The Moonlight Man (6 page)

Mr. Ames hoped to discourage her cooking, without hurting her feelings, by fixing her lunch himself. Today he had left her an immense sandwich of spinach, sardines, hard-boiled eggs, and slices of onion.

Mrs. Landy turned to them, holding the sandwich in her knobby little hands, an expression of amazement on her face. “I never saw such a thing, Mr. Ames,” she said. “It looks like a picture in a magazine. Dare I eat it?”

“We are here to administer first aid,” said Mr. Ames. “Go ahead, Mrs. Landy. Take heart. Take a bite.”

“I can see you two have been having fun,” she said, in her rather mournful way.

Mr. Ames put his arm around her and hugged her. “Mrs. Landy, you're sharp as a tack—as we said in the days of my youth.”

Mrs. Landy giggled and shook her head. “You are a funny man,” she said. “I tell my little Jackie all the things you say as best as I can remember them. I'm going to take this sandwich home and show it to him.”

She wrapped up the sandwich carefully and put it in a paper bag. Mr. Ames walked her to the door. She would go across the tracks to the tarmac road and catch the bus, driven by Mr. Conklin. Catherine heard her father telling Mrs. Landy how sweet she made the little house look, how lovely the Canadian summer was—as though there weren't summer everywhere. She ran to the parlor window to watch them. Her father still had his arm around Mrs. Landy. He seemed about to lead her into a dance to music she had never heard.

When he returned, Catherine was standing in the hall. He didn't seem to know she was there. He held up one hand and bit his thumb, then he saw her. He simply stood, letting her look at him, at his somber, elderly face. She didn't know she had reached out her hand as though to prevent him from falling until he walked past her. Had she offended him?

He didn't offer to make her lunch. He watched her as she ate a piece of bread and cheese and drank cold coffee from a glass. His skin was ashen. Mrs. Landy's dance was over, the music stopped. His face was like a room where the only light had been turned off. She had not seen him like this. When he spoke at last, his voice was so low she had to lean toward him to hear his words.

“I feel terrible … things catching up. A nap will put it right. You must be tired, too. Let's call it a day for a little while.” He left the kitchen. She could hear his slow steps on the stairs.

She went to her own room and drew down the thin canvas shade over the window. For a few minutes, she tried to read Daudet's
Lettres de mon moulin
. Gratefully, she felt sleep begin to cover her like a blanket lightly drawn up.

When Catherine awoke it was twilight. She heard her father moving around the kitchen. She washed her face and combed her hair and went downstairs. He came out into the hall to greet her.

“I'm myself. I'm better. I've recovered,” he said, smiling. He carried two glasses. “Soda and a bit of lemon for both of us,” he said.

Where had the sick, elderly man gone whom she'd seen in the hall hours earlier?

“Shall we take a stroll on the deck?” he asked. She followed him outside and to the antique swing that stood a few yards from the porch. It was built on wooden slats; the two seats faced each other. Beneath them was a floor like a duckboard. When Catherine and Mr. Ames sat down in the swing, it gave out pleasant wood squeaks, the only sound except for the faint hushing of swallows' wings as the birds rose and fell in the fading light. The lengthening shadows of the trees that bordered the shallow stream lay upon the meadow grass like a ghostly snow fence.

“It's the best time of day,” he said. “Look—there's a cat way down there near that willow.”

The cat was crouched on a mound of earth beneath the tree.

“What is it thinking about?” Catherine wondered.

“Supper and escape,” he replied. “Like the rest of us.”

She laughed.

He said, “No riotous behavior, please. Tell me what you really like best about your school.”

