The Enchanted Kingdom

He had somehow chosen me to disclose the story of his life, most likely I turned up on the Internet accidentally, and it was easier for him to share with a complete stranger. He drew back the curtain over the stage of his life so swiftly, he painted his kingdom in such bright colours that, without noticing, I became thrilled by the Kingdom's chronicle.

Howard had met Abigail near a swimming pool in an apartment complex in the state of Iowa where he sat reading some technical stuff declassified by the Pentagon and Abigail was a guest at a swimming-pool party. Abigail was the prettiest girl at the party, she threw sun-lotion at a student going on reading, out of fun, asking him to rub it into her back. Having caught the bottle Howard went to Abigail, carefully rubbed the lotion into her tender skin, made an appointment for a date and at their first date he already asked her to marry him. She answered: "Yes, but we will talk about it later" and they had never parted since then though they married only in a year and they had never recalled either his question or her answer.

In thirty years time the Kingdom still existed having gone through the period of rise when Howard studied in one of the best universities of America, and then Abigail and he moved from state to state. The Kingdom was in its prime for years when having finally settled in California Howard and Abigail set up their own consulting company, and Howard took part in a series of bright electronic projects. Howard's chronicles which he sent to me to Russia referred to the period of maturity and stability which the Kingdom entered by that time, they referred to the time of summing up, these chronicles were actually the sum of Howard's and Abigail's bright life in their bright and happy country.

Howard wrote his first letter about his life in a spring noon having come to the office from the garden where he cut off an Easter bouquet for Abigail, he settled down at the computer with a glass of beer, screwing up his eyes from sun rays hitting in the window. Howard's first letter was a hymn to Abigail: she was a beauty from the kin of well-known diamond magnates, and famous Broadway actresses recognized her in fashionable restaurants of New York. Abigail herself looked like a movie star, Howard said that once, leaving a hotel in Los-Angelos during the next Oscar celebrations they had run across a crowd which attacked Abigail with a cry "Here she is!" and having no idea whom they took her for Abigail had calmly given out autographs. Howard's Kingdom had not become an absolute monarchy right away: first of all he had curiously watched a slim and cheeky girl who had flown around their first home giving him orders and being indignant if he didn't fulfil them carefully enough, using words to which even sailors would shut their ears. Later he appreciated Abigail's bright and quick mind, her splendid memory, business skills, fearless resolution. More later when Abigail became a real, though informal, boss of their company, when she started to define its strategy, having left electronic design in which Howard was really talented, for him and their company business went up in the world, Howard finally came to believe in Abigail's brilliant abilities and admitted her first place both in business and in other areas of life.

The life of the Kingdom in the period of its prime was vivid and diverse. Howard and Abigail traveled much: twice a year, in spring and in autumn they had flown to Europe, Abigail missed the cities, the refined culture of the Old World. They had wandered about snow-covered Vienna where happily excited Abigail was taken for a Russian because of her sparkling furs and the high colour of her flushing cheeks; they had gone all over mountain roads of Greece in a car, they had sat near the sea and Howard read aloud Somerset Maugham for Abigail and having read the phrase about traveling American couples reading to each other on a sea-shore, he started to laugh out loud and Abigail also smiled, then they felt themselves as one unbroken team which had arrived from the continent victorious in its young barbarity to the continent proud of its past and traditions, and it seemed to them that they themselves had absorbed both the youth and the energy of America and the culture and the refinement of the Old World.

Strangers seldom appeared in Howard's Kingdom's chronicles: as a real queen Abigail had no friends, Howard was also too much engrossed in his serving to spend mental strength for strangers. Howard and Abigail often visited a professional engineering club famous in the Silicon Valley the members of which they have been and where it was possible to find contacts useful for their company. Sometimes they drew together with a couple belonging to the same circle, they often dined out together, accomplished common raids to the Beverly Hills restaurants, then imperceptibly moved away from each other. In this club Howard often played the piano in public: he loved music, he had perfect pitch, in his childhood he had asked his parents to take lessons for him, but his parents could not afford music for their both sons, they had decided to have lessons only for Howard's brother who was going to become a professional musician, but in the last moment the brother had changed his mind and decided to become a football teacher-coach, and Howard still had learned music independently, his favourite piece was Hershwin's Rhapsody In Blue, sometimes he just improvised and despite his merry and light character the sounds that the keys produced under his fingers were doleful and sad.

