Labrador Read online

  In the car you sat as close to the window as you could, your legs bent at the knees, drawn in towards your chest, where you cradled them tightly because they were reliable and you loved them. When I tried to slide up next to you, you shook me off. “At least give me room to breathe,” you said, so I moved away and curled up in a ball. The upholstery was gray and scratchy, its exhalations confusing, combining the friendly smell of woolen sweaters with the dangerous smell of vertical rocks in a gorge. You rolled your window down and stuck your face into the opening, filling the car with the tearing sound of its own tires spinning across the road’s watery tarmac. “It’s really pouring out,” you said, turning to face me; your cheeks were moist and shining.

  “Put the window up, Willie,” Daddy said. He leaned over to switch on the radio, but whatever it had to tell us was interrupted at intervals by static, synchronous with the ka-thunk ka-thunk of the windshield wipers.

  “See what I mean,” you said to me. Then you stuck your face back out the window. “This must be St. Johnsbury,” you said.

  “Now!” Daddy slammed on the brakes and we skidded wildly to a stop against the curb.

  A woman in a yellow slicker looked up at our approach, and I could see, in the vague light cast across the sidewalk by a restaurant’s windows—behind which a solitary cashier in pink picked something from between her front teeth with a toothpick—the resigned expression on the woman’s face. She leaned over to pat her dog, a large one, drenched to sorry thinness by the rain.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Daddy said, “until that window’s shut.”

  “Okay, okay,” you said. The car sprang forward and a wing of water closed down over the woman in the yellow slicker and her dog. “Who died and made him king?” you muttered, leaning back and closing your eyes.

  Then the heater took over and we were all like separate charms nestled in cotton wadding: intricately shaped little surprises within a box, waiting for the face to lower over us, wide as the sky itself, waiting for the informed hand to lift us out, one at a time, and assign meaning. A circle; a rectangle; a forked thing like a nerve; a knobbed wand. The heat blew into my nostrils and filled my ear holes; it trickled through the tiny openings in my eyes and wadded itself like a fist in my mouth. I fell asleep.

  When I woke up we were driving through Crawford Notch. The mountains were black around us and, although it had stopped raining, the wind hauled its silvery vestments overhead, snagging occasionally on the moon’s thin hooks.

  Luck and disaster are the same thing, Willie, and that thing is the gift of motion. We moved. We rode home in our dark car as if we all understood the meaning of destination.

  I think, now, if you’d really been crazy, if there had been a name we could have assigned to your behavior, it would have been easier for me. After your summer away you spent as little time as possible in the house, and yet even your absence assumed disquieting contours: I would pick up the phone almost every afternoon and hear your voice, very faint, as if you were in another country—a land where piano music was always playing, and where I knew that a woman with a black bun and green streaks over her eyelids encouraged you to believe that you had been born into the wrong family.

  “Kitty,” you would say, “tell them I won’t be home tonight, will you? Madame is having a few of us over for a late supper and then, who knows?”

  I’d seen you, though; I knew that you weren’t always where you said you would be. Once, driving through Conway with Daddy, I saw you walking past the old railway station with Peter Mygatz. His hair was longer and he’d shaved off his beard; still, I knew it was him. He no longer worked at the school, because Miss Mullen had fired him after he’d walked into the auditorium during the Pledge of Allegiance, carrying a Ban the Bomb sign on a stick. Daddy didn’t notice you—he was too busy looking for a parking spot—so I kept what I saw to myself. But I was astonished. Peter Mygatz was a grown-up.

  Sometimes I rode my bike out past the cranberry bog and, if there was no telltale plume of smoke rising from the bread truck’s crooked chimney, I would lean my bike against a cedar tree and peek in through the little window cut in the truck’s side. The first time I did this I actually gasped out loud: the room inside was tiny but immaculate, the narrow bed fastidiously made with mitered corners, a pale blue sleeping bag spread out across the sheets. There was a card table and two ladder-backed chairs with rush seats. The table was empty, except for a beautiful terracotta candelabrum, the figures of women forming its branches, holding white candles in their hands. On the wall was a picture of a man with a drooping mustache and a hat something like the ones the Shriners wore for their conventions; you told me, later, that his name was Gurdjieff, and that he was Peter’s idol.

