Secrets & Surprises

La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans

His father was Joseph Berridge, the painter. Her father was Horace Cragen, the poet (to be distinguished from Cragen the pianist, his brother Philip). They met in Cambridge, just after he had dropped out of Harvard at the end of the fall term. She was sharing a one room apartment with a girl who went to B.U. The girl was the one who introduced them; she had gone to high school with Griffin, and he had looked her up when he moved to Cambridge. In the short time since high school he had changed a great deal, and she no longer felt very comfortable with him. Had he not literally stumbled into her table, where she sat with Diana, just before Jacks bar closed, she would have avoided talking to him. She certainly would not have introduced him to Diana. She had nothing on her mind about introducing the children of famous men to one another — he pitched into her table, and when the boy he was with pushed him by the shoulders so that he slumped into a vacant chair at the table, she tried to make the best of the situation by pretending that he was not as drunk as he was by introducing him. Or perhaps part of the lurch into the table was show to begin with: outside, he had not been too drunk to ask for, and scribble down, Diana’s phone number. “I lost yours,” he said to Louise. “I know hers is the same, but if I don’t have yours—” Griffin’s friend clapped his hand around his neck and began to move him away from the two girls. “His father’s Joseph Berridge,” Louise said to Diana when they turned to begin the walk back to their apartment. “And Griffin decided to be fucked up about it all of a sudden and dropped out of Harvard. I think he’s faking — I knew him in high school, and there was nothing wrong with him. When he got here he started drinking and not going to classes. He’s just doing it to spite his father.”

Louise answered the phone when Griffin called. She said, “One moment,” and handed the phone to Diana and went into the kitchen. She thought that Griffin had a nasty streak, and had even in high school, when he was usually fun to be with, and it irritated her that now he was pretending they were not even friends. On the phone he had only asked her formally to speak to Diana.

She listened as Diana hesitated, then agreed to see him over the weekend. She was glad that even though Diana was shy, when put in a bad position, she would fight for her rights. She thought that Diana could — and would probably have to — handle Griffin.

“We’re going to the movies,” Diana told Louise, coming into the kitchen and grinning like a girl who had just been asked on a first date.

“What are you going to see?”

She shrugged. “Whatever’s at the movies.”

Louise had to smile. Not to have smiled would have looked as if she were sulking.

Louise was average in height and a little overweight, with hair that was pretty and wavy, even though it was no special shade of brown. Next to Diana she looked almost petite; Diana was a little taller than five nine, and her hips and shoulders were broad, so that people thought of her as a big person, even though she was slender. When Diana was depressed, Louise remembered not to stand by a mirror with her. She had done that once, inadvertently, walked up to Diana slumped in the hallway and tried to cheer her by insisting that she was pretty, and Diana had turned and stood facing forward, next to Louise, the mirror in front of them, and said simply, “See?” Louise had seen. Mirrors seemed to distort Diana’s body in some way, so that she actually did look taller than she was.

The “Griffin Berridge” that Diana scrawled on the bathroom mirror with lipstick was a real shock to Louise. And because she knew the message had not been left for her, she did not know whether it was all right to wash it off. She decided to be good-humored about it — even though it was her tube of lipstick.

On Saturday they went to the movies, and on Sunday afternoon he drove to her apartment in his black Volvo. It was a first-floor apartment, so Diana went to the window when the honking started. Diana thought it was hilarious that he sat outside blowing the horn, and grabbed her sweater and keys, and calling goodbye to Louise, ran to the car.

They went to the Museum of Fine Arts, and kept getting lost as they searched for the modern paintings. He said that Monet’s haystacks were his favorites. He knew so much more than she about all the paintings, but had she not commented or occasionally asked a question, she was sure he would have said nothing. She asked how he knew so much, forgetting, momentarily, who his father was, and he told her that instead of bedtime stories, he had heard about the lives of the painters.

“And my father read me Blake’s poetry to put me to sleep,” she said. “When I was very young, the Songs of Innocence and Experience. When I was a little older — six, maybe — he jumped right into The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s hardly a normal childhood.”

She was a little startled by how quickly he answered, cutting her off, because from the fond way she spoke about Blake she thought that Griffin understood that those memories were pleasant.

“He used to roller-skate with me,” she said — wondering herself at the non sequitur, saying it only to let Griffin know how pleasant and interesting a relationship she had had with her father.

“My father used to compensate like mad, too. He’d go on tirades against Kandinsky, actually standing over my shoulder and pointing to tiny spots of color with a pencil, when he knew I didn’t give a damn. Then the next minute he’d be pulling a baseball cap on my head and throwing me my catcher’s mitt, wanting us to go off to the game. My mother thought that was so wonderful, but I knew he didn’t care about baseball, and that he was suspicious because I liked it so much.”

They wandered into another room of paintings, and she went up to a piece of sculpture she had not noticed the other time she came to the museum: a statue by Degas, of a young dancer, foot delicately extended, head held high, tilted back.

