The Swimmers

We didn't know enough about her--and we weren't likely to, either

There are stories that go unaccountably wrong and become impermeable to the imagination. They lodge in the memory like an old wound never entirely healed. This story of my father's younger brother Clyde Farrell, my uncle, and a woman named Joan Lunt, with whom he fell in love, years ago, in 1959, is one of those stories.

Some of it I was a part of, aged 13. But much of it I have to imagine.

•

It must have been a pale, wintry, unflattering light he first saw her in, swimming laps in the early morning in the local Y.M.C.A. pool, but that initial sight of Joan Lunt--not her face, which was obscured from him, but the movement of her strong, supple, creamy-pale body through the water, and the sureness of her strokes--never faded from Clyde Farrell's mind.

He'd been told of her; in fact, he'd come to the pool that morning to observe her, but still you didn't expect to see such serious swimming, 7:45 a.m. of a weekday, in the antiquated white-tiled "Y" pool, light slanting down from the wired glass skylight overhead, a sharp medicinal smell of chlorine and disinfectant pinching your nostrils. There were a few other swimmers in the pool, ordinary swimmers, one of them an acquaintance of Clyde's who waved at him, called out his name when Clyde appeared in his swim trunks on the deck, climbed up onto the diving board, then paused to watch Joan Lunt swimming toward the far end of the pool...just stood watching her, not rudely but with a frank, childlike interest, smiling with the spontaneous pleasure of seeing another person doing something well, with so little waste motion. Joan Lunt in her yellow bathing suit with the crossed straps in back and her white rubber cap that gleamed and sparked in the miniature waves: an attractive woman in her mid-30s, though she looked younger, with an air of total absorption in the task at hand, swimming to the limit of her capacity, maintaining a pace and a rhythm Clyde Farrell would have been challenged to maintain himself, and Clyde was a good swimmer, known locally as a very good swimmer, a winner, years before, when he was in his teens, of county and state competitions. Joan Lunt wasn't aware of him standing on the diving board watching her, or so it appeared. Just swimming, counting laps. How many she'd done already he couldn't imagine. He saw that she knew to cup the water when she stroked back, not to let it thread through her fingers like most people do; she knew as if by instinct how to take advantage of the element she was in, propelling herself forward like an otter or a seal, power in her shoulder muscles and upper arms, and the swift scissors kick of her legs, feet flashing white through the chemical-turquoise glitter of the (continued on page 168)The Swimmers (continued from page 117) water. When Joan Lunt reached the end of the pool, she ducked immediately down into the water in a well-practiced maneuver, turned, used the tiled side to kick off from, in a single graceful motion that took her a considerable distance, and Clyde Farrell's heart contracted when, emerging from the water, head and shoulders and flashing arms, the woman didn't miss a beat, just continued as if she hadn't been confronted with any limit or impediment, any boundary. It was just water, and her in it, water that might go on forever, and her in it, swimming, sealed off and invulnerable.

Clyde Farrell dived into the pool, and swam vigorously, keeping to his own lane, energetic and single-minded, too, and when, after some minutes, he glanced around for the woman in the yellow bathing suit, the woman I'd told him of meeting, Joan Lunt, he saw, to his disappointment, that she was gone.

His vanity was wounded. He thought, She never once looked at me.

•

My father and my uncle Clyde were farm boys who left the farm as soon as they were of age: joined the U.S. Navy out of high school, went away, came back and lived and worked in town, my father in a small sign shop and Clyde in a succession of jobs. He drove a truck for a gravel company, he was a foreman in a local tool factory, he managed a sporting-goods store; he owned property at Wolf's Head Lake, 20 miles to the north, and spoke with vague enthusiasm of developing it someday. He wasn't a practical man and he never saved money. He liked to gamble at cards and horses. In the Navy, he'd learned to box and for a while after being discharged, he considered a professional career as a welterweight, but that meant signing contracts, traveling around the country, taking orders from other men. Not Clyde Farrell's temperament.

He was good-looking, not tall, about 5'9", compact and quick on his feet, a natural athlete, with well-defined shoulder and arm muscles, strong, sinewy legs. His hair was the color of damp sand, his eyes a warm liquid brown, all iris. There was a gap between his two front teeth that gave him a childlike look and was misleading.

No one ever expected Clyde Farrell to get married, or even to fall seriously in love. That capacity in him seemed missing, somehow: a small but self-proclaimed absence, like the gap between his teeth.

