Though he did not seem to hear, the words went through Leksy like a knife. Without a word to anyone, Leksy put down his cup, left the plant, and went to a bar. All through the (mostly) sexless years, it had been the memory of that morning that had kept him relatively constant. Not what Marla had said or the idea of it, or even the confirmation of his own maleness, but the feeling of the moment. The surge of contentment and joy and fulfillment. His whole body and mind had seemed to glow from within, as though lit by a joyous flame. He remembered it as the happiest moment of his life, shining like a star, and he had held that light before him, guiding himself with it, determined from the depths of his despair that it would someday be like that between them again, if not on this earth, then in heaven.
Now, he saw the star flicker out, a coal, a cinder, a black hard nothing. It had been a lie. His joy had been a lie. Marriage was a lie. Fatherhood, children, all that was a lie. Things coming out right if you just had faith and worked hard, that was a lie. He drank for a time, without becoming at all drunk. The alcohol went through him into some dry other place where all the liquor in the world could not have made a splash. There was no change in his feelings, his arid hopelessness. Finally, he got off the bar stool, went to a car lot, sold his car, took the money, and got on a bus. By suppertime he was two hundred miles away, headed toward the Atlantic seaboard, nothing in his mind but flight and emptiness. When he got to New York, he called one of his brothers, a priest, to say that his and Marla’s life together had been a sin and a delusion, that he was going, he didn’t know where, and would not be back.
The brother called Marla. She screamed, then wept, then blamed herself and threatened suicide. They talked her out of that, repeatedly. There wasn’t much anybody could do. No one knew where Leksy had gone. No one knew exactly why he had gone, though everyone guessed at part of the truth. Everybody on both sides of the family pitched in to keep Marla and the twins fed and clothed and the rent paid. Leksy had had some savings too, and there was a welfare fund at the plant. After a couple of months, Marla went back to work at the lumberyard.
Leksy’s folks made a modest effort to trace his whereabouts, without luck. Months later, one of his brothers heard through the clerical grapevine that Lek had joined a contemplative order of monks in the Atlas Mountains of North Africa, an eremitic order living in a high rock city where everyone ascended by ropes and no female person or animal of any kind was allowed to enter.
Marla lasted less than eighteen months by herself. She grew accustomed to going out for long lonely walks after the children were abed, trying to wear herself out so she could sleep. She couldn’t marry again because Leksy was still alive, somewhere. She couldn’t seek the company of men for anything less than marriage. She couldn’t do what Leksy had done and run off, leaving the twins alone. He had been able to do that only because he’d known she was there to care for them. Men, she thought, had always been able to seek holiness when they wanted to because some woman was back at home taking care of their obligations. That’s why most of the saints were men and why most of the women saints were virgins. Sometimes she spent the hours wondering if suicide was actually a mortal sin.
During one of her long, introspective hikes, she was accosted by a mugger who demanded her money or her life. She laughed hysterically at this. Judith had been right. Some men get awfully bent out of shape when they are laughed at. Marla’s funeral Mass was well attended.
Neither set of grandparents felt quite able to take the twins. It’s true that all of them were far advanced in years.
Aunt Judith, who by now had ten of her own, shook her head in dismay. Sorry, she said, but …
Most of the other aunts and uncles were in holy orders one place or another, and children were not allowed.
And then, out of the blue, the twins’ Aunt Sizzy showed up. Marla’s oldest sister Sizzy, who hadn’t been seen by any of the family for years; Aunt Sizzy with her apricot-dyed hair and sapphire-blue eyelids, her bright-glossed lips, bangles halfway to her elbows, a cigarette habitually dangling at the corner of her mouth even now, even after everyone knew it could kill you. Fifty-some-odd-years-old Aunt Sizzy who, everyone said, hadn’t changed a bit.
“I’ve come to get my niece and nephew,” she announced. “I’ve kept in touch through old friends here in town.” She didn’t remind anyone it had been her choice in friends that had contributed to her departure in the first place. No one needed to be reminded. “I know what a problem the twins would be for you people who have families of your own, but I’m alone, and I can take the twins with me.”
None of the agencies that might have moved in to investigate Aunt Sizzy, which would have moved in to investigate Aunt Sizzy had she been going to take anyone but the twins, none of them did zip. All of the agencies in town had been involved in the twins’ life since Lek had
