Fred and I agreed to meet at a place near town down at a lake where people came to swim and picnic in the summer. There was a pavilion there with a screened area above, where they sold sandwiches and steaks. The downstairs was a boat dock, a place to change for swimming, and perhaps a dry dock in winter. But Fred and I met outside and sat at a picnic table. He was wearing the blue shirt, the tan slacks, same as earlier, but had added a foulard, something for going out.
Fred Davis had a lean, rather blank face except that his eyes back of those odd-shaped glasses were intelligent, and he observed everything without asking questions. He seemed receptive to whatever was going on. I hadn’t seen him since I left Philadelphia, and I now felt, seeing him again, that he had brought his house—that atmosphere—with him, and that even here it was forbidding. It had seemed not only rich but mysteriously so; there was a darkness about the wealthy that had gone into it; the money, which had originally come from coal, might after that have also sprung from railroads or the stock market or real estate—there were stories about all three. If I’d asked the right questions I might have found out more. I would ask Mother, but she’d only smile faintly, distantly, and say “Business interests,” which means nothing.
“You can bet it was business interests, all right,” Jeff had said. “Now the guy’s got nothing to do but swap good investments for better and sit on boards of directors and enjoy a sexy new wife.”
Yet I wanted to tell Fred things. I wanted to then, and I wanted to now.
For instance: “I know I made good grades at Bryn Mawr at first, but I’m not interested in being educated. I know I fell behind. I’m just always practicing. But I thought I might follow up on that other thing, anthropology. I couldn’t act interested in a lot of other things. I can’t pretend. Also I wanted to be with Jeff. Maybe I would have been happy in your house except for things I couldn’t help feeling.”
“All that,” he said, and looked out at the lake, where a small sailboat was tacking uselessly, for there was no wind that day. Some children were going hand in hand out into the roped-off swimming area, making small uncertain steps forward where the bottom sloped unevenly. “But you could have talked to me.” He coughed.
He went up to the pavilion and came back with a drink in his hand; it looked like bourbon. He took a sip and sat back down. “The day you ran away from Bennington I had just made an appointment to go out to Bryn Mawr and see your faculty counselor. I had a feeling things were difficult for you. There were other schools. There might have been a way of talking things over with Jeff, too, if you’d have asked me. As for your mother, I know she demands things of you—‘measuring up,’ she calls it. Don’t you understand her ambition for you?”
I thought it over. “What does she want me to be?”
He turned his gaze slowly toward the restaurant pavilion above and then to the dock below. Near the gas pump some fuel had spilled a multicolored film in the water. It rocked when waves from a speedboat finally reached shore. “What does she want me to be?” I repeated, wondering if the pendulum swing of his gaze, as though he watched the world’s slowest tennis game, was going to pass me again.
“She wants me to be a credit to her,” I said bitterly.
His eyes turned back to mine. “Surely there’s more to her than that.”
“If you don’t know, I don’t,” I said. And added, “And if I don’t know, you don’t.”
He laughed. The laugh began with a smile but couldn’t stop there. He suddenly found it worthwhile to have seen me. The laughter which crinkled up the tight skin of his face stopped as suddenly as shutting off an outboard motor.
“You could have passed any course you wanted to. I think you were defeating us, defeating your mother in some way. Perhaps you were unhappy.”
His gaze was wandering again. He shifted once or twice and moved his hands nervously, like a smoker who had no cigarettes. He left his drink alone.
“I just wanted love,” I said suddenly.
He did not register surprise. Life to him was to be played like a hand of poker. But at least he did not disturb the force of what I had confessed.
“You’re no different, I imagine, from most of humanity on that. No different from your mother.” He had gained safe ground for saying something about her.
“But she gets what she wants from you.” Being certain about what he’d said had left him open for a moment.
Now he looked at me with more than interest because just for that moment I was the tortoise and he the hare; he had gotten behind and he knew it.
“Nothing left over for you, you mean?”
“Not from you.”
“Was there just this Jeff guy and no one else? No other ones you ever liked?”
