Work Text:
Hem woke at midnight. It was a common thing in those days.
Hadley lay by his side, her face soft and painterly in the moonlight. He gazed at her for a very long time.
They were so happy, when it was just them and Bumby and no one else. So happy he could have died.
That’s what made the other thing so terrible.
Like the scorching lashes of a whip that other thing was, like flagellating himself to ecstasy.
Like the saints.
Some saints.
And some religion, Catholicism was, stitched together out of pretense and shame, the sweetness and the guilt of anything it called sin. The wine of transubstantiation could chase the liquor of sin all you want, but they commingled in the gut, and he had never met a Catholic, devout or not, who could make sense of that concoction.
It was a drink you knew would give you a head in the morning, but you downed it anyway.
Hem searched for his slippers with his feet and got up, walking to where the silver light streamed through the window. Looking at Hadley would not help him now. Had she really not guessed what went on between him and Pauline? Or was it like her forgiveness – where she forgave but did not forget, though she pretended not to remember?
Outside, the mountains were black and purple, their tops etched with silver. The town lay curled at their base like a cat, and Hadley’s breath was like the sound of lapping waves.
It was cooler by the window, the sides of the glass frosted over. Maybe the chill would help him sleep. At least, there was no harm in hoping.
He gazed out the window at the snow, glittering-purple and packed thick as frosting.
Then he heard a creak and an exhale and turned to look, and his stomach dropped like a stone.
It was not Hadley, nor Bumby.
Instead, at the table some paces away, there sat a man, heavy-set and grizzled. His bathrobe was an indeterminate color in the moonlight, and above his left brow, a smooth white scar rose like a hill.
“Who the hell are you? How did you get in?” Hem rose instinctively on the balls of his feet.
The man grinned like a Cheshire cat, his face coming fully into view. The right side seemed to be covered with dark lacquer.
“Well, fröhliche Weinachten to you too,” he said, raising a glass that came from Hem knew not where.
At the sound of his voice, Hem nearly toppled.
He grabbed the window frame, making a bottle tumble from the sill with a clatter.
Hadley sighed and turned over in her sleep, but thankfully did not wake.
Merde. Had he really had that much to drink?
Meanwhile, the man tossed back his head and emptied the glass, exhaling sumptuously.
“Ahh, damn, that’s good. I’ve missed the schnapps they make around here.”
Hem rubbed his eyes and blinked several times, but the man did not disappear. He just sat there grinning.
“Well, well, well, well,” the man said. “I should’ve expected you’d stand there dull as a post, and not even offer Papa a drink. I had to get my own. What kind of hospitality is that?”
He squinted at Hem with familiar downturned eyes. He had Hem’s own square features, except for cheeks sagging like a bulldog’s. He also had a thick white beard: fearsome-looking and leonine.
“Do you not recognize me?” He winked. “Well, I suppose there’s no staying handsome forever. Dorian Gray would not have recognized his picture either.”
Hem ran his hand over his face, then he turned to the cabinet. He extracted a bottle of schnapps and a tumbler, pouring himself two fingers’ worth.
“Well, hah!” the apparition scoffed. “You don’t believe in me? Well, see if it gets better, then.”
Hem gulped down the schnapps, barely tasting it, but the man grinned all the wider, his legs spread indecently under his robe.
“Still don’t believe in me? Then stick your fingers in my wound, Doubting Thomas. They let me keep my face and jaw after we offed ourselves with the shotgun. They’re nice and reasonable in the afterlife, let me tell you. But the wound is still there. And so is the blood.”
“What? Huh?!” Hem clutched his schnapps bottle like a dinner bell.
The apparition raised his glass, which was inexplicably full again.
“Well, yes, what did you think? We offed ourselves, you and I. Just like your old man, and his old man before him. We died the same way, thirty-six years from today, except it was summer. But on the bright side, now I get to travel where I please, ticket-free. I get my papers stamped at the gates of the afterlife, and off I go. No boats, trains, or automobiles required. Oh, and by the way, there is no Heaven, or Hell, or Purgatory. That is just a lie they tell you to make you behave.”
