Kathy Little Bird (28 page)

“Without marriage it’s fornication. Have patience, Little Bird—your perch is with me.”

“Is it?” I wanted him to convince me. But when they changed me from left-handedness I don’t think they changed me all the way. “Do you really think you could put up with me, Abram? I mean, have you thought about it?”

“I’ve prayed about it.”

“What if I told you I was still married to Jack?”

“I know you’re not. That’s the first thing I asked Mac. He told me the divorce was uncontested.”

“So you made sure of that, first thing?”

“I did.”

I looked around the room with its copy of a T’ang horse on a small pedestal and the Flemish tapestry and a Picasso lithograph—a hodgepodge, like my life.

“Is there anyone here,” I called into this doleful effort at an artistic setting, “that knows why this man and this woman may not be joined in holy matrimony?”

I raised my hand. I stood up. “I have a daughter,” I said to the T’ang horse. “She’s being brought up by Mr. and Mrs. Mason.” This I directed to the Flemish tapestry. “They live on Oakdale Street in St. Paul, Minnesota,” I informed a modern print.

Silence reverberated against the walls, shrieked in the fireplace.

“You have a daughter?” Abram repeated slowly.

“You hate me, I knew you would. Despise, that’s closer to what you feel. And that’s what I feel for myself. She’s a teenager now, and she’s grown up thinking I’m dead. I’ve never done anything about it. The time was never right, and then it was too late.”

“Hold on, Kathy, hold on. Let’s get a handle on this. You have a daughter? The Lord has blessed you with a daughter?”

I was totally impaled by this statement. “You think so?” I asked uncertainly.

“When is a child not a blessing?”

“When you can’t raise it. When you have to give it away. When she thinks you’re dead. When it’s been an agony in your heart for fifteen years.”

“I’m not speaking of what happened afterward. But the child itself is a miracle.”

I jumped to Mac’s bottom line. “Then you think it would be the right thing to do, to go get her? When this trial blows over, if it ever does?”

“No. No, not necessarily. No, I don’t. She’s grown up with these people, they’re her family. You shouldn’t disturb that relationship out of your need to feel better about her, but out of
her
need.”

“Her need? How could I possibly know if she needs me?”

“Have faith that the Lord will tell you.”

Abram seemed so calm and sure that looking at the love in his honest face, I did have faith. Only it was in him. “I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I said in an effort to bring him back to the proposal.

I could see the twinkling look in his eyes when he asked, “What were we talking about?”

“You had just asked me to marry you.”

“And what was your answer going to be?”

“My answer was going to be yes. Yes, yes, yes!”

I knew what he was going to say, and hollered out along with him, “Praise the Lord!”

I
T
was Tuesday evening and the Wednesday of the deportation hearing only hours away. In an effort to nudge a little luck my way, I made a resolution to be less self-absorbed. We were sitting on the couch, my head on Abram’s shoulder, when I deliberately put aside
my
and
me
and
Kathy
, and prepared to listen to him and learn more of his inner life as well as fill in the gaps in the external one.

Abram wasn’t used to talking about himself, and he did it awkwardly. I persisted and bit by bit drew him out. I began by asking about his wife, wondering if he had been very much in love—after all, not all Mennonite girls were dumpy with thick ankles.

He began his account of Laura with a shy recounting of her father, his good friend, John Wertheimer. “He is a brother in Christ, a wonderful man, Kathy. You’ll love him as I do. He has acted as guide and mentor to me. It’s his bookshop, and through his kindness he has made me a junior partner. Upon his retirement he has undertaken to leave the bookstore to me. It’s a rare opportunity, Kathy.”

I smiled into his face. I knew he undoubtedly did all the work and at something like janitorial wages, but he was happy. And on the instant I made another resolution…to defend Abram, in case they laughed at his outmoded clothes, or made fun of his considered, methodical speech, or despised him for being poor.

Who “they” were, who would do these things, I had no idea. But it might happen, and if it did, they’d have to walk over my dead body first.

I prompted Abram here and there with questions, while he filled in the missing years. He gave a candid, complete account. It took exactly three minutes. In all these years absolutely nothing had happened in his life.

I thought of my life, how crowded and crazy, going from one extreme to the other. All this time Abram had not gone to college, not gone to war, or pursued a career or made money or dropped out, or anything.

He’d left home, it’s true, but without quarreling with his parents or defying the church. In fact, he’d sought out another Mennonite congregation in Montreal and was a member in good standing. He quietly got a quiet job in a quiet little bookstore on a quiet out-of-the-way street.

In telling me about this, his voice became soft and mellow, and I realized this was where his life was centered. I probed a bit more and discovered that the bookshop didn’t do much business. A beneficent look crossed his face as he confided that most of the time he sat on a stool reading out-of-print volumes before they were remaindered.

And that was it. Oatmeal with raisins for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, stew for dinner, and a store full of books nobody wanted.

Abram tightened his arms around me and smiled into my face. “You can see what an exciting life it’s been, filled with discovery and once in a while true revelation.”

