The summer went by placidly. The babies splashed and played in the Sound. Hamish and Sandy built forts around the inlet and staged Indian raids on the lawn. Scottie, the youngest, held tea parties in the gazebo for his imaginary friends. Paul began a collection of birds’ eggs that he displayed on sweat socks in the potting shed. Sometimes in the mornings they played on the front lawn with the Tanner boys from down the road. When the babies went swimming that summer, Max or Olivia or both of them went along to watch for rats. After lunch, Paul and Scottie napped and Hamish and Sandy disappeared into the woods. A beautiful quiet filled the house. Olivia played the piano and Max lay on the sofa listening. She played Chopin and Soler. He would lean back against the cushions and let the music mix with the quiet. It seeped into him and he felt it was another gift.
When autumn approached, Max began patrolling for rats. They hadn’t reappeared all summer, but Max waited by the water with Eddie Crater’s shotgun in his arms. Often he patrolled late at night after Olivia and the babies were asleep. The first frost had come and the grass was brown and trampled. He was warm and sleepy. He was not sure what was driving him out of his bed, into his clothes, and out to the cold Sound. It wasn’t restlessness, but he couldn’t sleep. He was being compelled. Once he got to the water, he felt a sense of calm. It seemed to him that what he was doing was right. It was part of his life, like getting up in the morning and going to work. He remembered his first days in the house; what a happy fool he had been, splattered with plaster, paint-stained. The workmen had teased him and smiled as they went over the plans. What a halo everything had had around it. He walked several times around the inlet and then back to the house. Inside he savored its sweet smell, the way the walls gleamed as he climbed the stairs. It was worth a walk in the cold to appreciate this. The house seemed to sleep as he walked quietly to the bedroom and got into bed carefully so as not to waken Olivia.
In December, Max patrolled the water’s edge three times a day: before he went to work, when he came home, and once before he went to bed. He knew Olivia was disturbed by this. When he put on his hunting jacket and boots and went to the cupboard for Eddie Crater’s shotgun, she watched him with a mixture of puzzlement and concern. But she said nothing and Max knew her silence was a form of trust. He thought of these patrols as brisk, fifteen-minute walks. He found that he liked the night patrol best, when nothing stirred, when the lights from the house expanded on the water, when everything was his. He liked being out when everything was asleep and the water breathed evenly. At times the silence was broken—a dog barking, something snapping in the woods, a dead limb cracking off a tree. Max waited for these punctuations. Sometimes he stood looking at the house which contained everything he loved. He stared at it as if it satisfied a hunger.
As the winter went by, Max’s patrols got longer. At night he often stayed out for two hours. There was a flat stone by the water’s edge and Max sat there with the gun on his knees. It was a cold, wet winter and the sky was constantly gray and swollen. Finally there was a storm and it snowed for two days. Huge drifts piled up in the front of the house and the back lawn was thick with it. The foam on the Sound froze and ice crusted the sand. Patrolling, Max kicked lumps of icy seaweed with his boot.
In February there was a brief thaw and then an ice storm. Flu broke out in the boys’ school and Olivia began to talk about going to Bermuda. She took the children there every year, and Max, if he could get away, came down for a long weekend, but this year he decided that he had too much work. The night before Olivia and the babies left, Max patrolled early. Olivia was sitting on the bed waiting for him when he came in. He took off his boots and his jacket which was stiff with cold.
“I don’t want to leave,” Olivia said. “I’m worried about you.”
“There isn’t anything to worry about,” said Max. “I’m concerned about all this flu.”
Olivia had fine straight hair that was scopped into a coil at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were gray and very steady. She lowered her eyes and asked Max if he were having an affair.
“How can you possibly ask?” said Max. It was like an assault.
“I know you’re not,” said Olivia. “But I had to ask. I’ve been desperate about you.”
“But nothing’s changed between us.”
“Max, every morning, every night. For God’s sake, it’s too cold for dogs to be out, let alone rats. I don’t know what’s on your mind. I don’t understand at all. It upsets me all the time.” She began to cry and Max held her in his arms. There was no one in his life except her, and he knew it was something she had to ask. He held her and comforted her, but there was no way for him to explain himself.
