“I simply wished you’d used some precautions. It’s not the best way to start a life together, is it?”
Adam couldn’t formulate an answer. It seemed that his entire future depended upon the next few minutes and how he handled them. He danced between the truth and a lie, wondering which would better serve his interests.
“When Justine told me, I left the house in a rage. I felt like some eighteenth-century father storming out to demand satisfaction. But I know how these things happen between people. I just want you to tell me if you’d talked about marriage. Before, I mean. Before you made love to her.”
Adam wanted to say that they’d talked about it often, in the late of night typing back and forth furiously on the Ceephone, making plans, sharing dreams, and committing themselves to a life together. But from the roots of such a lie had to grow a convincing performance of grief over the next few months. And while he regretted Elena’s death, he did not actually mourn her passing, so he knew that a show of abject sorrow would prove itself more than he could manage.
“She was special,” Anthony Weaver was saying. “Her baby—your baby, Adam—would have been special as well. She was fragile and working hard to find herself, it’s true, but you were helping her grow. Remember that. Hold onto that. You were tremendously good for her. I would have been proud to see you together as man and wife.”
He found he couldn’t do it. “Dr. Weaver, I wasn’t the one.” He dropped his eyes to the table. He concentrated on the open texts, his notes, the essays. “What I mean is I never made love with Elena, sir.” He felt more colour burn its way into his flesh. “I never even kissed her. I hardly ever touched her.”
“I’m not angry, Adam. Don’t misunderstand. You don’t have to deny you were lovers.”
“I’m not denying. I’m just telling you the truth. The facts. We weren’t lovers. It wasn’t me.”
“But she saw only you.”
Adam hesitated to bring forth the single piece of information which he knew Anthony Weaver was avoiding, perhaps deliberately, perhaps unconsciously. He knew that giving it voice would also mean giving voice to the professor’s worst fears. Yet there seemed to be no other way to convince the man of the truth about his own relationship with Elena. And he was an historian, after all. Historians are supposed to be seekers of truth.
He could demand no less of himself. He said, “No, sir. You’ve forgotten. I wasn’t the only one Elena saw. There was Gareth Randolph.”
Weaver’s eyes seemed to unfocus behind his spectacles. Adam hurried on.
“She saw him several times a week, didn’t she, sir? As part of the deal she’d struck with Dr. Cuff.” He didn’t want to put anything more into words. He could see the grey curtain of knowledge and misery pass across Weaver’s features.
“That deaf—” Weaver’s words stopped. His eyes sharpened once again. “Did you reject her, Adam? Is that why she looked elsewhere? Wasn’t she good enough for you? Did she put you off because she was deaf?”
“No. Not at all. I just didn’t—”
“Then why?”
He wanted to say, “Because I was afraid. I thought she would suck the marrow from my bones. I wanted to have her and have her and have her but not marry her, God not marry her and live on the black edge of my own destruction for the rest of my life.” Instead, he said, “It just didn’t happen between us.”
“What?”
“The sort of connection one looks for.”
“Because she was deaf.”
“That wasn’t an issue, sir.”
“How can you say that? How can you even expect me to believe it? Of course it was an issue. It was an issue for everyone. It was an issue for her. How could it not be?”
Adam knew this was dangerous ground. He wanted to retreat from the confrontation. But Weaver was waiting for his answer, and his stony expression told Adam how important it was that he answer correctly.
“She was just deaf, sir. Nothing else. Just deaf.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That there was nothing else wrong with her. Even being deaf wasn’t something wrong. It’s just a word people use to indicate something’s missing.”
“Like blind, like mute, like paralysed?”
“I suppose.”
“And if she’d been those things—blind, mute, paralysed—would you still be saying that it wasn’t an issue?”
“But she wasn’t those things.”
“Would you still be saying it wasn’t an issue?”
“I don’t know. I can’t say. I can only say that Elena’s being deaf wasn’t an issue. Not for me.”
“You’re lying.”
“Sir.”
“You saw her as a freak.”
“I didn’t.”
“You were embarrassed by her voice and pronunciation, by the fact that she couldn’t ever tell how loud she was speaking so that when you were out in public together, people would hear that odd voice. They’d turn, they’d be curious. And you’d feel embarrassed with all those eyes on you. And ashamed, of her, of yourself, of being embarrassed in the first place. Not the great liberal that you once thought you were. Always wishing that she were normal because if she were—if she just could hear—then you really wouldn’t feel as if you owed her something more than you were able to give.”
Adam felt his body going cold, but he didn’t respond. He wanted to pretend that he hadn’t heard, or at the very least, to keep his face from revealing the extent to which he comprehended the underlying meaning of what the professor had said. He saw that he failed to do so on both scores, for Weaver’s own face seemed to crumble in on itself and he said, “Oh God.”
He walked to the mantel where Adam had continued to place the gathering collection of envelopes and messages. With what appeared to be a tremendous effort, he swept them up and carried them to his desk and sat down. He began to open them, slowly, ponderously, his movements weighted by twenty years of denial and guilt.
Adam cautiously lowered himself into his chair. He went back to his notes, but he saw this time even less than he had managed to see before. He knew that he owed Dr. Weaver some sort of reassurance, a reaching out in fellowship and love. But nothing in his twenty-six years of limited experience provided him with the words to tell the other man that there was no sin in feeling what he felt. The only sin was in running away from it.
He heard the professor quake with a convulsive sound. He turned in his chair.
Weaver, he saw, had been opening the envelopes. And although the contents of at least three of them lay on his lap and another was crumpled into his fist, he was looking at nothing. He had removed his spectacles and covered his eyes with his hand. He was weeping.