“We’ll just wait for you,” I told him. “Dad certainly won’t mind lingering over a second drink before supper.” I laughed. “I doubt even a third would cause him much alarm.”
“Yes, I know,” Billy said. “But I’d planned to bring Dora.”
By then I knew that Billy had already brought Dora around to visit with The Great Example. My mother had received her with great warmth, he said, given every indication that she found Dora as remarkable as Billy himself did. She had even advised him to be bold in his pursuit of her. In my mind, I could see her doing exactly that, urging Billy forward in a wild, romantic quest, certain that he could maneuver whatever tangled road lay ahead.
I was less certain as to what my father might think of Dora. Over the last few years he’d taken to “wintering” in Virginia during February and March. He had only recently returned to Port Alma, and so had not yet been introduced to Dora. Once that meeting had taken place, I suspected that my father’s opinion of her, as well as his advice to Billy, would be considerably more guarded than my mother’s. He would temper enthusiasm with warning, point out that life was a long road filled with pits and snares, love a thing that had to flex and bend in order to negotiate it. I could hear his voice rise sagely in the parlor: Reason is still our only guide, Billy, regardless of what your mother contends.
“Dora will be at her house,” Billy told me. “Would you mind driving her to Dad’s?”
I had no desire to do it, of course. During the long snowbound months following Jack Stout’s return from New York, I’d purposely kept away from Dora. I could not imagine that a light would not soon go on in my brother’s head, reveal at least one or two of what I suspected must be scores of both small and large deceptions. A confrontation would ensue, then a vastly overdue parting of the ways.
But spring had now arrived and nothing of the kind had happened. Dora’s spell was still upon Billy.
I arrived at her house at just after six o’clock that evening. It was on a narrow lane on the outskirts of town, distant and somewhat secluded, bordered by woods all around, with only a few equally isolated cottages along the same untended road, most of them scattered along a rocky inlet so inhospitable it could scarcely be called a beach at all.
I’d never taken any note of Dora’s cottage, but when I arrived to pick her up, I was struck by how small it was, little more than a converted shed.
At my knock, the door opened slightly and a pair of green eyes peered through the slit.
“Cal,” she said, the door opening more fully now.
“Billy’s been delayed,” I told her. “He sent me to pick you up.”
“Come in,” she said.
For various reasons, I’d been in the houses of the richest people in and around Port Alma, its few doctors, lawyers, and owners of banks, fishing fleets, and canneries. For equally various, usually profoundly different reasons, I’d also seen the life of our state’s eternal poor, the wilderness hovels that crouched on rocky hillsides, homes that looked oddly pilfered, made of tin and discarded wood scavenged from nearby sawmills and boatyards. They were little more than huts, hardly distinguishable from the stacks of firewood piled beside them. But for all the poverty I’d seen, I’d never been in a dwelling place as unadorned as Dora’s. Even the poorest of the poor did something to relieve their bleakness, hung a family photograph on the wall or placed a colored bottle in the window to catch the light. But Dora had done nothing of this sort. There were no pictures or paintings on her walls or mantel. Not so much as a vase to hold a sprig of winter holly. For furniture, she had only two plain ladder-back chairs and a wooden table. It was a place so devoid of even the simplest comforts, I felt a grim awe that any life could will such bleakness upon itself.
Dora, however, appeared entirely indifferent to her surroundings. In fact, she seemed well accommodated to them, so that I got the impression she’d lived in such bareness before, like the wild child whose name she’d taken, accustomed to a life ruthlessly reduced to fundamentals.
“Would you like some tea, Cal? There’s some left.”
“All right,” I said.
She moved to the kitchen at the rear of the house, leaving me alone in the front room. From where I stood, I could see that the kitchen held a black cast-iron stove, a small sink, and a hand pump. A few utensils lay in a neat row on a white towel beside the pump, one of them the long knife my brother would later draw from his wounded chest.
“Sugar?” Dora called from the kitchen.
“No.”
The bedroom door was slightly open, and inside it, I saw a bed but no mattress, only a frame and bare wooden slats. A large chair rested beside it, spread with pillows and draped with a blanket.
I was still peering into the bedroom when Dora returned, two teacups in her hands. She noticed me staring into the room, no doubt realized how bizarre it appeared, grim as a dungeon, the sort of place people were taken to have confessions beaten out of them.
“I sleep in the chair,” she said. She handed me the tea, then walked to the bedroom door and closed it. “I have trouble lying down.”
“How long have you had this trouble?”
“Since I was a little girl,” she answered.
She added nothing else, but I immediately imagined a terrible injury, the “thing that had happened to her,” about which Billy had speculated so darkly, and that he seemed to consider part of her romantic allure.
“Was this in New York City?” I asked.
She looked at me as if I’d breached a wall she’d not expected to be so vulnerable.
“Billy once mentioned that you lived in New York,” I explained.
“Not when I was a child. Only recently.”
“I lived in New York too. While I was in law school.” Cautiously, I probed the darkness. “Where did you grow up?”
“California.”
“I’ve never been there.”