“Snob,” he said.

“No she isn’t. She’s fourteen years old and she can dance, and she’s proud.”

He started to walk away.

“Not proud, I guess, but she feels regal. She can do something and she’s poised for a moment before she moves.”

“Are you kidding?” Griffin said.

“No. I’m serious.”

“You really like that?”

“I like it a lot.”

“Well, don’t sound challenging. Is it an important issue?”

“You don’t like it?” she said.

“No. I don’t like it much.”

They moved away, went to one of the seats in the room and sat down, looking at the large dark painting in front of them.

“I don’t know why I spend so much time at museums,” he said. “I thought that the minute I got away from home I’d never look at a painting if it wasn’t in a book, but I end up here all the time.”

She said nothing, wanting to look at the ballerina again, but not wanting to shut him out, either.

“That was quite a scene back in Rye, New York: my father always pretending to be happy when the Yankees had home games, my mother always pretending excitement about the different shows at the galleries in Manhattan, the dog probably pretending she enjoyed playing tug of war with the stick.”

She said nothing. She was wondering if she could have been wrong — if he might have not liked roller-skating.

“It’s freaky,” he said. “That I’d end up taking a dive into the table of Horace Cragen’s daughter.”

She hated being spoken of as Horace Cragen’s child. Her image of her father, which was always in the back of her mind when she was not actually thinking of him, dimmed a little. She moved her head to get the picture back: her father, in his baggy slacks and cardigan, smiling down at her, poised on the edge of her bed with his large hands turning the pages of a book as delicately as if the paper were feathers.

Her eyes came to rest on the sculpture.

“You like it,” he said, looking at her looking at it, “because you were an aspiring ballerina when you were little. Right?”

“No,” she said. “I never took dancing lessons.”

“What did you do? You didn’t have a treehouse and play touch football, did you?”

She laughed at the notion. No — her father had always seen to it that she wore a ribbon in her hair and that she was a feminine little girl; if she had taken dancing lessons, she would have been like the statue. But she told him that she had taken lessons in nothing. She had belonged to the Brownies, until she got sick of it, but you could not really call that taking lessons.

“Then tell me what you did,” he said.

“Oh — I didn’t do so much. I was very shy when I was a child. I stayed home a lot of the time.” She smiled at him. He continued to look at her, not challenging, but interested: he wanted more. “I went sleigh-riding in the winter and I roller-skated a lot — sometimes at roller rinks. My father and I used to play tennis.”

“But you weren’t a little ballerina, huh?”

“No,” she said.

“They made me go to dancing class. Ballroom dancing. Can you imagine that? They wanted me to be a proper gentleman. My father always used to wear a jacket to dinner. He even painted in an old paint-smeared corduroy jacket. We went to the ball game and I’d wear my baseball cap and he’d sit beside me in his sport coat, with one of those porkpie hats on. It used to embarrass the hell out of me. He must have been embarrassed, too, to have been so handsome and to have such an ordinary-looking son. What he wore looked stylish, and whatever I wore looked wrong. At the time, I thought his hat was embarrassing, but he looked good in it — he was the sort of man who can look more serious because he’s wearing something silly and it doesn’t look funny on him. Do you know what I mean? He was six feet tall, and here I am, not even as tall as you.”

She felt uneasy again; she hated to have her height talked about. She had been a tall child, and that was part of her reason for being so shy. What she had always wanted was to fade in, to be like everybody else.

When they left the museum he talked no more about his father, or her father. She was glad, because some of the things he had said had disturbed her. And then when he kissed her, at the bottom of the museum steps, she smiled widely. She had started to be depressed, and then he had made her forget it.

Neither of them was sure it was not a mistake, but still they decided before Christmas to live together. Louise, who suspected it would happen, already knew a person who would share the apartment. Diana had made it clear that she would not move out until Louise could find someone to take her place, but that was accomplished quickly, much to Diana’s joy and Louise’s dismay. Louise had even spent a Saturday loading books into cartons and taking them by car to Griffin’s apartment.

When Diana and Griffin got back from New York, where they had gone to the wedding of Griffin’s good friend Charlie to a girl named Inez, they were going to stop at Louise’s and pick up Diana’s clothing. Everything else had been moved out. Driving back, Louise felt sure that Griffin would send Diana alone. It must be, she thought, that he knew she disapproved of his leaving school and drinking, that she did not like it when he called her when he got to town, and then saw her once and never called again. She did not think he was a nice person anymore, and she hoped that he would not be unkind to Diana.

For Christmas, Diana and Griffin went to Rye to stay with his parents, and on Christmas Day drove into the city to have dinner with her parents. Both places were loud and festive, with relatives from both sides sizing up the new person; Chopin waltzes were played at Griffin’s house as the family sipped afternoon wine, and at Diana’s parents’ apartment in the Village the radio was tuned to the Messiah, and Caroline — her favorite aunt — gave them a bottle of champagne and tall etched pink glasses and made them promise that they would visit her at her farm in Pennsylvania.

