WFOL 2022
BBTV Round Robin
i carry your heart
By
cb mcwhorter
The old man reached down for a slim volume – a pamphlet, really - hidden at the bottom of the bookshelf at the back of his chamber. Gently, he wiped the dust from its top edge, berating himself for neglecting this part of his library. The cover of the little book, long pressed between two larger volumes, was as bright as it had been on the day she gave it to him, on the eve of their wedding.
Margaret had been determined to win him over to the style of ee cummings. Clearly, she’d hoped that he’d see her point with this poem. On that day, he had seen something of the charm, but afterwards…
After all the horror of his last year Above, he’d wanted to destroy the book. But he was so far from being able to do so that he tucked it into his small valise when he left. It was one of the few things left when he wound up living in a Tunnel, relegated to the bottom of the valise, and then to the bottom of a shelf, and never moved again. He couldn’t even put it away with the other papers he’d collected and stored in a locker with his last suit.
For the first time in a lifetime, he opened the cover:
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
A slip of onion-skin paper slid into his fingers.
My Darling Jacob,
Your heart will always be in mine. This I know as well as my own name. And I cannot wait until our names are the same!
Your own,
Margaret
She’d changed that name, after. Her father insisted on it.
“I don’t have the strength to stand by you,” she’d written, and he’d wanted to reach into his own chest and tear out his heart. For years, he’d chewed on the bitter gall that when she’d had to choose between them, she’d discarded her husband for her father.
He harped to himself that she’d always been a Daddy’s Girl, the only child of a self-made man who married late and made no secret of his reluctance to share his little girl with anyone, especially a foreign doctor who didn’t have the ambition to make a fortune in practice, but did research into horrible things no one wanted to know about. At least, things old Sinclair didn’t see could make anyone any money, until he realized that the technology his son-in-law was researching could make an investor a fortune.
It was anyone’s guess, Jacob thought, whether he was so eager to expel Dr. Wells from his life because of that fortune he jeopardized, or because it was a convenient excuse to get rid of him under the rubric of ‘disgrace’. He’d actually used that word a lot.
She’d also been afraid of her father, a mercurial man who had no mercy for those who disagreed with him. Her love and fear were a dichotomy he couldn’t understand at the time.
He sighed, and cradling the book against his chest, made his way to his desk. Jacob’s memories of family were warm and idealized. He couldn’t recall conflict between his parents, except his mother’s sadness during the War while his father was away at sea. His last memories of his mother were frantic and wrenching, as she hurried him into the London Underground during an air raid, and shielded her boy from the collapsing wall that killed her. His father was summoned, of course, but couldn’t return before a U-boat sank his battleship. Jacob’s experience with the Sinclairs was the first education he’d had up close about a dangerous, overwhelming attachment. Sinclair was possessive and dependent on his daughter, to such an extent that he had managed custody of young Margaret when he divorced her mother. He might have grown less attached as time passed. Jacob could recognize now that she’d been rather young. She was eighteen the day he first saw her standing by a taxi, and twenty when they’d married. Now that he’d raised a few dozen children, he knew that though an adult, she was not completely one.
Lately, he was thinking a lot about Margaret Sinclair’s possessive father, and recognizing some of that emotion in himself. He really had been trying too hard to control the kids. Losing Devin hadn’t taught him much, had it? Fortunately, Vincent was more generous, and patient, and indulgent, and… he had to stop trying to tell a thirty-year-old what to do, honestly. Besides, Catherine Chandler in her thirties was no Margaret Sinclair at twenty. They were both the indulged daughters of powerful men, but the similarities ended there. And in her fifties, Margaret was very different from the girl he married. She was even more wonderful. He sighed. He’d missed so much.
He wiped away the tears. In the past week since her death, he’d cried more than he ever did in the beginning. All those years ago, he’d lived on rage. Time eased that. And Margaret herself healed the rest.
She revealed that she’d been angry, too, and not with Jacob.
