Chapter 17
Even before the first bestowal to Minnette, even before he moved into the Ponder House apartment, Theo searched for and found a comfortable bench, isolated and out of the way, where he could sit and watch the Oxbow River with minimal distraction.
There were a number of sturdy, comfortable benches at strategic places along the paved walkway beside the river for use by the public.
Theo’s year in Golden allowed him to watch that tree through a full cycle of seasons: tiny springtime buds becoming oblong, hand-sized leaves; light greens becoming deep green becoming scarlet and gold; pearl-sized cups becoming thumb-sized acorns; shade-making limbs blown bare by frigid winds.
But regardless of the season, this towering tree, as others had done in other places, served as Theo’s quiet companion and mentor in the ancient ways of stillness and listening. It was good company for an old soul.
He had carried this practice, this observation of sunset, to every place he’d lived for the past five decades.
Around the world, a host of rivers had welcomed his solitary presence, always facing west, almost always empty-handed, always from the quarter hour before declension until the first star of evening became visible.
What Giverny was to Monet — a place that was never the same on any two days — the sky above moving water was to Theo. Even as a boy, he had felt a gravitational pull to the western sky at the hour each day when the horizon dissolved landscape and heavens together.
That hour, that practice, that stillness had saved him when he was a younger man.
Though the memory was decades old, Theo never entirely escaped the dizziness, the difficulty breathing, or the disorientation that he had felt when he first got the news his daughter had been killed.
The ten-year-old had been the unexpected jewel of a loveless marriage, the raison d’être of the then-young man’s life and the inspiration for all he hoped to do in the world.
From rocky soil in which opposites had first been attracted and then repelled into cold civility, this flower of promise had bloomed.
She dethroned all of Theo’s previous deities the day she was born.
Tita. Named for her grandmother.
The young Theo, often away from home on business as his fortunes rose, began to reconfigure his life so that he could be near the child as much as possible.
His return home to Tita at the end of workdays or trips abroad, those first moments of exuberant embrace between adorer and adored, became the moments around which he built his existence.
Even Theo’s affection for his wife grew, in acknowledgment of the gift she had borne him.
He had been concerned, but not enough, about his wife’s fondness for wine and spirits.
The life she lived — license, privilege, respectability, boredom — was financed and well-fed by Theo’s achievements.
Their moves from one city of prominence to another, with immediate acceptance into the high culture of each new community, suited her taste for society and her need to be noticed.
They also landed her in a world where strong drink was plentiful and routine and where her power of resistance was easily stretched beyond its limits.
The part of her soul that she could not fill with the false transcendence of prestige, she filled or sedated with vodka and scotch.
Theo at first relished, then endured, and eventually loathed the perks of his business success and wealth.
Social gatherings, tuxedoed events, balls, galas, concerts, and galleries became the bane of his existence, the more so as each event encroached on his time with Tita.
His fondness for people never waned, but the pretense, on full display at many of the social events filling his calendar, became insufferable to him.
The same attention that his wife found intoxicating, he found mildly sickening.
He tolerated it as a necessary part of being a highly successful entrepreneur.
Theo was in New York City at a ceremony in the United Nations building when he got the call.
An international connection from France, with a slight and inconvenient delay, informed him — a trusted secretary was bearer of the tragic news — that his daughter had been killed in an automobile accident, a single-car accident caused when Theo’s seriously inebriated wife, also killed, lost control of her expensive car, left the roadway, flipped repeatedly, and came to rest at the foot of a slightly damaged beech tree.
For weeks, every thought of Tita made Theo gasp and sob at the nauseating finality of her death.
The impossibility of her return, the endlessness of his waiting for her presence, the suffocating silence of the house, his inability to find any words to express what he felt, and the haunting realization that it did not have to happen drove Theo to near madness.
Sleeplessness, tremors, and starvation became his reality.
His suffering was aggravated by a sense of guilt that took the form of a single tormenting question: “Did I not protect my child?”
Newsmongers in the press and gossips in social circles tried in vain to pierce his silence and isolation. To him, those heartless, curious beasts were nonexistent, as was everything and everyone else in the universe.
Only grief existed.
And it was everywhere.
The few who did see Theo during that time, a handful of friends and family, saw a desperate emptiness in his eyes that itself was a form of death. No words of encouragement, no news of the marketplace, and no prospect of future endeavors could entice him from the abyss of his loss.
He had other houses to which he might flee and the means to stay away for as long as he wished, but he chose to remain at his home near Paris. His decision not to leave was more visceral than rational.
If he could not be close to Tita’s living body, he could at least remain close to her grave. If he could not feel her breath, he could at least be where she had most recently breathed.
But God, the ache. The ache! Oh God, the ache.
One morning, just days after Tita’s burial, Theo woke before sunrise, dressed, left the house, and began walking.
He had no route in mind and no destination.
He told no one of his departure. He did not return home until that evening.
His friends, in the interim, had worried themselves sick, fearing the worst.
“I have been walking” was all the explanation he gave in response to their questions and scoldings. It was a truthful answer. His walk that day, and for the many that followed, was simply a way to save himself from drowning in guilt and regret.
Springtime came early that year. Some said it was the longest spring France had ever known.
And like a blind animal moving instinctively toward a mother’s scent, Theo left the oppressive walls of his villa early each morning to be in the presence of the season’s beauty.
Even in his darkest hour, he was drawn, if unconsciously, to space and verdure and color.
And so, he walked. And walked.
Every day.
As if his life depended on it, he walked. Alone.
Tirelessly.
Desperately.
