Dr. Grossman said, “Hmm.” That was a sign of approval.
Andy said, “Anyway, he ran off to the war. That’s how he put it back together again. It was Eunice who suffered.”
“And how did your friend suffer?”
“Well, the fellow she married beat her senseless more than once.”
“Do you mean that literally?”
Andy said, “Yes.”
“How do you feel about that?”
Andy said, “I feel nothing about that.”
Now there was a long silence, and Andy knew that Dr. Grossman believed her.
1960
HENRY DIDN’T THINK about Rosa much. Sometimes he identified her to himself as his “first love,” rather like Flora in Little Dorrit—the wrong girl, fortunately escaped, though she wasn’t silly, like Flora—she was argumentative, resentful, beautiful, and severe. And yet, when he got to the part in Eloise’s letter where Eloise said that Rosa had gotten married and seemed to be having a baby, he felt his mood darken. He read it over: “I don’t know if you met Elton Jackman when you were here. He is friends of friends. Anyway, Rosa has told me that she and Elton had decided to get married in a simple ceremony down in Big Sur (to which I was not invited, also not surprised) and they will now live down there with some friends until their baby is born (I guess it’s due in June).” Then she went on to write about some organizing she was doing in Oakland.
Henry had met Elton Jackman once—a small, wiry fellow whose real name, it was said, was O’Connell, and whose real game, it was said, was fencing stolen goods, though when the horses were running at Golden Gate, Bay Meadows, or Tanforan, he spent most of his time there. Jackman would take Rosa’s literary friends to the races and induce them to bet (and to fund his betting); he would give them a decent tip often enough so that they felt flush. Jackman, talkative and funny, was a bona-fide member of the Lumpenproletariat. Henry thought he was maybe forty-five or so by this time. He himself was twenty-seven, Rosa nearly twenty-six; when he broke up with Sandra, this seemed old, but now it seemed almost virginal. He had thought that failed romances were Rosa’s vocation, along with mourning the father she lost in the war. Obviously to everyone, including Rosa, these two activities were deeply and meaningfully intertwined, and getting knocked up by Eddie O’Connell could easily be the culmination of them.
There was a letter from Sandra, too, not in today’s mail, but in Friday’s, now four days old, which he hadn’t read, much less responded to. He sincerely hoped that Sandra was full of the same news—she was marrying an older man, she was pregnant, she was happy, she was defiant, she was thrilled beyond words to have escaped their hasty engagement, which Henry had attributed to the excitement of finding not one but two Roman coins in the same day on their dig in Colchester (“Camulodunon,” then “Camulodunum,” then, perhaps, “Camelot”?).
Henry went into his perfectly neat bedroom and opened his perfectly neat closet. Stacked on the shelf, perfectly folded, were three sweater vests in shades of brown—he called them “tobacco” (an Arawakian/Caribbean word apparently related to Arabic tabaq for “herbs,” describing in its very being the colonization of the Western Hemisphere by the Spanish), “rust” (from the Old English root, rudu, for “redness,” and obviously related to “red,” but also to erythros, Greek, and rudhira, Sanskrit, and the only color with such broad provenance, and what did that mean?), and “shit,” the darkest one, from Old English scitan, to “shed,” “separate,” or “purge,” also the root for “science”). Henry chose the rust, and then a nice Harris-tweed jacket with a bluish green cast, and a navy blue scarf.
The idea that his class would be starting on Beowulf in two hours reminded him that he should drop a note to Professor McGalliard, that man of infinite patience who had taught him everything he knew—or, rather, everything that Henry had been capable of learning at the time, which right now didn’t seem like much—and who had recommended him for this position. Henry had a couple of chapters to go on his dissertation, but when the department had gone to McGalliard for advice right after Professor Atlee dropped dead of a heart attack in August, he had recommended Henry most highly, so here he was. Professor McGalliard had never married. Now that Henry was rid of Sandra, never marrying seemed like the purest option.
Henry put on his coat, picked up his briefcase, went out the door to his apartment, closed the door behind him, made sure it was locked, put on his rubbers, wrapped his scarf around his neck, and went down the three steps to the outside door. Several kids had come home for lunch from the nearby elementary school, and were making snowballs in front of the apartment building next door. Henry waved to them. It was January. There had been four snowstorms before this, and all three of the boys knew that Henry had good aim, so they smiled, shouted hello, and kept their hands down.
