Places in the Dark (15 page)

I was still pondering exactly how I was going to break all this to him when I pulled up in front of his house later that evening. Night had fallen, and from the street I could look directly into the lighted dining room, see him moving about, putting a cluster of flowers on the table. Two candles flickered in a crystal candelabrum, the very one my mother had given him years before, insisting that it should be used only for “romantic occasions.” Because of that, I had no doubt as to what was going on. My brother was preparing to receive Dora, making everything just right.

I got out of my car and started up the little cement walkway that led to his door,
Astonishing True Stories
rolled up in my coat pocket. I was utterly intent on revealing, for whatever it might be worth, exactly what Jack Stout had found. Then, out of the darkness, I heard my father’s voice as clearly as if he were standing beside me, repeating the words he’d said in his parlor a few days before:
There’s nothing like loneliness to bring you to your knees.

At that instant, it struck me that Billy had finally reached the point in his life when he wanted nothing more than to put an end to his romantic longing, place his heart on the red nine, and spin the wheel.

Who was I to stop him?

And so I went back to my car, pulled myself behind the wheel, then glanced toward my brother’s house a final time, fully expecting to see him still busy with his preparations. He was in the dining room just as before. But he was no longer alone. Dora stood beside him, helping him set his table, chatting quietly with him until he suddenly turned and left the room, leaving her to stand alone, holding an empty goblet, a slender figure in
a plain white dress. In such a pose, she seemed little more than a wisp of breath, not at all robust, and wholly inadequate to Maine. In this harsh land, lashed by wind and sea, I felt certain she would wither.

But she bloomed.

I
t began with the smallest bud, Dora’s flowering, then opened steadily after that, so that by spring of ‘36, I could hardly imagine that she’d ever seemed in the least insubstantial to me, someone to be dismissed without consequence, a woman who might come and go, leave no lasting mark behind.

During the preceding winter, I’d seen her only rarely, usually in company with my brother. I knew that she continued to work at the
Sentinel
, always at the copy desk, a very able grammarian according to Billy, but with no interest in actually composing stories. From time to time I’d glimpsed her within the throng of locals who shopped in Madison’s on the weekend, but had always stepped away quickly, feeling no need to address her. Once Billy had suggested that we all “go out” together. Rather than refuse, I’d reminded him that I would surely be the third wheel in any such gathering, since I had no woman to “go out” with in the sense he meant.

And so it was not until early April that I found
myself alone with her for the first time since we’d strolled down the hill from Molly Hendricks’s frozen grave. She’d rented a small cottage at the edge of town by then. I’d gone there as a favor to Billy, who’d asked me to pick her up that evening. Earlier that day, he’d gone to the state capital to cover some new plan for social improvement that FDR’s followers in the legislature had devised. Typical of my brother, he’d gotten swept up in the debate, no doubt offering his own wild scheme, left later than he’d expected, then broken down on the way home, his old Ford barely lurching into a service station before it expired altogether. He’d called to tell me that he’d be arriving late for our customary Wednesday night dinner with our father.

“We’ll just wait for you,” I told him. “Dad certainly won’t mind lingering over a second drink before supper.” I laughed. “I doubt even a third would cause him much alarm.”

“Yes, I know,” Billy said. “But I’d planned to bring Dora.”

By then I knew that Billy had already brought Dora around to visit with The Great Example. My mother had received her with great warmth, he said, given every indication that she found Dora as remarkable as Billy himself did. She had even advised him to be bold in his pursuit of her. In my mind, I could see her doing exactly that, urging Billy forward in a wild, romantic quest, certain that he could maneuver whatever tangled road lay ahead.

I was less certain as to what my father might think of Dora. Over the last few years he’d taken to “wintering” in Virginia during February and March. He had only recently returned to Port Alma, and so had not yet been introduced to Dora. Once that meeting had taken place, I suspected that my father’s opinion of her, as
well as his advice to Billy, would be considerably more guarded than my mother’s. He would temper enthusiasm with warning, point out that life was a long road filled with pits and snares, love a thing that had to flex and bend in order to negotiate it. I could hear his voice rise sagely in the parlor:
Reason is still our only guide, Billy, regardless of what your mother contends.