By now, Hem was ready to slide down to the floor, his strength draining like water from a leaky bucket.
“So come on.” The ghost grinned, downing the replenished liquor. “Sit down and talk to Papa about what troubles you. You may as well, since I’m here. It’s not every day that you get to talk to your own self, except with thirty-six years of good old-fashioned head-knocking experience.”
He rapped the side of his head, exploding in raucous laughter. With a start, Hem glanced at Hadley – and also at Bumby, on the other side of the room in his little bed. But neither stirred.
“They will not wake.” The ghost smirked. “Only the ones who are meant to see me will see me. Only the ones who are meant to hear me will hear me.”
He bounced his eyebrows, depositing his glass on the table.
“Hadleeeey!!” he roared.
Hem’s stomach turned inside out, and the glass in the window shuddered.
But Hadley did not move.
Hem stared at his wife and then at the ghost, feeling very much like he was being squeezed through a coffee press.
Then he took a guarded step forward.
Heel-toe, heel-toe… He was nearly flush against the table now, appraising the ghost for solidity.
He certainly looked solid enough. None of the chair was showing through his bathrobe.
“Well, it seems you’re right,” he said, depositing his schnapps and taking a seat. “But I suspect that they could still hear me, since I don’t have your luck of being dead. And if you know what year it is, you also know what troubles me. So we can save some time.”
He tried for a sardonic grin, but managed only a grimace.
The older Hem sniffed.
“Well, yes,” he said. “I suppose yellow is yellow. Stein was right.”
Hem sucked in the air through his teeth, and the ghost flicked his eyes in the direction of Hadley, whose blanket rose and fell steadily.
“And what if she did hear all about your dirty, underhanded exploits?” He scoffed. “Your milksop lies – ‘oh, Hadley, Stein was talking my ear off again, you know how she gets’? You missing three trains in a row, making her wait here with Bumby while you celebrate your novel with your mistress? What then?”
Hem stiffened.
“Well, it will kill her twice, wouldn’t it?”
His older self narrowed his eyes.
“Yes. Yes, it would.” He emitted a sound that was neither grunt nor snort, but all derisive. “So why do it, then? Let me guess, because you’re a sap who loves two women at once and can’t make up his mind?”
“You could say that.”
His older self snorted, this time more fully.
“I’ve heard a lot of rot in my life, more than you could guess,” he said, tilting his glass loudly against the table. It began to fill, as if from an invisible bottle. “But that may be the worst. You love two women at once? How did you convince yourself of that one, hmm? You hardly love one. That is, unless we’re counting you. Ha! But of course, you love yourself so much that you seek yourself everywhere. How many hours ago did you tell Pauline that you loved her smile? How long since that lie came out of you without a second thought? You love what you see of yourself in her, and she’s clever: she does everything she can to be a mirror to you. But oh, you’re intoxicated by the whole thing!”
The ghost sneered for three eternal seconds, then heaved his glass to his mouth with a sigh that was practically a bellow.
“Oh, and just you wait!” he exclaimed. “Hardly a year from now you’ll wake up in that miserable ass-crack of America they call Piggott and wonder where your head has been. But it will be too late, because you will have two sons, and that won’t be the end. No, you’ll look for Hadley in every woman you meet, because the clever Pauline will grind on you, and your third wife will be a demon, and your fourth wife a toady, and a hanger-on. Oh, she will hang on – she will make barnacles blush with her tenacity! And you will kick yourself until your ass is raw, and you will drink until your liver is hard as a fist, all because you’ll know that you once had it all, and you poured oil on it yourself and set it on fire!”
His older self harrumphed, deforming his brow so hard that it pulled on his scar.
Hem whistled out of the side of his mouth.
“Four wives, huh? Well, damn, you’ve had a life.”
The ghost frowned even deeper.
“That’s right,” he said. “But don’t you get any ideas about it being any good. Because it won’t be. Each one will be worse than the last, did you hear me when I said that? And you will be worse with each one than you were with the last one.”
