The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [111]
“Not for some time” turned out to be over a year. I wrote, telephoned, asked friends from school and university, but could never find out where they had taken her.
Then one day, unannounced, she returned to Montreal accompanied by a husband and my child. I learned the bitter details from that font of all knowledge, Naomi Goldblatz, who had already seen all three of them.
I received a short note from Christina about a week later begging me not to make any attempt to contact her.
I had just begun my last year at McGill, and like some eighteenth-century gentleman I honored her wish to the letter and turned all my energies to the final exams. She still continued to preoccupy my thoughts, and I considered myself lucky at the end of the year to be offered a place at Harvard Law School.
I left Montreal for Boston on September 12, 1968.
You must have wondered why I never came home once during those three years. I knew of your disapproval. Thanks to Mrs. Goldblatz everyone was aware who the father of Christina’s child was, and I felt my absence might make life a little easier for you.
The rabbi paused as he remembered Mrs. Goldblatz letting him know what she had considered was “only her duty.”
“You’re an interfering old busybody,” he had told her. By the following Saturday she had moved to another synagogue and let everyone in the town know why.
He was more angry with himself than with Benjamin. He should have visited Harvard to let his son know that his love for him had not changed. So much for his powers of forgiveness.
He took up the letter once again.
Throughout those years at law school I had plenty of friends of both sexes, but Christina was rarely out of my mind for more than a few hours at a time. I wrote over forty letters to her while I was in Boston, but didn’t mail one of them. I even phoned, but it was never her voice that answered. If it had been, I’m not even sure I would have said anything. I just wanted to hear her.
Were you ever curious about the women in my life? I had affairs with bright girls from Radcliffe who were majoring in law, history, or science, and once with a shop assistant who never read anything. Can you imagine, in the very act of making love, always thinking of another woman? I seemed to be doing my work on autopilot, and even my passion for running became reduced to an hour’s jogging a day.
Long before the end of my last year, leading law firms in New York, Chicago, and Toronto were turning up to interview us. The Harvard tom-toms can be relied on to beat across the world, but even I was surprised by a visit from the senior partner of Graham, Douglas & Wilkins of Toronto. It’s not a firm known for its Jewish partners, but I liked the idea of their letterhead one day reading “Graham, Douglas, Wilkins & Rosenthal.” Even her father would surely have been impressed by that.
At least if I lived and worked in Toronto, I convinced myself, it would be far enough away for me to forget her, and perhaps with luck find someone else I could feel that way about.
Graham, Douglas & Wilkins found me a spacious apartment overlooking the park and started me off at a handsome salary. In return I worked all the hours God—whoever’s God—made. If I thought they had pushed me at McGill or Harvard, Father, it turned out to be no more than a dry run for the real world. I didn’t complain. The work was exciting, and the rewards beyond my expectation. Only now that I could afford a Thunderbird I didn’t want one.
New girlfriends came and went as soon as they talked of marriage. The Jewish ones usually raised the subject within a week; the Gentiles, I found, waited a little longer. I even began living with one of them, Rebecca Wertz, but that too ended—on a Thursday.
I was driving to the office that morning—it must have been a little after eight, which was late for me—when I saw Christina on the other side of the busy highway, a barrier separating us. She was standing at a bus stop holding the hand of a little boy, who must have been