by Paula Fox
“Let’s go to a movie,” he said suddenly. “Let’s get out of this insistent sunlight.” He grinned at her. “Come on! We’ll be spendthrifts. We’ll waste a day. We’ll waste this glory.”
She smiled because she felt obliged to smile. He was looking straight at her. He would sense any opposition. He reached out and brushed her hair behind her ears. They were standing in front of a fish market. The bellied of the freshly caught fish gleamed like wet silk. A drop of blood at the corner of the mouth of a huge silver and black fish caught her eye. She shuddered, recalling the animal skeleton in the pit in the meadow.
“Don’t be scared,” he said gently.
When they emerged, blinking, a couple of hours later from the movie house, he said it hadn’t been much of a picture. “A really good movie is always a fairy tale,” he said. “The more they try to be like life, to be realistic, the less real they are. That’s a paradox. I suppose you know what that is, my ignorant child?”
“I think so,” she replied. She was glad to hear him speaking in a kidding, indulgent way. He didn’t press her to explain paradox. As they drove out of Lunenberg toward the little house, she felt she was flying ahead toward her real home, a thousand miles away.
For supper that night he made a piperade, a Basque omelet, he told her. When they’d finished, he asked, “Shall I read to you?”
He sounded uncertain. She longed for what was ordinary, a rest from thinking, wondering. During their brief visits, she had found everything simple. At least, she had thought she had. But now, after living with her father this month, all that she had unthinkingly taken for granted was open to doubt; all certainties had shifted, broken up.
He was smoking continuously, dragging on each cigarette with a starved look on his face. When the smoke made him cough, he turned away from her as though she wouldn’t hear him if she couldn’t see his face.
She wanted to apologize to him for what she had shouted out in the swing. As she thought of her words, she felt their truth sink into her, blunt truths like rocks hurled. And just because they were true, because he was not the writer he had set out to be, her pity for him deepened.
“Well … not tonight, thanks,” she said softly.
He gave her a searching look. She tried to face him openly. But the conscious effort she put into it made her feel fake. She began to clear away the dishes and stack them in the sink. She heard him strike a kitchen match to light still another cigarette.
“It hasn’t worked,” he said quietly. “Oh dear, oh dear.… Too late.”
She said nothing.
“But you’ll remember these days, won’t you?” he asked.
When she didn’t answer, he asked angrily, “Catherine? Are you a stone?”
She turned to him. “I’m sorry for what I said yesterday. I wish I hadn’t said those things to you.”
He sighed immensely. “Thank you for that,” he said. “Someone has to forgive me. God knows, I can’t forgive me. God knows, I can’t forgive myself.”
“I’ll go pack when I finish the dishes,” she said.
“Yes,” he agreed, nodding. He left the kitchen. She felt peculiar for a moment, until she realized he had gone because she had dismissed him. She was glad he had. For all the pity she felt, he was a burden to her right now.
Mrs. Landy was coming in the morning and they would all three clean the house together. Then Mr. Ames was to drop her off at her house on the way to Digby. They would cross the Canadian border at Calais and drive to Portland, where she would take the Boston flight. He would drive on to Emma and his house in Rockport, and she would take the shuttle to New York after phoning her mother to give her the time she would arrive.
“Camp is over,” she said aloud.
She got up the next morning in a school mood, aware of work ahead, not overly enthusiastic, but relieved to know what she was supposed to do.
As Mrs. Landy sang tunelessly in the kitchen, Catherine began to gather up the old magazines and books they’d found in the parlor. She opened Dracula by Bram Stoker and read the first page. Her father came to stand at her side for a moment, looking down at the book over her shoulder.
“I saw a movie of it on television,” she said.
“Were you scared?” he asked.
“Not much,” she responded.
“That’s because it happened outside you. If you read it, the horror of it grows inside … where all horror is. I was scared witless by it. Did you know Stoker was the manager of a famous actor of that period, Henry Irving? He wrote that book because of a bet he made with his brother. This was the bet—that he could write the most frightening story ever written. He won.”
