Sarah's Window (20 page)

"Mrs.
Sullivan," she'd say, "leave no one near it. It is my nest and my cell and my little prayer-house, and maybe
I
would be like the birds and catch the smell of the stranger and then fly away from ye all."

Frank O'Connor, The Bridal Night

The line advanced and Joy kicked the suitcase forward a few feet.

"Damn, I wish you'd put this off."

"I can't. Can't change my ticket," Sarah said.

"You go sit. I'll hold your place in line."

"I'm fine."

"I bet you've got a fever."

"I'm just fine."

"You should've seen a doctor before you left."

"It's just the flu."

"It's probably some strange virus you got from the floodwater."

"It's just the plain old flu."

"There is no such thing as the plain old flu. Back in the Middle Ages entire populations of Europe were wiped out by the plain old flu. And you're probably
importing
some rare strain with you."

Sarah wrinkled up her face, gave Joy a suspicious look. She was sounding conspicuously unlike herself.

"Where'd you read that?"

Joy adopted a smug expression. "In that guidebook you bought. You left it in the kitchen the other day. I was reading it."

The line advanced another foot, and again Joy nudged the suitcase forward.

"Hell, you could've at least gotten a new suitcase."

"That one's fine."

"Won't hold up."

"It's fine."

"I want you to go to a doctor as soon as you get there."

"I'll be over it by then."

"Promise me."

"Yes, Mother."

They checked her bag, and then they sat at a coffee shop in the airport terminal and Sarah had a cappuccino while Joy picked apart a banana-nut muffin with her red-lacquered nails.

"Honey, really," she said, "I'm worried about you."

Sarah kept her eyes lowered, ripped open her sugar packet and sprinkled the sugar over the foamed milk.

Joy leaned forward across the table, peering up into Sarah's face. "You just get so closed up. The times you should be reachin' out to others and instead you just pinch that old shell of yours shut like a clam and God help any of us who've got their fingers in there."

Sarah dismissed this with a shake of the head. "You're trying to read all kinds of things into this. It's just... well, it's time for me to do it. It's something I've always wanted to do. I'm going to see things I've always dreamed of seeing." Her eyes swept past the faces at the counter, fixed on some distant point in space. "Always it's been books. Reproductions. Now I get to stand in front of the real works of art. The very names of these places are like magic to me. Lord, I've put it off long enough."

Joy held out a chunk of muffin.

"Sure you don't want anything to eat?"

Sarah shook her head. "I'm sure."

"Look, hon, it's not that you're doing this, that's not what worries me." Joy popped the bite of muffin into her mouth and washed it down with a swig of coffee. "You're still grieving. And for more than just that little boy, I think."

Sarah's eyes darted away, fixed on the back of a man counting out change for the cashier.

Joy dropped her voice, spoke gently, and her eyes were gentle, too. "You've never talked to me about him."

"There's nothing to talk about. Nothing happened."

Joy prodded. "I'm not gonna judge you. You know me better than that."

But Sarah's face was closed, and Joy knew that look well, so she shifted to the present, to the future.

"You will send me postcards?"

Sarah relaxed, broke into a weak smile. "I just wish you could come."

"I know. I'm sorry. Timing's just rotten. But you'll meet people. It's always easy
to meet
people when you travel alone."

"Yeah, right, like you've done so much traveling alone."

"That's what they say."

But then she noticed the tears in Sarah's eyes, and how she was struggling to blink them back, and she felt her own throat swell.

There was a baggage handler strike when the plane arrived in Paris the next morning, and she waited at the baggage claim for well over an hour, sat on a metal bench next to a white-scarfed Muslim woman with two small children and waited. It was almost noon by the time she boarded an Air France bus to take her into the city, and she found a window seat and pressed her nose to the glass, full of expectation. But as they approached the outskirts, all she could see in every direction was urban sprawl, ugly pollution-streaked concrete blocks, and her heart sank.

The bus dropped her in a busy street at the foot of a cluster of high-rises on the outer rim of the city. From there she took a taxi to her hotel in the Latin Quarter. Under an overcast sky, Paris struck her as a place without a beyond, enclosed in monochromatic stone and dense gray light. But then the people seemed to compensate for this, and Sarah, who was used to vast, unpopulated space, found a certain beauty in the way their lives were organized, with the shops and markets and cinemas and churches just below their windows, along the wide boulevards and down the narrow streets.

Tucked back in a residential neighborhood of nineteenth-century town houses, the hospital had not been easy to find. But it was well known, she had been told, and many notable and wealthy Americans went there to be treated by American doctors. Nevertheless, she had been wary, had conjured up an image of a shabby waiting room with peeling walls and broken chairs, but she found instead a thoroughly modern and comfortable clinic, and a doctor who greeted her with a southern accent.

