One April afternoon, Central Park, right across the street, turned green all at once. It was a green toned with gold and seemed less a color of leaves than a stained cloud settled down to stay. Rosalind brought her bird book out on the terrace and turned her face up to seek out something besides pigeons. She arched, to hang her long hair backward over the terrace railing, soaking in sunlight while the starlings whirled by.
The phone rang, and she went inside.
“I just knew you’d be there, Rosie,” her father said. “What a gorgeous day. Going to get hotter. You know what I’m thinking about? Lake George.”
“Let’s go right now,” Rosalind said.
The cottage was at Bolton Landing. Its balconies were built out over the water. You walked down steps and right off into the lake, or into the boat. In a lofty beamed living room, shadows of water played against the walls and ceiling. There was fine lake air, and chill pure evenings …
The intercom sounded. “Gristede’s, Daddy. They’re buzzing.”
Was it being in the theater that made her father, whenever another call came, exert himself to get more into the first? “Let’s think about getting up there, Rosie. Summer’s too short as it is. You ask Eva when she comes in. Warm her up to it. We’ll make our pitch this evening. She’s never even seen it … can you beat that?”
“I’m not sure she’ll even like it,” Rosalind said.
“Won’t like it? It’s hardly camping out. Of course she’ll love it. Get it going, Rosie baby. I’m aiming for home by seven.”
The grocer’s son who brought the order up wore jeans just like Rosalind’s. “It’s getting hot,” he remarked. “It’s about melted my ass off.”
“Let’s see if you brought everything.” She had tried to give up presiding over the food after her father remarried, but when her stepmother turned out not to care much about what happened in the kitchen, she had cautiously gone back to seeing about things.
“If I forgot, I’ll get it. But if you think of something—”
“I know, I’ll come myself. You think you got news?”
They were old friends. They sassed each other. His name was Luis—Puerto Rican.
It was after the door to the service entrance closed with its hollow echo, and was bolted, and the service elevator had risen, opened, and closed on Luis, that Rosalind felt the changed quality in things, a new direction, like the tilt of an airliner’s wing. She went to the terrace and found the park’s greenness surer of itself than ever. She picked up her book and went inside. A boy at school, seeing her draw birds, had given it to her. She stored it with her special treasures.
Closing the drawer, she jerked her head straight, encountering her own wide blue gaze in her bedroom mirror. From the entrance hall, a door was closing. She gathered up a pack of cards spread out for solitaire and slid them into a gilded box. She whacked at her long brown hair with a brush; then she went out. It was Eva.
Rosalind Jennings’s stepmother had short, raven-black glossy hair, a full red mouth, jetty brows and lashes. Shortsighted, she handled the problem in the most open way, by wearing great round glasses trimmed in tortoiseshell. All through the winter—a winter Rosalind would always remember as The Stepmother: Year I—Eva had gone around the apartment in gold wedge-heeled slippers, pink slacks, and a black chiffon blouse. Noiseless on the wall-to-wall carpets, the slippers slapped faintly against stockings or flesh when she walked—spaced, intimate ticks of sound. “Let’s face it, Rosie,” her father said, when Eva went off to the kitchen for a fresh drink as he tossed in his blackjack hand. “She’s a sexy dame.”
Sexy or not, she was kind to Rosalind. “I wouldn’t have married anybody you didn’t like,” her father told her. “That child’s got the most heavenly eyes,” she’d overheard Eva say.
Arriving now, having triple-locked the apartment door, Eva set the inevitable Saks parcels down on the foyer table and dumped her jersey jacket off her arm onto the chair with a gasp of relief. “It’s turned so hot!” Rosalind followed her to the kitchen, where she poured orange juice and soda over ice. Her nails were firm, hard, perfectly painted. They resembled, to Rosalind, ten small creatures who had ranked themselves on this stage of fingertips. Often they ticked off a pile of poker chips from top to bottom, red and white, as Eva pondered. “Stay …” or “Call …” or “I’m out …” then, “Oh, damn you, Nat … that’s twice in a row.”
“I’ve just been talking on the phone to Daddy,” Rosalind said. “I’ve got to warn you. He’s thinking of the cottage.”
“Up there in Vermont?”
“It’s in New York, on Lake George. Mother got it from her folks. You know, they lived in Albany. The thing is, Daddy’s always loved it. He’s hoping you will too, I think.”
Eva finished her orange juice. Turning to rinse the glass in the sink, she wafted out perfume and perspiration. “It’s a little far for a summer place.… But if it’s what you and Nat like, why, then …” She affectionately pushed a dark strand of Rosalind’s hair back behind her ear. Her fingers were chilly from the glass. “I’m yours to command.” Her smile, intimate and confident, seemed to repeat its red picture on every kitchen object.
Daughter and stepmother had got a lot chummier in the six months since her father had married. At first, Rosalind was always wondering what they thought of her. For here was a new “they,” like a whole new being. She had heard, for instance, right after the return from the Nassau honeymoon:
Eva: “I want to be sure and leave her room just the way it is.”
Nat: “I think that’s right. Change is up to her.”
But Rosalind could not stop her angry thought: You’d just better try touching my room! Her mother had always chosen her decor, always the rose motif, roses in the wallpaper and deeper rose valances and matching draperies. This was a romantic theme with her parents, accounting for her name. Her father would warble “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” while downing his whiskey. He would waltz his little girl around the room. She’d learned to dance before she could walk, she thought.
“Daddy sets the music together with what’s happening on the stage. He gets the dancers and actors to carry out the music. That’s different from composing or writing lyrics.” So Rosalind would explain to new friends at school, every year. Now she’d go off to some other school next fall, still ready with her lifelong lines. “You must have heard of some of his shows. Remember So-and-So, and then there was …” Watching their impressionable faces form their cries. “We’ve got the records of that!” “Was your mother an actress?” “My stepmother used to be an actress—nobody you’d know about. My mother died. She wasn’t ever in the theater. She studied art history at Vassar.” Yes, and married the assistant manager of his family firm: Jennings’ Finest Woolen Imports; he did not do well. Back to his first love, theater. From college on they thought they’d never get him out of it, and they were right. Some purchase he had chosen in West Germany turned out to be polyester, sixty percent. “I had a will to fail,” Nat Jennings would shrug, when he thought about it. “If your heart’s not in something, you can’t succeed” was her mother’s reasoning, clinging to her own sort of knowing, which had to do with the things you picked, felt about, what went where. Now here was another woman with other thoughts about the same thing. She’d better not touch my room, thought Rosalind, or I’ll … what? Trip her in the hallway, hide her glasses, throw the keys out the window?
“What are you giggling at, Rosie?”
Well might they ask, just back from Nassau at a time of falling leaves. “I’m wondering what to do with this leg of lamb. It’s too long and skinny.”
“Broil it like a great big chop.” Still honeymooning, they’d be holding hands, she bet, on the living-room sofa.
“Just you leave my room alone,” she sang out to this new Them. “Or I won’t cook for you!”
“Atta girl, Rosie!”
Now, six months later in the balmy early evening with windows wide open, they were saying it again. Daddy had come in, hardly even an hour later than he said, and there was the big conversation, starting with cocktails, lasting through dinner, all about Lake George and how to get there, where to start, but all totally impossible until day after tomorrow at the soonest.