Henry swore that he would open Sandra’s letter when he got home that evening.
He had five students. Whether they would get through all thirty-two hundred lines of Beowulf by May, Henry had no idea—that was sixteen weeks. Two hundred lines a week might be a lot. But anything was better than nothing. They looked at him expectantly, and so he opened a large book to a marked page and pushed it to the center of the seminar table. He said, “See that mound? I wish the picture were in color. It’s a beautiful grassy green. It is Eadgils Mound, in Uppsala, in Sweden. When it was excavated in 1874, it contained a corpse lying on a bearskin, with his sword and other precious possessions, indicating that he was a king. He seems to have died in the middle of the sixth century. When you are translating this poem, I want you to think of it as not only a monster tale, but also a historical record. This poem is considered to be about Eadgils, the king in the grave.” The students’ heads went up and down.
Class lasted two hours. They got twenty-five lines translated—from “Hwaet! We Gardena” to “man geptheon” (“What! We learn of the Danes of the Spear…” to “a man shall thrive”). It did not make much sense, but the students seemed to enjoy the puzzle. That’s what Henry said at the end of the class: “Think of the poem as a puzzle, not only a translation, but a jigsaw puzzle that will only become a meaningful picture when you’ve put all the pieces together. That means we have to be patient.”
He ate his supper at a café near the campus, then trotted all the way home, which took a single invigorating hour. Once home, he put off reading Sandra’s letter by working on his last chapter, a consideration of “The Battle of Maldon” and the monk Byrhtferth.
Finally, he picked up Sandra’s letter, slit it open, and got into bed with it. He was so sleepy that he hoped he wouldn’t really understand a thing that she wrote. The letter was surprisingly short. It read, “Dear Henry, I have only one thing to say. I no longer think that our engagement failed because you are American and I am English. I know I said that, and it made sense at the time, as Americans are known for their enthusiasm which then falters as novelty and amusement give way to commitment and familiarity. My sister told me about a fellow she went for at University who treated her as you treated me—always kind and more and more distant. He came up queer as a nine bob note. You might think about it. Yours truly, Sandra Boulstridge.”
The interesting thing to Henry was that he wasn’t offended. But he also decided to complete his dissertation before thinking any more about it.
—
HER MOTHER AND FATHER could not afford to buy her a horse. No plan or scheme that Debbie had managed to come up with (including sending Uncle Frank and Aunt Andy a letter, asking very respectfully for a loan of a thousand dollars, to be paid back in ten years, at 5 percent interest) had worked. But now that Debbie had met Fiona Cannon, who was a year ahead of her at school, she didn’t care about a horse of her own. Fiona had two horses—or, rather, a horse (Prince) and a pony (Rufus)—and riding with Fiona was far more fun than any camp or lesson she had ever experienced. She rode Rufus, who was a pinto and very low to the ground. She had fallen off Rufus dozens of times—she was expected to fall off Rufus. She wa
s also expected to watch Fiona, who rode Prince. Debbie knew the expression “He rode rings around her,” but she had no idea that it was so much fun to have rings ridden around her.
Fiona lived three stops farther on the school bus. She was an only child, and she kept Rufus and Prince at home, but home was not a fancy place with a stable and a riding ring—home was a two-story house with a wraparound porch down by the road, and a big fenced field that dipped, ran up the hillside, and ended at the trees. Rufus and Prince lived together in the field, and all of Fiona’s equipment and tack was stored in the garage. Fiona’s mom was a teacher at the high school, and her dad had a diner in town that served breakfast and lunch but not dinner. Debbie had been there; she liked the waffles.
When Fiona invited her—not every day, but lots of days—Timmy was supposed to tell Mom that she was going to Fiona’s, and most times he did. They dropped their books inside the house, changed clothes (she was just a little shorter and thinner than Fiona), and went out back, where Fiona stood at the gate with a bucket of oats and a lead rope, smacking the chain of the lead rope against the bucket and shouting, “Come in, come in!” And then the best thing happened—Prince and Rufus came galloping down the hill, exactly as if they were happy to see them, Fiona of course, but also Debbie, it seemed. While Prince ate from the bucket, Debbie fed a couple of handfuls to Rufus. Then they brushed them and picked their hooves.