“Things either click or they don’t.” I recalled two or three heavy-breathing students from Haverford, a boys’ school near Bryn Mawr. They have to be from top families or they wouldn’t be there. One had hid in my closet one night when my roommate was out of town.
“That’s true,” he agreed.
“Are things really working with Kathy? I mean, does Mother really want Kathy with her?”
Now he got to thinking hard, because he knew we had reached the nub of things, to where we were heading all along.
Fred’s not answering made me know I’d gained some ground.
I pushed a little. “I’ve got a right to ask, if anybody has. Haven’t I?”
He finally came out with it flat. “No, I wouldn’t say that it is working. Not altogether.”
I waited.
“At first she was so eager, she thought she was having a second chance to bring up a child and this time would be … well, a correction. She feels she wasn’t such a great success with you. But now something has started—a real impatience, I think, a longing to shake out of it. I thought we might get through the six months, though. I’d no great wish to baby-sit, waiting for the ‘reevaluation.’ Don’t they call it that?”
“You’d have ways of extending it; you know that. But if the risk grows that she—”
I stopped. How could he not think I was just being the neurotic one if I started remembering out loud, all about the silver hairbrush, myself locked up in closets, one nasty surprise after another?
“On your side of the fence,” he said, “it can’t be too healthy for a baby girl to walk in and find her mother has killed herself.”
Right out with it. He was testing to see if I could take that. Not so dumb, Fred. I could. “I’d never do that now. She’s old enough to know me.”
He was astounded. It took a while to digest. “You mean you were working it in before she could register what happened? Would never know?”
“You can be told things, but unless you experience what they are … It would have been just a fact, a shadow.”
“I’ll be damned.” He sat frowning. “There is definitely a strange thing with Kate. She sees herself in a role, being a certain way. But let her get what she wants, and she’s trying to get out of it. There’s a gap in there somewhere. A puzzle.” I waited. “‘Risk,’ you said. Are you actually afraid she would be negligent, let something happen that—” He broke off.
Now of course, he wasn’t the one who wanted Kathy anyway. Who would want his wife’s grandbaby wished on him this early in his second marriage? I was remembering the woman we’d both seen him with in Philadelphia. Fred moved to his own inner music. He was at his own command. He scratched his brow where something had bitten him. He broke out in a foolish smile. “The truth is, I’m getting very fond of her. I’m trying not to, but she’s a capital little girl.”
“Parting hurts,” I said, and he caught the irony, and gave it back with a smile. He thought of his bourbon and drank some.
I wondered about telling him something: about that time after Poppy’s death when Mother and I went on a trip together to visit some cousins in Mississippi and stopped off at Lookout Mountain, Chattanooga, over in Tennessee. She was holding me up to see the view through binoculars fixed to a stand. When you put a coin in and your face close to the circular lens and turned a small wheel for adjusting your vision, you could see battlefields and a river, seven states, a city. She was holding me up to see, and suddenly, as though to tease me, she gave me a little push, first swinging backward to make it stronger still, and then farther out toward the railing, with its long drop below. I cried out; I nearly screamed. People looked up and at her, and she said, all but dropping me on the gravel walk, “Don’t carry on that way—everybody’s looking.” I had thought she meant me to fall. I ran away from her and got lost among little scenic paths, boulders, signs, water fountains, flower beds, was stared at by statues of dwarves, was called after, caught by a guard. Back at the car, I crawled into the backseat and lay down still like a travelling dog.
Then we drove to Bessemer, Alabama, and spent the night. She tried to make up for what had happened, never admitting anything. We went out to a restaurant and ate some chicken. There was a tower over Bessemer that rose above a foundry, I guess, because they mine iron there. It was belching out smoke-colored red against the night clouds. We saw it and went in and ate peacefully. When we came out we were, for no reason, happy. Maybe, I sometimes think, the tower of flame was the male image we didn’t have just then, or maybe it was the Pillar of Fire we’d heard about in Sunday school: we were watched by One Who Cared.
But if that were so, then Fred Davis should have been the appointed one to create nothing but goodwill and happiness. Except maybe he wasn’t all hers. Maybe he had collected her like a pretty Southern mockingbird for his photographic birdwatching collection….
