Other Men's Daughters (25 page)

“Let me see if it's ok.”

Cynthia was asleep. She hadn't adjusted to the air almost two miles up here in the Rockies. What she did most, and most happily, was sleep. Her hair lay like a bundle of gold fibers over the pillow, her cheeks were red from sleep warmth, her mouth was open. Was Moses balanced enough to keep from leaping on her? “Ok,” said Merriwether.

Bender looked once at bed and girl, but he had important business in the closet. He reached behind a cedar chest and came out with a shotgun. (Merriwether hadn't known it was there.) He broke the barrel open, snapped it, and tried the trigger, at which CK-CK Cynthia opened her eyes. Merriwether moved into her line of sight for reassurance.

“Kids trashed my place last night. You can't live without a weapon.” He put the gun under his arm and strode out, Moses Nimrod, the Punisher.

Was the fellow going off to shoot his trashers? Merriwether saw himself interviewed by police. Another item in
Newsweek
. “Yes, he came in for the gun. He knew where it was.” These melodramas of the heights. Maybe heights generated aberration. Maybe when scenery dominated, unsteady human beings became extravagant; to make their mark. Cambridge scenery was so humanized, so worked-on and worked-out, it was as much actor as scene. In the mountains, human actors were subdued. Solitude was the human mode for mountains. Since Cynthia and Merriwether had no company up here, the conclusion was a comfort.

Most evenings, Merriwether and Cynthia walked the roads behind the cabin, by forests of aspen and silver spruce. The loudest noise was a stream melted out of the Arapahoe glacier crashing on its rock bed. Rainbow trout swam in it, though not enough for fishermen who lined Barker Lake a mile down the road. On the back road to Eldora, Merriwether and Cynthia almost never passed anyone. At first the walks were tiring; though beautiful. Terrific sunsets pulled color out of the sky and the woods and laid it down on the water, recoloring what evening uncolored. Clouds were golden, runic. There were flowers everywhere. Merriwether bought a Colorado Guide Book and learned to recognize fifteen or twenty kinds: blue harebells, heads bent like boudoir lampshades, golden avens, scarlet globemallow, clematis, silver-blue lupines, avalanche lilies with their golden pistils going “Blah.” He and Cynthia talked little. Occasionally, they pointed to fine sights, a horse drinking in the stream, dusk-lit peaks, glitteringly intimate, with snow in their lofted groins. The mountains were part of the Continental Divide. (They were on the Atlantic slope.)

Now and then, cars, lights high, drove by them. They judged the character of the drivers: some gave them wide berths, others skirted them savagely. “Fuckers,” yelled Cynthia to their murderous rear-ends. On the walk back, the last colors would be pressed from the hills, streams of rose and frail gold, violet, orange. “What a palette.”

“Wish you'd compliment me,” said Cynthia.

“Your palette's fine.”

“I mean cooking.” At a loss without school assignments, Cynthia had taken up cooking. “You didn't say one word about the fish.”

“That kind of palate? I did. Didn't you hear me groaning with joy?”

“You're not a Chinaman. That won't do.”

Bender had a shelf of cookbooks. Cynthia studied them as she studied the shogunate, underlining, analyzing. Then she shopped down in Boulder at King Sooper. She translated recipes for her diet, skimmed for whole milk, margarine for butter, imitation margarine for margarine. Her body was beautiful, but she was on a permanent diet and said she envied Merriwether his almost unfattenable body. “You're like something above the timber line. What a metabolism.”

“My mother thought I was dangerously thin.”

“She lived when diseases wasted people. You're perfect. I'd give anything to be like you.”

“I won't be like that long, if you turn this place into Lutèce. Look at this.” He raised his shirt and grabbed a fold of stomach flesh. There was precious little to grab. Out in the sun, chopping wood, walking miles, chinning himself on the pine tree under the hummingbirds' bottle, Merriwether was in good shape. He looked infolded around his bones. Until the Conference began in mid-July, he let his beard go for three and four days at a time; it grizzled dark gold and silver against his tan. He looked all right; and felt all right; his year-long Cambridge cough had stopped.

