THE INNOCENT

THE INNOCENT

 “‘Who is that?’ I said to myself.  ‘Who the hell is that?’”

     We were getting lunch ready.  Tom had taken a tray of chicken cutlets from the freezer and put it in the oven.  I was making a salad.  When Tom finished slicing a loaf of French bread, we sat in the dining room.  Father was sitting in his recliner, asleep.

     “It stopped raining,” he continued, “but the sky was overcast and the air was still misty, and though it was mid morning, it was dim as though the sun hadn’t yet risen.  Not a day to stroll out of doors.”

“Someone was strolling in the back yard?” I said, unbelieving.

“Under the trees in the back yard.  Yes.  It was a woman.  She wore only a light dress, an old-fashioned sleeveless summer dress.  No jacket or coat or rainslick to protect her from the damp.  She appeared to be young, late teens, the best I could tell from the distance.  I was in the kitchen, fixing myself a cup of coffee, looking out the window.  I watched her wander towards the house along the slate path.  She stopped just where the walk came out from the trees, looked at me in the window, then turned and retraced her steps.  I lost sight of her as she followed the path around the maples and the old shed.  When she didn’t reappear on the other side of it, I thought she must have paused and turned, coming back along the same path.  I watched curiously, and when, after a while, she didn’t reappear, I went outside, crossed the patio, trudged through the wet grass, soaking my shoes, passed along the garden, and went under the trees, following the slate path to where she turned behind the shed.  But no one was there.  Back away further is the stockade fence, which I was sure she could not have gotten over or through, there being no gate in it.  But no one was there either.  

     “I looked around, wondering, and thought she might have gotten over the fence by climbing the nearest of the big maples and edging out on the heavy limb that crossed over the fence and then dropping down behind it.  I tried to get an image in my mind of her in that dress climbing onto the dripping branch, but it wouldn’t come. I called out, ‘Hello, anyone here?’ and felt stupid as my voice dropped dead under the trees in the misted air.”

     “That’s really strange, Tom.  Why would anyone walk in papa’s yard?”

     “But that’s not all, Helen.  I told dad about it, and apparently, from what he says, this isn’t the first time.”

     “At least you two are talking.  I don’t know what that woman is up to, but I’m glad, for now, that you’re here.”  

     “But things aren’t going well.  I didn’t know how it would go and figured I would have to trust in my patience to get through.  I haven’t talked with father for years, thinking the best relation with him is no relation.  We could never talk to each other without it ending in bitter words, anyway.  If it wasn’t this it was that with him—always something to berate me for, as though I made my life decisions on purpose to thwart him.” 

“But he’s trying, isn’t he?  Can’t you give him credit for that?”

     “But he’s acting so much out of character I can’t figure him out.  First of all, look how he dresses, putting on a starched white shirt and tie and his dark blue suit!”

“Shhh, not so loud, you’ll wake him up.” 

“Isn’t it weird?”

“I don’t know.  It strikes me as pathetic.  He’s doing it to impress you.”

“Secondly, his neat little moustache sits motionless over his lip: he makes no conversation at all.  He sits straight backed in the dining room chair at the head of the table here and stares straight ahead, not ignoring me but waiting intensely for me to say something, which he responds to with withering politeness.  After the first day, I didn’t know what to say to him anymore.”

“But he seems happy, Tom.  It’s hard on you.  You’re doing this for his sake, not your own, though maybe before you leave, you’ll come to think of it as something you’ve done for your own sake as well.” 

     “If it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have stayed more than two or three days.  There are things about him, though.  Sitting, he seems very much himself: stiff, commanding, in possession of his faculties, dominating—even that staring and silence are typical of how I remember him.  But when he walks, he becomes another person.  He stoops, trembles, and seems distracted, like he doesn’t know where he’s going.  Sitting, he’s a boulder in a landscape; on his feet, he’s a reed in a windstorm.”

     I looked at father then, asleep in his recliner.  We both did.  He was frail.  I had been slow to acknowledge how far he had slipped in the last year. 

     “He’s not going to be with us much longer,” I admitted, “Don’t you think?”

“It’s harder for you than for me,” he said sympathetically.

I was feeling like crying.  Tom saw it and looked away.  I put my head in my hands and my elbows on the table.

“But what did father say about the woman in the yard?” I asked through my hands, trying to shift the subject to something I could talk about.

     “I told him I saw her under the trees, when he came into the kitchen, a woman wandering out there in a light summer dress, no coat, like it was June or July.  He steadied himself by leaning on the counter, with his two hands pushing himself upright, you know how he does.  I couldn’t help but to feel the idiocy of him in that suit and tie.  ‘Did you recognize her?’ he asked me.

     “I told him I didn’t know anyone around here her age. I asked him if he had seen her before.  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘in the last months, many times.  Don’t you recognize her?’  He said it again like he was surprised I didn’t.  I said I had just told him I didn’t.  ‘You will,’ he said.  ‘You’ll see her again.’”

     “‘What does it mean?’ I asked him.  ‘Tell me who she is and don’t make a mystery of it.’”

     “‘I don’t know what it means,’ he said, ‘You’ll have to tell me.’"