“He could have stopped the whole mess with a word,” she said.
“Yes, well, if he stepped back, you’d be returned to his side.”
“But I wasn’t.”
“No?”
“Not really.” She sighed and leaned against his shoulder. “As you know, I was shipped off to Paris. But he didn’t come with me. I was distraught, and he could tell I was angry with him. That was even less to be tolerated than you falling into disgrace, you know. He figured he’d come along later, after I’d ‘seen reason’.” This last was conveyed with the impish smile he could never forget. But the cool assessment of the man’s flaws, dispassionate and remote, was an attitude he’d never expected to hear.
“He’d been furious,” she continued. “And terrifying in his fury. You know how he was. I was so confused. Afraid of him and angry. It took me a while to sort it all out and realize the full enormity of what he’d forced on us. And to punish me by leaving me alone…” She shook her head. “All because of “appearances”. I enrolled at the Sorbonne.”
“You went to college?” Jacob said in surprise.
“Yes. So un-ladylike of me. He was horrified.”
“Troglodyte,” Jacob muttered.
She laughed. “I studied Art History and Museum Curation.”
“Of course, you did.”
“He showed up in Paris when I refused to come home for Christmas. Was enraged that I was in school. And started in about how there was a young man he wanted me to meet who would be so very much more suited to me.”
Did he, the bastard?
“That was the first time I actually showed him that I inherited his temper. Shocked the hell out of him. He may have figured out how to get the church to issue an annulment, but I didn’t see myself as un-married, and I never have. I’d learned that the document was only valid if both parties signed it. Neither party signed it. I congratulated him on his titular un-father-in-law-ness and told him to never tamper with my life again.”
Jacob’s heart swelled and he kissed her with thirty years of fervor.
After that was satisfactorily settled for both parties, she continued. “He threatened to cut me off without a dime.”
“Naturally.”
“But what he did not yet know was that my maternal grandmother had passed away and split her fortune between me and Mama. The worst possible thing happened: I had my own money. I sent him back to New York and finished at the Sorbonne.”
She stared at the waterfall, deep in thought. “I was so naïve, Jacob. I was heartbroken at losing you, but it didn’t dawn on me until it happened that if I had defied him, I would have lost him, yes. But only him. This way, I lost both of you.”
“You never saw him again?”
“Oh,” she sighed. “Nothing that gothic. I returned to New York. He wanted me to live with him. I would not. I went to work bolstering the museum system in the city. Made a bit of a name for myself, all without him, much to his distress. I certainly did my duty by him, especially in his failing later years. But my trust in him, my admiration for him, our closeness … They were gone, and he could never win them back. He introduced more suitors, all of them clearly able to do him financial good and all quite cowed by him. That tug-of-war got much uglier before it got better.
“And then it became very obvious to everyone that atomic radiation was just as dangerous as its detractors had said. His investments there took quite a hit. Not enough that he’d actually feel it, if you know what I mean, but enough to be embarrassing. And that was when he tried to find you.”
“You’re joking.”
“Of course, I’d been trying to find you all along. So, I knew he wouldn’t succeed.”
“You were?”
“Silly man. Of course, I was! And I never stopped. I tried so many ways. Hired so many investigators. That ad you finally saw was run at least once a year.” Her voice became tighter as she spoke until she dissolved into tears.
“It finally worked,” he said, knowing how inadequate that sounded. He held her closer and found he was crying with her.
“Not enough,” she whispered. “There could never be enough.”
“Oh, my love,” he whispered back. “We still have forever.”
The clanging of the pipes announcing dinner roused him from his reverie. Jacob unwrapped his arms from around the book, and gazed at it fondly. Then he kissed it, and laid it gently in the middle of the blotter.
He’d mourned the loss of her love, but he had truly never lost it. She’d carried his heart all along. Carried it in her heart. She’d never given up on him. They’d lost a lifetime together, and yet, lived it in each other’s hearts.
BBTV Classic Round Robin Story Index