“Yeah,” he said. “That’s hardly a normal childhood.”
She was a little startled by how quickly he answered, cutting her off, because from the fond way she spoke about Blake she thought that Griffin understood that those memories were pleasant.
“He used to roller-skate with me,” she said — wondering herself at the non sequitur, saying it only to let Griffin know how pleasant and interesting a relationship she had had with her father.
“My father used to compensate like mad, too. He’d go on tirades against Kandinsky, actually standing over my shoulder and pointing to tiny spots of color with a pencil, when he knew I didn’t give a damn. Then the next minute he’d be pulling a baseball cap on my head and throwing me my catcher’s mitt, wanting us to go off to the game. My mother thought that was so wonderful, but I knew he didn’t care about baseball, and that he was suspicious because I liked it so much.”
They wandered into another room of paintings, and she went up to a piece of sculpture she had not noticed the other time she came to the museum: a statue by Degas, of a young dancer, foot delicately extended, head held high, tilted back.
“Snob,” he said.
“No she isn’t. She’s fourteen years old and she can dance, and she’s proud.”
He started to walk away.
“Not proud, I guess, but she feels regal. She can do something and she’s poised for a moment before she moves.”
“Are you kidding?” Griffin said.
“No. I’m serious.”
“You really like that?”
“I like it a lot.”
“Well, don’t sound challenging. Is it an important issue?”
“You don’t like it?” she said.
“No. I don’t like it much.”
They moved away, went to one of the seats in the room and sat down, looking at the large dark painting in front of them.
“I don’t know why I spend so much time at museums,” he said. “I thought that the minute I got away from home I’d never look at a painting if it wasn’t in a book, but I end up here all the time.”
She said nothing, wanting to look at the ballerina again, but not wanting to shut him out, either.
“That was quite a scene back in Rye, New York: my father always pretending to be happy when the Yankees had home games, my mother always pretending excitement about the different shows at the galleries in Manhattan, the dog probably pretending she enjoyed playing tug of war with the stick.”
She said nothing. She was wondering if she could have been wrong — if he might have not liked roller-skating.
“It’s freaky,” he said. “That I’d end up taking a dive into the table of Horace Cragen’s daughter.”
She hated being spoken of as Horace Cragen’s child. Her image of her father, which was always in the back of her mind when she was not actually thinking of him, dimmed a little. She moved her head to get the picture back: her father, in his baggy slacks and cardigan, smiling down at her, poised on the edge of her bed with his large hands turning the pages of a book as delicately as if the paper were feathers.
Her eyes came to rest on the sculpture.
“You like it,” he said, looking at her looking at it, “because you were an aspiring ballerina when you were little. Right?”
“No,” she said. “I never took dancing lessons.”
“What did you do? You didn’t have a treehouse and play touch football, did you?”
She laughed at the notion. No — her father had always seen to it that she wore a ribbon in her hair and that she was a feminine little girl; if she had taken dancing lessons, she would have been like the statue. But she told him that she had taken lessons in nothing. She had belonged to the Brownies, until she got sick of it, but you could not really call that taking lessons.
“Then tell me what you did,” he said.
“Oh — I didn’t do so much. I was very shy when I was a child. I stayed home a lot of the time.” She smiled at him. He continued to look at her, not challenging, but interested: he wanted more. “I went sleigh-riding in the winter and I roller-skated a lot — sometimes at roller rinks. My father and I used to play tennis.”
“But you weren’t a little ballerina, huh?”
“No,” she said.
“They made me go to dancing class. Ballroom dancing. Can you imagine that? They wanted me to be a proper gentleman. My father always used to wear a jacket to dinner. He even painted in an old paint-smeared corduroy jacket. We went to the ball game and I’d wear my baseball cap and he’d sit beside me in his sport coat, with one of those porkpie hats on. It used to embarrass the hell out of me. He must have been embarrassed, too, to have been so handsome and to have such an ordinary-looking son. What he wore looked stylish, and whatever I wore looked wrong. At the time, I thought his hat was embarrassing, but he looked good in it — he was the sort of man who can look more serious because he’s wearing something silly and it doesn’t look funny on him. Do you know what I mean? He was six feet tall, and here I am, not even as tall as you.”
She felt uneasy again; she hated to have her height talked about. She had been a tall child, and that was part of her reason for being so shy. What she had always wanted was to fade in, to be like everybody else.
When they left the museum he talked no more about his father, or her father. She was glad, because some of the things he had said had disturbed her. And then when he kissed her, at the bottom of the museum steps, she smiled widely. She had started to be depressed, and then he had made her forget it.
Neither of them was sure it was not a mistake, but still they decided before Christmas to live together. Louise, who suspected it would happen, already knew a person who would share the apartment. Diana had made it clear that she would not move out until Louise could find someone to take her place, but that was accomplished quickly, much to Diana’s joy and Louise’s dismay. Louise had even spent a Saturday loading books into cartons and taking them by car to Griffin’s apartment.
When Diana and Griffin got back from New York, where they had gone to the wedding of Griffin’s good friend Charlie to a girl named Inez, they were going to stop at Louise’s and pick up Diana’s clothing. Everything else had been moved out. Driving back, Louise felt sure that Griffin would send Diana alone. It must be, she thought, that he knew she disapproved of his leaving school and drinking, that she did not like it when he called her when he got to town, and then saw her once and never called again. She did not think he was a nice person anymore, and she hoped that he would not be unkind to Diana.
For Christmas, Diana and Griffin went to Rye to stay with his parents, and on Christmas Day drove into the city to have dinner with her parents. Both places were loud and festive, with relatives from both sides sizing up the new person; Chopin waltzes were played at Griffin’s house as the family sipped afternoon wine, and at Diana’s parents’ apartment in the Village the radio was tuned to the Messiah, and Caroline — her favorite aunt — gave them a bottle of champagne and tall etched pink glasses and made them promise that they would visit her at her farm in Pennsylvania.
Above the mantle hung a poem of Horace Cragen’s, hand-lettered on parchment and framed in an old walnut frame — a gift to Horace from Diana’s mother. The poem was lovely, but as she admired it she also had the uneasy feeling that her mother should have given her father something else. Was it appropriate to — in a sense — give someone back what he had already given?
She wondered, at dinner, what her family thought of Griffin. She knew that her mother did not approve of her living with him, but she also knew that her mother would not allude to it. And her father? She looked at him across the table, eating roast goose, seeming happy but preoccupied, as he so often did. He had asked if the Griffin Berridge she was dating (he called it “dating”) was Joe Berridge’s son. He had called him Joe, so naturally she had asked if he knew him. “No,” he had said. “Know of him.” In conversation he did not mind speaking bluntly; his poems, though, were full of surprises and confusions. No matter how many poems were framed and hung in the house, she understood that where her father really lived was not there, but somewhere in the cloudy, starry world of poetry. “How is the roast goose?” her mother asked. “It’s fine with me,” her father replied. She and Griffin and Caroline nodded assent. “Very good,” Griffin said. Her mother nodded approval, and again they cut their meat and ate. The meal was more restrained than usual — because Griffin was there?