Why did Joanna want me off the case? Jimmy Haviland might think that Thomas Browning was responsible for the death of Annie Malreaux, but surely Joanna did not believe that. Or did she? It seemed impossible, but then, the more I learned about what had happened in the lives of these people with whom I had once been so close, the less I knew.
Perhaps she was only trying to warn me about the people who were out to destroy her husband, the people around the president who were ready to convict an innocent man of murder because it would help them force out of office a vice president they did not want. If they were willing to do that, it was not likely they would hesitate to go after a defense attorney who got in their way.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I was right: Joanna could not stop Thomas Browning from putting himself in danger’s way, but she could try to stop me. She must have known it was futile, that Browning had his part to play, but that so did I. Browning may have wanted me to take the case, defend whoever was charged in Annie’s death, but I was the one who had decided to do it. Jimmy Haviland was my responsibility. Even had I wanted to, I could not walk away from that.
Bartholomew Caminetti did not have any regrets or reservations; he certainly was not wondering about what had happened to former friends of his, people he had not seen in years. He was getting ready to make the case for murder, and I had seen enough of him to know that there was not anything that would be left to chance. I was going to have to be as well prepared for this as for any case I had ever tried, and that meant that I had to know everything there was to know about the victim, about Annie Malreaux; not just how she died, but how she lived. Every way I turned, I was face-to-face with the past.
I had known Annie Malreaux at Harvard for one short year, and I had known some of her friends; I did not know anything about what she had been like before she got there, and I did not know anything about what had happened to the people with whom she had once been so close. I was looking for something—anything— that would teach me who she had really been and why her death had to have been the accident Thomas Browning had always said it had been. At least I knew where to start.
I found her on her hands and knees pulling weeds out of a small garden behind a narrow gray stone house where she had lived since long before her daughter died. She knew I was coming, but she was a woman in her eighties, and I could not be sure she would remember the time. When no one answered the door, I opened the gate at the side and let myself into the backyard.
“Mr. Antonelli!” She sat up on her knees and pushed a floppy hat back from her eyes. “Right on time.” She got to her feet, dusting the dirt from the long sleeves of her shirt. With a graceful movement, she swept the hat from her head and tossed it onto a wooden stake around which a tomato plant had begun to climb. Her fine brown hair had only the slightest tinge of gray. Her eyes were large, inquisitive and proud. She had high cheekbones, a long, straight nose and a large animated mouth. She had the look of a woman who would not hesitate to speak her mind.
“Hot as hell, isn’t it, Mr. Antonelli,” she said in a voice that quavered, but only slightly and only at the end. With the back of her hand she wiped away the perspiration that had run from her high forehead into her eyes. Squinting into the sultry haze, she seemed to hesitate, uncertain of what she wanted to do next. She crooked her head and tried to think.
“People used to come here,” she remarked with a generous, thoughtful smile as she walked toward me. “In the summer, to stay at the lake. Just a few blocks away,” she added, twisting her long and still-elegant neck, until her eyes, turned away from the sun, fell under the shadow of the eastern sky. “That’s why they built all the big hotels, the ones with closets as big as bedrooms—for the summer trade. No one had air-conditioning then, and as long as you had to be miserable anyway, why not come to the beach and enjoy the water.” She put a frail-looking hand on my sleeve and with unexpected strength held on to my arm as we made our way to the back door.
“They use a couple of them now for dormitories, student housing. There isn’t much call anymore for summer resorts on the south side of Chicago. It’s too bad, really.” She opened a rickety dark brown screen door. “Some of the hotels were quite wonderful: I lost my virginity in one of them. The Windemere, I think it was.” She said this in a slightly puzzled voice, as if she wished she could remember, but could not really be sure. Her wintry eyes were full of mischief, and I knew that she had not forgotten a thing.
“You’re from New York?” she asked as she removed a pitcher of lemonade from the refrigerator and poured us each a glass.
