Up Island (37 page)

of hurt and spite. You got enough money? Made any plans beyond this winter?”

I closed my eyes and looked south in my mind. Atlanta and all that it held for me seemed to pulse and fester there like a red carbuncle. I recoiled from it. I looked over at my father and shook my head, smiling.

“There’s nothing that won’t keep, Daddy. To tell you the truth, I don’t think much about it, and talking about it seems like just plain more than I’ve got the strength for right now.

We have plenty of time. Don’t let’s spoil this lovely night.

You don’t know how I’ve looked forward to having you up here with me.”

He nodded agreeably and finished his Scotch and leaned back, his long legs stretched out in front of him toward the fire.

“You’ve got yourself a real magic kingdom up here, haven’t you, baby?” he said slowly. “Complete with a couple of maidens in distress and a fallen knight in need of nursing.

Even a pair of swans on the moat.”

I looked at him to see if he was being sarcastic, but his face was still and his eyes were comfortably closed.

“It’s not like that,” I said. “I certainly don’t think there’s anything magical about it. But what’s wrong with feeling happy here? Or at least, peaceful…”

He sat up and clasped his hands and rested them between his knees, staring into the fire.

“I worry about you, Molly,” he said. “I haven’t been so sunk in my own misery that I don’t know things are bad for you at home. I don’t blame you for not wanting to fool with it. Tee and that little hussy of his haven’t cut you enough slack to even stay in town. But, baby, this up here, as pretty and picturesque as it is…this is not real. This won’t carry you, either. If I’m hearing you right, that’s Alzheimer’s and heart failure up there in that

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farmhouse. That’s cancer over next door. That’s suffering and dying; it’s mess and pain and fear…”

“Not to me,” I said emphatically. “We agreed, Daddy. We agreed that past a certain very particular point, I would not get involved in things here. I made that perfectly clear from the outset.”

He shook his head, smiling a little.

“You can’t be a little bit involved with pain and death, Molly. It’s like being a little bit pregnant. Besides, you’re your mother’s daughter, no matter how hard you’re trying not to be. That’s what you’re really running from, you know, why you’re hiding out up here. You’re hiding from her. What she still is, what she’s made of you.”

“That’s just not true. I don’t even think much about her, Daddy. I mean to, but somehow I just don’t.”

“You dream about her,” he said. “The deepest, realest part of you is thinking about her.”

I felt a wave of cold unease break over me. Could he be right? Could it be that I had buried my mother deep, only to find that she grew more vividly real here in my own soil, more hungrily alive than ever, like Madeline Usher?

Sweat broke out at my hairline. I looked at my father. He was still staring at the fire, and all of a sudden his face was so slack and gray and empty that I was stricken with remorse.

He had come a very long way this day.

“It’s bedtime,” I said. “Why don’t you go on up? I’ll bring you up some chili.”

“Thanks, but I think I’ll pass on the chili,” my father said.

“I could do with another slosh of the Macallan, though.”

“Then take the bottle with you,” I said, rising and UP ISLAND / 321

kissing him on the cheek. “Tomorrow I’ll start showing you everything, but we’ve got lots of time. Sleep till you wake up.”

“Good night, baby,” he said, kissing me on the forehead.

I watched him as he climbed the treacherous stairs. Slowly, so slowly…

“Good night, Daddy,” I said softly into the firelight. “Sweet dreams.”

I spent a good half hour the next morning tiptoeing around trying not to wake him before I realized he wasn’t upstairs at all, was not, in fact, in the house. When it dawned on me, I felt a cold, still shock somewhere in my chest, and threw my coat over my robe and went out on to the porch. I found Lazarus there, his leash fastened to the leg of the heavy iron hammock stand. He was sitting, but he was as far toward the porch door as he could get, and the leash was straining, and he was whining softly. I ran across the porch and down the path toward the pond, icy dew stinging my feet in my flimsy scuffs, heart in my mouth. I did not even know, on any conscious level, why I was so frightened, or why I was so sure my father had gone down to the water. I did not call out to him, more from fear of what I would not hear than what I would.

