A Mind of Winter (18 page)

We both hesitated. The far-off twittering of birds seemed to grow louder, as if the woods were stealthily advancing.

“Non-fortes,” he said. With his right hand, he counted out two fingers on his left. “Croquet. Prisons. I see I’ll be learning about you in the negative.”

Those brown eyes: I felt I might reach into them and pull out something marvelous and undiscovered.

At dinner Barnaby leaned over and whispered in my ear, “We’ll be hearing from you this evening, I trust.” The pounding in my chest started up. I patted his arm.

“Perhaps,” I said, attempting nonchalance. “If Oscar’s brandy inspires me sufficiently.”

Barnaby gave a knowing smile and resumed his banter with the woman seated on his other side who was poking at her salad and looking at him in that hopeful, insecure way I’d seen women look at him before.

After dinner, we made our way upstairs to the green room. Simon, in conversation with a scholarly looking man from the Treasury Department, remained in the dining room. Climbing the stairs alongside Barnaby, I could feel the weight of his gaze.

We were the first to enter. Barnaby crossed the room to check the decanters, which had been readied on the sideboard. I sat in an overstuffed chair. Everything seemed vaguely altered; it was as if each piece of furniture had been moved two or three inches in one or another direction. The huntergreen of the walls appeared more precise, and the two paintings opposite me—a woman reading a letter, and a stiff family portrait of English aristocrats bearing no resemblance to Oscar—seemed suddenly both very still and very animated, as if the figures were holding their breath and waiting to spring to life.

The others came drifting into the room. From where Barnaby stood in the corner I could hear the sound of ice cubes clinking, one at a time, into empty glasses. I recalled the flash that had come to me the previous evening—only in the remembering it was different, larger and smaller at the same time. I could see the whole story before me in one frozen scene, the characters and setting in miniature: propped up on a bed the size of a matchbox, a minuscule girl with honey-blond braids that fell across her shoulders and onto her developing bosom, which rose nakedly above a tightly laced bodice. The picture had the feel of memory—not my own, but somebody else’s, as if I had divined the source of some stranger’s secret obsession. I looked around, a little bewildered. There was Barnaby, moving about with the tray of fresh drinks and an exaggerated, waiterly air. The room had filled. Barnaby set the last drink from his tray onto the coffee table in front of me and returned to the sideboard to retrieve the one he had poured for himself. Everybody turned expectantly to where he stood by the window.

“To this evening’s raconteur,” he said, raising his drink in my direction.

“It was discovered in the vault of a cathedral,” I began, though I scarcely knew where the words were coming from. “A leatherbound notebook, rotting at the spine and filled with the writing of a feminine hand.
The Twelfth Day of the Month of May, 1601 Years After the Birth of Our Lord Jesus
was written across the top of the first page.”

I found myself describing the story of a young girl, born in a servant’s shack built against the inside of a monastery wall, who grew up scrabbling with other children around the straw-roofed settlement, gazing in awe at the priests when they passed by on their way out into the parish.

Every now and then I glanced across at Barnaby, who was leaning back in a leather chair, chin resting on interlaced fingers. I wondered if he had contrived this storytelling business solely to afford the chance of watching me frankly, and in the open.

“The Canon knew the girl from church,” I continued. “He had not failed to notice how lovely she was. The mother, he knew, had eight other children at home; he knew, too, that her husband, an ironsmith, had recently lost the use of one hand.” A hush fell over the room. The only sound, apart from my voice, was the tinkle every now and then of ice cubes in a glass.

“
I’ll see to her education
, the Canon said one Sunday, taking the girl by the hand. The woman fell to her knees and covered his feet with kisses.

“The Canon believed the world sullied women, and that if he shut the girl away, she would, under his tutelage, flower. He placed her in a spacious cellar and brought in a staff to care for her: two servant girls—children themselves—along with a tutor and a cook.”

I realized, as I spoke, that this strange story had all been there in that heightened glimpse, the week before, as I lay reading in bed with Simon.