“One of the few unpolluted lakes left!” Daddy enthused to Eva. It was true. If you dropped anything from the boat into the water, your mother would call from the balcony, “It’s right down there, darling,” and you’d see it as plainly as if it lay in sunlight at your feet and you could reach down for it instead of diving. The caretaker they’d had for years, Mr. Thibodeau, reported to them from time to time. Everything was all right, said Mr. Thibodeau. He had about fifteen houses on his list, for watching over, especially during the long winters. He was good. They’d left the cottage empty for two summers, and it was still all right. She remembered the last time they were there, June three years back. She and Daddy were staying while Mother drove back to New York, planning to see Aunt Mildred from Denver before she put out for the West again. “What a nuisance she can’t come here!” Mother had said. “It’s going to be sticky as anything in town, and when I think of that Thruway!”
“Say you’ve got food poisoning,” said Daddy. “Make something up.”
“But Nat! Can’t you understand? I really do want to see Mildred!” It was Mother’s little cry that still sounded in Rosalind’s head. “Whatever you do, please don’t go to the apartment,” Daddy said. He hadn’t washed dishes for a week; he’d be ashamed for an in-law to have an even lower opinion of him, though he thought it wasn’t possible. “It’s a long drive,” her mother pondered. “Take the Taconic, it’s cooler.” “Should I spend one night or two?”
Her mother was killed on the Taconic Parkway the next day by a man coming out of a crossover. There must have been a moment of terrible disbelief when she saw that he was actually going to cross in front of her. Wasn’t he looking, didn’t he see? They would never know. He died in the ambulance. She was killed at once.
Rosalind and her father, before they left, had packed all her mother’s clothing and personal things, but that was all they’d had the heart for. The rest they walked off and left, just so. “Next summer,” they had said, as the weeks wore on and still they’d made no move. The next summer came, and still they did not stir. One day they said, “Next summer.” Mr. Thibodeau said not to worry, everything was fine. So the Navaho rugs were safe, and all the pottery, the copper and brass, the racked pewter. The books would all be lined in place on the shelves, the music in the Victorian music rack just as it had been left, Schumann’s “Carnaval” (she could see it still) on top. And if everything was really fine, the canoe would be dry, though dusty and full of spiderwebs, suspended out in the boathouse, and the roof must be holding firm and dry, as Mr. Thibodeau would have reported any leak immediately. All that had happened, he said, was that the steps into the water had to have new uprights, the bottom two replaced, and that the eaves on the northeast corner had broken from a falling limb and been repaired.
Mention of the fallen limb recalled the storms. Rosalind remembered them blamming away while she and her mother huddled back of the stairway, feeling aimed at by the thunderbolts; or if Daddy was there, they’d sing by candlelight while he played the piano. He dared the thunder by imitating it in the lower bass.…
“Atta girl, Rosie.”
She had just said she wasn’t afraid to go up there alone tomorrow, take the bus or train, and consult with Mr. Thibodeau. The Thibodeaus had long ago taken a fancy to Rosalind; a French Canadian, Mrs. Thibodeau had taught her some French songs, and fed her on tourtière and beans.
“That would be wonderful,” said Eva.
“I just can’t let her do it,” Nat said.
“I can stay at Howard Johnson’s. After all, I’m seventeen.”
While she begged, her father looked at her steadily from the end of the table, finishing coffee. “I’ll telephone the Thibodeaus,” he finally said. “One thing you aren’t to do is stay in the house alone. Howard Johnson’s is okay. We’ll get you a room there.” Then, because he knew what the house had meant and wanted to let her know it, he took her shoulder (Eva not being present) and squeezed it, his eyes looking deep into hers, and Irish tears rising moistly. “Life goes on, Rosie,” he whispered. “It has to.”
She remembered all that, riding the bus. But it was for some unspoken reason that he had wanted her to go. And she knew that it was right for her to do it, not only to see about things. It was an important journey. For both of them? Yes, for them both.
Mr. Thibodeau himself met her bus, driving up to Lake George Village.
“Not many people yet,” he said. “We had a good many on the weekend, out to enjoy the sun. Starting a baseball team up here. The piers took a beating back in the winter. Not enough ice and too much wind. How’s your daddy?”
“He’s fine. He wants to come back here now.”
“You like your new mother? Shouldn’t ask. Just curious.”
“She’s nice,” said Rosalind.
“Hard to be a match for the first one.”
Rosalind did not answer. She had a quietly aware way of closing her mouth when she did not care to reply.
“Pretty?” pursued Mr. Thibodeau. Not only the caretaker, Mr. Thibodeau was also a neighbor. He lived between the property and the road. You had to be nice to the Thibodeaus; so much depended on them.
“Yes, she’s awfully pretty. She was an actress. She had just a little part in the cast of the show he worked with last year.”
“That’s how they met, was it?”
To Rosalind, it seemed that Eva had just showed up one evening in her father’s conversation at dinner. “There’s somebody I want you to meet, Rosie. She’s—well, she’s a she. I’ve seen her once or twice. I think you’ll like her. But if you don’t, we’ll scratch her, Rosie. That’s a promise.”
“Here’s a list, Mr. Thibodeau,” she said. “All the things Daddy wants done are on it. Telephone, plumbing, electricity … maybe Mrs. Thibodeau can come in and clean. I’ve got to check the linens for mildew. Then go through the canned stuff and make a grocery list.”
“We got a new supermarket since you stopped coming, know that?”
“I bet.”
“We’ll go tomorrow. I’ll take you.”
The wood-lined road had been broken into over and over on the lake side, the other side, too, by new motels. Signs about pools, TV, vacancy came rudely up and at them, until, swinging left, they entered woods again and drew near the cutoff to the narrow, winding drive among the pines. “Thibodeau” the mailbox read in strong, irregular letters, and by its side a piece of weathered plywood nailed to the fence post said “Jennings,” painted freshly over the ghost of old lettering beneath.
She bounced along with Mr. Thibodeau, who, his black hair grayed over, still had his same beaked nose, which in her mind gave him his Frenchness and his foreignness. Branches slapped the car window. The tires squished through ruts felted with fallout from the woods. They reached the final bend. “Stop,” said Rosalind, for something white that gave out a sound like dry bones breaking had passed beneath the wheels. She jumped out. It was only birch branches, half rotted. “I’ll go alone.” She ran ahead of his station wagon, over pine needles and through the fallen leaves of two autumns, which slowed her motion until she felt the way she did in dreams.
The cottage was made of natural wood, no shiny lacquer covering it; boughs around it, pine and oak, pressed down like protective arms. The reach of the walls was laced over with undergrowth, so that the house at first glance looked small as a hut, not much wider than the door. Running there, Rosalind tried the knob with the confidence of a child running to her mother, only to find it locked, naturally; then with a child’s abandon, she flung out her arms against the paneling, hearing her heart thump on the wood until Mr. Thibodeau gently detached her little by little as though she had got stuck there.
“Now there … now there … just let me get hold of this key.” He had a huge wire ring for his keys, labels attached to each. His clientele. “Des clients, vous en avez beaucoup,” Rosalind had once said to him as she was starting French in school. But Mr. Thibodeau was unregretfully far from his Quebec origins. His family had come there from northern Vermont to get a milder climate. Lake George was a sun trap, a village sliding off the Adirondacks toward the lake, facing a daylong exposure.
The key ground in the lock. Mr. Thibodeau kicked the base of the door, and the hinges whined. He let her enter alone, going tactfully back to his station wagon for nothing at all. He gave her time to wander before he followed her.
