Hill Towns Read online

  After a few bad days and weeks following his promise at the inn to Caleb and Sarah to bring me north to meet his mother, I did not really fear that Joe would try to move off the Mountain and take me with him. That first summer in the little stone guesthouse we rented behind the larger home of the Dean of Graduate Studies, in a hardwood grove bordering the Steep, was a magical one. I started the first of the gardens for which I have become modestly renowned, began the series of small evenings of food and drink and talk that have become Trinity traditions, and began to lay down, with perfect intent and to the best of my abilities, a life for Joe that was so ordered and fulfilling and rich in substance that he would not miss the benison of scope. If he knew what I was about, he gave no sign. He must have known; from the very first Joe and I were able to read each other’s minds and hearts. I concluded from his silence and the contentment with which he let me wrap him in a web of beautiful days that he was saying to me, Yes. All right. Make me a life here that I could have nowhere else, and I will not ask you to leave. I will let you build me a world, and the larger one will come to us.

  But just for insurance, just for good measure, I covertly threw into the college incinerator, on the second day of my marriage, the little round cardboard wheel of Enovids the college physician had given me. I said nothing to Joe and made love to him, and cooked and entertained for him, and laughed with him, and talked long into the summer nights with him, and waited. And I knew past all doubt the exact moment, on an August night of long, slow rain and sweet fresh flower breath from my new garden, that I got pregnant. And knew that for a few months, at the very least, I was safe.

  The next April, when our daughter Lacey was born blind, I knew I was safe forever. We would not leave the Mountain now. If Lacey was to live without sight, she would live at least in Eden. The world that kept me safe would keep her too.

  Only decades later did I come to know that Joe occasionally fancied I had somehow literally blinded her with my terrible fear, bought my safety with her sight. But I honestly think he had thought it only a very long time ago, and not often even then. And by that time there were none of those terrible thoughts that had not visited me in the dark still nights when I could not sleep.

  On an evening nearly twenty-one years later we sat in a garden identical save in scope to that first one, having our drinks in the cool spring twilight and reading a letter from our daughter, in college a continent away. She had written to tell us she was going to Europe with friends that summer, to backpack through Spain and Italy and the south of France, and hoped we might join her afterward and travel in Yugoslavia. Her friends had to leave her in Rome, but she was on fire to go farther, into that strange, hybrid old country across the Adriatic from Italy.

  I hear that Dubrovnik is the most beautiful city in the world, she wrote in her dark, angular letters, on the paper with the raised lined grids that she used. I wish you’d come be my eyes. There doesn’t seem any reason you can’t, now. I’m well out of the nest. I’ve always wanted to see Dubrovnik.

  Joe put the letter down and looked out over the stone wall, spilling white clematis now, into empty blue air above the lip of the Steep. Our house commanded the whole valley like a fortress. He did not speak, but I knew he was thinking what I was thinking: Lacey for all her blindness would probably see Dubrovnik sooner, and more clearly, than either of us. My throat tightened at my daughter’s cheerful valor and my own crippling cowardice. And for my husband, who would not say what I knew: that he wanted with all his heart to stand on the sea wall of that old city with his daughter, and be her eyes, and let her be his.

  “We should go,” I said, around a great geyser of fear, in a voice that was not mine. “She’s right, there just isn’t any reason not to. This is silly. Enough is enough.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Cat,” Joe said, and there was nothing in his voice but the old love. Old, a long love….

  “Joe….”

  “No. I wouldn’t. It would be like holding a gun to your head and pulling the trigger. What do you think I am?”

  “A fifty-year-old man who’s never been to Europe,” I said, and got up and went into the house and called Corinne Parker.

  3

  “THERE ARE THESE BANDS OF GYPSY CHILDREN, REALLY small kids, who roam the streets like packs of orphan puppies; they dress in rags and come up to you in tears, begging for money, and while your heart is breaking and you’re fishing for your wallet, one of them slips around behind you and picks your pocket. Or else they swoop down on you from behind, so quietly you don’t even hear them coming, and just snatch your purse and are two blocks away before you realize what hit you. They’re all over Rome. Nobody seems able to stop them. Of course, in Rome, nobody tries very hard.”

