Love Begins in Winter (12 page)

“Don't you have a television at home?” she said.

“What? A television?”

“Is that your motorcycle by the tree?”

“My what?”

She turned and pointed.

“Oh, my motorcycle—yes, it's mine.”

“Can you take us for a ride?” she asked.

“Us?” Walter said, suddenly hopeful. “Us?”

The girl held up her doll.

“Ay,” Walter said. “I'll take you and your dolly for a ride.”

The girl's eyes widened with excitement. She said something in her doll's ear.

“But you have to tell me something first,” Walter said quietly.

“Okay.”

“Does your sister have a boyfriend in Canada?”

The girl looked back at his motorcycle.

“Are those eggs for us?”

“They might be—but first you have to tell me if your sister has a boyfriend.”

“A boyfriend?”

“Some awful, boring fellow who tried to impress your sister but who just ended up being a nuisance without even realizing she was beyond him in every way imaginable. Did you notice anyone like that at all?”

“I don't think so,” she said, unsure as to whether it was the right answer. Then in a voice loud enough to be heard from inside, she said, “Are you in love with my sister—is that why you've brought us a basket of eggs?”

Walter felt the tingling of embarrassment.

“It's more complicated than that, you know—you're too young to understand.”

“Are you going to marry her?”

“Is that a serious question?” Walter said.

The girl nodded.

“Do you think she'd like me?”

She nodded enthusiastically. “I think she would.”

“Well, that's a brilliant start,” Walter said with pure joy. “I'm Walter, by the way.”

“I'm Jane,” the girl said, with the embarrassment of all children when talking to someone older.

Walter didn't care that he was speaking to a girl of eight or nine. Through the cold autumn night, he could hear the bells of the church casting their notes upon the village like seeds. He could see Father McCarthy's serious face as they approached the altar. The Canadian orphan in white like the queen of swans, her eyes like tiny glaciers that held him, the church, the congregation, the whispering smoke of incense; old women's heads in colored hats, bowing like yesterday's flowers. He would wear his motorcycle jacket and Uncle Ivan's Olympic medal.

“What should I do, Jane?”

“It's a bit cold out here,” Jane said.

“Well, go on in,” Walter said. “You'll catch your death.”

Then he regretted saying it as he remembered what had happened to her parents only several months ago.

“I'm sorry about your ma and dad.”

Jane set down her doll.

“Don't worry, Jane—they're up in heaven, and when you've had a long life and your own babies you can see them again, so don't worry now, they're not really dead, they're just not here.”

Jane went back into the house with her doll.

Walter listened for the sound of the latch and considered for a moment that she might tell the uncle, and then he'd be discovered and would have to explain what he was doing.

He imagined her uncle coming out in black boots. His kind face quickly turning to scorn. Jane pointing at the hot, wet ball of boy in the thicket beneath the window. Then his beloved—ashamed and disgusted, surveying him from afar; a shawl over her shoulders like closed black wings.

What would he say? By the next Sunday, the entire village would think him a Peeping Tom.

But you can't explain love, Walter thought to himself, and with the breathless ambition of youth, he believed, in his young heart, that those five words would be enough to shield him.

“You can't explain love,” he said out loud. “That's how it gets ruined.”

Without daring to look in again, Walter decided he had to go—but that he would allow himself to return. He would leave the eggs at the door with one of his gloves—then he'd have to return to pick it up. He'd started to rise when he heard the latch of the front door.

His heart rolled like a stone ball into his stomach.

“It's just me,” Jane whispered. She handed Walter a lukewarm mug of tea.

“Jesus of Nazareth,” Walter said, gulping back the tea in gulps. “You're a little star, Jane—but you bloody well gave me fright.”

Inside the house, Uncle Popsy searched in vain for the tea he thought he'd set on the hall table only moments ago.

When the mug was empty, Jane pointed past the cottage and into the night.

“We have to go down to the sea now,” she said, and Walter noticed that in one of her small hands were two red buckets, the kind children used to build sand castles.

“The sea? Why, Jane?” Walter asked.

“Because,” she said, “I'm not allowed to go by myself.”

“But you don't know me.”

“Yes I do,” she said emphatically.

Walter sighed. “You want to go there now?”

Jane nodded.