He took up the glass, which was full again, but he did not drink it.
The younger Hem shifted in his chair, his throat moving up and down.
“Well, damn,” he said again.
When the ghost had said, “yellow is yellow,” Hem had been ready to raise a row, but everything that followed seemed solid enough – and just the sort of thing an older man would tell his younger self, if it were true.
But the part about him being drawn to Pauline because she was a mirror to him – well, that cut to the quick.
“Well, hell,” he said, and chewed his bottom lip to bide his time. “It seems that’s what would happen to me if I chose Pauline. But what if it goes bad with Hadley too? How do I know that it’s not just you at the end of your battered life, looking back and thinking of what might have been?”
He glanced at his wife in the bed, and the ghost’s features darkened.
“Well, there you have a point,” he said, taking a sip and smacking his tongue. “That I cannot know. But ever heard of poetic justice? No chance things get as bad as they do by accident. I only know what happens if you stay on the course you are on, but let me tell you, it is not a pretty one. Here,” he said, rising with a stiff effort. “If you don’t believe my words, I can show you.”
“No, I –”
But before the younger Hem could get a word in, his shoulder was seized, and the older Hem, he discovered, had lost very little of his strength as his fingers taloned into his flesh.
“Exhibit the first,” the ghost proclaimed. His voice was suddenly stentorian, but in it, Hem could hear a familiar cadence, an eager two-step remarkably like his own when he started an argument he knew he would win.
There was a feeling of being whisked away by a typhoon, and then a dizzying feeling of being put down again.
They were in a room with a slanted ceiling; it was dark except for a square of purple moonlight pouring in from above.
A chain was wrapped around Hem’s hand, and without thinking he pulled it.
“Oww, mother of –”
Something came crashing down on his head, and a white-hot pain sliced across his forehead.
“Papa!” cried a voice very much like Bumby’s.
The tinny smell of blood filled his nose.
“That’s how we get the thing on our forehead,” boomed the ghost, and Hem could almost hear him grinning. “I pulled down a skylight when I thought I was pulling a light cord. Shall we move on? Or would you like to see Pauline’s hysterics?”
Hem was not sure if he did, but before he could speak, or wipe away the blood, his shoulder was seized, and there was another rush of air and a sound like a turbine. The pain in his head vanished, and suddenly, the sky was stunningly bright and he was leaning over the gunwale of a boat. The craft was not large, only a few paces across, and there was a long metal pole in his grasp. Before he knew what was happening, the spindrift and the spume blew in his face like a blizzard.
“Get him, get him, get him!” an unfamiliar voice shouted from outside his field of vision, and several other voices in Spanish joined in.
Hem looked down, and at the end of his pole, there was a great white foaming. A giant fish was pulling hard on the gaff, thrashing, and he braced against the gunwale. In his other hand was a pistol. This surprised him, and he let slip the gaff – but only for a moment.
Instinct overcame him, and he gripped the gaff hard, his other hand moving like a hammer. He pointed the pistol at the bright, white, heaving sea, and then came the gunshot.
His entire body reared back, and he toppled over, falling on his bad knee.
His hands lost the gaff, and the pistol fell heavily to the deck and slid away.
Both his legs had been struck. The pain came ruthless, gouging and shredding. There was a dent in the paint of the gunwale. He had shot it, and the bullet had ricocheted and found his calves.
The ghost laughed uproariously.
“How do you like it now, my man?” Again, his voice had a cadence like his own – when he was performing for a crowd. “Shot by accident on your very own boat, your pride and joy. On such a fish-perfect day. Shall we move on?”
Hem could barely hiss a curse, and there was another rush of air, and another sound of a turbine, but this time it did not let up.
Hem glanced around, the pain in his legs ebbing, and they were in a very cramped space, filled with gauges and instruments. From the outside, there came a rattle and a roar that screwed every fiber of his being to an impossible tightness.
