by Paula Fox
She remembered that Tuesday Madame Soule and her husband had taken her to see a new ballet company. Madame LeSueur must have consumed more of her sherry than usual and imagined the phone call was from another music lover.
“You could have written,” she said.
“I know I could have written—but every day it seemed the damn clouds would blow away and things would settle down and I’d be able to come and get you.”
“It’s all right,” she said suddenly, though she had meant to press him more, make him really answer her. But she didn’t want to have to think any longer about how unhappy she’d been.
“I know,” he said. “I know you don’t want to hear all this, but you must. Later it will matter. I also had trouble with a series of articles that bored me to death to write—and the editor hated them! So, of course, I defended them with three times more self-righteousness than if I’d liked writing them—Emma, at least, was mollified. I sent her off to Charleston for a week. The cousin’s only staying—”
“I’m so glad you phoned,” Catherine interrupted him again, nearly out of breath, as though it had been she doing all the talking.
“Okay. I’ll stop,” he said. “You deserve to call the turns. Wait till you see the funny little house I’ve rented. It sits on the edge of a cliff. You can’t actually hear the sea but it’s not far.”
Catherine heard faint noises from the other side of the kitchen where the household staff lived. The smell of roast lamb was much stronger down here, faintly sickening. She resolved to ask him no more questions. He sounded so apologetic, and so glad to talk to her. She didn’t want to reproach him any more. But before she could stop herself, a question burst out of her.
“Why couldn’t I have come to Rockport?”
“Oh—my suspicious girl! So that’s it! Here’s the reason. Emma and I are thinking of moving to Nova Scotia. The whole coast around Rockport has become simply overrun with tourists and commerce, and in the summer, if I want to buy a loaf of bread, I must dress up in Alpine gear to climb through the crowds. So I thought to combine our visit with a look around a bit of the Maritime Provinces. Have you got that straight? Will you remember all that I’m about to tell you—how to find the Digby ferry when you get off the train? How to order a cup of tea and practice up for the day when you’ll sit in the salon of a great ship? If there are any great ships left.… And as the ferry draws into Digby harbor, you will see a portly, distinguished figure on the wharf. It will be me, your dear papa.…”
She laughed as she always did when he described himself mockingly.
“I’ll wire you some change in the morning so you’ll have enough money for tickets and for those magazines girls of fifteen are supposed to crave. By the way, I have a stack of letters from your mother to you. Is she visiting every hamlet in Cumberland and Westmoreland? Did she marry a census taker?”
“Where are you phoning from?” she asked hurriedly.
There was silence, then a roaring as though a wave had broken over the telephone. “From the bottom of the sea?” she whispered anxiously, fearful that he might have gone away.
“Are you running a detective agency on the side?” His voice came on strongly; she heard laughter in it. “Some things must remain mysteries,” he said, adding in his most serious voice, “I’m so glad we’re going to have this time, Catherine, though in my usual fashion I’ve spoiled some of it.”
After he’d told her about getting to the ferry and what time he’d expect her on the Nova Scotia side—“though I’ll wait for every boat until you appear”—they said good-bye and she stood in the hall for a while, astonished at how everything had changed. Yet she had known he’d turn up, hadn’t she?
She went into the living room that ran the length of the house and sat down in front of the grand piano, lifting her hands up high as though about to play a great smashing chord. She let them drop down so lightly her fingers barely rested on the keys. The room smelled of lemon furniture polish and of Madame LeSueur’s French cigarettes which she thought no one knew she smoked. Catherine realized suddenly how safe she felt in that room.
