Cold Spring Harbor (10 page)

The old cat came treading slowly in from the hall, and Phil said “Well, hey, there, Perkins; come on over here.” He gathered up the cat and held it hanging in both hands as he eased himself far enough down into the chair to set his heels on the edge of the seat, as children sometimes do; then, bringing the cat’s face in close, he kissed it on the nose.

That was when he looked up and found Evan Shepard standing in the room, watching him.

He spilled the cat instantly to the floor, got out of the chair as fast as he could, with a flailing of legs, and said “Oh, hi, Evan; just saying hello to my cat here, is all. How’ve you been?”

And even their handshake was a failure: Evan’s hand closed so abruptly around Phil’s that it clasped only the fingers instead of the palm; it must have felt as if he were shaking hands with a girl.

“Good to see you, Phil. How was your—how was your year?”

“Oh, it was okay, thanks.”

And they stood looking each other over. It was the first time Phil had ever seen Evan in his factory clothes, shirt and pants of dark cotton twill, with an identification badge clipped to the left breast pocket, and that outfit made him want to apologize for attending a private school.

“Well, then,” Evan said, with a nod to excuse himself, “see you later.” And he went charging upstairs.

From the beginning, in this artificial household, dinner was the most oppressive event of the day. Rachel would place a small electric fan on the table before they sat down,
because the weather was uncommonly hot and still for June, but the caged, buzzing, slowly turning face of it could only send faint new waves of warmth among the dishes.

“Oh, isn’t this nice,” Gloria often said at the brink of a dinner, and if Phil happened to glance at her then he could always see how afraid she was that tonight, once again, there might be no voices around the table except her own. Twice during the first week or so she made everyone’s discomfort all the worse by saying, plaintively, “Well; I’ve always thought the dinner hour was for conversation.” And not even her son could bring himself to look at her when she said that.

Evan Shepard hardly ever looked up from his plate, even in response to murmured questions from his wife, and his stolid concentration seemed to suggest that eating, no less than the day’s work or than fathering children, was just another part of a man’s job in the world. When he didn’t need both hands for forking and cutting his meat, the muscular forearm of his free hand would always come to rest in the same way—canted up against the edge of the table, with the hand curled in a loose fist or holding a folded slice of bread, and Phil found that mannerism intriguing: it was the way working-class heroes ate in the movies. He tried to copy it a few times but it didn’t come naturally and only made him self-conscious. One of the lesser things he had learned at Irving, without knowing he’d learned it, was that the prep-school style of eating involved one conspicuous elbow on the table and a tucking of your free hand down out of sight, hanging limp over your lap. That was the pose he kept reverting to now, involuntarily; it wasn’t any wonder that many people seemed to think of prep school as a tucked-in, prissy way of life.

“Darling?” Rachel inquired—and it always startled Phil to hear her say that word as if it were her husband’s name—
“Do you still like the salad, or should I try another kind of dressing?”

“No, it’s good,” Evan said with his mouth full, and with olive oil shining on his lips. “This is good.” But he didn’t look at her.

One evening their dinner hour was brief and free of its usual tension, if only because it held tensions of another kind: the elder Shepards had agreed at last, after several courteous postponements, to come over tonight for an after-dinner drink. Scarcely had the table been cleared and the dishes stacked before the doorbell rang; but when Gloria rushed to answer it she found Charles smiling there alone.

“I’m afraid my wife is a little tired,” he said, “but she made me promise to bring her along another time; possibly some afternoon, if that’s at all convenient.”

“Well, of course,” she told him, “as long as you’ll—you know—as long as you’ll keep your promise.”

Out in the kitchen again, where she dropped two ice cubes on the floor in her nervousness, Gloria decided she didn’t really mind Grace Shepard’s staying away: having Charles here by himself would simply make it a different kind of evening, and one that called for a different plan. It was always important to have a plan in situations where you weren’t entirely sure of yourself; otherwise your every chance at happiness could drift away and dissolve and be lost.

He was making small talk with the young people when she brought the liquor tray into the living room and set it with a little display of ceremony on the coffee table—or rather, he was allowing the young people to make small talk with him as he strolled the carpet and inspected things he probably couldn’t see.

