Night of Fire and Snow

by Alfred Coppel

  He could feel Alaine’s eyes on him. They were dark and gray and solemn under arching heavy blond brows. There was a touch of light about her, he thought, a glow that lived just under her skin, and a rich fullness to her body, large-breasted and heavy with the unborn child. He felt a stab of desire for her and reached for her hand.

  He pulled her down onto his lap and pressed his lips against her throat, feeling her sigh. “There’s always this answer,” she said ruefully, closing her eyes. He opened the front of her dressing gown and laid his face against the coolness of her breast. He could hear the quickening of her heartbeat.

  “This will do us no good at all,” she said faintly.

  “I know. Just stay where you are for a minute, that’s all.”

  Was she thinking of Nora, he wondered? It was odd, he thought, that coming back here fresh from his mistress—what else could he call Nora now?—he could suddenly think that he loved Alaine so. It was as though Nora were his wife, his keeper, and Alaine his love.

  “Please, Mike,” she said, her eyes still closed, “we can’t talk this way.”

  “I don’t want to talk, Allie,” he said.

  “Will you be gone overnight again?”

  “I don’t think so. Kirbee doesn’t like Moses Lake.”

  “Will you have someone call me if you have to stay?”

  “Ill have Chavez call. But I’ll try to get back.”

  Alaine stood up and held her gown together. She looked down at him and asked, “Mike, will you tell me the truth?”

  “What, Allie?”

  “You did see Nora this trip, didn’t you?”

  “That isn’t a question.”

  “Mike, please.”

  “Is that what you think? That every RON south of Santa Barbara is a shack-up with Nora?”

  “Tell me. I want to know.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I saw her for a few minutes. Is there anything wrong with that?”

  Tears welled into her eyes and she turned her face away.

  “It isn’t what you think, Allie.”

  “Mike—don’t lie. I can’t bear it when you lie to me.”

  He looked out across the sunlit roofs to the blue water of the bay. Richmond and Berkeley were clear and bright, and beyond, stacked against the hills, great towers of white cumulus rose into the sky. They made him think of the morning Tom and he had flown out into the stormy palisades toward that appointment with finality in the frozen mountains.

  Gulls banked and wheeled over the ebb-tide rushing through the channel of the Golden Gate and only the Navy tugs tending the submarine nets gave evidence that this was a year of war.

  For a moment Miguel surrendered to an irrelevant fear. The war was ending. The smell of victory was everywhere. And how did a man live in a world at peace? To Miguel the war had meant escape.

  “Allie,” he said suddenly. “When the war’s over let’s go away. I mean really far away.”

  Alaine sighed and said, “Oh, Mike—”

  “I mean it, Allie. Another year. Eighteen months at the outside. Your sister can take care of the baby for a while. We’ll go to Europe or maybe to South America.” He stood up and walked around the table to stand in front of her. “We need this, Allie. You know we do. I’ll have terminal leave pay coming and I’ve got almost twenty-five hundred dollars of Reserve bonus money. Let’s use it and just go. Maybe I could really do that book—Allie?” He realized suddenly that he was pleading with her to give him another chance at what they had once thought they had acquired with the marriage ceremony.

  “Mike,” she said quietly, “are you sure? Is it what you want?”

  “I’m sure,” he said, wondering if she knew how completely unsure he was about almost everything. She could generally tell when he shaded the truth, but he expected generosity from her. He felt he had, for some reason, the right to expect it.

  “With the baby and another year’s service I’ll have enough points to get out,” he went on anxiously. “Allie?”

  “And Nora, Mike?”

  “Forget Nora. Please.”

  Alaine regarded him soberly. “Can you?”

  “Yes, Allie. I swear it to you.”

  Alaine sat down and folded her hands in her lap. Miguel watched her, waiting.

  Presently, she said, “Your father would expect you to come home.”

  Yes, Miguel thought, Raoul would expect that. “No,” he said. “That’s out. No matter what.” And that much he was sure about. He had decided four years ago that he would never go back to Los Altos. In a way he could not quite bring himself to examine closely, he felt he owed it to his brother Luis to stay away. Luis, wherever he was, would understand.

