by Sally Mandel
They stopped once for lunch and again at an overlook, where Sharlie exclaimed at the October landscape—neat brown-green hills, tidy farmhouses, some white, some stone, some red. She said she wished they’d brought their camera, and they sat down on a boulder to enjoy the view.
“We’ll get the wedding movies back from your parents when we get home,” Brian said. “I want to see them again.”
Sharlie laughed. “Daddy probably edited out the bit where he’s deep in conversation with Barbara. Somebody at his office might blackmail him.”
“Or her.”
“You should see the movies of my parents’ wedding.”
“I didn’t think they had movies then,” Brian said.
Sharlie looked out at the pale-gray sky. “It’s crazy. When I think about anything that happened before about 1940, I visualize it in black-and-white. World War One, the Depression, people dancing the Turkey Trot, or whatever it was—no color at all, just like in the old movies.”
“You’re a victim of the communications media,” Brian said. “What about the American Revolution?”
Sharlie thought this over. “Color. That’s odd. And the Renaissance, too.”
“From staring at paintings in the Metropolitan Museum.”
She laughed. “You’re right.”
They rested a while longer until finally Sharlie began to shiver in her light jacket.
By the time they were within twenty miles of Silver Creek, it was dark. The moon, pale and round, had risen in the sky, and its face raced in and out of the clouds.
“He looks like I feel,” Brian said pointing up at the white globe.
“How?” Sharlie said, leaning forward to peer out the window.
“Worried,” Brian said. “Sure you don’t want to turn around and go home?”
Despite Sharlie’s prodding, Brian had steadfastly avoided discussing his father. But now, a few miles from his old home, he suddenly blurted, “You know, it’s funny, he started getting these hard lumps under the skin on his thumbs, and they’d hurt him when he was working with a pitchfork. Finally he had to give in and see a doctor. Know what they told him?”
“What?”
“He’s turning to stone. Calcifying.”
“Are you serious?” Sharlie asked.
“I could have saved him the doctor’s fee,” Brian muttered.
She watched Brian’s face in the headlights of an oncoming car. She could see the tough set of his mouth and his jaw muscle tensing. She felt wide awake, excitement keeping her alert and lending her a kind of surface energy. “I’m nervous, too,” she said.
“Good. Let’s go home.”
“What if he hates me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Well, not ‘hate.’ What if he … how do I make a verb out of contempt? Contempts me?”
“Holds you in contempt.”
“No. That’s not right,” she said. “You think your father dislikes you, and if he dislikes you, he won’t like me because I love you.” She paused to catch her breath. “See what I mean?”
“You’re just trying to distract me from my urge to make a giant U-turn.”
Sharlie stared up at the moon, which did indeed look anxious, eyebrows knit, mouth pinched. “Mmm hmm,” she said vaguely.
Brian sighed with resignation and turned off Route 13 onto a narrow road that wove through gentle hills. Sharlie rolled her window all the way down.
“It’s positively deafening,” she said, greedily inhaling the cold country air.
“The silence?”
“The crickets,” she said. “I went to Vermont once when I was about ten, and I couldn’t sleep with those damn things rubbing their legs together all night Don’t they ever go to bed?”
“That’s how they snore.”
“Oh,” she said. “I married a naturalist”
“We’re almost there.”
“The voice of doom,” she replied. “Is all this his?” She waved at the countryside.
“A lot of it, but don’t be impressed. It’s not worth much of a damn.”
He pulled up in front of a rambling old building. In the moonlight, it appeared almost deserted except for a small square of light off the front porch.
“We’re here?” she asked.
“We’re here.”
“Oh,” Sharlie said. “Hey, let me sit here for a second and get myself together.”
“Gladly.” He switched off the motor and stretched his stiff arms.
Sharlie felt a sudden terror of entering that house. She was weak and nauseated and afraid to stand up. Finally after a few deep breaths she said shakily, “This country air can kill you, you know. Too much oxygen. Too rich a mixture.”
