Nightlight (12 page)

But now the nightmares, and Len's disappearance, made the hour a bit late. It was far too late to help herself. She had damned herself to ash, if there were any justice. But perhaps there was still a speck of hope for Len.

She smiled at that thought.

The musicians turned pages of music and quieted into a group of people who could be ignored, except for the sounds which they produced.

“My strong little girl” her father had called her, smelling of leather and cognac and those spicy cigars he had made to his own recipe in London.
Strong
was a word he used more than any other. Instead of saying he felt well, or happy, he would say he felt strong. This desire for, and pleasure in, strength made him survive a fencing accident when she was a girl, an accident which she witnessed, teddy bear in hand, in the brightly lit expanse of the private gym.

The grinning Frenchman had been sweating with the workout her father was giving him when he lunged forward so gracefully he stayed for a moment, out of a desire never to make another less perfect movement again, ignoring the fact that the foil had shattered through a flaw in French metallurgy, and that the point had slipped into the only portion of flesh exposed beneath the fencing mask her father wore, which made his head resemble the gigantic single eye of a fly.

Her father had put a hand to his throat as if only slightly concerned at the sudden scarlet freckles that appeared on his padded chest. His hand, too, became splashed with amazingly bright splotches of crimson, and a long rat's tail of red appeared at her father's throat, then vanished. It appeared again, and only then did Mary understand that her father's life blood was squirting into the resin-scented air.

The Frenchman had turned to Mary, as men had always ever since turned, for help. Wordless, and instantly pale, the Frenchman's English was gone and he gaped at her as if she were to blame for the frailty of steel. She turned away from him, as one turns from savagery, and ran across the green lawn to the telephone.

Her father survived to fence again, with the same Frenchman, perhaps secretly hoping that a foil would snap in a similar fashion, skewering another throat.

There were no more accidents, except for the last, fatal one, her father brought down “like William the Second,” her mother had exclaimed. A fellow hunter had discharged his gun, mere birdshot, into the side of her father's head. His head was damaged only slightly, but mortally. It had been, oddly, not a sad event for Mary. Her father had wanted to die in a manly way, and while birdshot was scarcely warlike, she had not seen her father's perfect, embalmed corpse as one that had been insulted.

It was early in the morning when the news came. Her mother had been up since even earlier in the morning, when it was still dark, and although this was not unusual Mary sensed that her mother was in pain.

She rarely spoke to her mother. She loved her, she supposed, but it was the same love she might have had toward a delicate work of art in a distant corner. Her mother's hands always trembled, even when she gathered flowers. There was always a tremor, a vibration, as if life itself hummed too violently for her body.

Her mother was in the study, with the heads of animals she detested, a pale figure under the trophies on the wall. “What's the matter?” said Mary.

“I couldn't sleep,” her mother said. Not a complaint. A simple report.

“You should stay up late and get tired.”

Her mother smiled wanly, the smile of an adult advised by a fourteen-year-old child. “I stay up past midnight. I read, and I think.”

Yes, thinking. Mary knew what her father thought about his wife's “thinking.” “Idle brooding,” he said. “Sucking on the past like a tick. Absolutely no use to anyone.”

“You should run around and get tired.”

“Mary,” her mother said suddenly. “I had a terrible dream.”

Mary did not say, “Father says you dream too much,” but she thought it, and her mother sensed the thought. Her mother clutched the robe at her throat and stood. For a brief moment Mary wanted to protect her. “Did you have breakfast?” she asked.

“You know I can hardly stand the thought of food in the morning,” her mother said.

“You need your strength,” said Mary, repeating a phrase she had heard somewhere, but already she was not interested in whether or not her mother ate.

“In the dream, there was something wrong with your father.”

Mary scratched her thigh.

“Your father lay down in the leaves. He looked straight up into the trees, and then suddenly looked straight at me. What a terrible look! I could hardly move! And he grinned, such a ghastly grin.”

