The Toynbee Convector

I flinched, pulled back, then glanced up at the house. There was John’s face, of course, grinning like a pumpkin in the window, sipping sherry, toast-warm and at ease.

“Ohh,” a voice wailed somewhere. “... God....”

It was then that I saw the woman.

She stood leaning against a tree, dressed in a long, moon-colored dress over which she wore a hip-length heavy woolen shawl that had a life of its own, rippling and winging out and hovering with the weather.

She seemed not to see me or if she did, did not care; I could not frighten her, nothing in the world would ever frighten her again. Everything poured out of her steady and unflinching gaze toward the house, that window, the library, and the silhouette of the man in the window.

She had a face of snow, cut from that white cool marble that makes the finest Irish women; a long swan neck, a generous if quivering mouth, and eyes a soft and luminous green. So beautiful were those eyes, and her profile against the blown tree branches, that something in me turned, agonized, and died. I felt that killing wrench men feel when beauty passes and will not pass again. You want to cry out: Stay. I love you. But you do not speak. And the summer walks away in her flesh, never to return. But now the beautiful woman, staring only at that window in the for house, spoke.

“Is he in there?” she said.

“What?” I heard myself say.

“Is that him?” she wondered. “The beast,” she said, with quiet fury. “The monster. Himself.”

“I don’t—”

“The great animal,” she went on, “that walks on two legs. He stays. All others go. He wipes his hands on flesh; girls are his napkins, women his midnight lunch. He keeps the stashed in cellar vintages and knows their years but not their names. Sweet Jesus, and is that him?”

I looked where she looked, at the shadow in the window, for off across the croquet lawn.

And I thought of my director in Paris, in Rome, in New York, in Hollywood, and the millraces of women I had seen John tread, feet printing their skins, a dark Christ on a warm sea. A picnic of women, danced on tables, eager for applause and John, on his way out, saying, “Dear, lend me a fiver. That beggar by the door kills my heart—”

I watched this young woman, her dark hair stirred by the night wind, and asked:

“Who should he be?”

“Him,” she said. “Him that lives there and loved me and now does not.” She shut her eyes to let the tears fell. “He doesn’t live there anymore,” I said. “He does!” She whirled, as if she might strike or spit

“Why do you lie?”

“Listen.” I looked at the new but somehow old snow in her face. “That was another time.”

“No, there’s only now!” She made as if to rush for the house. “And I love him still, so much I’d kill for it, and myself lost at the end!”

“What’s his name?” I stood in her way. “His name?”

“Why, Will, of course. Willie. William.”

She moved. I raised my arms and shook my head.

There’s only a Johnny there now. A John.”

“You lie! I feel him there. His name’s changed, but it’s him. Look! Feel!”

She put her hands up to touch on the wind toward the house, and I turned and sensed with her and it was another year, it was a time between. The wind said so, as did the night and the glow in that great window where the shadow stayed.

“Hurt’s him!”

“A friend of mine,” I said, gently.

“No friend of anyone, ever!”

I tried to look through her eyes and thought: my God, has it always been this way, forever some man in that house, forty, eighty, a hundred years ago! Not the same man, no, but all dark twins, and this lost girl on the road, with snow in her arms for love, and frost in her heart for comfort, and nothing to do but whisper and croon and mourn and sob until the sound of her weeping stilled at sunrise but to start again with the rising of the moon.

“That’s my friend in there,” I said, again. “If that be true,” she whispered fiercely, “then you are my enemy!” I looked down the road where the wind blew dust through the graveyard gates.