“He’s waiting for us outside,” Maud drew him on. Then, in a rush, squared him with: “Caroline and Julia are waiting with him.”
Ah! He saw it in a flash—her image of him: the one she had cleaved to throughout their near two years of separation: the entirety of it, the sum of whose parts (lover, husband, father) she had long since molded into a completeness of expectation which, now, entirely, she posited in his very lap.
He took it up: “Caroline and Julia…” seen last as infants; loved out of emotional habit and on glad principle, the love tender, soft, illusory: one that had often occupied his daytime thoughts at sea but had never materialized as an invader of his night-time dreams. “I can’t imagine what they must be like,” he said in slow reflection. “How they must look now.”
She showed surprise: “But you have all the recent pictures of them,” said with a hint of protest, “—all the ones I’ve sent so regularly.”
He shook his head. Now was not the time or place. “I haven’t received any mail for a long time,” he said. “A lot’s happened. I’ll tell you about it later.” He tried for a dismissing smile that failed to strengthen.
He might have gotten by if only she hadn’t said: “We’re together. That’s all that matters.”
She took his hand and, as his protector, held it: he had come so suddenly undone. She ignored his tears; went beyond them: “Last week,” she began in a once-upon-a-time way, “I went to the lake and opened up the cabin. Got the remains of winter out of it. We’ll go there tomorrow, just the two of us. You can tell me everything then…. I was going to surprise you…Morgan?”
“Glorious,” he brought out. And, after a deep breath: “I swore to myself I wouldn’t fall apart.”
“Oh,” she said, almost laughing, “when you called this morning, after you hung up, I cried and cried and cried. Sopped the pillow.”
Her words fell on him like a mantle and for a moment more he sheltered under their cover. Then, insofar as he was outwardly restored, he picked up with: “I can’t wait to see the children. You are marvelous.”
“I knew you’d understand,” she said, passing over his view of herself in the matter, keeping to the core of it, “understand, I mean, how important it is for them.”
He thought it remarkable that the words they had thus far spoken, comprising as they did the unmasking text of their reunion, were being said so quietly in the hive of a railroad terminal with, all around them, the great industry of life going on, loud and churning and otherwise independently bent. He put on his cap and stood up: “Will I be able to tell them apart?”
“No,” she smiled, “but don’t worry. You’ll figure out how to soon enough.”
And, as they walked: “I hope they’ll like me.”
“Oh, but they do,” she wonderfully replied. “They do. They know all about you. All they need is to see you in the flesh.”
Outdoors, on the sidewalk, the crowd was thinner. He had the strong pleasure of seeing Maud’s hair take fire in the sunlight. “There,” she said, pointing off to her left down a line of waiting cars drawn up beside the curb. There indeed: the Leigh’s remembered “family car,” a maroon-colored, seven-passenger Packard with whitewall tires, and standing next to its polished bulk, Dennis, holding the hands of two little girls. Maud hurried toward them. At her approaching call, the three of them turned and began to run toward her.
Toward him.
Of that moment, what stayed longest in his memory was the look on the children’s faces of terrific curiosity.
Dennis was the first to speak: “Welcome home, Mr. Shurtliff. We’re all mighty pleased to have you back.”
He dropped his kit-bag and rung Dennis’s hand, then took another hand, tiny, that was tugging at his sleeve, its owner a stranger of a child in a blue flower-sprigged dress who told him in a high, positive voice that pierced him through: “You’re Morgan.”
He knelt to her and looked into her eyes: “Yes,” he affirmed, feeling from Mars: “I’m Morgan.”
The other child, mirror-image of the first, but wearing a green dress, stepped up to him. “My name is Caroline,” she said.
“Ah,” he murmured. He looked from one child to the other and said back their names (their identities secured for them by their different dresses), and, in as serious a way as they were seriously regarding him, he said to them: “You were this big the last time I saw you,” measuring off in the air a mite distance between his two hands. “You’re very grown up now.”
“We had a birthday party,” Julia rushed to say. She made the important point of holding up three fingers.