  Hays Bennett, who was president of the Faculty Council that year and Joe’s number-two man in the department, took a deep swallow of his gin and tonic and grinned his vulpine grin around the room. He had a sharp face and a brush of red hair and looked like a fox. Of all our friends, I was least comfortable with Hays. He always looked as though he halfway meant the sly barbs with which he larded his conversation. Probably he did not; Joe always said he didn’t. But he was the only one of our usual party crowd who teased me about never leaving the Mountain, and he did it so often I did not think it was casual or coincidental. He was looking at me now. I knew the story of the gypsy children was aimed like an arrow at me. Colin and Maria had just asked Joe and me to meet them in Rome in July, where they were to be married, and everyone at our party had been babbling in excitement over the proposed trip. My silence had not escaped Hays.

  “They sound awful,” I said truthfully. They did; the notion of that silent swarming pack bursting around me without warning, snatching, grabbing, was repellent to me, appalling. But I spoke lightly.

  “Oh, they never hurt anybody, except accidentally,” Hays said. “They’re after your money, not your life. Not like on the San Diego Freeway or even Atlanta. Italians are not really into bodily harm. Would you rather be mugged or murdered than surprised?”

  “Cat would,” Joe said lazily from the sofa, where he was sprawled with his bourbon and soda. I turned to look at him in surprise and the sort of swift, small shock of hurt you feel when a beloved child or a pet lashes out at you. Joe knew how I felt about Hays’s needling.

  “Almost, I would,” I said, smiling. “Death before stealth.” The small group in the living room laughed; Joe and Hays laughed with them.

  “Who wouldn’t? There’s no redeeming social value in being scared to death,” Corinne Parker said, grinning briefly and looking closely at me, and everyone laughed again, and the moment and the party flowed on.

  It was a pretty party, a good one. Ours almost always were. I knew that I had a knack for bringing people together in easy groups, and I had honed it by determination and repetition into an art. I liked the deep sense it gave me of nurturing, of caring for and making happy the people whose lives were intertwined with ours. After twenty-three years, most Trinitarians and much of the village and the Mountain were among that number. A party at the Gaillards’ had come to be, almost, Trinity’s official sanction; over the years I had given them to celebrate graduations, appointments, promotions, publications, new arrivals, retirements, grants received, degrees awarded, and every other ritual of academic life imaginable. I also celebrated with food and drink and flowers and candlelight and laughter the countless engagements, marriages, births, anniversaries, and once or twice even divorces of my fellow Mountain dwellers and raised enough funds in our stone house on the Steep to keep Trinity solvent well into the next century, or so Joe said.

  Joe loved our parties too. He loved being a host. It pleased him to please people, and he was as house-proud as only someone who has lived meanly in childhood can be. He was an absolute monarch of his small rich kingdom at the parties, a graceful and charming and benevolent monarch. It was for him I had them. I had sensed from the very beginning that deep inside Joe was a chasm that hungered for ritual and celebration, for extravagance. I felt that hunger too. Over the years, the parties had fed it for both of us. More glue, they were, more mortar for the perfect world that held us in its bowl on the Mountain. Like my beautiful garden. Like the music. Like the books and paintings and the food. I had taught myself to be a very good cook over the years. I wanted none of Joe’s hungers to go unfed. I wanted his needs met entirely in the house on the Steep and the school on the Mountain.

  I thought I had succeeded. But his lazy words tonight shocked me. Two words only, but they spoke from some unfilled emptiness I had not suspected, and I was frightened.