It had been difficult, frightening, to leave her mother, her life in New York, her friends there, and come to another country—almost another country. She’d made it even more foreign for herself by liking a French Canadian, Philippe Petit, a sophomore at McGill University, more than anyone except Cornelia. Her mother continued to be slightly suspicious of Dalraida because, Catherine was pretty sure, her father had chosen it. If her mother hadn’t been so caught up with Carter a year and a half ago, Mr. Ames might have had more difficulty persuading her to let Catherine come to Montreal. She was turning into a New York City hick, her father had written her mother, who had shown the letter to Catherine. He would pay for absolutely everything, he had said, including an eyelash curler, if Catherine went in for such things. She needed to get away from New York—and it was important to learn another language, other ways. Catherine wanted to do what her father wanted her to do. In time, her mother yielded. She had met Madame Soule and that had helped, although she’d observed that Madame was rather an unconventional type to be running a girls’ school.
Catherine stood up, exhilarated at the thought of the weeks ahead of her, and ran up the stairs. As she passed Madame Soule’s room, she heard Roland snoring, and she imagined telling her father stories about the dog. Madame insisted he was a great hunter. When the school went up to their ski cabin in the Laurentian Mountains, she took the girls on long walks, during which she would occasionally halt and shout, “Point!” at poor Roland. The dog would wag his tail, look up at his mistress with his slightly crossed eyes, and sit down. Or else he would turn sideways to the direction of Madame’s pointing finger. You could say, of course, that he pointed with his rib cage.
As Catherine passed the closed bedroom doors, she thought fleetingly of the other students: tough Emily and her humble roommate, Little Jane, who did whatever Emily told her to do and had given up knitting angora sweaters because Emily declared angora was disgusting and sentimental; then Margo Berry, who shared a room with two other girls—Margo, the Westport vamp, her hair falling all over her face, with more clothes than any two other students, who wore a perfume she wouldn’t reveal the name of and which she kept so well hidden no one had been able to find it, despite endless searches when she was out; then, on the top floor, across from Catherine and Cornelia, the only student who had a room to herself, a thin, tall girl named Gabrielle, who wore a ratty fur jacket instead of goose down, and high heels. She had a damp, uncertain voice. No one seemed to like her much, partly because she spoke French so perfectly—she’d spent most of her life in Europe. Her mother had appeared twice at the school, once with a man she introduced as a Hungarian count. His name was unpronounceable. The girls referred to him as Dracula. The second time she’d taken Gabrielle out of the school for good in April. Then she turned up with a sunburned young man who looked like a tennis player. It had been hard to be pleasant to Gabrielle. She was at once so meek and so haughty. Yet Catherine felt, reluctantly, that they had more in common with each other than with the other students, whose parents behaved predictably—unlike Gabrielle’s mother and her own father. When Harriet Blacking, one of Margo’s roommates, began to bully Gabrielle, Catherine had found it a little easier to be friendly to her.
Harriet Blacking was the dark presence in the school, a rather small girl, plump, nearly neckless, with dead-white skin and the thinnest nose Catherine had ever seen, as thin as the blade of a pocketknife. Harriet always had the goods on someone. Everyone was afraid of her except tough Emily, who used to kick her if she came too close. The odd thing was, Emily seemed to amuse Harriet.
Her thoughts about Harriet made her uneasy, as though Harriet would somehow know she’d been beached in Dalraida for three weeks. Where had her father been phoning from? And what was it he and Emma had quarreled about? Had Emma wanted to come with them to Nova Scotia after all?
She wasn’t going to think ab
out Harriet, or Emma. She began to pack her suitcase, right then at two in the morning.
Two
The dirt road along which Catherine drove the station wagon was deeply rutted and so narrow that wild bramble scratched the car’s sides. She stayed in first gear, feeling the weight of the massive metal box in her hands as it lunged forward.
“I’ve resigned myself to respectability,” her father had said when he led her to the car in Digby. He had taught her to drive two years earlier in a small, bright foreign model on a country lane near White Plains, and when she asked what had happened to it, he said, “A last youthful squeal. I gave it up. This monster is my future.”
The monster stalled. Catherine’s jaw ached from being clenched.
“Let her sit a sec, Missy,” said the farmer, Mr. Glimm, who sat in the front with her. He had grown sober during the last hour, like someone rising slowly from the bottom of a pond. He needn’t have spoken so softly. The two men in the back seat, her father and Mr. Conklin, a local bus driver, were sleeping, snoring loudly but not in unison. It was nearly five A.M. Catherine was taking her father’s friends home.
