So Claire had come back home. Where else to go, alone in the world as she was. But not entirely lost, for she was wealthy from selling out all of Featherstone’s holdings.
—He was awfully old, I said.
Exactly the wrong thing. For which I have a talent.
Claire made a puffing sound. Somewhere between angry huff and stifled laugh.
I yammered cringefully onward, not the least cool and contained within myself but saying exactly what I was feeling, that Featherstone was the biggest son of a bitch I ever knew. And yet now, finding that he had passed to the Nightland, I had to admit I loved him in some regretful way. What a bastard. And yet the world withered a little without him in it. Part of me still wished I’d put a ball through his heart way back then instead of just his thigh.
Claire put her hand on my arm and said, I miss him pretty bad too.
Then she said, Not long ago, I saw you in a dream and you were about the age when you fought that stupid duel. A young man.
She sounded disappointed in me for succumbing to the passage of time, as if its marks on me were a personal failure. But I had been assured by many women her age and much younger that I remained remarkably and attractively youthful. Concessions to this odious middle passage of life were few. My hair, though increasingly grey, persisted across most of its former territory. And I had not grown an entire belly but only displayed a slight virile thickness through the barrel. But of course there’s no arguing against the dreamworld. Its requirements are strict.
She said, I’d guess you’re carrying a flask?
—Tanqueray and lime. There’s some left.
She reached out a hand.
I took the flask out of my pocket and unstoppered it and wiped its threaded mouth carefully with a clean handkerchief.
—Ever the gentleman, Claire said.
She took a pull and then wiped with her own handkerchief, cambric trimmed in black. Twisting around the rim in parody before she handed it back.
—Looks like a rough day for you, she said.
I touched my beaten face. Looked at my pocket watch and did the arithmetic.
—Rough seventeen hours, I said.
—There’s a great deal of gossip about you here, she said. Senator, colonel, white chief. But beset all about by creditors and ill-wishers and lawsuits.
—They have time to talk about me? I though you occupied all their attention. The Woman in Black. Tragic and melancholy.
Claire reached her black hand back out, and I put the silver flask in its curve. She turned it up and finished it and handed it back.
—But, good God, Will, a Warm Springs Gypsy? How the mighty have fallen. I would have preferred a more extraordinary melodrama.
—Me too. But just so you’ll know, I’m planning on changing everything about my life real soon.
—Well, that will be fun to watch.
I turned my palms up. I live to serve, I said.
She was quiet for a while. The broad river was smooth and brown, and at some point in our walk we passed a big flat rock in the middle of the water on which someone had planted a Rebel flag. The handsewn artifact drooped in sun-bleached folds from a pole only head-high. It was meant to signify something about identity and defeat, though what I could not say. Too many possibilities.
Claire said, Featherstone greatly regretted being too old to fight Yankees, but he was thrilled when Stand Watie and his Cherokee cavalry captured that Union ship. He reckoned it a first in military history.
—What river was that boat on?
—I don’t know the name of it.
—Must have been pretty narrow.
—Was it bad for you?
—What?
—The War.
—When we weren’t needing to scalp people, it was mostly fine. A long camping trip. But all in all, the second stupidest thing I ever did.
—Second?
—Right behind letting you ride away in the wagon that day.
Claire said, You don’t know how long I hurt.
—I hurt now.
—For the record, this is not a contest and I was not talking about you and we’ll not allude to that day anymore.
I had sense enough to reach out and touch her, a hand on the black shoulder, a joint of bones I knew the shape of in my strongest memory. I told Claire about my dreams of her in the winterhouse with Bear. Dreams that still came to me at least twice yearly. Her fleeing from me, slipping through my arms like smoke when I tried to hold her.
I said, From the time I was thirteen, it was you or no one.
—You ask too much.
—That’s my gift.
When we were three or four river bends from the Springs, Claire said, You drive on. Let’s deny them further topics of discussion for today.
But before I could turn, she reached out and tapped two fingers to the hollow below my bottom lip.
—Perhaps you should grow an Imperial.
—I had one. But I cut it off after the surrender.
OFFICIALLY, THE BATHING HOUSES closed an hour before dinner, but it was always possible—for a handsome gratuity—to obtain a key from an attendant. Three in the morning, Claire and I in the water neck-deep. Moonlight falling pearly all around us. The air was so cool and damp that steam rose thick from the surface of the spring and made the summer moon and stars look large and vague. I could hardly see her, though she was barely more than an arm’s reach away. The river flowed all but silent behind us, its sound like a deep exhalation. The lamps of the gallery had long since been puffed out by the white-coated attendants. Only a single yellow insomniac window remained lighted all down the long face of the hotel. The thirty-five columns pale in the moonlight. The lawn already silver with dew and the whitewashed tree trunks ghostly all the way down to the riverbank.
Despite my fervent suggestion to the contrary, Claire had insisted we wear bathing costumes. We moved around in the heavy water like two loads of dark laundry.
—My God, I said. We’ve seen every square inch of each other. Whence arises this sudden modesty?
