The Moonlight Man (2 page)

But as bad as that would be, it would pass. She did not think she would ever get over her disappointment at her father forsaking her.

She glanced at the clock. It was a minute after midnight, June 28. She turned back to the window, feeling a rush of relief. Giving up made things easier. “What the hell,” she said aloud. Maybe her mother would let her fly to England and meet them and go to the Orkneys. When her father finally did show up—if he did—she would be gone.

She stared fiercely at the oriel window on the top floor of the house across the street. From now on, let her father wait on street corners, in restaurants, in hotel lobbies! She caught a flicker of movement. It must be the man who lived there, whom she and her roommate, Cornelia, called the Great Illusion. Sometime last autumn, he had realized they were watching him. He paraded up and down in front of his window, dressed in a plum-colored velvet smoking jacket, waving at them enthusiastically. When the weather was warm, he moved a phonograph to a table where they could see it, played Charles Aznavour records, and danced, throwing them kisses. They had thought him extremely handsome, with his small mustache, his glossy dark hair, and narrow face. One May morning, Cornelia spotted him coming out of the house to the sidewalk. He was so tiny, he would barely have come up to her waist. “Why don't I fly downstairs, grab him, and bring him back up to our aerie,” Cornelia had suggested, and they had laughed wildly and flung themselves about the room. “We shouldn't laugh,” one or the other would say, and that would make them laugh even harder.

Now Catherine could see him distinctly as moonlight touched his face. He was looking up at the sky. She could sense he was brooding, awakened perhaps by the flute player, as she had been. His face was in repose, pale as a moth beneath the dark hair. He feels as sad as I do, she thought, wondering why the relief she had felt a few minutes ago didn't seem to matter any longer. She had been almost happy. It was baffling the way feelings changed, each as fleeting as a cat's-paw across the surface of a lake. How she wished she had gone with Cornelia to her home in Dallas! But when Cornelia had invited her, she'd been proud, sure of the summer ahead.

The Great Illusion disappeared from the window. Catherine wandered out into the hall. Silence. Even Roland, Madame's Irish setter, was silent. Usually you had to get to sleep before Roland did or his snoring would keep you up all night. Cornelia claimed that on cold winter nights when Roland slept deeply, he was known to have wakened people in Calgary.

She leaned over the suitcase railing, staring down into the darkness. The house smelled stale, hot and faintly syrupy from Madame LeSueur's perfume, or else from the sherry she was said to take baths in. How glad Catherine would have been for Madame LeSueur's amiable company, no matter how much sherry she'd soaked up since five
P.M.
when she always drank her first little glass.

Catherine's resolution to be patient and stalwart melted away; she felt foolish, ghostly. She'd been pretty good that first week when her father hadn't shown up, not quite as good the second week, and now, at the end of the third week, she didn't feel bad or good, just gone.

She'd dutifully practiced the piano every morning after breakfast. She'd helped Madame Soule with various chores, gone to concerts with Madame LeSueur and listened gravely to her gushing about the divinity of music, her mind elsewhere. She had even dropped in to the badminton and squash club the Dalraida girls belonged to, and she'd discovered that their instructor wasn't drinking tea, as everyone had always assumed, but bourbon from the white coffee cup he kept on a wicker table in the viewing balcony above the courts. Maybe she would laugh about that when she told Cornelia. She had found only a ten-year-old boy to play a badminton set with; she'd beaten him effortlessly and, she admitted to herself, rudely.

“You're mean,” he had said to her when he walked away, his badminton racket tucked under a skinny arm. In the evenings she'd played two-handed bridge with Madame LeSueur, whose heavy, jeweled fingers kept her cards in a tight curve. Around ten each evening, after many glasses of sherry, she would stand, lay down her cards in a fan shape on the table, and walk up the stairs to her room with wobbling dignity. Madame Soule never appeared to notice Madame LeSueur's condition, and if Madame Soule's husband, a Scottish lawyer, noticed, he didn't say a word. Cornelia said that Madame Soule's head was so full of grand ideas there was no room in it for ordinary things. She and Catherine joked and laughed about her but they admired her immensely. How she wished Cornelia was here!

