Chez Cordelia (32 page)

All around us, as he talked, was the steamy straw-and-fertilizer smell of cows, the sound of their gentle chewing, and the noise of the milking machines. I loved it there. I also liked the meadow, where, while the autumn weather held, the cows wandered all day at their eternal munching—scrubby rolling acres bisected by the stream, a cow's paradise. I took the dogs down sometimes after lunch. They were unexpectedly wonderful with the cows. Even excitable Albert became calm and docile, lapping water and then flinging himself into a nap at my feet. The cows paid no attention to any of us, and on warm Indian summer days we all went to sleep there—dogs and me—lulled by the cows'
crunch-slobber-crunch
and the
flop-flop
of manure deposits and the occasional gentle moos. As a cook, I was enchanted by their need to keep eating.

“Their business is to eat,” Mr. Block said once, proudly. “Fifty pounds a day of high-protein grain, fifty pounds of alfalfa, and all the grass they can handle.”

“They're born with a hunger that's never satisfied,” one of the sons surprised me by saying—surprised his father, too.

“Well, that's a real nice way to put it, Ralphie,” he said, obviously wondering if there wasn't more to his boy than he'd suspected.

Ralphie Block waylaid me once in the meadow and asked me to go to the movies with him. He was stringy and blond, already balding on top, and he looked like he belonged in black leather, on a motorcycle—though as far as I know he was a devoted dairyman, with regular habits and a shelf-full of 4-H trophies. He took my refusal as if he'd expected it, beginning to nod understanding before I'd finished my lame excuse—so that I wondered if he knew about me and Paul. Maybe he'd seen us through a window, and the movie invitation was the beginning of blackmail. (The slimy phantom of Malcolm Madox hovered in the air before me.) Or maybe he was going to go right home and work on his anonymous communication to Martha, clipping letters of the alphabet out of
Farm Journal
to form his accusations with.

As the weeks went by, I had thoughts like that more and more. During my long afternoons alone in the kitchen preparing our elaborate dinners, I wondered about such things. Did anyone know? Did Martha know? And, like a bubble that's getting bigger and bigger but hasn't yet broken, the question: why doesn't Paul tell her? What was he waiting for?

The bubble broke on Thanksgiving Day. But first the dogs. I have to tell about the dogs, Victoria and Albert, and what a continual joy they were to me.

I had always wanted a dog, but my sisters' allergies had prevented it. Now I had two, and whenever I was bored or lonely or just plain full of beans, I went outside with them and romped. They were wonderful dogs, amiable and smart and generous; in return for a small investment (two minutes of stick throwing, say, or a dog biscuit, or a couple of pats on the flank) they were your slaves for life, and no questions asked.

Everyone in the family, I think, depended on the dogs for this ungrudging love. That peaceful country house was full of tensions (I suppose every house is), and the dogs were one release from them. Martha took them on her runs; Megan romped with them first thing off the school bus; Ian would roll around the yard with them after one of his terrible tantrums, and come in soothed. And Paul loved them. Until I came, they were all he had, he told me. I never really understood Paul's distance from his children, or what he meant when he said Megan and Ian were all Martha's. He was stern with them, with a confused affection that he seemed to be able to demonstrate only by tickling: his tickling of the children was a solemn and important ritual, regularly insisted on by both the kids. But his relationship with the dogs was deeper and more meaningful to him.

“They never judge,” he said one day when we had taken them for a run. We were standing, panting a little, in the grove of trees by the creek, and Paul hugged me (riskily) and said, “Neither do you, Delia. I'm so grateful for that. You accept, you just accept.” I felt bad, because it wasn't really true—I was beginning to judge and to question and to be dissatisfied. When I kissed him and clung to him, in love and remorse, he pulled away and said, “Let's go upstairs”—thinking of the Blocks down the road, the gardener due any minute. Resentment filled me. When will it end? How will it end? Don't we love each other? Why don't you do something about this? The judgmental questions beat in my head as we trudged back to the house and the dogs frisked loyally around us. Well, I can't help it, I said to myself, watching Paul fondle them. I'm not a dog.

“I love you,” I said, and he turned from the dogs and—drawing me inside—began to fondle me instead. But the questions didn't go away.