“In the dark?” Walter said.

Jane nodded. “It has to be now,” she said, and pointed up at the moon.

“What about your uncle?”

“He's watching TV with my sister,” Jane said. “Can we go on your motorcycle?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“Absolutely not.”

Jane stood and looked at him. She lifted her doll up to Walter's face, so they were at eye level.

“Please,” the doll said without moving its mouth. “Don't be boring.”

“Jesus, Jane—it's too feckin' loud.”

Jane looked at her feet. Her bottom lip protruded slightly from the rest of her mouth.

“All right,” Walter said. “But if we go, we go on foot.”

Jane clapped her hands and said something to her doll.

“C'mon then,” Walter said. “Are you sure you're warm enough?”

But Jane was already five paces ahead, her small body buckling with the flood of desire and the breathlessness of grief.

The journey would not be an easy one, for the path down to the sea was treacherous; they would have to hold hands for part of the way, stepping with more courage than faith.

S
HE SAT ON A
red towel, looking out to sea. People laden with bags and beach chairs passing slowly across the surface of her Wayfarers. It would soon be time to go home.

The sand beneath her towel had molded to the shape of her body. She glanced down at her legs. They were not as she would have liked them to be, but for her age, she felt she was still attractive. In the deli below her apartment, the Spanish men sometimes flirted with her if they weren't too busy. At the office, she realized that the young girls—the assistants and the interns—probably looked at her as being old. She didn't feel old. Although her feet ached sometimes. Her enthusiasm for life had turned to appreciation for life. And she could feel life getting quieter.
Her
life getting quieter, like the end of a party where only a few people remain at long messy tables, staring at their glasses, at the absent chairs, and at each other.

It was the end of summer and families were migrating back to New York from East Hampton. The lines in the cafés were shorter, and it was no longer difficult to park on Main Street.

In the distance, Jane's teenage daughters sat at the water's edge discussing boys and the secret things known only to siblings.

Jane had been close to her own sister.

They looked very much alike.

And while Jane's accent became unmistakably Irish, her sister had never lost her Canadian twang. They both had blond hair and would take turns twisting braids for one another in the garden on summer days, as their uncle Popsy picked lettuce and whistled.

Jane's daughters were close too.

They were both at the Waldorf School and always ate lunch together. Jane could sense how the world was opening up to her children. The telephone in the kitchen rang all the time now, and their doorman had got to know several boys quite well. Jane approved only of the ones who were nervous when they met her.

Her daughters' lives were very bright; everything felt for the first time.

The roots of her own life had found deep soil—holding her in place. Jane felt the strength and poise to give her children a safe and stable shelter. A place to rest when they sat at the kitchen table and said things that made them cry.

Her children meant everything to her.

The shelter of a mother's love was something that Jane thought of very often, for her own parents had lost their lives in a car accident when she was very little. Then her older sister died of cancer in London two years ago. Jane's husband experienced a breakdown at the funeral and was taken to a hospital in Kings Cross. He had been very fond of her sister.

In Jane's opinion, her sister had never been able to get over the death of their parents, as though a part of her had died too on that long-ago morning when charred debris lay scattered across the freeway outside Toronto.

The first car to come along saw several small fires: Something completely wrong. No trace of people. It was an image Jane conjured daily. Age is a plow that unearths the true nature of things. But only after the moment has passed and we are powerless to change anything, are we granted wisdom. As though we are living backward.

Jane knew her daughters must learn this for themselves, and so there was only one piece of advice Jane wanted to pass on to her girls.

She watched them at the water's edge.

Laughter.

Seagulls swooping down in their endless pursuit of scraps.

The billowing sail of a faraway boat holding the last of the day like a nugget of gold.

One day, Jane thought, this moment will be a long time ago.

For Jane knew that wisdom means knowing when to give everything, knowing exactly the right time to give everything and admit you've done it and not look back. Loving is the path to eternal life, Jane thought, not worship, as she was taught in Ireland.

And she sensed that everyone she had ever touched—whether deeply over years or for only a brief moment in a crowded elevator—might somehow be the whole story of her life.

Jane wiped her eyes and noticed a small child standing at the edge of her blanket with a red bucket.

