by Paula Fox
The place she liked best of all was a tiny fishing village perched on a cove that opened out into the Atlantic Ocean. They spent an afternoon there, climbing across great beige-colored rocks, stopping to watch the water sweep into narrow crevices, investigating tidal pools. Beneath their motionless, mucky surfaces, the little pools swarmed with minute life. He told her about the creatures that lived in them.
Looking at her quizzically, he said, “Surprised, aren’t you, that I know about such things? I know a lot that doesn’t matter—to me, that is. My brain is like an old attic. I wander through it, picking up one thing or another, hoping to be interested.”
It was not his knowledge that had surprised her so much as the odd revulsion he showed toward the rock-trapped greenish pools; as he pointed to a plant, or a tiny creature wriggling about it, one hand hovered just above the water and the other gripped the rough rock. He seemed to read her face, to know she was puzzled by something about him. “The teeming earth,” he murmured.
The sea glittered like a cloth of gold. Beyond the curve of a narrow jetty, its movement was slow and soft. The sky was cloudless. Fishing shacks on stilts strode the water like long-legged birds. A woman hung men’s workclothes on a rope stretched from a hook in the weathered shingle of her house to a pole that looked like a mast. Little islands of brilliant green grass grew in sand. There was a glitter of seashells on paths that led to the painted blue doors of the houses along the single narrow road. Except for the woman, the only other person they saw was an old man sitting in a rowboat near a ramshackle dock. He looked asleep.
“The men are out fishing. The women wait within,” said Mr. Ames.
“Maybe it’s the other way around,” Catherine said.
“Ha!” exclaimed her father.
The water, the rocks, the weathered shacks were like washes of pure color. “I love it here,” she said.
“Someday I’ll take you to the Shetland Islands,” he said.
When she was around twelve, during one of their restaurant meetings, he’d told her about a boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland. She would love it there, he had promised. “Little international girls,” he said. “Much more grown-up than their American counterparts.” She was jealous at once.
He’d buy her a steamer trunk, the old-fashioned kind people used to take on long voyages on the great ships that used to sail to all the ports in the world. She could pack it with wonderful things and sail away to France. He’d meet her there. They would drive through Burgundy and over the Jura Alps. The school was on a hill that overlooked Lake Geneva. She’d learn marvelous things in that school.
“What things?” she had asked.
“Languages, for one,” he told her. “French, Italian. You’ll see how differently people look at the world. You won’t be locked up inside your own language.”
“Don’t people talk and think about the same things?”
“No, they don’t,” he said. “I want you to learn how big the world is, how various. It’s said to be small; people are said to be the same everywhere. It’s not. They’re not.”
The steamer trunk took hold of her imagination. She expected it somehow to turn up in the apartment where she lived with her mother, the same one where her father had once lived, too.
One afternoon after school, she found a luggage shop. In the window sat an enormous trunk, its top open to show a floral-papered interior. Resting against the top was a huge, cream-colored fan painted with Roman arches and flowers. Across the trunk’s rim rested a pair of long ivory-colored gloves. Grouped around the steamer trunk were canvas bags and plastic suitcases. She suddenly understood that the trunk was like a suit of armor—or a dinosaur—and was part of a story her father was always telling her, a story of yesterday. After that, when he spoke about places he would take her “someday,” she began to believe that she would only reach them by traveling backward in time, into the past, his past.
They sat down on the pier and watched the old man, awake now, as he fished from the side of his boat.
“Perhaps not the Shetlands,” her father was saying reflectively. “That’s for when you’re older, when you’re not looking outward so much as you do now, quite naturally—”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she interrupted him, with sudden irritation.
“Now, now, child! Don’t be cross-tempered. You know that everything I say is true. I’ll tell you what I mean. The older you get, the less you’ll be interested in what is outside you.”
“I may be different from you,” she said sharply.
She saw how he looked at her then, with real curiosity, and it was that she believed in—not his promises.
