Late in May, last year, a man sat writing in the library. It had rained earlier, and the fragrance of drenched lilacs was strong. Curtains stirred at the open windows, and a circle of yellow light fell upon an enormous kneehole desk and illuminated the face of the man sitting there – a strong profile, leaning toward harshness, square-jawed, high in the cheekbones. He sat tall, with a striking breadth of shoulder and long, solid limbs. His hair was thick and untidy, and he was intent, and sometimes smiling, as he wrote.
A clock ticked, the lilacs sighed in the wind, a drowsy bird awoke and scolded musically. The house was quiet, for it was well after midnight. The man laid down his pen and stretched out his arms. He folded the sheets, without rereading them. He took from the desk drawer a long envelope and wrote a name on it. He wrote, "Edith." He sealed the envelope and left it lying there. Then he arose and turned out the desk lamp. In the darkness, he moved to the window and looked out across the lawn at the black shapes of tree and flowering bush. He breathed in the lilacs, and whether he smiled or sighed you could not guess, or whether in the darkness his eyes were saddened or content.
After a long time, he turned and left the room. On the desk, in the empty room, in the darkness, with the scent of rain-clean breeze and lilac still apparent even after the windows were closed, the letter lay waiting for tomorrow:
Edith (he had written), you are to be married tomorrow – no, today, for it is very late. In the morning I will cross the lawn, jump the hedge as I have a thousand times, and walk up to the front steps to give this letter to old Hattie. I’ll ask her to put it on your breakfast tray. So you will read it, lying in your bed by the windows, with the pillows behind you, I think, and your curly hair caught up with a ribbon – a blue ribbon, Edith? And when you have read it, you will laugh a little, and perhaps you will cry, only a little less because you are happy, as tears are as close as when you are sad. Tonight I saw you briefly and, in a sense, for the last time. I shall see you differently this day. I shall see you walking down the aisle with your hand on your father’s arm and a cloud of white moving about you. But I shall not be able to speak to you. I shall not be able to say good-bye to the girl I have known for two decades – I loved, I think, that long. I could not say good-bye tonight. I am not an articulate man, as indeed you must know. All I could say was, "I’ll see you tomorrow." At your wedding, I wanted to say, "Stay happy, for if you are not, nothing else can compensate. Yet you will not always be happy, Edith, for life is not quite like that."
I was 10 years old when your family moved to this little town and came to live next door. We had known about you for some time. In a town of this size, the arrival of new people is of paramount importance. My mother was vastly excited, and my father also, although he pretended he was not. But good neighbors are vital in our community, and certainly to my mother, a friendly, garrulous, active woman. The right neighbors meant a cup of tea on cold winter days, a running back and forth, a borrowing and lending; they meant people to whom you turned in the time of your sorrow, people of whom you felt and did in theirs. Or, if there was a death in the nearby home, my mother would go with a white cloth around her, with an offering of good food and place it quietly on the kitchen table or in the icebox. People must eat when they grieve.
My interest was mainly – would there be boys? On the other side of us, Miss Fanny Williams lived and had her spinster being. I had friends all over the block – but would there be boys next door? At 10, a burning question. Boys with whom to play, to fight, to struggle – the struggle for leadership, for admiration, friendship, loyalty. If there was a boy my age, how much I had to show him! The place where we swam summers, with the broken diving board, the deep, brown water, still and cold, and trees bending; the place where the good fish come to the early worm.
Would he be in my grade? Did he play football and basketball? How rooted was his scorn for girls, how accurate his knowledge of the important things?
It was a bitter moment for me when you moved next door; a horrible moment, a terrible disappointment. For you had no brothers, Edith, nor sisters. Like me, you were – and still are – an only child. When your mother put your playpen in the sun and I saw you for the first time – rosy, with vigor and innocent features, a pink button for a nose, a scarlet button for a mouth, and a fluff of copper-red hair – when I saw you, fat, squat, and unsteady, when I heard you, initially your lung power, your wails of stubbornness and temper, I was outraged.
No boys. Just Edith, roaring from her playpen.