Above the mantle hung a poem of Horace Cragen’s, hand-lettered on parchment and framed in an old walnut frame — a gift to Horace from Diana’s mother. The poem was lovely, but as she admired it she also had the uneasy feeling that her mother should have given her father something else. Was it appropriate to — in a sense — give someone back what he had already given?

She wondered, at dinner, what her family thought of Griffin. She knew that her mother did not approve of her living with him, but she also knew that her mother would not allude to it. And her father? She looked at him across the table, eating roast goose, seeming happy but preoccupied, as he so often did. He had asked if the Griffin Berridge she was dating (he called it “dating”) was Joe Berridge’s son. He had called him Joe, so naturally she had asked if he knew him. “No,” he had said. “Know of him.” In conversation he did not mind speaking bluntly; his poems, though, were full of surprises and confusions. No matter how many poems were framed and hung in the house, she understood that where her father really lived was not there, but somewhere in the cloudy, starry world of poetry. “How is the roast goose?” her mother asked. “It’s fine with me,” her father replied. She and Griffin and Caroline nodded assent. “Very good,” Griffin said. Her mother nodded approval, and again they cut their meat and ate. The meal was more restrained than usual — because Griffin was there?

“What was wrong?” she asked. They were walking down Fifth Avenue, having wandered far from the apartment after dinner. She had asked it not so much because she was convinced that Griffin was bothered by something, but rather because she was wondering aloud.

“Nothing’s wrong. You don’t like it when I’m moody, and when I’m not you act as though I am.”

“I didn’t mean to criticize you. I was wondering aloud, really. That’s all I meant.”

“Was it like other Christmases?”

“No. It was quieter.”

“Do they usually get along?”

“Who?” she said.

“Your mother and father.”

“They’ve always gotten along.”

He was swinging her hand, answering but not paying too much attention to the conversation.

“They’re always like that?” he said.

“Yes.”

“Then they don’t get along. Or they get along, but there’s something wrong.”

“What’s wrong?” she said, trying to remember if it was true that they always acted that way.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He’s a famous man and she’s his wife, and she’s in awe of him but also resents him.”

For the first time she lifted her head from staring at the sidewalk to look at him.

“Let’s not be serious on Christmas,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Later, on the walk home, she thought uncomfortably about her response to Griffin. It had been too deferential. Her mother, all her life, had been too deferential to her father. As they walked farther she thought that there was some logic to that at least: her father was Horace Cragen. But Griffin was only Griffin, and he shouldn’t declare her moods. Sorry that she had said she was sorry, she eased her hand out of his and plunged it into the deep silk-lined pocket of her coat.

They had just begun to live together.

In February her father sent her a new poem. Much of it she did not understand, but the allusions to their days roller-skating — the parts of the poem about her — she understood well. She left it on the table, with the morning mail, along with the letter from her father.

“What’s this?” he said, sitting at the kitchen table and trying to rub some life into his body. He had gotten little sleep, in spite of the fact that it was almost eleven o’clock, because he had gone to a jazz club with his friend Tony and then gone drinking at another friend’s apartment after the bars closed.

“Go ahead and read it,” she answered.

When he had come back at four in the morning, drunk, they had quarreled: hadn’t he said he wouldn’t drink to get drunk anymore? Didn’t he think she might worry — couldn’t he have called? He picked up the poem and read it, and then the letter, too. The letter asked her if she would come to her father’s favorite cousin’s remarriage on February 25—just the time she and Griffin had planned to visit friends up north.

“So what are you telling him?” he said. He shook the coffee jar but did not get up to make coffee.

“I think I should go, if you don’t mind delaying the trip a week.”

“Charlie and Inez will have to be out of the house then. They only rent it for February. The weekend after that is March.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I still think I ought to go. I haven’t seen them since Christmas, and he’s been depressed because his back has been bothering him.”

“I haven’t seen my parents since Christmas either.”

“I get along with my parents, and you don’t get along with yours.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “I sit like a stone with my parents, and you sit like a stone with yours.”

“That’s untrue! What are you talking about?”

“Forget it,” he said. “Go to the wedding. I’m going to Charlie and Inez’s.”

“Since you prefer getting drunk to being with me, I don’t see why you’re sulking.”

“Because I’m sorry for you, goddamn it. Because he’s ordering you around, and I don’t like that. Because he sent that sentimental poem about his baby girl, and after stroking her with the pen stabbed her in the heart and told her to come home.”

She looked at him to see if he could be serious. He looked very serious.

“You’re wrong,” she said.

“You are,” he said.

He went into the bedroom and dressed, and left the apartment without saying goodbye. Either he was crazy, or she was crazy. And she was sorry for him—he had looked so sick when he came into the kitchen. He had been sick from the night before. Since he was not there to talk to, she talked to herself. Through clenched teeth she said, “They are a poem and a letter.” She took them both with her when she went back to the bedroom and stretched out on the still-unmade bed. She did not go to class.

