The Moonlight Man

by Paula Fox

  She went outside; it was better to be away from his sleeping presence. The grass was still damp from the rain. She moved around restlessly, from porch to swing to railroad tracks, feeling confined by the small yard. After a while, she returned to the house. She heard a piece of cutlery drop in the kitchen. She heard a thin tuneless whistle. He was trying to carry it off even though he didn’t know she was in the hall, listening. She went out, back to the wooden swing. It was very hot, steamy.

  She grew aware that she was being watched. She turned toward the house. Her father was standing a few yards away, holding a cup of coffee.

  He lifted up the cup as though to toast her and ambled toward the swing. He looked terrible, as though barely able to stay on his feet.

  “Good morning, Catherine,” he said warily.

  She said nothing.

  The swing quivered as he stepped into it and sat down with a thump.

  “What an adventure! Like Prohibition days, I imagine. Of course, you and I wouldn’t know about that.”

  She looked out at the meadow.

  “There’s nothing so soul-shriveling as a female in a sulk,” he said somberly.

  “I’ll need the car,” she said icily. “I have to phone a friend today. He’s expecting my call. He’s in Trois Rivières. That’s a place in Canada.”

  “He? Well … well.”

  “He,” she repeated flatly. “I have to leave in a few minutes. The keys aren’t on the table where they’re supposed to be. Where are they, please?”

  “‘Where are they, please,’” he mimicked her, to her chagrin catching exactly the note of fake hauteur in her voice.

  “Are you going to tell me about the keys?” she demanded. She felt suddenly swollen with rage, huge with it, as though she would tower over him if she stood up.

  “If I want to, I will,” he said.

  “I left the keys on the table after I drove Reverend Ross home this morning, after I brought him here because I thought you were dying!” Her voice had risen to a shout.

  He looked startled, but only for an instant.

  “He must have enjoyed that,” he said drily. “No more satisfying meal to a pious man than seeing his worst suspicion confirmed.”

  “It wasn’t like that! He was good and kind to me. And he was kind to you. He pitied you!”

  “I don’t need his pity.”

  “If you won’t let me use the car, I’ll walk to Mackenzie.”

  “I’ll stop you from that, too, if that is what I want to do.”

  She started to get out of the swing. He gripped her arm.

  “You’re nothing!” she cried. “You’re not a writer, you’re just a drunk. Moonshine man! You bastard!” She was screaming.

  They struggled and tumbled out of the swing. As she turned and twisted, trying to break his grip, she saw his red-rimmed eyes, his ashen skin. She was dizzy with fury. He clung to her like a limpet. She felt her own strength even as his fingers dug into her arms.

  “Let me go!” she cried out.

  “Not until you forgive me!” he shouted into her ear. She thought he’d gone crazy. “You will forgive me,” he gasped. “How dare you not forgive me, you only just hatched, wretched girl—”

  “Let me—”

  “No!”

  They stood facing each other. He looked as if he was going to faint. She realized, astonished, that it was she who was holding him up. Her anger left her as a fever does, with sweat on her face and a sense of weakness. She held her arms another minute until she was sure he was steady on his feet, then she let go.

  “Your boyfriend can wait forever,” he said. “You cannot have the car.”

  “I forgive you,” she said quietly.

  “You must mean it.”

  “You drink too much,” she said.

  He burst into laughter. “Will you believe me if I tell you I’m afraid of you?” he asked. “Would you believe it drives me to drink?”

  “I don’t know what I believe,” she said.

  “What you said was awful. Did you know you could say such cruel things to anyone? My poor Rabbit, I thought you’d fly away across the meadow, you were so wild.”

  “I can’t talk anymore,” she said wearily. He stared at her for a moment. Then he took the car keys from his pocket and put them in her hand. “Go make your phone call,” he said. “But don’t tell your boy how badly you treated your old father. You might scare him off.”

  She walked away to the car without a backward look at him.

