James Salter - Light Years

Barefoot along the hissing shore, sometimes touching, hip to hip, in the shadowy interior of cars, entering shops, were couples lost in obsession with each other, heavy with the satisfaction of possessing, laden with it, brimming. She saw them, they passed before her blandly, as ordinary souls appear to a pilgrim. She had no interest in them. They were limp, translucent, like petals. Their time had not yet come. Gone from her completely was the knowledge she once was sure she would keep forever: the taste, the exaltation of days made luminous by love—with it, one had everything. “That’s an illusion,” she said.

Her thoughts reached backwards, deeply forgiving, fond. There were things she had nearly forgotten, she had never told. They came to her unexpectedly for perhaps the last time.

“Your grandfather,” she said, “my father—he was in the navy, did you know that? He was boxing champion of his ship. He used to tell stories about it. When I was a little girl, I can remember him doing it all, reenacting it. He’d put up his hands, you know. The admiral was there, and all the men. And across the ring, with his face shining and his teeth gold, the Cuban…”

“You never told me that.”

“I used to love those stories. I suppose he wanted a son. When I was about twelve, when it was quite clear I was a girl, that’s when he stopped. He was a difficult fellow. Not easy to know. You know, the strangest thing, I learned it by chance: Eve’s mother and mine are buried in the same little cemetery in Maryland. I mean, it’s a very small place. In the country.

“She came from there. She met my father at a picnic. It was so long ago. And now they’re dead. Her family were storekeepers. They came from Virginia. She had two sisters and a brother, but the brother died when he was a little boy. He was the favorite. His name was Waddy.”

“I wish I’d known her.”

“She had beautiful hands. I think she pined for Maryland. She wasn’t very strong.”

“What was her maiden name again?”

“McRae.”

“Yes, McRae.”

“Not one of them with money.” Nedra said. “That’s the pity of it. Honest, yes, but you can’t pass on honor.”

“So I have Scotch blood.”

“Mostly Russian, I think. You’re a lot like your father.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yes, it’s good.”

“Why?”

“Let me look at you. Well,” she said, “because there is something unfathomable there.” She reached out to touch Franca’s cheek. “Yes,” she said. “Unfathomable and divine.”

Franca took the hand and kissed it.

“Mama…” she began. She was close to tears.

“You know, I’m so glad you could come this year,” Nedra said. “I keep thinking we won’t be coming here much longer, we’ll have to find someplace else. We should really go out to dinner once or twice. Catherine tells me there’s a Greek place run by two brothers, that isn’t bad. We can have moussaka . I had it in London. There’s a wonderful Greek restaurant there. We’ll go sometime.”

“Yes.”

She was stroking her daughter’s hair. “I’d like that,” Franca said.

SHE DIED LIKE HER FATHER, SUDDENLY, in the fall of the year. As if leaving a concert during a passage she loved, as if giving up an hour before the light. Or so it seemed. She loved the autumn, she was a creature of blue, flawless days, the sun of their noons hot as the African coast, the chill of the nights immense and clear. As if smiling and acting quickly, as if off to a country, a room, an evening finer than ours.

She died like her father. She felt ill. Abdominal pains. For a while they could diagnose nothing. The x-rays showed nothing, the many tests of blood.

The leaves had come down, it seemed, in a single night. The prodigious arcade of trees in the village gave them up quickly; they fell like rain. They lay like runs of water along the melancholy road. In the turning of seasons they would be green again, these great trees. Their dead branches would be snapped away, their limbs would quicken and fill. They would again, in addition to their beauty, to the roof they made beneath the sky, to their whispering, their slow, inarticulate sounds, the riches they poured down, they would, besides all this, give scale to everything, a true scale, reassuring, wise. We do not live as long, we do not know as much.

They had given up their leaves as if to mourn her, as if weeping for an arboreal queen.

Among those few at the funeral, Franca stood alone. She had no husband. Her face and hands seemed bare as if washed clean. She was numinous, pale, her face the very face of the dead woman but more beautiful, far more than her mother could ever have been. The present is powerful. Memories fade.

Danny had her children with her, little girls of two and four who had hardly known their grandmother. Grandmother! It seemed incredible. They had pure features and a serene nature, though the older talked aloud during the service as if no one else were there. Two daughters, one on each side, who, though they were unaware of it, would know another century, the millennium. Perhaps they would read aloud as Viri had done on those long winter evenings, those idle summers when, in a house by the sea, it seemed the family he had created would always endure. Certainly they would be passionate and tall and one day give to their children—there is no assurance of this, we imagine it, we cannot do otherwise—marvelous birthdays, huge candle-rich cakes, contests, guessing games, not many young guests, six or eight, a room that leads to a garden, from afar one can hear the laughing, the doors open suddenly, out they run into the long, sweet afternoon.

There were so many things one wanted to ask her. The answers were gone. The small cemetery that lay in the road near the Daros’ was where they wanted her to lie. She may have even spoken about it at night when she’d been drinking, but it could not be arranged. Nedra herself might have managed it, but Franca tried in vain. There were very few plots, they told her, there was a board of trustees that decided such things; did the family live in town? The more difficult it became to gain entry, the more it became the only course. They wanted her to be apart from the ordinary dead. They did not want equality; she had never believed in it, not even for a moment.

Eve stood near them. Beneath the sleeves of her coat the bones of her wrists showed, they made her seem gaunt. Her lean fingers and long hands were like a woman’s on a foreclosed farm. The coat was cloth, the hat dark straw. As always, there was something thrillingly vulgar about her. She was the kind of woman who could say calmly, “What do you really know about it?” and in her face one could see that, yes, compared to her, one knew nothing. She stood impassively. As the casket was lowered, she suddenly seemed to cough, to bend her head as if choking. Her face was wet with tears.

“Your children are beautiful, Danny,” she said when it was over. She was introduced to them. She took a ring from her finger and the bracelet from her wrist and held them out. “Here. I didn’t give you anything when you were christened. But you probably weren’t christened, were you?”

“No,” Danny answered.

“It doesn’t matter. You should have something. It’s a very nice ring,” she said to the larger child. “You won’t lose it, will you? At one time I’d have given anything in the world for that ring.”

Artis, who was the younger, had dropped the bracelet. Danny picked it up. “Hold it tightly,” she instructed.

“It’s antique gold,” Eve said.

There was a brief reception at Catherine Daro’s. They said goodbye to everyone, they accepted the murmured regrets, they lingered and started back to the city finally in a hired car. The little girls were sleeping. The sun seemed very warm. At first there was nothing to say. They drove through the vacant countryside in silence, the last, unnatural heat of the year drifting from arm to lap.