March was a good month for them, and April was, too, until late in the month when he lost his job at the library. His friend Tony got him a job selling shoes, and he needed the money (he no longer would accept anything from his parents), but he found the job unbearable. All day women would come in and try to fit into shoes that were too small and that the store did not have in their size, and Griffin was supposed to tell them that he would take the shoes in the back and put them on the shoe stretcher. The shoe stretcher was a mop handle which he inserted in the shoe, then whomped down hard: the pressure would break the lining in the toe, and the women would have a fraction of an inch more room. Tony, who worked in the store part-time and was always stoned, thought it was hilarious. But after a week Griffin was miserable and began to drink again — this time topping off the evening by smoking grass with Tony. He went back to the apartment and fought with her, and she went into a rage, throwing clothes into a suitcase, saying that she was not going to live with him any longer. But she looked back and saw him, pale-faced and probably sorry for what he had said — he told her so often that he was sorry for blaming her for things she couldn’t help and to please forgive him — and she threw the things from the suitcase to the floor, shaking her head at him and at herself: if she was leaving, why would she take the Equadorian sweater but not a nightgown? Throwing things so randomly into the suitcase, she could not even have appeared serious to him about going.

“I think about what my father did to me — about how he implied it was all right not to consider women’s feelings — the way he was to my mother, taking her along, taking her hand the same way he took mine — on his outings. And it’s no wonder it’s taking me so long to know how to act.”

He lit a cigarette. When he drank, or was hung-over, he had begun to smoke cigarettes.

“You’re obsessed with your father,” she said. Before, she had screamed that, but now it was such a familiar line that she said it quietly, perturbed but stating the obvious. “Forget about your father and live your life.”

“You know that can’t be done,” he said. “You know it. You know it when you pick up a magazine and read your father’s poetry, or when you see his picture in a bookstore window. And I know it when I read interviews with my father, when he sends me brochures about gallery openings and I read about the facts of his life. You know that you can’t forget that.”

She stood amid the scattered clothes, wondering if it could be true.

They broke up in May, but it didn’t last. Griffin went to stay with Tony but came back at the end of the week, and she agreed to try again. He came back sober and, he said, sorry for being the cause of so much of their unhappiness. She could tell even as he spoke that he still believed she did not realize how much her father had her under his thumb, but if he would only not say that, then she knew she could stand it.

She was surprised when, in June, he told her he wanted to marry her. Their relationship had always been up and down, and when he came back after their separation they did not come together with the closeness they had had early on. So she tried to tell him no as gently as possible.

“God,” he said. “Your loyalty is still with him.”

“Don’t start that,” she said. “Please.”

“It’s so easy for me to see. It’s so clear, and sometimes I know you see it. I know you do, and sometimes you’ve even agreed with me. If you see it, then break away. Break the tie.”

“Griffin, I haven’t called or written my father for nearly a month.”

“But you don’t have to. That’s what’s so insidious about it. During that month he reminded you of who he was and how he was because his long poem was printed in the magazine you subscribe to. He was on your mind, even if you didn’t call, even if he didn’t call you. Jesus — at least admit the truth.”

“What do you want me to say? That I hate my father?”

“Admit you’ll never leave him — or you’ll leave him for somebody he approves of. Some man he’ll find for you.”

“Griffin, he has never told me who to date.”

“He has to approve, though, doesn’t he? And he doesn’t approve of me, does he? Did he like me there at Christmas, eating roast goose across the table from him, sitting next to his only daughter in his classy Village apartment? Did you think he radiated warmth?”

“He had just met you,” she said.

“And did he want to meet me again? You got the phone calls. Did he?”

“He’s never told me who to bring there and who—”

“He didn’t. Just give a simple answer.”

“Don’t tell me how to answer you. Answer yourself if you know all the answers.”

“Please,” he said, bowing his head and coming toward her with his arms outstretched. “Do you think I asked you to marry me because I hate you? Do you think I’m saying this because I only want to hurt? I’ve been through this too. Once you face it, you can get away from it.”

“I’m not going to let you make me hate my father,” she said. She was so confused, wondering now what her father had thought, why even her mother had not said what he thought. But maybe her father and mother weren’t getting along — Griffin had said they weren’t — and it had to be true that he was not saying these things because he hated her. He was standing and holding her, very sad; he was at least doing what he thought was right.

“It’s all so simple,” he said. His arms closed around her.

These were the things in their apartment: a sofa with two usable cushions, the other cushion ripped to shreds; one large pillow for floor seating; draperies at the window left by the former tenants; a kitchen table and two chairs, one of which always needed gluing; a bed in the bedroom and a bureau they shared. Nothing else. The clutter was not the result of trying to cram large furniture into small spaces, but piles of books, clothes, shoes and boots. They threw out little, keeping almost all the mail, stacked first into piles of a dozen envelopes or so, the piles later cascading, being walked over — letters getting littered across the floor. So when they were in the apartment and wanted to be close to each other, they gravitated toward the bed, the sofa with two cushions too small to stretch on comfortably.

