Dale Loves Sophie to Death Read online

  “Oh, God, Martin,” she said. “How can you love me? How can you? I don’t think you do. I don’t think you could!” She cried on and on, and he didn’t touch her at all he was so surprised. He didn’t even know what she could mean. He felt the beginnings of a vast exasperation that sometimes becomes a chasm between men and women. He was tired; he was angry, and he was helpless in this one instance because of the disparity of their separate male and female histories.

  “Look at me! Just look at me! I woke up in the middle of the night with the most awful feeling. Oh, Martin, I haven’t slept! I felt my whole face change; I felt my skin pulling and sliding. Why didn’t you tell me? I thought I was still so pretty! Damn!” and she slapped her hand against the wood-work in teary fury. “I wouldn’t have cared so much if I had known! Why didn’t you tell me? I have circles under my eyes—bags under my eyes—and creases where I smile. I can feel them from the inside! My hair doesn’t shine anymore. Oh, God, oh, God, I used to be all shiny the way young girls are. I used to be a young girl!”

  David, then just eight, had come to the door of his room and was watching them solemnly, but when his father turned and saw him, he went back inside and closed the door, embarrassed. Dinah was at last simply leaning against the wall, her head back, and her hands hanging limply at her sides. Her face was blotched and puffy, and her pale-blue eyes looked rabbity, underlined as they were just then with flaring red rims.

  Martin was so taken aback that he only stood there and thought how awful she did look at this moment. Maybe she was right; why hadn’t he told her? She wasn’t pretty now; she was getting older. But he was thoroughly struck through with sympathy all at once, and he reached out and held her against him, with one hand cupping the back of her head to his shoulder. “I love you, though, Dinah. I just do love you more than anything.”

  She cried and cried. “God! I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said.

  That evening she had looked as beautiful to him as always when they went out to dinner. He looked for circles beneath her eyes and didn’t see any; he noticed her soft, blond hair curling gently at the nape of her neck where it was tied with a blue scarf. She was, as usual, charming, enchanting, and unconsciously intimidating to the young couple they were entertaining, Martin had always seen that other men watched his wife, and they did tonight. He had no idea that there was beginning in his wife that subtle reliance on style rather than substance that gives to some women in their thirties and forties a particular grace.

  When they were home she came to bed in a cream-colored, silky gown, very lacy, and he knew that she wanted him to hold her and admire her, and he did admire her, so that was exactly what he wanted to do. But it wasn’t the way they always made love; she was rarely ever so vulnerable; she wasn’t often a victim of vanity. That night she was the subject of her own censure; she kept herself under careful control. She lay beside him for a while, and he knew that she was still tense, but he wanted to sleep. He also had the idea that she didn’t want him to realize her need; she wouldn’t want to be approached again. Finally, she slipped away into the bathroom and came back in the tatty, tacky flannel gown. When she caught his glance she smiled at herself. “I sleep better in it,” she said. “Well, it’s so comfortable.”

  Martin didn’t care about that at all. But he thought he might cry, in fact, lying there in the dark, when he remembered that all day he had been able to both pity and love his wife simultaneously. He thought that must augur well for the future.

  But so early on in the summers these reminders of his family life were hard to take; they made him restless in his own house, and he roamed too much about the rooms, up and down the stairs. So he often fled. He set up a routine; he had his summer schedule. In the evenings Vic and Ellen arranged chairs for them all behind their old farmhouse, in the yard they had thrashed out of the tall weeds and blackberry bushes, and everyone would sit and have a drink and gaze down the hill at the pond and the slow horses meandering through the meadow in the afternoon. There were four adults regularly this summer, now that Ellen’s sister had come. And Claire would sit among them placidly, not so intense as Ellen, but prettier in a traditional manner. Her little girl, Katy, would wander about, and the adults would talk peaceably until it was time for dinner.

  They watched Claire’s child, and she was lovely in the evening grass, beyond the enforced lawn, moving with care among the lanky weeds that dampened her thin arms as she made her way down the hill toward the pond. There was no doubting it, and the adults, sitting there on the lawn, were—each one of them—thunderstruck by her sudden, astonishing beauty. She was so ordinary up close that each person observing her in that instant had a clear idea of her future, and each person felt that shudder of awareness that accompanies so definite a promise of time that is bound to pass. So there under the slanting sun was a tableau that would seem to have been prearranged: Claire, sitting cross-legged on the grass, frozen in that quick glance she sent her daughter’s way; Martin, so awestruck that his expression of perpetual preoccupation—a look that made him handsome—had flown from his face and left him as surprised as a little boy; Ellen and Vic, lovely both of them, all of themselves, sitting so that the sunlight struck down over their faces irradiating their assurance that this moment was only what they had always expected. Theirs was a look of proprietary smugness.

  “Not to get too wet, Katy,” Claire called out to her daughter in such a light voice that the message just barely undulated over the rippling grasses, but Katy did turn back to drift, waist deep in the weeds, in their direction.

  The group resumed motion. Ellen snapped the tough ends off the asparagus and then began the painstaking process of peeling each slender stalk with her little paring knife. “I hate peeling this asparagus,” she said, by the way. But no one heeded her or replied, because she peeled it for herself; she preferred it thus.