Brian peered at her closely. “You okay?”
“Just babbling,” she murmured.
“Ready?” he asked, staring at the orange window waiting in the darkness.
“Charge,” she said, opening the car door and stepping out into the cold night. She had to steady herself by holding on to the door handle until Brian could get to her. She tried to keep most of her weight off him, just leaning enough to retain her balance. When they reached the front porch and walked up the creaking wooden steps, she straightened and gave Brian a desperate smile. He knocked on the door, and they heard a muffled sound from inside. After what seemed like a long time the porch lamp went on, spotlighting them and sending a whirlwind of moths swirling above their heads. Sharlie watched them dance around the naked bulb, then looked down just in time to see Brian and his father shaking hands formally.
“Sir,” Brian said stiffly. He put his arm around Sharlie. His father started to ask about the trip at the same moment that Brian began to introduce her, so they both broke off, leaving them all in silence again.
Finally Sharlie said, “I’m Sharlie, Mister Morgan. I’m glad to meet you.” She held out her hand and felt the old man’s callused fingers grip hers. She suddenly remembered the first time she had felt Brian’s touch, back at Saint Joe’s almost a year ago. The same sensation—rough, warm hands. She was moved, and looked away shyly for fear he might see the emotion in her face and think her strange.
Then, with awkward heartiness, John Morgan ushered them into the house, the screen door slamming behind them. One of the little moths slipped inside, too. Sharlie found its company comforting, and watched it settle against the inside of the screen door. She turned and saw Brian and his father halfway down the hall toward the kitchen at the rear of the house. They passed a small sitting room on the right—the source of the glow they’d seen from the road.
“Thought I heard a car outside,” the old man said when they reached the kitchen. He pulled out a chair for Sharlie. The table’s red Formica surface had become so worn and been polished so many times that it was almost pink. Sharlie sat down carefully, thinking to herself, Thank you, I’ll sit down before I fall down.
Brian started foraging in the refrigerator. He moved familiarly around the kitchen, finding a plate, a glass, utensils. John Morgan leaned against the counter and watched his son intently. Sharlie was grateful for the opportunity to inspect Brian’s father with freedom. How fascinating to scrutinize someone related to the man she knew so intimately. She searched for the impulses behind Brian’s well-memorized features and thought she could trace the familiar outline under the rugged, stubbly surface of the old farmer’s face. The eyes were identical—blue chips of sky. Chips off the old block.
She must have smiled because John Morgan suddenly looked at her questioningly. “Your eyes, they’re exactly like Brian’s,” she said.
The old man nodded. He didn’t return her smile, but his voice was warm. “You hungry?” he asked. Sharlie shook her head, and she saw his glance fasten briefly on her thin arms. “Good trip?” he asked.
She nodded. “There’s a full moon. It was nice.” Then they fell silent. Brian sat down, loaded with sandwich material. His father looked in Brian’s gener
al direction but didn’t quite meet his eyes.
“You working hard at the lawyer business?”
“Yeah,” Brian said, mouth full. “Busy time.”
The old man nodded and stared down at his arms folded across his chest. Everyone was quiet for a while, until Sharlie began to grow uncomfortable.
“I’ve never been on a farm before,” she said lamely.
“That a fact?” Brian’s father muttered.
“It’s … lovely.”
“Hard to see much at night,” he said.
Touché, Sharlie thought, and looked at Brian. Despise, that’s the verb form of contempt.
“Well, got to be up at five A.M.,” John Morgan said. He nodded to them both, said good night, and left the room abruptly. Sharlie could hear his steps receding up the stairway somewhere in the back of the house. She looked at Brian, trying to keep the dismay out of her face.
“Warm fellow,” he said grimly, taking a swallow of beer.
“He’s a little … shy,” Sharlie said, and Brian hooted, nearly choking on his sandwich. Her voice rose a little in protest. “He has to be nice. He looks so much like you.”