She put the book away on a shelf. Her heart sank. She recollected all the odd bits of information he’d given her, his stories, the news he was always bringing her about different ways to understand things. She imagined being seventeen, then twenty, and how they’d probably go back to meeting in restaurants on his infrequent trips to New York.
Then she would be gone, too, to college, or to work, to whatever was to happen to her. She could, as though they were drawn on paper, see how their paths had crossed and would now diverge. Time would make it happen. There was no stopping time. She thought of how she would probably never know him better than she did at this moment, standing in front of the shelf of dusty old yellowing books in this cramped, shabby parlor, the sunlight dappling the dusty floorboards.
She hoped he would tease her on the way back to the United States, hoped they would laugh again. There hadn’t been much laughter in the last few days.
She went upstairs to check her room. Her bulging suitcase lay on the bed, a strap of her bathing suit poking out of it. Her mother could fold a blouse so that it didn’t wrinkle, no matter how long it stayed packed. Catherine picked up the suitcase and carried it to the door and paused there, looking back into the room. Narrow bed, oak chest of drawers, straight-backed chair, unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling, gray-painted floor. Tonight it would be empty.
At noon they loaded up the car. Mr. Ames placed the red tricycle on top of her suitcases. Mrs. Landy hadn’t noticed it; she never appeared to notice much. She tweaked her bun of hair and looked back at the house before she got into the car.
“There’s been a lot of fun in Ethel Diggs’s old house, hasn’t there?” she asked, with slightly more animation in her voice than usual. Perhaps she was glad they were leaving. “I tell my Jackie how you two laugh so much,” she said. “And how good you cook, Mr. Ames. Mr. Landy won’t fry an egg. He wants the food set down before him. He doesn’t want to see an egg in its shell. He says: ‘Janet, I don’t want to know where my food comes from. Remember that.’”
“Some men really don’t like to cook,” Mr. Ames said, with jovial emphasis.
So there was a Mr. Landy, thought Catherine.
“Isn’t that the truth?” said Mrs. Landy.
Perhaps because she had never been so forthcoming, Mr. Ames asked her what Mr. Landy did for a living.
“Why—he works for Mr. Glimm,” she replied. “The farmer you took home in the morning after getting him so drunk. Yes, Mr. Landy’s worked for Mr. Glimm for twenty-three years. And my little Jackie found them their dog. Somebody had thrown it away on the road, the poor thing.”
She directed them to one of dozen or so houses, much like the Diggs house, a few yards back from the country road.
“There it is,” she said. Mr. Ames stopped the car so abruptly, the tricycle slid forward. Mrs. Landy smiled placidly at Catherine over the handlebar. The engine died. There was the crack of a screen door slamming. Mr. Ames got out of the car, opened the tailgate, got out the tricycle, and set it on the ground. Catherine looked at Mrs. Landy’s house. Dashing down the narrow cement path toward the car, smoking a large cigar, was a tiny man in a tiny plaid woodsman’s shirt and dark blue workpants.
“Here’s my Jackie,” Mrs. Landy said. “He’s a short-order cook over at the Blue Star café in Bridgewater. Took the morning off so�
��s to meet you and Catherine, Mr. Ames.”
Catherine cast a horrified glance at her father. He looked frozen.
“Daddy!” she said sharply.
“Mrs. Landy,” he began, staring at her. He cleared his throat, moved a few feet away from the tricycle. “I bought this—I didn’t know—”
“Oh, is that for us?” asked Mrs. Landy. “That’s so nice of you, Mr. Ames. Isn’t that nice, Jackie?”
“Certainy is,” agreed Jackie, in a basso profundo voice. “Certainy is nice to meet you.”
“There’s a little girl lives up the way that’ll just love it,” Mrs. Landy said. Jackie went to the tricycle and gripped one of the handlebars and wheeled it back and forth, smiling amiably at Catherine through a cloud of cigar smoke.