“You’re three years old,” he acknowledged, touching first the stub of Julia’s nose, then Caroline’s. He stood up and whispered to Maud: “They’re beautiful.”
Her returned smile was radiant: “Bright, too,” she whispered back. She looked at her watch and made a herding gesture: “Let’s go.”
In a degree of almost forgotten comfort he sat beside her on the car’s back seat whose velour upholstery retained a whiff of the attar-of-rose perfume Mrs. Leigh regularly applied to her handkerchiefs and to a small swatch of gauze she tucked between her breasts (the gauze visible sometimes when she leaned forward). The twins sat on the swivel jump seats. Dennis, in Mrs. Leigh’s remembered words, “manned the wheel.”
Within minutes, certain of the children’s character-traits were established for him: in equal measure they were immensely friendly, immensely trusting; laughter came easily to them; they were interested in the world and alert to its surprises. Caroline was an instantaneous reactor, a hasty, dispelling chatterer who thrived in the present tense and was competitive; Julia was quieter—a gazer and a listener who thought ahead: “When we get home,” she told him, “you can play with Ralph.”
“Ralph,” he said, looking directly at her. “Tell me about Ralph.”
Julia frowned: “Well,” she slowly began, “he’s yellow and he has big ears.”
Maud, he saw, was going to let the mystery of Ralph unfold on Julia’s terms. “How many legs does Ralph have?”
Caroline interjected: “He’s got a long tail,” dismissing the numerical question.
Julia, though, said: “Four.”
He asked her: “Is Ralph a cat?” But her concentration had strayed: her eyes were on his and Maud’s hands, on the clasp of their intertwined fingers, and he thought: she’s wondering about me—the arrived myth—sitting before her with a hand joined to her mother’s in a hold she perhaps senses as one that separates her from her mother in a way heretofore unknown, and he felt a kind of pity for her innocence and her plight of adjustment. He would have liked to be able to explain to her that he too was adjusting: that he was as new to the task as she was.
Caroline said, “He’s not a cat. He’s a dog,” and, swinging her legs: “Pip gave him to us.”
“Ah,” he exclaimed. “So Ralph’s a dog. And who’s Pip?”
“Your father,” Maud stated.
“Pa! ‘Pip’?” he charged, as surprised as he was amused.
“He chose it.” Maud smiled: “He said he couldn’t bear the thought of being called ‘Gramps’ or what he described as ‘some other age-inducing term of grandpaternal veneration.’”
He could absolutely hear his father saying that sentence. “When did Pip”—he had to try out his father’s new name—“give Ralph to you?”
Julia looked to Maud for the answer; Caroline kept swinging her legs.
Maud put a stilling hand on Caroline’s knees: “Gently, Callie.” (It startled him: took him way back in time: “Callie” had been his father’s sobriquet for his mother.) “About six months ago. Pip found him lying in a ditch by the side of the road. He’s a young dog. Somebody just abandoned him, we guess. He was pretty far gone. Pip thinks he’d either been grazed by a car or mauled by a bigger dog. Maybe a fox.” (From the intent way the twins were listening, he could tell that Ralph’s story was a favorite with them.) “Anyhow, Pip picked him up and took him to the vet an
d the vet patched him up and gave him a rabies and distemper shot, and then Pip nursed him along for a couple of weeks and by the time he brought him to us, Ralph was thriving.”
“Who named him?”
“Tessa. The first day we had him, she kept calling him Ralph—I don’t know why—and it just stuck. It suits him.”
“What breed is he?”
Dennis, until then silent, guffawed. “Dog, Mr. Shurtliff,” said in the voice of a base-minded vaudevillian; “Complete dog.”
He saluted Dennis’s summation.
Maud though, elaborated: “We’re sure collie. That mostly, with maybe a bit of beagle and cocker spaniel and golden retriever thrown in.”
“Lord! Is he smart?”
Maud hedged: “He’s—eager. Very eager.”
