by Ward Just
Exactly, she said.
When we were settled in the car, I said, I don’t know your name.
Aurora, she said. I told you. And then she added, Aurora Brule.
I didn’t say anything but I was thinking, Idiot. Ahead of us the married couple and the Englishman were struggling to fit themselves into a green MG, the Englishman driving and the woman sitting in her husband’s lap, her slippered feet riding high above the windshield. I was silent a moment, watching the antics in the MG, the wife hilarious and the Englishman trying to put the key into the ignition, dropping the key, and pushing the wife’s foot out of the way while he rooted about on the floor of the car. The husband was drinking from a flask, and when his wife reached for it he held it away, out of her reach.
Your bachelor father, I said.
She nodded. The head doctor, she said.
Oh, Christ, I said.
I’ll take that cigarette now, she said.
I passed her the pack of cigarettes and my Zippo. Ahead of us the green MG lurched off in a cloud of exhaust, trailing laughter, the woman’s crinoline skirt billowing in the breeze. The policeman at the end of the drive gave them a friendly wave but they ignored him. A cigarette sailed from the car and landed at his feet.
The Palshaws, Aurora said. Oscar and Lizzie. And the rude Englishman at the wheel. I forget his name but I heard he was a lord and he seems to be their permanent houseguest. I dated Oscar once. Once was enough. That MG, you might as well be riding in a coffin. He has trouble locating the gearshift and there’s no escape.
You dated Oscar?
Last summer, she said. And the next thing I knew, he was engaged to Lizzie.
Not a success, I said.
Definitely not a success, she agreed. And you won’t believe my father’s enthusiasm when he said, I told you so.
Their favorite words, I said.
Fathers, yes, she said.
I’m sorry what I said about him.
It was funny, Aurora said. For a minute I thought you were putting me on. When it was clear you weren’t, I just went along for the ride. Aurora lit her cigarette and exhaled in a long thin stream. She put her head on the backrest and looked at me, her eyes owlish behind thick-lensed glasses. They had materialized from nowhere and I decided she was more attractive with glasses than without, though I had not paid much attention to her looks beyond a general impression that she was pretty. At these formal dances it was difficult seeing beneath the party skin, the tulip-shaped dress, the corsage, the coiffure, and the forced laughter, except Aurora’s dress was more lily than tulip, she wore no corsage, and her laughter was not forced. In the quiet of the car I could smell her perfume and give attention to her voice, which seemed to me to have the timbre of an oboe. Her voice, the music of her personality, carried an odd cadence and inflection—
The Pal-shawzzz, Oscar and Lizzzzzie—
that on first hearing sounded affected but the longer I listened did not seem affected at all, simply a signature. She was small-boned and small-faced, made smaller by her short haircut. Her sheath dress was cut low and not made for a debutante. In the light of the dance floor her hair looked dark blond but now seemed merely dark. She looked nothing like her father, save for a tightly wound quality softened by her smile. Her mouth curved up at the edges as if she knew a secret and the secret was amusing and hers alone. Looking at her now, I had the sensation of stopping at a portrait I had seen often at a gallery, taking the time now to observe instead of look. Aurora had opened the glove compartment and was peering into it, muttering that she needed a Kleenex. When I handed her my handkerchief she began to slowly polish the lenses of her glasses.
She said, What about the champagne?
I handed her one of the glasses I had on the floor between my feet. I took the other, we clicked, and she said, Luck.
Luck, I said.
So don’t feel badly, she went on. It’s not worth it.
Sometimes I talk too much, I said. Without thinking.
Forget it, she said.
I’ve wanted to meet him—
I can arrange that, she said. I’ll make an appointment. Not that it’ll do you much good. He doesn’t talk much. Talking isn’t his long suit. I assume it’s a conversation you want, not a consultation.
God, no, I said hurriedly, throwing the car into gear and backing off the lawn and into the driveway. The policeman had moved off into the shadows, his uniform making him nearly invisible. Aurora was laughing at my “God, no.”
