I
BEGAN THIS rumination in the mood of an old-fashioned Christian who opens the Bible at random, hungry for a text. Because I could not reconcile myself to the way life cheated one who so loved being alive, I wanted to talk to her and about her, quietly. I see that I have been talking at least as much about Joseph Allston and how life has cheated him, who only wanted to retire and tend his garden.
Mischance is a collaboration, I have told myself; evil is everywhere and in all of us. Yet I am steadily tempted to poke around the garden looking for the snake. Sooner or later I shall find myself going (coming?) down my hole after myself. I do not forget the ambiguous serpent I dug out of the ground last summer, though I cannot make him fit any easy pattern of moral meaning.
None of us, surely, is harmless, whatever our private fantasies uige us to believe. Whatever any of us may have wanted in retiring to these hills, we have not escaped one another. The single-minded rancher anxious to capitalize on his remaining land, the Italian native son with the invalid wife and the sullen daughter and the narcotic adobe bricks, the threatened young woman desperate for continuity, the kook who lived in the birdhouse and this kook who lives at the top of the hill—whatever we wanted, we stumbled into community, with its consequences. And at the heart of our community was the Catlin cottage.
It sat on a shelf between our lane and the creek, a little higher than the rest of the bottomland. Its board-and-batten sides and its shake roof were weathered silvery as an old rock. To me it had an underwater look-that barnacled silveriness, the way three big live oaks twisted like seaweed above the roof, the still, stained, sunken light. It wasn’t air you looked at in that pocket. It was an infusion of green and brown plants, it seemed always to have a faint murkiness of sediment sinking through it. The small hollylike oak leaves lay thinly on the ground, as unstirred as settlings on a sea bottom, and all through the spring and summer oak moths flickered and wavered among the trees. You half expected mermaids to scatter in clouds of bubbles from the picnic grove that Thomas had cleared down along the creek.
The moment we met Marian Catlin, we knew that this was her sort of place. Until we met her, we had thought it shabby. For six months or so, while the Thomases lived there, we had driven past with no more than a nod or a wave, and had never been inside the house or sat in the grove. Once the Catlins moved in, we were in and out of the house almost daily, and the grove became a place as familiar as our own terrace.
I find it hard to reconstruct how that intimacy happened. One day we had never heard of them, days later we were close friends. All our lives Ruth and I have tended to protect ourselves from people and cherish our privacy, and we have been more likely to reject individuals peremptorily—the way I suppose I rejected Peck—than to like them on sight. But we caught Marian’s affectionateness as if it had been a communicable disease: she was the Typhoid Mary of love. We have never had the kissing habit, knowing how little it usually means, but the Catlins we kissed on greeting and parting as if they had been our children. Which, by a sort of spontaneous mutual adoption, they were. For Debby, at Marian’s request and by the terms of her will, we are now legally responsible in case anything happens to John.
We are a frail enough last resort, but our willingness gave Marian comfort, for she was anxious about the child and afraid of her aloneness in the world. John had no relatives closer than a brother whose State Department assignments kept him always in some Arab state or other. Marian’s parents had been killed in an automobile accident when she was five, and she had been brought up by a grandmother with a pin in her hip, who took as much care as she could give, but who did give her an intense and sentimental love. Marian wanted at least that much for Debby. More, actually, much more. That was why she passionately and mystically bent herself to produce flower and fruit and create her a brother or sister. If she had a religion, it was biological.
The day after the Catlins’ first visit, we passed down by the mailboxes a girl who had to be Debby—six or so, her hair pulled back in a pony tail from her thin wedge of a face, her eyes lost behind owlish little-girl glasses. Our waves got only a turning stare. Looking back as we crossed the bridge, I saw her moping along the lane touching mustard flowers with her fingers. “Moving is hard on children,” Ruth said.
Next day, when we had to do our Saturday marketing, Ruth cut a bunch of rosebuds and some sprigs of daphne and put them in the car. As we drew opposite the Catlins’ parking area we saw Marian pushing her daughter in a swing hung from a high oak limb in the grove. Their voices came up in chirps and cries, a sort of stinging musical spray from that brown pool. Marian saw us, gave the child a last running push, and came up the bank. I had not been mistaken about the vividness of her face; she brought light with her out of the shadow of the oaks.
