In the curve of a cobblestone path a fountain sparkles. I stroll through the resort, wearing white linen slacks, matching jacket, a straw hat, limping along with my birchwood cane, a book under my arm. What book? Emerson? Something vivid enough to draw my eyes from the beauty of the gardenias to gaze down into the pages. Mr. Granger, they call me here at the resort. I’m a widower with enough money to keep me comfortable in my old age, enough so that I can come to this resort each August. And what is that one shadow that hangs over the garden, you ask? The memory of my dead wife? No, it’s somebody else here at the resort. An old lover who comes at the same time each year, yet I ignore her, try to ignore her to make amends with my dead wife for that transgression so many years before. At this very same resort, in fact. You’d think on a man’s fifth anniversary he could remain true to his wife. Yes, I was terrible, heartless, selfish.
Her name was Audra. A young woman of nineteen, traveling with her elderly parents. I’d seen her first in the dinning room; we were placed at the same table. My wife must have sensed the attraction in the few words we shared during dinner. I showed too much interest in her daily activities, laughed too hard at her small whimsical jokes. Or was it the way she lit up when we sat at table? I believe women have a sixth sense for knowing when their loved one desires another, even in total absence of substantiated facts.
The next night my wife had requested we be placed at a private table. I felt ostracized, humiliated, enraged, sitting alone in a corner while most others at the resort sat at large community tables, laughed and drank and occasionally looked over to us, eating sullenly, not speaking.
I saw her by the fountain the next morning, before my wife had woken. Audra. Even when I say her name now it hovers in my chest a moment. Sitting side by side on the bench, our legs touching. Then a slow walk along garden paths, through the glen, away from the main house into the woods beyond. When I returned and served my wife breakfast in bed, she knew immediately. She threw a tea cup across the room, upended the breakfast tray, but didn’t say a word of accusation. She didn’t need to.
The next twenty-five years were spent in atonement. On her deathbed, the reconciliation between us was complete. I started going to the resort each year in memory of my wife and that great harm I had done to her there. And then I saw Audra, older now, but her eyes the same, her smile. Nothing was holding us back now, she pleaded. Am I to never love again? I am in love, I answered. To my wife. She persisted, and with each year my reserve slowly crumbled by the pangs of loneliness and the memory of our clandestine morning walks in the garden to the glen beyond. Do the dead watch from the garden gate, I wondered? Do the dead forgive?
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