It was most like a great church awash in waves of light.
Of course I had heard about Grand Central Station, New York. A wounded soldier on the train, a boy who had seen England and France, still compared Grand Central Station to the hub of the world. The place where all tracks eventually led. And standing there, in the middle of the vast lobby, with the light pouring in through the high windows, I believed. I dropped my valise on the pink marble floor and turned in a circle, staring open-mouthed at the towering ceiling far above me.
I had slept on the train during the night, and I stopped in a washroom in the tunnel beneath the station to wash my face and teeth and put on a tie. The valet in the washroom, whose mahogany skin reminded me of Prince, had refused my tip, assuming from my face that I was a veteran.
When he did so, I returned for one more glimpse into the cloudy mirror. The scar was long and jagged, but it had faded from a constant application of Bird’s onion juice, so that now it was only a thin line that ran diagonally across my face. My nose was only slightly crooked, and I had baked my whole head to a uniform nut brown in the spring sunshine. “I think I look pretty damn good, all things considered,” I commented to the valet.
“Oh, yessir,” he said, and I heard in his voice that he was a Southerner.
I handed him the quarter again. “I got this in North Carolina, not France,” I said, pointing to my nose. “Our own little sector of the war.”
He examined my face critically. “Hell of a place, that North Carolina.”
* * *
I AM FRIGHTENED, so frightened. By what’s happening to me and by what’s happening to you. I had read her letter over and over in the four months since the trial. The letter she had written to me on the evening of the third day, after Ed Rumbough’s deadly testimony. The letter she’d given to Prince and that he’d passed to me at supper the night after I was released by the jury. The letter that I’d carried in every suit of clothes I’d worn since. For months folded and refolded. Read and reread.
Stephen Dear,
I am frightened, so frightened. By what’s happening to me and by what’s happening to you. I sat today and listened to Edward Rumbough testifying how you had protected Siegfried and betrayed your country. And the whole time, I thought that it should be me on trial for my life, not you. In the beginning, I begged Prince to help me convince someone, anyone, that I had killed that awful man. But he refused because you had asked him to.
He refused and then the changes began.
What kind of perverse fate would let you die now? And would it be my fault if you did? After today, when even Mr. Johnson seemed defeated by Edward Rumbough, I am terrified.
You have asked me to leave. Over and over, almost as if you knew. So now I think I must leave. I think I must go and take Jonsy away as well, for she is about to give birth, here now, in the middle of all this death.
How long ago in the summer I tried not to love you. But how could I know, Stephen, what it would all mean? I don’t know yet how to pray, but I promise you that I will learn. Every day.
Your Anna
It had taken me a long time to imagine how she could blame herself for the choices I had made. I left Asheville on the first of April after all the Germans had been relocated to Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia; Hans Ruser and his senior officers had been removed while I was still in prison. Using Siegfried’s escape as their trump card, the army had finally taken over ownership of the Germans and decided within weeks that Hot Springs was entirely too soft a berth for the Hun. The more Americans who were killed overseas, the more anger there was against anything German.
In April of 1918, after all our efforts, it was announced that the camp was to be closed, and I was without a job. Edmund Rumbough had finally gotten rid of me, but only after the War Department shut him down entirely and the Mountain Park was left a wartime ghost town. King James and I walked the streets of New Heidelburg alone, he with his squirrels, and both of us remembering the men who had built such beautiful patterns out of almost nothing at all.
I left King James with Prince and Dora in Hot Springs. I went first as far east as Wilmington, North Carolina, where I found some slow peace in a boarding house near the ocean. I had watched the waves hour upon hour, and in the slowness of their measured time, I came to understand her sense of responsibility, her need to blame herself. From my own dim memories of the trial, I understood her fear. But still I wondered what changes she was talking about. A change inside her mind, a diminution of her love? Despite all my irrational fear, I was certain that our hearts had never betrayed us, and so I couldn’t understand what had finally taken her away.
Her letter was all I had. I had written and telegraphed to her in New York, at the address she had given me; I had written a dozen times from Hot Springs, and one long, rambling letter from the salt air of Wilmington. Letters that stitched together the past, the very precarious present, and what I hoped of the future. And no answer. Nothing to say what she thought or felt. Nothing to say she was even in New York.
* * *
“HOW CAN I get to 1000 Fifth Avenue?” I asked a policeman who was standing near the giant clock in the middle of the lobby.
He looked at me quizzically, with a grin on his face. I repeated the question, and he shook his head at me and shrugged.
