“But you also felt sorry for him.”
“How could I not? His life was not easy. And yet, I eventually learned that there were many children like Daniel.”
“No,” I say. “For both of us, there was only one.”
It was early October when Daniel first entered our home, a gangly, towheaded boy with rough country mannerisms and a shyness I hadn’t anticipated. He did not shake my hand on that first visit, nor did he meet my eyes. Instead, he stood with his hands in his pockets, his gaze fixed on the floor. Though Ruth had tutored him after school, she worked with him again that evening at the kitchen table while I sat in the living room, listening to the radio. Afterward, she insisted he stay for dinner.
Daniel wasn’t the first student she’d invited to our home for dinner, but he was the only one who ever came regularly. It was due partly to the family’s situation, Ruth explained. Daniel’s stepbrother and his wife could barely keep the farm afloat and were resentful that the sheriff had ordered them to send Daniel to school at all. All the same, it didn’t seem as though they wanted him around the farm, either. On the day Ruth visited, they sat on the porch smoking cigarettes and responded to Ruth’s questions with indifferent, single-syllable answers. The next morning, Daniel came to school with bruises on his cheek and one eye as red as a ruby. The sight of his face nearly broke Ruth’s heart, making her all the more determined to help him.
But it wasn’t simply the obvious signs of abuse that upset her. When tutoring him after school, she often heard his stomach rumble, though when asked, he denied that he was hungry. When Daniel finally admitted that he sometimes went days without eating, her first instinct was to call the sheriff. Daniel begged her not to, if only because he had nowhere else to go. Instead, she ended up inviting him to dinner.
After that initial visit to our home, Daniel began to eat with us two or three times a week. As he grew more comfortable with us, the shyness evaporated, replaced by an almost formal politeness. He shook my hand and addressed me as Mr. Levinson, always making a point of asking how my day had been. The seriousness of his demeanor both saddened and impressed me, perhaps because it seemed a product of his prematurely hard life. But I liked him from the beginning and grew more fond of him as the year progressed. For her part, Ruth would eventually come to love him like a son.
I know that in this day and age, it’s considered inappropriate to use such a word when describing a teacher’s feeling for a student, and perhaps it was inappropriate even then. But hers was a motherly love, a love born of affection and concern, and Daniel blossomed under Ruth’s care. Over and over, I would hear her tell him that she believed in him and that he could be anything he wanted to be when he grew up. She emphasized that he could change the world if he wanted, make it a better place for himself and others, and he seemed to believe her. More than anything, he seemed to want to please her and he stopped acting up in class. He worked hard to become a better student, surprising Ruth with the ease with which he learned. Though uneducated, he was highly intelligent, and by January, he was reading as well as his classmates. By May, he was nearly two years ahead, not only in reading, but in all the other subjects as well. His memory was remarkable; he was a veritable sponge, soaking up everything that Ruth or I ever told him.
As if keen to know Ruth’s heart, he showed an interest in the art that hung on our walls, and after dinner, Ruth often walked him through the house to show him the paintings we’d collected. He would hold Ruth’s hand and listen as she described them, his eyes flickering from the paintings to her face and back again. He eventually came to know the names of all the artists, as well as their styles, and in this fashion I knew that he had come to care for Ruth as much as she cared for him. Once, Ruth asked me to take a photograph of them together. After she presented it to him, he clung to it for the rest of the afternoon and I saw him staring at it sometime later, his face etched with wonder. Whenever Ruth dropped him off back at home, he never once forgot to thank her for the time she spent with him. And on the last day of school, before he ran off to play with his friends, he told her that he loved her.
