Dale Loves Sophie to Death (3 page)

On the porch, the children built card houses with the incomplete and abandoned packs of cards they had ferreted out of obscure drawers here and there around the house. They weren’t building with much success, however, because the floorboards were so worn that they didn’t afford sufficient purchase, and at crucial moments the bottom cards slipped out from beneath the upper construction. Polly’s house resembled her person, by now. Even though her business was interior design, and she was good at it, her own house had been left to its own silent transmutations. The bare bones of the
house
were also coming to light, so that the walls seemed only a thin veil over the basic construction, and the furniture had a delicate look of age.

Martin sat at the other end of the porch with a newspaper resting on the knee of one crossed leg and talked with Dinah’s brother, Buddy, and with Lawrence Brooks, who had come across the lawn from next door, where he had lived all his life. Now that house was Lawrence’s own house. He was a lawyer and no longer just a child next door. Lawrence’s wife, Pam, idled over with their two-year-old son propped on one hip and sat down next to Dinah, and they began to chat.

As she listened and put in a word now and then, Dinah stared out at the communal lawn shared by the Brookses’ and her mother’s houses, which sat at right angles to each other. She studied the myriad tiny crosshatched branches of the flowering bushes that grew untended around the stone patio in the center of the yard. She hadn’t much to say to Pam. Pam was so young, and her son seemed to take up both of their energies. The two women talked about the little boy, though it was apparent to each of them from the timbre of the other’s voice that neither meant to or wanted to.

At the edge of their conversation, Dinah heard David badgering whomever he could find to come and play Monopoly with him, and Martin, who would do almost anything with David, finally got up, and the two of them went to find the board. Buddy and Martin and David and Dinah’s mother settled around the card table at last and divided the money while Pam and Dinah went to mix drinks and set out dinner. Lawrence, still seated at the darkening edge of the porch, opened Martin’s discarded newspaper and kept a casual eye on the other children.

This was the house in which Dinah had grown up, and her childhood was so fascinating and mysterious to her in retrospect that each room was of great significance. Even the unique and musty scent of the house, a scent like no other, tantalized her with the possibility of an important revelation. So this first night back in her mother’s kitchen she could not abide the company of the innocent Pam. Dinah set out food at random and with no show at all of appreciation to Pam, who could only follow her about and try to help. And from the porch the sounds of the Monopoly game being laid out and getting under way made Dinah clench her teeth in apprehension, because David was, to his parents, like a rare gem set between them. He was not necessarily the nicest of their children, nor could it yet be said that he would be the most handsome, but he had been the first. It was not even that they loved him best; of course, he was not always lovable at all. It was just that beneath the surface of their consciousness there was an awareness of David that registered every shadow and nuance of his altering sensibilities. Their curiosity could never be assuaged by anything he might reveal about himself. They yearned after whatever it was that was at the very core of his personality, so puzzling to them was his blossoming independence. Dinah could hear his clear voice babbling above the others, and she noted the effort he made to suppress the keenness he felt for the competition. Listening to the progress of the game was a little like refusing Novocain at the dentist’s; it kept her on edge in anticipation of a painful shock.

She turned to Pam and smiled at her. She picked up Pam’s little boy, Mark, who was getting into everything, and feigned interest in him. But after a few moments of this she was overtaken by unease, and she realized that she could not be gracious tonight. She thought she felt the beginnings of a cold amassing like clouds behind her brow, and she was anxious. She took her drink out to the patio, though the air had grown chilly, and sat at a distance from her family and friends. Here she was once more, and she sat in a lawn chair expecting the childhood comfort of early evening, with grownups nearby talking over their drinks, to descend upon her. She watched with care to see how the darkness encroached upon the margins of the yard; she impressed upon herself the phenomenon of the intricate tracery of the foliage losing its distinction, so that each tree and each bush became a shaded mass. She evoked all these familiar impressions, but the accompanying sensation of nostalgic pleasure did not surface. No mellowness spread like the warmth of alcohol through her limbs; she found she could not call up the renewed faith that all is well, that all will be well. In fact, all she was feeling was increasing irritation. The image of that ham stuck fast in her mind. There it sat, bedecked like a Christmas tree, waiting to be carved, and only Pam and her baby to attend it. Where were the grownups? So she roused herself and went back to the house to set about the serving of dinner.