“An airplane,” the ghost explained – and somehow, Hem could hear him loud and clear over the roaring. “They’ll use them for everyday transportation after a while, not just war and mail. Like ocean liners and trains, but faster. So much faster!”
Hem’s ears grew tight – tight in a way he never knew ears could get – and he turned to see a pair of chairs on the other side of a divider. There were two people in them, their heads turned away. Beyond them there was a pane of glass which opened up to a vista: a dizzying expanse of cotton-white clouds against a flaxen sky.
Hem shifted gingerly toward the pilot and his passenger (or his assistant?) and tried to look out over their shoulders.
“Oh, but sometimes airplanes fail, I should tell you,” said the ghost matter-of-factly. “Maybe even too often. But play dangerous games, win dangerous prizes, isn’t that our credo?”
Hem’s hands went numb – or better yet, he felt like he had no hands.
The floor of the plane shifted, and his stomach pushed its way to his throat. Suddenly, he barely knew which way was up or which part of his body was connected to which. All he saw was the ghost grinning, and the horizon angling wildly outside the window.
Hem gripped the nearest thing he could – the back of the pilot’s chair – but it availed him little. Down they went, with his stomach and his heart rushing up, up, up.
It less than a moment and also an entire lifetime. Then came the crash: worse than the explosion in the Great War that felt like a furnace blasting open. Every part of the plane shuddered and whined as they hit the ground.
They skidded, half-bouncing, and the friction made the speed feel ruinously real. Hot dust filled the air, along with the smell of overheated machinery and scorched rubber.
He wanted to scream “fire!” and also to vomit. But his throat was stopped with panic, and he could see no flames. And yet it was undeniable. It was fire, rancid-hot – nothing like the sweet and earthy smell of firewood, but the hideous burning of things that did not want to be burned.
There was a sound of shattered glass, and voices, a woman’s and a man’s. The pilot and his companion were hoisting themselves up out of their chairs and scrambling out.
Hem tried to follow, but the ghost held him back.
“You won’t fit.”
“What do you mean, I won’t fit?!”
“Well, try and see if you can get out, if you don’t believe me.”
The ghost folded his arms, and Hem tried to follow the others out the window. But his arms and legs were suddenly thick as elephant limbs, and his torso jammed in the window frame.
The ghost guffawed.
“You think you’ll stay trim-waisted forever? Not with all the booze you’ll be drinking to drown your sins. Go on, try again.”
Hem no longer wished to try. A cold, hard anger coiled inside him.
“So, what now?” he said, gritting his teeth. “Do we just die here? I thought you said you died by gunshot.”
“Well, that I did,” the ghost replied. “And no, we don’t die here.” He stepped aside and nodded at the wall. Amid the gathering smoke, Hem discerned the outline of a door, amid a surface of levers and grommets. “Go on. You can break it open. Use your shoulder and your head. Give yourself a nice running start: a step or two should do it.”
“My head?”
“Your head or your life. Seems fair, does it not?”
“No, it does not seem fair!!”
But he had no choice.
He looked at the door, and then at the ghost with his smugly folded arms.
He thought of the matadors. Did a matador flee like a sensible person when a bull was coming right for him?
Maybe it was all a dream and it did not matter anyway. But if he was meant to do it, he would. The door before him, in the thick, black smoke, was his bull.
He backed away – two steps, the only distance he could – and he aimed his shoulder at the outline of the door. He ran, or what passed for running when you had only two steps to take. His shoulder and his head collided with the unforgiving surface, which gave, but not enough. His eyes stung with the smoke, and his head and the side of his shoulder were numb in a way that presaged pain.
He lowered his head and tried again. The pain hit him full-force this time and his head buzzed. Everything became white-hot, but the door gave way, and he tumbled out into the sunlight.
He landed on his hands and knees, the impact flattening his lungs.
“Well-well, how do you like it now?” The voice of the ghost came bobbing up and down over his ear.
Hem’s head felt like it was full of bees.
“Damn you,” he muttered.