Mr. Ames said in a weak voice, “I can’t thank you enough for all you’ve done for us, Mrs. Landy.” He seemed overcome for a moment.
“It’s been a nice change for Mother,” said the little man in his booming voice.
“Well, you’ve been wonderful to us,” Mr. Ames continued doggedly, staring at the side of the car. “Catherine, hasn’t she been wonderful?”
Catherine nodded mutely. A hundred years had passed since she had heard Mrs. Landy say Jackie was a short-order cook.
“We won’t forget you,” Mrs. Landy said. “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about.”
Jackie had taken from her the bag of leftover groceries Mr. Ames had given her. With his free arm, he continued to hold on to the tricycle. Mrs. Landy stopped and took hold of the other side of the handlebar. They began to wheel it up the walk to their house. Jackie didn’t have to bend.
“Good-bye, good-bye,” called Mr. Ames as he got back into the driver’s seat. He needn’t have said it twice, thought Catherine.
“My God!” he gasped as they drove off. “I should have bought him a box of stogies.”
Catherine let out a whoop of laughter. He laughed louder, leaning back against the seat, the car swerving down the road.
“What a fool I was!” he cried. “It never occurred to me to ask how old little Jackie was.”
“But how could you have known? She always talked about little Jackie.”
“I didn’t know she meant short,” he said.
“Stop!” shrieked Catherine.
“A short-order cook,” he said.
“Don’t say any more!”
“How can you be so wicked—laughing at that little fellow!”
“I’m not laughing,” she protested in a choked voice.
After a while, he said, “You never know. You get a peek at someone’s life—you start back in dread. Would you have guessed Mrs. Landy had so much delicacy? You know she saved us, don’t you? I wouldn’t put it past her to have invented a little girl up the way—just so we wouldn’t be embarrassed. Embarrassed! I feel destroyed!”
“I feel mean,” Catherine said. “It wasn’t really funny, it was unexpected.”
“Don’t make excuses,” he said. “There’s nothing funny about the way we all betray each other. You’ll laugh the same way at me someday. There will be people who’ll laugh at you—like that girl, Harriet, you told me about.”
“Not because I’m a dwarf,” she said.
“How do you know you aren’t one?”
“Harriet Blacking lives in order to get the drop on everyone. I don’t do that.”
“Don’t say what you don’t do. It’ll come back at you.”
She welcomed this half-lecture. She was happy they were driving together through the countryside, talking the way they used to, before the night of the bootleggers. She had thought it couldn’t be the same between them again. Now it was—almost.
They stopped in St. John for an early supper. He said he wished they had time enough to visit Grand Manan Island where Willa Cather had lived. When she looked at him blankly, he began to talk about Willa Cather, about her books, about how bitter she had become toward the end of her life.
“She felt the world she knew was going, and everything good was disappearing from it,” he said. “Of course, it always is disappearing. When you begin to grow old, you suffer from change of era.”
She didn’t understand much of what he was saying—he seemed to be speaking to himself more than to her—but she heard wistfulness in his voice when he told her to write down the titles of Willa Cather’s novels. He was asking her to remember him.
She was looking at him intently. He looked back at her, his usually animated features composed, still.
“Listen,” he began quietly, “I don’t drink like that anymore. I can’t. What was at work was that law—the one that says the worst thing that can happen will happen. Of all the times I should have been sober, it was during this time with you. I hope you can believe me. No excuses. And—I hope you do laugh at me.”
She wanted to believe him.
“Wasn’t that funny—Mrs. Landy knowing about the night you drove the drunks home? It’s what’s wonderful and awful about small-town life. Everybody knows at least a part of everything that happens.”
They spent the night in an old inn in Camden, Maine. She was so tired she hardly listened to what he was telling her about a poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had spent her childhood in Camden. The name alone ran through her mind like a lullaby as she fell asleep.
The next morning, they drove to Portland and its airport. He hardly spoke. But the long silences between them were not uncomfortable.
They parted at the airline security gate. Her suitcase trundled away, under the machine that X-rayed it. They said good-bye.
