September Song (11 page)

In his last letter he wrote that he had promised Marcia never to see her again. But his love was undying.

The Piper Cub was sold.

Her wings had been clipped.

Over the succeeding years:

The children all left home.

Married.

Had children.

Toby retired.

He grew increasingly hard of hearing and that made him less talkative than ever. One mate's deafness made the other one dumb. She pitied him for his infirmity, yet his refusal to get a hearing aid exasperated her. She had to repeat everything she said to him. It was so frustrating! She knew that his resistance to a hearing aid was not because he was vain of his appearance. Of that he was all too careless. It was that to wear one would be a constant reminder, like eyeglasses, false teeth, of decay. She was ashamed of her irritation with him, but that did not keep her from feeling it.

She knew that people long together grew impatient with one another's ways and weaknesses and magnified them out of all proportion. His chronic sinusitis was an affliction he had not sought, yet his honking into his handkerchief so annoyed her that sometimes she had to leave the room. It was he who should leave the room.

He had always been bookish; his hardness of hearing made him burrow still deeper into books, leaving her more than ever to herself. One winter evening, snow flying, wind moaning, the two of them sat in silence before the fire, he reading, unconscious of, indifferent to whatever she might or might not be doing. To see just how long this could go on she sat there for hours. At last she rose, took his book from him and tossed it into the fire.

“Now what did you do that for?” he wondered aloud as she made her way upstairs.

Now had come the call she had waited twenty years for, never expecting it. It was as though some dear one had come back from the dead. And as though she had too.

“That was John Warner on the phone,” she said. The care with which she enunciated the name conveyed the need she had felt to place the person.

“John Warner?”

“Mmh. Remember him?”

“John Warner … Oh, yes. Yes. Long time no see. What's with him?”

“His wife has died.”

That would make it sound as though his wife
had just
died. That he was newly in need of sympathy, condolence. But she had died three years ago. Three years! Oh, why had he waited so long to call her? Three precious years! All that time lost when there was so little time to lose, to live! Yet she could explain his hesitancy to herself. She could imagine him longing to call her but thinking, “After all these years? She has forgotten you, you sentimental old fool. No doubt she replaced you with another lover. You're too old for this nonsense—and so is she. What right have you to disturb her settled life? There is not an ember left of what was once a fire—not on her side. With three children she's a grandmother many times over—a great-grandmother by now.”

But he had called! He had overcome his fear of looking ridiculous, of being laughed at, rejected. He had trusted in her faithfulness, had trusted that she would respond. He alone of all the world believed she still had a heart that did not just pump but palpitated.

“Oh, dear! Poor man. Yes. His wife was a very beautiful woman.”

“Mmh. You have no trouble remembering her, I see.”

She was doubly jealous.

“He says he would like to meet me. In the old days he used to be rather … fond of me.” This last she said in a musing tone, as though after all these years just now recalling it. “If you can believe that.” Her little jab was lost on him.

“Where is he?”

“In Boston.”

“Then of course you must go. Poor man! To lose his wife.”

A meeting between an elderly widower, recently bereaved, still in mourning, and a onetime friend who just happened to be of the opposite sex, a seventy-six-year-old great-grandmother, contentedly married for half a century: what could be more innocent?

She resented the assumption that her capacity for love, for adventure—even for mischief—had been worn away by the abrasion of time. It had just been rekindled. What the world would ridicule as her silliness aroused her defiance. No fool like an old fool, all would say; act your age. That was just what she was doing. Who better than she knew her age? The stopwatch was running, and her countdown to zero was for a launch.

“But you're a woman of seventy-six!” Those were his first words to her when, on her return home from Boston, she asked him for a divorce so that she might marry John Warner. The trip had been like a weekend pass from prison. Now she was demanding her parole. She felt she owed no apology. She had earned her freedom by her years of good behavior.