But Clyde was powerfully attracted to women, and after watching Joan Lunt swim that morning, he drifted by later in the day to Kress's, Yewville's largest department store, where he knew she'd recently started to work. Kress's was a store of some distinction, the merchandise was of high quality, the counters made of solid, burnished oak; the overhead lighting was muted and flattering to women customers. Behind the counter displaying gloves and leather handbags, Joan Lunt struck the eye as an ordinarily pretty woman, composed, intelligent, feminine, brunette, with a brunette's waxy-pale skin, carefully made up, even glamourous, but not a woman Clyde Farrell would have noticed, much. He was 32 years old, in many ways much younger. This woman was too mature for him, wasn't she? Probably married or divorced, very likely with children. Clyde thought, In her clothes, she's just another one of them.

So Clyde walked out of Kress's, a store he didn't like anyway, and wasn't going to think about Joan Lunt, but one morning a few days later, there he was, unaccountably, back at the Y.M.C.A., 7:30 A.M. of a weekday in March 1959, and there, too, was Joan Lunt in her satiny-yellow bathing suit and gleaming white cap. Swimming laps, arm over strong, slender arm, stroke following stroke, oblivious of Clyde Farrell and of her surroundings, so Clyde was forced to see how her presence in the old, tacky, harshly chlorinated pool made of the place something extraordinary that lifted his heart.

That morning, Clyde swam in the pool for only about ten minutes, then left and hastily showered and dressed and was waiting for Joan Lunt out in the lobby. Clyde wasn't a shy man, but he could give that impression when it suited him. When Joan Lunt appeared, he stepped forward and smiled and introduced himself, saying, "Miss Lunt? I guess you know my niece Sylvie? She told me about meeting you." Joan Lunt hesitated, then shook hands with Clyde and said in that way of hers that suggested she was giving information meant to be clear and unequivocal, "My first name is Joan." She didn't smile but seemed prepared to smile.

Joan Lunt was a good-looking woman with shrewd dark eyes, straight dark eyebrows, an expertly reddened mouth. There was an inch-long white scar at the left corner of her mouth like a sliver of glass. Her thick, shoulder-length dark-brown hair was carefully waved, but the ends were damp; although her face was pale, it appeared heated, invigorated by exercise.

Joan Lunt and Clyde Farrell were nearly of a height, and comfortable together.

Leaving the Y.M.C.A., descending the old granite steps to Main Street that were worn smooth in the centers, nearly hollow with decades of feet, Clyde said to Joan, "You're a beautiful swimmer--I couldn't help admiring you in there," and Joan Lunt laughed and said, "And so are you--I was admiring you, too," and Clyde said, surprised, "Really? You saw me?" and Joan Lunt said, "Both times."

It was Friday. They arranged to meet for drinks that afternoon, and spent the next two days together.

•

In Yewville, no one knew who Joan Lunt was except as she presented herself: a woman in her mid-30s, solitary, very private, seemingly unattached, with no relatives or friends in the area. No one knew where exactly she'd come from, or why; why here of all places, Yewville, New York, a small city of fewer than 30,000 people, built on the banks of the Eden River, in the southwestern foothills of the Chautauqua Mountains. She had arrived in early February, in a dented rust-red 1956 Chevrolet with New York State license plates, the rear of the car piled with suitcases, cartons, clothes. She spent two nights in Yewville's single good hotel, The Mohawk, then moved into a tiny furnished apartment on Chambers Street. She spent several days interviewing for jobs downtown, all of which you might call jobs for women specifically, and was hired at Kress's, and started work promptly on the first Monday morning following her arrival. If it was sheerly good luck, the job at Kress's, the most prestigious store in town, Joan Lunt seemed to take it in stride, the way a person would who felt she deserved as much. Or better.

The other saleswomen at Kress's, other tenants in the Chambers Street building, men who approached her--no one could get to know her. It was impossible to get beyond the woman's quick, just slightly edgy smile, her resolute cheeriness, her purposefully vague manner. Asked where she was from, she would say, "Nowhere you'd know." Asked was she married, did she have a family, she would say, "Oh, I'm an independent woman, I'm well over eighteen." She'd laugh to suggest that this was a joke, of a kind, the thin scar beside her mouth white with anger.

It was observed that her fingers were entirely ringless.

But the nails were perfectly manicured, polished an enamel-hard red.

It was observed that, for a solitary (continued on page 190)The Swimmers (continued from page 168) woman, Joan Lunt had curious habits.

