by Paula Fox
“I found that in Hawkshead,” her mother was saying. “A very old lady makes those bears. Wordsworth went to school in that village, Cathy. Oh—the schoolroom! I saw his initials, W. W., carved in a desk.”
Catherine gazed at her mother’s hand, gripping her pocketbook. It was a slender hand with a new wedding band on her fourth finger. “It’s a splendid bear,” she said.
“You sound like him,” her mother said reproachfully. “Splendid is just what he would have said.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” Catherine asked tersely. “Him is my father.”
“Catherine, I’ve been so worried. I hope he behaved himself. I knew, I always knew, you’d have to spend some time with him. But I hope—”
“Mom. Stop hoping. I’m here. He’s not Frankenstein’s monster.”
“Carter was concerned, too,” her mother went on hurriedly, as though Catherine had not spoken.
“What has Carter got to do with Daddy?” Catherine asked. She moved closer to the window and sat up straight and didn’t look at her mother.
“I’m sorry, Cathy. We’ve had some uneasy moments. It wasn’t only worry about your father’s behavior. You and I were so far from each other, thousands of miles. Sometimes I felt each one of them.”
“Okay,” Catherine said. She sighed and took her mother’s hand in her own.
“Carter would have come to meet you, too, but he had a preregistration faculty meeting.”
“That’s all right.”
She dozed a while, her head against her mother’s shoulder, waking now and then to the noise of traffic. Then her mother was shaking her. They were in front of the apartment house on the west side of the city, where they had lived for so many years. The elevator seemed to take forever. Catherine wanted intensely to see her room, her things, the view from the window that showed a patch of the Hudson River. The sun would set soon, the water would look like a sheet of flame.
As she closed the door behind them, Catherine felt the eerie half-silence of a city apartment, the mutter and mumble of the city outside it like a distant perpetual motion machine.
“It’s nice here,” she said.
“It is, isn’t it?” her mother agreed. “These days, I keep congratulating myself that I held on to this place. We’d never find one like it anymore at a rent we could afford.”
Her mother didn’t sound as though she were congratulating herself, more as if she were defending herself.
“I can see why you must have cared about him,” Catherine said. They looked at each other across the suitcase.
“Wouldn’t you like to unpack and wash up?” her mother asked.
“I can see, too, why you couldn’t live with him.”
Her mother stared at the suitcase as though it were a compellingly interesting object.
“I’m so glad to be home,” Catherine said. Even as she said it, she had a presentiment that when she went back to Montreal in a week, she would be glad of that, too.
“Me, too,” her mother said, reaching across the suitcase and embracing her awkwardly.
Her father had said her mother was a daylight woman. Perhaps she was, but he left out too much. There were other things about her mother he’d forgotten, or had never known. Catherine left her suitcase where it was and went to the sofa and sat down. Her mother came and sat close to her. Catherine began to tell her about the visit, the house, Reverend Ross and the fishing day, learning how to use the rifle and shooting at barns.
“He always had a streak of lawlessness in him,” her mother said. “He always wanted to go against things.”
Catherine went on as though she hadn’t spoken. She described Mackenzie and the lovely village by the sea. The pale, uneasy face of Mrs. Conklin suddenly floated into her mind, and hurriedly, she described Mrs, Landy and the tricycle, the surprise of Jackie. She began to laugh wildly. Her mother grabbed her hand and gave her a stricken look.
“Catherine! Don’t laugh like that! How can you laugh so cruelly at someone’s misfortune?”
“Oh, Mom! We weren’t really laughing at him. It was because we’d been so dumb! We’d made such a mistake—about the tricycle—thinking he was a little kid when he was just a very short man.”
“That poor mother … that poor little man.…”
“He didn’t think he was a poor little man,” Catherine cried. “You should have seen him smoking his cigar!”
“Your father always mocked people,” her mother said bitterly. “His mockery was terrible to me.”
“He mocks himself, too,” Catherine protested. “Anyhow, we all laugh at each other, sometimes. Even when you feel sorry, sometimes you have to laugh.”
“He made me laugh at myself,” her mother said. “He made me my own enemy.”
“You loved him once!”
Her mother said nothing.
“You must have loved him once,” Catherine cried, gripping her mother’s arm.
“I was young. I didn’t know anything when I met him. I suppose he was glamorous.”
