Dale Loves Sophie to Death (28 page)

The kittens stalked tentatively across the couch, where her father had put them, and they glanced around fearfully with their protruding blue eyes. The three children were familiar enough with animals so that they still knew not to pick them up.

“I want that one. That tall one,” Toby said, in a voice of command that he had recently developed and that was grating, but that was probably the result of being expected to infuse eternal gratitude into his every exchange with well-wishers and visitors. He had come to know how much people needed in return for small favors. Nevertheless, Dinah didn’t forgive him immediately for this transgression, though she kept quiet about it for the time being.

“Well, you go on and pick, Sarah,” David said, standing away from the others; his encroaching adolescence caused him many complications lately. “I don’t care which one I have, but I do want to call mine Jimmy, so I want to have a boy.”

Dinah felt immense gratitude toward her son for this gesture. She was delighted with him. Once again, of course, she remained entirely still, as though she was not part of this occasion—indeed, she was not. Her father turned to David with pleased surprise, although it was likely he had expected some such homage, but he would have expected it from Toby. Dinah was briefly sorry for Toby in his naive and insensitive youth. His stoicism had made him seem so much older than he was, but now he had resumed his social age.

Martin was as moved by this tableau as Dinah was. The state of disquietude that encased him these days like a transparent wrap was rent apart by this little scene as though his black anxiety had been speared by a shard of glass. When Dinah suggested that the three of them sit out in the yard and leave the children alone with the kittens, Martin followed along absently; he was thinking he might like to talk to this man at some length. He imagined that Dinah’s father must have some of the answers or solutions to all the questions that unsettled him.

When Martin had first met Dinah’s family, he had not been at an especially contemplative age. He had arrived in the Midwest expecting that he would like her parents; he hadn’t listened with great care when she had talked about them. Any nuances that were there to be caught had passed him by. In fact, it hadn’t mattered much to him
what
he thought of them, and so, when he met them, he had simply acknowledged to himself that they were nice and intelligent and attractive people. But being intellectually undemonstrative, he had been hugely uncomfortable when Dinah’s father would settle himself in his library and attempt to engage Martin in the elaborate wordplay he so enjoyed. Dr. Briggs relished philosophical disagreement, and Martin had noticed that he would argue either side of a proposition, depending upon the persuasion of his adversary.

Martin had been unnerved by Dinah’s father, and he remembered one incident very clearly. He had thought of it often, and even upon reexamination he could not see what had been required of him, and what he should have done.

“They’re making great strides in the understanding of human nature through the study of dolphins,” Dr. Briggs had suddenly announced to Martin over the top of a newspaper one evening while they sat together in the library when Dinah was late coming down.

“Is that right?” Martin said.

“What do you think of that?” Dr. Briggs had asked him then, insistently, leaning forward to point a finger at him.

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t really think anything much about it. I don’t know anything about it at all.” In those days Martin enjoyed the innocent cockiness of bright graduate students.

At first, Dr. Briggs leaned his head back as though this were an affront, but then he launched into an imperative discourse on dolphins, their language, their songs, the size of their brains, their intelligence, etc. “Now, imagine this,” he had said, spreading his hands, “here are all these young men—brilliant scientists—standing around these great glassed-in tanks. Or maybe they stand on a cement apron, peering down into an enclosed marina. They monitor every little thing about those dolphins, you see, in hopes of finding out why New York City has become dangerous at night, or maybe they will find a cure for melancholia—well! The possibilities! They have such machines! They take every measurement. Heartbeat, pulse rate, well…Now, here are all these young men, with their brittle elbows and bony knees hidden inside their crisp white lab coats, watching every move made by those sleek, slippery animals. They move without effort, you know, in the water,” he said in an aside, very softly. “Of course, the animals are aware they’re being watched; in fact, they rarely mate in those conditions. Who could blame them?” He smiled bleakly. “Those men are very serious about the whole thing, with their pads and recorders and their pasty, dull faces.” He looked at Martin very long, seeking collaboration, then, of some opinion he had drawn about all this, but Martin was taken aback, and since he was mostly just waiting for Dinah, he simply nodded.