She would have had to come someday, Rosalind thought, one foot following the other, moving forward: the someday was this one. It wasn’t as if anything had actually “happened” there. The door frame that opened from the entrance hall into the living room did not face the front door but was about ten feet from it to the left. Thus the full scope of the high, shadowy room, which was the real heart of the cottage, opened all at once to the person entering. Suddenly, there was an interior world. The broad windows opposite, peaked in an irregular triangle at the top, like something in a modernistic church, opened onto the lake, and from the water a rippling light, muted by shade, played constantly on the high-beamed ceiling. Two large handwoven Indian rugs covered the central area of floor; on a table before the windows, a huge pot of brown-and-beige pottery was displayed, filled with money plant that had grown dusty and ragged. There were coarse-fibered curtains in off-white monk’s cloth, now dragging askew, chair coverings in heavy fabric, orange-and-white cushions, and the piano, probably so out of tune now with the damp it would never sound right, which sat closed and silent in the corner. An open stairway, more like a ladder than a stair, rose to the upper-floor balcony, with bedrooms in the wing. “We’re going to fall and break our silly necks someday,” she could hear her mother saying. “It’s pretty, though.” The Indian weaving of the hawk at sunrise, all black and red, hung on the far left wall.
She thought of her mother, a small, quick woman with bronze, close-curling hair cut short, eager to have what she thought of as “just the right thing,” wandering distant markets, seeking out things for the cottage. It seemed to Rosalind when she opened the door past the stairwell into the bedroom that her parents had used, that surely she would find that choosing, active ghost in motion over a chest or moving a curtain at the window, and that surely, ascending the dangerous stair to look into the two bedrooms above, she would hear the quick voice say, “Oh, it’s you, Rosalind, now you just tell me …” But everything was silent.
Rosalind came downstairs. She returned to the front door and saw that Mr. Thibodeau had driven away. Had he said something about going back for something? She closed the door quietly, reentered the big natural room, and let the things there speak.
For it was all self-contained, knowing and infinitely quiet. The lake gave its perpetual lapping sound, like nibbling fish in shallow water, now and then splashing up, as though a big one had flourished. Lap, lap against the wooden piles that supported the balcony. Lap against the steps, with a swishing motion on the lowest one, a passing-over instead of an against sound. The first steps were replaced, new, the color fresh blond instead of worn brown. The room heard the lapping, the occasional splash, the swish of water.
Rosalind herself was being got through to by something even less predictable than water. What she heard was memory: voices quarreling. From three years ago they woke to life. A slant of light—that had brought them back. Just at this time of day, she had been coming in from swimming. The voices had climbed the large, clear windows, clawing for exit, and finding none, had fled like people getting out of a burning theater, through the door to the far right that opened out onto the balcony. She had been coming up the steps from the water when the voices stampeded over her, frightening, intense, racing outward from the panic within. “You know you do and you know you will … there’s no use to lie, I’ve been through all that. Helpless is all I can feel, all I can be. That’s the awful part …!” “I didn’t drive all this way just to get back into that. Go on, get away to New York with dear Aunt Mildred. Who’s to know, for that matter, if it’s Mildred at all?” “You hide your life like a card in the deck and then have the nerve—! Oh, you’re a great magician, aren’t you?” “Hush, she’s out there … hush, now … you must realize—” “I do nothing but realize—” “Hush … just … no …” And their known selves returned to them as she came in, dripping, pretending nothing had happened, gradually believing her own pretense.
The way she’d learned to do, all the other times. Sitting forgotten, for the moment, in an armchair too big back in New York, listening while her heart hurt until her mother said, “Darling, go to your room, I’ll be there in a minute.” Even on vacation, it was sometimes the same thing. And Mother coming in later, as she half slept, half waited, to hold her hand and say, “Just forget it now, tomorrow it won’t seem real. We all love each other. Tomorrow you won’t even remember.” Kissed and tucked in, she trusted. It didn’t happen all the time. And the tomorrows were clear and bright. The only trouble was, this time there hadn’t been any tomorrow, only the tomorrow of her mother’s driving away. Could anybody who sounded like that, saying those things, have a wreck the very next morning and those things have nothing to do with it?
Maybe I got the times mixed up.
(“She had just a little part in the cast of the show he worked with last year.” “That’s how they met, was it?”) (“Your mother got the vapors sometimes. The theater scared her.” She’d heard her father say that.)
I dreamed it all, she thought, and couldn’t be sure this wasn’t true, though wondered if she could dream so vividly that she could see the exact print of her wet foot just through the doorway there, beside it the drying splash from the water’s runnel down her leg. But it could have been another day.
Why not just ask Daddy?
At the arrival of this simple solution, she let out a long sigh, flung her hands back of her head, and stretched out on the beautiful rug her mother had placed there. Her eyes dimmed; she felt the lashes flutter downward.…
A footstep and a voice awakened her from how short a sleep she did not know. Rolling over and sitting up, she saw a strange woman—short, heavyset, with faded skin, gray hair chopped off around her face, plain run-down shoes. She was wearing slacks. Then she smiled and things about her changed.
“You don’t remember me, do you? I’m Marie Thibodeau. I remember you and your mom and your dad. That was all bad. Gros dommage. But you’re back now. You’ll have a good time again, eh? We thought maybe you didn’t have nothing you could eat yet. You come back with me. I going make you some nice lunch. My husband said to come find you.”
She rose slowly, walked through shadows toward the woman, who still had something of the quality of an apparition. Did she think that because of her mother, others must have died too? She followed. The lunch was the same as years before: the meat pie, the beans, the catsup and relish and the white bread taken sliced from its paper. And the talk, too, was nearly the same: kind things said before, repeated now; chewed, swallowed.
“You don’t remember me, but I remember you. You’re the Nat Jennings’s daughter, used to come here with your folks.” This was what the boy said, in Howard Johnson’s.
“We’re the tennis ones—Dunbar,” said the girl, who was his sister, not his date; for saying “tennis” had made Rosalind remember the big house their family owned—“the villa,” her father called it—important grounds around it, and a long frontage on the lake. She remembered them as strutting around smaller then, holding rackets that looked too large for their bodies. They had been allowed on the court only at certain hours, along with their friends, but even then they had wished to be observed. Now here they were before her, grown up and into denim, like anybody else. Paul and Elaine. They had showed up at the entrance to the motel restaurant, tan and healthy. Paul had acquired a big smile; Elaine a breathless hesitating voice, the kind Daddy didn’t like, it was so intended to tease.
“Let’s all find a booth together,” Paul Dunbar said.
Rosalind said, “I spent half the afternoon with the telephone man, the other half at the grocery. Getting the cottage opened.”
“You can come up to our house after we eat. Not much open here yet. We’re on spring holidays.”
“They extended it. Outbreak of measles.”
“She made that up,” said the Dunbar boy, who was speaking straight and honestly to Rosalind. “We told them we had got sick and would be back next week.”
“It’s because we are so in-tell-i-gent.… Making our grades is not a prob-lem,” Elaine said in her trick voice.
“We’ve got the whole house to ourselves. Our folks won’t be coming till June. Hey, why don’t you move down with us?”
“I can’t,” said Rosalind. “Daddy’s coming up tomorrow. And my stepmother. He got married again.”
“Your parents split?”
“No … I mean, not how you think. My mother was killed three years ago, driving to New York. She had a wreck.”
“Jesus, what a break. I’m sorry, Rosalind.”
“You heard about it, Paul. We both did.”
“It’s still a tough break.”
“Mr. Thibodeau’s been helping me. Mrs. Thibodeau’s cleaning up. They’re coming tomorrow.” If this day is ever over.
