3

So I drove down to Newburg, assaulted by memories. Once, in a bad period during my marriage (perhaps a redundant phrase), I had gone to a shrink named Dedmon. I had talked about my mother’s mental collapse and how I had tried to protect her from my older brother and my father, both of whom seem, in my memory, brutal and insensitive. My mother was brilliant, a gifted painter of watercolors, a beautiful but fragile human. I had also told Dedmon about Anna, and he jumped at the obvious: I was in love with vulnerability, with helplessness. I wanted to be the daddy, the one in charge.

I told Dedmon he had never met Anna. Certainly, he didn’t do Anna justice. She was a force in her own right. And she had steel in her, a courage and resourcefulness I have never encountered since.

Dedmon told me I talked about Anna more than I talked about my wife. I told him that that’s what I thought I was supposed to do, talk about the past. I told him I was no longer in need of his services.

“Good,” he said.

Maybe there was some truth in what he said. I found myself remembering a time I had taken Anna to a party at Ray and Holly’s place. The party was composed of professors and grad students, very drunk, very erudite. Nobody completed sentences. It would have been bad manners to complete a sentence. To complete a sentence would suggest that your audience was ignorant of its direction. Nothing was uttered that wasn’t swathed in disclaimers. There was much eye rolling and eyebrow lifting on the part of both sexes.

I went to the kitchen and talked to Holly for awhile, and when I got back a lot of people were clustered around Anna, and a thin, effete-looking professor of English literature was looking mock serious, leaning forward, nodding his head.

Anna was talking about her favorite romance writers. Aside from Walker’s religious diatribes, Anna read nothing but romance novels, read them with the kind of rapt attention that authors of serious novels would kill for. Anna was telling the entire plot of Love’s Long Summer or some similar title. Anna had got up some steam, I could see. She was saying something like, “And then Darrell, who is acting real weird, disappears, and Lady Berkley is arrested for treason because Thomas has lied to the king …”

I looked at Anna and I looked at the circle of smirking faces exchanging arch, superior glances, and I grabbed her by the arm and yanked her away from that bloodless, thin-lipped lot. Anna didn’t know what was going on, but she was used to erratic, violent behavior, having lived the last years with drug-crazed Larry, and, although she could be infuriatingly stubborn when the mood hit her, she would shrug off really bad behavior with stoical indifference. (As time went by, I realized that Anna wasn’t oblivious to these wrongs. She totted them up and saved them, kept an account that she balanced against her own outbursts and inevitable guilt.)

I remember getting in the car, smiling at Anna, who hadn’t said anything since my peremptory “We gotta go.” The night was warm and humid, and I felt prickly, disgusted with Ray’s friends, a disgust that reached out to embrace the vast, impenetrable stupidity of the universe. Anna was looking straight ahead, mouth slightly open, street lamps fluttering by, lightly brushing the pure planes of her face, and I was overwhelmed by her innocence, and I pulled the car over to the side of the road and reached for her desperately and kissed her, and told her I loved her.

Maybe that shrink was right. Anna seemed defenseless that night, and I wanted to shield her from the brutal press of the world. I was angry, I remember, more angry than the situation warranted. And I was head-down, heart-howling in love. Maybe that was part of it, this love: hating the opposition, the cold, steam-rolling universe. Only Anna, an oasis from my anger, burned brightly, warm and vulnerable.

I got to Newburg at about two o’clock in the afternoon. I had toyed with the notion of just finding Diane’s house and knocking on the door, but I remembered my last shot at surprise entrances. So I called her from a gas station. She was delighted to hear my voice, and she gave me directions to her house, which turned out to be a pretty, freshly-painted wooden house amid maples. There was a child’s big-wheels bike in the yard, and a young beagle came banging out from behind the screen door to howl at me. Diane shouted, “Wimpy, behave!” and then ran to me and gave me a hug.

Back in the house, I met her daughter, Becky, who was a shy, skinny girl of seven with her mother’s wonderful eyes and something of her mother’s unnerving acuteness. I felt myself being inspected by the both of them.

Becky said, “You wrote The Summer Troll?” She seemed a little skeptical. Adults have the same problem with me. I don’t look in any way exceptional. I like to think that people would describe me as good-looking, but they would have to remember me first, and I am aware that I don’t have a memorable face.

I told her that I had written The Summer Troll, and she told me that she admired it greatly. It was a formal but heartfelt compliment.

Becky left, and Diane, who had apparently had time to think about my appearance in Newburg, studied me closely.

“Robert told you,” she said.

