The One In My Heart

At last. What we had come to talk about. I glanced at him, imagining the dashing young man he must have been thirty years ago. “No. It was Bennett who first told me about you—he’d heard a bit of the story from Mrs. Asquith.”


Mr. de Villiers wrapped his muffler more tightly about his neck—the cold of the day was the kind that seeped in slowly. “We were seriously involved for a while, and it was the most marvelous time of my life. When I made up my mind to propose to her, I commissioned a specially designed ring. Are you familiar with Tolkien’s works?”

I smiled to myself. “Very.”

“Then you’ll know what I mean when I say I wanted the ring to look like Nenya.”

I nodded, a sharp pinch at my heart. There were three rings of power the Elves had kept for themselves. Nenya, the Ring of Adamant, was wielded by Lady Galadriel.

Zelda would have loved that engagement ring.

“Finally the ring came back from the jeweler. I booked a holiday for us.” He looked up at the sky, heavy with the promise of snow. “But before we went, she had an episode.”

I’d expected those exact words. Still my stomach lurched.

“I knew she had a therapist and a prescription for her condition. But since I had no experience with mental illness—not up close, in any case—at first I didn’t understand what was going on. She had boundless energy, she couldn’t get enough of me, and she became tremendously confident—which was very gratifying, as I’d been telling her for months that she was too modest in her self-belief.

“I began to grow alarmed when I realized she was hardly sleeping. When I woke up at night she’d be on the telephone, talking to friends in America, Australia, or anywhere people were awake. During the day she brought back groceries by the car bootful, morning and afternoon. And she washed all the curtains, sheets, and tablecloths—again and again.

“And then it swung the other way and…” He took a deep breath. “You probably don’t need me to describe what it’s like.”

I shivered, my fingers ice-cold inside my gloves.

“I was a very capable young man who believed that everything was within my power to influence and change. I focused like a laser beam on her condition. We visited the best psychiatrists, the best nutritionists, the best everything. I was convinced that with proper medication, a well-calibrated diet, a rigorously adhered-to schedule, her illness could be controlled like type-one diabetes—still an annoying problem to have, but one that shouldn’t interfere with living a normal life in this day and age.”

My brows knitted. This kind of micromanaging was so different from Pater’s we-just-have-to-be-here philosophy that I didn’t know what to think of it.

“It didn’t quite work out that way. In hindsight, that I’d put so much pressure on her to become well and remain well was probably one of the reasons she was ill again a few months later. And that was a terrible episode—she had to be hospitalized for several weeks.”

Zelda’s first episode in the States, when I was six, had led to a hospital stay. The one in the wake of the ball also required institutional care. But each time she was back home in days. To need several weeks of hospitalization—I didn’t even dare to imagine the severity of that episode.

“She recovered eventually. But I felt I’d lost control over every aspect of my life. A complete failure of a man. So I told her I couldn’t do it anymore, that it was time for us to stop being a couple.” Mr. de Villiers sighed. Before me he seemed to grow smaller. “Six months later I was married. Two months after that she married your father and moved to America.”

Pater had been on a business trip to London when he’d met Zelda. Theirs had been a whirlwind romance, at most six weeks from introduction to wedding. Ever since Bennett first brought up the topic of her old boyfriend, I’d suspected that she might have married Pater on the rebound. What Mr. de Villiers said pretty much confirmed that.

“Have you seen her since?”

“Once at a party in London—she’d divorced your father the year before. We sat together and talked for hours. But when the party ended, we went our separate ways.” He glanced up at the sky again. Tiny snowflakes meandered down, disappearing the moment they touched ground. “My marriage was already an entity in name only, but I was still unwilling to face everything that a relationship with Zelda would entail. I couldn’t handle it as a young man; it seemed impossible I’d do any better as a man of middle age.”

We left our spot before the commemorative plane tree and resumed walking. At the far end of the garden I said, “But?”