A Father for Philip (14 page)

He beamed, jammed a cigar into her hand,
and said, “Oh, you won’t want that,” and tried to snatch it back. Eleanor
retained it, and he ran on, “Two boys and a girl. Kathy’s tired but feeling
great. We’re naming them Graham, Stephen and Eleanor, the boys for the two
grandpas and the girl for our landlady. Oh, you’re the landlady, aren’t you?
Hey how’s your cold? Kathy said I was to ask. She thinks you’re sicker than you
know. Are you?”

Eleanor laughed weakly, and said, “I’m
all right.” Then she spoiled it by coughing from deep in her chest. “I can’t
ask you in, Bill. You might catch something that would make Kath or the
babies—or you—sick.”

“They—my family”—his eyes shone with
pride at the term—“have been flown to a neonatal unit in Vancouver. I’m driving
down day after tomorrow to stay with Kathy’s folks. I came home to make
arrangements with Ralph to take charge for a week or so, and to pack some more
things for Kathy, and a bag for myself, too. She’ll be staying until the babies
can come home. See you, Ellie.” With that, Bill was off, exuding excitement and
wonder.

Eleanor leaned dizzily against the wall
for a moment before she found the strength to go back to her bedroom. I surely
am weak, she thought with a little giggle, and not just from the fever, either.
She staggered, lightheaded, into the bedroom, looking for David. He was gone!

“Dave?” she called hearing the panic in
her voice, trying to still it. “David?” The silence in the house pressed into
her ears, making them roar and she flung herself onto the bed, still rumpled
from the night before, and sobbed hysterically. “Did I dream you…? David?
David…” Then, “Oh! David, don’t you ever disappear like that again!” as he came
in from the back porch, carrying Casey, and wrapped her in his free arm.

“Sorry, my love,” he said, sounding
contrite. “I didn’t mean to scare you. You’re sick, and your fever’s rising
again. But I loved hearing that you really want me back,” he whispered against
her mouth.

“Can you have any doubts?”

“Still a few, sweetheart, but I can live
with them till you’re well enough to take them all away.”

“God!” she said. “How well I remember
that lustful look of yours.”

“You aren’t exactly the picture of an
innocent, blushing bride, either, my love. In fact,” he added, a frown drawing
his eyebrows together, “you’re looking more flushed than I like. Back to bed,
my lady.

“If you’ll come with me,” she said,
evading Casey’s lapping little tongue as he kissed her cheek. “Sorry, fella, I
only accept kisses from the big-guy here, and a few from your big-guy, but I do
not like doggy-kisses.”

“I’ll put him out on the grass for a
while, Eleanor, then come make sure you’re all right.”

“I’ll be all right,” she said, “so long
as you come back to me.”

“Always, Eleanor. From this moment on,
always.”

~ * ~

They woke an hour before Philip was due
home. David put his cool lips to Eleanor’s brow. “Fever’s still pretty high,
darling,” he said. “You stay here while I run a cool tub for you.” He got out
of bed and she watched sleepily as he went into the bathroom. She dozed as the
water thundered into the tub. He came back, lifted her and carried her into the
bath. David sponged her quickly, dried her gently, fed her aspirins and slipped
her into a clean fresh nightgown. He left her wrapped in a blanket on the chair
while he changed the linen on the bed and then helped her back into it.

“There you are, my lovely, sick darling.
How many times I lay awake nights thinking about this bed, and you in it.” He
put his head down on her shoulder and Eleanor caressed his hair, loving the
slide of it between her fingers.

“Darling, go have a shower,” she said.
“Philip will be home soon.” Oh, how wonderful it was to make sounds like a
wife. She lay there, thinking of all the wifely things she would be able to say
to him now. She’d had so little time, before, to do that.

When he came back, she asked, “David,
what do we tell Philip?”

“The truth,” he replied, rubbing his leg
with the end of the towel.

“What—” What is the truth? she had been
about to ask when she saw the scar on his thigh. It was long, wide and knotted,
an ugly purple pearled with white knobs, and sunken deep into his flesh. “Oh,
David!” She flew out of the bed and ran to him. “Oh, your poor leg! What
happened?”

