That night in bed I thought, what ways are there for murder that no one could know? Is Roger, a hundred yards away this moment, thinking the same? Will he search the woods tomorrow for toadstools resembling mushrooms, or drive the car too fast and fling her door wide on a curve?
I saw the wax dummy witch fly through the air in a lovely soaring arc, to break like ridiculous peanut brittle on an oak, an elm, a maple. I sat up in bed. I laughed until I wept. I wept until I laughed again. No, no, I thought, he’ll find a better way. A night burglar will shock her heart into her throat. Once in her throat, he will not let it go down again, she’ll choke on her own panic.
And then the oldest, the darkest, most childish thought of all. There’s only one way to finish a woman whose mouth is the color of blood. Being what she is, no relative, not an aunt or a great grandmother, surprise her with a stake driven through her heart!
I heard her scream. It was so loud, all the night birds jumped from the trees to cover the stars.
I lay back down. Dear Christian Anna Marie, I thought, what’s this? Do you want to kill? Yes, for why not kill a killer, a woman who strangled her child in his crib and has not loosened the throttling cord since? He is so pale, poor man, because he has not breathed free air, all of his life.
And then, unbidden, the lines of an old poem stood up in my head. Where I had read them or who had put them down, or if I had written them myself, within my head over the years, I could not say. But the lines were there and I read them in the dark:
Some live like Lazarus
In a tomb of life
And come forth curious late to twilight hospitals
And mortuary rooms.
The lines vanished. For a while I could recall no more and then, unable to fend it off, for it came of itself, a last fragment appeared in the dark:
Better cold skies seen bitter to the North
Than stillborn stay, all blind and gone to ghost.
Oh if Rio is lost, well, love the Arctic Coast!
Oh ancient Lazarus
Come ye forth.
There the poem stopped and let me be. At last I slept restless, hoping for dawn, and good and final news.
The next day I saw him pushing her along the pier and thought, Yes, that’s it! She’ll vanish and be found a week from now, on the shore, like a sea monster floating, all face and no body.
The day passed. Well, surely, I thought, tomorrow …
The second day of the week, the third, the fourth and then the fifth and sixth passed, and on the seventh day one of the maids came running up the path, shrieking. “Oh, it’s terrible, terrible!”
“Mrs. Harrison?” I cried. I felt a terrible and quite unwilled smile on my face.
“No, no, her son! He’s hung himseff!”
“Hung himself?” I said ridiculously, and found myself, stunned, explaining to her. “Oh, no, it wasn’t him was going to die, it was-” I babbled.
I stopped, for the maid was clutching, pulling my arm. “We cut him down, oh, God, he’s still alive, quick!”
Still alive? He still breathed, yes, and walked around through the other years, yes, but alive? No.
It was she who gained strength and lived through his attempt to escape her. She never forgave his trying to run.
“What do you mean by that, what do you mean?” I remember her screaming at him as he lay feeling his throat, in the cottage, his eyes shut, wilted, and I hurried in the door. “What do you mean doing that, what, what?”
And looking at him there I knew he had tried to run away from both of us, we were both impossible to him. I did not forgive him that either, for a while. But I did feel my old hatred of him become something else, a kind of dull pain, as I turned and went back for a doctor. “What do you mean, you silly boy?” she cried.
I married Paul that autumn.
After that, the years poured through the glass swiftly. Once each year, Roger led himself into the pavilion to sit eating mint ice with his limp empty-gloved hands, but he never called me by my name again, nor did he mention the old promise.
Here and there in the hundreds of months that passed I thought, for his own sake now, for no one else, sometime, somehow he must simply up and destroy the dragon with the hideous bellows face and the rust-scaled hands. For Roger and only for Roger, Roger must do it.
Surely this year, I thought, when he was fifty, fifty-one, fifty-two.
Between seasons I caught myself examining occasional Chicago papers, hoping to find a picture of her lying alit like a monstrous yellow chicken. But no, but no, but no….
