The Cry of the Owl (6 page)

“Hello,” she said. “Are you feeling better?”

“Who’s this?”

“This is Jenny Thierolf,” said the slow, smiling voice. “I just thought I’d call and say hello and see how you are. Did you have a nice Christmas?”

“Very nice, thanks. I hope you did.”

“Oh, sure. My parents and Greg’s. It was very homey.”

“Well—that’s the way Christmas should be. Were you snowbound?”

“Was I? I am now. Where are
you
?”

He laughed. “In a town. I suppose things are easier.”

“I’m getting plowed out tomorrow morning. Eight dollars a whack. It’s my third whack. What a winter! The only good thing is my phone wires didn’t come down, but my electricity did one night.”

Silence. He couldn’t think of anything to say. His mind dwelt for a couple of seconds on the fact he hadn’t sent her flowers at Christmas, that he’d had an impulse to and checked it. He’d sent her nothing.

“You don’t sound depressed anymore,” she said.

“Things are better.”

“I thought one night this week you might like to come for dinner. How is Wednesday for you?”

“Thank you, but—why can’t I invite you? Don’t you like to go out?”

“I love to go out.”

“There’re two good restaurants near here. Do you know the Jasserine Chains at Cromwell?”

“The Jasserine Chains?”

“It’s the name of an inn. With a restaurant. I’ve heard it’s very good. Shall we meet there?”

“All right.”

“At seven?”

“Seven’s fine,” she said.

Her call put him in a good mood for several minutes, until a thought came to him: She would come with Greg, and Greg would report him to the police. Then the idea vanished. The girl simply wasn’t that type, wasn’t that calculating, he felt sure. It pleased Robert that without forethought he had proposed she meet him at the restaurant rather than for him to call for her. It made their appointment a little more casual.

On Wednesday evening, sleet fell upon a ten-day-old snow, and made the roads icy and dangerous. Robert expected the girl to be late, perhaps to call him and say that she couldn’t make it at all, but she did not call, and she came into the Jasserine Chains punctually at seven. Robert was waiting in the lobby, which had a mahogany staircase, carpets and mirrors and paintings, like the hall of a private
house. She was wearing stadium boots, her high-heeled pumps in her hand, and she effected the change, holding on to his arm, in front of the wardrobe check booth.

“These things are so aw-wful,” she said apologetically.

They were shown to a table a pleasant distance from the fireplace. When he proposed a cocktail, she said she would have a Manhattan. She wore a blue-and-black patterned dress that looked to Robert a bit old and sedate for her. Her earrings were half spheres of silver. Their conversation, for the first fifteen minutes, was platitudinous. (“Oh, if any car can move in the slush, it’s a Volkswagen,” Jenny said.) Robert was uncomfortably conscious of the aroma of his hair: he had just had a haircut, and the barber had doused him with tonic before Robert could stop him. The girl’s eyes dwelt on him, stared at him, but what she was thinking about him Robert could not tell, and her conversation gave no clue. She talked casually of her family in Scranton, of her old-fashioned father, who hadn’t wanted her to go to college and who had insisted that she take some business courses as well as sociology. She asked him about his schools. He had gone to the University of Colorado. He hadn’t finished until he was twenty-four, because of money problems, he told her, though actually he hadn’t finished sooner because of a depression that had hit him at nineteen, a year after his mother remarried. Robert considered it the low point in his life, a period he was vaguely ashamed of. He had fallen apart because it had seemed to him that his family had fallen apart, though he had really approved of his mother’s marrying again and he liked the man she had married. Robert’s father had drunk too much, had never known how to manage his money, and nothing but his mother’s patience had held the family together—only three
of them, as he had no brothers or sisters—until his father killed himself in a car accident when Robert was seventeen. But Robert did not tell any of this to Jenny.

“How long are you going to be in Langley?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Because you look like someone who’s not going to stay long. Someone who prefers a bigger city.”

Robert poured a half inch more wine for her, so that her glass was just half full. He realized he was wearing the gold cuff links Nickie had given him on their first wedding anniversary, and he pulled his jacket cuffs farther down over them. “Where’re you and Greg going to live when you’re married?”