But already, the outlines of a room were forming around him, with light streaming in opulently through a window. There was a desk and Hem got up and scrambled toward it. On it lay a notebook and a pencil. A floral breeze came from the window, and suddenly, Hem felt the urge to write – even amid the ruin.
He picked up the pencil and sat down, the remnants of smoke in his lungs.
He thought of what he might write – in this place, in this preposterous situation. The pencil was sharpened to a lancet point, its angles stark and uneven.
The ghost bobbed to his side, but Hem ignored him.
He fixed his eyes on the page, stark and white, an invisible bull with invisible horns. Furrowing his brow, he felt like his life, and the resolution of it all, depended on writing a sentence – or even a single word. But something was amiss. There were no words. The shapes around him had form and function, but no reference point, no way of pinning them down. The thing that shone in through the window, diamond bright, had no name, and neither did the limitless thing that stretched in every direction outside. He could feel them and see them, but he forgot what they were.
The ghost floated by his side, at first saying nothing. He watched Hem’s hand, his onyx eyes inescapable.
Hem furrowed his brow and tried again. Very well, if not the bright thing or the limitless thing, then something else. What could he say about them, anyway, that wasn’t said before? But his mind felt like fingers slipping over something wet.
He shook his head.
A momentary lapse, that’s all. He had written before, and he would write again. But then again… His head filled with cotton, and with it came the distinct, horrifying notion that, no, he would never write again. Even the bright thing and the limitless thing were slipping away. The letters – those curling things he was supposed to put on the page – were blowing away like sand. He imagined them, but he could not understand them.
The ghost remained silent, watching with an unreadable expression. After a while Hem got up and went to search for a bottle of liquor. There was bound to be one, if this was a place he lived.
He found a bottle of rum a few rooms away, in the kitchen. As he poured himself a glass, he felt all the old feeling. His hands shook, but the alcohol gave a pleasant forgetfulness.
Then he heard a voice behind him.
“Papa, you said you wouldn’t drink anymore.” The voice was a woman’s, quivering as if crying.
Hem turned, and indeed there was a woman, but her face was not one he knew. Though no, her face was an amalgamation of five others that he did know, though none of them was cogent or complete. Her features shifted, borrowing from one face and then another.
“You’ll kill yourself, Papa,” she sobbed, wiping her cheeks with her whole palm. “You’ll kill yourself and you know it. You already said you can’t write like you used to. You swore you wouldn’t touch the stuff again. You swore on all your books, Papa. You swore it on every page and every prize…”
“Papa lied,” Hem said coldly. His voice was both his and not, the words the same way. He turned away, his hand closing around the empty glass.
He poured himself another drink and downed it, and again, it dulled things for a while. But the woman kept crying.
“Papa, you know I cannot leave you, darling,” she said. “But you must know. I cannot watch this. I can’t.”
“So don’t look.”
Inside, however, Hem was uneasy. He poured himself another glass and tried to forget, but the woman’s sobbing went on and on, and part of him wanted her to disappear. Hell, if she didn’t disappear, he would make her. Then he could pretend that none of it was real – that he was simply blocked.
The ghost flickered back into view, sitting on the kitchen counter with one leg over the other.
“Well-well-well-well, how do you—”
“Is it true, old man?” Hem interrupted, trying to shake the thoughts that, just like his earlier words, did not feel entirely his own. “Is it true that I cannot write? And that – that I’m this much of a—?”
The ghost laughed.
“What, you mean an illegitimate, as the censors like to say? Of course we’re like that. And worrying only about ourselves – ourselves and our genius for cobbling together words? Of course that’s us – that’s us through and through. ‘Oh, but if that’s what it takes—’ ”
Hem flushed.
“I don’t want to be a bastard,” he said. “At least not that much of a bastard. And I don’t want to—”
He turned to the woman, who had her face in her hands. She was shivering, her elbows pressed against her chest.
“Too late.” The ghost snapped his fingers. “All you can do now is this.”
Hem’s hand moved against his will to the glass, and he lifted it, carrying the liquor to his lips. His tongue and his throat moved in concert as he swallowed the burn.
