Three Short Novels (7 page)

With her father came two friends, the actor Max Laurie and a man younger than both, whom she had not met before. The three men in winter jackets and boots got out of her father's gray Chrysler and
began to cross the yard to the house. The men turned when she and David, on higher ground up in the orchard, called to them. In a row, they watched her and her son approach, and the memory of her fear, the night before, was dispelled. The farmhouse and the cold orchard and the yard in which they waited for her—everything was filled with the presence of the men as with a clap of thunder or a flooding of hot sun. When they began to turn away, because it was a long way for her to approach, and to look around the yard and lift up their faces toward the hills and the water tower, she took her son's hand and ran with him, and the running passed for a welcome from a woman unaware of herself in her happiness at seeing them. She threw her arms around her father and around Max and shook hands with the young man who, up close, was not so young, was in his late thirties, the coarse skin of his face incongruous with the young stance of his body as he had watched her approach.

She walked with him to the house, while David walked ahead of them between his grandfather and Max, and the presence of the men was the reason for
her
presence on the farm. She admired her father's build, his erect back and his elegant head; and admired the small figure of her son in the pearl-gray sweater her mother had knit for him, his straight legs in jeans; and admired the self-conscious sprightliness in the actor's body. They brought her—the three men—the excitement of pleasing them, the pleasure of pleasing them. She was glad that none of them had brought a woman. She was the only woman. The old woman in her hiking boots did not count as a woman; she was a past woman.

They had drinks together in the parlor. David drank hot cocoa and sat by Max, with whom he exchanged riddles and jokes and she, the only woman, listened to her father and Russell talk about the nightclub they were to finance in partnership with a shipping-company executive, and, engaged with them, she felt the riches of her womanness—in her gestures, in the ease of her laughing, in the
appreciation in her eyes and in her body of all they told to interest her and amuse her. And she saw that the man who was new among them, Russell Maddux, was glancing at her with that alternating peculiar to some men, a desire for her and a concealing of desire that passed over his eyes like a curtain shutting off their depths.

They all went out into the woods early in the afternoon to hunt quail. She and her son were each given a shotgun, Russell instructing her in the use of hers and her father instructing David, and in a line they went through the brush and among the trees. Russell was to her left and Max beyond him, and to her right David and then her father. For the first time David had a gun in his hands, and she saw that he strove for an ease in his walk, an experienced hunter's grace, but was stiff in the knees and the elbows. The space that was between her and him; his face, glimpsed in profile, set forward timorously, transfixed by the quail that might rise up in the next moment; the awkwardness and the grace of his small, slender body; the blindness of his feet in sneakers—all roused in her a desire for him to remain as he was, the only one and the closest one, the dearest, incontestably more dear than any man who was to become her lover and who was now a stranger. While she was bound over to the lover, her son might leave her forever. Walking three yards away from him—walking gracefully because the man to her left was a few feet behind her for a moment and was perhaps noting the movement of her buttocks in the tight, trim slacks—she felt a strong desire to embrace her son and to beg him not to allow another man to lessen her closeness with him, not to allow her to give herself over to another lover.

A covey of quail whirred up, skimming over bushes, flying over the tops of the low trees. One was brought down, her father assuring David that, although both had shot at the birds, he had missed but David had not. David began a babbling prediction of hundreds of more quail brought down, and had to be cautioned by her father to be quiet. After that first shot, David's attack on quail and cottontail
rabbits was almost ridiculously pompous, more confident than the men's.

They tramped back through the cold woods—in the bag four quail and two rabbits among them all—and on the large round oak table in the kitchen tossed the game down. She was standing across the table from her son and saw his face was flushed from the cold, his eyes narrowed by the intense excitement of the day, and it seemed to her that the span of years between him and the others, the men, had disappeared.

