When a Moment Arrives Ten Stories

By David Taylor Johannesen

Twelve absorbing stories of love lost and found again set in captivating locations from Scotland and Norway to New England, and from Paris to the Pacific ocean. From When a Moment Arrives to Tea Dance, and ending with The Golden State, each story invites the reader to join in the characters’ inner ––and geographic–– journeys and yearning to be understood, surprised by their capacity for new love, and others still gripped by a longing to be loved and to love ––without fear.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796085440

David Taylor Johannesen

About the Author David Taylor Johannesen was born in Salt Lake City and grew up in Boston. His earlier published literary works are: Tales of Love and Valor, Two Novellas (2018) Falcons and Seagulls, a Utah Tale (2015) Last One Close the Gate, Selected Stories (2012) Vespers East & West, Selected Poems (2011)* *Written at Oxford, 1996 Johannesen lives in Los Angeles with his life Linda and border collie Fallon. His ancestry is Scottish and Norwegian. He was educated at University of Pennsylvania, New York University and Oxford University, U.K. Johannesen has two children: a son, Christian, a media executive in New York City; and a daughter, Helen, a restaurateur and sommelier in Los Angeles.

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Copyright © 2020 by David Taylor Johannesen.

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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Rev. date: 01/28/2019

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CONTENTS

Assembly of Ghosts

Seaborne Grace

The Tempest

School by the Sea

When a Moment Arrives

Tea Dance

Pabst

Rodeo

Afterlife

Lyft Lightly

When Time Stops

Plus Ça Change

Norway Forever!

The Golden State

Assembly of Ghosts

I came upon a surprise when I was five: the disappearance of my mother from a well-planned family dinner devoted to her return; she had travelled to a distant quadrant of the State, across roads unmarked by fences where cattle might freely pass, heedless of roadside hazards or impediments facing mere travelers about. When a cow appeared upon the road, the driver swung sharply aside, even as the car, bending to its knees, rolled into a ravine, crushing sage and penstemon flowering by the road. Doors were flung wide and passengers were thrown aside, some sheltered by the car itself; another—mother—hurled from a broken door to land and expire beneath a cruel axel, a tire and fender.

She’s late, I announced. Keep dinner waiting for her."

Mom may have been delayed along the way, grandma offered.

We can keep the table set, leave the plates until she comes, I compromised at the age of five" I was told.

For three days the sorrow deepened in the house like a curtain drawn across the room, separating light in the fireplace from the dark hanging from the beams of the tall roof.

We must wait, our grandfather whispered. All will be revealed. Never explain and never complain; await the truth prayerfully.

Revelations are tricky, my cousin Gloria announced years later. You’ll never know for sure how to trust your own feelings.

I knew she, a second cousin, was wooing me towards the chancel of marriage though she well knew our grandfather must approve such a union and probably would not. I know your mother’s death so long ago left you with a mistrust of women, even though you’ve survived two marriages for which you were utterly unprepared: admit it, how could they compete?

That’s a crude way to sum up a life of overcoming failure—

Please spare me, dear boy: you’ve been a bright success!

Are you proposing to restore me from disappointment or even offer me an escape from everything crowding about me?

Neither, dear heart. You’re fit and well-suited to your life. Your calling will be to face it and live it; embrace and gather pleasure—

"In your meaning, pleasure is a kind of reward for getting things right, scoring a hat trick on the field, erasing the past—?"

Not at all! she protested. "Your reward is having me, belonging to me day and night. Finding our way forward away from the past. I shall be the future you have denied might someday unfold—"

—then let the promised land take us along and along! she was hesitant to agree, offering me a slim shadow of reassurance.

T he Promised Land may not be within easy reach; nor is it ever explained, defined or displayed in recognizable form or shape. I offered my bride fulfillment of a dream—an illusion we would keep secret from the world around us—which may disappear or unravel in such a way that would deny recollection. Yet it held—offered us a sanctuary—and we found its boundaries with ease.

Gloria was careful never to step into my mother’s lost place: she offered herself without hesitation to act as our children’s mother, a not to compete presence in their and my lives. She’d accept another woman perched upon my shoulders as if to guide me in raising my children as her very own. Your abiding love for your mother’s memory has strengthened your love for me,’ my wife said one day when we were taking our children from baths to beds, and beyond, perchance, to dreams. Her sister Charlotte appeared our last year in college and swept me away utterly.