She sipped her tea. “I haven’t met your father.”
It was a clear attempt to change the subject. I knew I’d gotten as far as I could, that the door into her past, like the one to her bedroom, was now firmly shut.
“Well, since my mother left him he’s taken on a few aristocratic pretensions,” I told her. “You’ve visited my mother a few times, I understand. With Billy, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“He goes almost every day now,” I said. “You don’t?”
“No,” I said. “I’d visit her more often, but I’m not sure I’m always a welcome sight.”
“What gives you that idea?”
I smiled, trying to make light of it. “Well, sometimes, when I come into her room, she looks like a cold blast hit her. Dad’s the one who’s always happy to see me. He reads a lot, and we talk about what he’s been reading. He was more or less my tutor when I was a boy. My mother tutored Billy.” I felt a sudden, curious ache that my family had been divided so starkly, like a body flayed open, the wound unhealed. Again I retreated to a less disturbing subject. “So tell me, are you glad you came to Port Alma?”
“I like it here. It’s remote.”
“Do you plan to stay?”
“No,” she said resolutely. “I’m only passing through.” Only passing through.
Something in the certainty of her tone told me that this was true, that for reasons I would probably never know, Dora was one of life’s pariahs. I felt something stir in me, something small, a tiny tremor of feeling for all who were like Dora, inexplicably driven from place to place, rootless, solitary, invisible whips forever at their backs.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said. “That you’re just passing through.”
Our eyes locked briefly, then she glanced toward the window. “A fog is coming in,” she murmured.
“Yes, it is,” I said. I took a final sip from the cup and set it down. “We’d better go while we can still see the road.”
We drove back through the town, then out along the coastal road, a wall of evergreen rising on one side, the sea
crashing on the other. The road turned inland less than a mile beyond town, wound through a series of rocky hills, and ended in my father’s driveway.
He was already standing at the door as we came up the steps, dressed to the nines in a dark suit and bow tie, a sure sign of how special he considered the evening to be.
“Ah, you must be Dora,” he said brightly. “Come in. Come in.”
She stepped into the foyer, her attention lighting briefly on a portrait of one of my forebears, his severe likeness trapped in a heavy wooden frame, a man with silver hair and stern features, utterly proper in his black coat and starched white collar.
“Obadiah Grier,” my father told her, pleased by her interest. “William’s grandfather. Looks like he’s just condemned a witch, doesn’t he?” He laughed. “Actually, he was quite a nice old man. Used to bounce William on his knee. Cal too.” He placed his hand on my shoulder. “Of course, Cal never enjoyed that sort of thing, did you, Cal?”
He waited for me to respond, engage him in our usual badinage. When I didn’t, he turned to Dora. “May I take your coat, Miss March?”
She gave it to him, but he only passed it over to me. “Hang it in the front closet, Cal,” he said as he escorted Dora into the sitting room.
Cradled in my hands, Dora’s coat felt even lighter than it appeared, designed for a climate where the seasons changed far less radically than in the north. A label had been crudely stenciled inside the coat: Lobo City Thrift.
Lobo, I thought, recalling the origins of her hand-picked name. Spanish for wolf.
My brother arrived an hour later, plunging hurriedly through the front door, gay and energetic as ever. He walked directly to the fire and warmed his hands, greeting each of us in turn before his eyes settled fondly on Dora. “I see Cal got you here safely.”
“Yes,” Dora said with a smile that rose with an unexpected brightness from the dark net of her face.
Billy’s eyes swept over to me, and I could feel the great affection he had for me. I knew it was the love of the righteous for the prodigal, but I also knew that at that moment his greatest wish was that I someday find what he now seemed unshakably certain he had found.
But there was no mention of such things that evening. Instead, we chatted about his day, the legislative debate currently raging, what might ultimately come of it. For a while we even discussed the weather, how soon summer would be upon us, how quickly it would pass.
As the clock chimed eight, we took our seats at the long cherry wood dining table my father had set with a pretentious formality, everything in its proper place, little silver salad forks and Bordeaux glasses for the wine.
My father took his customary place at the head of the table, the chair at the other end of it left vacant, as if in reverence for my mother. Billy and Dora were placed side by side, Dora directly across from me, my brother facing the empty chair to my left, the one that would have been taken by my wife or lover.
Dora sat erect, her hands in her lap, like a child at table in a boarding school. I felt her eyes drift toward me, then slip away.
“Well, has my father given you the family history yet?” Billy asked her, smiling happily.
She shook her head.
“Well, the Griers are a lively group,” he said.
“But the Chases are a criminal clan,” I added.
Dora glanced toward me. “Crime interests you?”
“Not really, no,” I said.
“A certain kind of crime would,” Billy said.
“Really, and what kind of crime would that be?” I asked him.
“One that was philosophical in some way. Abstract.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“What kind of case would interest you, then, Cal?” my father asked.
Before I could reply, my brother offered an answer of his own. “A murder case. Some horrible murder case.”