Perhaps, playing, he recalled his father whom he had recently seen in twenty years time after their parting. His father had lived in a Catholic Hospital chained to a wheelchair, a serious surgery had lain ahead of him then and Howard had come to see him. His father had sat motionless in his ward telling his beads, he had read nothing and even had not watched TV, his face had lit up when he saw Howard and Howard had been astonished to see his father after so many years, but he had coped with it, had smiled and in an hour they had already felt themselves as if they had parted only yesterday, they had recalled old Irish jokes, they had thought up new ones about which Abigail said later that they were not funny: about a man going in an elevator and suddenly announcing to people going with him that he had had clean underwear on, and they had guffawed till tears on these not very funny jokes, and just before the surgery Howard had hugged his father and had told him that he loved him. The surgery had passed successfully and Howard had left for home promising his father to write; and very soon his father had been moved to a hospital in another city in Texas where Howard's brother, the football teacher-coach lived with his wife and four children, and the brother wrote to Howard that their father still sat the same way in his wheel-chair and told his beads, and remembering his promise to write and his mother's old story how his father had checked an empty mail-box every day when Howard had left home for good being sixteen, many times Howard was about to write to his father, but every time his letter did not go further than the first line: what he wished to tell his father was impossible to express in words with which people wrote letters, every time he had delayed the letter for the next day until he understood that most likely he would not write it at all.

If he still wrote it maybe he would tell his father that their happiness with Abigail was incomplete: they had no children despite that shortly after their wedding, on the Christmas, they had written four names for their future four children and had hidden the pieces of paper with these names under a high Oregon Fir tree. Since then they have had the same big tree on each Christmas and for a considerable time yet they have dreamed that their children would sometime run into a brightly lightened room and would look for presents under the same tree, but time passed, one Christmas exchanged for another, but they were still alone, and becoming little by little accustomed to it and taking it for granted they did not visit any doctors and did not find out which of them particularly was the reason of their common misfortune, they just accepted it as their common fate.

Glancing back at the years of his life, remembering the most important of all he has done in the area of electronics Howard claimed that material prosperity was the criterion of the efficiency of any person's life, he and Abigail were the bright illustration of that -- the financial framework of their life has had firm supports and has not been exposed to any cataclysms. In emotional and personal aspect Howard's and Abigail's life was a continuous pursuit for perfectness of experience: having discovered for themselves the best restaurants of London and Paris, the most elegant dresses made by Haute Couture designers, communication with the most famous people of the world, Hollywood actors in the circle of whom they were well received, the best movies ever made by these people a very wide collection of which they have kept at home, Howard and Abigail had not stopped at that point and being already in their mature age they started to study to become pilots and having once flown over all America in a little twin-engined plane they have proved themselves that they were capable of that too.

Their Kingdom was situated in a fifteen-rooms house the walls of which were adorned with paintings brought by them from far away countries and cities they have visited. Their ordinary morning started from early getting up, the first report of financial news from the East coast, the first coffee and a brief discussion of their forthcoming attack at American business world. During day-time Howard locked himself in his lab or left for clients, then Abigail reigned in the Kingdom alone. In the evening they got together for dinner, then they separated again before sleep: Howard played the piano, Abigail wrote poems.

They both were religious, God occupied a sufficient place in their life, and though Howard seldom visited church and treated God with some portion of Irish humour as a good old friend, many of Abigail's poems were dedicated to her way to God which she promised not to turn off in spite of all temptations and seductions of the modern vain and crazy world. And though Abigail's voice rang as a small crystal bell when she read her poems Howard knew that an iron will and a character of steel were hidden behind that tender thrilling voice. Abigail's ancestors came from Prussia, as they did she despised both her own and others' weakness, she could distinguish unworthy business partners as nobody else, and if even worthy ones have had any problems Abigail preferred to step aside waiting until they have resolved their problems themselves explaining that she was not a crutch for others. Moved by the same arrogance towards herself Abigail did not show her poems to anyone else except Howard, she has never tried to publish them: in her conversation with God there should not be any witnesses who could insult or defile with their grin or a sidelong glance holy of the holies of her soul.