“Livvie, Eddie Crater told me I had to be on the lookout. Rats are a serious problem. I don’t want them to come back this spring with the kids swimming and all.”
“I just don’t understand,” Olivia said, sobbing. “I understand you all the time, but not this.”
“It’ll be all right,” Max said. “It’s all right now. I can’t put poison in the water so I have to be sure. Please, Livvie, don’t worry. It’s a small thing.”
The next day he drove them to the airport. It was snowing lightly and flakes flew up against the windshield. The lights craning over the road were fringed with icicles. His children giggled and clowned in the back seat. Max held Olivia’s hand and at every stoplight he turned to her and smiled. They waited for the plane in a tight, loving circle, hugging and kissing, until the flight was called. Max watched from the observation deck while the plane took off, and followed it until the clouds covered it.
In the car on the way home, Max was filled with dread. At night mostly, but sometimes during the day, fear assailed him. It was palpable and he could feel it in the area of his heart. It was not disease: he knew that from his yearly checkup. It was terror. Calamities occurred to him, especially alone in the car with his family hovering in the air. He thought of the airplane hanging tenuously in space. He knew life contained profound miseries: something could happen to his children. Hamish was prone to bronchitis, and in his sicknesses Max saw death. Sandy was the most mobile and daring of the four. He was fearless, sprinting from ledges and walls. It only took chance, a hairsbreadth for him to fall and shatter, break his young bones too far from home for help. Paul and Scottie, dreamy infants, could be lured and kidnapped. It happened to other people’s children and was reported in the newspapers. He thought of Olivia and the scores of marriages that had smashed around them: if Olivia left him, ceased to love him, got sick. This terrible set of possibilities attacked the shell of his life and put an edge on his happiness. But it seemed to him that life was teaching him the meaning of true happiness, and the secret was that it was difficult and terrifying to be blessed.
It was only chance that he possessed what he had and he had seen what life could do—how it crippled, maimed, killed off, and destroyed. He had seen other people grief-stricken, heartsick, and suffering. Something very different had happened to him. Life had put everything lovely into his hands and had not taken it away. He knew it was not impossible that things would stay this way, but looking at the world, he knew it was improbable. He wondered why the coin of his life didn’t turn, show its reverse side and leave him stranded with empty hands. He put on the radio and let the car fill up with music.
When he got home, the total quiet of his house dazed him. He sat on the sofa and added the fear of madness to his catalogue: he was afraid to breathe, afraid to let the thought of his loneliness filter in to him. He realized that if life were to reverse itself and everything he loved was taken away from him, it would resemble this thick, empty silence. He was to live this way for a week, but it seemed unbearable for even fifteen minutes. When Max and Olivia had first met, she remarked that he spent a lot of time staring at her. He knew every plane in her face, every line on her palm, the shape of each of her fingernails. He thought he could enumerate the hairs on his children’s bright heads if he were called upon to do so. He stored these th
ings up to have them firmly in his mind should he ever be deprived. After dinner, his family was used to his pushing his chair back and watching them quietly as they finished their coffee and cocoa. If he stared at Olivia, she would say, “Aren’t you tired of staring at me after all these years?” And Max would say, “I never get used to anything.”
He got up to put on his boots and hunting jacket and took Eddie Crater’s rifle out of the locked cupboard. It was dinner time. There was a cold roast in the icebox and a long note taped to the cabinet reminding him where the butter was and when Hattie, the cleaning lady, would be in. He read it and put it in his pocket. It was a love letter from Olivia, who knew he knew the place for every dish, pot, and pan in the kitchen.
He went to the door, about to go out, but the silence of the house drove him back. With the rifle in his hand he went into the dining room, and stood there. He read the grain in the walnut table as if it were print. He memorized how the afternoon light hit the tea service and lit up the back of the curtains. He went from room to room. It was dusk, but he didn’t have the heart to turn on any lights. In the living room his eyes went from the rug to the fireplace to the clumsy plaster lumps his children modeled at school, placed on the mantelpiece. He stood in the study, holding in his gunless hand an antique decoy that was as worn and soft as soap. Upstairs he stood at the thresholds of his children’s rooms. He went to the bedroom, to the attic, his boots clacking awkwardly against his shins. He realized that he was patrolling his house.