Tonight they were on the bed — he at the far end, his feet under her thigh for warmth, she with a pillow behind her head, looking down at him. She was recovering from a cold and did not have much energy. She had been asleep when he came in, but had roused herself to ask about his day, to talk to another human being in the hopes that if she stopped drifting in and out of sleep, she might feel less sick. He had gone out with Tony two nights before and had come home sober. She had been grateful and happy, sure that he was changing. He hardly ever talked about Joseph Berridge, and she wondered if she had finally gotten through to him. But, to keep peace, she hardly ever mentioned Horace Cragen either, and she felt ridiculous omitting mention of someone she cared for and thought about. Her mother had sent her a letter saying that his back still bothered him, after two doctor appointments, and that he was not working well, and growing despondent. She had meant to call, but each time she thought of it Griffin was in the apartment.

“If you got a job,” he said, “with my dividend checks and my job, and your income, too, you wouldn’t have to take money from him.”

She held up a hand, palm toward him, to tell him to stop talking. His words flowed right through it.

“And you’re being childish not to do it,” he said.

“You don’t want me to take my parents’ money, and you drive around in a new Volvo your father gave you,” she said.

Whether because she was sick and he was sorry for her, or because she had just effectively silenced him, he said nothing more. In retrospect, she would continue to think just what she thought at the time: that he had shrugged off what she said. When he and Tony, drunk again, were in the accident — when Griffin, going thirty miles over the limit, went off the road and crashed the Volvo into a tree, she did not even think of their conversation in the bed two nights before. Tony was cut and scraped; Griffin, with a broken arm and a concussion, was pulled out of the car by Tony. She got the call about the accident from the hospital. She had no money to get a cab to go get him, so she called Louise. “Let him wrestle with his own demons,” Louise said, her own foot heavy on the pedal. “I’m glad you weren’t in the car.” That must have been what started her thinking about the conversation in which she accused him of accepting the car from his parents. But surely crashing it into a tree at high speed was an extreme response. He seemed almost desperately happy to see her, and was very polite to Louise, thanking her over and over for putting herself out for him. He did not seem disturbed — not disturbed the way a person who crashes into a tree would act. It was probably foolish to keep wondering if it had been deliberate. But il it had been, she should be more careful about what she said to him. He was more upset than she knew, if it had been deliberate. She would have asked him if he meant it to happen, but he seemed so peaceful after the accident that she didn’t speak. She was also afraid that he would admit to doing it to spite her, even if the car had really gone out of control. He was sneaky sometimes — or a better way to put it was that he was an actor: Louise had been right the time she told her who Griffin Berridge was when she said that he decided to be fucked up about his father’s fame.

A week later when her mother called, she felt guilty for not having called or written. She told her mother about Griffin’s car accident, by way of explanation, and her mother said only, “I’m sorry.” Her mother was calling to tell her that her father was suffering, that he would not take the pain pills the doctor had given him because they made his mind fuzzy, but that he couldn’t work or, some days, even go out, because the disc in his back bothered him so. She said that she had thought that Diana’s coming home might cheer him — or perhaps Diana could talk him into taking the pills.

Alarmed, she called the airline, forgetting she could not reserve a seat on the shuttle, even before she spoke to Griffin. Then she went into the bedroom and told him she had to go home, and why. She hoped that it would not result in a tirade — that for once he would be reasonable and see it as the simple situation it was.

He said, “That’s where your parents live. This is home,” and went back to his reading.

Her father was not very pleasant to her, which surprised her and disappointed her mother, she knew. He was glad to see her, but brooded that his wife had summoned her, when she had a life of her own. Did he protest too much — could he be doing it to make his wife feel badly? Diana was ashamed for wondering. Here was her father, depressed and hurting, and she was wondering if mind games were being played.

She stayed for three days, and once each day — as much as she thought he would tolerate — she tried to talk him into taking the pills. When, at the end of the third day, he still would not, she resented his iron will, his thundering “I will not!” which made her back off, so far that she backed over the threshold to the living room, where she found her mother weeping. “He’s so damn stubborn,” her mother said, brushing away the tears. And it was not like her mother ever to disagree with her father; when her mother disagreed, you knew it by her blank face.

That night, when she left, a neighbor drove her to the airport. His name was Peter Jenkins — everyone called him Jenkins — and he could afford to live in the Village because of the money he got when his parents were killed in a plane crash. She could not remember how she got that information, but from the time she was small she had known it, and because people in the neighborhood talked about it often, she was able now to understand that they liked Jenkins, but they also looked down on him. Even calling him by his last name indicated that he was a little apart from them.

