The Moonlight Man (4 page)

“I don't know how to shave someone,” she said.

“Yes, you do,” he replied. “The knowledge of shaving is deep in you. Women are a race of barbers.”

“You forgot to put on socks,” she observed, suddenly noticing his bare ankles.

“That's not all I forgot,” he said. She stared at his narrow ankles and slender feet. She thought—that's a part of him that is still young, the way he was years ago, before the belly and the graying blond hair and all the lines in his face.

“You weren't dangerous. You were soggy lumps,” she said, and worried that she'd gone too far. She couldn't recall, now that she thought about it, seeing him angry, not at her in any case.

“Yes, it's strange, isn't it,” he said in the thoughtful, serious voice that she loved. “We drink to be dangerous and end up soggy lumps.”

He reached out across the space between them, his hand moving through sunlight until it touched her knee, which he patted.

“I'm going to fix you a wonderful breakfast as soon as I can hold a cup without dropping it. You'll see! A perfect egg, fried ever so delicately in butter, and toast caving in with honey. But first—if you'd make me some coffee. It'll give me strength.”

She knew one thing about him, the way he talked about what he was going to do as though the words fed a hope always at risk of fading.

She made him coffee and watched him drink it as he leaned against the sink. She felt he was returning to her from a long way away. He looked back at her over the rim of his cup. In the musty little kitchen, in the silence, he appeared to be pondering something. Was it because he wasn't talking that she suddenly felt so strongly the reality of where she was?

After he had finished the coffee, he said he'd devised a plan for shaving. He'd be more at ease in the bathtub and therefore less likely to start involuntarily with terror when confronting a woman with a razor in her hand.

“You sound as if you think men and women are enemies,” she said.

“I suppose you think they're not?” he asked, with an edge of hardness.

“Women don't go to war.”

“You must read up on the Amazons.”

“They're a myth.”

He started to reply but smiled mildly instead. As she followed him up the narrow staircase to the bathroom, he said, over his shoulder, “You're pretty tough yourself.”

He stepped right into the tub, gripping its sides as he lowered himself until he was reclining against the curved back. She picked up his straight razor which lay among some toilet articles on the shelf.

“Soap first, for mercy's sake!” he groaned.

“I don't want to do this,” she said. She didn't want to be tough, either, not in the way she thought he'd meant. He had put a bent cigarette in his mouth and was fumbling in his pockets for a match.

“Put that away,” she said indignantly.

“All right, all right—never mind the evil of tobacco. Mrs. Landy will be scandalized if I look like the bum I am. Get on with it now!”

What if Mrs. Landy, the woman Mr. Ames had hired to keep house for them, and who lived in a hamlet several miles east, crept up the stairs and saw Catherine with a razor in her hand and Mr. Ames in the tub? She managed to stir up some lather with a sliver of soap and tepid water. She knelt and covered his cheeks and chin with it.

He was fifty years old. She was not accustomed to being so close to an adult man. Her stepfather hugged her “hello” or “good-bye” so quickly she had not really seen his face except when he moved away from her, and Philippe was nineteen and his skin was smooth and taut. He could never become so fragile, so old, as her father was, lying there in the old tub, its claw feet sunk into linoleum that might once have been green, his eyes bloodshot, his skin the color of an oyster.

“Come on,” he ordered her. “I'll pray silently so as not to unnerve you.”

She held the razor just above his face. He gave her a look of mock terror. She held her breath and drew the blade down across the stubble of whiskers.

“I didn't cut you,” she said triumphantly.

“Admirable child,” he said, in what he called his humbug voice and which he used, she knew, when he wanted her to laugh and not to think too hard about what he was up to.

When she had finished, he climbed out of the tub slowly, groaning and complaining. He wiped his face carelessly with the sleeve of his pajama top that hung from a hook on the back of the door; then he peered into a small mirror nailed up over the washbasin.

“Very good,” he observed.

“I missed a lot of places,” she said.

