feet, hiding her size-ten shoes artfully in the drapes of her black silk pants, John imagined he saw a glimmer of lust in his father's eyes. Then, a little later, while still in the throes of balanced portfolios, John dangled his empty glass next to Susan's ear and ever so discreetly rattled the ice cubes, a gesture he had watched his father repeat over the years to his mother who would, without batting an eye, step over and pick up his glass and refill it. John was waiting for a pause, waiting for her to turn a bemused eye on him and lance him with a dry smile, but she did not. Instead, she set down her own drink, rose to her full five-foot ten-inch height, removed the glass from his hand, and whisked across the room with a rustle of silk to the bar where she mixed John another gin and tonic as if she had been doing it all her life.

There could be no surer test of authenticity than this.

But the Wildes saw even more; they saw a potentially powerful ally, someone with a faultless guidance system, a characteristic Armand Wilde appreciated in humans as well as in defense systems. Her career, in one form or another, was viable in every region of the world, in every economic climate. She could follow John to Stanford, Columbia, even Copenhagen. She would be more than succor and balm; she would lay down the track upon which their son would travel.

Armand Wilde was not an intuitive man, but perhaps he sensed a certain hesitancy in his son that summer, because while John was busy at his old construction job and bedding Susan in her well-appointed brownstone near the Kansas City Plaza, Armand Wilde made an unannounced side trip to Stanford. He was already in the general vicinity, had been called out West as a consultant for Lockheed and just thought it worth his time to check the classified ads and see what was coming up in the way of rentals that might be convenient for a young man in his first year of doctoral studies. He found just the thing, a little two-room duplex within walking distance of the physics department. He filled out the rental agreement, signed his own name, and put down a deposit that included the first month's rent.

Upon his return he presented John with this fait accompli as calmly if he had just picked up a nice bottle of merlot for dinner.

That's when Hortense faded. Or perhaps she had faded earlier and John had been too busy to notice. That evening John shut himself in his room and dug out the papers from their hiding place in his closet: the acceptance letter, the instructions for training and interviewing that were to take place in August. He read them through again and again, trying to revive their plausibility. He sat on the side of his bed with the letter on his knees, rubbing his sweating palms against his jeans. He would look up at the door and see himself opening it, walking out, finding his father in his study, in his re-cliner, reading glasses riding low on his nose, smooth skull glistening in the light. John would thrust the letter into his gut and bellow like a drill sergeant, "Stanford be damned! I'm going to Africa to teach math to little Kenyans!" Then he would turn and walk back to his room and close the door and lie there in bed with his stomach squeezing out his breath while he waited for that battleship of a man to cruise into his dark waters and destroy him.

Instead, John destroyed the letter. He destroyed every trace of his folly. He had told no one about it; not Susan, nor his mother, nor Robert, not even the comfortingly anonymous workers on his construction crew. He took all the papers out on the job very early one morning, pulled them out from underneath the seat of the Ford Mustang his parents had given him as a graduation present, and burned them in an incinerator behind a new home they were building in Overland Park.

Afterward, he sat on the front steps drinking his Quick Trip coffee while he waited for the other workers to arrive, feeling all the ponderous weight of his decision. He knew all along Africa had been a myth; all he had really wanted was his freedom. Now, as he looked out across the sea of rooftops it occurred to him he might have just incinerated his soul.

He married Susan the week before Christmas in a candlelit ceremony in Lawrence, performed by the most Reverend Simpson in that very church where Hortense had visited him. The First Congregational Church welcomed 512 guests to its sanctuary decked in holly and flocked pine, with tall, flickering tapers playing against the solemn shadows. John had returned from school just two days prior to the wedding, and the whole affair struck him as something out of a dream.

John would be the first to admit that his life set its course at that moment. As his parents had predicted, Susan—the wind in his sails—directed him. Not so much overtly but subtly, because of who she was. Sometimes it seemed to him that she was a Wilde before she was a Blackshere, and so John followed in his father's footsteps. But even if he had wished it, John could never be that battleship he so feared; he was much more like the deep and darkly perplexing waters through which it sailed.

Hortense rarely visited him anymore. Only in rare and troubling dreams, and then she was always disguised somehow, and she no longer had a name.

John had not intended to drive up to the university until later in the week, but he changed his mind that morning while he had his coffee and listened to the shovel scraping against the concrete walk and thought about things past, and wondered some about the future. The encounter with Sarah seemed to have set things in motion, to have flooded his consciousness with a peculiar awareness. Even Will appeared to him in a new light, and when he looked at the strange child crawling around on the floor at his feet, there would flash across his mind the image of Sarah sleeping, and the child didn't seem quite so strange anymore.