—Sudden? she said. That was a very long time ago. Another world. We’ve long passed the statute of limitations on those memories.
—Not for me. They’re equivalent to capital murder. Unforgivable. I could mention certain particulars.
—As a person, there are elements of you that just won’t do.
—O wad some Power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as ithers see us!
—Yes, that’s just the sort of thing you need more of.
—I’m working on it. Day by day.
We swirled about each other in the sulfur-smelling water. Claire’s hair curled at her temples and at the back of her neck exactly as it had at sixteen. At sixteen, I had thought Claire was the prettiest thing I had ever seen. And also at seventeen, eighteen, twenty-three, thirty. But now, these many years later, she was only some of the person I remembered. I had never guessed she could ever look like this. She had been awfully pretty, but now she was beautiful. Rich beyond my imagination to conjure. She seemed full and complete. Though the rational, unenraptured part of me figured that no one, man or woman, gets to be full and complete ever. We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people. It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living.
Notwithstanding, she looked awfully good in the steam and moonlight.
I lifted a dripping hand out of the water and touched her damp hair. It was all gathered up in the fashion of the day. Bunched and rolled and crimped.
—I wish you’d do your hair the way you used to, I said.
—I don’t remember.
—A thick braid down your neck. And when you took the braid apart and raked your fingers through your hair, it fell long and waved and wild across your shoulders and down your back.
—You recall so exactly?
—I’ll revise. When you undid the braid, your hair was waved at the ends and ruched at the nape.
I swam clos
e and reached behind her to pull out the various pins and barrettes that held it in place, but she pulled away from me. Water swirled. Steam rose to the Green Corn Moon.
—This is not easy for me, she said. How to grow old?
—Going to water is a start, I said. It’s supposed to do you good.
SCATTERED ABOUT MY ROOM, a great deal of widow’s lingerie. Sheer and fragile as the shed skins of snakes. Claire held an item to the lamplight and it was luminous and of no color at all, like the stripe in the ribbon of lamp flame between the blue base and the waved yellow top. So slight I could not tell what part of the body it was shaped to fit. She dropped it to the floor, and it fell slowly as if nearly weightless.
Claire did not pretend that she did not drink, as many women do, by taking only patent formulas, proper and medicinal but strong with alcohol and laudanum. She mostly drank London gin, clear and straight. She had taken quite a bit of it through the evening, and sometime around four in the morning she went to the open window and leaned out and retched briefly into the darkness. Then to the washbasin, where she poured tooth powder from its perforated tin very liberally over her wetted finger and scrubbed out her mouth.
—There, she said.
She smiled, but her eyes were wet and a little red in the lamplight.
We tried kissing, and contrary to my expectations, we were more awkward at it than we had been at sixteen. A skill diminished by time. Back then, the awkwardness had arisen out of our rush to melt into each other. Though melt is not necessarily the right word. We collided with some hope that all the pieces shattered in the collision might form a pleasant pattern afterward. Now it was the avoidance of collision that was our trouble, the insistence on pulling back into the limits of our individual persons, so carefully delineated all these years.
After the kissing went badly, we tried just holding each other. And that was a little better but still awkward, a bumping of the soft and hard parts of the body. I said aloud that at least we were both lean enough that the points of our hips still clashed against each other as they once had done. After all, how often in midlife do you get to repeat any element of the distant past whatsoever? And by the way, we both being in the range of a half century old, any assertion of occupying a midpoint in life was a highly optimistic note to strike.
I became aware that I was talking too much.
—How come I’m still in love with you? I said.
—One of the mysteries.
THREE NIGHTS LATER, I stood at the far end of the ballroom. Lights dim. The band played all the current waltzes and a few of the popular songs of the day. Dancers moved across the floor in shapes like water, if water were considerably less graceful than it is. I waited and waited. And then through the wide French doors down the two-hundred-thirty-three-foot length of the ballroom, Claire entered. All the heads turned. She wore a shining silk dress of midsummer green, close at the waist, full below. Her hair was drawn up in an approximation of the current fashion but much looser, stray locks falling around her face and shoulders. A thin band of black crepe no wider than my finger around her upper arm. I went to her and gave her my hand, and we danced.
Oddly, hardly anyone was scandalized. After that first waltz, a few muted gloved hands met in applause directed our way. I credit the free and generous spirit of the Springs. Something in the water.
WE WERE CLOSE TOGETHER all the way from high summer to the equinox. The progression of wildflowers, blooming and fading in the ditches, and the phases of the moons were all the calendar I needed. By day, we spun along the river road and on country lanes in my colorful cart. After dinner we climbed to watch sunsets at the jump-off. Waltzes late into the night. Much wine and other spirits. In the foggy hours after midnight, tangled abed in one room or another.
One evening we waded out into the river to the broad rock with the Rebel flag. Wobbling barefoot over mossy riverbed cobbles, Claire with her skirts held knee-high, me with cuffs rolled over pale shanks and a half bottle of champagne sloshing in my hand. As twilight fell in the gorge, I lit a fire no bigger than the lid to a bucket. Striking a blaze from a nest of sticks and tinder collected in a hollow of the rock and feeding it with driftwood lying about. We watched the fire burn and I told Claire about Granny Squirrel’s potion made from just such a river nest. Me fasting and drinking the tea brewed from it in an effort either to forget her or bring her back.
