After her stint in the office, and lunch, she went to the polar bear pit, as was her custom. She felt she had been away for a month rather than less than a week.
Ula brought her head up and stared at Sarah across the reach of water which separated the pit from the fence. Sarah doubted the bear could recognize her from sight. Besides, she supposed she appeared to Ula much as Ula appeared to her, indistinguishable from any other polar bear of like size, nor was there any reason to believe that Ula could distinguish Sarah’s particular smell from the others milling along the edge of the fence, though she supposed the bear’s sensitive nose might have that capability. On the ice pack bears could scent prey thirty miles away. But here were many prey, and Sarah assumed that her own smell was inextricably mingled with the others. But she stood in her regular place and was shyly pleased when the bear raised its great head and probed the air in her direction. There was a moment when the bright black eyes seemed to single her out, to rest on her curiously, but she had too much humility to mistake that for recognition.
She remembered that there had been a time, early in her relationship with Hal, when she refused to believe that their attraction was mutual. It was too improbable that he would actually want her when he was everything she had always wanted. She loved the smell of him, of tobacco and wool and gin. Loved his voice, husky and deep and brimming with passion for Milton’s grandeur. The self-absorbed way he paced behind the lectern, as if so involved in the world he was describing that he would have continued talking and walking had they all stolen away, one by one. She loved his contemptuous indifference to their opinion. His arrogance. That these might have been difficult qualities to live with did not occur to her for some time.
And what had he seen in her, this mother of a five-year-old child? Sarah’s parents were dead by the time she met Hal, and her lineage had not been a particularly distinguished one. But Sarah had good, clear skin, thick dark-blond hair which was forever working itself free of pins and getting into her eyes, a tidy body, and large gray eyes that drooped ever so slightly at the outer corners like teardrops.
“Like the Queen of Hearts or a lady of the Italian Renaissance,” Hal told her. For the art of the Italian Renaissance was a passion of his. Every year he went to Florence. He wanted very much to show her Florence.
Later she would decide that it had less to do with how she looked or who she was than that he was in love with her being in love with him. He was flattered by the intensity of her passion and intoxicated by her humility. He was so centered on self that only someone willing to share that self-interest could penetrate his indifference. And he was charmed that she seemed as interested in his thoughts on the machinery of local politics or the most effective way to combat the aphids on his roses, as his pronouncements on the Areopagitica.
They had other things in common, of course. They played tennis together. Skied. Took long walks about the town with Catherine. Hal was appropriately, if not extravagantly, attentive to her young daughter. Certainly more attentive than Catherine’s natural father, who had by then started another family of his own.
The unhappiness in the early part of her marriage to Hal was all her own, as she felt more and more keenly the disparity in their respective stations. It required more than filling in the appalling gaps in her literary education. She knew she was foolishly sensitive to the condescension shown her by the other wives of the department, few of whom had any more education than she, but they had the advantage of their years, their wisdom, and the psychic battle scars suffered in their husbands’ tortured struggles to attain the recognition which Hal had already achieved and she so effortlessly shared. She could not experience the camaraderie of their shared disappointments in failed appointments and rejected publications. They were of another generation, and though she recognized that their slights and lack of cordiality arose from envy, that recognition was of little consolation. She was “Hal’s wife.” And the years which separated her from them were a gulf which she could not seem to bridge.
She learned that she could not share this hunger for acceptance with her husband. It puzzled him, then irritated him. So she devoted herself to her family. To housework and gardening and dinner parties. She filled up her days the way a nautilus built its shell, layer by layer and chamber by chamber, never mistaking an instinct to survive for delight in the complexity of design.
Time was on her side, but as she had accumulated sufficient years to simulate wisdom, the other wives had gone — to other schools, to retirement, to the grave. And in their place were women not so much younger than she but whom she found very different. They were bright and ambitious for themselves as well as their husbands. If they were intimidated by Hal’s wife, they showed it only in that they approached her with considerable reserve. So ultimately she was deserving of their respect only and not their friendship. It was at about this time that her daughter married.
Sarah and Hal began to travel more, to Mexico and Hawaii and of course to Italy, and the disappointments she had experienced early in their marriage she felt were behind her. If there was less passion, she and Hal were easier with each other now, expecting little and demanding less. The passage of time had weakened his compulsive assertion of his superiority as it had armed her with a dispassionate indifference. It should have been the best of times, but little by little Hal’s health failed.
In late January, shortly after she had seen the Nobile film, a long article on Ula’s rejection of the cubs appeared in the newspaper. She had read it avidly, and went into Denver the following week to see the cubs, taking the route that would later become as much hers as the steps to her own house or the back walk among Hal’s roses.
Only two months old, the cubs looked like the teddy bears of her childhood as they sprawled on the floor of the nursery with their legs splayed on either side, bodies flat on the carpet. They couldn’t walk yet and propelled themselves across the floor on their stomachs with a rowing motion. Their nose and eyes were black buttons. They nursed greedily in the quilted laps of the women who tended them and shrieked and hissed in disappointment when they had sucked the bottles dry. A volunteer stood with the crowd which had assembled outside the glass of the nursery and demanded they lower their voices because “the noise was causing the cubs stress.” And of course to keep moving so that everyone could see.
Sarah disliked the woman controlling the crowd, disliked her assertive, confident manner. She wondered how such a disagreeable personality had come by her position. In moments Sarah had been rushed past the great glass window of the nursery and found herself again in the bright sunshine. Having already endured Hal’s derision at her interest in the cubs, and disappointed that she had seen so little for her six dollars, she decided she would visit the mother of the cubs, although she was on the other side of the zoo. Still, it was a nice day, warm for January, and Hal would not expect her for hours. She walked past enclosures of kangaroo, ostrich, eland, zebra, and warthog, past the main entrance with its business office to an exhibit entitled “Northern Shores,” where she saw Ula for the first time.
The polar bear pit curved beneath an overhanging high concrete bank cleverly sculpted and studded with stones and simulated streaks of clay to look like the bank of a river. Despite the cleverness, even Cherry Creek, the concrete-walled trench which Sarah followed through the heart of Denver, looked less artificial.
Along the foot of the bank was a narrow beach bordered by a stream which traversed the length of the pit, swiftly running down the slope from right to left. Between it and the low fence was the pool, the surface of which was some four feet below the low box hedge and the three horizontal pipes set in cement posts which made up the barrier between prey and predator. The bear was sitting on the base of its spine alone at one end of the pit, sprawled like an old woman with its stubby hind legs spread indecently apart in front of it. The soles of its feet were as black as its nose and eyes.