Back to Wando Passo by David Payne (books to improve english txt) 📕

but firm, and he presses the book into her hands that want only to hold his. As he turns away and walks to the far end of the porch, Addie catches the scent of musk roses from the climber in the yard.

“Then what…”

“I’ve thought about our conversation, too,” he says. “The person I believed you were could not have done this. You’re someone else. I don’t know who you are.”

“I don’t believe that,” Addie says. “I don’t believe that in my heart. You do know me. You’re the only one who ever has. And if I’ve hurt your trust, then you must let me earn it back. I will.”

“If you’d seen me, Addie, if you had any notion who I truly am, you could not have done this. Had I been in your place, I don’t believe I would have to you.”

“But I do see you, Jarry,” she says, crossing to him, looking fervently into his face, “I do see you. I see you the way no one ever has or ever will.”

“Then tell me this,” he says. “Had I been white and free, like Harlan is, would you have kept this from me? Would you have kept from him a truth as fateful to his happiness as you knew this one was to me?”

“Oh, Jarry,” she says, “I don’t know, I don’t know! How am I to answer? Perhaps I wouldn’t have. Perhaps I would have told him, but—”

“That’s what I believe. You certainly would have. Not to have told him would have been a stain upon your honor. Whereas to tell me now…isn’t it essentially an act of charity? A philanthropic act toward one less fortunate, of lower circumstances than yourself? No, Addie, for you to tell me this is an act of generosity, a grace note in your character, whereas not to have told a white man would have been an inexpungable disgrace. This, Addie, this”—and he is earnest now, and fierce—“is where you cannot see me. This is where I am invisible to you.”

“But you’re wrong, Jarry. You are so, so wrong! I don’t feel generous. Not a day has passed, not an hour, that this hasn’t weighed upon my conscience, especially in light of all you and your mother did for me when I was ill. And yes, my silence was disgraceful. I have disgraced myself, but, Jarry, try to understand…. If you seeme as you wish to be seen, you must grasp that I was silent out of fear and weakness. I felt my loyalties divided. I was confused, my dear. I didn’t act with evil in my heart—surely you don’t think that? I had no intent to harm. Don’t I at least deserve the chance to correct a fault when it is pointed out to me? If I don’t see you fully, if I’ve seen you through a glass darkly, can I not learn to see you face-to-face? Can love not teach me this? Can it not teach us both? Can I not change? Can I not hope that love will make me better than I am? If I’ve failed you, at least give me the chance to amend my fault. Jarry, Jarry…Believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things….”

Addie’s weeping now and wild, but the softness she so loves in Jarry is absent from his face tonight. “My mother lies there in the graveyard, Addie, dead of grief,” he says. “She went to her death with an accusation in her heart against my father that you and you alone knew to be untrue, and you kept it from her. You kept it from us both, and she died without the consolation of the truth. And if my father’s spirit now suffers I know not what torment, if Clarisse has worked some evil against him…And all this, because you didn’t speak?”

“You blame me for your mother’s death?” she answers, shocked. “You hold me responsible for what Clarisse has done? Is this what you believe?”

“What I believe,” he answers, “is that it can never work. Mother told me this before she died, and I didn’t believe her. I refused. But she was right, Addie. It didn’t work for her and Father. He was a decent and honorable man. He loved her, or believed he did, yet he kept her a slave until the day he died. Harlan loved Clarisse, and look what it has brought her to. None of them, none of you, could see us as you see yourselves, and you do not see me. You can’t.”

“I do,” she whispers, passionately. “I do.” And now she takes his face between her hands and kisses him, and the kiss is hard and hot and passionate with longing long suppressed and with the desperate fear of losing him.

Recklessly given, the kiss is recklessly received, but Jarry, when he pulls away, says, in a despairing voice, “I don’t know, Addie. I don’t know…. I must go back.”

“Go back,” she tells him, tenderly. “Go back to your guests. We’ll speak more of it tomorrow. Will you come? There’s so much more I want to say.”

This question goes unanswered, too, and Addie will remember, later, that it did. Tonight, she walks home in the dark, and she is troubled, she is sad, but despite this, she’s amazed at the size and power of what she feels. So this is what the poets meant by fate, she thinks. All those years, even when she was a girl, she never quite believed. But everything they promised, everything they said—all of it is true, all of it is real! How strange to no longer be afraid, to no longer want for anything she doesn’t have. How strange to no longer wish to be other than she is. And this is Addie’s thought: So this is what being human truly is.

She isn’t tired, but she sleeps, and so it isn’t till first light, when she awakes from a dream she briefly recalls, which then slips through her fingers like a thread,