but had moved when he married. Nobody knew his address.“They might know at the store,” said a bass voice from an open manhole near which I happened to be standing with the two thin-armed, barefoot little girls and their dim grandmothers. I entered the wrong store and a wary old Negro shook his head even before I could ask anything. I crossed over to a bleak grocery and there, summoned by a customer at my request, a woman’s voice from some wooden abyss in the floor, the manhole’s counterpart, cried out: Hunter Road, last house.
Hunter Road was miles away, in an even more dismal district, all dump and ditch, and wormy vegetable garden, and shack, and gray drizzle, and red mud, and several smoking stacks in the distance. I stopped at the last“house”a clapboard shack, with two or three similar ones farther away from the road and a waste of withered weeds all around. Sounds of hammering came from behind the house, and for several minutes I sat quite still in my old car, old and frail, at the end of my journey, at my gray goal,finis, my friends,finis, my friends. The time was around two. My pulse was 40 one minute and 100 the next. The drizzle crepitated against the hood of the car. My gun had migrated to my right trouser pocket. A nondescript cur came out from behind the house, stopped in surprise, and started good-naturedly woof-woofing at me, his eyes slit, his shaggy belly all muddy, and then walked about a little and woofed once more.
29
I got out of the car and slammed its door. How matter-of-fact, how square that slam sounded in the void of the sunless day!Woof, commented the dog perfunctorily. I pressed the bell button, it vibrated through my whole system.Personne.Je resonne.Repersonne. From what depth this re-nonsense? Woof, said the dog. A rush and a shuffle, and woosh-woof went the door.
Couple of inches taller. Pink-rimmed glasses. New, heaped-up hairdo, new ears. How simple! The moment, the death I had kept conjuring up for three years was as simple as a bit of dry wood. She was frankly and hugely pregnant. Her head looked smaller (only two seconds had passed really, but let me give them as much wooden duration as life can stand), and her pale-freckled cheeks were hollowed, and her bare shins and arms had lost all their tan, so that the little hairs showed. She wore a brown, sleeveless cotton dress and sloppy felt slippers.
“Weeell!” she exhaled after a pause with all the emphasis of wonder and welcome.
“Husband at home?” I croaked, fist in pocket.
I could not killher, of course, as some have thought. You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
“Come in,” she said with a vehement cheerful note. Against the splintery deadwood of the door, Dolly Schiller flattened herself as best she could (even rising on tiptoe a little) to let me pass, and was crucified for a moment, looking down, smiling down at the threshold, hollow-cheeked with roundpommettes, her watered-milk-white arms outspread on the wood. I passed without touching her bulging babe. Dolly-smell, with a faint fried addition. My teeth chattered like an idiot’s. “No, you stay out” (to the dog). She closed the door and followed me and her belly into the dollhouse parlor.
“Dick’s down there,” she said pointing with an invisible tennis racket, inviting my gaze to travel from the drab parlor-bedroom where we stood, right across the kitchen, and through the back doorway where, in a rather primitive vista, a dark-haired young stranger in overalls, instantaneously reprieved, was perched with his back to me on a ladder fixing something near or upon the shack of his neighbor, a plumper fellow with only one arm, who stood looking up.
This pattern she explained from afar, apologetically (“Men will be men”); should she call him in?
No.
Standing in the middle of the slanting room and emitting questioning“hm’s,” she made familiar Javanese gestures with her wrists and hands, offering me, in a brief display of humorous courtesy, to choose between a rocker and the divan (their bed after ten p.m.). I say “familiar” because one day she had welcomed me with the same wrist dance to her party in Beardsley. We both sat down on the divan. Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she lookedhad always lookedlike Botticelli’s russet Venusthe same soft nose, the same blurred beauty. In my pocket my fingers gently let go and repacked a little at the tip, within the handkerchief it was nested in, my unused weapon.
“that’s not the fellow I want,” I said.
The diffuse look of welcome left her eyes. Her forehead puckered as in the old bitter days:
“Notwho?”
