Page 29 of Theo of Golden

“I can tell you. It was 1968. I had finished my last deployment in Vietnam. We got on a plane in Saigon, five days after being in the jungle. I was still cut to hell up and had bug bites all over me. We’d been fightin’ for over a month. A terrible month.”

Tony shuddered at the memory.

“I’d hardly eaten a thing. I slept on the plane until we got to American soil. When I knew I was really out of the jungle, on safe ground, I took a long shower, put on something other than camouflage, and ate a meal. It was the best everything I’ve ever eaten in my life. Best meat. Best bread. Best everything. Best coffee. Every bite of it was…” Tony paused and grinned. “… heavenly. And then I stayed drunk for a month.”

They reached the counter, exchanged greetings with Shep, and placed their orders.

Theo reached for his wallet.

“And now, Tony, my poor boy. Let me buy your coffee. And then we will study your portrait on the way out.”

Tony refused the offer with a flourish.

“No, no, no. No, sir. I pay my own way. I don’t want to owe anything to the Mob. Shep, this man,” Tony pointed to Theo, “this is a dangerous man. He’s from Rome. Mafia. Don’t trust him.”

Shep watched as the two men walked away. They stopped at the wall and leaned in to study Tony’s portrait. Theo pointed to one of its details. Tony said something. They both laughed and then left, Theo’s arm on the shoulder of his American friend.

It was the sort of moment Shep had hoped for when he opened the Chalice. Moments light and broad.

CHAPTER 17

Even before the first bestowal to Minnette, even before he moved into the Ponder House apartment, Theo searched for and found a comfortable bench, isolated and out of the way, where he could sit and watch the Oxbow River with minimal distraction. There were a number of sturdy, comfortable benches at strategic places along the paved walkway beside the river for use by the public.

The one Theo chose backed up to and was cradled beneath the thick limbs of a chestnut oak. He reckoned from the tree’s size that it might be old enough to have witnessed the burning of the bridges when Union soldiers attempted to attack Golden from the western shore in 1865. If so, it would have been a mere sapling back then, barely breaking the red clay on the river bank.

Theo’s year in Golden allowed him to watch that tree through a full cycle of seasons: tiny springtime buds becoming oblong, hand-sized leaves; light greens becoming deep green becoming scarlet and gold; pearl-sized cups becoming thumb-sized acorns; shade-making limbs blown bare by frigid winds.

But regardless of the season, this towering tree, as others had done in other places, served as Theo’s quiet companion and mentor in the ancient ways of stillness and listening. It was good company for an old soul.

When evenings were unobligated, particularly during the temperate months of spring and fall, he would make the short walk from Ponder House to the riverside in time to be seated precisely fifteen minutes before sunset. If sunset was at 7:21, Theo would be on the bench, looking west, no later than 7:06.

He had carried this practice, this observation of sunset, to every place he’d lived for the past five decades. Around the world, a host of rivers had welcomed his solitary presence, always facing west, almost always empty-handed, always from the quarter hour before declension until the first star of evening became visible.

What Giverny was to Monet — a place that was never the same on any two days — the sky above moving water was to Theo. Even as a boy, he had felt a gravitational pull to the western sky at the hour each day when the horizon dissolved landscape and heavens together.

That hour, that practice, that stillness had saved him when he was a younger man.

Though the memory was decades old, Theo never entirely escaped the dizziness, the difficulty breathing, or the disorientation that he had felt when he first got the news his daughter had been killed.

The ten-year-old had been the unexpected jewel of a loveless marriage, the raison d’être of the then-young man’s life and the inspiration for all he hoped to do in the world. From rocky soil in which opposites had first been attracted and then repelled into cold civility, this flower of promise had bloomed. She dethroned all of Theo’s previous deities the day she was born.

Tita. Named for her grandmother.

The young Theo, often away from home on business as his fortunes rose, began to reconfigure his life so that he could be near the child as much as possible. His return home to Tita at the end of workdays or trips abroad, those first moments of exuberant embrace between adorer and adored, became the moments around which he built his existence.

Even Theo’s affection for his wife grew, in acknowledgment of the gift she had borne him.

He had been concerned, but not enough, about his wife’s fondness for wine and spirits. The life she lived — license, privilege, respectability, boredom — was financed and well-fed by Theo’s achievements. Their moves from one city of prominence to another, with immediate acceptance into the high culture of each new community, suited her taste for society and her need to be noticed. They also landed her in a world where strong drink was plentiful and routine and where her power of resistance was easily stretched beyond its limits. The part of her soul that she could not fill with the false transcendence of prestige, she filled or sedated with vodka and scotch.

Theo at first relished, then endured, and eventually loathed the perks of his business success and wealth. Social gatherings, tuxedoed events, balls, galas, concerts, and galleries became the bane of his existence, the more so as each event encroached on his time with Tita. His fondness for people never waned, but the pretense, on full display at many of the social events filling his calendar, became insufferable to him. The same attention that his wife found intoxicating, he found mildly sickening. He tolerated it as a necessary part of being a highly successful entrepreneur.

Theo was in New York City at a ceremony in the United Nations building when he got the call. An international connection from France, with a slight and inconvenient delay, informed him — a trusted secretary was bearer of the tragic news — that his daughter had been killed in an automobile accident, a single-car accident caused when Theo’s seriously inebriated wife, also killed, lost control of her expensive car, left the roadway, flipped repeatedly, and came to rest at the foot of a slightly damaged beech tree.

For weeks, every thought of Tita made Theo gasp and sob at the nauseating finality of her death. The impossibility of her return, the endlessness of his waiting for her presence, the suffocating silence of the house, his inability to find any words to express what he felt, and the haunting realization that it did not have to happen drove Theo to near madness. Sleeplessness, tremors, and starvation became his reality. His suffering was aggravated by a sense of guilt that took the form of a single tormenting question: “Did I not protect my child?”

Newsmongers in the press and gossips in social circles tried in vain to pierce his silence and isolation. To him, those heartless, curious beasts were nonexistent, as was everything and everyone else in the universe.

Only grief existed.