The Moonlight Man (14 page)

“It's not enough,” she murmured.

“I have some old photos,” he said. “I'll send them along to you.”

She was puzzled by his reluctance. He would talk about anything, as a rule. But she sensed she wouldn't be able to get much more out of him on the subject of his parents.

“Where did you live when you were little?”

“Nyack,” he said, almost resentfully.

“You didn't like it?”

He paused for a moment. “There was something I didn't like,” he answered. “Maybe it wasn't Nyack.”

They had stopped in front of the display windows of a small department store. “Come on. Let's see what we can find in here.”

“How old is little Jackie?” Catherine wondered.

“Hard to guess. Mrs. Landy is probably in her forties. I have the impression Jackie is five or six.”

“She never mentions a Mr. Landy.”

“Perhaps he fled to the mainland.”

In the store's toy section, they found a red tricycle. After some hesitation, Mr. Ames bought it, and they took it back to the car.

For a while they walked around the town. When she glanced at him, he looked as unknowable as the strangers whom they passed. She wanted very much to ask him more about his redheaded father, his mother who didn't want to grow old, the place where he'd lived as a child.

“What an odd place to be,” he remarked, as they stood on a corner waiting for the traffic light to change. “For an old world traveler like myself, this humble crossroads is a sign of decline.”

There were other signs of decline, Catherine thought, but she said nothing. And what was so humble about this crossroads?

They found a restaurant near the harbor, where they had a lunch of freshly caught mackerel and new potatoes.

“Isn't it wonderful?” he asked. She felt a certain tension, a fear that he would insist on her being conscious of this moment being “wonderful.” He must have caught a flicker of what she was feeling, must have seen it in her face. He fell abruptly silent.

When the waiter brought him the coffee he'd ordered, he got up and said, “I'll be back in an instant …” and she watched him with alarm as he wound among the tables and out the restaurant door. He was going to get a drink somewhere; maybe he had noticed a bar near the restaurant. But Mr. Ames returned almost at once. He was opening a pack of cigarettes.

“I thought you were going to try and stop.”

“I was,” he replied. “And now I've started again. Having fun …”

There was a note of willfulness in his voice, even of belligerence, she had been hearing often lately. The worst of it was that he might have been speaking to anyone at all.

He inhaled deeply. “I see disapproval written all over your face,” he said mildly. “Don't be a young fogy.”

“But it's so bad for you,” she said with urgency. He looked fragile and elderly. Yet now she thought she could see that child in him who had thrown an apple core at his father because he didn't want him to go away.

He stared at her a moment. Slowly, he ground out the cigarette in an ashtray. “If it worries you so much …” he said. “And, of course, you're right.”

Still, when they left the restaurant, he put the pack of cigarettes in his pocket.

They spent an hour or so walking around the waterfront, looking at fishing boats. He told her how Joseph Conrad had come to the United States when he was an elderly man, “ancient by your standards,” for a series of lectures. But he never got off his ship. “Life had worn him out,” Mr. Ames said.

Had he invented the story? she wondered. Conrad, too, had been a traveler. But he'd not written budget travel books for tourists. She felt guilty at once. She'd kept in her memory, she was sure, everything he had ever said to her. Now she questioned what he said, secretly disbelieving.

“Let's go to a movie,” he said suddenly. “Let's get out of this insistent sunlight.” He grinned at her. “Come on! We'll be spendthrifts. We'll waste a day. We'll waste this glory.”

She smiled because she felt obliged to smile. He was looking straight at her. He would sense any opposition. He reached out and brushed her hair behind her ears. They were standing in front of a fish market. The bellied of the freshly caught fish gleamed like wet silk. A drop of blood at the corner of the mouth of a huge silver and black fish caught her eye. She shuddered, recalling the animal skeleton in the pit in the meadow.

“Don't be scared,” he said gently.

When they emerged, blinking, a couple of hours later from the movie house, he said it hadn't been much of a picture. “A really good movie is always a fairy tale,” he said. “The more they try to be like life, to be realistic, the less real they are. That's a paradox. I suppose you know what that is, my ignorant child?”