“Where is he? Quick!”
“Look,” she said, inclining her head to one side and shaking it in that position. “Look, you are not going to bring that up.”
“I certainly am,” I said, and for a momentstrangely enough the only merciful, endurable one in the whole interviewwe were bristling at each other as if she were still mine.
A wise girl, she controlled herself.
Dick did not know a thing of the whole mess. He thought I was her father. He thought she had run away from an upper-class home just to wash dishes in a diner. He believed anything. Why should I want to make things harder than they were by raking up all that muck?
But, I said, she must be sensible, she must be a sensible girl (with her bare drum under that thin brown stuff), she must understand that if she expected the help I had come to give, I must have at least a clear comprehension of the situation.
“Come, his name!”
She thought I had guessed long ago. It was (with a mischievous and melancholy smile) such a sensational name. I would never believe it. She could hardly believe it herself.
His name, my fall nymph.
It was so unimportant, she said. She suggested I skip it. Would I like a cigarette?
No. His name.
She shook her head with great resolution. She guessed it was too late to raise hell and I would never believe the unbelievably unbelievable
I said I had better go, regards, nice to have seen her.
She said really it was useless, she would never tell, but on the other hand, after all”Do you really want to know who it was? Well, it was”
And softly, confidentially, arching her thin eyebrows and puckering her parched lips, she emitted, a little mockingly, somewhat fastidiously, not untenderly, in a kind of muted whistle, the name that the astute reader has guessed long ago.
Waterproof. Why did a flash from Hourglass Lake cross my consciousness? I, too, had known it, without knowing it, all along. There was no shock, no surprise. Quietly the fusion took place, and everything fell into order, into the pattern of branches that I have woven throughout this memoir with the express purpose of having the ripe fruit fall at the right moment; yes, with the express and perverse purpose of renderingshe was talking but I sat melting in my golden peaceof rendering that golden and monstrous peace through the satisfaction of logical recognition, which my most inimical reader should experience now.
She was, as I say, talking. It now came in a relaxed flow. He was the only man she had ever been crazy about. What about Dick? Oh, Dick was a lamb, they were quite happy together, but she meant something different. AndI had never counted, of course?
She considered me as if grasping all at once the incredibleand somehow tedious, confusing and unnecessaryfact that the distant, elegant, slender, forty-year-old valetudinarian in velvet coat sitting beside her had known and adored every pore and follicle of her pubescent body. In her washed-out gray eyes, strangely spectacled, our poor romance was for a moment reflected, pondered upon, and dismissed like a dull party, like a rainy picnic to which only the dullest bores had come, like a humdrum exercise, like a bit of dry mud caking her childhood.
I just managed to jerk my knee out of the range of a sketchy tapone of her acquired gestures.
She asked me not to be dense. The past was the past. I had been a good father, she guessedgranting methat. Proceed, Dolly Schiller.
Well, did I know that he had known her mother? That he was practically an old friend? That he had visited with his uncle in Ramsdale?oh, years agoand spoken at Mother’s club, and had tugged and pulled her, Dolly, by her bare arm onto his lap in front of everybody, and kissed her face, she was ten and furious with him? Did I know he had seen me and her at the inn where he was writing the very play she was to rehearse in Beardsley, two years later? Did I knowIthad been horrid of her to sidetrack me into believing that Clare was an old female, maybe a relative of his or a sometime lifemateand oh, what a close shave it had been when the WaceJournal carried his picture.
TheBriceland Gazette had not. Yes, very amusing.
Yes, she said, this world was just one gag after another, if somebody wrote up her life nobody would ever believe it.
At this point, there came brisk homey sounds from the kitchen into which Dick and Bill had lumbered in quest of beer. Through the doorway they noticed the visitor, and Dick entered the parlor.
“Dick, this is my Dad!” cried Dolly in a resounding violent voice that struck me as a totally strange, and new, and cheerful, and old, and sad, because the young