He ambled down a path behind the library, into the secluded Virginia woods that surrounded the campus where he’d grown from adolescence to young manhood. Something had drawn him here, something stronger, more compelling than mere nostalgia. Christ, by now he’d had far too much fulfilled nostalgia thrust upon him to seek out any more.
Perhaps it was the fact that this was the last significant living environment of his life that he had not replayed, and that still existed as he remembered it. He’d already been back to his childhood home in Orlando, had twice returned to Emory. And the places he had originally lived after college, where he’d been a young bachelor and later married to Linda, contained no part of him in this life or the one he’d most recently been through. Here, though, he was remembered; he had put his own small stamp of personality upon this school, just as it had, in this existence as well as the others, had its greater effects on him. Maybe he simply needed to touch base here, to confirm his own being and remind himself of a time when reality was stable and nonrepetitive.
Jeff pushed back the overhanging branch of an elm that was drooping over the path, and without warning he saw the bridge that had haunted him with guilt and shame for all this time.
He stood there in shock, staring at the scene that had troubled five decades of his dreams. It was just a little wooden footbridge across a creek, a simple structure not more than ten feet long, but Jeff could barely control the panic that rose in his chest at the sight of it. He’d had no idea this was where the path was leading.
He let go the elm branch, walked slowly toward the diminutive bridge, with its hand-sawn planks and lovingly crafted three-foot guardrail. It had been rebuilt, of course; he’d always assumed that. Still, he’d never come back to this spot again while he was in school, not since that day.
He sat down on the creek bank next to the bridge, ran his hand along the weathered wood. On the other side of the stream a squirrel nibbled on an acorn that it held between its paws, and regarded him with a placid but wary eye.
Jeff hadn’t really been a shy boy, that first year here at school; quiet, and serious about his studies, but by no means timid. He’d made several friends quickly, and joined in the boisterous dormitory horseplay: shaving-cream battles, draping another student’s room with toilet paper, that kind of thing. As far as girls went, he’d had as much, and as little, experience as might be expected at fifteen, in that more innocent year. There’d been one steady girlfriend his last year in junior high, but as yet no one special among the high-school girls who came in from Richmond on weekends for the dances here on campus; that fondly recalled encounter, with a girl named Barbara, would have to wait until he was sixteen.
That first year, though, he fell in love. Thoroughly, mind-numbingly in love with his French teacher, a woman in her mid-twenties named Deirdre Rendell. He wasn’t alone in his obsession; roughly eighty percent of the boys on the all-male campus were in love with the willowy brunette, whose husband taught American History. Each night at dinner, there would be a mad scramble for the six student seats at the Rendells' table in the dining commons; Jeff managed to grab himself a place there two or three nights a week.
He was convinced she felt a special something for him, more than just the bright warmth she displayed to the other boys; he was positive he perceived a special glow, a flame, in her eyes when she spoke to him. Once, in class, she had stood behind his chair and slowly, casually massaged his neck as she led the students in reciting Baudelaire. That had been a moment of high erotic intensity for him, and he’d basked in the envious glares of his classmates. For a while he’d even stopped masturbating over the Playboy centerfolds, had reserved his sexual fantasies for Deirdre, as he thought of her privately, for Deirdre alone.
By the end of November it became obvious that Mrs. Rendell was pregnant. Jeff did his best to ignore what that implied about the health of her relationship with her husband, and focused instead on the fresh beauty that impending motherhood brought to her face.
She took her maternity leave in the winter, and another teacher took over her classes until she was able to return. The baby was born in mid-February. Mrs. Rendell was back at the couple’s table in the dining commons by April, her breasts gorgeously swollen with milk. She kept the infant in a portable bassinet when she didn’t have it in her arms; and her husband doted on her constantly from the seat next to her. Between the two of them, they captured almost every moment of her cherished attention; Jeff could no longer imagine he read secret endearments in the rare smiles she bestowed on him.
The Rendells lived in a house off-campus, on the other side of the woods behind the library. On sunny days, Mrs. Rendell liked to walk to and from school, through the peaceful stand of elms and birches. There was a well-worn footpath that led that way, though it was broken by a small creek. In the fall, she’d been able to ford the narrow rivulet easily; but now, pushing the baby in its perambulator, the stream presented a serious obstacle.
Her husband labored for six weeks, building the little bridge. He cut the lumber to size on the band saw in the school’s shop, planed the wood to smoothness, made the joists and crossbeams of the tiny span twice as sturdy as they needed to be. The night of the day it was completed, Mrs. Rendell kissed him right at the table in the dining commons, kissed him long and lovingly. She’d never done anything like that in front of any of the boys before. Jeff stared at his uneaten food, his stomach tight and cold.
The next day he walked into the woods to be alone, to sort out the awful feelings that overwhelmed him; but something seemed to snap inside when he came across the bridge.
His mind was blank with unaccustomed rage when he picked up the first large rock from the creek bed, hurled it with all his strength at the wooden guardrail.
Again and again he heaved rocks, the heaviest ones he could find and lift. The buttresses were the hardest parts to crush; they’d been built to last, but under Jeff’s furious assault the beams finally gave way, collapsed into the creek along with the splintered remains of the rest of the bridge.
When it was done, Jeff stood staring at the sodden wreckage, his breath coming in great gulps of exhaustion and anguish. Then he glanced up, and saw Mrs. Rendell standing in the path on the other side of the stream. The face that he’d adored for so many months was an expressionless mask as she looked at him. Their eyes locked for several seconds, and then Jeff bolted.
He assumed he’d be expelled; but nothing was ever said about the incident. Jeff never sat at the Rendells' table again. He avoided seeing either of them as much as he was able. She remained unfailingly polite, even pleasant, to him in class, and at the end of the year he received an A in French.
He tossed a pebble into the lazy creek, watched it bounce off a rock and plop into the water. Destroying the bridge had been a vile, unforgivable act. Yet Mrs. Rendell had forgiven him, protected him, had even had the good sense not to shame him further by expressing her forgiveness in words. She must have understood the lonely, mindless fury that had led him to such an extreme, must have recognized that in his childlike way he had seen her love for her husband and baby as betrayal of the deepest sort.
And it had been, in Jeff s crush-distorted view of things. It had been his introductory encounter with the death of hope.
Now he knew what had drawn him back here to the school, to this quiet clearing in the woods of his youth. He must again face that emptiness of infinite loss, but this time on a more complex level. This time he knew he could not crack beneath the weight of the intolerable. There were no more bridges to destroy; he must learn to go forward, and to build, despite the torment of his daughter’s death, of knowing what could never be.
At a quarter to eleven on a Friday night, at least twenty couples embraced in the shadows outside Harris Hall: arms around each other, faces pressed together for a last few minutes of fevered contact before the young women would be called into the dorm by their vigilant housemother. Jeff and Judy shared a stone bench away from the huddling pairs. She was upset.
'It’s that Frank Maddock, isn’t it? It was all his idea; I know it was.'
Jeff shook his head. 'I told you, I suggested it to him.'
Judy wasn’t listening. 'You shouldn’t hang around with him. I knew something like this would happen. He thinks he’s so cool, thinks he’s Mr. Sophistication. Can’t you see through that act of his?'
