Love Story

Love Story Jean McGarry (bio) Regina Her first love was her baby brother, Inky, and her second and last was Asa, your father and mine. Inky was away at the War when Asa crossed her path at the officers' club in Mohasset Bay. She was moving in a better class of girlfriends after her mother's early death and the sale of the house. When Inky was discharged, she had a check for him, a tidy sum. They wrote each other weekly letters until he crossed the channel into blackout. Captain Asa Birch, usn, stayed on this side, posted at the war college with a small part to play in the formulation of an aerosol deterrent. Inky was a foot soldier, Quartermaster Corps, at the rear of the line. The two gents met in the summer of '45. I have a picture of the uniformed sailor and soldier with our Regina in between, a big, floppy cloth flower in the opening of her crepe dress. They're drinking highballs. Why do they look dazed? They were on the brink of life with a clean finish to the early chapters. Perhaps just tired. Their girl has no smile, and her back is already showing the curve that would bring her womanly shoulders up to her ears. Man, woman, and brother. Inky and Asa would father eight children between them; and us, with our marriages and remarriages, a paltry three; and you and I, none. Asa took Regina for his bride while still in uniform, Inky overseas. Asa moved her to his rural town on the Canadian border, so when Inky was mustered out, he found his sister gone and the family house sold. He made his home with an aunt who kept house for four bachelor cousins. The weekly letters stopped. Inky didn't keep hers, but Asa had preserved Inky's with his own wartime letters to his sweetheart. When you found them, remember how you told me that Inky's expressed more feeling than Asa's love letters, so-called. Our father's love, so-called, never found its voice, no matter how tightly he clasped his human possessions. Regina and Inky were slaves—you said that—to their feelings, erupting in volleys of oaths, curses, and threats, and subsiding in tears and retreat. Our side of our family followed Asa's cue, folding up in ever-thickening wads of silence, leaving our mother to fend for herself. To the end, we gave her no quarter. This hurt most coming from me, the only girl. [End Page 42] Is this why I'm left an empty shell with no juice and no fancy clockworks like yours? Did Asa eat our lunch? Or did he just point, with a long, bony finger, to the golden rule of askesis? You can see that rule written on his own father's face, which no smile ever cracked. Asa knew it as self-mastery, mastery of others being a secondary gain, but our father—don't forget—didn't rely on others for anything he could do for himself. That's the real mystery behind the locked-room puzzle: why, not how. We so wanted to be in there with him, especially you. We were his children, we were his, but he wasn't ours. And he certainly—least of all—was hers. Am I boring you? Our family was a system—machine, if you will—with one balky part. How is it that she didn't gum up the works? Answer: Asa sealed her off with us and burrowed into a workshop he built himself with a door to the yard and no access or ingress to the house. When you were eight or nine, you were promoted to assistant and began your grueling education. With every day, there was a new test of dexterity, intelligence, and recall. You were a jabberer, though. Did you have to control your tongue? Just enough, I guess, for you've been talking since then, as if a cork had been pulled from a Methuselah of vintage bubbly, because we are vintage, boy, as he sometimes called you, and you hated so much to hear it...

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