“I bet you are,” he said with conviction. “God knows, I hope you are. Look! He’s caught something.”
Slowly, sedately, the old man reeled in his line until the struggling fish, wrenched out of its own element, hung glistening in the air. The old man unhooked it, dropped it into the boat, and cast out his line again.
“What pleases you most in the world?” her father asked.
She loved his questions. Her answers often surprised her as much as they seemed to surprise him. She pondered as they sat there on the warm splintery wood of the dock, their legs dangling over the side above the water shushing gently among the pilings. It was hard to think of anything that could please her more than this moment. She gave it a try, thought of one thing or another, picking over pleasures as though they were candies in a box, until she recalled the performance of a troupe of Spanish dancers the Dalraida girls had been taken to see that winter.
The premier male dancer, dressed in black, had stood on the stage as straight as a column, slim as a birch tree, his hands raised above his head to clap the quickening beat. She thought of a movie she’d seen, set in Greece, and a scene of men dancing with their arms around one another’s waists in the vine-hung courtyard of a taverna, and she thought of Philippe in his ski boots in front of the mountain village chapel where people went to have their skis blessed. It was midnight; a single lamp glittered in the frosty air. He did a wild clog dance, a burlesque of a folk dance. They had laughed so much; they had fallen into a snowdrift, their arms around each other, shouting with hilarity, with their delight in each other.
“Men, dancing,” she said at last.
He was staring intently at her. As she spoke, he turned his face away quickly but not before she had seen some profound sadness in his face. He patted her shoulder. “You’re a dear,” he said.
They walked slowly back to the car, which he had parked just outside the village. “Where I most want to take you is Italy,” he said. “I won’t drag you through museums—you can’t tell what you’re looking at after a while. We’ll follow one painter from the place he was born to all the churches where he left a fresco or a painting. That’s how you’ll really see. How you’ll love the countryside! The Chianti hills, the Alps of the Moon, the cities, Siena and Arezzo, Sansepolcro, Urbino, Assisi …”
The names rang through the village silence like deep-throated bells. She expected people to come out of their houses and applaud.
“I mean it this time, Cath,” he said. “I know I’ve built up your expectations before—and disappointed them. But I always truly believed it would all happen. Now I mean it to. Emma and you and me. What good times we’ll have! But you must finish your schooling first so as not to alarm the guardians of our lives.”
She didn’t ask him what school, whether he meant high school or college or graduate school, or if he would arrive—at last!—with tickets and hotel reservations when she was working and the mother of six children.
She had realized that for her father, talking itself was an event, a journey. But, at least, she was with him now. That had really come true. The skimpy little house on a scruffy cliff was not Italy, not the Shetlands. But in the cramped rooms where they had talked so much, it seemed to her that a promise had been fulfilled.
She wondered if he knew that.
Although nine
teen days had passed, the time had seemed to stretch only through one long afternoon. She had begun to learn ordinary things about him: his indifference to clothes but his pleasure in the English shoes he had made for himself once every two years, his comical rages at his inability to stop smoking, his voice in the morning, the boisterous way he cooked and the rather delicate way he ate, what his face looked like when he was tired.
One Saturday morning as she washed up the breakfast dishes, she realized she wanted to go off by herself. The hours had been so precious to her when she’d met him for visits, she hadn’t even wanted to take the time to go to the bathroom.
“I think I’ll make a sandwich and go down that road where we went shooting,” she said.
He looked amused. “Had enough, have you?” he asked.
She started to explain—then didn’t know what it was she wanted to explain. She felt apprehensive. Had she hurt his feelings?
“Splendid idea,” he said. “Me, too. I’ll take some time off. We can afford that now, can’t we?”
She made herself a peanut butter sandwich and put it in a bag with an apple and a bottle of water. He had brought her a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Lost Girl, and she stuffed the paperback into the pocket of her jeans. As she went out the door, he called after her, “Be sure to come back! Don’t join some traveling troupe of actors!”