“Dora will be at her house,” Billy told me. “Would you mind driving her to Dad’s?”

I had no desire to do it, of course. During the long snowbound months following Jack Stout’s return from New York, I’d purposely kept away from Dora. I could not imagine that a light would not soon go on in my brother’s head, reveal at least one or two of what I suspected must be scores of both small and large deceptions. A confrontation would ensue, then a vastly overdue parting of the ways.

But spring had now arrived and nothing of the kind had happened. Dora’s spell was still upon Billy.

I arrived at her house at just after six o’clock that evening. It was on a narrow lane on the outskirts of town, distant and somewhat secluded, bordered by woods all around, with only a few equally isolated cottages along the same untended road, most of them scattered along a rocky inlet so inhospitable it could scarcely be called a beach at all.

I’d never taken any note of Dora’s cottage, but when I arrived to pick her up, I was struck by how small it was, little more than a converted shed.

At my knock, the door opened slightly and a pair of green eyes peered through the slit.

“Cal,” she said, the door opening more fully now.

“Billy’s been delayed,” I told her. “He sent me to pick you up.”

“Come in,” she said.

For various reasons, I’d been in the houses of the richest people in and around Port Alma, its few doctors, lawyers, and owners of banks, fishing fleets, and canneries. For equally various, usually profoundly different reasons, I’d also seen the life of our state’s eternal poor, the wilderness hovels that crouched on rocky hillsides, homes that looked oddly pilfered, made of tin and discarded wood scavenged from nearby sawmills and boatyards. They were little more than huts, hardly distinguishable from the stacks of firewood piled beside them. But for all the poverty I’d seen, I’d never been in a dwelling place as unadorned as Dora’s. Even the poorest of the poor did something to relieve their bleakness, hung a family photograph on the wall or placed a colored bottle in the window to catch the light. But Dora had done nothing of this sort. There were no pictures or paintings on her walls or mantel. Not so much as a vase to hold a sprig of winter holly. For furniture, she had only two plain ladder-back chairs and a wooden table. It was a place so devoid of even the simplest comforts, I felt a grim awe that any life could will such bleakness upon itself.

Dora, however, appeared entirely indifferent to her surroundings. In fact, she seemed well accommodated to them, so that I got the impression she’d lived in such bareness before, like the wild child whose name she’d taken, accustomed to a life ruthlessly reduced to fundamentals.

“Would you like some tea, Cal? There’s some left.”

“All right,” I said.

She moved to the kitchen at the rear of the house, leaving me alone in the front room. From where I stood, I could see that the kitchen held a black cast-iron stove, a small sink, and a hand pump. A few utensils lay in a neat row on a white towel beside the pump, one of them
the long knife my brother would later draw from his wounded chest.

“Sugar?” Dora called from the kitchen.

“No.”

The bedroom door was slightly open, and inside it, I saw a bed but no mattress, only a frame and bare wooden slats. A large chair rested beside it, spread with pillows and draped with a blanket.

I was still peering into the bedroom when Dora returned, two teacups in her hands. She noticed me staring into the room, no doubt realized how bizarre it appeared, grim as a dungeon, the sort of place people were taken to have confessions beaten out of them.

“I sleep in the chair,” she said. She handed me the tea, then walked to the bedroom door and closed it. “I have trouble lying down.”

“How long have you had this trouble?”

“Since I was a little girl,” she answered.

She added nothing else, but I immediately imagined a terrible injury, the “thing that had happened to her,” about which Billy had speculated so darkly, and that he seemed to consider part of her romantic allure.

“Was this in New York City?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I’d breached a wall she’d not expected to be so vulnerable.

“Billy once mentioned that you lived in New York,” I explained.

“Not when I was a child. Only recently.”

“I lived in New York too. While I was in law school.” Cautiously, I probed the darkness. “Where did you grow up?”

“California.”

“I’ve never been there.”