She filled her cheeks with air and blew it down into the stairwell. As though in response, a strong smell of the lamb Jeanne had cooked for dinner floated up to her. Oh, she was getting sleepy.…

In two days, she would have to be in touch with her mother. She went to her bed and fell on it, knocking the pillow to the floor. Her head felt stuffed with socks. She started up briefly, thinking she heard the faint ring of the telephone from the hall leading to the kitchen. She dragged up the pillow and covered her head with it. Now the phone—if it was a phone—sounded like a bell buoy far out at sea.

Her father loved villages by the sea, islands, rocky headlands. One of her happiest visits with him had taken place on a Saturday when she had expected only lunch and a movie or a walk to the Central Park Zoo. But he had arrived in a rented car and taken her out to the end of Long Island. It was early November and most of the summer people were gone. He had driven over a carpet of hog cranberry right up to a dune and parked there. They got out and both ran down to the edge of the sea.

It was a chilly day with brief moments of sunlight, windy, the sand shadowed by scudding clouds. The great stretch of beach was empty except far ahead, where a young man ran with his dog.

As they trudged through the sand, keeping out of reach of the breaking waves, he told her a story about a man who lived alone in a lighthouse with no telephone. He had had an attack of appendicitis and set out in agony for the nearest village, several miles away. In the dark night, close to death, he struggled on, draining the poison out of himself. By the time he reached help, he was out of danger. She wondered if the story could be true. She knew her father would say a story was always true in some way, even if it wasn't factual and couldn't be proved. Facts, he had said to her, could lead in any direction you wanted them to, but there was only one truth.

What truth was that? she mused, and musing, fell asleep. Almost at once she was awake. The overhead light was on. Madame Soule, wrapped in her long, green silk dressing gown, was standing beside the bed shaking her shoulder.

“Catherine, your father is on the telephone.”

Catherine staggered up.

“Let him wait a minute,” Madame said with a certain sharpness. “He's kept you waiting a very long time. You're still asleep. Wake up entirely or you'll trip on the stairs.”

Behind Madame stood Roland, his leash gripped firmly between his jaws. “Don't be ridiculous, Roland,” said Madame. “It's one o'clock in the morning.” Roland groaned through the leash. “Night has no meaning for this creature,” Madame remarked. She looked as though she had more to say but Catherine didn't wait to hear. Her bathrobe thrown over her shoulders, she ran out of the room and down the two flights of stairs to the hall, where she grabbed up the telephone.

“Daddy?”

“I'm sorry, sorry, sorry—you can't know how badly I feel,” he said.

“But what happened?”

“Catherine, I wasn't fit to be around. I'm afraid I lifted a few too many glasses in my wretchedness. The first blow was a perfectly terrible row with Emma. She didn't want to horn in on us and our plans, but she discovered a cousin she detests is going to be in Petersburg while she's visiting her family. Like a lot of peaceable women, she's wild when she's crossed—”

“You could have telephoned or written,” Catherine interrupted.

“I did telephone a week ago, dear Rabbit. A Tuesday evening, I think. I spoke to a person so swoggled I thought I'd been connected with your local loony bin. I shouted my name at her—and yours—but all she wanted to do was to talk about Mozart—or perhaps it was Moss Hart—it was hard to tell.”

She remembered that Tuesday Madame Soule and her husband had taken her to see a new ballet company. Madame LeSueur must have consumed more of her sherry than usual and imagined the phone call was from another music lover.

“You could have written,” she said.

“I know I could have written—but every day it seemed the damn clouds would blow away and things would settle down and I'd be able to come and get you.”

“It's all right,” she said suddenly, though she had meant to press him more, make him really answer her. But she didn't want to have to think any longer about how unhappy she'd been.

“I know,” he said. “I know you don't want to hear all this, but you must. Later it will matter. I also had trouble with a series of articles that bored me to death to write—and the editor hated them! So, of course, I defended them with three times more self-righteousness than if I'd
liked
writing them—Emma, at least, was mollified. I sent her off to Charleston for a week. The cousin's only staying—”

“I'm so glad you phoned,” Catherine interrupted him again, nearly out of breath, as though it had been she doing all the talking.

