by Paula Fox
When he talked, when he gestured with his hands and arms, she thought she’d never seen anyone so tenanted with emotions, ideas. They had not been able to afford silence until now. When they met for their visits there had been so much to tell, to ask.
Last spring, he had brought Emma along to their visit for the first time, though they’d already been married two years. Catherine had seen how gone Emma was on him. She’d not taken her eyes from his face except when Catherine spilled her ginger ale on the restaurant table. She glanced at Catherine then as though she were a shadow in a dream she was having. She hadn’t been unpleasant. She’d even tried to show interest in the usual things—Catherine’s school and what she liked about it, or didn’t like, what movies she went to, what she wanted to be when she grew up.
Catherine had noted how expensive her clothes looked, how intricate and beautiful the three rings she wore. One was a large diamond on her wedding-ring finger that Catherine guessed Emma had given herself. She was sure her father couldn’t have afforded such a ring. There had always been the tug of money between him and her mother. She’d heard about that, of course. If your parents were divorced, you always heard about money. Sometimes he was so late with support checks, they would turn to Granny, her mother’s mother, who lived a meticulous life like a fine old clock ticking silently, in a stone house in New Hope, Pennsylvania; a house full of antiques people were always trying to persuade her to sell.
She would give them money and she would always remark how much she had liked Harry Ames. In her cool, remote voice, she would observe that he was a bundle of trouble but worth it, though it might not be for her to say. “Then don’t,” Catherine recalled her mother saying. She remembered, too, the flush that spread over Granny’s fine, pale skin.
When Catherine described Emma to her mother, the clothes, the rings, she’d commented somewhat grimly, “He found someone to take care of him. Not many of us can afford the luxury of a husband who wrote two novels before twenty-six and hasn’t managed to write his daughter a decent, fatherly letter since she was born.”
There were things, Catherine had begun to understand, that were so untrue there was no point in arguing about them. When Mr. Ames telephoned Catherine from Athens on her twelfth birthday, her mother had said, “He’d rather spend thirty dollars than buy a stamp. He’d never look up a phone number in the telephone book the way normal people do—always got the operator to do it for him and considered himself a sport for it.”
Normal. Decent. Catherine kicked up the dust. Like Carter, she supposed her mother meant. Carter was as calm as a sofa. A normal sofa. Her father actually did make a living writing travel books, mostly about Scandinavia. She’d asked him why he didn’t live in Oslo or Uppsala, or one of those places he wrote about. He had answered that he detested the whole northern world. Catherine had laughed at the extravagance of what he said. He went straight to Italy whenever he could afford it, he told her, and he had vowed never to write a guide for use in the country. He didn’t want to encourage still more tourists to go there.
“Let’s pause a minute,” he said. “My character may be better than yours but my legs aren’t.”
He grinned at her and went to a straggly oak by the side of the road and leaned against its trunk. Catherine squatted down and watched an ant dragging a dead beetle, twice its size, around a small stone.
“How’s my old wife?” he asked. It was the first time he’d asked about Catherine’s mother.
“She’s not so old,” Catherine replied. “And she’s fine.”
“Still slaving away for that swine of a publisher?”
“She’s the chief copy editor now,” Catherine said. “The man she works for is very nice.”
“Very nice,” he repeated. “What does that mean? Chocolate pudding and a song at twilight are very nice.”
Catherine stood up and walked rapidly away from him, down the road. He called after her, “Don’t get sore! Though it does you credit.”
“I’m not sore,” she called back. “It’s just so boring!”
It wasn’t boring. It was confusing and unsettling. She wanted to hear more, though she was afraid of what he might tell her. It was like a door slowly opening in a suspense movie. Would something frightful walk through that door? At best, her mother spoke of him as though he were a naughty child she had had to put up with, and he spoke about her as though everything she did were touched with foolishness.
She imagined the two of them jeering and sneering at each other as they walked down the aisle to be married. But it couldn’t have been like that!
