“They did that, in those days,” said Emily, almost to herself. “Young women, sometimes young men, sent off for a year to forget.”
“Even if there was nothing to forget?” said the old man, reading his own palms spread out on his knees.
“Even that. I have another letter here. Can you tell me what it says?”
She opened it and her eyes grew wet as she read the lines and heard him, head down, speak them quietly, from remembrance.
“Dearest dear, do I dare say it, love of my life? You are leaving tomorrow and will not return until long after Christmas. Your engagement has been announced to someone already in Paris, waiting. I wish you a grand life and a happy one and many children. Forget my name. Forget it? Why, dear girl, you never knew it. Willie or Will? I think you called me that. But there was no last name, really, so nothing to forget. Remember instead my love. Signed W.R.F.”
Finished, he sat back and opened his eyes as she folded the letter and placed it with the others in her lap, tears running down her cheeks.
“Why,” she asked at last, “did you steal the letters? And use them this way, sixty years later? Who told you where the letters might be? I buried them in that coffin, that trunk, when I sailed to France. I don’t think I have looked at them more than once in the past thirty years. Did William Ross Fielding tell you about them?”
“Why, dear girl, haven’t you guessed?” said the old man. “My Lord, I am William Ross Fielding.”
There was an incredibly long silence.
“Let me look at you.” Emily leaned forward as he raised his head into the light.
“No,” she said. “I wish I could say. Nothing.”
“It’s an old man’s face now,” he said. “No matter. When you sailed around the world one way, I went another. I have lived in many countries and done many things, a bachelor traveling. When I heard that you had no children and that your husband died, many years ago, I drifted back to this, my grandparents’ house. It has taken all these years to nerve myself to find and send this best part of my life to you.”
The two sisters were very still. You could almost hear their hearts beating. The old man said:
“What now?”
“Why,” said Emily Bernice Watriss Wilkes slowly, “every day for the next two weeks, send the rest of the letters. One by one.”
He looked at her, steadily.
“And then?” he said.
“Oh, God!” she said. “I don’t know. Let’s see.”
“Yes, yes. Indeed. Let’s say good-bye.”
Opening the front door he almost touched her hand.
“My dear dearest Emily,” he said.
“Yes?” She waited.
“What—” he said.
“Yes?” she said.
“What … ” he said, and swallowed. “What … are you … “
She waited.
“Doing tonight?” he finished, quickly.
Remember Me?
“Remember me? Of course, surely you do!”
His hand extended, the stranger waited.
“Why, yes,” I said. “You’re—”
I, stopped and searched around for help. We were in middle-street in Florence, Italy, at high noon. He had been rushing one way, I the other, and almost collided. Now he waited to hear his name off my lips. Panicking, I rummaged my brain which ran on empty.
“You’re—” I said again.
He seized my hand as if fearing I might bolt and run. His face was a sunburst. He knew me! Shouldn’t I return the honor? There’s a good dog, he thought, speak!
“I’m Harry!” he cried.
“Harry … ?”
“Stadler!” he barked with a laugh. “Your butcher!”
“Jesus, of course. Harry, you old son of a bitch!” I pumped his hand with relief.
He almost danced with joy. “That son of a bitch, yes! Nine thousand miles from home. No wonder you didn’t know me! Hey, we’ll get killed out here. I’m at the Grand Hotel. The lobby parquetry floor, amazing! Dinner tonight? Florentine steaks—listen to your butcher, eh? Seven tonight! Yes!”
I opened my mouth to suck and blow out in a great refusal, but—
“Tonight!” he cried.
He spun about and ran, almost plowed under by a bumblebee motorbike. At the far curb he yelled:
“Harry Stadler!”
“Leonard Douglas,” I shouted, inanely.
“I know.” He waved and vanished in the mob. “I know … “
My God! I thought, staring at my massaged and abandoned hand. Who was that?
My butcher.
Now I saw him at his counter grinding hamburger, a tiny white toy-boat cap capsizing on his thin blond hair, Germanic, imperturbable, his cheeks all pork sausage as he pounded a steak into submission.
My butcher, yes!
“Jesus!” I muttered for the rest of the day. “Christ! What made me accept? Why in hell did he ask? We don’t even know each other, except when he says, That’s five bucks sixty, and I say, So long! Hell!”
I rang his hotel room every half hour all afternoon. No answer.
“Will you leave a message, sir?”
“No thanks.”
Coward, I thought. Leave a message: sick. Leave a message: died!