  The telephone rang and it was Sergeant Chavez at the Flight Section asking if Lieutenant Rinehart would mind getting out to the field a little early. General Kirbee wanted to make the round trip to Moses Lake before nightfall.

  Miguel showered and changed into a fresh uniform. He felt cleaner and better.

  At the door, he took Alaine in his arms. He could feel the child moving inside her. What would it be, he wondered, a son? Or a blond daughter with somber gray eyes.

  “Are we all right, Allie?” he asked.

  “I hope so,” she said.

  “We will be,” he said, and kissed her hard.

  But riding in the Clipper, Nora came back. She always came back. He found himself remembering something Tom had once said, half-jokingly, half-bitterly. “It’s like watching incest to see you two together, you’re so much alike.” And Miguel had to shut his eyes and press the heels of his hands against them to blot out the sight of Tom with his face turned away into the snow and the blood oozing from his stumps into the muddy drifts.

  Two of his fellow passengers, a Signal Corps captain and a flight surgeon, tried to start a conversation, but Miguel pretended to be asleep.

  A month later, September 6, Dorrie was born. And in the spring, Miguel was a civilian again. There had been a year of work on the book—a good year that ended the following March in Europe. The Canceled Skies was winning him a reputation.

  Nora, he heard, had remarried.

  TWO

  The arcade was brightly lit and crowded. There were people dozing on benches, others arguing with the douanier about duties. The ticket counters were two deep in gesticulating Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, Americans, Germans—all complaining about the delays caused by the weather as though the harassed ticket agents could do something about it. With the doors closed against the Paris rain, the place smelled of garlic and damp wool, of perfume and sweat and liquor. The streams of travelers in the ugly room flowed together to make a mindless, displaced eddy. It struck Miguel that he was now part of this displaced population, the mass movement of people from here to there and back again, rootless and restless—some but for a short time and others, perhaps, forever—blown by the four winds and ten thousand airplane engines to and fro across the rim of the world. A man could so easily lose his sense of identity in this sea of transient humanity if he lacked the anchor of a home, of a place where he belonged.

  He made his way through the crowd to one of the counters where a huge glossy cat lay curled amid the perfume bottles surveying the room with yellow eyes half-closed by indifference. For some reason the animal’s lazy insolence pleased him. If I were to see only that cat, he thought, and that counter with its glass Taj Mahals of perfume, I would know I was in France. Other cats must have looked at the Nazi conquerors just that way, somehow typifying the pliable intractability and the charming ill temper of the Gallic spirit.

  These are the things I should have written about, he thought: French cats dozing on counters and petite salesgirls looking the way Parisiennes are supposed to look: slender, hungry-gaunt and small-bosomed and wearing cheap black dresses with the flair and style of Schiaparelli originals.

  He shook his head at the thought. What nonsense went through a man’s mind when he stood before a perfume counter. A blue enameled case the color of the sea
at Alassio. A lip rouge that captured the sunset at Mont Saint Michel. A tiara of rhinestones like the drops of dew on the grass on a nearly forgotten morning in Normandy.

  I can think of these things, he thought. But when I write them, they die.

  The girl addressed him in rapid French. Perversely, he replied in even more rapid Spanish. My mother’s tongue, he thought. Maria’s language and Concha’s. How long ago it all was.

  The girl shrugged. It was a charming gesture and he could not help smiling at her.

  “I’m American,” he said. “Let’s try it in English.”

  “I took m’sieu for a Frenchman,” she said. Clearly, she meant it as a compliment.

  Miguel was often taken for French or Italian. The dark hair already flecked with gray, the heavy black brows and the sharply aquiline nose looked European. Only the blue eyes struck a wrong note.

  He considered buying some perfume for Nora and discarded the idea. She had once asked him to make suggestions about her clothes and the cosmetics she wore. But that was long ago and she didn’t need that now. Nora learned quickly.

  ‘That small music box, ma’mselle,” he said. “May I see it?”

