Letta found herself Thursday night doing the dishes. She was leaning against the sink scrubbing a skillet and just looked up. There she was, reflected in the uncurtained window over the sink, staring at herself over the jumble of grease-flecked soap-bergs. The reflection startled Letta with its revelations of a woman with lined features and graying hair. It trumpeted the white scar that split her left cheek from just under the eye to the ashen pucker of tissue on her chin. It showed the woman’s surprise and discomfort. She had not prepared herself for seeing herself. She had been thinking of other things.

Still, she did not lower her eyes. The image in the glass was like a raw documentary photograph. There she was, Letta Blighe Applewhite, captured unromantically in the twilight of a life whose multiple satisfactions were not reflected nearly as well as were the effects of erosions, not all of them governed by natural law.

A wave of color disturbed her reflection. It was Matt, passing the open dining room door. She heard him rummaging in the buffet. A drawer slammed. “Honey,” he called, still rummaging, “have you seen the Meerschaum? I’m reading Holmes tonight.”

“Mrs. Brown was here. She must have put it up in its stand.” Letta’s reflection softened with the ghost of a smile.

He went upstairs and then came thudding back down. She pictured him holding the pipe; he never lit it until his mind was fully settled into the atmosphere of 221B Bakker Street.

The leather in his favorite living room chair squished as he settled in to visit Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson. She imagined Matt’s face relaxing, the small almost-smile of anticipation beginning to play around his mouth as he opened his worn copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes. She could almost feel the house assuming a foggy, British personality, time slowing, then moving backwards. It would not be surprising, now, to hear the clop of hooves as a carriage passed in the street. Letta smiled at herself in the window, realizing that her own muscles had relaxed, just imagining the refuge Matt was finding in the London of long ago.

He had been making these imagined time-travel visits ever since he’d returned from Europe in 1946. The famous consulting detective and his physician—and war-veteran—friend reminded Matt of his US Army Air Corps time in wartime London, France—and finally, Germany. People now called World War II the last good war; and that was how she and Matt remembered it. To them, it didn’t seem long ago—just a short look back over their shoulders; but it was more than three decades past. All those years, during which they’d lived in three different houses, worked hard. And raised four children.

Her left hand played absently through the disintegrating suds. She imagined Holmes leaning against the fireplace, his sharp, uncompromising eyes watching Matt read Watson’s chronicles, noting the depth of his concentration on stories he knew by heart, reaching back in his formidable memory to find the point at which this almost desperate concentration had started. Drawing the proper conclusions.

She fussed with a stain on the skillet for a minute, then looked to the window again. What would Holmes see in that: a woman in a window, the merest outline, a scrim of aging features shielding an infinity of dark.

She finished the skillet with a burst of short, heavy strokes, rinsed, pulled the plug, and hurried the remaining suds toward the drain, beginning to scrub the sink with cleanser before they had completely disappeared.

Tonight, the aging features had planned to write letters. That was one of Letta’s jobs, keeping in touch the old-fashioned way. Except that wasn’t really what she did anymore. These days she dashed off notes on carefully selected topics to people who rarely responded. And she had begun to write emails, hesitantly, not certain it was proper or that, once she pressed “send,” the missives wouldn’t simply disintegrate in the air. She still felt that the old-fashioned way was better, deeper—a way to truly say something: report, reflect, inquire, draw forth, reveal. To communicate. Imagine that:

Dear Angie:
        Your last phone call was typical. You were a lively child, spunky, infuriating, delightful. What happened? When did you start to whine? What good does it do?
        If you and Robert are having problems, tell him how you feel and try to work them out, ignore them, or get a divorce—after five years of endless agonizing you ought to be able to decide which way to go. In any event, get busy. Baby’s almost grown, and you can work full-time if you want to. Find a cause you believe in and work for it—or join the circus, for God’s sake, where you can at least contribute to other people’s dreams.
        Your father and I gave you a backbone for your birthday. Go find it and put it back where it belongs.

A piece of plastic was hanging out of the breadbox and, unlatching the cover to tuck it back, Letta frowned at the mess inside. She took everything out and used the dishrag to remove the carbohydrate silt on the box’s bottom.

Dear Mrs. Brown:
        You are, all in all, a lovely lady, and I enjoy talking to you every Wednesday—even though I am aware that we both feel sometimes like we’re tiptoeing in opposite directions through a minefield.
        I know six hours a week is not a lot of time for cleaning such a large house. But I cannot help but wonder why you have declared the breadbox, the bookcase behind Matt’s chair, and the rugs in the guest room alien territory. I am intrigued by your omissions.