“So since, as I said, it isn’t altogether working, God knows why. I’m inclined—” he began, and set down an empty glass.
“Inclined to what?”
“To let her go back with you.”
I stared in blank astonishment. I’d never hoped for that.
“Think you could manage it?” he asked, jibing at me a little, daring me.
“I’d die to,” I said, and meant it.
He pointed out that the important thing was to stay alive. I agreed to.
“You’re going to have problems. You’re going to have to dodge the probation people, not trust just anybody to know you have her. Perhaps in a large city it will work, but if it doesn’t I will have to say that in an unguarded hour you spirited her away, something vague like that. If it does work, I’ll fill your documents out when the time comes—how much longer is it—three months?”
“I’ve friends now,” I cried, triumphing. “Oh, I know it’s going to work!” I felt like leaping up and waltzing around, doing a Ginger Rogers act over tables and benches, ecstatic.
Fred sat observing. Maybe he was wondering if he wanted another drink. “What friend brought you here? You didn’t come alone.”
“He thought we should talk alone, I guess. He must just be in town for a while.” I wondered if I hadn’t come there with a spirit— an angel, sort of.
Fred was tired of sitting on the hard bench, I could tell. Now that his decision was made he was ready to act on it. Men in business act this way: they think, decide, move; that’s that. But I sat still for a moment.
I remembered how after Mother met him she had come in so light and happy, taking matching bracelets off, summer bracelets set in blue and white, something plastic and glossy, saying, “There’s this man asking me out occasionally now, the one I met in Atlanta. He just came down today from where he lives in Philadelphia.”
“Do you want to get married again?”
“Married? Oh, don’t be silly, I hardly know him.”
“But do you?”
“Any woman, I suppose, prefers to be married, any real woman. …”
I remembered Jeff, one particular memory buried off in the Jasper County woods, reading while I lay curled half on my side—“like a cat,” he said—and read by twilight and firelight and flashlight, Whitman being the best, he said. Nobody but him till you got to Crane and Frost. Poetry had something to say that life was saying, too. Then he would read again, stopping now and then to gather me up under his arm. He’d make me close my eyes and shine the flashlight on my face. “Your face is poetry,” he would say. And we would kiss. I had to make myself numb when I remembered all this, so as not to feel too much.
“Why did you marry Mother?” I asked Fred timidly, the smallest possible question.
He had passed off somewhere beyond our conversation, but finally decided to answer anyway. “We have,” he said, almost negligent now, “what most people look for and never find.”
“Would you call it love?” I pursued humbly, because I wanted him to see that it all related to Mother, that I’d spent at least half my life trying to understand, and that if he and I could agree that love was what she felt for him, and he for her, then that might be a base for understanding her in a new way. But he just kept looking down at the table and shifting the little bits of ice that hadn’t melted in the bottom of his glass.
Finally, he said, “I hesitate to use that word, about anything.”
“But why—” I stopped, thinking of the woman Mother and I both knew existed, wondering if it was she he cared more about. “Is it somebody else that you—”
He looked up and was really displeased now, about to get mad. “Who’s giving you the right to ask? No one has, or will.”
That reaction was cold, a bucket of freezing water. He put out his hand, already regretting. “Come on, now, let’s stick to you, not me.”
But, dashed, I had already left the table. They were they; he was not about to let me in. I found the ladies’ room on the basement floor and went inside. I leaned my forehead on the rough cement wall. I might as well have beat it on the wall. Eventually I heard Fred outside talking to some woman: “I can’t find her. She’s not well. Did you—”
“I’m coming,” I called. “Coming.”
Fred was standing in the middle of a wide area with a few bare tables for snacking pushed back against the wall, useful I guess for summer dances or maybe in winter for dry-docking, a cement floor painted gray under this man who was used to Oriental rugs and green lawns mowed and rolled, and marble entrance halls. He looked like he owned it, though. He seemed to have decided to sell it and was wondering how much to ask. He came to me.
“Come here.” He actually took my arm, to draw it under his own. “It’s all right,” he told the woman. “She’s been upset.” He led me out then toward his car.
“What did I do?” I said.
