Denial: a twice told love story

And always, somewhere in the distance,
there is a land where two people could be
happy if only they were together.
Robert Nathan


Prelude


The fiery Nebraska sun lit up the prairie in greens, golds and reds. A warm wind blew from the south, surging and ebbing in an elemental rhythm across waving crops, pale but agitated poplar trees trembling with nervous twisting leaves, and long slender grasses wagging in rippling waves. He took her hand in his, interlocking their fingers, their lives.
“It’s this way,” he said, pulling her up the hill, she racing to keep up in her long dress, her other hand holding a gathered fold of gingham and her straw hat. She could sense his excitement at having discovered some grand thing he wanted to share with her. She loved his urgencies about life. Farm fields baking beneath a mackerel sky. Arrowheads half-buried in caked sod near Pawnee Lake. The comic scenes he invented for chance faces they met on the street. Her. He reacted to everything as if discovering it for the first time, and each time she was with him, she felt discovered. Nothing that she felt or thought passed by him unnoticed. When she was secretly amused at some little thing he said, he had only to look at her, and he smiled too. When her heart threatened to burst, he would raise his hand to her cheek, as if it could drain away the pain. Why did life, she wondered, provide a woman only one man who could touch her like that? And why did it have to be the wrong man? He loved life, with a passion he reserved only for her presence, and when she was with him, she loved it too. But there were times when she hated it and wished it were all finally over.
As they neared the top of the hill, he stopped to admire a small blue flower shaped like a crumpled trumpet. It was just a weed really, rudely pretty, but triumphant. He knelt down.
“Beauty is muted out here in the prairie,” he said in a low voice, as if imparting a secret. “One has to look carefully. It is the shading of colors as they blend together, or come apart, that tests your eye. This little thing endured a bitter, cold winter below ground to have its short day in the sun. That’s the real wonder of it. Can anyone ever paint that?”
“I’m sure I couldn’t,” she said humbly. But it wasn’t a mock humility. She meant it. He turned and smiled at her sympathetically.
“It will be here when you can.”
She bit her lip. She didn’t want to spoil their last day together by being sad. She forged a smile out of her trembling lips.
“Is this the grand thing you brought me up here to see?”
“There’s more,” he insisted and pulled her further. “In nature there’s always more.”
At the top of the hill, the view was spectacular: rolling hills dotted with Black Angus to the left, to the right rows of young corn stalks grooved the fertile earth, soaking up the summer heat. Behind them, quivering cypress trees protected a farm house painted bright yellow, from which was strung a clothesline full of cotton print dresses and faded blue overalls, and one hilarious piece of long underwear misshapen by a farmer’s swollen belly. Crows with bits of coal for eyes wheeled overhead, screaming in indignation.
As they jogged down the other side, straight ahead appeared his intended prize, a small indolent stream flowing quietly through a tight, shaded copse of trees. The sunlight caught it obliquely through the undulating leaves, so that the water held shining flecks of bright gold dancing against a solid backdrop as black as cold coffee.
“There,” he exclaimed, holding his hand forward.
“It is beautiful,” she said, gazing fixedly on the scene.
“This is a world that should be painted. Your world.”
She nodded slowly, but said nothing. She knew what he wanted. They would meet in secret just outside of town, where the railroad tracks disappeared into unimaginable horizons east and west, and they felt as if the earth were so big they could be lost in it forever, and nobody would ever find them. They would ride bicycles down dirt farm roads to secluded wooded gulches, clamber down a hill with easel and brushes in hand, slipping and laughing in the wet grass. There she could paint freely, in a rush of vision and certainty, swept up by the towering cumulus clouds overhead, feeling a heavenly balloon inside her chest explode and pour out all her love to drench the landscape. All her love, more than she ever dreamed she could feel, lavished itself upon the world, upon him. But now she could only gaze upon the prairie in hopeless silence, caught between two worlds and two lives.
They stood there in silence, neglecting the dwindling minutes. The water and the light, mingling in constant motion, had transported them to another time. They forgot their lives. Nothing else mattered but their being there together. But she also knew it had to end, and she felt a twinge of pain in her chest. Her fingers, in his, began to fidget. He held them tighter, sensing what was troubling her.
“I have to go,” she whispered urgently. “You know I have to go. My husband–“
But before she could say more, the man interrupted. “Guilt is a waste of time, my love. Precious time.”
“We have no more time left,” she said, her eyes looking down, avoiding his. But she knew he was already resigned to defeat.
He turned without a word, pressing his lips tightly together, as he always did when he fought against his own heart, and led her back to town. Their hands would unlock before they got there, for fear of discovery.