G loria awakens with full memory of her dreams: scenes and their sequence; shades of colors on visible landscapes; conversations with people past and present; parades and processions, music by instruments. I remember nothing but the vague, escaping dark or light from my pillow, not even a shadow or a shape to call forth a memory. Yet I am grateful not to recover whatever may have passed through my sleep: better not to know, start a day with a fresh, blank page; arise, make morning tea, feed the dog and read the news, not spools of social media . Where is my husband?

Did you say something? Gloria asks from the covers. Are there any other presences we may have overlooked or found ?

We have so many cousins and ancestors to account for: shall we not cast our nets closer to shore? Deep waters await us. There is nothing to acclaim— even if there is much I must deny—

—Have you’ve given any thought what might appear or present itself in our midst? her guardian and benefactor asked. Don’t answer that; I’d rather not face the struggle of disproving or even speculating beyond my own range of fantasy.

In some ways you are a phantom! she laughed, rolling adroitly on top of me. Since neither of us wears pajamas, consequences were an authoritative, merely swift twelve minutes of arching which seemed to last over and over, but couldn’t have as our children were still asleep. They always announced themselves profoundly. I didn’t think to wear my diaphragm, so prepare yourself for a third child, even twins given your potency. My progeny will likely four: brace yourself.

Put out more flags and fasten bright chevrons to your collar! I rejoiced, dancing a few steps around the parlor which very soon brought the children to the threshold of my nudity, deftly hidden by the counterpane on the bed. They danced with me delighted and begged their mother to join in, singing in her rich alto voice. The tune, taken from a Scottish frolic, was improvised to offer a theme and variations which still haunted me: Gloria, O Gloria lift up your praise; Glorify your husband, yet awaiting you in the gladdened morning haze: trip lightly across the meadows whose flowers stand in a promise of tomorrow’s fulsome days, haunted me. God forbid she might sing Gaelic!

"I never told you this but a few years before we met I drove out to mother’s crash site and tried to replicate the car rolling down a small ravine —with a seatbelt , which would have saved her life. Of course there were no seatbelts in 1950 and a few years ago I explored with one of my cousins, a lawyer, the possibility of a class action suit against the auto industry. He demurred, noting the statute of limitations, but I offered my sentiments to CEO’s of Chevy, Ford and Chrysler and a letter to the Boston Globe."

No reply on all fronts, I assume, she mused forbearingly. "Your provocation reminds me of your memory when you were twelve in that exclusive Boston boarding school and refused to accept demerits the headmaster announced in school assembly."

The car I rolled was a beat-up, retired-to-scrap Plymouth which my grandfather had traded for a new Chrysler—he had been a dealer in the ‘thirties until the Depression wiped him out. Still, he had land and buildings which he spent his lifetime selling.

Did you enjoy some thrill of survival, or was it safe enough to be purely mechanical? And how did the car look afterwards?

According to one of my uncles—who went directly to the crash site to retrieve my mother’s watch—it suffered greater damage than the later model I chose for my research: Maybe more robust construction? But in the old days they made heavier cars—no concern either about gas mileage—with thundering V8 engines to race you across the Eisenhower highways!

After all these years of speculation it must be frustrating to you, she soothed me in an effort to take me out of the past.

"I keep pondering if something were missing—not lost— misplaced. I have spent years of therapy in that long search—the most satisfactory a Harvard MD again, before I met you—yet the outcome seems to be equivocal at best. Am I sitting on the fence or are the doctors?"

"Will it be best to dismiss these…demons? No, that’s harsh, I’ll admit. What is it you lawyers say, let me re-phrase—"

I never finished law school at Tufts: the dean took me aside after my first year and said: ‘the study of law requires changing your thinking. You are very bright, but you have bad luck when you think. May I suggest the business school? They’ll accept you.’

And they did! You became a banker instead and flourished—your contributions bear witness to that—and made more money than most lawyers in far more years, slaving to become partners.

"Maybe that’s what is missing, a love of our judiciary since Chief Justice Marshall established the principle of judicial review, (as well as denying Indian rights.) In my college years I loved reading great Supreme Court decisions more as literature than Constitutional precedents—Cardoza, Brandeis, Holmes and Black—not that I approved of FDR’s attempt to pack the Court—"

But those were perilous times, she reminded me. How could you have assessed what your grandfather believed?

I agree that the New Deal actually saved capitalism in the USA. Reactionaries still deny this but his service over four terms may not be disputed. During the War was it he or Churchill who said: ‘We have nothing to fear but fear itself?’

I’m sure it was FDR. After all, noble Churchill had to pander to him yet Dunkirk, above all, was the century’s bravest rescue.

