Dale Loves Sophie to Death (15 page)

“Well, Dad,” she said, “that cat was pretty hard on the wildlife.” Was she trying to justify this cat’s death to protect Toby? To protect himself? She had never considered her father a sentimental man; she had always known, at least, that neither she nor her mother could ever touch any kernel of his sentiment. That’s what she thought, at any rate, but now he leaned back against the doorjamb, and his face filled with a familiar look of gleeful irony.

“Yes, Jimmy was a great hunter.” He arched his eyebrows with pleasure. “It was the only career I could get him to take up. He wasn’t the least interested in the law, or accounting.” Then he grew solemn again and was intent upon getting Jimmy’s description clear. “He was a very smart cat,” he said. “No, he was an
intelligent
cat. Not at all sweet-natured, but canny.” She would have to think later about whatever it was he meant by this; she couldn’t understand it now, but her father had always been a man who chose his words with stingy care. She knew she must give them some thought. “But, you know,” he went on, “until he got so interested in Toby, he had always been a cat who was content to live in his own yard. I have that fence, you see. Dogs didn’t bother him. Oh, well…well, will you let the children know?”

Dinah nodded. How could she ever explain to her father that it was she, and not Toby, who had seduced that sleek gray cat?

Chapter Seven

Easy Living

D
inah stood in the doorway and watched her father retrace his path down the steps and along the curving front walk that wound around the corner of the house to the street. Usually, people in Enfield came to the side door and entered through the kitchen; that door was easily accessible, but her father was a man who always observed the formalities. Especially after so long a time, he had come to the front door, not chancing to presume he would be casually welcomed just like any other neighbor. His elaborate propriety suddenly brought to mind the long-ago Sunday luncheons at expensive restaurants, slightly grim occasions as were any gatherings that included the four of them, but nevertheless the event she had always anticipated most during the week.

The whole country had been naïve then. It had been rather an innocent age all around. The restaurants they had gone to had served very good but ordinary food. Baked Alaska was considered exotic. And the rooms were only rooms with painted walls, some mirrors, and pictures. No fantasy was involved; no room pretended to be Polynesian or Victorian, and those restaurants had names like The Capitol House or Pinetta’s. One of her and Martin’s favorite places to eat in Fort Lyman now was called The Spotted Zebra. She thought that it had been easier to define things then. She and Buddy and Polly and her father had sat together in a restaurant that smelled sharply of starched linen, luxurious carpeting, and secret edibles enclosed in silver dishes and wheeled on trolleys to nearby tables. The atmosphere had been sincerely respectable and reassuring as they unfolded their napkins into their laps.

Now, she watched her father walking away down the sidewalk, and a sensation of familiarity swept over her so entirely that she believed she knew the next move he would make, how the branches of the shaggy pines would flex as he brushed against them, the angle he would hold his head. She was at once enclosed in the same claustrophobic apperception that was becoming unbearably frequent these hot days. The simple tableau of which she was now a part seemed thoroughly of the past—as though her mind, having long ago expanded into a certain territory, must occupy it again if given the slightest prod. But her hand resting there on the intricately carved woodwork registered the sensation of being in the present, so even as she stood transfixed by her conflicting sensibilities, she could isolate that instant as a clear bubble of experience. She knew what had happened, and she thought that this particular manifestation of déjà vu was simply her mind’s absolute refusal to admit the random nature of human events and of human connections. It was far too risky, she knew, to confront the fact of one’s initial lack of choice. There was a degree of anxiety involved in understanding that it was not
reasonable
that she was who she was, tied to and caring about her inevitable relations. Her circumstances had come about only by chance, and her intelligence couldn’t approve of that.

She stood there watching her father stoop to avoid the branches that protruded, untrimmed, into his pathway; he was too tall to walk beneath them. Before she considered it, she took up her purse and keys from the hall bench under the mirror and left the house to catch up with him. “I’ll go along with you and get my mail,” she said, and he nodded at her absently and smiled. They recrossed the street and walked along slowly next to the handsome iron fence in front of his house. Some new construction had been started. Dinah had observed it with mild curiosity for days. Raw-looking two-by-fours were erected in the rough skeleton of a box that straddled the peak of the roof. She regarded the house from its long side; she couldn’t see the gable. “What are they doing there on the roof, Dad?” Her father came to a stop and looked up at it, and so she did, too.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “that’s going to be a cupola. I’ve always wanted one. I’ve always wanted a cupola and a gazebo. As soon as I have those, I’ll be finished with this house. I even like the names. They have a nice sound, don’t you think? You wouldn’t think of one without the other.”

