When the third pretty bluestocking made eyes at me, I left. Libraries always make me feel covered in ink, anyway. Ink on my clothes, ink in my eyes. Terrible. All the body heat in there is bound to make the pages mushy. My parents met in a library. My mother was a junior librarian, and my father’s books were always overdue. He asked my mother’s best friend what her favourite books were, and he took them out, one by one—La Dame aux Camélias. Thérèse Raquin. Madame Bovary. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Anna Karenina. He couldn’t make head nor tail of them—“Hasty women,” he told me, shaking his head. “Hasty women.” But he told my mother how much he enjoyed them, and when he got around to asking whether she objected to his calling on her at her family home some Sunday afternoon to continue their discussion, she didn’t say no.
I thought briefly about going to see my mother, in her tiny apartment two hours’ drive away, but I know she doesn’t want to see me, and I know it’s not because of anything I’ve done or failed to do. She doesn’t want to see anyone. She’s happy like that, I think. Always relieved at the end of a visit. I think she’s too old to want to talk anymore; she doesn’t mind listening, but she’s got a radio set for that. She’s still in good health; she’s still got her wits about her. She had a lot more to say for herself before my father passed away, but then he was a fine man, great company — really great company, actually — let you have your opinions and talked about his own in a way that never put your nose out of joint. And now that he’s gone she’d rather not talk to anyone else. Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it’s swell that there are people you don’t have to worry about when you don’t see them for a long time, you don’t have to wonder what they do, how they’re getting along with themselves. You just know that they’re all right, and probably doing something they like. Last time I saw my mother she kept nodding and saying, “Everything’s just fine, dear. Everything’s just fine.” This was before I’d even made an opening remark — she was in such a hurry to get her part of the conversation out of the way. If I went to see my mother, what would I tell her, anyway?
I drove around instead, just drove around, trying to decide where to stop. As I drove I tried to think of a word, a single word to sum up the way Daphne’s been behaving lately. Inscrutable. The woman has become inscrutable.
Take yesterday morning. Daphne was right outside my study, watering the flowers in the window box, warbling to herself — a pretty little racket, and I was somehow enjoying it and getting a little work done at the same time. Then suddenly she stopped and said, “Well, St. John. . You know what Ralph Waldo Emerson says. . ”
I waited quietly, held my pen still to show I was paying attention, braced myself for some cloying scrap of verse she’d just remembered from her high school yearbook. But she didn’t finish her sentence. Nor did she continue with the singing. So I said, “Go on, D., I’m all ears.”
She made a little moue with her mouth, blowing a couple of stray curls out of her line of vision so that I felt the full force of her stare. “What do you mean, ‘Go on’? I don’t know what Emerson says.”
“Oh, you don’t?” I asked, and I laughed. She didn’t laugh with me.
“You know what Emerson says, St. John. That’s why I said, ‘You know what Emerson says.’ ”
Her sleeves were rolled up, and her voice kept going from flat to sharp. I got the distinct impression that she was steaming mad at me for failing to supply her with an Emerson quotation.
“Can I ask — would you mind telling me — where you got this idea that I know what Emerson says? Have I ever mentioned in passing that I know what Emerson says?”
She yawned at me. “Come on, St. John. Don’t be shy. Tell me something Emerson said.”
I dropped my smile.
“Did someone tell you that Emerson’s a great friend of mine? Did the ghost of Ralph Waldo Emerson call one day when I was out and leave a message for me—Well, now, Fox, my boy, you know what I always say?”
“I really think you ought to know what Emerson says, that’s all,” she returned, without batting an eyelid.
I stood up and went to the window. When I got close to her she looked down at her watering can. “Mrs. Fox,” I said. “You’re a horror today.”
To which she replied, “Why don’t you write a book about it?”
Why don’t you write a book about it?
Why don’t you—
Speechless, I gestured for her to stand away from the window; then I closed it. We looked at each other through the glass — she had this cool, triumphant smile on. She really felt she’d said something extraordinarily cutting. God knows what I looked like. Then she moved on to the next window box. What the hell am I supposed to make of a conversation like that?
Then there was the picnic D. and I went to last weekend — neither of us wanted to go, but my publisher was hosting, and it seemed necessary to show my face. Some of the women had brought their little kids along to run around in the meadow, singing their nonsensical songs and making daisy chains. There was this one girl with a pair of angel wings on — she actually had quite a lot going for her. She could whistle around two fingers, and she showed some of the little boys how to skim stones off the stream, and she didn’t scream when water splashed her. I wouldn’t mind having a kid if she turned out to be like that. Daphne was watching her, too, and scowling. At one point the girl with the angel wings bumped into Daphne and said sorry real sweetly. Daphne just ignored her, looked straight ahead, tight-lipped. I told the child there was no harm done, but if I could have gotten a million miles away real fast, I would have. Then my publisher’s wife, a new mother, offered to let Daphne hold her little boy, and Daphne looked at me with these eyes of mute suffering, as if asking, Do I have to? Do I really, really have to?