All Who Are Lost (Ashmore's Folly Book 1) (70 page)

He walked over to the open wall of the pavilion, his back to her. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from him.

“I might have excused that in myself,” he said. “I wasn’t so naïve as not to know that Francie was culpable too. But then Diana returned the next morning, and Francie made a comment that reminded me of all that had gone wrong, and I looked at my dear wife, and I remembered what a true deceitful bitch she could be, and I deliberately embarked on an affair with my nineteen-year-old sister-in-law.”

Laura whispered, “Eighteen.”

“What?” He looked over his shoulder at her.

“She was eighteen.”

“Oh, Christ.” Richard sounded appalled. “Well, at least she still wasn’t jailbait. And the next time you start wishing you’d been there instead of her, you need to remember that you
were
jailbait, and it would have been a criminal act for me to touch you.” He looked at her gravely. “God, this feels strange. I have never talked about this before.”

“Not even your father?” How isolated he must have felt, as isolated as she had felt about Ash Marine
… something that you are so ashamed of… you would do anything to keep it a secret….

“No. Lucy guessed some of it that spring. You know how she is – I’d feel those X-ray eyes on me, and I knew she was trying to figure out what was going on. Francie and I were particularly careful when I was home for exactly that reason. I didn’t care, Laura. I knew I was doing something as dishonorable as it could be, and honest to God, I – did – not – care.”

She thought he had cared, very much.

“Besides – and this excuses nothing – I liked Francie. Oh, she was a world-class liar, and she never missed a chance to take a swipe at Diana, but I didn’t care. She was warm and funny, and she was always laughing. Diana and I lived in such an armed camp that it was a relief to be with someone who smiled, who put herself out to please me, who was glad to see me, for God’s sake. It was a relief to make love with a woman again, even if it violated every principle I held. When you live with a woman who wants nothing to do with you, you lose confidence in yourself as a man. Francie restored that, and for that, I will always be grateful to her.”

She swallowed hard and nodded, even though he didn’t see her. He was still staring into the distance.

“Finally, though,” Richard made a gesture, “it was time to cool off. We were moving back home, Francie was going off to college – I knew it was time to end it. So I met her to tell her we needed to stop, and somehow, I have never figured out how, Diana found out and tracked us down. And that was such a disaster – I had sweating dreams about it for a couple of years afterwards. I woke up then, believe me, I saw what a hash I had made of things, and the first thought that went through my mind was that I was going to lose my daughter.”

“Oh, no.”

“Oh, yes.” He turned around. “I’m not the first man to have risked my child for a few afternoons with a pretty girl, but I can tell you I was the sorriest in a hurry. And then – then Dominic called a few days later and said that you and Francie were missing, and I knew I had driven her away, and I looked in the mirror and all I saw was a faithless bastard.”

She felt tears welling up in her eyes. Her heart ached for him. He’d been only twenty-three, after all, and it was easy to sit in judgment from the thirties and forget that he’d been a young man, with all the maturing and tempering of adult life still ahead of him.

“Here I was, finally out of grad school, finally ready to get started on the career I’d wanted all my life, but I had wrecked my personal life beyond repair. There was no hope for Diana and me – there hadn’t been for years, and it’s not all her fault. She doesn’t bear all of the blame. I didn’t know what to do, except go back home, and start working, and try to rebuild myself into the man I had hoped I was.” He fell quiet. “And the one thing I was determined was that no one would ever know. My father suspected, and Lucy outright accused me, and by that time I figured you had to know. Diana thought she had the whole picture. But the only two people who knew for sure were Francie and me, and I wanted to keep it that way.”

Laura thought of her ill-advised remark to Diana and Lucy.

“It’s an old joke about unfaithful men. Deny, deny, deny
.
I didn’t even do that. I just never spoke of it. And gradually – as time went on, I gained some perspective. Part of it was work; I’m damn good at what I do, and people knew it. I worked hard at being a good father, and you can’t feel like a complete failure when your little girl thinks you hung the moon. I reached out to Lucy, who took her time forgiving me, and I worked to get my father’s respect back.” He stopped and then said slowly, “I worked harder at relationships with other people in those years after than I had worked at anything in my life.”