I gulped and nodded. His books. That was the world he lived in. And not only what they contained, but the books themselves were important. Old ragged cloth or worn leather binding didn’t matter to him. The whisper of pages turning was for him what music was for me. On rainy or icy days—and a Montreal winter has plenty of those—the steep street banked with slush deterred customers, and Abram would lose himself in whatever world the print dictated.

Bit by bit, as I listened, I shed the skin I’d wrapped myself in all these years. I hoped the new one would prove to be a better fit. I wanted the little musty bookshop, where I could close the door on a hurtful world and be alone with Abram. And this is what I told him.

“If you’re sure,” Abram said, “then you won’t be upset tomorrow if things go wrong.”

“I’m very positive about this. What I want more than anything on earth is that musty old bookshop and you.”

Abram told me about Montreal “…intellectual and creative capital of Canada. Artists flock to it. There’s a keen interest in music, and…”

“And books,” I finished for him.

He nodded with utmost seriousness. “Everything in the shop has its proper place and designation. It’s all been codified: History, Biography, Reference, Fiction, and in the northeast corner, Classics, arranged by subject and under that by author.”

“I wouldn’t dare touch one.”

“Of course you’ll touch them and read them. If you get stuck, I can lay my hand on anything from the World Atlas to
Macaulay’s
Quotations.
And our flat is directly behind the shop.”

“So I can be with you all day in the bookstore?”

“There’s a stepstool that slides along the entire back wall. That’s where you’ll sit.”

“While you explain this obsession you have for reading.”

“That’s easy. I’ll explain now. It’s a way of finding out what people make of themselves and to what extent they’ve figured out the world.”

“Have you figured it out, Abram?”

“Not yet.”

“By the end of your life?”

“Maybe.”

“When you find out, tell me.”

“I will,” he promised.

I was teasing; he was serious.

W
EDNESDAY
morning. That’s when I discovered that absconding was not the worst thing Mac had done. It seems he had neglected to renew my green card, or so Wendel Morris’s assistant told me—the great man himself was conveniently sick with the flu.

I knew Mac didn’t do it on purpose. He was never petty—he had his eye on the big things, the important things—and he just forgot.

Eleanor Cooke did not like me. I was young. She was old and dried up. Even worse, I was part of that suspect world of music and entertainment.

I was classified as an undesirable alien, and ordered deported to my country of origin. I don’t really think she, or anyone, believed for a moment I was a threat to the United States government, but they’d found the ammunition they needed.

I held my head high, looked her in the eye, and made the peace sign.

It was over. Over, over, over.

Abram was right, it was no punishment to go home to Canada. It was to be our honeymoon. So what if my career was in shambles, my fans hated me, and I’d lost my money? I had a new role to play in life as Mrs. Abram Willems.

I took Abram’s arm. He wouldn’t look for a back way. Together we strode out the double glass doors and faced the press. I blew kisses and called out that I was getting married.

W
E
went straight home and made wedding plans. That is, Abram made them and I said yes to everything. None of it sounded real. But I knew it was everything else that wasn’t real, and that this was. This was the life I should have lived, could have lived, long ago.

“We will fly to Montreal. You will stay with my friends the Wertheimers until we can fix the wedding day. They will stand up for us. We will be married in my church. And I think it would be nice if your father gave you away. Why don’t you write and ask him?”

“You think he might? That would make it perfect.” After a moment I plucked his sleeve. “Abram,” I said, “I want a honeymoon.”

“A honeymoon?” he repeated, as though this word were
not in his vocabulary. Probably it wasn’t. Abram never had even a vacation in his entire life.

“I want to run away with you, just like we always said. I want it to be the way we planned when we were kids.”

I could see he was catching fire slowly, as Abram did. “I’d have to refigure things, calculate more carefully…”

“If it’s money, Abram, I…”

I saw his jaw jut out. “No, that’s out of the question.”

“Do you know what I was thinking of doing with the pittance Mac left me? I was thinking of starting a big bonfire and tossing it on.” I could see the thought of this was painful to Abram. “So instead, why don’t we pool it with whatever you’ve got for a real honeymoon, a honeymoon to remember! Please, Abram.”

“It would mean starting out without a dime,” he said considering it.

“Absolutely.” I was overjoyed. I’d dreamed of running off with Abram since I was eight. “That’s the best way to start out. Then we make everything we have together.”

“It means being poor. It’s been a long time since you were poor.”

“Was I poor?” I asked, laughing up at him. “I don’t remember that.”

A long kiss sealed the discussion.

Coming back to terra firma, I asked, “Where will we go?”

“What would you think of B.C.—Vancouver Island? It’s wonderfully beautiful from all I’ve heard. Then…” He stretched out the word and grinned.

“Then?” I said impatiently.

“Then on to Alberta to a little place known by you and me, and scarcely anyone one else, where you will visit your brothers, Jas and Morrie. And if you’d like, your friend Elk Woman. I will say hello to my parents and introduce you to them. And then…”

He didn’t finish; I’d thrown my arms around him and smothered him in kisses. “Oh Abram, will we really? Will we do that?”

“You think that’s a good addition to the plan, do you?”

I nodded. I couldn’t talk.

That evening I wrote my father.