Dinah didn’t say anything at once. Her father had only asked her a rhetorical question, and they walked on. “Won’t that be something of an anachronism on that house?” she said. “I guess a gazebo would be fine in the garden. But the lines of the house are so elegant.” The thought of a cupola perched on top of that pristine slate- and copper-clad roof worried her unaccountably. She cared about the integrity of houses. But she knew even as she made this mild objection that her argument was futile. She had tried, off and on during her life, to abandon her own tendency to insist on getting things just right. Her father looked disdainful, as much as to say she had missed the point. But she already knew, anyway, that he liked what he liked, and that a mere architectural incongruity would be of no consequence to him.

“I always thought we should have had a gazebo out back in the far yard,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. “Up at Polly’s, you know. But that didn’t interest your mother at all.” A faint nasal twang whined out into the middle of a sentence now and then as her father spoke, and it was an inflection that connoted absolute self-assurance. It was curiously attractive, but also entirely patronizing. Perhaps it was perversely tempting to an audience to be patronized; perhaps that accounted, in part, for her father’s magnetism. Otherwise, his speech drew one’s attention because underneath the distinctly enunciated syllables there was a faint tension of the chest and vocal cords. He gave the impression of speaking with a very tenuous restraint, and that, too, was compelling.

Dinah didn’t care if her parents had ever talked about building a gazebo; certainly they never had within her hearing or memory. But she winced at her father’s petulance about it now, which had crept into his manner right away when he mentioned it. That petulance was too reminiscent of childhood, when she had finally perceived that whatever one parent desired, the other was bound to despise. The two of them—her mother and father—had never understood that. They would approach each other time and again with various plans and schemes, only to be met with bland opposition once more. A plaintive resentment grew up between them and came to rest like a constant shadow over Dinah and Buddy. As a result, of course, Dinah was adamantly incurious about the unconstructed gazebo in Polly’s back yard.

“Toby’s birthday is coming up, Dad,” she said. “I wonder if you’d come? I’m going to wait and have it when Isobel is here, because she’s his godmother. They’ve never met, though.” This still made her sorry, that her life and her friend’s life could have progressed so far so separately.

He turned his mind to this question now, to Dinah’s relief. “Oh, well, Dinah. I don’t think so. I don’t much like those sorts of things.”

Dinah had never set out, had never intended, to invite him at all, and her first impulse when he refused the invitation was to tell him so. She was furious at his obtuseness. Now she couldn’t manage not to feel his rejection, his lack of generosity; she couldn’t be unaware that Toby, too, was rejected, even though, on her father’s part, it was all unconscious. It was only an example of his own consuming self-involvement. But it laid Dinah and Toby open, in Dinah’s view, to their own humiliating desires and dependencies. She walked on beside him in apparent calm, but she was laden with a disproportionate anger.

They paused in front of the post office, and her father readied himself to mount the steps. He shifted his weight and transferred his envelopes to the hand that would not clasp the banister. He assumed a look of concentration, and Dinah watched him with sympathy in spite of herself. “Look,” he said, “why don’t you bring the children over someday and I’ll fix a birthday lunch for Toby? Something like that. I’ll arrange it all, and you get Isobel to come, too. I don’t think you’ve seen the house, have you?” He turned once again to gather himself up and take the steps, but he added in an abstracted and bemused tone, “It will be good to see Isobel again, too. She used to come over just to listen to music. Dave Brubeck. She never liked any of my Ahmad Jamal.” He thought that over. “Well, I think she was probably right about that. They were just a shade too commercial. Now
she’s
an attractive girl!” It seemed that he meant she was attractive in opposition to someone else, but Dinah didn’t want to explore that possibility. “She must be almost thirty-five or thirty-six by now. She still seems so young! She came over at Thanksgiving just to say hello. I like to have her visit.”