  I looked at him again. He sat in a circle of warm light from one of the two tall copper lamps that sat on the library table behind the big sofa in the living room, his long legs in chinos flung over the sofa’s arm, his head thrown back into piled pillows. He was tanned from early tennis in the thin, clear spring air, and his hair was in his blue eyes; he needed a haircut. I loved the thick flaxen tumble of it when it was too long. Over the years it had lightened with strands of silver to the shade of old vermeil, and it and his mustache were lighter than his skin, so that his teeth flashed very white. His eyes seemed bluer tonight, darker. It was probably because of the fairly recent contact lenses, and the lamplight, and the bourbon. He had had rather a lot of that. Behind him, dogwood branches in a crystal vase glowed like snowflakes in the room’s dimness, and I thought their whiteness darkened his eyes too. He was still very handsome. Still as lean and sinewy, thin-featured, thick-haired, still as knobbily graceful as the day I first saw him. The only change over all the years had been a kind of ashiness that settled on his skin, a web of infinitesimal dry lines, a small thickening of grain and pore, a deepening of creases, a sharpening of bone. He was still Joe, just a b
it hardened.

  It was not unbecoming. He had aged, I realized, like many men on the Mountain. He had hardened into age, not slackened. Up here, men do not often get fat or go to seed. They desiccate. Something in the thin air preserves them almost like mummies, both literally and metaphorically. For that matter, there are few fat women at Trinity, either. We might be a lost race found a millennium later in some fabulous, airless tomb.

  Suddenly I did not want to take the metaphor any further. I knew what happened to the beautiful, dried dead when the tombs were opened at last and the air of the world rushed in.

  I looked at my husband in the light of the copper lamps and for a moment did not know him.

  I looked around my living room at the people who had come to my party and did not know them, either.

  “Dinner in fifteen minutes,” I said, and got up and went into the kitchen and through it into the downstairs bathroom and stood at the mirror over the washbasin, eyes closed.

  “That better be you,” I said, and opened my eyes. It was, but there was something different. I was still me, but more so. Or maybe me, but less….

  I had been in therapy with Corinne Parker for almost exactly two years. I started the week after the letter from Lacey we had read together in the garden, asking us to go to Yugoslavia with her. We had not gone; Lacey did not really expect us to. She had known since early childhood that I did not go off the Mountain, though I had insisted, finally, that she do so. She had seemed as incurious about it as our friends in the village and at Trinity; it was simply a given. Mother did not leave the Mountain. I suppose it did not seem strange to her. Lacey was raised among a thousand strangenesses, great and small. Trinity has always been proud of its myriad graceful eccentricities. Lacey’s world was full of people who did nor did not do things that were common fodder to those unfortunates off the Mountain. I think that fact helped her live as easily with her blindness as she did. In the end she had persuaded one of her companions to stay on in Europe and go across the Adriatic with her, and Joe and I stayed at home and read her letters with joy for her and no more overt regret for ourselves.

  But I had been determined never to see in Joe’s eyes again a yearning for something I held him back from, and I worked with Corinne as I have never worked at anything else. It cost me a great deal, but the look in his eyes over Lacey’s letter had cost me more. I trembled and sweated and gasped with the pounding of my heart, and I wept, and once or twice I threw up in Corinne’s neat little bathroom off her office, as she walked me through that long-ago night on the chain bridge and the terrible days and years afterward, in the house of my crazy grandmother and frozen grandfather. I gulped Valiums like candy for a while, and lost sleep and weight, and railed at her, and cried endlessly, when I thought Joe could not hear me; and on the nights in the second year before the short, and then longer, trips I took off the Mountain with Corinne at my side, I paced the house or the garden, sick and weeping, until dawn came. But I never once held anything back from Corinne. And I never once missed a session.

  Different? How could I not be different, after all that? I might look the same—for, like Joe, I was still tall and slender and tousle-haired, and still had the small face and soft mouth of a child, and still wore the smattering of freckles across the bridge of my nose and cheekbones that I had always worn—but one profound change had been made. Only one, and that one small and invisible. But it redefined me. Before I had been Cat who could not go off the Mountain. Now I was Cat who could. Haltingly, frightened still, not far, and only after escape routes had been mapped and bolt-holes located…but I could go. Even if I never did again, I knew I could. And Joe knew.

