Dale Loves Sophie to Death

by Robb Forman Dew

  “Do you think you’re putting too much pressure on Toby about something or other, Dinah?” her mother had asked her one afternoon as the two of them sat reading the evening paper on Polly’s porch while the children played in the yard. Dinah sat there a moment, hopelessly depressed by her mother’s uncanny ability to phrase this question so disingenuously that there was no satisfactory answer to it. She didn’t answer at all and just looked out at the children instead. David was lying on the ground reading a comic, and Sarah was digging a system of canals with one of Polly’s silver teaspoons. Toby was wandering around in his own world, oblivious of the rest of them. Dinah repressed her fury as she watched Toby move around the yard with such apparent and truculent difficulty.

  “Well,” Polly persisted, “he’s under some sort of strain, Dinah. His stutter is even worse, and that limp…I remember when Buddy did that. Isn’t that odd?” she said, suddenly led away from the mainstream of her thought and sounding a bit vague, like a very old woman all at once. Dinah was caught by this note unexpectedly, in the middle of her resentment. She glanced over at her mother with involuntary compassion to see the narrow, aristocratic regularities of her mother’s profile held dead still and starkly outlined against the gentle, muted movement of the tree-filled landscape. “It was just after you turned two, I think, and your father was away in the army. He was stationed at Fort Dix, you know. Buddy was just nine.” She seemed to think she had explained something, but Dinah drew no conclusions; she just let her mind go blank. Her senses registered the trace of moisture that lay over her skin like a coating of oil, irritating and emotionally defeating. “You were everywhere,” Polly added. “I’ve never known a child who made her presence more felt. That’s when I first hired Jeannie. She used to come every day.” Jeannie was a local woman who had always been in and out of the house doing various jobs of cleaning and baby-sitting. She came regularly now only once a week. “That’s when Buddy stopped using his left hand and arm. He’s right-handed, of course, so I didn’t pay much attention, at first. But, you know, I don’t think children do those things intentionally. I helped him exercise it for hours a day. He was so jealous of you, and he was feeling absolutely deserted. He needed all that attention, and it finally worked.”

  The implications of all this information—so unexpectedly offered—were inescapable. This must mean that in some way Dinah had to be responsible for the past as well as the present, she thought.

  She got up and went to stand at the porch rail. She stood there for a while, just gazing into the yard, until she was sure she wouldn’t cry in pure frustration. She felt suffocated at the idea that she would be forever imprisoned in her mother’s mind as her two-year-old self. How could she ever rectify what wrongs she may have done? The injustices she may have perpetrated? She thought she might cry at the impossibility of ever, ever making herself clear—of ever justifying herself—to her own mother, who should know her so well. Her own mother should know her at least as well as Dinah herself knew her own children!

  “Oh, Mother! Why do you always end up saying things like that?” Her voice was very quiet, but not ominous, just truly sad and quizzical. “Toby gets lots of attention! He knows we love him! How could he not know?” Real sorrow enveloped her as she spoke, not an apprehensive sorrow, just an overwhelming sadness for all human beings. She also felt awfully sorry for herself and all the people she cared about. Dinah had no idea if Toby did understand how much he was loved; every now and then she became very worried about that. When she thought of Toby, she sometimes imagined that she and he were like television lovers, running toward each other across a great, grassy distance, their arms open wide in expectation. Dinah wondered if the two of them were charted just enough off-course so that they were destined to hurtle past each other, heavy with love and good intentions, but inevitably missing their target. Her mother didn’t comment further, and Dinah hoped she had lost interest, for the moment, in Toby and his happiness. A little later she gathered up the children, and the four of them wandered back to their own house.

  They never arrived home that the cat was not waiting for them. Dinah had stopped feeding him, and he was uninterested in the restrained attentions of David and Toby, and he openly shunned Sarah’s gregarious affection. Dinah could not understand their attraction for him, but over the last few weeks her father’s cat had become a more and more dubious conquest. At any hour of the day he might be found lounging on the steps or under the shrubbery if he sought the shade. She didn’t even allow the children to feed him the scraps of their dinner; he was a sleek creature, and she had immediately despised herself in the first place for her initial, petty enticement of him.

  Dinah kept going—she got by, day to day—on a belief in her own decency. In general, she had very little hope of anything; she was not an optimist, and hope would have been foreign to her nature. In fact, hope would have indicated a certain sort of faith in something—even simply in the nature of the universe—that she had given up even considering. She was not as nice, certainly, as she meant to be; she didn’t believe that anyone was. But she was determined to believe in people’s intentions of decency and kindness. She was also aware that because of that belief she was probably circumstantially naïve. But at least she didn’t extend to herself the easy charity she extended to everyone else, and she was particularly contemptuous of that small remnant of childishness that often led her into pursuing revenge. She was ashamed of herself every time she contemplated the company of that handsome cat, and she was obliged to think of him often. In spite of her discouragement, he seemed to find the activity of their household especially interesting. And, oddly enough, he had taken to courting her.