John showed his age and she was glad he did. She had feared that he would find her too old. He did not try to tell her that she had not changed, and she was glad of that too. He accepted her as she was. He said, “You look wonderful!” And his eyes shone with a light that she had not seen in a man's since last looking into his.

They drove down to the Cape, to his saltbox on the shore. They strolled on the beach. Arm in arm. Together they prepared the meal and dined at home. He was still all that he had been, and he made her feel that she was too. A few wrinkles—what were they? The intervening years vanished as though at the wave of his wand. It was she—
she!
—across the table from him, in the candlelight's flattering glow. No book lay on the surface separating them. She did not mind his self-assurance; she liked his certainty that she was his.

He had let her know over the phone something of what she might expect if she agreed to meet him. He held her hand, and it was the splicing of a long-severed electric connection, the current restored; but he did not want just to hold hands. He paid her court, turning upon her all his charm, his wit, but briefly—telegraphing his intentions. She appreciated his gallantry, but she must not prolong it. There was not time for coyness. He had a lot to accomplish in a short while—more, indeed, than she guessed. For just picking up where they had broken off all those years ago and carrying on as before was not what he had in mind. He had in mind much more than that.

After dinner they danced. He had mapped out his flattering but needless campaign of conquest down to orchestrating on tape the background music. They swayed to:

You were meant for me.

I was meant for you.

To:

Although you belong to somebody else,

Tonight you belong to me.

To—in the sultry voice of Marlene Dietrich:

Falling in love again—

Oh, what am I to do?

Long as I'm near you

I can't help it.

Being the music of their youth, it made them feel young. Until the finale, in the cracked old voice of Walter Huston—his proposal to her in song:

For it's a long long time from May to December

But the days grow short when you reach September

She needed no persuading to spend those remaining days with him.

“But you're a great-grandmother!” said Toby.

“I do not need to be told my age. Nor that I am not acting it. I see it in the mirror. I feel it in my joints. I am an old woman. But I am still a woman. A woman in love. I am not afraid of making a fool of myself. What you are afraid of is my making you look foolish. You won't miss me. You will still have your books, your slippers and your pipe.

“Your first words to me ought to have been, ‘I love you. Don't leave me. Give me a chance to prove my love to you and to win back yours.' It would have done you no good. It's too late in the day for that. But it is what you ought to have said.”

“Well! This has certainly been a whirlwind romance.”

“I liked him when I knew him before. Now, as you have so chivalrously pointed out, I have got no time to lose.”

In truth, she both did and did not feel her age. Her years with Toby after the loss of John had dragged by, they had piled up. And yet in their very sameness they ran together, uncountable, all one. They were easily shed. They were like a sleep. A sleep from which she had now awakened.

“So,” she said. Discussion was at an end, it was time now for decision. “Are you going to give me what I want, or do you mean to contest it?”

“Well … If that is what you want…”

So that was how much she meant to him! Not worth putting up the least fight for. Her heart sped on wings to her old, her new lover.

Then her conscience told her that she was being unfair. If he was so readily acquiescent it was because he had been stunned, crushed. In just one minute, the duration of an earthquake, his familiar world had crumbled.

“This is a pretty big step,” he said. “Are you sure of your own mind? Don't you want to think it over?” Then with a feeble attempt at humor, “Lots of auld lang syne riding on this, old friend.”

She was moved, but moved to pity, not to a change of heart. That was no longer hers to change.

She wrote the children, braving their condemnation for her faithlessness to their father, their embarrassment over her geriatric folly. That she not seem still more ridiculous than she did, she had to reveal to them her affair of long ago with the same man. This was not someone new to her. To confess herself a one-time adulteress to her children was preferable to having them think she was so depraved as to fall illicitly in love for the first time at her age. All three approved, her daughter applauded, even reveled in the revelation of her former affair. Poor Toby! What treacherous little beasts children were! It made her wonder about the example she was setting her daughter. She had had misgivings about that marriage, and about what its breakup would mean to her grandchildren. Their encouragement brought with it a pang. It showed how pitifully apparent to them over the years had been her need for warmth, her lack of love. It was an acknowledgment of how little time she had left in which to find a crumb of the true staff of life.