Then the valet from the washroom appeared beside me, wearing a coat now over his uniform. “He don’t understand you, boss. You in New York City now and no Irish cop gonna grab onto what a cracker like you n’me tryin’ to say.” He nodded and smiled at the policeman, who laughed at both of us. “Come on. I’ll start you.”
He led me by the arm as we walked toward the huge doors. “You see that there floor?” he asked.
I nodded. “Pink marble isn’t it?”
“Pink marble out of Tennessee. That’s down there bout where you’re from, ain’t it?”
I was still nodding as he led me out to the wide street and down to the corner. “What’s wrong, boss?”
“I’ve never seen so many people in my life,” I admitted. “Not on a sidewalk at any rate.”
“You should’a seen it afore the war. Most empty now.”
He led me across the street to the far corner. On the way, we stepped over tracks just like those that bisected the main streets in Asheville. “Streetcar runs by here ever’ 30 minutes. Going north.” He pointed and laughed. “No, that way. You get on it and ride ’til you see Central Park. That’ll be trees and ponds and such on your left hand. First stop after you start seein’ woods, you get off. Make damn sure you get off or you’ll end up so far uptown you’ll never get back. Then all you gotta do is look at the numbers on the doors. Think you can member that?”
I grinned at him. “I’m not quite as stupid as I look,” I said. “And thank you!” I called out to his broad, laughing back as he disappeared into the crowd.
* * *
RIDING THE STREETCAR down the wide, frantically busy street in New York only served to remind me of the first time she and I had visited Asheville for the Major’s funeral. The streetcar ride from the train station by the river up to Pack Square, and the ride back down the day after, when we had become lovers and the earth had tilted on its axis. As it tilted still.
But what if she wasn’t there? What if the house at 1000 Fifth Avenue was boarded up or rented out? I had an address given to me by the Nameless Man, an address to which he wanted me to report, but I hadn’t really come to New York to find him. Her rather. Always her. And I’d traveled a hell of a long way to face an empty door and my own crashing heart.
The brass number 1000 was scribed above an ornate stone entry way. I stood for a moment and focused on trying to control my breathing. It wouldn’t do to be gasping for air if she should happen to answer…. I knocked.
The door swung open suddenly, impetuously. “Would you be him?”
A tall, thin woman with her hair pulled back in a loose bun, wiping her hands on her apron.
“Well, I guess—”
“Come on then. I’ll take you into the front room. It’s there that she does the portraits.” Her face was pockmarked by some past flirtation with smallpox, but her voice had all of Ireland in it.
She spun on her heel and I followed her, closing the door behind me, not sure just what else to do.
“Are you an artist fellow?” she asked conversationally. “She does mostly artists and writers and editors and such like. I don’t know why editors, as they don’t create nothin’. And the one thing she loves like Mary and Joseph is the creatin’ of things.” She turned back in the wide, rich hallway to examine me more closely. “And just what is it that you do?”
“I tell stories,” I muttered in surprise. And then more boldly. “I’m a story teller from—”
“Well, a writer it is then. You must be that Sherwood Anderson fellow. Rumor has it he’s as ugly as—” She flashed a gap-toothed smile over her shoulder. “Sorry. It was the …”
“Scar?”
“To be sure, the scar. And a fine scar it is. Plus that funny gray patch in your hair. But never you fear; she’ll be lovin’ that. She has the very eye of the world for beauty in strange places.” She turned suddenly off the hall and into a large sitting room whose windows opened onto Central Park. Her camera, oh my dear God, her camera stood on its battle-scarred tripod in the center of the room, facing a large easy chair before a wonderful, deep bay window. “Don’t you worry now, Mr. Anderson, she will think you just the finest thing with your lovely face.”
“Where must I sit, Miss …?”
“Mattie. Actually Miss Maitlen McCall, but you must call me Mattie. You must sit where they all sit to have their portraits done. The throne I call it. And you must have a drink or a cigarette, whichever makes you feel to home. That’s her style, you know, to make these important people feel at home, and then to catch them most natural.”
“Will she come along soon, your mistress?”
“Oh, yes, she’s very prompt. It’s only that she hasn’t felt at all well since …” She looked critically at me. “Lately, she hasn’t been her usual self, and I do worry when she works so hard, but you must do just as she tells you and give her not a moment’s worry.”
“I don’t mean to worry her at all if I can help it.”
That earned a smile from Mattie McCall. “It’s a drink, then, you’ll want?”
I sat in the chair. It was firmer than first it appeared. Caused the subject to tip forward, actually, toward the camera. “I need a drink,” I admitted. “Would you pour me something strong into a cup of hot tea?”