I followed her out of the kitchen into the dining room, where we sat at a ponderous dark wooden table with round thick legs. There were only two chairs, one at the end and one just around the corner at what would normally have been the first place on the left. Scholarly books with long and obscure titles, writing paper covered with a precise and calibrated longhand flourish, pages of double-spaced and frequently corrected typescript were strewn across it in the careless haphazard fashion of a work in progress.
“Just shove that aside,” she said as if the stack of handwritten notes in front of me had no more value than last week’s newspaper. “My lecture,” she remarked.
Closing her eyes, she held the icy glass against the side of her taut, wrinkled cheek. It seemed to relax her. A languid, almost sensuous smile crossed her parchment mouth. “Yes, at my age,” she said as she opened her eyes and set down the glass. “How exactly can I help you, Mr. Antonelli? You’re from New York?” she asked again, looking at me with extreme interest. “That’s where I’m from—originally. New York—there’s no place quite like it. Wouldn’t you agree? Is that where you’re from?”
She reached for the typed manuscript, ten pages or so that, following her instruction, I had pushed toward the center of the table, away from my glass. As she held it in her hands, I noticed a slight tremble. Then I realized that it was always there, and that the constant barely discernible motion of her head, which at first I had attributed to an intense interest, was symptomatic of the same palsied condition, the same decline, gradual, irreversible, and cruel.
“‘Tolstoy’s Unacknowledged Indebtedness to Rousseau.’” She raised her eyes, certain I would understand the daring significance of it. Or was that what she wanted me to think? That she assumed she could talk to me about her work as an equal when she assumed nothing of the sort. There was something comfortable, assuring and not entirely honest about the way she enveloped you with that look of hers, as if she understood a part of you that until you saw that look you had not quite known was there. It was uncanny, the way she made you feel that you were discovering something about yourself, but only by seeing it first through another person’s eyes. It had happened to me before, a long time ago. I had forgotten about it, forgotten that serious and at the same time strangely whimsical look. Now, when I saw it again, I remembered more than the look, I remembered the eyes; and it seemed to me that I was seeing them again, the same eyes a second time, this time in the woman who had had them first.
“I suppose I might call it ‘Plagiarism Pure and Simple,’ but that loses a little of the precision, a little of the subtlety, don’t you think?” She sat perfectly erect, an indulgent smile on her dry, desiccated lips. There was something about the way she held herself: the high neck, the loose-limbed broad shoulders, the light-filled eyes, the strong yet somehow vulnerable mouth, the ever-trembling hands; the way her voice seemed to quiver into a kind of breathless silence at the end; the way each question she asked sounded like a personal appeal, that reminded me of the way I had remembered an aging and majestic Katharine Hepburn. It was impossible not to like her; impossible not to fall under her spell.
“Do you think I’m too old to keep doing this, Mr. Antonelli?” She held her head back at an angle. “No one here seems to think so. It’s one of the things that make this place different; one of the reasons some of us—the ones who have been here the longest—love it so much. The University of Chicago has the peculiar idea that it just might be possible that the mind is worth more than the body; and that the gradual decline of the one may not be inconsistent with the continuing, and perhaps even increasing, power of the other. You may die here, Mr. Antonelli; but you don’t retire here: because at the point when you can’t work, can’t do what you were put here to do, you should die. Or, rather, your body should die. The mind never dies; not if it has been part of the conversation.” She smiled at my dense, puzzled expression. “The conversation that goes on over the centuries with the minds that knew how to think. Do you think Aristotle is really dead? Open the Metaphysics and see if you don’t find yourself talking to him, questioning him, finding answers. Anyway, that’s what we do here: ask questions of people like Rousseau who once wrote—Why did he write?—‘If you want to live beyond your century.’”
“How long have you been here, at the University of Chicago, Mrs. Malreaux?”
A thin smile creased the corner of her mouth.
Leaning forward, her back arched straight, she placed her right elbow on the table. With her middle and index fingers spread along the side of her face, she joined her thumb and two remaining fingers at the apex of her chin. The smile began to float, slip sideways across her mouth.
“The university was founded in 1892. Sometime after that.” She tilted her head to an angle a little more acute.
“It isn’t ‘Mrs. Malreaux.’ I never married. Call me Vivian. How can I help you, Mr. Antonelli? Why did you want to see me?”
