Dale Loves Sophie to Death Page 8

  As everyone ate and talked to the children, Dinah sat sipping more wine and staying very quiet. Her mind remained blank, not searching for conclusions, and the progress of her thoughts veered off just short of clarity. She was tired, and she was thinking just now that this particular dusk was weighing with loathsome heaviness on the trembling leaves of the pin oak; each leaf was so tenuously attached by its fragile stem.

  When everyone had gone, and the children were in bed upstairs, Dinah poured herself even more wine and set about the business of clearing up the kitchen. She rinsed the plates and put them in the dishwasher and put the casserole in the sink to soak. But when she came to the platter with the last of the shish kebabs she hesitated. Finally, she slid two of the large cubes off the long skewers and carefully cut them into smaller bits, and then with the blade of her knife she scraped all those little pieces off the cutting board into her hand. She started toward the back door, but she had to stop and remove her shoes, because in these high heels she was beginning to wobble.

  She went to the edge of the front yard, directly facing her father’s now darkened house, and stood there in her stockinged feet. She stood there for a few minutes until she could make out the eyes of her father’s cat sitting just behind his fence, staring back at her.

  “Here, kitty, kitty,” she said. “Here, kitty, here, kitty.” And she stepped along backward, dribbling the little pieces of meat from her palm in a sort of trail as she called all the while to the cat. Finally, she reached her own back door, and she went in and washed her hands and went up to bed, carrying her cast-off shoes with her.

  In the morning, when she looked out on the back steps, she saw that all the little pieces of meat leading up to her door were gone, but of course who could tell what animal had eaten them?

  Chapter Five

  Housekeeping

  Martin had no idea that he had accumulated over the years—say all his years past age ten—so many alternatives to an apology. It would have been especially unusual for him to turn to anyone, particularly a woman, and simply say, “I’m sorry.” It was not because there was anything of his pride at stake; it was because men have other ways than women do of making amends. Not many men have ever understood how disarming, how unarguable, an admission of guilt and culpability can be. Martin could only stand at the window tap-tapping his fingers on the sill and look out while Claire sat on the floor of his living room, cutting and wrapping and tying ribbons on the presents she had selected for her daughter, Katy. In this instance, anyway, sorrow, or even guilt, might not have been the precise sentiment he would have had to accommodate. Nevertheless, he remained preoccupied. At other times in his life he had rubbed two fingers over his lower lip, abstracted; he had put his hand over the late-evening stubble of his beard and gazed out of some other window to avoid an issue. In none of this behavior was there intentional deceit; there was really only an element of reticence and tradition and simple clumsiness. Martin couldn’t have thought of any way to say to Claire that when they had entered his house, and he had watched her spread out the wrapping paper and ribbons and go to work with the tape, his immediate impulse had been finally to put his hands at her waist, with his thumbs pressed against that vulnerable cleft just below her winglike rib cage. It was all he had thought about as he watched her, because over the summer weeks his house had become a neutral territory, empty of his wife and not under the influence of Ellen. Summer after summer, he had experienced the same melancholy during the absence of his family, but his dejection always took him unawares. It had never become a habit. He hadn’t caught the knack of nestling gloomily into it so that it might even have been of some use to him. Vic and Ellen had always been his mainstay during the two and a half months his wife and children were away, but never before had he been offered any other distraction than simply that of their calm company. But now, since Claire and Katy had come to live with them, and even the Hofstatters’ lives were becoming complicated, he was drawn more and more into a new and separate domesticity.

  The souvenirs of Dinah and his children, dispersed throughout his house, had lost their significance, and the usual communal state of the household had gradually elapsed into an entirely personal order controlled only by himself, and he was seldom there. He had taken to sleeping on the couch many nights at the Hofstatters’ house in the country and staying in town only on the two days he had to teach. There was so little gas, and the cost of going back and forth was too great. He had forgotten, in some respects, that he was responsible for any house at all. And night after night he had thought about Claire, and he had convinced himself that she expected and desired just what he expected: that at last, like children growing up and leaving home, they could do just as they liked, now that they were alone together. Thus the lingering feeling that he should explain something to her, since they weren’t doing anything at all but wrapping packages. But she worked with incurious concentration, and not only could Martin not have said anything to the point or even formulated what was to be said, but his mind adapted with singular beauty to the situation and leaped over his original intentions. He was only looking out the window wondering where they could get all those balloons filled with helium.