He caught up with her and placed his hand flat on her head. “‘Jane, Jane, tall as a cane,’” he murmured. It was his quoting voice. She didn’t ask him, as she usually did, whom he was quoting.
“Don’t tell me I’ll understand everything so much better when I’m older,” she said resentfully.
“I? Tell you such a stupid thing?” He grabbed her hair and held it straight up. She stood there like a cat held by the scruff of its neck. “I’ll never tell you that,” he said. “I understand life less and less. My certainties lie dead, strewn over the battlefields of the past.”
“You’re boasting!” she cried.
He laughed and let go of her hair. “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you!” he said. She heard pride and pleasure in his voice and she knew it was about her. He’d liked what she said. She couldn’t help but smile. He took hold of her arm for a moment, then let go of it.
“Your mother was a sweet girl,” he said. “I have nothing against her. She couldn’t stand my ways. She’s a daylight woman.”
They walked half a mile or so in silence. She was thinking hard about what he said—how he sounded superior to his own marriage, his past, as though he’d believed all along what he believed now.
The heat, the blueness of the air, the insect whirr, the scents of evergreen trees and dust simmered gently, a summer stew. He had been speaking for a while before she realized it. She’d been set to dreaming by the quiet, and the warmth, and her own thoughts, which had trailed off like vapor trails in the sky.
“—intensity of hope, of feeling,” he was saying. “I wonder if there is ever such a mix of giddiness and seriousness in anything as there is in love. Perhaps in revolution. Love is revolutionary … you’ll see. Oh, you’ll see how love is! Of course, you were right in your instinct to resent my condescension toward Beatrice. I don’t really feel about her that way.”
Beatrice … her mother’s name. Beatrice, who had existed long before Mom.
“I’ll tell you what Hawthorne said: ‘When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to mock the sacred with a show of those commonplace civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse.’ Do you understand that?”
She felt oppressed—all those wise sayings. She didn’t want to be his student.
“I got a fortune cookie message once. It said: ‘Your true love is a gunboat,’” she said, feeling that she’d like to do a little jeering herself.
“My girl, you’ll have to put up with parental advice and quotes and warnings. Then you can throw it away and learn your own truths. In time, you’ll bore and oppress your own children with them.”
“I won’t oppress my own children.”
“Oho! The hell you won’t!” he said boisterously.
The hills around them were higher now. A crumbling stone wall held back a sea of wildflowers. From a single rafter of a shed a fan of weathered slats hung down toward the ground. On a crest, an old barn stood like a sentry. Despite the sings of human activity, the hills looked deserted, empty of human life. Mr. Ames stepped forward, raised the rifle, and took aim at the barn. A second later, Catherine heard glass shattering.
“You shot out a window!”
“Don’t worry!” he said, so quickly his words seemed part of the reverberation of the shot. “I’ve looked into it. Those are abandoned buildings. Come here. I want to show you how to stand when you fire a rifle.”
There were many things to do at the same time, place her feet correctly, learn to sight through the tiny antler at the end of the long barrel, fit the stock in the right place on her shoulder.
“Go ahead,” he ordered. “Shoot before you start to worry.”
Catherine aimed at the shed, which already looked as if it were about to stumble upon the slope and collapse in a heap on the road. She pulled the trigger and shouted, “No!” at the same time. Through the sound of the shot, she heard her father laughing.
“Well—you can hit the side of a shed,” he said. “And you mustn’t shout no. The bullet might turn around and hit your dear papa.”
She was dazed but exuberant, and she wanted to try again at once. Mr. Ames said it was best to scatter their shots and not concentrate them in one place—in case.
“In case—what?” she demanded.
“I suppose people own these derelicts even though they aren’t used. I suppose Canadians have the same property obsession as our own countrymen.”
They went on past thickets of raspberry mixed in with small dense stands of oak and high wild tangles of lacelike shrubbery. The meadows hummed with insect life. The road itself began to fade away, as though the underbrush was slowly erasing it. There were no more buildings to shoot at, so Catherine shot at branches her father would point to. Once, by error, she hit a utility pole.