It seemed impossible that she did not know, but it was clear that she had no idea why I had come.
“I knew your daughter, Ms. Malreaux. We were in law school together, and…”
Her gaze became curious, intense and alert; but there was also a sense of confusion and an instinctive reserve. Why would someone who had known her daughter in law school want to see her now, after all this time?
“You knew Anna at Harvard. You were in the same class?”
“No, she was a year behind me. I was Thomas Browning’s roommate.”
This seemed to put her again at her ease. “Ah, yes— Thomas.” She searched my eyes, waiting for me to explain.
“I’m representing Jimmy Haviland.”
The name produced the same look of recognition in her eyes; but this time there was more than the acknowledgment of a fact: There was a feeling of sympathy and understanding that had been absent at the mention of Browning’s name.
“Why would Jimmy need representation?” she asked with a worried glance. “He can’t have done anything wrong. Not the Jimmy Haviland I remember.”
How could she not have heard? The rumored involvement of the vice president of the United States in a criminal cover-up had made it one of the most widely covered stories in the country. She must have read about it, and then, with the faltering memory of age, simply forgotten.
“It’s been in all the papers, all over the television,” I began to explain, looking down at my hands with a growing sense of embarrassment.
Instead of the blank look of forgetfulness I expected, I looked up to find her half laughing at what I had said.
“I’m afraid I don’t read the papers, Mr. Antonelli.” She threw me a glance terrific in its cheerful indifference to what the world thought important. “I’m eighty-two years old: What new thing do you think I should follow with interest? And as for television… Why would I? Why would anyone? But, please,” she went on, anxious to get back to the question she had raised, “tell me about Jimmy Haviland. What’s happened?”
“He’s been indicted for murder.”
With stoic reserve she kept hidden whatever reaction she had. She knew there was more to it, and she waited for me to tell her what it was.
“They claim that Annie’s death wasn’t an accident; that it was murder; that Jimmy pushed her out the window.”
Vivian Malreaux threw up her hands. “In a long life in which I have seen stupidities of every description, that is unquestionably the single stupidest thing I’ve ever heard suggested. I would have pushed her out a window before Jimmy ever could have. Why are they doing this? They can’t possibly believe it’s true.”
Vivian Malreaux stared straight ahead, bleak, disconsolate, angry. She lifted her chin and, as if she were trying to hide them, folded her palsied hands in her lap. A brief shudder passed through her. She clenched her hands into fists and beat them in soft despair against the hard wooden table. With her mouth twisted into a knot, she slowly shook her head.
“I used to tell Anna she was going to ruin Jimmy Haviland’s life,” she said in a bitter, anguished voice. “He was so in love with her, it was almost painful to watch. It was not her fault, of course—a lot of young men were in love with her, or thought they were. But Jimmy was different. He loved her too much. I saw it right away, the first time I met him: the way he looked at her, trying so hard to figure out what she wanted, how he could please her. He loved her too much. If he had loved her less, he would have known that he was doing all the wrong things, that he should have kept a certain distance, made her think he wasn’t spending all his time thinking about her.”
Vivian Malreaux threw me a significant look. She wanted me to understand that the judgment she was about to pass was not quite so cruel as it might at first sound.
“In the end, of course, it would not have changed things. Jimmy Haviland was in love with something he could not have. Anna was never going to be in love with him. But it would have made him depend less on how she felt and left him something of himself.”
A smile, strange, mysterious and profound, flashed through her eyes. “I imagine something like that happened to you once, Mr. Antonelli. Something tragic,” she remarked, lowering her eyes to spare me the embarrassment of a reply.
“In some people, tragedy deepens the soul, makes them see things in a different light. It makes sense out of the world, this terrible knowledge that terrible things happen, that there are no happy endings, that we can’t know—not really know—what fate has waiting for us. But other people—people like Jimmy Haviland— never recover from it. They can never quite believe it really happened, that the world could be that unfair, that life can be that unjust. I knew it when I saw him, saw the way Anna had become his whole world. I knew it was going to end badly; I knew that he was going to have his heart broken. What I didn’t know was that it was going to happen twice.”