  In the lunchroom in Mackenzie, the waitress gave her change. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. It was hard to believe that included Philippe. He answered on the second ring. He must have been standing next to the phone.

  “‘Ye are the salt of the earth,’” he quoted, “‘but if the salt has lost its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?’”

  They always paused on their walk up Mont Royal in front of the plaque with those words from Matthew; he always read them aloud to her. She couldn’t smile now.

  “Catherine?” he questioned. She stared at the little heap of coins on the shelf beneath the telephone, wishing it were already used up.

  “I’m here,” she said finally. She read a notice about a lost dog someone had tacked to the wall.

  “You sound as though you wished you weren’t,” Philippe said.

  “I can hardly stand it,” she said with sudden intensity. “He drinks all the time.” Anger stirred in her again.

  “Leave!” he exclaimed. “Isn’t your mother back in New York?”

  “I can’t do that. Anyhow, it’s almost over. We’re leaving in a couple of days.”

  Someone dropped a plate in the kitchen behind the counter. There was a muffled shout.

  “How is it there?” she asked with an effort. “How has it been?”

  “Healthy,” he replied. “Boring. Logs, water, too much coffee. I quit smoking. Catherine? I’ve missed you.”

  His voice had thinned out. He had sensed her remoteness. Was there no rest from this burden of other people’s feelings? And from one’s own?

  “What if I call you from home next week? You’ll be back in Montreal. And I’ll be out of this—”

  “It’s okay,” he interrupted her. “It must be hard, not really knowing him, and the drinking. Listen. We’ll go dancing. We’ll run straight up Mont Royal. We’ll ski in the moonlight. I will try to correct your horrible States accent—”

  “Don’t say any more,” she begged him, close to weeping.

  He was silent a moment. She heard him breathing. Then he said, “Catherine, you have a life elsewhere.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I forgot that. We had a fight. It’s over now. So is something else.” She paused. “I missed you, too.”

  It wasn’t exactly true. She hadn’t thought about him much. She had been taken up with her father. She tried to say what was closer to the truth. “I miss you now,” she said.

  Mr. Ames was reading in the parlor.

  “Any place you’d like to go today?” he asked her, almost, it seemed to her, indifferently. It had been he who had always suggested what they would do, where they would go.

  “No … let’s stay here,” she answered.

  They avoided each other’s company all day. If he walked into the kitchen and found her making a sandwich, he left at once. She went upstairs and stayed in her room while he was in the parlor. She took a long walk. When she returned, the car was gone.

  She told herself she didn’t care if he came back with a bottle of liquor. But what if he got so drunk he couldn’t drive them away from this cramped, dark little house? She felt momentary panic. Well, she would walk to Mackenzie. There would be a bus to Halifax. She could walk and ride and find her way home. She took her suitcase from beneath her bed and put a few things in it and felt better for a while.

  Then she felt worse. She wasn’t angry anymore; she couldn’t pretend to be. It was only that she couldn’t believe what he said. She had always believed him—even
when the steamer trunk didn’t arrive and the trips to faraway places didn’t materialize. She roamed through the house. What was it she had believed? She sat down on the hard little sofa in the parlor and stared at the armchair in which he usually sat. She had believed herself to be central to his life.

  But she wasn’t. Her father, too, had a life elsewhere.

  When he came back, he was carrying a bag of groceries, which he handed over to her, asking her to put things away. She understood at once that he wanted her to see there were no bottles of liquor hidden in the bag.

  She stayed in her room while he fixed supper. When he called her to the kitchen, she noticed he had used one frying pan. There was none of the usual disorder that accompanied his cooking.

  He had fried pork chops and opened a jar of applesauce. There was a salad of rusty lettuce and hard pieces of tomato. Looking across the table at him as he ate, she felt this disagreeable supper was not revenge for what she had said to him but the expression of his dejection.

  They had made up. But even so, there were consequences.

