The story, as it circulated around town, was confusing, and everyone wanted to get at the core of it, though no one, of course, asked any member of the family about it. They simply offered their condolences when Dinah went down for the paper, as though her father had had a stroke. But Polly had begun at once, as though something had been confirmed, to sort and pack up her father’s belongings.
“Oh, of course he won’t be coming back here!” she said to Dinah with impatience and irritation, obviously wishing Dinah would not ask questions of her. And any questions Dinah did ask, Polly met with a look of exasperation. “Oh, Dinah, for heaven’s sake…” and she would trail off to one room or another or go take a long bath.
Her father’s recuperation had taken a long time, and, indeed, he had not ever come back to Polly’s house. He had lived in an apartment in Fort Lyman for about five years. It was near the hospital, where he underwent physical therapy for a while, and close to his office. Eventually, he bought the house in Enfield, and came home to it. When he did that, he officially discontinued his psychiatric practice, so that he wouldn’t have to commute even the short distance back to town.
Dinah could look from her bedroom window, across the street, directly into his study with its long french doors, and she often saw him looking through his papers or reading a book late into the night. She could watch his progress as he stacked the papers on his desk and made his way into the central hall and up the stairs, turning the lights out as he went. He moved slowly, dragging the leg that had been left damaged by that shot. But with his tall, spare figure and arrogant hawk’s head silhouetted in the windows as he passed them, he never aroused her pity. She only watched him, bemused. At last the light in his bedroom would go off, and Dinah would go to sleep.
Dinah had watched one day three summers ago from her window while two of her father’s gardeners erected a sign on his meticulously kept lawn. It was a cleverly designed sign, hung in the fashion, Dinah supposed, of the period of the house. Three narrow white boards were suspended one from the other by little chains. Three separate messages. All three were then suspended from a black iron bar and post by two sturdier chains. She could not read the messages on the slender boards, though, not at such a distance. When she took the children out for a walk and to get the mail, she stopped by her father’s wrought-iron fence for a long look. The three signs said:
PSYCHIATRY ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAMS FORTUNES TOLD
It was after the sign went up that people talked to her about her father as though he and she were not related. They were absolving her from responsibility. The people in Enfield were no less sophisticated about human behavior than people anywhere else, and some of them had always understood her father’s brooding cynicism. Almost everyone understood that the signs were intentionally amusing, but in the end they had come to think that beneath the surface of that slippery humor lay insanity of a sort. Dinah was not sure herself. She had sometimes considered the possibility of her father directing the force of his intellect, and his gloomy wisdom, to the outermost limits of sociability. Beyond the reach of sociability at all, perhaps, so that his keen intelligence would be cut asunder to range around among the most grotesque facets of his mind. Out of civilized bounds. She felt an obscure pride in the fact that it would be a profound madness, not any pitiful eccentricity. Sometimes she wondered what her father thought if he looked out his window and saw her with her three children ambling by his doorway on their daily walks. Did he have any compunction about his loss of her—her loss of him? But after eight summers she had become more and more accustomed to this peculiar arrangement.
Even so, when she was at her mother’s house in the evening fixing dinner or tending the children, she was roused to a great, repressed rage if she had to hear those nightly telephone conversations between her parents, to whose silences she had devoted the whole passion of her youth in her efforts toward mediation. This evening, as she sat with Lawrence and Pam among the flowering spirea, she did not move a muscle when the phone rang; she let Polly get up and go to it. But her body went tense, because she was so disturbed by this ritual. Her parents kept up a running chess game, too, in this manner, telling each other their moves over the phone and then rearranging the pieces on their separate boards. Whenever Dinah came across her mother’s board, laid out on the table in the study with its little ivory pieces all set up in the current positions, she found it inexplicably maddening. So she sat quite still while Polly went to answer the phone.
Dinah and Lawrence and Pam were sitting on the patio just at that moment before the onset of evening. As the day breaks away, the light settles on the edge of the horizon, seemingly sullen, not giving an inch, just a long horizontal bar of whiteness stretching on and on beneath the graying sky. Then it dissolves into a gentleness so unexpected that the dense and hazy quality of the air seems to be the embodiment of relief. The relief of the burden of that one day.
Chapter Four
A Party
Dinah did her grocery shopping at the little village store, even though the prices were higher than if she drove into Fort Lyman. She liked the sociability, and she would take the children along to the post office on the opposite side of Hoxsey Street, collect the mail, and then cross over to do each day’s shopping while the children dawdled behind her. In the summers she didn’t shop in great quantities. She didn’t need to, for one thing; she didn’t have the Artists’ Guild shop in West Bradford to attend to—a burden she shouldered almost exclusively September through May—and also she had to carry these groceries home in her arms. Besides, it was her summer luxury, with no other pressing duties at hand, not to think ahead, not to plan in advance.
