17

Phil had attracted her because he so closely resembled her father, a tanned, Scotch-drinking skier when she first met him, strong and good-humored. Except that he had used too much Scotch in the late evenings, stumbling upstairs the way her father never had, and then had the nerve to blame her for his weakness.

Frigid. He would spit the word, stinking of liquor, and then during the years when he stopped drinking and she had softened—warmed, he said—there was still distance between them, an air of mutual disappointment.

Her son had been her only pleasure, and at first it seemed natural. Of course she declined the services of a nurse, and of course she wanted to have the boy taught at home, because she wanted to be close to him, and even when a series of flustered tutors had left, perplexed and complaining that they had done nothing wrong, Phil had suspected nothing. He understood that Mary was perhaps too fond of the boy, no doubt because he so closely resembled her father. The resemblance was profound. Young Leonard looked like a slim, frail version of his grandfather, and Mary had been ecstatic sometimes watching her son run across a lawn. Her father was alive again in the bones and blood of her son. Sometimes she meant it literally, frightened, nearly, that her father’s spirit was actually present in the flesh of her boy, but other times she realized that this was merely nature’s way of perpetuating the genes of that proud and virile man. Either way, when she was with Leonard, she was with her father.

Phil said he never wanted another woman. He would stroke her, explaining how he needed her in the quiet dark of their bedroom, although she preferred to sleep in a bedroom of her own down the hall, where she ordered a designer every year to do something interesting, something that would make the walls and the floor come alive.

Mary would give in to Phil, understanding his needs, and realizing that although he was an insect compared with her father, he was, in the eyes of the world, a desirable husband. The eyes of the world had always mattered to Mary. To appear cheerful and sophisticated was to earn envy, and envy was power. Power to do what? she asked herself sometimes, because she was not smug, and she was not stupid.

Simple power was enough, its own end. She was a jewel, and her husband and her son were the fine setting. Except that night after night she hungered for the touch of her father, his manly laugh, his rough-gentle hands, the way he had tossed a football to her, so that the ripe leather of it had seemed to breathe under her fingertips as he laughed. “Throw it back! And let’s see a spiral.”

And she had thrown it back with a spiral, while her mother, that pale spoonful of spit, would watch from the steps, disapproving her daughter’s masculine ways, disapproving her father’s attention, her father’s fondness, the way her father would caress his daughter after a day of riding, his intelligent, strong hands soothing her back as if she were a filly as he told her she was the best horsewoman who had ever lived, and he was proud to have her as his daughter.

The night came when her husband was again drunk, the bottle of twelve-year-old single malt on the floor beside him, his snoring mouth like the mouth of a salmon exhaling the sour stink of a man who does not know how to live his life.

“You are disgusting,” she told the rattling carcass. “Weak. Empty. Worthless.” The words were weak. She could not enunciate her contempt.

Like an answer, his breath caught and he coughed.

She waited for him to wake, but he did not. She hungered for him to rise for a moment so she could tell him what she thought, but he was beyond that, a man who had transformed himself into a heap of garbage.

She wept, furious that she had to live with such a wasted man. Her father could drink all night, and never waver. He could laugh as heartily at dawn, smoking yet another cigar, as he had laughed the evening before. His card companions would reel apologetically, and he would saunter, in control of every movement, assisting them into their coats.

And then she awoke to the understanding that her father was alive that moment, waiting in that house, to show his contempt for Phil in the best way a man could show contempt for another. Not that her father had ever expressed contempt; such a feeling was too base. But you could see in the glint of his eye that he knew that he was superior to a man who complained too much, or couldn’t hold his drink.

She slipped through the house like a wraith, called to where he lay, a proud man in the body of a youth, but calling to her, willing her to him, up the carpeted stairs, the unheard signal of his will drawing her in like a trout on the long, transparent line.

She was in his room, and his eyes were alight. “Father,” she whispered. “Take me away from this.”

And his eyes glittered, and she understood that her father had felt more than a father’s love for his daughter. “I can’t,” she groaned, kneeling beside the bed. “I can’t stand it any more.”

She gripped the hand, her father’s hand, her son’s hand, and held it. She gripped it, squeezed it until it must be agony, but of course there was no cry, and she knelt there beside the bed imagining the walls dissolving as the room soared into the air, the bay, the hills and the distant lights of faraway cities scattering around them, like playthings.