All Peter Jenkins wanted to talk about was her father (a great man, he always said — talented and also kind) and his difficulties, and what difficulties she might be having adjusting to life in Boston. She felt hypocritical presenting her life as interesting and peaceful. She knew that he would want to hear the truth, and she did not mean to be condescending to him — it was just that she did not want to think about the truth herself. She was doing badly in school and the man she lived with might have deliberately smashed up his car, and she had found her father remote, obstinate, wanting sympathy rather than help. She had felt sorry for her mother.

“Ever go rowing on the Charles?” he asked, weaving through traffic.

She told him she hadn’t.

“You jog?” he said. “Last time I was there it looked like a marathon was going on, there were so many people running.”

She said that she didn’t run.

“If you ran, you might make it to the airport faster than I’m getting you there.”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “If I miss one flight I can get another.”

When they got to the airport he smiled at her and got out to lift her bag to the sidewalk.

“You take care,” he said. “Everything’s going to work out all right.”

“Thank you very much for bringing me,” she said.

To fill an awkward moment of silence he said, “You know, your father is really a fine man. I don’t understand every word of what he writes, but God — the tone of those poems — the mood he can create. And he never has his head in the clouds. The week before he got sick he came around to see if he couldn’t steady the ladder for me so I could fix the shutter on the second floor that had blown loose in the storm.”

She thanked him again and walked into the airport. She was sad to leave with nothing resolved. She was depressed because she knew Griffin was going to be waiting with some sarcastic comment, or something to be said in the guise of enlightening her. She was going back to Griffin, and everything in that world seemed so complicated, yet so vague, and the man who had just brought her to the airport was so nice and sensible. But neither did it cross her mind to get something going with Peter Jenkins. Griffin was, as Louise had said, obsessed with his own demons, and that did not make it easy to live with him, but she respected that intensity. In the long run, someone like Griffin was important, in spite of his faults. Peter Jenkins was even a little dull, although he was a very kind and caring man. If she had had to talk to him longer than the car ride, what would she have said?

Getting onto the plane, she thought she might have asked him for help — or made some move toward him, to break his exterior. Then she settled into her seat, convinced her thoughts were crazy — she was imagining a whole situation in her mind that did not, and would not, exist. She was like Griffin.

No one, including Horace Cragen, imagined he would die. When they operated they found a malignant tumor, and the cancer had already spread through his lymphatic system. Diana had not even gone to New York for the operation. She had talked to him the day before he was hospitalized, and tried to cheer him by promising to go with him to Paris in the spring, to a conference he wanted to attend. Before the operation he had started to care again about poetry, and an old friend — another famous poet who was the subject of a week-long conference in Paris in June — had invited Horace to attend with him. And Horace Cragen did go to the conference, taking along his medicine and checking in with an American doctor. When Diana and her mother showed delight with his progress and told him they would both go with him to Paris, he said — and not even nicely — that he would go with William, alone.

William, besieged by reporters and having had enough of listening to himself talked about, having shaken enough hands, left Paris for the States two days before Horace was to leave. Horace waited two days, did not cancel his flight, talked in the morning to a reporter and gave him information about his youth with William at Princeton, ordered dinner to be sent to his room, ate it, then shot himself in the head, the radio playing music he did not understand because he had adamantly refused to learn French.

“Oh, parley-voo and fuck these Frogs,” Horace had said to William as they stood in the lobby of the big hotel, William having checked out and lingering for a final cigarette before he left for Charles de Gaulle Airport. William had laughed at that; Horace had been profane in his youth, but he had become — both of them had become — so dignified, so cultured. William himself did not even use bad language, with the exception of a “goddamn it.” Or, as Horace told the interviewer who came two days later, on the morning of the day he was to kill himself, “He became a gentleman.” The interviewer, wondering if Cragen’s phrasing was not perhaps a subtle way to indicate something about the other poet’s character, and used to interviewing writers who knifed other writers in the back, wrote simply that Horace Cragan considered William Duvall a true gentleman. He took the last photograph of Horace Cragen alive. Cragen was pictured, thin from his recent medical treatments but still strikingly handsome, sitting in a tufted chair in the hotel lobby, an uncharacteristic cigarette in his hand. (The pack was given to him by William, who said that now that he was leaving the tension behind, he was leaving the cigarettes too — Horace Cragen reached out and took them and, to William’s surprise, lit one. Then they embraced for a slap on the back, shook hands, and William left for the airport.)

Back in the States, William did not even hear the news the day it happened. He heard it days later and flew to New York. The apartment was full of mourners, including Diana and Griffin, and the only order was kept by Peter Jenkins, who, after a little time had passed in which the mourners expressed their sorrow to the family, would walk up to them and thank them kindly for coming, and slowly edge them toward the door. Peter Jenkins did not do that to William Duvall, or to a couple of other old friends. They sat with Diana and Griffin, in silence mostly, and stared about the room as if the ceiling might go at any second, or the floor. Most of them seemed to be betting on the floor.