“It’s great to see you,” I said. “How are you doing? How is Charles? I’m looking forward to meeting him.” Diane Larson was now Mrs. Charles Nichols. I assumed that Charles Nichols was an improvement over Saul. A wolverine would have been an improvement over Saul.

“You’ll like Charles,” Diane said. “You guys are a lot alike. I fall for a certain type—self-involved, immature, but charming and witty.”

“I wasn’t aware that you ever fell for me,” I said.

“Self-involved,” Diane said, nodding. “Self-involved.”

We chatted along smoothly. Diane was still working three days a week out at Romner and once I got her going on that she was good for awhile. Then I had to tell her how I had been doing, and about the new book. We talked, inevitably, about old times, and so we came back to Anna.

“Yes, Kalso told me,” I said. “And he told me that you already knew, but didn’t want to tell me. I understand that. I think you are wrong, but I understand. I don’t hold it against you.”

“That’s big of you.”

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Are we going to have an argument?”

Diane sighed. We had moved out on the porch to drink coffee. Mottled sunlight decorated the grey floorboards. “You would always do anything to avoid an argument,” she said. “You have this dread of arguments, David. Why is that?”

I shrugged. “Beats me.”

“Anna never shared that dread. She liked a good fight.”

“Yeah. Anna was born to fight. A stormy girl.”

Diane smiled. She was a good-looking woman, and now she had a self-assurance, an easy elegance that the younger woman had lacked. She was wearing a frayed grey sweatshirt and her hair was tied back in a pony-tail.

“Why should I fight with you? You are here. You are going to do what you came here to do. You are going to see Anna. I hope it works out. I don’t want you to get hurt. And I particularly don’t want her to get hurt.”

That edge was back in her voice. I have always been wary of women who preface anything with “I don’t want to fight” and I was right to be wary.

Diane told me that she thought it was a miracle Anna was sane at all after what she had gone through. Diane said that it was her opinion that Anna might not be sane in any other surroundings. Not much mental equilibrium was required out at Walker’s commune. They were more tolerant of eccentricity.

I told Diane I understood all that. I just wanted to see Anna. She might, I said, even want to see me.

The argument warmed up. Diane told me that I was hunting a ghost. Yes, Anna was alive, but not the Anna I had come looking for. I asked her how she could know what I was looking for, how she could read my mind.

“I know you, David,” she said. Her face had lost some of its control, and she looked older, more formidable. “You write these scenarios in your head. You have a problem with real people, real intimacy. Remember when I asked you to come? You couldn’t make it. If you didn’t owe it to me, you owed it to Ray and Holly, but you couldn’t make it.”

I hadn’t been expecting that one, and it hurt. In December of 1971, Ray and Holly had been driving to South Carolina to visit Holly’s parents for the holidays. A drunken kid in a rented moving van had slammed into them on the highway. Ray and Holly had been killed instantly.

Diane, traditional bearer of bad news, had called me. Diane and Holly had hit it off back when I first introduced them, and the friendship had grown since I left Newburg. She was almost hysterical when she called, and I knew she needed me; I needed to be there.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was in a bad way then. I was drinking twenty-four hours a day, and the world just looked black, chaos. When you called, I knew I should come, but I couldn’t. I was hallucinating, in and out of d.t.’s, suicidally self-involved. I was afraid of going to that funeral. Ray and Holly were just about the only friends I ever had, and their death seemed so … I don’t know … hostile, that’s not the word. I wasn’t in any shape to comfort anyone; I was dangerous to be around. I really am sorry.”

“I know.” Diane’s voice had softened. I think she recognized genuine remorse, the sound of arguments played out to unforgiving walls on solitary nights. “I was sick then too, and I hated you for not coming, but I understand now. I really do. I’m sorry I brought it up. But it’s part of the way you are.” She leaned forward to make this point, all earnestness, full of terrible revelation. I fidgeted, studied my sneakers.

“David,” she said, “you are good with dreams. You write beautifully illustrated children’s stories, because you are a child yourself. It’s wonderful, really. The world needs dreams, ideals. But sometimes the dream doesn’t mesh with reality. The reality can be unpleasant. Then you step back, you get a bee-stung look, you run. You don’t mean any harm, but the rest of us, well, the rest of us don’t have any place to go, and you’ve ducked under a rainbow, and maybe we feel a little abandoned. Maybe we feel betrayed.”

Diane was right, but I was beginning to feel schoolboy-reprimanded, and I wanted to get out, get moving.

“You understand why I’m telling you all this?” she asked.

I told her I understood. Then I asked her if she would come with me to see Anna.

“No, I don’t think so. My stomach isn’t what it used to be.”