“When we go to the ski cabin in the mountains. The train is always filled with people. They walk up and down the aisle laughing and talking. They wear bright sweaters and caps and they shout because they're happy about where they're going. Skis stick out everywhere like pins in a pincushion. When we arrive, it's night. It's a little train, maybe like the one that used to go through the backyard here. The station in the mountains is tiny, just a shed. We get out and crunch on the snow in our ski boots. The train starts back to Montreal. It's really dark. You can just barely make out the shapes of people as they go off to wherever they're going. Enormous horse-drawn sledges are waiting for everyone. We take two of them. The drivers are muffled up in moth-eaten fur rugs—there are rugs for us, too. The horses begin to climb up the road, which runs along the mountainside. You can look across the valley and see small lights on those other slopes. Your hands are warm beneath the rug but your face is nearly frozen, and the air is so crisp you feel you could break off pieces of it like mica. And it has a wonderful smell—you keep sniffing it, breathing it in, trying to catch hold of it. If the moon is out, or the stars, you can see the whole long valley. Oh—it's so mysterious, so beautiful! And everything about the horses is beautiful, their smell, their great legs pulling, pulling. And the snow is everywhere, like a different world.…”

“Snow,” he said reflectively. “It's like the twilight when all the hurry and noise of things stops.”

The swing squeaked; the swallows dipped and rose like fish in a clear stream. She told him about the time she and Cornelia got hold of a gallon of red wine made by people who lived in a small village in those mountains. They had drunk all of it, sitting in a bunk while the other girls were out skiing. Madame had called her downstairs to discuss the United Nations and what was wrong with that organization, and she, Catherine, had to hang onto the back of a chair for dear life so as not to fall flat on her face. She and Cornelia had been sick for three days, throwing up, dizzy and shaken. How that bunk had flown around the room! And they so weak they could only wait for it to settle so they could lie down and groan.

“Now that you've done that once, you don't have to do it again,” he said neutrally. With a touch of sternness, he added, “Don't do it again, Catherine. It's a fool's way.”

“I know,” she said.

They were silent for a long time. The sky welled up with night. At last, he sighed and said, “Suppertime.” They walked back to the house, their arms linked.

He made their supper while she sat on the horsehair sofa and looked through old issues of the Canadian edition of
Time
magazine. He had concocted a dessert he called no-name pudding, in honor of an Italian called D'Annunzio who had, himself, invented a dessert,
senzanome
—without a name, he told her.

Catherine didn't always listen closely to her father. She listened, as it were, at a distance, catching a phrase or a name, the way she listened to music. He didn't seem to mind. He never asked her, as other grown-ups did—Are you listening to me? Did you hear what I said? Are you daydreaming?

He used up every pot and pan in the kitchen and it took them quite some time to clean up.

“It drove your mother mad,” he said, “the way I made such a mess in the kitchen. I don't like it to be neat—it would affect my cooking. Neat cooking is extremely repulsive and ungenerous, and it worries too much about the future.”

“Neat cooks can turn out a good meal, too, just as good as one of yours,” she declared. She knew she was defending her mother, who was so tidy in the kitchen it hardly seemed possible she had cooked a meal.

He shot her a knowing look. “No, they can't,” he said. “And you know it!”

He was going to read to her, he told her. It would settle her digestion. Her digestion was fine, she protested, a protest left over, she knew, from his pronouncement about the right way to cook. He interrupted her with falsetto screams, a look of mischief on his face, screeching, “No! No! My tum-tum is perfect!” pretending it was she speaking. She laughed helplessly. It was what being disarmed meant, she guessed.

He had brought with him an Evelyn Waugh anthology. Slumping into the armchair in the parlor, he announced he was going to read her a story called “A Handful of Dust.”

At moments it was difficult to follow the story because she was watching his expressive face, listening to the sound of his voice. It was resonant, sometimes as mournful and deep as a church bell. He was like an actor, she thought, then, no, he wasn't like an actor. He was reading only for himself. He looked up from time to time but not at her. He held out his hand in a gesture of emphasis as though he read words he'd written.

It had been the longest day of her life, she told herself when she lay down at last on the narrow bed in her room under the eaves. It was a day that started dreadfully and ended happily. Living with her father was like living with a crowd of people. One of that crowd was a drunken man, a smudged outline of a person with a voice as soggy as a wet sponge.

She tried to recall all that he had said that day, all that they had seen and done, as though to fix everything in a scrapbook of remembrance, as though even the time she was still to spend with him was already in the past.