He'd come out here because of the Conference. At least, partly so. The Conference was an Intensive Study Program in the Neuro-Sciences sponsored by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Colorado. Merriwether hardly qualified as a neuro-scientist, but the semi-popular book he was writing for Timmy Hellman was about changing concepts in motivation research, and he wanted the latest poop. In May, he'd written Bender about getting a place in the mountains. Bender taught physiology in Boulder. He was also a rancher, and it turned out he was going off for the summer to buy cattle in England. His cabin was free from mid-June, so when the spring semester ended in Cambridge, Merriwether took off, driving out with Cynthia in a secondhand Mustang he'd bought one day after George said the six-year-old Dodge looked “worse than my worst dream.” “You wouldn't have bought it if I'd complained,” complained Cynthia.

In the weeks before the Conference started, Merriwether worked on the book. There was a void in his conception of it; he didn't know what it was. He told Cynthia he was marking time until something in the Conference papers hit him right. Still, every morning, he wrote at the kitchen table; and, now and then, he had a good session; mostly, though, it was pure relief to finish his day's chore. As noon came on, he found himself looking up every few minutes at Bender's Swiss birdie clock. (The birdie came out but didn't chirp.) He stopped on the non-chirp of noon. After lunch, he walked, read, or listened to music and news on the public educational channel in Greeley; once or twice he went with Cynthia to ride a glue-footed nag on the mountain trails.

Mostly he read at Bender's library, poetry anthologies, books on real estate—Bender was apparently a land shark—a novel called
Poor Plutocrats
“by the Hungarian Balzac, Jøkai,” a Dutch novel with the beautiful title
Old People and the Things That Pass
. The library was in two parts, the first in shelves built under the stairs, the second, towers of paperbacks piled in the attic like a miniature San Gimignano. The shelf library was full of medical texts, dictionaries, cookbooks, and books about the West, the geomorphology of the Rockies, mountain plants and minerals, histories of Denver and Leadville, treatises on silver and tungsten mining. You went upstairs to the attic with a flashlight and a chest full of breath, knocked into a tower and came down with a handful of—it could be anything, six mysteries of Margery Allingham, an anthology of western mystics (Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, Thomas a Kempis) histories of the potato and Venezuela. By August, the towers were down, the little Tuscan city was sacked. The day before they left, Merriwether reconstructed it.

Until George and Esmé came out to Colorado for ten days apiece, their only human visitor—there were lots of dogs, rats, rabbits, bugs, birds—was young Bender. He showed up every few days to fetch or inquire. The second time he came for cartridges (“I'm going hunting.”), the third for his VA check. (Merriwether picked up Bender's mail.)

“I didn't see anything for you.”

Apparently young Bender had been wounded in Vietnam and lived on a disability check. Ed, the Fina Station owner who serviced Merriwether's Mustang, told him Bender had a plate in his head. “He is a strange guy. He's wrecked three cars in the Canyon. Comes buzzing up from Boulder and piles into a curve.” When Merriwether told Ed about the trashing, he said it didn't surprise him at all. “He lets these STPers crash in his place. They've got a month's fog between the ears. They get cold, they can't chop wood, so they break up the chairs.”

Since Bender's first visit, Merriwether had been locking the cabin, so he was relieved that trashing just didn't come out of the blue. “Though who knows,” he said to Cynthia, touching the pile of pages for whose sake he locked the door, “this may have been destined for trashing.”

Cynthia, in flowered underpants and blue denim shirt, was gobbling yoghurt. (Home-brewed.) “You know you have more to say than anybody.” He occasionally read to her from the manuscript. “That part about conation is like a poem. You're the best scientific writer in the world.”

This extravagance undercut the praise. More and more, Merriwether relished accuracy. How much had his early surprise, then humorous puzzlement, dismay and then anger at Sarah's inaccuracy deformed his marriage? For his birthday Priscilla had given him
A Room of One's Own
and
Three Guineas
. Otherwise he might have sloughed it off with, “Women.” Though perhaps the protein chains did register the millennial enslavement. No. “And Education more than Nature's fools.” Radcliffe was full of careful, alert, fiery girls; and in her own work, Sarah was precise, accurate, full of interesting distinctions. Nature-nurture, whatever, that was over. But he did not relish this extravagance in Cynthia, no matter how charged it was with love.

This was the first summer in years he had no official employment of any sort. Most of his colleagues relished these untethered months, he'd always felt more comfortable in some sort of harness. Writing a book was a loose commitment. He was going to have to discipline himself in a new way.