“Oh, Greg likes Trenton. For business reasons. It’s ugly compared to Princeton, but Princeton’s expensive. He’s got a house picked out in Trenton, and we’re supposed to take it June first.”

“Do you like the house?”

She took a long time to answer, then said seriously, “I think what it amounts to is I’m not so sure I ought to marry Greg.”

“Oh? Why?”

“I’m not so sure I love him enough.”

Robert had no comment that seemed appropriate. She had finished her dinner.

“I’m not going to marry him,” she said.

“When did you decide that?”

“Just after Christmas.” She rolled the lighted end of her cigarette in the ashtray.

The waiter came to remove their plates, to take their orders for dessert. Robert didn’t want dessert, but the homemade apple pie was
highly touted on the menu, and Jenny agreed to it when he suggested it, so he ordered two with coffee.

“My advice to you,” he said, “is to postpone the wedding a few months. Maybe you’re worried because Greg’s rushing you.”

Her slender eyebrows frowned slightly. “That wouldn’t do any good, postponing. I’m talking about something I already know.”

“You’ve talked to Greg about it?”

“Yes, but he thinks I’m going to change my mind. I talked to him between Christmas and New Year’s.”

The apple pie and coffee arrived. Robert ordered two Courvoisiers. She would end by marrying Greg, he thought.

“Can I ask you a very personal question?” Jenny asked.

“I suppose. What?”

“Did you leave New York because of a girl?”

Robert looked at her. He had not so much as blinked. “No. An argument in my office. Besides, the building I was living in was going to be torn down.”

She did not ask any more questions. He felt she knew he had lied. They sipped their brandies in silence.

“Can we go soon?” she said.

“Yes. Certainly.” He looked around for the waiter.

Robert paid the check at the door, then went back to the table to leave his tip.

The girl was putting on her snow boots by the wardrobe booth. He held her coat for her.

“Can we take a drive?” she asked.

“All right,” he said, surprised. “In your car or mine?”

“In yours.”

Robert did not know what to make of her mood. He saw her car in the restaurant’s parking lot. He opened the door of his car for her. It was an Oldsmobile convertible, one he’d had with Nickie for a year or so, but Nickie hadn’t wanted it when they separated. Ralph Jurgen had two cars.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked her.

“I don’t care.”

The only roads properly cleared of snow and ice were the main highways, and those were boring to take a drive on. He turned the heater on high, because the girl was huddled in her coat. She looked straight ahead through the windshield. He decided not to try to talk, but after a few minutes he began to feel uncomfortable. Why did she want to ride around with him on a night like this—the sleet had turned to a cold, fine rain—without any objective? What was she trying to do, tempt him to park somewhere and make a pass at her? Did a girl ask a man who’d acted like a voyeur to take her for a drive in his car? Robert felt suddenly wretched and depressed. “It’s a rotten night for driving,” he said, and pulled into a filling station. “Suppose we turn around?” He turned around and headed back in the direction of the restaurant.

“I don’t mind a night like this. Sometimes I feel as if I have to move, just move somewhere.” She was still staring through the windshield. “Sometimes when I feel like this, I take a long walk.”

Robert’s resentment, his hostility, slowly ebbed. The girl was not thinking of him at all. She was completely wrapped up in her own thoughts. He felt suddenly a curious sympathy and rapport with her—often he was in the same mood himself. “Out of touch with reality,” Nickie called it.

They got back to the restaurant’s parking lot, and the girl opened the door as soon as he stopped the car.

He got out as she did. “Know your way back? You have enough gas?”

“Oh, sure.” She sounded sad and lost.

Robert was disappointed at the way the evening was ending. He had wanted her to be cheerful, talkative, and he had imagined a second brandy, and lingering at the table until eleven or so. It was barely ten. “Thanks so much for the evening,” he said.

She might not have heard him. She got into her car.

“Jenny, if I’ve said anything that offended you tonight, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything about Greg. It’s none of my business.”

“No, it’s mine,” she said. “You didn’t offend me, honestly. It’s just that sometimes I can’t say anything. It’s terrible of me, I know, but I can’t help it.”

He smiled. “I don’t mind.”

“Will you come out to my house some time?”

“Yes, if you’d like. How about some time when Greg is there? You could introduce me as that friend of Rita’s.”

