The next morning—cold and clear—they made coffee at the campsite, had a real breakfast at a cafe near the summer playhouse in Bigfork, and drove north to West Glacier.
Their plan had been to cut through Glacier Park to the Blackfeet Reservation and then head south along the Bob and the Front Range to the little reservation town of Heart Butte where Clare’s mother had been born. On Saturday they planned to head straight back to Missoula on Highway 2, turning south again along Flathead Lake. Dale had argued for the side trip through Glacier—it was part of his annual late-autumn outing—but mostly he wanted to show off Montana to this young visitor.
The fifty-two-mile-long Going-to-the-Sun Road was famous, but one had to see the incredible scenery to understand how spectacular it really was. Heading east, they drove along the narrow but very deep Lake McDonald for eight miles or so, then started curving and climbing toward Logan Pass. Dale kept glancing at Clare. The young woman was attentive but did not appear to be enraptured by the incredible view.
About four miles beyond the lake, Dale pulled into the Avalanche Campground turnoff. “Want to walk for a few minutes?” he asked. “I know a nice little loop trail up the road here.”
“Sure.”
The Trail of Cedars was a tourist walk—partially built on a boardwalk to protect the delicate undergrowth of ferns and moss—and it wound through a forest of 200-foot-high hemlock and red cedar. There were no other visitors on this beautiful October morning. A soft wind stirred the branches high above them, creating a regular sighing that Dale found as calming as the susurration of ocean surf. Patches of light filtering down through greenery above filled the air with the scent of sun-warmed pine needles and decaying humus. Where the boardwalk crossed Avalanche Creek, water tumbled over moss-covered rocks into the steep and narrow gorge.
“Don’t you wish we’d brought a camera?” said Dale.
“No,” said Clare Hart.
“No?”
She shook her head. “I never travel with a camera. Occasionally a sketch book, but never a camera. It always makes me sad to see tourists snapping away with their cameras and staring through video viewfinders—waiting to get home to see what they didn’t really see when they were there.”
Dale nodded, pretending to understand. “But you have to admit that this is some of the most beautiful country in the world.”
Clare shrugged. “It’s spectacular.”
Dale smiled. “Isn’t that the same as beautiful?”
“Not really,” said Clare. “Spectacle is just more accessible to the dulled sensibility. At least that’s the way I think of it. This kind of country is hard to ignore. Rather like a Wagnerian aria.”
Dale frowned at that. “So you don’t find Glacier Park beautiful?”
“I don’t find it subtle.”
“Is subtlety that important?”
“Sometimes,” said Clare, “it’s necessary for something to be subtle to be truly beautiful.”
“Name a subtly beautiful place,” challenged Dale.
“Tuscany,” said Clare without hesitation.
Dale had never been to Tuscany, so he had no response. After a moment, moving onto the trail beyond the boardwalk, he said, “Your people considered these mountains to be sacred.”
Clare smiled at the “your people” but said nothing. As they came back toward the campground, she said, “Can you think of any mountains anywhere in the world that some primitive people did not consider sacred?”
Dale was silent, thinking.
“Mountains have all the attributes of the gods, of the Jehovah God, don’t they?” continued Clare. “Distant, unapproachable, dangerous. . . the place whence cometh the cold winds and violent storms of rebuke. . . always present and visible, looming over everything, but never really friendly. Tribal peoples worship them but have the sense to stay away from them. Western types climb them and die of hypothermia and asphyxia.”
“Whoa,” said Dale, rolling his eyes a bit. “Theology. Social commentary.”
“Sorry,” said Clare.
They continued the drive across the incredible Logan Pass. Dale told Clare that the pass was usually closed even this early in the autumn, but that the snows were coming late this year. She had nodded, her eyes on a mountain goat hundreds of yards above them on the rock.
Going west to east, Dale had saved the most spectacular scenery for last— St. Mary Lake with the high peaks to the west, little Wild Goose Island in the foreground. He realized, looking at the scene, that if he had a dime for every photograph taken from precisely this spot, he’d never have to teach or write again. Clare said nothing as the view receded behind them. They reached the east portal to the park before lunchtime.
Passing out of the park and through the little reservation town of St. Mary, they headed south into the flatter, sadder belly of the reservation, driving toward Heart Butte. Dale found himself irritated at his passenger—at her arrogance, at her refusal to be amazed by the amazing scenery, at her dismissal of her own heritage. He was sorry that they had another night of camping and day of driving ahead of them before he could get back to Anne and the girls and his work. He was sorry that he’d invited this spoiled little diva’s daughter on a trip that usually made him calm and happy to be living in Montana. He was sorry that he’d ever spoken to Clare Two Hearts about her real name.
He was only hours away from becoming Clare Hart’s lover and, much worse, from falling in love with her.
Dale?”
He looked over the top of his wine glass at Michelle Staffney.
“You still here, Dale?”
“Sure,” he said. “Just gathering wool.”
“You were going to tell me what’s upstairs behind the plastic and how you know.”
He nodded and set his wine glass down on the wine-stained tablecloth. “The Jolly Corner,” he said.
Michelle’s expression showed no recognition.
“When we were kids, I remember Duane calling this house ‘The Jolly Corner,’ “continued Dale. “It’s a story by Henry James. A sort of ghost story.”
“Like The Turn of the Screw?” asked Michelle. She had lit a cigarette and now exhaled smoke from her narrow nostrils. When she’d asked earlier if she could smoke after dinner, he’d said “No problem,” but he was surprised that she still smoked. Now he was surprised that she knew about The Turn of the Screw. Quit making assumptions about people, he warned himself. He heard Anne’s voice saying that, since she had suggested that to him hundreds of times during their marriage.
“Not quite like The Turn of the Screw,” he said, “but subtle in the same way.” Subtle. “Sometimes it’s necessary for something to be subtle to be truly beautiful.”
Michelle batted ashes into the small bowl she’d brought out to use as an ashtray. She waited.
“In ‘The Jolly Corner,’ “continued Dale, “James has one of his typically Jamesian protagonists—a fifty-six-year-old guy named Spencer Brydon—return to New York and the States after decades spent in Europe. Brydon’s coming back to check on some property of his, including a tall old home in Manhattan where he grew up. . .”
“A place his family called The Jolly Corner,” guessed Michelle.
“Right. Anyway, the house is empty—no furniture—but in the story, Brydon becomes obsessed with it, returning night after night to climb the stairways and wander through the empty rooms in the dark, carrying only a small lantern or a candle. . . searching for something. . . for someone. . .”
“A ghost,” said Michelle.
“A Jamesian ghost,” agreed Dale. “Actually, Spencer Brydon is convinced that The Jolly Corner is haunted by the ghost of his alternate self.”