Up Island (35 page)

He began to laugh and pushed the gray-shot black hair off his face; the firelight and the laughter deepened the flush of color that the sweater gave him. He looked almost as young as the photograph he had shown me when we’d first met.

He did not, for that moment, look ill at all.

“I wasn’t doubting your credentials,” he said. “I have no doubt at all that you can do a very creditable job at whatever you turn your hand to. I was just thinking that you keep on offering to save my ass even when I’m being as bad a dick-head as I can to you. Are you a Quaker, by any chance? A Jehovah’s Witness? An angel of the Lord?”

“I didn’t mean to pry,” I said stiffly, getting up. My eyes stung and my face burned.

UP ISLAND / 301

“Oh for God’s sake, sit down, Molly,” he said. “I wasn’t being snotty. I meant it admiringly. I just don’t do admiration well. Fix us some tea, or better yet, a slug of Scotch, and let’s talk about this cataloguing thing. You’re right. It
is
too much for me right now, but it needs doing in the worst way. I can’t live with my books in a mess.”

I saw his color deepen and then recede, and knew without knowing how I did that he had thought, very clearly, that perhaps he would not live at all, and if not, what difference did orderly books make?

I said quickly, “I’d love to help. I could work out here and you could work in your bedroom. A couple of hours a day for a month or two would probably do it. I’d be very quiet, and I wouldn’t have to be under your feet at all. Your foot, I mean. Oh, Lord, Dennis, I’m sorry.”

He laughed again. “Don’t apologize. It’s uncontrollable.

We don’t even do it with the thinking part of the brain; it’s something older and deeper. Maybe the cerebral cortex. I met Betty Rollin right after she had those two mastectomies and wrote that book, and promptly told her how much I admired her on the boob tube.”

All of a sudden it was all right. We laughed. I brought a tray with tea and Scotch and we drank some of both, and listened to a tape of Don Shirley’s
Orpheus in the Underworld,
and talked a little about the book project. The fire snickered sturdily behind its screen, and Lazarus snored softly on the rug before it, and by the time the twilight came down and I stood up to go we had decided that I would work a couple of hours three or four mornings a week, and that, as I had suggested, he would begin sorting the notes for his book
302 / Anne Rivers Siddons

in his bedroom, and unless he called out to me or left me a note, I need not check on him.

“I wouldn’t mind, but I’m not very good company when I’m working,” he said. “I’ve been told that I snap and snarl.

That shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to you.”

“What’s your book about?” I said, and then flinched. I did not think it was the sort of thing one asked a writer.

But he said, equably, “It’s about a lot of years spent in the company of kids. About what they really think, as opposed to what we think they do, or wish they could. At least, it’s about what I know about that. It’s called ‘In the Company of Tigers.’ ”

“And are they? Tigers, I mean?” I said, smiling.

“You bet they are. Don’t you know that? You have a son, you said…”

“A daughter, too. Yes. I can see what you mean. Often they are, just that. As pure and beautiful and ruthless as that…”

“Precisely.”

Before I reached the door he called, “Did Lazarus really come and get you?”

“He really did,” I said. “Did you send him?”

“No. I guess, after the third or fourth time I fell on my ass, he thought it was time to take matters in his own hands.”

“Nosy bastard, isn’t he?”

He was still laughing when I closed his door. I walked down the hill in the fresh, cold darkness, Lazarus larruping at my heels, feeling as sated with leftover glee as if I were a child coming home from the circus.

The leftover gaiety held until I stopped at the UP ISLAND / 303

farmhouse later that evening with groceries for Bella and Luz.

I felt, running up the front steps and letting myself in, almost as if I were a daughter of the house, bringing youth and air and sustenance into it. But the room was dark, the lamps unlit, and Bella lay on the sofa, covered with an afghan, breathing windily like a ponderous, beached sea creature, and Luz was crying.

“Don’t pay any attention to her; she’s just acting up,” Bella whispered. Her voice was so weak that I could hardly hear her, and she was white and filmed with sweat. Alarmed, I went over and switched on the lamp and looked down at her. Her lips were blue.

“Bella, I’m calling the nurse,” I said, but she shook her head violently.

