An extraordinary contentment filled me suddenly. You are a Child of the Angels, I thought, and the angels are bringing Liona and her son, your son, to you.
I took a long walk around the Mission Inn, thinking what a perfect cool California day it was, passing all my favorite fountains and chapel doorways and patios and curios and other such things, and it was just time then for her to have come.
I returned to the far end of the walkway, near the doors to the lobby, and I waited for two likely people to start up the path and then pause under the low arched campanario with its many bells.
I couldn’t have been there for longer than five minutes, pacing, looking around, checking my watch, moving in and out of the lobby now and then, when suddenly I realized that amid the steady flow of foot traffic along the path, there were two people standing right beneath the bells as I had asked those two people to do.
For a moment I thought my heart would stop.
I’d expected her to be pretty because she’d been pretty when she was a girl, but that had been the bud to this, the radiant flower, and I didn’t want to do anything except stare at her, to drink in the woman she’d become.
She was only twenty-seven. Even I at twenty-eight knew that’s not very old, but she had a womanly manner about her, and she was dressed in the most becoming and most finished way.
She wore a red suit, fitted at the waist and flaring over her narrow hips, with a short flared skirt that just covered her knees. Her pink blouse was open at her throat and there she wore a simple string of pearls. There was a tiny bit of pink handkerchief in her breast pocket, and her purse was patent leather pink, and so were her graceful high-heeled shoes.
What a picture she was in those clothes.
Her long full black hair was loose over her shoulders, with only some of it drawn back from her clear forehead and fixed perhaps with a barrette, the way she’d done it when she was a girl.
A sense came over me that I would remember her this way forever. It didn’t matter what would happen next or hereafter. I would simply never forget the way she looked now, so gorgeous in red, with her full and girlish black hair.
In fact a passage came to me from a film, and it’s one that many people love. It’s from the film Citizen Kane, and an old man named Bernstein speaks the passage as he reflects on memory and how things can strike us that we see for no more than a few seconds. In his case, he’s describing a young woman he once glimpsed on a passing ferryboat. “A white dress she had on,” he says, “and she was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month has not gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”
Well, I knew that I would always remember Liona in that very way as to how she looked now. She was looking around, and she had about her the self-confidence and self-possession I remembered, and yet the pure uncomplicated courage that I had always associated with her simplest gestures or words.
I couldn’t believe how lovely she was. I couldn’t believe how simply, inevitably lovely she’d become.
But right beside her was the ten-year-old boy who was my son, and when I saw him, I saw my brother Jacob who’d died at that age, and I felt my throat tighten and the tears stand in my eyes. This is my son.
Well, I’m not going to meet them weeping, I thought, but just as I pulled out my handkerchief, she saw me and she smiled at me, and taking the little boy by the hand she brought him right up the path towards me, and she said in the most sprightly and confident voice,
“Toby, I would have known you anywhere. You look exactly the same.”
Her smile was so vibrant and so generous that I couldn’t answer her. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t tell her what it meant to me to see her, and when I looked down at the little boy looking up at me, this dark-haired, dark-eyed image of my long-dead brother Jacob, this perfect straight-shouldered and regal little boy, this confident and clever-looking little boy that any man would want for a son, this fine and splendid little boy, well, I did start to cry.
“You’re going to make me cry if you don’t stop,” she said. She put her hand out and clasped my arm.
There was nothing hesitant or reticent about her, and when I thought back on it, I realized there never had been at all. She was forceful and confident and she had a deep, soft voice that underscored her generous character.
Generous, that was the word that came to me as I looked into her eyes, as she smiled up at me. She was generous. She was generous and loving and she’d come all the way here because I asked her to do it, and I found myself saying it out loud.
“You came. You came all the way. You came. I thought up until the last moment that you wouldn’t come.”
The little boy took something out of his breast pocket and he handed it to me.
I bent down the better to look at him, and I took what he had given me and I saw it was a little picture of me. It had been cut out of my school yearbook and it had been laminated.
“Thank you, Toby,” I said.
“Oh, I always carry it,” he said immediately. “I always tell people, ‘That’s my dad.’ ”
I kissed him on the forehead. And then he surprised me. He put his arm around me, almost as if he was the man and I was the boy. He put his arm around me and he held me. I kissed him again on his soft little cheek. He looked at me with the clearest simplest eyes. “I always knew you’d come,” he said. “I mean I knew you’d show up someday. I knew you would.” He said all that as simply as he’d said the rest.
I stood up, swallowed, and then I looked at both of them again, and put my arms around them both. I drew them close to me, and held them, and I was conscious of her softness, of her pure sweetness, a feminine sweetness so alien to me and the life I’d lived, and of a lovely floral perfume coming from her silky dark hair.
“Come on, the room’s ready,” I stammered as if these were momentous words. “I checked you in, let me take you up.”
I realized then that the bellhop had been standing there all the while with the cart of luggage, and I gave him a twenty-dollar bill, told him it was the Innkeeper’s Suite and we’d meet him on the top floor.
For a moment I merely looked at her again, and it came back to me what Malchiah had said. What you tell her, you tell her for her sake. Not for your own.
Something else hit me full force as I looked at her, as well, and that was how serious she was, that seriousness was the other side of her self-confidence. Seriousness was why she would pick up and come here without a moment’s hesitation and let her son meet his father. And that seriousness reminded me of someone I’d known and loved on my adventures with Malchiah, and I realized now that when I’d been with that person—a woman in a long-ago age, I’d been reminded then of this beautiful and living and breathing woman who stood with me in my own day and age now.