They had arranged to met at Michael's Delicatessen for pastrami. Peter Johnson swore he had never eaten a pastrami sandwich before, and there was only one place Henry thought adequate for such an introduction.
Johnson ordered the half-size and was still working the edges of his sandwich when Henry had finished his whole one and began picking the loose bits from his plate. Conversation about the book trade in England compared with the United States turned to the differences between the customers themselves, and then the continued attraction of Americans to things English—Austen and Dickens and Waugh. Perhaps that was part of what Heber had felt.
Henry asked aloud, “Why do you think they married?"
Peter shook his head without looking up from the dissection of his sandwich.
"That would be me. She was pregnant. He was still a student when he met her. The young medieval scholar. He must have seemed a very romantic figure to her then. I think she was already eccentric. She might even have appeared to be exotic to the American mind, letting her hair grow to her waist. Strawberry red—she only pinned it up for her bath. She was given to wearing robes and cloaks—she had one, a green velvet shawl she wore in autumn for all the years I can remember.... She believed in fairies, you know."
A picture of Ismay Whyte came to mind drawn from a Pre-Raphaelite painting Henry recalled, but he had no ready comment that seemed politely possible.
"Really?"
"Very much. She believed there were several races of them—very Tolkienesque—living in the woods and dales. She would take me to the woods and sit on a log and say, ‘Listen—hear them? They play.’ And I would say, “Mother! It's only the leaves. It's only the rustle of the squirrels.’ And she would say, ‘Be quiet. You must listen. You'll hear them.’ She meant it. She was raised to believe it. Her father was a friend of Conan Doyle's. Her mother was a Scot. The Scots are hopeless about such things."
Henry laughed. “Her travel books must have been wonderful."
Peter Johnson's face brightened as he looked up. “Oh, they were. They are. She went to places no one else cared for. Dragged me all over the back roads of Brittany. We went to every one of the chalk circles. We visited each of the great stones. I spoke French like a Breton until I got through school. She liked the Pyrenees. She loved the Basques. And she found fairies everywhere. For a short while, in the mid-fifties, her books became the rage for the educated British on short holiday. You weren't allowed to take much in the way of funds out of the country then, and of course we were all still broke from the war, so the three- and four-day holiday was quite popular."
Henry took a jealous breath. “It must have been fun, tagging along."
Peter actually smiled. “It was, in retrospect. But I made few friends. I had my books, of course. I had my Oxford Classics. I don't know if you had them here, but those little blue books were stuffed in every pocket, wherever I went. I felt like another piece of her luggage at times. She even called me...” Peter hesitated. Henry wondered what revisions he was making to his words, and waited.
Finally the man spoke again, “Once, going across the border from Portugal to Spain, the guards inspected everything we had. It wasn't much. And then the fellow said. Is that all? You have nothing else to declare? And she said, ‘Nothing, except for the stolen child.’ She said it straight-faced. The guards went crazy. Phone calls were made. We were there for hours. It was a silly joke. Somehow she thought it was all very entertaining. But after that, she often called me her stolen child ... and it was the last thing she ever said to me."
Henry heard the words in his head. He knew them by heart and repeated them aloud.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
than you can understand.
Peter frowned. “You know the poem?"
Henry nodded. “'The Stolen Child,’ by Yeats. Something my mother liked."
Peter stopped nibbling, with a genuine look of puzzlement. He said “Really...” in a near whisper before looking away from Henry's eyes to study the edges of his sandwich again. His puzzlement became a frown.
Henry pursued the past. “And you never came to visit your dad?"
Peter said, “No. Not then. I hardly knew him. I was barely four when he left. I had seen several letters. Their correspondence was rather harsh.... Mind you, she never said a bad word about him. In fact, she said very good things about him. But like all children, I was curious. I found the letters.... She still loved him."
Henry followed the line of his own curiosity. “Why did they divorce?"
Peter's back straightened. “He divorced her. Because he did not love her. It was his mistake. No one could have ever loved him more."
Henry could not meet the man's eyes now. He could not tell him that he knew what Morgan's love must have been like. Such comparisons of love were beside the point.