The girl had lovely eyes. Her belly lunged forward. Her red bucket was full of water. Jane reached out to the girl, but she turned and ran away.

Above her, the sky held on to a few clouds. They hung far out at sea—watching the lives of people who'd gathered at the edge of land.

The red bucket reminded Jane of Walter, calling to her as she reached the edge of the field long ago in Ireland. And then his large, rough hand, which although she didn't know it then, was a young hand.

The beach was dark, and the sand had been packed hard by the outgoing tide. Rain lingered; like something said but not forgotten.

Walter ran to the water's edge, and Jane remembered a moment of panic when he disappeared from her sight—but then he was upon her again. He had found shells and he unloaded them into her small arms.

She told him about her mother and father, and he listened and kissed her once on the forehead, telling her that they would never truly leave her behind—that people, like little fish, are sometimes caught in the cups of rocks as the tide sweeps in and out.

Jane wondered what he meant; whether it was she or her parents who were trapped.

“And should you ever feel too lonely, Jane,” Walter said as they carried the moon home in buckets, “listen for the roar of the sea—for in it are all those who've been and all those who are to come.”

Jane remembered his words during the long nights in the cottage where she would spend the next fifteen years.

Some nights, she believed that if she listened hard enough, she might hear the voice of her mother and father calling to her from wherever they were.

Some mornings, the moment before she opened her eyes, she had forgotten they were gone; then like all those left behind in the world, Jane would have to begin again. For, despite the accumulation of experience, one must always be ready to begin again, until it's someone else's turn to begin without us, and we are completely free from the pain of love, from the pain of attachment—the price we pay to be involved.

As the sun dropped lazily in the sky, Jane stood and removed her sunglasses. She brushed the sand from her legs. Her eyes were swollen with crying. She stepped across the warm beach down to the water where her daughters were huddled.

When they saw her coming, they made a space and she sat between them—excited and afraid to tell them how the very best and the very worst of life will come from their ability to love strangers.

And they would think she was talking about Dad, about Walter, who grew up in a Gypsy caravan on a cliff, and who every Christmas without fail gives their mother a dozen eggs which he cleans in the sink on Christmas Eve, while they—his two daughters—talk to their friends on the phone, help string the tree with tinsel, or stare out the window at fading shadows, at the happy sadness of yesterday, the promise of tomorrow.

O
NE DAY
, G
EORGE
F
RACK
received a letter. It was from very far away. The stamp had a bird on it. Its wings were wide and still. The bird was soaring high above a forest, its body flecked with red sparks. George wondered if the bird was flying
to
a place or away from it.

At first, George thought the letter had been delivered to him by mistake, but the name on the envelope was his name and the address was where he lived.

Then he opened it and found a page of blue handwriting and a photograph of a little girl with brown hair. The girl was wearing a navy polyester dress dotted with small red hearts. She also had a pink clip in her hair. Her hands were tiny.

The handwriting was full of loops, as if each letter were a cup held fast upon the page by the heaviness of each small intention.

When George read the page, his mouth fell open and a low groaning resounded from his throat.

He held the paper very close to his eyes and read it again several times.

Then he dropped the page and looked around his apartment as though people were watching him from every dusty corner.

On the mantelpiece was the only photograph of his great uncle, Monsieur Saboné, who like George had lived alone in a quiet part of the city where he was born.

George wandered from room to room without knowing why, balancing the words of the letter in his mind; trying to make sense of them.

When George found himself standing in the kitchen, he automatically reached for the teapot. Perhaps because he wasn't himself, he somehow managed to knock it to the floor. When George tried to pick up the pieces, he realized he could not control his shaking hands and he cut his fingers in several places.

Blood dripped onto the broken pieces of china; large spots fell upon the white sink.

George sat on the edge of the bathtub and wrapped his hands in old bandages. He imagined writing out the story of his life across each length of white. What words would he choose; would there be things he wrote that weren't true; would there be spaces for things he wished he had done, people he wanted to meet, but who never came?

George sat on his toilet with the lid down. He remained there for two hours looking at his bandaged hands. When he felt faint, George removed his clothes and slipped into bed. Blood soaked through the bandage and left spots on the sheets.

Outside, a fire engine wailed, changing pitch as it passed: one sound for coming and one for going—the moment in between, indistinguishable.