She went with them after dinner.…
The Dunbar house could be seen from the road, a large two-story house on the lake, with white wood trim. There were two one-story wings, like smaller copies of the central house, their entrances opening at either side, the right one on a flagstone walk, winding through a sloping lawn, the left on a porte-cochere, where the Dunbars parked. Within, the large rooms were shuttered, the furniture dust-covered. The three of them went to the glassed-in room on the opposite wing and put some records on. They danced on the tiled floor amid the white wicker furniture.
Had they heard a knocking or hadn’t they? A strange boy was standing in the doorway, materialized. Elaine had cried, “Oh goodness, Fenwick, you scared me!” She moved back from Paul’s controlling rhythm. They were all facing the stranger. He was heavier than Paul; he was tall and grown to the measure of his big hands and feet. He looked serious and easily detachable from the surroundings; it wasn’t possible to guess by looking at him where he lived or what he was doing there.
“Fenwick …” Paul was saying to him. What sort of name was that? He strode over to the largest chaise longue, and fitted himself into it. Paul introduced Rosalind to Fenwick.
“I have a mile-long problem to solve before Thursday,” Fenwick said. “I’m getting cross-eyed. You got a beer?”
“Fenwick is a math-uh-mat-i-cul gene-i-yus,” Elaine told Rosalind. The record finished and she switched off the machine.
“Fenwick wishes he was,” said Fenwick.
It seemed that they were all at some school together, called Wakeley, over in Vermont. They knew people to talk about together. “I’ve been up about umpteen hours,” Rosalind said. “I came all the way from New York this morning.”
“Just let me finish this beer, and I’ll take you home,” said Fenwick.
“It’s just Howard Johnson’s,” she said.
“There are those that call it home,” said Fenwick, downing beer.
They walked together to the highway, where Fenwick had left his little old rickety car. The trees were bursting from the bud, you could practically smell them grow, but the branches were still dark, and cold-looking and wet, because it had rained while they were inside. The damp road seamed beneath the tires. There were not many people around. She hugged herself into her raincoat.
“The minute I saw you I remembered you,” Fenwick said. “I just felt like we were friends. You used to go to that little park with all the other kids. Your daddy would put you on the seesaw. He pushed it up and down for you. But I don’t guess you’d remember me.”
“I guess I ought to,” Rosalind said. “Maybe you grew a lot.”
“You can sure say that. They thought I wasn’t going to stop.” The sign ahead said “Howard Johnson’s.” “I’d do my problem better if we had some coffee.”
“Tomorrow maybe,” she said. “I’m dead tired.” But what she thought was, He likes me.
At the desk she found three messages, all from Daddy and Eva. “Call when you come in.” “Call as soon as you can.” “Call even if late.” She called.
“So it’ll be late tomorrow, maybe around dinner. What happened was …” He went on and on. With Nat Jennings, you got used to postponements, so her mother always said. “How’s it going, Rosie? I’ve thought about you every minute.”
“Everything’s ready for you, or it will be when you come.”
“Don’t cook up a special dinner. We might be late. It’s a long road.”
In a dream her mother was walking with her. They were in the library at Lake George. In the past her mother had often gone there to check out books. She was waiting for a certain book she wanted, but it hadn’t come back yet. “But you did promise me last week,” she was saying to somebody at the desk; then she was walking up the street with Rosalind, and Rosalind saw the book in her shopping bag. “You got it after all,” she said to her mother. “I just found it lying there on the walk,” her mother said, and then Rosalind remembered how she had leaned down to pick up something. “That’s nice,” said Rosalind, satisfied that things could happen this way. “I think it’s nice, too,” said her mother, and they went along together.
By noon the next day her work was done, but she felt bad because she had found something—a scarf in one of the dresser drawers. It was a sumptuous French satin scarf in a jagged play of colors, mainly red, a shade her mother, with her coppery hair, had never worn. It smelled of Eva’s perfume. So they had been up here before, she thought, but why—this far from New York? And why not say so? Helpless was what her mother said she felt. Can I, thought Rosalind, ask Daddy about this, too?
In the afternoon she drove up into the Adirondacks with Elaine and Paul Dunbar. They took back roads, a minor highway that crossed from the lakeshore road to the Thruway; another beyond that threaded along the bulging sides of the mountains. They passed one lake after another: some small and limpid; others half-choked with water lilies and thickly shaded where frogs by the hundreds were chorusing, invisible amid the fresh lime-green; and some larger still, marked with stumps of trees mysteriously broken off. From one of these, strange birdcalls sounded. Then the road ran upward. Paul pulled up under some tall pines and stopped.
“We’re going to climb,” he announced.
It suited Rosalind because Elaine had just asked her to tell her “all about the theater, every single thing you know.” She wouldn’t have to do that, at least. Free of the car, they stood still in deserted air. There was no feel of houses near. The brother and sister started along a path they apparently knew. It led higher, winding through trees, with occasional glimpses of a rotting lake below and promise of some triumphant view above. Rosalind followed next to Paul, with Elaine trailing behind. Under a big oak they stopped to rest.
Through the leaves a small view opened up; there was a little valley below, with a stream running through it. The three of them sat hugging their knees and talking, once their breath came back. “Very big deal,” Paul was saying. “Five people sent home, weeping parents outside offices, and everybody tiptoeing past. About what? The whole school smokes pot, everybody knows it. Half the profs were on it. Remember old Borden?”
Elaine’s high-pitched laugh. “He said, ‘Just going for a joint,’ when he pushed into the john one day. Talking back over his shoulder.”
“What really rocked the boat was when everybody started cheating. Plain and fancy.”
“What made them start?” Rosalind asked. Pot was passed around at her school, too, in the Upper Eighties, but you could get into trouble about it.
“You know Miss Hollander was heard to say out loud one day, ‘The dean’s a shit.’ ”
“That’s the source of the whole fucking mess,” said Paul. “The stoopid dean’s a shit.”
“Is he a fag?” asked Rosalind, not too sure of language like this.
“Not even that,” said Paul, and picked up a rock to throw. He put down his hand to Rosalind. “Come on, we got a little farther to climb.”
The path snaked sharply upward. She followed his long legs and brown loafers, one with the stitching breaking at the top, and stopping for breath, she looked back and discovered they were alone. “Where’s Elaine?”
“She’s lazy.” He stopped high above to wait for her. She looked up to him and saw him turn to face her, jeans tight over his narrow thighs and flat waist. He put a large hand down to pull her up, and grinned as she came unexpectedly too fast; being thin and light, she sailed up so close they bumped together. His face skin was glossy with sweat. “Just a little farther,” he encouraged her. His front teeth were not quite even. Light exploded from the tips of his ears. Grappling at roots, avoiding sheer surfaces of rock, gaining footholds on patches of earth, they burst finally out on a ledge of rough but fairly flat stone, chiseled away as though in a quarry, overlooking a dizzying sweep of New York countryside. “Oh.” Rosalind caught her breath. “How gorgeous! We live high up with a terrace over Central Park,” she confided excitedly. “But that’s nothing like this!”
Paul put his arm around her. “Don’t get too close. You know some people just love heights. They love ’em to death. Just show them one and off they go.”
“Not me.”
“Come here.” He led her a little to the side, placing her—“Not there, here”—at a spot where two carved lines crossed, as though Indians had marked it for something. Then, his arm close around her, he pressed his mouth down on hers. Her long brown hair fell backward over his shoulder. If she struggled, she might pull them both over the edge. “Don’t.” She broke her mouth away. His free hand was kneading her.
“Why? Why not?” The words burrowed into her ear like objects.