“This is all you will be able to do, now and forever. You want to go to her and be a decent man? You can’t. You want to write about the thing that hangs in the sky – it’s called the sun, by the way – you can’t. After a while, you’ll have no choice but the gun. Especially when they zap you.”
“Zap me? What’s that?”
The older Hem grinned. “Oh, that is a novel treatment for all sorts of head stuff, don’t you know. Faster than Freud, that’s for certain. They strap you down and give you several hundred volts until your brain shakes like a broken engine. But don’t worry, you’re asleep for that part. It’s the afterwards you’ve got to worry about.”
Hem swallowed – and as the woman withdrew to another room, still sobbing, he pushed aside the glass, though it kept sticking to his fingers.
“Papa,” he said at last, with barely any breath at all. “Papa, I do not want any of this to happen. I don’t want to lose my life, or my words, or my Hadley. And Pauline… I hate that I’ve made her happy and that I’ve made her suffer that much. So how do I…”
He sounded pathetic, and he was, but he was long past caring.
The ghost furrowed his brow.
“Well, for starters, with words,” he said. “You’ve still got a few of them left, man upstairs willing?”
Hem nodded.
“Still, though,” the ghost went on, “this isn’t the true gen. You want to save yourself, is that it? Then let me tell you. This is bigger than Hadley or Pauline. You want to do better? There’s nothing to it. Your burden is this: stick with one woman, no matter what pair of legs catches your eye; stay off the sauce, except for three glasses at dinner, and don’t sell any part of yourself except the words you’ve already written. Ha!”
The ghost got closer to Hem than ever before, his face filling his vision.
“And if this sounds like something you’d hear at a temperance meeting, or something your father would say as he thumbs his Bible, well, congratulations, the observant writer strikes again! But I know – I know how you deceive even yourself. Even now you are mangling my words. You think that rules are for lesser men? That epigrams and proverbs are for the masses? Well, they’re not!! Not being a bastard takes blood and sweat, no less than writing a great novel. You toil away at it, and you make one right choice, you make a hundred right choices, and maybe it gets easier with time. It starts with Hadley but it does not end with Hadley, do you understand?”
Hem tried to breathe steadily as the ghost spoke, but his throat closed up to the diameter of a reed. The syllables pounded his brain like mortar-shells. His head was spinning, and the glass stuck to his fingers.
The ghost peered at him – like a cat gazing into a bell-jar.
“Alright, I will do it,” Hem finally said. “I have to. I will.”
The ghost’s features softened.
“All you can do.” His voice shrank, and so did the rest of him. Again, he was sitting on the counter with his legs crossed.
They sat in silence for a spell, and Hem heard the trilling of birds in the trees outside.
“Well, now,” the ghost said, “seems that I’ve walloped every inch of us, so maybe it’s time to show you something nice?”
Hem nodded.
By God, he was ready.
The ghost cocked his head, the brightness around them fading.
With his mind still dragging, Hem glanced around. They were in a smoky room with the smell of wine and bodies and perfume. Glasses were clinking, and several people sat bunched together on a couch. Someone was toying with piano keys and everyone was talking, but he could not discern the words.
A door opened, and Hadley came in.
“Oh, there you are, Hemingstein.” She used his early nickname, the word both sweet and hesitant on her tongue. “Did you still want me to read your story? I’m ready now. Should I read it in the kitchen? Or do you want to read it to me?”
Her cheeks rode a little higher and her hips were a little narrower, but otherwise she was completely unchanged.
“Go on,” said the ghost, nudging Hem by the elbow. “Give her a story for the ages. You’re good for it, I think.”
Hem’s throat felt boggy, and he stepped toward his wife – or rather, his not yet wife. His face tightened, and he extended a hand. He had no words just yet, but he would. He knew it with absolutely certainty.
That morning, Hem woke up late, and that was not common.
He opened his eyes, and the sunlight was spilling across the floor, white and shining like water with suds for scrubbing.
