In fact, as he grew older, he became more and more concerned with the weather. He collected almanacs scientific and not so, and he studied the daily weather surmise in his paper though it was the divination of priests he didn’t entirely trust—he only hoped, without having reason to, that they were right when they read the omens Fair and wrong when they read them Foul. He watched the summer sky especially, could feel as a burden on his own back any far-off cloud that might obscure the sun, or that might bring others after it. When fluffy harmless cumulus trod the sky like sheep, he was at ease but watchful. They could combine suddenly into thunderheads, they could drive him indoors to listen to the dull fall of rain on his roofs.
(As they seemed just now to be doing, over in the west, and he powerless to stop them. They drew his eye, and each time he looked they were piled that much higher. The air was dense and palpable. There was then little hope that rain and storm would not begin soon. He was not reconciled.)
In the winter, he wept often; in the spring he was desperately impatient, rageful when he found heaps of winter still piled in the corners of April. When Violet spoke of spring she meant a time of flowers and baby animals—a notion. A single clear day in April was like what she had in mind, he supposed. Or May, rather, because it had become clear to him that her idea of the qualities of months differed from his: hers were English months, Februaries when the snow melted and Aprils when flowers burst, not the months of this harsher exile place. May, there, was like June here. And no experience of these American months could change her mind: or even reach it, he sometimes thought.
Perhaps that conspiracy of cloud on the horizon was stationary, a kind of decoration merely, like the high-piled clouds behind country scenes in his children’s picture books. But the air around him belied that: laden and sparkling with change.
Violet thought (or did she?—he spent hours grappling with her cryptic remarks, with Dr. Bramble’s elaborate explications for a guide, and yet he wasn’t sure) that it was always spring There., But spring is a change only. All seasons, collated into a string of fast-following days like changes of mood. Was that what she meant? Or did she mean the notional spring of young grass and newunfurled leaves, changeless single equinoctial day? There is no spring. Perhaps it was a joke. There would be precedent for that. He felt sometimes that all she said to his urgent inquiries was a joke. Spring is all seasons and no season. It’s always spring There. There is no There. A humid wave of despair washed over him: a thunder mood, he knew, and yet…
It wasn’t that he loved her less as they grew older (or rather as he grew older and she grew up); only that he lost that first wild certainty that she would lead him somewhere, a certainty that he had because for sure she had been there herself. He couldn’t, as it happened, follow. After a bitter year he knew that. Better years followed. He would be Purchas to her pilgrims: he would tell her journeys to the world, her traveler’s tall tales of marvels he would never see. She had intimated to him (he thought) that without the house he had built the whole Tale could not be told, that it was the beginning and perhaps the end, in some way, like the house that Jack built, cause of a chain. He didn’t understand, but he was satisfied.
And there was no time when (even after years, after three children, after who knows how much water under what crumbling bridges) his heart would not swell when she came up to him and put her small hands on him suddenly and whispered in his ear Go to bed, old Goat—Goat she called him for his shameless ceaselessness—and he would mount the stairs and await her.
And look what he possessed now, all framed against the vertiginous height of cloud forming.
Here were his daughters Timothea Wilhelmina and Nora Angelica come home from a swim. And his son (her son, his) Auberon stalking across the lawn with his camera as though seeking something to strike with it. And his baby August in a sailor suit, who had never smelled the sea. He had named him for that month when the year stands still and blue day follows blue day, when for a while he stopped looking at the sky. He looked at the sky now. The white clouds were being edged with somber gray, sagging like old men’s sad eyes. Yet still before him his shadow lay amid the shadows of leaves. He shook his newspaper and changed the way his legs were crossed. Enjoy, enjoy.
Among many other and odder beliefs, his father-in-law was sure that a man can’t think or feel clearly if he can see his own shadow. (He thought also that looking at oneself in the mirror immediately before retiring caused bad, or at least troubling, dreams.) He always sat in the shade or faced into the sun, as he now sat in the wrought-iron love seat by “The Syrinx” with a stick between his knees to rest his hairy hands on, and a gold chain glowing on his stomach as the sun played with it. August sat at his feet listening or perhaps only politely seeming to listen to the old man, whose voice reached Drinkwater as a murmur, one murmur among many, the cicadas, the lawn mower Ottolo pushed in widening circles, the piano in the music room where Nora was practicing now, her chords running together like tears down a cheek.
Gone, She Said
She liked mostly the feel of the keys beneath her fingers, liked the thought of them being solid ivory and ebony. “What are they made of?” “Solid ivory.” She stroked them in harmonic sets of six and eight at a time, no longer really practicing, only testing the plangency as her fingertips tested the smoothness. Her mother wouldn’t notice it was no longer Delius she was playing or trying to play, her mother had no ear, she said so herself, though Nora could see the shapely whorl of her mother’s ear where she sat cheek in hand at the drum table, playing her cards or looking at them anyway. For a moment her long earrings were still, till she looked up to take another card from the pile and everything moved, earrings shook, necklaces swung. Nora slid from her polished stool and came to stare at her mother’s work.
“You should go outside,” Violet said to her without looking up. “You and Timmie Willie should go down to the lake. It’s so hot.”
Nora didn’t say that she had just returned from there, because she had told her mother that already, and if she hadn’t understood then, there seemed no reason to insist on it. She only looked down at what her mother had laid out.
“Can you make a house of cards?” she asked.
“Yes,” Violet said, and went on looking. This way Violet had of seizing first not the most obvious sense of what people said to her but some other, interior echo or reverse side of it was a thing that baffled and frustrated her husband, who sought in her sybilline responses to ordinary questions some truth he was sure Violet knew but couldn’t quite enunciate. With his father-in-law’s help, he had filled volumes with his searchings. Her children, though, hardly noticed it. Nora shifted from foot to foot for a moment waiting for the promised structure, and when it didn’t appear forgot it. The clock on the mantelpiece chimed.
“Oh.” Violet looked up. “They must have had their tea already.” She rubbed her cheeks as though suddenly waking. “Why didn’t you say something? Let’s go see what’s left.”
She took Nora’s hand and they went to the French doors that led out to the garden. Violet picked up a wide hat that lay on the table there, hut stopped when she had it on, and stood looking out into the haze. “What is it in the air?” she said.
“Electricity,” Nora said, already crossing the patio. “That’s what Auberon says.” She squinted her eyes. “I can see it, all red and blue squiggles, when I do this. It means a storm.”
Violet nodded, and started across the lawn slowly, as though making progress through an unfamiliar element, to where her husband waved to her from the stone table. Auberon had just done taking a picture of Grandy and the baby, and now he brought his instrument toward the table, making a motion to gather his mother into his field of focus. He went about his picture-taking solemnly, as though it were duty not pleasure. She felt a sudden pity for him. This air!