She covered her face, neck and the backs of her hands. But the paste needed drying to be effective. Sitting there waiting for it, she started twitching. She tried to reach to the center of her back, but couldn't.
"Karl, they got me all over. Scratch me back there," she said, wriggling.
He sat down on the edge of the bed behind her. While he scratched her back, she began scratching her ankle, then her arms and soon her chest.
"Ya, they got you good, little one," he agreed. When he realized what he'd said, his fingers stopped moving.
Suddenly she too fell still, the bites forgotten momentarily, while she let the endearment wash over her.
But the itching started again, so she asked, "Karl, could you put some paste on my back?"
There followed a long pause while he looked at her shoulder blades, remembering times his palms had run over them while he was carried away by passion. At last he swallowed hard and said, "Hand me the cup."
When she had, she unbuttoned the front of her gown and lowered it, exposing her back to him, holding the front over her breasts. It was more skin than she had bared to him since their estrangement had begun. She pictured his eyes scanning her bareness, remembered his hands, gentle in the midst of love, caressing her in the way she now yearned for with daily-increasing fervor. She waited with hammering heart and tingling nerves for his first touch upon her, after all this lonely time. When it came, it was cold, and she flinched, then silently cursed herself, wanting to appear calm before him.
There were welts as big as peas all over her back, white-centered, rimmed with red. When he touched the first one with the clammy paste, her shoulders twitched away.
"Sorry," he muttered, the sight of her bare back raising old, yearning memories within him. He forced himself calmly to continue his ministrations, keeping his eyes from dropping to the shadow of her spine where the gown sagged, swagged, far enough a droop that he knew there was an inviting shadow there. He dabbed all the bites he could see, then-- his stomach went tight and his heart went crazy --he lifted the fringe of hair from her neck and found two more bites beneath it.
She reached an arm back, lifting the hair aside so he could get at the rest hidden there. With racing heart she wondered if he would think her wanton posing so seductively. As if to repudiate his possible thought, she clutched the front of her nighty more tightly to her breasts that ached for the sensual way he had touched them so well, days past.
The hair that grew in the hollow of her neck was fine and curly. He had never seen it before, for she always let her hair hang free.
"You must let them dry," he rasped.
She sat there holding the hair up, feeling his thigh against her buttock on the edge of the bed, wondering if he was experiencing any of the same overwhelming feelings as she--sexual, pulsing, throbbing. But he sat as still as a statue, and finally the hair dropped. Anna reached blindly over her shoulder, saying, "There are a few more up here. Hand me the cup."
Wordlessly, he placed it into her hand, carefully avoiding her fingers. He saw her gown drop to her waist, saw her chin lower as she looked down at herself, watched her elbows moving as she touched the paste to her skin. He need not see the front of her to remember. He felt blood surge through his loins, and a tightening contract his chest. He tried to think of her as he had when he was writing letters to her, as his little whiskey-haired Anna. But even as want crept over him, he found himself wondering how many others had seen her brush the back of her hair away from her neck so seductively. No matter how many others there had been, he could not help placing his hand around her neck, squeezing her hair lightly against it.
Anna's eyes drifted closed and she leaned back, lifting her chin, pushing more firmly into his spanning hand. It was warm, even through her hair, speaking of desperation and hope, making her want to turn quickly and be taken into his forgiving arms. But it had to be him beckoning her to return to them.
"Anna," he whispered in a choked voice, "there are things we must talk about."
"I can't go on like this much longer," she managed, tears in her voice.
"Neither can I."
"Then why do you?" She could feel her own breath, battling its way up her throat past the heart, which threatened to choke her with its clamor.
"I cannot forget it, Anna," he despaired.
"You don't want to forget it. You want to keep remembering it and keep me remembering it, too, so I will always know I was once bad." Her eyes still remained closed.
"Is that what I am doing?"
"I ... I think so."
A very long, silent minute eased by, nothing more than crickets, fire and breath speaking.
"Can you blame me?" he asked.
The pain in his question became magnified within her own heart. She leaned yet against his hold, the hair now hot where he enclosed it about her neck. "No," she whispered.
"Did you think that if I guessed, I would let it pass?"
"No."
"I have tried to put it from my mind. But it is there, Anna. Every minute I am awake it is waiting there and I cannot forget it."
"Do you think I can?"
"I do not know. I do not know you well enough to know such things about you."
"Well, I can't, Karl. I can't forget it either. But I'd give anything if I could make it so it had never happened."
"But that cannot be."
"So will you hold it against me forever?"
"You are my wife, Anna! My wife!" he said intensely, squeezing her neck. "I took you to me believing you were pure. Do you know what it means to a man to learn that others have gone before him?"
Stung, shamed, she felt his words pierce her heart. So he had thought all this time that her scruples were that low. "Not others, Karl, only one."
Anger and hurt surged through him. "Only one? To me you say only one! You might as well say lightning is only fire after it has struck me down. Do you know that is how I felt that day?" His hand tightened painfully for a moment. "I felt like I was struck by lightning, only it was not kind enough to kill me. It only left me burned and blistered instead." The hand dropped from her hair as if the sensation were upon him presently.
"Karl, I never meant for you to find out," she said, ineptly. "I thought-“
"Don't you think I know that? There is no need for you to say it now. I know what a fool you must have thought me when I did not even guess that night in the barn. Green Karl! Green as the spring grass. I thought we were learning together that night."