  He left her to the dishes. The glasses they drank from were old grape-jelly jars; the flatware was tinny, bent. Most of the dishes were cracked and stained. She had not paid attention to these details until now.

  She sat with him in the parlor. He spoke in a rather finicking way about which route to Portland they should take. He sighed as if it were too much for him. He’d look at the map again. Perhaps he ought to have the car checked, at least have the spare tire looked at.

  She must have had a strange expression on her face. “Life’s not all grand opera,” he said gruffly. She started to protest that she hadn’t said it was, but she let it go.

  “I’m going to Lunenberg tomorrow morning to look for a present for Mrs. Landy’s son. I couldn’t find anything in Mackenzie. You can go with me—or not,” he said.

  They had both stood up, and they seemed to her to be too large for that dinky parlor. And then she thought, no, it wasn’t that that they were too big; it was the strain between them.

  “Mrs. Landy had been very kind to us, very patient,” he said.

  Was there an accusation in his voice? She, after all, had not been patient with him, or kindly. But how could he be so unreasonable as to expect patience, and kindness?

  “And I guess I wasn’t kind!” she burst out, wishing at once she’d choked off her words.

  “Oh, my dear!” he exclaimed. “No one has been kinder to me than you! I’ve made you so suspicious. Listen. No, don’t listen. Got to bed. Go to sleep.”

  She sat for a while at the window in her room. The dirt road was ash-white in the moonlight; the hills in the distance loomed larger, more mysteriously than they did in daylight.

  She had not thought before whether or not she had liked her mother. Her mother was one with the air she breathed, the ground she walked upon, the four corners of the world in which she moved. She had hated her at times—or felt what she imagined was hatred. Perhaps it had been hatred of the captive years of her childhood. Was growing up escaping captivity? Doing what you thought you wanted to do, when you wanted to do it? Drinking yourself into insensibility? “They think it’s their own will,” Ross had said, of drunkards. He had meant that will had nothing to do with it. Her head was beginning to ache.

  She had disliked her father that day. Yet she did love him. She went to her bed and hit the pillow hard. Love, love, love, everyone was always saying. As though it were the easiest thing!

  The words she had shouted at him in the swing came back to her. Her father had been right; she hadn’t known she had it in her to be so mean. Move over, Harriet Blacking, she said to herself.

  Eight

  While Catherine was dressing the next morning she heard the door close below. She bent to look out of the window and saw her father walking slowly toward the car, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed.

  “Wait!” she called down. She stepped into her moccasins, ran downstairs and into the kitchen, and gulped down some tomato juice. She knew she’d slept hard; sleep lingered in her heavy limbs, in the way she found herself staring at things without knowing what they were.

  He’d left the car door open for her. She slipped in beside him.

  “I’m here,” she said.

  He smiled. “So I see,” he said.

  They spoke hardly at all during the drive to Lunenberg, and when they did, one or the other would point out something in the countryside—a tiny, fenced cemetery in the middle of a plowed field, a tree struck by lightning, one of its main branches nearly ripped from the trunk, an elderly couple hoeing in their patch of garden, their heads wrapped in identical blue bandannas.

  There wasn’t much traffic in Lunenberg, but he grew nervous; his hands clenched the wheel, and she saw sweat break out on his forehead when he edged the car into a parking place large enough for a bus.

  “Phew!” he exclaimed. “My life would have been different if the internal combustion machine had not been invented. Oh, for horse and buggy days! My old man told me that when he was a boy, he was taken on holiday to the Adirondacks in a coach drawn by two horses.”

  They walked down the street past old dark brick buildings and new storefronts. Through an alley, she caught sight of fishing boats at rest on the bright blue water of Lunenberg Bay.