They stayed late around the table after a supper of roast lamb, of fruit preserves—the figs and plums of the hot summer—drinking brandies and smoking, talking about the division of Germany, and Russell about his experiences in the war in Europe, and Max about his entertaining the troops. David stayed with them in the parlor until midnight, listening and recalling at every chance everything about the hunt as if they had not accompanied him and were eager to hear, and when at last he fell asleep on the parlor rug, she roused him and went up with him. He fell onto his cot, too weary to undress, and she pulled off his shoes and waked him enough to undress himself, and he was asleep again the moment he lay down under the covers. As she lay in her bed, hearing below her the considerately low voices of the men in the parlor, their presence below her like depths to float upon, the sense of the loss of her son to the men seemed not so alarming, instead seemed desirable, for the presence of the men in the house, among them David, was to release her into a sleep that was like the expectation of a reward. The men came up quietly, their footsteps on the stairs a sound that in her half-sleep seemed to go on forever. She heard them in their rooms around her, the murmur of their voices, the scrape of a chair, and their number verified their strength. In each was the strength of all three and their strength was in David also, in his cot way up in the attic's vast reaches.

11

R
ussell unlocked the door of the nightclub, fumbled on a light, and escorted her down red-carpeted stairs to a large, cold cellar where numerous little tables and chairs were scattered around a stage. The cellar ran under a restaurant and a bar, and the pipes along the ceiling were covered with a false sky—a black cloth painted with many gold moons, both crescent and round, and festooned with gilded gauze. The seepage and the dampness had been taken care of first, he told her; everything was as dry as a bone. The sign above the door—
THE CARNIVAL
—would be lit next Friday night, when the gossip columnists and some local big names would be wined and dined and entertained by a stripteaser and by a comedian and by a jazz trio who were to appear for the opening weeks. He himself, he said, and her father and the other owner had nothing to do with the details—everything from the plumbing to the entertainers was taken care of by the manager, but the whole works, he said, fascinated him. He did a jig step up on the stage, then stooped down to pick up a wire, and stood gazing upward to trace the origin of the trailing wire in his hand.

Later in the evening, in a quiet bar, he told her that he had been married twice, the first time when he was twenty. His second marriage had ended in the death of his wife, Anna. She had been a very unhappy person, weeping over slights that nobody else, he said, would even think to call slights, and, for days, brooding and miserable for reasons unknown to him. After a year she had decided to have a child because she might, she had said, feel necessary to somebody. But the child, a girl, had failed to bring that certainty to her and she had grown worse, calling herself foul names and wandering away, leaving the child alone in the house. She saw a psychiatrist almost every day, and every night took sedatives to sleep. She slept alone. The child slept in a bedroom of her own and he slept on the couch in the den. One night he was wakened by the smell of smoke and had time only to run into the child's room and rescue her. That part of the house where his wife slept was already in flames. Under the soft light of the bar lamps, he removed his coat, loosened a cuff link, and pushed up his shirtsleeve to show her the long, heavy scar down his arm.

The rest of the evening he brought up a hundred other topics, his way of apologizing for the story that had checked her vivacity. There was something unlikable about him after the story. She was afraid to be close with someone who had suffered the death of a wife under those circumstances. That he had been on the other side of the burning door, that he had been unable to break through, made it impossible for her to look into his eyes. She felt that he had been marked for that catastrophe and might be marked for others, and that there was nothing he could do to prevent them, even as he could not prevent his wife dying on the other side of the burning door. Yet, later in the night, lying with him in his apartment, she kissed the long scar on his arm, wondering if her dislike of him, earlier, had been fear of another dimension of reality. Waking in the middle of the night, she drank his brandy and laughed with him over a joke. When he sat up on the edge of the bed, she got up on her knees and kissed the back of his
head and his shoulders, unwilling to let him go from her even for a moment, desiring to transform him, with her kissing, into a man who could avert any catastrophe.

The wedding, in the rectory of the church her mother attended, with only Russell's aunt and her parents and David present, seemed to her the wisest occasion of her life. Her parents liked him. He was a more responsive son, a more companionable son than their own; in addition, he was, at last, a son-in-law as affluent as they were, and perhaps more so.

