The Moonlight Man (5 page)

She didn't know the ordinary things about him, things the other Dalraida students knew about their fathers and took for granted—how they behaved with their families in their homes, what they thought about politics and art and the way the world was going, what work they did. What she did know about him was how he felt about what he read, the delight in his face when he mentioned certain poets, how he saw the comic side of familiar things most people never noticed, how he never took anything at all for granted. And, she thought ruefully, how many other of the students had seen their father passed out cold in the back seat of a car?

“What's that look mean?” he asked her intently.

She didn't want to tell him what was in her mind.

“I was thinking about the farmer's wife,” she answered, pretty sure he wouldn't care to follow that line of discussion. He ran his hand along the stock of the gun. Then he looked up at her. “What's that you're wearing? What's the
North Face?
”

Catherine looked down at her T-shirt. “I guess it's the north face of some mountain.”

He shook his head. “Don't be a sheep, Cath,” he said. “Don't follow fashion.”

“I have one with Virginia Woolf's face on it,” she said defensively.

“Worse yet,” he said. “Nobody reads her work, just gossip about her. Why don't you wear one with a snapshot of God?”

“I have read Virginia Woolf,” Catherine replied sharply, “I read
Orlando
.”

He walked on, crossing the tracks and setting off down a narrow dirt road opposite to the blacktop they took to Mackenzie. “You ought, at least, to know the name of that mountain,” he said over his shoulder.

“I'll make up a mountain,” she said, following him. “The way you were going to make up a story about who owned the house.”

He laughed then. “Philadelphia lawyer,” he said.

The road soon led them among low hills on whose long slopes spruce trees stood, motionless and solemn looking. They trudged along through the warm, silent landscape. Catherine grew drowsy; the few hours of sleep on the horsehair sofa hadn't done her much good. A sudden liquid rise and fall of bird song startled her. She caught up with him and glanced at his face. He was pale. His shoulders were stiff, as though he were carrying too heavy a burden. She knew he wasn't feeling well. She started to ask him if he knew what kind of bird had sung, but she didn't.

She didn't want conversation at that moment. It was a chance to study him and think about him. It was just such a moment of private observation that made this time with him so different.

When he talked, when he gestured with his hands and arms, she thought she'd never seen anyone so tenanted with emotions, ideas. They had not been able to afford silence until now. When they met for their visits there had been so much to tell, to ask.

Last spring, he had brought Emma along to their visit for the first time, though they'd already been married two years. Catherine had seen how gone Emma was on him. She'd not taken her eyes from his face except when Catherine spilled her ginger ale on the restaurant table. She glanced at Catherine then as though she were a shadow in a dream she was having. She hadn't been unpleasant. She'd even tried to show interest in the usual things—Catherine's school and what she liked about it, or didn't like, what movies she went to, what she wanted to be when she grew up.

Catherine had noted how expensive her clothes looked, how intricate and beautiful the three rings she wore. One was a large diamond on her wedding-ring finger that Catherine guessed Emma had given herself. She was sure her father couldn't have afforded such a ring. There had always been the tug of money between him and her mother. She'd heard about that, of course. If your parents were divorced, you always heard about money. Sometimes he was so late with support checks, they would turn to Granny, her mother's mother, who lived a meticulous life like a fine old clock ticking silently, in a stone house in New Hope, Pennsylvania; a house full of antiques people were always trying to persuade her to sell.

She would give them money and she would always remark how much she had liked Harry Ames. In her cool, remote voice, she would observe that he was a bundle of trouble but worth it, though it might not be for her to say. “Then don't,” Catherine recalled her mother saying. She remembered, too, the flush that spread over Granny's fine, pale skin.

When Catherine described Emma to her mother, the clothes, the rings, she'd commented somewhat grimly, “He found someone to take care of him. Not many of us can afford the luxury of a husband who wrote two novels before twenty-six and hasn't managed to write his daughter a decent, fatherly letter since she was born.”

