down over her breasts within the white negligee she had bought a few days before. They went up the stairs together, his hand moving over her back under the negligee. In her room, her lover sat down on the velvet bench, drawing her to stand between his knees as if she were attempting to escape him, delighting her with that vise. She put her hands on his head to brace herself against the languor that was pulling her down, against his unbalancing of her as he moved his knee between hers to open her thighs.
She closed her eyes, sensing that her son was in the doorway and must be driven out, and, opening them again, saw him there, his small figure in pajamas, gone before her lover could turn to see what had caused her to push him away. She hid her face, clotted with shame and anger, cursing her son for intruding upon the heart of her privacy, yet knowing that neither shame nor anger was as strong as she was making it appear. With a twist of the brass knob she locked the door and lay down on her bed, stricken silent by the commotion within her.
Leland, still on the bench, untied his shoes, laughing softly. When he came down beside her, there was a remainder of laughter in his mouth and in his teasing body, and not until after their loving did she ask, “Why did you laugh?” But he was already asleep and she already knew the answer. He had laughed because the years with her were to lead to nowhere, and so he could make light of her son’s curiosity and even use it to their advantage.
With the end of the affair, the false anger she had felt against her son became true. She was angry with him because he had always baffled her conscience, and she recalled, often, the shock of his small figure in pajamas, there in her doorway. She avoided him and he avoided her; he went to school, did all that was asked of him, and avoided her, besides.
One morning, when she had not heard from her lover for several weeks, wanting to impress upon him her remorse for asking for certitude when no one’s future gratification was ever certain, she telephoned him at his office and was told by his secretary that he had gone to Japan again. She locked herself in her room and wept as if someone else had locked her in. She walked the room, smoking and weeping. A woman alone was obviously a sinner, had obviously not done something right or done all things wrong, and the aloneness was inflicted upon her to bring her to a comprehension of the enormity of her sin. She longed to be forgiven by her son for the time she had struck him across the back, for if he forgave her for that, then it would serve as a forgiving of more, of all her sins, those she knew about and those she did not. He had seen her in her worst moments and in her best, and, though he was a child, she felt he sensed who she was more than any other person sensed or cared to sense. Nobody else knew her so well. Nobody else was so near, so near he could walk into the heart of her privacy, knowing that her anger could never make him less a son, less than the dearest one.
10
Up in the hills above the Russian River, her father owned a farm inherited from a bachelor uncle who had grown apples and raised sheep. He went there in the winter, taking a few friends, to hunt deer and quail. Nothing was grown with purpose anymore. The trees went on blossoming, the apples went on ripening, and there was a small grazing flock of sheep, a few chickens, a few pigeons. Everything was watched over in its cycles by an elderly woman who had been a painter in the city and who preferred the solitude on the farm, wearing old jodhpurs and hiking boots, her hair peppery gray and cut as short as a man’s.
In the late fall of David’s ninth year, her father suggested that she bring her son to the farm on the same weekend that he was there with a few friends; he would take the boy hunting and teach him how to handle a gun. She drove up with David a day before her father and his friends were to arrive, and in the evening they strolled out into the orchard. The sheep, wandering in the fields and under the apple trees, trotted up to them. Several were afflicted with colds and made burbling noises as they breathed, and out in the twilight and the cold she felt a sympathy for them as for neglected children. Down below, a long drift of white fog, touched by the daylight still in the sky and by the moon rising, was moving along above the river, fog more silent than the fogs on the bay that came in filled with sound, the deep and high sounds of horns on the bridges and the ships. The call of the quail was fading into the night, into the bushes and groves of trees. Strolling out with David, their sweater collars turned up against the cold, against the darkness sifting down over the low hills around them, she longed to feel in communion with him. The distance was still between them. After school he stayed away, doing whatever it was that boys together kept secret from their parents and that gave him a wordless wildness, an aura, at night, of the entire day of boys and secrecy, his face like the face of a leader recalling treason or of a follower recalling humiliation. On this stroll with him in the orchard, he told her nothing of himself, though the possibility for closeness was there in the beauty all around, the silver fog below, and the rising moon.
While David slept way up in the attic, she sat with the woman in the parlor. The wood-burning stove sent out its waves of heat, and the large parrot hung upside down in his cage and hid behind the tasseled shade of a standing lamp, curling his claws and tongue in a cawing, clucking, moronically cunning flirtation. The woman was knitting a red sweater; under the yarn her thighs were heavy in the faded jodhpurs. She had been gregarious in the city, a ponderous raconteur over cheap wine, a good friend of Adele’s; but in the four years up here on the farm she had become a hermit. For an hour Vivian leafed through several magazines, chatting with the woman about their friends in the city, and, going up early, she felt that the woman was not offended and even preferred to be left alone.
She went up the narrow stairs that were lit by the globe in the hallway on the second floor. The door to her room was open and the lamp on, and she could see the bed covered with a reddish quilt, and the dresser with a long white cloth, and on the cloth a hand mirror with a tarnished silver back. Reluctant to enter her room, she climbed the staircase to the upper reaches of the house to look in at her son. He might be regretting his choice of sleeping quarters and willing to accept a small bedroom of his own on the second floor. Climbing the staircase that was enclosed by age-darkened walls and lit with a dim globe for the convenience of her son, a globe that would not be lit the other nights when the woman was alone, she was afraid for herself, a fear that, someday, she, too, would be able to be alone, like the woman alone in this house.
The top floor was not partitioned, as below, with bedrooms. It was one large room under a peaked roof that came down to the row of casement windows at each side, and, on one side, under the windows, were three cots. In the middle cot she saw the small, dark hump David’s body made under the olive-drab blankets. From up here, the fog along the river was seen in its dimensions; from the window it had a breadth and a depth that seethed with moonlight. Way down in the yard and out in the woods and the orchard, the silence appeared to be the moonlight, to be tangible. She crossed the bare floor to the other side of the room and leaned on the sill to look out the open window, but a low hill, its top at a level with her eyes, seemed to crowd against the house, an obstacle to the view she had expected, and the trickery of the scene increased her fear. She went down again to the parlor, hearing on the way down the woman talking to the parrot. She explained to the woman that it was difficult for her to sleep in a strange house, and she sat down on the sofa, leafing through the same magazines and chatting again until eleven o’clock, when they parted.
With her father came two friends, the actor Max Laurie and a man younger than both, whom she had not met before. The three men in winter jackets and boots got out of her father’s gray Chrysler and began to cross the yard to the house. The men turned when she and David, on higher ground up in the orchard, called to them. In a row, they watched her and her son approach, and the memory of her fear, the night before, was dispelled. The farmhouse and the cold orchard and the yard in which they waited for her—everything was filled with the presence of the men as with a clap of thunder or a flooding of hot sun. When they began to turn away, because it was a long way for her to approach, and to look around the yard and lift up their faces toward the hills and the water tower, she took her son’s hand and ran with him, and the running passed for a welcome from a woman unaware of herself in her happiness at seeing them. She threw her arms around her father and around Max and shook hands with the young man who,
