Iris shaded herself with her parasol as she and Ambrose walked parallel to the tide line, darting away when the surf frothed in too close to their feet and then returning to their path when it retreated. An invisible line existed somewhere ahead of them in the sand. If they were to cross that line, guards would materialize and they would be returned to the asylum. Still, they had learned to walk with the air of enfranchised civilians. Iris had been talking fondly of her father, and his prayers, so beautiful and earnest.
“My father is the wisest man I ever met,” she said. “It grieves me that he has no idea where I am, or what’s become of me. The doctor says that I can write him, but only if my letters are ‘rational.’ In other words, only if I take full blame for my predicament. I cannot do that. My father hates a lie.”
“Your father sounds like a man of character,” Ambrose remarked.
“Have you had contact with your family?” Iris asked, and immediately felt the tension of broaching a subject for the first time. He had spoken of his boyhood as a series of images and sensations with no mention of human contact. It was as though he’d been raised by a vortex of experiences instead of human beings. She found this quality of narrative a warning against intrusion and had thus far respected it.
“I have two older brothers. They both went to war before me. I do not know their whereabouts. And my mother died in childbirth. My father never spoke of it, but my aunt told me I came out of the womb in an unnatural position, and she succumbed from blood loss. I was told, again by my aunt, that she nursed me as she died. My brothers remembered her somewhat. They’d tell me little stories and I’d treasure them. She sat for one formal portrait with my father. I look quite a bit like her.”
“Did it make you sad,” she asked, “growing up without a mother?”
He stopped walking and considered this as saltwater froth ran up and covered the tips of his shoes. “I was more puzzled about it. And I felt a vague guilt, that it was my awkward birth that killed her.” He put his hands in his pockets. “But, you know, there was work to be done. We had to help our father run the farm. He didn’t believe in sadness. He believed in getting on with things. When my dog was kicked by a mule and died, he made me bury him, forbidding tears. ‘Don’t say goodbye,’ he said. ‘You will only look ridiculous, speaking to a carcass.’ That’s how he was.” Ambrose stared out at the water. “My father has never written me. He believes the correct way to return home from the war is in a coffin, on crutches, or in a victory parade. I came back ranting and raving, tied to a buckboard. I was put in the local hospital with the other veterans, but my screams kept them awake. So I was put in a jail cell. Handcuffed to the bars. Fed like a dog.”
The surf came crawling up. Ambrose didn’t move and neither did Iris. The warm water covered their shoes. A gust of wind made Iris hold on tight to the trembling staff of her parasol.
“Your father sent you here?” Iris asked.
Ambrose nodded. “He was not a rich man, but my great-grandfather made a fortune in steel in Canada, and my father used his inheritance to send me here. I suppose I should be thankful he provided me with the best care in the country. And I am. I just can’t wait for the day, Iris, when I walk back into town restored. My own man with my own mind. Everything in the past where it needs to be. Quiet like a dog in a grave. I’ll come back and I’ll look my father in the eye and I’ll shake his hand and I’ll say, ‘I’m home.’”
Iris had accustomed herself to the odd way Lydia Helms Truman ate a grapefruit, taking the precut sections, tossing them in her mouth, and throwing her head back. It reminded her a bit of a swan gulping a series of tiny pink frogs. And yet, she seemed to accomplish the action with a certain daintiness. Lydia had gone through exactly seven sections of grapefruit this way when she said out of nowhere, “You love him.”
Iris blinked at her, startled.
“Love who?”
Lydia dabbed at her lips with a white napkin and took a sip of her coffee. “The crazy soldier,” she said.
“He’s not crazy.”
Lydia smiled. “Look at your posture as you defend him. You straightened up indignantly. Your eyes narrowed. You’re already willing to go to war over an adjective. That’s love, my dear.”
“That’s ludicrous,” Iris said. “I’m married.”
Lydia could not quite set down her coffee in time to beat her laughter. It spilled on the tablecloth and spread out to the size of two quarters as Lydia’s peals of laughter continued. Her eyes watered. Her shoulders shook. “Yes, married,” she said. “So am I. Isn’t married life grand?”
Iris tapped at a boiled egg with the side of her spoon, hitting it too hard, leaving a savage gash in the shell, out of which the yolk protruded. She was not sure why Lydia was irritating her so. It was perhaps that love, spoken so boldly, was such a dangerous word. Hot enough to melt the key to freedom she’d been stealthily crafting. She set the egg down. “I do not love him. I simply find his companionship comforting, given my situation.”
Lydia gained control of the frantic hummingbird inside her that was her laughter. She dabbed at the corners of her eye with a napkin. “I see the way you look at him, and he looks at you. Don’t question love, Iris. It may have come to you in an inconvenient form, one that society finds scandalous, but it’s a gift from God. A reminder that this institution can’t interfere with natural processes, like laughter, prayer, a dream that comes to you in sleep. Or love. Do with it what you want, but know that it means God still sees you not as a lunatic but as His child.”
Iris later took a walk down the beach, as far as the guards would tolerate and then back again. Love. The word came out of nowhere, rattling her. She had never thought of her feelings for Ambrose as love. The desire to be with him, the lying in bed at night thinking of him, and even the occasional daydream of kissing him, or lying in his arms . . . she had simply let these feelings exist without naming them. And so that word love had flown at her out of nowhere, like an osprey come to steal an eagle’s fish.