Hill Towns (5 page)

He chose Dartmouth, partly because it was essentially a village, and therefore within his limited ken, and partly because he had seen a cloyingly romantic movie long before about Winter Carnival that had enchanted him. When he said goodbye to his mother and Caleb and Sarah, everyone understood that it would be a long goodbye.

His first year at Dartmouth he had drifted into a southern literature course and found there such nourishing richness and romantic grotesquerie and indolent beauty that his heart, suckled on granite and silence, flowered HILL TOWNS / 33

like wild honeysuckle, and he was lost. He brought his new degree and his hunger for dark Faulknerian loam south, found the Mountain, and began to sink grateful roots almost before he cut off the motor of his old Volvo station wagon.

By the time he met me, he was a perfect medium for such specialized cultivars as we produce here. He would have fallen in love with me, I think, if I had been built like Brünhilde and had a mustache and the mind of an Easter chick.

The extravagant personae of my parents and Cash grandparents, plus the whole seductive and beautiful Mountain-church-philosopher business, would have seen to that. The fact that I was bright enough, funny, vulnerable, and matched him almost inch for inch in height, slenderness, and exaggerated Victorian-valentine purity of feature was merely a plus.

After a few bad days and weeks following his promise at the inn to Caleb and Sarah to bring me north to meet his mother, I did not really fear that Joe would try to move off the Mountain and take me with him. That first summer in the little stone guesthouse we rented behind the larger home of the Dean of Graduate Studies, in a hardwood grove bordering the Steep, was a magical one. I started the first of the gardens for which I have become modestly renowned, began the series of small evenings of food and drink and talk that have become Trinity traditions, and began to lay down, with perfect intent and to the best of my abilities, a life for Joe that was so ordered and fulfilling and rich in substance that he would not miss the benison of scope. If he knew what I was about, he gave no sign. He must have known; from the very first Joe and I were able to read each other’s minds and hearts. I concluded from his silence and the contentment with which he let me wrap him in a web of beautiful days that he was saying to me, Yes. All right.

34 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

Make me a life here that I could have nowhere else, and I will not ask you to leave. I will let you build me a world, and the larger one will come to us.

But just for insurance, just for good measure, I covertly threw into the college incinerator, on the second day of my marriage, the little round cardboard wheel of Enovids the college physician had given me. I said nothing to Joe and made love to him, and cooked and entertained for him, and laughed with him, and talked long into the summer nights with him, and waited. And I knew past all doubt the exact moment, on an August night of long, slow rain and sweet fresh flower breath from my new garden, that I got pregnant.

And knew that for a few months, at the very least, I was safe.

The next April, when our daughter Lacey was born blind, I knew I was safe forever. We would not leave the Mountain now. If Lacey was to live without sight, she would live at least in Eden. The world that kept me safe would keep her too.

Only decades later did I come to know that Joe occasionally fancied I had somehow literally blinded her with my terrible fear, bought my safety with her sight. But I honestly think he had thought it only a very long time ago, and not often even then. And by that time there were none of those terrible thoughts that had not visited me in the dark still nights when I could not sleep.

On an evening nearly twenty-one years later we sat in a garden identical save in scope to that first one, having our drinks in the cool spring twilight and reading a letter from our daughter, in college a continent away. She had written to tell us she was going to Europe with friends that summer, to backpack through Spain and Italy and the HILL TOWNS / 35

south of France, and hoped we might join her afterward and travel in Yugoslavia. Her friends had to leave her in Rome, but she was on fire to go farther, into that strange, hybrid old country across the Adriatic from Italy.

I hear that Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city in the world
, she wrote in her dark, angular letters, on the paper with the raised lined grids that she used.
I wish you’d come be my
eyes. There doesn’t seem any reason you can’t, now. I’m well
out of the nest. I’ve always wanted to see Dubrovnik
.

Joe put the letter down and looked out over the stone wall, spilling white clematis now, into empty blue air above the lip of the Steep. Our house commanded the whole valley like a fortress. He did not speak, but I knew he was thinking what I was thinking: Lacey for all her blindness would probably see Dubrovnik sooner, and more clearly, than either of us. My throat tightened at my daughter’s cheerful valor and my own crippling cowardice. And for my husband, who would not say what I knew: that he wanted with all his heart to stand on the sea wall of that old city with his daughter, and be her eyes, and let her be his.