He made a large gesture with his hand, waving away any objections. “Survival is what we're after,” he said, “not perfection.” With a sudden excess of energy, he hurried out of the bathroom and down the stairs, calling back to her that it was time for her reward.

Catherine went to her room to change her clothes. The first thing she saw, on the windowsill where she'd left it, was the pile of letters from her mother which he'd handed her without comment when she arrived.

She felt a touch of guilt. She'd read only three of them. There were probably more now in Toronto, at Betty Jane Rich's house. She must write to her mother in Windemere today and tell her everything was fine. Catherine laughed out loud.

The egg was a trifle overcooked but the toast was just as he had promised. With her mouth full of honey and butter, it was hard to make the sweeping statement she had in mind, to declare that she would absolutely never drive him—or anything else—anywhere when he was drunk. He was gazing out of the small kitchen window. A tea strainer hung from a nail over a pane and he seemed to be squinting through it, as though to see the world differently.

She wanted to know what he was thinking about. She had never been especially interested in what adults were thinking until this moment of studying her father's profile—unless she'd been trying to outguess or outwit them.

People claimed they spoke about their thoughts, their feelings. She had often wondered if another kind of conversation was taking place, wordlessly, at the same time. No matter what you talked about with Harriet Blacking, she was really saying—
you can't fool me
—and you were always protesting—
I'm not trying to fool you!
Her conversations with Cornelia were partly about how much they liked each other. When she asked Cornelia if she could borrow a blouse and Cornelia said yes, but don't get strawberry jam on it, they were both saying—you can have what is mine. And when she and Philippe talked in the café where she sometimes met him after his Thursday anthropology class, whatever they said, it was about being glad to see each other—there wasn't anyone they wanted to see more, even if they argued about drinking coffee black or with milk, or when Philippe was going to stop smoking, or why the Conservatives were so boring. Their words were paper boats floating on a river—a strong current of delight and excitement that was the other, hidden conversation between them.

“I'm thinking about you,” Catherine's father said. “And what a nice girl you are.”

She was startled. She had an impulse to thank him for being plain, for not making a joke. She didn't. He might think she was criticizing him.

She would like very much to tell him that often his jokes tired her out, even though she laughed, and that the joking made her feel as if a door were being pushed shut against her. Was there another conversation, she wondered, going on between the two of them, too? Beneath all the jokes?

The back door opened and shut. It would be Mrs. Landy. Mr. Ames had gotten her name from the Mackenzie postmistress.

“Postmistresses know everything worth knowing,” Mr. Ames had told Catherine. “Don't forget that.”

Mrs. Landy was making mouse noises in the hall. She would be hanging up the jacket she always wore, no matter how warm the day. In a moment she appeared in the kitchen door, thin as a hairpin, with hairpin legs and a little twist of mouse hair on the top of her head.

“Dear Mrs. Landy,” said Mr. Ames. “I'm glad to see you!”

“I was just here yesterday,” Mrs. Landy said.

“And here you are again today!” exclaimed Mr. Ames. “Is everything fine at home? How is Jackie?”

“My little Jackie is just fine,” said Mrs. Landy, in her faintly mournful voice. “But Mr. Conklin, the bus driver, nearly wrecked the bus this morning with us all in it, he was driving so crazy. A good thing the road isn't much traveled.”

Catherine glanced at her father. He gave her a conspiratorial wink. She didn't smile; it wasn't funny.

“We'll leave you to your labors,” Mr. Ames said.

Mrs. Landy tittered. “The way you talk, Mr. Ames,” she said.

Catherine followed him outdoors. He looked up at the sky and spread wide his arms as though to embrace it. The early fog had cleared away, the sky was cloudless, the July sun, brilliant.

She still hadn't said what she wanted to say about last night. It was like a lump in her throat. She had shaved him. They had had breakfast. They had had conversations. It was a summer day and everything was fine.

