Prologue

It was my wife's ten-year class reunion, not mine, so I was a bit bored. 

I could have stayed home., b But since it was so hard for her to get time off from the hospital, free time together was a precious commodity.  She had the larger salary of the two of us, so I felt I owed it to her to accommodate her schedule.  She had moved out to the D.C. area, married me, and started med school right after college.  Now she was a doctor but, bless her heart, she'd found time to have two kids, whom we had dropped off with her parents in Cleveland on the way.  She'd been too busy in D.C. to make close friends, so she valued her college friends all the more.  I, if the truth be told, had little interest anymore even in my college friends, let alone hers.  New experiences had made the past irrelevant, and I had even developed the East Coast metropolitan attitude that the entire "heartland" is an irrelevant backwater. 

I was a freelance writer, an investigative journalist, a stringer for a few magazines and newspapers, whatever you want to call it.  The kind of job where I could work away from home if I wanted to. It was on that pretext-- needing to get some work done-- that I excused myself on Thursday afternoon and stopped by 55 Oak Street, the house I used to live in in college.  Not just me of course, for 55 Oak Street is enormous, four stories high with turrets and gables, a mansion almost.  Seven of us had lived there.  The neighborhood had become run down in those days.  Lawyers and doctors commuted from Seton Park and Greenwood.  Oak Street, within walking distance of campus and downtown, was almost a slum.  The realtor, old Michael Brewer, was used to be wary of letting female tenants; he didn't think it was a part of town where a girl should be walking at night.  But in its heyday Oak Street was one of the finest streets in town, and 55 Oak Street one of the finest houses.  To judge by appearances, the neighborhood had recovered a bit since we lived there.  There were more well-mown lawns, fresh paint jobs, and new cars in the driveways-- including a shiny red sportscar with the windows open in the driveway of #55. 

It was a little hotter, but a little less humid, in Indiana than in Virginia.  On that quiet summer afternoon, the huge, stately old trees that arched over the road, casting their leafy shadows on the grass, gave the neighborhood almost a solemn feeling. 

I stood in front of #55 for a while, reminiscing.  Then I knocked, and a boy of about nine years old answered the door.  I made my request and he turned and ran without a word shouting "Millie! Millie!"  A Somewhere in the floors above, a cell phone conversation was going on upstairs which the boy interrupted, and after a brief altercation the conversation began walking down the stairs, bringing with it a girl of about sixteen, blonde, about 5'6", thin waist, short shorts, tank top showing a lot of skin, a face habituated to an expression of youthful aloofness. "Well, Richie thinks so...  Hello cleavage!...  Lissa doesn't have a chance with him...  Hold on-- Hi, may I help you?"

Callow.  I was startled by how quickly I had judged her.  A curious juxtaposition, this girl and her cell-phone conversation against 55 Oak Street with its  weighty, wounded dignity, 55 Oak Street that was built long ago by Lionel English son of Lawrence English, the well-respected local businessman, as a love-offering to a wife he adored, and also, I think, as a penance for a certain secret he had kept from her: that he no longer believed in God.

"Hello," I said.  "Sorry to bother you.  I used to live here in college.  I just wanted to look around a bit if you don't mind."

"Sure no problem. Welcome," she said, with a tone of efficient politeness, then forgot my existence forever.  "... Sorry about that, you were saying...  Her parents let her stay out as late as she wants in the summer, but she gets in trouble for drinking, so she waits till it wears off.  Ironic that she got into the situation that way..." continued the cell-phone conversation as Millie wafted back up the stairs.

She's not much younger than I was when I first lived here, I thought.  And that seemed odd, that she was (almost) what I had been, and I had become something else.  We never quite grow accustomed to time and change.

Unfortunately, the boy felt the need to follow me.  Why was that a problem?  Not for the first time in my life, but on the other hand it has not happened very often, I realized I had a quite definite purpose in that house, which I had not been aware of a few minutes before, but which I felt was very important-- even if there was no rational justification for attaching importance to the memento I was seeking.  The boy was in the way.  I couldn't do it while he was there, so to pass the time and wait for him to go away, I wandered the rooms, trying to penetrate with my mind two histories: my own, the three years I had spent in this house, the parties, dancing and drinking and hook-ups, studying, a few conversations that were turning points... and also a deeper history, which I heard on a certain strange evening in my sophomore year, and which after that had always seemed to be a presence in this house, as if it had permeated the very walls.

The phone rang-- the house phone, not Millie's cell phone-- and the boy darted off to fetch it.  This was my chance.  I stepped into the pantry and looked at the wood floors.  There it was: the gap in the floorboards.  I peered through the crack into the dark beneath the floor... and there it was, the outline of wrinkled, yellow paper.  Suddenly my heart was pounding, not with suspense or the fear of getting caught by the boy (though I was following the conversation in the background: "Hello?... No, my parents aren't here right now... Yes, I can leave a message, let me get something to write with...") but rather with surprise.  There was, after all, so little reason that this letter should have been there that it seemed mildly insane-- or rather, if you will, a minor but very foolish fallacy-- even to have looked there at all.  Yet there it was.  I pulled a pen from my pocket, slipped it through the gap in the floorboards, and carefully fished the letter out of its hiding place.

I began to read.

Dear Mary,

I have written and destroyed this letter so many times by now-- ten or eleven, I think-- that I hardly feel I'm writing it to you at all.  Am I writing only to myself, and a letter to you is simply the only language in which I know how to express myself?  I am desperate to write, or to do something, to do something about the restlessness that has haunted me my whole life, sometimes ebbing for a few weeks or a few months, yet year after year growing stronger, harder to bear.  My whole life, that is, except those precious months and days that I spent in your arms.  Outside my window here there is a full moon that casts its light over the whole earth; the edges of the leaves are like spun silver.  How maddeningly beautiful!  But what good is it without you: you, the only one in whom every beauty is imprinted, the book in which they are written and so are not fleeting, not lost as soon as they are born, but become permanent.