Yes, the Marne and Ypres in the First War and the Battle of Britain in the Second are what I remember. But there were many others such as the Dardanelles and Egypt and Singapore and El Alamein. Those are episodes and distractions of history.

You are a diligent historian, my love, she said even as she tried to reign my remote, wandering recollections, speculations and assumptions. But I must ask how history matters today?

"I suppose not very much I must confess after years of chasing its mysteries and random suppositions. It is a great beast upon my shoulders, ever reminding me I don’t know what I don’t know. I sense a winter of discontent such as Richard discovered as the last Plantagenet king: how much will my fate now reveal?"

So if we adhere to Shakespeare all will be revealed.

He is the alpha and omega of human personality and mutability, ever reminding us of the heritage of language after Chaucer and the certitude of our—what?—destiny in a world of confusion. I’ll stand beside the ancients, starting with Dante.

"Aah, confusion is a handmaiden to ambiguity, a distant relation remembered on few inconvenient holidays. We’ve seen this in our daily lives and found the message welcome, elastic even, as we seek to navigate the byways and waterways of faith."

"A Glorious thesis your sister could frame, my darling girl, yet you left me eyeless in the wilderness, rather like something Robert Graves may have penned after the First War—although I confess I read only Good Bye To All That—now terribly remote."

O, Solomon of the ancients, tell me a truth: Where in the last century would you like to dwell? The infamy of Bolsheviks taking control of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station; or an insurgence of resistance and discovery of a pathway to liberty? The U.N. was a fulfillment of Wilson’s failed League of Nations, and we live by its sanctions and promises however they fail daily

"My chosen century is the one you inhabit, day after day, as you said. It matters little what day and year we face, merely a sweet notice we take of the world around us; we may ignore all the rest—the detritus of whatever we now call civilization—a summing up of explanations and apologies of where history failed us as we wade through the swamps and estuaries left by."

"Then you must husband your resources, Gloria pleaded. I shall grant you any request you make, and every adventure you propose, but we must keep to our promises and leave speculations aside; we are safe in the arriving present moments."

ii

T he months flew away, as if gathered by winds and clouds which obeyed each other’s commands and gestures. She miscarried. I relished progeny, any line of Fairchilds which may well have expired with the death of my parents and Uncle Jocelyn’s demise without issue or beneficiaries or generations to bestow the line.

As if she had heard my ruminations she offered me a reprise, not even an escape, which she knew would lead to shuttered doors. "Your troubles are of your own making. You must search for a door you haven’t opened and remember, when God closes one door He, She opens another, but there’s hell in the hallway."

If so, my, self-mate, you’ve offered me the Key to the Kingdom: what’s the alternative, I always ask, forgetting today.

"I have always been your alternative," she assured me, laughing. Where else can I have been all these days and years? "To wear the world as a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there lightly—where does that come from—?"

—sounds Christian, for sure, but I can look it up somewhere?

No, I don’t scour the internet for something so sacred—: we’ll come upon an attribution from other sources; the Bible?

"I always prefer to consult primary sources in my research."

"You are a purist at heart. Could it be St. Francis of Assisi?"

I’ll not speculate just now. I don’t want to be burdened by any unwarranted expectations or led into blind attachments—

"—as long as you keep our attachment in the full light of day: We have our little sunbeams to remind us of that—four if you count Charlotte’s. In fact, I now remember a hymn from Sunday School, ‘Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, to guide and show the way…’"

Sounds like your distant Mormon upbringing, sweet and sentimental. In my Anglican Church background the hymns are more severely regimented; they fit the reading of the Nicene Creed. I thank my stars for women priests and a married clergy. Celibacy breeds an adolescent clergy who never really grow up

Dear husband, you’re on a tear: bring it down a notch!

Yes. But I do want to find where I heard that saying I gave.

Just accept deep inside you from the Scriptures you knew.

"The deep down things Gerard Manley Hopkins penned?"

"Not quite that distant, but I did learn in school days God’s Grandeur and the dearest freshness. A Great Victorian poet?" I knew I had reached a crossing point at this streaming baptism.

There you have it, dear boy: the glory revealed from your deep and profound recall of literature. Can we graze in the Twentieth? Or would you guide me back to far earlier realms?

"Prowl would probably be my approach. I never got much further than the Nineteenth Century—Middlemarch was the peak—yet I did immerse myself in Virginia Woolf when I was at Oxford long ago, well, not so long before I met you."