  “Ah, c’est très charmant, m’sieu,” she said, smiling at his choice.

  When he lifted the lid of the tiny enameled chest, it played “The Bridge of Avignon.”

  “Combien, ma’mselle?”

  “Eight thousand francs, m’sieu.”

  It was more than he should spend, but he said, “Wrap it, please.” It would make a wonderful gift for Dorrie.

  The girl handed him the parcel and wished him bon voyage. The cat had gone to sleep.

  Walking back toward the stairway, Miguel toyed with the idea of buying something for his sister. It had been three years since he had seen Essie and looking at the wares displayed behind the plate windows lining the walls of the arcade, he thought of some token, some tangible thing he might put in her hand to express the loneliness he felt for her and kindle the friendship they might have had but had never achieved.

  But what did you buy for a Bride of Christ? The phrase, medieval and overly emotional, was her own. To buy a gift for someone assumed a certain understanding. And understanding was a thing that had never existed between Essie and himself. It was far too late now. Perhaps it had always been too late. If there had ever been a chance it was lost just as surely as the pale love Essie might once have felt for Anson Wilbur was lost. Essie was no longer Miguel’s sister. The gates of the convent had closed behind her and left nothing of the woman she might have become. Even her name was gone. There was no woman named Esther Rinehart in Miguel’s world. There was only an austere face under a starched coif that had, through some strange alchemical interaction between her personal need and the need of Mother Church, become Sister Cecilia.

  Only once had it seemed that familial closeness might develop among the Rineharts. That first summer at the river. The summer of 1932 and the months that went before it, while Patches was being built. How ironic, Miguel thought, is that word seemed.

  In the autumn of 1931, indulging a passion she never satiated, Maria Rinehart bought land on the Fitch Mountain Road out of Healdsburg. It was a slanting two acres of loamy soil, somnolent in the California sun and thick with madrona and hazelnut. The Russian River wound through the vineyards a quarter-mile away, flowing past willow groves and pebbly beaches from Eagle Rock to Del Rio Woods—a slow lukewarm river, deep and green and often treacherous.

  The new resort area had been heavily promoted by Mr. Coward, a balding fat man with an Elk’s tooth and a golden watch chain and an office like a gabled privy at the entrance to Del Rio Woods proper. Mr. Coward’s efforts had been rewarded with a sudden flurry of building along Fitch Mountain Road. By the time Maria Rinehart bought her land there, there were summer cabins generously planted on the mountain’s slopes and Del Rio was populated with people from San Francisco and Oakland anxious to get away from the relative coolness of the Bay Area and into the suffocating heat of the river country.

  The houses all had names and were built to resemble something whenever possible. The names ranged from an unpronounceable Yram-na-mot—Tom and Mary spelled backwards—to a continental Villa du Soleil—a communal retreat for a group of French people from the Peninsula.

  Maria Rinehart was first amused by the naming mania and then trapped by it. Miguel, who was nearly eleven, thought it delightful.

  If Miguel was fascinated by the prospect of naming the house-to-be, it was his sister Esther who begged Maria to let her award the job of designing it to one of her friends from the California School of Arts and Crafts.

  The friend was Anson Wilbur, a stocky young man of twenty with unruly hair and burning eyes.

  Raoul Rinehart, who lived apart from the family, and Miguel’s brother Luis, who worked for Raoul, both warned that Anson was a Red, and worse, an idiot. But Essie thought Anson sensitive and Miguel thought him a hell of a fellow.

  “I see the house,” Anson would tell Esther mystically, “as something nested in the soil—drawing its strength from the earth.” And then, more practically, he would ask if there were any chance that Maria might let him have the job of building the place.

  Work, that year, was hard to find, and Maria, more out of compassion than out of confidence in Anson, finally succumbed to Esther’s pleading. She made a provisional arrangement with Anson.

  Anson declared he wouldn’t even make a preliminary sketch until he had spent a couple of days on the ground “getting the feel of the place.” This seemed reasonable, so Maria planned a weekend in Healdsburg for the family, Anson to drive up in Essie’s Whippet roadster with his “associates.”