By now, in spite of herself, Dinah could not help but think of Isobel. All of their lives, the two of them had played at competition. She had a vivid impression of Isobel, all at once, as she had been the weekend she had been home from her boarding school when Dinah was in the Home-coming pageant at Fort Lyman High School. Dinah had been pleased when she had found out that Isobel would be home to see her celebrated. Isobel had been so glamorous! But Dinah did not want to hear her father name any more of Isobel’s virtues, as much as she might agree with him. Now she was intimidated by her own memories.

Dinah put all this out of her thoughts for the moment, but she did accept her father’s invitation to lunch, for Toby’s sake, and for the benefit of her own curiosity. Dinah had forgotten, over the years, that she needed an armored sensibility and a sturdy ego to risk exposure to her own father. Isobel had always had both, and besides, she and Dinah’s father had approached being the other’s favorite person. This notion flickered alarmingly over the surface of Dinah’s mind, laserlike, a beam of pure resentment that permeated her studious unconcern.

“Dad, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Toby. You’ve noticed his limp?” She had caught his arm at the elbow this time, before he started up the steps, and he turned back to her with slight impatience. “Should I take him to a pediatrician or an orthopedist? Could it be something that ought to be looked at?”

“Oh, Dinah, for God’s sake!” He looked at her with his head slightly cocked. Dinah had spent many years of her life learning all the subtleties of her father’s expression, just as children must. When he raised an eyebrow and drew one corner of his mouth down ever so slightly, she understood entirely the implied derision. She understood entirely, once more, the horror of being anyone’s child, subject to such terrors as the denial of approval. “I’ll tell you,” he went on. “It almost amuses me that, of all the possible traits he could have taken up, he chose my least attractive!” She was momentarily embarrassed, because just as they had walked along together this afternoon and she had watched her father’s cautious handling of his body, she had remembered his huge and unabashed vanity, and she had become aware that his faltering gait was especially distasteful to him. But he went on, unconcerned apparently, and she remembered that people always suffered more for him than he ever did for himself. That was his best trick. “Martin’s not here,” he explained with exacting condescension. “Well, Toby’s just at that age, I suppose. About seven? It’s just a kind of hero worship. Toby’s fine.”

Dinah didn’t mean to, but generally she believed what men told her. In this case, though, she knew that in some way Toby was not fine. “He isn’t,” she said.

Her father had gone ahead, laboriously, up two steps, and this time he turned to look at her in amusement. “Well, Dinah? What do you expect?” She just looked back at him; her mind wasn’t moving with the conversation. She was thinking of Toby with a small but penetrating grief; she wondered if he was beyond her help. “Why isn’t Martin here? Why
do
you come back here without him year after year? Of
course
that’s on Toby’s mind. You shouldn’t imagine that children don’t feel the weight of a situation like that.”

She stood there astonished as he made his way up the steps and into the post office, struggling with his balance as he levered open the heavy door. She was not shocked by his audacity. She had long ago, and during the most bitter of their confrontations, given up expecting him to coordinate his advice with his own actions. It was only his own children who were expected to be immune to the effects of family trauma. But she continued to stand there after he disappeared into the dark interior, before she could register anger, before she formed a reply. She had nothing to say; she didn’t even have anything to think. Her situation, her desperation, went unnamed and unaccounted for. All the loose ends of her life flew around her like unfettered ribbons around a maypole. The only thing she knew for sure, and what astounded her most, was that he misunderstood it altogether; he had it all wrong. In fact, when challenged in such a way, she felt the absolute solid certainty of Martin’s reassuring existence in the world. As with every other summer, she had reached that stage of separation at which point the idea of Martin had become as slight as the rustle and final settled whisper of her letters to him when she dropped them down the “Out of Town” slot in the air-conditioned lobby of the post office. She often lingered there, because it was cool, and because she wanted to extend the moment. When she talked to him on the phone, they were both fairly matter-of-fact; they were well practiced, by now, at being in different places. But she had never thought for a moment that they were not closely bound. Now every facet of her mind suddenly reflected all the myriad aspects of their marriage into her consciousness, and for one moment all the day’s persistent despair was alleviated. Then the moment was gone.