For instance, swimming. Very few women swam in the Y.M.C.A. pool in those days. Sometimes Joan Lunt swam in the early morning, and sometimes, Saturdays, in the late morning; she swam only once in the afternoon, after work, but the pool was disagreeably crowded, and too many people approached her. A well-intentioned woman asked, "Who taught you to swim like that?" and Joan Lunt said quietly, "I taught myself." She didn't smile and the conversation was not continued.

It was observed that, for a woman in her presumed circumstances, Joan Lunt was remarkably arrogant.

It seemed curious, too, that she went to the Methodist church Sunday mornings, sitting in a pew at the very rear, holding an opened hymnbook in her hand but not singing with the congregation; and that she slipped away afterward without speaking to anyone. Each time, she left a neatly folded dollar bill in the collection basket.

She wasn't explicitly unfriendly, but she wasn't friendly. At church, the minister and his wife tried to speak with her, tried to make her feel welcome, did make her feel welcome, but nothing came of it, she'd hurry off in her car, disappear. In time, people began to murmur that there was something strange about that woman, something not right, yes, maybe even something wrong; for instance, wasn't she behaving suspiciously? Like a runaway wife, for instance? A bad mother? A sinner fleeing Christ?

Another of Joan Lunt's curious habits was to drink, alone, in the early evening, in the Yewville Bar & Grill, or the White Owl Tavern, or the restaurant-bar adjoining the Greyhound Bus Station. If possible, she sat in a booth at the very rear of these taverns where she could observe the front entrances without being seen herself. For an hour or more she'd drink bourbon and water, slowly, very slowly, with an elaborate slowness, her face perfectly composed but her eyes alert. In the Yewville Bar & Grill, there was an enormous sectioned mirror stretching the length of the taproom, and in this mirror, muted by arabesques of frosted glass, Joan Lunt was reflected as beautiful and mysterious. Now and then, men approached her to ask if she were alone. Did she want company? How's about another drink? But she responded coolly to them and never invited anyone to join her. Had my uncle Clyde approached her in such a fashion, she would very likely have been cool to him, too, but my uncle Clyde wasn't the kind of man to set himself up for any sort of public rejection.

One evening in March, before Joan Lunt met up with Clyde Farrell, patrons at the Yewville Bar & Grill, one of them my father, reported with amusement hearing an exchange between Joan Lunt and a local farmer who, mildly drunk, offered to sit with her and buy her a drink, which ended with Joan Lunt's saying, in a loud, sharp voice, "You don't want trouble, mister. Believe me, you don't."

Rumors spread, delicious and censorious, that Joan Lunt was a man-hater. That she carried a razor in her purse. Or an ice pick. Or a lady's-sized revolver.

•

It was at the Y.M.C.A. pool that I became acquainted with Joan Lunt, on Saturday mornings. She saw that I was alone, that I was a good swimmer, might have mistaken me for younger than I was (I was 13), and befriended me, casually and cheerfully, the way an adult woman might befriend a young girl to whom she isn't related. Her remarks were often exclamations, called across the slapping little waves of the turquoise-tinted water, "Isn't it heavenly!"--meaning the pool, the prospect of swimming, the icy rain pelting the skylight overhead while we, in our bathing suits, were snug and safe below.

Another time, in the changing room, she said almost rapturously, "There's nothing like swimming, is there? Your mind just dissolves."

She asked my name, and when I told her, she stared at me and said, "Sylvie--I had a close friend once named Sylvie, a long time ago. I loved that name, and I loved her."

I was embarrassed, but pleased. It astonished me that an adult woman, a woman my mother's age, might be so certain of her feelings and so direct in expressing them to a stranger. I fantasized that Joan Lunt came from a part of the world where people knew what they thought and announced their thoughts importantly to others. This struck me with the force of a radically new idea.

I watched Joan Lunt covertly, and I didn't even envy her in the pool--she was so far beyond me. Her face that seemed to me strong and rare and beautiful and her body that was a fully developed woman's body--prominent breasts, shapely hips, long firm legs--all beyond me. I saw how the swiftness and skill with which Joan Lunt swam made other swimmers, especially the adults, appear slow by contrast; clumsy, ill-coordinated, without style.

One day, Joan Lunt was waiting for me in the lobby; hair damp at the ends, face carefully made up, her lipstick seemingly brighter than usual. "Sylvie," she said, smiling, "let's walk out together."