By then, the idea had taken root in her mind to ask Daniel if he wanted to live with us permanently. We talked about this, and in truth, I wouldn’t have minded. Daniel was a pleasure to have around our home and I told her as much. But by the end of the school year, Ruth still wasn’t sure how to broach the subject to him. She wasn’t sure whether Daniel would agree or even if he desired such a thing, nor did she know how to suggest this to his stepbrother. There was no guarantee that such a thing would even be legally allowed, so for all these reasons, she said nothing on that final day. Instead, she decided to postpone the matter until after we returned from our summer trip. But during our travels, Ruth and I spoke of Daniel frequently. We resolved to do whatever we could to make such an arrangement possible. When we finally returned to Greensboro, however, the shack stood empty, apparently abandoned for weeks. Daniel didn’t return to school in August, nor were there any requests for his records to be forwarded. No one seemed to know where he’d gone or what had happened to the family. Students and other teachers soon forgot about him, but for Ruth, it was different. She cried for weeks when she realized not only that he was gone, but that he might be gone forever. She made a point of visiting the neighboring farms, hoping that someone could tell her where the family had gone. At home, she would eagerly sort through the mail, hoping to find a letter from him, and she could never hide her disappointment when, day after day, none arrived. Daniel had filled a hole in Ruth that I could not, something that had been missing in our marriage. In that year, he’d become the child she’d always wanted, the child I could never give her.
I would love to tell you that Ruth and Daniel reconnected; that later in life, he contacted her, if only to let her know how he was doing. She worried about him for years, but with the passage of time, Ruth began to mention his name less frequently, until finally she stopped mentioning him at all. Yet I knew she never forgot about him and that part of her never stopped looking for him. It was Daniel she was looking for as we drove the quiet country roads, passing run-down farms; it was Daniel she hoped to see whenever she returned to school after a summer spent in distant studios and galleries. Once, she thought she spotted him on the streets of Greensboro during a Veterans Day parade, but by the time we were able to make our way through the crowds, he was already gone, if he’d ever really been there at all.
After Daniel, we never again had a student in our home.
There is a bone-chilling cold in the car, the aftereffect of the window I opened earlier. Frost glitters on the dashboard now, and every time I breathe, a cloud forms beyond my lips. Though I’m no longer thirsty, my throat and stomach remain chilled from the snow. The cold is inside and outside, everywhere, and I can’t stop shivering.
Beside me, Ruth stares out the window and I realize that I can see starlight beyond the pane. It is not yet light, but the moonlight makes the snow on the trees glow silver, and I can tell that the worst of the weather has passed. Tonight, the snow on the car will crust as it continues to freeze, but sometime tomorrow or the next day, the temperature will rise and the world will shake off the white embrace of winter as the snow begins to melt.
This is both good and bad. My car may become visible from the road, which is good, but I need the snow to live, and within a day or two, it might be gone completely.
“You are doing fine for now,” Ruth tells me. “Do not worry about tomorrow until you have to.”
“Easy for you to say,” I reply, sulking. “I’m the one in trouble here.”
“Yes,” she says matter-of-factly. “But it is your fault. You should not have been driving.”
“We’re back to this again?”
She turns to me with a wry grin. She is in her forties now and wears her hair short. Her dress is cut in simple lines, in the bright red hues she preferred, with oversize buttons and elegant pockets. Like every other woman in the 1960s, Ruth was a fan of Jacqueline Kennedy.
“You brought it up.”
“I was looking for sympathy.”
“You are complaining. You do this more now that you are older. Like with the neighbor who cut down the tree. And the girl at the gas station who thought you were invisible.”
“I wasn’t complaining. I was observing. There’s a difference.”
“You should not complain. It is not attractive.”
“I’m many years removed from being attractive.”
“No,” she counters. “In this you are wrong. Your heart is still beautiful. Your eyes are still kind, and you are a good and honest man. This is enough to keep you beautiful forever.”
“Are you flirting with me?”
She raises an eyebrow. “I do not know. Am I?”
She is, I think. And for the first time since the accident, if only for a moment, I actually feel warm.
It’s strange, I think, the way our lives turn out. Moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined. Such a moment occurred when I first met Ruth. I wasn’t lying when I told Ruth that I knew in that instant we would one day be married.