He had intended to break in mid-afternoon, but he lost track of time as he usually did. He slapped shut his lap- top and quickly gathered up his work and dashed down the walk behind the research library with his coat open and flapping in the cold wind. It was getting close to nightfall when he exited the turnpike at Cassoday and cruised slowly into the town. The lights were out at the Cassoday Cafe and the place was dark inside. There was an
open
sign hanging askew in the front window, but when he tried the knob the door was locked. Just then the red-checkered curtains stirred, and Amy's face appeared in the window. The door opened, and she greeted him with a shy smile.

"Hi."

"Is Sarah here?"

"Nope. We're closed."

John motioned to the book and the large envelope under his arm. "I just wanted to return this. She left it over at our place last night."

"Oh, I can give it to her."

She held out her hand, but he only stared blankly at her. She couldn't help but notice the way disappointment washed over his face and troubled his blue eyes, and there was a sudden boyishness in his demeanor that twisted at her heart.

"She'll be in early tomorrow. I can give it to her then."

"Yeah. Thanks," he answered. But just as he shifted the book to his hand, there was the sound of tires crunching on the snow, and he glanced over his shoulder to see a white Bronco with the Chase County Sheriff logo emblazoned on the door pull to a stop behind him.

"Sorry, I gotta go," Amy said as she struggled into her coat. "My dad's here." She turned to lock the door behind her. "You know, she lives just up the road in Bazaar.

It's on your way. If you want to take it by yourself."

"I guess I could do that."

There is an enchantment that settles over the Hills at twilight. It is rapid and fleeting and can only be seized at just the right time in just the right confluence of light and shadow. As John drove slowly up the road to Bazaar, he sensed such a moment was on him. He took his time, glancing often at the snow-patched winter-brown hills shrouded in ever-deepening hues of violet as the sun pulled its last light from the sky. As he rounded a bend or climbed to a plateau it seemed the face of the land was always changing. The north wind blasted his car from time to time, and he had to grip the wheel tightly to keep it on the road. The stars were already out and shining with cold brilliance in the clean sky. He thought again of the letters he had read and the man who had written them, and the seductive power in the words that passed between this man and Sarah. He wondered what kind of woman Sarah was and how it could be that he had never in his thirty-some years felt quite this urgency about anyone before.

Even in the penumbra of dusk he could make out the yellow house with peeling white trim. He slowed and turned into the driveway.

An old man on crutches answered the door and John didn't recognize him right off, only when he gave a little hop forward out of the shadows and his face came under the porch light. A screen door separated them, but John could still catch a glimmer of mistrust, a seasoned wariness in the old man's eyes.

"I apologize for dropping in like this...," John began. "Is Sarah here?"

"Nope."

John had sealed the batch of letters in a large manila envelope, and Jack Bryden cast a suspicious look at the package John now gripped in his hand.

"You sellin' somethin'?"

"No, I'm returning some things she left at our place last night when she baby-sat my son. I'm John Wilde."

Recognition lit up the old man's face and smoothed out the deeply furrowed brow.

"John Wilde! Well, come on in. Too cold to be standin' out there."

The room reeked of stale cigarette smoke only partly masked by the odor of roasting meat wafting in from the kitchen. A hand-sewn quilt covered the wom seat of a chesterfield sofa, and limp lace doilies hid the threadbare armrests. Next to the recliner sat a metal TV tray littered with the old man's essentials—a sand-filled Fol-gers coffee can in which to extinguish his cigarettes, this week's
TV Guide,
nail clippers, a tin of Altoids. The room was dark except for the flickering light from the television tuned to the evening news. Beside the recliner, lodged between it and the chair, rested a prosthetic leg.

"Sorry I didn't recognize you. I was a little under the weather that night of the open house," apologized Jack. With the rubber tip of his crutch he jabbed at the switch on the base of a floor lamp behind his recliner and light flooded the room. Only then did John notice where his denim overalls were turned up and pinned just above the knee.

There was an awkwardness in the encounter, and if Jack Bryden, who was generally a convivial man even with strangers, found himself looking with vague suspicion on this man with the unsettling blue eyes, it was because somehow Sarah figured into the equation. He looked down at the leather-bound volume John held out to him, shifted his weight a little on his crutches.

"This is what she left?" His voice was edged with surprise.

John handed him the envelope. "And this, too."