“Well?” Dr. Briggs had suddenly become brusque and gotten up from his chair all at once. “Suppose those
dolphins
are studying those very clever young men?” he said with a persistent rage, and started toward the library door. “We’ll look to be a sorry species, won’t we?” He left Martin alone in the room, because clearly Martin had not been a worthy conversationalist. Martin had concluded then, not profoundly, that Dinah’s father was an angry man. Eventually, Dr. Briggs’s anger had become so large, and his disapproval so all-encompassing, that he and Dinah stayed apart. Dinah had drawn away to protect herself, Martin had always thought.

Now Martin saw that Dinah and her father had come to some sort of reconciliation, and he was pleased; he thought this might make Dinah’s life more pleasant. In fact, she wouldn’t have to think so often about her father at all; she could let it rest. Right now, however, Martin wanted some word from Dr. Briggs, whose intelligence Martin had always considered eccentric, but which he now perceived—in his own new state of revelation—to be incisive. Martin had the feeling that he could broach any subject at all with him and be taken seriously.

Dinah and Martin and Dr. Briggs went through the kitchen and out the back door to sit in the yard. The flowers had waned and dropped their heads, but now that the air was so mild the heavy scent of decay was not trapped over the garden. The season was ending, but all the foliage was still intensely green.

Dinah brought out wine and cheese and crackers, and the three of them sat in a triangle around the low metal table on which she placed the tray.

“The kittens were the nicest thing you could have done, Dad,” she said. “It was very smart of you to get three, and not just one for Toby.” She seemed maudlin, Martin thought, almost teary.

“They won’t really belong to anybody, you know. Those cats won’t be owned by any of the children,” her father pointed out, matter-of-factly. Any idea of sentiment seemed to have left him. Dinah looked up quickly, and then her mood changed, too, and she laughed. “Oh, yes, they will. As much as cats do belong to people, they’ll belong to me! Litter box, cat food, and all! I’m pretty sure of that.”

Her father gravely sipped his wine and nodded.

“You know,” Martin said to him, “did you ever see patients who you knew would never improve? Well, I mean, just suppose they perceive
ultimate
hopelessness.” Martin spoke in a soft and pleasant voice, without any timbre of desperation to it, but Dinah watched him with surprised curiosity. “Suppose they
were
able to comprehend the universe—and beyond that, too. Well, what becomes of those people?”

Now Dinah was suddenly wary for her husband, and she was hurt. He could have asked me first, she thought. But his face was open and vulnerable. Her father laughed shortly and leaned back so that he could turn in his stiff way to look at Martin directly. “Well,” he said, “you know how to tell the difference between the patients and the doctors in any asylum, don’t you?”

Martin shook his head, annoyed at what seemed to be an insider’s joke, a med student’s grisly riddle. His attention began to wander again, until Dr. Briggs leaned forward with his hands on his knees. “The doctors are the ones who are
talking! They
ask all the questions!” he said with startling vehemence. “The patients, you see, already
know!
”

Dinah looked at her husband to see that he was absolutely stricken, as though he had no breath. She was infuriated with these two men; she was far too irritated to stay in their company. She wouldn’t have helped out either one, at the moment. “I’m going in to check on the kittens,” she said, “and set up the cat box.” She had heard her father tell this little tale time and again, with the same attempt at drama, and at last he had found his audience. She went back to the house as agitated and angry now as she had been sympathetic and soothed a short while ago. She had thought that, if nothing else, her father could never be accused of hypocrisy. But there he sat, in the beautiful day, embracing and encouraging a bitterly luxurious nihilism, when he disproved it himself by being as subject as the next man to the sordid, paltry, futile pleasure-seeking of the human race. Whatever pose it assumed, that search for the gratification of some desire at least bespoke hopefulness, hopefulness at its lowest point.