“What do you know now that can change what you felt back then?” Catherine demanded.
“There are shallow reasons for feelings. And there are deep ones.”
“No!” Catherine shouted. Her mother put her hands over her ears, then dropped them. “You loved him once. I know it!”
“Falling in love isn’t the same as—”
“It is the same. It’s all the same … those feelings. I watched a boy I know dance a crazy clog one night on the snow. And I loved him. I’m not going to say a hundred years from now that I didn’t love him, no matter what happens!”
“Let go of my arm, Catherine. Oh, Lord! Look how he’s made trouble between us! He always made trouble!”
She had not known she was as big as her mother, her arms as long, her own shoulders as broad and strong, until she became aware that she had gathered her mother up and was holding her as one would hold a child, a child who, if you let go for an instant, will run away and hide herself.
“There must have been an hour, a day, when you couldn’t think about anything else,” she whispered fiercely against her mother’s cheek, “when you loved him!”
“All right!” her mother cried, and shook herself free from Catherine’s grasp and stood up, smoothing back her dark brown hair, her fingers quickly touching hairpins that kept it so neatly coiled at the nape of her neck. “All right,” she repeated quietly. “I did. And for more than an hour and a day.”
“Did?” Catherine asked.
“I’m going to start supper. We’ll talk more later—if that’s what you’re going to insist upon.”
Catherine nodded. She might insist but she didn’t believe they would talk later about Harry Ames. She’d gotten what she wanted from her—for now. Her mother was gazing at her with curiosity, as though she were unfamiliar to her.
“I’ll unpack,” Catherine said.
“The tweed jacket is hanging in your closet,” her mother told her. “I’m dying to see it on you.” She didn’t look as if a jacket was on her mind. She touched Catherine’s shoe with the toe of her own. “Okay,” she said, and walked off toward the kitchen.
Catherine took her suitcase to her room. They didn’t have air-conditioning, and the apartment was hot, airless. She put on the new jacket, anyhow, and wore it as she got out her old school atlas from beneath a pile of textbooks. She turned pages until she found a map of Italy. She found the places her father had spoken of that day they had gone to the fishing village—Arezzo, Perugia, Assisi. She leaned closer, looking for Sansepolcro. It was there, near Arezzo. She lifted up her hand from the page. Under it was the city of Rome.
She would go to Italy herself someday.
She began to unpack. She was not going to tell her mother everything. She wouldn’t speak of her father’s drinking. If her mother asked her, she would say, yes, he drank some. And she wouldn’t tell anyone about Mrs. Conklin. But she knew she would have to speak of the three weeks she had spent at Dalraida when she was the onl
y student left in a closed school.
She would do it the day before she left for Montreal. Of course, it would make trouble. Her mother would blame Madame Soule as well as her father. Catherine would have to try to persuade her that Catherine herself was as responsible as anyone else for what had happened. She had chosen to wait for him, after all.
But even if she told her more than she intended to—her mother had a way of getting things out of her—one thing she would not tell her was what Harry Ames had said to her at the Portland airport.
“See you,” she had said, as they paused near the electronic gate.
He leaned forward. He kissed her forehead. Then he bent his head so that his face was close to her ear.
“Not if I see you first,” he whispered.
About the Author
Paula Fox is a notable figure in contemporary American literature. She has earned wide acclaim for her children’s books, as well as for her novels and memoirs for adults. Born in New York City on April 22, 1923, her early years were turbulent. She moved from upstate New York to Cuba to California, and from one school to another. An avid reader at a young age, her love of literature sustained her through the difficulties of an unsettled childhood. At first, Fox taught high school, writing only when occasion permitted. Soon, however, she was able to devote herself to writing full-time, but kept a foot in the classroom by teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the State University of New York.
In her novels for young readers, Fox fearlessly tackles difficult topics such as death, race, and illness. She has received many distinguished literary awards including a Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer (1974), a National Book Award for A Place Apart (1983), and a Newbery Honor for One-Eyed Cat (1984). Worldwide recognition for Fox’s contribution to literature for children came with the presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978.
Fox’s novels for adults have also been highly praised. Her 2002 memoir, Borrowed Finery, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and in 2013 the Paris Review presented her with the Hadada Award, honoring her contribution to literature and the writing community. In 2011, Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.
Fox lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Martin Greenberg.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1986 by Paula Fox
Cover design by Connie Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3743-3
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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