by Paula Fox
Catherine didn’t care for the idea that Emma was responsible for this visit. Her father had a rather silly look on his face—thinking of Emma’s wonderfulness, no doubt.
“What about what I thought?” she asked.
“That’s what Emma was concerned about.”
“I mean—what did you think about my thoughts?”
“Do I hear self-righteousness? Are you feeling badly treated? Don’t—for God’s sake—be a victim. It rots out the brain. You’ll never have a moment of pleasure because of thinking of all the wrongs you’ve suffered.”
She quailed at the anger she thought she heard in his voice. As though to confirm it, he got out of the swing and strode off to the house. How could he be so unfair? She followed him and at once tripped on some root or hummock. She knew it wasn’t because it had grown dark. Her body had gone out of control because she’d lost inner balance.
She found him in the kitchen pouring himself a drink of whiskey.
“What about that?” she cried, a tremor in her voice. “Does that stuff keep your brain from rotting?” She remembered how his features had slackened that night of drinking, how his body had slumped. Her dismay was so great, she held out both her hands toward the bottle as though to snatch it from him. He looked at her as though she were a stranger. Her hands dropped to her sides. She felt exhausted. She felt she could go to sleep standing there next to the kitchen table.
“Don’t be a prig,” he said harshly. “You’re old enough to know damn near everything—though not, I must add, to have any judgment. And don’t tell me your sainted mother hasn’t nailed me to the cross about my drinking habits.”
“Mom didn’t have to tell me,” she said flatly. “Do you think I can’t see on my own? How I hated it when you were passed out cold in the back of that horrible car!”
“Not at all,” he protested. “I wasn’t passed out. I was thinking.”
“Do you snore and snort when you think?”
He started to laugh. He took two steps and grabbed her arms and shook her. “Cath, I won’t do it again. I swear it! As for the car—if you like, we can go out and throw rocks at it!”
She didn’t want him to swear to anything, to what he would or wouldn’t do. “Try to understand,” he urged her. She had begun to learn his face. She knew he was trying to show her how earnest and simple—and truthful—he was being. But being simple was the last thing he wanted to be. She knew that, too.
“Try to understand,” he began in a conciliating voice. “I was so damned nervous about living with you. Don’t you see that it’s strange for both of us? Not only for you? I’m used to seeing you on the run—as though we were fugitives.”
She could understand all that—to be nervous, to feel the strangeness of things. But was he being really truthful? What did it all have to do with his drinking?
“Oh, how hard you’re thinking! I can see that poor little brain all twisted up like an acrobat.”
“Don’t tell me what I’m doing!” she cried out. Hadn’t he heard her? He was the acrobat, or rather, a juggler, keeping a lot of objects going at the same time, plates and oranges flying through the air while he, the juggler, remained hidden behind them.
“I felt superior at first,” she admitted. “Driving three idiots around in the middle of the night. It didn’t last. I was afraid I’d back the car into a swamp. It kept stalling. The farmer’s wife thought it was all my fault. I could tell. I was even afraid she’d set the dog on me.”
“Dog?” he asked wonderingly, asking as a child might. She burst into laughter despite her indignation.
“Don’t laugh at your poor old father—don’t make rude fun of such a pitiful relic as I am.”
“Stop that!” she shouted. “And stop laughing!”
“Me, laugh?” he asked, rolling his eyes. “A dog? My poor addled mind—have you a dog hidden away somewhere?”
She felt tears on her cheeks before she realized she was crying. She sat down at the table and held her head in her hands. She felt his hand on her hair. “I am sorry,” he said softly. “I was only trying to amuse you and, as usual, botching things up even more. I’ve told you, I’ll tell you again, forever if you want, that I know how hard my drunken gang was on you. Don’t cry. Cath … look! Look at what I’m going to do. Look up!”
She raised her head.
“It’s all going down the drain,” he said, as he poured the remaining contents of the whiskey bottle into the sink. She heard it gurgle. She wiped her face with the back of her hand. He held up the empty bottle. Staring at it, as relieved as she was, she felt a thorn of anxiety.
