Dale Loves Sophie to Death (7 page)

When Buddy and Dinah were children they had often played with the Brooks children, Alan, Lawrence, and Isobel, who had for a while been Buddy’s wife. They had played in this same twilight among the trees and flowering bushes while Polly sat in a chair on the lawn with her drink, just waiting for their father to come home from work. For Polly’s two children, as they bobbed around her chair, these moments were as close to true conversation with their mother as they ever came.

Sometimes Polly would reminisce and offer out little pieces of her past. One evening when Dinah was almost ten, Polly had begun to talk about her own days away from home, when she was at college.

“Well, I was down at a dance at Princeton,” she had said, “I don’t remember who I was with, but I had on a beautiful dress—it was a black dress with a halter neck and one of those wide skirts, cut on the bias. I had bought it in New York just for that party. And I was very pretty, you know, but not at all glamorous or especially chic. While I was dancing with some boy there was a great stir. The band stopped playing in the middle of a song, and all the couples sort of fanned out around the stage to see what was happening. I thought there was going to be an announcement of some kind. But the most amazing thing! A girl was up there—she had just hopped up on the stage, I guess—and she started playing the drums! So the band played with her, too. I was awfully impressed. She had on a dark-blue dress, and she had that terrible color of red hair that’s mostly orange, really. Her face was a little like a pug dog…around the nose, somehow. But I thought she was the most attractive girl I’d ever seen! I would have given my soul to have been able to climb up on that bandstand and play the drums! She had such fun that she was a great hit, of course.”

Her mother had spoken all of a sudden that evening, prompted by who knew what impulse. But Dinah remembered what she said—all those bits and pieces of her mother’s recollections—she remembered them verbatim. The words her mother had used to frame her own memories had gone spinning out into the air like winged maple seeds, and they had taken root in Dinah’s mind. So, with the growth of the host, the memory itself became enlarged beyond any action that ever engendered it. Now those memories belonged no more to Polly, their originator, but were the property of Dinah, for whom they were the only definition of her mother.

Every now and then, Dinah would approach Buddy with these images, these ideas she had about her mother. “Don’t you remember, though, when Mother talked about the time she made herself a strapless dress out of a satin bedspread? Very daring at the time, I guess. Can you imagine her doing that?”

Buddy would look up from his book or away from the television. “Oh, really?” he would say, raising his eyebrows in good humor. “I don’t remember that, but you’re right. It’s hard to imagine.” Then he would go back to whatever he was doing, not having tried to imagine it at all.

But it had been Buddy who had phoned her at college when her father had been shot.

“What do you mean, he was ‘shot’?” Dinah had said, after she understood that he was all right but in the hospital.

“Oh, Lord, Dinah! It was just some seedy thing in a motel. There was some other couple, too,” Buddy had answered, sounding more put-out than anything else about the whole business.

“Do you mean Mother was with him?” Dinah had been absolutely at a loss.

“Lord, Dinah! You know Dad!” Buddy was angry at
her
, which made her feel unreasonably apologetic as she tried to piece the whole thing together. “Good Lord, grow up! Of
course
she wasn’t.”

When she had insisted on flying out, he had discouraged her. “You can see Dad when he gets out of the hospital. I don’t think Polly wants any company, really. Not right now, at least.” So Buddy had understood something about their mother that Dinah had not, because she had come home, anyway, and she had been useless and in the way. On the plane going home, however, she had imagined all the circumstances that might have been possible. The exotic ménage à trois. She was not altogether surprised, because her father’s nature was so extreme that, once she thought about it, she realized something just this dramatic had always been likely to happen.