     “Then he got this look in his eyes—like he was dreaming, and said my name twice.  He asked me then to take his arm and lead him to the dining room.  He let me guide him through the door.  Sitting, he said, ‘Living the bachelor life doesn’t appeal to me.  Tell me why you never married.’”

     “And then we almost had an argument.”

     “You’ve got to avoid that, Tom.  No arguments.  I think an argument will kill him.”

     “I bit my tongue.  We didn’t argue.  I told him that he and mom got along, I just never found someone I could do that with.  So he says, ‘The female presence is necessary to make life whole.  I didn’t know how true that was until after your mom died.  I feel sorry for you.’

     “Feeling sorry for me!  For not marrying!  It’s exactly this kind of thing that always drove me up the wall.  I was looking him in the eye, trying to find an answer that wouldn’t start an argument, when he said,

     “‘I’m not criticizing.  I’m explaining.  I can’t help my feelings.  They are all I have left.  Don’t take them from me.  You asked me about the girl in the yard.  I asked you about girls in your life.  The one leads naturally to the other.’”

     “God, it’s pathetic.  He dwells on mom endlessly.  He’s feeling all sorts of things, Tom, that you and I can’t understand.  We need to be patient with him.”

     “He’s feeling a lot of pain, anyway.  Should we wake him?  The cutlets are done by now.  I’ll get them and you get him.”

     “Tell him you appreciate his making them for you.”

     “You’re a good girl, Helen.  I’ll humor him, don’t worry.”

* * *

We were a happy family once.  But Tom, my brother, had ambitions that were not our father’s ambitions for his only son.  When Tom went off to college, he did what he wanted to do, and father grew morose and incommunicative towards him.  Tom never came home again.  Perhaps learning his lesson from Tom, father was never overbearing with me.  Or perhaps there were other reasons—the demons of conscience can prey upon us in horrible ways, sometimes upon even the most blameless of us.  Who lives blamelessly anymore?  In spite of his sins, father was a good man.  The horrors that came to visit him were all the harder to bear, perhaps, because of it.

Mother’s death came without warning.  She had a simple cold that had gotten worse and worse and after a week had turned into pneumonia, and by the time father had gotten her to the doctor, hospitalization didn’t help.  She died in her sleep.  Father blamed himself for not forcing her to the doctor sooner, but mom was always stubborn that way.  In the grim days between the hospitalization and the funeral, father had declined dramatically.  He had lost a lot of weight over the last several years and had gone from gray to white, but he was still vigorous and strong.  At the funeral he was stooped, needed help walking, and his hands trembled.  His thin moustache, which was still grizzled at the time mother died, had turned white as his hair.  He was so confused about where he was at the cemetery that I had to take his arm and walk him to the car.  He didn’t recognize Tom.  At the house after the cemetery, father wouldn’t speak to him, and when the house finally emptied of relatives and friends, father went to bed, leaving Tom alone in that solemn emptiness.  The pain, I guess, of mom’s dying was so great that he had no room in him for dealing with old wounds—at least as he imagined them.  In the time since, he had grown frailer, but he also had resolved to face up to Tom.  More than that.  It was more than a facing up.  Father had taken his wedding pictures out of the closet and put them in new frames and set them around the house.  Often, when I came to visit, I heard him talking with mom, and sometimes I had the feeling she was with him.  I feared it was more a giving up than a facing up.

But Tom was coming home, and father was behaving excitedly.  I couldn’t help but to feel he was looking at Tom’s visit as an occasion to make peace before he followed mom.  I had been visiting everyday because I was worried about the strain on him.  He was unable to rest.  In spite of his arthritis and decreased mobility, he had been cooking and storing in the freezer as many of mom’s favorite meals as he could remember.  He opened the freezer one day and asked my opinion about what else to make.  The meals were neatly stacked and labeled, and as I considered the wrapped trays, he said, “It’s too bad, so much has changed.  It won’t be the same.”

“Who ever expects things to be the same?” I tried to reassure him, closing the freezer door.  “Tom’s coming home isn’t and can’t be a return to the past, papa.  You have to accept life as it is now.”

“Of course, of course,” he said, shaking his head.  “I wish mom were here, that’s all.” 

Time was when my brother could play in the pine forest, be free with his two dogs, and fish in the bay and swim.  That world was gone forever.  The old house which used to sit in the middle of the forest had become in later years surrounded by tenements and highways and traffic lights and crime on a daily basis.  The house itself had become rickety and squatted sorely like a reminder of a past the apartment dwellers all around, the local toughs, and the herds of cigarette-smoking, doll-eyed adolescent girls never knew.  In some ways the house, so out of place in the world that had grown up around it, was a symbol of our lives, Tom’s, father’s, even my own.

     But father had preserved a bit of the old times.  The trees in the yard, sycamores and sassafras and maples and the red-barked dwarf pines that made up the vanished forest, were still there.  The old red and blue slate walk he wound through the trees and beside the garden when we were children was still there, and the dark green moss he worked so hard to cultivate in all the shaded areas still made the ground shine like velvet.  The little fish pond was gone, as were the white ducks.  But the azaleas and forsythias, rose-of-sharons, and hydrangeas, all huge, rank, and wild grown, still bordered most of the yard.  Perhaps Tom’s coming in the spring was decided by his memory of these—the flaming forsythias, yes; and the rich redness of the azaleas.  Rank and wild they had become, but enormous, full, blossoming like fairytale things.  Sometimes father sat and looked at them and their profusion made him dizzy.

