Mummy called him Hudson because his favorite of his family’s homes was there—a castle, he said, on the verdant bank beside the river. He’d told her he’d never cared for Charles, his given name; it was a hand-me-down from his father, who sent him to a place called Le Carogue.
He had refused a planned marriage since he’d arrived back in New York, he told her in one of the first letters. When could he come back and get her? He would make his father understand…
Mum refused to go without her mum. Hudson said he would send for Gammy, too, and buy her closetsful of gowns and a home of her own, with stacks of fine china and a mountain of silver.
Mummy wasn’t sure that she could manage in America, even alongside him. He wrote her, “Here I am a king—and you would be my queen. There is nothing I can’t give you, dearest.”
He was wrong. He couldn’t give my mother strength.
She didn’t go. She urged him to marry as he’d planned, a better wife than she could hope to be, and in an effort to propel him toward that end, she let herself be married to Peter Evans, the last of the island’s capable, unmarried males—a quiet, slightly younger boy who’d brought her a flower when her father died at sea.
When she told Hudson what she’d done, his letters halted for five months, and when at last he wrote again, he raged and railed. Henceforth, he wrote daily, begging her to annul the marriage if some unknown-to-me bit of information she’d conveyed to him in a previous letter was indeed true.
Finally, after a few months of such letters, one read simply, “Please take great care. If you would deliver in Cape Town, I could help with transport. For all three of you. Anything. I am always yours, Isla. Always, insensibly always…”
Another year, another creased, time-stained letter: “I developed the film, love. She is nothing short of magic.” And on another line, one halfway down the page, “I did it. I can’t say much for fear of breaking my own heart. Soon she’ll be with child. If a son, Declan. If a daughter, my Isla.”
I found the last letter hanging from the mouth of a wine bottle, having previously been tightly rolled.
My father likely found it shortly before my seventh birthday.
“I pray you’re on your way here. He’s gone mad! Finley & I must escape. There’s no time for further correspondence. Hear me through the stars. I’m always yours, and you are always mine. Remember Rumi?”
And there was a poem there at the bottom, something heady and enchanting.
I took that letter with me, a cylinder I folded into an accordion and pressed against my palm, and at the moment I stepped back into Gammy’s cottage, she was on the telephone, telling someone, “I understand—but she can’t go. Finley is not a simple girl, but she is broken. She has never spoken since it happened. No, it’s not. In Switzerland?” My Gammy laughed. “See if they will learn to read her mind, as I have, Charles. In the meantime, send her tutors.”
I waited, still, until the call ended, and longer before making a sound. Gammy turned to me and smiled as if I wasn’t mute, as if she’d merely been baking a pie. And from that day onward, I imagined Charles. Years later, I looked him up on the new Macintosh at the café, gotten, as were all our things of value, by a grant from the Carnegie Foundation.
I found a newspaper image of his wedding, and inside me, something swung open—a sort of locked door. Charles had a son, I found, and he had indeed named the boy Declan. I saw him as a young teen pictured on a sailboat—lovely eyes, a luscious mouth, and wild, dark hair befitting of a prince. Sadness blossomed like a flower in my heart.
That night at the dinner table, when I set my napkin down beside my empty plate, I opened my mouth, and I told Gammy I’d enjoyed the meal. Each night after, I lay on my back in the field under the cliffs where Vloeiende Trane flowed, and I whispered to the stars the poem Mummy had scrawled. Those final words she thought to send to sea.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
when the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
I didn’t know until I met Doctor, who had been to university, that the poem was longer. Longer than, by then, I cared to memorize—although I did learn some of it.
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
when the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.