She made herself unclench her hands and spread her fingers on the cool sheets, imagining herself in the limitless landscape of the Arctic, with the wind curling the snow about her feet like smoke.
She had been twenty-four years old when she had gone back to school and taken her first course from Hal. Catherine was five. Sarah was newly divorced and embarrassed at being such an old undergraduate. When asked, she would say that she was “going for her doctorate,” for she had every intention of doing so. That was the price her husband had been willing to pay for an uncontested divorce. He would support her and the child until she had collected whatever degrees she could. It was more than generous, but then the divorce had not been her doing. She had left the university after her sophomore year to marry Catherine’s father in haste, and as it had turned out, unwisely.
After the divorce, she had found a woman to look after the child during the day and had returned to school eagerly. On the first day of her Milton class she had thought Hal the most attractive man she had ever seen. He was elegantly slender and impeccably dressed in a blue blazer, snowy oxford-cloth shirt with a button-down collar, tailored tan slacks, and a blue and red and white striped tie. His cordovan loafers were so highly polished she was sure he could see his reflection there as he appeared to study them for prompts, rather than the notes stacked neatly on the lectern. While gathering his thoughts, he seemed to prefer to fix on such lowly objects: an imaginary crumb on his spotless tie, a piece of lint on his sleeve. Sometimes he formulated his answer to the rare question in the glowing tip of the omnipresent cigarette, omnipresent despite the prominent NO SMOKING sign posted at the upper right-hand corner of the blackboard. Later she would find that he glanced at the sign at the start of each class before bending his sleek head to light his cigarette. She decided he did so to avoid embarrassing students who might otherwise have pointed it out to him, by making it obvious that he knew it was there. But it also had the effect of impressing on them that ordinary rules applied only to ordinary people. They did not apply to him.
He was a Milton man, the youngest tenured professor on campus and already chairman of Graduate Studies in English. Even so, he was fifteen years her senior.
She went to him during his posted office hours with a difficulty with her term paper on Comus. They went for coffee.
He was not divorced but was separated from his wife who lived in the East. Their affair was discretion itself until Hal had obtained his divorce. Most of his colleagues were stunned when they married. Though they showed her pitiless courtesy, they treated her much the way Hal himself had treated her almost from the beginning, as though she were an attractive, precocious child whose opinions were to be tolerated, not valued.
She stopped her formal schooling after she got her B.A. Though her grades were excellent, going on for an advanced degree would have been too awkward as long as Hal was chairman of Graduate Studies. Besides, she had a young girl to rear.
“What are you going to do?” her daughter asked her over breakfast. “You’re still a young woman.”
She had not been unprepared for the question but thought its timing inappropriate. Did one bury one’s husband one day and go to work for IBM the next? She decided her daughter was old enough to know better and would not profit from a rebuke.
“I suppose I’ll go back to the zoo,” she said cautiously.
“In Denver?” Her daughter frowned.
“Boulder doesn’t have one.”
“Yes, I mean, but that’s awfully far away to drive, isn’t it? Even if it is only a couple of days a week. Can’t they get along without you for a while?”
Perversely, her daughter now seemed to feel resuming her activity of choice was a desecration of her weeds.
“It’s only two mornings,” Sarah said.
“But they don’t even pay you for it,” Catherine said.
“I don’t need to get paid for it. I enjoy it. It pleases me.”
Her daughter nodded, humoring her, no doubt.
“And I intend to travel,” Sarah continued. “There is a trip I want to take to Canada before Thanksgiving. Travel is one antidote to ‘simple depression,’ don’t you think?”
“Of course it is,” her daughter said. “But it’s an odd time of year to go to Canada, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Early November is the best time to see the polar bears.”
“Early November? You mean right now?” Her daughter was shocked. She had a little bit of a frightened look. Sarah wondered if her daughter thought her mad as a hatter.
“Next week, actually,” Sarah said. “Otherwise I’ll have to wait a whole year. It’s now that the bears migrate north to Hudson Bay. Every spring they are carried south with the last of the pack ice. When it finally melts, they make their way north along the coast to wait near Churchill until freeze-up. The fresh water at the mouth of the Churchill River causes that part of Hudson Bay to freeze first. That’s why the bears are there. They’re waiting to go onto the ice.”
She realized she was flushed with excitement and talking far too much, but she wanted her daughter to understand.
“Next week?” Her daughter seemed stunned.
“All the arrangements have been made,” Sarah explained. “The tour is paid for.”
“You made these plans before Hal died.” It really wasn’t a question, but her daughter looked at her as though she expected an answer.
“I made the reservations this morning, actually.”
“Mother,” her daughter stifled a wail, “the funeral was yesterday! What in the world are you thinking of? What are people going to say?”
Sarah looked at her daughter’s imploring expression. She was reminded then of how different a creature Catherine was from herself. Catherine had a social context. She moved among people. The approval and disapproval of others was important to her. Sarah found it curious that she could have reared such a daughter when she herself had become so indifferent to the opinions of others.
It was as if a door were closing somewhere in her mind with a vaguely metallic sound.
“Tell them I’ve gone to the south of France for my health,” Sarah said. “For my grief.”
Her daughter swallowed. Sarah thought that Catherine seemed very far away. “I’m sorry,” Catherine said. “Everyone knows how devoted you were to Hal. Of course you must go on your trip now if that’s what you want to do. I was just surprised, that’s all. I know how fascinated you are by the bears. Had you discussed your going with Hal?”
A sly, probing question. Her daughter knew very well how Hal felt. He had labeled her involvement with the polar bears at the zoo as “obsessive behavior.”
When it became obvious that her mother was not going to respond, Catherine dropped her eyes to the surface of her coffee. “I think it will be good for you to get out of Boulder, in any event. These last few months can’t have been easy for you.”
How easily her daughter had suddenly turned gracious. What a social creature she was. Sarah wondered if Catherine would tell her friends that her mother had taken her grief to a warmer clime.
The next day her daughter went back to Colorado Springs, and Sarah went back to the zoo. She followed the same route automatically: the old Boulder turnpike to Denver and I-25 then south down Speer along Cherry Creek. She scarcely noticed that the lilacs along the edge of the Denver Country Club had taken a beating in the last snow, that some of them already had lost their leaves. She turned left on Colorado Boulevard and drove to the zoo, which was just off 23rd. She always went the same way, even though she knew it was not particularly the most efficient. It would do. Like a pony in a pound, she wore her way.