I said after a moment, Is he good at what he does?
She said, I guess so. They say he is. He has patients all day long and often into the evening and they swear by him. They send him flowers on his birthday.
Well, I said. He must talk to them.
Not necessarily, she said.
He must, I insisted. That’s what psychiatrists do, ask leading questions about your dreams and so forth and so on. Your sex life.
He’s a Freudian, she said wearily. Freudians listen, the patients speak. It’s a technique. The patient is led to her own discoveries, and dreams would be one of the routes. All dreams are sexual, by the way.
All dreams? I asked skeptically.
No exceptions, she said. Sometimes he’ll go fifty minutes without saying a word and then he looks at his watch and says, See you next week. Now will you please give it a rest? Aurora was sitting with her feet on the seat, the glass of champagne resting on one knee and her fist with the cigarette on the other. Now and again she jerked her hand out the window to flick the ash from her cigarette.
But I didn’t want to give it a rest, preoccupied as I was with the sexuality of dreams, including one I had had about falling from a great height. I said, I suppose it’s the quality of the listening, then. Listening well, concentrating hard.
She said, You can usually tell when they’re bored. They try not to show it but they don’t succeed. At least, they don’t succeed with me. You can feel their attention wander and suddenly they aren’t there, they’ve gone away. Their heads are there, and their crossed legs, and their notebooks and pencils and shirt cuffs and shoes. The creak of a chair when they shift their weight. Their breathing’s there. But they aren’t.
You’ve been, then, I said.
Of course, Aurora said.
What was it like? I had an idea it was an all-consuming experience like a serious illness or sex. And I was surprised by her casual “of course,” as if psychiatry was as normal as homework.
She turned to give me a long wary look, and then hesitated before she replied, Not all it’s cracked up to be.
Was it—I sought a neutral word—helpful?
Told me things I didn’t know or even imagine. Whether the things were helpful, we’ll see.
My father thinks it’s voodoo.
Well. She thought a moment. In one sense, it’s like sticking pins in dolls.
She was silent, winding her index finger around her gold necklace. I wondered if that had any special significance that a voodoo master could spot and, with a blinding flash of insight, explain.
We were driving slowly along Lake Road, most of the houses dark except for lawn lights, somehow out of focus, that gave the grass an unnatural amber cast. The effect was amateurishly theatrical, a midsummer night’s dream on the lawn of a banker’s mansion, Caliban cavorting in the moonlight. Unnatural too was the architecture, European souvenirs, here a mansard roof from a château of the Loire, there a stone arch from a manor house in East Anglia, up high an eyelid window from the brothers Grimm, down below heavy double doors fashioned by the bearded Norwegian cabinetmaker in his shop on Skokie highway. You could lose your way inside these houses, corridors without end, rooms that had never been looked into. Now I noticed a single light burning in a downstairs room of the nearest house, and I imagined an insomniac ill at ease in the library, a book in her lap, listening to the clock tick, wondering what happens next or if anything happens. The time was past midnight, the moon a sliver among the trees, the lake out o
f sight back of the houses.
Fortresses, Aurora said. You stay in and the world stays out. No admittance to the world without an invitation. That’s the point. Did you see the cop back there? Oscar threw his cigarette at him. What a place. I’d call it a Potemkin village but it’s all too real. And what it conceals, not very successfully, is a lack of imagination.
They like it in there, I said.
They surely do, she agreed.
They feel safe. And the world envies them.
The genius of capitalism, she said.
My father says that money isn’t everything but it’s way ahead of whatever’s in second place.
Aurora smiled in the darkness. She said, My father wouldn’t agree, I’m afraid. But then again, he sees the results.
I suppose he would, I said.
She said, What does your father do?
Not psychiatry, I said. He owns a printing business.
Are you going into it?
No, I said.
That’s a start, she said.
What do you mean by that? I asked, annoyed at her presumption.
