Dale Loves Sophie to Death (26 page)

When all the girls were in the car together at the Monument Drive-In, where they ordered their dinner from one of the microphones at each parking place, those girls felt their own power. The boys cruising around and around in their cars could see that
these
girls were not available to anyone but those they chose to see. Their elaborate, cocooned heads in their colored scarves were signals of their desirability. They had to hurry. They needed their hamburgers, their french fries, and their lemon Cokes right away. They had to hurry, because they had to go right home and get dressed.

But when their dates arrived, the boys were usually kept waiting while the girls had one last cigarette, settled back on Dinah’s bed, or changed clothes once again—swapping a skirt or a blouse; they traded off with one another. Finally, they did leave, but they went off into the evening with a faint air of regret.

When Isobel was home, the tempo changed. She would be seeing Buddy; she was eager to get away. She dressed in a flash and never did more than brush her straight thick hair back and secure it with a tortoiseshell barrette or a plain ribbon. She had no patience with the knowing, leisurely, confidential atmosphere of Dinah’s bedroom full of girls. In fact, she hardly ever joined them there; she usually dressed next door at her own house, but she would sometimes come over to wait for Buddy and smoke a cigarette. She was like a needle, slipping in and out of the room, putting on lipstick, teasing Dinah’s father, or drawing Polly into animated conversation.

“Oh, I’m getting married tonight, Dr. Briggs. I’m eloping.”

“Then I’ll greet you in the morning as a daughter-in-law, I guess,” he would say. Not really taking up the game, since it wasn’t especially amusing, but catering to Isobel because he admired her so. She had gone away to school; she was planning on a career—many of them. She was getting out into the world. He had never understood his own children’s reluctance to leave home, to go to a
good
school, nor had they. They had only known not to leave these two parents together; they knew it would be perilous to leave them isolated in this house by themselves with no go-between. Buddy and Dinah had never said this to each other; each of them had instinctively come to feel this, independently of the other.

Dinah sat looking around Snow’s and remembered Isobel’s influence in her life; she remembered the envy she had felt for Isobel’s possession of dull and predictable parents, and she also saw that even Isobel had been young and fatuous, simply on a different level. For a long time Dinah had been made miserable by the idea that Isobel could so easily command more of her mother’s attention, her father’s approval, and her brother’s affection than Dinah could attain through a sustained and everlasting effort. It was still true, and it was still painful.

Her father had never attempted to hide his admiration for Isobel. She had always been able to amuse him in a way that Dinah could not, and would not have been able even to attempt. In fact, it was Dinah’s father around whom the girls, their dates, the gossip, the latest news, all orbited. He was exotic. The things he deplored! All the things he wanted them to know!

“You girls, you girls! Don’t give up your lives to these boys. Use your
minds!
”

They were so interested to hear this exhortation. They were so vain, and they had an insatiable craving for their own reflections thrown back at them through someone else’s eyes. When their dates arrived, the boys sat with Dr. Briggs to wait for whomever it was they had come to get, and they sat there intimidated. Dinah’s father would sit in his study sipping a drink, leaning back in his chair, casually dressed on the weekends, but impeccable in chino pants and Sperry Top-Siders—“I grew fond of them in med school, in the operating room. If there was much blood on the tile, they would always keep you from slipping.” He would explain how the treads were minutely cross-hatched. He would sit in his house and gently harass these vulnerable young men; he would whittle away at them with a mild, sardonic tone. “But Nixon? You ought to look at his face when he speaks. What do you
really
think?” He would lean back in contemplation. He would try to pin them down in other ways. What did they think, he wanted to know. “Now, take God. Whichever one”—and he would wave his hand to suggest their choices—“do you think He’s up in the heavens with his tally sheet? Right this minute?” What could they say, these young Republican Methodists and Episcopalians? They had never thought anything through in their lives, and they met his inviting smile apprehensively. They stammered out and grappled with the few ideas in which they thought they had invested. In the end, of course, all the girls could see that none of these boys was in any way superior.