“For five years, the Canon came every week to visit the girl. She noted some of their exchanges in her diary.
It’s a curse to see things too clearly
, the girl had said one day, to take one example.
No vision is ever a curse
, the Canon had replied.

“But on her thirteenth birthday, the pattern changed. Late that afternoon, the staff suddenly vanished (they would reappear later in the evening). The Canon swept in, bulky beneath the heavy velvet he wore, and took the girl onto his lap.

“
The flower is formed
, he muttered. Then, in a whisper, to himself:
The sweet nectar at the core
.”

I could feel the expectancy in the room; I could see it in the faces around me. Only Barnaby seemed not to be listening, lost in some faraway private domain, an elsewhere that in some intimate way included me.

“It struck the girl as odd that with all the care her master had taken with her wardrobe he should tear so at her clothes.

He repeated these same actions on the next visit, and the next.

“The girl quickly grasped that this was the new order of things. Sometimes, the Canon instructed that the clothes he tore be mended, and then the servant girls would sit stitching into the night. On other occasions, he would simply press the ruined fabric to his nose and inhale.”

Barnaby took his hands from his chin. Why the look of puzzlement, as if he’d been presented with a difficult theorem it was somehow his business to solve?

The story went down well, judging from the general liveliness that replaced the crowd’s prior drowsiness. Afterward, the room emptied with the usual uninhibited performance of bonhomie—too-ardent back slaps and goodnight kisses, the more sober supporting the less. Until there were just the two of us, Barnaby and me, alone.

“Misfiled,” I lied, when Barnaby asked me about the tale. “In the Agriculture section at the New York Public Library. I was looking for something on the history of corn and there it was. A facsimile edition of the original diary which was published in 1821, two hundred years after it was written.”

It was an unseasonably cold night and earlier Barnaby had made a fire. Now, three burning coals—all that remained of it—eyed us redly from the grate.

“There’s the matter of the truth quotient,” he said quietly.

“Diaries always tell some kind of truth, don’t you think?” I rejoindered.

“The question is, what is the truth of it for you?”

I took a cigarette from the polished wooden case on the table. Barnaby did not rise to light it but sat peering at me, head cocked, the vertical shadow in his cheek.

“That’s changing the rules of the game,” I said, striking a match. Looking at Barnaby, I was suddenly blindsided by an intuition that my marriage to Simon depended, in some crucial way, on the abiding love of this man.

“I imagine you keep a diary,” he said. “A journal. Some account of your life.”

Oscar furnished Galois, and now the tarry smoke hung in the air between us.

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“And how does the truth quotient figure in that?”

I flicked ash into the bronze ashtray, shook my head. “Barnaby, your parlor game and my personal life are two quite different matters.”

The smoke thinned; through the dissolving, gauzy swatches, I could see that the shadow in Barnaby’s cheek had disappeared, leaving not a trace of the rogue about him.

“Are they?”

Typically, when I came into the yellow suite, I would find Simon at the desk. Sometimes he would be staring out the window; then, he would turn to look at me, offering a faint smile. At other times, he seemed not to notice my presence, keeping his head lowered as his pen moved across the page. I would walk quietly into the bedroom, sit by the window in the chintz chair, and read, glancing occasionally out at the scene below me—a gardener raking the lawn, a handful of flush-cheeked guests returning from a walk, servants covering a trellis table with white linen and then lining up glasses and setting out little dishes that would later hold olives and nuts and tiny sweet gherkins.

This time, when I opened the door, Simon put down his pen and looked up. He rose and crossed to where I stood in the middle of the gold rug with its border of bright green leaves. He raised his hand and with one finger stroked the side of my neck. For an instant, I looked into eyes that were certain of what they saw and yet claimed to know nothing. In the slow time of the slowest waltz we edged toward the bedroom. The sheets were crumpled into clusters of unruly shells; we lowered ourselves onto the bed and they rustled beneath us.

Later, we lay there together sipping brandy, the curtains raised, lights out. Modest starlight gave a shady cast to the room.

“The University of Montreal has a visiting writer’s fellowship,” Simon said. “The person they had lined up for the summer program canceled. They’ve invited me to come in his place.”