  “See,” you told me, “it was because of the way I moved—Peter wanted to get to know me better because he thought there were things I could teach him. Can you believe it? He said that dance is a really good way to start waking up.”

  I would look in through the bread-truck window and try to imagine you in that tidy room. I would begin by placing you on one of the chairs, the soles of your feet pressed together, your legs bent at the knees, sticking out, perfectly straight, on either side. The candles would be lit, their heat licking away, little by little, the icy surface of your face. And then, no matter how hard I tried—I couldn’t stop it from happening—you would be on the bed, a white star in a blue sky. And he would lower himself onto you; then your face would whip over to one side, staring right at me, as the line of his spine stirred over and over, like a single insistent wave lapping at the lake’s edge.

  It was my vision, Willie, but I could not keep it chaste.

  One afternoon in late October, following what had, by now, become a routine side trip to the bog, I rode my bike up the driveway and then, when I saw you leaning on your elbows, looking out the living-room window, I turned around and rode back down towards the highway. I was ashamed. As I rode away from the house I felt it behind me, getting bigger and bigger; I felt you watching me, your face a pansy, the features bunched together in one dark scowl. From out of the pine trees to the left of me crows flew up, all at once, as if the air’s molecules, thickening and dimming to signal nightfall, had likewise grown so large that they’d acquired wings and voice. The crows were cawing and furious, their fury directed at something I couldn’t see. An owl, I thought; for some reason crows hated owls. When I got to the foot of the driveway a tractor-trailer zoomed by, showering me with gravel.

  Then you were behind me, out of breath. “Kitty,” you said, “Dad told me to come and get you. He said he wanted you inside the house immediately.”

  “I’ll come in when I’m ready,” I said, courting your approval, but you shook your head.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” you said, “but he’s really upset.” And then, when I remained standing there, balancing my bike carefully between my legs, you turned your head to one side, in that way you had, leading with the chin, to let me know that you would not tolerate refusal. “He isn’t faking it,” you said. “I’m scared.”

  Daddy was sitting in the west room, his whole body bent forward towards the seductive light of the television set. He almost never watched television; we were, on the whole, not a television-watching family, although there had been a time, not all that long ago, when you sat enraptured by the image of Bishop Fulton Sheen, whose piety interested you less than his appearance. I wasn’t fooled, nor did it escape my notice that he bore a striking resemblance to Daddy.

  “Kathleen, come here,” Daddy said, patting his bony lap and, even though I was still wary of him—of the possibility that at any moment he would change from his grudging self into a monster of purpose and epic fury—even though I was much too large to do so, I sat down where he indicated. His arms folded around me and he held on tightly, as if I was the only substantial piece of flotsam to come his way.

  At first I thought that he was laughing, because of the way his body jiggled under me. His breath smel
led like Scotch, and I noticed the empty glass on the table beside him. “I’ve always loved you, you know that, don’t you, Kathleen?” he said, and I wanted to kill you, because I thought that you’d brought me back from the isolating darkness of the driveway to even the score, to see whether I could tolerate, as I’m sure you thought you had, the advances of his difficult soul. But then I realized that he was crying. “We’ve really done it this time,” he said.

  On the television screen I saw a tiny man walking alongside the trunk-like legs of a woman in high-heeled shoes, lifting from the floor a napkin the size of a circus tent.

  “Done what?” I asked.

  “We’ll get the fallout from Boston,” Daddy said, “first. It’s only a matter of time. And the idiots responsible for all this will be sitting pretty somewhere underground. Turn it off, Willie,” he said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  You jerked yourself to an upright position from where you’d been lounging against the wall. “It’s just American Bandstand, Dad,” you said, walking over to flick off the switch. “It’s just a bunch of nice teenage kids from South Philadelphia pretending that they know how to dance.”