While her father was in the hospital recuperating, Dinah stayed with her mother, but she could not help her mother deal with what was quite plainly just relief. Polly’s habitual expression of mildly penitent suffering had fallen away and been supplanted by a look of almost triumphant resignation which settled over her features and her tense body. She had loosened and gone lax at every joint. In the post office and at the grocery store the whole thing was discussed and puzzled over, because her father had been shot in the hip and leg at a little motel on the outskirts of Fort Lyman. Both the man who shot him and the woman with the man were said to have been drunk. By the time Dinah saw her father, she had been made too embarrassed to ask, and he was no less fierce; he didn’t seem to feel he owed her any explanation. He wasn’t feeling guilty or apologetic at all; in fact, he even seemed amused, which fueled Dinah’s imagination like kindling.

The story, as it circulated around town, was confusing, and everyone wanted to get at the core of it, though no one, of course, asked any member of the family about it. They simply offered their condolences when Dinah went down for the paper, as though her father had had a stroke. But Polly had begun at once, as though something had been confirmed, to sort and pack up her father’s belongings.

“Oh, of course he won’t be coming back
here!
” she said to Dinah with impatience and irritation, obviously wishing Dinah would not ask questions of her. And any questions Dinah did ask, Polly met with a look of exasperation. “Oh, Dinah, for heaven’s sake…” and she would trail off to one room or another or go take a long bath.

Her father’s recuperation had taken a long time, and, indeed, he had not ever come back to Polly’s house. He had lived in an apartment in Fort Lyman for about five years. It was near the hospital, where he underwent physical therapy for a while, and close to his office. Eventually, he bought the house in Enfield, and came home to it. When he did that, he officially discontinued his psychiatric practice, so that he wouldn’t have to commute even the short distance back to town.

Dinah could look from her bedroom window, across the street, directly into his study with its long french doors, and she often saw him looking through his papers or reading a book late into the night. She could watch his progress as he stacked the papers on his desk and made his way into the central hall and up the stairs, turning the lights out as he went. He moved slowly, dragging the leg that had been left damaged by that shot. But with his tall, spare figure and arrogant hawk’s head silhouetted in the windows as he passed them, he never aroused her pity. She only watched him, bemused. At last the light in his bedroom would go off, and Dinah would go to sleep.

Dinah had watched one day three summers ago from her window while two of her father’s gardeners erected a sign on his meticulously kept lawn. It was a cleverly designed sign, hung in the fashion, Dinah supposed, of the period of the house. Three narrow white boards were suspended one from the other by little chains. Three separate messages. All three were then suspended from a black iron bar and post by two sturdier chains. She could not read the messages on the slender boards, though, not at such a distance. When she took the children out for a walk and to get the mail, she stopped by her father’s wrought-iron fence for a long look. The three signs said:

PSYCHIATRY ELECTROENCEPHALOGRAMS FORTUNES TOLD

It was after the sign went up that people talked to her about her father as though he and she were not related. They were absolving her from responsibility. The people in Enfield were no less sophisticated about human behavior than people anywhere else, and some of them had always understood her father’s brooding cynicism. Almost everyone understood that the signs were intentionally amusing, but in the end they had come to think that beneath the surface of that slippery humor lay insanity of a sort. Dinah was not sure herself. She had sometimes considered the possibility of her father directing the force of his intellect, and his gloomy wisdom, to the outermost limits of sociability. Beyond the reach of sociability at all, perhaps, so that his keen intelligence would be cut asunder to range around among the most grotesque facets of his mind. Out of civilized bounds. She felt an obscure pride in the fact that it would be a profound madness, not any pitiful eccentricity. Sometimes she wondered what her father thought if he looked out his window and saw her with her three children ambling by his doorway on their daily walks. Did he have any compunction about his loss of her—her loss of him? But after eight summers she had become more and more accustomed to this peculiar arrangement.

Even so, when she was at her mother’s house in the evening fixing dinner or tending the children, she was roused to a great, repressed rage if she had to hear those nightly telephone conversations between her parents, to whose silences she had devoted the whole passion of her youth in her efforts toward mediation. This evening, as she sat with Lawrence and Pam among the flowering spirea, she did not move a muscle when the phone rang; she let Polly get up and go to it. But her body went tense, because she was so disturbed by this ritual. Her parents kept up a running chess game, too, in this manner, telling each other their moves over the phone and then rearranging the pieces on their separate boards. Whenever Dinah came across her mother’s board, laid out on the table in the study with its little ivory pieces all set up in the current positions, she found it inexplicably maddening. So she sat quite still while Polly went to answer the phone.