“I hadn’t thought of you … not for myself.”
“Think of me now. Let’s just stay here a minute.”
But she slipped away and went sliding back down. Arriving in the level space with a torn jacket and a skinned elbow she found Elaine lying back against a rock, apparently sleeping. A camera with a telescope lens was resting on the canvas shoulder bag she had carried up the hill.
Elaine sat up, opening her eyes. Rosalind stopped, and Paul’s heavy stride, overtaking, halted close behind her. She did not want to look at him, and was rubbing at the blood speckled out on her scratched arm where she’d fallen against a limb.
“Paul thinks he’s ir-ree-sisty-bul,” Elaine said. “Now we know it isn’t so.”
Looking up, Rosalind could see the lofty ledge where she and Paul had been. Elaine picked up the camera, detached the lens, and fitted both into the canvas bag. “Once I took a whole home movie. That was the time he was screwing the waitress from the pizza place.”
“Oh, sure, get funny,” said Paul. He had turned an angry red.
In the car, Elaine leaned back to speak to Rosalind. “We’re known to be a little bit crazy. Don’t you worry, Ros-uh-lind.”
Paul said nothing. He drove hunched forward over the wheel.
“Last summer was strictly crazy, start to finish,” said Elaine. “Wasn’t that true, Paul?”
“It was pretty crazy,” said Paul. “Rosalind would have loved it,” he added. He was getting mad at her now, she thought.
She asked to hop out at the road to the cottage, instead of going to the motel. She said she wanted to see Mr. Thibodeau.
“Sorry you didn’t like the view,” said Paul from the wheel. He was laughing now; his mood had changed.
Once they’d vanished, she walked down the main road to the Fenwick mailbox.
From the moment she left the road behind she had to climb again, not as strenuously as up to the mountain ledge, but a slow, winding climb up an ill-tended road. The house that finally broke into view after a sharp turn was bare of paint and run-down. There was a junk car in the wide yard, the parts just about picked off it, one side sitting on planks, and a litter of household odds and ends nearby. A front porch, sagging, was covered with a tangle of what looked to be hunting and camping things. From behind, a dog barked, a warning sound to let her know who was in charge. There was mud in the path to the door.
Through the window of a tacked-on wing to the right, there was Fenwick, sure enough, at a table with peeling paint, in a plain kitchen chair, bending over a large notebook. Textbooks and graph papers were scattered around him. She rapped on the pane and summoned his attention, as though from another planet. He came to the door.
“Oh, it’s you, Rose.”
“Rosalind.”
“I’m working on my problem.” He came out and joined her. Maybe he was a genius, Rosalind thought, to have got a fellowship to that school, making better grades than the Dunbars.
“I’ve been out with Paul and Elaine.”
“Don’t tell me Paul took you up to that lookout.”
She nodded. They sat down on a bench that seemed about to fall in.
“Dunbar’s got a collection of pictures—girls he’s got to go up there. It’s just a dumb gimmick.”
“He thinks it’s funny,” she said, and added, “I left.”
“Good. They’re on probation, you know. All that about school’s being suspended’s not true. I’m out for another reason, studying for honors. But—”
A window ran up. A woman’s voice came around the side of the house. “Henry, I told you—”
“But I need a break, Mother,” he said, without turning his head.
“Is your name Henry?” Rosalind asked.
“So they tell me. Come on, I’ll take you back where you’re staying.”
“I just wanted to see where you lived.” He didn’t answer. Probably it wasn’t the right thing. He walked her down the hill, talking all the way, and put her into his old Volkswagen.
“The Dunbars stick too close together. You’d think they weren’t kin. They’re like a couple dating. They make up these jokes on people. I was there the other night to help them through some math they failed. But it didn’t turn out that way. Know why? They’ve got no mind for work. They think something will happen, so they won’t have to.” He hesitated, silent, as the little car swung in and out of the wooded curves. “I think they make love,” he said, very low. It was a kind of gossip. “There’s talk at school.… Now don’t go and tell about it.”
“You’re warning me,” she said.
“That’s it. There’s people living back in the woods, no different from them. Mr. Thibodeau and Papa—they hunt bear together, way off from here, high up. Last winter I went, too, and there was a blizzard. We shot a bear but it looked too deep a snow to get the carcass out, but we did, after a day or so. We stayed with these folks, brother and sister. Some odd little kids running around.
“If they get thrown out of Wakeley, they can go somewhere else. Their folks have a lot of money. So no problem.”
“But I guess anywhere you have to study,” said Rosalind.
He had brought her to the motel, and now they got out and walked to a plot where shrubs were budding on the slant of hill above the road. Fenwick had speculative eyes that kept to themselves, and a frown from worry or too many figures, just a small thread between his light eyebrows.
“When I finish my problem, any minute now, I’ll go back to school.”
“My mother died three years ago, in June,” said Rosalind.
“I knew that. It’s too bad, Rosalind. I’m sorry.”
“Did you know her?” Rosalind experienced an eagerness, expectation, as if she doubted her mother’s ever having been known.
“I used to see her with you,” said Fenwick. “So I guess I’d know her if I saw her.” His hand had appeared on her shoulder. She was at about the right height for that.
“Nobody will ever see her again,” she said. He pulled her closer.
“If I come back in the summer, I’d like to see you, Rosalind.”
“Me, too,” she said.
“I’ve got some stuff you can read.” He was squinting. The sun had come through some pale clouds.
“Things you wrote?” She wondered at him.
“I do a lot of things. I’ll have this car.” He glanced toward it doubtfully. “It’s not much of a car, though.”
“It’s a fine car,” she said, so he could walk off to it, feeling all right, and wave to her.
Rosalind was surprised and obscurely hurt by the message she received at the motel: namely, that her father and stepmother had already arrived and had called by for her. She had some money left over from what her father had given her, and not wanting to call, she took a taxi down to the cottage.
Her hurt sprang from thwarted plans. She had meant to prepare for them, greet them, have dinner half done, develop a festive air. Now they would be greeting her.
In the taxi past Mr. Thibodeau’s house, she saw a strange car coming toward them that made them draw far to one side, sink treacherously among loose fallen leaves. A Chevrolet sedan went past; the man within, a stranger, was well dressed and wore a hat. He looked up to nod at the driver and glance keenly within at his passenger.
“Who was that?” Rosalind asked.
“Griffin, I think his name is,” the driver said. “Real estate,” he added.
There had been a card stuck in the door when she had come, Rosalind recalled, and a printed message: “Thinking of selling? Griffin’s the Guy.”
Then she was alighting, crying, “Daddy! Eva! It’s me!” And they were running out, crying, “There she is! You got the call?” Daddy was tossing her, forgetting she’d grown; he almost banged her head against a beam. “You nearly knocked my three brains out,” she laughed. “It’s beautiful!” Eva cried, about the cottage. She spread her arms wide as wings and swirled across the rugs in a solo dance. “It’s simply charming!”
Daddy opened the piano with a flourish. He began thumping the old keys, some of which had gone dead from the damp. But “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” was unmistakably coming out. They were hugging and making drinks and going out to look at the boat, kneeling down to test the still stone-chill water.
“What good taste your mother had!” Eva told her, smiling. “The apartment … now this!” She was kind.
