And it was all right. He could sit back, drift where he would, and look at the sky, which he did for a while. Then he paddled over to the sandbar and retrieved his hat, his good old felt Digger hat that had protected him from so many storms. Good old hat!
He took his De-liar from his fly-fishing vest and measured the fish: twenty-eight inches, eight and a half pounds. The beautiful great fish trembled, dying as it must, as it must. And with that flicker of sadness, “as cold and passionate as the dawn,” the world changed for him. It was seven o’clock on this subarctic afternoon, a crisp southeast wind raising a few whitecaps on Baie Borne, the bluest of waters. He pulled the canoe up on the sand and carefully cleaned everything up, put everything away, sponged out all water and slime, made everything shipshape and Bristol fashion.
On his way back through the long passage he headed into the wind, his bow pounding across the larger waves, a Laurentide Ale in his hand. There lay the trout, monstrous, outsized, beyond dreaming of. Who cared that it was nothing he deserved, that because of his clownish errors he should have lost it six times? The knowledge of his fear and awkwardness would only heighten memory. All the rest of his life he would see the pure and desolate bay and the pulse of incoming river, its turbulence meeting the blue water. The black density of the spruce, on island and hill, grew vividly into the past.
But what if he’d lost this fish? Would the shadows fall across these hills in tones of lead? Maybe, but the great fish hadn’t got away. That alternate fate was past and gone, as were so many alternates, large and small, to the course of his own life. No matter now; he was brought back, for better or for worse, along a line as sure and fragile as his own.
The Old Dancers
THE YOUNG couples always saw them dancing at the Blue Moon—Wilma and Harvey Lake. She was in her late forties and he was at least sixty. They seemed to enjoy themselves so much. That was what the young couples said: “How they enjoy themselves!” They’d say this fondly, as though Wilma and Harvey, who dressed so carefully in fashions a little too young for them, were somehow old, precocious children, who imitated pleasures not rightly theirs. Wilma’s dark hair was dyed, of course, but she groomed herself so well. She’d had only one child by her first husband, and so her figure wasn’t bad for her age.
“Why shouldn’t they have their fling?” the young couples said; but “fling” was not the right word. Even in their pride the young people knew it wasn’t quite the word; the old dancers skimmed across the floor, their faces serene.
Harvey had started as a butcher for Swift & Co., although he was now in business for himself, and Wilma was still the secretary, bookkeeper, and receptionist at the Public Service Co. After they were married she sold her house, and they lived in Harvey’s house on School Street. The house was a little too big for just the two of them, but in the storage loft above the garage, in the long attic, and in the unused bedrooms were the dusty remains of their former marriages. Boxes of photographs, sheaves of old fuel bills, children’s dolls, model airplanes with broken empennages, high chairs with spoonchipped trays, bureaus with drawers full of folded clothes, sleds whose runners bore the rust of years ago—they left these relics alone. Each had lived too long in a house of shouting and tears, and now they were careful of each other, careful about such things as nakedness, and the shutting of doors.
“Wilma,” Harvey said to the woman who sat beside him the dim light. It was intermission, and they had walked out the moving boards to the bench on the floating end of the boat dock. Rowboats nudged each other with wooden sounds, and voices came over the water from the Blue Moon.
“Harvey,” she answered.
“Are you chilly?”
“No. It’s too warm a night,” she said.
“Let me put my jacket over your shoulders.”
“No, dear. My scarf is enough.” She arranged her blue chiffon scarf, a wisp as insubstantial as breath. He smoothed across her shoulders, over the crisp fabric of her dress, feeling the slight roundness of age. It flashed across his mind only security for him. She was so much younger than he; sometimes he didn’t want her to be as beautiful as she was.
When he had first become aware of her as a woman, rather than as someone’s child, he was an old buck of thirty, dragged down by payments and three children and a wife whose red hands never left the terrible labor of housework. One Saturday night he went with a friend who was interested in basketball the high school game, and he sat again in the stands, a place hadn’t seen in more than ten years. The kids who yelled and sighed at the progress of the game seemed shadows of himself; he sat with due bills in his wallet, and in his mind the weight his family in a house down the street, where his wife stood over her ironing board.
Wilma was a cheerleader, and when she jumped her T-shirt rose three or four inches above the waistband of her skirt, exposing just for a moment at the height of her leap white skin so smooth he had to shiver. He had to acknowledge her beauty then, her soft black hair and green eyes, and the way she moved as though she could never tire. Throughout the game he watched her, the delicate way she smoothed her skirt as she turned after a cheer, then sat so lightly on the cheerleaders’ bench, her whole body so weightless, yet charged with expectation as she followed the game.
But he had never been so foolish as to fall in love with the unattainable, or even the difficult to obtain. His life had been a series of practical decisions, most of which seemed shortly afterward to have been wrong.
He did not forget her; he followed her life without ever having to ask a question. How she married at nineteen and had a child a few months later. He knew that it was not really his business.