Was it fine? She felt again the fear and disgust she had felt last night on that wild country road; she heard again those groans and snores from the back seat.

“I don't want to do that again,” she said in a low, steady voice. He bent to listen to her. “Like last night,” she said.

“I know,” he responded gravely. “I know just how bad it was. For you and for me. It won't happen again. And now it's time you learned how to shoot.” He went back inside the house.

She knew he had gone to fetch the rifle he'd found wrapped up in newspapers in a closet and which she'd watched him clean the first day of her visit.

She was immensely relieved that she had spoken about last night, not that she entirely believed what he'd said—that it wouldn't happen again. And along with the relief, she felt that stirring of anticipation he was always able to arouse in her.

He had done that from the earliest times she could recall seeing him, even when he was only taking her to have a hamburger in some bar where he could order German beer. He would show her the label, point out how beautiful it was, and then tell her everything about it, how the beer was made, what the city was like where it came from, the feel of it, the cold, stinging, hearty, blessed rush of it down one's parched throat. He'd given her a spoonful once, and when she'd made a face, finding it bitter, he'd laughed.

“It doesn't taste the way you said it would,” she'd said to him reproachfully.

“Ah, you're learning to be a critic,” he'd replied.

Three

A train used to pass once a day through the backyard on its way to Luhenberg, Mrs. Landy told the Ameses. Catherine pressed aside thick clumps of grass with her foot and bent to touch the rusted track. What had happened to the passengers who had traveled on that one-car train to the fishing town on the Atlantic Ocean? Who had lived in the little house in those days? Mr. Ames didn't know the house's history, but he offered to provide Catherine with one, or several, if she liked.

“I want the real one,” she said.

“It wouldn't be more interesting than what I could invent. Less so, probably,” he'd responded.

She wandered around the back of the house where there was a narrow porch but no door. Perhaps the original owners had been afraid they'd tumble out and over the edge of a low cliff a few yards away. Beyond the cliff lay a broad meadow, its farthest border a meandering stream. A few miles beyond the stream was the village of Mackenzie.

When he arrived there, Mr. Ames said he knew he had come to the right place. “I'm an old hand finding good places,” he'd told her. “It's because I know what I'm after. Do you know a village has temperament and character just as a person has? I saw that it was rural here without being brutal.”

She imagined him parking the big car the morning he'd driven down Mackenzie's main street, talking to people in his easy, confiding way, which, she guessed, flattered them and made them want to trust him and do things for him. There was a pub in the village; he'd probably gone there in the evening and met Mr. Conklin and Farmer Glimm.

He had lived in so many places in Europe and in the United States, too, all along the eastern coast, Key West, towns along the Chesapeake, all over New England. “I'm settling down at last,” he would write her. The rest of the letter would be a description of the village or town, the beach, the headland, the bay, so detailed it was as though he was making a map.

After he had married Emma, Catherine's mother had wondered if he would indeed settle down at last, but the return addresses on envelopes continued to change every year or so.

She heard him calling her and she rounded the house and found him standing near the tracks, holding the rifle at his side. She hadn't been sure he had seriously meant to teach her to shoot even after he'd bought ammunition in Mackenzie. He had often said they were going to do one thing but changed his mind because he'd thought of something more interesting.

He'd had a gun collection when he lived on Cape Cod. An arsonist had burned down his house and everything in it had been destroyed. That was when he was young, before he'd met and married Catherine's mother. She gave Catherine a photograph of him in his little saltbox house near Pilgrim Lake, sitting in front of a wicker table, a portable typewriter on it as well as a cat curled up next to an ashtray. In the picture, he looked so thin, staring down at the typewriter, writing his first novel.

She didn't care about learning to shoot. What she wanted was to get him talking about his early times. Why had he always sought out the sea? Where had he gotten the money to rent that house and buy guns and live and eat? And what about his parents? Her grandparents? Where had they come from? All that she knew about his early history was that he'd been born in New York City.