“I’m not going to see Greg till the twentieth of January. We have an agreement. That’s his birthday.”

“Well, after that.”

“What’s the matter with next wee-eek?” she asked, her smile spreading in a shy, uncontrollable way. “What’s the matter with Monday? Or Sunday? I can cook, you know.”

He should know. Robert did not want to come to her house when only she was there. He suddenly saw the girl’s behavior in a new light. He said painfully but firmly, “I’d rather wait till—till after January twentieth.”

“Don’t be so stubborn, I’m
inviting
you. Or are you so busy?”

“No. No, I’m not so busy.”

“Then come for dinner Sunday. Come around five. I’m going skiing with a friend in the afternoon, but I should be back by four. Do you ski?”

“Used to. But I haven’t any skis now.”

“You can rent them at this place where we ski. Come with us Sunday. Do you know where Vareckville is?”

He didn’t know, but she told him, and told him how to get to the ski station a mile outside the town. She seemed so happy that he might be coming, Robert couldn’t say that he wouldn’t come. He agreed to meet her at two
P.M
., and to have dinner with her at her house afterward.

Robert slept badly that night. It might have been the coffee, the brandy. Or the whole evening. He had taken the last of the Seconals he had brought from New York, and hadn’t troubled to find a doctor in Langley to get a new prescription. He had thought he wouldn’t need any more sleeping pills, but apparently he was wrong.

Jenny’s friend was a girl of about twenty named Susie Escham. She lived in the next house to Jenny, she said, which was half a mile away on the same road, and she was going to business school in Langley. She volunteered this information all at once to Robert. And from then on, even when they were skiing down the mild slope to the wood’s edge, and pulling themselves back by the hand rope, Robert felt Susie eying him, watching him with interest and curiosity. No doubt Susie knew Greg, knew Jenny and Greg were engaged, and thought it strange, therefore, that Jenny had another “boy friend.” Robert felt very old, an adult among adolescents. He was careful to be impersonal and rather inattentive to Jenny. Jenny was in high spirits, laughing at Robert when he fell, as he did twice, then racing down to help him get up again. She seemed to be quite a good skier, and could have taken a more challenging hill than this one.

“Do you know Greg?” Susie asked Robert.

They were drinking hot coffee from the thermos Susie had brought. Jenny had finished her cup and was several yards away, about to go down the hill again.

“No, I haven’t met him,” Robert said.

“Oh? I thought you knew Jenny a long time.”

Robert didn’t know what Jenny had told her. Susie’s bright, dark eyes were on him. She had a small, full mouth inclined to smile, and she was smiling mischievously now, her lips pressed together. “No, not long.” Length, especially in time, was a subjective matter, Robert thought.

“How’d you meet Jenny?”

The prying amused and annoyed him, too. “Through a mutual friend,” he replied. Then he stood up from the wooden bench and felt for his cigarettes. “Would you like one?”

“I don’t smoke, thank you. You work in Langley, Jenny said.”

“Yes. Langley Aeronautics.” Robert glanced down at his trouser cuffs, unfashionably folded into the tops of his rented ski boots. “Well, I suppose I’ll try it again,” he said, moving toward the starting line. Jenny was coming up by the hand rope.

“You have a house in Langley?”

“No, an apartment,” he called over his shoulder, and then he was out of talking range.

Jenny took one hand from the rope and extended it to him. “Wow!” she said, out of breath, her cheeks bright pink. “Why don’t they get a
ca-able
car here?”

Robert had checked an impulse to take her hand and pull her up the last couple of feet. “I don’t think I’ll go down again after all,” he said, frowning down the slope. “Nope, I’ve had it.”

“You’re getting old,” Jenny said.

“You said it.”

“How old are you?”

“I’ll be thirty in June.”

They left just before four, Susie and Jenny in Jenny’s car and Robert in his own. He drove at a good distance behind them to Jenny’s house. Jenny drove past her house to drop Susie off, and her car was out of sight when Robert turned in at her driveway. He hoped Jenny hadn’t told Susie that he was coming to her house to have dinner. The goodbye Robert had said to Jenny had been calculated to serve just as well as a goodbye for the day. He waited by his car until Jenny’s Volkswagen pulled up beside his.