She was having a dinner party of sorts this evening, so for once she had come to the store with a careful little list written out on a spare deposit slip she had torn out of her checkbook. Pam had taken all the children swimming that morning, so Dinah lingered among the limited selection of produce. She had tended the Hortons’ vegetable garden with sticky and ill-tempered determination in the afternoon sun, but now as a result she had lettuce and beautiful tomatoes, some splitting with ripeness on the vine. She began to sort through the potatoes in their metal bin; most of them yielded too readily to the pressure of her fingers. She found five that would do and put the paper bag of them into her cart.
She turned the corner of the aisle, which brought her to the meat counter, and there she came upon her father, who was just being handed whatever he had selected in a brown paper bundle tied with string. He looked predatory there with his neck projecting lengthily from his collar. He peered down at the meat in such sincere deliberation that with his height he was like a great, melancholy buzzard. He turned and saw her and smiled with that rather supercilious amusement he always assumed when they met in town.
“Hello, Dad. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m well. I’m well.” And he leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek. Then he took his package and went off to the checkout. Just as he was walking away from her he turned back obliquely, hindered by his stiff leg from turning easily around. “Say, Dinah,” he said, having to turn his head somewhat over his shoulder to catch her eye, “I really like that little boy of yours,” he said and then continued on his way.
Dinah moved along to the dairy section, because she saw that the butcher, Jim, who owned the store and had known her all her life and knew all her history, had been embarrassed at having to witness this confrontation. She looked over all the little cartons of cream—real cream, not the chemical-tasting, ultra-pasteurized variety—until she came upon the most recently dated ones, and she put two of those into her cart. She bought some unsalted butter in one big block, not in sticks, because it was so convenient for cooking. Dinah and her father met often in the village; it was unavoidable. They were civil; they weren’t sorry to see each other. But neither of them attempted a conversation of any length. When she saw that her father had left the store, she moved back to the meat counter to study the choices in the display case
s. She wanted to grill shish kebabs tonight, and she was hoping to find a sirloin tip roast.
Jim was washing and drying his hands on the other side of the counter. “He almost never shops for himself, you know,” he said.
“Oh, no?” she asked.
“No…no. He had a girl helping him out for a while. A secretary, I guess. She used to come in sometimes. Now he usually sends one of those boys down. One of those people who works for him. I think that girl must have quit.”
“Oh, yes,” Dinah said pleasantly, drawing out the vowels a little to show her interest and also so as not to seem affronted. She wouldn’t have hurt Jim’s feelings.
“Well, he’s come in pretty often, lately. He just buys a few things at a time. I don’t think those boys ever get just what he wants.”
Dinah explained what she needed, and Jim went back into the meat locker to get a side of beef from which to cut it. When he returned and was standing at his porcelain table sideways to her, he continued his part of the conversation. “It’s a funny thing, though, about Dr. Briggs, you know. Sometimes I think he’s kind of gone to pieces. Do you remember my son, Pete? He’s up at OSU now?”
Dinah nodded.
“Well, last year he had to have an operation.” He looked up at Dinah with a reassuring shrug. “He’s fine, now. It turned out not to be anything serious. But, anyway, he was pretty scared beforehand. He was working here in the store with me, and he was real worried about the idea of being cut open.” Jim paused to pull out a long sheet of paper, in which he would wrap Dinah’s roast, from the serrated-edge holder over his table. “Do you want me to cut this into cubes for you, or do you want to do it yourself? It’s no extra charge.”
“Oh, no. I can do that,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what size I want them.”
Jim nodded in agreement, and went on, “Well, I really got to be afraid he wouldn’t go through with it, and I finally called up Dr. Briggs, you know, and just asked him if he would talk to Pete about it. I knew your dad was still seeing some patients, and he’s known Pete all his life. Anyway, he said he’d be glad to. He asked me if Pete could bring along some meat and groceries when he came, just to save him the walk that day. I guess your father has some pain still, getting around.”
By this time Jim had wrapped and tied the meat and put it on the counter in front of Dinah, but he was standing with both hands resting on the glass and leaning toward her, so Dinah didn’t take up the package yet. She saw he had more to say.
“Well, Pete took all the groceries over to him. He carried them through to the kitchen for Dr. Briggs and waited while your father checked over them all and put them away. But your dad had ordered a thick T-bone”—and Jim held his fingers up to approximate the thickness—“and he didn’t put that away. He just put it there on the table, and began to ask Pete all about his operation and when it was going to be and all, while he was unwrapping that steak. And then when he got it all untied, and the paper off of it…well, then your father took one of those long carving knives out of a drawer. The kind of knife you use to carve a turkey or a ham, Pete said. And he kind of flung it point down into the beef, so that it stood straight up there on the table. Then he looked up at Pete and said, ‘You see, your surgery won’t be any different than that. No different than that at all.’” Jim looked earnestly over the counter at her, declining to judge the incident, but anxious to impart it, nevertheless.
Dinah just stood there a moment, struck dumb by so much information. But finally she responded, “Well! That’s terrible! Poor Pete. What did he do?”
“Oh, Pete went on and had the operation. It turned out fine.”
