The Swan Thieves

I confronted him the next day, asking him to stay home for a few minutes after my mother had gone out with the children--I knew it was a day when he didn't have class until afternoon. I had hidden the letters in the dining-room sideboard, with the exception of the one in Robert's handwriting, which I put in my pocket, and I sat him down at the table to talk. He was impatient to be off to school, but his body stilled when I asked him if he realized that I knew what was going on. He frowned. Now I was the one trembling--with rage or fear, I wasn't yet certain. "What do you mean?" His frown seemed genuine. He was wearing something dark, and his remarkable handsomeness leapt out at me, as it sometimes did, without warning--the regal body, the strong features.

"First question--do you see her at school? Do you see her every day? Did she come here from New York, maybe?" He leaned back. "See who at school?"

"The woman." I said. "The woman in all your paintings. Does she model for you at school or in New York?"

He began to glower. "What? I thought we'd been through this before."

"Do you see her every day? Or does she send you letters from a distance?"

"Send me letters?" He looked flabbergasted at this, pale. Guilt, surely.

"Don't bother to answer. I know she does."

"You know she does? What do you know?" There was anger in his eyes but also bewilderment.

"I know because I found her letters to you."

Now he was staring at me as if he had no words, as if he actually didn't know what to say. I had seldom seen him so disoriented, at least not in response to something from outside himself. He put both hands on the table, where they rested against the sheen of the grain, Mom's polishing. "You found letters from her to me?" The strange thing was that he didn't sound ashamed. If I'd had to characterize his voice and face at that moment, I would have said he seemed somehow eager, alarmed, hopeful. It enraged me--the note in his voice made me realize that he loved her uncontrollably, loved even the mention of her.

"Yes!" I shouted, jumping to my feet and pulling the pile of notes from under the place mats in the sideboard. "Yes, I even know her name, you stupid fool! I know it's Mary. Why did you leave them in this house if you didn't want me to find out?" I dropped them in front of him on the table, and he picked one up.

"Yes, Mary," he said, and then he glanced up and began almost to smile, but sadly. "That's nothing. Well, not nothing, but not so important."

I began to cry in spite of myself, and I felt it was not because of what he'd done so much as what he'd seen me do, that dramatic pulling out of letters and tossing them down in front of him. It was as humiliating as I ever could have dreamed. "You think it's nothing that you love another woman? What about this?" I pulled his own scrap of letter from my pocket, the one indisputably in his handwriting, crumpled it up, and hurled it at him.

He caught it and smoothed it out on the table. I thought I read disbelief in his face. Then he seemed to rally. "Kate, what the hell do you care? She's dead. She's dead!" He was white around the nose and lips, his face rigid. "She died. Do you think I wouldn't give anything to have saved her, to have let her go on painting?"

Now I was sobbing in confusion as much as anything else. "She's dead?" The one dated letter from Mary meant she must have been alive even a couple of months before. I had the weird social impulse to say, Oh, I'm so sorry. Had she been in a car accident? Why had he not acted traumatized these last months or weeks? Nothing had seemed different. Perhaps whatever the relationship had been, he'd cared so little, actually, that he hadn't grieved for her. But this struck me as terrible in itself--could a person be that coldhearted?

"Yes. She is dead." He gave the word a bitterness I wouldn't have thought him capable of. "And I still love her. You're damn right about that, if that satisfies you. I don't know why you should care. I love her. And if you don't understand the kind of love I mean, I'm not going to explain." He stood up.

"It doesn't satisfy me." Now that I had started weeping, I couldn't stop. "It makes it all worse. I don't know what you've been up to or what you mean. You have no idea how hard I've tried to understand you. But we're done, Robert, and that satisfies me--that does satisfy me." I picked up our Chinese vase from the sideboard, where it had always sat well out of child-reach, and threw it across the room. It smashed to heartrending bits on the hearth, under the portraits of my father's parents, stalwart people from Cincinnati. I regretted its destruction already. I regretted everything, except my children.