Yet she said nothing and so either Monty had tossed out some menacing riddle for dessert or Claire found the real fact of two films impossible to talk about with me.
Instead she recurred to what I’d suspected was her real motive here, her rebuke upstairs when I impugned Dagger’s sensitivity: You know Uncle Dag as well as anyone and he knows things and goes his way and what he knows and doesn’t know is probably much more a mystery to me than you — right?
I let the two-film idea drop. I would check it out when I made the new move I’d decided on in the shower.
I discreetly opened my door and went back to the bureau where my necktie lay.
Claire was a very pretty girl who could be boring. I had her full attention now and she talked and talked while (like something else I couldn’t quite lay my fingers on) Monty’s voice continued upstairs giving me intimations of my own irrelevance that I did not exactly mind because I had Claire, though I had real feelings only in the shape of more Dagger. I did not regret bringing up Jenny in England. Not that she was going to be someone’s helpmate-wife, and I can’t imagine I ever wanted that for her; but she is succinct.
Dagger took Claire to Freehold. That’s in Jersey, quite near the shore; and there’s a track.
I said I knew.
She was thirteen, she’d never forget. Dagger was about thirty-five, he kidded her a lot and gave her the feeling he did anything she wanted to do but that wasn’t so, but it didn’t matter, only the impression. Her parents were breaking up and then not breaking up. Her father is a gum specialist in Philadelphia. They would talk behind closed doors so that she wouldn’t hear, except what she heard was even worse because she only half-heard it. Then they would sit down with her, they were always sitting down with her. Dagger took her to Freehold one weekend and saved her another sitting-down session with her parents, who would be murmuring behind closed doors, then emerge and call her and they’d sit down on some of the plastic-covered decorator furniture and she would be told gently and boringly the problems her parents were trying to work out, but she didn’t care or thought she didn’t or knew she didn’t know how, and she hadn’t had her periods very long but they stopped and her mother took her to her own doctor who phoned a shrink, but her father put his foot down; but that didn’t matter, she’d sit at these sitting-down sessions in which her parents would so patiently define some of their differences and like some kind of patient herself she could be told the true possibilities of the situation and all these months she never heard her parents fight. But for all their sitting down with her and opening up for her the problems, she’d have liked it better if her father had said I’m fucking someone else and I don’t want to fuck your mother and I haven’t for some time; but maybe she’d forgotten what it was like to be thirteen and all this was unfair to her mother in defense of her father with whom she knew she could take risks without spoiling what she felt for him. Still she always felt that this attention she was officially receiving was directed to some thing called Our Daughter Claire or called Claire, like from whom we will have no secrets, so she felt like really a thing instead of the mature person they stupidly hoped they were treating her as in their dull imaginations, and if everything was so out in the open why did she then not know what was happening? Were they splitting or weren’t they? And she now saw that Dagger took her to Freehold that weekend to get her out of the house, though at the time it was just a big thing and this was worth something too, it was fun, he took her to the races and up close the turf the trotters ran in seemed deep and soft as a farm and Dagger explained trotters and pacers, and they went to dinner at the American Hotel with all these horse trainers and a cute antique rocking horse and stately prints of horses, and Dagger introduced her to the owner of the hotel who lived up on Main Street in a big house with a long porch, and Dagger took her to visit a mad old man, the father of one of his school buddies who had disappeared down around the Gulf of Honduras, and Dagger bought her an onyx elephant and took her to the local Walter Reade movies and fell asleep, but what she liked best was having griddle cakes with him Sunday morning in the dining room of the American Hotel even more than his incredible long story of bringing ancient maps out of France wrapped round his leg so he had to walk stiff-legged with a cane and in front of the English customs man got such an itch inside his knee the sweat started out all over his face and he told the man his leg made him nauseous so the man decided to search Dagger’s suitcase.
Claire asked if I understood all this nonsense and before I could speak she said this was after Dagger had left New Orleans where he’d worked on a charter boat and lived with a girl who was on the Times Picayune and through her had sold to the paper a photo of a fishing accident in the Gulf and the picture won a prize. But the thing was that when they got back to Philadelphia Sunday, Claire’s father had left for good, and when Claire told her mother what a great time she’d had with Uncle Dagger, her mother said he was really only a cousin by marriage, but after that Claire got her periods again.
She asked if I worried about Jenny. There was something genuine in Claire’s asking, but something false in the moment of silence after.
Monty was on the phone. I asked how she’d met him. She said that was another long story. I asked why she’d asked about Jenny before, and Claire said No reason. I said You know the man in the Hebrides. Claire sat on the bed holding her breath. I said, If you remember I said Jenny had probably gone north.
Claire asked why I’d put in the technical stuff about 8 mill, in the famous two pages. On the pad on the bed table I jotted “Gulf of Honduras” and circled it.
I stood at the door and told Claire I wanted to show her something, wait there a second.
She was still holding her breath — a bad thing to do. She stayed where she was. I was on the move up the carpeted stairs.
Monty rang off. He was still at a distance. His lower face looked and perhaps itself was tired. I said I couldn’t go to eat with them. He was concerned. I said, Is Claire upstairs? He said upstairs? He went out of the room, did not call upstairs. On the floor beside the couch I found Claire’s roomy leather bag with its shoulder strap draped over it. I found a small ring of keys beside her money purse and I took the keys. A floor above me, Monty called to Claire, called down to Claire — so he wasn’t outside this room listening for a call to Sub. Below me, Claire called back, I’m here.
I snatched the pages off the desk and belted back downstairs. Claire was at my door. I kept my voice low and she did not object. I said rather fast, Do you believe this about Dagger forgetting which scene in Corsica we’d used b & w for and which we’d used color for? Do you believe Dagger could forget a thing like that?
I was of course using the two pages Jenny had typed (which had gone from hand to hand) as a cover for having nipped upstairs. Claire was caught between purposes, to defend Dagger’s intelligence or his honesty.
Having asked my question as cover, I heard again the cluck of coin in slot (or was it a thin-shelled New York egg breaking as my mind came down hard on it). There was indeed something else about one of those pictures upstairs, but all I could handle now was Jan Graf and the magic orange I had marked her London canvas with: if Dagger had ignored Savvy Van Ghent chasing the foul ball and instead paused as I thought deliberately upon the red-haired woman and the Indian who himself was a friend of Dagger’s idiot friend Cosmo, might Dagger not also know Jan Graf, who I was all but certain had painted that woman we’d filmed at the softball game even if I had had (if not for art’s sake) to supply her hair color not so very many hours ago on a Knightsbridge gallery wall?