Sari Wilson - Girl Through Glass

I harassed you with my wishes, my dreams, my desires. I wanted the perfection of steps, a vision of loveliness. I hungered for beauty like only the dying can hunger for it. I wanted to continue living, although I myself was half dead. I wanted these things out of a terrible need and they made me who I was — who I am.

I am sorry. I hope you can forgive me.

I look up. “Is he dead?”

“He passed away six months ago,” Kevin says.

I fold the letter, tuck it back into the pile. I look for a place to rest my eyes — they find the moonscape screen saver, undulating.

I try to take this in: the monster-prince of my childhood is gone. Maurice is gone from this world.

After a moment I say, “If he was already dead in March, who sent the letter to me?”

Kevin fiddles with something on his desk. He doesn’t — or can’t — answer. When he looks up at me, I see the furrows in his brow. Behind the mask of the young professional I see the pain, the attempt to relieve it in work.

“Let me explain.” His eyes dart to the window, then back. “I was engaged. To a great person. We had planned everything — our whole lives. Then on the train back from a client’s meeting. .” He looks right at me. “A heart attack. At twenty-six. They said it was a congenital heart defect, undetected.” His eyes are brimming. “At first, I couldn’t . Then I realized I could bear it. I would just have to be a different person living a different life.”

I feel something inside trying to stem his words, to shut down. But another part of me is opening up.

“So two years ago — after my fiancée died — I began to search,” he continues. “It took me a bit, but I found him. Maurice. I found my father.” He continues to stare directly at me. “The papers had his name. When my mother signed them, she added his name. That was unusual — for the situation.”

His gaze is disconcerting. I haven’t felt this visible since I was onstage as a child. His eyes are bright — unbearably, ridiculously bright — behind his glasses. My old purse has become very interesting to me. I slip the stack of letters I’ve been holding into my purse. “And your mother?” I mutter.

“That was much harder. My mother was very young. She changed her name when she had me.”

I don’t dare look up. The office feels like it has shrunk around me.

“But after he died, I finally got a name—”

I’m making strange sounds, low, and wounded. I realize that I’m crying, that’s the sound I’m making. I hear someone knock on the door. Kevin walks out from behind his desk, tells them to come back later, and shuts his office door. He goes back to his desk. When I finally look up, he is staring at me so simply.

“You can’t bury the past,” he says.

“But my name—”

“There’s a record. There’s always a record.”

I wipe my eyes with a tissue from my purse. “Rob said — but I didn’t think. I couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.” I nod, blow my nose, even give a little laugh. How shoddy, how childish, my attempts at not being found, at changing my life. How bold they seemed at the time. That dusty room at the courthouse. The line of divorce-seekers, of name-changers. That adult land of mistakes that one has to pay dearly for in paperwork and in emotional toil. The bleak but steady wind outside the courthouse. It was something, it was the beginning of something else.

I look at the wall and see an incongruous thing in the room: a photo of Pavlova bent over her leg. The same one Maurice had in his gallery of ballerinas past.

“So you sent the letter,” I say. I’m trying to order things.

“Yes, I sent it,” he says. “He wrote it, but I sent it. When he died, he left me the execution of his remaining estate. But the most difficult thing for me to adjudicate”—he adjusts his glasses and gives an awkward laugh—“was these letters. He had left them for you — my mother.” He takes off his glasses, cleans them with a cloth from his pocket. He puts them back on and blinks at me. His eyes look clearer, as if the cleaning of the glass polished his actual eyes. “One night, sitting in this office here — after he was gone, I sat with the letters in my hand, feeling — well, sorry for myself. I took one of the letters from the pile, without even reading it — and put it in an envelope and sent it to the address I was given. I sent the letter to you. It’s his, but I sent it.”

“But—” I say, stupidly—“how — if he was already dead?”

“I took the train to Armonk and then a cab to town, and dropped it in the mailbox. Then I took the train back.” He has pantomimed these actions with precision and grace. I watch his hands, pale and manicured, but muscled and precise. too. The very exact and intelligent way he moved had an almost mechanical affect that I recognize from Maurice. I always thought that was the result of Maurice’s illness, but maybe it was just him.

“He was forty-something. I was fourteen.”

“I know,” he says. “He said, ‘If you find her, be kind to her. She was — a child.’” He paces in front of his desk, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. He was so hobbled, so compromised — I can’t imagine. The polio and then the stroke. He couldn’t move around much at the end. He was confined to his bed. Tremors wracked his body. He’d had them for years, but they’d gotten worse after I found him. They came every few minutes and left him exhausted. This was only a few months before he died. Every time I visited, he’d say something mysterious. I didn’t know what he was getting at.”

He stands in the middle of his office, his arms hanging at his sides. “I was so angry when I started to search, so ready for a fight. Somehow I blamed him — and you. I thought my whole future was gone. In the months after my fiancée’s death I thought that if you hadn’t given me up, if I hadn’t been adopted, somewhere I would have been spared the pain.” He laughs huskily, adjusts his glasses. “Anyway, when I began to search, I never thought I’d find such an old man. Or someone in such a feeble state in a state hospital. I never imagined any of it.”

I look away, but I’m listening.

“After he gave all his money to SAB, they moved him to a state hospital, and it was a pit. He wasn’t well cared for. They didn’t even change his bedclothes for days,” he says. “Anyway, I moved him to a nice place. I could do that for him.”

“Wait.” I hold the top letter up. “Why did he give his money to SAB — if he felt like this?”

“I don’t know exactly, but I could guess. He was a complicated man.” Kevin walks closer to me. Standing in front of me, he looks smaller, lost, like he’s just wandered into this office. “He gave his money to the archives. There is a stipulation that said it has to be used to preserve their records of the past.”

That is something I will have to think through. What has been lost to me, he devoted himself to preserving. History is steeped in irony, and here it is. I am drowning in irony now.

Kevin is still talking. “I had him hooked up to five different machines. And I kept him alive — I did — for a time. He stabilized. I would go after work and on holidays and the weekends. I would sit by him and listen to the machines buzz and whir and beep. I was keeping him alive. That gave me peace.”

I’ve been standing this whole time, but now I brave the edge of a leather chair.

“He began to have moments of lucidity. He recognized me. He wanted to talk. He told me about his ballerinas. He had saved all these old photos. He wouldn’t let me touch them, and he handled them with protective gloves of some sort. He would take them out one by one and he would school me in why each ballerina through history was so great.” He gives a little laugh.