She announced her intention to her brother Thornton. As she had expected, he was scandalized. If she persisted he might well disown her. Thornton had never married; that was how awesome a step he considered holy matrimony to be. He inveighed against divorce. Those of his friends who got one were scratched from his address book. He needed only sandals and a robe to seem like Moses down from the mountaintop bearing the tablets of the law, a list of Thou Shalt Nots inscribed in stone by the fiery forefinger of God. She was not fond of Thornton—he had been a prig from his youth; but she was afraid of him. On matters of devotion and duty he spoke with the voices of both their dead parents, all their ancestors. Yet even the scorching she got from him did not deter her. Thornton was like a firefighter setting a fire around a fire to contain it and let it burn itself out. But her heart's fire blazed on unchecked. Opposition only fanned its flames.

Thornton's opposite was the lady lawyer recommended to her, a specialist in divorce. Separating people was not only her profession, it was her passion.

“Go for it!” she urged. “Never too late to make the break. I know men. Totally inconsiderate. I say being born male is a birth defect.”

“It is my intention,” she said, “to remarry immediately.”

She was not only a fool, said the other woman's look; she was an old fool, of which there was none like.

Toby might have made things extremely unpleasant for her if he had been so inclined. The law, had he invoked it, was on his side. He was the injured party. He might have charged her with desertion, adultery, and have turned her out without a dime. Might have advertised in the town paper, “My wife having left my bed and board, I will no longer be responsible for debts incurred, etc.”

He never threatened her with such actions. Instead there would be an equal division of their common property. The house and its furnishings would either be sold or else he would buy it from the estate at the assessed value. She would be financially independent.

“You must be provided for in case this marriage of yours should break up. I owe that to the mother of my children,” he said. It was as if he were
her
father, doing his duty by her but washing his hands of an errant child by settling a competence upon her.

“It won't break up,” she said.

“One never knows. Ours did. After fifty years.”

“Forty-nine,” she corrected him. “It only seems longer.”

He made one condition, to which she agreed: that she will everything of hers that had once been his in part to their children.

He was being fair. What was unfair was his fairness. His irreproachable uprightness was inhuman. It disarmed her. If he had threatened her, railed at her, she could have defended herself.

Nothing so tried the patience as a saint.

“I'll go by way of—” And he mapped his route. Since growing old they always did this whenever either of them set off alone for someplace. Thus if he or she was not back when expected the state police could be told where to look. He was off now to see his lawyer to draw up the settlement.

She watched him struggle into his coat. Painful arthritis in his left elbow made this difficult for him. But he would refuse her help now. She had forfeited her right to help him. Neither did she straighten his hat, as she had done all their married life. He always got it on slightly crooked. It made him look as if he were headed one way while the rest of him was going off at a tangent. Oh, dear, what would become of him without her to look after him?

She watched him make his way to the garage. He was the picture of rejection. He looked like one of those homeless old men who, bent beneath the weight of their overcoats summer and winter, tramped the highways aimlessly, endlessly. He not only looked like one: his pride, or rather his humiliation—his tattered pride—would never permit him to ask one of the children for a home in his solitary old age.

What would become of him? He could not look after himself. He had never been able to. A more helpless, more dependent man could not be found. Perhaps he would sell the house and go into one of those senior citizens' retirement complexes where the elderlies' wants were all attended to. That thought gave her a wrench. It also held up to her, as in a mirror, an image of herself. In the hunch of his shoulders, in the hang of his head, in his slow gait she saw her own age reflected. Two-thirds of their years they had spent together. She could be sure that in all that time he had never had a thought unfaithful to her. She wished she could think he had. Then she wished she could unwish the wish. It was unworthy of her.