     It all lasts for such a short time, though.  Soon the prodigality of color gives way to the darkness of full leaf summer growth, and the bushes hum with insects, hedging the world out and closing father in, their tangled growth making passage through impossible, except for squirrels.

     I worried about old wounds and that father would suffer and worsen—who knew?  My husband—who had had his own difficulties with father, having to learn to balance his own natural assertiveness against the submissiveness father could sometimes demand as respect for his age and experience—shared this worry and suggested I keep a close eye on him.  Sensitive to the moment, my husband also felt that he should stay away, so as not to complicate matters.  The three of us had to feel our way through this visit alone.  Perhaps he was right.  But I could not be with them every minute.  Father and Tom would be together without me, unavoidably, for long stretches of the day.  Knowing how father could explode at an inconsiderate word or a deliberate disagreement, I feared the worst, feared finding him, when I came, in a temper, Tom stomped off somewhere, or worse, finding him—finding him. . . .

* * *

“Your mother was only sixty-eight,” he said dreamily.  We were sitting at the dining room table.  I had cleaned up after lunch and fixed a small glass of cream sherry for him, taking none for myself.  I was thinking about the woman in the yard, father sitting straight backed and sipping the sherry, when his words came and brought me back.  “Usually, it’s the man who goes first and the woman who lingers on.”

     Whenever he said this I felt both irritated and sorry.  Blaming himself, trying to get on without her, missing her—I knew it was an ordeal, but the dwelling on it was impossible. 

     “You have to stop it, papa,” I urged sympathetically, rubbing the top of his right hand which was flat on the table, his arm propping him up straight in the chair, trying to get him off the subject, but he was unable to stop thinking about her. 

     “All my life I paid no attention to religion,” he said, looking at me, trying a wistful smile.

“I know.  Mother took us to church without you, when we went at all.  But she wasn’t that much of a believer either.  Your influence,” I said jokingly. But now he got a serious look.

“I’m not becoming religious, now, either,” he said, the “but” hanging in the air.

“I’m glad,” I said, uncertainly, filling the interval.  “Getting religious now will only make you feel guilty for all the years you weren’t.”

I didn’t like this talk about religion, but for some perverse reason I wanted him to continue.  I was curious about his feelings.  I wished Tom were with us so he could hear first hand; it would be different telling him about it.  But then I knew that if he were, father wouldn’t talk about these things.  I guess it was best as it was.

  “A strangeness has settled on me,” he said, pausing, sipping the sherry.  He loved the sweet wine, and I could see the sense of it in his eyes when he sipped. 

“I don’t understand it.  When I look at you you seem odd.”

“Me?”  I was surprised that what he was feeling included me.  “But I am odd, papa.  I’m a weirdo.  Didn’t you always say that?”

He smiled and looked at me, but then the seriousness returned.

“Your being there, your being yourself, is what’s odd.  I don’t know what I’m trying to say.  It’s not odd. It’s incomprehensible.  That’s not it.  Mysterious!  No, not that either.”

He was taking all this gravely, and I can only guess at what he was thinking, feeling.  But whatever he was trying to say, it was already affecting me.  I was amused by his groping and by his changing his mind, but I was feeling odd for real.

“It’s like when I look at you, I see something more than you, but I don’t understand what it is.  It’s not just you, either, it’s everybody.  It’s people.  Even the kids playing in the street,” he paused, thoughtfully, then said, “especially the kids.”

     I didn’t know what to say.  Tom was gone for a while.  My husband came and took him on the pretext of running some errands and picking up the boys, but it was really to get him out of the house, if only for an hour or two. 

     “You think it’s a religious thing?  What you’re feeling?” 

There had been no blow-ups since Tom came, no violence of feeling that I most feared.  But his talking like this worried me even more.  It was like he was preparing himself, thinking himself free from life—like what was odd about me was that I was alive.  There was no reason he couldn’t live ten more years, fifteen, even twenty.  He had no serious health condition.  His arthritis caused pain, but the doctor said his stooping and mental distractions were emotional conditions.  He could get over these if he tried.  But talk like this was dreadful.

“Yes, I’m sure of it.  But not in the normal sense, the Ten Commandments and go to church sense.”

“I think you’ve been ill, papa, and that’s what you’re feeling.  You don’t have to stoop when you walk.  Why do you do that?  I’m going to make an appointment for you with Dr. Santos, and I want to come and talk with him, too.”

“Talk with him about me?”

“Who else? not me.”

“I’m not sick.  My perceptions have changed.  This is what I’m trying to tell you, only I can’t explain it.  I have not been a careful thinker, especially in later years, sorting things out and making sense for myself.  I made my living sorting out other people’s things and making sense for them.”

“The newspaper lasted long enough to retire you, then it retired.   That’s a religious experience!”

“Ha! You’re right,” he laughed, his features relaxing the sense of urgency. 

There was a lot of traveling in the first years after retirement.  Thinking about those days gladdened me because mom enjoyed them more, I think, than any other time in their lives.

“But then, you know,” he said, “ten years ago, I thought only in terms of luck.  We all saw it coming, anyway.  No.  You’re mother’s being gone—it’s not the same kind of thing at all.”

