We drove home in silence. We went to our respective rooms, wishing to be alone. A little later I watched Steffie in front of the TV set. She moved her lips, attempting to match the words as they were spoken.
18
It is the nature and pleasure of townspeople to distrust the city. All the guiding principles that might flow from a center of ideas and cultural energies are regarded as corrupt, one or another kind of pornography. This is how it is with towns.
But Blacksmith is nowhere near a large city. We don't feel threatened and aggrieved in quite the same way other towns do. We're not smack in the path of history and its contaminations. If our complaints have a focal point, it would have to be the TV set, where the outer torment lurks, causing fears and secret desires. Certainly little or no resentment attaches to the College-on-the-Hill as an emblem of ruinous influence. The school occupies an ever serene edge of the townscape, semidetached, more or less scenic, suspended in political calm. Not a place designed to aggravate suspicions.
In light snow I drove to the airport outside Iron City, a large town sunk in confusion, a center of abandonment and broken glass rather than a place of fully realized urban decay. Bee, my twelve-year-old, was due in on a flight from Washington, with two stops and one change of planes along the way. But it was her mother, Tweedy Browner, who showed up in the arrivals area, a small dusty third-world place in a state of halted renovation. For a moment I thought Bee was dead and Tweedy had come to tell me in person.
"Where is Bee?"
"She's flying in later today. That's why I'm here. To spend some time with her. I have to go to Boston tomorrow. Family business."
"But where is she?"
"With her father."
"I'm her father, Tweedy."
"Malcolm Hunt, stupid. My husband."
"He's your husband, he's not her father."
"Do you still love me, Tuck?" she said.
She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All the male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason. I was the first of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in their voices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweet about it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.
She wore a Shetland sweater, tweed skirt, knee socks and penny loafers. There was a sense of Protestant disrepair about her, a collapsed aura in which her body struggled to survive. The fair and angular face, the slightly bulging eyes, the signs of strain and complaint that showed about the mouth and around the eyes, the pulsing at the temple, the raised veins in the hands and neck. Cigarette ash clung to the loose weave of her sweater.
"For the third time. Where is she?"
" Indonesia, more or less. Malcolm's working in deep cover, sponsoring a Communist revival. It's part of an elegant scheme designed to topple Castro. Let's get out of here, Tuck, before children come swarming around to beg."
"Is she coming alone?"
"Why wouldn't she be?"
"From the Far East to Iron City can't be that simple."
"Bee can cope when she has to. She wants to be a travel writer as a matter of actual fact. Sits a horse well."
She took a deep drag on her cigarette and exhaled smoke in rapid expert streams from nose and mouth, a routine she used when she wanted to express impatience with her immediate surroundings. There were no bars or restaurants at the airport-just a stand with prepackaged sandwiches, presided over by a man with sect marks on his face. We got Tweedy's luggage, went out to the car and drove through Iron City, past deserted factories, on mainly deserted avenues, a city of hills, occasional cobbled streets, fine old homes here and there, holiday wreaths in the windows.
"Tuck, I'm not happy."
"Why not?"
"I thought you'd love me forever, frankly. I depend on you for that. Malcolm's away so much."
"We get a divorce, you take all my money, you marry a well-to-do, well-connected, well-tailored diplomat who secretly runs agents in and out of sensitive and inaccessible areas."
"Malcolm has always been drawn to jungly places."
We were traveling parallel to railroad tracks. The weeds were full of Styrofoam cups, tossed from train windows or wind-blown north from the depot.
"Janet has been drawn to Montana, to an ashram," I said.
"Janet Savory? Good God, whatever for?"
"Her name is Mother Devi now. She operates the ashram's business activities. Investments, real estate, tax shelters. It's what Janet has always wanted. Peace of mind in a profit-oriented context."
"Marvelous bone structure, Janet."
"She had a talent for stealth."
"You say that with such bitterness. I've never known you to be bitter, Tuck."
"Stupid but not bitter."
"What do you mean by stealth? Was she covert, like Malcolm?"
"She wouldn't tell me how much money she made. I think she used to read my mail. Right after Heinrich was born, she got me involved in a complex investment scheme with a bunch of multilingual people. She said she had information."