Martha's mother was invited for Thanksgiving dinner. I was looking forward to meeting her, and to showing off my skills. With Martha's help, I had boned a whole turkey and was serving it stuffed with chestnuts and raisins and crumbs.

“Cordelia has taken to all this incredibly quickly, Mother,” I had heard Martha say on the phone. “She's a natural cook.” I grinned to myself with pride until I figured out that, of course, she knew I could hear her and was psyching me up for the big feast. But maybe she meant it.

On the morning of Thanksgiving I was in the kitchen when I heard a car horn honk and the squeal of tires and loud barking. I ran for the door—I knew Ian was outside somewhere—and was just in time to see a car speed away down the road, and a woolly heap in the gravel: Albert, with his skull crushed and his long nose covered with blood.

Paul and Martha weren't far behind me, and then the kids. I tried to motion them back. “Don't—don't,” I said. “He's dead, he's done for.” I didn't want the kids to see, or Paul, and I was untying my apron to put over the body, but Paul ran up and knelt beside it. He put his hand on Albert's still flank, and then he looked up and down the road for the car that had done it, and then he went to pieces.

He stood up and staggered, weeping, his face distorted. I hardly knew his face, it looked like an old man's. He went blindly to Martha, and she put her arms around him, motioning to me to take the kids inside. I stood stunned, watching Paul's shoulders shake and hearing him sob. Megan and Ian turned and ran, crying, toward the house—horrified more by their father's grief than by the dead dog by the road.

I knelt by Albert and put my apron over him—the blood was already drying on his muzzle, and had settled in clotting pools in the hollows of his broken skull—and then I followed the children. No one paid any attention to Vicky, but her frantic barking, with a little question at the end of each yelp, was all around us.

Inside, I cuddled Megan. I had never before so much as hugged her, and I was astonished at how fragile a bundle she was—a butterfly of a child. “Albert liked me, didn't he, Delia?” she kept asking, and I kept saying yes. Ian had gone upstairs, after yelling at me to get away from him. After a while, Martha came in.

“Paul's gone to get a shovel. He's going to bury him out by the creek,” she said, her face red from holding back tears. I told Martha she'd better see to Ian. There was a crash from above, and she ran to the stairs, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

Megan pulled away from me, and climbed slowly after her mother, and I went back outside. Victoria was still barking beside the body of her puppy. She had nosed the apron off his crushed head. I tried to pull her away and she growled, but when I knelt to pick Albert up she let me; that was what she'd been wanting. He was a big, heavy dog, but, dead, he seemed very light—as if death was nothing, living was all. I carried him easily across the brown grass to the creek, where I could see Paul digging, and Vicky trotted behind. Across the road, in the distance, were the cows as usual. I thought of Albert's docility with them, and of all the stories I'd told Megan in which a good-hearted puppy was a pivotal character, and tears came to my eyes, blurring the scene.

I set Albert down on the dead leaves by the creek and pulled Vicky to me. “It's okay, Vic, it's okay,” I whispered to her. But she sat rigidly, paying no attention, watching Paul.

Paul didn't look at me until the hole was finished. He started out in a wool jacket, a sweater, and a shirt, but by the time he was done he'd shed everything but the shirt. It took him a while, though the ground wasn't frozen yet and was particularly soft down by the water. But he dug deep, and I could see that from time to time he was still crying. Vicky and I sat beside Albert's body and waited. I noticed closely—perhaps Vicky did, too—that the sun coming through the leafless trees made the icy water sparkle, and that the deep, mucky hole looked cold. Finally, Paul scooped out the last shovelful and turned to me.

“Do you want to put him in?”

I hesitated. “Don't you?”

“Don't you see I can't touch him?” His glasses were all wet, but he didn't bother to dry them, just looked at me hopelessly through his tears.

I gathered Albert up and carried him to his grave, wrapping the bloody apron closer around him. I tried to be gentle, but it was a long way down, and I had to let him drop the last couple of inches. I reached in and smoothed the apron and then, without a word, took the shovel and filled in the hole. It occurred to me that there should have been a ceremony, a velvet-lined box, a hymn, but there was only Vicky whimpering beside me, and Paul turned away with his hands in his pockets, and the mucky dirt.