  “You never told me about him,” she said. “Or about her, my grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother,” he said musingly. “She would have gone to any length to avoid being a grandmother—and in fact she did go to an extreme length. I think she died young to avoid suffering the indignities and changes of age. As for him, he had beautiful red hair. He had studied philosophy in a German university, but he made his living as a salesman. In his day, salesmen were called drummers. He had to travel a great deal. I didn’t like him to go away. The house was very silent when he was gone. One day when he was setting off with his salesman’s black case of pharmaceuticals—that’s what he sold—how well I remember that black case, I hated it so—I hid behind a tree. When he walked down to his car, I threw an apple core at him and shouted, ‘Red! Red!’ I remember so well how he threw back his head and laughed. He didn’t do that often. That’s enough about him.”

  “It’s not enough,” she murmured.

  “I have some old photos,” he said. “I’ll send them along to you.”

  She was puzzled by his reluctance. He would talk about anything, as a rule. But she sensed she wouldn’t be able to get much more out of him on the subject of his parents.

  “Where did you live when you were little?”

  “Nyack,” he said, almost resentfully.

  “You didn’t like it?”

  He paused for a moment. “There was something I didn’t like,” he answered. “Maybe it wasn’t Nyack.”

  They had stopped in front of the display windows of a small department store. “Come on. Let’s see what we can find in here.”

  “How old is little Jackie?” Catherine wondered.

  “Hard to guess. Mrs. Landy is probably in her forties. I have the impression Jackie is five or six.”

  “She never mentions a Mr. Landy.”

  “Perhaps he fled to the mainland.”

  In the store’s toy section, they found a red tricycle. After some hesitation, Mr. Ames bought it, and they took it back to the car.

  For a while they walked around the town. When she glanced at him, he looked as unknowable as the strangers whom they passed. She wanted very much to ask him more about his redheaded father, his mother who didn’t want to grow old, the place where he’d lived as a child.

  “What an odd place to be,” he remarked, as they stood on a corner waiting for the traffic light to change. “For an old world traveler like myself, this humble crossroads is a sign of decline.”

  There were other signs of decline, Catherine thought, but she said nothing. And what was so humble about this crossroads?

  They found a restaurant near the harbor, where they had a lunch of freshly
caught mackerel and new potatoes.

  “Isn’t it wonderful?” he asked. She felt a certain tension, a fear that he would insist on her being conscious of this moment being “wonderful.” He must have caught a flicker of what she was feeling, must have seen it in her face. He fell abruptly silent.

  When the waiter brought him the coffee he’d ordered, he got up and said, “I’ll be back in an instant …” and she watched him with alarm as he wound among the tables and out the restaurant door. He was going to get a drink somewhere; maybe he had noticed a bar near the restaurant. But Mr. Ames returned almost at once. He was opening a pack of cigarettes.

  “I thought you were going to try and stop.”

  “I was,” he replied. “And now I’ve started again. Having fun …”

  There was a note of willfulness in his voice, even of belligerence, she had been hearing often lately. The worst of it was that he might have been speaking to anyone at all.

  He inhaled deeply. “I see disapproval written all over your face,” he said mildly. “Don’t be a young fogy.”

  “But it’s so bad for you,” she said with urgency. He looked fragile and elderly. Yet now she thought she could see that child in him who had thrown an apple core at his father because he didn’t want him to go away.

  He stared at her a moment. Slowly, he ground out the cigarette in an ashtray. “If it worries you so much …” he said. “And, of course, you’re right.”

  Still, when they left the restaurant, he put the pack of cigarettes in his pocket.

  They spent an hour or so walking around the waterfront, looking at fishing boats. He told her how Joseph Conrad had come to the United States when he was an elderly man, “ancient by your standards,” for a series of lectures. But he never got off his ship. “Life had worn him out,” Mr. Ames said.

  Had he invented the story? she wondered. Conrad, too, had been a traveler. But he’d not written budget travel books for tourists. She felt guilty at once. She’d kept in her memory, she was sure, everything he had ever said to her. Now she questioned what he said, secretly disbelieving.