  Martin sat quietly, at ease to be in company, and thought idly about Claire’s long hair—such odd hair of a peculiar color between brown and gray. No color at all, really. For these few moments he was suspended in his summer, just himself, alone. For at least that small time this became the essence of his existence, with no comparisons to be made.

  Chapter Three

  One Day

  In the mornings Dinah always felt hopeful; mornings seemed so promising, and now with the uncommon languor she retained from the flu, she lay in bed just a little longer than usual, dozing and waking, and turning over in her mind the carefully ordered events of her day. One day’s schedule, firmly set, had become the schedule of all the summer days. Monotonously reassuring, just as she thought summer days should be, with their variety afforded only by some one person’s unexpected irritation or pleasure, or just by some offhand remark that might turn one’s thoughts in an interesting direction. All in all, she led a limited life here, and it was soothing.

  She anticipated an easy day, imbued with a luxurious kind of boredom, because she needn’t put any thought into this day’s structure, although she did intend to write to Martin this morning. This mild order was a relief from her winter life, which had a frantic pace, and in which she had to allot her energies with such care.

  Dinah awoke in the mornings to that picture at the end of the bed of the pretty girl running. It was oddly invigorating, and encouraged Dinah to rise, to exercise, to shape her day. To the left of that picture was a portrait of the girl’s mother, Mrs. Horton, who looked out into the room with a sweet and shy expression on her rather long, oval face. Dinah liked confronting these two people every morning—the one getting right up and getting on with things, tough-minded, self-assured. The other woman was more wary than her daughter, and had more reasonable expectations, but was still prepared to find goodwill and cooperation through every hour; that was what her face said.

  The curtains at the bedroom windows blowsed out in the light morning breeze, and Dinah could lie in bed and look out at the village of Enfield. It was her hometown, but only recently had it become a place t
hat other people came to on purpose. The Hortons had been the first; they had come here to make this their winter home, while they spent their summers in Europe. Enfield was only eight miles from Fort Lyman, which was a town of no particular consequence, but which provided services and such mundane necessities as weekend people often need. It was only forty miles from the Columbus airport, and real estate was cheap. So the Hortons had been the pioneers of a movement, only gently afoot, to restore and rejuvenate the village, because soon after they bought and restored this large and even elegant house, other commuter families from nearby cities began to buy up the fine old houses in the town. Dinah could look from her second-story bedroom window all up and down Gilbert Street, which was the right-hand side of the “H” that was Enfield. She could look out through the tall maples at the several handsome houses now in various states of renovation.

  When Dinah’s parents had finally separated after years and years of stony accommodation, Dr. Briggs had bought the house directly across the street from the Hortons’. After her parents’ silence had literally been shattered with a bang, after her father had been shot under such peculiar circumstances, and then after he had been so long recuperating, he had finally bought the house on the corner of Gilbert and Hoxsey Streets and come home to it alone. Dinah’s mother had taken on the interior decoration of it; she met with him at his house or at her shop just as she would have met with any other client. That’s what she said; Dinah knew it couldn’t have been so simple. Eventually, her father had begun the direction of the exhaustive physical renovation; he had never found a contractor who suited him. The work was extensive and tedious and still in progress after many long summers. So on clear mornings when the hammering and the shouting of the workmen would begin across the street with the earliest light, before the heat built up, Dinah would wake up and look out at her father’s house without really thinking about it. It only caught her eye there, before she moved off into her life and the pattern of her day. She could look out and see with what perfection these workmen were applying the copper flashing along the ridge of the roof. It shone brilliantly in the sun; by this time next year it would have weathered to a fine, muted, greenish gold.

  The entire establishment intrigued her; it intrigued her that her father was overseeing all this activity with such painstaking care and apparent deliberation. She noticed that each detail was being executed with determined fidelity to the era of the house’s original glory. Last year she had watched the slate roof replace the asphalt shingles and had been amazed at the beauty of the square gray tiles lapping over the scalloped ones, which were the color of dusky rose. The roof had turned out just like a wedding cake in a bakery window, symmetrically assembled, and now iced with shining copper.

  She could not account for this aesthetic gentling of her father. He had scarcely seemed even to live within the walls of her childhood house—Polly’s house—and he certainly hadn’t ever shown any interest at all in its structure or appointments. Besides, Dinah invariably believed that a household was a manifestation of the woman who lived within it, no matter how undetermined or careless her influence seemed to be. No matter how little that woman herself might perceive or care about it. It did not seem to Dinah that men belonged to houses; she thought that in spite of themselves they could always only be tourists in their own rooms.