“Well, this is nice, Gloria,” he said. “You’ve found a very comfortable house.”

“Oh, well, it’s damp,” she said, letting him have the worst of the information at once to prove she wouldn’t dream of withholding it. “That’s the main problem. Still, we’re hoping all this dry, warm weather’ll make a difference.
I
think it will. What would everyone like?”

There was gin and whiskey; there was even a bottle of beer for Phil to nurse; and it wasn’t long before their gathering seemed to glow with a sense of incipient pleasure.

“Charles?” Gloria said. “I’d almost begun to think we’d never see you again. Have you been avoiding us?” She knew that might sound like a tactless thing to say, or even a reckless thing, but it was a deliberate part of her plan. If you could go straight to the root of a social awkwardness and bring it out into the open, it nearly always worked to your advantage. The other person might feel momentarily embarrassed, but he’d appreciate your candor soon enough. The air would be cleared.

Charles assured her he’d been meaning to stop by for weeks—as, of course, had Grace; he said he couldn’t imagine where the time had gone; he said he certainly hoped she hadn’t thought he’d been rude.

And his embarrassment did seem only momentary: when the apologies were over he subsided in his chair and looked as though he felt better.

“… Has Evan told you about what’s happening at the plant, Charles?” Rachel inquired, and her sweet young face showed an earnest pride in being able to call her father-in-law by his first name.

He said Evan had indeed told him, and that it was excellent news; then the news itself was revealed in their discussion of it. Evan had been named as a likely candidate for the job of “parts-control supervisor,” a responsibility to be taken along with his regular work as machinist; if it came
through it would mean a pay raise substantial enough to bring the hope of engineering school a little closer.

And Gloria made appropriate murmurs of approval and congratulation, but her heart wasn’t in it. “Parts-control supervisor” sounded as grindingly tedious as any other title Evan might bring home from the plant; and for that matter, even “mechanical engineer” seemed scarcely a term to put stars in a girl’s eyes.

It wasn’t easy to remember now that she had ever sensed the devil in Evan Shepard: as long as she’d known him here, in the close quarters of Cold Spring Harbor, he had impressed her only as a very, very dull young man. And that was always a source of dismay, because his father conveyed such an innate and unfailing elegance.

“You always look so
el
egant, Charles,” she said. “That must be a brand-new summer suit, isn’t it?”

“No,” he told her, tugging the coat of it straight. “Matter of fact it’s a very old summer suit; I’ve been wondering if I can make it last through one more summer.”

“Well, it’s certainly very—certainly very handsome. Very debonair.” Then she brightened with a new thought. “Tell me something, Charles: are you always called ‘Mr. Shepard,’ or do people sometimes use your military title—sort of ‘Colonel Shepard’ or whatever it may have been.”

“Oh, no, no,” he said quickly. “I retired as a captain, you see, and that’s not at all the kind of rank that carries over into civilian life.”

“Oh, that’s
mar
velous,” she cried. “ ‘Captain Shepard.’ I think that sounds extremely distinguished”—and here she turned happily to one and then the other of her children—“don’t you?”

“Well, but no. Look,” Charles told her, straining for patience. “Let me explain this if I can. If you ever meet a man in civilian life called ‘Captain,’ he’s most likely to have been in the navy, don’t you see? Rather than the army?
Because the naval rank of captain is far more—exalted: it’s only one notch below a rear admiral; whereas the army’s use of the same designation is an entirely different and lesser thing. I’m sure you’ll understand.”

It seemed to Charles that he hadn’t heard this much of his own voice in weeks, or months, and he wasn’t even sure he had yet made himself clear, though she’d responded with several little nods of comprehension as he talked. But now she said “Oh. Well, I don’t care about any of that.
I’m
going to refer to you as ‘Captain Shepard’ anyway. Always.” And she gave him a loose smile of lipstick and stained teeth.

There was probably nothing to be done about a woman like this. Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn’t much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.