But now as sleep began to overtake her, the only moment she could clearly recall was when they had opened the door to the house. He had looked back at the sky, flaring with darkness and the last rays of the sun, and said so softly she barely heard him … “the romance of life.”

Four

This was the surprise: to wake to her father's voice; to see him standing in the doorway. He was telling her that he was off to Mackenzie to persuade Reverend Ross to go fishing with them today. “Go back to sleep,” he said. She was slept out.

If she had been used to him, would she have been so aware of his living presence? Perhaps you didn't think about ordinary, familiar things until you lost them. Lying in her bed, feeling the pleasant coolness of the morning air, she thought about thought itself. “Think!” Madame Soule exhorted the Dalraida students. No one told you how to do it. And, she told herself, it didn't have to stop you from having breakfast.

She dressed, took the steps two at a time, and raced into the kitchen, suddenly happy to have the house to herself. Because they had no telephone, Mr. Ames would drive right to the Reverend Ross's parsonage. He'd met him before Catherine had arrived in Nova Scotia. In the post office, he'd told her, the second important social center of the village. The pub, of course, was the first. Mr. Ames had discovered that the minister was wild about fishing and knew all the best spots in the countryside. He was hoping he would prevail upon him to guide them to a trout stream he had mentioned, about twenty-five miles north of Mackenzie. Catherine cleaned the last of her fried egg from her plate with a piece of bread. She didn't doubt that her father would prevail.

She heard the car return and ran to the parlor window. Mr. Ames took several paper sacks from the back seat and put them on the ground. He looked up at the sky, lit a cigarette, crossed his arms, and leaned against the car. She didn't know whether his eyes were closed because of the cigarette smoke, or because he was exhausted by his early-morning effort. And all for her entertainment, she thought uneasily. She realized he was now looking straight at her. He waved, stamped out the cigarette, and grabbed up the sacks. She went to meet him at the door.

“We don't have to do things all the time,” she said. “I like hanging around, just reading or something.”

“Or something,” he repeated mockingly. “Now cut that out! This isn't a generosity contest. I'm doing everything for myself alone. And for God's sake, find a better word than
something
! The Reverend is delighted to let us in on his secret place—and not for godly reasons, either. I'd better warn you, he's a ferocious prig. He'd have me in chains if he heard a word about our adventure the other night with poor old Farmer Glimm and Mr. Conklin.”

“He probably has,” she said. He certainly had no reason to speak so patronizingly about those two men.

“No one ever tells ministers anything,” he replied. “For fear of offending their delicate sensibilities. Anyhow, you don't have to convince the church of human weakness.”

They made a picnic lunch and put it in an old straw hamper she'd found in a closet.

“I always want to eat a picnic the minute it's made,” she said.

“Me, too,” he said companionably. “In fact, once I did. It was when I first knew your mother. We made a marvelous picnic—we had planned to go to some New Jersey beach, I think, but instead, we sat down on a Navajo rug in the living room and ate it all up.”

“What living room?” she asked. “What Navajo rug?”

He looked at her pensively. “Of course, you would like to know all of it, wouldn't you? I think we bought that rug in Taos—”

“—I didn't know you and Mom had been there.”

“Oh, we wandered quite a lot. There was life before you, Cath.”

“I know that.”

“I guess you do. And the living room … that was probably Cape May. I remember so much I wish I didn't. But I forget the sequence of events and the places where we lived. Another thing Beatrice couldn't bear in the long run—all that moving about. Tidal drifting, she called it.”

Catherine went upstairs to get a sweater. He said she might need it later in the day. When she returned, she found him still in the kitchen. He held a drink of whiskey in his hand. The bottle was open on the counter. He looked at her defiantly.

“A small one,” he said. “There's a certain strain being around the Reverend.”

He brought the glass to his lips, then swallowed its contents in one gulp, his throat working convulsively. He put the glass in the sink and grinned at her. “There. That's better. Now we'll go pick him up at the parsonage. Let's go. It's a longish drive to that stream. You'd better stuff your ears with cotton. He's a nonstop talker.”