What was the strong attraction to Woolf? Gloria probed.

Rather than devote her writing to plot and sequence, she draws her characters from the inside, revealing them purely through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. Narratives flow intimately, invite readers to enter into and suspend themselves.

Isn’t that how we live lives today, secure and transparent?

Not to the world beyond but yes, deep within our own domains

There, you have offered a supple prophecy; no lingering questions are unanswered and no speculation is required—

—then we are indeed free and released from any judgement!

iii

T wo days later Gloria’s twin sister Charlotte arrived suddenly without any notice. Her dress was outlandish: she wore waders to her hips as if she were fishing and a long gaberdine jacket with matching headgear which defied any description. In the family she was always known as different but not dangerous and clung faithfully to that description. Gloria and I had been lovers before I met Charlotte in college—it was their father who’d introduced us—but our flame faded and expired very soon. She moved away.

What shall we do with her? Gloria asked, perplexed and alarmed that our long-past attraction might inflame us again. A spare room might not be far enough from you, and a hotel may be insulting. She is my sister, after all; I must look after her—

Then give her every consideration, protection even. She’s not well, even if she seems herself, whoever that is these days. I sought a generous, even compassionate approach, although I felt a growing attraction to my sister-in-law. I now wished her settled far as possible away from me: Lilith, wanton seductress.

You seem to be riding this storm, she said cautiously. I shall have my eye on you, nevertheless, she teased. She’s had another husband and professed to me to be looking around!

My darling, chivalrous girl, I’ll not be the next or even a slave to her forgotten claim and dubious charms. But I’ll confess, I may be mildly tempted. To have a pair of sisters is tempting!

"Being attracted to my sister—Charlotte the Harlot we called her—may be a form of polygamy or outright blasphemy. If you’d lose your senses to that extent I’d have to keep you near me and our children. I’ll allow you to marry her as a second wife."

Her cheerful accommodation was so profoundly confusing!

That’s my Mormon refugee talking! You’ll never leave Zion, will you, ever holding it’s eternal waiting for the world to discover?

"It would be purely to keep peace in the household. You know that long before you met me I let relapse that form of stimulation in my life. My problem was with women’s lack of Priesthood ordination. I found in my lovely Anglican husband a refreshing liberty and sanctity to become myself, apart yet inside.

I pledged every celebration of that belief to you, and you to me."

Gloria’s affirmation of faith left my knees weakened in an out-of-body surrender to what she had offered throughout our marriage. She had been David’s Bathsheba, leading, coaxing and forgiving; she whispered my name to remind me—: Solomon, my Solomon, you must know your father’s House and my place in it."

My father’s selection of names for me and my sister Leah were well considered. He was from the ancients, I told them.

Ø

C harlotte hid herself aside in another room, probably lamenting high school memories, her relentless competition with Gloria for boys and awards, and the bitterness unleashed between them. I had listened to these stories with an open heart, wanting to see both sisters in an even light; it was plain to find Gloria had been hurt but was forever forgiving, even hearing my fugitive remarks about polygamy and her distant Mormon roots. Please be as kind and forbearing to Charlotte as you can, she pleaded. "I can accept her joyfully as a sister wife, to keep our household peace ."

"She’ll never accept any amends for not marrying her before you! She was a loose and wild girl and we lived together in college and planned to go off to Oxford with her grandfather’s holy sanction."

I doubt she has appeared here to claim or take you away—

"—God forfend! Her life compass will never reach that far; no, I believe she appeared to make her mark, to clear some ledger she may have kept to calculate her grievances—real or imagined—I may have inflicted to deprive her of promised privileges, blessed by sacred endowments she may have imagined."

"Are you saying she’s delusional—mentally disturbed?" Gloria threw at me fiercely. Can she be absorbed by this after these years? Can you say her appearance is a psychotic episode?

Glorious girl, how else can I explain she is here to settle a score we may never discover? Her fantasies lie far beyond and beneath a mere adult reaction to ordinary life, distortions and excessive views or withdrawal from any clarity of recognition—

—you’re ranting amateur psychiatry: Is Charlotte’s insane? Is there a cure you can release her from her torment?

"I must marry her, even give her children; what she believes she has missed I must restore. If I share my love for you with her she will be fulfilled, feel compensated. That will eliminate the sorrow of losing her life, and me, to you. I envisage you, sister wives, as twins who cleave to each other with no hesitation. I’ll be fair and equitable in my attentions to each of you, neither to have advantages she would not share with the other."