When I finished, I leaned on the shovel and said, “He must have been chasing it. Damn those people—didn't even stop.”

Paul had dried off his glasses on his flapping shirttail. “Poor old Albert,” he said unsteadily, and we started back to the house. Vicky hesitated, and began to paw at the grave—just tentatively, as if waiting for instructions—and Paul went over to her. “Come on, old girl,” he said gently. He put out his hand, and she licked it and followed us. As we came out of the trees into the bright, cold sunshine, Paul stopped. “I'm sorry,” he said, and his voice was stretched thin. “I'm sorry to carry on like this. But I loved that dog.” I began an understanding murmur, but he raised a hand to stop me. “And I'm sorry I—I had to hold someone, and I obviously couldn't go to you.”

“Don't even think about it, Paul,” I said. “It doesn't matter.” But the memory of Martha's arms around him was as strong as the memory of Albert's dead body, and I think my voice must have lacked conviction, because Paul said, “These things take time, Delia.”

His words were like something out of a movie about some pampered, philandering husband who wants everything and doesn't have the guts to make choices. They made our relationship look cheap and ordinary, especially after the shock of Albert's accident, and the tears, and the burial. I hated his excuses. I hated him for talking about it like that—for talking about it at all—and I felt briefly lit up and glowing with rage. I said, “I don't have all that much time.”

A little snort of bitter laughter out of the same movie. “Delia, you're twenty-two!”

“There's a lot I want to do, Paul. I'll be gone from here eventually,” I said brutally. “I can't stay around forever, taking cooking lessons and being nanny to your kids.”

“Nobody's talking about forever, Delia.”

“Well, how long, then, Paul?” I immediately realized the question wasn't fair, but I didn't take it back.

“I don't know, I don't know, I don't know,” he said in a low, miserable mumble, staring at the ground. The sun lit up, as always, the silver in his hair. I remember how elderly he had looked to me earlier. Now he looked like himself. If we hadn't been in full view of the house, and if little lights of rage hadn't still been flickering inside me, I would have put my arms around him, dragged him down on the hard brown earth …

“I wish I were in that grave with Albert,” he said.

It didn't soften me. “Stop it, Paul!” I snapped at him. His words struck me as self-indulgent and babyish. I wondered, with a shock, if I could really love him after all, thinking those things about him. “Don't talk like that,” I said, trying not to sound merely irritable.

“I don't deserve you, Delia. It's that simple.”

“Stop it, please. Let's not talk about it. This is no time. Let's get this damned day over with, Paul. We can talk another time.” My voice died out wearily. I just didn't have the energy. I thought: I've got that huge dinner ahead of me to cook and serve and clean up after. I thought of all the potatoes I still had to peel, and the limp turkey to stuff, and the green beans to snap, and the artichokes to wrestle with. I started toward the house. Vicky ran ahead, and Paul trailed behind me. We were like some dreary tail end of a parade.

That was a horrible day, that Thanksgiving. The sun went behind a cloud, and a cold wind sprang up and found its way through every crack in that old house. The kids were alternately weepy and rowdy and sulky. Vicky whined and whined, and got underfoot. Martha and I kept crying furtively, at odd moments. Paul seemed all cried out, but he was touchy and withdrawn, watching football games on TV and yelling at the kids to pipe down. By the time Martha's mother showed up in her Mercedes at 4:00, all anyone wanted was to crawl off somewhere alone and sleep.

But Mrs. Lambert wanted to drink sherry with us—me included, insisting that I sit down, take a break, have a drink. In fact, she paid more attention to me than she did to Paul, whom she treated as a sort of trusted, valuable underfootman, sending false, sparkly smiles in his direction when he took her coat and brought her drink, but hardly ever looking at him directly or speaking to him.

She wanted to talk about “our tragedy,” as she called it. “Have you discussed it with the children, Martha?” she asked, throwing off her mink and patting her snow-white upsweep. She looked exactly like Martha—same eyes, nose, chin, but all slipped down a notch. She wore rings on four out of ten fingers, and she had an expensive, powdery, little-old-lady smell. “Have you had a good, thorough talk about it?”