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Antique Loyalty, continued...Read Part 1 first!
 The flower shop she owned was two blocks from the hotel Herman stayed in two years earlier and was the one he was checked into now. The room's only difference was the absent gold-edged Bible. As Herman walked to the boutique, his mind's mental frame hadn't allowed him to notice much of his surroundings: the people passing him, children playing in the park across the boulevard, the warm scent of bread wafting from the bakery. Fantasy instead swirled in his head.
A muted bell sounded his entrance, as his scanning first saw sunlight slanting through blinds, shielding tulips, daffodils, and carnations from over-exposure. It also illuminated the side of the woman's shape—her profile, how he remembered her smell, the fullness of her that first time. A bouquet of flower scents tickled his nose to the point of a resisted sneeze. Lilacs, because she liked them the most, were dominant. The color of her dress matched that smell.
“A deeper shade might have been more effective,” she said, approaching and reaching to smooth the tie she instantly recognized. Herman's brain skipped at what his conscious mind hadn't previously noticed what she clearly had. Her words caused destiny to skew further, a final piercing of temptation's thrusted spear completed.
She took Herman, wordless, by the hand, leading him out the rear of the shop, to a high-hedged courtyard. Flowering purple lilacs. There was the option of a roped hammock at the sunny corner of the yard. She instead chose the grassy patch nearest her favorite shrubs, whose morning dewiness was yet untouched by the sun.
She stopped, her shadow-shrouded back to him still. First it fell from her shoulders, the purple dress, then slid down, catching a long second at her hips before fully falling to the ground. She stepped out of it, bringing her bare body for a moment back into the sun. Turned she did, as the light rotated on her skin, broadcasting her comeliness. As she moved from the sun closer to Herman, he noticed her painted toenails—a violet purple.
He reached up to unbutton his shirt as she assisted him below, before each pulled the other down to the earth. It was early, the beginning. The start of their spent day. And, it was enchantment that widened the fissure which was already established in him. A room had been constructed, its inhabitants now forever dwelling there.
“All finished?” Gladys asked.
“Um huh, yeah … good as usual, dear. Yesiry.” Herman excused himself from the table and fetched his cardigan sweater. Gladys, as always, began tidying their lunch dishes.
“Give my regards to Roger, could you … tell 'em I'm sorry for his loss.”
“Sure will, ubetcha, honey,” Herman returned with sincerity's reflex before grabbing his cane to meet his latest friend. Roger was new at the senior home, and he and Herman shared the same hankering for multiple games of checkers – its established routine diversifying their daily mundanity.
When Herman found empty Roger's place in the activity room, he went to Roger’s apartment. He sounded a wrinkled one-knuckled tap on the already cracked open door before poking in his head.
“Roger?” It was the second time Herman had entered his friend's residence. There, he found Roger weeping, sitting in his deceased wife's favorite chair, its threadbare surface now matching his own worn skin. It came from the home he and Madeline had shared for nearly sixty years. A damp handkerchief was clenched in the hand that also held a brass-framed photo. The black and white exposure revealed a serious-faced groom and a precocious bride.
“God, how I miss her,” was all Roger managed to emit between abruptions of silent sobs. Herman went to sit at his side.
“You live with someone as long as we have Herman, and you can't figure out how to get on without them…” Because agreement with Roger was Herman's natural inner reaction, he felt fear. He knew he needed to be the first to go, before Gladys. Because she could better survive his absence. Herman then saw clearer the wedding picture Roger was clutching, causing his thin vision to double take as his trembling hand groped a pocket for the glasses he usually wore.
Her eyes, their length of lash, their heavy-lined lids, were unmistakable. Herman's head began to spin. Further down, the distinct lines of the fruit her bust line revealed. The pears he partook of, the hips that straddled him, the lips that had mouthed him, the ones he and Roger had shared.
Finally, the verification of her confirmed—the lilacs. The bouquet of them she held at her waist. In his delirium, now Herman could smell them as flashes of her flesh erupted from his ancient memory, clear as the day they were etched on it. Roger's Madeline had been his Madeline! So 'Madeline' was her name! Yes! Of course.
Time seemed to bend for both men as grief consumed them, each having lost something so real. For Roger, it was the defining of nearly his entire history, the sum of his adult life, and for Herman, the fragments of a memory, of another's intensity for him, the slice of it he would take into eternity.
Herman and Roger sat as long as their weeping held them. There, in the living room, absent of Madeline's shared anima that once had infused their veins.
Checkers, the best of seven to win, the two still played.
When he returned, Herman found his Gladys in her own chair, in her usual afternoon slumber, a celebrity magazine open across her lap. Seeing her warmed Herman with peace, an unfathomable awe. She was alive and he knew how much she loved him. How she was breathing, at least a little longer, for him.
Then a smell. He saw them on the table, the water in the vase magnifying their stems: a bouquet of lilacs.
story by Darrell Rohling
email him about this piece at djrohling@aol.com |
