“Could be.”
“Better let me take them along with me.”
“Why?”
“Why!”
She answered him with a half-shrugged wave of the hand. He saw why, of course. The sun, now sinking outside, had reached even here, dappling on mallet and rope, on quoit and bow and all other implements for game, as outside it must be touching, one by one for tomorrow’s life, the trees.
“I don’t like to take away any of it. He hasn’t very much of his—of those years. Before he knew me. I don’t like to—seem against him.”
He stared at her.
“Don’t you see? He did me an injury. Long ago. And he can’t forget it. Forgive.”
“So you have to let him keep on—trying.”
“No. It was nothing physical. Not really. Not with those. He—” Her hand went to her mouth. “Oh—what does it matter? He married me under a false name.” She made an odd, stretching grimace with her lips, like a child released from medicine. “No worse than what I did to him.”
She swayed then, and he would have shut up—but she held her hand out, for the box.
“But don’t you want anything else!” he cried. He heard it echo. “You could leave. Again.” All the unaskable questions—to her, to anyone, tumbled out at once. “Can’t you pity yourself!”
“I can, I do,” she said. “But not without Sligo.”
They exchanged a glance conjoined but unseeing, the mutual hold of two people in their separate ways looking back.
“Don’t come again.” Her voice was harsh. “I can’t afford the perspective.”
For help, he turned to the man sleeping there. It was said that sleepers remembered what was said while they slept, poison or balm in the ear. He wondered. In the hospital he had seen nurses speaking for hours on end to catatonics, who it was said registered everything, and if their lips ever broke open again, would recall. No one could lie there as Sligo was, except in stupor, the head sideways on the arm now, position otherwise unchanged. He could think of nothing to tell that ear. “Hadn’t I better help you get him to bed?”
“He gets up himself. After a while.”
“Will he remember?”
“Not always. Not—for a while.”
“Not until Mondays?” He slapped the box.
She held out her arms, hands cupped. Quite suddenly, he laid the box along them, and strode to the door. At his name, he stopped.
“You’re welcome,” he said, without turning.
“Guy—”
She was holding the box clasped to her as if it were an infant, or two dozen long-stemmed American Beauty roses. “Is it sick of me? That I stay.”
Hair prickled on his nape. Questions on leaving were so often for the leaver as well. He heard an answer, long ago inserted in his own ear. “Without help—” He choked on it. “Surely—? But why do you ask me?”
She bent her head.
The door behind him was stuck with dampness. He kicked it open. No sun came with it. “Without help,” he said again, half to himself, hand on knob. “I’ll come Mondays.”
When he got home, he began rustling up his usual meal for these nights, a cold evening supper anybody might have on his day of rest. During the week he was a fair enough straight cook, though he had never been able to become one of those over-interested bachelors. There were a number of other things he hadn’t been able to become, again or newly, but these did not intrude on him now. His mind was the merciful blank that warded off the black infections of others. Later on, when properly immunized, he might safely ponder those, but not now. As he banged the refrigerator door open and closed, crackled butcher’s paper and clinked dishes on a tray, taking comfort in all this domestic voodoo, he kept hearing a cat mewing at the small window which gave directly from bathroom shelf to high grass bank outside. He went to open it. The cat stepped in daintily among his toilet things, then drew itself up with the wariness of all cats that are helped. It was one he’d never seen before, a Siamese with the brown and buff markings called “points,” and the clenched head of its breed—like a child’s fist holding up eyes. At the sight of it, he could hear his mother, all her life a yearner for more than Hartford calicoes, sigh in her grave. This one would not be fed, but circled the house, calling, and after a minute he put it out again, through the same window. He himself preferred dogs.