Dinah had all the things she needed, and she paid the cashier and walked out of the store into the sunshine dappling down onto the shaded sidewalk and went slowly home carrying her groceries. A smile slipped down over her face; she was intrigued by her father’s splendid misbehavior—well, cruelty. The smile stayed there; it took over her entire face, but she could not excuse her peculiar pleasure. After all, a little kindness among the civilians was what she had longed for and valued above all else in her life. Nevertheless, her father’s performance had a certain gruesome elegance that she admired. But as she walked on down the street, careful along the sidewalk, which rose and fell precariously over the ancient tree roots, her smile dried on her face as though it were set in clay. Her smile lay over her lips, and her eyebrows remained lifted in amusement, as if her expression had just been extracted from a plasticine mold. It was one of those times when her mind raced ahead with new thoughts and neglected to signal her body of the altered direction. She stepped carefully along, embracing a brown paper bag with each arm, thinking about what her father had said to her. What boy did he mean? What child of hers could her father have access to?
When she passed by her father’s house in order to get to the corner where she would cross, she slowed slightly and turned her head, still with its rigid, powdery smile, to that house being so elaborately turned out. She was suddenly so uneasy that a tingling spread down her back and arms. She was beyond judging this situation; she didn’t even attempt to reach an objective state. She only knew that she did not want her children to encounter that evanescent, chill cynicism her father possessed. She did not want that cloud to envelop David or Toby or Sarah.
But all she saw of interest as she approached her father’s house with an eye out for something sinister was the large gray cat hunched on his doorstep, and he only stared at her audaciously, assured of his domain. Her father doted on this cat; Dinah saw him in the evenings allowing the cat to climb over him and sit on his newspaper as he was trying to read it. She had watched from her window as her father cut up bits of cheese from the tray of hors d’oeuvres at his elbow and fed the little pieces to the cat. Sometimes the cat would eat a bite, condescendingly, and sometimes he would flick his tail and walk away around the corner of the house. Dinah had come to a standstill at her father’s gate, and all at once she put her groceries down on the sidewalk and stooped so that she could reach her hand through the wrought-iron bars and wriggle her fingers enticingly at the cat. “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” But the cat just looked back at her solemnly, unmoving, and Dinah found herself stooping there, feeling the kind of fool that only a cat can make you feel. She picked up the two sacks and went home.
Dinah was a good cook. She often suspected that the pleasure she found in preparing a meal, step by step, with careful calculation and order all around her, was a substitute for the pleasure she would have felt if she could have applied such sensible organization to the other aspects of her life. It wasn’t everyday cooking she enjoyed, and in fact, that had fallen by the wayside, a victim of her summer listlessness. Sometimes in the mornings, though, she would decide to make a stew for the children’s evening meal. She would begin meticulously, peeling carrots and slicing them on the diagonal so that she could carve them into little ovals, and then she would carve the potatoes the same way. It gave her great pleasure to serve a stew with coordinated vegetables. All the little olive-shaped carrots and potatoes would lie in segregated heaps on waxed paper next to the sink, and then she would cube the meat, carefully cutting away all the fat. But when she took out the wide skillet in which she would have to brown each separate cube of beef, she would envision herself standing there by the stove, closely monitoring the heat and turning each little cube from side to side—six sides for each, in all—so that when she finished, the sizzling oil would have risen from the pan in a transparent mist that would coat the stove and her hands and the teakettle on the rear burner. With that picture in the back of her mind, she would carefully rewrap the cut-up meat and put it in the freezer, and she would drift out of the kitchen indecisively to begin some other project. In the evening she would open some tuna and canned peaches and make do one way or another, and the children preferred this laxity. Meanwhile, as the children slammed in and out of the back door during the day, they would pass the sink and take up a few of the delicately carved carrot
s and eat them out of hand. When Dinah cleared away the dishes and cleaned up after dinner, she had only the little pile of graying potatoes to dispose of.
Now, with a party to cook for, Dinah took stock of all the little cans and bottles of spices lined up so carefully by Mrs. Horton, who had left a note encouraging Dinah to use them up. Dinah had cubed the sirloin for the shish kebab, and with rubber gloves over her hands she rubbed each separate piece with a cut clove of garlic and then with powdered ginger, being sure that the deep golden powder adhered to every surface. She stirred the cubes into a marinade of sour cream, rosemary, and bay, and left the bowl in a shady place on the counter.
Pam kept the children for most of the day, and Dinah was lying on her bed, idly watching television and resting when she saw Pam’s car pull up in front of the house about four o’clock to drop them off. When she looked out to see that the children had been delivered home, she was surprised to find that she had become inordinately interested in the show she was watching. She didn’t want to get up and leave it, but she did, because she needed to feed the children their dinner early. Her guests would arrive about six o’clock; since they would eat outside tonight, she must cook while the light held.
She gave the children a dinner of hot dogs and potato chips and then suggested that they ride their bikes down to the school playground, where there were swings and a jungle gym. She knew they were tired, and she had noticed that Toby was limping again slightly when he had come up the sidewalk from Pam’s car, although he seemed to be fine now. Dinah wanted them out of the house, because she knew she was too preoccupied to be kind to them if they were hanging about to hinder her dressing or final preparations for dinner.
Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 6