The Gargoyle (24 page)

Vicky would admonish Tom when he forgot to shave, and Tom would tease Vicky that her heels were too high for a farmer’s wife, but she secretly thrilled at the rugged angles of his stubbled jaw and he loved the way her city boots made her hips sway. The smell of his sweat could bring her skin to gooseflesh, and the hint of her perfume could make him wipe the back of his neck with his well-stained handkerchief. In London, her body had been a muted thing, but on their farm, Vicky was plugged directly into the elements of the earth. She would stoke the fire to heat giant kettles for Tom’s evening bath. She squeezed the bellows, smiling, sweating, and imagining how he would feel under her touch. It was during these evening baths that Vicky loved her hands for the first time in her life. She forgot her childhood piano lessons as she scrubbed the dirt from her husband’s body.

At harvest time, Vicky conceived. She grew fat over the winter and gave birth in the spring. Vicky called the boy Alexander; Tom called him Al. The country air was even sweeter than before.

On their cliff they would stand in the mornings, baby in arms, watching the fishermen come and go. They had done this often through their marriage, and things did not change over the baby’s first summer. Tom would close his eyes and imagine that it was he who was on the water. When he was younger, he had flirted with the idea of enlisting in the Royal Navy, but had abandoned the notion when his father died and left him the farm.

Still, Tom had a small boat that he took out on Sundays. On one such day in early November, much like any other, he asked Vicky to come with him. The crops had recently been harvested and they had the time to take a day for themselves. She told him that she was feeling under the weather and wanted to stay with the baby. “But go,” she said. “Enjoy yourself.”

From the cliff Vicky, with Alexander in her arms, watched as Tom steered the boat out of the harbor and into the ocean, becoming smaller and smaller until he disappeared. She pulled her coat tighter and tucked the baby’s blanket under his chin. There was a chill wind coming; she felt it in her bones as she hurried back to the house.
It’s November,
she thought,
wind’s to be expected.

The wind brought a storm upon its cold breath, very suddenly and very violently. Inside the farmhouse, Vicky was sleeping off her headache with the baby pressed to her bosom. She tossed and turned until they were startled awake by a vicious slap of lightning against their fields. Vicky sat bolt upright and Alexander burst into tears. She threw on her clothes and headed for the edge of the cliff, handing the child to the housemaid.

Vicky scanned the horizon for her husband’s little boat. There was nothing but the water’s churning gray anger.

Soon, one of the farmhands came to bring Vicky back to the house, afraid that the wind might pull her over the cliff’s edge. At the bottom were rocks that could shred a person. Once Vicky was inside, the hands tried to reassure her. “Mr. Wennington’s a good sailor. He’ll find shelter in an inlet and wait out the storm in a safe place. He’ll return when it’s over.” Vicky nodded distractedly, wanting to believe it.

The storm was the worst in living memory and raged for three obscene days. Vicky wandered from farmhouse to cliff, where she would stand until a farmworker forced her back to the house by telling her that Alexander was crying and needed attention.

The storm finally passed. The dark skies opened and sunlight poured through the cracks in the clouds. Vicky resumed her place at the cliff’s edge, and there she stood for an entire day, awaiting her husband’s return. But he did not appear.

The next day she organized a search party. Tom was well liked and all available boats ran up and down the coast looking for him.

There was no sign of Tom. No sign of anything. Just long, lonely expanses of water. It was as if the ocean had removed all evidence of his existence. After three days of searching, the fishermen reluctantly called off their efforts. They had families of their own to feed. They promised Vicky that they would continue to keep a good eye out.

She would not—could not—give up so easily. She hired a sailor and his boat, and together they spent six more weeks looking. Vicky became intimately acquainted with every rocky crag of the shoreline. In mid-December, however, the icy winds blew Vicky and her hired man right off the ocean. It was time to return from the search for the lost to the care of the living. The child Alexander needed his mother.

The farmhands continued their duties but lacked the direction that Tom had provided. They were only thankful that the crops had been brought in before the storm. Christmas was an awful affair, with no tree erected and no goose cooked. The year, which had started so promisingly with Alexander’s birth in the spring, ended in sadness.

Gradually Vicky resumed her life but, still, she wore only black. The locals called her the Widow Wennington. She received some decent offers for the farm, but decided not to sell. It did not feel right to release the land that had been in Tom’s family for generations, and she did not want to give up the home where she had loved and been loved so well. Besides, she could not return to London society life now. There was too much dirt under her fingernails.

But most of all, this land would be all that Alexander ever knew of his father. This land was Tom. Over that first lonely winter, Vicky studied farming operations, learning all she could, for the sake of her missing husband and her infant son. She needed to do something, anything, to minimize her brooding over Tom’s unjust theft by the sea. But every morning, while the sun rose, Vicky stood at the cliff’s edge for one hour. “Tom’s dead,” the locals said. “Why can’t she accept it? Poor thing!”

When spring came, Vicky mobilized operations. At first the laborers were hesitant to follow her lead but when it became apparent that she knew what she was doing, they stopped muttering. They decided that Wennington money was as good out of Vicky’s hand as it ever had been out of Tom’s. She worked hard to prove herself, and while the harvest was not as good as that of the year before, it was good enough. On the first anniversary of Tom’s disappearance, Vicky removed her widow’s weeds, but each morning she still visited the cliff’s edge. It was not anything that she could ever explain to anyone else, but she believed that somehow the return sweep of the tide took her love out to Tom.