She looked away and didn’t reply. I’m outspoken, she said at last. Always have been. It’s the way I am, take it or leave it. But I don’t see you in business. She had thrown away her cigarette and was moving her right hand sideways out the window, catching a balloon of air and releasing it. Now she bent her head close to the dashboard and switched on the radio, Hit Parade music. I turned off Lake Road and headed inland, picking up speed on the deserted streets, waiting for her to continue.
He takes me to school, she said suddenly. He thinks buses are dangerous so he drives me to school and then turns around and goes back to the apartment so he can prepare for his first patient. He’s never said much on these drives until lately, my last three or four weeks of school. He’s decided to open up. He’ll stop at a light and point at some poor pedestrian and say, Paranoid, and at another and say, Repressed, and at a third and say, Hysteric. When I asked him how he knows, he said by the way they carry themselves, their gait, and the expression on their faces. A certain aura surrounds them. Everyone has an aura, a particular style, a signature that belongs only to them. When I pointed out that the paranoid one had his hat pulled down over his eyes in such a way that you could not see his expression, my father said he knew what the expression was without seeing it because he knew the aura, and the angle of the hat confirmed it. He was quite definite. And he did this every day while he was taking me to school, analysis on the run. Isn’t that strange? But we’re very close.
Aurora finished her champagne and carefully put the glass under the seat. She continued to sit with her hands on her knees, except now her chin was resting on her hands. He was in the war, she said, and the way she said it I knew she meant World War Two. They were going to call him up for Korea but they didn’t. My father has terrible headaches and perhaps that was the reason, but I never heard of missing a war because of a headache, did you? He was in the Pacific. And he won’t say a word about it. None of them do. Another conspiracy of silence.
She said, Was yours?
In the war? No.
Why not?
I thought a moment. I don’t know, I said.
Medical deferment, probably.
I suppose so, I said. My father had no medical problems that I knew of except for nearsightedness and, now, his knees. Probably it was his age. I imagined my father at Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, a second lieutenant like Sassoon’s infantry officer, recklessly brave, wounded in the chest, and at the end of it a pacifist. His war would have made him a different man, not the father I knew but another personality altogether. Sassoon’s nerves were shot—
Won’t say a word, Aurora said. Won’t say where he was or what he did. But he was trained as a surgeon, so I imagine that was what he did, care for the wounded. I know when he got out he went back to school to become a psychiatrist. He’s a lonely man but he won’t admit it.
Maybe that’s the essence of loneliness, I said. Not admitting anything.
Maybe it is, she said.
Lonely, you speak only to yourself because you’re the only one who’ll listen. And then it becomes a habit. Aurora said nothing to that, and after a moment I said, Can I meet him?
Sure, she said. Don’t ask about the war, though.
I won’t, I said.
He’s only told me one thing, when I asked about it. And I’ve asked him more than once. He said he was on a hike. That’s what he called it, “the Hike.” She was quiet again, looking out the window and humming to the music on the radio, one of Frank Sinatra’s old wartime songs. She said, You’re simpatico.
I said, So are you.
I don’t meet many boys who are simpatico.
I said, You scare them away.
Why did you ask me to dance?
I was avoiding Dana, I said. You were alone and you looked like you wanted to dance and I liked your looks. It wasn’t a bad idea, either, because here we are drinking champagne without anyone cutting in.
You didn’t like it when I made that crack about your father’s business.
Sore subject, I said. He’s had some trouble with his business. A strike and some minor violence, so he hasn’t been himself.
She didn’t say anything. She looked to be counting her toes, one by one. Then she said, I have a hard time with my father. There’s one way, his way. And one story, his story. And if you don’t fit into his story, well then, you don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s hard to discuss anything with a man like that. Plus which, his grandparents were Dutch. He’s hardheaded and so am I. Difference is, I’ll admit it and he won’t.
Even so, she said, we’re very close.
