20. Love’s Mirror
I WAS innocent for the last time, and shivering with cold. The weather contradicted my dream: was there significance in this chilly reality? I had seen myself arriving on a hot evening in dry moonlight; a whisper of wind; a landscape banked like a room. But in my hurry to reach my brother I had boarded a night train in New York after delivering my Florida pictures to the Camera Club. The canal crossing from Onset to Bourne, a mile of metaphor, confounded me by plunging me into dark early-morning mist. The Cape was imprisoned in freezing sea-fog, and dawn was far off. The spikes of mist continued until we were halfway to Yarmouth-port — Sandwich or thereabouts — where it began to lift on the crewcut marshes and revealed in flecks of escaping light nature’s frostbitten eyesores.
The Cape was bare and looked assaulted. It was that naked spell in late autumn between the last fall of leaves and the first fall of snow. Damp fields in Barnstable, an exposed farm house in Cummaquid, a frail soaked landscape of harmed hills and squashed grass and sunken meadows. In this stalled season, without muffling foliage or insulating snow, the brooks were louder, the rasp of crows noisier, and the sea-moan a despairing lament some distance inland through the dripping fingers of naked trees. That amplified racket, and the excluding cold, made me a stranger.
In those years, Hyannis was one street — a white church, a post office, a filling station, ten shops. That wet morning its off-season look was gooseflesh and senility, and it wore its shreds of fog like a mad old bride in a torn veil. It jeered at my homesickness and reminded me that home is such a tragic consolation of familiar dullness — that tree, this fence, that shrinking road.
Yet I was as happy as a clam. The photographer’s habitual impulse is to go on shooting, despite her incredulity. The camera — her most private room — must be used for memory. But I had taken care of that. On my Florida sojourn I had found the limits of the eye and I believed there was no more to see on earth. I had done air, earth, fire, water, and flesh, and now I could dispose of the world as I had disposed of photography and Blanche and Papa — my obsession, my rival, my patron. What I saw of Hyannis looked ridiculous and insubstantial, but with Orlando all things were possible. I was determined to begin again. It only remained for him to embrace me, for a return home was a return to childhood: a beginning.
I sat in Mr. Wampler’s old taxi — a beach wagon with wood paneling on the outside — my camera in my lap, my hands over its eye. We passed CLOSED FOR SEASON and SEE YOU NEXT YEAR signs. I was lucky. I knew this: we are offered not one life but many, and if we are alert we can seize a second or third. Sorrow is for those who expect too much from one; who, having exhausted all the possibilities of a single life, turn inward and refuse to see that schizophrenia is merely a mistake in arithmetic. When I heard someone described as a split personality I thought, Only a schizo? Why choose two lives when so many are available in us? My life as a photographer was over — there were no more pictures to take — but I had other lives in me, and there would always be others as long as I was in love. Wasn’t love the chance to lead another’s life and to multiply his by your own?
With Orlando I could be anyone I wished. It was the feeling I had known as a child, a longing buttressed by hope, and during that brief ride out to Grand Island from the railway station I felt a tide of blood batter my heart and at last a great warmth — though the day was bleak; and a blossoming of optimism — though the mist at the windows had turned to pissing rain. I was drenched in a freshet of joy as we bumped over the sand sludge that rutted the road.
There was the letterbox stenciled PRATT and the house snug on its own stretch of coast and surrounded by pines. Behind it, where the bare orchard began, was the looming windmill with its sails anchored, and some straggly dead geraniums blowing in the window boxes. And a maroon car parked near the house: Orlando’s Hudson.
“This is far enough.”
“Can’t stop here,” said Mr. Wampler. Mr. Wampler had a froggy voice; a tobacco-chewer, he spat often and inaccurately; he was known as “peculiar.” He jerked his thumb at my peepshow in the back of the beach wagon. “Can’t carry it all that way — not with my back.”
“Stop the car,” I said. “I want to walk.”
“Too damned much to carry—”
“Leave it here by the letter-box.”
“The rain’ll raise hell with it.” He put on his “peculiar” face: puzzlement, glee, incomprehension.
“I don’t give a hoot about the rain. I don’t need this stuff anymore.”
Mr. Wampler was still protesting as I paid him. I heard the thud of my trunks hitting the roadside as I made my way up the long drive toward Orlando. Instead of using the knocker, I let myself in with my key, and I saw my hand trembling to turn it. I pushed the door open and waited for some responsive sound of welcome. But there was only the grumble of the taxi dying on the road, and the regular slap of the sea, waves emptying on our length of beach.
My dream had been flawed. I knew even then I had been deceived by its moony romance. I was cold. It was a weakly lighted morning, with a storm pushing at the house. My moonlit windmill was fanciful. I corrected my dream: I would find him here, in the house. And he was here — there was his car, parked under the leafless birch.
I stepped in and slammed the door, walked from the parlor to the kitchen. Dishes in the sink and a smell of coffee: hope. I went up the backstairs and groped down the dark hall trying the doors, opening them left and right. Then I was at the front of the house again and looking back at the hall brightened with all the doors open. Not a sign of him. The rain simpered monotonously on the windowpanes, the wind sniffed at the eaves.
Of course! He had gone out. He had risen, made his bed, had a coffee, and gone for a walk in the hope that I would be here when he returned. Orlando loved rough weather. I made my way to the parlor and laughed out loud — a great hollow yuck — when I noticed that I was still wearing my huge camera. I had grown so used to its weight and the strain of its strap I hadn’t felt it. I did not unharness myself, but rather relished its tender and useless weight.
The parlor mirror showed me this businesslike person which, even as I gazed, I ceased to believe in. And it was then — my image fading almost to transparency — that I saw its reflection.
It was movement, it was white, and it appeared as a little flash in the windmill at the depths of the mirror. A swatch of hair, a hand, a face; I could not tell. But the sudden warmth of this tiny signal stirred a creature in me, and it stretched and shook itself and blinked as I brought my face close to the glass for more. My dream had made me cautious, but this was as I had imagined it: the beckoning stroke of light — he was there, he was waiting, through the looking glass, in the windmill.
I woke from this pause and ran through the house, out the back door and squelched across the grass of the sodden lawn. But even as I ran I was holding back. I had waited so long for this — contained my innocence for so many years — I kept myself from rushing to the windmill’s narrow porch and bursting in. My habit of innocence was its own restraint, and the stinging rain from the low cloud slowed me. I was terrified by what I knew was about to happen, as if I were seeing a fuse sparking toward the cylinder of a bomb and anticipating the boom in willful deafness.