She held her head high, rigid, yielding as little as she could to the palsied tremors that laid siege to her mouth.
Her face was like a raw winter wind, cold, desolate, unforgiving. Her eyes searched relentlessly through the layered past to that moment when, once she had it, she could recall as easily, as clearly, as if she were reciting it from the written page of a well-written book.
“Jimmy called. That’s how I learned Anna was dead.” There was a long, stringent pause. Her eyes half closed, she rubbed the palm of her right hand with the thumb of her left. “I think I knew it before he said anything; I knew it from the sobbing gasp in his voice when he tried to speak my name; I knew it when he tried to say Anna’s name and broke down completely.
“He came here; he helped me with all the arrangements; he was quite brave. He came here because he thought he should try to help me; he came here, and I did what I could to try to help him.”
A sad and wistful smile floated over the straight, fragile, trembling ruins of the mouth of Vivian Malreaux. Her voice was hesitant, sympathetic, the echo of vanished things that linger forever, clear and vivid, in the quiet and aching memory of the mind.
“He asked her to marry him. She broke his heart when she said no. But Jimmy Haviland was one of those rare, decent beings that I think you don’t find so often anymore, someone who believed—really believed—that it wasn’t quite possible to love anyone as much as he loved her and not have her love him back.”
The wistful smile, become more hopeful, hovered a moment longer, began to dim, and then, sadly and irretrievably, died out. Her remarkable eyes appeared to pull back from some fixed point in front of her and cast about for something else to hold, some other place from which to begin.
“He was right: Love is never unrequited, not entirely. That’s the rub, of course—that ‘not entirely.’ Jimmy loved her with all his heart, and Anna loved him because of it.” She turned her head suddenly and gave me a sharp, searching look. “Anna did love him. She loved him because of how much he loved her—not because he was in love with her, but because he was capable of it, of being that much in love with someone. She envied that a little, that capacity to feel like that about someone; it was not a capacity she had. She was too much a woman for that.”
“‘Too much a woman for that’?” I blurted out, astonished at what she had said. “What do you mean?— ‘too much a woman for that.’”
With a kind of luxurious self-indulgence, an enigmatic smile curled along the corner of her mouth. With two fingers of her left hand she gently touched her chin.
“Anna understood the changeable nature of things; that what you feel today you may not feel tomorrow, and you almost certainly won’t feel next year or the year after that. She understood, not that love doesn’t last, but that love changes what it means. Jimmy Haviland was in love with her—Thomas Browning was in love with her— there were a lot of young men in love with her—and they all wanted to marry her; but marriage, if it means anything, means possession, and she was not able to do that, be possessed by someone. She understood herself too well for that; understood herself too well as a woman for that.”
I was still confused, but not so much that I did not see the flaw, the error she had made. Vivian Malreaux said she had never married. Annie had been born out of wedlock when that sort of thing did not pass unnoticed or always go unpunished. Vivian Malreaux’s objections to marriage had undoubtedly been based on a serious conviction, but what may once have been a reasonable analysis of the oppression of women seemed as dated as the Victorian furniture that filled the house in which she lived.
“Do you really think marriage is about possession?” I asked, hiding my incredulity behind a mask of polite interest. To my further astonishment, she laughed.
“Only when it works,” she said, her eyes shining at my shocked and helpless stare. “It’s why marriage has become an impossibility; why it isn’t anything more than a temporary arrangement by which two parties agree to have sex and make money.” She looked at me with a kind of gleeful mischief. “Marriage ended sometime in the nineteenth century. It did not just end because the economic situation of women changed and they became more independent, more self-sufficient; and it did not just end because it became easier—a lot easier—to get a divorce. Why did divorce become easier? Because women acquired an equal status in the law. But once women had an equal right to all the protections of the law, and all the economic opportunities of the marketplace, a woman was no longer an object, no longer dependent for her existence, her livelihood, her happiness on anyone but herself. She was not an object: She could not be possessed. But if she could not be possessed—if she could only belong to herself—how could a man believe that she belonged to him? And if she didn’t belong to him—if she was not a part, an ineradicable part, of himself—how could he ever protect her with the same fierce passion with which he would protect his own life? How could he have about her the same kind of instinct of possession and responsibility that she—that any woman—has about her child? It is the vanity of our age, Mr. Antonelli: We keep thinking we can change the very nature of things and that there won’t be anything lost. Marriage died a hundred years ago when women were set free to do what they liked, because then of course men were free to do the same thing. Now everyone has their rights and, it seems to me, not much else. I did not marry, Mr. Antonelli. I was not about to belong to someone else; and because, to be quite frank about it, the kind of man who would have settled for anything less simply did not interest me very much.”
