Another Recollection Collected

Matters of the Heart

As I mentioned previously, I did not understand why Mother married Father. Even from the normally rosy perspective of a child, I was unable to comprehend how she could have chosen such a match. They rarely spoke to one another, and when they did it was only to communicate the most banal of information. Indeed, it seemed painful at times for them to be near one another, so much so that one might be able to sympathize with my father's gallavanting, even if forgiveness remained an impossibility. One day, I worked up the courage to ask mother about it directly. I was twelve years old, entering that period of boy's life when the issues of grown men and women first begin to trouble the unclouded adolescent mind. "Why did you marry father?" I asked her as we sat together at breakfast. I hadn’t meant to put it as bluntly as I did, but I was urgent to know.

She looked at me for a moment, her face calm and collected as ever. "Why do you ask?"

"I hate him," I said flatly.

"That's a foolish thing to say. He is your father."

"He's a cad first, a drunkard second, and a scoundrel through and through." The virulence of my response startled me more than her.

"Be that as it may, he's still your father. We live in a society of rules and convention, Atelon, and bearing the shortcomings of one's father is an important one." I expected her to chide me, but she seemed sympathetic. Ah! If anyone has ever understood me, it was Mother.

I soaked this in for a short time before as I struggled to form my next query. "Did you love him?"

"Love him when?"

"When you married him."

She looked past me, out the window to the old stone wall at the back of the family estate. It must have been over three hundred years old, that old wall. Over time a quilt of ivy and moss had enveloped the old edifice, its gray-green bulk broken only by a few rosebushes growing at its base to which Fenwyck was busy tending. But Mother seemed to gaze not so much at this idyllic tableau as into her memory of a distant past, remote but not forgotten. "One doesn't marry for love," she said after a time.

"Why ever did you marry him then?"

"It was the right thing to do. A wealthy man, with a deeded manor, and I the daughter of a humble bureaucrat -- what could I do? Your father loved me , or at least he was infatuated with me for as long as he ever is with a person, and I would have been a fool to pass up such a match."

I admit that I had suspected something like this instinctively, her incredible tolerance of his untoward liaisons, the hardness of her manner with him; it was all too clear even to a child the immeasurable gulf that separated my parents. Still, it was shocking to hear her acknowledge such a state of affairs all the same. We sat in silence for a few minutes as I let the full range of implications wash away the last vestiges of idealism from my as yet imperfectly formed mind. I chewed on some toast while she sipped naive d on her tea and continued to gaze out the window. "So you've never been in love?" I asked. It was a frightening prospect for a boy only just becoming acquainted with such profound sentiments. My family was living proof that one could live without love, but I wasn't sure that it was something to which one ought aspire.

A small, private smile bent the corners of her mouth. "Once."

"With whom?" I was filled with images of young lovers rent apart by circumstances too tragic to bear. I half expected her to chastise me for a question such brazen, but instead she chuckled and blushed slightly. "Who was it?" I prodded, breathlessly.

"Someone to whom marriage was an impossibility," she said simply.

"Why?"

That same tolerant shrug. "It is the way things are." I was about to demand further details, but at that moment Fenwyck entered the breakfast nook from outside to announce the arrival of my tutor. The sudden interruption caused mother color slightly and giggle with uncharacteristic surprise. At that moment, I was struck by the most curious wish. I dreamed that instead of my cold, distant father by blood, I was the offspring of Mother and a man resembling Fenwyck exactly in terms of character and appearance, inhabiting of course a more socially advanced position than that of manservant. He was at least not a philandering wastrel like Father. I was bustled off to my lessons, driving this happy fantasy from my mind. I was condemned to endure my natural father, and there was little utility in thinking otherwise.