—Granny Squirrel’s spells rarely failed, she said. So maybe that one just took a long time.
—Maybe. I’ve always tried to maintain the attitude that being happy interferes with our perceptions of the world.
—Did she ever die? Claire said.
—Possibly. During blueberry season one year, she never came home from picking. We looked and looked and all we found was her basket, half full. Nobody knows what happened. She might have just moved on.
—How old would she have been?
—Couple of hundred. Maybe more.
SUMMER WAS SUDDENLY DONE, wheeled away too quickly. Overnight, abandoned cornfields bloomed with head-high purple ironweed, burning and blinding and visionary. Autumn never the best of times for me.
Letters arrived daily from Conley and others. Debts and responsibilities. Things falling apart. Every morning, carriages rolled away taking summer people back to the lowlands. We had reached the sad time of year when the ballroom was used only on Friday and Saturday nights and the two upper floors of bedrooms were dark and empty. Dogwoods and sumac already burning red and poplars fading to yellow. Time to go.
Claire and I had not talked at all about a future. We never had before. When we were young, we worked under the assumption that all the life there was or would ever be was right in our hands at the moment, so why bother speculating about a future entirely lacking reality? But the future had waited in ambuscade and now pressed down on us with all its weight.
LATE ONE NIGHT, along about the equinox, I asked her to marry me. We were sunk to our chins in the steaming spring, and a light rain fell around us without even the force to pock the water. I interlocked fingers with her and pulled her to me and said what I had to say about loving her for so long, yearning and despairing. And about the power of second chances. While I talked, Claire’s eyes teared up, which I took as a good sign.
But when I was done she shook her head. Not yet, she said.
—If not now, when?
—I need some time to think about it.
—Time, I said. That’s exactly the problem.
THE NEXT DAY, Claire put back on her mourning. All the dismal black layers. Green summer was passed and gone. Time again for heart grief. She came to my room dark and weighted down. I held her in the doorway, the Woman in Black. Hugging a bleak stiff figure. I looked her in the eye and argued all the muddled and desperate wisdom of my middle years against her gloom. We are not made strong enough to stand up against endless grief. And yet pain is the constant drone of life. So if we are to have any happiness at all, it is only in the passing instant. This past season together had been an exception to the general miserable conditions of existence. As had those two summers back in the old world. Surely it is a sin to reject the few gifts we are given. Be happy in the flash of time granted to us or hurt forever. Those are the harsh and contradictory rules Creation has laid down for the game we’re forced to play.
CLAIRE ABOVE ME, white bedcovers crisp and bunched in folds at her hips. Through the window, a thin final curvature of End of Fruit Moon falls down a milky sky to the black jittery ridge. The upcoming new moon will mark the beginning of the new year. An odd time to start, with the dying of summer, the fall of leaves. Claire moves in private abstraction. I am not absolutely necessary to whatever pleasure she’s finding. Her veil on, and nothing else. On the floor a dark pool of mourning clothes. The netting a blank scrim over her face. Only when she leans a certain way to the left and turns her head and catches the backlight from the candle stub burning over her shoulder on the washstand do I see any features at all beneath. A fierce determin
ed silhouette. The only signet of passion her full and slightly parted lips.
I raise a hand to lift the veil where it swags below her chin, but she stops me, presses the hand back down to the one place where we connect. Moth wings hiss in the candle flame. She finishes, pressing down hard, and only then lifts the veil with a sweep of wrist and forearm, a motion I remember from our youth. She falls onto me.
I doze off with her in my arms and awake to the sound of ankle boots being buttoned. I reach to her where she sits on the edge of the bed and try to make her stay, but she will not. She stands and studies her grim attire in the mirror, bends and smooths a hand over rumpled crepe.
—I have to go tomorrow.
—Go?
She draws the veil back down, leans, and kisses the corner of my mouth, the veil between our lips grainy and resistive.
—Go where?
No answer.
—Where? I said.
—Away.
—This will break us both, I said.
OVER HER PROTESTS, I insisted on taking her to the railhead. No dawdling allowed for enjoying the brilliant autumn weather. And little conversation. We did the four-day journey in two. Spinning along the river road from dawn into dark, skipping the usual pleasant night at the inn in Alexander and driving on to the Eagle Hotel long after dinner with the horse exhausted and steaming in the cool night. I hired another for the next day’s travel, which began before dawn. We fell out of the mountains like a dropped stone and reached the railhead at midnight. An eastbound train waited at the station. Its lamps were lit and steam huffed rhythmically from the engine. Ready to roll. Porters transferred bags in a hurry. Claire kissed me a sort of smeared glancing blow and was gone up the two steps into her car. I sat on the carriage seat with the reins loose in my hands and watched the taillight until it disappeared around the first bend in the rails. All the autumn stars were sprayed across the sky, and the dew was rising in the grass.