This Kingdom was enchanted: time as if stopped in it. Everyday life in it was the same as in any other ordinary State where there is neither dazzling Sovereigns nor pages devoted to them, but both spouses were just engaged in drudgery. In Howard's Kingdom sinks leaked, plumbing needed repairing, Howard's hair badly fell out and he swept them up with his own hands sprinkling the floor with a special anti-static compound. But ancient furniture in a living room reminded Howard the times that had passed long ago when these couches and chairs had stood in Abigail's mother's house where he, a young student, had come in cut-offs unwashed for a hundred years and he also had striven to sit on that furniture, but Abigail's mother, a nice lady whom he always liked so much, had tried to lead him to another room as if by chance, never letting him know that to sit on the family furniture in dirty pants was inadmissible. Abigail's mother had been always more attentive to him than his own mother, every birthday he had got a card from her. Many years later, during their last meeting with her, Howard and Abigail offered her to arrange for her to live in a mercy-house because it had already been hard for her to live alone, but Abigail's mother said that she wished to die in her own bed, she kissed Howard and thanked him for everything, and soon she had really died as she wished, and Howard and Abigail inherited that same ancient furniture on which Howard has never more sat down.

Abigail did not reveal her real age even for the doctors, but from Howard's letters I knew that she was older than he, that her health was poor, that she badly slept at night and could not sleep at day time, that when Howard was beside her eyelids always stuck together. Howard bitterly admitted that she ate very little, but still gained weight, that that time she could not bear long transatlantic flights, that's why they did not travel any more and, longing for Europe, Abigail, however, did not wish to meet fussy and noisy people in the streets and in the stores, that's why she almost never left home. Howard said that she felt elated only when he took her to the next charity reception or to a theatrical premiere, then she put on a new, usually black slimming dress and really seemed as she had been previously, and having also put on his new tie as the mayor's brother's one, purchased for two hundred dollars, Howard escorted her to the reception and, standing there near Abigail with a cocktail in his hand in a circle of famous in their city people, he listened to her speeches with everyone else. And when Abigail, happy with her success, suddenly smiled at him with her former dazzling smile Howard for a short moment thought that something mysterious and unusual would happened in their life yet, but moments like that have already seldom happened.

And then the revolution has crashed out in the Kingdom -- absolute monarchy in it has suddenly turned into a constitutional one, Abigail remained a formal Sovereign, but her real place was taken by an impostor, a woman much younger than Howard, a waitress from their engineering club, formerly a ballerina, a beauty with radiant eyes and alluring dancing gait. This woman's name was Gloria, a spirit of new life burst into the Kingdom with her scattering the magic of shadows lurking in the corners. In his new letters Howard feverishly exclaimed that he had always been rather the escort than the husband for Abigail, that all their life she had dictated him her own conditions, to begin with prohibiting him to appear in the kitchen to cook or to waste time in Internet. Howard said that he would be better at home than away, but when home was not home then away was home. At the same time he confessed that his love for Abigail has always been rather love of a boy to a girl, but he loved Gloria as much as only a man could love a woman, he needed her for life, for happiness, for children, for sex, for care of her and for arranging for her home. Replying to my question for what Abigail was needed Howard said that there would be nobody except him even to take her to the doctor and that he supposed that Abigail would not mind if Gloria settled somewhere around and gave birth to his child.

But his new love was not especially kind to him, she has periodically left him finding other men, more suitable for her in her life, then experiencing financial difficulties she invariably returned and Howard gave her the money, she remained with him for a while, but repeated that people who had seen them together took him for her father. And trying to please her Howard has done several plastic surgeries, he cut growths on his face and started to use a remedy from growing bald. And I was afraid to ask him about Abigail and could not ask her myself because I knew that Abigail hated computers even more than doctors. I imagined her sitting all by herself in a remote room of her fifteen-rooms house and writing poems about her way to God by her calligraphic hand-writing, and having nobody even to read them, she was putting them into her desk.

I know nothing about the Kingdom for already several years, but sometimes I still imagine how a young queen Abigail enters the office flooded with sun-light and, having immediately noticed the change of disposition of the things on Howard's desk, unerringly finds a chocolate bar hidden for her under the circuit diagrams, calmly tears off the bright foil and bites bitter chocolate with her perfect teeth victoriously meeting a rapt gaze of her faithful page.