Dinah looked across the table at Lawrence. He had spent hours in that study. Over the years he must have developed a certain leeriness of her father; he could be a terrible man. “Was my father…well”—she wasn’t sure exactly what she meant to ask him—“what did you think of him?”

Lawrence looked straight at her, but she could see that he was embarrassed, and it surprised her. “I tell you, Dinah,” he began, rather ponderously, and Dinah wondered if she really cared what he thought of her father one way or another, “I guess that in spite of the whole mess I really do feel sorry for him.” He seemed to think that this was a magnanimous attitude, and Dinah was mystified, but she also realized that they were both getting a little drunk. She peered at Lawrence and bridled at the smug look of pity that he had assumed in relation to her own father. She didn’t say anything, however, because she was curious.

“Of course,” Lawrence continued, “he hasn’t ever been the same since that whole thing out there at the motel, but—well!—it must have been humiliating! I mean, to have been in his position.” Lawrence didn’t seem dreadfully sorry about it. “I wouldn’t have believed it at all, I guess, if my father hadn’t been handling the whole business for him. The legal side, anyway. Well, in the end it didn’t come to much, but it could have gotten pretty ugly. You know, that man was going to
sue!
” This struck him as incredible, and Dinah just stared at him while she tried to puzzle this out and regain her balance. “Even though he’d already
shot
your dad. He didn’t have a permit for that gun, either, so he could have been backed down, I imagine, if it had come to that. No one else
saw
your father at the window, either, so that was a break. But for a while that woman swore she was going to testify. I’ll tell you! She was mad! And they probably thought they could collect a bundle. She could have crucified him, of course. Lord, it was a real mess!” Lawrence sipped his beer, and Dinah took a swallow of her drink. She wanted to be very quiet. “She finally just dropped out of the picture,” Lawrence said. “The thing was wrangled around so much and went on for so long that she just left town.”

Dinah reached across and put her hand on Lawrence’s arm before he could raise the beer glass again. She wanted to stop his attention from going in any other direction. “What do you mean, Lawrence?” she said. “Are you saying…Do you mean to tell me that that man shot Dad because Dad was looking in the
window?
Now wait…” She drew her hand back and laid it palm down on the table. “Do you mean that he was just a
voyeur?
”

Lawrence looked back at her blankly, due in part to the amount of beer he’d drunk and in part to real surprise. “Well, yeah”—his voice inflected upward in puzzled apology. “What did
you
think he was shot for?”

“God, Lawrence.” She could only make a vague gesture and smile at him without any meaning or intention in the world. “I never thought it out, I guess. No one said. It was all so mysterious that I thought it was something much more…well, I just thought it would be something more than that.”

D
inah had traveled the route between Enfield and Fort Lyman well over three thousand times in her life. The road was imprinted on her nervous system, every hill, every sudden turn and dip, and the final long, upward climb, the shifting down of gears, had always been a moment to assemble herself in one way or another. When she was young, and if she had been to town with a date, it was the moment to be sure her blouse was tucked in neatly, and to put on fresh lipstick. This is what girls did then: they perched on the edge of the car seat and turned the rearview mirror so that it would reflect their own face, and they would dart a small, flip, conspiratorial smile at whatever boy had made this repair necessary. With one sure sweep—if this was a popular girl, sure of herself—she would repaint her mouth and give that same boy one more arch look as she dropped the lipstick back into her purse. It was one of many small ways of making a kind of claim. Dinah had done it many times on this same drive.

These days she usually made this trip with children in the car; she ferried them back and forth. When she shifted into low to begin the winding, wooded ascent to the village of Enfield, she called orders back to them. She told them to get their bathing suits and sandals together, or to throw away the sticky stems of the lollipops they had been given at the bank—“in the ashtray!” She got them settled apart from each other, with their belongings collected so that she could drop them at their separate houses without too much rearranging.