  Those early mornings when she went down at dawn to open the house, she would often find on her porch a freshly dead but unmarked little corpse—a mouse or a mole. The first few mornings the cat, whose name, Toby had told her, was Jimmy, would be sitting apart from his gift, looking into the yard with satisfaction and apparent disregard. He sat there, suspiciously immobile, and she knew that he was attuned to every nuance of her discovery of this tribute to her. However, subtlety had eluded her in this instance, and upon first coming across a small, dead, furry animal, she had naturally recoiled and shut the door to think how best to dispose of it. She returned with a trowel and squeamishly used it to transfer the little body to the garbage, while all the time the cat appraised her from the porch rail. This continued, to Dinah’s dismay, for several days, but Jimmy had become dissatisfied with her response, and now she would often find just a severely gnawed head or an undigestible, bony leg. It angered her, each time; she wondered at that cat’s lust for murder.

  It was bound to have been Toby who would be the one to come in full of delight one afternoon, in search of her. When he found her in the living room, he coyly held both hands behind his back. “Guess which hand!” he said, for the first time in weeks, shy with immense pleasure.

  “That one,” she replied, and he brought forth a handful of silvery-gray feathers that caught the light from the bay windows so that the web could be seen as a composite of its separate, delicate filaments against the rigid quill. Without waiting, too full of excitement to carry on the game, he also held out his other hand, palm flat, on which were displayed two knobby, brownish bird feet.

  Her face immediately and involuntarily was cast over with distaste; subtlety deserted her here, too. “But, Toby, those are from a dead bird!” she said at once, idiotically meaning to impose on him the initial brutality that had yielded such trophies. She had looked up from the feathers and feet to see the pleasure leave his face, and his mouth and eyes become still and guarded.

  “I found them on the back porch. I didn’t kill it,” he said.

  “Well, no,” she said, striving for kindness now; who was she to judge mercy? “The feathers are beautiful, Toby.” She picked one up and held it to the sun, so he could see it as she had. He stood politely with her and then silently took his leave, disappointed in her, it was clear.
He ponderously made his way toward the stairs and his own room.

  Dinah was so distressed that the air of the room and every object in it took on an ominous substance. Once in a very great while, and always unexpectedly, all the freewheeling elements of her senses came to a dead stop, so that the impression of that instant would be printed on her mind for all her life. Such occasions were rare, and she sat in thrall, watching Toby progress away from her for the many hours it seemed to take him, while she sat so apart, her assessment of time gone murky with the intelligence—suddenly communicated to her—of all the terrifying havoc and harm she might cause in the world. Then the moment passed; time picked up as though it were her pulse revived, and she sat still on the couch as Toby began carefully to climb the stairs. With both hands encumbered, he couldn’t make use of the banister, and his ascent was clumsy and precarious because of his refusal to use his right leg as he should.

  In the next instant, Dinah was caught up in a terrible rage, and she leaped up from her seat in the quiet living room and raced up the stairs past him, turning at the top to face him as he approached, slowing in alarm.

  “Toby, I just can’t stand this anymore! I don’t even know what to say about it. If you’re sick, you’ve got to tell me why! If I’m doing something that makes you miserable, for God’s sake, tell me what it is. Are you mad at me about something? My God, Toby, it’s like being tortured! I can’t stand to see you so unhappy. Don’t you know how much I love you. And your father loves you!” Her anger had lost its force almost at once, dispelling itself in her voice, which became a breathy, plaintive rasp as she lowered herself to sit down on the landing and receive Toby as he made his way steadfastly upward, his hands still full. “I just don’t understand what’s wrong. Would you like to talk to someone, Toby?” She was pleading with him by now, staring at his lowered face as he stood next to her on the top step. What she wanted was for him to tell her how to give over the responsibility for his ease and comfort in the world. “You know, maybe we could talk to your grandfather.” They looked directly at each other in their first acknowledgment of that association. Here, at least, was a truce. “He’s good at helping people who are unhappy, and he’s told me how fond he is of you. Or, Toby…if you want to talk to him when I’m not around, that would be fine. If I’m making you unhappy, sweetie, you might want to see if he could tell you what we could do about it. Toby, I don’t mind anything you tell him. Don’t try to protect me! I want you to be happy and to feel good again!”

  She was holding Toby around the waist as she talked to him, although he wasn’t bending into her embrace; he was standing rigidly beside her. He looked at her quite honestly. “I don’t think I’m very unhappy about anything,” he said at last, and resumed his slow progress to his room.

  Dinah put her head down on her knees in sorrow and exasperation. It was clear she had no leverage with which to pry him away from his sullen, sulky, obsessional illness, and since she loved him with greater determination than she could have directed even at herself, her expectations of him and for him were enormous. She was having difficulty forgiving him for his recalcitrance.

  Dinah began to try to foist off her own apathy, which she thought might be causing the widening breach between herself and her children. In fact, she began to infuse a really dreadful cheer into their days. She made clever little meals, designed to appeal to children, and they all sat at the table together as her resentment grew when the children ate the food suspiciously and without any particular gratitude. She thought of activities they could all do together. They went to the Amish museum; she took the children to the zoo in Columbus, where they were all made miserable by the heat. She discovered that Toby’s malaise had caught on. She couldn’t shake it, and she furiously resented the force of her own empathy. In this state of extended sensitivity, she imagined that she had practically become Toby; she suffered so for him in spite of herself, and all to no avail. It served no purpose, this anguish, except to communicate itself to David and Sarah as well, so that a pall hung over the household. She had no choice but to try to improve the situation, in however trite a manner. She didn’t really believe for a moment that she could put things right, but she was bound to try.