Griffin took Diana for a walk when Peter Jenkins suggested it. Peter took Diana’s mother for a walk, too, putting her sweater around her and leading her, unprotesting, out the door. They locked the apartment and went outside, Peter indicating to Griffin that he was walking left and that he and Diana should go right. Griffin, shocked by the death and still remembering Diana’s first cry of pain, was very glad that Peter Jenkins was there to manage instead of him. He did everything the man said, and hoped that Diana would stay as calm as she had become. He meant to do nothing wrong — he had left town with her, even though he thought it meant he would lose his job. He intended only kindness, but walking down the street and seeing her sorrow, and thinking that he understood its peculiar quality, he said to her that one time when his own father had been ill with hepatitis and he had seen him losing strength, he had been amazed that as his father lost weight, as he got slighter in the hospital bed, he had nevertheless grown larger in proportion. “It was as though even in death — and although nobody else thought it, at least I thought he was dying — he was becoming larger than life, rather than shrinking. He was a famous man, and that was getting more intense, he was …”

“Shut up, you son of a bitch,” she said. “You don’t understand anything, and I’m not going to let you rage against my father the day after he’s been buried.”

He looked at her, shocked that she would call him that, sorry for having said the wrong thing. She had let go of his arm and stood there, her face firm and challenging, and he could see that she did not want to do anything more than kill him. He looked at the sidewalk and muttered an apology, reached again for her arm. She snapped it in to her side and began to walk, and he walked at her side, thinking, for the first time, My God — she’s bigger than I am. He looked up at her, a large girl, even taller than usual in the high-heeled black boots she had worn to the funeral. She would never understand. Horace Cragen had been larger than life, he was right about that, and she was larger than life too, though she would never admit it. Didn’t his own father disparage the constant photo-taking, the constant reporting on, analysis of, his work? Great men didn’t want to think they were great all the time — only when they needed confidence, or when they felt like playing the role. But he squinted hard here: she was not great in that she was accomplished, she was just large and silent — her father and not her father.

He squinted again, this time looking at her: she had admitted that she was shy as a child. He was that way, too, and he understood it: he had quit Harvard because he did not want to let people know he was bright and talented, just another rich man’s son making it big. He would rather be passive, lie low, carry out the pointed-toe shoes to the fan-shaped feet of the women who came into the store. It was no wonder she had admired the statue so — she had envied the young dancer, poised to take her step. Like him, Diana had no clear ambition. He knew more than he ever had before, and he wanted to explain it to her, but there was no way to do it. She was walking ahead of him, still furious. He trailed beside her, but her face was set. If a man walking along had not touched Griffin’s sleeve to ask what time it was, the intensity of his own thoughts might not have been interrupted and he might have continued to walk with her — she clearly did not know where she was going, but was getting breathless going there — across the city for even longer. Griffin looked at his watch and was shocked to see that they had already been walking for almost two hours, that he must get her back to the apartment.

She lived with Griffin in the month following her father’s death, not hating him for his problems or even for what he had said so coldly on the walk in New York to leave him instantly, but unhappy still, in spite of their occasional compatibility and even happiness, now knowing she would have to leave soon. She asked Louise if she would be able to stay with her and her roommate until she could find an apartment to share, and Louise, of course, said yes.

Since coming back, she had had recurring dreams: grotesque in their comicness, dreams clearly planted in her mind by Griffin (the way her mother had planted the word “home” and she had innocently repeated it to him) in which she would approach her father’s tombstone and it would grow higher and higher, blocking everything from her view. She would finally be standing before a wall of total gray, and this is the point in the dream at which she would wake up. Lately the dream had become even more horrible, with a loud noise — a confusion of voices — that augmented as the tombstone rose: the voice of her father reading fragments from his long poem, the voices of a Lion and a Wolf talking with human voices, a shout from Lyca, even the landscape of the cemetery — the softly-out-of-focus bushes but the bright tall sunflowers bordering the path she walked to her father’s headstone — all put in her head by her father.

Her father had told her that she didn’t do well in literature classes because she knew more than the teachers; Griffin told her that because her father was a literary man, naturally she resisted competing with him. Why did Griffin stubbornly insist that her father was such a dominant force in her life? He had been a gentle man, not overbearing at all, the man she skated with in the warm weather, who brushed her hair and told her bedtime stories like any father. But then why — if he had not been that force — why the nightmares? Because anyone would have nightmares when a parent died. Louise had said so.

She told Griffin she was leaving, and he was very unhappy. So unhappy that he rose from the bed before her — she heard the faint music from the other room when she awoke from the nightmare and reached out to touch only tangled blankets. She listened and could pick it up faintly: “Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously …” And she pursed her lips until she realized that this time she was making too much of it; he would surely not have been able to time the singing of that phrase with her awakening if he had wanted to. So she went out to the living room and put her arms around him.