He was shaking his head, staring down at the table.  I reached over and patted his hand again, but he still shook his head, his eyes wet with sadness.

“When the paper died,” he paused again, remembering, “it meant for those still working there a mere disruption of routine until they located elsewhere—all of them did, you remember?  For me it meant nothing at all, except feelings of regret.  When your mother died, it was different. . .”

“Of course it was different.   Why try to compare, papa?  You put the paper to bed every night, but you didn’t sleep with it.”

I was trying to distract him, for his mood had become somber and I was feeling it, too, and I didn’t know where all this was leading. 

“Not because she was a person and the newspaper was a thing, you know.”

He looked at me, then grasped my hand.  I was rubbing the top of the hand with which he was pushing himself back into the chair.  But then he released the pressure, grabbed my hand, and surprisingly stayed straight up in the chair.

“When she died a portion of existence died!”

“But that’s normal, papa.  You and mom have been married so long.  It’s understandable that whichever of you died first, the other would feel that a part of themselves died, too.”

It was normal for people who survived a spouse to feel what he was feeling.  What wasn’t normal, I guess, was to be the one feeling it.  And for this I was sorry.

“It’s like losing?. . .” he went on, ignoring me, “not just the left side of your body, but the idea of left along with it.  Can you understand that?  When your mother died, a portion of existence died, too.  Not just a portion of my existence.  Helen, I can’t explain it.  Try living in a world without left.”

“I can’t imagine what that would be like.  I don’t know what you’re feeling, papa.  Does it help when I’m here?  Is it worse when I’m not here?  When you’re alone?”

“When I look at you I feel awe for all the existence I see in you.  Hmmm, mmmm, but that’s not it either.  None of it.  I don’t know.  I can’t describe it.”

He fell silent and his mood darkened.  I didn’t want to talk about it anymore.  Death permeated the room, lodged in our minds.  Not mother’s death, but death itself.  Death the thing.  I was sure it wasn’t healthy to be dwelling on this feeling he was trying to explain.  The weather had cleared and the back yard was in full sun now, so I coaxed him up from the chair to go outside and sit in the sunshine.  The azaleas and forsythias were gloriously effulgent, and out there I felt his mood would lift.  Mine would.

Behind the house was a small glinting lawn about thirty feet square.  All along the right side was the garden, freshly tilled, the earth dark brown from the rain; all across the back and the left side were the copses of trees, the slate walk winding through them, the tool shed at the back of the copse of maples directly in front of us, and behind it the tall stockade fence, mostly in deep shade.  Behind the garden was one of the hedges of forsythia, very high, fifteen feet at least, densely covered with golden flowers, in front of them the azaleas, chest high, flaming red.  In the middle of the little lawn was a heavy, concrete garden table with two wrought-iron chairs beside it.  I led father to one of these and I took the other.

I could see, after he settled into the chair, that he was still dwelling on what he was trying to say inside.  He had an abstracted look, his eyes focused on nothing in particular, and his hand raised, palm outward, like he was hushing me so he could continue talking.  So I hushed.

“We don’t know what love means when we are living it,” he said, looking across the lawn to the trees.

“Papa! You’ve got to stop this,” I said, irritated.  

“You see,” he responded, looking at me now, “it doesn’t matter.  That’s what I’m trying to tell you.  It doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t understand, papa.  What doesn’t matter?”

“Me, what I dwell on.”

“It matters to me.”

“There’s a generation difference.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; so what if there’s a generation difference?  Of course there is, you’re my father.”

“Because of it, my dying can’t affect you the way you’re mom’s has affected me.  That’s what I mean by the generation difference.”

“I don’t get it.  It still matters.  You matter.”

“Existence won’t change when I die.”

“This is some nonsense you’ve latched onto.  You’re acting like you’re the only person. . . .  Existence hasn’t changed, papa.  Mom’s not here, that’s all.  But you are.”

“I know how you feel.  Your attachment.  Don’t forget, my parents died, too.  Something is different, now.  Everything is different now.  I have perceptions I don’t understand, understandings I can’t explain, recognitions I never experienced before.  You ask why I stoop.  That’s why.  Sometimes the pain helps to keep me from going crazy.”

I didn’t know what to say.  It was too much for me.  I was wishing Tom were here.  Another perspective on this might just have been what was needed to throw father out of the crazy ideas he was fastening onto.  Getting irritated with him, as I was, was not the way, obviously.  He just tried to account for it, to make my irritation understandable.  That, I guess, is what undid me.  We both had fallen into our own thoughts and were silent for a while.

My reverie was broken by the sight of movement under the trees.  Someone had come walking from behind the shed along the slate path.  A woman.  It was, I thought, it had to be, the same one Tom had seen this morning.  She fit his description—young in a light summer dress.  She walked casually along the shaded path, a smile on her face, and stopped at the edge of the copse, still in the shade.  I was curious and looked at father, about to ask who she was, when the words stopped in my throat.  He was staring open-mouthed, gripping the arms of the chair. 

