His great love was fishing. He had fished in Ireland, the Restigouche, he had fished the Frying Pan and the Esopus. “That’s where I won Catherine,” he recalled. “A miraculous day. We went down to the river and she sat on the bank and read while I fished. Finally she said, ‘I’m hungry.’ And exactly at that moment, as if on cue, I pulled out two beautiful trout.
“But the best fishing story I know,” he said, “happened to a friend of mine who lives in France. His father-in-law has a big country house with a pond, and in this pond lived a huge pike. Very cunning fish, very old. The gardener had been after him for years, he had sworn his death. One day Dix was fishing there, he had nothing serious in mind, and he just cast out and accidently hooked the pike in the tail. Unusual, but it sometimes happens. Enormous struggle. The pike was three feet long. Dix was fighting and shouting for help. The gardener ran to the house and came racing back with a shotgun, and before they could do anything to stop him, was blazing away at the pike. There was blood all over, great confusion. The fish was stunned but alive. They put it in a bathtub where it was floating around, wounded. That night it died. There was some question of exactly how it died because there was evidence of stabbing, but anyway there was nothing to do, they froze it in a block of water—this happened in winter—and later it was sent to Paris to make a fish soup for an important dinner the father-in-law was giving. Dix was there, everyone, including the Minister of Education, who took a bite of fish and reached up to his mouth in bewilderment to take out pieces of buckshot. The father-in-law looked at Dix, who… what could he say? He just shrugged.
“Women don’t like fishing,” he decided, “do they?”
“Of course we do, darling,” his wife said.
“They don’t like to get up early in the morning. Actually, neither do I.”
He liked brandy, crystal glasses, vermouth cassis at the Century. His life was solid, well-made, perhaps not happy but comfortable; there were feasts of comfort like nights in sleeping-trains with their clean sheets and cities floating in the dark. The first anachronisms were appearing in his clothes, the first blotches of age on the back of his hands. There was seldom music in his house. Books and conversation, reminiscences. He wore blue-checked shirts, faded from many launderings. English shoes a little out of style. In his face a marvelous alertness, in the iris of one eye a small dark key like a holy stain. He had traveled, he had dined, he discussed hotels with the affection one usually reserves for women or beasts. He knew exactly in which museum a painting was hung. His French was a rickety structure based on a vocabulary of food and drink. He spoke it grandly.
The hours passed quickly. The mist was forming, the brandy gone.
“My God,” Nedra said, “what time is it?”
Peter looked at his wrist watch. After a moment of consideration, he answered, “One o’clock.”
“I’ve had too much brandy,” she said. “I can’t drink it any more.”
“Well, it’s all gone.”
“It goes to my legs.”
Silence. He nodded in agreement. “Nedra…” he said finally. “What?”
“It’s not doing them any harm,” he said.
A last image of him standing in the lighted doorway, the fog obliterating all else, the house, even the windows, the dogs crowding behind him.
“Let me drive you home,” he suddenly decided. “The fog is awful. You can get your car in the morning.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“I know the roads,” he said. He was earnest, his speech slurred. “Damn it, dogs! Wait a minute!” he shouted. “You shouldn’t drive alone,” he decreed.
They got only as far as the end of the driveway where he hit a post.
“I was right. You’d never have made it,” he said.
That fall, in November, his legs began to swell. It was something inexplicable. It affected his knees and ankles. He went to the hospital, they made tests, they did everything but nothing helped, until finally, as if by itself, the fluid disappeared and in its wake, like a mortal drought, a terrible change began. His legs began to stiffen and grow hard.
The doctors now knew what it was.
“It’s the gout,” he told people calmly, lying in bed. “I’ve always had it. It flares up every now and then.”
It was richness of living, he said, the fate of Sun Kings. He was in pain, though one could not see it. This pain would grow greater. It would spread. The skin and subcutaneous tissue would harden. He was turning to wood.
“What is it?” their friends asked Catherine.
It was innominate.
“We don’t know,” she would say.
9
NEDRA DID NOT SEE HIM UNTIL THE spring. It was a Sunday. When she rang the bell, Catherine came to the door.
“He’ll be glad to see you,” she said.
“How is he?”
“Not any better,” Catherine said. “He’s in the next room.”
“Shall I go in?”
“Yes, go in. We’re having drinks.”
She could hear voices. Through the doorway she could see a fat-cheeked man she did not recognize. As she entered the room and came closer she suddenly realized that this swollen face was Peter’s. She had not even known him! In six months what a giant step he had taken toward death. His eyes were deeper, his nose seemed small. Even his hair—could he be wearing a wig?
“Hello, Peter,” she said.
He turned and looked at her blankly like some dissolute stranger propped in a chair. She could have wept. “How are you?”
“Nedra,” he finally said. “Well, considering everything, not bad.”
Beneath the sleeves of his coat lay the wasted arms of a paralytic. His body had hardened everywhere, it was like the lid of a chest, he could barely move.
“Feel it,” he told her. He made her touch his leg. Her heart grew faint. It was a statue’s leg, the limb of a tree. The flesh that enclosed him had become a box. Within it, like a prisoner, was the man.
“This is Sally and Brook Alexis,” he said.
A young, red-haired woman. Her husband was thin, folded like a mantis in nondescript clothes. Their children were playing with the Daros’ in the back of the apartment.
The conversation was innocuous. Other people came, a cousin of Peter’s and an old woman who had a glass eye. She was the Baroness Krinsky.
“The doctors,” she said, “my dear, the doctors know nothing. When I was a child I was sick and they took me to the doctor. I was terribly sick. I had a fever, my tongue was black. Well, he said, it’s one of two things: either you have been eating a lot of blackberry jam or it’s cholera. Of course it was neither.”
Nedra found the chance to talk to Catherine alone. “But what is it?” she asked.
“Scleroderma.”
“I’ve never heard of it. Is it only the arms and legs?”
“No, it can spread. It can go anywhere.”
“What can they do for it?”
“Not very much, I’m afraid,” Catherine said.
“Surely there are medicines.”
“Well, they’re trying cortisone, but look at his face. Really, there’s nothing. They all say the same thing: they can promise nothing.”
“Is he in pain?”
“Almost constantly.”
“You poor woman.”
“Oh, not me. Poor man. He wakes up three or four times a night. He never really sleeps.”
“Catherine!” he was calling. “Can you open some champagne?”
“Of course,” she replied. She went to get it. “What have you been doing?” the cousin was asking.