George was asleep by the time it was dark. Lights went on in kitchens across the city as people arrived home. As George entered his first dream, the unknown world carried on. Men in heavy coats walked dogs outside his front door. Women fell asleep in front of television sets; others stayed up without any good reason. And as in every city, a handful of children gazed gently from windows upon the roads and passageways of their childhood, small questions falling in their minds like a rain that disappears by morning.

When George opened his eyes the next day, they were wet. His body was also very stiff. He unfurled his limbs as though waking from hibernation.

The sky outside his window was very bright. Yellow light fell through holes in the curtain and made patterns on the bed. The patterns came and went with the journey of clouds.

George's first thought was that the whole thing was a dream, but life soon poured over him. On the desk he noticed the tip of the envelope. The photograph of the little girl would be lying next to the letter.

Along the rim of the kitchen sink, George's blood had dried in crimson circles. Pieces of broken teapot on the floor had not moved, like small ruins of an ancient civilization.

George didn't go to work and no one telephoned to see if he was ill.

Every so often he checked the address on the letter to make sure it had been delivered to the right person. Then he looked at the photograph. Then he read the letter again.

He stayed in bed until it was dark and did the very same thing the next day, swallowing mild sleeping pills every few hours and drifting in and out of a slumber heavy with memories from childhood.

In the middle of the night, George woke up sweating and gasping for air. For a few moments, the residue of the dream convinced George he had died and was reliving life all over again—but with the memory of everything that had happened before and all that was going to happen. What would it be like to know every detail of every event that would ever happen? The thought carried him in its arms to another dream.

When George finally woke at noon the next day, he sat up for an hour trying to piece his thoughts together like jigsaw pieces from different puzzles.

When he lay back down and drifted into a snooze, pieces came together by themselves, and the book of his childhood blew open. George heard the sound of his father's key churn the lock of the front door. Home from the office. His suit would be creased from the office chair. A small George sat very still in a room that glowed with the spell of television. He wanted to be found. He wanted to be scooped up like a rock from a river and found precious. And every evening his father returned home, George held his breath, like an understudy watching from the wings. George lived always on the verge of his greatest performance.

Then in the dream, George felt himself reaching for the television, turning up the volume as the shouting got worse. If only they had got divorced. Children at school ripped to pieces by their parents' lack of love, shells of their former selves—and George burning with shame, wanting only to have his parents by themselves in the park on dull afternoons at the duck pond.

Instead, George spent his childhood like a small satellite orbiting their unhappy world.

Then he left home. His parents remained together, until one day his father jumped off the office building where he worked. George imagined his raincoat flapping, then the impact; strangely bent limbs; people circling in disbelief; somebody's ruined day.

George wept at the funeral, not because his father was dead but because he'd never known him. If grief has levels, this was the one below guilt.

On the third day after receiving the letter, George lay on his back and followed the cracks in the bedroom ceiling with his eyes. He imagined he was on a journey across a tiny Arctic plain.

And then he fell asleep and dreamed it.

At the end of his journey across the snow was the little girl from the photograph, waiting for him in the dress with hearts on it. In the dream, all the hearts were beating. When George drew close, he noticed she had butterfly wings. Whenever he tried to reach her, she fluttered away laughing. The sound of her laughing filled him with joy. George managed to cup the feeling and hold on to it for a few seconds after waking up. In his heart, some tiny piece of what hadn't happened would lodge.

In the afternoon George drank tea in the quiet of his bedroom. He wiped away his blood and took a series of showers, concentrating on a different body part each time. He swept his apartment and threw out many things that at one time had been valuable to him.

On the fifth day, George stared through his bedroom window into backyards of bare trees, children's toys, and half-filled plant pots.

Although he lived on a city avenue, the back room where George spent his evening hours was very quiet. Sometimes a neighbor's dog could be heard barking and scratching weakly at a back door. For some reason, George found these to be comforting sounds—while the mean grinding buses that passed his front room irritated and depressed him.