The way she said it and the loaded look she gave him was terribly funny; sexual somehow. He exploded into laughter.
He was having a marvelous time.
The twins had no dimples; their hair wasn’t curly; their bodies were not cherubically chubby. Of cuteness, none, or of the darling that draws exclamations from sentimental strangers. Fair hair, thick and shiny, framed their oval faces. Their long eyes were heavily lashed, the irises a dark, deeply-welled blue. Noses are unpredictable, but for now, theirs were formed in a way that augured well for the future. Expressive mouths. Good hands, the thumbs articulate. Legs straight as masts. But what was rarest was the stamp of laterness, seen on their faces as they gazed out of the car windows or were otherwise quietly engrossed: their beauty would outlast childhood: it was of a kind to be taken seriously at all stages of life…. As he studied them he couldn’t but think that their biological parents must have been a handsome pair, attractive to the world: attractive to each other in the costliest of ways….
“We know some songs,” Caroline said.
“Sing them for me.”
Baa, baa, black sheep…Polly, put the kettle on…Three blind mice…Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea / Silver buckles on his knee / He’ll come back and marry me / Pretty Bobby Shaftoe.
Caroline, the leader, switched from song to verse, reciting: “Ride a cockhorse to Banbury Cross / To see a fine lady upon a white horse / Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes / She shall have music wherever she goes.”
Julia took a deep breath: “Two blackbirds, sitting on a hill / One named Jack, one named Jill / Fly away, Jack, fly away, Jill / Come again, Jack, come again, Jill.” Finished, she said, “Now you, Morgan.”
Maud turned to him and said in a fast, whispered aside: “We’ll settle about the first-name bit later.”
(Hint of a cloud. What, he wondered, was there to “settle”?) He asked: “Do you know about the crookéd man?”—and to the children’s negative nods—“who walked a crookéd mile, who found a crookéd penny against a crookéd stile and bought a crookéd cat which caught a crookéd mouse and they all lived together in a little crookéd house.”
The children laughed. “Again…Say it again.”
He did, pleased to be a hit.
They were out of the city now, in deep country, fields and woods distributed all around them, greened in the thousand tones of spring. It was that fading hour of the afternoon when even on the stillest days the leaves of the sycamore trees shiver. In the merging harmony of the land’s immense calm and the warm nearness of Maud’s body and the children’s prattlings and the smooth ride over the familiar road, the tensions of the day began to fall away. He felt them going, like burdens lifted off his shoulders.
(Old Argus—Odysseus’s beloved hound—who died of joy when his master at last returned…)
Toward the stopped car, Ralph came, robust and juvenile, streaking over the lawn, barking with excitement.
And from the steps of the front porch, Tessa hurried toward him with outstretched arms, her face with its little white-berry blotches remembered as vividly as the generous face of his house with its imperfect fenestration, seen behind her, through tears.
Stirred by a risen twilight breeze, the trees communed in whispers. A mocking-bird sang.
At last, at last, he was home.
Indoors, he went from room to room, certain that were he blindfolded he could easily have done so, yearning and absence had so memorized them for him, their spacial encompassments and the contexts of their individual atmospheres like stanzas of poetry learned by heart—seen in the mind’s eye as on the page. And the stability of things, felt most in his study: on one of the wall-shelves, the novels collected and read in adolescence, their plots conveying of thrilling risk and a hero’s incorruptibility; and on his desk, his grandfather’s hour-glass, the float of its mercury placid in the clear cup of its bottom chamber; and over the desk, the Landseer water-color of sheep grazing on a hillside (a gift from his father on his twenty-first birthday). He picked up the amber globe of a paperweight, remembered as much for its beauty as for its fecklessness, tending as it did to roll off on its own, its stopping-point the brass lipping that bordered the desk’s surface—
“I’m sorry about the spot on the rug,” Maud startled from the doorway. “Ralph. Before he was fully house-trained. Tessa and I went at it with everything we could think of, but it does still show.”
She came into the room’s twilit luminance, entering its evocations.