“Yeah, well, my brother looks like Dracula, and he’s about the nicest kid on two feet,” Brian said.
“Are we going to see them, you think?” Sharlie asked.
“Probably don’t even know we’re here.” At Sharlie’s exclamation of disbelief, he went on, “Unless Dad happened to run into them out in the fields. And they happened to ask if he’d heard anything from me lately.”
Suddenly she was overwhelmed by the excitement of the day, the long trip, meeting Brian’s father at last. She thought she couldn’t possibly hold herself upright at the table for one more second. She must have looked as feeble as she felt, because Brian set his sandwich down and said softly, “Where’s your medication?”
“Suitcase,” she answered.
He pushed back his wrought-iron chair with a scrape and went to fetch her pills. He returned with the special travel kit he had bought her for the trip, a square canvas case that held her bottles in neat compartments. Her instruction sheet was enclosed, and Brian read the directions under 10 P.M. She sat quietly while he sorted the drugs. Then she swallowed them down with a large glass of lukewarm water.
“I’m going to put you to bed,” he said, helping her up.
She didn’t protest, just leaned against him and let him lead her upstairs to Brian’s and Marcus’s old room. The two youngest boys had lived together until Brian left for college, and their beds were still there, neatly made up with plaid blankets. Sharlie sank down on the bed farthest from the door. Brian smiled at her.
“This was yours?” she asked. He nodded. “Don’t you want it, then?”
“No, I like seeing you on it.”
“I don’t know if I can get undressed,” she continued, smiling apologetically. He undid her buttons and draped her clothes across the cane chair by the window. Then he opened their suitcase, pulled out her nightgown, and put it over her head, lifting her arms through the sleeves. It hung loosely on her, and she knew that when she stood, it dragged on the floor a little now, as if she had shrunk in stature.
She kept her face averted for fear that he would see her tears, and said softly, to explain her hanging head, “Wow, I’m wiped out.”
Brian went to get an extra blanket out of the closet, and when his back was turned, she quickly drew her sleeve across her cheeks. By the time he returned, she could show him a dry face. He snapped off the table lamp, and moonlight streamed in the high windows.
“Want me to pull the shade?” he asked, cupping her face with his hands as he stood over her.
“No,” she said fervently. He bent down and kissed her on the top of her head.
“Sleep tight. See you in the morning.”
She smiled, and he left her, closing the door quietly behind him. She tugged feebly at the blankets but didn’t have the strength to pull them back far enough to crawl in. So she lay back on the rough wool and gazed out the window at the silver light.
She had thought sleep would be instantaneous, but she found her mind whirling with memories of the trip. Often after a special event she would spend the hour before sleep sorting through the day’s images. The habit reminded her of the rainbow jukebox she’d seen when she was a child. Walter had shown her how to slip a quarter into the slot and choose three songs—J-6, K-5, M-11. The lights would flash, the machine’s long arm stretching to select the favorite tune. Mechanical fingers laid the record precisely onto the turntable in full view of Sharlie’s enchanted eyes. Number J-6, as you wish, little girl.
Today had added dozens of new selections to her collection. She would begin at A-1 and work her way through, relishing them one by one, playing them over and over if she chose, until she knew them all by heart.
This house. That was A-1. Despite her aching exhaustion, she could barely wait until morning to explore the rambling old place. So remarkable to think of Brian growing up here, playing on the floor in the kitchen under his mother’s feet, reading by the fireplace in the sitting room, where, she imagined, his father had waited tonight, this bedroom with its ghosts of childhood and adolescence—the dreams and yearnings and heartbreaks suffered here by someone whose life had shaped hers so profoundly. Brian and Marcus murmuring back and forth in the dark with sleepy, conspiratorial voices—Brian, the little boy she could sense so vividly in the shadows of the old house.