“What happened?”

“I don't know.”

Mary slumped, disappointed. The dark eyes of the moose looked ahead across the room, and seemed to regard her for a moment with a kind of amusement. “That doesn't sound too scary.”

“No, I guess it really doesn't. But what woke me up was realizing that it wasn't a dream.”

“It's silly,” said Mary, and regretted it. Her mother had feelings, after all.

“Yes, it is silly.” Her mother laughed gently, and Mary left to have scrambled eggs and cocoa.

The phone rang, and Henrietta answered it, the woman with skin the color of butterscotch, and a gentle New Orleans syrup in her voice. Mary paid little attention, annoyed with the scum that had formed on her chocolate.

Henrietta appeared, however, and put one large hand over Mary's. “You better go in and be with your mother,” she said.

“What's wrong?”

Henrietta's eyes looked deep into Mary's, trying to will the knowledge into her. “I think your mother should be the one to tell you,” she said.

“It's an accident,” said Mary.

“Yes, it's an accident.”

Mary wanted to ask more, but she had run out of questions. Accidents involved cars, and everyone she knew drove very well. Her father had run into something, she supposed.

She ran into the study, but the heads of animals looked down into an empty room. She found her mother in a little-used bedroom. Plastic sheets covered the Chippendale, and the frames on the wall held simple etchings, bridges over anonymous rivers, troubadours singing to women who looked away, admiring butterflies.

“There's been an accident,” said Mary.

“Close the door,” said her mother.

Her mother rarely gave a simple command. Mary closed the door, but kept her back against it.

Her mother held her hands palm-down in her lap, and spoke as if to them. “Something has happened.”

Mary felt a flicker of confidence. She had known this much already.

“While they were hunting.”

Mary flashed into uncertainty.

“A gun went off—” Her mother stopped and clenched her fists. When her hands had relaxed again, she said, “And your father was hit.”

A grinning face, thought Mary. So he can't be in pain.

“They thought he could be helped, but there was nothing the doctors could do.”

Mary realized that she was supposed to understand, but she didn't. “A gun went off and Father was in the way?”

“Yes. And the shot hit him, and now he's dead.”
Dead
was said as a high, pure note. Her mother wept quietly. Mary touched her, incredulous. Only her mother's grief told her the truth.

She climbed into a plastic-shrouded chair, and listened to the shuddering of her mother's narrow body. Mary had never conceived of such a thing, and was nearly nauseated. When she could move again, she crept from the room, and downstairs, into the study.

The heads of the animals surveyed her, and surveyed the room, and surveyed the chair her father had used, and the row of pipes beside the humidor. All those eyes, gleaming, dark, promising her that her father was powerful. They were proof, these conquered beasts. Her father's might was not diminished.

And when she saw his body she was convinced that he was not really there. His face was too delicate, his nostrils tiny slits, his lashes perfect.

He wore a black wool suit, and a tie of dark blue, in her father's usual Windsor. His hair was impeccably combed, as if her father had just paused before a mirror. The life had been blown from him by magic. He was entire, undamaged. He would smile, and wink and say, “Silly, huh?”

He said nothing.

The fellow hunter was an old drinking friend of her father's, a cardplayer with a red face and hairy hands. He appeared at the funeral white and shrunken, eyes seeing nothing. He looked much more ruined than her father, and although she would see the man from time to time at weddings or other funerals, the man never regained his previous color, and seemed shorter, as if in a moment he had lost his strength, firing not shot but vitality into the unsuspecting skull of his companion, killing him as breath kills a candle.

One evening several days later her mother called her into the study. Mary stepped into the room, then shrank to the wall. The dozens of trusting eyes were gone.

“I couldn't stand to see them,” her mother said.

Now Mary wept. Her father's presence had been stripped from the house. She could not despise her mother, although she wanted to. Her mother's voice was thin as she explained, “They reminded me of so much pain. So much unnecessary pain.”