From upstairs, Caroline and Julia were calling for her.
She didn’t care, she said in a whisper.
He put down the paperweight, staying it against an ink-well.
They kissed with all the rapture of their first encounters—as when, in the Leigh library, they would steal their chance before Doctor Leigh’s firm surgeon’s tread would be heard approaching the threshold.
“Where are you?” The children’s imperative question came now from down the hall.
As of yore—torture of Tantalus—they stepped apart.
In the pantry, he poured a drink of whiskey. A small window in the pantry door afforded a slotted glimpse into the dining room. Two places were laid on the table. Flowers. Candles to be lit. He turned around, his view now into the kitchen where Maud and Tessa were overseeing the twins at their supper, the scene a timelessly domestic one, a living model of a Dutch genre painting, even to the inclusion of the family pet: Ralph, over by the sink, was muzzle-deep in his own bowl of food.
Maud and Tessa cajoled: “No custard until you finish what’s on your plate.” “Use your spoon, Julia.” “Careful, Callie. Try not to spill.”
Julia acknowledged his presence in the doorway by raising a hand and fluttering it. He waved back. Caroline covered her face with her bib, then lowered the curtain: “Peekaboo.” “Peekaboo yourself,” he told her, ducking his head up and down, opening and shutting his eyes, making gargoyle faces. Giggles from Julia, now in the game. Caroline shrieked. Ralph barked.
Maud’s and Tessa’s glances informed him: he was gumming up the works. “I’m going to have a bath,” he announced. “I won’t be long.”
“We get a story before bed,” Julia said.
(Ah…sacred routine.)
Maud looked at him: “Take your time, darling. Have a nap if you want to.” And, with a full smile: “You’re home.”
Their bedroom. Its fragrance. Its remembered spring shadings made by the day’s last light coming through the windows emerald from the tree-tops.
The long mirror showed him in his uniform. In this room of all places, it bore no application, and he took it off with the haste of an actor shedding the costume of an uncongenial role. Then the droll moment when he opened his closet door and stood back, surprised to the point of silent laughter by the sartorial choices displayed within: jackets and pants and suits, all having to do with civilian life. From his kit-bag, he took out the wrinkled Durban jacket and hung it, honored, next to what had once been (might still be?) his favorite summer suit. But his uniform he hung apart.
In complete contrast to the accustomed military shower was the long bath taken in the commodious, old-fashioned lion-footed tub he’d stubbornly insisted o
n keeping when the bathroom was modernized. “In such a tub,” he’d told the plumber, “one could be a hippo.” The plumber—a bulbous-nosed, strong, noisy worker—had vowed he’d never wanted to be anything but the human being God had made him, but it was surely every man’s right to be what he wanted to be, even if it was such a soulless thing as a beast.
Out of his bath, he toweled himself dry and finished off the last of his whiskey. “Have a nap if you want to,” Maud had said. He did want to, terribly, after his soak, tired as he was from the long trip, and faced with the sight of the bed and its cool, turned down sheets. So he just would, he decided. Just would lie down for a few minutes and take a tight-eyed, short, restoring nap, one such as—as a fourteen-year-old Latin student with a sexually rhapsodic imagination—he had fancied a Roman centurion would have allowed himself at the end of a day’s march, enabling him, afterwards, to display to a soft-skinned, moist camp-follower a pair of testicles hard as agates and a penis erected of iron.
A risible fabulation…
Simply put, it was a nap from which he never wakened. Never, that is, until the next morning when dislocating sounds unknown at sea roused him (a dog’s bark, voices of children). He sat up, alert and knowing and appalled by what had happened: that he had spent the first night of his homecoming alone in his marriage bed. He put on a bathrobe and went down the hall and from the top of the stairs, wailed out her name: “Maud.”
She came and stood smiling up at him from below.
“I can’t believe what I’ve done.”
She was all mildness. “What?”
“What?” He reaccused himself: “Slept through the night is what. Exiled you to the guest room. God, darling—”
Matters of Chance Page 14