I ask myself: Why are the sweetest things forbidden?  Why do angels with flaming swords guard the gates to Eden?  And yet it was not always thus.  There was a time when everything that you were was mine, when all your thoughts were for me and mine for you, when to kiss your lips was as free and easy as to eat an apple.  Nothing was forbidden; every heart's desire was instantly granted, hour after hour, day after day.  We feared nothing.  Our love was so abundant that it overflowed; there was enough of it to fill the whole world.  We could, if we like, quarrel over which of us was to blame for the loss of our Eden.  Was it I who walked away, or you who would not follow?  But I was a soldier then, and must go where my commanders called me.  Never mind if the cause was just: the ardor with which I loved you was the same as the honor with which I served my cause; had I denied the one, I would have lost both.  It was your part to give yourself, never to look back.  Or is that only a fairy tale men tell themselves?  Is that only an ideal?

And yet I know you: you are living a lie.  You gave your heart to me, and you could not take it back, nor give it to another.  Man makes his laws and he pronounces you man and wife in the name of God, but is there not a truth that lies deeper than the law?  Were you not bound to me then as truly, nay more truly, than the words of any preacher could do?  Were we not man and wife?  And does not that bond exist even now?  Is the man you are with now your husband?  Do you not feel the same sense of sin as if you lay with a stranger?  Sometimes I seethe with jealousy and hate you for what you have done, for what you are doing still.  And then I think of the girl I loved, the girl you were, and I almost weep with pity.

But perhaps you will reproach me, for what, after all, did I leave you for?  Was the cause worth it, after all?  I burned with anger then against the rich man who feasts while the poor starve outside his door.  Against the white man who thinks he is better because of his white skin, who oppressed India and Africa, who makes his fellow man separate and inferior.  Against the profiteers who steal the laborer's wage and who foment wars to build their wealth while men die.  Against the churches that condoned it all, that assuaged the greedy man's conscience and promised him salvation, that urged men to kill for King and country.  I was not angry for myself, for I knew that I had been fortunate.  Yet over the years my anger has turned into sadness.  The cause is just, perhaps, but what does it matter: even the fortunate have no peace, for the sweetest things are all forbidden.

Or can we make the world anew?  It is here that I keep destroying this letter, for do I dare to make this proposal?  But there must be a second chance.  There must be forgiveness.  Your courage failed you once; but perhaps you have learned courage now.  Perhaps there are no angels with flaming swords guarding the gates, after all.  My love.  Look at the moon and the stars.  Do you not feel a sense of wonder?  Is it not unearthly?  Were those stars made to shine on creatures destined for irrevocable unhappiness?  Is a being that can look on the moon and feel that wonder meant to be a slave to laws and lies?  Deep in your heart there is freedom: let it out, let it grow, let it fill you.  And then the imaginary chains will dissolve as if they had never been.  There will be a new heaven and a new earth.

And then-- come to me.  I will take you.  Only in you is my heart at home, and yours in me.  Let us not be exiles anymore, my love.

Peter Marcielo
December 4, 1958

There it was: the love letter, blasphemous and beatific, mad and musical, the love letter that had had such power, that had reverberated for so many decades and through so many lives.

Hearing footsteps in the hall, I folded it and slipped it into my pocket.  The boy appeared in the kitchen door.  "Sorry," he murmured.

"No, that's fine!" I said as brightly as I could.  "Well, I'd better get back to my wife.  Thanks a lot for letting me see the house.  It brings back a lot of memories."

"You're welcome," said the boy.

Comments

[Nato]

Some feedback:

The behavior of the characters is a bit surreal to me. Why did the woman just let the narrator come in, and why does the narrator evince any real surprise? Perhaps I would need more of the story as context for this; I'm not sure how otherworldly a tone you wish to set.

There's also a question of pacing. The direct narrative prose is on the sparse side of contemporary style, sketching rather than portraying action, while the letter is dramatic at length and almost expository. To some extent the contrast represents the difference between the narrator and the letter's author, but it also makes the letter seem somewhat overwrought (or the first person narrative rather terse, but since the reader encounters that style first, it's the default). When I write, I frequently find myself writing segments that don't work because of tonal or stylistic mismatches with the narrative in which they're embedded. I haven't seen enough to say if that's happening here, but I figured I'd make the critique anyway.

I think you're being fairly ambitious with your craft, and mostly succeeding in sounding natural. that makes me want to read more even though this is, of course, merely a draft and though I doubt this will turn out to be the sort of story I'd usually read.

My experience with ambitious prose has been pretty rocky: over the course of long works I have produced a great deal that is noticeably substandard juxtaposed with passages around it. This has moderated after several hundred thousand words, but I still find it discouraging to look back and recognize I have a great deal of inadequate work to rewrite. Further, part of that moderation has been abstaining from including some inspired prose that would not fit.

So those are my thoughts, but this is only seven (paperback) pages of a prologue during which I'm ordinarily still getting my bearings with an author, so I feel it's premature to say that any of it is applicable. I just wanted to reflect my contemplations.

There are, of course, a number of ways to tighten up, tweak and otherwise fine-tune this prologue - usually it's good for prologues to be a bit shorter, for example - but that's inevitable in a draft and I doubt my feedback there (at least at this stage) would serve your vision well.