So we walked outside into the snow-glaring, windy sunshine, and she said, "Are you going in this direction? Good, let's walk together." She addressed me as if I were much younger than I was, and her manner was nervous, quick, alert. As we walked up Main Street, she asked questions of me of a kind she'd never asked before, about my family, about my "interests," about school, not listening to the answers and offering no information about herself. At the corner of Chambers and Main, she asked eagerly if I would like to come back to her apartment to visit for a few minutes, and although out of shyness I wanted to say "No, thank you," I said "Yes" instead, because it was clear that Joan Lunt was frightened about something, and I didn't want to leave her.

Her apartment building was shabby and weather-worn, as modest a place as even the poorest of my relatives lived in, but it had about it a sort of makeshift glamour, up the street from the White Owl Tavern and the Shamrock Diner, where motorcyclists hung out, close by the railroad yards on the river. I felt excited and pleased to enter the building and to climb with Joan Lunt--who was chatting briskly all the while--to the fourth floor. On each floor, Joan would pause, breathless, glancing around, listening, and I wanted to ask if someone might be following her, waiting for her. But, of course, I didn't say a thing. When she unlocked the door to her apartment, stepped inside and whispered, "Come in, Sylvie," I seemed to understand that no one else had ever been invited in.

The apartment was really just one room with a tiny kitchen alcove, a tiny bathroom, a doorless closet and a curtainless window with stained, injured-looking Venetian blinds. Joan Lunt said with an apologetic little laugh, "Those blinds--I tried to wash them, but the dirt turned to a sort of paste." I was standing at the window peering down into a weedy back yard of tilting clotheslines and wind-blown trash, curious to see what the view was from Joan Lunt's window, and she came over and drew the blinds, saying, "The sunshine is too bright, it hurts my eyes."

She hung up our coats and asked if I would like some coffee or fresh-squeezed orange juice. "It's my half day off from Kress's," she said. "I don't have to be there until one." It was shortly after 11 o'clock.

We sat at a worn dinette table, and Joan Lunt chatted animatedly and plied me with questions, as I drank orange juice in a tall glass, and she drank black coffee, and an alarm clock on the window sill ticked the minutes briskly by. Few rooms in which I've lived even for considerable periods of time are as vividly imprinted in my memory as that room of Joan Lunt's, with its spare, battered-looking furniture (including a sofa bed and a chest of drawers), its wanly wallpapered walls bare of any hangings, even a mirror, and its badly faded shag rug laid upon painted floor boards. There was a mixture of smells--talcum powder, perfume, cooking odors, insect spray, general mustiness. Two opened suitcases were on the floor beside the sofa bed, apparently unpacked, containing underwear, toiletries, neatly folded sweaters and blouses, several pairs of shoes. A single dress hung in the closet, and a shiny black raincoat, and our two coats Joan had hung on wire hangers. I stared at the suitcases thinking how strange, she'd been living here for weeks but hadn't had time yet to unpack.

So this was where the mysterious Joan Lunt lived! The woman of whom people in Yewville spoke with such suspicion and disapproval! She was far more interesting to me, and in a way more real, than I was to myself; shortly, the story of the lovers Clyde Farrell and Joan Lunt, as I imagined it, would be infinitely more interesting, and infinitely more real, than any story with Sylvie Farrell at its core. (I was a fiercely introspective child, in some ways perhaps a strange child, and the solace of my life would be to grow, not away from but ever more deeply and fruitfully into my strangeness, the way a child with an idiosyncratic, homely face often grows into that face and emerges, in adulthood, as "striking," "distinctive," sometimes even "beautiful.") It turned out that Joan liked poetry, and so we talked about poetry, and about love, and Joan asked me in that searching way of hers if I were "happy in my life," if I were "loved and prized" by my family, and I said, "Yes--I guess so," though these were not issues I had ever considered before, and would not have known to consider if she hadn't asked. For some reason, my eyes filled with tears.

Joan said, "The crucial thing, Sylvie, is to have precious memories." She spoke almost vehemently, laying her hand on mine. "That's even more important than Jesus Christ in your heart, do you know why? Because Jesus Christ can fade out of your heart, but precious memories never do."

We talked like that. Like I'd never talked with anyone before.

I was nervy enough to ask Joan how she'd gotten the little scar beside her mouth, and she touched it, quickly, and said, "In a way I'm not proud of, Sylvie." I sat staring, stupid. The scar wasn't disfiguring in my eyes but enhancing. "A man hit me once," Joan said. "Don't ever let a man hit you, Sylvie."