  The associates turned out to be three frowning young artists as young as Anson. Maria began to have some misgivings, but she felt herself committed. Raoul was on a business trip in Mexico and wasn’t consulted. Since their separation four years earlier, Maria made a point of not seeking her husband’s advice on business matters.

  For two days Anson and Esther and their friends tramped the ground in a bleak January rain, exclaiming on the beauty of the red-skinned madrones and the misty view of the river. Miguel followed them everywhere.

  Two weeks passed after the family’s return to the house in Berkeley before Anson arrived with the plans and perspective drawings. It was a two-week stretch of agonized impatience for

  Miguel. Concha, his nana, cautioned him about the sin of covetousness, but without much effect.

  Yet, when the rolled sheets were spread out on the solarium floor, the wait seemed more than worthwhile. For Anson had designed a house that looked like a mushroom.

  The floor plans were a jumble of curved lines and figures, but the perspective sketch showed an elfin house nestled in a landscape that might have been part of the land of Oz.

  Essie regarded her family with all the triumph of her eighteen years. Concha smiled and nodded her approval. “Qué curiosidad!” All looked at Maria.

  Maria Rinehart pursed her lips and smiled like a Rafael madonna. She inclined her head regally and it was understood that the design was a success. The house would be built by Anson and his friends.

  The mushroom was to be called Séptimo Cielo—Seventh Heaven. Both Maria and Esther had been deeply moved by Janet Gaynor and Charlie Farrell in the film of that name.

  Anson and his co-workers were in a whirl of preparation and copies of the plans were now sent to Raoul, who objected bitterly to the whole thing. His opinions were disregarded, and Anson was dispatched to Healdsburg in early February with Maria’s check for five thousand dollars to begin construction.

  A stream of unemployed artists, sculptors, woodcarvers and musicians followed him.

  In March, and chaperoned by Concha, Esther drove up to Del Rio to check on the progress of the house. She returned crestfallen. She had taken her Kodak with her and the pictures she brought back showed a roughly oblong frame structure, far from completed.

  Miguel, studying the photographs
, remarked ingenuously that it really didn’t look very much like the mushroom in the drawings. Essie grew angry with him and Maria made him apologize. It came to him that Anson’s failure was Essie’s failure as well. She was responsible. He felt very sorry for his sister but he couldn’t help a certain feeling of resentment as he looked at the boxlike structure in the photographs. The wonderful gnomish house in the fairy landscape began to fade from Miguel’s mind.

  By early May, the money was gone and most of Anson’s friends with it. The house, farther than ever from any resemblance to a mushroom, looked like a shoebox. And it was still unfinished.

  Anson crept back to Berkeley in an agony of self-chastisement to tell Maria and Esther that he needed more money to finish the house and that progressive modifications and simplifications in the design would result in a rather more conventional house than he had at first planned. Almost in tears, he admitted that drawing a house that looked like a mushroom was rather simpler than building one.

  Maria, for Esther’s sake, hid her annoyance. Raoul was beside himself with irritation. It was up to him to supply the extra money to complete the house and there was no way out of it. Good money must follow bad. After a bitter scene, the money was produced and the work continued. In Miguel’s mind the mushroom was replaced by a box, standing raw and unfinished in the woodland.

  When school closed in June, Maria and Concha packed the family into the big Lincoln and moved to Healdsburg, renting a small house from an Italian family named Pavoni. From this distance, Maria kept an eye on Anson’s new—and smaller—crew of artisans. Essie was on the site each day, her presence a goad in the flesh of the suffering Anson, who by now realized he was not and never would be a builder of houses unique or otherwise.

  The finished product, ready in time for the Fourth of July influx of Essie’s friends, was a rambling frame house, not without a certain unplanned charm. There were four large rooms, a kitchen, a long screened sleeping porch—added as an afterthought—and a not-quite-level sundeck. The house, after a wry family conference, was named Patches, and the earlier, more romantic name was never heard again.