Now Marion is dead and I can’t believe I spent all those years in New York in Trusts and Estates and taking dogs down elevators and out to the park to take a crap.
In two seconds he saw that his little Yankee life had not worked after all, the nearly twenty years of making a life with a decent upstate woman and with decent Northern folk and working in an honorable Wall Street firm and making a success of it too. The whole twenty years could just as easily have been a long night’s dream, and here he was in old Carolina, thinking of Ethel Rosenblum and having fits and falling down on the golf course — what in God’s name was I doing there, and am I doing here?
He gazed at the figure which seemed to come and go in the trembling dappled light of the poplar.
You were trying to tell me something, weren’t you?
Yes.
That day in the swamp you were trying to tell me that this was what it was going to come to, not only for you but in the end for me, weren’t you?
Yes.
You did it because you hoped that by having me with you when you did it you would show me what I was up against and that if I knew about it that early, I might be able to win over it instead of it winning over me, didn’t you?
Yes.
Then it’s not your fault. It’s not your fault that after all this time here I am back where we started and you ended, that there is after all no escaping it for us. At least I know that, thanks to you, you tried, and now for the first time since that day you cursed me by the fence and grabbed my gun, I don’t hate you. We’re together after all.
Silence.
Very well. At least I know why I feel better holding a shotgun than a three-iron.
He walked through the chestnut fall to the poplar. The figure changed in shape, disappeared, returned as a solid of darkness bounded by gold leaves, then vanished altogether. Glass winked in the sunlight. The leaf shook violently as he went under it.
Once he cleared the screen of leaves the sun behind him suddenly went down and came up in front, blazing into his eyes. Holding one hand against the light, he sidestepped into the shade of the pines until he could see. The sun behind him was reflected from a bank of windows. It was a house of glass. He went on circling until he reached the darkness of a great pine and the house came into such an angle with his eye that no part of it reflected the sun.
It was a greenhouse, such as he had never seen before, freestanding but sheltered at one end by the ridge, with a wall of lichened concrete and a tall gambrel roof. It looked as big as an ark. The sun, sunk behind the pines, had come straight off the lower, more vertical of the glass slopes. A steep copper hood, verdigrised green-brown, shaded the front door like a cathedral porch. Iron spikes and fleurs-de-lis sprouted from the roof peak. Virginia creeper and saplings thrust through broken windows. The glazing on the lower tier was intact. The dusty glass was gilded by the sun and he could not see inside. The greenhouse, he judged, was a good fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide. As he watched it, his head moved slightly as if he were appraising the width of a green or the length of an iron shot. A single huge pine near the porch towered over the whole forest.
“Are these yours?”
One heart-jump not from surprise but from anger at being taken by surprise, for in his circling he had, without thinking about it, backed into the fork of cloven pine, a vantage point from which he could see without being seen. He turned, frowning.
The youth held out two golf balls. He took them, still frowning and inattentive as if it were no more than he expected, a caddy retrieving lost balls, and thanked the youth — no, not a youth he noticed now, another miscalculation: he had at first thought long-haired youth with unchanged voice but no, it must be short-haired girl with woman’s voice — and still frowning, examined the balls.
“Yes. Spalding Pro Flite and Hogan four. Yes, that’s them all right. Thanks.” He held out a dollar. Nice going, youth-girl caddy. But the slender hands which had given him the golf balls didn’t move.
Frowning still — he was still off-balance — he shrugged and turned to leave.
“This one woke me up.”
“What?”
“Hogan woke me up.”
“Hogan woke you up?”
“It broke my window.” She nodded toward the greenhouse.
“Which one?”
“Not those. At the end of my house, where I was sleeping. The surprise of it was instigating to me.”
“Okay okay. Will five dollars do it?” He fumbled in his pocket.
No answer. Eyes steady, hands still.
“Did you say your house?”
“Yes. It is my house. I live there.”
There was a window broken in the lower tier. His slice could hardly have carried so far. On the other hand, he had hit the first drive very hard, too hard (Was that it, his anger, that was causing the slice? Never hit a golf ball or a child in anger, said Lewis Peckham), and it went high, curving very foul, and did not hit wood. A real banana ball, said Lewis the first time.
“Okay. How much do I owe you?”
“It was peculiar. I was lying in my house in the sun reading this book.” She had taken a book from the deep pocket of the jacket and handed it to him, as if to prove — prove what? — and as he examined it, a rained-on dried-out 1922 Captain Blood, he was thinking not about Captain Blood but about the oddness of the girl. There was something odd about her speech and, now that he looked at her, about her. For one thing, she spoke slowly and carefully as if she were reading the words on his face. The sentence “I was lying in my house” was strange. “The surprise of it was instigating.” Though she was dressed, like most of the kids here, in oversize men’s clothes, man’s shirt, man’s jacket, there was something wrong — yes, her jeans were oversize too, not tight, and dark blue like a farm boy’s. Yet her hair was cut short and brushed carefully, as old-fashioned as the book she was reading. It made him think of the expression “boyish bob.”
“I was lying in my house in the sun reading that book. Then plink, tinkle, the glass breaks and this little ball rolls up and touches me. I felt concealed and revealed.” Her voice was flat and measured. She sounded like a wolf child who had learned to speak from old Victrola records. Her lips trembled slightly, not quite smiling, her eyes not quite meeting his yet attentive, sweeping his face like a blind person’s.
Oh well. She was one of the thousands who blow in and out every summer like the blackbirds, nest where they can, in flocks or alone. Sleep in the woods. At least she had found a greenhouse.
As he turned away, gripping the three-iron with a two-handed golfer’s grip and with a frowning self-consciousness which almost surprised him, she said: “Are you—?”