“But you had a…”
“A child?” With a slight movement of her head she acknowledged the force of this entirely conventional objection. “You assume I was asked.” She rested her chin on top of her fingers, closed partway into a crippled, arthritic fist. A restless smile moved along the shadow of her mouth. “You assume Anna’s father knew he was Anna’s father. You assume…” she gave a start like someone suddenly aware of her own bad habit, smiled a silent apology and rose from the table. She stood behind the chair, both hands on top of it, looking down at me.
“I might have married Anna’s father, if he had survived the war. Perhaps he did. I don’t know. I don’t know what happened to them, any of them, the boys who went off to the war that summer, the summer of nineteen forty-two, the summer I lived in New York. It was the war, Mr. Antonelli—the war. Young men… going off to fight and die in a war. A look, a glance, a touch… an hour, a night… and no regrets. There were half a dozen young men who could have been Anna’s father, young men with whom I slept during the time she had to have been conceived. By the time I realized I was pregnant, there had been other young men. I didn’t even try to guess who it might have been, or even what he must have looked like. I didn’t care. It didn’t matter. I wanted it to be every young man I had been with, every young man to whom I had said good-bye and sent off to war.”
Brave, defiant, indomitable, the fire in her wintry eyes lit up the room.
“Who was Anna’s father? A boy I knew one wonderful summer night in 1942 in a small walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village not far from Washington Square. I think that’s why she turned out so well: born to love and bravery in the middle of a war.”
A faint smile on her mouth, she left me alone and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later she brought out a wooden tray with tea and cookies. The air-conditioned house was comfortable, but not so cool that I would have been tempted to put on my jacket. She had thrown a sweater over her shoulders to stop a chill. The teacups rattled as she placed them as carefully as she could on the saucers. She nibbled on the edge of a chocolate cookie.
“I’m an old woman,” she said with an impish glow. “Not so old that I could have danced with Isadora Duncan—but frankly, not so stupid that I would have wanted to. I did not want to be something men desired; I wanted to be someone who had a value in my own eyes. And that’s what I wanted for Anna: to be herself, to be what she was—not what she thought someone wanted her to be.” Her head came up sharply. “The last thing I wanted was for her to try to be like a man. Isn’t it pathetic? These raging demands for equality between the sexes. Equal with respect to what? Work? Letting someone else tell you how to live? That’s what I wanted for Anna: to live!” She stared at me for a moment, then looked away.
With a pensive expression, Vivian Malreaux sipped on her tea.
“It’s strange what we remember, isn’t it? I see the things Anna did, the things she accomplished, and I think I see what would have happened, how she would have lived, what she would—or could—have become, but of course…”
Pulling the sweater closer around her throat, she huddled beneath it as if the cold had reached down to her bones.
“When is the trial?” she asked in a calm, dispassionate voice.
“The first week in October.”
“How is he? How is Jimmy holding up? It must be tearing him apart. I haven’t seen him in years. He used to come, once in a while, when he could; and then, for a long time, he’d write. Every year at Christmas I would get a card, but then it stopped. I hoped that maybe it meant that he had stopped believing that part of him had died that day, too. He believed that, you know. From the look in your eyes, Mr. Antonelli, I can see he still believes that, that his life ended, too; that from the moment Anna died every hope and dream he had died, too; and that whatever happened after that, it was always going to be judged with that kind of bittersweet nostalgia that tells you that nothing is ever going to be that good again. We all do that, I suppose—have something in our lives that makes other things seem not so good as they would have been if we had not had those other things first. It was worse for Jimmy Haviland, though; because what Jimmy had—what he remembers—was not anything that ever happened. What Jimmy had was that hope, that almost sacred hope, of what might have happened, what in his mind was bound to happen, once Anna understood— really understood—how impossibly and desperately serious he was; once she understood that no one would ever—could ever—love her as much as he did, as much as he always would. Jimmy was the exception that proves the rule: He would have loved her forever; and, good God, he still does—doesn’t he?”