Tonight, though, she remained slumped against the car seat while Lawrence drove the car up that same hill. She was engaged in frenetic reassessments, and yet she was so weary that she couldn’t get anything sorted out. All of a sudden she felt a little as though her history had come unstuck. She kept thinking of an aunt she had visited now and then as a child, and of whom she had always believed she was very fond. This woman would invariably stoop down, upon catching her first glimpse of Dinah after a long interval, and say to her, “Oh, Dinah! How lovely to see you! Why, I’ve know you since you were a baby!” That had been the most seductive of all assertions. Dinah thought that those words alone must have convinced her of her affection for that woman. Dinah was very sad tonight, and she supposed, tiredly, that the gratification she had felt upon hearing that she had been known since she was born was no more than another example of the endless racketing around of the ego in constant search of recognition.

When Lawrence parked his car in front of the Hortons’ house, Dinah simply didn’t respond. She only sat there, delaying the moment when she must move, until he got out of the car and came around to open her door for her. She assumed he would do that, if she sat there long enough, despite whatever progress had been made in Enfield regarding equality between the sexes. But he sat on, too, behind the steering wheel, and they didn’t say anything to each other for a while.

“You know,” Lawrence said at last, and with rather a slowing of his speech, “I always thought you and I would get married. I mean, when we were growing up.” This was only a statement; it didn’t have the sound of any sort of plea. “And then, when I didn’t marry you, I thought you wouldn’t get married at all, the way your father felt about it. But when you finally did marry Martin, I thought, ‘Well, Dinah and I know each other so well. We could always make love. It wouldn’t matter where we met or how old we got. Even if we were walking down a street in some city and just happened to pass by each other by accident, we could still go off to bed together and never feel strange about it. We’ve known each other for so long!’”

He was still sitting away from her on his side of the car behind the wheel, and she was awfully glad he hadn’t moved over to her or even reached out a hand to touch her. When she cast her eye over the dark house where no one was waiting for her, she was tempted to take Lawrence inside with her. All those early-morning hours they had spent drinking coffee in the heat and talking quietly must have been leading up to something. She knew that they had both believed that it
was
leading up to something. They had been on the edge of this all summer, but she wondered now what Lawrence really hoped for. He knew that Martin was in close proximity now; why hadn’t he approached her sooner? Why hadn’t she made the invitation clearer? Perhaps he had only meant to stay there, on the verge of something. She thought that must have been her
own
intention, but nothing that came to her tired mind right now was articulate enough to prevent her from doing whatever she wanted to do most, and she just sat there a moment, considering. She looked again at the Hortons’ house, which tonight seemed more than ever to belong to strangers, and she spoke before she knew what she was going to say.

“You know what, Lawrence? I think I want to get David and Sarah from your house and put them to sleep in their own beds.”

He looked at her to see if she meant it. Not much weight had ridden on his vague and hesitant proposition; they
did
know each other well enough so that there wasn’t any embarrassment between them, but he didn’t approve at all of this plan. “That’s silly, Dinah! You’ll just wake them up. They’re perfectly comfortable. In fact, they were delighted to be able to sleep in sleeping bags.”

“Oh, I know that. But it won’t bother them all that much if I get them up. I won’t be going back to the hospital until Toby’s had his breakfast and Martin’s seen Dr. Van Helder, so they can sleep late. I won’t be leaving until sometime after ten.”

They retrieved Dinah’s children. Pam didn’t protest at all, and she seemed even to have expected them. She had David’s and Sarah’s belongings gathered together in a shopping bag all ready to be taken along. At the Hortons’, Lawrence carried Sarah upstairs to her room; she was sound asleep. David had awakened, and he made his own way to bed. When the children were settled, Lawrence gave Dinah a quick kiss on the cheek and took his leave.

Dinah changed her clothes and went to her bedroom and lay in bed in her gown and heavy robe. The rain had stopped earlier, but the cool damp air lingered on. There were no lights in her father’s house across the way, and she stared out the window at the quiet street, which was gently illuminated by the streetlights as they beamed down in rainbow circles through the mist. Here she came every summer, back to this town where everyone said they had known her all her life. It seemed reasonable that among those people she would find peace and security. But she was thinking of Martin when he had first come into the hospital that evening and asked Toby how he was feeling.