“In my mind,” Ethan said to Mary, at last extending to her the russet file envelope he had brought her, “I see you as lost children. Wandering apart, or wandering together. I have had a hand in this.”
Her hands closed on the packet, but first she looked up at him. For a while, as though the packet contained a living presence, she simply held it, breathed differently with it in her lap. With the significant object, blessing or curse, a dancer would whirl for long savoring turns before putting it to use.
“Are you okay?” she asked Ethan suddenly. “Not sick or anything?”
Ethan hesitated. “Well… perhaps Jane or Kate let you know….”
“No. Nothing.”
“I haven’t been too well, to tell the truth. It’s enough to prompt this trip, isn’t it, thinking I may not have too long a time left to me. Jeff is my own creation. He seemed a boy without ties, homeless in a sense, but loaded with sheer, tough intelligence. Sui generis … that is to say, his own person. A teacher’s dream.”
“But what about you?”
Control and the wry smile, fading. “I told you, my dear. I may not have too long. Enough for now, though.” He watched her open the packet, unwinding the ribbon that bound it.
As though a find of treasure had been dredged up and was finally piled in one hoard for sorting, she spread the white oblong envelopes out on the bed, first moving Kathy, who had fallen asleep from the wine. All the runaway panic of the morning seemed a week ago to her. Mary spread the letters around her like the sea around a shore-line. She sat straight, with her strong nimble legs folded neatly under her. She began to open the envelopes and spread out the sheets, noticing datelines.
“These begin in San Francisco. That was long after I lost touch. He would call sometimes and say I should be hearing, but I rarely got anything. It was so depressing that I thought, Well, he’s gone for good. I tried to work, I found friends, I played little games of good cheer. But finally, last winter, I just wanted out of it, everything. Out of the world.”
“Jeff heard something of that. He was nearly wild until they told us you were well again. But surely you got something? Your mother—”
“Mother!”
“Your aunt passed some letters along to her because we heard you were moving, old address no go. It seemed to me logical. Surely you got them … something.…”
“Nothing. Ethan, if you gave Jeff’s letters to her—”
“I simply cannot imagine—” He could not imagine Kate.
She sat with closed eyes, trying to smooth an inner image that had formed already, leaped to life by itself. If she got them, she read them. It would not do to think about it. Those long, firm, white hands, tearing the white paper. And she had wanted him, too; the original of Madeleine Spivak. I’ve got to stop this. Thinking what she must have done.
“A misunderstanding,” Ethan pled. “I’m sure your own mother would never—”
Drive me to suicide? “No, of course not.” There was a burned-out cinder lodged black in her heart. It would remain.
Before she shrank to nothing, Mary straightened, like a limp plant given water. She surveyed the spread of papers. “I have these.”
Ethan responded to her mood, smiling encouragement. “Read them, then. While I, well-fed and weary—” He approached the second of the twin beds and began to arrange the pillows. “I’ll just rest awhile. It comes on all of a sudden these days. Go on, my dear. Read.”