Dale Loves Sophie to Death (16 page)

For the next few days, Dinah was in a rather exquisite state of mind. She was wrapped up in a tender and fragile malaise, compounded of despondency, nostalgia, and wistful anticipation. Without thinking, she took care not to disturb that balance. She didn’t indulge in introspection; she didn’t allow herself anger; she was content to stay adrift. In the evenings she sat with her children, who were unusually and sweetly subdued because of the continuing heat. They sprawled over the furniture or on the rug in front of the fan to read or draw or watch television, being careful not to move too much. Dinah sat there, too, while the black-and-white television glimmered fluorescent light and shadow into the room, and she stared and stared out the window at the little village of Enfield.

The Hortons’ study was a close and comfortable room, tightly pocketed between the kitchen and the living room on one side of the house. From its windows Dinah could see all the way down Gilbert to Hoxsey Street and count the maple trees planted symmetrically in corresponding pairs on either side of it. In the late afternoon the fading light came down in such a way that evening seemed to begin in the heavy dark heads of those maples and slip down slowly over their gray trunks. There was not one building in the village taller than the towering trees; the village had formed itself to suit the topography of the land, and that reinforced more than ever the pull of natural time on the shape of a day. It always had. When dusk came, the day was over. This was a great comfort; one was relieved of choice in these matters, and Dinah came back each year hoping that the rhythm of village life would once again—as in childhood—give a direction to her time. Most of her life she had moved through this particular village lulled by its unelaborate charm and civilized—even elegant—rusticity. This place was so much a part of her nature by now that it was no longer a place she could choose to leave. She could trace out her earliest years on a transparency, unroll it maplike over Enfield, and therefore interpret it. That was what seemed likely to her. And now, wherever she might go, she would have to impose any other manner of living upon those early learned habits of gentle expectation.

Sometimes in the quiet evenings Toby mentioned to her that he wasn’t feeling good, and she knew what a healthy sign that was. She would have liked for him to tell her more, but that was all he would say. She held him on her lap, although he had grown much too lanky for either one of them to be comfortable that way. She told him about his upcoming party, and she listened to his suggestions, pinning great hope on his enthusiasm. She told him about the luncheon her father was giving solely in his honor, and she talked to him about his godmother’s arrival.

She was aware when she spoke out into their quiet company that her voice had the disembodied intonation it had in her own dreams, but the children listened and didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. They were interested in the arrival of Isobel, although David and Sarah were jealous because it became clear that she was to be more Toby’s than their own. That was galling; they had heard so much about Isobel, and they had no particular charity for their brother simply because he wasn’t well. But they were not terribly envious, and in Dinah’s case this was an easy way to live. The four of them, that small family, sat together in the study with an unexpected and soothing measure of contentment. Whatever had settled over their mother—her sudden nonchalance about the bothersome details of their lives—was beneficial. They preferred their mother’s peaceful listlessness to her frantic efforts to energize herself on their behalf. They were all quite satisfied in their cool, shady twilights together, while the heavy air hung over the dark trees outside their window.

D
inah and Lawrence talked about his sister in the mornings when they sat together drinking coffee. The prospect of Isobel’s company, in fact, had practically mitigated Dinah’s need for Lawrence’s; he paled by comparison. But she found a mellow pleasure in his physical presence. She would lean her leg in its nylon gown just companionably against his long, bare thigh as they sat outside together. When he got up and went away, the fabric would be damp from his perspiration. She would go in and rinse their cups in the kitchen with the moist, sheer nylon clinging to her leg, and she enjoyed that warm, pleasurable sensation so fondly felt that it amounted to the reminder of her own sexuality and little more. She saw him every morning, and he always gave her a hug in greeting and sat close beside her, but in some singular way neither of them sought to carry their familiarity beyond that. This event, Isobel’s arrival, loomed ahead of them as it had intermittently all their lives. She was more important to each of them than either was to the other, so they couldn’t explore what might happen between them until this other anticipation could be overcome.