He said little but examined her thoroughly, then sent her back to the waiting room while lab tests were run.

It was a long while before he reappeared in his white coat and flashed her a tired smile and gestured to the door of his office.

He sat down behind his desk and waited, hands crossed over his stomach, while she took a chair opposite him.

"Miss..." He hesitated, bent forward to check the file in front of him.

"Bryden," Sarah prompted.

"It is 'miss,' is it not?"

"Yes."

"Well, as I suspected, it's not the flu."

"It's not?"

"You're pregnant."

She sat motionless before him, as if he had spoken not to her but to some other woman sitting in that chair facing him at this moment. It took her a few seconds to find her voice.

"You must be mistaken."

"You didn't suspect..."

"That can't be."

"I'd say from the size of your uterus you're a good nine weeks."

"It must be something else..." Her voice trailed off.

"It's not a tumor, Miss Bryden. Your urine test is positive."

"That's impossible."

"I'm afraid not."

"But it's not possible."

She struggled to keep her voice from shaking as she told him about John's medical history, about his infertility and the subsequent adoption, although she omitted anything about Will's death.

After she finished, she listened in stunned silence while he clarified a few points, explained to her that the gentleman in question apparently was not completely infertile, that oligospermia was easy to misdiagnose, that chances of conception were so slim that lab tests fail to indicate any possibility whatsoever.

"But in this case"—he smiled expansively—"you beat the odds. I've seen it happen. Couples try for ten years, then all of a sudden the woman becomes pregnant. The chances are there, you know. Somewhere in the universe at some point in time, someone beats the odds. It does happen."

He could see she was in shock, the waves of confusion, of disbelief, passing across her face.

"So, all these aches and pains I feel..."

"Just another symptom of pregnancy. The first trimester is the most difficult."

"It doesn't mean I'm going to lose the baby?"

"Not at all."

A smile flickered on her face, and she grew calm.

She rose to her feet.

"Thank you," she said, fumbling with the zipper on her backpack, and he noticed her hands were shaking.

"You might want to rest a bit outside, Miss Bryden," he said kindly, rising from behind his desk. "Or maybe get something to eat or drink. There's a cafe across the street."

"Thank you," she said, and this sudden kindness overwhelmed her and she broke down in tears.

She wasn't quite sure where she was going. But it was a sunny, glorious day and the idea of a bus ride appealed to her. She found a seat at the back and perched there with a Cheshire-cat smile on her face while she watched the neighborhood roll by. They passed a small park, and from her window she caught a glimpse of a playground hidden among the trees, circumscribed by bright flower beds and cleanly clipped shrubs. It was purely spontaneous, a gesture that fit her mood; she shot out of her seat and dashed off the bus just before the door swung shut.

Following the sounds of laughter, she came upon the playground. Children romped noisily from swing to slide, hung from rope ladders, squatted in sand piles. Their mothers, seated on freshly painted green benches, watched or read or chatted among themselves, from time to time raising their voices in warning or to break up a squabble.

Despite what doctors had told her years before, Sarah could not believe anything would happen to this unborn child. It was not that she was trying to delude herself, but rather, for some obscure reason, the startling news brought with it a profound serenity. Had she been visited by angels, she could not have been more reassured. As she sat there she recalled how she had lain awake one night in the loft in Billy's barn, had lain in the straw curled up with Billy's gentle old hunting dog she had dragged up there to keep her company, recalled how she had cried herself to sleep with the dog in her arms. Her heart had been drained of hope that night, and yet, without her knowledge, she had been carrying within her this miracle.

She sat on the bench until noon and the park began to empty; mothers settled toddlers into strollers and trundled back home for lunch and naps. It was very much an insider's world, Sarah thought. So banal and prosaic to the outsider, so often belittled and scorned. But there was for Sarah in that sun-dappled deserted playground the fulfillment of a dream and a reason to be alive.

Of all escapes from reality, mathematics is the most successful ever.

Gian-Carlo Rota, Mit Mathematician

It was around the middle of July when John first made the acquaintance of Dr. Shelley, a British physicist who was joining the faculty at Berkeley for the fall term as visiting professor. Rupert Shelley was an unassuming man with pallid skin and drab brown hair, and so soft-spoken one had to strain to hear him. Shelley was one of the first to develop a system of thought that synthesized quantum theory and traditions of mysticism, and his books were now classics in the field.

The two men were introduced in the hallway outside the physics office, and the encounter stretched through the afternoon, continued through dinner and late into the night. As they shuffled through the empty parking lot toward their cars sometime after midnight, Shelley extended a personal invitation to John to join a small group of colleagues and friends on a retreat scheduled for the first of August. Shelley's retreat was a well-kept secret, open to a select few involved in research across a wide spectrum of interests—cosmology, chemistry, biology, particle physics—and devoted specifically to the interfacing of those fields and, above all, to the search for unity. It was held every summer in an ancient monastery in an isolated region of northern Greece. He and a group of like-minded benefactors had restored it to a certain degree, hardly luxurious by Western standards, but it was adequate for their needs.

