The Porter's Muse Page 6

  Chapter 8

  I’ve taken this trip several times and always by train from Grand Central. Spring weather is much cooler in Stamford. It doesn’t matter.

  They’re much more at ease when they board here. No hustle and bustle and a whole lot of excuse me and no, you were here first. So unlike the City. It has been thirty-seven years since I last deboarded here, except to cross over to the inbound track and head right back into the City.

  As a teen, I‘d spent a lot of time here in Stamford with Aunt Marjorie, on Mother’s side of the family. There was a luncheon at Sacred Heart in the fall of ‘57, where I was determined to study pre-med to prove Daddy right. Aunt Marjorie promised to drive me over to the Fairfield campus for the event. But she’d met up with a friend whose son was also going and whom the university had already invited to attend the next fall. A year my senior, Alfred Jones was a high school football star, smart, and absolutely gorgeous. And he had his own car. I can’t imagine what Aunt Marjorie was thinking when she sent me off with that boy. Certainly not college.

  Alfred was so attentive that I thought I had him all to myself. He had nothing in common with Sharp Lamberton. He was bewildered by his seemingly random popularity with the girls and hadn’t figured out how to fend them off. We were just kids, after all. And Alfred was both handsome and attentive. Things were bound to get messy. I’d been waiting at the station to tell Daddy just how much so when the stout, white, and not particularly handsome man showed up and begged me away.

  You know he’s dead, right? Died yesterday. It’s right here in the Times. I’ll be darn.

  Ninety years old. I thought he’d live forever. I guess living to ninety is kind of like living forever. So few even come close.

  We’d kept in touch since Bellevue. I even went to see him a few times at the psych ward, where I had to give him my real name so he could add me to his visitor’s list. He still couldn't remember it. We met up, mostly, for hot chocolate down from the station once they let him out. It was just like I thought it would be. We grew close and visited regularly. I confided in him and told him everything, including all that I could remember about Russell McNair Lamberton. He took the most pleasure in hearing those stories. “The kind of man I’d admire,” he’d say. I’d even told him about Alfred and the reason I’d travelled to Stamford so much but never left the platform. He said it’s hard to forgive yourself, even when you’ve never intended a wrong.

  “You can spend your years seeking forgiveness, even though you know it’s not owed to you,” he once said.

  “What about forgiving?” I asked him. “Have you ever forgiven?” He looked at my face and remarked how I’d always made him feel honest.

  I called him the day the banshees returned Daddy’s letters to Delia Lamberton’s home and her son passed them on to me. Sixteen, tightly bound by a lavender ribbon, laid in date order in a floral box. Lilacs. Mother’s hand had addressed them all. Daddy received them. Not a single one to, from, or even about Delia. Yet, she’d tended them as if her own all these years beyond Daddy and Mother’s deaths.

 

  Chapter 9

  They had an affair! Mother, Daddy and Janira Cruz. Let me explain this better. Janira Cruz was Mother’s friend, and she was Daddy’s friend. The three of them conspired the craziest adulterous affair I’d ever heard of. Those years Delia Lamberton pretended she’d won, she knew Daddy was spending all the time he could spare at Janira Cruz’s house, chasing down Mother. Those two were having an affair. Mother and Daddy. And it was raunchy. At least sixteen letters worth of raunchy. Mother was shameless.

  I’ve only shared one once, and, even then, I couldn’t bear to hear it read aloud.

  “Children really ought not know every little thing about their parents,” he said, after reading just a line or two and returning my parents’ letter to its envelop. Then we finished our hot chocolate and said our goodbyes.

 

  Chapter 10

  Bomber who Terrorized City Dead at 90

  Dateline—May 23, 1994

  Man responsible for explosions detonated throughout the City in the 1940s and 1950s, during a reign of terror provoked by a denied injury compensation claim, has died. He apologized during a deathbed confession for “killing the girl’s father,” he said. The victim was unnamed. So was the girl. But the City’s ‘mad bomber’ insisted he was sorry and said he was certain the unknown girl would read about his remorse in the paper.

  I got pregnant the weekend I was supposed to be driving up to Sacred Heart. This is what I was trying to tell my father. Except, it wouldn’t have mattered. Alfred went on to college in the fall.

  We have a son. I gave him up for adoption. There, that’s my secret. Aunt Marjorie raised him here in Stamford. I’ve been travelling up here by train twenty-nine years on my boy’s birthday, seeking forgiveness, even though I’ve always known it wasn’t owed to me. I guess that’s why I’ve always turned back.

  Sacrificed so many years waiting to forgive and be forgiven, I barely remember the days lost that I could have been happy. Mother, Daddy, Amelia, and Delia, we were all Lambertons. And for all the time I blamed Mother and Father for not keeping the family together, those pesky banshees, in a single timely moment, revealed just how far away from the truth my anger had lived. The callousness of the man who killed my father unraveled in his saving me. He had remembered my face but spared me the demand of forgiveness. The craziness of these acts of unselfishness cannot sustain reason. Yet, we try, still, to make sense of it all.

  I’m an old woman, now. And as of this day, May 23, 1994, everyone I’ve ever really cared about, except the boy I’ll never know and who may never forgive, is dead. I haven’t a single secret left in me.

  Go ahead. Read the letter:

  Dear Ted,

  Look at us. Happier than ever. I long for the next time you’ll lie naked next to me. My desire for you is inexhaustible. The way you run your tongue against my thighs warms me wildly, and I cannot resist…

  Stop! You couldn’t have thought I meant read the whole letter. Remember, “Children really ought not know every little thing about their parents.” And neither should you about mine.

  End.

 

  About the Author

  KyleeliseTHT lives, dreams and writes near a splendid Florida beach with her husband and youngest son.