I would complain during that first summer, "That little ole baby does nothing but holler."
For two years, I refused to admit that you existed. This was difficult, as when you were four, you took a fancy to me. You would crawl under the hedge, stick there and yell until I came and pulled you out. You would beam at me, with the tears still wet on your cheeks and your lashes stuck into points. "Boy," you would say coaxingly, questioningly, "Boy?"
I bore with you. My mother had impressed correct conduct upon me. I was disgusted, but I was a gentleman. Now and then your mother and mine bribed me with a rare nickel, or splendid cookie, to stay with you for a time while they went down the street together to pay a call, or do an errand.
I suffered agonies. You had a passion for people, for color and excitement. You still have. You wished me to mind you in full view of the passing populace. I could not coax you to the old two-seated swing in your backyard, or to the tousle of fruit trees there, adjoining our own equally untidy orchard.
No, in the front yard, it must be, with you inventing the most deplorable games, and the whole town passing by to watch Doc Henderson’s Jim taking care of little Edith.
The older people thought it was sweet. They congratulated my mother. But the realistic lads in my grade were highly entertained. That year they called me "Nursie." I fought on an average of twice a week. My eyes were black more often than they were blue.
The worst of it was that at 13 I had fallen in love. She was 16. You remember her – Rose Ann? Such a pretty girl, a cool, blonde girl, with a slim waist, a way of tossing her hair out of her eyes, and with laughter like the running of fresh water over stones. I remember the afternoon you grew tired and stickily affectionate, cookie crumbs in your hair, and the lollipop I had given you, with extreme reluctance, all over your round face and your fat hands. You were sitting on the grass by the wrought-iron urn, which bubbled with geraniums, and I beside you whittling a little boat from a stick. And you threw your arms around me, put your sticky, dirty face to mine, warm and breathing. You said, "I love you, I do."
Rose Ann went by just then, tossing the hair from her eyes and laughing. Pete Dunnage was with her. They stopped and stared on the way to drink sodas at Pop Minter’s. And Rose Ann laughed until the tears ran down her cheeks. That was when I pushed you away, so hard you fell and skinned your nose.
For Rose Ann said, "Do look at Jimmy Henderson!"
And Pete, who was her age or a little older, asked, "Playing at being a mommy, Jim?"
So I left you, face down on the grass, howling your heart and lungs out, went to the fence, looked over it and demanded, "Want to make something of it?" Because I was ashamed and miserable and my world was insecure, I couldn’t look at her. I said it to Pete, a few years my senior, taller than I and heavier. I was not brave, I was desperate.
It seemed curious then – but not now – that it was Pete who understood and not Rose Ann. The solidarity of sex, perhaps. Because he pulled her away and said, "Aw, leave the kid alone."
I could have murdered you, Edith. After a moment, you put your hand in mine, sticky and dirty, and warm as your cheek had been. And you looked at me, and I looked at you. Your eyes were brown – I noted them for the first time, I think.
You looked the innocence, and the love, and the trust, for I had hurt you, but you did not hold it against me. You were merely amazed to find me unkind. You said, "I’m sorry." I was sorry, too.
It was after that that we became friends. By the time I was 15, I tolerated and even enjoyed you. I dug you out from under the hedge. I took you out of trees. I escorted you to my father when you had a cut thumb, a bruised foot, a bee sting. I permitted you to tag along when I went spring-exploring in the orchard and the strip of wood beyond. I killed the first snake that ever frightened you and showed you your first bird’s nest. It was fun. I was a god, replete with mercy and patronage.
I could be proud. When you were seven and ill with the measles – which I regret to recall you had contracted from me – I was the only one who could coax you to take my father’s medicine during your convalescence. Those were heady days, Edith. They can never come again. You’d have to be seven years to my 15.
You were adorable, if undistinguished, as a baby. You were a pretty child, with copper-red hair and pink and white skin. You were a homely little girl, going to school, the curves resolved into lankiness, your legs, scratched and brown, much too thin, your feet a little on the plump side, your teeth coming out – that was before the period of braces – and your hair, which should have saved you, merely an excuse for a nickname. "Ginger," they called you.