She wanted to put her arms around him, tell him that he had succeeded, become the man he wanted to see in the mirror – but somehow he divined her intention, and he put up a warning hand.

“Something else about that time, Laura. I’d been an agnostic for years. I got fed up with my mother’s piety in my teens. I’d see her with her rosary and her novenas, going to confession every Saturday afternoon, and it all seemed like so much claptrap to me, it seemed absurd that someone as good as she was had to worry all the time about her salvation. I remember one time I lectured you about how you couldn’t prove that God was even there, and you just blinked at me, because you were like her, you never lacked faith. Well—” he gave a short laugh— “God might have gone on vacation, but when I needed help, He came back fast enough. That’s when I learned what true charity was – that gift of mercy, wiping the slate clean, no matter what you’ve done, it’s not irretrievable. You’re not irretrievable. And I found out – it took a while – if you truly believe that God has forgiven you, you’d better learn to forgive yourself.”

Laura stared at him. “You went to church this morning,” she whispered.

He gave her a smile. “I went to Eucharist. I go every week. I never miss.”

Her hand went to her mouth. She couldn’t stop staring at him.

“I guess years of listening to Mom worry about my going to hell rubbed off. I started going to church with my father, and I joined a men’s study group – that’s where I met Tom – and I found—” He paused. “Truth. Answers. Peace. All the things that a rationalist can find once you lay down pride at the foot of the cross. All the things that came so naturally to you and Mom. It took the worst moral failure of my life for me to get past my empiricism.”

That boy, so sure of himself and his intellect. It must have indeed come as a shock to him, this crisis of self and identity and faith. He had never doubted himself before.

“One day – I looked in the mirror, and I had a sense of integrity back. I felt better – I’d flunked the big test in life, but I’d pulled myself back together, and I was,” he sounded ironic, “pretty damn proud of myself. And Diana was sliding badly, she was drinking heavily, and we were so alienated from each other, I wasn’t even interested in helping her. I just wanted her out of my life. I didn’t want any reminders of what had happened. She tried once to patch things up, and I rejected her out of hand. I was back on my moral high horse, because at least I’d faced my demons, but she hadn’t undergone the spiritual transformation I had. I told myself I’d forgiven her, but I felt justified in never trusting her again. I wasn’t about to wipe the slate clean for
her
.”

She wanted to tell him that he hadn’t flunked the test, that the real test was how he had dealt with failure – but he wasn’t finished.

“Sorry, I know I am going on too long, but you need to know this. You have a decision to make after I finish, so you need to hear it all. About three years later, Diana and I had one last huge blowup – an appalling scene, you cannot believe, I don’t think either of us ever behaved so badly in our lives – and I threw her out. I was full of righteousness at that point; she’d strayed off the straight and narrow, while I had remained faithful, and I didn’t consider that she deserved any of the forgiveness I’d claimed for myself – anyway, we separated, and I filed for legal custody of Julie.”

Was he going to tell her about the custody fight? Tell her the truth about Julie?

“Then Francie came back,” and she stiffened in shock. “I know you know, Laura, you said as much the night you came back. She called me from Ash Marine, and I went running out there to tell her as gently as possible to stay the hell out of my life. I had left her behind, it was time for her to move on and forget me – oh, I had a whole speech to give her. I was on my high horse about her too. This time, I was going to do the honest and decent thing. And I saw her, and – well, suffice it to say within minutes we were going at each other.”

She couldn’t breathe. Tight bands had wrapped around her lungs.

“I hadn’t been with a woman in three years. I was starved for physical love – I have no idea if you know what that feels like, Lucy says women have the same hungers men do, they just don’t dwell on them as much. That may be true, I don’t know. I was in my mid twenties, and in seven years of marriage, I’d had one good year with my wife and six years of near-total abstinence. I have a normal sexual appetite. I touched Francie, and it was like going up in flames.” He heard his own words and winced. “Not the best way to put it. I’m sorry.”

She shook her head. She couldn’t speak.
He still thought he’d seen Francie on the island.