“Who is that?” I gasped, looking at him, then at her.  She was still at the edge of the trees, in the shade, just standing.  Garbled, choked words came from him.  I was suddenly afraid.  I rose from my chair with the intention of accosting her, demanding an explanation.  But as I walked towards her, she receded backwards at each of my steps, and I foolishly began to run.  But she kept pace with my advance, and did so while giving the appearance of standing still.  I had such uncommon sensations, like the dimensions of space had altered and time stopped as the space between us detached from the world.  When I stopped running, I found myself panting for lack of breath and standing at my chair!  Father was still looking at her, his hands gripping tensely the wrought-iron arms.  When I looked back to her, she was walking casually in the direction from which she had come, disappearing, finally, behind the shed.

* * *

“I’m afraid she’s been in the house, Tom.”

     “What you say is unbelievable; it doesn’t seem like a human experience.  If I hadn’t seen her, I’d be certain you were hallucinating.  In the house?  Why do you say that?”

     “Who has he been talking to all this time?  I thought he was just imagining, you know, acting like mom was still here.  You know how obsessed he’s been.  But now I wonder.  I’m sure of it.  She’s been in the house.”

     “But, if that’s so, why did he act so frightened when he saw her with you?  I mean, if it’s her and he’s been talking with her, why did he freeze in fear like that?”

     “I don’t know.  I’m confused.  I’m not sure this woman is mom.  She doesn’t look like her.  But papa said you would recognize her, didn’t he?  Why would he think that?  I didn’t.  Neither did you.”

     “Maybe there’s no connection.  Maybe dad’s just been talking to himself, or talking out of habit.  It’s been hard for him to adjust.”

     “You have no idea.  There’ve been times I was certain he was losing his mind.”

     “There’s only so much you can do.”

     “I’ve done everything I know to do.”

     “Maybe we should get him out of that house.  Maybe that’s the only thing that’ll make a difference.  It might end this business of the woman.”

     “I don’t know, Tom.  Moving him would kill him for sure.  If we wanted to end it for him, we'd do that.  Besides, papa makes up his own mind.  He’s not feeble that way you know.  He’s sharp as ever.”

     It was late in the evening.  I wanted to get father out of the house, away, far away, from all the gloom and the dreary emotions that obsessed him.  The afternoon encounter was so vivid and disturbing, and father’s reaction to it was so fearful, I had to do something.  When Tom and my husband and boys returned in the mid-afternoon, I proposed we all go to my house.  I made the excuse that my two boys needed to spend more time with their uncle, and I demanded Tom and father spend the night with us.  Father objected strongly to leaving the house, but Rick, my husband, sensing the urgency I was trying to suppress, pitched in helpfully by offering to play pinochle, which my father loved to do, and so he packed a small overnight bag, and we all left together, Tom and I feeling more than a bit relieved.

“I think we should spend the night in the old house,” I said to Tom.

     My husband nixed that idea, or tried to, and Tom was incredulous at the notion.  We sat for a while in silence.  Father and the boys were long in bed.  We had talked about the day, about father’s sense of altered perceptions, about all this coming to a head while Tom was here, and why that should be.  Rick had his theory about us both falling into the grip of father’s obsession; that we had succumbed to his freakish mood and spun these events out of our own heads.  He explained how Tom’s description of the woman planted in my head earlier in the afternoon provided the scenario I had experienced in the back yard, and that given our tendencies to project what we feared, we couldn’t do worse than to spend the night in the house. 

Rick believed also that father had either to work his way through to acceptance of mom’s death and live or fail to and die.  I thought it was not so simple.  I was certain that what I had seen and experienced was hardly caused by father.  Besides, I was beginning to believe that father’s obsessiveness was the effect rather than the cause of these things Tom and I had experienced that day, and I was beginning to feel protective of him.  These experiences we had, what could they be but provocations?  They were directed at us.  I was sure of it.  That woman, or whatever she was, displayed herself to Tom, and she displayed herself to me, brazenly and only incidentally with father present.  She got inside my head, I was sure, for reasons having to do with father, but it was me she was after.  Certain instincts were being aroused and feelings I had never known before had taken possession of me.

He was my father, and my love for him was being challenged.  I understood now why father was talking about the generational difference between us, what he was really feeling—unshielded by the kind of love people would fight to preserve!  He was so much in her sphere already that reality was beginning to seem strange to him, and he felt utterly helpless and alone.  That’s why he put out his and mom’s wedding photos.  She had been coming to him for some time now, and her success in whatever she was up to was being threatened by Tom’s presence and my influence.  Incredible as it might seem, she challenged us!  She opened the fight by making the first move.  I’d be damned if I was going to let her take my father.  Rick was certain that it was merely father’s growing frailty that I felt challenged by, and that I was trying to convince myself there was something to strike out at to prevent the natural course of things. 

“You’re resorting to superstition,” he said.

“We’re spending the night in father’s house,” I repeated, determined, getting up and staring at Tom.

“If you insist,” he said, shrugging, “but I don’t think we’re going to get any sleep—it’s all so crazy.”

“What are you going to do all night?” Rick said.  “I mean, what if. . . .”

“We’ll do what comes natural,” I said, a bit shaken by his implied capitulation to my theory, having no idea what we’d do if she came. 