  He and Claire had waited an hour in line at the gas station to fill Martin’s car, and he had expected to be able to have the balloons inflated at the same station, but he had found that they didn’t offer that service, and, in any case, this was a poor time to make the request. In answer, he had been given only a vacant stare. But Martin had latched on to the idea of helium balloons for Katy’s party, and he was not to be persuaded that they weren’t necessary. He had become privately morose, standing against his car waiting for gas and listening to people insult each other. The poor, gangly attendant burst into apprehensive perspiration under the accumulated fury of his customers. In the unusual heat the cars glistened ominously, and Martin even became fearful. All summer he had protected himself from the sudden desperation of a previously complacent society by steeping himself in what he considered to be the remarkable serenity of Ellen’s house. It was a balm for his spirit. One could remain convinced, in that carefully contrived environment, of one’s relevance in the world. But in that gas line the only things that seemed important, all at once, were fuel and food and sex. And—also—the helium balloons.

  He turned to Claire, who was still working with ribbons there on the carpet. “I think we might be able to get them filled at Newberry’s,” he said.

  Claire didn’t care about the balloons so much, but she looked at him with an expression of resignation. “Look, why don’t I phone first? It’s so hot to drive around, and we’ll only waste gas. Where’s the phone?” Martin showed her through the house into the kitchen and rinsed their beer glasses while she telephoned discount stores and any dime stores she could find listed in the book, but she had no luck. Finally, they gave up and carried all the presents Claire had bought and wrapped out to the car, leaving behind them a litter of tiny slivers of paper and odds and ends of ribbon strewn across the rug where she had been sitting. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to sweep them away; the house didn’t seem to be anyone’s property. Their plan was to take the party, completely assembled, out to the farm, because it had become apparent over the week that Ellen had no intention of making an exception to her habit of non-celebration, even for Claire’s daughter, Katy, of whom she was very fond, and who would be five years old on Saturday. In fact, Ellen had seemed cross and edgy all week, and Martin had boxed himself into the position of being Claire’s conspirator.

  One evening Martin had been sitting down on the grass with Katy and Claire so that they formed a triangle. Katy was talking about her birthday. “Well, Katy,” Martin said then, “you’re probably feeling very sad. In a few days you’ll have the very last evening of ever being four years old. Think of that! It will be the last time you’ll look over and see those horses with four-year-old eyes, the last time you’ll go swimming in your four-year-old skin. And you’ll never wak
e up four years old again!”

  His own children usually took this up wildly: “And the last time I have to go to bed at an eight-year-old hour! The last time I’ll get an eight-year-old allowance!” But sitting there in the grass at age thirty-eight, and looking around him at Claire, who was frowning, and Katy, who watched him with alarm, Martin realized what he was saying, and he was ashamed of himself.

  “So,” he went on, “your mother and I will go into town Saturday morning and buy everything that’s simply too old for a four-year-old but just right for someone as old as five. When you still had so long to go before you would be five, I didn’t want to tell you how much better it is than being four. You’ll be much smarter, and you’ll be able to swim faster, of course. And you’ll be surprised at how soon you’ll even be much taller!” But all the while he talked to Katy with her tiny wedge of a face and wispy, colorless hair like her mother’s, he was plagued with sorrow that year after year he had remorselessly inflicted on his own children the desolate message of their mortality. Why had he done that? And as though it were a joke? Perhaps he had thought that they could avoid it if they knew about it, because that was what he wished; they were the repository for all his life’s care.

  Claire looked up at him, relieved. “If you really would drive me to town on Saturday, it would be a big help. I haven’t wanted to ask Ellen or Vic. I’m not so sure they’re too enthusiastic about this party.”