When he had brought his tray to the screened porch—“terrace” the builder had called it—where he had all his meals summers, he heard the cat again, nosing at the screen and retreating somewhere into the dusk outside. He got up with a sigh of his own, fetched a dish of milk and set it outside, then sat down to his meal, on a low settle he’d placed to face the grove of trees that hid the river, holding the tray on his knees. Above the grove, the sky was still full of western light. After a moment, a cat came to feed, but not the first one—a black tom he’d fed once or twice before. Shortly, a high, silvery voice, young girl or young woman, wended here and there through the grove. “Here, kitty-kitty, here, Max. Ma-ax.” The tom lifted its head, then bounded off, in the opposite direction. This drama too had occurred before. The voice, still calling, after a while always blended away. He’d never decided whether or not the cat was Max.
He was still eating when a girl in a bathing suit stepped into the clearing and came toward him, head bent. Halfway, she stopped, facing the trees, put both hands to her mouth as if she were blowing on a conch and said faintly, “Max?” Circling the barn, not calling again, she came round to the screen door, hands locked behind her, head still bent, saw the dish and gave a start of surprise, saw him, and palms at her chest, gave another. He smiled tentatively at her, not sure whether she could see this through the screen at this hour, but did not rise. The heavy tray held him indolent now. The thin figure, dim in its faded robin’s-egg suit, barefoot, was close to a child’s. And it was his porch, his clearing, hidden without sign or path, where even in daytime he was almost never surprised.
“Excuse me,” the girl said, “but you don’t have a cat, do you.”
“Well, no, I don’t. But I’ve been feeding somebody’s.”
“Oh.” She seemed to peer in at him. “A black one? Oh, that’s ours,” she said, before he had a chance to nod.
“Oh, is he. I wondered. He always seems to run the other way.”
She giggled. About fourteen, he’d say, with those pointed little breasts that couldn’t be counterfeited, nor the way her hands latticed at them. “Oh, he’s just one I found. He’s been giving the others the worst habits. But the rest are really ours.”
“Are they.” He couldn’t help his stiffness toward those who were too casual to the young of any breed, even when they were themselves the young of another. “There did seem to be several, and there didn’t seem to be anybody—”
“My p—my people are away, you see.” The manner was suddenly elegant, the voice theirs from five to fifty, kin to the one he’d left only an hour ago. “Which ones have you seen?”
The tray felt heavy on his knees, too awkward somehow to rise. He judged her after all about twenty. “There was a Siamese here, just a few minutes ago.”
“Itty-Katty!” She clutched her brow. “Oh God and criminy, that’s my mother’s, she’ll be frantic.”
“And a striped one, yesterday.”
“Fatty-Kitty! I haven’t seen her for two days. Oh dear, will I catch it. They’re not allowed in the house, you see. Because we’ve been staying at Gran’s.”
More likely twelve. She was small in size, and he hadn’t been around children. Possibly even ten. “We could go hunt up Itty, er, Kitty,” he said. “I don’t think the other one’s been around today. That is, Fatty, er, Katty. The striped.”
“Got you!” she said, clapping her hands.
“I beg your—”
“Itty-Kat. Fatty-Kit. Oh it drives everyone wild. Scat-rhythm, to coin a pun—as my father says. Makes you say it on the downbeat, you see. The other would just be Dixieland.” She peered in on him, as if
at another world she expected to see there. “Jazz. We all pretend to be fanatic on the subject. To annoy Gran.” Her voice was suddenly shy.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Is any one of those creatures named Max?”
“Why, that’s the one you’ve been feeding!” she said. “The lost one.”
“Oh, the lost one.” He looked down at the dish. “Good old Max.”
She giggled. “That’s what my kid cousin said. Bill, he’s a senior at Stanford. He was here till today, but he had to go back early.”
Good old Bill. Eighteen? He gave up. It was the gloaming hour, just before all cats became gray.
“Oh, don’t get up,” she said. “You finish your meal, fevvens sake. And don’t think of helping hunt—that’s my responsibility. I was going to ask you a favor, but not that one. If it wouldn’t be too much of a drag. Oh gee—well, thanks.” As she came through the door, she looked up at him. All he could be sure of was that she wasn’t ten. “I guess I ought to introduce myself, hadn’t I, I’m Alden Benjamin, we live just down the road.” She recited this rapidly.