There were things, Catherine had begun to understand, that were so untrue there was no point in arguing about them. When Mr. Ames telephoned Catherine from Athens on her twelfth birthday, her mother had said, “He'd rather spend thirty dollars than buy a stamp. He'd never look up a phone number in the telephone book the way normal people do—always got the operator to do it for him and considered himself a sport for it.”

Normal. Decent. Catherine kicked up the dust. Like Carter, she supposed her mother meant. Carter was as calm as a sofa. A normal sofa. Her father actually did make a living writing travel books, mostly about Scandinavia. She'd asked him why he didn't live in Oslo or Uppsala, or one of those places he wrote about. He had answered that he detested the whole northern world. Catherine had laughed at the extravagance of what he said. He went straight to Italy whenever he could afford it, he told her, and he had vowed never to write a guide for use in the country. He didn't want to encourage still more tourists to go there.

“Let's pause a minute,” he said. “My character may be better than yours but my legs aren't.”

He grinned at her and went to a straggly oak by the side of the road and leaned against its trunk. Catherine squatted down and watched an ant dragging a dead beetle, twice its size, around a small stone.

“How's my old wife?” he asked. It was the first time he'd asked about Catherine's mother.

“She's not so old,” Catherine replied. “And she's fine.”

“Still slaving away for that swine of a publisher?”

“She's the chief copy editor now,” Catherine said. “The man she works for is very nice.”

“Very nice,” he repeated. “What does that mean? Chocolate pudding and a song at twilight are very nice.”

Catherine stood up and walked rapidly away from him, down the road. He called after her, “Don't get sore! Though it does you credit.”

“I'm not sore,” she called back. “It's just so boring!”

It wasn't boring. It was confusing and unsettling. She wanted to hear more, though she was afraid of what he might tell her. It was like a door slowly opening in a suspense movie. Would something frightful walk through that door? At best, her mother spoke of him as though he were a naughty child she had had to put up with, and he spoke about her as though everything she did were touched with foolishness.

She imagined the two of them jeering and sneering at each other as they walked down the aisle to be married. But it couldn't have been like that!

He caught up with her and placed his hand flat on her head. “‘Jane, Jane, tall as a cane,'” he murmured. It was his quoting voice. She didn't ask him, as she usually did, whom he was quoting.

“Don't tell me I'll understand everything so much better when I'm older,” she said resentfully.

“I? Tell you such a stupid thing?” He grabbed her hair and held it straight up. She stood there like a cat held by the scruff of its neck. “I'll never tell you that,” he said. “I understand life less and less. My certainties lie dead, strewn over the battlefields of the past.”

“You're boasting!” she cried.

He laughed and let go of her hair. “You think you're pretty smart, don't you!” he said. She heard pride and pleasure in his voice and she knew it was about her. He'd liked what she said. She couldn't help but smile. He took hold of her arm for a moment, then let go of it.

“Your mother was a sweet girl,” he said. “I have nothing against her. She couldn't stand my ways. She's a daylight woman.”

They walked half a mile or so in silence. She was thinking hard about what he said—how he sounded superior to his own marriage, his past, as though he'd believed all along what he believed now.

The heat, the blueness of the air, the insect whirr, the scents of evergreen trees and dust simmered gently, a summer stew. He had been speaking for a while before she realized it. She'd been set to dreaming by the quiet, and the warmth, and her own thoughts, which had trailed off like vapor trails in the sky.

“—intensity of hope, of feeling,” he was saying. “I wonder if there is ever such a mix of giddiness and seriousness in anything as there is in love. Perhaps in revolution. Love is revolutionary … you'll see. Oh, you'll see how love is! Of course, you were right in your instinct to resent my condescension toward Beatrice. I don't really feel about her that way.”

Beatrice … her mother's name.
Beatrice,
who had existed long before
Mom
.