Even Polly was restless, apparently, in her accustomed rounds. She set her own hours for her work, and lately she had taken to showing up at Dinah’s now and then during her usual office hours. She had become oddly loquacious and curious, and disconcertingly less distant. Now and then, during Dinah’s childhood, Polly had been alarmingly lifted out of her habitual repose, and then she had become vigorously active in her pursuit of some problem that whetted her curiosity. She hadn’t ever had much appetite for involvement, but once that appetite was roused, it was not easily satisfied. There had always been a few things Polly must find out, and there had even been a few things that had brought her to anger. But they were arbitrary events, never predictable, and she seized upon them as a terrier digs for groundhogs. So no one in Enfield, really, could be sure of being left in peace until Polly settled whatever it was that was on her mind.

She dropped by one afternoon when the children were off with Pam, and Dinah was sitting lazily in the living room with a book she was reading but not absorbing. She was watching for her father, idly, although she had not admitted it to herself. She had taken to walking with him often if she happened to see him when he took his daily exercise, but she only walked as far as the post office and then went on to do her shopping and other errands in the village. Those few occasions when she had caught up with him and kept him company hadn’t been at all remarkable. It was as if they had been visiting with each other regularly for years. Her father was never surprised to see her.

When Polly joined her in the living room, and Dinah brought in tall glasses of iced tea for them both, she was ill at ease and realized that she wanted Polly to leave so that she would not miss her father. Polly was sitting in a chair with her back to the long windows that looked out at Dr. Briggs’s front door. Dinah sat down opposite her, and they talked about Isobel a little, about her mother’s bridge club, about her decorating business, about David and Toby and Sarah. Dinah could not make out exactly what her mother’s purpose was, if she had come with any.

“I think Toby’s improving,” Polly said.

“He says not,” Dinah replied, startling herself by the brusqueness of her own voice. “He complains about his leg now,” she added more softly. “I talked to Dad about it. He says it’s just one of those stages, so I’ve tried to ignore it.” She understood what had given such an abrupt edge to her voice; it was nothing more than the somnolence of the room itself. Each piece of furniture was upholstered in a slightly deeper shade of plum than the piece next to it, although the impression was of a happy accident of harmony, not a conscious design. Dinah knew that this was Polly’s doing; she had done the whole house for the Hortons. A flat-blue, pierced screen stood in one corner, cutting diagonally across the edge of the broad Oriental rug. The air was drowsy with the heavy colors. Not pastels, but deep, plain, chalky colors that seemed to exude something of their own essence into that confined space. Any voice—any but Polly’s pale tone—would have been unsettling and inappropriate.

Polly made a gesture of dismissal with her hand. “If Toby’s
talking
about it, that’s the best thing yet, isn’t it? Once he brings it up, you can find out what’s at the bottom of it. Have you talked to Martin about it?”

“Only a little,” Dinah said, without attention. Just as Polly had reached up and pushed her hair behind her ears in a characteristic gesture of settling in, Dinah had caught sight of her father leaving his house. Polly twisted in her chair to follow Dinah’s gaze. “What is it?” she said.

“Oh, I was going to walk along with Dad to the post office. He might be able to tell me the best way to talk to Toby, you know. Toby visits with him every morning. Well, that’s where he picked up that limp, of course.”

“Oh, yes,” Polly said. But Dinah wasn’t sure if that signified any previous knowledge or not. “Well, we can catch up with him if you like. I have to talk to him today, anyway.”

This idea unnerved Dinah, but the two women rose. Polly picked up her purse and Dinah her mailbox keys. They didn’t hurry, because her father’s slow pace made it unnecessary, but they left behind them their two glasses of iced tea sitting in puddles of condensation on the delicately carved ivory coasters.

Her father saw them from across the street and stopped to wait. He turned to study the construction on his house, and when they joined him, Dinah fell in between her two parents and felt peculiar about it. They walked together for a moment before any one of them spoke, and then her father began to speak as if they were all simply continuing a conversation.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve just been sorting through my records. You ought to come over and listen to some of these!” It wasn’t clear who he meant. “They’re marvelous, some of them. It seems to me that Isobel likes Charlie Parker better than she likes Dave Brubeck. She always did. Now, I wonder why? I can’t understand it, but I know she likes Miles Davis and Charlie Parker. I remember that. I guess that was the thing to do.” This last was a question, but Dinah didn’t answer, and her mother smiled at him with surprising indulgence. The disharmony over this very subject in the household in which Dinah had grown up was still vivid to her. Her mother, of course, hadn’t liked any of it, and had said with her unimpeachable scorn that it was not, as her father insisted, the classical music of the age. She discouraged the idea entirely, refusing to entertain it at all. It was beneath her consideration.