Misery swept through Anna, coupled by her need to have him believe her. "We were."
"Do not lie to me any more. I forgave
409 you all the other lies I discovered. But this one I have great trouble forgiving. I do not know if I ever can."
"Karl, you don't understand-“
"No, I do not understand, Anna." His voice quivered with intensity. "I am a person who does not understand the selling of what should only be won with love. I have thought to myself so many times, why did Anna do such a thing? How could she? Do you know that I have even started to think that if you had done this with a man you loved I was wrong not to forgive you? But to do it for money, Anna ..." His voice trailed away. When it came again, it was heavy with defeat. "He did pay you, Anna, didn't he?"
She only nodded, then her chin dropped down to her chest.
"A man old enough to be your father ..." His words had the woeful tune of a lament.
"Don't do this to yourself, Karl," she whispered at last.
"It is not Karl who does it to himself, it is you who have done it to me." His agonized voice drove on, killing her, making her bleed with regret. "How I thought of you as my little whiskey-haired Anna. All those months, waiting for you, thinking of how it would be to have you here, to build the log house and have you here so I would not have to be alone ever again. Do you know how alone I feel now? It was much better--the kind of being alone I felt before you came. This now--some days I do not think I can bear it."
Dread surged through Anna, but she knew she must ask the question which followed. "Do you want me to leave, Karl?"
He sighed. "I do not know what I want any more. I have spoken vows to love and honor you, and have sealed those vows with an act of love. I do not believe this vow can be sidestepped by turning you away. Yet I cannot honor you. I am torn in pieces, Anna."
As it had the first time she'd heard him pronounce it, her name falling from his lips with that beloved accent, endeared him to her as never before. "As soon as I met you, that very first day, I knew that this was how you'd feel if you ever learned the truth."
"Could you not tell by my letters that I am ..."
"That you are forgiving, Karl?"
They both realized how utterly untrue that
sounded right now.
"Accepting, Anna. Accepting. Do you understand? If you had told me beforehand I would have accepted."
"No, you wouldn't have, Karl. Even you aren't that big. You think if I had written to you and told you I was a prostitute's daughter and I had a kid brother I felt responsible for, you'd have brought us here willingly?"
Hearing it put that way, Karl, too, doubted what his reaction would have been.
"Karl, I think it's time I told you about
Boston
, all about
Boston
."
"I do not want to hear it. I have heard enough about Boston to last me a lifetime. I hate the word."
"If you hate it, imagine what I feel when I talk about it."
"Then do not!"
"I must. Because if I don't, you'll never understand about my mother."
"It is not your mother who disappointed me, Anna, it was you."
"But she's part of it, Karl. You have to know about her to understand me."
When he sat silently, she took it for assent. Gulping a shaky breath, she began.
"She never had much time for us. We were only two of her miscalculations, two of her mistakes. And in her profession, we were the biggest mistakes she could have made. She never let us forget it. `Where are those two brats of mine now?` she'd holler, until everybody who knew us took to calling us Barbara's Brats.
"We were never told for sure, but it didn't take much figuring to know that it's a pretty slim chance James and I are even full brother and sister. Chances are we had different fathers. But where we came from, that didn't matter to us. We learned early to depend on each other. Nobody else gave us support of any kind, so we got it from just ourselves.
"You were right about something else, Karl. She never wanted us calling her `mother` for fear it'd scare away her customers. She needed to look young and act young to keep the men interested. Sometimes, we'd forget and call her mom, and she'd fly into a rage. The last time it happened was when I was about ten or eleven, I think. One of the other women had given me a cast-off feather for my hair, and I went running to her to tell her about it.
"That's the first time I ever saw ...
saw Saul. He was with her when I went charging outside as she came home, calling her. Only, I was so excited, I forgot to call her Barbara. When she heard me saying `ma` she tied into me right there in front of that man. Strangely enough, it proved one thing--she wouldn't lose her customers as quick as she thought, once they learned she had two kids.
"Saul was around from that time on, more than I'd have liked him to be. He watched and waited while I grew up, only I never knew he was waiting until I was about fifteen or so. That's when I started staying out of his way. You don't grow up in a place like that without knowing the hungry look on a man's face at too young an age.
"It was about that same time Barbara got the disease all women of her profession fear. She went downhill really fast, and lost her looks, her strength and her customers. After she died, her friends --if you want to call them that--let James and me stay at the place nights. But when the rooms were full, they sent us packing. That's why I knew what the inside of St. Mark's looked like. We holed up there when there was no place else to go. At least nobody threw us out of there.
"We did look for work, Karl, honest we did. I used to keep the women's dresses mended at the place--they always had to have their clothes just so, of course--and that's how I learned a little seamwork. They paid me a little to do it, but not nearly enough. When I started writing to you, that's why I told you I was a seamstress. It was the only thing I could think of.
"And you guessed right about the dresses, too. They're cast-offs from the ladies. They were better than nothing, so I took them. I guess you understand now why I'd rather wear James' britches.
"Well, we hung on by our teeth, James and I. Then he started picking pockets and stealing food from the market stalls, and the ladies at the house were starting to encourage me to join their ranks.
"It was about then that James found your advertisement in the paper. It seemed like the first lucky break we'd ever had in our lives. And when you actually answered his first letter, we couldn't believe something had finally gone our way. We knew perfectly well I was no prime candidate for your wife. But all we could think of to do was to lie about my qualifications until I got to you and it was too late for you to do anything but accept.