You couldn’t buy liquor just anywhere in Nova Scotia; you had to go to a special store run by the Liquor Control Commission. People called those stores government dairies, her father had told her. “Laws are made to be broken,” he had said. “The law tells you exactly what people want to do which the law prevents them from doing. We are such a foolish sort of animal that we waste all our ingenuity finding ways around laws that protect us.” That was why there was a lot of bootlegging in the area, he said. Many farmers had stills in their barns.
“I didn’t mean for you to throw it all out,” she said.
“Ah, feeling a touch of guilt, are you? Good! It’ll make you more tractable, the way females ought to be.”
He turned to the counter and began to chop an onion, then a stalk of celery. His hands worked quickly, efficiently, in a blur of movement. When he stopped, there were two small heaps of perfectly cut vegetables.
“Actually,” he said, looking at her, “I have always thought women were better than men in every way.”
She was sitting quietly at the table; her mind felt pale, washed like an early morning sky. “They’re not better or worse,” she said. “They’re different. Better is a disguised insult.”
“You astonish me,” he said. He walked over to her and pushed her hair carefully behind her ears and looked down at her closely. “Nice eyes,” he commented somewhat absently.
She wandered off into the living room, leaving him to his cooking. She felt tranquil. His drastic action in pouring away the whiskey had, after all, reassured her. She turned on a dinky standing lamp and sat down with a book on her lap. She had taken it from a shelf without looking at its title. She turned it over. It was Great Expectations. She wouldn’t read; she didn’t need to at this moment. She had regained the balance she had lost outside in the dark. She was content simply to sit there doing nothing.
This place might have been another planet. The silence that began with evening shadows lasted until the next morning, when she heard a car or two up on the country road, or the bus halting when Mrs. Landy was dropped off by Mr. Conklin. Sometimes a plane passed so high overhead you could barely see it, a sliver of silver when it caught the light of the sun. It must have been as silent five hundred years ago, a thousand yeas ago. And there was no radio, no television set, no telephone in the house to make a person forget that immense, timeless quiet. Except for two hippies she had noticed yesterday as they were driving to Mackenzie to pick up Reverend Ross, Mackenzie itself seemed split off from modern life. And even the hippies had looked sedate, very smug as they carried their groceries in a string bag to an old panel truck upon one side of which someone had painted a swollen yellow moon. Visiting her father was like going back to another time.
He came into the living room. “I must have eggs,” he announced, “and we’re out of them. I saw a sign in front of a house on the Mackenzie road that said fresh eggs. Come on. Let’s go get some.”
“It’s so late.”
“If they’ve taken in the sign, we won’t stop. Get up, Catherine. Up, up …”
He was full of energy now, of anticipation, as though they were setting out on an adventure. When they came to the house on the road, the headlights showed a small cardboard sign leaning against the trunk of a maple tree. It read: FRESH EGGS AND HONEY.
“I like that ‘and,’” he commented. “It shows they are formal an
d exact.”
They went up two steps to a narrow porch. There was no bell. Paint flaked on the door. A dim light glowed distantly in a window. Mr. Ames knocked. They waited for a longer time than it had taken them to drive there. When the door opened at last, they saw a large, elderly woman in a dark dress holding a kerosene lamp. A blast of warmish air smelling of vegetable soup came from inside the house. The light fell on the woman’s face; it was broad, expressionless, and unlined.
“I’m sorry to disturb you at such an hour,” Mr. Ames said with elaborate politeness, even bowing slightly. “I was about to make my daughter an omelet for her supper when I discovered we were out of eggs. I recalled your sign and hoped you would forgive us for stopping. Of course, if we’re inconveniencing you—we’re living in the Diggs house, down the—”
“I know who you are,” the woman said with mysterious emphasis. “Of course I know. And it isn’t inconvenient. We haven’t sold any eggs today. Mother has finished her tea, and, well, do come in.”