“I told you. I got lost, injured… All
that.”

“The details, David. Tell me the whole
story. All Dad and I ever got was that you and a group of others were overdue,
and a search was underway. Then came the word the search had proved fruitless
and was called off. Dad… Dad was so upset he dragged the Christmas tree out of
the house, decorations and all and threw it on the bonfire pile.” She swallowed
hard and firmed her mouth. “I need to know what happened to you.”

David stood, pulled on his clothes and
began talking. Eleanor curled up under the covers with him sitting beside her.
While he talked, she held his hand.

“I went out, as you know, to be trained
in the jungle, and to learn about the trees that grow there. There was a guide,
an instructor, two other trainees and myself. We came to a wide, tumbling river
that we needed to cross. A bridge had been washed out, but we had to get to the
other side because that’s where we were to study the growth patterns of certain
tropical hardwoods. They’ve been drastically over-logged and— Sorry, that’s not
what you want to hear.

“We hiked upstream, trying to find a way
over. After a three-day slog in which we made about five miles—those jungles
are thick, Eleanor—we reached an escarpment we had to climb. The river fell in
a beautiful cascade down the cliff, and the guide was sure he could see a chasm
narrow enough to bridge, way up at the top of the waterfall. We’d just need to
drop a couple of trees across it.

“We made it up that escarpment all right
and sure enough, the river had cut a deep, narrow groove into the top of the
cliff. It was too wide for the trees we’d hoped to use, but the guide managed
to sling ropes across it and got us to the other side. We were too far
upstream, of course, so we had to backtrack. It was when we were trying to get
down the cliff on the right side of the river that the accident happened. We
were roped together and one man slipped, pulling the rest of us with him. The
instructor and the guide were both killed along with the man who had slipped.

“The two of us who survived were both
hurt. I had this,” and he indicated his bad leg, “and my buddy, Juan Mercado,
had a broken arm it. It was a terrible fracture. The two bones of his forearm
were snapped, protruding jaggedly through the skin. When we both regained consciousness,
we were feverish and in a lot of pain. We knew that if we just lay there
waiting for help, we would die. Our supplies were gone, no food, no medicine.
We both had wives with children on the way…” David was silent for a few moments
and Eleanor held him strongly until he was ready to go on.

“Juan could walk, even though he had
only one good arm and I had two good arms, but couldn’t move unaided. Juan
managed to hack down some small trees with the one machete we had, and some
vines. I got a splint on his arm, then together, we fashioned a kind of crutch
for me. Since we weren’t far from the river, we put some of the trees together
with braided vines and made a very makeshift raft. We finally got it to the
water and somehow managed to get both of us onto it.

“We floated downstream until it broke up
in some rapids. We were pretty weak by that time and our rebuild job wasn’t
very successful. We just lay on that float waiting for it to fall apart again,
and when it did, Juan simply drifted off. He didn’t even fight, Eleanor, and I
couldn’t get to him.”

The anguish in David’s voice cut into
her like a hot knife. She held his head tightly to her breast and said, “That’s
enough, darling. No more.”

“No. I want to finish.” His Adam’s apple
bobbed.

“I got ashore by clinging the one of the
logs from the raft and pulled myself half out of the water. I don’t how long I
lay there, but after a while some tribesmen found me and took me to their
encampment, then got me to a nearby mission. The nuns there looked after me for
a long time… I think I spent seven months there before I could even begin to
think about finding a way out. I didn’t know who I was, or where I was from, or
what I was doing there. My whole world was like that of a baby, who’d been born
into the world full grown, but reliant upon others for everything. It took a
further two months, after I became myself again, to convince the natives they
had to show me the way out. Finally, three of them agreed to take me back to
civilization.

“I was still sick when we got to the
city, darling, and when I was finally well again I knew I could never come back
here.”

Eleanor remained silent for a long
moment, still cradling his head against her. She let her hold slacken when he
failed to continue with this, the most important part of his story. He pulled
away from her and buried his face in his hands.

She had to ask. “Why?”

“I… can’t tell you… Oh, darling, don’t
ask!”

“You must know it’s a question I was
bound to ask, David. A question that must be answered.” Why was he holding
back? What was he holding back?

