A Light in the Window (15 page)

“Cynthia!”

“I’m in here,” she said from the studio. What did he hear in her voice? Iron. Steel. Sheetrock. Knives.

He walked in and saw her sitting on the floor, piling books into a carton. She brushed her hair back and looked at him. He felt he had been slammed across the chest when he saw her eyes. They were the most extraordinary eyes he had ever seen. Why did he always feel he was seeing them for the first time? “Cynthia ...”

“Timothy.” She stared at him, cool and removed.

“Listen to me.”

He sat on the floor across from her, and Violet slithered into his lap.

“I’m cursed with an orderly mind,” he said, “so let’s begin somewhere vaguely at the beginning.” There! He was not croaking, and he was not going to croak. He had the voice of Moses on the mount. It might have shattered the glasses in her cupboard.

“I tried to call you again and again, but your machine ...”

“What about my machine?”

“It made noises like a truck on a highway.”

She gave him a stupefying look.

“I knocked one day,” he continued, “but it was raining.”

“Raining. Oh, my,” she said, looking bored.

“And I don’t know what you were thinking the morning I came home in Edith Mallory’s car ...”

“Thinking? I didn’t think. My mind felt like oat bran stirred with a spoon.”

He plunged ahead. “There is absolutely nothing between Edith and me. She held me at her house against my will.”

“Really,” she said in a voice encrusted with ice.

“It was raining. Tad and Ron went ahead without me. Ed Coffey was going to bring me home, but the car flooded. I slept in a chair. It was a miserable experience.”

“Caring about you has been a miserable experience.”

He noted the past tense. “Cynthia, I’m sorry. That’s what I really came over here to say. If you could know the letters I’ve written to you...”

“I never got them.”

“I wrote them in my mind.”

“Oh,
those
letters!”

“I tried to call you in New York. I rang your publisher and they wouldn’t give me your address.” Something was going wrong here. Why was he pleading and explaining?

He tacked into the wind. “Listen,” he said firmly, “why didn’t you tell me you were moving? Why just go off like that without a word?”

“Without a word? I had hardly had a word from you in months! Two letters that might have been written to a distant relative, and that was all. You said you were going to think about that ridiculous proposition I made to you about going steady and give me an answer on your return. That was your condition, not mine. But of course, you never mentioned it again. And not only did I hardly see you when you came home, but you couldn’t even find the time to call me.”

“But, Cynthia...”

“No ‘but Cynthia,’ if you please. And it was you who said we mustn’t let the path through the hedge grow over. Well, have you seen it? It would take a bush hog to clear it out again!”

“What do you know about bush hogs?” A stupid question, but out it came.

“There are lots of things I know that you’ll never know I know, because you’ll never ask.”

“I just asked.”

She looked at him, biting her lip. “I’m either going to punch you in the nose or bawl my brains out,” she said.

“I deserve the former, but I’ll leave the decision to you.”

Great tears loomed in her eyes, and he rose to his knees on the bare floor and took her in his arms.

It was wonderful to sit close to her on the minuscule love seat, to smell the scent of wisteria, to have his arm around her and hear the silken voice he’d longed to hear again. Violet had sprawled across both their laps, purring like the engine of a compact car.

“I’ve missed you,” he said. “I’ve missed you terribly. It’s been like a death, having the little house empty, and no lights on, and not knowing ...”

“I haven’t exactly moved,” she said, her eyes red from the storm of weeping. “It’s just that I had such a terrific deadline on the new illustrations that my editor said why not take his apartment while he’s in Europe for six months, and so I thought, of course, how perfect, and I won’t have to bother with ... with my wretched neighbor!”

He kissed her hair.

“So I moved in there until I’m finished. I had most of my books sent up, and my favorite drawing board, and my bed, which I’m never without—just a few things. Actually, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I felt very foolish, throwing myself at you like that and you backing away from me at sixty miles an hour.”

“Forry-five.”

“I prayed for you when you called.”

“I knew you would.” He kissed her temple.

“I thought it was very clever of you to ask me to do that.”

“It was the Holy Spirit who had such a wild notion, not me.”

She laid her head on his shoulder. What an extraordinary development. An hour ago he had been sitting at his desk in a hard-back chair, laboring over his sermon with an aching heart, and now he was holding someone soft and tender and fragrant and desirable, with a vast furry creature in his lap. He might have sunk to the moss-covered bottom of a clear pond where he was resting like a leaf.

But it was just such false content that had gotten him in trouble before. “Where did you go to school?” he blurted, “and how is your nephew?”