“Try now,” urged Mr. Glimm.
The car started up at once and shot forward. “Downshift!” Mr. Glimm directed her. She caught a glimpse of his unshaven chin, heavy and slack above his tightly buttoned wool shirt.
The bramble fell away, the thick oak wood behind it thinned. She saw how the light had changed; the sky was no longer black as it had been when she had started out from the backyard at the little house, but a pale and blistered gray. There was a gleam of black water to her right. Mist rose from its surface and hooked onto the branches of a dead tree like cotton caught on pins.
“There’s our marsh,” the farmer said. “Not much farther for me, half a mile or so.…”
She gripped the wheel and leaned forward to peer through the windshield and the sliding clumps of damp leaves that clung to the glass.
“My pals from the village are coming,” Mr. Ames had announced when he left her after supper to drive in to Mackenzie and pick them up. She hadn’t much wanted to meet anyone. She’d been in Nova Scotia for two days. When she saw two middle-aged men getting out of the car in the yard, she felt her father was elbowing her aside. All three men began to drink at once.
She had seen her father drink before. When they had a restaurant meal, it was always in a place that served liquor. He usually ordered whiskey in a tall glass with a little water and no ice. She had never seen such drinking as she had last night.
The bottles Mr. Ames had bought at the government-run liquor store were lined up on the kitchen counter. The three men emptied them as though it had been their duty to do so.
Years ago, when her mother still talked about her father, she had told Catherine that wherever they lived when they were married, he managed to find all the local rats. Catherine guessed he had searched out the rats of Mackenzie before she’d gotten off the Digby ferry, though Farmer Glimm was more like a badger.
“Up there,” he muttered. “Up on the rise.”
The marsh had given way to solid land. The farmhouse on the hill looked desolate. If there had not been a light in a window, she would have thought no one lived there. A large dog came from behind an outbuilding and silently raced down the hill. Catherine turned off the motor.
Her father groaned. Mr. Conklin woke up and began to whistle, as though to show how lighthearted he felt. He broke off to emit a high-pitched giggle. A woman was moving slowly toward them. The dog ran back and forth between her and the car. The woman’s hair hung down from her head in two long thin braids. She wore a thick shawl over a faded lilac flannel nightgown. When she was a yard away from the car, she halted and stared, her face expressionless.
Farmer Glimm sighed and fumbled with the door handle. Without looking at the woman, he bobbed his head at Catherine.
“My missus,” he murmured, as though to himself. “Just keep on going,” he said in a louder voice. “Don’t go back the way we come. This road will take you straight to Mackenzie. And thank you, Missy.” His wife clutched her shawl so tightly, Catherine could see the outline of her shoulder bones. With the dog prancing about them, the two people went up the rise toward the farmhouse. They didn’t speak as far as Catherine could tell.
“Well done!” Mr. Ames called out from the back seat. “I taught you good. Doesn’t she drive like a champion, Mr. Conklin?”
“She does,” Mr. Conklin squeaked.
Catherine didn’t turn around. She started up the car. The silence of the farmer’s wife had been full of anger. As though he had read her mind, her father said, “Serves that woman right—waiting up for him like Nurse Sally. My God! We need a vacation from women.”
“Right,” agreed Mr. Conklin.
She had not dreamt people could drink as they had, pouring the liquor down their throats as though they were trying to drown themselves. When Catherine, growing frightened, disgusted by them, had left the parlor and gone into the kitchen hoping to find some chore to do, her father had shouted, “They want to catch you in their domestic webs. They want to bring a man down.”
Standing in the dark kitchen, her fists clenched, Catherine had hated him. How could it be that only two days earlier she had packed her suitcase, thinking she was about to embark on a splendid journey? The journey had taken her to a dinky parlor, and the sight of her father, a shambling wreck crashing into furniture, reciting snatches of poetry to tall, silly Mr. Conklin and the short, melancholy farmer.