“But it’s a question I cannot answer.”
He raised his ravaged face to her, reaching out for her and she backed away
from him to the other side of the bed. “Eleanor,” he beseeched her, “believe
me. I would tell you if I could.”

Familiar sounding brakes squealed up by
the farmhouse. Eleanor looked at David with hopeless, dead eyes. “The school
bus is in. Philip’s home. Go and meet him. I’m sure he’ll want to thank you for
looking after his mother… Jeff.”

“‘Jeff’?” David whispered, agony in his
eyes, his voice strained.

Eleanor swallowed with difficulty. She
licked suddenly dry lips. “Yes. Jeff,” she replied in a voice she barely
recognized as her own “Jeff.” She turned her back on him.

David caught Eleanor by the shoulder and
dragged her close to him. She stared up into his tense, quiet face. “Why?” he
whispered.

“I think you can figure that out. If
there can’t be true truth between us, what can there be?”

“He told me,” David said rapidly
quietly, a note of desperation in his voice, “he told me you said his father
would have to have a good reason if he ever did come back… A good reason for
having stayed away. But I have, Eleanor. I have!”

“Then tell—”

“Hey, Jeff! Where’s my mom?” yelled Philip
as he ran across the kitchen and into the hallway. “Oh there you are. Are you
better now, Mom? You sounded funny and I couldn’t find Kathy and Bill so I got
up on Siwash and went to get the Exleys and then Jeff came home before I rode
that far and he looked after you for me. Hey, Mom, how come your face is all
red now? It was white last night.”

Eleanor subsided back against her pillow
and David quickly thrust another behind her. Why—and how—had she missed seeing
the striking resemblance between Philip and David? Seeing them together for the
first time, Eleanor blinked back tears. Philip’s brown hair was several shades
lighter than David’s, and his eyes closer to blue than dark gray, but his mouth
curved exactly as his father’s did when he smiled. The cleft in his chin,
though, was exactly like the one in hers, small and slightly off to one side.
He was a part of the two of them, a combination, a continuation… He was an
amalgam of their making, and she didn’t know what to do.

 
“What, or who, is Siwash?” she asked, feeling
more and more wretched with each passing moment.

“My horse,” replied David tersely.

Her eyes flew from the face of her son
to that of her husband. “He rode a horse?” she asked in awe.

“Sure, Mom! Me and Casey have been
riding on Si for a long time. Jeff holds the reins and we walk around and
around the clearing but when you got sick I had to do it all by my ownself. Can
I go out and ride him now again Jeff? I like it now. When you got up on him
last night, too, and we went fast it was cool.”

“You can go see him,” David said, “but
no riding fast alone.” Philip scampered off, jumping over Casey who ran between
his feet.

“But…” Eleanor protested. David cut her
off with a quick grin.

“He doesn’t know how to make the horse
go fast, so don’t worry.”

“Not that.” She found it hard to believe
Philip could even climb onto a horse. “His school clothes.”

David called the boy back.

“Change into your play clothes, sport,
will you? If you fall down you might get your good things all dirty or torn and
I know you wouldn’t want to do that, especially when your mom’s sick. Let’s you
and I try to keep the laundry to a minimum. Okay?” David smiled into the
child’s face as he spoke, then ruffled his straight hair.

“Okay, Jeff,” Philip replied cheerfully.
“Are you going to cook dinner tonight, or is Mom?”

Before Eleanor could assure her son that
she was quite capable of preparing dinner, a lie, and she knew it, David’s hand
pushed her back into the pillows. “I am,” he said. “Your mom still feeling kind
of bad, Phil, but I’ve managed to keep her in bed most of the day.” He let what
Eleanor chose to call a dirty smirk flit across his face for a moment, then
went on. “She needs all the rest she can get. Want my help mounting Si, or do
you want to do it alone by climbing up from the fence?”

“I’ll do it my ownself!” the boy said as
he sauntered from the room, flinging clothes helter-skelter as he went.

“Hang up your pants,” David called.

“Aw, Jeff! You sound just like my mom.”