“How’s that school? I liked that grand old dame, Madame Soul,” he said, after they had used up the ammunition.
“Madame Soule,” she corrected him. “Some of the girls think she’s pretty crazy. But I like her, too. She worries about the state of the world.”
“Quite right. So she should. And there’s a villain, isn’t there? There’s always a villain at work in any community, like the snake in Eden.”
Was there anything she could tell him that would surprise him?
“Well … yes.”
“Tell me about her.”
“Harriet Blacking. She sneers,” Catherine said.
“Sneer back—in your own fashion.”
“You always feel she knows something terrible about you,” Catherine said.
“That’s why villains are so successful,” he said. “Because they do know something—our secret villainies we try to hide from ourselves. They feed on secrets like termites feeding on wood—and bring the house down—only because we try to defend ourselves against our own charges. My advice to you is—admit you’re a villain and attack!”
He was walking a few steps ahead of her, his head down, the rifle held loosely in one hand as he gestured with the other. He was speaking to himself, she suspected.
“They get the goods on us,” he said.
Moved by an impulse of pity she couldn’t explain to herself, Catherine caught up with him and took his arm. For a second, she rested her head against his shoulder.
“Thanks, pal,” he said. “Thanks for that.”
When they reached the house, they found Mrs. Landy about to have lunch in the kitchen. They’d discovered at once, when they sat down to the first meal she had prepared for them, that she was a frightful cook, frying meat as though she were trying to tan it, and adding a jelly glass of milk, but no butter, to two boiled potatoes that she had mashed with a tablespoon.
Mr. Ames hoped to discourage her cooking, without hurting her feelings, by fixing her lunch himself. Today he had left her an immense sandwich of spinach, sardines, hard-boiled eggs, and slices of onion.
Mrs. Landy turned to them, holding the sandwich in her knobby little hands, an expression of amazement on her face. “I never saw such a thing, Mr. Ames,” she said. “It looks like a picture in a magazine. Dare I eat it?”
“We are here to administer first aid,” said Mr. Ames. “Go ahead, Mrs. Landy. Take heart. Take a bite.”
“I can see you two have been having fun,” she said, in her rather mournful way.
Mr. Ames put his arm around her and hugged her. “Mrs. Landy, you’re sharp as a tack—as we said in the days of my youth.”
Mrs. Landy giggled and shook her head. “You are a funny man,” she said. “I tell my little Jackie all the things you say as best as I can remember them. I’m going to take this sandwich home and show it to him.”
She wrapped up the sandwich carefully and put it in a paper bag. Mr. Ames walked her to the door. She would go across the tracks to the tarmac road and catch the bus, driven by Mr. Conklin. Catherine heard her father telling Mrs. Landy how sweet she made the little house look, how lovely the Canadian summer was—as though there weren’t summer everywhere. She ran to the parlor window to watch them. Her father still had his arm around Mrs. Landy. He seemed about to lead her into a dance to music she had never heard.
When he returned, Catherine was standing in the hall. He didn’t seem to know she was there. He held up one hand and bit his thumb, then he saw her. He simply stood, letting her look at him, at his somber, elderly face. She didn’t know she had reached out her hand as though to prevent him from falling until he walked past her. Had she offended him?
He didn’t offer to make her lunch. He watched her as she ate a piece of bread and cheese and drank cold coffee from a glass. His skin was ashen. Mrs. Landy’s dance was over, the music stopped. His face was like a room where the only light had been turned off. She had not seen him like this. When he spoke at last, his voice was so low she had to lean toward him to hear his words.
“I feel terrible … things catching up. A nap will put it right. You must be tired, too. Let’s call it a day for a little while.” He left the kitchen. She could hear his slow steps on the stairs.
She went to her own room and drew down the thin canvas shade over the window. For a few minutes, she tried to read Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin. Gratefully, she felt sleep begin to cover her like a blanket lightly drawn up.
