The Moonlight Man (15 page)

“But how could you have known? She always talked about
little
Jackie.”

“I didn't know she meant
short,”
he said.

“Stop!” shrieked Catherine.

“A short-order cook,” he said.

“Don't say any more!”

“How can you be so wicked—laughing at that little fellow!”

“I'm not laughing,” she protested in a choked voice.

After a while, he said, “You never know. You get a peek at someone's life—you start back in dread. Would you have guessed Mrs. Landy had so much delicacy? You know she saved us, don't you? I wouldn't put it past her to have invented a little girl up the way—just so we wouldn't be embarrassed. Embarrassed! I feel destroyed!”

“I feel mean,” Catherine said. “It wasn't really funny, it was unexpected.”

“Don't make excuses,” he said. “There's nothing funny about the way we all betray each other. You'll laugh the same way at me someday. There will be people who'll laugh at you—like that girl, Harriet, you told me about.”

“Not because I'm a dwarf,” she said.

“How do you know you aren't one?”

“Harriet Blacking lives in order to get the drop on everyone. I don't do that.”

“Don't say what you don't do. It'll come back at you.”

She welcomed this half-lecture. She was happy they were driving together through the countryside, talking the way they used to, before the night of the bootleggers. She had thought it couldn't be the same between them again. Now it was—almost.

They stopped in St. John for an early supper. He said he wished they had time enough to visit Grand Manan Island where Willa Cather had lived. When she looked at him blankly, he began to talk about Willa Cather, about her books, about how bitter she had become toward the end of her life.

“She felt the world she knew was going, and everything good was disappearing from it,” he said. “Of course, it always is disappearing. When you begin to grow old, you suffer from change of era.”

She didn't understand much of what he was saying—he seemed to be speaking to himself more than to her—but she heard wistfulness in his voice when he told her to write down the titles of Willa Cather's novels. He was asking her to remember
him
.

She was looking at him intently. He looked back at her, his usually animated features composed, still.

“Listen,” he began quietly, “I don't drink like that anymore. I can't. What was at work was that law—the one that says the worst thing that can happen will happen. Of all the times I should have been sober, it was during this time with you. I hope you can believe me. No excuses. And—I hope you
do
laugh at me.”

She wanted to believe him.

“Wasn't that funny—Mrs. Landy knowing about the night you drove the drunks home? It's what's wonderful and awful about small-town life. Everybody knows at least a part of everything that happens.”

They spent the night in an old inn in Camden, Maine. She was so tired she hardly listened to what he was telling her about a poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, who had spent her childhood in Camden. The name alone ran through her mind like a lullaby as she fell asleep.

The next morning, they drove to Portland and its airport. He hardly spoke. But the long silences between them were not uncomfortable.

They parted at the airline security gate. Her suitcase trundled away, under the machine that X-rayed it. They said good-bye.

Her parents had not been married to each other for nearly all of her life. It seemed to Catherine that the divorce between them, which had taken place so many years ago, and that had been the main fact about her life, was at last final.

She went through the electronic gate. She turned back and saw him walking up a ramp. She watched him for a moment. He walked briskly. At the top of the ramp, he stopped. He looked to his right, then to his left. He didn't seem to know where to go. She wanted to run back, to help him.

A woman's voice said roughly, “Hey! Take your bag. There's other people coming along.”

Nine

In the airports where she waited, Catherine looked through thick glass walls at planes. “They look like big fools,” her father had said of them, “bumbling around on the asphalt. But when they leave the ground, that immense striving until they're free … that's the lovely thing.”

She had studied him like a book for a month. Her heart and mind were so strained with her effort that she was glad for this time of dullness. After she had called her mother at her office, she had stood, staring blankly at magazine covers, in the small newspaper and souvenir shops.

Her mother had started to ask her something but said, “Never mind.” Catherine guessed it would have been a question about Harry Ames.

There was another, disturbing question she was asking herself. It had to do with the weeks when she waited for her father to turn up at the Dalraida School. The chances were that Madame Soule would say something to her mother at some point during the next year. Would it be better if Catherine told her first?

Day by day she had waited, hardly believing at each day's end that there had been no word from him. She had covered for him with letter tricks, with lies; she had pleaded for him with Madame Soule. For herself, too. She had been so busy at her contrivances, she had hardly considered the possibility that he might simply abandon her for the summer. That he might have fallen ill or been in an accident had not occurred to her. Perhaps she had sensed then what she knew now—he couldn't rely on himself, and no one else could, either, not for those qualities of character people summed up with the word “reliable.”

He was a pained and haunted man. But did he find his life unbearable? One evening, he had whispered, “The romance of life.” How could you hate your life and still say such a thing? Or had what he said been only words, intangible, and as fleeting as the flute music she had heard the night he'd finally telephoned her?

“But I heard it,” she said to herself, as she pressed her face against the airplane window and looked down at Jamaica Bay. “Words and music,” she said to the thousand rooftops over which the plane was now descending.

As she marched down the ramp into the waiting room in New York, she caught sight of her mother searching for her, an apprehensive look on her face. When she spotted Catherine, her face lit up.

She kept her arm around Catherine's waist, hugging her as they went outside into the humid air. “Oh, I'm so glad to see you,” she said again and again, as though Catherine had just been ransomed from captivity. “I'm so glad you got back in one piece.”

“Why wouldn't I get back in one piece?” Catherine asked, her pleasure at seeing her mother at once clouded. She heard the old condemnation of her father lying just below the concern in her mother's voice. “‘Round up the usual suspects,'” she muttered.

“What?” asked her mother sharply.

“A line from a movie,” Catherine said.

“There's a taxi,” her mother said. “The bus ride is too long. You must be tired. You can't have had much rest. I was worried he wouldn't get you to Portland today. He was always late—a matter of principle with him. Does he still drive as though he were having a fit?”

