Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 13

  Even Polly was restless, apparently, in her accustomed rounds. She set her own hours for her work, and lately she had taken to showing up at Dinah’s now and then during her usual office hours. She had become oddly loquacious and curious, and disconcertingly less distant. Now and then, during Dinah’s childhood, Polly had been alarmingly lifted out of her habitual repose, and then she had become vigorously active in her pursuit of some problem that whetted her curiosity. She hadn’t ever had much appetite for involvement, but once that appetite was roused, it was not easily satisfied. There had always been a few things Polly must find out, and there had even been a few things that had brought her to anger. But they were arbitrary events, never predictable, and she seized upon them as a terrier digs for groundhogs. So no one in Enfield, really, could be sure of being left in peace until Polly settled whatever it was that was on her mind.

  She dropped by one afternoon when the children were off with Pam, and Dinah was sitting lazily in the living room with a book she was reading but not absorbing. She was watching for her father, idly, although she had not admitted it to herself. She had taken to walking with him often if she happened to see him when he took his daily exercise, but she only walked as far as the post office and then went on to do her shopping and other errands in the village. Those few occasions when she had caught up with him and kept him company hadn’t been at all remarkable. It was as if they had been visiting with each other regularly for years. Her father was never surprised to see her.

  When Polly joined her in the living room, and Dinah brought in tall glasses of iced tea for them both, she was ill at ease and realized that she wanted Polly to leave so that she would not miss her father. Polly was sitting in a chair with her back to the long windows that looked out at Dr. Briggs’s front door. Dinah sat down opposite her, and they talked about Isobel a little, about her mother’s bridge club, about her decorating business, about David and Toby and Sarah. Dinah could not make out exactly what her mother’s purpose was, if she had come with any.

  “I think Toby’s improving,” Polly said.

  “He says not,” Dinah replied, startling herself by the brusqueness of her own voice. “He complains about his leg now,” she added more softly. “I talked to Dad about it. He says it’s just one of those stages, so I’ve tried to ignore it.” She understood what had given such an abrupt edge to her voice; it was nothing more than the somnolence of the room itself. Each piece of furniture was upholstered in a slightly deeper shade of plum than the piece next to it, although the impression was of a happy accident of harmony, not a conscious design. Dinah knew that this was Polly’s doing; she had done the whole house for the Hortons. A flat-blue, pierced screen stood in one corner, cutting diagonally across the edge of the broad Oriental rug. The air was drowsy with the heavy colors. Not pastels, but deep, plain, chalky colors that seemed to exude something of their own essence into that confined space. Any voice—any but Polly’s pale tone—would have been unsettling and inappropriate.

  Polly made a gesture of dismissal with her hand. “If Toby’s talking about it, that’s the best thing yet, isn’t it? Once he brings it up, you can find out what’s at the bottom of it. Have you talked to Martin about it?”

  “Only a little,” Dinah said, without attention. Just as Polly had reached up and pushed her hair behind her ears in a characteristic gesture of settling in, Dinah had caught sight of her father leaving his house. Polly twisted in her chair to follow Dinah’s gaze. “What is it?” she said.

  “Oh, I was going to walk along with Dad to the post office. He might be able to tell me the best way to talk to Toby, you know. Toby visits with him every morning. Well, that’s where he picked up that limp, of course.”

  “Oh, yes,” Polly said. But Dinah wasn’t sure if that signified any previous knowledge or not. “Well, we can catch up with him if you like. I have to talk to him today, anyway.”

  This idea unnerved Dinah, but the two women rose. Polly picked up her purse and Dinah her mailbox keys. They didn’t hurry, because her father’s slow pace made it unnecessary, but they left behind them their two glasses of iced tea sitting in puddles of condensation on the delicately carved ivory coasters.

  Her father saw them from across the street and stopped to wait. He turned to study the construction on his house, and when they joined him, Dinah fell in between her two parents and felt peculiar about it. They walked together for a moment before any one of them spoke, and then her father began to speak as if they were all simply continuing a conversation.