When Catherine awoke it was twilight. She heard her father moving around the kitchen. She washed her face and combed her hair and went downstairs. He came out into the hall to greet her.
“I’m myself. I’m better. I’ve recovered,” he said, smiling. He carried two glasses. “Soda and a bit of lemon for both of us,” he said.
Where had the sick, elderly man gone whom she’d seen in the hall hours earlier?
“Shall we take a stroll on the deck?” he asked. She followed him outside and to the antique swing that stood a few yards from the porch. It was built on wooden slats; the two seats faced each other. Beneath them was a floor like a duckboard. When Catherine and Mr. Ames sat down in the swing, it gave out pleasant wood squeaks, the only sound except for the faint hushing of swallows’ wings as the birds rose and fell in the fading light. The lengthening shadows of the trees that bordered the shallow stream lay upon the meadow grass like a ghostly snow fence.
“It’s the best time of day,” he said. “Look—there’s a cat way down there near that willow.”
The cat was crouched on a mound of earth beneath the tree.
“What is it thinking about?” Catherine wondered.
“Supper and escape,” he replied. “Like the rest of us.”
She laughed.
He said, “No riotous behavior, please. Tell me what you really like best about your school.”
“When we go to the ski cabin in the mountains. The train is always filled with people. They walk up and down the aisle laughing and talking. They wear bright sweaters and caps and they shout because they’re happy about where they’re going. Skis stick out everywhere like pins in a pincushion. When we arrive, it’s night. It’s a little train, maybe like the one that used to go through the backyard here. The station in the mountains is tiny, just a shed. We get out and crunch on the snow in our ski boots. The train starts back to Montreal. It’s really dark. You can just barely make out the shapes of people as they go off to wherever they’re going. Enormous horse-drawn sledges are waiting for everyone. We take two of them. The drivers are muffled up in moth-eaten fur rugs—there are rugs for us, too. The horses begin to climb up the ro
ad, which runs along the mountainside. You can look across the valley and see small lights on those other slopes. Your hands are warm beneath the rug but your face is nearly frozen, and the air is so crisp you feel you could break off pieces of it like mica. And it has a wonderful smell—you keep sniffing it, breathing it in, trying to catch hold of it. If the moon is out, or the stars, you can see the whole long valley. Oh—it’s so mysterious, so beautiful! And everything about the horses is beautiful, their smell, their great legs pulling, pulling. And the snow is everywhere, like a different world.…”
“Snow,” he said reflectively. “It’s like the twilight when all the hurry and noise of things stops.”
The swing squeaked; the swallows dipped and rose like fish in a clear stream. She told him about the time she and Cornelia got hold of a gallon of red wine made by people who lived in a small village in those mountains. They had drunk all of it, sitting in a bunk while the other girls were out skiing. Madame had called her downstairs to discuss the United Nations and what was wrong with that organization, and she, Catherine, had to hang onto the back of a chair for dear life so as not to fall flat on her face. She and Cornelia had been sick for three days, throwing up, dizzy and shaken. How that bunk had flown around the room! And they so weak they could only wait for it to settle so they could lie down and groan.
“Now that you’ve done that once, you don’t have to do it again,” he said neutrally. With a touch of sternness, he added, “Don’t do it again, Catherine. It’s a fool’s way.”
“I know,” she said.
They were silent for a long time. The sky welled up with night. At last, he sighed and said, “Suppertime.” They walked back to the house, their arms linked.
He made their supper while she sat on the horsehair sofa and looked through old issues of the Canadian edition of Time magazine. He had concocted a dessert he called no-name pudding, in honor of an Italian called D’Annunzio who had, himself, invented a dessert, senzanome—without a name, he told her.
Catherine didn’t always listen closely to her father. She listened, as it were, at a distance, catching a phrase or a name, the way she listened to music. He didn’t seem to mind. He never asked her, as other grown-ups did—Are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said? Are you daydreaming?