Debbie stood Rufus up next to the fence and clambered on bareback. He was slick beneath her, so she entwined the fingers of one hand in his mane and gripped the lead rope with the other. Fiona eased onto Prince, and sat there, limber and relaxed, until Debbie felt secure; then Fiona clapped her legs against Prince’s sides and headed diagonally up the hill in a big walk. Rufus jogged a little to keep up. Prince was a beautiful horse, a Thoroughbred who had raced at Pimlico. He was a chestnut (Debbie mouthed the word “chestnut”) with a blaze and two white feet.
As far as Debbie could tell, Fiona could do anything on a horse. It was not only jumping and fox hunting—in Virginia, lots of people did that. Fiona loved riding bareback, and she could do some things that you only saw in movies, like slide to one side and show her face under Prince’s neck at a canter, and then pull herself upright again. She could also ride backward, jump off at a trot and a canter, and get Prince to turn, stop, and back up without any bridle or halter at all, just voice commands and the weight of her body.
Debbie wasn’t sure what Fiona saw in her—they weren’t special friends at school. Debbie was in a group of seventh-graders who took Latin instead of French and thought serving on the Student Council was important. Most of them didn’t know who Fiona was, but in the fall, at the bus stand, Fiona had overheard Debbie say to one girl that she was going to have a set of riding lessons, and then she had started talking to her that afternoon. The next day, she had invited Debbie to meet Rufus and Prince, which was, of course, fine with Mom, who thought that Debbie did not need to copy her homework over twice just to make sure every word was perfect.
The horses ambled along nicely, until the dip was below them and the hillside stretched damp and green before them. All along the fence to their left, the dogwoods were blooming against the darker background of the not-yet-leafy trees, and there were a few bluebells. In the fall, they had picked blackberries at the top of the hill, right from the backs of their horses, while the horses ate grass. Now they walked along the fence about halfway up the slope; then Fiona said, “Stop a minute and watch this.” Debbie pulled on Rufus’s lead rope, and Rufus halted. Fiona trotted on up the hillside for another ten or fifteen feet and turned Prince, still trotting; as he trotted down the slope, she squatted on his bare back, and then stood up. After a few strides, she dropped the lead rope and jumped into the air, bending her knees. He trotted out from under her. She landed on her feet. Debbie clapped, and Fiona gave a little bow. She pulled a piece of carrot out of her pocket and called, “Prince! Come in!” Prince looped a lazy circle and took some bites of grass, but after thinking about it for a moment, he came up the hill and received his carrot. Rufus wanted a piece, too. When Fiona had given him a tiny bit, she said, “I started doing that over the weekend. I want to try it at a canter.”
Debbie had learned to sit calmly on Rufus and say, no matter what Fiona proposed, “That would be fun.” What Fiona saw in her was a mystery, unless it was that whatever she wanted to say about the horses Debbie was happy to listen to: Prince had won three races, his racing name was Ball Four, he was by Shut Out, which meant Shut Out was his sire. One day, out fox hunting, Fiona had stayed in the front, and when they had a kill she got a pad; a pad was the fox’s foot; only grown-ups got the brush, which was the tail, or the mask, which was the head. Her boots had cost sixty dollars; her saddle had cost seventy-five dollars; it was from England. Someday she was going to hunt in England; the best hunt there was the Belvoir; she could grow up to be a whipper-in. Now she said, “Okay, I’m going to do it again. You go down the hill and wait on the flat part.” Debbie turned Rufus and went down at a walk while Fiona went up at a canter. By the time Debbie had Rufus right in the middle of the flat part, Fiona and Prince were at the top, pointed downward. Debbie waved. Fiona clapped her legs against Prince’s sides, and he started to canter. Fiona leaned back, and then she was squatting on Prince’s back, her hand still clutching the lead rope, and then Prince was galloping right at Debbie and Rufus. Fiona stood up. Debbie held the pony’s mane, bit her lip.