Weakly, I said, "No, I won't."

No man in our family had ever struck any woman that I knew of, but it happened sometimes in families we knew. I recalled how a ninth-grade girl had come to school that winter with a blackened eye, and she'd seemed proud of it, in a way, and everyone had stared--and the boys just drifted to her, staring. Like they couldn't wait to get their hands on her themselves. And she knew precisely what they were thinking.

I told Joan Lunt that I wished I lived in a place like hers, by myself, and she said, laughing, "No you don't, Sylvie, you're too young." I asked where she was from and she shrugged, "Oh--nowhere," and I persisted, "But is it north of here, or south? Is it the country? Or a city?" and she said, running her fingers nervously through her hair, fingering the damp ends, "My only home is here, now, in this room, and, sweetie, that's more than enough for me to think about."

It was time to leave. The danger had passed, or Joan had passed out of thinking there was danger.

She walked with me to the stairs, smiling, cheerful, and squeezed my hand when we said goodbye. She called down after me, "See you next Saturday at the pool, maybe--" but it would be weeks before I saw Joan Lunt again. She was to meet my uncle Clyde the following week and her life in Yewville that seemed to me so orderly and lonely and wonderful would be altered forever.

•

Clyde had a bachelor's place (that was how the women in our family spoke of it) to which he brought his women friends. It was a row house made of brick and cheap stucco, on the west side of town, near the old, now defunct tanning factories on the river. With the money he made working for a small Yewville construction company, and his occasional gambling wins, Clyde could have afforded to live in a better place, but he hadn't much mind for his surroundings and spent most of his spare time out. He brought Joan Lunt home with him because, for all the slapdash clutter of his house, it was more private than her apartment on Chambers Street, and they wanted privacy, badly.

The first time they were alone together, Clyde laid his hands on Joan's shoulders and kissed her, and she held herself steady, rising to the kiss, putting pressure against the mouth of this man who was virtually a stranger to her so that it was like an exchange, a handshake, between equals. Then, stepping back from the kiss, they both laughed--they were breathless, like people caught short, taken by surprise. Joan Lunt said faintly, "I--I do things sometimes without meaning them," and Clyde said, "Good. So do I."

•

Through the spring, they were often seen together in Yewville; and when, weekends, they weren't seen, it was supposed they were at Clyde's cabin at Wolf's Head Lake (where he was teaching Joan Lunt to fish) or at the Scholharie Downs race track (where Clyde gambled on the standard-breds). They were an attractive, eye-catching couple. They were frequent patrons of local bars and restaurants, and they turned up regularly at parties given by friends of Clyde's, and at all-night poker parties in the upstairs, rear, of the Iroquois Hotel--Joan Lunt didn't play cards, but she took an interest in Clyde's playing, and, as Clyde told my father, admiringly, she never criticized a move of his, never chided or teased or second-guessed him. "But the woman has me figured out completely," Clyde said. "Almost from the first, when she saw the way I was winning, and the way I kept on, she said, 'Clyde, you're the kind of gambler who won't quit, because, when he's losing, he has to get back to winning, and when he's winning, he has to give his friends a chance to catch up.' "

In May, Clyde brought Joan to a Sunday gathering at our house, a large, noisy affair, and we saw how when Clyde and Joan were separated, in different rooms, they'd drift back together until they were touching, literally touching, without seeming to know what they did, still less that they were being observed. So that was what love was! Always a quickness of a kind was passing between them, a glance, a hand squeeze, a light pinch, a caress, Clyde's lazy fingers on Joan's neck beneath her hair, Joan's arm slipped around Clyde's waist, fingers hooked through his belt loop. I wasn't jealous, but I watched them covertly. My heart yearned for them, though I didn't know what I wanted of them, or for them.

At 13, I was more of a child still than an adolescent girl: thin, long-limbed, eyes too large and naked-seeming for my face and an imagination that rarely flew off into unknown territory but turned, and turned, and turned, upon what was close at hand and known, but not altogether known. Imagination, says Aristotle, begins in desire: But what is desire? I could not, nor did I want to, possess my uncle Clyde and Joan Lunt. I wasn't jealous of them, I loved them both. I wanted them to be. For this, too, was a radically new idea to me, that a man and a woman might be nearly strangers to each other, yet lovers; lovers, yet nearly strangers; and the love passing between them, charged like electricity, might be visible, without their knowing. Could they know how I dreamt of them!