She raised her head and gave him an odd look. “Smith, and he’s fine.”

“How is
The Mouse in the Manger
doing? Is it selling well? How did I do as a wise man?”

“Mouse
is selling very well, thank you, and sometimes I think you are not very wise at all.”

He had broken the spell, but she mended it with a dazzling smile.

“What do you want in a companion?” he asked.

“Someone to talk with,” she said, stroking his cheek. “My husband was too preoccupied to talk. He was too busy making babies with other women ...”

“Is that why you ended up in the hospital?”

“Yes. I tried to kill myself.”

The pain of her confession pierced his heart.

“My parents were well-meaning, but they were always too involved socially to talk. And so, you see, what I want is very simple really.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Everything and nothing. What you did today, what I did today, what we’ll do tomorrow. About God and how He’s working in our lives. About my work, about your work, about life, about love, about what’s for dinner and how the roses are doing—do they have black spot or beetles ...”

He kissed the bridge of her nose, smiling.

“Life is short,” she said.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

He kissed her mouth, and it was as if he’d been doing it all his life; it was the most natural thing in the world. He felt he was taking a kind of nourishment that would make him strong and fearless.

She wasn’t going back until Sunday afternoon. He would wine her and dine her, he would wrap her Waterford goblet in gold paper, he would fulfill that silly and heedless wish of hers, he would buy a dozen roses from Jena, he would buy a new jacket at the Collar Button sale, he would make her a peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich, he would buy a tango album—or was it the rhumba she liked? He would bathe Barnabas, he would give Violet a can of white albacore tuna in spring water, he would ask Dooley to put on his football uniform for her, he would pray for rain and take her walking in it.

He collapsed in bed. It went without saying, he supposed, that the love business could be exhausting.

“I’ll come home at Christmas,” she said.

They might have been sitting together in just this way, slouching into the disheveled slipcover of his study sofa, since time began.

“I’ll string the lights on your bushes to welcome you home.”

“What a lovely thing to even
think!
Oh, Timothy, how could you not have loved someone all these years? Loving absolutely seeps from you, like a spring that bubbles up in a meadow.”

“Maybe you can convince me of that, but I doubt it. I find myself niggardly and self-seeking, hard as stone somewhere inside. Look how I’ve treated you.”

“Yes, but you could never deceive me into thinking you were hard as stone. You’ve always betrayed your tenderness to me, something in your face, your eyes, your voice ...”

“Then I have no cover with you?”

“Very little.”

“ ‘Violet only wanted a friend,’ ” he quoted, “ ‘but every time she tried to have one, she did something that chased them away.’ ”

She looked at him with a kind of joy. “You’ve read a Violet book!”

“Yes, and learned something about myself, disproving entirely that Violet books are only for ages five through ten. I really try to express my feelings for you, but I always chase you away. It makes me want to give up.”

“Please! I can’t bear it when someone says that. Remember what Mr. Churchill told a class that was graduating from his old school?”

“I confess I don’t remember.”

“When Mr. Churchill was a student, the headmaster had told him how hopelessly dumb and trifling he was, and then, years later, when he was prime minister and had written the history of the English-speaking people, for heaven’s sake, they invited him back to address a graduating class. They anticipated one of his brilliant and lengthy speeches, and here’s the entire text of what he told them:

“ ‘Young men,’ he said, ‘nevah, nevah, nevah give up!’ And he sat down.”

He laughed.

“Nevah,” she said soberly.

“I regard that as wise counsel.”

“It has counseled me for years.”

“Will you have dinner with me on Friday evening?”

She looked into his eyes and smiled. “I would love to have dinner with you on Friday evening.”

“How do you like your peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches?”

“With the bananas cut in thick slices and smashed into the peanut butter.”

“Smooth or crunchy?”

“Crunchy.”

“White or dark?”

“White.”

“With or without crusts?”

“With!”

With such knowledge now his forever, he felt invincible.

“Yellow or red?” asked Jena Ivey at Mitford Blossoms.

“Red,” he said.

“Loose or arranged?”

“Loose.”

“In a vase or a box?”

“A box.”

He needed an assistant, a curate, a gofer, anybody, somebody. Puny had helped him put the tablecloth on and had polished the glasses until the lead crystal sparkled like gems. She had vacuumed the entire house, then cleaned out the rabbit cage in case Cynthia, who loved rabbits, wanted to hold Jack on her lap. She had washed the dining room windows, refilled the bird feeder outside the windows, changed the threadbare mat at the front door, waxed the entrance hall, and done the grocery shopping.