Vivian Malreaux faced forward, her long thin arms stretched in front of her on the space cleared in the mountain of books and papers scattered over the heavy-legged dining-room table. With the tip of her left index finger, she beat insistently on the hard dull surface, her eyes narrowed into a penetrating stare.
“No,” she announced abruptly as that incessant drumming echoed into silence. “It isn’t reasonable; it isn’t fair. There isn’t any way in the world Jimmy Haviland could have done anything like what they say. Not in a thousand years. He was hurt, disappointed— I’m sure of it; but he was always a gentleman. The last thing he would have done was allow himself to get angry over the way Anna felt. Anna loved him, you know—in that way she had. She was not going to marry him, or take him to bed—Anna didn’t love him like that. She didn’t love anyone like that—until… That’s why it’s so incredibly sad.”
“Didn’t love anyone like that until—whom? Thomas Browning?”
Vivian Malreaux was thinking of Jimmy Haviland. At first she did not quite understand what I had asked. She blinked her eyes, a puzzled expression on her face. It was gone in an instant.
“Yes. She brought him here once: that fall, a few months before the accident, a few months before she died. I don’t know if she was in love with him: She was intrigued by him. Who wouldn’t have been?”
I knew what she meant. “He was different from the others,” I started to agree. “He always seemed older, more intelligent…”
“More intelligent?” She gave me a skeptical glance. “Yes, I suppose he was, more than most,” she remarked, her glance subdued, thoughtful, measured. “Intelligent, charming, considerate; but those aren’t such rare qualities in the world that Anna would have had the same reaction, the same interest, to someone else who had them. No, Thomas—Thomas Browning—had another quality, a quality that set him apart from every other young man she had known, and from every other young man she was ever likely to know.”
I scratched my ear, trying to think of what quality she meant. She peered at me from behind those defiantly intelligent eyes as if I already knew the answer and would, once she told me, wonder why I had had to wait to hear it from her.
“He was going to become one of the richest men in the world. She would have married a man like that.”
It was said without the trace of a suggestion that there was anything heartless or mercenary about it. She kept looking at me, daring me, I think, not to laugh, not to admit that what she had said about her daughter reflected not the tragedy, but the great comedy, of the human condition. She lifted her proud head, holding it at a confident angle, someone who can see not just to the heart of things, but to the best in things. She was what I think Anna would have become, and what, all those years ago, I had thought Joanna had been: a woman with qualities of her own, qualities that made her immune to the ill-informed judgments of the world.
“She might have married him for that, for having that much money, in the same way she might eventually have decided to marry Jimmy Haviland for having that much love. Don’t you see why? Because she did not need either of the things they had—love or money. Because she would not have taken what they had to give, they would each of them have become astonishingly generous men.”
Laughing with her eyes, she patted my hand. Then she twisted her head to the side as if she were about to share with me the secret that explained everything.
“There is no equality between the sexes, Mr. Antonelli. There never has been, there never will be. Everything interesting or important a man has ever done was done for a woman. Men create religions, but only so they can worship women in a different form. Men are only what women let them think they are. It’s not my fault that so many women seem to have forgotten that rather important fact of life.”
Through the open sliding door that divided the dining from the living room, she glanced at the clock on the fireplace mantel.
“I have to be over at my office,” she said as she rose from the table and began to clear the dishes. “I have a doctoral candidate coming by. It won’t take me a minute to get ready. If you have time, walk over with me. We can talk on the way.”
Under a white relentless sky, we made our way along the Midway. The August heat was oppressive, inescapable; the air left a bitter burned taste in the mouth.