After Clyde and Joan left our house, my mother complained irritably that she couldn't get to know Joan Lunt. "She's sweet-seeming, and friendly enough, but you know her mind isn't there for you," my mother said. "She's just plain not there."

My father said, "As long as the woman's there for Clyde."

He didn't like anyone speaking critically of his younger brother apart from himself.

•

But sometimes, in fact, Joan Lunt wasn't there for Clyde: He wouldn't speak of it, but she'd disappear in her car for a day or two or three, without explaining very satisfactorily where she'd gone, or why. Clyde could see by her manner that wherever Joan had gone had, perhaps, not been a choice of hers, and that her disappearances, or flights, left her tired and depressed; but still he was annoyed, he felt betrayed. Clyde Farrell wasn't the kind of man to disguise his feelings. Once, on a Friday afternoon in June before a weekend they'd planned at Wolf's Head Lake, Clyde returned to the construction office at 5:30 p.m. to be handed a message hastily telephoned in by Joan Lunt an hour before: Can't make it this weekend. Sorry. Love, Joan. Clyde believed himself humiliated in front of others, vowed he'd never forgive Joan Lunt and that very night, drunk and mean-spirited, he took up again with a former girlfriend...and so it went.

But in time they made up, as naturally they would, and Clyde said, "I'm thinking maybe we should get married, to stop this sort of thing," and Joan, surprised, said, "Oh, that isn't necessary, darling--I mean, for you to offer that."

Clyde believed, as others did, that Joan Lunt was having difficulties with a former man friend or husband, but Joan refused to speak of it; just acknowledged that, yes, there was a man, yes, of course he was an ex in her life, but she resented so much as speaking of him; she refused to allow him re-entry into her life. Clyde asked, "What's his name?" and Joan shook her head, mutely, just no; no, she would not say, would not utter that name. Clyde asked, "Is he threatening you? Now? Has he ever shown up in Yewville?" and Joan, as agitated as he'd ever seen her, said, "He does what he does, and I do what I do. And I don't talk about it."

•

But later that summer, at Wolf's Head Lake, in Clyde's bed in Clyde's hand-hewn log cabin on the bluff above the lake, overlooking wooded land that was Clyde Farrell's property for a mile in either direction, Joan Lunt wept bitterly, weakened in the aftermath of love, and said, "If I tell you, Clyde, it will make you feel too bound to me. It will seem to be begging a favor of a kind, and I'm not begging."

Clyde said, "I know you're not."

"I don't beg favors from anyone."

"I know you don't."

"I went through a long spell in my life when I did beg favors, because I believed that was how women made their way, and I was hurt because of it, but not more hurt than I deserved. I'm older now. I know better. The meek don't inherit the earth and they surely don't deserve to."

Clyde laughed sadly and said, "Nobody's likely to take you for meek, Joan honey."

•

Making love, they were like two swimmers deep in each other, plunging hard. Wherever they were when they made love, it wasn't the place they found themselves in when they returned, and whatever the time, it wasn't the same time.

•

The trouble came in September: A cousin of mine, another niece of Clyde's, was married, and the wedding party was held in the Nautauga Inn, on Lake Nautauga, about ten miles east of Yewville. Clyde knew the inn's owner, and it happened that he and Joan Lunt, handsomely dressed, were in the large public cocktail lounge adjacent to the banquet room reserved for our party, talking with the owner-bartender, when Clyde saw an expression on Joan's face of a kind he'd never seen on her face before--fear, and more than fear, a sudden sick terror--and he turned to see a stranger approaching them, not slowly, exactly, but with a restrained sort of haste: a man of about 40, unshaven, in a blue seersucker sports jacket now badly rumpled, tieless, a muscled but soft-looking man with a blunt, rough, ruined-handsome face, complexion like an emery board, and this man's eyes were too bleached a color for his skin, unless there was a strange light rising in them. And this same light rose in Clyde Farrell's eyes, in that instant.