In the late afternoon Rosalind and her father lowered and launched the canoe, and finding that it floated without a leak and sat well in the water, they decided to test it. Daddy had changed his gray slacks and blazer for gabardine trousers and a leather jacket. He wore a denim shirt. Daddy glistened with life, and what he wore was more important than what other people wore. He thought of clothes, evidently, but he never, that she could remember, discussed them. They simply appeared on him, like various furs or fleece that he could shed suddenly and grow just as suddenly new. Above button-down collars or open-throated knit pullovers or turtlenecks or black bow ties, his face, with its slightly ruddy look, even in winter, its cleft chin and radiating crinkles, was like a law of attraction, drawing whatever interested, whatever lived. In worry or grief, he hid it, that face. Then the clothes no longer mattered. Rosalind had sometimes found him in a room alone near a window, still, his face bent down behind one shoulder covered with some old faded shirt, only the top of his head showing and that revealed as startlingly gray, the hair growing thin. But when the face came up, it would seem to resume its livingness as naturally as breath, his hair being the same as ever, barely sprinkled with gray. It was the face for her, his gift.
“Did you see the real estate man?” Rosalind asked over her shoulder, paddling with an out-of-practice wobble.
“Griffin? Oh, yes, he was here. Right on the job, those guys.”
They paddled along, a stone’s throw from the shore. To their right the lake stretched out wide and sunlit. One or two distant fishing boats dawdled near a small island. The lake, a creamy blue, flashed now and again in air that was still sharp.
“Daddy, did you know Eva a long time?”
There was a silence from behind her. “Not too long.” Then he said what he’d said before. “She was a member of the cast. Rosie, we shouldn’t have let you go off by yourself. I realized that this morning. I woke up early thinking it, and jumped straight out of bed. By six I’d packed. Who’ve you been seeing?”
“I ran into the Dunbars, Paul and Elaine, down in the big white house, you know. They’re here from school. I have to run from Mrs. Thibodeau. She wants to catch and feed me. And then there’s Fenwick.”
“Some old guy up the hill who sells junk … is that the one?”
“No, his son. He’s a mathematical genius, Daddy.”
“Beware of mathematical geniuses,” her father said, “especially if their fathers sell junk.”
“You always told me that,” said Rosalind. “I just forgot.”
When they came in they were laughing. She and Eva cooked the meals. Daddy played old records, forgoing gin rummy for once. That was the first day.
“Wait! Look now! Look!”
It was Eva speaking while Daddy blindfolded Rosalind. They had built a fire. Somebody had found in a shop uptown the sort of stuff you threw on it to make it sparkle. The room on a gloomy afternoon, though shut up tight against a heavy drizzle, was full of warmth and light. Elaine and Paul Dunbar were there, sitting on the couch. Fenwick was there, choosing to crouch down on a hassock in the corner like an Indian, no matter how many times he was offered a chair. He had been followed in by one of the Fenwick dogs, a huge German shepherd with a bushy, perfectly curling tail lined with white, which he waved at times from side to side like a plume, and when seated, furled about his paws. He smelled like a wet dog owned by a junk dealer.
At the shout of “Look now!” Daddy whipped off the blindfold. The cake had been lighted—eighteen candles—a shining delight. They had cheated a little to have a party for Rosalind; her birthday wasn’t till the next week. But the idea was fun. Eva had thought of it because she had found a box full of party things in the unused bedroom: tinsel, sparklers, masks, and a crepe-paper tablecloth with napkins. She had poured rum into some cherry Kool-Aid and floated orange slices across the top. She wore a printed off-the-shoulder blouse with a denim skirt and espadrilles. Her big glasses glanced back fire and candlelight. The young people watched her lighting candles for the table with a long, fancy match held in brightly tipped fingers. Daddy took the blue bandanna blindfold and wound it pirate-fashion around his forehead. He had contrived an eye patch for one eye. “Back in the fifties these things were a status symbol,” he said, “but I forget what status they symbolized.”
“Two-car garage but no Cadillac,” Paul said.
Daddy winked at Elaine. “My daughter’s friends get prettier every day.”
“So does your daughter,” Paul said.
Eva passed them paper plates of birthday cake.
“She’s getting to the dangerous age, not me. Hell, I was there all the time.”
Everyone laughed but Fenwick. He fed small bites of cake to the dog and large ones to himself, while Rosalind refilled his glass.
The friends had brought her presents. A teddy bear dressed in blue jeans from Elaine. A gift-shop canoe in birchbark from Paul. The figure of an old man carved in wood from Fenwick. His father had done it, he said. Rosalind held it up. She set it down. He watched her. He was redeeming his father, whom nobody thought much of. “It’s grand,” she said, “I love it.” Fenwick sat with his hand buried in the dog’s thick ruff. His nails, cleaned up for coming there, would get grimy in the dog’s coat.
Rosalind’s father so far had ignored Fenwick. He was sitting on a stool near Elaine and Paul, talking about theater on campuses, how most campus musicals went dead on Broadway, the rare one might survive, but usually … Eva approached the dog, who growled at her. “He won’t bite,” said Fenwick.
“Is a mathematician liable to know whether or not a dog will bite?” Eva asked.
“Why not?” asked Fenwick.
“You’ve got quite a reputation to live up to,” Eva pursued. She was kneeling near him, close enough to touch, holding her gaze, like her voice, very steady. “I hear you called a genius more often than not.”
“You can have a genius rating in something without setting the world on fire,” said Fenwick. “A lot of people who’ve got them are just walking around doing dumb things, the same as anybody.”
“I’ll have to think that over,” Eva said.
There came a heavy pounding at the door, and before anybody could go to it, a man with a grizzled beard, weathered skin, battered clothes, and a rambling walk entered the room. He looked all around until he found Fenwick. “There you are,” he said.
Rosalind’s father had risen. Nobody said anything. “I’m Nat Jennings.” Daddy put out his hand. “This is my wife. What can we do for you?”
“It’s my boy,” said Fenwick’s father, shaking hands. “His mother was looking for him, something she’s wanting him for. I thought if he wasn’t doing nothing …”
“Have a drink,” said Nat.
“Just pour it straight out of the bottle,” said Fenwick’s father, who had taken the measure of the punch.
Fenwick got up. “That’s O.K., Mr. Jennings. I’ll just go on with Papa.”
The dog had moved to acknowledge Mr. Fenwick, who had downed his drink already. Now the boy came to them both, the dog being no longer his. He turned to the rest of the room, which seemed suddenly to be of a different race. “We’ll go,” he said. He turned again at the living-room entrance. “Thanks.”
Rosalind ran after them. She stood in the front door, hidden by the wall of the entrance from those in the room, and leaned out into the rain. “Oh, Mr. Fenwick, I love the carving you did!”
He glanced back. “Off on a bear hunt, deep in the snow. Had to do something.”
“Goodbye, Fenwick. Thanks for coming!”
He stopped to answer, but said nothing. For a moment his look was like a voice, crying out to her from across something. For the first time in her life, Rosalind felt the force that pulls stronger than any other. Just to go with him, to be, even invisibly, near. Then the three of them—tall boy, man, and dog, stair-stepped together—were walking away on the rainy path.
When she went inside, she heard Paul Dunbar recalling how Nat Jennings used to organize a fishing derby back in one of the little lakes each summer. He would get the lake stocked, and everybody turned out with casting rods and poles to fish it out. (Rosalind remembered; she had ridden on his shoulder everywhere, till suddenly, one summer, she had got too big for that, and once it had rained.) “And then there were those funny races down in the park—you folks put them on. One year I won a prize!” (Oh, that too, she remembered, her mother running with two giant orange bows like chrysanthemums, held in either hand, orange streamers flying, her coppery hair in the sun.) “You ought to get all that started again.”
