All the Little Live Things (33 page)

Changes, symptoms, stigmata—we watched for them, unable to help ourselves, and slowly, a trace at a time, they appeared.

“Have you noticed how indifferent Marian is getting to Debby?” Ruth said one day, one of those blurred indistinguishable days while summer droned on and she burned toward her end. “It’s as if she’s so intent on having the new baby she’s forgetting the one she has.”

I said I hadn’t noticed any such thing. If she seemed indifferent, it was because she was tired all the time, and who could blame her?

“I wasn’t blaming her. I’ve just been noticing. It started all of a sudden. It’s more than tiredness.”

“That doesn’t sound like Marian. She adores that child.”

“Adored,” Ruth said. “She’s changed. You watch. John’s the one who’s attached to Debby now.”

“Naturally, he’s saving Marian all he can.”

“That wouldn’t make her act so cold. It’s like a repudiation.”

“If I were in her place I’d probably think of nobody but myself,” I said. “I can’t think it’s any more than that. What are they going to do when John has to go back to teaching?”

“I thought you knew. He’s taking the quarter off.”

I brooded about that, trying to imagine how it would feel to conduct your life as if you were driving soberly, carefully, well within the speed limit and in accordance with all the traffic laws, toward an intersection already in sight, where you knew a crazy drunk out of control was going to hit you head on. It is no good to say we all conduct our lives that way: most of us can’t see the intersection, and so can pretend it isn’t there.

Bitterly I said, “They figure three months will take care of it, is that it? It’s almost obscene, they’re like conspirators. Are they going to have signals, you suppose, so when she’s at her last breath she can lower her little flag and John can tell the doctors, ‘O.K., boys, rip away, get that babe’?”

“Joe!”

“Christ,” I said, “it gives me the horrors.”

“What should they do, pretend?”

No, not pretend. Pretending was what a lot of people did, and changed nothing. Only undoing would serve. I thought I would trade my possible ten more years of life to be God for ten minutes, to undream their nightmare for them and unravel all their careful preparations.

What is more, I didn’t understand all their preparations. Some, like the heartbreaking little gifts she brought us, things that were like the gifts a serious and affectionate little girl might leave her friends when she went home from a summer at the shore or in the mountains, were plain enough, however painful. But why would she let John suspend his work for a quarter? It would have been more her style to make him go down to that lab every morning until the very day she had to be taken to the hospital. His career was at least as important to her as to him, and she would want life served, not death. And now this rejection of Debby, right when I would have expected her to be hungrily protective and possessive to the last frayed end of her strength. What about her wish to be generous and loving? Was she already so far gone that she was letting go the strongest claim on her life?

For as soon as Ruth put me to watching, I saw that she was right. Marian was systematically rejecting her daughter. And something more: John abetted her, it was some agreement between them.

In place of the two pony tails we had got used to in the station wagon, bouncing out across the bridge to piano lesson or school, now it was crewcut and small pony tail. In place of the thin bright figure that used to lean on the corral watching Debby ride, it was now John. In the early morning when sounds rose clearly from the bottom land I heard child and father talking as they dipped rolled barley out of the bin or shook out a slab or two from a bale of hay. Marian’s voice was not there any more; she was inside, in bed, in the kitchen, down in the grove reading. And on weekends and afternoons when Debby would ordinarily have been around the place, with or without playmates, John frequently took her with him into the hills while he salvaged firewood out of down trees. He didn’t need all that wood, he had two or three cords of it already. But he went, and he took Debby with him.

When the child skinned her knee or walked into a blackberry vine or had her foot stepped on by the horse, it was John who answered her crying and took her into the bathroom for ceremonial Mercurochrome and a Band-Aid. If she tried to climb into Marian’s lap, Marian held her away until John could take her, not always without an argument, onto his own knee. We heard her call, sometimes, yelling for her mother to come and see some skink or ring-necked snake or brick-colored salamander in the frog pond, and though Marian had spent hours and days teaching her to take an interest in country creatures and had built that frog pond herself, we observed that now she paid no attention. If John was not there to take over, the summons went unanswered.