Yet experience has taught me that fate is sometimes cruel and that even a boatload of hope is sometimes not enough. For Ruth, this became clear when Daniel entered our lives. By then, she was over forty and I was even older. It was another reason she couldn’t stop crying after Daniel left. Back then, social expectations were different, and both of us knew that we were too old to adopt a child. When Daniel disappeared from our lives, I couldn’t escape the conclusion that fate had conspired against her for the last and final time.
Though she knew about the mumps and had married me anyway, I knew that Ruth had always clung to a secret hope that the doctor had somehow been mistaken. There was no definite proof, after all, and I admit that I nurtured a slim hope as well. But because I was so deeply in love with my wife, it was seldom at the forefront of my thoughts. We made love frequently in our first years of marriage, and though Ruth was reminded every month of the sacrifice she had made by marrying me, she wasn’t initially bothered by it. I think she believed that will alone, that her profound desire for a child, would somehow make it happen. Her unspoken belief was that our time would come, and this, I think, was the reason we never discussed adoption.
It was a mistake. I know that now, but I didn’t know it then. The 1950s came and went and our house slowly filled with art. Ruth taught school and I ran the store, and even though she was growing older, part of her still held out hope. And then, like the long-awaited answer to a prayer, Daniel arrived. He became first her student and then the son she had always longed for. But when the illusion suddenly ended, only I remained. And it wasn’t quite enough.
The next few years were hard for us. She blamed me, and I blamed myself as well. The blue skies of our marriage turned gray and stormy, then bleak and cold. Conversations became stilted, and we began to argue for the first time. Sometimes it seemed to be a struggle for her to sit in the same room with me. She spent many weekends at her parents’ house in Durham – her father’s health was declining – and there were times when we didn’t speak for days. At night, the space between us in the bed felt like the Pacific, an ocean impossible for either of us to swim across. She did not want to and I was too afraid to try, and we continued to drift further apart. There was even a period when she wondered whether she wanted to remain married to me, and in the evenings, after she’d gone to bed, I would sit in the living room, wishing that I were someone else, the kind of man who’d been able to give her what she wanted.
But I couldn’t. I was broken. The war had taken from me the only thing she’d ever wanted. I was sad for her and angry with myself, and I hated what was happening to us. I would have traded my life to make her happy again, but I didn’t know how; and as crickets sounded on warm autumn nights, I’d bring my hands to my face and I would cry and cry and cry.
“I would never have left you,” Ruth assures me. “I am sorry I made you think such things.” Her words are leaden with regret.
“But you thought about it.”
“Yes,” she said, “but not in the way you think. It was not a serious idea. All married women think such things at times. Men too.”
“I never did.”
“I know,” she says. “But you are different.” She smiles, her hand reaching out for mine. She takes it, caressing the knots and bones. “I saw you once,” she says to me. “In the living room.”
“I know,” I say.
“Do you remember what happened next?”
“You came over and held me.”
“It was the first time I had seen you cry since that night in the park, after the war,” she says. “It scared me very much. I did not know what was wrong.”
“It was us,” I say. “I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to make you happy anymore.”
“There was nothing you could do,” she says.
“You were so… angry with me.”
“I was sad,” she says. “There is a difference.”
“Does it matter? Either way, you weren’t happy with me.”
She squeezes my hand, her skin soft against my own. “You are a smart man, Ira, but sometimes, I think you do not understand women very well.”
In this, I know she is right.
“I was devastated when Daniel went away. I would have loved for him to become part of our lives. And yes, I was sad that we never had children. But I was also sad because I was in my forties, even though that might not make sense to you. I did not mind my thirties. That was when I felt for the first time in my life that I was actually an adult. But for women, older than forty is not always so easy. On my birthday, I couldn’t help but think that I had already lived half my life, and when I looked in the mirror, a young woman no longer stared back at me. It was vain, I know, but it bothered me. And my parents were getting older, too. That was why I went to visit them so often. By then, my father had retired, but he was not well, as you know. It was difficult for my mother to take care of him. In other words, there was no simple way to make things better for me back then. Even if Daniel had stayed with us, those still would have been hard years.”