Chapter One

Julia Stephens had grown up properly in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the 1950s, when it was still a sleepy Midwestern town of conservative values, boxy houses, and squandered imagination. She was christened Julia Clarissa Lancaster, of decorous English stock who had settled there in the 1880's before the German farmers came “and ruined everything,” as her grandfather used to say. She was a thin girl from a fat family: father in banking, mute whenever home; mother a housewife, eloquent whenever ill; an older sister who had better things to do than hang around a clinging waif with a small delicate mouth and large brown eyes. No two sisters could have been more different, Joanna the athletic gadfly, Julia the delicate recluse. Joanna swooped into rooms like a big, rollicking dog forgetful of its size, bumping into things, scattering Julia’s watercolors, laughing heartily. Joanna was the kind of girl who would march out into the forest and chop down her own Christmas tree. Julia was the kind who decorated it, sorting carefully through antique icons handed down from three generations of Lancasters. Their mother, Emily, was always too nervous to join in their fun or settle their disputes; she would drop dishes and shake her hands over her ears as if they were on fire. She was that sensitive to sound. Her father, Edmund, had hardly anything to say to people and kept to himself in the shed out back, shredding tools, rebuilding an old Packard that never accumulated enough parts to work. Julia seemed lost in the middle of her own family.
So she became Grandmother Rose‘s favorite, visiting daily on her way home from school at the quaint Victorian house at 2301 Euclid Avenue. Its high ecclesiastical windows, curtained by creamy Maltese lace imported from Bedfordshire, greeted her formally as she climbed the creaking wooden porch steps; a heavy carved door with glazed oval glass swung aside to reveal an ornately decorated parlor on the right, a crowded dining room on the left, and a carpeted staircase ascending into a series of oak-paneled hallways, where her father’s childhood room lay in seclusion, still furnished with lacquered bureaus in the style of the 1920's. In the closet, Julia found her father’s old toys, nothing artistic, miniature cranes and tractors, a Lionel three-rail train set , and a squad of toy soldiers, battered dough boys from the Great War, some with their heads missing, stuffed into a sack hidden in the corner. In the parlor, family history was preserved in a shrine of faded photographs in oval frames, myriad mementos tied together with ribbons, and souvenirs carefully arranged in order of importance.
Julia would gaze at the pictures of dead pioneers who had braved fierce dust storms, only to become dust themselves. Rose told the child fascinating stories about them, in a voice as old and cracked as the photos themselves, of feasts and famines, floods and droughts, a world of extremes testing the resolve of sunburnt ranchers and steadfast farmers. Everything in Gramma Rose’s memories seemed hard yet endurable. Julia would remind Rose to retell her favorite stories: of the day a herd of cattle was mistakenly driven to market down “O” Street, routing foot traffic; of General John “Black Jack” Pershing recruiting local boys for the war in France in 1917; of cousin Aaron who was killed in a grain elevator explosion because he had foolishly lit a cigar; of the families that endured and those that broke apart, casting themselves willy nilly to the four winds in coal burning trains and Model “A” Fords.
“And what became of them?” Rose asked little Julia rhetorically, who was by now resting her sleepy head on Rose’s lap and playing indolently with the white lace buttons on her grandmother’s lavender dress.
“Are they dead?” Julia asked back, worried. Julia always thought that anybody who ran off to the four winds would end up dead.
“Perhaps. Or soon will be. And that will be the end of the story,” Rose replied mysteriously, and then added with a smile: “But I’m still here.”
And Julia would hug her tightly, afraid to let go.