David stood there looking down at
Eleanor’s back which she had turned to him during this last exchange between
father and son. He remained silent until he heard the screen door squeak open
then with another squeak slam shut “Darling, look at me,” he said quietly.
“Please?”

Eleanor might have been made of stone.

David sat beside her on the bed and
tremor ran through her as his weight depressed the mattress. He put his hands
on her shoulders and turned her to face him. She squeezed her eyes tightly
shut, could feel her mouth trembling, tried to stop it and failed. She gave up
the struggle then, and opened her eyes, knowing he would know about the tears
she was trying to hide even if she did keep them covered with squeezed eyelids.

“Go home, David.”

“I am home, Eleanor.” And the old,
caressing note was in his tone as he said her name. “This is my home. You are
my wife. We proved that today. No matter what, we belong together. Philip is
our son and the three of us are a family. I built this house for us, remember?”

“I remember,” she whispered. “But I also
remember more than seven years of silence, seven years of raising my son alone.
Remember the years of watching my father slowly die, having to bury him alone,
without my husband beside me to give me support when I needed it. I was so
alone when Dad died, Dave, and for the next three years I just barely made it.
All that held me together was Philip and living with the hope that you would,
by some miracle, return. Well, here you are, David. You have returned. The
miracle did happen and when I ask you how it happened, why, all you can say is
you remember building this house.

“What else do you remember, David? You
told me that for months you didn’t know who you were, where you were, or why
you were there. What happened during that time, David? What else do you remember?
A woman? A child, perhaps, whom you couldn’t bear to leave? Seven years is a
long time, David, and you won’t convince me you didn’t make a life for
yourself. Either before or after you decided that Philip and I could have no
place in the new one you had. Another thing I would like to know is why you
have left there now? Why did you come back? Did whomever it was kept you away
for so long finally make you leave?”

His face was gray, drawn. “Is that what
you believe?”

“You give me no choice but to draw my
own conclusions. That seems the most logical.” And she choked on the last word,
put her hands into her hair, rolled onto her side and shook with paroxysms of
grief. That grief, David knew could only be assuaged by words he dared not
utter. To do so would cause a wound that even he, given time, might never be
able to heal, as he hoped to heal this wound she bled from now. All he could do
was hold her to him and hope that the same miracle that had sent him back here
would give him the time with her he needed to make her believe his reasons,
unspoken though they must remain, were the best.

“Go away… Go away…” she moaned. “I can’t
bear you to touch me.”

“Stop this! Oh, God, Eleanor. Stop!”

“Go!”

And he went, but only to find more
aspirins. “Take these. You’re burning up again. Take them and sleep some more.
I’ll look after everything.”

“I know! I know!” she wept distractedly.
“And it frightens me. Grant looked after everything, one day, too, because I
was sick, and in spite of the way he was—is—with Philip, I agreed to start
proceedings to have you declared dead… So I could marry him, David! But you
aren’t dead, and I’m married to you, and I love you so much! I know I’ll never
marry Grant. I probably shouldn’t even have considered it, not for a minute,
but I don’t know if I can stay married to you, because for all those years you
might have been dead and suddenly here you are, looking after me, looking after
my son, giving us both orders and making us like it, teaching Philip to ride,
ridding him of his fear of horses and what if I feel for you is the same as
what I felt for Grant? Gratitude that someone, anyone, had taken over for a
time and let me rest when I needed to?”

He held her tenderly as she wept and
ranted, and when she was finished, he gave her a little shake and pulled her
face up to look down at her puffy eyes. “Sweetheart,” he said seriously, “did
you go to bed with Grant when you were feeling grateful to him?”

“Of course not. I don’t lo—”

“No. You don’t love him. You love me,
and after the loving we shared today, can you say you might feel nothing more
than gratitude toward me?”

 “I don’t know! I don’t know! You
aren’t the same. You don’t even look the same. Your face is all hidden, you’re
bigger around, so much more muscled and I’m not sure I recognize you anymore
even if you sound the same and your eyes never changed and the way you smell
like trees and moss and fresh air.” What she said did not seem to be making
much sense, but David answered as if it did to him.

