“Tell me, Eileen, does my wife ever call you?”
Eileen looked down.
“I see. And what does she want?”
A helpless shrug.
“Does she want money?”
“—”
“She wants money, then.”
“No.”
“She doesn’t want money. Then what does she want?”
“I don’t know.”
“She wants information. Where is she, Eileen? And this time I want an answer.”
Eileen said, “You find out yourself, playboy.”
This was too astonishing. He had to imagine he had misheard. He tried to think of other words that sounded like “playboy.” Frank wandered to the window, his temples pounding. He had pushed Eileen too far. Instinctively he looked for the old couple, remembered the old man unwrapping his wife’s piece of candy. The sun slanted like an examining light into the corners of the yard. A bright and slumbrous column of dust marked a recently departed automobile. A magpie sat on the single telephone wire that soared in and attached to the wall. He realized that Eileen had pretty much said what he thought she had said. He would come in from another direction.
“Quite right, Eileen,” said Frank. “I haven’t been what I should have been of late. We’ll see what we can do.”
Eileen listened and Frank imagined that she was comparing him perniciously to his own father. It left him with the feeling that in speaking to Eileen, he was never quite speaking for himself, with her mustiness of another era.
24
Frank adjusted the gooseneck lamp over the oak desk in his den and pulled up chairs for himself and Holly. Holly had been studying most of the day and had tied her hair back with a bandanna. “Let’s have a look,” she said. Frank opened the drawer and pulled out two aluminum fly boxes. Holly drew them toward herself and tipped open their lids. Inside, they each had twelve compartments with glassine covers that could be opened by tripping a small wire latch. About half the compartments were filled with flies. Holly frowned.
“Where are the pale morning duns?”
“Must be out of them.”
“Don’t go anywhere without pale morning duns.”
“I make the light Cahill do the work for me.”
“Not on big fish,” said Holly, “only on dumb fish. I see you have Adamses in about nineteen sizes.”
“I believe in the Adams.”
“The Adams is pretty vague.”
“It’s not vague. It’s a strong generalization.”
“Where’s the vise and stuff?”
Frank dug out his fly-tying vise, an old Thompson A, and set it up on his desk. He pulled out the lower left-hand drawer, revealing a collection of feathers and pieces of moose and deer hide, small blue and white boxes of hooks, spools of different-colored threads and silk flosses. A nice smell of camphor arose and Holly took a deep breath.
“You and Uncle Mike are really going to sell the ranch?”
“If we can! All we need is a buyer! All he needs is American money! Who told you?”
“Uncle Mike.”
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
“Could it be sold before I get home again?”
“That would be too good to be true, but it could happen.”
“Then I’d like to go once more before I catch my plane.”
“Who’s picking you up in Missoula?”
“Mama.”
“Mama!”
“Yessir, this is a clean sweep. She wanted to come up and check out my boyfriend. Maybe she’ll give you a report. This boyfriend is special and I want you and Mama involved.”
“Well, send her my best.”
“I will. I’ll give her your best. I don’t know if I told you, I changed faculty advisers this term.”
“You didn’t tell me. You’re still a history major?”
“Still a history major.”
“Why did you change?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Dr. Carson — that was his name, huge redheaded guy — Dr. Carson had been reading all these statistics about increasing American ignorance ever since I got there. How many Americans had never heard of the Civil War, never heard of Roosevelt, couldn’t guess the dates of the First World War within fifty years, on and on. He collected these things as a joke and” — she put a size 16 hook in the vise and began winding cream-colored thread on it, almost too quickly to watch — “saved them for me as a kind of gesture of friendship. It got more and more obsessive with him until it became an icky form of intimacy. I tried to agree with him. But he just never seemed to feel I was quite negative enough about proclaiming the awfulness of everything.”
Holly rubbed beeswax onto the thread, then spun pale yellow fur onto it; she wound the thread on the hook until it looked like the eggy, delicate body of a bug. “I had to meet with him every week, but we couldn’t really talk about my work because the stupidity of the American people was becoming so ominous to him that he was paralyzed, and it was starting to paralyze me. Finally, about two weeks ago, I went into his office determined to take a course on the French Revolution even though I hadn’t had the prerequisite, and he said, ‘Do you know how many books the average American reads between graduation from high school and death?’ And I said no and that I really didn’t care because it was not in my plans to become an average American. But I could see he was in this vortex. He said, ‘Guess!’ I mean, he sort of croaked it out. I refused to guess. He stuck his arms straight out from his body and made little fists. His face was red. ‘Guess!’ When I backed out of his office for the last time, he was shouting, ‘Statistically less than one! Statistically less than one!’ So I got a new adviser.”
Holly set two minute white feathers on top of the hook and figure-eighted the thread around them until they stood up.
“Who is the new one?”
“A very quiet, very pleasant dwarf with a Ph.D. from Harvard.”
“Are you calling him a dwarf because he went to Harvard?”
“I’m calling him a dwarf because he’s four feet high.”
“Oh. Did you get the course?”
“Yep, Dad, yep I did.” Holly wound the hackle around the hook shank and the hackle points spun like a bright little cloud around the base of the wings. She wound the thread to the front of the hook and tied it off in a precise whip finish to make the head of the fly. She opened the bottle of lacquer and, when its good smell came out, looked over at Frank and smiled. She dipped the end of her bodkin in it and touched a clear drop of lacquer to the head of the fly. It gleamed for a second and soaked in. She took the fly out of the vise and put in another hook and started again on an identical fly.
“I was kind of surprised when you told me you were going to come back after graduation.”
“It’s home.”
“I know, but it’s not a place of much opportunity for people your age.”
“Think of the places that are.”
“That’s true.”
“I might even reopen Amazing Grease.”
“Please.”
“Well, I might.”
Frank watched while Holly finished another fly. She used to tie flies for the anglers’ shop, for spending money in high school. She had always fished with Frank. When she was in practice, she could outfish him. She couldn’t cast as far but she was a great water reader and better at stealing up on trout and making her casts count. She’d had a boyfriend down in New Mexico who fished; she even brought him up one time. Frank didn’t like him — Miles something or other. He seemed to think his being a fisherman covered everything. He was an avid, excited young man who took the position that he and Frank had known each other for years. It was part of the angling camaraderie. Frank despised him. Later, Miles gave up fishing to work at the Chicago Board of Trade, where he became a drug addict and dropped from sight. Holly put in another hook and wound the thread onto it.