  But, for once, he didn’t take the bait. “Girls,” he said, “there are Russian ships, right now, on their way to Cuba. They’re carrying missiles.”

  “Atom bombs?” you asked. And I saw your eyes darken, saw the pupils’ rapid dilation—it was the avidity I remembered from the nursery—and I had an inkling then of how for you desire and fear were the same thing. “But Cuba’s pretty far away from here, isn’t it?” you asked.

  “There’s no such thing as far away anymore, Willie,” Daddy said.

  I got up out of his lap and walked over to the window. Like someone signaling to us through the trees I saw the lights of cars moving from east to west, from west to east, on the highway. I thought of Amy Gertner, spooning soup into her mouth in the rectory dining room, and I wondered whether the holiness of that household precluded despair. “Is there going to be a war?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Kathleen,” Daddy said. But it was horrible—he had his head in his hands and he was weeping. “I’ve tried to be a good man,” he said, “for all the good it’s done me.”

  You came over and stood beside me. “Kitty,” you said, “where’s Mom?”

  “Do you think we should get her?” I asked, and you shrugged.

  “It’s just like him,” you said, “to turn the end of the world into an excuse for sentimentality.”

  Mama, it turned out, was upstairs taking a bath. She had filled the tub with hot water and then emptied into it an entire bottle of scented bath oil, so that when she appeared downstairs, her gray hair stuck to the top of her head with a butterfly-shaped barrette, she smelled overwhelmingly of gardenias. “I suppose you’re all hungry,” she said.

  Did she know what was going on? If she did she gave no sign of it, and if her hands shook a little as she cranked open two cans of Scotch broth—that soup you hated, because you claimed it smelled like sweat—it was only her usual tremulousness. Mama stirred the soup lovingly, over the gas flame, and we all sat at the table, listening to the irregular chinging of the spoon against the sides of the pot. “Who wants sandwiches?” she asked. All of us!—our hands shot up as if we were in a classroom. Mama’s apparent obliviousness to the fact that at any moment the engines of our destruction might spring forth from the earth’s surface lulled us into inactivity. We let her wait on us.

  Meanwhile, on its shelf near the refrigerator, the radio played its happy music, music to which we were attentive in the manner of patients hooked up to life-support machines, waiting for the moment when the regular beeping would resolve itself into a single strand of noise. The kitchen looked different to me and I could hear a mouse’s sporadic movement in the pantry; a little, separate life was going about its business and I realized that I was seeing the kitchen from the mouse’s point of view: a great, yellow carton in which gigantic creatures of flesh and blood appeased their hunger.

  After we ate, Daddy instructed us to carry canned goods from the pantry into the cellar. Tomatoes, lima beans, corn: the fronts of the shelves were stocked with the foods we ate regularly. It was only when we began reaching in deeper that we came upon the dust-covered cans with their exotic, faded labels.

  “Look at this,” you said to me, as we stood side by side in the cellar. You held up a can the size of a walnut.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “A truffle. ‘Le diamant noir de la cuisine,’” you read. “‘Use the juice and appreciate the taste to the utmost.’ It must be a million years old.” You shook the can daintily between your thumb and index finger. “Well,” you said, “when the end is near, we can open this up and cut it into four pieces. It’s probably really bad.”

  “Willie,” I said, “do you think we’re going to die?”

  “I don’t know.” You set the truffle down on top of a can of Mary Kitchen roast beef hash. “Peter says this world is so fucked up, the only way to fix it will be a war.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “Kitty,” you said, “remember me? I’m Willie, the girl who doesn’t ever want to die.”

  I sighed, thinking things over. “There’s the angel,” I said. “There’s Rogni.” I looked at you and saw that your mouth was curved in a little smile, like the moon high above the perfect boat of your collarbones.

  “Rogni again,” you said. “Who, exactly, is this Rogni?”