The place touched her deeply, as if by visiting here she was in some way sharing the beginning of Brian’s life. She imagined the child Brian, his small fingers exploring the worn books in the shelves between the beds. She heard his young voice, eager to please, calling out to his mother with some new discovery, smelled the odor of his boy’s body as he tumbled on the floor, wrestling with his brothers. She felt her knowledge of him deepen and intensify.
Selection A-2: John Morgan. Astonishing to look into the face that Brian’s would someday become. How grateful she was, because she knew she would never touch Brian’s cheek when his face was carved and lined like his father’s.
Same eyes, bright blue and deeply set, the father’s shadowed with great bushy, grisled brows. She remembered her first glimpse of the man, framed by the front door, his shadow stiff, lean, a little bent, a figure cut out of black paper against the orange light of the hall.
She thought of Brian and his father, eyes averted from each other, formal and uncomfortable but each one needing the other’s—what? Respect? Good opinion? No. It was care. Their caring was evident in the surreptitious glances each gave the other when there was no chance of being caught. The old man had asked about Brian’s law office. Surely that was an overture after all the years of bitterness. But Brian remained rigid and wary, determined to barricade his father into some remote place where he could no longer wound.
The jukebox was blurring, colors fading from bright neon to pastel, the outlines wavering. She gazed once more at the moonlit window and drifted into sleep.
She woke up once in the middle of the night, tangled inside the blanket Brian had tucked around her when he came to bed. She looked over at him and could see his face quite clearly in the moonlight. Eerie how he almost seemed to have become a little boy again, the child she had sensed in this house—the outline of his face softened by sleep, his hand curled by his cheek.
She felt sorrow mingle with her tenderness. Only a few weeks ago Brian had slept either facedown or lying on his back, arms and legs flung out, totally open and vulnerable. Recently, however, she had noticed that he often lay clenched in the fetal position, as he did tonight. It hurt her to watch him curl up protectively, defending himself against injury. Against me, she thought sadly. She resisted the impulse to reach out and touch the curly head. Instead, she ran her hand along the edge of her sheet. It felt curiously dry and smooth for such a damp old house. She was certainly awake for good now, she thought, but very soon she slipped into a quiet sleep an
d didn’t open her eyes again until six thirty the next morning.
Chapter 53
The sound woke her with a start, an odd, jarring, daytime sound and somehow familiar. Suddenly she realized she was listening to a rooster. Crowing, just like in the movies, except that it wasn’t exactly cock-a-doodle-doo, more like aw-aw-aw-aw-AWW. Same rhythm, same ridiculous self-proclamation. She rolled over to tell Brian, but he was sleeping so peacefully that she couldn’t bear to wake him. He’d heard the damn thing so many times, she thought, it was probably like fire engine sirens for her, just subliminal background muttering. She got up, dressing quickly in the cold early morning air.
There wasn’t anyone in the kitchen, so she helped herself to a cup of tea and, since she couldn’t find a toaster anywhere, a slice of bread. The butter was delicious, so she shrugged away the disapproving specter of Dr. Diller and had another slice, surprised at how well she felt.
She let herself out the back door and strolled toward the barn. John Morgan emerged, carrying two large gleaming silver pails filled with what Sharlie presumed was milk, although it was bluish white and foamy, not like the creamy stuff that Brian consumed by the carton at home in New York.
“Morning. You’re up early,” he said. He kept on walking, the load heavy in his hands.
“Is it okay if I come with you?”
“Unh,” he answered. Sharlie interpreted this to be affirmative, and followed him into a shed where there were large aluminum troughs into which he poured the milk.
She asked him questions about what happened to the milk next, and then followed him back to the barn again. She watched him as he moved among the cows, nudging them with his shoulder, comfortable with their steamy bodies.
“The closest I ever got to a cow was the Children’s Zoo in Central Park. It was the raggediest-looking thing I ever saw, not like these. It had great big bored brown eyes. I think it must have died.”
“City air probably killed her off,” John Morgan said gloomily, attaching a milking machine to the pink udder by his knees.