I stared at the phone, helpless. Of course I hadn’t recognized him. Whoever recognizes anyone away from their counter, desk, car, piano, or wherever someone stands, sits, sells, speaks, provides, or dispenses?
The mechanic free of his grease-monkey jumpsuit, the lawyer devoid of his pinstripes and wearing a fiery hibiscus sport shirt, the club woman released from her corset and crammed in an explosive bikini—all, all unfamiliar, strange, easily insulted if unrecognized! We all expect that no matter where we go or dress, we will be instantly recognized. Like disguised MacArthurs we stride ashore in far countries crying: “I have returned!”
But does anyone give a damn? This butcher, now—minus his cap, without the blood-fingerprinted smock, without the fan whirling above his head to drive off flies, without bright knives, sharp tenterhooks, whirled bologna slicers, mounds of pink flesh or spreads of marbled beef, he was the masked avenger.
Besides, travel had freshened him. Travel does that. Two weeks of luscious foods, rare wines, long sleeps, wondrous architectures and a man wakes ten years younger to hate going home to be old.
Myself? I was at the absolute peak of losing years in gaining miles. My butcher and I had become quasi-teenagers reborn to collide in Florentine traffic to gibber and paw each other’s memories.
“Damn it to hell!” I jabbed his number on the touch-phone, viciously. Five o’clock: silence. Six: no answer. Seven: the same. Christ!
“Stop!” I yelled out the window.
All of Florence’s church bells sounded, sealing my doom.
Bang! Someone slammed a door, on their way out.
Me.
When we met at five minutes after seven, we were like two angry lovers who hadn’t seen each other for days and now rushed in a turmoil of self-pity toward a supper with killed appetites.
Eat and run, no, eat and flee, was in our faces as we swayed in mid-lobby, at the last moment seized each other’s hands. Might we arm-wrestle? From somewhere crept false smiles and tepid laughter.
“Leonard Douglas,” he cried, “you old son of a bitch!”
He stopped, red-faced. Butchers, after all, do not swear at old customers!
“I mean,” he said, “come on!”
He shoved me into the elevator and babbled all the way up to the penthouse restaurant.
“What a coincidence. Middle of the street. Fine food here. Here’s our floor. Out!”
We sat to dine.
“Wine for me.” The butcher eyed the wine list, like an old friend. “Here’s a swell one. 1970, St. Emilion. Yes?”
“Thanks. A very dry vodka martini.”
My butcher scowled.
“But,” I said, quickly, “I will have some wine, of course!”
I ordered salad to start. He scowled again.
“The salad and the martini will ruin your taste for the wine. Beg pardon.”
“Well then,” I said, hastily, “the salad, later.”
We ordered our steaks, his rare, mine well-done.
“Sorry,” said my butcher, “but you should treat your meat more kindly.”
“Not like St. Joan, eh?” I said, and laughed.
“That’s a good one. Not like St. Joan.”
At which moment the wine arrived to be uncorked. I offered my glass quickly and, glad that my martini had been delayed, or might never come, made the next minute easier by sniffing, whirling, and sipping the St. Emilion. My butcher watched, as a cat might watch a rather strange dog.
I swallowed the merest sip, eyes closed, and nodded.
The stranger across the table also sipped and nodded.
A he.
We stared at the twilight horizon of Florence.
“Well … ” I said, frantic for conversation ” … what do you think of Florence’s art?”
“Paintings make me nervous,” he admitted. “What I really like is walking around. Italian women! I’d like to ice-pack and ship them home!”
“Er, yes … ” I cleared my throat. “But Giotto … ?”
“Giotto bores me. Sorry. He’s too soon in art history for me. Stick figures. Masaccio’s better. Raphael’s best. And Rubens! I have a butcher’s taste for flesh.”
“Rubens?”
“Rubens!” Harry Stadler forked some neat little salami slices, popped them in his mouth, and chewed opinions. “Rubens! All bosom and bum, big cumulus clouds of pink flesh, eh? You can feel the heart beating like a kettledrum in a ton of that stuff. Every woman a bed; throw yourself on them, sink from sight. To hell with the boy David, all that cold white marble and no fig leaf! No, no, I like color, life, and meat that covers the bone. You’re not eating!”
“Watch.” I ate my bloody salami and pink bologna and my dead white provolone, wondering if I should ask his opinion of the cold white colorless cheeses of the world.
The headwaiter delivered our steaks.
Stadler’s was so rare you