She began to run and didn’t stop until she was out of sight of the house. At the top of her lungs, she sang an Aznavour song she’d memorized. Her voice echoed and was lost in the hills, and she stopped singing, content with the silence. She ambled down the road they’d walked, and far beyond the place where they had turned back, until there wasn’t even a track. She strode through a great meadow full of Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans. On a mossy mound beneath a tree, she sat down and ate her lunch.
In a painful moment, she felt a touch of fear, of anxiety—she was losing time she might have spent with him. But the sense of her aloneness filled her with a kind of exultation. She stared up through the leaves at the sky. After a while she opened her book, though she didn’t attempt to read. A breeze stirred her hair. She heard from nearby the steady workmanlike buzz of insects. She felt herself sink into mindlessness, felt the edge of sleep, and then it broke over her like a slow wave.
When she woke up, the paper lunch bag was caught on a thistle a few yards away. The sun had moved a long distance westward. She must have slept a day and a night! How tired she had been! She grabbed up the bag, the book, and started back to the house, eager to see what he’d been up to all this time. It must have been three or four hours that she’d been away. At breakfast, he’d said something about going to a movie that evening. Maybe they could find one in Lunenberg, the nearest large town, one they hadn’t yet visited.
The car was parked in a different place. He had probably gone into the village to get groceries. What would he cook that night? She felt famished.
At the back door she paused. The house was so silent. He had been tired, too. Perhaps he had taken a nap and was still sleeping. Then she heard his voice. The words were indistinct, but the tone, as soft and sweet as caramel, carried to where she stood. She opened the door and went into the parlor. “Oh!” she said.
A woman was leaning forward in the old armchair. Mr. Ames was standing behind it, his hands resting on its curved back. The woman started to get up. Mr. Ames touched her shoulder and she sank back into the chair. “Here’s my big girl!” he greeted Catherine loudly, and walked over to her, putting his arm around her shoulder and drawing her further into the room. The woman smiled uneasily, looking from Mr. Ames to Catherine with a dazed, helpless expression on her face. She looked away from them and began to smooth the skirt of her light cotton dress.
“Catherine, this is Mrs. Conklin … you remember her husband … you met him recently.”
“I must be going,” Mrs. Conklin said in a timid voice, as she stood, holding tightly to the arm of the chair.
“Mrs. Conklin dropped by to talk something over with me—” he began, but realized his mistake when Mrs. Conklin gave him a stricken look. “What is the matter with me? I mean to say—I picked her up in Mackenzie. She’s been concerned about her husband’s drinking—”
Catherine cleared her throat, croaked out, “Yes …” and turned to leave the room.
But Mr. Ames grabbed her arm. “Come along with us. I’ll drive her home. I have to pick up the lamb anyhow.”
Catherine said, “Thanks”—though she didn’t know for what—for his reminding her of supper? She ran upstairs.
Her father called out to her with a kind of maniacal cheerfulness, “Be right back, my girl!”
From her room, she listened to the horrible grinding of gears. Starting the car always agitated him. It sounded now as though he were tearing it apart with a chain saw. There was one last screech before the gears engaged, then a rumble, then silence. She ran downstairs into the kitchen and gulped down a glass of water. In her mind’s eye, she saw Mrs. Conklin’s pale, almost pretty face, her close-set dark eyes turned beseechingly up to Mr. Ames. What had he been up to?
She knew what he’d been up to. “He’s married,” she whispered aloud. “He’s old.”
She had heard that caramel tone in his voice even when he spoke to Mrs. Landy. He wanted everyone to be in love with him, Reverend Ross, the village bums. He’d show up next with the farmer’s wife, romancing her, too. She twisted away from the sink and sat down at the table. Her head felt full of gravel. He was disgusting! The world traveler, stomping through Mackenzie with his big belly, his actor’s voice, showing the hicks what a star he was!