Dinah and Lawrence and Pam were sitting on the patio just at that moment before the onset of evening. As the day breaks away, the light settles on the edge of the horizon, seemingly sullen, not giving an inch, just a long horizontal bar of whiteness stretching on and on beneath the graying sky. Then it dissolves into a gentleness so unexpected that the dense and hazy quality of the air seems to be the embodiment of relief. The relief of the burden of that one day.

Chapter Four

A Party

D
inah did her grocery shopping at the little village store, even though the prices were higher than if she drove into Fort Lyman. She liked the sociability, and she would take the children along to the post office on the opposite side of Hoxsey Street, collect the mail, and then cross over to do each day’s shopping while the children dawdled behind her. In the summers she didn’t shop in great quantities. She didn’t need to, for one thing; she didn’t have the Artists’ Guild shop in West Bradford to attend to—a burden she shouldered almost exclusively September through May—and also she had to carry these groceries home in her arms. Besides, it was her summer luxury, with no other pressing duties at hand, not to think ahead, not to plan in advance.

She was having a dinner party of sorts this evening, so for once she had come to the store with a careful little list written out on a spare deposit slip she had torn out of her checkbook. Pam had taken all the children swimming that morning, so Dinah lingered among the limited selection of produce. She had tended the Hortons’ vegetable garden with sticky and ill-tempered determination in the afternoon sun, but now as a result she had lettuce and beautiful tomatoes, some splitting with ripeness on the vine. She began to sort through the potatoes in their metal bin; most of them yielded too readily to the pressure of her fingers. She found five that would do and put the paper bag of them into her cart.

She turned the corner of the aisle, which brought her to the meat counter, and there she came upon her father, who was just being handed whatever he had selected in a brown paper bundle tied with string. He looked predatory there with his neck projecting lengthily from his collar. He peered down at the meat in such sincere deliberation that with his height he was like a great, melancholy buzzard. He turned and saw her and smiled with that rather supercilious amusement he always assumed when they met in town.

“Hello, Dad. How are you?”

“Oh, I’m well. I’m well.” And he leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek. Then he took his package and went off to the checkout. Just as he was walking away from her he turned back obliquely, hindered by his stiff leg from turning easily around. “Say, Dinah,” he said, having to turn his head somewhat over his shoulder to catch her eye, “I really like that little boy of yours,” he said and then continued on his way.

Dinah moved along to the dairy section, because she saw that the butcher, Jim, who owned the store and had known her all her life and knew all her history, had been embarrassed at having to witness this confrontation. She looked over all the little cartons of cream—real cream, not the chemical-tasting, ultra-pasteurized variety—until she came upon the most recently dated ones, and she put two of those into her cart. She bought some unsalted butter in one big block, not in sticks, because it was so convenient for cooking. Dinah and her father met often in the village; it was unavoidable. They were civil; they weren’t sorry to see each other. But neither of them attempted a conversation of any length. When she saw that her father had left the store, she moved back to the meat counter to study the choices in the display cases. She wanted to grill shish kebabs tonight, and she was hoping to find a sirloin tip roast.

Jim was washing and drying his hands on the other side of the counter. “He almost never shops for himself, you know,” he said.

“Oh, no?” she asked.

“No…no. He had a girl helping him out for a while. A secretary, I guess. She used to come in sometimes. Now he usually sends one of those boys down. One of those people who works for him. I think that girl must have quit.”

“Oh, yes,” Dinah said pleasantly, drawing out the vowels a little to show her interest and also so as not to seem affronted. She wouldn’t have hurt Jim’s feelings.

“Well, he’s come in pretty often, lately. He just buys a few things at a time. I don’t think those boys ever get just what he wants.”