She sipped her tea. “I haven’t met your father.”

It was a clear attempt to change the subject. I knew I’d gotten as far as I could, that the door into her past, like the one to her bedroom, was now firmly shut.

“Well, since my mother left him he’s taken on a few aristocratic pretensions,” I told her. “You’ve visited my mother a few times, I understand. With Billy, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“He goes almost every day now,” I said. “You don’t?”

“No,” I said. “I’d visit her more often, but I’m not sure I’m always a welcome sight.”

“What gives you that idea?”

I smiled, trying to make light of it. “Well, sometimes, when I come into her room, she looks like a cold blast hit her. Dad’s the one who’s always happy to see me. He reads a lot, and we talk about what he’s been reading. He was more or less my tutor when I was a boy. My mother tutored Billy.” I felt a sudden, curious ache that my family had been divided so starkly, like a body flayed open, the wound unhealed. Again I retreated to a less disturbing subject. “So tell me, are you glad you came to Port Alma?”

“I like it here. It’s remote.”

“Do you plan to stay?”

“No,” she said resolutely. “I’m only passing through.”
Only passing through.

Something in the certainty of her tone told me that this was true, that for reasons I would probably never know, Dora was one of life’s pariahs. I felt something stir in me, something small, a tiny tremor of feeling for all who were like Dora, inexplicably driven from place to place, rootless, solitary, invisible whips forever at their backs.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. “That you’re just passing through.”

Our eyes locked briefly, then she glanced toward the window. “A fog is coming in,” she murmured.

“Yes, it is,” I said. I took a final sip from the cup and set it down. “We’d better go while we can still see the road.”

We drove back through the town, then out along the coastal road, a wall of evergreen rising on one side, the sea crashing on the other. The road turned inland less than a mile beyond town, wound through a series of rocky hills, and ended in my father’s driveway.

He was already standing at the door as we came up the steps, dressed to the nines in a dark suit and bow tie, a sure sign of how special he considered the evening to be.

“Ah, you must be Dora,” he said brightly. “Come in. Come in.”

She stepped into the foyer, her attention lighting briefly on a portrait of one of my forebears, his severe likeness trapped in a heavy wooden frame, a man with silver hair and stern features, utterly proper in his black coat and starched white collar.

“Obadiah Grier,” my father told her, pleased by her interest. “William’s grandfather. Looks like he’s just condemned a witch, doesn’t he?” He laughed. “Actually, he was quite a nice old man. Used to bounce William on his knee. Cal too.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Of course, Cal never enjoyed that sort of thing, did you, Cal?”

He waited for me to respond, engage him in our usual badinage. When I didn’t, he turned to Dora. “May I take your coat, Miss March?”

She gave it to him, but he only passed it over to me. “Hang it in the front closet, Cal,” he said as he escorted Dora into the sitting room.

Cradled in my hands, Dora’s coat felt even lighter
than it appeared, designed for a climate where the seasons changed far less radically than in the north. A label had been crudely stenciled inside the coat:
Lobo City Thrift.

Lobo, I thought, recalling the origins of her hand-picked name. Spanish for wolf.

M
y brother arrived an hour later, plunging hurriedly through the front door, gay and energetic as ever. He walked directly to the fire and warmed his hands, greeting each of us in turn before his eyes settled fondly on Dora. “I see Cal got you here safely.”

“Yes,” Dora said with a smile that rose with an unexpected brightness from the dark net of her face.

Billy’s eyes swept over to me, and I could feel the great affection he had for me. I knew it was the love of the righteous for the prodigal, but I also knew that at that moment his greatest wish was that I someday find what he now seemed unshakably certain he had found.

But there was no mention of such things that evening. Instead, we chatted about his day, the legislative debate currently raging, what might ultimately come of it. For a while we even discussed the weather, how soon summer would be upon us, how quickly it would pass.

As the clock chimed eight, we took our seats at the long cherry wood dining table my father had set with a pretentious formality, everything in its proper place, little silver salad forks and Bordeaux glasses for the wine.