She went outside to the swing and stood next to it, her hand on the sun-warmed wood slats, taking deep breaths the way she did before the dentist gave her a needle. The swallows had begun their late-afternoon flight over the meadow. She watched them for a long time, until they seemed to be flying inside her head, and she felt quiet and somewhat comforted. She went back to the kitchen and made herself a large sandwich. She didn’t need him to feed her.
“Catherine?”
He was standing in the doorway, looking at her.
“Whatever you think—you’re wrong,” he said.
“Mrs. Conklin just dropped in,” she said coldly. “By parachute, I guess.”
“You might take note of how ineptly I lie,” he said. “That ought to reassure you.”
“Is that what telling lies is for?”
“You don’t know how empty people’s lives can be,” he said.
“Is Emma’s life empty?” she asked, not looking at him.
“Emma doesn’t expect me to make her life full,” he replied, but his voice had faltered a little. “I wasn’t intending to run off with that young woman,” he went on. “I was spending an hour or so with her. It’s true that I ran into her in the grocery store in Mackenzie. I’m from far away, an outsider, someone she can talk to.” He paused. When he continued, his voice was louder, more confident. “She did want to talk to me about his drinking. And I know a bit about that.”
That was like asking the wolf for advice about how to protect the sheep, Catherine thought to herself. What she said was, “You didn’t look like you’d been talking.”
He laughed, throwing back his head. “My God! I’ve sired a Puritan. Do you know about Puritans? It was remarked about them that they objected to bearbaiting as a sport—not because it gave pain to the bears but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Is that what you’re like?”
“None of it’s my business,” she said angrily.
“Oh, indeed! You’ll think your own thoughts, will you? Listen. I wouldn’t take up with anyone whose eyes are so close-set. It’s a sign of a treacherous nature, Catherine. I’m not a tempter … ravening through the countryside. Do you think all I want to do is win people? Beguile them?”
“Yes!” she cried. “Yes, I do!”
He sat down suddenly at the kitchen table, banged his knee against a table leg, and exclaimed,
“Ouch!” making a pained face at her. She didn’t believe that ouch, either.
“You were coming on to her. I saw—”
“Listen to me,” he interrupted. “Don’t use that junk language to me! ‘Coming on to her …’ I’d rather have you grunt like an ape than use such locutions.”
“I don’t know what that means,” she said, feeling a certain satisfaction that she’d made him angry.
“Look it up,” he said gruffly.
“When I have the time,” she replied.
He laughed suddenly. It disconcerted her. “All right,” she said grudgingly. “Then you were flirting.”
“That’s better,” he said. “In this case, it’s untrue. But do you think your old father is past such things? You think flirting is only legal when it’s done by the young and beautiful? You’d better get something straight. People flirt on their way to the guillotine.”
“I’m going for a walk.”
“You’ve been for a walk,” he said sternly. “Anyhow, you had better not leave me alone. I might drive off and grab Mrs. Landy and cozy up to her with ginger beer and forget-me-nots. You’d do much better to peel those potatoes in that bag over there. I slave for you night and day over a hot stove and you don’t lift a finger. Here! Take the knife in hand! Peel! I dare say there are scandalous goings-on in that school of yours that would turn your father’s hair white with shock!”
He was running all over her, drowning her in language. Still, she felt better. How did he do it? How did he make things that seemed to signify so insignificant? She even had to turn away so he wouldn’t see her grin because she was thinking about Mrs. Landy and ginger beer and forget-me-nots. She peeled the potatoes and sliced them thinly as he directed her to do, and was gratified when he praised her work.
He didn’t offer to read to her that evening. He had some work of his own to do, he said. Once, unbidden, the face of Mrs. Conklin interposed itself between her eyes and the pages of the Lawrence novel she was reading. She glanced over at him. He had drawn up a small table to his armchair, and he was bent over some pages of typing, a pencil in one hand, his expression concentrated. He seemed to sense her scrutiny. He looked up and smiled at her.