  “You know,” he said, “I’ve just been sorting through my records. You ought to come over and listen to some of these!” It wasn’t clear who he meant. “They’re marvelous, some of them. It seems to me that Isobel likes Charlie Parker better than she likes Dave Brubeck. She always did. Now, I wonder why? I can’t understand it, but I know she likes Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. I remember that. I guess that was the thing to do.” This last was a question, but Dinah didn’t answer, and her mother smiled at him with surprising indulgence. The disharmony over this very subject in the household in which Dinah had grown up was still vivid to her. Her mother, of course, hadn’t liked any of it, and had said with her unimpeachable scorn that it was not, as her father insisted, the classical music of the age. She discouraged the idea entirely, refusing to entertain it at all. It was beneath her consideration.

  “I need to find out when you want us to come over for lunch, Dad,” Dinah said. “Isobel will be in late tonight.”

  As they walked along three abreast, they were suddenly accompanied by a great, happy golden retriever that circled and trailed them, dragging a long chain behind him. He wove cheerfully among them, smiling and stopping to raise one foot in pleased and foolish attention. They had to move along fitfully to avoid the silly dog as he interrupted their progress down the sidewalk.

  Polly shooed him away ineffectually with her hands. “Go on! Go on!” she said, but he paid no heed, and they made their way slowly.

  “Why don’t you all come over about one o’clock tomorrow?” he said, and he sidestepped the dog. “You come too, Polly. It’s a Saturday. And see if Buddy will come. We’ll have everyone! A celebration!”

  At first Dinah thought to object that the children would be far too hungry to wait for lunch at one o’clock, but that would have been petty; her children could observe this occasion with some small amount of grace. She would give them a snack beforehand. Besides, Dinah had lost her tongue. She had been thrown into a bewildering insecurity, as of a child between two adults, and yet she had never been persuaded of her parents’ authority, or even of their majority; they had always been split in two in disagreement.

  “Whose dog is that?” she finally asked into what was masquerading, she thought, as a companionable silence.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” her father said irritably, because the dog was causing him a good deal of trouble, since he lacked their agility. “He’s broken his chain. I don’t know where he belongs, but I don’t think he ever came around the house to bother Jimmy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.”

  They crossed the street, and the dog bounded behind them. Polly was talking to Dinah’s father about an insurance policy that had just surfaced, which they mutually owned, although he didn’t seem much interested. They had only reached the corner of Hoxsey Street, but Dinah wanted very much to be away from her parents just then. The remaining two-block walk to the post office looked to her to be too long a time to endure this disruption of her calm assumptions. In her mind she had resigned herself happily, and with relief, to each one of her parents being separate from the other, so she was thoroughly annoyed with them both, standing as they were, circled by the dog, her mother almost transparently blond and fragile in relation to her father’s lean height. They stood, still talking, and her mother angled her face toward her father, who had turned around to her. Now she presented to him a tilted profile, glancing at him sideways, slightly and charmingly distracted. Dinah thought that there
was, for an instant, that same intangible promise about them—which had fooled her time and again—of the certainty of their alignment. The idea made her unusually cross. They must, by now, be either one thing or the other. She could not bear it if they ever became again what they had been for so long: both together and apart. They owed it to her to give it up. It left her on too precarious a footing; all the meticulously constructed links to her past hung in the balance.

  “You ought to do something about that dog!” she said to both of them suddenly, interrupting them before she took herself off to do some shopping, and they looked at her in surprise. “Well, look at him, Dad! He’s dragging his chain. He could get caught up on something somewhere. Out in the woods! Well, you can tell he’s lost. It seems to me that you would at least find out who he belongs to and let them know!”