Everything about the summer was remote. He hardly heard from the children. Priscilla was working for the Muskie campaign in Spanish-and-Italian-speaking districts of Boston. Albie, like some fusion of Hercules and Candide, worked in the stables and gardens of a Long Island estate. George was in an Ozarks “Survival Camp,” Esmé with Sarah at Sarah's sister's in California. George was coming out to Colorado in July. He would stay ten days and be exchanged for Esmé at the Denver airport. The logistics were worked out in notes from Sarah, who, after twenty-two years of marriage and five months of divorce, still could not bring herself to head them with salutation or conclude them with her signature. As if to say, “You know my hand, I know yours. Minimal recognition is all that's left for us.” Merriwether had been raised by courtly people, and though he understood the revolutionist's view that courtesy was the mask of refusal, why should it dissolve between him and Sarah? Hadn't they had enough harshness? And what was that? Was proximity like gravity or altitude? Every thousand feet of altitude meant three-and-a-half Fahrenheit degrees of cold. This could be translated into air pressure and wind convection. But what were the forces which made love grow and die?

Those hovering jewels with the cinnamon glass tails stabbing their bills into the amber bottle hanging from the pine branch were not capable of it. But was there a connection between their feeling for the bottle and his for, say, the Acorn Street house? The Merriwether house. Did anyone feel for it as he did? Weeks ago, Priscilla had stopped by to get the mail and written that it was already being glassed and mirrored. The barnacled old shell would have as much relationship to the interior as the Merriwethers did to the Devereaux. The Devereaux would put in new chairs, who knows, maybe bulge the floor into sitting, eating and lying areas, nail slashes of color over the old walls, or knock them out for windows to make the fight against Cambridge dark less of a losing battle. And that was fine, all fine, but the million connections of that house with Merriwethers and Tiptons were cut.

Merriwether hiked the trail up to the Arapahoe Glacier. Cynthia dropped off below the timberline, and waited for him in a rock cranny by a waterfall with a Penguin Mencius and a carton of low-fat cottage cheese. Merriwether carried a lunchbag with a nectarine and a Gorgonzola sandwich. For pauses—and these became more frequent—he had a pocket
Bhagavad-Gita
on the flyleaf of which he'd written notes on mountains from a geomorphology text inscribed by Bill Bender. Apparently Nimrod had studied—as well as wrecked himself in—the mountains. Merriwether sketched varieties of the regolith in the empty pages of the
Gita
. “Might as well know our neighbors,” he told Cynthia, who saw this “greed for information” as masculine dysfunction. “All this naming of rocks and birds limits your feeling for them. You see little more than the name. Didn't you tell me biology didn't advance till it unburdened itself of nomenclature?”

“Not quite,” he said, kissing her to take away even this small sting. (She could not take much contradiction from him.) “You're reacting to eighteen straight years of school. Adam didn't assign names to the animals just for attendance records. Anyway, these geological names are wonderful.” He read out, “‘Vug, till, scree, kane, drumlin.' I guess they're Scandinavian or Celtic. They sound like primitive gods.”

“More like Henry James characters to me.”

Up on the mountain, fifteen hundred feet beyond the timberline, there is nothing but rock. It is a sight that has less of ease than most Merriwether's seen. He counters his uneasiness by identifying what he sees, trying to discriminate between glacial and alluvial debris, checking on the stone shapes by comparing them with the squiggle drawings on the flyleaf. A mantle of unconsolidated gray stuff, the mountain on which he feels himself but another stone, looks miles across gray air at its brother lumps. “The newest part of the earth.”

Walking up here is no joke. He has to stop every fifty or sixty yards for breath, though, aware of oxygen narcosis and sensitive to its giddiness, he tries not to gulp the air too greedily. Less is best. He pokes into the lunchbag: the Gorgonzola decomposes, and its fumes have contra-narcotic force. “Every nose its own eco-system.”

The first hour's walk was all color: meadows, black hawthorn with purple thorns, white aspen, chokecherry, tiny waterfalls, then a thinning in the grass, the bone-show of the rocks, the plates of snow. Beyond were the hundred shades of gray stone, split, sheared, cracked, broken, ground, dusted, the world's trash coat, its vomited foundation.