  As a rule, the Hofstatters did not give parties, but their summers went like this: People arrived in the morning or after lunch on some days and didn’t leave until late evening. If Vic was at work on his own writing, or if he was going over material for the Review, the company might not see him at all. He would have settled himself into the big upstairs bedroom for the day, only appearing now and then to make a sandwich or get some coffee. If this was the case, the visitors would register their arrivals and departures with Ellen, who moved around the downstairs rooms to attend to many and various small tasks. Sometimes she would sit at her desk in one corner of the dining room and work at her poetry, and then people came and went without disturbing her. The wide front door, mortised in a traditional double-cross pattern, stood open. The central hall was illuminated on sunny days, or if the sky flew with clouds, it was as though the shining wood floor was darkening and lightening of its own accord. The guests arrived dressed to swim, or they changed unabashedly in the long grass at the edge of the pond. Some simply took off what they had on and waded in. It was established that no visitor judged any other as to their apparel.

  Some of the company were friends who just came out to enjoy the pond, and others were carpenters or plumbers or rural neighbors who stopped by on farmers’ errands. People brought gifts. They brought cakes, tomatoes, cut flowers, books.

  Martin had a niche in that house into which he settled customarily, and of which he was the sole occupant. He and Vic could consult each other if need be, but otherwise they could weed in peace through the unsolicited manuscripts sent in to the Review. They could work well in the tranquillity of a busy house that nevertheless functions methodically. The two of them could work with the assurance that other things were being taken care of.

  Ellen was their protection. She had almost made Martin believe in the feasibility of living a life that was only immediate. One night, as they sat watching the news in the Hofstatters’ small sitting room off the kitchen, they had suddenly been confronted with the plight of the Vietnamese boat people set afloat precariously on dozens of swaying, tottering ships. The people were packed so tightly aboard that they could only stand, and they looked out at the camera with apparent apathy. In that instant Martin was overawed by sorrow. His instinct was to cover his ears and close his eyes, although he only sat there looking, filled with hopelessness, and then also affected with fear for his own children, who would be, who must be, eventually, threatened by the world’s condition. But Ellen rose from the floor where she had been sitting and turned off the set. She sat back down to the crocheting she was doing, and her features were so bleakly determined in her anger that Vic was surprised into alarm. “Ellen…” he began, and Martin, too, thought that she was so saddened that she couldn’t bear it.

  But, in fact, he hadn’t understood. “It’s an obscenity,” she said, “to have that on the air. What can we do about it? Why do we need even to know about it? For God’s sake, why do they tell us?”

  Anyone could have answered her, and might have if she had not been so angry—and her anger was at the people themselves, all those people crowded on board those bath-tublike boats. Martin was shocked; he saw that her empathy was so far away, so isolated from any external influence that she would not be touched. From that moment he would regard her more warily, and yet she had given him a peculiar comfort. She managed to sanction a life lived within the bounds one delineates for it. In some way Martin was absolved of responsibility by her attitude, and yet his affection for her was subtly diminished.

  But it was Ellen’s determination to live her life within her own house that made Martin’s summer a respite from normal cares, and made it a time in which he could do work that was important, for the most part, only to himself. He set himself up in the large living room and spread his material on the coffee table, while he stretched out comfortably over one or the other of the huge, matching butterscotch leather couches. When he and Dinah had first visited this house and sat in this room, Ellen had been very charming and precise in explaining it.

  “Well,” she said, “when we decided it was time to buy some furniture we were in Boston, and we simply walked into a store that seemed to be completely filled with very swank, leather furniture. You know the sort of store. Chrome lamps and glass tables. There was brown leather, black leather, white leather, beige leather…well…” She shrugged helplessly. “I became very taken with it all. I just walked around and around that store loving the smell of all that leather, and we bought these two couches and those three armchairs and quilted leather pillows! I was carried away.” She tilted her head down with a deprecating smile. “And then, as we were leaving the store—after we had arranged for delivery and so forth—a man was coming in, and I just stopped dead still and put my hand out to make him stay there at the door. I was astonished, you see. I just couldn’t grasp it. He had on one of those sports-car hats—suede—and I said, ‘But, Vic, we’ve forgotten the hats! We haven’t got any leather hats!’”