They stepped inside. From somewhere in the dark room where the light of the kerosene lamp didn’t reach, there must have been a stove. Catherine felt its heat. The room was packed with chairs and tables, trunks, glass cases, two immense sofas. The woman set down her lamp on a table. If they’d just wait a minute, she’d fetch them a dozen eggs, she said, and disappeared down a hall.
Mr. Ames held up the lamp. “Look at that!” he exclaimed, pointing to a huge old-fashioned birdcage on a metal stand. In it perched a gray parrot. “Stuffed,” he observed. Its glass eye gleamed in the light.
“These really are fresh,” the woman said as she came back into the room.
“I hope they’re not parrot eggs,” whispered Mr. Ames to Catherine.
“You’re looking at our Tweedy,” the woman said with a certain warmth. “He was our darling. Mother and I thought he’d outlive us. Parrots are supposed to outlive one. But Tweedy lay down on his back one morning and died. I suppose he had some bird ailment one has never heard of. Well—it was something of a relief for us. After all, what would have happened to him if he had outlived us? He was so bad-tempered! Naturally, we miss him. Or her. It is difficult to know about birds.”
As she spoke, she was taking eggs, one by one, from a basket and slipping them into a paper sack. She held it out to Mr. Ames. “That will be one Canadian dollar, please,” she said, with sardonic emphasis on the word “Canadian.” Mr. Ames paid her and he and Catherine started to leave.
“Just a minute,” the woman said commandingly. “Would you mind terribly saying a word to my mother? She hardly has any visitors anymore, except when the Reverend Ross stops by. Just as well he doesn’t stop too often. He’s forever gabbing about food and how people eat it. A tiresome man. A secret glutton, I believe. Fortunately, Mother is quite deaf.”
“We’d be delighted,” Mr. Ames said, smiling, but the woman had not waited for his answer and did not see his smile. She had taken the lamp and was marching down the hall. They followed her to a room as stuffed with objects as the one they had left. A potbellied stove glowed like a giant ember. In front of it, sitting in a huge collapsed chair that looked like an elephant kneeling, was an ancient woman. Her eyes were closed.
“Mother!” shouted the woman. “The people from the States have come to say good evening to you.”
The old lady opened one eye, then the other, like a doll with sticky works.
Mr. Ames pushed some cardboard boxes out of his way and stood in front of her and bowed deeply. In a loud voice, he said, “Delighted to meet you!” Something fell in the dark beyond the glow of the stove and the light of the lamp. Could it have been some other visitor trapped by junk who had not been able to escape the room? Catherine felt a violent surge of laughter. She clenched her jaw. Sweat dripped down her forehead. Her father seemed unable to straighten up. He cast a glance at her, and she tried to back into the hall, but the woman was blocking her way.
She thought she might scream, when the ancient woman suddenly nodded and said in a tiny high voice, “Thank you … thank you. Have you seen our Tweedy?”
“Tweedy!” her father shouted as though the parrot’s name had some immense significance he had just recollected. I am going to faint, Catherine announced to herself. “I’m hot,” she muttered to the big woman. “Must get outside.…”
The woman pressed herself against the wall. Catherine shot past her down the hall, through the front room and out of the house. She leaned against the car, gasping with laughter.
She heard the door close; then her father was standing in front of her. “Deserted me in mid-battle,” he said reproachfully.
“I was going to burst,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d ever straighten up again, and you’d be stuck there forever, like Tweedy.”
“What a tableau we’d make, Tweedy and I,” he said, starting the car.
“What crazy old people.”
“Don’t condescend.”
“I wasn’t,” she said. “They were crazy.”
“You were,” he contradicted her. “It doesn’t matter if they were crazy.”
“But you thought they were funny, too. I could see you did.”
“So I did,” he acknowledged. “The difference is—I know I could end up the same way in just such a room. You think what we saw there is far from your own fate. Don’t be so sure.”
She felt put upon. How could she be expected to know what he knew? He was pretty old, after all. She looked over at him. As usual, his grip on the steering wheel was desperate, as though he suspected that the car at any moment might fly off the face of the earth. An impulse of sympathy, so contrary to what she was feeling, made her reach out a hand to touch his sleeve. “I’ll take care of you when you’re a crone,” she said.