Panting, she took the hand I held out, gave it a quick hard squeeze, and still holding it, stooped to smile through the car at Ruth, who was leaning to pass the roses across me.
“The worms we promised you,” I said.
“Do I dare sniff them, or will I be inhaling DDT?” But she buried her face in the buds, and lifted it only to bury it again, though that variety, Fred Edmonds, does not have much odor. “I love them,” she said, to make sure we didn’t misunderstand her joke. “They’re beautiful.”
She was laughing at me through the bouquet—and what a blue her eyes were: cornflower, delphinium. The tilted updrawn look in the outer corners that women try to get with make-up was in her somehow wistful and young and vulnerable, since she wore no make-up at all and was in spite of the exercise so pale.
If I am really remembering, and not inserting feelings I had later, every movement she made troubled me with its intimation of the mutilation she had suffered. I could not help wondering if it was her scarred side she held the roses to. The left, was it? I could see no difference, but she had to pad herself, obviously. And would that seem offensive to her, that falseness? How did she feel when she looked at her ruined body, or when her husband looked at it? Mystically addicted to the distribution of seeds, did she feel herself crippled for love? She couldn’t have, for what had she done as soon as she recovered from the operation but get herself pregnant? For just an instant I wondered if a husband in John Catlin’s position might feel used, and then I thought of his good-humored, firm, guarded face, his eyes that followed her around, and I knew he didn’t.
She chattered in the fluty, hyperthyroid voice, a thin girl in a faded denim skirt that showed no slightest sign of podding under its wide pocket. The orange-red roses lay in her bent arm. Behind her the weathered cottage stared, still curtainless, into unspaded beds of weeds. Ruth was offering slips, geranium or ice plant or something that took practically no care, but no, Marian insisted, they really weren’t going to plant anything. Maybe she was a nut, but she believed that plants whose genes were adapted to an environment ought to be let grow in it, instead of being uprooted in favor of exotics that would die as soon as the gardener turned off the hose. Besides, why should she break her back gardening when the neighbors brought her such lovely flowers? In exchange, we must come and sit in their nice dusty grove, and get oak moths in our hair.
From that grove her daughter was calling. “Mummy! Come push me, I’m dying.”
“I’m talking now, hon. Pump. See how high you can go.”
“I can’t, I go all crooked.”
“Sit square in the middle.”
“I
am
!”
Marian frowned, made an explaining face, seemed about to excuse herself and leave us. Across me Ruth passed the sprigs of daphne that filled the car with their scent. “Ask her if she’d like something for her buttonhole.”
Sniffing—ummm!—Marian called, “Debby, the Allstons have brought you something nice.”
The white nylon ropes jerked, twisted, and hung shaking. The girl came up the bank, flinching and frowning when she brushed against a thistle. She took the handful of perfume as if she had expected something a good deal more gorgeous, maybe a pony. “Smell,” her mother said. Debby held the daphne against her nose and stared at us owlishly. Her mother hugged her shoulders. “Debby, this is Mr. and Mrs. Allston, who live up on the hill in a beautiful house and have a Siamese cat named Catarrh.”
“What’s catarrh?”
“Sinus trouble,” I said. “We only call him Catarrh inside the family. His registered name is Otorhinolaryngitis.”
She was not amused. Exit clown, to scornful laughter.
“Say how do you do, and thanks for the lovely daphne,” Marian said.
“How do you do. Thanks for the daphne.”
“I hope you’ll come and see us often,” Ruth said. “How do you like your new house?”
“All right.”
“She hasn’t had a chance to find playmates yet,” Marian said. “John’s at the lab all day, and she gets tired of just me. And she’s had to change schools. We’ve got to get busy organizing some of her friends to come out and play, or find some new ones.”
“But you’ve got a beautiful swing,” Ruth said.
“Ya,” Debby said, “but she’ll never
push
me.”