"How generous of you, groom, to come up with a solution which suits you so well! Gloria exclaimed in bitter scorn. Clarity and Charity may pave the way as twin consolations for your pride—which, as we were taught, goeth before the fall—but I’ll never accept Charlette in our bed, even in a secondary trundle."

Her fury, tempered with quiet contempt, restrained me from any reply or even apology. I was stranded, like Odysseus returning to his Penelope, and must pass through Scylla and Charybdis to regain my love again. This was a daunting prospect, yet still within my reach which will exceed my grasp!

You look smug and satisfied, like a professor with a fresh proof. If you open yourself up to me, not even repent, I am yours always. I shall always stand with and beside you. We’ll send our Charlotte away, back to where she belongs to see again the hills, shallows and meadows of the farm where she has long been reconciled, happy, and, let’s face it secure.

She may see only the shadows of a life long forgotten, a claim which may never be redeemed or a promise never fulfilled; even if absolutely the vision of what was impossible to be—

—then how can we account for her life living with us always—? I must follow and discover the answers we all await until done.

iv

N o answers appeared, no Rosetta Stone showed itself across a desert, let alone the doors of our simple abode where our lives and Charlotte’s expected twins to shelter and thrive. Gloria, with Evasive Mormon sentiments accepted a plural bond of marriage.

After our wedding, Charlotte and I went away, not from Gloria, but to a sanctuary we had known years before: Oxford, where a flood of memory had to be set aside as we reconciled that part of our lives with the urgent need to bring into focus again, if not restore, recover and agree upon the life we were to live with or without Gloria. I believe Gloria and I are inseparable: lives lived together must not be lived apart, Charlotte insisted, quite lucid after the days before we married, with a command of reason and vision, qualities she had not revealed when we were young as I began to envision, embrace, and take her into my ken.

As my lover after Gloria, her passion captured the days we’d first known each other; measured and appraised our fervent love before it became evident or mature, merely a flame rising and receding like a winter tide following a Northwest wind across a thin November sky. Fishermen returned in their sleek trawlers.

I want to take you to realms you’ve never seen, and return as if you are still searching for those and others before your eyes— I promised—: shall we go there together? Her eyes blazed yes, take me everywhere, mountains and valleys will be our home!

W e brought our lives to an accommodation, a reconcilement of the nearness and distance hovering above us—which could only be aligned within a family where all hopes and failures joined—as we came together to heal and surrender our differences to an authority we had not recognized or encountered. Everything must change, and we’ll all be the agents of change! a voice rose above all others in the crowded room where distant relations were offered cups of punch and the comfort of disguise.

Grandmother’s ever-expanding salon is today flooded with strangers and well-wishers who claimed the honor of being lost relations. I remembered a great aunt from my school days, and another who had come to my faux law school graduation whose husband admonished me to change the way I think to take up the law—an admonishment I failed to fulfill—or vanish into the Business School, where I prepared myself for a banking career which served me well later in Wall Street. I led a random life, backing into work I despised and becoming a success through a labyrinth of deals I improvised at best or passed on to others in hidden transactions, always under the scrutiny of the S.E.C.

You seem agitated, dear Solomon, grandmother took me away from the swerving and discordant commotion filling the room—a tribute to her keen selection and endurance of an orchestra—to take me by my shoulders and swing into her stern sensibility. You’ve troubles in your life, I hear, and you must pull yourself together.

Yes, I accept your concern; I’m taking steps to satisfy you. I need time and distance to find a solution: you’ll know soon—"

—dear boy I want to know now! As I see it you face the prospect of two women in your life; one your wife, and the other who hoped to be your wife and still holds that possibility at heart. I have no doubt you’ll make a difficult choice—between sisters—and come to your senses as your late grandfather would expect.

But we believe Charlotte may be delusional and need a doctor’s care. She still sees Gloria as her rival since high school and college days and has come forward to assert again her claim.

And you feel a heavy responsibility for her, I understand.

That’s my quandary. I have no authority to commit her.

"It would be very difficult to have her committed, or even placed under psychiatric care. Patient’s rights have advanced by leaps since my day when we had to admit your uncle Seth Fairchild to McClean Hospital for extended….observation. When released he came into the care of your grandfather for ten years."

Did you suffer under that guardianship? I asked bluntly.

Not at all! He turned into an avid gardener—even a horticulturist noted for his discovery of certain hybrids we introduced at the farm. But he never followed the expectations of all our family’s M.I.T. graduates to go into the fledgling electronics business after Jocelyn sold the mills.