The grade school and high school were in the same building. I could look out and see you in the playground. You were always fighting, Edith – you had plenty of spirit. You were a terror. Your playmates came to accord you respect; your teachers gave you up as a bad job.
Once you embarrassed me greatly. I was in the woods with Slim Waters. It began in fun, wrestling, rolling around like a couple of cubs. It turned into something else – something he did, something I said – it doesn’t matter now. But you came tearing through the woods on your skinny legs, your braids flying, screaming at the top of your voice, "You stop that, Slim Waters, you just stop that!" You fell on him tooth and nail.
You bit him, Edith. You scratched his face. You kicked his shins. You pulled out his hair, and he retreated baffled and furious. Who can blame him?
He fired his parting shot. He yelled, "Jim Henderson has to get girls to fight for him!"
You were panting. You sat down on a log and dusted your hands. Your nose was bleeding a little, for it had come in contact with a hard, round head. You said triumphantly, "I fixed him."
"You needn’t have bothered," I told you. I was a big, overgrown boy – but close to tears of rage. I slapped your face. I slapped it hard. I said, "I’ll thank you to mind your own business," and walked away and left you sitting there openmouthed and too astonished for weeping.
You avoided me thereafter for a time. I was glad. Yet in a few weeks our relationship was on another basis, cautious, neutral, coolly friendly. You no longer tagged or followed me; when I condescended to talk to you, you answered.
Shortly before I was 18, I was graduated from high school. I was, with reluctance and surprise, valedictorian. Dry mouth, knocking knees, a voice that had nothing to do with me, spots before my eyes. Now and then the spots would clear and I could see my mother, sitting there smiling, her hands in white kid gloves straining at each other. I could see my father, his enormous bulk. I could hear him clear his throat. I could see your mother and your father, looking at me with encouragement. And I could see you, briefly, in a white dress, with your shoulder-length braids and, a recent acquisition, braces on your teeth.
My university was distant from this town, Edith. For my short vacations, I did not come home at all. And after the first summer, mine were spent elsewhere. During that time, you grew up. After four years, then medical school. I remember the summer before I entered, I was home for a few weeks. Those were good weeks with my father. He talked to me so much more than he ever had, that busy man, warning me what I faced, the obstacles I would encounter, the choice I must make someday. You were – how old? Fourteen, weren’t you? Going to high school. Your looks had come back, as a bright bird returns to the tree in spring. You had cut your braids, and your hair curled around your shoulders and ears. The braces were gone. There were freckles across your nose, marching like little golden soldiers. Your eyes were bigger than I remembered, and you were aloof, which amused me.
You were a kid, and I was 22 and had my first degree. I was going to be a doctor. I was a man. You were just a nice kid, Edith.
My mother said, "The boys are beginning to flock around Edith. Her mother is nearly distracted."
From my superior height and years, I was highly entertained. I saw them flock those summer nights, the gawky boys with the changing voices and the sudden loud laughter, the boys who needed haircuts and handkerchiefs, the boys whose interests lay so many years behind me.
The night before I went away, you came to dinner with your parents. Afterward, we sat on the porch. The vines screened us from the street. Was not the clematis in full bloom, Edith? I think it was – like a bridal veil falling. You and I sat in the creaky old swing, and I talked of my ambitions. I said weightily that, of course. Dad expected me to come back and take over his practice, but I wasn’t sure. A city was the place. A big city, and of course, specializing.
You were not greatly interested. You remarked thoughtfully that you would never marry a doctor.
"Why not?" I asked, willing to be amused again.
You said that you had lived next door to my father for 12 years and that you were so sorry for my mother. "She never knows where he is," you told me soberly, "and he’s never on time for meals. And the telephone rings all night and he has to go out in the rain and heat and blizzards and high winds. I’ve seen him coming in mornings after being out all night, and looking so tired. I couldn’t marry a man like that. I’d worry about him," you said, "all the time. I’d want to tell his patients to go away, and I’d be jealous. I’d hate them. I couldn’t stand it."
