“It was right there,” Henry was suddenly saying to Max. “Riiiight there, and I tapped it with the cane. Looked at Jim, back in the cart, and he looked away, to let me know he hadn’t noticed. Hell, I had done good to land it there, with one leg that wouldn’t even swivel. Who’s going to criticize somebody who’s half crippled? It’d be like taking exception to finding a blind man in the ladies’ room.”
On Wednesday Len stopped by, having guessed that the bracelet in his car must have been Dixie’s, lost when she borrowed his car to go to Videoville. Henry was upstairs, taking his afternoon nap, when Len arrived. Elizabeth invited him in for an iced tea. He countered with an offer of lunch. He was house-sitting for his brother, whose house was about fifteen miles away. She didn’t know she would be driving thirty miles when she got into the car. Why take her there, instead of into Bethel, or to Westport, for lunch? He probably thought she was more fun than she was, because they had gotten involved in a drunken game the other night, playing matador in the backyard with the tablecloth and the bull tray.
She had put on Dixie’s bracelet for safekeeping: copper strands, intertwined, speckled with shiny blue stones. The stones flashed in the sunlight. Always, when she was in someone else’s yard, she missed the music of the wind chimes and wondered why more people did not hang them in trees.
She and Len strolled through Len’s brother’s backyard. She waited while Len went inside and got glasses of wine to sip as they surveyed the garden. The flowers were rather chaotic, with sunflowers growing out of the phlox. Scarlet sage bordered the beds. Len said that he had been surprised she did not have a garden. She said that gardening was Henry’s delight, and of course, so soon after the accident, he wasn’t able to do it. He looked at her carefully as she spoke. It was clear to her that she was giving him the opportunity to ask something personal, by mentioning her husband. Instead, he asked about the time she had taught in New Haven. He had been accepted there years ago, he told her, but he had gone instead to Duke. As they strolled, she learned that Max and Len had been college roommates. As he spoke, Elizabeth’s attention wandered. Was it possible that she was seeing what she thought?
A duck was floating in a wash tub of water, with a large fence around it. Phlox were growing just outside the wire. Bees and butterflies flew around the flowers. There was a duck, floating.
Len smiled at her surprise. He said that the pen had been built for a puppy, but his brother realized he could not give the puppy enough time, so he had given it away to an admirer. The duck was there in retirement.
“Follow me,” Len said, lifting the duck out of the tub and carrying it into the house. The duck kicked, but made no noise. Perhaps it was not kicking, but trying to swim through the air.
Inside, Len went to the basement door, opened it, and started down the steps. “This way,” he hollered back.
She followed him. A fluorescent light blinked on. On one corner of a desk piled high with newspapers there was a rather large cage with MR. MUSIC DUCK stenciled across the top. The cage was divided into two parts. Len put the duck in on the right and closed the door. The duck shook itself. Then Len took a quarter from his pocket and dropped it into the metal box attached to the front of the cage. A board rose, and the duck turned and hurried to a small piano with a light on top of it. With its beak, the duck pulled the string, turned on the light, and then began to thump its beak up and down the keyboard. After five or six notes, the duck hurried to a feed dish and ate its reward.
“They were closing some amusement park,” Len said. “My brother bought the duck. The guy who lives two houses over bought the dancing chicken.” He reached into the cage, removed the duck, and smiled. He continued to smile as he walked past her, duck clasped under his arm, and started to walk upstairs. At the top, he crossed the kitchen, pushed open the back door, and carried the duck out to the pen. She watched through a window. The duck went back to the water silently. Len looked at it a few seconds, then turned back toward the house.
In the kitchen, Len poured more wine and lifted plates out of the refrigerator. There was cheese and a ham butt. He took out a bunch of radishes — bright red, some of them cracked open, so that white worms appeared to be twisted around the bulbs. He washed them and cut off the tops and tips with scissors.
They ate standing at the counter. They talked about the sweaty bicycle riders who had been pouring over the hilly highways near Elizabeth’s house all summer. She looked out the window and saw the duck swim and turn, swim and turn. She poured a third glass of wine. That finished the bottle, which she left, empty, in the refrigerator. Len reminisced about his days at Duke. He asked then, rather abruptly, if he should drive her home.
In the car, he put on the radio, and she remembered the crashing keys under the duck’s bill as it played the piano. Drinking wine had made her think of the brandy in the bag, and of sitting in the matinee with Z.
She wondered what she would say to Henry about how she had spent the afternoon. That she had eaten lunch and watched a duck play the piano? She felt foolish, somehow — as if the day had been her idea, and a silly idea at that. To cover for the way she felt, and in case Len could read her mind, she invited him to Sunday brunch. He must be lonesome, she realized; presiding over someone else’s house and someone else’s duck was probably not his idea of a perfect day, either. But who was he, and why had he not said? Or: why did she think everything had to have a subtext?
She shook his hand when he dropped her off. His eyes were bright, and she realized that the ride back had been much faster than the ride to the house. His eyes were riveted on the stones in the bracelet. Henry, too, noticed the bracelet the minute she came in, and told her he was glad she had gone out and bought herself something pretty. He seemed so genuinely pleased that she did not tell him it was Dixie’s. It hurt her to disappoint him. He would have been sad if she had admitted that the bracelet was not hers, just as he had been very worried when she told him, some time ago, that the college where she taught in New Haven would no longer be using part-time faculty, so she would not be teaching there after the end of the semester. She had been able to say that, in spite of his sad face, but of course other thoughts remained unstated.
Z had young hands. That was what had stopped her. Or maybe she thought that because she wanted to think there had been one thing that stopped her. He had large, fine hands and long, narrow feet. Sometimes it seemed that she had always known him in summer.
* * *
She searched her mind for the title of the poem by Robert Browning about the poor servant girl who had only one day off a year.
Here it was Sunday, and she was entertaining again. Z (without Ellen, who was having a snit), Len, Max, Margie and Joe Ferella, who owned the hardware store, Louisa, and the baby.
What a week it had been. Phone calls back and forth between Connecticut and Atlanta, between herself and Louisa, between Louisa and Henry, between Louisa’s husband and both of them — and finally, through a flood of tears, after Louisa accused Elizabeth of every example of callousness she could think of, she had said that not only did she want to be with Elizabeth and Henry but that she wanted to be with them there. She wanted them to see the baby.
The baby, in a cotton shirt and diapers, slept on Louisa’s chest.
Louisa’s hand hovered behind the baby’s head, as if it might suddenly snap back. Elizabeth was reminded of the duck, held in the crook of Len’s arm — how lightly it rode there, going downstairs to play the piano.