  Martin and Dinah had been delighted, and a little mesmerized, to discover such furtive and superior humor let loose in their midst, and they were all four complacent in their mutual grasp of each other’s wit.

  The vast leather sofas continued to be exotic and misplaced there in the living room of the old house, where the floor was still covered with black-and-white linoleum. Sometime during the summer Vic and Martin would pull up those tiles, however, because they had removed a small section and found grand, wide, primitive walnut boards beneath. They would pull up the tiles and strip off the glue and varnish. They would sand the floor and perhaps they would stain it, and then they would cover it over with a final coat of polyurethane. Meanwhile, Martin didn’t mind the black-and-white linoleum at all, he was so used to it. And when the heat and humidity grew intense and hung for a long time in the little valley where the Hofstatters lived, Martin pitched in and helped remove the film of greenish mold that blossomed overnight on the exposed surfaces of honey-colored leather.

  Each summer Martin accomplished the greatest portion of what he considered to be his work. Not his job, because his job was teaching, and he enjoyed it, but the Review was his work. The four of them, Vic and Ellen and Dinah and Martin, had conceived the idea; they had planned it as a collective editorial effort, but both women had drifted away from the project and from each other. Martin had never taken time to ponder this; it hadn’t seemed unusual as it had happened. Dinah was increasingly involved with the Artists’ Guild shop, and Ellen became more and more wrapped up in her own writing, which she regarded as strictly her ow
n affair. She did not intend it for publication, in any case, so the Review could not be a useful instrument for her, and Vic and Martin never even saw her work. She did mail it off to a few friends across the country, and to favored ex-professors. The Review became a thing of Vic and Martin’s making, and it gave them great satisfaction, but the work was often tedious. So Martin thought of his summer as a time in which he truly labored.

  This summer, though, a new intensity of purpose suffused the air like pollen. Ellen moved about these days taut-limbed and with severe and controlled intentions—setting up for herself more and more arduous tasks and insisting on completing them by her own arbitrary schedule. Her tension was picked up by everyone in the household, even the visitors and carpenters and plumbers, who did their work in half the time and departed. Her tension was picked up by all but Claire and Katy. Therefore, Martin gradually realized that there was an eccentric insistence in Ellen’s behavior that had as its focus Claire’s blithe disregard for the gravity of everyday life. Claire proceeded through each day as need be. Of course, she cooked and ate and cleaned and cared for her daughter. She did all the irritating or pleasant chores of any day, but she went along with comparative frivolity; she never acknowledged or even seemed to think of any long-term goal.

  Martin had always watched Ellen with wonder as she ran her household. She laid out her days like playing cards, he thought, so that one felt she must be bound to complete the deck. Each task was carefully thought out in relation to something else. “You know, I can’t bear it—it almost makes me ill—to have anything in my house that isn’t beautiful of its own accord,” she had said to Dinah one night years ago. So she persuaded herself of the beauty of things which had always seemed quite ordinary to Martin. She even insisted that Vic mow the lawn with an old-fashioned push mower she had found in a junk shop, because she said it pleased her by its simplicity. “I don’t see why all the objects we’re forced to live with, just because of a sort of imposed civilization, shouldn’t have aesthetic value. Well, the thing is, I think I’m diminished in some way if I allow myself to use inferior tools—or inferior methods.” Martin had known at the time of that discussion that Dinah would be intimidated and irritated at once by even such a notion. As it turned out, the reverse was true, also. Ellen had been ill at ease in Dinah’s house with its almost systematic chaos. In those early days, when the two women had been friends, Ellen visited Dinah at the shop, where tranquillity reigned. But this summer Martin observed Claire and Ellen and began to think that Ellen’s passion for perfection amounted to an obsession. As this came home to him, he realized that Ellen herself perceived his slight disenchantment, and it seemed to drive her into a frenzy of worthwhile activity.