“It sounds grand, but I guess you’d better learn how yourselves,” Eva was saying. “We’ll probably not be up here at all.”
“Not be here!” Rosalind’s cry as she returned from the door was like an alarm. “Not be here!” A silence was suddenly on them.
Her father glanced up, but straightened out smoothly. “Of course we’ll be here. We’ll have to work on it together.”
It had started raining harder. Paul and Elaine, though implored to stay, left soon.
When the rain chilled the air, Eva had got out a fringed Spanish shawl, embroidered in bright flowers on a metallic gold background. Her glasses above this, plus one of the silly hats she’d found, made her seem a many-tiered fantasy of a woman, concocted by Picasso, or made to be carried through the streets for some Latin holiday parade.
Light of movement, wearing a knit tie, cuff links on his striped shirt (“In your honor,” he said to Rosalind), impeccable blue blazer above gray slacks, Nat Jennings played the country gentleman with pleasure to himself and everyone. His pretty daughter at her birthday party was his delight. This was what his every move had been saying. And now she had gone to her room. He was knocking on its door. “Rosie?”
He laughed. “We’re going to talk at dinner, Rosie. When you sober up, come down. Did you enjoy your birthday party, baby?”
“Sure I did.”
“I like your friends.”
“Thank you.”
“Too bad about Fenwick’s father. That boy deserves better.”
“I guess so.”
She was holding an envelope Paul had slipped into her hand when he left. It had a photo and its negative enclosed, the one on the high point, the two of them kissing. The note said, “We’re leaving tomorrow, sorry if I acted stupid. When we come back, maybe we can try some real ones. Paul.”
There won’t be any coming back for me, she lay thinking, dazed. But this was your place, Mother. Mother, what do I do now?
He was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs and treated her with delightful solemnity, as though she were the visiting daughter of an old friend. He showed her to her place and held the chair for her. Eva, now changed into slacks, a silk shirt, and nubby sweater, came in with a steaming casserole. The candles were lighted again.
“I’m not a grand cook, as Rose knows.” She smiled. “But you couldn’t be allowed, on your birthday …”
“She’s read a hole in the best cookbook,” said Daddy.
“I’m sure it’s great,” Rosalind said in a little voice, and felt tension pass from one of them to the other.
“I’m in love with Fenwick,” Eva announced, and dished out coq au vin.
“Won’t get you anywhere,” Daddy said. “I see the whole thing: he’s gone on Rosie, but she’s playing it cool.”
“They’re all going back tomorrow,” Rosalind said. “Elaine and Paul were just on suspension, and Fenwick’s finished his problem.”
They were silent, passing dishes. Daddy and Eva exchanged glances.
“Rosie,” said Daddy, filling everyone’s wineglass, “we’ve been saving our good news till after your party. Now we want you to know. You remember the little off-Broadway musical I worked with last fall? Well, Hollywood is picking it up at quite a hefty sum. It’s been in negotiation for two months. Now all’s clear, and they’re wanting to hire me along with the purchase. Best break I ever had.”
“I’m so happy I could walk on air,” said Eva.
“Are we going to move there!” Rosalind felt numb.
“Of course not, baby. There’ll be trips, some periods out there, nothing permanent.”
Before Rosalind suddenly, as she glanced from one of them to the other, they grew glossy in an extra charge of flesh and beauty. A log even broke in the fireplace, and a flame reached to some of the sparkler powder that was unignited, so that it flared up as though to hail them. They grew great as faces on a drive-in movie screen, seen floating up out of nowhere along a highway; they might mount skyward any minute and turn to constellations. He had wanted something big to happen, she knew, for a long time. “They never give me any credit” was a phrase she knew by heart. Staying her own human size, Rosalind knew that all they were saying was probably true. They had shoved her birthday up by a week to tidy her away, but they didn’t look at it that way, she had to guess.
“Let’s drink a toast to Daddy!” she cried, and drained her wineglass.
“Rosalind!” her father scolded happily. “What does anyone do with an alcoholic child?”
“Straight to AA,” Eva filled in, “the minute we return.”
“Maybe there’s a branch in Lake George,” Daddy worried.
“I’ll cause spectacles at the Plaza,” Rosalind giggled through the dizziness of wine. “I’ll dance on the bar and jump in the fountain. You’ll be so famous it’ll make the Daily News.”
“I’ve even got some dessert,” said Eva, who, now the news was out, had the air of someone who intends to wait on people as seldom as possible. The cottage looked plainer and humbler all the time. How could they stand it for a single other night? Rosalind wondered. They would probably just explode out of there by some chemical process of rejection that not even Fenwick could explain.
“If things work out,” Daddy was saying, “we may get to make Palm Beach winters yet. No use to plan ahead.”
“Would you like that?” Rosalind asked Eva, as if she didn’t know.
“Why, I just tag along with the family,” Eva said. “Your rules are mine.”
That night Rosalind slipped out of her upstairs room. In order to avoid the Thibodeaus, whose house had eyes and ears, she skirted through the woods and ran into part of the lake, which appeared unexpectedly before her, like a person. She bogged in spongy loam and slipped on mossy rocks, and shivered, drenched to the knees, in the chill night shade of early foliage. At last she came out of shadow onto a road, but not before some large shape, high up, had startled her, blundering among the branches. A car went past and in the glancing headlights she saw the mailbox and its lettering and turned to climb the steep road up to the Fenwicks’. What did she expect to happen there? Just whom did she expect to find? Fenwick himself, of course, but in what way? To lead her out of here, take her somewhere, take her off for good? Say she could stay on with him, and they’d get the cottage someday and share it forever? That would be her dream, even if Fenwick’s daddy camped on them and smelled up the place with whiskey.
She climbed with a sense of the enveloping stillness of the woods, the breath of the lake, the distant appeal of the mountains. The road made its final turn to the right, just before the yard. But at that point she was surprised to hear, as if growing out of the wood itself, murmurous voices, not one or two, but apparently by the dozen, and the sound of a throbbing guitar string, interposing from one pause to the next. She inched a little closer and stopped in the last of the black shade. A fire was burning in a wire grating near the steps. Tatters of flame leaped up, making the shadows blacker. High overhead, the moon shone. Fenwick, too, was entitled to a last night at home, having finished some work nobody else could have understood. He would return that summer. He was sitting on the edge of the porch, near a post. Some others were on the steps, or on chairs outside, or even on the ground.
They were humming some tune she didn’t know and she heard a voice rise, Mrs. Thibodeau’s beyond a doubt! “Now I never said I knew that from a firsthand look, but I’d have to suppose as much.” Then Mr. Thibodeau was joining in: “Seen her myself … more than a time or two.” The Thibodeaus were everywhere, with opinions to express, but about what and whom? All went foundering in an indistinct mumble of phrases until a laugh rose and then another stroke across the strings asked them to sing together, a song she’d never heard. “Now that’s enough,” a woman’s voice said. “I ain’t pitching no more tunes.” “I’ve sung all night, many’s the time.” “Just you and your jug.”
From near the steps a shape rose suddenly; it was one of the dogs, barking on the instant of rising—there had been a shift of wind. He trotted toward her. She stood still. Now the snuffling muzzle ranged over her. The great tail moved its slow white fan. It was the one she knew. She patted the intelligent head. Someone whistled. It was Fenwick, who, she could see, had risen from his seat.