“I'll tell you what Hawthorne said: ‘When a real and strong affection has come to an end, it is not well to mock the sacred with a show of those commonplace civilities that belong to ordinary intercourse.' Do you understand that?”

She felt oppressed—all those wise sayings. She didn't want to be his student.

“I got a fortune cookie message once. It said: ‘Your true love is a gunboat,'” she said, feeling that she'd like to do a little jeering herself.

“My girl, you'll have to put up with parental advice and quotes and warnings. Then you can throw it away and learn your own truths. In time, you'll bore and oppress your own children with them.”

“I won't oppress my own children.”

“Oho! The hell you won't!” he said boisterously.

The hills around them were higher now. A crumbling stone wall held back a sea of wildflowers. From a single rafter of a shed a fan of weathered slats hung down toward the ground. On a crest, an old barn stood like a sentry. Despite the sings of human activity, the hills looked deserted, empty of human life. Mr. Ames stepped forward, raised the rifle, and took aim at the barn. A second later, Catherine heard glass shattering.

“You shot out a window!”

“Don't worry!” he said, so quickly his words seemed part of the reverberation of the shot. “I've looked into it. Those are abandoned buildings. Come here. I want to show you how to stand when you fire a rifle.”

There were many things to do at the same time, place her feet correctly, learn to sight through the tiny antler at the end of the long barrel, fit the stock in the right place on her shoulder.

“Go ahead,” he ordered. “Shoot before you start to worry.”

Catherine aimed at the shed, which already looked as if it were about to stumble upon the slope and collapse in a heap on the road. She pulled the trigger and shouted, “No!” at the same time. Through the sound of the shot, she heard her father laughing.

“Well—you
can
hit the side of a shed,” he said. “And you mustn't shout
no
. The bullet might turn around and hit your dear papa.”

She was dazed but exuberant, and she wanted to try again at once. Mr. Ames said it was best to scatter their shots and not concentrate them in one place—in case.

“In case—what?” she demanded.

“I suppose people own these derelicts even though they aren't used. I suppose Canadians have the same property obsession as our own countrymen.”

They went on past thickets of raspberry mixed in with small dense stands of oak and high wild tangles of lacelike shrubbery. The meadows hummed with insect life. The road itself began to fade away, as though the underbrush was slowly erasing it. There were no more buildings to shoot at, so Catherine shot at branches her father would point to. Once, by error, she hit a utility pole.

“How's that school? I liked that grand old dame, Madame Soul,” he said, after they had used up the ammunition.

“Madame Soule,” she corrected him. “Some of the girls think she's pretty crazy. But I like her, too. She worries about the state of the world.”

“Quite right. So she should. And there's a villain, isn't there? There's always a villain at work in any community, like the snake in Eden.”

Was there anything she could tell him that would surprise him?

“Well … yes.”

“Tell me about her.”

“Harriet Blacking. She sneers,” Catherine said.

“Sneer back—in your own fashion.”

“You always feel she knows something terrible about you,” Catherine said.

“That's why villains are so successful,” he said. “Because they do know something—our secret villainies we try to hide from ourselves. They feed on secrets like termites feeding on wood—and bring the house down—only because we try to defend ourselves against our own charges. My advice to you is—admit you're a villain and attack!”

He was walking a few steps ahead of her, his head down, the rifle held loosely in one hand as he gestured with the other. He was speaking to himself, she suspected.

“They get the goods on us,” he said.

Moved by an impulse of pity she couldn't explain to herself, Catherine caught up with him and took his arm. For a second, she rested her head against his shoulder.

“Thanks, pal,” he said. “Thanks for that.”

When they reached the house, they found Mrs. Landy about to have lunch in the kitchen. They'd discovered at once, when they sat down to the first meal she had prepared for them, that she was a frightful cook, frying meat as though she were trying to tan it, and adding a jelly glass of milk, but no butter, to two boiled potatoes that she had mashed with a tablespoon.