“You mus’ drive us, my dear girl,” her father had said at last. “I’ve not the knack at the moment. You mus’ drive us.…”
As she gained the road, she felt his hand on the back of her neck. She shook it off.
“Ah, well. I can hardly blame you,” he said plaintively.
“Leave me off outside Mackenzie,” Mr. Conklin said, with the self-importance of a foolish man. He neighed suddenly like a horse. “It’s a treat to have someone else do the driving for a change,” he said. “But don’t go no further. I got to get home without no one seeing me. Saves the nerves.”
She stopped the car just before the dirt road joined the blacktop, the one she remembered from the shopping she and her father had done yesterday. She kept her eyes straight ahead. The car door opened; there were muttered farewells. Her father said, “A fine evening, lad. We’ll do it again.” He spoke as though challenging her.
They wouldn’t do it again with her around, she told herself. She had enough money to buy a return ticket to Montreal. Madame Soule would help her. Maybe she would visit Betty Jane Rich in Toronto. And her mother would be back at the end of July.
She would not see her father again. Perhaps she would speak to him on the telephone. She might even write him a letter now and then over the years. “He thrived on chaos,” her mother had said, and the words had stayed with Catherine. They had had a certain grandeur, then. When the possibility of this long visit had come up, her mother said Harry Ames had, no doubt, changed. “He’s a lot older, after all,” she said. She had sounded smug, as though age would teach Mr. Ames what everyone else in the world already knew. Her mother had not told her how terrible drinking could be.
She reversed the car violently. Her father let out a wordless exclamation and fell back against the seat. She was glad. In the rearview mirror, she could see Mr. Conklin walking along the road, a tall, rather frail-looking man huddled over himself.
By the time she parked in the yard, her father was asleep again. She opened the door quietly and went to the house, leaving him in the car. For a little while, sitting on the hard, knobby horsehair sofa in the parlor, she felt the force of a loneliness she’d never experienced before.
He had made her such a good supper; he had watched her eat with such unconcealed delight. “You didn’t know that I could cook, did you?” he had asked. “I’m full of surprises.”
He had talked about his life, the early days before he’d met and married her mother. He told her he’d bee
n thrown out of two colleges for what he proudly called “riotous behavior,” and how he’d shipped out on a freighter to Valparaiso and read Joseph Conrad’s novels all the way there and back. He described the way he made a living—once he’d put an ad in a Boston newspaper when he was living in Provincetown, saying he could read people’s futures in their faces. He’d gotten tons of photographs, he said. “My God! I had to leave town. But I couldn’t bring myself to throw away all those pictures. I still have some of them in a box somewhere; they’re fading now, as the people have—their futures all caught up with them at last.” He talked about books he loved, and poets, and countries where he had lived.
“You’re like Scheherazade,” Catherine had said.
He smiled and replied, “Yes, yes. I’m talking against the time of the executioner, too.”
He was quiet as she put away the dried dishes, but he walked restlessly around the small kitchen. After a while, he said, almost coldly, as though speaking of a person he didn’t particularly care for, “I didn’t have the endurance for it. So I write travel books. Not the way Conrad did.”
Then he had gone to Mackenzie to get Mr. Conklin, and to the farm to pick up Mr. Glimm.
Did he drink so much when Emma was around? Was this to be that vacation from women he’d shouted at her about in a hard, sorrowful voice? What about her, his daughter? Was she merely an excuse to get away from Emma?
She suddenly realized why he hadn’t come to get her at the school, or written, or tried to call more than once. He’d been drinking the way he had tonight, making himself insensible, escaping from reason and obligation. Struck down all at once by exhaustion, Catherine fell asleep sitting up on the sofa.
She woke to see a sash of sunlight across her cotton skirt and, sleepily, stretched her hand to feel its warmth. Her father was sitting in a chair across from her, staring at her. When she looked up at him, he smiled. He looked terrible, pale and blotchy, his eyes sunken. But his smile was so tender, she felt her indignation slip away.