  She knew, for instance, that Martin relied on her to interpret his environment for him if she happened to be there. Even as small a gesture as touching his arm at a party might settle for him the fact that the gathering was hospitable, not unfriendly. Dinah could discern the nature of the atmosphere immediately by taking into account even the rugs on the floor or the arrangement of the chairs. It was not the quality or stylishness to which she gave credence, but she was alert to any sympathetic alignment of the most ordinary objects. The place need not be handsome; it was just that about her surroundings Dinah was like a dog: some rooms raised the hackles on her back. If Martin saw her come into a room and relax and enjoy herself, then she knew he could enjoy himself as well. So it puzzled her that her father had come to such an involved domestic situation independently. She sometimes wondered if the girl jogging along in the picture had one day run right up her father’s sidewalk and sat down with him there on the porch, where he had a drink each evening—Dinah watched him from her window sometimes. Perhaps that girl had engaged him in conversation and had managed to ask him all these questions—about his house, about how he liked it—because Dinah didn’t visit her father anymore; they were so estranged.

  This morning the hammering and carrying about of ladders and such had begun very early, and finally Dinah got up and went down to the kitchen, thinking to anticipate the children. She meant to make them some special morning treat, since the noise hadn’t awakened them yet and she would have time. But now Martin was so much on her mind that she sat down at the round wooden table with a legal pad she had found in a drawer and a ballpoint pen, and began a letter to him.

  But the truth was that Dinah was frightened of writing down words. She felt that as the word spread itself across the paper to the left of her pen point, then there she was, more and more committed to that paper, pinned there like a butterfly. She always thought that it was essential to get down precisely what she meant, and she never realized how relentlessly she relied on a gesture or a touch to convey a message. She was restless as she struggled with her letter, and she thought with envy of the skill with which Martin could dash off a note. He didn’t even watch the letters forming as he wrote, or reconsider the intent compressed within the skeleton of words he established with authority in his thick, full handwriting. His written words rolled exuberantly forward, while hers lagged back toward the left-hand margin, as though they might flee the page altogether.

  With all that Dinah meant to say to Martin, what could she write? Anything she might want to tell him, and all that she meant, could only look trite on paper. How could she be anything but mute about her caring? And sometimes this speechlessness reminded her alarmingly of her parents and the long, bewildering looks that had passed between them in lieu of ordinary communication. Whenever she wrote to Martin and folded the paper and sealed the envelope, she felt as though she held a potential explosion of misunderstandings and possible injury. Her letter already reeled with underlinings and parentheses, because she could not help but labor toward reproducing the exact emphasis with which the words proceeded in her mind. She sat poised over her letter in exasperation.

  In any case, here were the children, who had been asleep only ten minutes ago, but who were now wandering around the kitchen, bumping against the table and jostling her pen so that it made unexpected leaps across the page. She had every reason to put away this letter; in fact, she had no choice. These were bright little children with minds as sharp as razors, and she could never remain absorbed in her own sensibilities for long with their energy directed her way. She knew, but hoped that they had not discovered, that in this landscape of her childhood, her parental authority was halfhearted at best. With relief, she arose to fix them food or do whatever they might require.

  “Oh, Lord, you three,” she said with irritation, “how do you always manage it? As soon as I sit down…I was just trying to write a letter. Now what do you want? Let’s see. I thought I would have five minutes of peace.”

  Dinah listened with mild curiosity to her own voice, ineffectual at the moment, and blond as she was herself, fading into the bisque walls, just as imperative to her three dark children as the many buzzings, creakings, and abrupt settlings of this big house. It was only breakfast they wanted, of course.

  “But not eggs, Mama,” Toby said. “I just want plain cereal. I hate that wheat toast.”

  She took a frozen coffee cake out of the freezer and turned on the oven, then she did begin to break eggs into a bowl in order to beat and scramble them; someone would eat them. Toby climbed up the step stool to look into the cupboards to see if there was something to be had immediately, and Sarah tried to follo
w him.

  “Get down, Toby,” Dinah said. “I’ll give you something in a minute.”

  David was still sleepy and still in his pajamas, although the other two already had on their bathing suits. He sat at the table watching them all with his serious brown glance and the suggestion of a scowl. Inwardly, Dinah quailed at so judgmental a look from this ten-year-old, even though she knew that he was probably doomed to love her unreservedly. She was titillated, somehow, by the presence of her own children in this town where she had grown up. All day, as they came and went in and out of the house while she carried out any number of homely tasks, she might look down at her hands as she cut out a dress pattern and observe the beginnings of the many tiny pleats and wrinkles around her knuckles, the creases along her wrists, and she would feel a sudden pause. It made it inevitable that she absorb the fact of her own adulthood. And so she quailed before them all, considering what lay ahead, considering their potential, considering that perhaps there would be an eventual reversal of dependency. Subtle, she hoped, but probably inevitable.

  She settled the children at the table and served them the coffee cake and the eggs she had scrambled, and then she turned to wash up the bowls and pans at the sink while she took occasional sips of her coffee. When she turned around she saw that Toby had left his place and was not in the kitchen, and that he hadn’t eaten at all or drunk any milk. She started up the back stairs to find him and bring him back. To tell him in a voice like God’s own that if he didn’t eat his eggs and drink his milk he wouldn’t get strong, he wouldn’t stay well. He had to take her at her word that she knew these things. But she found him at the top of the stairs at the landing, folded up on himself, and when he looked up at her she saw that tears were sliding down his face. And sorrow overtook her; he was such a wiry, pathetic bundle huddled there on the floor. She sat down on the step below him and held him in a hug.