Indications multiplied. We stopped once to pick up Marian for shopping, and here came Debby running, squawling to go too. Marian shut the car door in her face. “Lucky you,” she said. “You get to stay home with Daddy.” She gave me a sign, and we drove off. In the mirror I saw Debby in a brief shower of tears at the roadside, and out the door John coming, alert to provide his substitute comfort.

Or they were up at our place one Sunday afternoon for a drink. The fog had rolled over the skyline, and the wind was chilly, so that we sat on the patio side, in the lee. Debby had stripped to the hide to wade in the pool and push around a plastic boat that John—not Marian—produced for her. She gabbled to herself as she played, an innocent obbligato to our talk, which was uristrained and quiet, briefly oblivious of the mad-man on the intersecting road. The sheltered sun was warm, the mockingbird was singing again from the terrace, where he had sung for us the first day they ever visited us.

This was what we had come here for, this peace. We had cultivated it as strenuously as Marian cultivated aliveness. Whenever it settled upon us in its purity I was likely to think that if this was what Peck and the boys got on a sugar cube I might be tempted to join them. It lay on us that afternoon like a fine dust of gold, and especially on the child, slim and tender, a peeled willow stick, bending in the pool. She was absorbed, entirely unself-conscious. Her body was brown except for the white pants of skin that had been protected from the sun by swimming trunks. Turning, bending, shoving the plastic boat, she was the most graceful of creatures, perfect and smooth, smoothly cleft, round-limbed.

Then I took my eyes off her and found Marian watching her with so hungry an expression that it obviously embarrassed her to be caught in it. “Ah!” she exclaimed, and stretched out her legs luxuriously. “This is nice!” She reached down and picked up limp Catarrh, arching past her chair. A little flush stained the satiny skin across her cheekbone. She knew what her face had given away, and it was neither weariness nor rejection, it was devouring love.

“Hey!” Debby said suddenly, with her face bent nearsightedly close to the water. “There are fish in here! Little tiny fish! Mummy, come look!”

“Mosquito fish,” I said. “I had the county mosquito abatement bring some the other day: we were getting a lot of wigglers.”

Stroking Catarrh with so firm a hand that it slanted his blinking eyes, Marian looked toward me as if begging some conversation. The pink in her cheekbone deepened. She said nothing. John stood up.

“Mummy!” Debby cried. “There are
millions
of them!”

Her father squatted beside her with one hand on her narrow back. Touching her—I had noticed how much he touched her lately, his hand was always on her head, his arm around her—he said heartily, “Those little fish are as fierce as sharks. Here, let’s catch a fly, I’ll show you.

It was smoothly done. He waited, squatting, until one of our summer flies alighted on his knee. A swoop of the hand and he had it. He pinched and rolled his fingers, opened them, and dropped the injured fly on the water. From where I sat I could see the water swirl with miniature savagery as they tore it apart.

“Wow!” Debby said. She stepped out to stand, September Morn, reaching an uncertain toe back toward the water.

“You’d
better
get out,” John said. “Those things would gnaw you off at the knees.” His hand patted her white bottom, but she was already gone, pulling at Marian’s arm. Catarrh hopped down and slid away. “Mummy, come and look. They just
gobble.
”

Sitting straighter, Marian brushed away the drops of drink that Debby had spilled on her. “Now you’ve slopped me.”

“Come
look
!
”

“I’ve seen them, hon.”

“No you haven’t.”

“Others like them.”

“Why
won’t
you come?” Debby said angrily. “
I want you to come and see!
”

Marian withdrew herself. “If we’re losing our manners we’ll have to be taken home.”

“You’re acting very badly,” Marian said. “Mummy may not want to come and see. Mummy may be tired. You go watch them all you want.”

Ruth and I sat and listened as to the demonstration of a problem we had not heard stated. Now John came into it again. He picked up the naked child and held her, smiling down into her angry face. “Come on, kid,” he said. “I’ve got a better idea. You get your pants on so we don’t shock the neighbors and you and I will go over in the field and see if John Rabbit is around.”