Not everyone can be expected to discover semi-conductors?

Your father did, and took silicon all the way to California to Intel Which, with Howard Hughes, basically hijacked it, I’m told; that may be a tale I misunderstood, my interests lay elsewhere."

v

A s it turned out—or devolved, as my father may have said in his elegant search of theorems, proofs and probabilities—Charlotte and I live with Gloria in harmony. Our household is devoted to healing, to the binding up of old wounds with pure ointments of recovery. There is no more blame to assign or prosecute as we move step-by-step along a footpath of reconciliation; slow at times, yet never falling backwards into an unseen chasm. Every moment within our household is transparent, especially when Charlotte presented me prospective twins as we marveled at a genetic or merely hereditary pattern we cared not to question.

We’ll need a bigger house, I laughed, sisters now to hold all children in an embrasure of faith and progeny. I shall propose to grandmother that we live at the old farm in Hamilton if she’d care to live in town, on Charles Street in Back Bay. Knowing her, I’d say she may prefer to live at the farm with us and superintend the raising of her great-grandchildren. Gloria withheld approval.

"Have you considered your seraglio? I agreed to this arrangement purely for the benefit of the children; fucking Charlotte day and night is not where I’ll cross the line. Shelter both your children, yes, that is where we are, but is as far as it goes. I’ve decided to sequester mine away from this ménage and move to my brother. You may decide which ‘wife’ you want to inhabit your life, but I’ll not be one of two. With two sets of twins I’m more than a mere midwife. Whoever you may father with Charlotte are not mine."

As Gloria left for New Hampshire and Charlotte sequestered at McClean Hospital in Belmont I found myself facing challenges I had not considered. I was responsible for the well-being of two women who, through whatever agency, had borne my children. My immediate priority was to attend to Fairchild interests in Silicon Valley and I booked reservations to San Francisco, thence south to Menlo Park where I found a small bungalow near Stanford to rent. Before leaving, I adjusted my wills to leave equal bequests to my sister wives and their issue, as the lawyer worded it, and other ‘assigns’ or beneficiaries in extended family.

Where are you? appeared a message on my phone from Gloria. I shut down the device but kept open a dedicated phone to the hospital where Charlotte was recovering. Only her doctors could reach me. Her condition, now pregnant with my twins, complicated a solution I had hoped to resolve to her and my advantage. Having lost my mother as a child, I revered all womanhood; if a woman left me, however, I cut her loose. Now I struggled to save one with every breath I could summon.

Following a successful mission in California, securing our position as an initial Intel investor and selling a well-diluted minority to Howard Hughes—who always made money and forever lost it—I returned immediately to Boston to find Charlotte in good spirits and ready to be discharged. "You’ve come for me?" she cried. I thought surely I’d lost you. I’ve learned never to share you with Gloria, however. I’m forever her sister, but not a sister wife! I took her away from the hospital and drove to grandmother’s house on Charles Street. We climbed the tall steps to our home and vowed never to leave.

vi

"N ow we can live the life we were always meant to have," she beamed. I want you tell me about your life before we met in high school—your early teens especially—but not the tragedy of your mother. I am your Charlotte, never again to compete with Gloria."

"When I was thirteen and home with my father in New York from boarding school in Boston, he took me to all the Broadway musical. He was well-to-do and highly regarded in his profession. One night we went to see Camelot, starring Robert Goulet. After the show, he sent me across the theatre alley to a flower shop and told me to inquire for a job delivering flowers. He evidently heard from a wealthy parent that her son had some temporary job ‘to build up character.’ I felt humiliated—the more so since the shop had an opening—yet I told my father ‘no openings.’"

Poor darling! Out of the blue. Did you get a summer job?

Yes, when I was sixteen. I worked in a bookstore in Back Bay as a stock boy, but soon to handle invitations for author readings. I loved literature and was encouraged as I hadn’t been at school beyond years of Latin and Santayana’s The Last Puritan.

Did you feel….not betrayed but discarded by your father? He did pay for your college and grad school? Full ride I assume?

I nodded. I was not eligible for scholarships because his income was too high. Such entitlement! I felt like a beggar.

But your life has turned out well; true you flunked out of law school but your years in Wall Street were fruitful, agreed?

Only because I figured out—from M.I.T.—how to sell a fading family company to Silicon Valley—

—yes of course, that’s what we live on now, my gracious lord! Now take me to bed! After my sister you owe me one thousand days and nights, end-to-end, to catch up!