Her parents had not been married to each other for nearly all of her life. It seemed to Catherine that the divorce between them, which had taken place so many years ago, and that had been the main fact about her life, was at last final.
She went through the electronic gate. She turned back and saw him walking up a ramp. She watched him for a moment. He walked briskly. At the top of the ramp, he stopped. He looked to his right, then to his left. He didn’t seem to know where to go. She wanted to run back, to help him.
A woman’s voice said roughly, “Hey! Take your bag. There’s other people coming along.”
Nine
In the airports where she waited, Catherine looked through thick glass walls at planes. “They look like big fools,” her father had said of them, “bumbling around on the asphalt. But when they leave the ground, that immense striving until they’re free … that’s the lovely thing.”
She had studied him like a book for a month. Her heart and mind were so strained with her effort that she was glad for this time of dullness. After she had called her mother at her office, she had stood, staring blankly at magazine covers, in the small newspaper and souvenir shops.
Her mother had started to ask her something but said, “Never mind.” Catherine guessed it would have been a question about Harry Ames.
There was another, disturbing question she was asking herself. It had to do with the weeks when she waited for her father to turn up at the Dalraida School. The chances were that Madame Soule would say something to her mother at some point during the next year. Would it be better if Catherine told her first?
Day by day she had waited, hardly believing at each day’s end that there had been no word from him. She had covered for him with letter tricks, with lies; she had pleaded for him with Madame Soule. For herself, too. She had been so busy at her contrivances, she had hardly considered the possibility that he might simply abandon her for the summer. That he might have fallen ill or been in an accident had not occurred to her. Perhaps she had sensed then what she knew now—he couldn’t rely on himself, and no one else could, either, not for those qualities of character people summed up with the word “reliable.”
He was a pained and haunted man. But did he find his life unbearable? One evening, he had whispered, “The romance of life.” How could you hate your life and still say such a thing? Or had what he said been only words, intangible, and as fleeting as the
flute music she had heard the night he’d finally telephoned her?
“But I heard it,” she said to herself, as she pressed her face against the airplane window and looked down at Jamaica Bay. “Words and music,” she said to the thousand rooftops over which the plane was now descending.
As she marched down the ramp into the waiting room in New York, she caught sight of her mother searching for her, an apprehensive look on her face. When she spotted Catherine, her face lit up.
She kept her arm around Catherine’s waist, hugging her as they went outside into the humid air. “Oh, I’m so glad to see you,” she said again and again, as though Catherine had just been ransomed from captivity. “I’m so glad you got back in one piece.”
“Why wouldn’t I get back in one piece?” Catherine asked, her pleasure at seeing her mother at once clouded. She heard the old condemnation of her father lying just below the concern in her mother’s voice. “‘Round up the usual suspects,’” she muttered.
“What?” asked her mother sharply.
“A line from a movie,” Catherine said.
“There’s a taxi,” her mother said. “The bus ride is too long. You must be tired. You can’t have had much rest. I was worried he wouldn’t get you to Portland today. He was always late—a matter of principle with him. Does he still drive as though he were having a fit?”
“I’ll tell you all about it when we get home,” Catherine said, leaning back against the sticky warm plastic seat. She did feel flattened.
“How was the Lake Country?” she asked.
“Wonderful,” replied her mother animatedly. “We have pictures. It’s surprising, what being in the places where the poets lived does for one. Now I know they’re real. I saw the chairs they sat in. We even went to Beatrix Potter’s farm—though Carter wasn’t too enthusiastic. We tramped for miles.” She opened her pocketbook and took something from it. “Here’s one little present. I also got you a beautiful tweed jacket in Edinburgh in a shop on Princes Street.”
Into Catherine’s hand lying open on the seat between them, she placed the smallest bear Catherine had ever seen. It was dressed in a tiny embroidered waistcoat and green felt jacket. Another wee creature, thought Catherine, along with the Great Illusion across the street from school and Jackie Landy. She must stop growing taller or she’d be beyond the reach of all kinds of interesting beings.