He gave a cursory glance at the envelope but made no move to take it, just hung there on his crutches cradling the book in his hands.

There was a movement across the room, and John looked up to see a gray-haired woman standing in the kitchen doorway, a woman as drab and ordinary as a sparrow. A housedress hung loosely on her thin shoulders, and she stared warily at him as she dried her hands on her apron.

"This here's my wife, Ruth," Jack said.

Ruth gave him a curt nod.

"That's a rare book, isn't it?" John said, shifting his gaze back to the old man.

"Well, it's a pretty special book if that's what you mean. It belonged to Sarah's mother." He shifted his weight and then went on softly, "She drowned. Off some damn island in Greece... hell if I can ever remember the name of the place. Even though I been there. Had to go over to pick up Sarah and bring her home. She was just a baby. Not even a year old." His voice had turned gruff and he was thumbing the soft leather of the book.

"Don't need to talk 'bout those things in front of strangers," spat Ruth, and just as she turned back into the kitchen they heard snow crunching underfoot and footfalls on the porch steps, and Jack shouted, "Hold onto that handrail, Blanche!"

There was a flurry of stomping feet and mumbled curses as the door burst open, and John stepped back to make way for a bundle of fur swathed in yards and yards of muffler. A gloved hand unwound the knitted wool from her head and neck, and Blanche shook out her softly curled white hair, and John looked down into the face of a vision.

"John Wilde, meet Blanche. Bazaar's one and only registered historical monument."

But it was not Blanche, it was Hortense, with the ice-blue eyes.

John muttered a greeting, but Blanche didn't take note of the awe in his voice. She was too busy trying to untangle the cat from her feet.

"Damn her hide, she's gonna be the death of me."

"Well, if you'd feed her once in a while..."

"Jack, I feed that damn cat three, sometimes four times a day and she's still between my feet."

"She loves you, be thankful you've got somethin' loves you, Blanche. Somethin' you don't have to stick dollar bills in their birthday cards every year so as to get their attention."

Blanche had finally unwound her muffler and stuffed her gloves in her pocket and was unbuttoning her coat.

"Well, I've never liked cats, so how is it I got myself three of 'em."

Ruth appeared from the kitchen with a scrap of cold ham. "Here, give this to her." Blanche held open the screen door and tossed the ham onto the porch, but the cat was not interested. Finally Blanche gave the animal a swift kick with her black rubber overshoe and sent it hissing off the steps and into the front yard.

"Blanche!" cried Ruth.

"Oh, hell, she ain't hurt. She'll be right there when I come out. Never seen a cat like that. Acts like a damn dog. Only worse."

Only when she was relieved of her coat and the cat did she turn her twinkling eyes to John and hold out a bony hand.

"What's your name?" she said, squinting at him through fogged glasses. John was surprised she didn't already know, didn't set about cursing him right then and there for his betrayal all those years ago.

"John Wilde," he answered.

"This here's Clarice's son-in-law," clarified Jack. "Married to Susan Blackshere."

Blanche flopped down onto a chair and bent over to remove her overshoes. She looked up at him and the look unsettled him just as her first appearance had done, for the resemblance—although not perfect—was stunning.

"Where you from, John?"

"California for the last ten years, but I was raised in Lawrence."

"Ah!" She lit up. "I've got family up in Lawrence. Good town," she said.

"You look a lot like a lady who used to attend our church."

Blanche was massaging her toes through thick wool socks.

"The Congregational Church, by any chance?"

"Yes. It was."

"That was my twin sister. Hortense."

She looked up at him and John felt the back of his neck tingle.

"Did you know her?" she asked.

It took him a moment to answer. "She seemed to take an interest in me."

"That doesn't surprise me. She didn't have kids of her own and she was always meddlin' with those youngsters at that church, tellin' 'em what they should and shouldn't do. But they loved her for it. She had the best darn Halloween parties. She'd get all dressed up and do these haunted house things, 'n kids'd come from all over the neighborhood to parade through her house." Her voice had softened from the brusqueness of earlier, and she engaged John with a direct look and said, "You must've been a little boy when she died."

He answered gently, "Yes. I was."

John just stood there staring blankly at Blanche while she rubbed her foot.

There was a brief, uncomfortable silence, and then John excused himself politely, said he should be going. As he left he deposited the envelope on a table next to the door.

It was a confluence of events, to be sure, happenings that slowly seemed to construct an awareness of a place, a person. And so it was that he felt himself drawing closer to a world that was not his, and at the center of trnVworld was a woman.