  Her parents watched her with attention all at once, as though they hadn’t known she was standing with them at all. And she felt what they saw: a tall, grown woman with slightly graying hair, speaking out with the peevishness of a child. “Dinah,” her father said, “I can’t possibly take the time to find out who that dog belongs to. I’m sure he knows exactly where he lives, anyway. He just doesn’t choose to go there right now. Frankly, that dog strikes me as a fool!” They all looked at the dog, who was dragging his chain through the bushes bordering the sidewalk, stopping now and then in absurd ferocity—when he thought he’d tracked a scent—to stare menacingly at the ground. Then he would abandon that hope and move cheerfully on to the next bush to raise his leg and sniff around. He seemed to Dinah to be an especially amiable and good-hearted dog.

  “So few people have your special knack for making such absolute judgments!” Dinah said. “Even if he’s a terrible dog, he’s still lost!” Dinah was depressed by her own lack of control. Irony was lost on her father, and he would not brook disagreement, or even pay attention to it; she and he would only reach another impasse.

  Her father was seldom angry, and now he was only hugely irritated; she was a bother to him just now. “For God’s sake, Dinah, why don’t you find out where he lives?”

  “Well!” she said. “I don’t even live here!” That was all she thought to say, and she left them as they resumed their walk to the post office; she crossed the street to the little grocery store. As she entered the market, other answers crossed her mind. “I can’t do that, Dad,” she should have said, her voice mild and quite reasonable. “I’m with you.” She might have said that to him and to her mother. When she looked out over the tomatoes piled in a pyramid in the market’s window, she saw her parents still discussing something, and still being wooed by the hopeful dog.

  That evening she thought with charity even toward herself about that trifling incident and her overreaction to it; she saw that these little matters were always the trials of summer. The long sunny days and the soft nights were never enough to counterbalance her self-righteousness. It still seemed to her that she was the only member of the family who was bound to put an order to all their lives, to set them straight in their pattern. Then she wouldn’t be needed any longer; she could relax, and they could all know how much each of them was loved by all the others. Everything would be much easier.

  Buddy came by in the evenings sometimes, to eat dinner with her and his niece and nephews. He had come the past few nights, and he appeared that afternoon just as Dinah was starting to fix dinner. She was only making a chef’s salad. He came into the kitchen with the evening newspaper and sat at the table reading the front page while Dinah ran cold water over the steaming hard-boiled eggs before she tried to peel them. She suspected that Buddy’s company these past few days was due to his own restless anticipation of Isobel’s homecoming.

  Dinah began peeling the eggs under running water, but they wouldn’t peel, and she was angry every time a sliver of hard-cooked white came away with the brittle shell. Buddy got up and hovered behind her. Finally, he took an egg from the colander and one of Mrs. Horton’s teaspoons from the drawer and tapped the shell into minute fragments with the spoon’s back. After this careful preparation, he slipped the shell and its underlying membrane off the egg as easily as if he’d unzipped its coat. Dinah noticed this with aggravation, but she left the rest of the eggs for him to do and began laying down layer upon layer of Boston lettuce in the salad bowl. She and Buddy had acquired from their father the infuriating habit of interfering in the most mundane busywork carried out by any other person. It was kindly meant. They could not believe—not one of the three of them—that they couldn’t make life easier for some other person if only that other person would follow their example or advice. Oddly enough, in Dinah’s view, since she thought they were so little alike, Martin and Polly dealt with this trait in the same manner. They listened docilely enough and agreed with any suggestion wholeheartedly; then they proceeded with whatever they were doing just as they liked.

  In this case, Dinah’s aggravation was momentary; she enjoyed having Buddy there in the kitchen with her. When he was in his teens and she had just become old enough to assess him, to wonder what he was like, he had had the lanky height of her father and something of the same edginess and restrained tension. There had been an uneasy promise about him like that of a tightly drawn wire under incessant strain. But he had thickened and become one of those tall, kind-faced, burly men—the sort Dinah would dare to stop on a city street to ask directions. He had become the kind of man who wore a beautiful suit and then didn’t button the jacket, as though he wished he didn’t have it on. He looked content; he looked successful; he had become an avuncular, well-pleased man, she thought. He finished the eggs and dried his hands and settled back at the table with the paper.