Joan Lunt was whispering, "Oh, no-- no," pulling at Clyde's arm to turn him away, but naturally, Clyde Farrell wasn't going to step away from a confrontation, and the stranger, who would turn out to be named Robert Waxman, Rob Waxman, Joan Lunt's former husband, divorced from her 15 months before, co-owner of a failing meat-supplying company in Kingston, advanced upon Clyde and Joan smiling as if he knew them both, saying loudly, in a slurred but vibrating voice, "Hello, hello, hello!" and when Joan tried to escape, Waxman leapt after her, cursing, and Clyde naturally intervened, and suddenly, the two men were scuffling, and voices were raised, and before anyone could separate them, there was the astonishing sight of Waxman, with his gravelly face and hot eyes, crouched, holding a pistol in his hand, striking Clyde clumsily about the head and shoulders with the butt and crying, enraged, "Didn't ask to be born! Goddamn you! I didn't ask to be born!" And "I'm no different from you! Any of you! You! In my heart!" There were screams as Waxman fired the pistol point-blank at Clyde, a popping sound like a firecracker, and Waxman stepped back to get a better aim--he'd hit his man in the fleshy part of a shoulder--and Clyde Farrell, desperate, infuriated, scrambled forward in his wedding-party finery, baboon style, not on his hands and knees but on his hands and feet, bent double, face contorted, teeth bared, and managed to throw himself on Waxman, who outweighed him by perhaps 40 pounds, and the men fell heavily to the floor, and there was Clyde Farrell straddling his man, striking him blow after blow in the face, even with his weakened left hand, until Waxman's nose was broken and his nostrils streamed blood, and his mouth, too, was broken and bloody, and someone risked being struck by Clyde's wild fists and pulled him away.

And there on the floor of the breezy screened-in barroom of the Nautauga Inn lay a man, unconscious, breathing erratically, bleeding from his face, whom no one except Joan Lunt knew was Joan Lunt's former husband; and there, panting, hot-eyed, stood Clyde Farrell over him, bleeding, too, from a shoulder wound he was to claim he'd never felt.

•

Said Joan Lunt repeatedly, "Clyde, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

Said Joan Lunt carefully, "I just don't know if I can keep on seeing you. Or keep on living here in Yewville."

And my uncle Clyde was trying hard, trying very hard, to understand.

"You don't love me, then?" he asked several times.

He was baffled, he wasn't angry. It was the following week and by this time he wasn't angry, nor was he proud of what he'd done, though everyone was speaking of it, and would speak of it, in awe, for years. He wasn't proud because, in fact, he couldn't remember clearly what he'd done, what sort of lightning-swift action he'd performed; no conscious decision had been made that he could recall. Just the light dancing up in a stranger's eyes, and its immediate reflection in his own.

Now Joan Lunt was saying this strange, unexpected thing, this thing he couldn't comprehend. Wiping her eyes, and, yes, her voice was shaky, but he recognized the steely stubbornness in it, the resolute will. She said, "I do love you. I've told you. But I can't live like that any longer."

"You're still in love with him."

"Of course I'm not in love with him. But I can't live like that any longer."

"Like what? What I did? I'm not like that."

"I'm thirty-six years old. I can't take it any longer."

"Joan, I was only protecting you."

"Men fighting each other, men trying to kill each other--I can't take it any longer."

"I was only protecting you. He might have killed you."

"I know. I know you were protecting me. I know you'd do it again if you had to."

Clyde said, suddenly furious, "You're damned right I would. If that son of a bitch ever--"

Waxman was out on bail and returned to Kingston. Like Clyde Farrell, he'd been treated in the emergency room at Yewville General Hospital; then he'd been taken to the county sheriff's headquarters and booked on charges of assault with a deadly weapon and reckless endangerment of life. In time, Waxman would be sentenced to a year's probation: He had no prior record except for traffic violations; he was to impress the judge with his air of sincere remorse and repentance. Clyde Farrell, after giving testimony and hearing the sentencing, would never see the man again.

Joan Lunt was saying, "I know I should thank you, Clyde. But I can't."

Clyde splashed more bourbon into Joan's glass and into his own. They were sitting at Joan's dinette table beside a window whose grimy and cracked Venetian blinds were tightly closed. Clyde smiled and said, "Never mind thanking me, honey: Just let's forget it."

Joan said softly, "Yes, but I can't forget it."

"It's just something you're saying. Telling yourself. Maybe you'd better stop."

"I want to thank you, Clyde, and I can't. You risked your life for me. I know that. And I can't thank you."

So they discussed it, like this. For hours. For much of a night. Sharing a bottle of bourbon Clyde had brought over. And eventually, they made love, in Joan Lunt's narrow sofa bed that smelled of talcum powder, perfume and the ingrained dust of years, and their lovemaking was tentative and cautious but as sweet as ever, and driving back to his place early in the morning, at dawn, Clyde thought surely things were changed; yes, he was convinced that things were changed. Hadn't he Joan's promise that she would think it all over, not make any decision, they'd see each other that evening and talk it over then? She'd kissed his lips in goodbye, and walked him to the stairs, and watched him descend to the street.