They moved into a home he owned near Twin Peaks, on a wide avenue of white stucco homes of early California architecture. The lawn was perfect and so was the patio with its pink hydrangea bushes and granite birdbaths. The three of them, Russell and herself and David, each contributed, she felt, an admirable self to the pleasure of the marriage. At the beginning there appeared to be an easy compatibility between David and his stepfather, and their evenings together were always pleasant, with cocktails before supper and a special grenadine cocktail for David, and the gourmet suppers she cooked for them and for their frequent guests, Russell's friends, who were loan-company executives and bank officials, and their wives. They went on trips together in their red convertible to Lake Tahoe and to the mountains to fish and up into Sun Valley to ski, and always she was aware of the picture they made of the elegant family, climbing into or springing from their car and entering the lobby of the hotel, the father or the mother resting an arm on the boy's shoulder.

Neither she nor Russell had any desire to bring his daughter, Maria, to live with them, and, even had they wanted to, the girl would have chosen to remain with her maternal grandmother, a vigorous women with a daughter of seventeen, whom Maria idolized. They sometimes, however, took her along on their trips, and they sometimes
had her over for a weekend, but her presence among them was, to Vivian, like a flaw in the picture. She was a year younger than David, a slight, colorless girl with enormous smoky blue eyes that seldom lifted. She was a reminder of the tragedy because it seemed to have shocked her from her normal pace of growth. When Russell brought the girl from her grandmother's, he hustled and bustled around to entertain her, to entertain them all. His eyes were tired when he came in the door with her, tired of the visit before it began, and afraid of the child he performed for. Around the girl he was a man making extravagant amends, a weary buffoon. In the last minutes of the girl's visits, with everybody collecting her possessions, gifts and hats and gloves and candy, Maria joined in with them, gave up sitting and being done unto, and, with her participation in the search, implied that she was both gratified and sorry her visit had roused them all to such a pitch of expiation.

After the girl's visits, when Vivian was left alone in the house with her son, there was always a time of relief, in which she felt the bond between herself and David, the bond of mother and son, to be stronger than that between herself and Russell. If Russell remained away, visiting with Marie's grandmother and, afterward, drinking at the nightclub, and David was asleep, she would go in and watch the boy while he slept.

In the light of lamp he lay on his back as if flung there, sometimes clear of the blankets from the waist up, his pajama top twisted upward, exposing his pale, tender stomach. He was, at these times, like an old friend. If her husband was not that, then her son was that. If marriage was not a resolving, then some compensation, or more than that, some answer, was to be found in the existence of her son. One night she bent and kissed him above the navel, pleased by the warm, resilient flesh, knowing that he would not wake up from the kiss because he slept so soundly and in the morning always came up fathoms out of sleep.

12

S
ome land that Russell had inherited south of the city, near the ocean, sold to a tract developer, and almost every week, or so it seemed to her, he sold at a great profit an old apartment building or a small hotel that he had bought only a few months before with a loan and had remodeled with another loan. And everything that she did with this prosperity brought words of praise, whether it was the accumulation of exquisite clothes or of oil paintings from the Museum of Art exhibits, the selection of silver and crystal and antiques, or the artistry of her suppers for a few guests. After two years in the house near Twin Peaks, they moved to a modern house surrounded by a Japanese garden, and the combining of her antiques with the modern architecture, all the harmonious combining was like a confirmation of the happiness of the family. It was further confirmed by color photographs in a magazine of interior decoration and by the article written by one of the editors who stressed the wonderful compatibility of antique and modern that had, as its source, the compatibility of the family with everything beautiful. No member of the family, however, appeared in the pictures—only Vivian
at a far distance, her back turned, a very small figure in lemon-yellow slacks way out among the etching-like trees of the garden, glimpsed through the open glass doors of the living room. It was in bad taste to show the family, she understood; they would appear to be like the nouveaux riches, wanting to be seen among their possessions. Not to show the family gave more seclusion to the home and a touch of the sacred to the family.