The Hour Before Dark by Douglas Clegg

great-grandfather had founded in the South of France, and from which she had been disinherited when she purportedly stole several thousands of dollars from my grandmother’s bank account. (How many times had I been told by people as I grew up that she was bad Woman? That I might turn out just like she had, somehow tainted with her blood?) She had been raised in London, Switzerland, and Majorca, gone to college at Columbia. She had met my father in Burnleyside one summer when visiting a college friend’s family there, dropped out of college, and went slumming with him until she ended up pregnant and in love. Her family never spoke to her again. And she never spoke to them. They never spoke to us, the grandchildren, either. They lived in other countries, and were mythological to me—real but not truly to be believed.
    My father had his own share of fame, but without the wealth, so he was her equal in many ways, despite his rough-and-tumble upbringing, as opposed to her refined boarding school years. She had been, without question, the most beautiful woman on the island. I remember her looking like a fairy princess—slender, ethereal, with almond-shaped eyes, and a sloping but elegant nose. She had golden hair—not blond or yellow, but a rich autumn gold that might look sandy blond on her worst days, like creamy toffee on others, and spun gold at her best. She always smelled of vanilla and lime and lavender. I would sit with her while she bathed, and she would tell me tales from the Arabian nights or of how she had stowed away once with a friend on a tramp steamer and had gone to Brazil, her favorite country in the entire world. “I was sixteen and running away,” she said, “but it was just for the summer. A wonderful summer of romantic suspense,” she added, without explaining any details. My mother had many talents: She played music, sketched on long summer afternoons, read from books, and tried her hand at poetry briefly. I remember her mainly surrounded by candlelight—she was a romantic at heart, and I suppose it’s what changed her, that romantic yearning.
    She had mischief in her as well. I discovered this early and was charmed by it—by her misadventures in finding ways of getting to Boston faster than anyone could get there, the way she’d spend money cautiously one minute and then as if nothing were more important than something whimsical she’d just seen—and had to have at any cost. My father adored her, and adored the attention men gave her—he told me that he was proud that his wife was such a prize and yet had chosen him.
    It all ended one night, years ago. December 19th. A red-letter day.
    My mother walked out the door when I was nine years old and told my father that if he loved his kids so much, he could have them. The details: She wore her reddest dress (as small town minds like to recall), she had one of my father’s guns for protection in case he tried to force her to stay, and it was very late at night or else very early in the morning. The story went that my father sobbed quietly, gave her his blessing, and told her he would be there with the kids when she got tired of this new man in her life.
    My father was a good man, so said people in Burnley and everyone who had ever heard of him. He told us that our mother loved us very much and left us only because something inside her head had control of her—but he promised he would be there, to take care of us and keep us safe.
    He kept that promise, in his own way.
    He even told us he’d take her back, if she wished to return.
    “But to stand in the way of someone’s happiness,” he told me once, “is the cruelest of impulses. It’s as cruel as killing men, in my opinion. Real love sometimes means letting love fly.”
    I had a dream soon after my mother left us. When I spoke about it to my brother and sister, when we were young, they told me they had dreams like it, too. In the dream, our mother came home and took each of us up in her