poor things, can’t glide,” she said. “Go on. But what do they need to glide for?”
“You act like a teacher,” he said. “They ask you questions and spoil everything.”
“Me a teacher?” she cried in mock distress. “I came in here to learn a few things and you accuse me of acting like a teacher. Baby, I’m ignorant,” she pleaded. “I don’t know anything about birds except they’ve all got feathers and go peep-peep. Go on and tell me about them. Because birds are the greatest miracle. God really outdid Himself when He made a bird. Say you and I were God, could we think up something like a bird? Never in a million years. It took God to think them up, and even for Him it was something. You go on, tell me more about birds.”
“It says about migration,” he began again, “that millions of them never get there, where they’re going. It says it’s really a big risk to a bird, the biggest risk in his life. It says that hundreds of millions of them never get there.”
“Isn’t that funny? I thought they all made it,” she said.
For a time he read to her about the perils of migration. She recrossed her ankles, while she listened, observing the arches of her bare feet. Then, because she heard a murmur of voices in the glassed-in porch below, where the bank manager and his wife slept, and knew that the rest would be coming up the stairs and that only a short time was left her in her son’s room, she lost her feigned reverence for birds. “Listen, Davy baby,” she began. “I don’t want you to get vain about being a good dancer or looking like the great lover Gable just because you stirred up those women down there. You’re neither. You want to know what it is?” She tilted her head back, lifting her gaze to the ceiling. “It’s your youth. It’s because you’re so young, baby.” She laughed. “You look at them as if you’re seeing women for the first time, and what it does to them is make them feel they’re being seen for the first time by any man. You make them feel fabulous—oh, as if they’ve got a thousand secrets they could tell you.” She laughed again, still toward the ceiling. “You know what Russell is going to say? When everybody is asleep, he’ll say in a whisper, he’ll say, ‘Davy got out of hand tonight, didn’t he? Those women will be creeping around the house all night long.’ ” She brought her gaze down, a humorously warning gaze. “You want to put a chair against your door?”
She saw in his expressionless face that he did not want to understand her joke. He did not want to suspect that she had come up the stairs and away from the others not to tell him about the other women but to tell him, by her presence, that nobody else could claim his enticing youth except herself, if it were to be claimed at all. He was her son; she had given him his life and his youth, his present and his future, his elusiveness, and, by telling him she knew his effect upon the other women, she was reminding him of her claim to him, if she had a claim. “Go on,” she said, settling farther into her chair. “Read to me, read to me.”
She heard Duggan and his wife come up the stairs and enter their bedroom quietly, while the murmuring below was borne out on the still air into the dark yard. After a time she heard Russell come up. Then the murmuring ceased and the house was silent. David read to her for a while longer and when he was tired of reading she told him to turn off the light, and she sat in darkness, reluctant to go to her husband, to lie down beside him. She was struck by the years of her accumulated contempt for her husband as by an unexpected blow to her body. Their voices muted by the darkness, she and her son talked together, finding inconsequential things to talk about. He told her about a boy he had made friends with a few days before and how far around the lake they went with the boy’s uncle in his motorboat, and as he talked she listened more to the sound of his voice than to the words, feeling the sound of his young voice, his faltering, low, slightly hoarse voice reverberate in her body.
Her husband was sitting on the bed in the darkness. The light from the hallway, as she opened the door, revealed him half undressed, smoking a cigarette. Though he was not yet in bed, he had already turned off the lamp, or not turned it on, apparently wanting to reject her with darkness, and she felt that she had come from the presence of a man who was more than he. It seemed to her that Russell and the others in the house and herself were all to be left behind by her son, their lives nothing compared to what his life was to be, that this man, castigating her with darkness, sat in a cul-de-sac of a life. She felt that all of them except her son were trapped in the summer night in that house with the unwashed glasses and ashtrays on floors and couches and windowsills, with intimate, used garments on floors and chairs—everything testifying to wasted lives.
“Golden vipers,” she said, low, pacing the floor in her bare feet, making no noise on the floorboards, as if she were weightless. “Always some little surprise or other, always some concoction nobody ever heard of before and that’s deadly familiar. How do you manage to accomplish both at the same time?”
“Enough, enough. Every little thing. Enough . . . ,” he said, breathing out the words as if someone were testing him physically to see how much pain he was able to bear.
“They all add up to the big thing.”
“What’s the big thing?” he asked, challengingly, unafraid.
“You. They all add up to you.” She was unable to move, struck by her own cruelty.
“You don’t see me right, Vivian,” he said. “You’ve got a crazy way of looking at me. You put together things nobody notices because they’re nothing to notice. You watch for everything and call it a fault.”
She pressed her temples to destroy the cruelty in her head, but it was not cornered by a posture or a wish. “It’s you I see,” she insisted.
“Me? Me?” He kept his voice low. “You act like I misrepresented myself. I never misrepresented myself, Vivian. Besides, you’re smart, Vivian. You’re smart enough to know if a man’s lying to you. That’s not saying I’m satisfied with myself. You don’t know what’s plaguing me. You think I think everything’s great. You think I think my life’s just great. What I gripe about—this guy and that guy, some deals—you think there’s nothing else that gripes me. I see the way you see me and I don’t look so good, sometimes, but you can’t see what I feel. I’d like to tell you what I feel. Or maybe I wouldn’t like to. If I could tell you, you still wouldn’t know.” He paused. “I’ll tell you,” and paused again. He was rubbing his knees, trying to rub away his confusion over himself, straining to engage his being in whatever was the aspiration he could not find words for.
It was so amorphous a thing for him to tell—the thing which he hoped would make him more in her eyes—that the attempt to reveal it was almost like an attempt to confess a crime instead of to reveal a virtue.
She went over to him. There was no one else to lie down beside if she wanted an embrace against her own cruelty. He leaned forward to clasp her around her legs, drawing her down with him.
“Vivian, listen. When I first saw you, the way you ran down that hill like a kid, I said there’s a woman with a heart as big as the world. So if I blow up, you’re supposed to know I don’t mean it. Lie still, lie still,” he urged.
14
Maria came to visit more frequently at Vivian’s invitation until she was with them almost ritually every weekend. Along with the diffidence, there was now in her manner almost the slyness of a spy in the enemy camp. At twelve she was ineffectually pretty in Vivian’s eyes; there was no quickness, no grace, no wiles, no artifice to make persuasive the large, smoky blue eyes and fair skin; and this lack of conscious femininity, which was, to Vivian, the very soul of a woman, was not, she thought, the girl’s fault, not the dead mother’s fault, not the fault of the grandmother with whom she