T
oby’s birthday party was held the day before the Howells left Enfield for the summer, so it was intended as a goodbye party as well, but Toby clung to the idea of its being his celebration, much to the dismay of David and Sarah. They were tired of Toby’s illness, and they didn’t entirely believe in it anymore, since they couldn’t see anything wrong, even though Toby was still not allowed to walk very much on his own and often had to be carried. Dinah had never been inside her father’s new house, and she was impressed but unaffected by the beautiful rooms. She was glad it was a pretty house and so handsomely fitted out, but this was the house of her father, and she was ill at ease that there was nothing of her childhood there. She stared into the long living room, and her eye took in the lovely dark floors and white woven carpets. Her mother had done this, of course; she had decorated this house, and it suited the client. The lines of the furniture were tall and clean and spare. Books were everywhere, and the colors were absolute—not beige, but heavy tan walls, for instance, the color of grocery bags. The woodwork in the house was a brittle, glossy white. They moved past the living room and dining room to the kitchen at the back of the house.

Dinah and Martin had spent the week packing, and Martin was still distracted and inattentive to details. Dinah felt compelled, each summer, to leave the Hortons’ house in the same good order in which she found it, but this year Martin had not been at all exact about the replacement of the Hortons’ objects which he and Dinah had put away for the summer. She had taken on the house this time, and left him to do the packing of the car, which he went about with an irritating and melancholy slowness. But when they crossed the street to attend this celebration, everything was ready; and Dinah and the three children were in that tiresome state of simultaneous regret and anticipation at the idea of leaving.

Martin carried Toby across the street and into the house, where he put him down on a couch in a beautiful brick-floored room that Polly had designed and Dr. Briggs had built out from the kitchen. A long, narrow, white-tiled counter separated the cooking area from this retreat, where the family and Pam and Lawrence were all gathered. Dinah’s father was fixing drinks there, and all along the spotless white surface were meticulously arranged trays and plates of crudités and hors d’oeuvres. Dinah was surprised at all the trouble her father had taken, and she thanked him for it when he handed her a drink with a slight Old World flourish of courtliness. But the children almost immediately grew uneasy and whiny when they sensed the formality and intention of the setting. Dinah tried to put together plates of things she thought they might eat from this exotic collection, and by looking balefully at them on the sly, she tried to instill in them the proper sense of gratitude, but she didn’t think it boded well, all this lovely elegance.

She supplied Toby with a plate of smoked salmon, tiny Norwegian sardines, and various sizes of crackers. She spread each cracker with the parsley-flecked mayonnaise her father had made himself. “Well, you
like
fish,” she said when Toby sullenly fingered the food on his plate.

Buddy and Isobel were both there, but they seemed less a couple in her father’s presence. In fact, Isobel was somewhat stark in her attitude of bristling independence. Her determination hardened her features almost past beauty. Buddy joked with Sarah and David, who gravitated toward him as always. Martin meant to be polite, and he fixed his drink and moved around the room talking to everyone and then sat down alone, just looking tired.

Dinah began to move across the room to go and talk to Polly, who in these surroundings had no more impact than a child of Sarah’s age. When Dinah had caught sight of her across the room, she was very nearly alarmed by the ineffectualness of her mother’s bearing. It seemed to Dinah that her mother looked afraid. But Lawrence reached out a long arm and detained Dinah with a great hug around her waist and a kiss on her cheek. Pam smiled at him placidly, and Dinah knew that he had had several drinks—she and her family had been caught up in last-minute packing and had arrived about an hour late. Suddenly Isobel was there, too, almost incandescent with the energy of her odd, high-strung restlessness.

“Ah, Dinah!” she said. “You’re not buying
that
, are you? That’s the jogger’s hug, you know. The crunchy-granola, health-food hug!” She moved around their small group gracefully, but she ended up at its center. “Now, in the office we call that the ‘it’s-perfectly-healthy-to-have-a-quicklay-with-someone-you-trust’ hug. You have to beware of those, Dinah!” Only Isobel could say these things, because her pointed face took on a smile of self-mockery. There was nothing that could not become a source of amusement for Isobel. Parties were her métier, and she could move from group to group, rustling through their conversations like an unexpected breeze. She would move on to the next group, having made an impression, having unsettled the people she left, unpleasantly or not. But Dinah looked at Isobel this afternoon with rare discernment. Old friends are just like creatures from dreams. They are so elusive because they are made up of memory that isn’t always reminiscent of reality but only of one’s past ambitions, hopes, and necessities. Dinah could look and look at Isobel, and still she would not quite know the essence of what she meant to find.