This was the thought he had pushed from his mind only an hour before, when he had met Leona at his father's house. She had called him earlier to talk, and he had told her he would be there on his way to a lunch appointment. But it was a thought he had considered many times before. There was no measure of love.
That meeting had been thankfully brief. Leona had gotten to the point quickly, sitting at the kitchen table and twisting a rubber band in her fingers.
"Did you love me? I mean, back then?"
He was unready for that kind of discussion.
"I think so. We were kids. Do kids really understand things like that?"
She was ready in her own thoughts.
"Better than adults, I think."
He had said, “Everything was much simpler then."
She had answered, “Maybe.” Her eyes were attached to his. “But you never said it, you know. I thought about that a hundred times later on. You never really said it."
Had he ever actually said it? To anyone?
He said, “I don't remember."
She heaved her bosom with a breath that seemed enough for both of them.
"But you acted like you did. You were very cute. But you never said it. And the words matter.... And I was thinking. I remembered. I did say it to you. I wasn't just playing. Do you remember? I meant it. Did you know that?"
He did not know what the answer to that was. The silence as he searched for the words grew painful.
Leona took his right hand and lifted it. She had been there when he broken his arm years ago. He was glad it wasn't broken this time.
"Does it still hurt?"
"Not much. Just a little stiff."
"Stiff can be okay."
"You've got the wrong limb."
"I've got the right limb, but maybe it's attached to the wrong guy."
Avoiding her eyes, so close, meant watching her hand on his.
He said, “You're probably right about that."
She shook her head at him. “Why do things have to be so difficult? Weren't you the one who always said keep it simple?"
"My father says it."
She answered back, “You say it, too."
He looked away. He was lost. “I guess I do."
"You remember the letter your father wrote—the one you wouldn't read?"
He tensed at that. “Yes."
She held his hand between both of hers. Her hands were warm in a way he recalled. “He told Mom that he loved her. He wrote it. He said it was not the same as the only love he had ever known before, but it was love and real nevertheless. He said it very sweetly. I think it must have made my mother very happy."
What other fractures would he find in his world? “The old man is full of surprises."
It had not been the right response. He had no idea what the right response might have been. If he had loved her, he had never been sure enough of it to say the words. And there could be no comparison of love, from one person to another, or even of love from one time to another. Whatever love was, it had no measure.
Leona had been disappointed in him. It was on her face, and she had let go of his hand, and he knew, even more than feeling sympathy for her, he had felt relieved. But it was the thought which he still played with. His father had often surprised him, more because, in most things, he was so predictable.
Now Henry watched Peter Johnson slice another edge of his pastrami away with a knife—perhaps because it appeared to be burned.
Henry said, “It's too bad you never got to know your father."
Peter raised one eyebrow skeptically.
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. I'm not sure I could have ever liked him.... I saw him once again when I was still young. Before I went off to university ... after Mother had died. He had offered to cover my expense at school and sent a check, and I used a part of it to buy a ticket to the States. It was quite a surprise to him.... I had not remembered well. I had conjured a picture of the American. Something along the lines of William Holden in The Bridge on the River Kwai. I did not expect him to look so—well, you see me. One forms an idea about others based on oneself. Heber was not a thin man."
Henry asked, “Was he unkind?"
Peter tilted his head. “No. Not actually. Rough. That was, I suppose, part of his charm to some. His cigars. The sharkskin suits. But he was civilized. He must have been an odd duck during his Oxford days in any case.... When I arrived, he had his new young wife beside him. He looked very comfortable. And, as you know, he was already quite successful. I thought he was full of himself."
At the time, Peter would have been the man's only child. Henry could not imagine why Heber would show so little interest. What was in the letters that was so harsh? It seemed like a question he could not fairly ask.
When he told Peter what was in the will, he watched the man's eyes. That was the purpose of their meeting. He wanted Peter to know in case Arthur was not forthcoming. This might be something which a bank would take seriously if Peter needed money right away.
Peter seemed oddly interested, not in what the will said, but where it was kept.
He looked up from the splayed body of his sandwich and said, “And there was Heber, the Arthurian scholar. It says something, don't you think, that she would hide it there, in the Malory, from her own Arthur?"
Henry had to agree.