We passed the Rockefeller Chapel, and then, a block or so later, walked next to the iron spiked fence behind which a grass schoolyard ran the length of a gray stone Gothic building. It was, she explained in a brief reference, the Lab School, where Anna had gone to grade school. Two blocks later we crossed the street and passed through a narrow opening between two larger Gothic structures into one of the quadrangles.
“Anna went to school here, from the Lab School when she started, all the way through college. The university was really her home. She graduated when she was nineteen.”
“You must have been very proud of her,” I remarked, breathing slowly the heavy, humid air. I followed her through a leaded-glass wooden door.
“This is Harper,” she explained as we waited for an elevator in a building that had the look of something that, instead of a hundred, had stood there for a thousand, years.
Her office was on the top floor with a ceiling that sloped under the roofline toward the outer wall. The doctoral student had not yet arrived. I stood in the doorway, watching her.
“There’s just one more thing I wanted to ask. Annie had a friend, a young woman. They were in law school together, but I think she had known her before. I can’t remember her name, and I don’t know where she might be now.”
“You must mean Helen, Helen Thatcher.” She came around the desk, staring down at the uneven gray stone tiles, trying to remember. “Yes, they were good friends. I don’t know what’s happened to her. I used to hear from her. The last time—and that must have been years ago—she was living somewhere out west. California, I think; but, as I say, years ago. I don’t know if she would still be there or not. I might still have that address—I kept most of the letters and cards I was sent by Anna’s friends. Would you like me to try to find it? I’ll be glad to send it along.”
Down the hallway, the small elevator clunked to a halt and the narrow metal doors cranked open. With tousled brown hair and dark moody eyes, the young man whose dissertation awaited what he still thought an uncertain fate came slouching toward us.
“Would you mind waiting, Evan?” she asked him. She put her liver-spotted hand on my sleeve and started to walk me down the hall. Her heart was too gentle, and her respect for good work too great—too much a part of who she was—to make him wait in suspense. “It’s quite good, Evan,” she said over her shoulder.
I had to look back; I had to see for myself the reaction, the inexpressible sense of relief that comes with the knowledge that something to which you have given years of your life, something that has an importance that no one who has not tried it can ever understand, has come out as good—no, better—than you had ever dared hope.
“It’s better than good, Evan. It’s one of the best things I’ve read.”
His eyes lit up with a youthful, bashful enthusiasm. I remembered what that felt like, when the future—your future—suddenly seems to stretch out forever and there is nothing in it except all the things you thought you could ever want. It had been like that once for all of us, for Anna, and Joanna, and for Thomas Browning, and for no one more than Jimmy Haviland, who, more than the rest of us were capable of, had loved something— someone—more than he had ever cared about himself.
“Poor Jimmy,” said Annie’s remarkable mother while she stood with me, waiting for the elevator to come back. “You know what he did—after?”
I was not quite sure what she meant. “After he quit school? After he came back and finished?”
Her eyes acknowledged the fact. “Yes, that’s right. He did quit. I made him go back.”
“You?”
“I told him that it was the last thing Anna would want—that he should quit and not finish. So he went back, that next fall. But after he graduated, that summer? He enlisted, went into the army. He went to Vietnam. He tried to get himself killed, if you ask me. How many others signed up for a second tour? Jimmy! He thinks he’s a failure because he didn’t die. Jimmy did everything right, and everything always went wrong. He should never have met Anna,” she said with a short, decisive motion of her head. “If he had not known her, none of this would ever have happened. He would have had a good life.”
I wondered if that was true, or whether, if it had not been Anna, it would have been someone else, and though the dream would have been different, the end would have been the same. Some of us seem born to unhappiness.
The elevator jerked to a stop; the doors creaked open. She held my sleeve a moment longer.
“He really did love her; maybe more than anyone ever loved anyone. He did everything for me after it happened. I never saw him shed a tear after that first awful phone call, he was so determined to see me through it.” A wistful smile crossed her mouth. “Thomas Browning loved her, too; but I never heard from him, not once, not even a card.”