“Oh, how do you do, I’m G—”
“Oh I know who you are, of course.” She refused a chair and sat on the floor, clasping her knees. “You’re Mr. Callendar. Gwee Callendar.” This last came very softly, as if it were being tried out for the first time. “The tenant,” she said.
“Ten—? Oh.” He glanced up at his own eaves, the fine old triangulated ones, deep enough for swallows to nest in, on whose rescue he had rubbed his knuckles bare.
She giggled. “Oh, I know. Not really, any more. But it’s always been called that, kind of, ever since the land grant—it was one, you know. Some revolutionary jerk, way back. And it’s marked that way on the map that went with it—‘tenant’s land.’” She gave a small, convulsive smile. “They still like to think…you know how p—” She coughed. “—people are.”
“Oh.” He drew out a cigarette. “Your—people.”
She nodded. “Parker and Buzzie.”
“Cigarette?”
She lit the filter end. He gave her another. She addressed the trembling end of it, deeply. “It’s just, you know, I smoke these plain fags.”
He stood up again. “Just about to get myself another beer. Would you—?”
“Oh, no thanks, I mean, I do, but no thanks.”
He brought back a Coke and a plate of store cookies, the filled kind.
She ate one. “Peanut butter! God. Haven’t tasted it since I was six.”
“Your—people,” he said. “They’re—your parents?”
“Oh dear.” She sat back to survey herself, unclasping her knees. Sparks flew from her, and the cigarette. She retrieved it. “I catch everything, don’t I know it. There was this boy at the Proot, he used to say it.”
“The—Proot?”
“Prewitt Country Day.”
“Oh.” He remembered the term, from Hartford. “A school.”
She stared. “It’s just down the road from here.” She waved a hand, inland. “I used to go there.”
He often had a sense of how much in this landscape was just down the road from him, from childless people living in inns and barns. This was one of the times. “Which is which?” he said.
“Hmm?”
“Your people.”
“Mummy is Parker.” Suddenly she took another cookie. She gulped it. “Oh, you mustn’t think—Buzzie is very dignified. He can’t perform an instrument or anything, but he has this very serious interest. He even wanted to go to the Newport Festival, the jazz one. But Parker dragged him off to the Casals. Spain, or somewhere. She recruits for Gran, you see.” She hefted a sigh. “That’s why I’m here.”
“To see me?”
“Oh, no. Well, partly. But I meant here in this godforsaken end of nowhere. Home.”
It was almost dark now. “You must have a huge view from there.”
“Oh no, our part’s all overgrown, been that way since I was a child, not that I mind. And Gran won’t give us the money to—” She broke off. “Anyway, the only place you can see out is up-river. From Gran’s tower.”
“Oh yes, I think I’ve seen it,” he said. “An old American Gothic. Way, way on south there, there’s one open spot. Through those trees. But I should think my trees would block—the tenant’s, that is.”
In the dark, her eyes shone. “No. You’re our view.”
“Oh.” It had never struck him that anyone could look in on his solitude. “Dull for you.”
She was silent for a time. “Summer!” she said then. “Summer around here is sure a real dark nervous green.”
“Nervous?”
“Oh God,” she said. “Me again. I’m an absolute ensemble. We had a guest last week—Hollywood. That’s what they say out there. For anything awful.”
He repeated it. “It does have a hit.”
“Mmm.” Her voice was shrewd. “So did he.”
He turned on the porch light. “You mind telling me something? Exactly how many years ago was it you tasted peanut butter. Since you were six?”
She lowered her chin, then raised it. It was a more than nice face, not quite lovely, but sympathetically planed, already shaped both to give and to receive. She tilted it higher. “Ten. Ten and a half.”
He was less relieved than he should have been. “I judged you older, somehow,” he murmured.
Her look said that his judgment was profound.
“All I ask is to be old enough to be natural,” she said gruffly. “I just pray for it.”
“Other way round, I thought. When you’re young is when you are, I thought.”