"What we really like about the place is the vacuum," he told John while they sat in Shelley's office the following day eating ham sandwiches. "There's bloody well nothing up there. And that affords us a certain freedom from artificial needs—you know, all those countless things we're told we need to keep us happy and functioning. We have no fax, no television, no automobiles. Now, you can bring your PC and your mobile telephone," he grinned sheepishly, "but they must be turned off during the day."

Susan liked the idea, said she thought it was just what John needed.

"You should do it," she called to him as she came out of the bathroom that evening, briskly towel-drying her hair. "Vacation's out of the question for me this summer. I told you that when I took this job." She plopped onto the bed beside him, her wet, tousled hair sticking out in short shocks around her face. She looked more youthful these days, seemed to have regained her old buoyancy and vigor.

"Your passport's still valid, isn't it?"

"Should be."

"We've got a good travel agency at the office. I can see what kind of fares they can get you."

"If you don't mind."

"Where is it?"

"Place called Meteora. I'll have to fly into Athens. Take a train from there."

"I think it's a fantastic idea," she said brightly, and John looked over at her, admiring the confidence that lent her such credibility, thinking how impressed they must be with her at work. He smiled warmly.

"My God," she said in a breathy voice, and her hands fell limp to her lap and lay there in the folds of her wet towel. "That's the first time I've seen you look at me like that in ages."

Caught up in his work during the days prior to his departure, John gave little thought to the trip. He rummaged through his drawers, found his passport and set it aside with the plane ticket, and stopped by the cleaners to drop off a load of shirts to be laundered. Just before Shelley left he dashed into John's office to say goodbye and leave the necessary travel information, but apart from a reminder to bring warm clothing and sturdy walking shoes, John had no idea what awaited him. So when the train to Kalambaka rounded a bend in the track and he first saw the place, he was so mesmerized that the book he had been reading slipped from his hand to the floor, remaining there until the woman next to him picked it up and laid it on the seat beside him.

"Isn't it spectacular?" she said, and John turned to look at her. She was young, with glasses and a quirky smile, and she seemed to bristle with that enthusiasm he always found so engaging in his students.

"I had no idea," he murmured, his eyes shifting back to the window.

After a few minutes of rummaging through the backpack wedged between her legs, she withdrew a water-dimpled brochure and handed it to him.

"Here," she offered. "Keep it. I don't need it. This is my third trip up here."

The Kalambaka train station was a shoddy, decrepit piece of bureaucratic work and decidedly unpic-turesque. There was no footbridge spanning the tracks, and he noticed the Greeks were lugging their suitcases across the rails, so John did likewise. At the gated exit he looked around, but Shelley was nowhere in sight. After a moment he noticed a dark-haired boy moving toward him, fighting the current of bodies and all types of conveyances pouring from the station. The boy scrambled up on a boulder, swaying from foot to foot while he surveyed the crowd. He caught John watching him and there seemed to be an immediate recognition; he broke into a disarming grin, ripped off his baseball cap, and fanned it through the air. John picked up his suitcase and wended his way down the road.

"You must be waiting for me," John said as he approached and set down his bag. "John Wilde."

"Hello, Dr. Wilde," grinned the boy. "I'm Yannis. Dr. Shelley's very sorry he couldn't meet you himself. He's having some problems getting the rooms opened up. It happens every year. The old monk in charge locks things up when we go, with these huge medieval locks and keys, and Dr. Shelley has to run all over the place tracking down the keys."

The boy's British syntax was weighted with a thick Greek accent. John suspected he was older than he had appeared from a distance; judging by his speech and ease with strangers he might be all of twelve or thirteen. He pointed to John's bag. "Is this all you have?"

"Yes. Just this bag."

"Here, let me take it for you."

John protested, but the boy was strong, of tough mountain stock, and he lifted the bag with ease.

"It's good you don't have much luggage. It's a bit of a climb."

They had little chance for conversation after that They walked several blocks to a taverna, and Yannis disappeared inside while John drank a tepid beer at a wobbly table out front and enjoyed fleeting moments of sun between clouds. All around the edges of the town, the strange outcroppings of rock rose like dusky sentinels. From time to time there would be a break in the mist and he would catch sight of a red-roofed monastery clinging to a distant pinnacle high in the clouds.

After a while, an old car pulled to the curb in front of the taverna and Yannis hopped out, snatched up John's bag, and motioned him into the car. It was nothing as official as a taxi, but the man took directions from Yannis and drove them the short distance through the bleak, ramshackle town to a farm at the foot of
a
cliff. As John removed his bag from the trunk, Yannis darted off to where a muleteer was busy lashing a load onto the back of a mule.