Finally he went out to the Sound and sat on the rock. The earth was spongy beneath his feet and there was thick foam on the sand. A wind came through the pines.
He heard a soft splash in the water and cocked the gun. Something moved in the Sound but in the twilight he couldn’t be sure if it was a swell or a rat. He didn’t know what to do. The thing surfaced and looked at him. Its eyes glowed like glass. It lifted its sleek head, pulled itself out of the water, and dashed toward the woods. It was a raccoon. Max lifted the gun and aimed at it, but when he realized what he was about to do he walked to the edge of the water, knelt down, and began to cry. Then he got up and hurled the gun out into the Sound as far as he could throw.
When he got back to the house, he took off his wet, cold clothes and sat in his bathrobe in the living room. He was beginning to feel hungry. On his way to the kitchen, the telephone rang. He knew it was Olivia. He picked up the receiver—it was long distance from Bermuda.
“We’re all safe,” she said. “It’s so blue here. The kids are just sitting down to dinner. I miss you.”
“I miss you.”
“Are you all right? Is everything O.K.?”
“I’m fine,” Max said. “Everything is O.K. and I miss you.”
“It’s only a week,” Olivia said. “I love you. Do you have everything you need?”
“Yes,” said Max. “Everything.”
the girl with the harlequin glasses
ON GUIDO MORRIS’S DESK was a framed photograph that showed Guido and Vincent Cardworthy looking splendid. This photo had been taken on a day when both of them were feeling very cavalier, and reveals them to be tall, lean men in expensive suits. Guido had angled the camera, which had a time exposure, and then rushed behind the desk. Vincent and Guido had been friends since babyhood. In fact, they were second cousins and their states of mind frequently coincided. Their cavalier state manifested itself in large, open smiles, hands thrust forcefully in pockets and heads thrown slightly backward, with appropriate locks of hair falling onto foreheads. On that particular day, Vincent and Guido were filled with an almost anachronistic sense of well-being and optimism. This mood was the occasion for the photo. “If we’re feeling this good, we ought to have a record of it,” said Guido.
Between them in this photograph, almost obscured by the well-cut shoulders of their jackets, stood Jane Marshall-Howard, the beautiful English girl who at the time had been Guido’s surly and inefficient secretary. If there was any hint of tension in the photo, it was in some tiny bunched lines around Guido’s eyes: he was brooding about firing Jane. It was going to be difficult, because she was very decorative and because he had grown used to her, in the way one grows used to constant shooting pains. She was always late, she spilled coffee on his papers, and she could only type for five or six minutes until her attention strayed. The day after the picture was taken she told Guido that she had been secretly married to a Brazilian coffee heir and was quitting her job to join her husband, who had recently come into his plantation.
On the afternoon of the day Jane Marshall-Howard quit, Guido’s wife called to say that she had gone to stay at her parents’ country house for a few months. She felt it would be good for their emotional development. “We should grow separately for a while,” she said.
Jane’s quitting threw him into the large panic that comes with small change: he did not know what to think about his wife. She told him that she had taken some of her clothes and a few of her books. Barely realizing that he was being committed to living alone among her shoes, bottles, copper pots, and French books, Guido immediately called the employment agency and said that he needed a secretary, and that she must be able to type at least seventy-five words per minute. Then he drank a large glass of seltzer and did nothing more productive for the rest of the afternoon than empty his ashtray.
On the other side of the desk was another photo of Guido and Vincent. This photo was not a record of one of Guido’s good moods, but of one of his decisions. Very much obscured, except for a pair of harlequin glasses, was the face of Betty Helen Carnhoops, the girl Guido hired to replace Jane. In this photo, Guido looked faintly pleased because he had hired someone sensible, and Vincent looked aghast but inscrutable. He had just pegged Betty Helen Carnhoops for a truly bad apple.
Vincent said, “How could you hire her after Jane?”
“Jane,” muttered Guido, abstractly.
“She’s awful,” said Vincent.