“You will, will you!” he exclaimed ferociously. She saw he was smiling.
When they were eating their supper, he told her there was a French expression, fou rire, for that uncontrollable laughter that can seize one in the most inappropriate situation. It was just such an attack of “fool’s laughter,” he said, that had probably driven him into writing. It had happened to him during a high school production of a play, a medieval stew put together by his class and their English teacher. He had been given a walk-on part as the King’s guard.
“I wasn’t much of a guard,” he told her, “since the King was murdered in Act Two. We were dressed in costumes. It was the end of June. I thought I was turning into a pudding. The King was lying in state on his funeral bier, and he was covered from head to toe in ill-fitting sections of tin armor we’d made in shop. His faithful and ancient courtier—and bearded, that’s the important detail—leaned over the corpse to say farewell. The courtier was a disreputable pal of mine named Duds, who was having an awful time with his speech, making up most of it since he hadn’t been able to memorize more than a line or two. I was beginning to smirk behind my visor when suddenly poor Duds bent too close to the King, who was itching and sweating and wriggling. Anyhow, Dud’s long fake beard got caught somewhere in the King’s breastplate. He couldn’t stand up straight without ripping off the beard. Duds didn’t have much feeling for drama, but he knew that would be a serious mistake. I’ve never heard such whispered curses as passed between Duds and the corpse—at the same time, Duds shouted out words of praise for the King’s character: Honest! Courteous! True blue! The teacher finally sent four boys out and they picked up the bier with the King on it and Duds bent over him, trapped, and ran offstage, Duds running sideways like a giant bearded crab. The Queen was supposed to make a speech, but she never got to make it. Your daddy was sprawled on the stage on his back just like a beetle, screaming, helpless with fou rire. Of course, I was never given another chance at a part. They made me write plays after that. Thus I met my destiny—by backing into it.”
“That isn’t really why you wrote, is it?” she asked.
“It’s as good a reason as any,” he said. Then, abruptly changing the subject, he told her he was going to read The
Ancient Mariner to her when she finished the dishes.
“I had it in school,” she said.
“What in God’s name does that mean?” he asked irritably. “Had it …”
“I mean we had to read it and memorize parts of it.”
“That doesn’t mean you had it. I can’t bear that lingo,” he said.
After they had eaten their omelets, he went into the parlor. She washed up the dishes, glad to have something ordinary and boring to do. The chore steadied her. She had never been around anyone whose mood could change so quickly.
When she went into the parlor, he was sitting in the armchair, a book opened on his lap. He smiled pleasantly, somewhat remotely.
“Ready for Coleridge?” he asked.
“Ready,” she replied.
Five
He began to grow restless. In the night, she heard him moving about the little house. Sometimes he took care not to disturb her sleep; at other times he walked heavily through the rooms and turned on all the downstairs lights. She lay awake, staring at her doorway and the dimly illuminated passage beyond it. She listened to his footsteps, the jarring of furniture when he bumped into it, and she felt disquieted, confused, by his voiceless presence below.
Once, at four A.M., unable to fall back to sleep when the house had grown silent again, she went downstairs to find him reading intently in the parlor, an opened bottle of club soda on the floor by his foot. He looked at her briefly. “Back to bed with you, Burnhilde,” he said. “Leave me to my wars.”
Only a long time later, when she was back in school, did it occur to her that his “wars,” his trouble, had been about liquor.
They did a good deal of driving: to Lake Rosignol, often to Halifax, or they would follow a country road for miles, pausing in one of the villages they passed through to buy a lunch of cheese and crackers and apples, eating it in a field by the side of the road. Whatever it was that kept him wakeful at night, he appeared to Catherine to be calmer in the day as they drove about the countryside without any special destination, or as they sat among clumps of wildflowers in those stubbly fields talking of this or that. There were even hours when she took his presence for granted and so, in a way, forgot him.