At home he would respond in kind to his wife’s complaints. That they were legitimate made them unbearable. He took to buying a six-pack or two every night, or a pint, and once in a rage threw all the living-room furniture out onto the front lawn. When he was forty he stopped drinking, but his wife and daughters had by then given him up entirely, and treated him with all the care they might have shown a grenade: if he was quiet, they were satisfied.
His daughters married as soon as they could, and one February his wife developed a fever of 106 degrees. He took her to Northlee Hospital, and she died that same night. No part of her, they told him, was not full of infection. It was a general septicemia. They couldn’t reduce her fever in time, and she burned out like a match. He rarely saw his daughters after that.
When Swift & Co. closed down the plant in Leah, he rented the building and started his own freezer-locker service. In four years he owned the building, and sold not only meat but home freezers, refrigerators, stoves, and washing machines. He did little but work, and when he was fifty-five he found almost to his surprise that he was fairly well off. That was the year Wilma’s husband, drunk at ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, drove his car straight into the side of a moving Boston & Maine streamliner at the foot of Water Street and was killed.
In their relationship that was the year when it all began. They loved to remember how it all started with them, how shy and yet direct they could afford to be with each other.
Now, with the floating dock moving beneath them, they looked across Cascom Lake to the eastern shore, a mile away, where cabin lights shone out through the black woods.
Wilma laughed. “Do you remember?” she said.
Of course he remembered; whatever it was made her so happy could not have happened more than five years ago. It pleased him to hear her make gentle fun of him, to tell him how she had waited and waited for him to change the subject of their conversations. He had taken to stopping in at the lobby of the Public Service Co., at first only when he paid his electric bills, then often, to talk about her son in the Navy, or anything else he could think of beforehand, and she’d answered him as though she liked to talk to him. One time it was near her lunch hour, and she invited him to lunch with her at the Leah Inn. It was a fancy place, a dressy place.
She was one of those women who, even though they’ve married a ne�
�er-do-well, keep themselves up. She had always been the main support of her home, had kept up the house and dressed her son. When her husband worked, he kept his money back from her, and finally she never bothered to ask for any of it. It was actually her car, paid for by her, he’d wrecked when he killed himself. To see her at her desk at the Public Service Co., so neatly dressed, so cheerfully civilized, no one would have suspected that at home she was often afraid for her life, and that her attempts to have a living room with some effect of graciousness, with pictures on the walls, nice lamps and end tables, and a piano, quite often ended in broken glass and splintered wood. Like Harvey’s daughters, her son had escaped as soon as he found a way.
“I’d always watched you with half an eye,” Harvey said. “Iremember everything because I wasn’t doing anything else but work.”
“Remember when I invited you to the inn?” she said.
“I’d never been a customer there,” he said. “They were always my customer.”
When she brought him in from the hard sunlight of the street, into the darkness of the inn, it struck him as magic to be suddenly in the intimate dark where their voices could be heard only by each other, though they were in a wide room. Right at noon, in the middle of Leah, a door opened and closed and it was night.
“You had a chicken-salad sandwich,” he said. “I didn’t know what to have.”
“You were very distinguished-looking,” she said.
“You told me that then, and when I went home that night, I looked in the bathroom mirror.”
“You became positively vain.”
He laughed, and then said, taking hold of her hand, “Your hand’s cold. The intermission’s nearly over. Should we go in?”
They got up and walked, holding hands as they crossed the tippy boards, back toward the Blue Moon. The band had already started to play a fast number—a gallo. They didn’t care; sometimes they sat out the fast ones. At the entrance to the ballroom they were not asked to show proof they had paid. All the others had to put their hand under the black light, to show the luminescent stamp of admission, but Wilma and Harvey were always remembered.
After the gallo the little five-piece band played an old foxtrot, “Sweet Eloise,” and Harvey took Wilma lightly by the waist. From the revolving globe suspended in the center of the ballroom, steady little flecks of light, in all colors, turned across the dancers, across the walls, and back up through their orbits, where they were lost, found, lost across the high roof rafters. So smoothly they danced. She was there before him, yet was never there in the space into which he moved. He hadn’t been a natural dancer, and she had taught him everything. It was a duty that had changed, as he learned, into a terribly precarious pleasure, as though he danced along a tightrope a hundred feet above the ground. He had always thought of his body as a dull thing, heavy and stodgy, although he had admired lightness and grace in others.
“Can you make a plow horse into a trotter?” he’d asked her once. This was in the year of their courtship. He had wanted to take her out, but didn’t know where to take her.
“I love to dance,” she said. “At home I dance by myself.”
He snorted, and laughed ruefully. “I never even danced in school! Sometimes I went to dances, but I just sat there like a lump.”
She asked him to dinner at her house, and after dinner she put some records on her phonograph, and began to teach him to dance. It was so strange for him; he thought there must be something wrong, something sinful and ridiculous for Harvey Lake, a rigid old man with false teeth and heavy shoes, to be holding this bright, soft woman in his arms. Her fragrance. His memories of her as a lovely child; the police should come and lead him away.