“A man after my own heart with his dram in his tea. The kettle’s on so it won’t be a minute. And she’ll follow soon, once I tell her you’re here.”
I studied the room while Miss Maitlen McCall put liquor into a tea cup. The walls were covered with book shelves and the shelves stacked with books. Her father’s, I imagined. And in the breaks between the shelves, she’d hung photographs, one of which I recognized.
When Mattie came back with my steaming cup, I was standing before an image from Anderson Cove, the photograph of my mother in her porch rocker. Suddenly, I was back there once again, in that isolated mountain valley.
“You’ve found her favorite of all then,” said Mattie as she handed me a fine china cup on a fine china saucer. “It’s the place she says she’ll go back to some day. Some place down there …”
“In North Carolina,” I whispered.
“So it is. In them mountains they have there…. Now, you listen, Mr. Anderson. When she comes in, you must sit and be natural. Look at her and smile, as if you’ve known her a thousand years. That way, she’ll have your portrait before you know it.”
“Thank you, Mattie.” I hesitated. “Is she all right, your mistress? Before, you seemed to say that she’d … been ill perhaps.”
“You seem a nice enough man, you do. And I will tell you what I tell you so that you’ll be patient with her today. She was to have a baby, you see. And she has lost it.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Yes, we were enjoying the thought of it, as women are like to do.” She must have seen the stricken look on my face. “But still, it was early enough, so that she didn’t suffer except in her heart. But oh, it cut her something cruel. She is the strong woman of the world, but it was weeks before she got out of her bed. So you, sir, must be gentle with her.”
“Gentle,” I repeated.
“Then Mary and Joseph and Patrick be with you,” she said and left the room.
And I did sit, after a few minutes. Sat forward in the chair Mattie called a throne and sipped my tea, so strong that it would have brought tears to my eyes if they weren’t there already.
And so it was that I sat so still, breathing in the musky glories of the liquor and tea, as she came into the room. Anna Ulmann. As she came forward to stand beside her camera and so to consider the light. The light as it emanated from her subject. She looked ever so much like herself. Pale and worn, but still the woman who carried my whole heart in her hand.
“Oh my,” she whispered. “You’re not Sherwood Anderson.”
“No. No, I’m not.” All I could think of to say.
She leaned over and pulled the cloth attached to her camera around her head and studied, I suppose, the strange man who’d come there in my skin. I looked down and then squarely back into the aperture, smiling as bravely as I could, as the tears began to trickle down my crooked face.
She stood after a moment, one hand massaging her lower back in a gesture I’d never seen before. “You are a far more beautiful man than any Sherwood Anderson,” she said. About to cry herself. Fighting back her tears like any mountain woman. “Far more beautiful than any man I know except one.”
“Who would he be, this beautiful man?”
“Oh, someone I knew down in Carolina. In a pure state of nature and ever so long ago.”
“Might I be him, this man?”
“Yes, you might,” she admitted. And so we stared into the current of each other’s eyes, she standing and me sitting on the edge of her overstuffed chair.
“Why didn’t you write to this man of yours? He ached to hear from you.” I heard the words more than said them.
She looked suddenly down at the carpet beneath her feet, the river of light between our eyes broken. “I lost his baby,” she whispered. “I never meant to. And I was so ashamed when it happened. I was scared that it would break his heart.” She looked up suddenly, and the river flowed again. “Your heart. Tear your heart in two to know what we’d lost.”
“I never knew until today,” I whispered. “Or I’d have been here the first moment.”
“I know,” she cried. “I know. I wanted to be sure, and so I waited. And then she was gone. How could I write then and tell you? Or not tell you? I so feared what you would think of me. The sadness lingers still. Even into spring.”
I sat my cup carefully on the arm of the chair. Stood slowly to face her. “Perhaps I could help,” I said softly. “I am ever your servant.”
“And I yours,” she said. “Though I know I’ve never been very good at it.”
“You saved my life at the bridge,” I said slowly. “You save it still.”
“I am a divorced woman,” she said. “That much I have done. A divorced woman trying to make her way in the world.” She fell silent.
“Does that mean you want me to leave? Go back?”
She studied my face critically as if to make a photograph. Memorizing, I thought; she is memorizing my face before she sends me away.
“No. I think you had better stay,” she said with the tiniest flicker of a smile, the smile that was my heart’s balm. “Stephen Baird Robbins.”
“Where must I stay, Anna?”
“Why, here. With me.” And then, almost as an afterthought. “For a time anyway.”
“Until I die?”
She nodded and began to laugh. The months falling away from her so that she seemed to stand again in the garden behind Sunnybank, laughing in the honeyed light.