Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

“He loved you, too,” she says. “He told me so before he died. Do you know what he said?”

Jarry shakes his head.

“He told me you were his beloved son. He said there was something in himself he was able to give to you without effort, from simple joy, that he could never give to Harlan, however hard he tried, and I see so clearly what it was, and why.”

“Father didn’t love me,” Jarry says.

“What?” she asks, surprised. “Of course he did.”

Jarry shakes his head. “He believed he did. There was a time I thought so, too. Not anymore. If he had, he would have set me free.”

Jarry’s self-possession has returned. The look that Addie knows, the one she first saw on the dock, has settled in his eyes. They’re like the ocean, serious, comfortless, and deep, and touched with the suggestion of fatigue the waves express when they draw back. “It took me a long time—years—to see,” he says. “Really, it’s only since the funeral, but what Father did, he held out his two hands to me….” He extends his fists and turns one face up and opens it. “In the right was freedom, and in the left was poetry, and he said, ‘This—poetry—is more valuable, and if you will give me that—your freedom—I will give you this.’ And because I was fifteen and didn’t see the gambit for what it was, because he was my father and I wanted to believe, I accepted it.”

“But, Jarry, I’m sure, in your father’s view, poetry was the most precious gift he had to give, and he shared it with you alone, not Harlan.”

“I don’t deny its value,” he replies, “but it’s a secondary good. Without the primary one, how much is it really worth? Harlan was able, every day when he got up, to choose his course.”

“But your father put the operation of the family business in your hands and taught you how to run it. What did Harlan learn—to ride to the hounds and go whoring in French Alley?”

“If he didn’t put his freedom to constructive uses, he was free nonetheless. If I’d told Father I wished to spend my hours in the library and leave the plantation business to others, do you know what he’d have said? He’d have been shocked and offended, Addie. Father would have felt betrayed by my ingratitude. If I’d persisted, eventually he’d have punished me. I know this as I know the sun will rise tomorrow. And how can that be love? It’s not. That Father felt a positive regard for me, I don’t deny. That there was fondness, affection, respect for my capacities—all this, I concede. But, love, no. For love is never love that regards the beloved in a lesser light or accords him lesser rights than the lover accords himself. Love is never love that oppresses, that grants the beloved lesser freedoms than the lover grants himself.”

And she is weeping now.

“But what…?” With surprised tenderness, he touches her shoulder.

“Do you know, I always feared they didn’t love me either.” She looks at him with streaming eyes.

“Who?”

“My parents. They died not two miles south of here.” She points with her right hand. “One day, when I was four months old, an afternoon as calm as this, they walked into this very sea and did not come back. My aunt always said it was an accident, but look…Look there, and tell me how could they have drowned.”

“You don’t believe they did?”

She shakes her head. “I never have and never will.”

“But why…?”

“Because of me. Because I was burdensome to them.”

“That can’t be true. I’m sure it’s not.”

“And I’m just as sure that Percival loved you.”

Reflected in the mirror of the other, each beholds himself more truly than either has alone. And love is close, so close, for what is it but this, one True Self by another beheld, and, by the power of that beholding, freed to see?

Addie is more beautiful now than when she was that girl of seventeen, who read “Evangeline” and vowed that she would wait for her own Gabriel no matter what, however long it took. And she has waited after all, despite herself. No man but Jarry has beheld her in this state; none ever will. A door has opened, one that Addie never found at Mme Togno’s school. For each of them, it is as if the world has only been created this last hour and no one else exists in it but them.

And she must tell him now. Addie knows she must.

Why doesn’t she? Why, instead, does she allow her head to drop against his shoulder, allow her eyes to close? In this brief, unexpected sweetness, she luxuriates, listening to the waves come in, and Addie vows to tell him on the walk to camp, and yet she doesn’t. Nor on the sail back. She’s grateful for the hissing of the bow wave on the keel, for the drumming of the edge of the taut sail.

At home again, she accuses her reflection in the mirror as she brushes out her hair. Love is never love that grants the beloved lesser freedom than the lover grants himself. Isn’t that what Jarry said, and isn’t it what she has done? And why?

The cardinal lights upon the branch, and Addie hears the words as clear as if the dead man spoke them in her ear: “I was afraid that if I freed them, they might leave.”

I must tell him, Addie thinks. “I must tell him now.” She says the words aloud, and yet she doesn’t rise to go. For shaking the foundations is, after all, a fearful enterprise. She never leaves the room all night, but lies awake and tosses, fretting. She’ll tell him in the morning. “I will,” she vows. “I will.” The necessity has the inevitability of death, and Addie dreads it hardly less. She’s unaware of having slept, but apparently she has, for something startles her and she awakes to find a gray light in the