* * *

Rick stayed home because of the boys and because father would be worried if he woke and found us all gone.  Tom and I took the Mitsubishi and parked, when we arrived at the old house, in the drive in front of the garage, the door of which was so beaten and shattered that we could see father’s old Buick right through it.  We let ourselves in through the front door, trying to be quiet, as though we might disturb someone.  It was quite late.  We left my house about one forty, and it was now nearing two in the morning.

“Should we turn on lights?” Tom whispered.

“No,” I whispered back, not thinking at all about the witlessness of sitting in the dark.

“Why not?” Tom replied.  “It’s dark as hell in here.”

“I don’t think we should have lights on,” I whispered, as though I knew what I was talking about.

But Tom turned the lights on in the living room, anyway, and as I was about to protest, he held up his hand and told me to sit down.  We both sat, Tom steering clear of father’s recliner to sit on the sofa, and me doing the same to sit in the wing back chair beside it.

“Look,” Tom said, not whispering anymore, “we both saw what we saw in the daytime.  Darkness has nothing to do with it.  And I refuse to whisper.  There’s no one here!”

“But us,” I said.

“But us,” he repeated and leaned back into the sofa.

Neither of us wanted to talk any further about why we were there, and talk about anything else just didn’t come.  After a while, I couldn’t stand sitting and staring, so I said, “Should I make some coffee?  If we’re going to sit here till dawn, we’ll need some.  I’m beginning to feel a little stupid right now.”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.  Instincts.  I’m being prodded by instincts that stir up confusions and regrets, as Rick says, and not a little fear.  I don’t know about you, but I’m not giving up on this.  I’m going to sit it out.  It won’t hurt anything if I do.  You can sleep on the couch when you can’t fight it any longer.”

I went into the kitchen and put up coffee, Tom getting up and coming with me, both of us laughing as we went through the house.  I made us some buttered toast, as well, after joking about popping one of father’s frozen trays in the oven.  Neither of us was hungry enough for that, and after our small nibble, we refilled our cups and, leaving the lights on in the kitchen, went back to the living room.

I did have feelings.  I felt afraid, mildly, at first, but increasingly strongly, and I was certain the fear was not something I was bringing on myself.  The house seemed abandoned and eerie without father there, making us both feel like intruders.  Maybe it was that, but there was a feeling in the air, filling the house.  As I looked at Tom, his thereness seemed odd, infused with an extraordinary presence I never felt before.  I remembered father struggling to describe his changed perceptions yesterday afternoon.  With a thrill, I realized I was beginning to experience those same changes.

“Something is happening,” I said.

“What?  What’s happening?” Tom said.

“Don’t you feel it?”

“I don’t feel anything.”

“Do I seem to have changed to you?  When you look at me?”

“Of course not,” he said, looking around the room and getting up, checking the dining room and kitchen.

“Everything’s normal,” he said, coming back to the sofa and sitting again.

As he crossed the living room to the sofa, his body  vibrated with a clarity and solidity that made my normal sensations seem dream-like by comparison.  I was looking at him with such an arched expression that he became alarmed.

“What is it?” he demanded.  “What are you seeing?”

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling, again, the frustrations father felt trying to explain these perceptions to me.

He looked at me and took my hand.  The skin of my arm was goose-bumped, and he stroked it, trying to warm it. 

“You’re having a physical reaction to something, I can see that.”

“You.  It’s you.”

“Me?  I don’t understand.  What’s happening to me?”

“No, not you, me.  It’s me.”
     “I see.  It’s perfectly understandable.”

“Don’t joke,” I said, pushing his hand away.  “She’s here and she’s affecting me.”
     “How?  I don’t feel anything.  I can’t help if I don’t understand.”

“Keep your eyes on me, don’t take them off me.  That helps.”

And suddenly she was there!  Standing in the archway between the living room and the dining room.  She was exactly the same as I saw her yesterday afternoon, even to the light summer dress.  She had no expression on her face, her features being calm and trance-like.  Tom saw that I saw her and rose from the sofa to face the direction in which I was staring.

“Where do you see her?” he shouted, flailing the air in front of him with both arms.  “God!” he croaked, “I feel her—it’s terrible.”

I was frozen, unable to respond.  The air in the room and all my senses were filled with menace, which seemed to visibly radiate from her; I could smell and taste it, and it crawled on my skin.  Utterly helpless, I couldn’t even scream.  Tom, making choking sounds like he was breathing in a gas, grabbed both my hands and pulled me to my feet.  He pulled me forward, and I could see but not respond to the panic in his eyes.  My legs were frozen, even my breathing was frozen.  Still gasping and choking, he bent over in front of me and pulled me over his shoulder and trundled me off to the front door, which, just as we reached it, pushed open.  He fell backward with a scream, and we both tumbled to the floor, my weight dragging him down.

“What the hell is going on?” we heard.

It was my husband, and behind him father.  They came in, Rick looking amused as he took in the scene, and father, stooped and trembling, reaching out for someone, me, to help him to his chair.  The whole world erupted into consciousness.  Tom was sitting, shaking himself, in front of the door, and I was peeling myself off the floor, reaching out to father, to take his arm before he tripped over Tom.  With more than usual care, the kind of care that only comes from the profoundest sympathy, I got him seated, finally, and he leaned back and relaxed.  The menace that had gripped us only moments before was gone, and the catatonia into which I had fallen was dispelled.  In Rick’s presence it all seemed unreal, like a hallucination, a dream.  Waking reality was restored, and I looked at Tom.  He was clearly shaken and still white, though he had a grip on himself.  Neither of us responded to Rick’s question.