“No, not a murder case,” I told them. “Most murder cases are quite ordinary. The motivations are usually predictable. Love or money, for the most part.” I shrugged. “Nothing that would make for a great case.”
“So what would make a case great?” Billy asked. “For you, I mean.”
“I’ve never really thought about it. But I suppose it would have to involve something important, some idea or—” I stopped, unable to put my finger on it. “Some principle that would make me—” Again I stopped, still searching for the right answer.
Then, out of nowhere, Dora found it.
“Sacrifice something,” she said.
I had never thought of it that way, never sensed, other than inchoately, that I wished to be called to any greater purpose than the lowly office I maintained. And yet it was true. She had seen it, the fact that for all my professional dispassion, I longed for something fierce and noble, something for which I would put everything at risk.
“You’re right,” I said to her.
Billy gazed at me, amazed. “Really? I never knew you felt that way.” He turned to Dora. “I think you know Cal better than I do.”
Dora’s eyes remained on mine. “Yes, I think I do,” she said.
She added nothing else, and the conversation quickly moved on to other things. And yet, for the rest of the evening, I felt curiously vulnerable and exposed, like a small animal snatched from the undergrowth, the predator’s black talons already sinking in.
After dinner, we gathered around the fire. Dora and Billy sat together on the brocade sofa my father had bought some years before. It had a mahogany frame and was covered in a wine-red velvet, a taste for the luxurious he felt entirely free to indulge, buying silver and crystal, expensive furniture and a large Oriental carpet, all of it designed to give him a sense that he was, at last, the lord of a great estate. For Dora’s sake, he commented expansively upon almost every article in the room, from the tinkling chandelier to the old grandfather clock that ticked loudly in the corner.
I could hardly imagine a more boring recitation, but through it all, Dora showed a peculiarly intense interest in even the most banal aspects of my father’s conversation, how things were made, for example, where they came from. Even his travels, limited as they were, engaged her, his recent sojourn in Virginia as wondrous as one of Sinbad’s voyages.
As for Dora herself, she spoke almost exclusively about books, presenting fictional characters, even the most minor ones, as if they were real, the shopkeepers and seamstresses in Balzac, the milling throng in Dickens. But of the caravan of actual individuals anyone of her age should have encountered in real life by then, she had almost nothing to say.
The evening came to a close at just before eleven. At the door my father took Dora’s hand. “It was a pleasure, my dear,” he said as he kissed it ceremoniously. “I hope you come again.”
“Thank you,” she said, smiling up at him. “So do I.”
With that she turned and headed down the walkway, Billy at her side. I saw him take her arm as they neared the stairs at the end of it.
“Charming girl,” my father murmured as we stood together and watched them go, two figures moving through the dense fog to where my brother’s car rested like a pile of rusty scrap at the bottom of the stairs. “Quite charming, don’t you think? And lovely.”
I tossed what remained of my cigar into the yard. “Charming and lovely, yes.”
“Billy’s quite taken with her.”
“By all indications.”
My father smiled. “His mother must be pleased. She’s always expected such a woman to turn up.”
I shrugged. “And now, at last, she has.”
“It’s an illusion, of course,” my father said. “But there’s a sweetness to it.” A curious wistfulness settled over him. “And who knows, Cal. Maybe Dora is the woman who was born to love Billy all his days.”
A different possibility flashed into my mind like the glint of a knife. “Or born to break his heart,” I said.
Chapter Fourteen
For the next few weeks, I watched Dora from a
distance. Each time I visited the Sentinel, I found her working at her desk. She never greeted me with more than a quick nod. On other occasions, when I ran into her in a local store, she would say only “Hello, Cal” and go on with her shopping. Sometimes, I noticed her striding alone by the seawall, her eyes on the bay, MacAndrews Island, the charred remains of the Phelps mansion that lay atop it, its blackened chimneys rising like gun barrels against the overarching sky. Plotting her next move, I thought.
As for Billy, he now lived in the full radiance of romantic anticipation. So much so that one warm Saturday afternoon in early May, as we played a game of croquet on my front lawn, he even ventured the hope that I might find such happiness too.
“Happiness,” I said. I gave one of the wooden balls a hollow bang. “So you’re happy now?”
“Yes, I am,” Billy said.
“You’re happy with Dora?”
“I’m happy because of Dora.”
“And you’ve learned a lot about her, I suppose?”
Billy paced from one ball to another, then knelt down, eyeing the angle of his shot. “Enough.”
“Enough for what?” I asked absently.
Billy got to his feet, slapping bits of grass from his trousers. Instead of answering me, he said, “I was thinking of dropping by Mother’s cottage later this afternoon. Take a walk along Fox Creek. Would you like to come along? With Dora and me, I mean.”
A warning sounded suddenly at this suggestion, like the snapping of a twig behind me in the dark, but I said nothing.
Billy made a grand swing. The ball shot forward, swept beneath a metal goal. He crowed with pleasure. “I want Dora to see the cottage. Get some sense of what Mother was like before the stroke. How vibrant she was.”
“Well, for God’s sake, don’t tell her what happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“The way she was when I found her.”
“Why not?”