He held her between his knees and slid on her panties. Then he hoisted her onto his shoulders. “Excuse us,” he said. “I’ve been promising to show her where a jack-rabbit friend of ours lives.”

Marian was exposed to two looks, her daughter’s reproachful glare and her husband’s still, questioning glance. She closed her eyes, and they went away. When they were fifty steps out on the drive, and turning up toward the stile in the pasture fence, she moved her head back and forth slightly against the chair. “I’m sorry,” she said, still with her eyes shut.

“Is she too much for you, Marian?” Ruth said. “Why doesn’t she stay with us? We’d love having her. She’d see you every day, but you wouldn’t have the care of her, or John either.”

With her thumb on her cheekbone, her fingertips braced against her forehead, Marian sat looking down. Through her fingers she lifted a brief, wry smile. “It’s sweet of you, but that wouldn’t do it.”

“Do what?”

“Oh, it’s the hardest thing, of all!” Marian said. Her fingertips rubbed at the crease between her eyes. “We don’t want her unhappy, she shouldn’t feel repudiated, but she
has
to be detached from me. She’s always been too dependent. John’s been away so much, and I’ve spoiled her.”

“So you’re now doing what?” I said, more sharply than I intended. “Breaking down her affection?”

“Not her affection, Joe. Her dependence. I don’t want her to feel lost and shattered without a mother. I’d like her to miss me, but I know it’s better she shouldn’t, too much. So we’re trying to phase me out and John in. But oh, it’s hard! I have to turn myself into a stone!”

I said to Ruth, “Well, there’s your explanation.” I felt like clutching my head. How often that girl outraged me, trying to live by a theory instead of by her own sound feelings or by common sense. Or die by one. I couldn’t help saying, “Does John think she should be deprived of the memory of a loving mother?”

“He agrees with me. He hates it, but he agrees.”

“I hate it too,” I said, “and I don’t think, I do agree. Good God, Marian, it’s impossible for Debby, and miserable for you! Let her miss you. She’ll be richer all her life for that sorrow.”

She gave me her clear blue thoughtful glance, looking sidelong through the fingers still pressed against her forehead. Evidently she saw the redness of her palm, for with a grimace she laid it flat on her thigh. “Both my parents were killed when I was just about her age,” she said. “I don’t want her lost like that.”

“You
survived it,” I said. “Not too badly.”

“Joe, I had nightmares for years. I was always dreaming I was lost in some forest, or in a great bleak place like a tundra.”

“And survived the nightmares too,” I said. “This isn’t the way you usually talk. You’re always saying face up to it, experience it. Anyway, what about what Debby wants? Doesn’t that matter?”

“She wants love,” Marian said. “She’s learning to go to John for it. He’s the gentlest man in the world, she’s got to discover that. Before long, she’ll be calling on him, not me. Then it’ll be easier for both of them when I go.”

Preparations, plans as if for a sabbatical year. They set my teeth on edge. Her explanation left me shaky and undone, as always when I caught her trying to assert her will against inevitability. Sometimes I almost resented her assumption that she could control the circumstances of her death; I wondered if she could be called selfish for presuming to steer the lives of those who would survive her. And inconsistent: if all experience, including pain, was good for her, it ought to be good for Debby too. And finally presumptuous. Good God, presumptuous was too mild a word.

Bothered by her presumption, I vaguely resented John’s submission to it. Perhaps he resented me, too, for I could not keep still. Sometime in September I begged him to make her abort the wretched fetus that was shortening her life.

The answer that he gave me was probably the only possible answer, and he gave it to me with the emotional control, the rocklike composure, that had put me off when I met him at the airport. This active, strong, clean, easy-smiling, well-educated young American, this man whose face you could have used on posters, this mens
sana in corpore sano,
no beater of the breast or dabbler in his own insides, but a doer, a hunter of new knowledge and a believer in the future—this man you could trust to look after a child or chair a committee or conduct an impartial investigation, who could conceive an important problem and devise the system of research that might solve it, this scientist whose science was life, and who was as tender and intense about life as anybody I knew except his wife—this man so fortunate in every way but the most important looked at me somberly and said, “She’s entitled to do it her way. It’s her death.”