“I thought you’d never come out.”
“Mentioning love is the wrong thing,” I finally said.
For once he made no answer. He handed me a comb for my hair, not unkindly.
We moved in step together over the gravel toward his car. “She’s not really a mother,” I said, “wasn’t meant to be.”
He opened the door for me. “Kate, you mean?”
“She can’t help not being.”
Again he said nothing. He closed the door.
“You’re in no state to take this step,” he remarked, starting the motor. “They are probably right about your testing period.”
“I shouldn’t have showed anything,” I said, half to myself. “I’ve hurt my chances.”
He backed and began to drive out of the parking area. “I think you have to take her now. Stopping you now … you couldn’t take that.” The car was wandering back home. Before we turned into the drive, he drew up by the side of the road and spoke to me. “If pushed, I’m going to say you stole Kathy, took her away. I’ll have no part in it. You understand?”
I was a waif in rags and tatters; he wore slacks and sport shirts with labels that sent a message to the world.
“This country is in a war,” he said.
I was stubbornly silent.
“Don’t you think you should use that comb?” he asked. “And where is this ‘friend’?”
“He’ll come,” I said. I should have said I guess he’ll come, because how can you know about anything, anybody? Maybe Leonard had taken me here just for holding me as he had in the woods; now, things getting difficult, he might have retreated home. Good faith may be a never-never land we hope to die and go to. But letters from Jeff and checks: my secret hold on the world were those.
“Money, of course,” Fred was saying, “can be arranged.”
“Money,” I repeated, having just been thinking of it. It was more to me than he knew, more than just eating and paying for things. It was proof that Jeff was still alive and free. Also, Jeff caring, Jeff getting word through a living network.
Fred began slowly driving again. Now I had combed my hair and smoothed down my eyebrows, even smeared on a little lipstick.
“Outrageous, what’s happened in Washington.” I wasn’t up-to-date on what he meant. The Pentagon march was way back. Maybe something new had happened. Maybe what he said was a bid for what I knew.
“You helped Jeff about Chicago,” I said. The bail he paid, five thousand. “It was such a mix-up as to who did what.”
“It was no mix-up that violent elements took over, or tried to. You do realize that?”
“It was the police that got violent.” I did know that much. “All Jeff’s crowd was trying to do was get into the convention. To get a hearing.”
“Nobody wanted them,” Fred said dryly.
“A lot of people wanted them. They just wanted to be heard. Why did you help Jeff, if you think they’re all so wrong?”
He stopped the car again to speak to me. He used his words slowly, deliberately, as if talking to someone not sure of the language. “I do not know this Jeff of yours. I went solely because of your mother’s interest. Her daughter’s husband was in jail. Her distress was evident. Understand?”
The car moved again.
The wheels pressed the fine gravel, the house loomed close for the first time, yellow with white scrollwork trim, even a little lightning rod sticking up like a candle on a child’s birthday cake. We approached flat on, so that the house seemed dimensionless, like the backdrop for a ballet which rolls down on a weight, and if anyone came out of it they were coming out of nothing like an interior because it was all make-believe. The drive led the car in a small circle. We stopped before the door as though we were guests. I thought, I can’t do it, I just can’t, but I was getting out just the same, with legs numb, and he said, “Wait, she had no idea when I went out that you—”
But the door opened and out she came, onto the stage of my life once more.
So I stood waiting, holding on to the side of the car. She came on and on with crisp, beautifully fitted slacks creasing and uncreasing with the forward motion of legs everybody, including herself, so admired. Going up the steps to her, I stumbled, and this threw us together because her arms were out and we were half shaking and half crying together like the one body we once literally were.
It was a real upheaval.
They led me—she and Fred between them—into the house.
“Kathy’s here,” said Mother.
“I know.”
“Of course, you know. I must be crazy. To think you wouldn’t, I mean.”
“We’re causing so much trouble,” I said.
“You’re back to stay with us, aren’t you? In the States, I mean.”
“No, not back.”
