Chapter 5 The Secret

After this, Mr. Brewer was silent for a while. I have left out some interruptions from the account-- there was a phone call at some point, for example, I don't remember when-- but here there was an outside interruption that matters to the story because it gave Mr. Brewer time to collect his thoughts. A friend of one of us knocked at the door, to pick him up to see a movie or something, and there was a leave-taking, slightly apologetic because of the unfinished story, and when the house was quiet again it took a direct question from Renny to provoke Mr. Brewer to resume.

"So this was just about the time that Peter Marcielo wrote her that love letter?" asked Renny.

Mr. Brewer laughed. "Yeah, I've kind of gotten sidetracked, haven't I? Actually, Peter Marcielo had been writing her love letters for a long time, as I discovered a few days later. Or not love letters exactly... but he had been in correspondence with Mary for years. I don't know quite when it began..."

"How do you know that?" asked Renny in surprise.

"She showed them to me."

"She showed them to you?"

"Yes."

"When? Why?"

"I don't know why exactly. To break up an awkward silence in a conversation, I guess. Or maybe it was for the same reason that Lionel told me about his atheism-- she wanted to tell someone, and she couldn't tell him. But this is why it's hard to tell stories. People can have a lot of motives, and sometimes they aren't even aware of their own deepest motives...

I should tell you that Mary was still very beautiful, maybe even more beautiful than before, but differently. It was on that same evening that I noticed it, the evening when I played chess with Lionel and heard his confession of atheism, but I left it out because somehow I cannot tell the story of meeting Lionel again together with the story of seeing Mary's beauty. They have nothing to do with each other, even though they happened at the same time. When I had first seen her beneath the apple blossoms with a book in her hand, Mary's beauty had been the simple beauty of innocence. That beauty was still there, only now it was somehow skindeep and commonplace. For some reason, I don't know why, at the time I attributed the change to the decade, and blamed the prosperous 1950s for commoditizing innocence so that it could no longer inspire feeling in men. Perhaps that was my way of not blaming the change on her. I couldn't help thinking cynically that her face would almost serve to grace the cover of a Good Housekeeping magazine.

Almost... but not quite. She was mostly the cheerful housewife, but there was a hint of something, a reluctance or a wistfulness, which marred it. And this was the key to the real interest and beauty of her face. It recalled to my mind a couple of lines from a poem I once read:

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each... I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

It was like that.  I can think of no other way to express the strangeness that her face had when you looked at it in a certain way than to say that it was like a mermaid's, wild, sweet, otherworldly.  Even while she was sitting across the table from me at dinner, making insipid conversation, sometimes I would glance at her, and suddenly my spirit would be transported to some faraway place where all things partook of the magic of her beauty, and I would feel a sense of wonder and danger.  In those moments, it seemed strange that the flimsy wood and drywall of that house could contain her beauty.  And then she would go back to being almost the cheerful housewife.  I wondered why Lionel didn't fear this wild, romantic beauty that lay hidden within her.  But then I saw in her face that she feared it, feared it as something alien.

In the days after that evening, I had a growing sense of disaster, as if twelve years of friendship had been ruined. Of course, no explicit offense taken on either side. But we would no longer be comfortable in one another's company. To try to repair the friendship could backfire. It might well lead to just the explicit offense which we had avoided. I hit on a bold move. I would show up at Lionel's house uninvited. In our college days, after all, we would have been horrified at the thought that either of us should ever require an invitation to visit the other. To show that I trusted him still to abide by that tacit contract, to assume still the privileges of an intimacy that now, with his elevated position in life, it would hardly have been in his power to initiate with anyone, was to run a slight risk of causing offense and deepening the rupture but, if he permitted it, would render any damage done on that awkward evening irrelevant. I resolved, too, to show up early, before he could be expected home from work. Mary, who must know nothing of how my first visit had ended, would assume merely from the way I showed up that my intimacy with Lionel either had become or always had been sufficiently close that a spontaneous, uninvited visit was normal. Lionel would come home and find Mary and David and me already talking, conceal his surprise, and I would have gained a new right of access to 55 Oak Street which would make our friendship secure.  I did this not for my own sake but for his.  I thought he had few friends and needed me.  But as I said, people's motives are complex.  For it's quite possible that all of this was rationalization, and what I really wanted was to see Mary's beauty again.  I don't really know why I did it.

Anyway, I showed up at about 5:00 on the Tuesday of the next week, a few days after my first call at Lionel's house.  The pretext was to invite Lionel to a football night at my friend Eddie's, but I knew Lionel liked neither football nor Eddie, and told him that I was only passing along the invitation because Eddie had asked me to.  Then Mary and I had to kill half an hour to an hour before Lionel returned.  David, fatefully, was not home, but had gone to a friend's house to play.  It was harder than I expected for the two of us to make conversation.