Over the years, the farm flourished. Vicky became known as a fine farmer and a shrewd businesswoman. She got the best hands because she always paid the best wages. She always paid the most because she always made the most. Eventually she started to buy out neighboring farmers, at a fair price, and when she brought new land under her management, its yield invariably increased.

For twenty-two years, Vicky worked. She became the greatest landowner in the region, and Alexander became a healthy young man, strong in body, spirit, and values. Then one day, he met a bright, energetic young woman from a nearby town. He fell in love, proposed marriage, and was accepted. Vicky knew that her son would be happy.

For twenty-two years, she had spent an hour every morning looking from the cliff at the crooked, inviting fingers of the surf. Three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Everyone knew she was waiting for her husband. Eight thousand days. Rain, wind, sleet, snow, sun; it did not matter to the Widow Wennington. Eight thousand hours. Never once did she desert her lonely command post at the edge of the world, where the earth fell into the sea.

In the autumn after Alexander’s wedding, there was a terrible storm. It was, in fact, the worst since the one that had claimed Tom. Strangely enough, it occurred during the same weekend, in early November, in which she’d lost him. The wind raged, but not even a storm of such magnitude could keep Vicky from the cliff’s edge. In truth, she liked stormy days best, because they made her feel closest to her missing husband. Vicky stood with her arms out, embracing the rain as it pounded into her skin. She whispered his name, “Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom…” Her hair leapt about in mad directions, and then she yelled into the gale. “I love you, I love you, I love you. I will always love you.”

Alexander watched from the farmhouse, fascinated and dismayed. He had accepted his mother’s ritual because he had never known a life without it, but this was different. Usually, she was quiet and contemplative in her lookout; this day, she was jerking about as if she were the storm’s marionette. Alexander rushed out to confront her. “Mother! I’ve never asked you to stop before. Come in, this is dangerous!”

Vicky shouted back over the storm, “No!”

Alexander braced himself against the winds. Against his mother. “It doesn’t matter how long you watch.”

Vicky shook her head. “Of course it does.”

Alexander pulled the neck of his raincoat tight. He shouted from under his yellow rubber hood. “No one doubts your love.”

Vicky turned her face away from her son, towards the sea. She spoke softly, too softly for him to hear. “I only want to remember him.”

The thrashing of the rain had dug tiny gutters around her feet. The ground had begun to loosen and Alexander felt it shift. A crack opened between them: twenty-two years of standing in the same spot had undermined the cliff’s foundation. Alexander reached out frantically towards his mother, his eyes wide with fright. He screamed for her to take his hand. Vicky reached out towards her son but when her hand was almost in his, she stopped. Her fear left her and she smiled. She let her hand drop to her side.

“For God’s sake, Mother!”

Alexander could say nothing more. The wind and rain howled, and blasts of thunder and lightning crashed everywhere, but he had never seen his mother so calm, so beautiful. It was as if she had been waiting for her turn, and it had finally come. The ground gave out under her and he watched his mother disappear with the cliff’s crumbling edge.

Her body was never found. All the villagers said that she was finally returned to her beloved Tom, beneath the ocean’s waves.

N
ext to my bed, on the small table, I found a glass lily the morning following Vicky’s story. I was at a loss to explain how it had gotten there, as Marianne Engel had left the hospital well before I fell asleep. When I asked the nurses whether any of them had left the glass lily, they all swore that they had not. Furthermore, Maddy firmly held that no one had passed by the nurses’ station during the night. Which meant that either the nurses were lying, or Marianne Engel had sneaked back in under the cover of darkness.

The second question about the glass lily was: what did it represent?

Why, you might be asking, do I assume that it had any meaning at all? Some things, blown-glass objects among them, are simply pleasing to look at. (And need I remind you that real flowers were not allowed in the burn unit?) Nevertheless, I was certain that it
did
have meaning; the more time I spent with Marianne Engel, the more certain I became that all things are inexplicably connected.

“Well,” Dr. Edwards said, “a little mystery is not always a bad thing. It forces a person to have faith.”

“Don’t tell me that you’re religious, Nan. I don’t think I could stand it.”

“My religion, or lack of it, is none of your business. You have your life, like last night’s big feast, and I have my life.” There was a touch of—jealousy, anger, disdain? what?—in her voice.

It was odd that Nan would resent a meal she herself had authorized. Ever the opportunist, I saw this as an opening to ask a question that had been bothering me: yes, I knew that hypermetabolism required me to take in an inordinate number of calories, but what was the
real
reason she had authorized Marianne Engel to bring meals for me?

“Everybody needs to eat,” Nan said simply.

Her answer, of course, was not an answer. So I asked again. Nan, as she sometimes did, took a moment to weigh the benefits against the drawbacks of speaking the truth. I liked it when she did this. True to form, she didn’t lie. “I allow these meals for a number of reasons. First, it
is
good for you to take in as much nourishment as possible. I’m doing it for the nurses, too, because you’re a nicer person after Ms. Engel visits. But most of all, I’m doing it because I’ve never met anyone who needs a friend as badly as you do.”

It must have felt good for Nan to get that off her chest. I asked what she thought about Marianne Engel helping with my physical therapy, and she admitted exactly what I suspected, that she did not like the idea very much.

“You worry I’m going to come to start depending on her too much,” I said, “and that she’ll let me down.”

“Doesn’t that worry you, too?”

“Yes,” I answered.

Since Nan had chosen to tell me the truth, the least I could do was reply in kind.

Everything seemed to be progressing more or less exactly as it should. Now that I actually had a desire to improve my body and was working to do so, I could feel myself becoming stronger.
ARE YOU SURE?
But preparation for the real world included the mental as well as the physical.