Clandestine

So the dead hovered over my wife and me, solidifying their presence as Lorna and I lived on. For years we loved, and it was worth the price in sorrow that my blind ambition had exacted from me and so many others. For a long while I wanted nothing that I didn't have, and I was moved, beyond movement by Lorna's willingness to give it to me. When I thought and thought and thought about it, and tried to reduce it to words, Lorna would read my mind and place fingertips to my lips and whisper softly the words I had once told her: "Don't think, darling, please don't try to hurt it." She always knew when the wonder was creeping into my consciousness, and she always circumvented it with love tinged with the slightest bit of fear.

That fear ran concurrent with our love; an undertow of guilt, a clandestine transit of many restive dead souls that seemed to give an almost spiritual weight to our lives—as though our joy were a communion for Eddie and Maggie and a vast constituency of the dead. We both felt this, but we never talked about it. We were both afraid that it would kill the joy for which we had worked so hard.

For a long time our destiny was manifest joy—joy in each other, in the sharing of our separate solitudes, in the spirit of loving contention that would end our arguments with us laughing in bed, Lorna's hands clamped over my mouth while she shrieked, "No, no, tell me a story instead!"

I told her stories and she told me stories, and gradually the distinctions between my stories and Lorna's receded until they became one vast panorama of experience and more than a little fantasy.

Because somehow, in our fusion, we lost sight of ourselves as the separate entities that we were, and somehow, very strangely, that made us easy prey for the long unmentioned dead.

16

It started getting bad with Lorna gradually, so that there was no place to look for causes and no one to blame. It was just a series of smoldering resentments. Too much giving and too much taking; too much time spent away from each other; too much investing of fantasy qualities in each other. Too much hope and too much pride and too little willingness to change.

And too much thinking on my part. Early in '54 I told Lorna that. "Our brains are a curse, Lor. I want to use my muscles and not my brain." Lorna looked up from her breakfast coffee and scratched my arm distractedly. "Then go ahead. You used to tell me 'Don't think,' remember?"

Construction work and later bricklaying was mindless and exhilarating. The men I worked with and drank beer with were vital and raw. But Lorna was aghast when I stuck to this kind of work for eight months, liking it more each day. She thought I was wasting the overactive brain that I was trying so hard to quiet. And her resentment grew. She couldn't stand the anomaly of a successful attorney married to a laborer husband. An ex-cop accused Communist, yes; a working stiff, no. I noted the contradiction of a champion of the "working man" disdaining the very same in her own household.

"I didn't marry a hod carrier," Lorna said coldly.

*     *     *

I was beginning to wonder who she did marry. I began to wonder who I married. I started to feel a hollowness, a depression that was fifty times worse than fear. But I held on: rigorously continuing to earn through construction work and golf hustling at least as much as Lorna did as an attorney.

We split the household expenses fifty-fifty, and each contributed monthly stipends to our joint savings and checking accounts. At the end of each month when we did our bookkeeping, Lorna would shake her head at the sad equity of it. We had a running gag at these sessions. We would split the expenses fifty-fifty, but I would pay for everything connected with Night Train. Lorna was mildly amused by him, but considered my noble link to Wacky and the past an obscene object. She thought dogs belonged on farms. "And the beast is your burden," she would say as we concluded our paperwork.

One day early in '55, she didn't crack her usual jokes. She was drawn and cross that day. When I looked to her to deliver her line she flung a sheaf of papers at me and screamed, "It's so goddamned easy for you! Goddamnit, how can you live with yourself? Do you know how hard I work to make the money I do? Do you, Freddy, goddamnit? Don't you think it's sad that I went to school for eight years to become a lawyer and help people, while all you do is swing a hammer and hit golf balls? Goddamn you, you Renaissance bum!"

For the first time I felt my marriage vows begin to impinge me. I began to feel that I couldn't ever be the man Lorna wanted me to be. And for the first time I didn't care, because the Lorna of 1955 was not the Lorna I married in 1951. I started to get itchy to break the whole thing up, to blow it all sky high.

As my love for Lorna entered this awful, angry stasis, I felt stirrings of what I could only call the wonder. Wonder.