I put my arm on her seatback and she made room so that her head was resting on my wrist, and then her hair was in the palm of my hand. Her hair was rough against my fingers. She moved her head slowly and I knew without looking that she was smiling. I wondered what it meant, being Dutch, or if it meant anything. I realized that we had a story that, with luck, no one else would fit into. The story was only beginning, an hour or so in duration, but it was ours.
She said, Will you tell me one of your stories?
I said, I’ll make one up.
Not make-believe, she said. A real one from the newspaper, the story behind the story behind the story. What do they call it? The inside skinny.
The inside dope, I said. All the stuff that doesn’t get into the paper because of the libel laws. Questions of taste, questions of propriety, maybe because the subjects are friends of the publisher. Or the daughter of an advertiser or the son of an alderman we support. All sorts of reasons why the inside dope never sees print.
Tell me one, she said.
I’m thinking, I said.
Aurora raised her head suddenly to look around, then turned and stared sourly at me. Where are we, Wils? This is not the way to Chicago.
I said, We’re going to Quarterday. I thought you ought to see it.
I thought we were going to Chicago.
We were. We aren’t now.
And who decided that?
I did, I said.
I don’t like surprises, she said.
You’ll like this one.
How do I know? What if I insist you turn this car around?
I’ll argue and you’ll win. We’ll go to Chicago. But you’ll miss your one chance to see Quarterday at night. More romantic than Venice.
She shrugged unhappily and continued to stare out the window at the fields and the farmhouses scattered here and there. We met few cars. The farmhouses were dark. West of the North Shore a curtain descended, the air saturated with smoke from the smoldering Skokie peat bogs, the road rising some and falling, moving in a line so straight that the car seemed to be steering itself. There was breathing room here, I thought, even if what you were breathing was burning peat. The North Shore was hemmed in, each breath a kind of gasp, closely observed from behind eyelid windows. All in all, this anonymous countryside had
an attraction; the attraction was its undefinition. When we stopped at a railroad crossing I counted the freight cars, ninety-nine, bound for the Chicago rail yards. Aurora was silent beside me, smoking a cigarette as the monotonous fields flew by. We drove on, unobserved.
Indian country, Aurora said at last. We might as well be in the middle of Kansas. And just think, at this very moment we could be listening to jazz on Bryn Mawr Avenue. Are we at the Mississippi River yet? Aurora asked, and then I stopped at the golf club entrance.
Aurora’s head touched my shoulder. I kissed her tentatively, and again, not so tentatively. I drove slowly into the club grounds, past Sixteen and Seventeen and Five, the short par three. All the houses were dark, including my own. I pointed it out and explained the layout of the holes while Aurora yawned flamboyantly. It felt strange to me, being in these familiar surroundings with a girl. The men’s locker room was dark and I drove into the empty parking lot, stopping at the far end. I had an idea we could take a swim in the club pool, strictly forbidden after dark but there was no night watchman to check. Aurora took off her glasses. She said something I didn’t hear, and when I looked at her questioningly, she murmured, I like you. We like each other, I said. At that instant I did not want to be in the swimming pool or anywhere else except where I was. She took off my tuxedo jacket and threw it on the back seat and then she loosened my tie. When I moved to turn off the car’s headlights, Aurora’s hands flew from my shoulders and she screamed, a high-pitched wail such as a child might make. Staring at us through the window was a deer, its eyes blood red in the brilliance of the headlights. The animal did not move, mesmerized in the light; and then it turned and loped away, graceful leapings to the hedge that surrounded the parking lot, and over the hedge to the fairway on One, where it seemed to ascend into the darkness and in a moment was lost to view.
Aurora’s face was buried in my neck, her arms tight around me. She was trembling. I spoke softly to her, explaining about the deer everywhere around the club. Still, this one was alarming with its blood-red eyes and wolfish snout, tawny coat like a lion, so silent and static, as if it were staring into a mirror. But it was only a harmless deer after all.