“We should go,” I said, around a great geyser of fear, in a voice that was not mine. “She’s right, there just isn’t any reason not to. This is silly. Enough is enough.”

“I wouldn’t do that to you, Cat,” Joe said, and there was nothing in his voice but the old love. Old, a long love….

“Joe….”

“No. I wouldn’t. It would be like holding a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. What do you think I am?”

“A fifty-year-old man who’s never been to Europe,” I said, and got up and went into the house and called Corinne Parker.

T
“HERE ARE THESE BANDS OF GYPSY CHILDREN, REALLY small kids, who roam the streets like packs of orphan puppies; they dress in rags and come up to you in tears, begging for money, and while your heart is breaking and you’re fishing for your wallet, one of them slips around behind you and picks your pocket. Or else they swoop down on you from behind, so quietly you don’t even hear them coming, and just snatch your purse and are two blocks away before you realize what hit you. They’re all over Rome. Nobody seems able to stop them. Of course, in Rome, nobody tries very hard.”

Hays Bennett, who was president of the Faculty Council that year and Joe’s number-two man in the department, took a deep swallow of his gin and tonic and grinned his vulpine grin around the room. He had a sharp face and a brush of red hair and looked like a fox. Of all our friends, I was least comfortable with Hays. He always looked as though he halfway meant the sly barbs with which he larded his conversation. Probably he did

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HILL TOWNS / 37

not; Joe always said he didn’t. But he was the only one of our usual party crowd who teased me about never leaving the Mountain, and he did it so often I did not think it was casual or coincidental. He was looking at me now. I knew the story of the gypsy children was aimed like an arrow at me. Colin and Maria had just asked Joe and me to meet them in Rome in July, where they were to be married, and everyone at our party had been babbling in excitement over the proposed trip. My silence had not escaped Hays.

“They sound awful,” I said truthfully. They did; the notion of that silent swarming pack bursting around me without warning, snatching, grabbing, was repellent to me, appalling.

But I spoke lightly.

“Oh, they never hurt anybody, except accidentally,” Hays said. “They’re after your money, not your life. Not like on the San Diego Freeway or even Atlanta. Italians are not really into bodily harm. Would you rather be mugged or murdered than surprised?”

“Cat would,” Joe said lazily from the sofa, where he was sprawled with his bourbon and soda. I turned to look at him in surprise and the sort of swift, small shock of hurt you feel when a beloved child or a pet lashes out at you. Joe knew how I felt about Hays’s needling.

“Almost, I would,” I said, smiling. “Death before stealth.”

The small group in the living room laughed; Joe and Hays laughed with them.

“Who wouldn’t? There’s no redeeming social value in being scared to death,” Corinne Parker said, grinning briefly and looking closely at me, and everyone laughed again, and the moment and the party flowed on.

It was a pretty party, a good one. Ours almost always were. I knew that I had a knack for bringing people together in easy groups, and I had honed it by determi 38 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

nation and repetition into an art. I liked the deep sense it gave me of nurturing, of caring for and making happy the people whose lives were intertwined with ours. After twenty-three years, most Trinitarians and much of the village and the Mountain were among that number. A party at the Gaillards’ had come to be, almost, Trinity’s official sanction; over the years I had given them to celebrate graduations, appointments, promotions, publications, new arrivals, retire-ments, grants received, degrees awarded, and every other ritual of academic life imaginable. I also celebrated with food and drink and flowers and candlelight and laughter the countless engagements, marriages, births, anniversaries, and once or twice even divorces of my fellow Mountain dwellers and raised enough funds in our stone house on the Steep to keep Trinity solvent well into the next century, or so Joe said.

Joe loved our parties too. He loved being a host. It pleased him to please people, and he was as house-proud as only someone who has lived meanly in childhood can be. He was an absolute monarch of his small rich kingdom at the parties, a graceful and charming and benevolent monarch. It was for him I had them. I had sensed from the very beginning that deep inside Joe was a chasm that hungered for ritual and celebration, for extravagance. I felt that hunger too. Over the years, the parties had fed it for both of us. More glue, they were, more mortar for the perfect world that held us in its bowl on the Mountain. Like my beautiful garden. Like the music. Like the books and paintings and the food. I had taught myself to be a very good cook over the years. I wanted none of Joe’s hungers to go unfed. I wanted his needs met entirely in the house on the Steep and the school on the Mountain.