  “Listen, Buddy,” she said. “I hope you’ll come to Toby’s party tomorrow at Dad’s. You could just come for lunch. Polly’s coming, too. Would you mind? You’re much easier around the two of them than I am.” It was embarrassing to be making such a blatant appeal. “Isobel will be there. She’s coming in tonight. Will that make any difference?”

  “Oh, no. In fact, I’m meeting her at the airport. She’s always coming and going. I’ll be glad to see her.” He leaned back in his chair and folded the paper. He had fallen into an awkward discomfiture, and Dinah was puzzled. She wasn’t sure if he meant he was coming to the party or not.

  “Will you come, then?”

  He rearranged his big body in an apparent attempt to stall for time, in an attempt not to say something. She was so curious about this that she turned around from the sink and leaned back against its edge to wait for him to speak.

  “You know,” he said, “all this would be so much easier for you, Dinah, if you could just get it into your mind that some people are…just bad people.”

  She turned back around to her salad making and began to scrape garlic from the garlic press. She knew, of course, that he meant their father. Buddy had decided very early just how he felt about his father, but Dinah thought that might be due in some part to the natural rivalry between boys and their fathers. “Oh, well,” she said, with not much inflection at all, “it’s not that simple. I really don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “Damn, Dinah, it is that simple!”

  “You can’t really think that”—and she heard a mortifying quaver in her own voice. “No one sets out to be a bad person! Who would intend that?”

  “Intentions don’t have anything to do with it! Christ! No one sets out to be an old person either! Who would intend that? The point is…well, the point is that it’s not worth it to try so hard to get things to work out. It’s a waste of your time.” He seemed almost to be pleading with her, but she was slightly baffled. “Well,” he went on, “this really isn’t worth talking about either, I guess. But your life could be easier. It could be a lot less complicated. And, by God, Dinah, having you worry about us all the time is hard as hell on the rest of us! I just wish you wouldn’t expect so much. It’s just going to make you tired in the end.”

  Dinah went on assembling the salad,
with her back to him. She had made a little stack of ham slices on the cutting board and was carefully shaving them into slivers with Mrs. Horton’s French knife. Her feelings were hurt.

  “I’d like to come to Toby’s party, though,” he said, and she even resented it that he was offering her mollification. She thought that she, too, had learned a little about life. She wasn’t grateful for his brotherly admonition.

  Buddy turned a page of the paper and shook out the crease with a snap. “I’ve been worried about Toby, in fact,” he said. “How’s that limp? What did the doctor say about it?”

  “Dad’s a doctor!” She paused and measured oil into the cruet with care. “Toby’s fine. This party will cheer him up, I hope.” But by now she and Buddy were put out with each other. Dinah’s voice was crisply matter-of-fact and polite, and every line of Buddy’s frame, as it was arranged precariously over the small kitchen chair, suggested disapproval. He read the paper with aggressive interest and obviously refrained from comment only with inordinate restraint.

  Dinah called the children in to dinner and carefully served their plates with all the ingredients of the salad meticulously segregated, and each one’s favorite bottled dressing dribbled over everything. She tossed the remainder of the salad in the wooden bowl, with the garlic-laden oil-and-vinegar dressing she had mixed. When she did this, all the fragile, julienned cheeses and meats disintegrated, and the whites and the yolks of the carefully peeled and sliced eggs fell apart and were dispersed among the lettuce leaves. This was just how she liked it: a fine, pungent mélange. If Buddy preferred his salad beautifully arranged and sparingly sprinkled with dressing, he wouldn’t say so, and she didn’t care. She was irritated at him. Life was too easy for him. He didn’t worry enough. He lacked the resonant contemplation of the married, the child-bound, the intimately connected. It struck her as a willful and selfish disassociation, and she resented him for it. So she heaped his plate full and gave him his dinner, and they sat for a while just eating while the children talked.