“OK,” he said, still looking amused, “explanations are in order.”

We were standing in the living room near father’s recliner, and Tom turned to the dining room, looked around, then looked at me.  I was reluctant to blurt it out, afraid Rick would laugh.  But I was trembling, feeling faint from the relief.  Tom grabbed me and led me to the sofa.

“What’s going on?” Rick said, laughing.  “Did you have an experience?”  He had such a look of incredulity that I started to cry.

“We had an experience,” Tom said.  He was still standing.  “It wasn’t pleasant.  In fact, it was damn terrifying.”

“Tell me about it,” Rick said, all curious and disbelieving.

“Not here,” Tom said.  “We should move dad out of this house right now.  If you want my advice, I’d say let us leave and not come back.”

“WHY ARE YOU HERE?” I shouted through my tears.

“I’m sorry,” Rick said.  “Something did happen.  I can see that.”  He became gentle then, sitting next to me, trying to soothe me.  “Your father woke me up and demanded I bring him home.  He knew you and Tom were here.  There was no point in my feigning, so I just got dressed, and here we are.”

We all looked at father, then.  He was reclining comfortably, his eyes closed, but awake.  When the silence grew, he opened his eyes and looked at us.

“She’s not evil,” he said.

“Who is she, papa?  You told Tom he would recognize her.  Why?  What does she want?”

“Did he see her tonight?”

“No,” Tom said.  “I felt her, but I didn’t see her.  Helen saw her.  I was afraid she was going to kill Helen.”

“No, not that,” father said.  “I don’t think she wants that.”

“Who is she?” Tom said, squatting beside the recliner and taking father’s hand.  “Does she want you?”

He was unwilling to explain.  He closed his eyes again.  We waited, but after a while it was clear he wasn’t going to say any more.

“What should we do now?” Tom said, frustrated.  “We can’t stay here like this the rest of the night.”

“Go,” father said.  “All of you.  Go back to Rick and Helen’s.”

“And leave you here?” Tom said.

“We’re not going to leave you here, papa,” I said.  “Either we all go or we all stay.”

“But this is my house, where I belong.  I don’t fear anything here.”

“Dad, what did Helen and I experience?  Who was it we saw, and why did she make us both feel so...,” he didn’t say it, but leaving it unsaid made it worse.  My skin crawled with the recollection.

“She won’t come again, after you leave.”

“How do you know?” I asked, exasperated by his evasiveness.

“Obviously,” Rick said, “he doesn’t want to tell.  Maybe we should do what he says, Helen.  Tomorrow will be time enough to sort through it all.  Tom can stay here if he wants to.  He’s been here for two weeks.  Another night . . . .”

“No,” I interrupted.  “Everything is different now.  I don’t think Tom should spend another night in this house.”

We both looked at Tom.  He rose from father’s side, looked into the dining room, and said, “I’ll stay with dad.  Someone should.  But I’d really feel better if someone was with me.”  He looked at Rick, “You should stay with me.  Let Helen take the Mitsubishi and stay with the kids.”

I didn’t like this plan.  I didn’t want to be left out.  If something happened again, I wanted—no, needed—to be part of it.  He was, after all, my father, not Rick’s, and not, in a way, Tom’s—not Tom’s father in the same way he was mine.  The menace we felt with her appearance in the house was directed at me; it was me she paralyzed, me whose perceptions she altered, and me she appeared to.  Tom only felt her, and then not so intensely that he was unable to act.  Whoever this woman was in life, she had reason to hate me, or blame me, or resent me.  I was part of what was happening, and although I was afraid, I knew that in some way I had to come to understand I was the key.  Besides—he was my father.  Who was this woman to threaten him like this?  Threaten me?

“We all stay,” I said.  “Rick, call your brother and ask if he won’t go to the house to stay with the boys.  I’d feel better knowing they weren’t alone.  If he’ll go, we all stay here.”

Rick looked at Tom and me, raised his eyes and shrugged, but went to the phone and dialed his brother.  It would have been funny listening to Rick had I not felt so grim about what we decided to do.  Father was resting, his eyes closed, but I knew he was very much aware of what we were deciding.  I was sure he was grateful.  I could see a peacefulness in his face which I knew instinctively was a response to our decision.  This woman has been haunting him.  Father’s saying that my love for him was a thing different in kind from the love of husband and wife was his way of telling me how unsheltered he felt, how unprotected.  Unsheltered and unprotected from what?. . .this he would not reveal.  But I wasn’t going to let him down.  I was convinced his life depended on me, and the next few hours were going to be decisive.  It was three o’clock.  We had about three hours till dawn.  It was going to be a new day, but what that day would bring, I didn't know.

* * *

“She’s not evil,” he said.  We were sitting in the living room, sipping coffee—all but father.  A half hour had passed uneventfully.  Try as we may, we could not get father to tell us anything.  He would say only that she wasn’t evil.  I wasn’t comforted.  I was beginning to feel the opposite, discomfort—a feeling much like the strangeness I experienced earlier.  It came upon me slowly, so that as I looked at Tom, I could actually see his physical presence deepen.  His coloring seemed to be an object independent of his body and only coincidentally identical with it.