“Not when you’re me. I’m just only bits and pieces of whosever’s around. Simply hilarious.” She gave a doleful shrug. “It can last on and on too, Buzzie says, the way it has with himsel—” She coughed. “Unless you have a serious interest.” She flung her head back, and her hands—flung the world off. “I don’t mind Gran, though. Funny thing, when a person is themselves, no matter what, they’re not so catching. To me, that is.”
“She’s old enough, I gather? To be nat—”
“Boy!” She giggled. “I’m supposed to be looking after her—and the cats, of course. And she’s supposed to be taking care of me. But that’s Parker for you.” She rested her chin on her knees, eyes up. “Anyway…summer around here is sure a…grim. I don’t see how you stand it. I should think it’d drive you absolutely nuts.” Then, with a horrified glance at him, she sat up very straight, open-mouthed, arms at her sides. He had a feeling that only manners, or perhaps the delicacy which already showed so plain on her, kept her from clapping a hand to that mouth.
He was used to this of course. One couldn’t expect them to be as used to his history as he was. “Tell me,” he said. “The favor you wanted to ask me.”
From what he could see of her cheeks they were red, but she answered in his own tone. “I was wondering. If by any chance you were going to be around next weekend. Labor Day weekend.”
“Why, yes.” The past afternoon rose up in him, dark pool so alien from this light refreshment its own dusk offered him. “As a matter of fact—I was planning to.”
“And you don’t seem to mind cats. At least, you’ve been feeding them.”
“We-ell, that’s about it, I don’t mind them. I prefer dogs, of course.”
“Of course,” she said. “But then—you don’t have a dog.”
He stared at her, at their image of this clearing, minuscule in their distance, across which a toy man, toy solitary, never walked a toy dog.
“Apparently Gran isn’t too old for twenty-twenty vision,” he said.
Her face was still pink. She kept it lowered. “Oh—she never goes up there. It’s hot as blazes, and full of dead flies. Lucky for me. You see—they’re supposed to be off the place altogether. The cats. And I’ve been keeping them up there, or trying to.” She looked up at him. “Cats need a place!” Her lip trembled.
“And yours is closed up?”
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p; “Rented. So they could go, you know. And we couldn’t ask the renter to keep four. And for four, there just wasn’t enough—well, a kennel was just—out. So it was up to—” She cast him a faint smile. “Gran never thinks about money. Far as she knows, that’s where they are.”
“So it was up to you,” he said.
“Oh, I’m quite dependable.”
“Yes.” He watched that movie. “I can see that you are.”
“And it would all work out,” she said. “Only dammit, just for this weekend I’m being sent away.”
“Ah yes,” he said. “From your tower.” When his powerful garage light was on, as it often was if he worked evenings, then his clearing must hang in the trees like a fair. Still, it was cruel of him. “Like Rapunzel,” he said. “Or, no. Rapunzel was kept.”
“Oh, I’m not de trop, or anything,” she said. “Gran wouldn’t give a hang. It was Buzzie who insisted. She’s having a very sophisticated bunch up for the weekend, some of her screamers—you wouldn’t know about that—and…and I’m not supposed to be that sophisticated. So Parker had to arrange for me. Buzzie was really very strong about it.” She looked proud.
“Good for Buzzie.” A sudden thought struck him. “Cats give some people asthma,” he said absently.
Her face fell.
“Oh, not me,” he said hastily. “I thought perhaps that was why—”
“Gran? No, far as I know she just ha-ates them. Really she’s just one of those people who’s mortally afraid of them. There’s a name for it.”
“Mmm.”
“If one comes in a room where she is, she jumps up on a table. They do rather go for her extra. They know.” She chewed a finger. “Could be her color too, of course. She’s got some vein disease that doesn’t bother her otherwise. But she is blue. I expect you’ve heard.”
“N-no, I—” He leaned back, arms folded. “Your gran. Mrs. Aldrich. She jumps on tables. And she is bl—?”
“Really, rather turquoise.”
“N-no,” he said. “I h-hadn’t.” Hiccups engulfed him. “Heard.”
She waited until he’d finished, to stand up. “I didn’t think you’d laugh. At other people’s misfortunes. I didn’t really think you would.”
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