• • •

She saw him hardly at all after she left, then not at all, and when he called her in late September she was surprised to hear that he was back at Harvard. She knew from Louise that he had called there wanting to find out about her — he had called drunk one night and demanded that Louise tell him if she had another boyfriend.

“I’m sorry,” Diana sighed. “What did you say?”

“I didn’t want to say no, so I hinted that you did.”

“That was silly. You should have just said that I didn’t.”

“You will,” Louise said. “You will.”

“I don’t want a boyfriend,” Diana said. “I just want to be left alone.”

“You’re still upset about your father,” Louise said, laying her hand on Diana’s in sympathy.

And it was only because she knew Louise meant to be kind that she didn’t yank away her hand. How many times would she have to endure hearing how her father’s life and her father’s death had to do with her life?

Not long after hearing from Louise about Griffin’s call, he called her himself. She was going to berate him for drinking and for bothering her friend, but thought better of it. He had said enough to her, and she had said enough to him — she should just let it go.

She was glad that she had not criticized him for anything when he said that he was back in school, with money on loan from his mother. She was glad that he had gone back — she thought that he was wasting his time working, and had told him that all along. She was glad she had not been critical (and would not be critical, as he would have been, about the semantics of taking money from his mother but not from his father) because he sounded happy, and he seemed to know he had made a sensible decision. He had called her for approval, and she gave it to him. He had also called to see if she would have dinner with him, and she said that she would.

“Do you have night classes Monday?” he asked.

“I don’t have any classes. I’m working on Newbury Street from nine to five, and I love it. I go home at night and read a book or go to the movies.”

“You’re kidding,” he said.

“No. I know it’s ironic, your going back to Harvard and my dropping out of school, but you made the right decision, and I did too. I wasn’t getting anything out of it.”

“Christ,” he said. “You didn’t make the right decision.”

She let that go, too. The last thing she wanted was another argument with him.

The dinner was nice: the food was good, he had only one glass of wine, and it made her a little sad that she was no longer with him. She knew that she had done something to him that she had not meant to do — she knew it at the time, when she awoke to hear him listening to sad songs late at night. But it was inadvertent — at least she could say that; he had continued his drinking and badgering her, when he knew she could not stand it, but she had only lingered with him a little time before deciding to go. And now that she was gone, he seemed better. She was so glad that he had gone back to school. They left the restaurant and took a walk before she went back to her apartment and he went back to his when, swinging her hand and speaking very kindly, he said, “I guess Louise told you what I did. My apologies to you for acting so stupid, but no apologies to her — if anything, it put a little excitement in her life.”

“She’s a nice person,” Diana said. “Why don’t you care about her feelings?”

“I do — it’s just that we’re so different that we can’t come close to understanding each other. Look, it’s simple: Louise didn’t have a famous father, so she doesn’t know what it’s like. I’ve missed you so much because we could talk, we could know things and not have to say them, couldn’t we?”

She could not believe that he had said that. And because he had ruined her evening, she spoke without thinking that it did no good to argue. “No, Griffin. All our time together should have taught you that I didn’t agree with you, that we didn’t have that common bond.”

“You know we did,” he persisted. “The nightmares told you that, didn’t they? That wasn’t me putting thoughts in your head; that was your head telling thoughts to you.”

“Why did you call to put me through this again?”

“Because you have to know it. You have to know that it’s all right, and that you’ve got me — you can have me again in a second — that you can work through it. He’s going to vanish. He might expand from a tombstone to a tower, but eventually the tower will topple. But don’t give in — don’t quit school and not come back to me. Don’t—”

“Stop it!” she said, so loudly that people turned to stare at them.

“Please,” he said, taking her arm. “I didn’t tell you that day in New York when Peter sent us off on a walk, but I think about it every day, and it’s still clear in my head and I can still tell you about it.”

“Tell me what?” she said. She began to wonder, as she had after the car crash, as she did so often when they argued, if he might really be crazy.

“What I was trying to say before: that your father’s dead—”

She threw off his arm and ran, praying he wouldn’t follow. And by the time she had gone several blocks she felt free, his voice had stopped ringing in her head. She looked back, thinking she would see him, but she had left him behind. She had missed him, in spite of his obsession, and it angered her that that was so, because of what he had just done. She remembered what her father had told her one time when she came home crying from grade school because she wasn’t selected to be on anybody’s team: “It’s hard, but that’s what life is like, and you’re very special, so you’ll see that sooner. You know, I’m an outsider too — if I hadn’t been a poet, I wouldn’t have been fit for much of anything else. And even outsiders hate other outsiders: poets hate novelists, painters look down on sculptors …” The rest of what he said was blurry, but she remembered the feel of his hand on her shoulder, felt it there as she moved down the street and walked more than twenty blocks home because as she looked down at the sidewalk, remembering, she didn’t think to take a bus or a cab — she just kept putting one foot in front of the other, as the sidewalk kept lengthening.