Draping the rinsed dishrag over the faucet, Letta became aware of the scent of pipe tobacco, weak after its trip from the living room. She drew in a breath and held it—almost weeping at the thought of Matt seeking refuge in the certainties of Holmes’ Victorian England. In this one thing only, she envied her husband: the comfort he derived from those stories; the precious belief Holmes and Watson somehow helped him preserve in the presence, somewhere, of justice.

Staring at herself in the window, she focused on the reflection of the scar that bisected her cheek. Glass always reflected it perfectly—almost, she sometimes imagined, with pride. For glass had created it. An anonymous shard had struck her like lightning, precipitating, appropriately, a warm downpour of blood.

It had been a hot summer evening, the terrible hot summer of 1968. Her blouse had quickly become wet and sticky with blood. But she just kept standing there, in the midst of the angry, impervious crowd, because just as the glass struck, she had gotten close enough to see the faces of the national guard soldiers confronting them. Strained faces, nervous and so very young. Some of the guards, so well-armed, so apparently formidable, were little more than children.

Dear Jordie: “No!” She recoiled so fiercely that the word actually came out. Don’t be stupid, she thought. The woman in the glass stared back at her accusingly. Letta looked through her into the dark.

Dear Jordie, the dark said. It reminded her of months of letters, the old-fashioned kind that she had written every morning, before doing anything else, to her youngest son. The letters had been her way of keeping faith with him, as she had kept faith with Matt during his war so many years before. Dear Jordie, she had written every morning. Until the day after Major Overton had appeared at their front door.

She looked back from the dark, back at the woman in the glass, at the scar that was part of her now.

Dear Jordie:
I only went to one antiwar demonstration, just after we heard about you. And see what happened. I was just standing there, trying to find a place for myself, when something shattered.

That was true, as far as it went: something made of glass had shattered that day and split open her cheek. But what had truly marked her, caused something deep within her to begin disintegrating, was more complicated. It had begun much earlier than Major Overton’s formal appearance to tell the Applewhites that their son was dead. There had been a change in tone in Jordie’s letters. And there had been a change in tone all around them here as well: at church, on the news, club meetings, street conversations—the atmosphere was choked with words and silences that clashed and assaulted.

Clear lines, lines within which Matt and Letta had lived their entire lives, within which they had raised their children, broke into meaningless pieces. Men in high places were proven to be liars. Men in high places sent frightened child-soldiers out against their own angry civilians. Angry civilians filled the air with stupidities and obscenities in the name of peace. Everything was clamorous and incoherent.

Despite her best efforts to put strength in her letters, despite her fervent and passionate prayers in church every Sunday, Jordie’s life had been lost in that roaring cloud of violence and chaos. And because of the chaos, because no lines were clear anymore, because the air was thick with obscenities and lies, his death was made meaningless. And there had been nothing to do about it.

She had made a pact with herself, for Matt, to keep silent and to continue with life as if it made sense. But in truth, to her, life had been robbed of sense. And she herself became one of the abounding lies by pretending that it had not.

Black night was pushing at the window, pushing memories, pushing reflections. It whispered to her of the trip she and Matt had just made, a trip long in miles, heavy with pain. For the black night was like the black stone. That beautiful, serene, unsettling stone.

They had gone to Washington, D.C., seen a black stone, and come back and unpacked and sat down to dinner and now she was washing up. Those were the facts. You could say it that quickly. But the trip had not been anywhere near as simple as that. Because of the stone. It seemed to stretch forever and had about it the beauty and dignity of a desert. It was covered with names, thousands and thousands of names. One of them was Jordie’s.

She had seen his face in the stone, and all of his short life, and she had heard his voice. It was part of the voice of the stone, a continuous, subliminal hum that spoke profoundly of sacrifice and uncertainties and love and fear and death. How could anyone who touched the stone, who went close enough to hear its voice, forget what it said?

Sounds from the living room told her Matt had come back from England. She reached for the light switch over the sink and, almost of its own accord, her hand detoured to her cheek and traced its scar, while the woman in the window performed the same ritual. The movement of her shadow’s hand against the dark glass was like the movement her real hand had made against the black stone over the letter of her son’s name.

And she understood, she admitted to herself at last, why she had never had that scar removed, why she never would.

Matt called to her. She turned off the light, making the window simply a window again, and went out to see what he wanted.

 

M. E. Wagner is an editor and published author of nonfiction books (from a fun and funky short history of the golden age of American illustration, to an in-depth look at the United States and its international relations during the era of the First World War).