“Hon, I can’t push you all the time. If you’d learn to pump you could swing all day.” To us, with a deprecatory down-drawn mouth, she said, “She’s been simply
berserk
about that swing since John put it up last night.” Again she hugged Debby to her hip. “We’re a little lost, that’s our trouble. But we’ll soon get acquainted and like the country better than anywhere. Won’t we? We’re already making friends with the animals. We saw one of our foxes again, and a raccoon got in our garbage can, and three deer came by. You don’t see those in town.”
Held against her mother’s leg, Debby seemed to resist the pressure without wanting to break away. “You forgot the man that lives in the tree.”
Marian broke into laughter. “Yes, why didn’t you tell us about our arboreal neighbor?”
“He never crossed my mind,” I said. “As a matter of fact, I don’t want him crossing my mind.”
“Why not? He seems like a real original.”
“Original?” I said. “You can grind out originals like that on a mimeograph machine.”
“Oh, come on, how many people do you know who live in trees?”
“How many beards do you see running around on motorcycles?”
“But that’s unfair. Should I call you a stereotype because you drive a car like a hundred and fifty million other Americans? As far as that goes, it’s a shaven face that’s unnatural. I think beards on men are handsome, sometimes.”
“You’ve persuaded me,” I said. “Starting right now, I’m growing a beard.”
“Not in my house,” Ruth said. “I have trouble enough with Catarrh shedding all over everything.”
“Don’t talk to me, it’s her responsibility. She likes these dustmops, and what she likes, that’s what I try to be.”
“You’re so amenable,” Marian said. “Isn’t he amenable ? But I like your face all bare. I just think you shouldn’t judge a person by how much hair he’s got.”
“Have you met this kid? Do you find him charming?”
“Well, charming, that’s a word. He’s pretty far out. But maybe that’s because he cares about things.”
“Cares about what? If he cared about things, he’d be down in Mississippi or carrying a sign in some protest march, not perched in a tree with his drawbridge up.”
“I take it back,” Marian said. “You aren’t amenable at all, you’re full of gross prejudice. If you don’t like him, why do you let him live down here?”
“Softheadedness. Amenability.”
“I’ll bet. No, he really isn’t so bad. Coming home the other night he rode his motorcycle by the window pretty loud, and Debby woke up scared, so we went out and talked to him while he was putting it away.”
“I hope you did. If he disturbs you with that hoodlum machine, he’s through roosting in that tree right now.”
“Oh tush,” Marian said. “He was perfectly good about it, he just hadn’t thought. This morning he pushed the motorcycle past and started it down by the bridge. But he is about as odd as Dick’s hatband, with the whiskers and that flying suit. John says he’s got a bad case of disestablishmentarianism.”
“I noticed,” I said. “He’s all broken out with it.”
“And he eats only nuts and fruits and vegetables.”
“He seems to tell everybody that.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“No.”
“His father’s some bigwig in the meat-packing business in Chicago, and that’s why he won’t eat any meat.”
“That’s a great reason,” I said. “Doesn’t his father wear pants, too? How come Tarzan doesn’t wear a sarong, or a toga?”
“You can’t say those coveralls are exactly orthodox.”
“Nor very sanitary,” I said.
“Ah,” she said, smiling and screwing up her eyes, “you like to sound like old Scrooge, but I notice he’s still living in your tree. And that’s going to disrupt this household, you know that? This one here has been after me all day, when she hasn’t been screaming to be pushed in the swing, to go see his treehouse. And he obviously doesn’t want people looking at his treehouse.”
“But I could ask him,” Debby said. “Why can’t I ask him?”
“Because he’s fussy about his privacy,” her mother said. “Everybody’s got his peculiarities. He likes privacy, Mr. ,Allston is grossly prejudiced, you’ve got bug eyes, I’m a skinny hysteric. But we’ve all got a right to be what we are. Haven’t we?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do. So that’s why he keeps his bridge pulled up and doesn’t want us snooping around his place.”
“Well I’m going to!”
“I hope not, baby,” Marian said. “You’d embarrass us awfully if you did.”
Ruth, leaning, said, “I’m afraid we have to go or we’ll get caught in the rush-hour traffic. But please stop by when you’re out walking. And bring Debby up to meet Catarrh.”