Her mother held out her arms to Mary, and they held each other, but Mary felt that her mother had made a mistake. Her father belonged in this house. She knew that he would find a way back.

“We have to learn,” her mother said, “to be life-givers, not death-dealers,” but her mother's voice was so feeble that Mary sensed it was an impossible task.

Three or four years later she stopped before a diorama in the Natural History Museum in San Francisco. Two deer fed off the branches of a tree. Mule deer, the sign explained, and their large ears, their ebony hooves, were unspeakably beautiful. Hills rose and fell behind them, an oil painting dotted with bushes that looked much the way mesquite looks when it stubbles distant slopes.

And yet, the deer were not real. Stiff, shielded by glass that dimly reflected her blouse and skirt, they stood exactly where they were no matter how often she looked away and then back again. They were an illusion. She had always known this. But she knew it again, and it pleased her.

Her father's trophies had been empty husks, no more animal than a clotheshorse is human. And when they were removed what was taken away amounted to little more than cages over which hides had been stretched. Her father did not need those masks.

She left the museum and strolled into the darkness of the aquarium. Bright tanks of fish pulsed and danced, graceful shapes like hundreds of eyes.

Her father needed nothing. He was waiting somewhere to make his presence felt. Even now, he was waiting for her, or perhaps preparing to return. She believed in him. He would find a way.

In a huge tank at the edge of a corridor, a creature longer than a man leaned against the glass, mashing its bulk against the glass. The air of the corridor stifled, and faces were lit by the light from the habitat of the gigantic beast.

Manatee. It fed on a head of lettuce, and bits of cellulose drifted down in the water, large motes of plant material that clung to the occasional hairs of the creature's sides.

“Yuck!” said a boy.

“I'd hate to look like that,” said a girl.

“It doesn't mind,” said Mary, although she didn't even know the girl.

“I would,” said the voice in semidarkness.

No, you wouldn't, Mary thought, but she did not bother arguing. The manatee's crumpled face and small black eyes were beyond such quibbles. It chewed. The head of lettuce swam out of reach, but the manatee caught it just in time. A leaf detached from the head, and drifted, high above them all, on the quaking surface of the water.

The manatee was at peace. It was beyond even contentment. It knew something Mary could not even guess. It was giant with wisdom. If such a creature trusted the world, she could, too.

And years later, when she was pregnant and felt as huge as the manatee, she trusted more than the world she could see. She trusted the world she could not see.

She trusted her father.

17

Phil had attracted her because he so closely resembled her father, a tanned, Scotch-drinking skier when she first met him, strong and good-humored. Except that he had used too much Scotch in the late evenings, stumbling upstairs the way her father never had, and then had the nerve to blame her for his weakness.

Frigid
. He would spit the word, stinking of liquor, and then during the years when he stopped drinking and she had softened—warmed, he said—there was still distance between them, an air of mutual disappointment.

Her son had been her only pleasure, and at first it seemed natural. Of course she declined the services of a nurse, and of course she wanted to have the boy taught at home, because she wanted to be close to him, and even when a series of flustered tutors had left, perplexed and complaining that they had done nothing wrong, Phil had suspected nothing. He understood that Mary was perhaps too fond of the boy, no doubt because he so closely resembled her father. The resemblance was profound. Young Leonard looked like a slim, frail version of his grandfather, and Mary had been ecstatic sometimes watching her son run across a lawn. Her father was alive again in the bones and blood of her son. Sometimes she meant it literally, frightened, nearly, that her father's spirit was actually present in the flesh of her boy, but other times she realized that this was merely nature's way of perpetuating the genes of that proud and virile man. Either way, when she was with Leonard, she was with her father.

Phil said he never wanted another woman. He would stroke her, explaining how he needed her in the quiet dark of their bedroom, although she preferred to sleep in a bedroom of her own down the hall, where she ordered a designer every year to do something interesting, something that would make the walls and the floor come alive.