After that, I didn’t see you for a long time because of my work. I liked it; it infuriated me. Sometimes I thought it would trick me, and then I fought it. The harder I fought, the better I liked it. I hated and feared the professor of surgery. I almost worshipped my professor of medicine. I learned equally from both. I grew seemingly hard-boiled and callused. I grew casual and profane. I walked with a swagger in my blood. Most of us did – it was the thing to do, it was protective coloration.
For in our last two years, we worked in the hospital as medical students, under direction, and we saw things. We were not just reading about them. Some of us were shocked, and most of us were frightened. We were in love and becoming lovers of the profession we had selected; but we were determined that it remain a secret and that no one should know of our passion and dedication.
My father died during my senior year. You remember, Edith? I came home, and after the services, I found myself alone. There had been a constant stream of people all that day. A man was never more loved than he. The house was heavy with the smell of flowers, the icebox overflowed with offerings. Children came, and young people and elderly people came alone or in couples, some of whom I had never seen before. Most of them wept. Everyone said, "He was so good to us."
My mother was asleep in the big bedroom, in the lonely bed in which I had been born. Doc Parker left her, with your mother sitting beside her, after he had given her a sedative, and came down to this room in which I now write, which was his retreat after office hours. Here Parker put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You’ll take his place, son, very soon." And I remember saying, "Not in 50 years could I do that."
When he left, I went to the window and looked out over the snow and the long, blue shadows. You came in and touched my arm, Edith. I turned and looked at you. You were 18. You were more beautiful than the star rising and infinitely more compassionate. I could not recall seeing you at the service, although you were there. You had come from college 60 miles away to be there.
You asked as though we had just been talking: "Do you remember the time I went down Hellman’s hill on your sled and broke my arm? You carried me here to your father. I was roaring like a bull, and you were so frightened that you were white?" I remembered.
You said, "Missing him will be bad, Jimmy." I put my arm around you, and we stood there and looked at the green sky darkening and we did not speak again.
My mother came to my graduation. Somehow, I looked for your parents. I looked for you, but you were not there. Your mother had been very ill, and you had left college to help care for her, and now in the summer the three of you had gone away on a cruise.
I was lucky, Edith; I had my appointment to the big hospital, and I went to work immediately, in the unfamiliar city, with the heat and the stench, the ambulance bell clanging; and the long wards furnished simply with human suffering. My mother wrote that you had not returned to college, as your mother’s heart condition, while not immediately dangerous, was a constant source of anxiety. So you had stayed home to run the house and look after her.
I had two years in the hospital. My father had made that possible despite the books I found with unpaid debts (to him) that he wrote off when he knew that he carried death with him, no farther away than arm’s length.
Then we had a year together, Edith. The first strange year in which people came to me, some because of curiosity, many because of loyalty to Doc Henderson. I was young Doc Henderson. I was often discouraged.
When my mother died in her sleep, there was nothing to hold me here, Edith, except the brass plate on the door, which had been there for some time, except my friends and the people who had learned to trust me, the remembrance of things lost – and you, Edith. You were still next door.
Before my mother died, she told me about Pete Dunnage. I had been too busy to notice. She said, "He’s been in love with her for years. Of course, he’s a good bit older, but he’s a clever and nice man." Pete’s father was president of the bank.
I said, "He’s a swell guy. She couldn’t marry a better man." Pete was in the bank, too. You’d never have to worry about him or watch him crawl out of a warm bed on cold nights, and wonder, when the blizzard struck, where he was. You’d never be troubled by patients – the pretty young women patients, the elderly, clinging patients, or those who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, pay their bills.
You were right for Pete and he was right for you. Yet I couldn’t believe it, no matter how right you were for each other. These past two years I had seen you every day – for a minute or two, an hour, an evening, as much of it as I could manage. Your mother was my patient now, since Doc Parker had retired. I was taking care of her funny little heart, her good little heart, which would go on doing its work for a long time if I had anything to say about it
You were my patient, too. You had that bad cold the first winter I was home, which worried me more than I told you. It was strange to go up to your room and look at you lying in the four-poster bed, with your hair tied back with a blue ribbon.