“It’s already going away,” she said. “She just provoked me till I yelled at her. Sometimes I think she does it on purpose.

But the nurse scares her to death. Maybe you could make us some tea; that’s one of the things she’s crying for. I’ve just been too tired to make it.”

I made the tea and brought it in. Bella was sitting up by then and did look a little better, though she was still sweating.

In her rumpled bed Luz sniffled and cut her eyes at us.

“What’s the trouble?” I said, wishing with all my heart I did not have to ask. But the fact that there was trouble hung in the air like rotting grapes.

“Oh, I always tell her a story this time of day, or read to her, and I didn’t today,” Bella wheezed. “She used to read to Denny this time of day, and we just kept on reading aloud when he left. Then, when she started to fail, I read to her.

Or sometimes she told me stories she made up, but she doesn’t do that much anymore. Anyway, it just seemed like my voice was too

304 / Anne Rivers Siddons

weak to do it this afternoon. I told her that over and over, but she’d forget and beg me again, and after a while I just lost my temper. I’m sorry for that, but she does try you sometimes.”

I averted my eyes from her big, white, miserable face. Poor old women, yoked together by decay and failed expectations like two old oxen who had always toiled in tandem, and could no longer do so.

“Maybe I could read to her sometimes,” I said, knowing as I said it that I was going to be sorry. But what, after all, was a half hour or so of reading?

“Oh, yes!” Luzia cried, her sulk forgotten. But Bella shook her head stubbornly.

“We don’t have any books she hasn’t read a million times.

And anyway, I don’t want to bother you. We agreed that I wouldn’t.”

But she was looking at me slyly from under her lashes.

“Oh, Bella, please,” Luzia whispered, the tears beginning to flow again.

“I’d like to,” I said. “I used to read aloud to Caroline and Teddy. I’ve sort of missed it. I’ll get some from the library; what sort do you like, Luz?”

“Oh…stories. You know. Adventures and things. About places way off that I’ve never been to. And I like stories about animals…”

“Maybe I can find some about swans,” I said, and left her clapping her hands, and Bella smiling faintly. The morning’s benevolence flickered again as I drove home. It felt good to be needed, as long as I could control the precise degree of the need.

The next morning, when I took Lazarus and went to begin the book job, Dennis Ponder was his old self again, remote and chilly and impatient. After I had UP ISLAND / 305

called into the bedroom a couple of times to ask questions that needed answering before I could continue, I heard him sigh and scramble laboriously to his feet, and heard the thump of the crutches for what seemed a very long time before he stood in the doorway scowling at me.

“I thought you said you knew how to do this,” he said. “If you’re going to be yelling in there every five minutes about this and that, I’m not going to get a fucking thing done. I should have known there wasn’t a woman alive who could resist the urge to chatter.”

It was such a consciously, crankily malicious thing to say that I smiled at him. He sounded like Teddy in an adolescent funk. But his words stung, all the same.

“Okay,” I said calmly. “I’m just going to sort the books into piles by types today and save the questions for when that’s done. Or maybe we could agree to have one small question and answer session at the end of every work day. I could write them down on a piece of paper and slide them under the door to you. Or throw them in with a chunk of raw meat.

And I don’t chatter. And I asked you exactly two questions.”

“Yeah, sorry,” he muttered, and shuffled back into the bedroom and closed the door with a small slam.

“Shithead,” I mouthed at him. From inside I heard him mutter something to Lazarus, who lay on the rug beside the bed, and heard Lazarus’s tail thump in answer.

“Shithead and Benedict Dog,” I said, and set about my sorting.

At the end of the morning I had most of the books
306 / Anne Rivers Siddons

separated into huge, spilling pyramids, by subject, around the room. I was sitting on the floor, lost in a volume of Isak Dinesen, when I heard him come thumping into the room.

“I got hooked and forgot what time it was,” I said. “I’m done for the day. You ought to be able to get through the piles to the kitchen okay…”

“Isak Dinesen,” he said, looking down at the book in my hands. “Some say the best natural storyteller in the world.”