“She’s pleasant. She doesn’t take any getting used to.” Guido looked absently out of the window. “A pleasant and efficient girl.”
Guido and Vincent were both blessed with private incomes, and their sense of work was leisurely. Vincent was a free-lance statistician for the Board of City Planning, and his special field of interest was garbage. He did studies of garbage levels, estimated garbage per dwelling unit, potential garbage crises, and developed theories for the removal of garbage.
Guido had inherited a private foundation called the Magna Carta Trust, which sponsored a literary magazine called Runnymede, of which he was the editor.
“How much garbage do you figure Betty Helen Carnhoops and her husband account for?” Guido asked Vincent.
“Who would marry her?” said Vincent.
“She’s married to a graduate student in engineering or something,” said Guido. “Or chemistry.”
“It’s the amount of garbage for one squared.”
“Isn’t it doubled?”
“Squared,” growled Vincent. “That girl is a real cup of tainted soup.”
“She’s perfectly nice,” said Guido. “I’m very pleased. She’s calm and efficient. The trouble with you is that you’ve become so jaded that you don’t know what agreeable, simple people are like any more.”
“The trouble with you, Guido, is that you’re very naïve. That girl is a snake.”
“She’s my secretary,” Guido said, “and I think she’s nice.”
“But I’m here a lot,” said Vincent, mournfully.
Vincent did most of his work in Guido’s office. He had a desk in a corner by the window. As a free-lance statistician, he had been given an office by the Board of City Planning, but it was in the shape of an isosceles triangle and it made him feel cramped and slightly dizzy. Guido’s office was large and white and airy, with a view of Central Park. Vincent felt he did his best work there. He and Guido spent long afternoons drinking Seltzer and lime juice, watching the sun shine through Guido’s collection of glass bowls.
T
hey spent months in indolent, indulgent sloth, followed by a transition into frenzied hard work. Once every quarter Guido produced an issue of Runnymede, which was considered magnificent by critics, writers, and subscribers. Once every six months Vincent produced a garbage study that was published in Urban Affairs Dialogue and quoted in The New York Times and the City Heretofore.
Betty Helen Carnhoops was a square girl with piano legs. Her hair was short and efficient. It was of no particular color, although Vincent claimed it was the exact shade of rat fur. She had pale, dampish skin, and her arms were slightly mottled, like Bratwurst. She had pale eyes surrounded by short, spiky lashes. Her harlequin glasses were green plastic and sprouted in each corner a little gold rose with a rhinestone in its center.
“Who would marry her?” said Vincent. He was editing one of his studies entitled: Technology and the Common Good: New Techniques for Effective Disposal. “Did you say her husband was a vet?”
“Political science or something.”
“He ought to go into public health,” said Vincent. “And start on her.”
“Look,” Guido said. “Take Jane. Jane was very decorative and all, but she came in late, left early, didn’t come in on nice days, and sulked all the time. Besides, she was always on the phone and she took three-hour lunches. Furthermore, she couldn’t spell, she lost five manuscripts, and she was cranky and rude. Now Betty Helen, on the other hand, is always on time, leaves on time, spells like a dream, knows grammar, and she only makes one phone call a day and it takes under four minutes. I think it’s to her husband.”
“I think she’s a holy terror. You just wait,” said Vincent. “Jesus, who would marry her?”
There were very few people Vincent liked. He liked Guido, whom he had known all his life; he liked his sister, who lived in Colorado; he had kind memories of a girl he had been engaged to; and he liked a girl who worked at the Board of City Planning. Her name was Misty Berkowitz. Vincent had discovered her one morning slumped over her typewriter, stirring her coffee in a desultory fashion with her fountain pen. Small oval spectacles slipped down her nose. She had amber-colored hair that fell into her eyes. She looked bored and misanthropic and was drawing mustaches on the faces in The New York Times. Vincent said good morning to her and was about to begin a conversation about the headlines when she looked up and growled: “Get the hell away from me.” Later she came into his office to apologize. “It’s hell in the morning,” she said. Vincent felt his heart melting like hot candles. He asked her to have lunch with him and took her to a badly lit Italian restaurant.
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