Causing so much trouble was just a Southern phrase that fell out of my mouth without my meaning it to. It meant that life would have gone on in a smooth way if I hadn’t come into it, at this time, at other times, at any time at all. It meant, Excuse me for existing, for breathing the same air you do, for occupying the same planet, for being anything but what you think I ought to be. Excuse me for trying to kill myself. I was only trying to get out of the way.
We all went inside.
I was always amazed at Mother. She sat so quietly in this new turn of events, so correctly and beautifully, as though she were about to get a present from somebody and would know just what to say by way of thanks. Fred also was filling his role, sitting like a leading Philadelphia businessman.
I wanted to yell at them, Are you thinking it’s just ordinary, like I came for dinner? But what I said was: “I just came for Kathy. I know it’s a little early, but I’m okay now. I can manage.”
Mother broke the silence. “You can’t mean to take her back out of the country?”
“Just to Montreal,” I said. “Not an hour up the road.” It was more, but that sounded good.
Another silence. “How did you get here?” she asked. “Did your husband bring you?”
“A friend.”
“Oh.” Where is Jeff? was hanging in the air, unsaid. She would never say his name.
When she was working in cell structures she had this idea of getting cells enlarged into poster-sized colored pictures, which she mounted by buying some department store reproductions of paintings, throwing out the pictures, and using the frames. She hung them in a small sitting room we had in that duplex we moved into. They looked smart, like a series of modern paintings. I wondered if they were healthy cells or sick ones, and which, for that matter, were prettier to look at.
“Where is she?” I asked. I looked up the steps. Could they just hold me there?
“Asleep,” said Fred.
“As a matter of fact,” Mother said, “she had a little cold this morning. I don’t think we ought to get her up.”
I was on the edge of my chair.
“Have you kept up with your dancing?” Mother asked.
I thought, This is where Jeff Blaise would get so mad he would pick up a vase and break it.
“Tell me about Montreal,” she continued. “You’ve met some nice people there. The Stewarts, wasn’t it?”
This is where Leonard Abel would smile and answer courteously because, he would explain, they are just acting out dreams of themselves. But what power those dreams have! Kathy was asleep upstairs and I couldn’t go up to her.
“I’m taking Kathy back with me,” I came right out and said.
“We’ll talk about it,” Mother said. “First we’ll have some lunch. You must be hungry.”
“I’ve eaten already,” I said.
Mother said, “It’s been like having my own little girl again.” She had real tears in her eyes. Somebody to slam the door on, is that what you’re missing? Will she get sent to the attic for a whole day, no food? Kate had on that beautiful scarf dyed by some New York or French designer to a natural freshness of light and dark, sat hiding all her anxious demands. Like, Where is he? What’s he mixed up in? What’s he not mixed up in? New Jersey break-ins? Berkeley riots? In prison? Do you have a job? What is it?
She’s trying to think of something, anything, to stop me, I knew.
I glanced at Fred and saw his tension, too.
“I think she’s right in wanting to take her, Kate.”
She whipped around to him, cords in her neck, eyes flashing. But what could she do with him? Fred, however he had had to get it, enjoyed his control. Seeing them locked in conflicting stares, I didn’t waste a second. By the time they turned back to me I was halfway up the stairs and vanishing fast. “No!” sounded behind me, but he must have caught her. I didn’t dare turn back to look, nor want to, either, with my child almost at a breath’s distance from me.
Nothing stopped me. I rushed first through a door, but it was wrong, the wrong room. It was their room, and something on the dresser caught my eye, only momentarily, but I was to remember it later. It was a full page torn from a magazine, a cigarette ad or some such. It showed a girl in a fluffy pure white dress standing with a boy in duck trousers and a yachting coat. They were leaning together, elbows touching, over the rail of a white-painted gazebo—all carved woodwork and graceful posts and peaked roof—so beautiful, both of them. So charming, social, entirely right. It is what she’d dreamed I would be, I thought, passing by it on thudding feet, crossing the hall to another door. Now she was dreaming for Kathy. I opened the door.
The room was gotten up like a nursery, everything new and expensive. My baby was there, quiet and awake, lying in a little high-railed white bed. I leaned over it. “Mommy?” she said at once, like there was no doubt I’d be there, ever.
I picked her up and we left together.