“Would you like to go?” In the dim light, the brandy shone black like tar.

“They want me for the month of August.” He turned, looked at me calmly, openly, a little sadly. I put my snifter on the nightstand and lit a cigarette, aware that my heart was pounding.

“You’d be happy there,” I said. “A chance to exercise your French and write in outdoor cafés. You could pretend it was Paris.”

Simon took my chin in his hand, turned my head toward him. “Would you visit?” he asked.

“Darling, of course.”

I rested my cigarette in the ashtray. We kissed. Simon closed his eyes. I looked at his lids, picturing his gaze, longing for the force of it, relieved to be free of it, aching all over for him, unsure what part of my pounding heart was panic and what part the slithering thrill of freedom.

All week long, back in Manhattan, my mind flew forward to the weekend. When Friday morning came, I found myself dawdling—packing and repacking my small valise, flitting about to tidy this and that.

I smoked the whole way there, the window unrolled, the summer air rushing in and tousling my hair. Thelonius Monk crackled on the radio, leaving me feeling slightly off-kilter; Simon relaxed, enjoying the music. Though we were driving at quite a speed, time felt irritatingly sticky and slow.

Eventually, we pulled into the driveway. My mouth felt dry. Simon smiled one of his infrequent, happy smiles and patted my hand.

“Run along, squirrel,” he said sweetly. “I know you’re eager to see your friends.”

I stepped slowly from the car feeling puzzled, then walked around to Simon’s side and kissed him through the open window.

“See you at dinner, darling,” I said.

Dinner seemed to go on for hours.

Why not, I thought, taking another sip of Oscar’s port, which sometimes, as on that night, when the sky outside was inky and blank, glowed so deep it was almost purple. Why not honor Barnaby’s rule: really tell them some of the truth as I see it?

And then, there we were, Barnaby and I in the lead, heading up the stairs to the green room, me in the grip of an edgy desire—to show them something. Not just to tell a story, but to really make them see. Images from a troubling photographic assignment in the South clamored inside my skull, pressing for release. I sat in my usual place, waited for Barnaby to do the honors with the drinks. I could feel the grimness in my face, was uncomfortably aware of the locked bone hinge of my jaw. I surveyed the room; these people I only half knew with their cool linen jackets and sleek silk dresses, smooth brows and eyes glazed by not enough to think about and too much good wine. I wanted to take them away from all this; I wanted to take them
there
.

I had in mind a picture I had shot which appeared in a book I collaborated on years ago with a writer friend—of a sharecropper family in its shack. I had never here, in America, seen such poverty. It had seeped into the woman’s face; the children, too, were all of a piece with it, the way opulence becomes similarly stamped into the physical being of the wealthy. At the epicenter of the scene was the woman; in her arms, a bowlegged boy, too old to be held, and beside her, a girl of about thirteen, who wore a threadbare dress that seemed pasted on with filth. In all their eyes, the same strained bleakness.

“In a small town in Alabama, long before the war, a sharecropper’s daughter was raped,” I began. As I described the woman’s circumstances, I recalled following her into a small room misshapen as the poor woman’s face: relived the feel of the camera before my face, the woman stone still, bearing the boy, regarding me without accusation as I focused and shot.
She’s turned to salt
, I remember thinking, focusing on her pale blue eyes, which I knew would show up slug-brown in the prints.

I told the comfortable little group about how word of the rape had traveled and how the first order of business for the town was to nail a suspect. This they went about with a certain glee; it didn’t much matter who it was, so long as the color of his skin was black. As I talked, I recalled how easily the pictures had slid from my eyes, how alive I’d felt with the disconcerting harmony of the compositions.

I glanced over to Barnaby; he was looking at me uncertainly. I wondered what he was thinking.

There was murmuring in the room; the guests were restless. I knew I was losing their attention, but I didn’t care. This account was not for them. I wanted to show Barnaby what I’d seen. To let him know that I saw Oscar’s playground as just a pleasantry, a diversion. But I realize now, too, that it was also a test. It’s easy to sit back and watch. I wanted to know if Barnaby was also willing really to
see
.