  “I don’t think he’ll let us die,” I explained. But you shook your head.

  “Don’t count on it,” you said. “Besides, if this Rogni is so hot to help us, why doesn’t he do something about them?” You pointed to the ceiling, across which the feet of our parents paraded in short bursts of movement.

  “You shouldn’t say that,” I said. “He might be listening.”

  “So what if he is? Face it, Kitty, we’re stuck with them, believe me. Even when we die and go to heaven, they’ll be there. Along with Abraham Lincoln and Jesus and all the other people we’re supposed to be looking forward to seeing.”

  “You’re the one he loves,” I said.

  You ran your shoe along the base of the cellar wall, mashing to a bluish-green smear a colony of delicate, umbrella-shaped fungi. “I don’t get it,” you said. “I mean, if you’re going to go to all the trouble of making something like that up, why me? Fantasies are supposed to give you what you want. They’re not supposed to make you jealous.”

  “It’s not a fantasy,” I said.

  We slept in our own beds that night, although Daddy insisted that we sleep in our clothes. And, of course, we slept in those beds for many, many nights after that, because the crisis ended as abruptly as it had begun—the ships turned around and went home to Russia, while our good-looking President was able, once again, to sit beside his pretty wife on a gilt chair in the White House, listening to cello music. Still, I remember that night: how I lay there on my bed in my red sweater and brown wool slacks, itching to death. My feet were encased in heavy oxfords and they felt like they weighed a ton. If I have to get up quickly, I thought, I’ll never be able to do it.

  “Rogni,” I whispered, “where are you?” I remembered that time, long ago, when he had swept me up so fast into the place where the future had already happened. If he wanted to, I knew, he could be there, in my bedroom, in the twinkling of an eye. Then I heard what you had described to me—the chiming of the grandfather clock downstairs—and I thought of how behind its glass door the brass weights were slowly falling, and how the face of the moon was slowly making its way across the curve of blue sky, painted with tiny golden stars. What do I want, I wondered. And then it came to me, like a surprise: what I wanted, I realized, was not to want. I wanted to be the object of desire. I wanted to be the precious, frozen stone that a world would die for, its light severe and unattainable. I wanted to be you.

  Instead, I turned into what is called a “young adult.” As a young adult I moved ar
ound the house like a thing made out of stumps and wires. Some of my classmates had begun to date—the boys’ fathers drove them into Conway, where they’d sit and watch James Bond movies, and go to first base or second, depending upon the diligence of the usherette.

  Amy Gertner and I pretended to have nothing but scorn for such behavior. On my fourteenth birthday—in honor of which she had presented me with a box full of madras-plaid cummerbunds, stolen, as she confessed to me later, from Carroll Reed—we sat together in my bedroom and Amy, who was a talented caricaturist, drew pictures of our peers locked in passionate embrace, wearing diapers or gym bloomers.

  “Mowbrey,” Amy said, “don’t you just hate the immaturity?”

  I nodded my head in agreement but, needless to say, I was green with envy. I dreamed about love. I wrote letters to myself:

  My darling Kathleen,

  I long for your kiss. I cannot describe to you the torture I feel every time I see you in third-period English class. This hidden passion tears at the very fibers of my soul! It will not be long, my darling. Mrs. Tulkington’s horrible disease gets worse and worse. Soon she will be completely covered with pustules. And then it is just a matter of time. I know it is wrong of me, but I think with joy of the day when we will be joined in holy wedlock. Until then, my darling! Be brave!

  Love, Paul.

  “He was looking at you today,” Amy told me. “When he didn’t think anyone else was watching.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.” And then Amy shook her head up and down energetically, making her blond curls dance like little yoyos. “He was suffering, Mowbrey. It was written all over his face.”

  The man in question was Mr. Paul Tulkington, our English teacher, the victim of his sad marriage to Mrs. Tulkington. This tragedy in his life, we were sure, explained those unsettling moments when he would stand at the blackboard, chalk in hand, and then fall into a trance.