But Clyde never saw Joan Lunt again.

•

That evening, she was gone, moved out of the apartment, like that, no warning, not even a telephone call, and she'd left only a brief letter behind with Clyde Farrell written on the envelope. Which Clyde never showed to anyone and probably, in fact, ripped up immediately.

It was believed that Clyde spent some time, days, then weeks, into the early winter of that year, looking for Joan Lunt; but no one, not even my father, knew exactly what he did, where he drove, whom he questioned, the depth of his desperation or his yearning or his rage, for Clyde wasn't, of course, the kind of man to speak of such things.

Joan Lunt's young friend Sylvie never saw her again, either, nor heard of her. And this hurt me, too, more than I might have anticipated.

And over the years, once I left Yewville to go to college in another state, then to begin my own adult life, I saw less and less of my uncle Clyde. He never married; for a few years, he continued the life he'd been leading before meeting Joan Lunt--a typical "bachelor" life, of its place and time; then he began to spend more and more time at Wolf's Head Lake, developing his property, building small wood-frame summer cottages and renting them out to vacationers, and acting as caretaker for them, an increasingly solitary life no one would have predicted for Clyde Farrell.

He stopped gambling, too, abruptly. His luck had turned, he said.

I saw my uncle Clyde only at family occasions, primarily weddings and funerals. The last time we spoke together in a way that might be called forthright was in 1971, at my grandmother's funeral: I looked up and saw through a haze of tears a man of youthful middle age moving in my general direction, Clyde, who seemed shorter than I recalled, not stocky but compact, with a look of furious compression, in a dark suit that fitted him tightly about the shoulders. His hair had turned not silver but an eerie metallic blond, with faint tarnished streaks, and it was combed down flat and damp on his head, a look here, too, of furious constraint. Clyde's face was familiar to me as my own, yet altered: The skin had a grainy texture, roughened from years of outdoor living, like dried earth, and the creases and dents in it resembled animal tracks; his eyes were narrow, damp, restless; the eyelids looked swollen. He was walking with a slight limp that he tried, in his vanity, to disguise; I learned later that he'd had knee surgery. And the gunshot wound to his left shoulder he'd insisted at the time had not given him much, or any, pain gave him pain now, an arthritic sort of pain, agonizing in cold weather. I stared at my uncle thinking, Oh, why? Why? I didn't know if I were seeing the man Joan Lunt had fled from or the man her flight had made.

But Clyde sighted me and hurried over to embrace me, his favorite niece, still. If he associated me with Joan Lunt--and I had the idea he did--he'd forgiven me long ago.

Death gives to life, to the survivors' shared life, that is, an insubstantial quality. It's like an image of absolute clarity reflected in water--then disturbed, shattered into ripples, revealed as mere surface. Its clarity, even its beauty, can resume, but you can't any longer trust in its reality.

So my uncle Clyde and I regarded each other, stricken in that instant with grief. But, being a man, he didn't cry.

We drifted off to one side, away from the other mourners, and I saw it was all right between us, it was all right to ask, so I asked if he had ever heard from Joan Lunt after that day. Had he ever heard of her? He said, "I never go where I'm not welcome, honey," as if this were the answer to my question. Then added, seeing my look of distress, "I stopped thinking of her years ago. We don't need each other the way we think we do when we're younger."

I couldn't bear to look at my uncle. Oh, why? Why? Somehow, I must have believed all along that there was a story, a story unknown to me, that had worked itself out without my knowing, like a stream tunneling its way underground. I would not have minded not knowing this story could I only know that it was.

Clyde said, roughly, "You didn't hear from her, did you? The two of you were so close."

He wants me to lie, I thought. But I said only, sadly, "No, I never hear from her. And we weren't close."

Said Clyde, "Sure you were."

The last I saw of Clyde that day. it was after dark and he and my father were having a disagreement just outside the back door of our house. My father insisted that Clyde, who'd been drinking, wasn't in condition to drive his pickup truck back to the lake, and Clyde was insisting he was, and my father said, "Maybe yes, Clyde, and maybe no," but he didn't want to take a chance, why didn't he drive Clyde home, and Clyde pointed out truculently that, if my father drove him home, how in hell would he get back here except by taking Clyde's only means of transportation? So the brothers discussed their predicament, as dark came on.

"They arranged to meet for drinks that afternoon, and spent the next two days together."