The Early Stories (76 page)

We left refreshed.
We give thanks to thee, Almighty God, that Thou hast refreshed us through this salutary gift
. The church smelled like this school, glinting with strange whispers and varnished highlights. I am neither musical nor religious. Each moment I live, I must think where to place my fingers, and press them down with no confidence of hearing a chord. My friends are like me. We are all pilgrims, faltering toward divorce. Some get no further than mutual confession, which becomes an addiction, and exhausts them. Some move on, into violent quarrels and physical blows, and succumb to sexual excitement. A few make it to the psychiatrists. A very few get as far as the lawyers. Last evening, as the priest sat in the circle of my friends, a woman entered without knocking; she had come from the lawyers, and her eyes and hair were flung wide with suffering, as if she had come in out of a high wind. She saw our black-garbed guest, was amazed, ashamed perhaps, and took two backward steps. But then, in the hush, she regained her composure and sat down among us. And in this grace note, of the two backward steps and then again the forward movement, a coda seems to be urged.

The world is the host; it must be chewed. I am content here in this school. My daughter emerges from her lesson. Her face is fat and satisfied, refreshed, hopeful; her pleased smile, biting her lower lip, pierces my heart, and I die (I think I am dying) at her feet.

Man and Daughter in the Cold
 

“Look at that girl ski!” The exclamation arose at Ethan's side as if, in the disconnecting cold, a rib of his had cried out; but it was his friend, friend and fellow-teacher, an inferior teacher but superior skier, Matt Langley, admiring Becky, Ethan's own daughter. It took an effort, in this air like slices of transparent metal interposed everywhere, to make these connections and to relate the young girl, her round face red with windburn as she skimmed down the run-out slope, to himself. She was his daughter, age thirteen. Ethan had twin sons, two years younger, and his attention had always been focused on their skiing, on the irksome comedy of their double needs—the four boots to lace, the four mittens to find—and then their cute yet grim competition as now one and now the other gained the edge in the expertise of geländesprungs and slalom form. On their trips north into the White Mountains, Becky had come along for the ride. “Look how solid she is,” Matt went on. “She doesn't cheat on it like your boys—those feet are absolutely together.” The girl, grinning as if she could hear herself praised, wiggle-waggled to a flashy stop that sprayed snow over the men's ski tips.

“Where's Mommy?” she asked.

Ethan answered, “She went with the boys into the lodge. They couldn't take it.” Their sinewy little male bodies had no insulation; weeping and shivering, they had begged to go in after a single T-bar run.

“What sissies,” Becky said.

Matt said, “This wind is wicked. And it's picking up. You should have been here at nine; Lord, it was lovely. All that fresh powder, and not a stir of wind.”

Becky told him, “Dumb Tommy couldn't find his mittens, we spent an
hour
looking, and then Daddy got the Jeep stuck.” Ethan, alerted now for signs of the wonderful in his daughter, was struck by the strange fact that
she was making conversation. Unafraid, she was talking to Matt without her father's intercession.

“Mr. Langley was saying how nicely you were skiing.”

“You're Olympic material, Becky.”

The girl perhaps blushed; but her cheeks could get no redder. Her eyes, which, were she a child, she would have instantly averted, remained a second on Matt's face, as if to estimate how much he meant it. “It's easy down here,” Becky said. “It's babyish.”

Ethan asked, “Do you want to go up to the top?” He was freezing standing still, and the gondola would give shelter from the wind.

Her eyes shifted to his, with another unconsciously thoughtful hesitation. “Sure. If you want to.”

“Come along, Matt?”

“Thanks, no. It's too rough for me; I've had enough runs. This is the trouble with January—once it stops snowing, the wind comes up. I'll keep Elaine company in the lodge.” Matt himself had no wife, no children. At thirty-eight, he was as free as his students, as light on his skis and as full of brave know-how. “In case of frostbite,” he shouted after them, “rub snow on it.”

Becky effortlessly skated ahead to the lift shed. The encumbered motion of walking on skis, not natural to Ethan, made him feel asthmatic: a fish out of water. He touched his parka pocket, to check that the inhalator was there. As a child he had imagined death as something attacking from outside, but now he knew that it was carried within; we nurse it for years, and it grows. The clock on the lodge wall said a quarter to noon. The giant thermometer read two degrees above zero. The racks outside were dense as hedges with idle skis. Crowds, any sensation of crowding or delay, quickened his asthma; as therapy he imagined the emptiness, the blue freedom, at the top of the mountain. The clatter of machinery inside the shed was comforting, and enough teen-age boys were boarding gondolas to make the ascent seem normal and safe. Ethan's breathing eased. Becky proficiently handed her poles to the loader with their points up; her father was always caught by surprise, and often as not fumbled the little maneuver of letting his skis be taken from him. Until, seven years ago, he had become an assistant professor at a New Hampshire college, he had never skied; he had lived in those Middle Atlantic cities where snow, its moment of virgin beauty by, is only an encumbering nuisance, a threat of suffocation. In those seven years, his children had grown up on skis.

Alone with his daughter in the rumbling isolation of the gondola, he wanted to explore her, and found her strange—strange in her uninquisitive
child's silence, her accustomed poise in this ascending egg of metal. A dark figure with spreading legs veered out of control beneath them, fell forward, and vanished. Ethan cried out, astonished; he imagined that the man had buried himself alive. Becky was barely amused, and looked away before the dark spots struggling in the drift were lost from sight. As if she might know, Ethan asked, “Who was that?”

