“I miss her,” Dinah said. “I miss Sally.”
“You shouldn’t drink in the morning, Dinah. It makes you sentimental.”
Sally, long ago, a large and unwashed girl on her way to camp, she needed a bra, but no one, it seemed, had told her. No one had told Sally about Dinah either; not until Clive and Dinah were married was Sally introduced to Dinah — whose idea was that? Sally’s arms were shapeless even then, and the pallid skin up close was pimpled — some kind of rash. Sally’s arms — most of what Dinah remembers from that time: that, and her impulse to hug the girl. Stepdaughter? The word was too harsh for such a big, gentle soul.
“You talk about Sally as if she were a Saint Bernard.”
“Oh, Clive, please!”
Sally stretched out along the picnic cloth was long, nearly as tall as Clive — six feet — and her backside, monumental.
“I know Sally can be needy, has been — is!” Dinah didn’t want to yell. Who was she to scold?
When Dinah woke from her nap, she saw the meadow had been mown. The fieldstones were visible again. They looked like lumpish animals in the muddy embankment, and Clive, at the shed, appraising, seemed pleased — pleased with the appearance of everything, himself included, and why not? The smooth movable parts of him — nothing caved in or stiff or dry about Clive, nothing barreled but his chest was russet colored, ardent — all worked, and the whole of him turned to her now, welcoming. Up close, he smelled grassy. Was it any wonder what she did, what she had done, and would do again for the attentions of this man? Years ago Dinah had left the young husband — known long but married shortly — for this man, Clive Harris, older but not by so many years anymore. Left a husband, a hometown, and friends for a man who openly cheated on her even then. Oh, pride was overrated; she had learned how to put it aside. Drinking a little helped and the days when she fancied she had written a good line, which sometimes turned into a poem and a good one at that.
“Does the meadow meet with your approval?” Clive asked, and in asking she knew he was sorry, sorry about Sally. He was sorry but he did not want to talk about his daughter. No more about Sally, please. No more, and they turned back to the long white house with the wind dropped to nothing and the wind chimes quiet.
*
At some unrecognizable hour, Dinah woke to his juddering hand. He was turned away, but the movement he made, his seeming light, expert touch impressed her, and Dinah tugged at herself a little, but hard so it hurt, which was a way to feeling, and she went off to sleep thinking about her age — sixty — and Clive’s age and Sally’s. The Bournes, how old were they? Ned Bourne was in her dream, ineffective, silent, seated, yet comely compared to the woman she saw or what might have been a woman: Where there should have been breasts were cavities; where hair, a coarse whorl, a black twat.
“Oh, what a terrible dream I had!” were her first words in the morning.
He didn’t ask her to recount it, but she would not have told him; no more than she would tell him that she, too, often cried in the morning — what remedy? She had her jiggered-up juice from time to time and reveries of children. She was sorry she had not prevailed on the subject of children. Childlessness was a hole in her life, and how a child might map this house was a game she had played for years — still did. By what surfaces, what smells, colors, places, dogs would a child know this house?
Something Sally did one summer when she stayed with them in Maine. She was old enough to drive by then, but didn’t; rather, every morning, she and Clive set themselves up — he seated in a wheelbarrow en plein air. Sally had a foldout chair but stood, even then, restless or jumpy, a girl who trembled to be spoken to though her hand was steady. The watercolors Sally made were as precise as oils. Dinah had one, a painting of stalks and tassels, high summer greens; she hung it in the sunny nest where she wrote in the winter — a green memory of summer.
Which of the daylilies would a granddaughter favor? The cream-colored, ruffled ‘Longfield’s Beauty’ or the velvety red ‘Woman’s Work’? The yellows will not move her — and ‘Going Bananas’ is just another yellow, but the name might win her over. Dinah didn’t like the common orange when she was a kid, so why should a granddaughter, fancifully made, embrace them? (Poor Wisia is not fancifully made. She hasn’t the attention span for flowers. She likes camp and archery — and may come to love horses.) Go on with the game, and Dinah does, thinking a granddaughter has come to visit. The stone floor in the kitchen is cold underfoot in the morning and Grandfather is a grump, but Grandmother wears an apron — hug her! — she is bacony and sweet.
Dinah would like to tell Clive that she wants grandchildren, that the unaccountably odd Wisia is preferable to silence, and Sally is his daughter.
*
“Let’s start the morning over again,” she said. “How do you want your eggs?”
*
After the smear of lunch, blue skies and a chance to play with watercolors, sleep, no swimming today but she was caught up in the cocktail hour and playing around with the festive mesclun, washed red bits sticking to her hands—“My day?” Dinah considered. “It was,” and she tossed the salad not unhappily though she heard his knuckle-crackling sounds and sighs.
“Break the seal on the whiskey,” he said, and she turned away from the sink to do it. Five Motrim at a swack usually did the trick for him, but tonight the ache went on. He was looking at his feet.
“Your drink,” she said, and now she looked at his feet and was awed by the crisscrossed, ropy varicosities knotted at his ankles. Was it any wonder he ached?
*
“Good morning, sweetheart!” Clive was not always glum. So why did she ruin the day with mention of Sally?
“I’m not talking about the Bournes,” she said. “Why can’t Sally stay with us?”
“I saw a lot of Sally in New York this spring. Too much of Sally,” he said. “I don’t want to go on outings to Isle au Haut.” Clive said, “I want to work,” and his purpose was as final as a nail.
Once your parents die, there is nothing between you and it. Not a new idea, but the reality has pressed against his heart. Clive has had his mother on his mind. And not because Ned Bourne has made it his subject — no, hardly that; rather, remorse over his own behavior toward the women in his life has Clive facing backward to where his mother left off. Would she approve? Doubtful. Your father would never was how she reprimanded Clive when he was growing up. He sees his mother from a distance and then spends the night by her side. His mother in imposing diamonds at the Hotel Gritti, New Year’s Eve, the passing of the year in which his father had died, Clive sat with his mother while she delivered her pronouncements on Daddy’s genius, his kindness, his elegance — such assertions had hissed past his ears before, chiding; but on this one night she spoke of his father’s gift for life and for loving others. “Your father was a man who let things go alive.”
Then with the alacrity of another new year, she tucked the dead man into her clutch, quoting him only from time to time when it served instructive. Scolding Sally’s table manners, “Your grandfather used to say only boiled and roasted joints allowed on the table!” Clive thinks his mother liked to poke Sally in the elbow with a fork. In this way Clive thinks he is more like his mother: He’s a killer.
The other day he had told Isabel he would not be needing her services for a while. Poor choice of words, probably, but he was not given to lying. He had told her from the start, just as he had once told Dinah, he must have full sway.