Sometimes when he is there alone in the house he is buying now (with the loan his ex-lover Ahmed coaxed out of an uncle), Estes Drover gets to stay with Kathy and she gets to stay with him. He reads to her and laughs with her and talks to her and teaches her little miniature dance steps, around and around his room. She falls asleep there, holding on to his hand, tucked up on the couch. Mary, returned, will pick her up and carry her upstairs to their room.
The house is three stories with a basement apartment. Looked at from the street, with a certain lack of faith, it does seem to tilt slightly. But there is another house close to the left, and an alley to the right, and both have remained in the same proportion for the last year. It is better not to consider such things. The ground floor and basement apartment are rented. The second floor houses Estes and two extra rooms (one rented, the other vacant). These rooms are better let to the slightly deaf, as Estes and Mary’s dance classes take place in a large room on the top floor. In a room off this one, Mary and Kathy live. They cook on a small hot plate. Their bed is under the window overlooking the alley, shoved against the wall.
But Kathy feels peaceful enough to sleep in Estes’s room. When she falls asleep, Estes strips naked sometimes and stands before the window in the dark, watching the moon on a clear night, pouring out over the snow-silenced city. He enjoys his lean dancer’s body, his sinewy rhythmic legs. Sometimes, with practiced silence on the rug, he will spin with folded arms or execute a whirling jeté over the sleeping little girl. Then he will kneel, touch her cheek, with his finger push back threads of her hair. He has always longed for this warm protectiveness he is now able to give. As a child, he had pet dogs and cats for the best of reasons. A sickly child, he had overanxious parents afraid of animal germs, or fate decreed that they be run over in the street, or other parents lured them off to delight other homes. One way or another, he lost them. And then there were the younger children he wanted to escort home from school, who soon got wary around him because he had all the symptoms early on of the way he would grow up to be, and their mothers warned them. But to himself Estes never grew up to be anything: he simply was.
He loved Mary. She didn’t go around making the sort of distinctions that others had. Mary knew he would never hurt Kathy. He would, in fact, die for her. Mary trusted him. It was for Mary he had given up the fiery pleasures of Ahmed, who still called him to rendezvous but who couldn’t stomach to live there, or so he said. (Nobody had invited him.)
It was Ahmed nobody could trust. Nobody knew for sure what state of mind he would be in next, what he would do. The uncle who had backed their mortgage had no faith in Ahmed, either and was very conscious that money was desirable. Mary thought that Estes would make good, even to the uncle’s satisfaction. Mary saw Estes as a nice Indiana boy, conscientious, whose family had rejected him over his sexual preferences long before anybody had ever heard of Vietnam. He probably would have been in Canada anyway, or some other retreat.
Estes’s talents were strong. In New York, he had auditioned with Graham, had danced one summer with Lemming. As for permanence with any company, something always went wrong at the last minute.
“We could work together,” he ventured on Mary’s return to Montreal. He sounded casual; like a timid man proposing, he held his breath and almost shook. But weren’t they working together already?
“Okay with me,” she said at once. He went joyously straight to apply for a grant from Ottawa. There was money for such combinations. He gave her the small room upstairs for nothing, while waiting to be answered.
Mary wrote to Gordon and Gerda Stewart:
Don’t worry. I know you must have lost the bail money you put up for me, but I’m back in touch with the probation lady. I quit the psychiatrist. Thank you for getting me permission to keep Kathy. I’m working and I’ll pay you back. It’s all I have in mind. Mary.
Mary may even have thought that this last was true, except it couldn’t happen yet. There was food to buy out of Fred Davis’s monthly check, and money from Ethan and Jeff was for needed extras—when it came.
Jeff and Mary walked home together from the Purple Window. It was a route narrowed at times by banks of snow, heavy with chunks of ice, dimly lit. Dimmer still as the business and university areas dropped behind and the eastern city opened up its devious streets before them. Small crooked corner shops appeared and passed— dépanneurs, they were called—wearing faintly legible signs.
“Ethan was here,” said Mary.
“He told me. He brought a stack of letters.”
“All the San Francisco ones. Some earlier I never got.”
“Lost somewhere. In some old locker in a bus station in the middle of Texas.”
“Are you still on the run?”
“I guess I always will be. The Big Job, you know. The damned thing backfired. Still … it’s done.”
“What good did it do?”
“It was one more thing, don’t you see? They’ve got to stop sometime. Or so we tell ourselves.”
He sounded tired of his own voice.
“Ethan’s publication is folding,” he told her. “No more ‘From the Front Lines’ by your roving patriot, Jefferson Blaise.”
“Ethan’s too sick,” she guessed. She walked close as if to warm him, the cold being a new thing for him. “So what will you do now?”
“Work here if they’ll let me alone. We’ve still got those immigrant papers.”
“Let you alone?” she repeated.
“I must be on the books for something in every state I’ve lived in for more than a week. Jesus, you’re the only warm thing in the world, aren’t you?”
“I’ve gotten used to it, is all. We’re right up the next street. Just a block. Let’s run.”
Estes, waiting, heard footsteps on the stairs below, more than one pair of them. He grabbed up his robe, reached for his trousers, stood waiting and dreading Ahmed, those quarrels he brought with him like the coat on his back, repulsive companions apt to be stoned, all that riffraff Ahmed could pick up. Kathy waking. Then the steps quieted down to one pair and he recognized Mary’s.
She came in quietly, with her own mouselike peering around the barely cracked-open door, her eyes seeking out first Kathy’s little mound, now thrashing around in wakefulness, then turning to Estes. She closed the door and crossed the room to him, with the floating motion of not seeming to move, the way he admired. He had barely fastened his trousers. She laid a gentle hand on his wrist. “It’s Jeff,” she said. “He’s come back.”
“Oh,” was all he said—nothing more, just the one word. When he spoke again he seemed to be distant, his voice muffled. “Kathy?” he said at last. “Do you want to take her?”
“Could she stay here? If we wake her up … and she’ll want—”
“Sure. Let her stay.”
“Estes….” She tiptoed and put her arms gently around him. Then, like someone with a gift of becoming invisible, she was soundlessly gone. The pairs of footsteps resumed, going upward.
That night Estes wept. Dimly, Mary seemed to hear the sound of it floating up from below. Exhausted from travel and love, Jeff slept like a stone. But Estes must have awakened Kathy, who crept upstairs by herself. A knower, though small. She hadn’t had to be told that her mother was behind the door she struck her fists against, pushing, thumping, but waiting confidently, all the same, to be let in.
It was the one night Estes could never bear to remember, the night in his life he felt a testing that must be a lot like being in a war. His soul seemed straining to tell him something; his heart was trying to jump out of his chest. Once again, what was his was being taken from him. It wasn’t fair. Even when he slept, Mary came right into his dreams. His fantasy arms had folded her to him, time and again. They did so now.
In troubled half sleep he saw Jeff Blaise, hairy as a bear unnaturally walking upright, fallen ferocious and avid across her small body. And she, with a witch’s smile, welcomed a monster.
Of course, he didn’t rationally think that. He woke and went to the window. The inner of the double panes was cold but clear, the outer piled halfway up with snow. He leaned his head against the pane, looking out through a frame of snow. Picture postcard.
The gods were looking in. They saw Estes’s face framed there. They laughed. He thumbed his nose at them. He would go on.