"Hurry." Yannis waved. "He's getting ready to leave. We can go with him."

Day was quickly fading, and the towering cliffs seemed rooted in darkness while their peaks bathed in the glow of late-afternoon light. They were unlike any form John had ever seen. He had read about their formation in the brochure pressed upon him by the young woman, the result of millions of years of erosion, cut out of the mountains by the Pinids River. They appeared, however, not so much a result of a wearing down, but rather a rising up—as if the rock had sprouted these formations, the rebellious manifestation of something unaccountable in the very earth itself. A place so spectacular that theories of erosion do not suffice, and the mind wants to believe a mysterious force at work.

John had thought to make the trip to the top on foot, but he soon mounted the mule they had brought along for him; Yannis walked at the head of the mule train, chatting in Greek to the muleteer. It was a long climb, and at times perilous, but the sure-footed beasts plodded at a steady pace. The sun was setting when they finally reached the monastery walls.

Once inside, they passed through a series of gates and inner courtyards. The village had once been organized for work, survival, and defense, and Yannis briefly pointed out the old bathhouse and fountain, and the domed church, explaining that it had been started in the late 1300s with additions built over a period of three centuries. At one of the gates Yannis stopped and spoke briefly to a bearded monk seated on a chair in front of the porter's lodge before they continued into the cloisters and down a covered arcade, finally entering a long refectory with a smoke-blackened ceiling.

"I'll take your things on up to your room," Yannis said as he turned to go. "And I'll find Dr. Shelley and tell him you're here."

Rupert arrived in minutes, out of breath and more agitated than John had ever seen him, but there was a freshness, a glow to his normally pale skin that had not been there in California. He still wore his proverbial sweater, but the bow tie was gone, and he had not shaved for several days.

"Terribly sorry I couldn't meet you at the station, John," he said as he rushed forward to shake his hand. "Hope my young assistant took good care of you."

"Yes, he did. Excellent care."

"Brilliant boy. Met him when I gave a series of lectures at the British School in Athens." Rupert paused to brush some rock dust from his trousers. "A prodigy in math. It's amazing what he's been able to do with so little formal education. I told him about you. Said you'd have much in common. He's been looking forward to meeting you."

"He's Greek?"

"Yes. But his English is impressive, isn't it?"

"Very."

"So much potential. I've been trying to get him out of here, place him in a good boarding school in England. I think I've found some sponsors, but what he really needs is a mentor. Someone to champion his cause. Parents are peasants. Don't really see much use in his toying around with numbers." He paused and rubbed his hands together excitedly. "Tell you what, I still have some business to finish. I'll show you to your room. Then you'll be on your own for a while. Take a look around. Get yourself acquainted with where things are. Sorry, old boy, no running water. No electricity, either. Rather primitive. But we manage. Ever used a gas lantern?"

"Not since Boy Scouts."

Yannis had taken great care to prepare John's room, had lit the gas lantern and laid out a box of candles and matches, had even turned down the raw cotton sheets and plumped the down comforter at the foot of the bed. A pitcher of water had been left next to a metal basin with a bar of soap.

John washed and changed his clothes, then went to look for Yannis, but the boy was nowhere to be found. He looked for him along the arcade, down steep paths and up steps cut into the stone, coming at last to the church. The church was empty, but rows of votive candles flickering in an alcove testified to the presence of spirit in the absence of man. John was about to turn to go when he was startled by the sudden rustling of wings—sounds of bird or bat frightened from its perch. He paused and raised the lantern, followed with his eyes where the lantern cast its light. There, gazing down upon him from the high gilded dome were sober-faced prophets and saints and angels, resplendent in still-vivid colors of the past, in ocher and sienna and jewel blue. He thought of the ceiling in Sarah's room, and the way she had climbed down from the ladder, down out of the clouds and into his arms. He had not thought about her all day, not since boarding the train in Athens that morning, and this sudden recollection of her startled him. She seemed distant to him up here, the once sharp and poignant pain now blunted.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the portal creaking open, and he turned to see Yannis in the doorway.

"Dr. Wilde?"

"Yes?"

"It's time for dinner. Dr. Shelley's already gone ahead. I'll take you there." He reached for the lantern. "Are you a religious man, Dr. Wilde?"

"Yes," John replied without hesitation. "I am."

"I thought you would be."

Night had fallen sharply and the high cloistered walls surrounded them with an impenetrable blackness, so that the eyes were drawn immediately heavenward to the starry sky.

The boy scampered up the steep rocky path ahead of John, the lamp swinging from his hand. After a while he paused, turning back toward John. "I've kept a notebook," he said. "It's all my formulas. Everything I do on my own during the school year. But there's no one in my school who understands what I'm doing. Would you take a look at it?"