You said that morning I went to see you, "I feel ghastly, and I look it." You did. Your nose was red, your eyes were swollen, and you had a temperature. You ached all over, and you were as hoarse as a crow.
I said, "You never did look like much, Edith," and sat down beside you to put the thermometer in your mouth, to hold your wrist, and listen with my finger to the story of your pulse, and with my stethoscope to that of your chest. And I was frightened, because that season was a bad one for pneumonia.
It was strange for just a moment, but after that you were the little girl who howled when the bee stung her or when she bruised her bare foot on a stone. Perhaps it ceased to be strange to be there with you because it did not seem strange to you.
Yes, thinking about you and Pete Dunnage, I couldn’t believe it, because you had belonged to me all these years; I had carried you in my heart, carelessly perhaps, half the time not knowing you were there, part of myself. A man doesn’t think about his right arm or the air he breathes, but when one is gone he is crippled, and when he is deprived of the other, he suffocates.
The next time I saw you with Pete, there was an ache in that right arm as if it already knew itself for lost, and a choking in my throat. But I knew it was right that you were going to marry Pete someday. Everyone said so.
Once I asked you, "Are you going to marry Pete?"
You looked at me directly and answered with a question. You asked, "What would you think if I did?"
I said, "I would think it fine for both of you, Edith."
When my mother died, you came over, as you had that other time. You came into my room with me and looked at her, sleeping. You put your head down against me and cried, very bitterly. I knew you had loved her, and I knew also that you were afraid, thinking of your own mother.
I held you and wished I could cry. And I thought, I’ve loved you so long, Edith, that I did not know I was in love with you. But you would never marry a doctor.
Now we come to the year just past, with Pete coming almost every evening to your house. Nights, working in the office with the windows open, I could see the white blur of your dress, and Pete and you sitting on your front steps. You wore white a lot last summer. You were lovely in white. You needed no color, for you had your eyes, your glowing hair, and the shape of your mouth.
Was it only three months ago that the desperate girl came to my office quite late? The other parents, two or three, had gone. And here was this girl for whom fear had stripped the hardness, as a willow wand is peeled. A girl who was still pretty young. You were walking with Pete in the garden, and you came in with Pete beside you. I couldn’t leave the girl, not for a moment. There was so little time. So you were helping me, Edith, doing the hard things you had never had to do. You were white, but you didn’t let me down. Pete telephoned for help, but by the time help came we’d won.
I remember looking at you, and at Pete, looking sicker than the patient, sweating and wiping his forehead with a shaking hand. And I thought, It’s all right. I can’t lose you – even when you and Pete are married. This is what you hate, Edith, and this is what you won’t ever have to face. But tonight you came through for me, because you are my friend.
Today you will be married Edith. This is good-bye to the baby who crawled through the hedges, the little girl who fought my battles, the child on the sled, and the 14-year-old girl who didn’t like the smell of doctors. This is good-bye to a girl who watched a star rise, who stood beside a bed with me and looked down at a woman asleep. For never again will you be that girl, because of a ring on your finger and inarticulate pledges in the dark. You will still be there, at the core; but you will change. Life will change you. Love will, and happiness; sorrow will change you, and anxiety, the big problems and the small ones, the everyday irritations, the petty things. Birth will change you, the inevitable vigil and heartbreak, the hope and the glory. Death – but we will not think of that. Girl into woman, Edith, subtly, slowly.
Darling, good-bye.
Dr. Henderson then added this final note:
This is a love story, Edith. It begins long ago, and it does not end. I have been your instinctive enemy. Perhaps I must be again when we meet those things upon which men and women differ so basically, and we look at each other across the chasm. I have been your sweetheart and shall so continue. Tomorrow I shall be your husband. You are not afraid, Edith? I am, I think, a little.
Goodnight, darling. When you read this, it will be good-morning.
I love you very much, Jim
*Featured in Focus on the Family February issue, written by Faith Baldwin*