“You married a boy, Eleanor, who smelled
like trees and moss and fresh air. He has simply become a man through the
intervening years. A man who still hangs out with trees and moss in the fresh
air. You loved me before, when I was skinny and underfed, so why shouldn’t you love
me still when I look more mature?”

“But I can’t stop making… unfair
comparisons. Grant can’t help the way he’s built. That’s genetics and...” She
pressed the back of her hand to her mouth. “I feel… I don’t know what I feel.”

“Guilty? Do you feel guilty about
choosing me over Grant? Is it because I’m more of a man in your eyes? You chose
me long before you ever knew of his existence.”

“Guilt? Is that what you think I’m
feeling?”

“I do, darling.”

She denied it. “What I’m feeling is
lost. Out of my depth. I’m drowning in a sea of questions you don’t want to
answer, like where did you grow from the boy into the man?” And with whom, she
wanted to ask. In whose company? But something held her back. When she had
suggested it before he had not denied it.

“We have a long life ahead of us,
sweetheart, to catch up on all that… If you will just give me that time. Time
to teach you to trust me again. I promise I’ll tell you all the places I’ve
been, all the jobs I’ve done, but you’ll just have to accept, for now, the fact
that my reason for not returning was the best in the world, the only one that
would ever have kept me from you. And accept that I have returned and will
never leave you and Philip again unless you send me away. Can you accept me on
those terms, Eleanor?”

David gazed at her. Acceptance—the
desire to accept—seemed to be lighting her eyes from within, lightning the
darkness of misery which had been the only thing he had seen in them for the
past few minutes. His heart leapt in his breast as she leaned toward him, her
lips half parted, closed her eyes for a second, then something jerked her back
and she opened her eyes, looked straight into his and said “No.”

David bowed his head and picked up her
left hand. With gentle, movements he held it to his lips, kissed each fingertip
once, then kissed of the golden band he had placed there eight years before.
Still bowed over her nerveless hand, he placed a finger and thumb over the band
and gently removed it from her. He put it in his shirt pocket. Still without meeting
her eyes, he said in a dull, lifeless voice, “As soon as you want to, we’ll go
into town and see a lawyer.”

Eleanor stared into the empty space
where David had been sitting, and at the white band of skin around her tanned
finger for a long time after David gently close the door behind him. Then she
turned and wept silently into her pillow until she slipped into sleep.

The following morning when she awoke, it
was to hear the screen door slam and Philip calling, “See you later, Jeff! Look
after my measly little mom for me!”

“Sure will, sport. So long,” came the
cheerful, not-at-all heartbroken reply from Eleanor’s husband.

How did I suddenly become nothing more
than the ‘measly little mom’? she wondered, feeling hurt. Has David been
preaching ideas about the ‘weaker sex’ or ‘the little woman’? She felt
horrible. Ordinarily something like that coming from her son wouldn’t bother
her, she knew, but after the terrible night she had just put in, with fever,
chills and nightmares, everything would bother her today. She slipped out of
the bed and padded to the window. She swooped the drapes back and the bright
sun stabbed in her eyes, making them ache nothing else on earth.

Eleanor put a hand to her burning face
and as she turned to cross the hall into the bathroom the act of putting one
foot in front of the other made her head throb unbearably. Her cough tore from
her lungs. Moaning slightly from the pain in her eyes, in her head and chest
and all her joints, Eleanor washed her face, hoping to cool it. As she reached
her towel on the rack she saw a shaving kit standing large as life, and looking
like it belonged, on the counter. With a wild sweep of her hand, she sent it
flying across the room. The lid off the spray can of lather rattled into the
tub and the door burst open to reveal David standing there, a look of fear on
his face.

“What happened?” he barked. Then, “Oh. I
thought you’d fallen.” He gave a glance of the debris from his shaving kit
littering the floor, then reached out a gentle hand to his wife. “Come on,
sweetheart, back to bed. Finished in here?”

Dumbly, she nodded, then holding onto
the side of the sink, said, “But you have to leave. You shouldn’t have brought
your shaving gear here. Why did you cut off the beard? Now you’re David, my
David again.” She dropped onto the lid of the toilet, holding her face in her
hands, and sobbed. “Oh, please, just go away.”