  I looked in the mirror at Cat who could go and knew I had grown, and Joe feared it and had spoken tonight from that fear. In that instant I wanted to undo it all, take back all the sessions with Corinne, go back to where I had been before Lacey’s letter came, run to Joe and fling my arms around him and cry, I’m back, I’m here, this is me, don’t feel like that about me, don’t ever speak like that to me again! See, I’ve undone it all. Let us be again like we were.

  But I knew I could not. I was doomed one day to be healed, if imperfectly and reluctantly.

  I leaned my forehead against the cold surface of the mirror and shut my eyes again. “Oh, God,” I whispered aloud. “Why didn’t I see what was happening?”

  Corinne had seen. Seen, and tried to make me see. But I would not, could not.

  “Well then,” she said to me in exasperation finally, after nearly a year of arguing with me about Joe’s role in my recovery, “we’ll just damned well do it without him. But I don’t like it, Cat. I don’t think you realize how deeply all this is threatening Joe. I don’t think he realizes it, come to that. He’s capable of sabotaging everything we’ve worked so hard for, of cutting your legs off under you. He wouldn’t think he was doing that, of course; he’d think he was protecting you. I’ve known him even longer than you have. I’ve seen him operate in faculty situations. He wouldn’t hesitate, and he’d never admit he’d harmed you. It will be up to you to protect yourself.”

  “I thought you were such a great friend of his; I thought you loved him so much,” I cried, furious with her.

  “I am. I do,” she said. “But I love him like he really is, and there’s nothing I need from him. I can see him a lot clearer than you can right now.”

  “Corinne,” I said, still angry, “I think you are probably the best therapist this side of Vienna, but if you say one more word to me about Joe, I’m going to terminate. Right now. I mean it.”

  She looked at me for a long moment over her horn-rimmed glasses. Corinne was a handsomer woman than she had been a girl, her tanned, lined face alive with intelligence and caring. There was no answering anger in her eyes, only a kind of weariness.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It was the friend talking and not the therapist. It’s one of the pitfalls. I’m sorry, Cat. No more about Joe. It was way too soon.”

  I let it go. In fact, I buried it deep and forgot it. Or thought I had. But now, staring into the mirror, I saw the two of us, Joe and me, over the past two years, as if we had been on a screen in a theater and I was watching from the audience.

  He had not objected to my seeing Corinne at the beginning; he had said only, “It seems a pity to go back into all that when you’ve made your peace with it. But if it’s what you want….”

  “It is,” I said. “I want to do it for both of us.”

  “No need to, for me,” he replied. “I like us just the way we are. I love you just the way you are.”

  But he said no more, and I began the long journey with Corinne through the debris of my childhood that I had not thought was there at all.

  At first when I came home white and depleted, or cried in the nights, he would hold me and soothe me. But soon the twice-a-week crises of fear and sadness seemed to annoy and then anger him.

  “I can’t stand seeing what it’s doing to you,” he would say, smoothing the hair off my face, holding me hard against him. “It’s killing you, and it’s just so unnecessary. I’m going to talk to Corinne—”

  “No,” I said. “No, Joe. This is necessary. This is work I didn’t do back then. I have to go through it; I can’t go around it. Don’t say anything to Corinne; this is my therapy.”

  After that, I tried to weep when he could not hear me. I think I succeeded. He did not speak of it again.

  But he began to tease me, small thrusts that would have been wounding if they had not been so funny. Joe was and is a very funny man. His eye and ear for absurdity are wicked and true. He could mimic Corinne perfectly, and I would find myself laughing in spite of my annoyance when he said things like, “Now, tell me, Catherine, just when did you first notice this terrible fear of fucking on suspension bridges?” and “Today we’re going out to the chain bridge and sit there all afternoon, and you’ll see, not a single couple will come do the Black Act on it.”