Speaking in Tongues

rationalist Tate, reedy folk singer, collector of the unexplained, the arcane, the invisible . . . Tate had never figured out if her sublime mystique magnified their love falsely, or obscured it, or indeed if it was the essence of their love.
    Magic . . .
    In the end, of course, it didn’t matter, for they separated completely, moved far away from each other emotionally. She became for him what she’d been when he was first captivated by her: the dark woman of his imagination.
    Today she prodded her face in the mirror, rubbed at some invisible blemish as he remembered her doing many times. She’d always been terribly vain.
    She flipped the mirror back.
    “Pull over, Tate.”
    He glanced at her. No, it was not an imperfection she’d been examining; she’d been crying again.
    “What is it?”
    “Just pull over.”
    He did, into the Park Service entrance to the Bull Run Battlefield.
    Bett climbed from the car and walked up the gentle slope. Tate followed and when they were on level ground they stopped and simultaneously lifted their eyes toward the tumultuous clouds overhead.
    “What is it, Bett?” He watched her stare at the night sky. “Looking for an angel to help you decide something?”
    Suddenly he was worried that she’d take offense at this—an implicit reference to her flighty side—though he hadn’t meant it sardonically.
    But she only smiled and lowered her eyes from the sky. “I was never into that angel stuff. Too Hallmark card, you know. But I wouldn’t mind a spirit or two.”
    “Well,” he said, “this’d be the place. General Jackson came charging out of those trees right over there and stopped the Union boys cold in their tracks. Right here’s where he earned himself the name Stonewall.” The low sun glistened off the Union cannons’ black barrels in the distance.
    Bett turned, took his hands and pulled him to her. “Hold me, Tate. Please.”
    He put his arms around her—for the first time in years. They stood this way for a long moment. Then found a bench and sat. He kept his arm around her. She took his other hand. And Tate wished suddenly, painfully, that Megan were here with them. The three of them together and all the hard events of the past dead and buried, like the poor bodies of the troops who’d died bloody and broken on this very spot.
    Wind in the trees, billowing clouds overhead.
    Suddenly a streak of yellow flashed past them.
    “Oh, what’s that?” Bett said. “Look.”
    He glanced at the bird that alighted near them.
    “That’d be, let me see, a common yellowthroat. Nests on the ground and feeds in the tree canopy.”
    Her laugh scared it away. “You know all these facts. Where do you learn them?”
    A girlfriend, age twenty-three, had been a birdwatcher.
    “I read a lot,” he said.
    More silence.
    “What are you thinking?” she wondered after a moment.
    A question women often ask when they find themselves in close contact with a man and silence descends.
    “Unfinished business?” he suggested. “You and me?”
    She considered this. “I used to think things were finished between us. But then I started to look at it like doing your will before you get on a plane.”
    “How’s that?”
    “If you crash, well, maybe all the loose ends’re tied up but wouldn’t you still rather hang around for a little while longer?”
    “There’s a metaphor for you.” He laughed.
    She spent a moment examining the sky again. “When you argued before the Supreme Court five or six years ago. That big civil rights case. And the Post did that write-up on you. I told everybody you were my ex-husband. I was proud of you.”
    “Really?” He was surprised.
    “You know what occurred to me then, reading about you? It seemed that when we were married you were my voice. I didn’t have one of my own.”
    “You were quiet, that’s true,” he said.
    “That’s what happened to us, I think. Part of it anyway. I had to find mine.”
    “And when you went looking . . . so long. No half measures for you. No compromises. No bargaining.”
    The old Bett would have grown angry or dipped into her enigmatic silence at these critical words. But shemerely nodded in agreement. “That was me, all right. I was so rigid. I had all the right answers. If something wasn’t just perfect I was gone. Jobs, classes . . . husband. Oh, Tate, I’m not proud of it. But I felt so young. When you have a child, things do change. You become