“I think so,” she replied. She was glad to hear him speaking in a kidding, indulgent way. He didn't press her to explain paradox. As they drove out of Lunenberg toward the little house, she felt she was flying ahead toward her real home, a thousand miles away.

For supper that night he made a
piperade,
a Basque omelet, he told her. When they'd finished, he asked, “Shall I read to you?”

He sounded uncertain. She longed for what was ordinary, a rest from thinking, wondering. During their brief visits, she had found everything simple. At least, she had thought she had. But now, after living with her father this month, all that she had unthinkingly taken for granted was open to doubt; all certainties had shifted, broken up.

He was smoking continuously, dragging on each cigarette with a starved look on his face. When the smoke made him cough, he turned away from her as though she wouldn't hear him if she couldn't see his face.

She wanted to apologize to him for what she had shouted out in the swing. As she thought of her words, she felt their truth sink into her, blunt truths like rocks hurled. And just because they were true, because he was not the writer he had set out to be, her pity for him deepened.

“Well … not tonight, thanks,” she said softly.

He gave her a searching look. She tried to face him openly. But the conscious effort she put into it made her feel fake. She began to clear away the dishes and stack them in the sink. She heard him strike a kitchen match to light still another cigarette.

“It hasn't worked,” he said quietly. “Oh dear, oh dear.… Too late.”

She said nothing.

“But you'll remember these days, won't you?” he asked.

When she didn't answer, he asked angrily, “Catherine? Are you a stone?”

She turned to him. “I'm sorry for what I said yesterday. I wish I hadn't said those things to you.”

He sighed immensely. “Thank you for that,” he said. “Someone has to forgive me. God knows, I can't forgive me. God knows, I can't forgive myself.”

“I'll go pack when I finish the dishes,” she said.

“Yes,” he agreed, nodding. He left the kitchen. She felt peculiar for a moment, until she realized he had gone because she had dismissed him. She was glad he had. For all the pity she felt, he was a burden to her right now.

Mrs. Landy was coming in the morning and they would all three clean the house together. Then Mr. Ames was to drop her off at her house on the way to Digby. They would cross the Canadian border at Calais and drive to Portland, where she would take the Boston flight. He would drive on to Emma and his house in Rockport, and she would take the shuttle to New York after phoning her mother to give her the time she would arrive.

“Camp is over,” she said aloud.

She got up the next morning in a school mood, aware of work ahead, not overly enthusiastic, but relieved to know what she was supposed to do.

As Mrs. Landy sang tunelessly in the kitchen, Catherine began to gather up the old magazines and books they'd found in the parlor. She opened
Dracula
by Bram Stoker and read the first page. Her father came to stand at her side for a moment, looking down at the book over her shoulder.

“I saw a movie of it on television,” she said.

“Were you scared?” he asked.

“Not much,” she responded.

“That's because it happened outside you. If you read it, the horror of it grows inside … where all horror is. I was scared witless by it. Did you know Stoker was the manager of a famous actor of that period, Henry Irving? He wrote that book because of a bet he made with his brother. This was the bet—that he could write the most frightening story ever written. He won.”

She put the book away on a shelf. Her heart sank. She recollected all the odd bits of information he'd given her, his stories, the news he was always bringing her about different ways to understand things. She imagined being seventeen, then twenty, and how they'd probably go back to meeting in restaurants on his infrequent trips to New York.

Then she would be gone, too, to college, or to work, to whatever was to happen to her. She could, as though they were drawn on paper, see how their paths had crossed and would now diverge. Time would make it happen. There was no stopping time. She thought of how she would probably never know him better than she did at this moment, standing in front of the shelf of dusty old yellowing books in this cramped, shabby parlor, the sunlight dappling the dusty floorboards.

She hoped he would tease her on the way back to the United States, hoped they would laugh again. There hadn't been much laughter in the last few days.

She went upstairs to check her room. Her bulging suitcase lay on the bed, a strap of her bathing suit poking out of it. Her mother could fold a blouse so that it didn't wrinkle, no matter how long it stayed packed. Catherine picked up the suitcase and carried it to the door and paused there, looking back into the room. Narrow bed, oak chest of drawers, straight-backed chair, unshaded bulb hanging from the ceiling, gray-painted floor. Tonight it would be empty.

