• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Please,” he had written, “let us not descend to the vulgarity of, as I believe the phrase goes, ‘exchanging snaps.’ No photographer, save in Heaven, could ever take a picture of the angel that rises from your letters to blind me with adoration.”

But one heady, warm spring night, Annie enclosed a snapshot anyway. The picture was one Ed had taken at a picnic five years before, and, at the time, she’d thought it was a terrible likeness. But now, as she studied it before sealing her letter, she saw a great deal in the woman in the picture that she had not seen before—a haze of spiritual beauty that softened every harsh line.

The next two days of waiting were nightmares. She hated herself for having sent the picture, and told herself that she was the ugliest woman on earth, that she had ruined everything between herself and Hawkins. Then she would try to calm herself by telling herself that the picture couldn’t possibly make any difference—that the relationship was purely spiritual, that she might as well have enclosed a blank sheet of paper, for all the difference the picture, beautiful or ugly, could make. But only Joseph P. Hawkins could say what the effect of the picture was.

He did so by special-delivery airmail. “Bright angel, adieu!” he wrote, and Annie burst into tears.

But then she forced herself to read on. “Frail, wispish counterfeit of my mind’s eye, stand aside, dethroned by warm and earthly, vibrant bride of my mind—my Annie as she really is! Adieu, ghost! Make way for life, for I live and Annie lives, and it is spring!”

Annie was jubilant. She hadn’t spoiled anything with the picture. Hawkins had seen the haze of spiritual beauty, too.

It wasn’t until she sat down to write that she understood how changed the relationship was. They had admitted that they were not only spirit but flesh, and Annie’s skin tingled at the thought—and the pen that once had wings did not budge. Every phrase that came to Annie’s mind seemed foolish, inflated, though phrases like them had seemed substantial enough in the past.

And then the pen began to move with a will of its own. It wrote two words that said more than Annie had said in the hundred pages that had gone before:

“I come.”

She was blind with love, gloriously out of control.

Hawkins’s reply, a telegram, was almost as short: “PLEASE DON’T. AM DEATHLY ILL.”

That was his last communication. Annie’s telegrams and special-delivery letters brought no more response from Joseph P. Hawkins. A long-distance call revealed that Hawkins had no telephone. Annie was shattered, able to think of nothing but the gentle, lonely man, wasting away without a soul to care for him, really care, seven hundred miles from the vibrant bride of his mind.

After one agonized week of Hawkins’s profound silence, Annie strode from the Schenectady railroad station, flushed with love, suffocating in her new girdle, tormented by her savings, which crackled and scratched in her stocking-tops and spare bosom. She carried a small suitcase and her knitting bag, into which she’d swept the entire contents of her medicine cabinet.

She wasn’t afraid, not even rattled, though she’d never been on a train before, and had never seen anything remotely like the clouds of smoke and clanging busyness of Schenectady. She was numbed by duty and love, impressively tall and long-striding, leaning forward aggressively.

The cabstand was empty, but Annie told a redcap Hawkins’s address, and he directed her to a bus that would take her there.

“You just ask the bus driver where you should get off,” said the redcap.

And Annie did—at two-minute intervals. She sat right behind the driver, her modest luggage on her lap.

As the bus picked its way through mazes of noisy, fuming factories and slums and jounced over chuckholes and railroad tracks, Annie could see Hawkins, thin and white, tall, delicate, and blue-eyed, wasting away on a hard narrow bed in a tenement room.

“Is this the place where I get off?”

“No, ma’am. Not yet. I’ll let you know.