“Okay. I'll stop,” he said. “You deserve to call the turns. Wait till you see the funny little house I've rented. It sits on the edge of a cliff. You can't actually hear the sea but it's not far.”

Catherine heard faint noises from the other side of the kitchen where the household staff lived. The smell of roast lamb was much stronger down here, faintly sickening. She resolved to ask him no more questions. He sounded so apologetic, and so glad to talk to her. She didn't want to reproach him any more. But before she could stop herself, a question burst out of her.

“Why couldn't I have come to Rockport?”

“Oh—my suspicious girl! So that's it! Here's the reason. Emma and I are thinking of moving to Nova Scotia. The whole coast around Rockport has become simply overrun with tourists and commerce, and in the summer, if I want to buy a loaf of bread, I must dress up in Alpine gear to climb through the crowds. So I thought to combine our visit with a look around a bit of the Maritime Provinces. Have you got that straight? Will you remember all that I'm about to tell you—how to find the Digby ferry when you get off the train? How to order a cup of tea and practice up for the day when you'll sit in the salon of a great ship? If there are any great ships left.… And as the ferry draws into Digby harbor, you will see a portly, distinguished figure on the wharf. It will be me, your dear papa.…”

She laughed as she always did when he described himself mockingly.

“I'll wire you some change in the morning so you'll have enough money for tickets and for those magazines girls of fifteen are supposed to crave. By the way, I have a stack of letters from your mother to you. Is she visiting every hamlet in Cumberland and Westmoreland? Did she marry a census taker?”

“Where are you phoning from?” she asked hurriedly.

There was silence, then a roaring as though a wave had broken over the telephone. “From the bottom of the sea?” she whispered anxiously, fearful that he might have gone away.

“Are you running a detective agency on the side?” His voice came on strongly; she heard laughter in it. “Some things must remain mysteries,” he said, adding in his most serious voice, “I'm so glad we're going to have this time, Catherine, though in my usual fashion I've spoiled some of it.”

After he'd told her about getting to the ferry and what time he'd expect her on the Nova Scotia side—“though I'll wait for every boat until you appear”—they said good-bye and she stood in the hall for a while, astonished at how everything had changed. Yet she had known he'd turn up, hadn't she?

She went into the living room that ran the length of the house and sat down in front of the grand piano, lifting her hands up high as though about to play a great smashing chord. She let them drop down so lightly her fingers barely rested on the keys. The room smelled of lemon furniture polish and of Madame LeSueur's French cigarettes which she thought no one knew she smoked. Catherine realized suddenly how safe she felt in that room.

It had been difficult, frightening, to leave her mother, her life in New York, her friends there, and come to another country—
almost
another country. She'd made it even more foreign for herself by liking a French Canadian, Philippe Petit, a sophomore at McGill University, more than anyone except Cornelia. Her mother continued to be slightly suspicious of Dalraida because, Catherine was pretty sure, her father had chosen it. If her mother hadn't been so caught up with Carter a year and a half ago, Mr. Ames might have had more difficulty persuading her to let Catherine come to Montreal. She was turning into a New York City hick, her father had written her mother, who had shown the letter to Catherine. He would pay for absolutely everything, he had said, including an eyelash curler, if Catherine went in for such things. She needed to get away from New York—and it was important to learn another language, other ways. Catherine wanted to do what her father wanted her to do. In time, her mother yielded. She had met Madame Soule and that had helped, although she'd observed that Madame was rather an unconventional type to be running a girls' school.

Catherine stood up, exhilarated at the thought of the weeks ahead of her, and ran up the stairs. As she passed Madame Soule's room, she heard Roland snoring, and she imagined telling her father stories about the dog. Madame insisted he was a great hunter. When the school went up to their ski cabin in the Laurentian Mountains, she took the girls on long walks, during which she would occasionally halt and shout, “Point!” at poor Roland. The dog would wag his tail, look up at his mistress with his slightly crossed eyes, and sit down. Or else he would turn sideways to the direction of Madame's pointing finger. You could say, of course, that he pointed with his rib cage.