Something fell past him, out of the thick-bunched human shapes on the porch. It had been pushed or shoved and was yelling, a child. “Stealing cake again,” some voice said, and the body hit the ground with a thump. The mother in the chair, not so much as turning, said, “Going to break ever’ bone in her one o’ these days.” “Serve her right” came from the background—Mr. Fenwick. It was young Fenwick himself who finally went down to pick her up (by the back of her shirt, like a puppy), Mrs. Thibodeau who came to dust her off. The yelling stopped. “Hush now,” said Mrs. Thibodeau. Rosalind turned and went away.
“Who’s there?” Fenwick was calling toward the road. “Nobody,” a man’s voice, older, said. “Wants his girlfriend,” said the father. “Go and git her, fella.”
The mountain went on talking. Words faded to murmurs, losing outline; as she stumbled down turns of road, they lost even echoes. She was alone where she had not meant to be, but for all that, strangely detached, elated.
Back on the paved road, she padded along in sneakers. Moonlight lay bright in patterns through the trees. Finally the Dunbar house rose up, moonlight brightening one white portico, while the other stood almost eclipsed in darkness. In a lighted interior, through a downstairs window, she could see them, one standing, the other looking up, graceful hands making gestures, mouths moving—together and alone. Great white moths circling one another, planning, loving maybe. She thought they were like the photographs they took. The negative is me, she thought.
Far up the road, so far it tired her almost as much to think of it as to walk it, the old resort hotel looked out on Lake George with hundreds of empty windows, eyes with vision gone, the porticoes reaching wide their outspread arms. Water lapped with none to hear. “No Trespassing,” said the sign, and other signs said “For Sale,” like children calling to one another.
Rosalind looked up. Between her and the road, across the lawn, a brown bear was just standing up. He was turning his head this way and that. The head was small, wedge-shaped. The bear’s pelt moved when he did, like grass in a breeze. Pointing her way, the head stopped still. She felt the gaze thrill through her with long foreverness, then drop away. On all fours, he looked small, and moved toward the lake with feet shuffling close together, rather like a rolling ball, loose and tumbling toward the water. The moon sent a shimmering golden path across the lake. She was just remembering that her mother, up here alone with her, claimed to have seen a bear late at night, looking through the window. Daddy didn’t doubt she’d dreamed it. He didn’t think they came so close. Rosalind knew herself as twice seen and twice known now, by dog and bear. She walked the road home.
Voices sounding in her head, Rosalind twisted and turned that night, sleepless. She got up once, and taking the red scarf she had found from the drawer, she put it down on the living-room table near the large vase of money plant. Then she went back up and slept, what night was left of it.
Daddy came in for Eva’s coffee and then they both appeared, he freshly shaved and she perfect in her smooth makeup, a smartly striped caftan flowing to her ankles. Rosalind had crept down in wrinkled pajamas, her bare feet warping back from the chill floor.
“Today’s for leaving,” her father said. When Rosalind dropped her gaze, he observed her. They were standing in the kitchen before the stove. They were alone. He was neat, fit, in slacks, a beige shirt checked in brown and blue, and a foulard—affected for anyone but him. His amber eyes fixed on her blue ones, offered pools of sincerity for her to plunge into.
“What’s this?” Eva asked. She came in with the scarf.
“I found it,” said Rosalind. “Isn’t it yours?”
Eva looked over her head at Nat. “It must have been your mother’s.”
“No,” said Rosalind. “It wasn’t.”
After breakfast, by common consent, Rosalind and her father rose from the table and went down to the boat. Together they paddled out to the island. They had done this often in the past. The island was inviting, slanted like a turtle’s back, rich with clumps of birch and bushes, trimmed with gray rock. Out there today, their words emerged suddenly, like thoughts being printed on the air.
“We aren’t coming back,” said Rosalind. “This is all.”
“I saw you come in last night.”
A bird flew up out of the trees.
“Did you tell Eva?”
“She was asleep. Why?”
“She’ll think I just sneaked off to see Fenwick. But I didn’t. I went off myself … by myself.”
He played with rocks, seated, forearms resting on his knees, looking at the lake. “I won’t tell.”
“I wanted to find Mother.”
“Did you?”
“In a way … I know she’s here, all around here. Don’t you?”
“I think she might be most everywhere.”
Maybe what he was saying was something about himself. The ground was being shifted; they were debating without saying so, and he was changing things around without saying so.
“I let you come up here alone,” he went on, “because I thought you needed it—your time alone. Maybe I was wrong.”
“If you’d just say you see it too.”
“See what?”
“What I was saying. That she’s here. No other places. Here.”
The way he didn’t answer her was so much a silence she could hear the leaves stir. “You didn’t love her.” The words fell from her, by themselves, you’d have to think, because she hadn’t willed them to. They came out because they were there.
“Fool! Of course I did!”
Long after, she realized he had shouted, screamed almost. She didn’t know it at the moment, because her eyes had blurred with what she’d accused him of, and her hearing, too, had gone with her sight. She was barely clinging to the world.
When her vision cleared, she looked for him and saw that he was lying down on gray rock with his eyes closed, facing upward, exactly as though exhausted from a task. Like the reverse picture on a face card, he looked to be duplicating an opposite image of his straight-up self; only the marked cleft in his chin was more visible at that angle, and she recalled her mother’s holding up a card when they were playing double solitaire once while waiting for him for dinner: “Looks like Daddy.…” “Let me see … sure does.…” She had seen the florid printed face often enough, the smile affable, the chin cleft. “Jack of Diamonds,” her mother said. For hadn’t the two of them also seen the father’s face turn fixed and mysterious as the painted image, unchanging from whatever it had changed to? The same twice over: she hadn’t thought that till now. He reached up and took her hand. The gesture seemed to say they had blundered into the fire once, but maybe never again.
The scent of pine, the essence of oak scent, too, came warm to her senses, assertive as animals. She rubbed with her free hand at the small debris that hugged the rock. In former times she had peeled away hunks of moss for bringing back. The rock was old enough to be dead, but in school they said that rocks lived.
“You’re going to sell it, aren’t you? The cottage, I mean.”
“I have to. I need the money.”
“I thought you were getting money, lots.”
“I’m getting some. But not enough.”
So he had laid an ace out before her. There was nothing to say. The returned silence, known to trees, rocks, and water, went agelessly on.
Nat Jennings sat up lightly, in one motion. “What mysteries attend my Rosalind, wandering through her forest of Arden?”
“I was chased by a bear,” said Rosalind, attempting to joke with him, but remembering she had almost cried just now, she blew her nose on a torn Kleenex.
“Sleeping in his bed, were you? Serves you right.”
He scratched his back where something bit. “I damned near fell asleep.” He got to his feet. “It’s time.” It’s what he’d said when they left that other time, three years ago. He put out his hand.
Pulling her up, he slipped on a mossy patch of rock and nearly fell. But dancing was in his bones; if he hadn’t been good at it, they both would have fallen. As it was they clung and held upright.
Rosalind and her father got into the boat and paddled toward the cottage, keeping perfect time. Eva, not visible, was busy inside. They found her in the living room.
She had the red scarf wound about her head gypsy-fashion. Above her large glasses, it looked comical, but right; sexy and friendly, the way she was always being. She had cleared up everything from breakfast and was packing.
“You two looked like a picture coming in. I should have had a camera.”
“Oh, we’re a photogenic pair,” Nat said.
“Were you ever tempted to study theater?” Eva asked her.
“I was, but—Not now. Oh, no, not now!” She stood apart, single, separate, ready to leave.
Startled by her tone, Nat Jennings turned. “I think it was her mother,” he quickly said. “She didn’t like the idea.”