Hadley was sitting at the table, feeding Bumby porridge with berry preserves – which was an easy task, because Bumby ate each meal like it was his last.
“Oh, Tatie.” Hadley turned as soon as she heard him stirring, her auburn hair touched with gold. She folded the spoon into Bumby’s hand and came over, sitting down by Hem’s side and running her hand over his face. “Are you sick, Tatie?” She tented her lovely eyebrows. “Did you catch a cold on the train?”
He could barely look at her, though he wanted nothing more than to look at her. She had deep indentations between her lips and cheeks, and they got deeper when she smiled.
“You were talking in your sleep,” she said, pressing her palms over his cheeks and forehead. “I thought you might be running a fever.”
“No, I just…”
Hadley seemed satisfied that he was not warm, but he clasped her hands before she could take them away.
“What – what was I saying?”
He pressed her hands between his own and kissed them.
“Oh, nothing that I could discern. Just mumbling.”
“Oh. I see… What’s in the plans today?”
“Not much. I thought I might do some Christmas shopping while Natalie takes Bumby sledding. They say it is not safe to ski yet. Too much fresh snow.”
“I need to send a few telegrams.”
She straightened up.
“Alright, you do that, Tatie. Then we can go out for lunch at the place with the good berenwurst.”
She started to get up, but Hem grabbed her wrist. A flicker of electricity ran between them.
“What, now?” She chuckled. “You naughty man. Bumby’s watching.”
“No… Not that. This.”
He threw aside the blanket just long enough to pull her down, and then covered them both.
“My beautiful Tatie.” He kissed her eyes and hair. “Don’t you go anywhere, Tatie.”
Again and again he kissed her, wrapping his arms and legs around her.
Her eyes flickered in the direction of their son, but he cupped her cheek and kissed her yet another time.
“Bumby will be fine,” he said. “He will be fine. Let’s just stay here like this for a while.”
The snow angled past the glass, with snowflakes gathering at the edges of the panes like pigeons bunching together for warmth. The sky outside the telegraph office was tinted gray, and the click-click of machines was almost the only sound.
Hem had spent a wonderful hour with his wife that morning, feeling all the old feelings. They stayed under the covers until they could no longer make excuses, with Hadley leaving for brief intervals to tend to Bumby. Now, she was probably at the other end of town poring over woolens in a shop, while Bumby was being pulled around in a sled by his nanny, a young local woman who cared for him whenever they visited Schruns.
And yet Pauline, who was in Paris, was a determined woman. It was not over until it was over whenever she was involved. She may not capitulate so easily, simply because he determined to be good and chose to stay with his wife. She would demand to know why; she might even tell Hadley what happened just to spite him. She could do all sorts of things, which made his hair stand on end.
It also did not help that it felt like he was killing something – snuffing it out with his own fingers. But there were no excuses left, not when the path was suddenly clear. A dangerous prize, he thought as he dipped the pen in the forgettable inkwell.
Some games were never worth playing.
The words came out with shocking ease.
“Fife,” his message ran, “don’t come Or if you come make iteasy for us both and make other arrangements for your lodging Listen mydear we both know that this thing we have let’s just say you cannot build happiness on the bones of another’s The world does not end with love and there will be other men foryou far better men thanme Goodbye It is probably best we don’t see each other anymore”
He ran his eyes over the words.
Was it really so easy? As easy as handing the slip of paper to the clerk, counting out the coins and handing them over? As easy as the message cracking through the wires, setting the wheels of a machine in motion hundreds of miles away?
He imagined Fife, collapsing stiffly in a chair, her hands and legs as close to her body as her hat was to her face.
She was a strong girl, though. She would pull through.
He signed his name, filled out the address, and slid the paper across the counter.
“Seventy words exactly,” said the girl on the other side. She had clear skin and reddish, softly waving hair, like Hadley.
He thought it a good sign.
She named the price and he counted out the coins.
He then stepped out into the drifting snow, where the wind was wafting flurries from the sharply angled roofs.