“Some kid.” Kids, her tone suggested, were in plentiful supply; one could be spared.

He offered to dramatize the adventure ahead of them: “Are we going to freeze at the top?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you think it'll be like?”

“Miserable.”

“Why are we doing this?”

“Because we paid the money for the all-day lift ticket.”

“Becky, you think you're pretty smart, don't you?”

“Not really.”

The gondola rumbled and lurched into the shed at the top; an attendant opened the door, and there was a howling mixed of wind and of boys whooping to keep warm. He was roughly handed two pairs of skis, and the handler, muffled to the eyes with a scarf, stared as if amazed that Ethan was so old. All the others struggling into skis in the lee of the shed were adolescent boys. Students: after fifteen years of teaching, Ethan tended to flinch from youth—its harsh noises, its cheerful rapacity, its cruel onward flow as one class replaced another, taking with it another year of his life.

Away from the shelter of the shed, the wind was a high monotonous pitch of pain. His cheeks instantly ached. His septum tingled and burned. He inhaled through his nose, and pushed off. Drifts ribbed the trail, obscuring Becky's ski tracks seconds after she made them; at each push through the heaped snow, his scope of breathing narrowed. By the time he reached the first steep section, the left half of his back hurt as it did only in the panic of a full asthmatic attack, and his skis, ignored, too heavy to manage, spread and swept him toward a snowbank at the side of the trail. He was bent far forward but kept his balance; the snow kissed his face lightly, instantly, all over; he straightened up, refreshed by the shock, thankful not to have lost a ski.

Down the slope, Becky had halted and was staring upward at him, worried. A huge blowing feather, a partition of snow, came between them. The cold, unprecedented in his experience, shone through his clothes
like furious light, and as he rummaged through his parka for the inhalator he seemed to be searching glass shelves backed by a black wall. He found it, its icy plastic the touch of life, a clumsy key to his insides. Gasping, he exhaled, put it into his mouth, and inhaled; the isoproterenol spray, chilled into drops, opened his lungs enough for him to call to his daughter, “Keep moving! I'll catch up!”

Solid on her skis, as Matt had said, she swung down among the moguls and wind-bared ice, and became small, and again waited. The moderate slope seemed a cliff; if he fell and sprained anything, he would freeze. His entire body would become locked tight against air and light and thought. His legs trembled; his breath moved in and out of a narrow slot beneath the pain in his back. The cold and blowing snow all around him constituted an immense crowding, but there was no way out of this white cave except to slide downward toward the dark spot that was his daughter. He had forgotten all his skiing lessons. Leaning backward in an infant's tense snowplow, he floundered through alternating powder and ice.

“You O.K., Daddy?” Her stare was wide, its fright underlined by a pale patch on her cheek.

He used the inhalator again and gave himself breath to tell her, “I'm fine. Let's get down.”

In this way, in steps of her leading and waiting, they worked down the mountain, out of the worst wind, into the lower trail that ran between birches and hemlocks. The cold had the quality not of absence but of force: an inverted burning. The last time Becky stopped and waited, the colorless crescent on her scarlet cheek disturbed him, reminded him of some injunction, but he could find in his brain, whittled to a dim determination to persist, only the advice to keep going, toward shelter and warmth. She told him, at a division of trails, “This is the easier way.”

“Let's go the quicker way,” he said, and in this last descent he recovered the rhythm—knees together, shoulders facing the valley, weight forward as if in the moment of release from a diving board—not a resistance but a joyous acceptance of falling. They reached the base lodge, and with unfeeling hands removed their skis. Pushing into the cafeteria, Ethan saw in the momentary mirror of the door window that his face was a spectre's; chin, nose, and eyebrows had retained the snow from that near-fall near the top. “Becky, look,” he said, turning in the crowded warmth and clatter inside the door. “I'm a monster.”

“I know, your face was absolutely white, I didn't know whether to tell you or not. I thought it might scare you.”

He touched the pale patch on her cheek. “Feel anything?”

“No.”

“Damn. I should have rubbed snow on it.”

Matt and Elaine and the twins, flushed and stripped of their parkas, had eaten lunch; shouting and laughing with a strange guilty shrillness, they said that there had been repeated loudspeaker announcements not to go up to the top without face masks, because of frostbite. They had expected Ethan and Becky to come back down on the gondola, as others had, after tasting the top.

“It never occurred to us,” Ethan said. He took the blame upon himself by adding, “I wanted to see the girl ski.”

Their common adventure, and the guilt of his having given her frostbite, bound Becky and Ethan together in loose complicity for the rest of the day. They arrived home as sun was leaving even the tips of the hills; Elaine had invited Matt to supper, and while the windows of the house burned golden Ethan shovelled out the Jeep. The house was a typical New Hampshire farmhouse, less than two miles from the college, on the side of a hill, overlooking what had been a pasture, with the usual capacious porch running around three sides, cluttered with cordwood and last summer's lawn furniture. The woodsy, sheltered scent of these porches never failed to please Ethan, who had been raised in a Jersey City semidetached, then a West Side apartment beseiged by other people's cooking smells and noises. The wind had been left behind in the mountains. The air was as still as the stars. Shovelling the light dry snow became a lazy dance. But when he bent suddenly, his knees creaked, and his breathing shortened so that he had to pause.