“That’s a funny word, icebox,” he said. “I never heard it before. It’s a funny thing to call a frigidaire. But you speak differently, you know—people like you. You say lots of different things. Now, you say divine—you say lots of things are divine, but, you know, my mother, she wouldn’t ever use that word, excepting when she was speaking of God.”
Frightened by the chart in the hallway, she wondered if there was anything else incriminating in the house, and remembered the gallery of family photographs in the upstairs hall. Here were pictures of her in school uniforms, in catboats, and many pictures of her playing on the beach with her son. While he put the groceries away, she went upstairs and hid the pictures in a closet. Then they walked down the bluff to the beach.
It was surprisingly warm for that time of year. The wind was southerly; in the night it would probably change around to the southwest, bringing rain. All along the beach, the waves from Portugal rolled in. There was the noise of a detonation, the roar of furling water, and then the glistening discharge fanned out on the sand, faded and sank. Ahead of her, at the high-water mark, she saw a sealed bottle with a note inside and ran to pick it up. What did she expect? The secret of the Spada treasure, or a proposal of marriage from a French sailor? She handed Emile the bottle and he broke it open on a stone. The note was written in pencil. “To whomever in the whole wide world may read this I am a 18 yr old college boy, sitting on the beach at Madamquid on Sept. 8. . . .” His sense of the act of setting his name and address adrift on the tide was rhapsodic, but the bottle must have returned to where he stood a little while after he had walked away. Emile asked if he could go swimming, and then bent down to unlace his new shoes. One of the laces knotted and his face got red. She dropped to her knees and undid it herself. He got out of his clothes hurriedly in order to display his youth and his brawn, but he asked her earnestly if she minded if he took off his underpants. He stood with his back to her while he did this, and then walked off into the sea. It was colder than he had expected. His shoulders and his buttocks tightened and his head shook. Naked and shivering, he seemed pitiful, vain and fair—a common young man trying to find some pleasure and adventure in his life. He dove into a wave and then came lunging back to where she stood. His teeth were chattering. She threw her coat over him and they went back to the house.
She had been right about the wind. After midnight or later, it came out of the southwest, spouting rain, and as she had done ever since she was a child, she got out of bed and crossed the room to close the windows. He woke and heard the sound of her bare feet on the wooden floor. He couldn’t see her in the dark, but as she came back toward the bed her step sounded heavy and old.
It rained in the morning. They walked on the beach, and Melissa cooked a chicken. Looking for a bottle of wine, she found a long-necked green bottle of Moselle, like the bottle she had set out in her dream of the picnic and the ruined castle. Emile ate most of the chicken. At four they took a cab to the airport, and flew back to New York. In the train out to Proxmire Manor he sat several seats ahead of her, reading the paper.
Moses met her at the station and was pleased to have her back. The baby was awake; and Melissa sat in a chair in their bedroom singing, “Sleep, my little one, sleep. Thy father guards the sheep. . . .” She sang until both the baby and Moses were asleep.
Chapter XIV
In the meantime things at the Wapshots’ in Talifer were very gloomy. There were no checks from Boston and no explanation and Betsey was complaining. One Sunday afternoon after Coverly had cooked some lunch and washed the dishes Betsey returned to her television set. Their little son had been crying since before lunch. Coverly asked the boy why he cried but he only went on crying. Would he like to take a walk, would he like a lollipop, could Coverly build him a house of blocks? “Oh, leave him alone,” Betsey said and turned up the volume. “He can watch TV with me.” The boy, still sobbing, went to his mother and Coverly put on a jacket and went out. He took a bus to the computer center and walked across the fields to the farmland. It was late in the season, purple asters bloomed along the path and the air was so heavy with pollen that it gave him a not unpleasant irritation in his nostrils; the whole world smelled like some worn and brilliant carpet. The maples and beeches had turned and the moving lights of that afternoon among the trees made the path ahead of him seem like a chain of corridors and chambers, yellow and gold consistories and vaticans, but in spite of this show of light he seemed still to hear the music from the television, to see the lines at Betsey’s mouth and to hear the crying of his little son. He had failed. He had failed at everything. Poor Coverly will never amount to anything. He had heard it said often enough by his aunts from behind the parlor door. He will marry a bony woman and beget a morbid child. He will never succeed at anything. He will never pay his debts. He stooped to tighten a shoelace and at that exact moment a hunting arrow whistled over his head and sank into the trunk of a tree on his right.
“Hey,” Coverly shouted, “hey. You damned near killed me.” There was no reply. The archer was concealed by a screen of yellow leaves and why should he confess to his nearly murderous mistake? “Where are you,” Coverly shouted, “where the hell are you?” He ran into the brush beside the path and in the distance saw an archer, all dressed in red, climbing a stone wall. He looked exactly like the devil. “You, you,” Coverly called after him but the distance was too great for him to catch the brute. There was no reply, no echo. He startled a pair of crows who flew off toward the gantries. That the arrow would have killed him had he not stopped to tighten his shoelace exploded in his consciousness, accelerated the beating of his heart and made his tongue swell. But he was alive, he had missed death at this chance turning as he had missed it at a thousand others and suddenly the color, fragrance and shape of the day seemed to stir themselves and surround him with great force and clarity.
He saw nothing unearthly, heard no voices, came at the experience through a single fact—the deathly arrow—and yet it seemed the most volcanic, the most like a turning point, in his life. He felt a sense of himself, his uniqueness, a raptness that he had never felt before. The syllables of his name, the coloring of his hair and eyes, the power in his thighs seemed intensified into something like ecstasy. The voices of his detractors behind the parlor door—and he had listened to them earnestly all the years of his life—now seemed transparently covetous and harmful, the voices of people loving enough but whose happiness would best be served if he did not make any discoveries of himself. His place in the autumn afternoon and the world seemed indisputable, and with such a feeling of resilience, how could anything harm him? The sense was not that he was inviolate but headstrong and that had the arrow struck him he would have fallen with the brilliance of that day in his eyes. He was not the victim of an emotional and a genetic tragedy; he had the supreme privileges of a changeling and he would make something illustrious of his life. He examined the arrow and tried to pull it out of the tree but the shaft broke. The feathers were crimson and he thought that if he gave the broken arrow to his son the boy might stop crying, and when the boy saw the crimson feathers he did.