His dead wife had never been so feminine and full of color. He had married her because it was easy, and because she was nice enough. He had never been led to expect frivolity or enchantment from a woman—that was the stuff of movies, not of his life. He did remember with mild sadness that his wife once had smooth arms and was young. She seemed persecuted, always persecuted, used up in menial service until her arms, her face, her clothes—everything about her turned darker. If it was his fault, the solution had been so far beyond his understanding he could not find himself guilty. He would come home and cry out to his family that he had worked. “I worked all day! I earned money! I worked!” The faces of his daughters and the face of his wife became one face, impoverished and secretive.
After the set of fox-trots, Wilma suggested that they sit out the next set, which would be more modern and violent. So they walked down onto the dock again, and sat on the farthest bench, with the black water rising in little mounds against the sides of the moored rowboats, yet never staining their white strakes.
“I felt awfully tired all of a sudden,” she said.
He put his hands on hers and felt her tremble.
“Are you all right? Are you cold?”
“No, no, dear. I’m fine. It’s so warm tonight.”
“Maybe you’re coming down with something. I ought take you home and put you to bed.” Her hands had stopped trembling, but his worry died slowly.
“The water must be so warm,” she said. “The wind’s so warm coming across the lake.”
“Look at all the stars,” he said. As he looked up, the stars were so clearly separate from one another he had the sense of space, knowing there was no down or up out there in that magnitude, and he might fall straight up out of the world forever, through the vast indifference of the universe.
“The water seems so deep,” she said. “It seems as deep as forever. It’s like a coverlet. You can’t see into it, but you can feel it, so deep.”
His first inclination was to reassure her, to tell her that the water wasn’t all that deep right here, maybe only about three feet. But he was wiser than that, and didn’t say it.
* * *
After they had seen much of each other for six months, and he had been sure she was seeing no one else, he had asked her if she would consider marriage. He was aware that she had spoken all around this question, as though her words were little scissors that had snipped away each possible doubt in his mind as to her answer. Even so, when her answer came, nothing had been taken from its force, and he was full of joy and gratitude. It was like a stab in his chest. An old man, he kept thinking then. An old man with rust on the back of his hands, to be given that answer.
His house was in a quieter part of town, so they sold her house and used part of the money to redecorate. Two things he gave her, a small upright piano that cost two thousand dollars, and what he considered his best inspiration: a large bathroom and dressing room just for her, with indirect lighting and real tile, plenty of storage space and deep cabinets. He wanted no traffic jams in those places where they must go to repair, where they must deal alone with the ugly things. At his work he sometimes helped with the butchering, although he had a butcher and a salesman working for him, and he had to come home sometimes in soiled clothes, with blood under his fingernails. At work he peeled meat from bone; at home he treated his aging body with lotions and ointments. And so did Wilma. Being a woman, she tried to hold on to her youth more than he ever thought of doing. She needed more time and privacy than he.
The moon was about to rise from behind the hills across the dark lake. From the casino came the diminished, short blares of horns, the high pings of the vibraharp, and the stamp of a foot that was louder than all the other noises. A girl laughed suddenly on the balcony, and the parts of her laughter seemed to fly out over their heads like night birds that had called and then flown silently over.
Wilma trembled so much, all at once, that she couldn’t pretend to him that it was nothing.
“I’m not cold,” she said.
“But you had an ague. I could feel it!”
“Yes. I don’t know what it was.”
She was lying, and it frightened him.
“You’re coming down with something, and I’m going to take you home.” As he stood up, the dock moved slug
gishly, and water sloshed, with a metal noise, inside one of the floating drums. She was so much younger than he, he hadn’t thought of her ever being in real danger, but at that moment he remembered his wife’s death, and for the first time thought of Wilma in that context. It was true that they were both women, and mortal, and that what he needed could be taken away from him as easily as what he hadn’t seemed to need.
With Wilma’s hand on his arm they walked down the dock and stepped to the sand, where, if she didn’t step light on her toes, her tiny heels would sink out of sight. She laughed for no apparent reason, and squeezed his arm.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “You’re so concerned.”
He wouldn’t be put out of his seriousness. “You wait here, and I’ll get the car.” He didn’t want her to have to step over the beer cans in the parking lot, or to hear the coarse laughter. Once they had heard a girl crying in the backseat of an old car, and the brutal purr of a man.
He drove the big car down the boat-launching road to where she waited, then got out and went around to open the door for her. This ritual of the door was one he had initiated, and they both smiled at it. They had so many little formalities that gave them pleasure; their lives passed in little gifts and rituals. What they had never done before in their lives they invented, or imitated from the movies—her straightening his tie before they went out, his hand beneath her elbow at a step.
They drove home in their big black Chrysler Imperial, the radio playing softly from both speakers, the powerful headlights making the road ahead brighter than daylight, as though the trees and turns were painted white. Below the windshield, behind glass so clear it seemed not to be there, the great orb of dials glowed.
Leah, New Hampshire Page 25