I found him sitting on the end of the dock, his legs dangling over the water, regarding Charles and Di. They stood on the bank in their accustomed dining place, heads together, looking back at my father. From the scattering of husks around them I could see that he had already fed them. They seemed at ease, and except for a half-hearted hiss in my direction, they did not flap or fuss or threaten. If I had been at all sentimental about

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swans, or at least about these two, I might have said that they had been communing with my father. And then I thought, Well, the mere fact that they haven’t tried to kill him could be construed as communication.

“What are you guys talking about?” I called softly from midway down the path, where I had stopped.

My father looked around at me, smiling. He was pale and drawn, but some of the lax, heartbreaking weakness had gone out of his face.

“All sorts of things. The high price of barley. The shoddy work they’re doing on nests now. The scandalous way people let dogs just go anywhere these days. You know, Molly, I think the female has something wrong with her wing. I don’t think she can fly. I’ll bet that’s why they’ve hung around here all these years. She can’t go, and he won’t leave her.”

“Why do you think that? Her wings seem to flap just fine to me.”

“Well, look, while she’s still like that. See how one of them just droops, so that the tips drag in the grass? The other one doesn’t. His don’t.”

I looked closer, and saw that he was right. Diana’s left wing did seem to hang lower; the snowy tips drabbled on the wet, front-whitened verge of the pond. I realized then that I had never seen them before when their wings weren’t drawn back in the horrendously familiar busking position.

“Come to think of it, I’ve never seen them flying,” I said.

“They don’t, unless they’re moving on. Too much trouble.

Next to the trumpeters, these mutes are the biggest swans there are, almost the biggest bird. It takes them more distance to get airborne than any other bird alive. It would take the whole length of this pond, I

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expect, and even that might not be enough. They’d have to want to go somewhere a lot more than they do now for them to try to get launched.”

“Sorry, guys,” I said to Charles and Di. “I misjudged you.

I thought it was pure sloth and greed that kept you here. I’ve been telling everybody you were spoiled brats.”

“Well, that’s not to say they’re not,” said my father. “Maybe just not entirely. See there, Molly? Nobody is ever as simple as you think they are.”

“I guess not. You want to come with me to check on Dennis and the old ladies? I told them you were coming, but I guess I should introduce you. You won’t have to fool with them after this.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’d like to.”

I unleashed Lazarus while my father and I ate breakfast, and when we reached Dennis Ponder’s camp Lazarus was waiting for us, as I knew he would be, sitting in the doorway to Dennis’s bedroom and thumping his tail. Dennis stood behind him, dressed and balanced on his crutches. I tried to look at him with my father’s eyes and almost gasped aloud; why had I ever thought he looked better these days? He looked like a half-melted snowman propped up with sticks.

His shirt collar and cuffs stood out a good two inches from his neck and wrists, and it seemed to me that there was much more steel gray now in the black hair that hung over his forehead. It was far too long, too, I saw: It badly needed cutting. Not your problem, a voice in my head said, but my hands itched to get at his hair with scissors. I wondered how it would feel under my fingers.

All my life I have been surprised at the ease and naturalness with which my father meets people. I don’t know why I should be, still; I have seen it happen over
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and over again. I suppose we get used to thinking of people close to us in a certain way: my father, the sweet but not too sophisticated old Irishman from the South Georgia wire-grass country, none too wise in the ways of the world. I was wrong, of course. My father has an innate courtesy, a delicate consideration for others that is almost Navajo in its depth. He is also keenly interested in literally everything and everybody he encounters, or at least he had been, before this awful summer. I watched these qualities reach out to Dennis Ponder now, and watched Dennis respond to them like a half-wild horse under firm, gentle hands.

They spoke in slow, exploratory half sentences to each other, as men will when they first meet, but there was nothing tentative about my father’s interest in Dennis, none of the quickly averted eyes that the very ill must come to despise, none of the false heartiness. And there was nothing supercili-ous or cold in Dennis’s response to him, as there had been, and often still was, in his dealings with me. The two men sat on the sofa in front of the fire and drank the coffee that I brought in, and talked peacefully of nothing, even the long silences between their words comfortable. Lazarus slept the sleep of the just on the hearth rug, his nose and toes twitching in his doggy dreams, his two, for now, main men content to be with each other. I fidgeted and sulked. Dennis’s behavior toward my father was patently an insult to me, I thought. It was as if he were trying to show me the kind of person he could be when his patience was not being tried by fools.