After graduating from university about ten years ago, George had gradually lost interest in the lives of his friends. He dreaded the blinking red light on his telephone that indicated messages waiting to be heard. He stayed away from gatherings, and he purposefully forgot birthdays. Life had not turned out the way he thought. He had not stayed with the woman he truly loved (she was married and living in Connecticut). His mother died one day at the kitchen table before she could drink her tea. He developed a mysterious pain in his hands. His sister became a single mother to a boy (Dominic) with Down syndrome. His job was uninteresting and he felt that his life was nothing more than a light that would blink once in the history of the universe and then be forgotten.

George had lived for several years without a television. Television made him feel lost and lonely. George's local post office had recently attached one to the wall—an attempt to calm people confined to wait in massive queues. George bought his stamps elsewhere and avoided the voice he felt knew absolutely nothing but refused to stop talking.

George's neighbors were very fond of him, however. His apartment was situated on the top floor of the Greenpoint Home for the Agéd, and George occupied the only dwelling that wasn't part of the “home.” It had, of course, originally been built for a live-in nurse, but thanks to a cocktail of modern drugs, the residents had little need for any professional assistance. George could even hear them being intimate, and sometimes the occasional fight, and sometimes sobbing—if he listened with a glass against the wall.

The previous tenant—still discussed in the hallway from time to time when a letter came for him—was a Polish carpenter who punched holes in his walls, then spent half the night repairing them with cutting, sawing, and sanding.

George Frack was not without interests. He liked:

1. Large Chinese kites
   
2. Sitting beside the window in his bathrobe with a box of Raisinets
   
3. New-wave European films (viewed only at Eric and Burt's small movie house in Greenpoint)
   
4. Horoscopes
   
5. Velvet loafers
   
6. Drinking coffee in the park from a thermos when nobody was around
   
7. His collection of world Snoopy figures (Chinese Snoopy, Arctic Snoopy, Russian Snoopy, Aussie Snoopy, etc. etc.)
   
8. David Bowie songs
   
9. A cat called Goddard (pronounced God-AR) now deceased
   
10. A heavy fall of snow that ruins everyone's plans
    

George's last serious relationship was with Goddard, a stray cat who one day appeared outside the building and threw himself at everyone who passed. They slept together under the same blanket, and George sometimes awoke to Goddard's paw upon his hand. After almost a year at the Greenpoint Home for the Agéd, Goddard escaped one Sunday morning while George was out buying oranges and sardines. He had squeezed through an open window and carefully stepped down the fire escape.

A few minutes later Goddard lay squashed under a bus. Someone put him in a shoe box; his limp body was like a sack of broken parts.

The evening Goddard died, George stood naked on the edge of his fire escape until it got dark and lights came on one square at a time. Then some neighbor spotted a bare human figure on a fire escape and shouted. Suicide was one thing—but confrontation was out of the question. George climbed back inside. Then he went to bed. His usual supper of Raisinets went untouched. The oranges lay on the floor where they had rolled.

George held the letter and the photograph of the little girl in his hand and sat very quietly in a wooden chair beside his bedroom window. He remembered the feeling of Goddard's head brushing his legs.

After almost a week in his apartment without any human contact, a storm built slowly on the edge of the city and then broke open. George watched from his window as a seamless band of clouds rolled toward him. Trees bent, as if leaned on by invisible hands. The streetlight fell in perfect columns of raindrops.

Cars pulled to the sides of the road. Umbrellas blew out like escaping squid.

George got up from his chair and went to the closet for a blanket. The kitchen light felt good against the darkness of the afternoon. He walked halfway into the kitchen, but then decided against making tea and went back into his bedroom, where he planned on settling down for the night. It was six o'clock.

He sat down and spread the blanket across his legs. He was wearing his velvet loafers and a bathrobe. The rain tapped gently against the window, magnifying the backyards in long watery lines. The roofs of the buildings glistened black, and a tiny alphabet of birds hung motionless in the sky.

George looked at the photograph. The girl in it would smile forever. Every photograph is a lie, he thought—a splinter from the tree of what happened. Clouds moved from one side of the sky to the other. The darkness would be upon them sooner than ever. George pressed the photograph of the girl to his cheek. In his mind, he could feel her gentle fantasies. Then her heart began to beat within his and he was suddenly full of yearning for this child, a daughter who came in the mail—in a dress of tiny hearts, from a city of windy trees: a place where he had been conjured ten thousand times from a pillow of alternating hope and disappointment.