“… Oh, and I’ll never forget that wonderful afternoon on Hudson Street,” she said an hour later as he hung smiling in the open doorway, all but dying to go home. “And wasn’t it a funny way to meet? Just imagine: if your car hadn’t happened to break down exactly where it did, and if you hadn’t happened to ring our doorbell, among all those hundreds of other people’s bells …”

Surprisingly, there were pleasant interludes in that big, damp living room—times of mutual trust that seemed to promise better times ahead.

“You’re sixteen now, right, Phil?” Evan asked him once.

“Right.”

“Well, then, you ought to have your driver’s license. They teach you how to drive up there at whaddyacallit? At your school?”

“No, that’s not the kind of thing they—no, they don’t.”

“Well, hell, it’s easy enough to learn. Want to go out for a lesson on Saturday?”

“Sure,” Phil said. “That’d be fine, Evan, if you have the time. I’d like that a lot.”

On most other afternoons, when Evan got home from the plant, he would hurry upstairs to be secluded with his wife until dinnertime; but today he was having his whiskey with her down here in the living room—and the remarkable thing was that neither of them seemed to mind including Phil in the easy flow of their after-work talk. They even laughed together at one or two of Phil’s jokes, as though Evan were just beginning to discover what a nice, bright kid he could be; and Phil could only hope they hadn’t noticed the little spasms of shivering that repeatedly seized his shoulders and made him hug his arms as if he were chilled. None of this could probably have happened if Gloria hadn’t been busy in the kitchen: it was her turn to cook dinner.

“It’s a deal, then,” Evan was saying. “We’ll go out after lunch and we’ll—or no, wait; damn. I’ll have to be gone on Saturday.”

And Rachel’s face seemed to sag a little. This would be one of the alternate Saturdays when Evan left home for an all-day visit with his daughter.

“Well, we’ll do it some other day, is all, Evan,” Phil said, “and thanks. It’s something I’d really like to do.” If they could begin to do things together, almost as if they were friends, it might make all the difference; besides, there was a blood-quickening sense of adulthood in the very idea of knowing how to drive a car.

Evan squinted and frowned at his wristwatch; then he looked up again, apparently invigorated, and said “How about getting started right now? We’ve still got a couple hours of daylight; maybe more.”

“Well sure, Evan, if you’re not too—you know—not too tired or anything.”

“Nah, nah, that’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” Evan drank off the last of his bourbon and put his glass on the coffee
table. “So. If you can pack up a couple of beers for us, dear, we’ll be on our way. Or make it four beers, okay? Or make it six.”

“Coming right up, sir,” Rachel said as she hurried away to the kitchen; and Phil was glad to see her so pleased but wished she could have veiled it just a little. A subtler display of happiness might have been less embarrassing.

He and Evan were waiting at the front door, slumped in identical postures with their thumbs in their belts, when she came back with a heavy paper bag that clinked with bottles.

“Here you go, gentlemen,” she said. “Have a good time.”

But Gloria trailed her into the living room, looking even more bewildered than usual, and said “What’s this?”

“A driving lesson,” Rachel told her.

“Oh!” Holding her drink in one hand, she used the other to make a gesture of fear: the back of the wrist pressed to her brow, with the limp fingers splayed and hanging like a broken wing. “Oh, but you
will
be careful, Evan, won’t you?”

“Careful of what?”

“Oh, well, I know I’m a foolish woman, but I’m terrified of cars. I’ve always been terrified of cars.”

Phil was almost too ashamed to see what her gesturing hand was up to now, but he could predict it, and he looked anyway: she was cupping her left breast.

And it might have been nothing more than that—the mortification of his mother’s carrying on—but from the moment he climbed into the passenger’s side of Evan’s car he was afraid he might fail at whatever test would have to be passed this afternoon. He felt a little better once they were out on the road; he’d found he could keep his spirits up by taking one greedy swig of beer after another, and Evan’s agreeably calm demeanor at the wheel was reassuring too.

There was, Evan said, an almost deserted stretch of macadam
some four or five miles from here; that would give them a good place to start. Then, opening a new topic, he asked how Phil felt about the way the war was going.

“Well, I haven’t really kept up with the papers or anything,” Phil said, “but I guess it’s not so good, is it. Looks like it’ll take a long time to win.”