  She had decided to go ahead and give Toby an early birthday party. This was always a celebration of summer, so it wasn’t quite so out of the ordinary, and Dinah had some notion of distracting Toby, if only for a few hours, from his preoccupying melancholy.

  One afternoon, when Pam had taken all the children with her to the pool, Dinah settled herself in the living room with a notebook and pencil and began to make plans for the party. She sat making lists of guests, lists of party favors, clever ones for the adults—grim as she always thought it was when everyone must openly appreciate the stale humor—and some little things that would entertain the children. She had never enjoyed giving children’s parties, just as she didn’t think she had ever had fun at one as a child, and she made out her lists with no great hope of a successful celebration.

  She paused for a moment and was looking up, vacantly staring through the front window, when she saw her father leave his house and come down his front walk. She just watched him without thinking of anything much, until she realized he was crossing the street to her house. She was thrown into that juvenile and abject state of alarm in which one craves approval and worries about appearances above all else. She jumped up to go to the mirror and see how she looked. She wished she were nicely dressed. She wished she had put on lipstick. She felt a terrible apprehension, but she had known that he would eventually come to talk to her about Toby.

  The past few nights she had lain awake wondering if her father was waiting for her to approach him first, because she knew he must be concerned. He had always had great respect for children. She thought that the years when her father had liked her best had been when she was still a young child. He had always been earnestly interested in her opinions and adventures. It had pleased him to be able to show her how to think about things. It was only later that she received the full force of his scorn or simple lack of interest. Their gradual parting had begun in her adolescence, during those long, futile years when she had tried, with as much disinterest as possible, to discover and solve her parents’ differences. She hadn’t known what a presumption that was. She hadn’t known until she was married herself. But she had been sure that her father would be bound by his fierce conscience, and probably some affection, to take action on Toby’s behalf. She had reached a state of such desperation that she wouldn’t mind if it turned out that she must shoulder the entire burden of responsibility for Toby’s mysterious and persistent sorrow. She wouldn’t mind anything her father might tell her if only he could offer her a solution.

  She opened the door as her father was mounting the steps, and she walked out to the edge of the porch to lean down and greet him with a light kiss. He smiled at her with what seemed to be a weary effort and followed her into the house.

  “Come into the living room, Dad,” she said. “I can get you some iced tea if you like.” It should have seemed peculiar to be ushering her father into this house for the first time, and yet, oddly enough, the occasion seemed perfectly ordinary. But, then, her father was a close friend of the Hortons’; he was probably entirely familiar with these rooms.

  “No, I can’t come in, Dinah. I have to go to the post office.” He held up a handful of letters in illustration. “I have to walk a mile every day,” he said, “to exercise my leg. I just stopped by for a minute. I wanted to tell you that my cat, Jimmy, is dead. I thought that I ought to tell you so that you could tell the children. I saw them go off with Pam, and it seemed to me that this would be a good time to let you know first. I know how fond Toby was of him, and Jimmy was always coming over here lately. I kept telling Toby that he shouldn’t encourage Jimmy to leave my yard…but Toby just didn’t understand, I guess. Well, in fact, Jimmy was hit by a car this morning. He must have been crossing the street to your house.”

  Dinah re
sponded immediately, as was appropriate, without having time to think of the gray cat or her father, so obviously saddened. “Oh, Dad, I’m sorry. He was a beautiful cat!”

  Her father looked particularly pained, and he shook his head in a manner that indicated a resigned futility. “Why in God’s name do people always say something asinine like that about a cat? What difference does it make what he looked like?” He was making himself very angry, but he was also tired. She watched him with alarm and fascination. Dinah had expected such a different conversation that her mind had not really started to work on what he was saying.

  “Well, Dad,” she said, “that cat was pretty hard on the wildlife.” Was she trying to justify this cat’s death to protect Toby? To protect himself? She had never considered her father a sentimental man; she had always known, at least, that neither she nor her mother could ever touch any kernel of his sentiment. That’s what she thought, at any rate, but now he leaned back against the doorjamb, and his face filled with a familiar look of gleeful irony.

  “Yes, Jimmy was a great hunter.” He arched his eyebrows with pleasure. “It was the only career I could get him to take up. He wasn’t the least interested in the law, or accounting.” Then he grew solemn again and was intent upon getting Jimmy’s description clear. “He was a very smart cat,” he said. “No, he was an intelligent cat. Not at all sweet-natured, but canny.” She would have to think later about whatever it was he meant by this; she couldn’t understand it now, but her father had always been a man who chose his words with stingy care. She knew she must give them some thought. “But, you know,” he went on, “until he got so interested in Toby, he had always been a cat who was content to live in his own yard. I have that fence, you see. Dogs didn’t bother him. Oh, well…well, will you let the children know?”