I’d almost forgotten them when they returned this morning. He’s very old now, more like a doddering husband than a son. Baked gray clay he is, with milky blue eyes, a toothless mouth, and manicured fingernails which seem stronger because the flesh has baked away.
At noon today, after a moment of standing out, a lone gray wingless hawk staring at a sky in which he had never soared or flown, he came inside and spoke to me, his voice rising.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tell you what?” I said, scooping out his ice cream before he asked for it.
“One of the maids just mentioned, your husband died five years ago! You should have told me!”
“Well, now you know,” I said.
He sat down slowly.
“Lord,” he said, tasting the ice cream and savoring it, eyes shut, “this is bitter–“
Then, a long time later, he said, “Anna, I never asked. Were there ever any children?”
“No,” I said. “And I don’t know why. I guess I’ll never know why.”
I left him sitting there and went to wash the dishes.
At nine tonight I heard someone laughing by the lake. I hadn’t heard Roger laugh since he was a child, so I didn’t think it was him until the doors burst wide and he entered flinging his arms about, unable to control his almost weeping hilarity.
“Roger!” I asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Oh, nothing!” he cried. “Everything’s lovely! A root beer, Anna! Take one yourself! Drink with me!”
We drank together, he laughed, winked, then got immensely calm. Still smiling, though, he looked suddenly, beautifully young.
“Anna,” he whispered intensely, leaning forward, “guess what? I’m flying to China tomorrow! Then India! Then London, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Mexico City!”
“You are, Roger?”
“I am,” he said. “I, I, I, not we, we, we, but I Roger Bidwell Harrison, I, I!”
I stared at him and he gazed quietly back at me, and I must have gasped. For then I knew what he had finally done tonight this hour, within the last few minutes.
“Oh, no,” my lips must have murmured.
Oh, but yes, yes, his eyes upon me replied, incredible miracle of miracles, after all these waiting years. Tonight at last. Tonight.
I let him talk. After Rome it was Vienna and Stockholm, he’d saved thousands of schedules, flight charts and hotel bulletins for forty years; he knew the moons and tides, the goings and comings of everything on the sea and in the sky. “But best of all,” he said at last, “Anna, Anna, will you come along with me? I’ve lots of money put away, don’t let me run on! Anna, tell me, will you?”
I came around the counter slowly and saw myself in the mirror, a woman in her seventieth year going to a party half a century late.
I sat down beside him and shook my head.
“Oh.. But, Anna, why not, there’s no reason why!”
“There is a reason,” I said. “You.”
“Me, but I don’t count!”
“That’s just it, Roger, you do.”
“Anna, we could have a wonderful time-“
“Undoubtedly. But, Roger, you’ve been married for seventy years. Now, for the first time, you’re not married. You don’t want to turn around and get married again right off, do you?”
“Don’t I?” he asked, blinking.
“You don’t, you really don’t. You deserve a little while, at least, off by yourself, to see the world, to know who Roger Harrison is. A little while away from women. Then, when you’ve gone around the world and come back, is time to think of other things.”
“If you say so—“
“No. It mustn’t be anything I say or know or tell you to do. Right now it must be you telling yourself what to know and see and do. Go have a grand time. If you can, be happy.”
“Will you be here waiting for me when I come back?”
“I haven’t it in me any more to wait, but I’ll be here.”
He moved toward the door, then stopped and looked at me as if surprised by some new question that had come into his mind. “Anna,” he said, “if all this had happened forty, fifty years ago, would you have gone away with me then? Would you really have me?”
I did not answer.
“Anna?” he asked. After a long while I said, “There are some questions that should never be asked.”
Because, I went on, thinking, there can be no answers. Looking down the years toward the lake, I could not remember, so I could not say, whether we could have ever been happy. Perhaps even as a child, sensing the impossible in Roger, I had clenched the impossible, and therefore the rare, to my heart, simply because it was impossible and rare. He was a sprig of farewell summer