“It’s hard to know what metaphors I can use with you, although,” he showed a gleam of humor, “I noticed you teased me about skyscrapers last night, and it didn’t seem to bother you. You’ll have to tell me if I say something that upsets you.”

She forced out, “Don’t worry about that.”

He resumed his story. “So we were together, and then afterwards it turned – never mind, suffice it to say that the row I had with her cast the time in the park with Diana in the shade. I lost my temper, and Francie lost hers, and we behaved unforgivably towards each other.”

He wasn’t going to tell her. She wasn’t to know that he had goaded
Francie
with the threat of losing her child. She wasn’t to know that
Francie
, in retaliation, had picked up a gun and shot him.

“That’s the last time I ever saw her. But – it didn’t take long for all the guilt and self-loathing to descend again. I’d fallen off my pedestal again, and this time I had hurt a young woman that I cared about deeply. It wasn’t like hurting Diana, who gave just as good as she got. Francie was so much more vulnerable, and I had been cruel beyond belief to her. I had driven her flat crazy. So now I had to look in the mirror and square that in myself.”

She felt sick. She’d spent so many years trying not to remember Ash Marine –
there be dragons
– that she had never thought beyond the physical damage she had inflicted. She had never thought that he might struggle with guilt about the way he had behaved towards her – because she had never realized that he might feel guilty over Francie. She had loved Richard Ashmore, and she hadn’t known him at all.

“How long did it take that time to come back?” she asked.

He smiled at her; he knew she understood what he had been trying to tell her. “Not as long this time – a year or so. I had a lot to keep myself busy. I was a single father, I’d gotten my license as a registered architect so I got assigned more challenging projects, I started working on the Folly – and I kept going to church. I learned to accept myself as a flawed individual who was going to fall, and I learned to repent and ask for forgiveness and start anew.” He stopped. “At some point,” he said, “you know you’re going to make it.”

She watched him with wet eyes as he came back and sat down opposite her.

“That’s it for Francie,” he said. “I never saw her again. But I had finally learned one thing, and it’s that I am a fool when it comes to women. I had made three monumental mistakes, and I had screwed up any hope I had of a normal life. And, honestly, that’s all I ever wanted. I never wanted to sow my wild oats, sampling women like a buffet; I didn’t consider that part of being a man. I wanted to be like my father. By the time I was twenty-six, that was all gone.”

“Oh, Richard.” She looked away, blinking away tears. “You should have had what you wanted.”

“Instead,” said Richard, and his voice had started to strain from talking, “I knew that I was going to be by myself until Julie was old enough that Diana couldn’t take her. I’m sure,” he cocked an eyebrow at her, “you’ve heard Lucy’s theories about why we never divorced, and it’s true that I didn’t want to risk another down-and-dirty custody fight. So you can see my dilemma – how to build a decent life as Julie’s father and balance that with my own needs. I needed to matter in a woman’s life, and have her matter in mine, and when you have to tell a woman up front that you are not getting a divorce, that is not easy. Most women aren’t interested.”

She said hoarsely, “But some were.”

He nodded. “Three, after Diana left. Two were shorter relationships – very nice women, both of them were getting over bad marriages, and I made a pleasant stopgap. I treated them well, and they treated me well. I made it crystal clear from the beginning that there was no hope of anything else, and everything ended gracefully and with no recriminations on either side.”

He paused. “The third – well, Jennifer was a different story. I met her when Julie was ten. It lasted three years, and that was the only time that I seriously considered divorce. She wanted me to, Lord knows we talked the subject to death. I put all my usual restrictions on her – she was part of my private life, and that meant no meeting Julie or my parents, no coming to the house, no socializing near home. She lived in Richmond then, and we saw each other there most weekends. After a year or so, she was chafing at that. She wanted to be an official part of my life. She wanted us to get married and have children and be a family, and I don’t blame her for that.” He ruminated. “By year two, we were in trouble. I had to weigh my genuine affection for Jennifer against the need to keep Julie safe, and the problem was – that’s all it was, genuine affection. It simply wasn’t enough to outweigh the risk to my daughter.”