“I need to find out when you want us to come over for lunch, Dad,” Dinah said. “Isobel will be in late tonight.”

As they walked along three abreast, they were suddenly accompanied by a great, happy golden retriever that circled and trailed them, dragging a long chain behind him. He wove cheerfully among them, smiling and stopping to raise one foot in pleased and foolish attention. They had to move along fitfully to avoid the silly dog as he interrupted their progress down the sidewalk.

Polly shooed him away ineffectually with her hands. “Go on! Go on!” she said, but he paid no heed, and they made their way slowly.

“Why don’t you all come over about one o’clock tomorrow?” he said, and he sidestepped the dog. “You come too, Polly. It’s a Saturday. And see if Buddy will come. We’ll have everyone! A celebration!”

At first Dinah thought to object that the children would be far too hungry to wait for lunch at one o’clock, but that would have been petty; her children could observe this occasion with some small amount of grace. She would give them a snack beforehand. Besides, Dinah had lost her tongue. She had been thrown into a bewildering insecurity, as of a child between two adults, and yet she had never been persuaded of her parents’ authority, or even of their majority; they had always been split in two in disagreement.

“Whose dog is that?” she finally asked into what was masquerading, she thought, as a companionable silence.

“Oh, I don’t know,” her father said irritably, because the dog was causing him a good deal of trouble, since he lacked their agility. “He’s broken his chain. I don’t know where he belongs, but I don’t think he ever came around the house to bother Jimmy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.”

They crossed the street, and the dog bounded behind them. Polly was talking to Dinah’s father about an insurance policy that had just surfaced, which they mutually owned, although he didn’t seem much interested. They had only reached the corner of Hoxsey Street, but Dinah wanted very much to be away from her parents just then. The remaining two-block walk to the post office looked to her to be too long a time to endure this disruption of her calm assumptions. In her mind she had resigned herself happily, and with relief, to each one of her parents being separate from the other, so she was thoroughly annoyed with them both, standing as they were, circled by the dog, her mother almost transparently blond and fragile in relation to her father’s lean height. They stood, still talking, and her mother angled her face toward her father, who had turned around to her. Now she presented to him a tilted profile, glancing at him sideways, slightly and charmingly distracted. Dinah thought that there was, for an instant, that same intangible promise about them—which had fooled her time and again—of the certainty of their alignment. The idea made her unusually cross. They
must,
by now, be either one thing or the other. She could not bear it if they ever became again what they had been for so long: both together and apart. They owed it to her to give it up. It left her on too precarious a footing; all the meticulously constructed links to her past hung in the balance.

“You ought to
do
something about that dog!” she said to both of them suddenly, interrupting them before she took herself off to do some shopping, and they looked at her in surprise. “Well,
look
at him, Dad! He’s dragging his chain. He could get caught up on something somewhere. Out in the woods! Well, you can tell he’s lost. It seems to me that you would at least find out who he belongs to and let them know!”

Her parents watched her with attention all at once, as though they hadn’t known she was standing with them at all. And she felt what they saw: a tall, grown woman with slightly graying hair, speaking out with the peevishness of a child. “Dinah,” her father said, “I can’t possibly take the time to find out who that dog belongs to. I’m sure he knows exactly where he lives, anyway. He just doesn’t choose to go there right now. Frankly, that dog strikes me as a fool!” They all looked at the dog, who was dragging his chain through the bushes bordering the sidewalk, stopping now and then in absurd ferocity—when he thought he’d tracked a scent—to stare menacingly at the ground. Then he would abandon that hope and move cheerfully on to the next bush to raise his leg and sniff around. He seemed to Dinah to be an especially amiable and good-hearted dog.