A second circle had formed around the card table to see how the game was progressing, and so she, too, stopped to watch. Immediately she was aware of her son’s fragile courage hanging so vulnerably in the air when she caught sight of his shining eyes and large gestures of bravado. He made a great show of cavalierly paying a debt. Buddy sat across from him, leaning back in his chair, accepting David’s money with a grin and carefully sorting it into the proper piles. “I’m gonna clean up! Oh boy, I’m really gonna clean up!” he said with mock greed. But Dinah watched him as only a younger sibling would, knowing that Buddy didn’t play games except to win. He was flicking an imaginary cigar between his fingertips and patting his stomach with the satisfaction of a contented businessman. David relaxed and smiled at him with unassumed pleasure; Buddy’s pantomime seemed to assure him that this was only a game. Dinah could scarcely bear it.

Her mother sat with all her bills gathered into a pile that she held in one hand and ruffled absentmindedly with her thumb. She rolled the dice with seeming indifference. Who could tell if it was real? She was looking out into the yard when the dice fell, and she looked around at the numbers on them almost in surprise and reached for her cigarette. She moved her token to St. James Place and completed a monopoly, the first of the game, and David sat up on his knees in excitement to look over the board. “Wow! You got the first one, Polly!”

“Oh, yes, I guess I did,” she said, paying out the money for the deed. But she would win as usual, Dinah knew. Polly couldn’t lose at games, playing, as she did, with tremendous detachment and no thought given to bribing her luck, while her competitors silently tried to strike up bargains with God or fate. Polly would finally wander away from the game, uninterested even in her own victory. It was maddening.

David rolled the dice and landed on a railroad. He had two already, and now was beside himself with delight. “I’ll get you, Uncle Buddy! Now I’ll really get you if you land on me! You’ll have to pay me a hundred dollars. A hundred dollars!” Buddy covered his face at the grim prospect and sadly shook his head, and Dinah understood with gratitude that her brother was using all his charm to align himself with David, so that David could withstand the suspense of this intolerable game.

But Martin didn’t play games, didn’t know about games, really; he was so innocent of some things, and he was watching his son with an air of censure. Dinah felt suddenly as though those four people were frozen in the moment: her mother abstracted, Buddy all pretense, Martin the epitome of thought and propriety, and David open to anything, ready to head in any of their directions. And, sure enough, Martin frowned across the table at his son. “Don’t be so rude to Buddy, David. You shouldn’t gloat. That’s one of the first things to learn about playing games. Otherwise, you’ll hurt people’s feelings.”

“Oh, Jesus,” Dinah said. “What a pompous ass you are sometimes, Martin. Great God!” And in a frenzy of frustration at them all she glared into their crestfallen little group. “Not one of you—not a single one of you—has any idea how to play this asinine game!” And she stalked from the room while they all stared after her.

“Dinah, you talk like some kind of sailor,” her mother said, mildly. Dinah left the room in a fury, going straight to the kitchen, and instead of carving the ham into careful slices, she hacked it savagely into chunks that were scarcely manageable when eaten buffet-style on paper plates.

Two weeks later, when she drove Martin into Columbus to catch his plane back East, she considered various ways of apologizing to him for the foul and dismal temper she had vented at him over the past long days. She looked at his clean head, which she so loved, silhouetted against the car window, and she wanted to weep at the misunderstanding between them. She was sure she was coming down with a flu, and she simply couldn’t think. There was no one, no others but the children, to whom she was more tied. But then, as they passed through the familiar fields and the little towns, she could not think how to isolate that misunderstanding; how could she name it?

Now, as she suffered all the physical miseries of the flu, she also ached with a regret at having left a chink uncovered in their carefully constructed foundation of experience and tolerance. She lay in bed staring at the walls, awash in something similar to guilt, only much worse. There was self-loathing, there was fear, and, oh, there was a kind of homesickness she felt at this slight loss of herself, because she might have weakened a profound connection.