That adds up to two thousand? I’d better start counting! And I’ll discount what dad gave me along the way…

"When in your life did love equal money? Did you balance a thin line, not even an equation, strung with doubt and hope for resolution? Darling there is no such thing as division of the spoils."

"I always thought prosperity was a concern for the next world, far beyond my reach; Puritans—Calvinists, if you must—believed that the evidence of your salvation, or doom, was how your life in its progress could prepare a plain table for God’s Will."

I hesitated to overwhelm her with too much family history; it was enough to feed her spoonfuls one-by-one, lest she flee!

Well, my now and forever husband, you are free of a persuasion of that cast; we have a life together which sees and celebrates present moments without ghosts or their memories

Are you saying there are no more ghosts or phantoms: What you see is what you see? That will be a huge leap of faith, given the life I have had.

I believe you dwell too much on whatever your life has been—an accumulation of everything the rest of us have faced—as it’s been a blend of imagined scarcity and anticipated abundance. ‘In ordinary life we bless and are blessèd’ Yeats said while looking at passersby from a London teashop.

"He also wrote, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world—"

—full marks, darling, for us both. We didn’t have to look it up!

I’ve always seen your Wellesley education equal to mine.

Nothing to match your training in science at M.I.T.—which girls missed for the most part beyond window-dressing; and I’m not saying you ever saw me as a mannikin in a shop window—still, I held my own, certainly as the measure is against Gloria!

Gloria is a free spirit who wavers between heaven and earth; never rising above or landing below, citizen of a lost land.

How elegantly you phrase that, darling. I fear she is behind every cupboard, wainscoting in the wall, and alcove from sight.

Then I shall have to summon sweepers, carpenters, roofers and even shepherds to probe, inspect and remove the intrusion.

Oh, my redeemer! Charlotte sang out, rushing into my arms with pre-emptory urgency, clearly hoping to tip the scales of my affection from her sister when she knew they must remain equally shared.

vii

W e found ourselves lost yet discovered by some interference, a blessing; a configuration of stars and planets unknown and lost in the heavens—even the mystery of the Moon which hung like a pendant in the sky, reminding us of the nearness and distances we must approach, perhaps never reach, which should exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for, as John Browning taught us—:

She and I fled into a heavenly redoubt, a sanctuary where none could find us; our love consumed us, then threw us into a bliss we had not found before, companionship, the well-shared and understood fidelity which sister-wife Gloria never discovered. I took Charlotte to a high plateau above a sacred Utah desert she had never seen before. We climbed to red-rocked buttes where morning and evening appearance was the same glow, a subdued and hidden landscape where our ancestors had strived; thrived.

You have given me safety, loyalty and a handle for living,

I fear, dear heart, you may have awarded me too much praise.

Can it be because of your childhood you find it difficult to accept my love?

I accept our love without hesitation; it seems to be my boyhood has vanished.

Then I’ll take you at your word, as I always have: you and I love each other beyond measure or doubt: nothing hinders us!

Have you noticed the stillness out here is like the great sound of a muted drum, distant yet present everywhere? I asked her, suddenly aware of vast canyons and towering buttes around us.

It’s what gives us the presence to be part of it. Otherwise we’d be as invisible as the red sands spreading out before us, behind us at every footstep, which are far beyond count, she assured.

It’s fitting we should find intimacy in such an empty place!

That’s the point: we seek to fill spaces with ourselves and to expand life or imagination to meet what we see ahead—

"—it can’t be that simple, like cowboys answering immediate questions by scanning the distances they prowl—perspective is in our faces every day, not our footsteps along the way, if you’ll forgive my twist of tongue; do we inflate our vision to meet the reality facing us? Do we respond to a stimulus of base necessity?" I felt I was crawling to a resolution for which I had little faith, no boundaries protected me from the steep walls of doubt—

That’s what we’re in this wasteland to discover. Do you think we could find answers in the narrow streets and alleys of Boston? We’ve come here to cleanse our minds of assumptions and prejudice, neither of which prosper in a desert, my love!

Then I shall ever be your desert bride, forever and ever. Whatever spaces may divide I shall close; any impediments I’ll sweep aside. This trip—austere as it has been—has offered me a vision of paradise which I can attain only with you, by your side.

Ø

W e returned from Utah weary and footsore, not so much from hiking those wastelands as the raw fatigue of having examined our life and marriage in such an empty and vacated landscape. I and Charlotte knew we had annealed our bond, given it space to inflate our love for each other. Our memories we told ourselves were abundant, yet I saw that the only accurate memories are those we refuse to admit to our consciousness: We are doomed by memory, and still are exalted by love, day-after-day.