Prince kept coming. Fiona stood like someone in the circus, her knees slightly bent, holding the lead rope with both hands—maybe she had decided she was going too fast this time to jump off. But she didn’t look scared; she looked surprised and excited. They came on. Debbie had no idea what Rufus would do. The hoofbeats sounded loud to her, even though they were muffled by the grass and the dirt, and Prince looked enormous. They came on. Debbie tightened her legs around Rufus’s fat sides. She could see Fiona’s mouth open as she raised her right hand and straightened her shoulders, still standing on Prince’s back. Debbie’s heart was pounding. At the last moment, Rufus jumped to one side, and Prince skipped to the other. Debbie slid but hung on. Fiona flexed and kept her balance. Two strides later, she squatted down again, with Prince still galloping, put her hands in his mane, and dropped to his back. At the lower fence, Fiona brought him around in a big trot circle, then came back up the hill. Debbie fell forward onto Rufus’s neck, her face in his bushy pony mane. She did not want to be the one to faint and fall off. She closed her eyes.
Fiona’s face was flushed, but she was nonchalant about the whole thing by the time she and Prince got back to Debbie and Rufus. Rufus was nonchalant, too, but Prince was delighted with himself—he arched his neck and picked up his feet and took deep breaths. Fiona said, “Horses are really good at knowing where they are.” Then, “I’m sorry if I scared you.”
Debbie said, “You didn’t.”
But for the rest of their ride, all they did was wander around the field. Fiona made Debbie trot in a circle both ways for a few minutes, just to practice. And, of course, when the horses were cooled out and they went in the house for a snack, Mr. Cannon was home, and he said, “You girls having a good time?” Fiona shrugged. Debbie said, “Yes. I love Rufus.”
“He’s a good pony.”
After they looked at Fiona’s latest issue of The Chronicle of the Horse, Mr. Cannon drove Debbie home while Fiona took the horses their hay. All Mom said when she walked in the house was “Hi, honey. The fresh air is doing you good.”
—
JIM UPJOHN HAD his way, of course, and Frank was brought in by the board of Fremont Oil to “reorganize and redirect operations.” Frank’s “objectivity” was secured by means of a very large salary and no stock in the company. Uncle Jens had some proportion of his assets in oil, but none in Fremont. Fortunately for Frank, Hal and Friskie had already moved the corporate offices from Tulsa to Manhattan, so, when Andy and Janny went looking for a new house the better to accommodate Frank’s new
position, they didn’t have to look far. Andy liked Englewood Cliffs, because she could get to the Upper West Side quite easily, and the schools, the private schools, were said to be excellent.
Frank was quite friendly with Hal and Friskie. Hal was thirty-one and Friskie was twenty-eight. Frank alternated between treating them like kid brothers and like experts. Every time Hal told him what to do, Frank smiled cheerfully and said, “I think that’s a great idea.” Friskie wasn’t much of a suggester, more of a complainer, so when Friskie came charging into his office, upset about something, Frank was sympathetic, offered him a drink (Friskie liked a straight shot of The Glenlivet). He also listened to their views about their father—that he was over the hill, that he didn’t understand the modern world, that he always acted on impulse. When push came to shove, that’s what he did—shoved them around with those big hands of his. Frank nodded and shook his head with all kinds of sympathy and said that his father had been just the same way, a farmer who had his belt off at least once a day, “The only question was, buckle end or not buckle end?” This made them laugh. They thought Frank was on their side.
Jim Upjohn had led him to believe that Dave Courtland would be buying property somewhere nearby—if not Manhattan or New Jersey, then a place in Southampton. But Dave Courtland hated the East as much as he hated the North. His favorite places were Caracas and Galveston. Frank did not mind not seeing him, because he and Jim Upjohn were in complete agreement about developing the Venezuelan oil fields to their most attractive potential, and then allowing a hostile takeover by Jersey or Getty. When Frank expressed a bit of nervousness about Dave Courtland’s reaction, Jim laughed and said, “Oh hell. Millions of bucks are a good tranquilizer. He’ll have a tantrum and then, no doubt, decide to use that money to do a little more exploring. And that will rejuvenate the old coot. We’ll buy him a nice donkey. The fellow who started a company can’t run it when it’s going strong. They get bored and cranky, so you have to send them out to start something new. Maybe he’ll get remorse, like Carnegie did, and build something for the workers.” Jim Upjohn was the only man Frank regularly spoke with who pronounced it like Eloise did, “the workers.”