HILL TOWNS / 39

I thought I had succeeded. But his lazy words tonight shocked me. Two words only, but they spoke from some unfilled emptiness I had not suspected, and I was frightened.

I looked at him again. He sat in a circle of warm light from one of the two tall copper lamps that sat on the library table behind the big sofa in the living room, his long legs in chinos flung over the sofa’s arm, his head thrown back into piled pillows. He was tanned from early tennis in the thin, clear spring air, and his hair was in his blue eyes; he needed a haircut. I loved the thick flaxen tumble of it when it was too long. Over the years it had lightened with strands of silver to the shade of old vermeil, and it and his mustache were lighter than his skin, so that his teeth flashed very white. His eyes seemed bluer tonight, darker. It was probably because of the fairly recent contact lenses, and the lamplight, and the bourbon. He had had rather a lot of that. Behind him, dogwood branches in a crystal vase glowed like snowflakes in the room’s dimness, and I thought their whiteness darkened his eyes too. He was still very handsome. Still as lean and sinewy, thin-featured, thick-haired, still as knobbily graceful as the day I first saw him. The only change over all the years had been a kind of ashiness that settled on his skin, a web of infinitesimal dry lines, a small thickening of grain and pore, a deepening of creases, a sharpening of bone. He was still Joe, just a bit hardened.

It was not unbecoming. He had aged, I realized, like many men on the Mountain. He had hardened into age, not slackened. Up here, men do not often get fat or go to seed.

They desiccate. Something in the thin air preserves them almost like mummies, both literally and metaphorically. For that matter, there are few fat

40 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

women at Trinity, either. We might be a lost race found a millennium later in some fabulous, airless tomb.

Suddenly I did not want to take the metaphor any further.

I knew what happened to the beautiful, dried dead when the tombs were opened at last and the air of the world rushed in.

I looked at my husband in the light of the copper lamps and for a moment did not know him.

I looked around my living room at the people who had come to my party and did not know them, either.

“Dinner in fifteen minutes,” I said, and got up and went into the kitchen and through it into the downstairs bathroom and stood at the mirror over the washbasin, eyes closed.

“That better be you,” I said, and opened my eyes. It was, but there was something different. I was still me, but more so. Or maybe me, but less….

I had been in therapy with Corinne Parker for almost exactly two years. I started the week after the letter from Lacey we had read together in the garden, asking us to go to Yugoslavia with her. We had not gone; Lacey did not really expect us to. She had known since early childhood that I did not go off the Mountain, though I had insisted, finally, that she do so. She had seemed as incurious about it as our friends in the village and at Trinity; it was simply a given. Mother did not leave the Mountain. I suppose it did not seem strange to her. Lacey was raised among a thousand strangenesses, great and small. Trinity has always been proud of its myriad graceful eccentricities. Lacey’s world was full of people who did nor did not do things that were common fodder to those unfortunates off the Mountain. I think that fact helped her live as easily with her blindness as she did. In the end she had persuaded one of her companions to stay on HILL TOWNS / 41

in Europe and go across the Adriatic with her, and Joe and I stayed at home and read her letters with joy for her and no more overt regret for ourselves.

But I had been determined never to see in Joe’s eyes again a yearning for something I held him back from, and I worked with Corinne as I have never worked at anything else. It cost me a great deal, but the look in his eyes over Lacey’s letter had cost me more. I trembled and sweated and gasped with the pounding of my heart, and I wept, and once or twice I threw up in Corinne’s neat little bathroom off her office, as she walked me through that long-ago night on the chain bridge and the terrible days and years afterward, in the house of my crazy grandmother and frozen grandfather. I gulped Valiums like candy for a while, and lost sleep and weight, and railed at her, and cried endlessly, when I thought Joe could not hear me; and on the nights in the second year before the short, and then longer, trips I took off the Mountain with Corinne at my side, I paced the house or the garden, sick and weeping, until dawn came. But I never once held anything back from Corinne. And I never once missed a session.