This is what I’ve always told you: Remembrance is a false god, dragging you into a past which no longer exists, Charlotte appeared to plead.

"Then what does exist? Yes, our children flourish and we rejoice in them; our ancestors have given us our lives. Gratitude seems to be as natural as blood flowing through our veins. Have I lost sight of or overlooked any blessing at our doorstep?"

We must let go of pride or need for vengeance, Charlotte said in a soft, uplifted voice, as if sung from a choir or soothing a troubled child. There is no gap in our faith to fill or redeem.

Both emotions are bred and nourished by memory, or the past which we reconstruct every few minutes. ‘I don’t know what I don’t know’ a law professor once said. Then he advised, ‘You’re very bright Solomon—but you have bad luck when you think.’ That’s what sent me to the M.I.T. Business School instead—

—but you seem more like a philosopher, a classics scholar—

At Oxford you wear many hats, beneath many guises; sheltered from overt scrutiny—so long as you declared a field of study and paid your fees. This is how a university evolved over 1,000 years.

And you took that identity, and wore it like a chevron on your sleeve? she searched for a response I had not yet offered, a clue to some hidden, long exalted, sequestered, sanctuary.

"I have no other identity—whatever that is—other than what you see every day. At Oxford I decided to make life transparent, seen and unseen, as the Scriptures tell us, or whatever your senses detect."

So you have given me a summary, not the core, of all we have been reaching for in our life together, Charlotte insisted. "I am offering you the core as you say, not the perimeter, or the outside of our life together, for there are no such boundaries—"

—then our love is secure; our children will know grandchildren; will we live so long as to see them grow and thrive? We stand at the threshold of that question but already know the answers.

"My darling, we live in the midst of our lives, and so we can see into and behind through a prism sharpened to our presence.

‘—Let us go then, you and I, as the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table.’ —TS Eliot", I quoted.

T here was a quiet in the house for several days, as if occupants and visitors had arrived to mend fences and withdraw quickly to salve wounds and forget why they had come. Neighbors, well- wishers and distant relatives poured into the house, were soon a fragment searching for a means to leave. Grief had no place to settle and mature, offering itself to a proper resting place.

I gave myself a week of distance from family sorrow and dread. We had filled our lives with those left behind and those who had promised to love us until every measure of life is shed and lost. It was a severe, Puritan claim to life which me to a definition— The sneaking suspicion that somewhere, someone is happy. I held to the remark of George Santayana about the kind of private school I had attended in Massachusetts: hotbeds of snobbery, cruelty, and disaffection, from his book The Last Puritan. I never gave myself the label as a disaffected Puritan, whatever my ancestry had witnessed, ordained or given me to believe. I merely sit in the silence and wait for the light, as a Quaker.

That is all we can hope for, in this life and the next.

Those are the words my grandmother spoke when she died. We seek and we strive and never find the outcome, everything is suggested but nothing is revealed: that is the wonder and beauty of our life together—

—a sacrament I can take with me, and you to the afterlife.

Nothing will ever delay, retard, inhibit, or even restrain our journey, wherever it may take us, Charlotte urgently promised.

‘We are at the midpoint of that journey, neither here nor there, was the best cautious assurance I could offer her—yet I amended my words to say of course the midpoint is everything!"

I cherish how you said that, she beamed, because we’ve come together closer to our mature lives rather than extreme youth, when my sister may well have snagged you! Thank God I am with child, and I know they’ll be twins.

"Darling, we’re far from middle-aged, at least until we reach forty—! I gasped, struck silent by what she told me. How long? I stumbled. How long—why didn’t you—

"I just found out. And there are two heartbeats! Shall we hope for fraternals, a boy and a girl. We’ll know in a few weeks."

Have you told Gloria? Will she be jealous? I pondered, and felt a twinge of disloyalty begin to rise in my throat. Why should this be? Both women are eternally equal in my eyes.

"She can come to the Christening next year. We’ll invite lots of our friends and she’ll fade into the crowd or seek out people to befriend. Yes, she’ll enjoy being noticed by everyone: wasn’t she always like that, somewhat needy? I was the wallflower, she reminded me, and so grateful you found me upon my trellis!"

I took Charlotte in my arms and settled us on a long leather sofa, the kind you see in clubs and hotels. We undressed each other, and she fitted herself on top, murmuring, "we must get used to this position for when the babies grow inside of me. I’ve always immensely enjoyed looking down