I roused out of my huff to hear my father laughing quietly, and saying, “Tigers is right. My granddaughter has two earrings in one ear and a white stripe like a skunk’s down the back of her head, and looks at you out UP ISLAND / 325

of those yellow eyes as if she’d like to take a bite out of you.

How on earth do you handle the girls? The boys are bad enough.”

I knew that they were talking of Dennis’s work, and of the book he was writing, and put an interested smile on my face.

“Actually, I didn’t handle girls,” Dennis said. “Castleberry is all male. It’s probably one of the last all-male, private prep schools left in the country, and that can’t last. It’s just that nobody’s filed a class-action suit against it yet. Too busy with the Citadel and VMI.”

“Did you like that? Working with just boys?” my father asked.

“Very much. I find them far less distractible. And I’ve never been good with girls. Somehow we don’t connect.”

There was a silence, and then he turned to me and said,

“And it’s not that I have the old Jesuit thing about little boys, either.”

“Well, I should think not,” I said stiffly. “Why would you think I thought you did?”

“Some people have,” he said briefly. I did not reply. I was seething inside. It had been an unwarranted thing to say.

“I do have a daughter,” he said to my father, who nodded agreeably. “I don’t see her. Her mother thinks I don’t care much about her; she says I was always distant from her, and am much worse since the divorce, so she doesn’t let me see her at all now. Maybe she’s right. I never could think of much to say to Claire. Girls are not the snap to raise that boys are.”

My dad winked at me.

“Takes some doing,” he said. “Sometimes they turn out okay, though.”

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“I hope mine did. I hope she does,” Dennis said. “I keep thinking I ought to try to see her again…”

He did not say, “now that I’m sick,” but I heard it in my head.

“How old is she?” my father said.

“Ten.”

I was surprised; I had thought his child must be much older. He was at least my age, and probably more; it was not possible, with the illness, to say. It had been either a late marriage or a late fatherhood. Either way, the separation must be recent. That must still hurt. I wondered how I would feel, separated from Teddy and Caroline and knowing that I was desperately, perhaps mortally, ill. Unwanted pity swept me.

“We need to get on,” I said to my father. “Dennis is working, and I’ve got to get groceries for the ladies. I’ll get back to the books next week, Dennis, and I’ll stop in with your stuff later today…”

“No hurry. Spend some time with your dad,” Dennis said pleasantly, and then to my father, gruffly, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

My father looked at me, and Dennis caught the look.

“My mother wrote me,” he said. “Molly is as closemouthed as a flounder about personal things.”

“Well, thank you,” my father said.

“A nice man,” he said to me as we got in the truck and headed for the farmhouse. “Pity about his sickness. He does well with it.”

“I guess so,” I said, wishing perversely that he could see Dennis Ponder in the midst of one of his arctic spells. “Of course, he’s never once told me he was sorry for
my
loss. I can certainly see why he says he doesn’t connect with women.

Do you realize he told

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you more about himself in half an hour than he has me in two months?”

“Well, you said you had an agreement,” my father said. “I don’t have any agreement. Maybe he just needs to talk. It’s usually easier for a man to talk to another man about personal things.”

“Oh. It’s a guy thing, huh?”

He chuckled. “I guess so. Do you care?”

“No.”

But oddly enough, I found that I did, just a little.

I had not told Bella and Luzia that I would bring my father up to meet them that morning, but they were ready to receive distinguished company nonetheless. The fire burned brightly, the teapot steamed on the tea table, there was a bunch of fresh-cut, berry-laden holly in a beautiful old brass urn I had not seen before, and the old women wore what must have been their best, and makeup. Bella’s dull black rayon was draped with a magnificent old red paisley shawl shot with gold threads, and her hair was piled on top of her head so tightly that her black eyes slanted like a Chinese empress’s.