     For a moment I didn’t appreciate the significance of the sign, but then, as I looked at Rick leaning back in the sofa with his eyes closed and saw how his breathing seemed like a thing, alertness rushed over me and my skin crawled.  I stood, looking at father to see if he was aware.  He was.  He was looking at me with alarm.  She was here.  “Where?” I said, looking around the room.  But he began to gasp, his face blanching.  I rushed to him.  I couldn’t see her, but she was there, preventing him from breathing.  I started to scream.  Rick was at my side instantly.  We lifted father from the chair, and he suddenly began to take in air, like a diver breaking water.  Two, three deep gulps.  Tom had walked around the room, saying, “Where?  Where is she?” 

     I felt no menace as I had before, but I could feel her none-the-less.  We walked father between us—Rick and I—until his breathing settled.  Then we sat him down in the dining room at the head of the table, his customary place.  Rick stayed beside him.  I took a quick tour of the house and came back to father’s side.

     “She’s still here,” I said, looking at my arms, the skin crinkled in goose bumps, and rubbed them to calm myself.

     “I can feel her, too,” Tom said.

     “I don’t feel anything,” Rick said, staying by father’s side.

     For a few moments we held our places, not knowing what to do.  Father was staring across the table, silent, absorbed.  That’s when I realized she was sitting at the other end, in mother’s chair—a chair no one has sat in since mother died.  I couldn’t see her, but I knew father did.  I walked over to the chair and stood beside her.  She was quiescent, letting me near, affecting me by sending a wave of emotion through me.  It was a feeling of yearning and sorrow, so tragic in depth that I could not imagine what could happen in one’s life to make one feel it.  I knew it was her, and I felt instinctively it was an attempt to communicate.  Why?  I should have been afraid but wasn’t.  Was there more danger now, I thought, than when I felt her menace?

     Then she attacked.  It came ferociously, like a wind, buffeting me from head to toe, and I fell backward against the buffet.  It was a wind of terror.  Tom reached me in time to keep me from falling.  “Father!” I screamed.  He was on fire, flames leaping from his shoulders and forearms!  Rick stepped backwards instead of trying to help.  I had slumped in Tom’s arms, my knees buckling, when he shouted, “Fire!  She’s on fire,” and let me drop.  I lay on the floor in a daze, wondering why I wasn’t feeling the flames.  I rolled on my back and lifted my arms to look at them.  “I’m not burning,” I said to myself, “not burning.”

     And as though in echo, I heard Rick say, “There’s no fire.  No one’s on fire.  What the hell are you all seeing?”

     Then he was beside me, helping me to stand.  I got to my feet, reeling, dazed, emotionally spent, and trembling.  I fell into his arms and he hugged me, holding me up, for I was limp.  Over his shoulder, I could see father sitting in his chair.  His eyes were closed and tears were running down his cheeks.  I could breathe freely again, and the dreamlike perceptions of normal reality returned.  She was gone.

* * *

These events cannot have happened.  Reality is not a dream state.  I say these things with little conviction.  In the time since, my meditations have grown sometimes ponderous and sometimes wild.  I have gone to church and prayed, but such attempts at reconciliation with traditional beliefs have left me feeling only more helpless because of their futility.  It is not peace of mind one wants after such experiences.  It’s explanation! 

The perceived reality we manipulate to live in, I now know, is but part of the nature of being—a part we may well be trapped in, perhaps deluded by—and is terribly unsatisfying next to the reality hinted at by these experiences.  Were my changed sensations at the approach of the woman a momentary access to the more of reality or a delusion?  The blondness of Tom’s hair, the brownness of his shirt, the flesh-tones of his cheeks—all seemed to have independent existence, to be things apart from him.  Yet the flames engulfing father, those engulfing me—what were they?

     Father’s tears were real.  These coursed down his face copiously.  Yet he would say nothing.  All of the events of those twenty-four hours came to us out of his past, were part of his life, were present to us through him.  Only he could explain.  He is more frail now, and now he is detached and motiveless, as though he were waiting to die.  Among us there has been endless talk.  Talk.  Talk.  Talk.  But we know no more than before. 

     My own speculations have led nowhere, for I am innocent of wrong-doing and can find nothing in my personal history to explain anything.  Father was engulfed in flames—she made me see that.  Why?  A moral judgment upon him?  A condemnation?  A payback?  Father is mute.  But why did she make Tom see me all afire in the same way?  How did I wrong this woman?  Can one be condemned to perdition for wrongs of which one is unaware?  Father insists she is not evil.  What, then?

     Father has done something of which he is so ashamed he cannot speak.  I try to imagine what this might be, what violation could have been so dreadful as to cause this woman to haunt him—all these years later?  I try to imagine.  In a world so filled with horrors, what shame could be so great?  Did mother shield him from her while she was alive?  I suspect she did, by her sheer presence, or by her love, as father himself suspected.  But most maddening is my role in his shame.  This woman appeared to us as little more than a girl.  Was I even born at the time?  Why am I burning?  Not knowing the answers, oh, how haunting!  How can I live?  I look at my husband, my boys, and I think, can my life with them ever be the same?  Oh, my father, what did you do?  To her?  To me?