“I'll tell you all about it when we get home,” Catherine said, leaning back against the sticky warm plastic seat. She did feel flattened.

“How was the Lake Country?” she asked.

“Wonderful,” replied her mother animatedly. “We have pictures. It's surprising, what being in the places where the poets lived does for one. Now I know they're real. I saw the chairs they sat in. We even went to Beatrix Potter's farm—though Carter wasn't too enthusiastic. We tramped for miles.” She opened her pocketbook and took something from it. “Here's one little present. I also got you a beautiful tweed jacket in Edinburgh in a shop on Princes Street.”

Into Catherine's hand lying open on the seat between them, she placed the smallest bear Catherine had ever seen. It was dressed in a tiny embroidered waistcoat and green felt jacket. Another wee creature, thought Catherine, along with the Great Illusion across the street from school and Jackie Landy. She must stop growing taller or she'd be beyond the reach of all kinds of interesting beings.

“I found that in Hawkshead,” her mother was saying. “A very old lady makes those bears. Wordsworth went to school in that village, Cathy. Oh—the schoolroom! I saw his initials,
W. W.,
carved in a desk.”

Catherine gazed at her mother's hand, gripping her pocketbook. It was a slender hand with a new wedding band on her fourth finger. “It's a splendid bear,” she said.

“You sound like
him,
” her mother said reproachfully. “
Splendid
is just what he would have said.”

“Why shouldn't I?” Catherine asked tersely.
“Him
is my father.”

“Catherine, I've been so worried. I hope he behaved himself. I knew, I always knew, you'd have to spend some time with him. But I hope—”

“Mom. Stop hoping. I'm here. He's not Frankenstein's monster.”

“Carter was concerned, too,” her mother went on hurriedly, as though Catherine had not spoken.

“What has Carter got to do with Daddy?” Catherine asked. She moved closer to the window and sat up straight and didn't look at her mother.

“I'm sorry, Cathy. We've had some uneasy moments. It wasn't only worry about your father's behavior. You and I were so far from each other, thousands of miles. Sometimes I felt each one of them.”

“Okay,” Catherine said. She sighed and took her mother's hand in her own.

“Carter would have come to meet you, too, but he had a preregistration faculty meeting.”

“That's all right.”

She dozed a while, her head against her mother's shoulder, waking now and then to the noise of traffic. Then her mother was shaking her. They were in front of the apartment house on the west side of the city, where they had lived for so many years. The elevator seemed to take forever. Catherine wanted intensely to see her room, her things, the view from the window that showed a patch of the Hudson River. The sun would set soon, the water would look like a sheet of flame.

As she closed the door behind them, Catherine felt the eerie half-silence of a city apartment, the mutter and mumble of the city outside it like a distant perpetual motion machine.

“It's nice here,” she said.

“It is, isn't it?” her mother agreed. “These days, I keep congratulating myself that I held on to this place. We'd never find one like it anymore at a rent we could afford.”

Her mother didn't sound as though she were congratulating herself, more as if she were defending herself.

“I can see why you must have cared about him,” Catherine said. They looked at each other across the suitcase.

“Wouldn't you like to unpack and wash up?” her mother asked.

“I can see, too, why you couldn't live with him.”

Her mother stared at the suitcase as though it were a compellingly interesting object.

“I'm so glad to be home,” Catherine said. Even as she said it, she had a presentiment that when she went back to Montreal in a week, she would be glad of that, too.

“Me, too,” her mother said, reaching across the suitcase and embracing her awkwardly.

Her father had said her mother was a daylight woman. Perhaps she was, but he left out too much. There were other things about her mother he'd forgotten, or had never known. Catherine left her suitcase where it was and went to the sofa and sat down. Her mother came and sat close to her. Catherine began to tell her about the visit, the house, Reverend Ross and the fishing day, learning how to use the rifle and shooting at barns.

“He always had a streak of lawlessness in him,” her mother said. “He always wanted to go against things.”

Catherine went on as though she hadn't spoken. She described Mackenzie and the lovely village by the sea. The pale, uneasy face of Mrs. Conklin suddenly floated into her mind, and hurriedly, she described Mrs, Landy and the tricycle, the surprise of Jackie. She began to laugh wildly. Her mother grabbed her hand and gave her a stricken look.

“Catherine! Don't laugh like that! How can you laugh so cruelly at someone's misfortune?”

“Oh, Mom! We weren't really laughing at
him
. It was because we'd been so dumb! We'd made such a mistake—about the tricycle—thinking he was a little kid when he was just a
very
short man.”

“That poor mother … that poor little man.…”

“
He
didn't think he was a poor little man,” Catherine cried. “You should have seen him smoking his cigar!”

“Your father always mocked people,” her mother said bitterly. “His mockery was terrible to me.”

“He mocks himself, too,” Catherine protested. “Anyhow, we all laugh at each other, sometimes. Even when you feel sorry, sometimes you have to laugh.”

“He made me laugh at myself,” her mother said. “He made me my own enemy.”

“You loved him once!”

Her mother said nothing.

“You must have loved him once,” Catherine cried, gripping her mother's arm.

“I was young. I didn't know anything when I met him. I suppose he was glamorous.”

“What do you know now that can change what you felt back then?” Catherine demanded.

“There are shallow reasons for feelings. And there are deep ones.”

“No!” Catherine shouted. Her mother put her hands over her ears, then dropped them. “You loved him once. I know it!”

“Falling in love isn't the same as—”

“It is the same. It's all the same … those feelings. I watched a boy I know dance a crazy clog one night on the snow. And I loved him. I'm not going to say a hundred years from now that I didn't love him, no matter what happens!”