She looked at the picture, directly across from her, of that girl running. She was growing more beautiful each summer, and Dinah studied her intently. The girl’s endearingly long upper lip was almost ready to smile, but she was clearly giving no thought to the camera. Caught in midstride as she was, she was involved only with herself; she was thinking about her next step. Dinah studied the picture for a long while, so that by the time her fever returned and she began to drift into a light sleep she had become convinced that she did, indeed, know this girl. The girl was Sophie, beloved of Dale, loping steadily toward him, or perhaps away from him, through that neighborhood, to be loved or not to be loved to death.

Chapter Two

Summer Time

F
or himself, Martin could scarcely bear this leave-taking each summer, always the same, their two weeks in Enfield culminating in an obligatory kiss at the departure gate. He walked away leaving Dinah standing alone and unhappy, but what he thought they both longed to do was to stay—somewhere, in the car, standing on the asphalt, simply stay—just to talk and talk to each other. His vision was of the many words spilling from their mouths and taking a physical shape, all those words entwining them vinelike in what would be the final explanation. They would be enclosed in an arbor that would be the exact definition of themselves. Then they could sigh with relief. They could hold hands and smile. But it never happened, and these summers they parted mute with bewildered misery, feeling at once that they were being forced apart, and yet each anxious to be away from the other. In two days, a week, many times over the summer, they would telephone, and little pieces of apologies, of curiosity and best wishes, would be passed back and forth over the wires, so that at summer’s end they had the illusion once more of having made a concrete alignment, a familiar bridge, a bond.

And in the airport with Dinah, and as he took his seat on the plane, Martin was visited with his usual apprehension and fear of death, and also he was plagued by that now familiar but equally unsettling hollowness in his stomach at the prospect of taking up his life alone. That feeling approached sorrow and self-pity, and yet it was also comprised of the few, small lingering doubts about himself and the way he had chosen to live his life. The stretch of solitary time before him seemed shiny and glamorous with possibilities, and yet he did not hunger after change; he didn’t like to anticipate the unknown. He had never liked uncertainty, so he buckled his seat belt and sat back in his padded chair in a quandary.

Whenever Martin was in transit, he was more or less a man absolutely free. All the thoughts that tied him either to one place or to another fled his mind; therefore, the trip was a gentle interlude. Once the plane left the ground, his mind went idle; he was fairly undisturbed. But as he glanced at the people in the seats around him and saw the stewardesses at the front of the plane bend to each passenger with some question or instruction, he did, as usual, become preoccupied with his appearance. He could never believe he looked like a man who should be on a plane, because Martin was just old enough, at thirty-eight, so that he could remember airports as exotic places. As a child he had relished his own self-importance when boarding those large passenger planes among the beautifully dressed travelers, and he had stared out the window over the wingspan to see the propellers putt-putt-putt and then become a transparent blur of motion. He could not lose that notion of air travel even now, when he observed that across the aisle a couple in jeans and with backpacks at their feet took it none too seriously. It seemed that it was no more to them than taking the bus.

Still, he considered how he must look to the stewardess. Once, when his mother had come to meet him at the train station where he arrived on a trip home from graduate school, she had been laughing when he had finally made his way through the crowd and reached her. “Oh, Martin! You’ve gained some weight! Martin, your face looks like the full moon coming up over the bay!” He was trimmer now, but he did not have a look of authority or importance, even though, in his real life, these were qualities he possessed in some small way. This failure of his to match up to himself had always disappointed him. He was tall enough, but because of his thick torso and rather short legs, he looked stocky and bearlike—sometimes an endearing trait, he knew. His features, though, were so innocent and exactly arranged that his sweet, pale face set atop his wrestler’s body was as surprising as the black dot in an exclamation point. His looks belied a mildly severe nature, and on airplanes he would have been pleased to look severe. He would have liked to look like a man who needed a drink to unwind. He didn’t know that he had aged, and that his round, choirboy’s face had elongated a bit with the pull of gravity. He had finally developed a faint air of irritation not so uncommon in people who otherwise have a look of boundless good nature. The stewardess accorded him due respect, though he didn’t perceive it, and no one else was paying attention, anyway.