His voice was not so cold now, but tired, a little weak. I realized that it would be a pattern with him, the letting down of his guard to let me in a millimeter, then the hasty withdraw-al and the coldness, and then another microscopic thawing.

Well, fine. If I scared him that badly, so be it. I wanted no more closeness than that, either. I just did not want any more of the glacial sarcasm. If I was only going to have four living beings to talk to—two ill old women and a dog and Dennis Ponder—I did not want that talk to be constrained and unpleasant.

I had a sudden thought.

“I wonder if I might borrow this book for a day or two?”

I said. “I promise I’d take good care of it. I’m short of books and I don’t have a library card yet.”

“Take it, by all means,” he said aloofly. “I only read science books now.”

“What a pity. Why is that?”

“I don’t have time for speculation,” he said stiffly. “And I’m short on patience with what-ifs.”

“I want to read it to Luzia,” I said defensively, feeling as though he had condemned me for my frivolity. “She’s past the stage where she can read for herself, and your mother is getting too weak to do it.”

UP ISLAND / 307

He said nothing, and then he said, briefly and coldly,

“What’s the matter with my mother?”

“I think it must be congestive heart trouble,” I said. “I don’t know any more about it than that. I’m not carrying tales from her, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

I got to my feet, then remembered.

“Oh, I didn’t know what to do with these. I can shelve them along with the others, but some of them seem pretty old and valuable to me. I thought you might want to keep them separate somehow. The damp up here isn’t going to be good for them, and they’re awfully fragile already.”

I gestured to a box I had found at the end of the morning, full of beautiful, crumbling old leather volumes that seemed to be mainly concerned with ships and the sea. After a page had disintegrated into silky dust in my fingers I had not handled them further.

He limped over and looked, then looked away.

“Just leave them there for now,” he said. “They’re my father’s. They came from some lawyer’s office after he died last year. I haven’t looked at them yet.”

“He’s dead, then,” I said.

“As a doornail.”

“Do you remember him at all?”

“No.”

I paused, then said, “Do you know that your mother doesn’t know he’s dead?”

He shrugged.

“Should I tell her?”

“Why?” he said, his mouth curled around the word. “She’s done just fine all these years as an abandoned wife. On second thought, though, why not? She
308 / Anne Rivers Siddons

could get even more mileage out of being the Widow Ponder.

Open up a whole new world for her.”

I took the Dinesen book and went home without saying anything else. This was as far as I went with the Ponders,
mère et fils.
If Bella needed to know that her husband was dead, I assumed that the anonymous lawyer would tell her.

Or maybe he already had. With her penchant for drama and manipulation, who knew?

That afternoon I opened the Dinesen book and prepared to read to Bella and Luz. It was a happier scene today; the fire burned bright, Bella had managed a tray of tea, and Luz looked as expectant as a child waiting for story time.

“That’s a pretty old book,” she said, reaching out to touch it. “Where did you get it?”

I hesitated, and then said, “I found it in a box.”

I did not want to introduce Dennis Ponder into the day.

“Like lost treasure,” Luz said.

“Like that.”

I opened the book, cleared my throat, and began to read:

“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills…”

Thanksgiving Day was wild and windy, with curtains of rain spattering the windows and the last of the leaves whirling wetly to earth. Lazarus and I spent it alone. I had gotten a ready-roasted chicken and some packaged stuffing for Bella and Luz, but had suggested no getting together to share the meal. Luz had a virulent, nose-running cold, and Bella looked strange when I delivered the food on Thanksgiving Eve, as UP ISLAND / 309

remote as a monolithic statue, gone away somewhere inside herself. Dennis had persuaded me not to look in on him. He was going well on his notes, he said, and did not want to be disturbed. He would call me if he needed me. He did not ask me if I had plans for the holiday, beyond saying that he was willing to do without Lazarus for the day, seeing as it was a family day.

“I’ll call you around six, anyway,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” he said.

I had dreaded the day alone, but it turned out to be a good one. I built a big fire and kept it roaring, and I lay on the sofa before it with Lazarus, reading Oliver Sacks, from Dennis’s library, until about four, when I made myself an omelet and fed Laz and the swans. Then I fell asleep on the sofa and dreamed of my mother.