The large plot of land that surrounded Theo’s home outside of Paris was laced with a labyrinth of trails that ran through forest and field.
Beyond his own property were miles and miles of hillside and country that he was free to roam.
Some days, his lone figure was seen at such long distances apart that locals assumed he must be hitchhiking or driving from one spot to another.
But not so. His walking was driven by fear and hope, fear of the thoughts that would catch him if he sat still and hope that he might somehow walk himself into a stupor or oblivion or, better, into the place where he would find Tita.
Pursued or pursuing, he walked.
Bedraggled, unkempt, inconsolable, he walked. Furious, frightened, fitful, he walked.
At day’s end, he would return to the damnable emptiness of his home and, if fortunate, collapse from exhaustion.
The temptation to drink or drug himself into sleep was never strong enough to overcome his remembrance of what that power had already taken from him.
He would not grant it the pleasure of a third casualty even if, quite strongly, he longed to escape the world.
Eventually, the dark spell broke.
After weeks of walking, the beauty that had surrounded him, beauty to which grief had temporarily numbed him, became consciously present again.
It was evening. The sight of lush fields, the scent of turned soil, the color of innumerable blossoms, and the cool air of April conspired against the death and darkness that he carried into their midst. His first lucid thought — “this is lovely” — felt like a betrayal of his daughter.
He tried to stifle it with the argument that, in her absence, goodness was no longer possible in the world.
But then the appearance of additional co-conspirators, a little boy and girl on bicycles, laughing as they tried to outpace a playful dog, struck him with the inescapable recognition that life would and must go on, even if altogether new and subject to a grief that would be present with every step.
Theo stopped to let the thought take firmer hold.
He wanted it to prevail. He was tired.
So… grievously… tired.
He walked along a path that ran beside the River Marne.
At a high brow overlooking the ribbon of water, he sat.
Theo had seen the small bench many times in his frantic ambulations but had never once considered stopping to rest. Nor had he ever seen anyone else sitting there.
This time, however, under the spell of a resplendence that would not be denied, he took a seat.
His hands were empty. The sun was minutes from sinking below the tree line on the distant horizon.
He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply, yielding as best he could to the slight peace that was trying to claim some corner of his heart.
He removed his hat, bowed his head wearily, and, sensing what was to come, covered his face with both hands.
His breath shortened until tears — could there be any left after weeks of crying?
— filled his haggard eyes. He wept… and moaned…
and choked on his sorrow until one final eruption of longing, and a sob that seemed to carry the hurt of all his stolen hopes, tore through his chest. Bit by bit, he emptied the bitter cauldron of his anguish and then sat in silent stillness.
He forced himself to take a deep breath, and then another.
His body relaxed. His head remained bowed, cradled in fingers that were soaked with tears.
Slowly, a calmness, absolute and irresistible, began to possess him with such presence that, in those moments, he knew his season of darkest grief was over.
He dried his eyes on his forearms, lifted his face, and sat upright on the bench. He heard faint sounds of children laughing in the distance. The last tiny sliver of sun was visible behind trees on the skyline.
When he was able to see clearly again, a motion above the river caught his attention.
A cloud of birds — starlings and redwings, thousands upon thousands of them — flew with synchronized precision, a dancing funnel, undulating in perfect unison.
Theo had learned somewhere in his past that the spectacle was called a murmuration.
His soul caught its breath at the sight, like a swimmer coming up from the depths.
For that moment he could separate beauty from his grief, and celebrate, if only ambivalently, that there was still a world of goodness apart from, or bigger than, his aching loneliness.
Above and behind the aerial ballet of bird flight, the clouds began to robe themselves in color, as if the sky, too, was fighting for the heart of this wounded man.
The slow, subtle changes, akin to tilting a cluster of opal beneath light, in which one tint dissolves into another, hinted that the great expanse overhead was alive, a thriving nest of angels and hope.
The sheer wonderment of the moment, the wings of fifty thousand birds, and the intoxicating surplus of beauty, overwhelmed him, as though a rope that had been pulled taut, that tied him to the darkness of Tita’s death, had snapped and fallen powerless to the ground.
Theo’s eyes filled with tears again — weariness? Hope? Forgiveness? Surrender? — as he lay his head back and looked into the open sky above him.
A single star caught his eye.
A tiny glimmer.
Searching from horizon to horizon, he confirmed that it was the first and only star in the sky.
“Tita, darling, look. A star… for us.”
He heard a lone dove in the distance and imagined his daughter beside him. Imagined that she too saw the ballet of the birds, saw the single star — was the single star? — heard the mournful song.
He rose, clasped his hands behind his back, and went home.
Looking back on that moment, he realized that, in the time between the quarter hour before sunset and the first star of dusk, somehow under the spell of that April evening in France, his splintered soul had begun to heal.
It would happen in fits and starts. It would be a healing that would never, at least in this life, be total or final.
But it was the moment when the fever broke for him.
And the moment when heaven took possession of his soul.
A host of faint recollections — words from his mother, the Story he had been taught from the priest, fragments of music, images of the Christ that he had pondered in museums around the world, books he had read — all converged in the beauty of that riverside moment and coalesced into a name, a hope, a Love that changed him forever.
Theo eventually sold the majestic house and moved far away from the parish where his daughter was buried. In every place he ever lived after that, he insisted his home be within walking distance of a river, with a view to the west, and with a bench or a place to put one.
And on many days, sometimes for many consecutive days at a stretch, he would check the local morning paper for the exact time of sunset to ensure that he would be punctual for his date with a ten-year-old girl whose laughter was a murmuration and whose memory was a single star, the brightest in all the sky.