At noon they loaded up the car. Mr. Ames placed the red tricycle on top of her suitcases. Mrs. Landy hadn't noticed it; she never appeared to notice much. She tweaked her bun of hair and looked back at the house before she got into the car.

“There's been a lot of fun in Ethel Diggs's old house, hasn't there?” she asked, with slightly more animation in her voice than usual. Perhaps she was glad they were leaving. “I tell my Jackie how you two laugh so much,” she said. “And how good you cook, Mr. Ames. Mr. Landy won't fry an egg. He wants the food set down before him. He doesn't want to see an egg in its shell. He says: ‘Janet, I don't want to know where my food comes from. Remember that.'”

“Some men really don't like to cook,” Mr. Ames said, with jovial emphasis.

So there was a Mr. Landy, thought Catherine.

“Isn't that the truth?” said Mrs. Landy.

Perhaps because she had never been so forthcoming, Mr. Ames asked her what Mr. Landy did for a living.

“Why—he works for Mr. Glimm,” she replied. “The farmer you took home in the morning after getting him so drunk. Yes, Mr. Landy's worked for Mr. Glimm for twenty-three years. And my little Jackie found them their dog. Somebody had thrown it away on the road, the poor thing.”

She directed them to one of dozen or so houses, much like the Diggs house, a few yards back from the country road.

“There it is,” she said. Mr. Ames stopped the car so abruptly, the tricycle slid forward. Mrs. Landy smiled placidly at Catherine over the handlebar. The engine died. There was the crack of a screen door slamming. Mr. Ames got out of the car, opened the tailgate, got out the tricycle, and set it on the ground. Catherine looked at Mrs. Landy's house. Dashing down the narrow cement path toward the car, smoking a large cigar, was a tiny man in a tiny plaid woodsman's shirt and dark blue workpants.

“Here's my Jackie,” Mrs. Landy said. “He's a short-order cook over at the Blue Star café in Bridgewater. Took the morning off so's to meet you and Catherine, Mr. Ames.”

Catherine cast a horrified glance at her father. He looked frozen.

“Daddy!” she said sharply.

“Mrs. Landy,” he began, staring at her. He cleared his throat, moved a few feet away from the tricycle. “I bought this—I didn't know—”

“Oh, is that for us?” asked Mrs. Landy. “That's so nice of you, Mr. Ames. Isn't that nice, Jackie?”

“Certainy is,” agreed Jackie, in a
basso profundo
voice. “Certainy is nice to meet you.”

“There's a little girl lives up the way that'll just love it,” Mrs. Landy said. Jackie went to the tricycle and gripped one of the handlebars and wheeled it back and forth, smiling amiably at Catherine through a cloud of cigar smoke.

Mr. Ames said in a weak voice, “I can't thank you enough for all you've done for us, Mrs. Landy.” He seemed overcome for a moment.

“It's been a nice change for Mother,” said the little man in his booming voice.

“Well, you've been wonderful to us,” Mr. Ames continued doggedly, staring at the side of the car. “Catherine, hasn't she been wonderful?”

Catherine nodded mutely. A hundred years had passed since she had heard Mrs. Landy say Jackie was a short-order cook.

“We won't forget you,” Mrs. Landy said. “That's one thing you don't have to worry about.”

Jackie had taken from her the bag of leftover groceries Mr. Ames had given her. With his free arm, he continued to hold on to the tricycle. Mrs. Landy stopped and took hold of the other side of the handlebar. They began to wheel it up the walk to their house. Jackie didn't have to bend.

“Good-bye, good-bye,” called Mr. Ames as he got back into the driver's seat. He needn't have said it twice, thought Catherine.

“My God!” he gasped as they drove off. “I should have bought him a box of stogies.”

Catherine let out a whoop of laughter. He laughed louder, leaning back against the seat, the car swerving down the road.

“What a fool I was!” he cried. “It never occurred to me to ask how old little Jackie was.”