Doug Allyn - v108 n03-04_1996-09-10

“Early November is the best time to see the polar bears.”

“Early November? You mean right now?” Her daughter was shocked. She had a little bit of a frightened look. Sarah wondered if her daughter thought her mad as a hatter.

“Next week, actually,” Sarah said. “Otherwise I’ll have to wait a whole year. It’s now that the bears migrate north to Hudson Bay. Every spring they are carried south with the last of the pack ice. When it finally melts, they make their way north along the coast to wait near Churchill until freeze-up. The fresh water at the mouth of the Churchill River causes that part of Hudson Bay to freeze first. That’s why the bears are there. They’re waiting to go onto the ice.”

She realized she was flushed with excitement and talking far too much, but she wanted her daughter to understand.

“Next week?” Her daughter seemed stunned.

“All the arrangements have been made,” Sarah explained. “The tour is paid for.”

“You made these plans before Hal died.” It really wasn’t a question, but her daughter looked at her as though she expected an answer.

“I made the reservations this morning, actually.”

“Mother,” her daughter stifled a wail, “the funeral was yesterday! What in the world are you thinking of? What are people going to say?”

Sarah looked at her daughter’s imploring expression. She was reminded then of how different a creature Catherine was from herself. Catherine had a social context. She moved among people. The approval and disapproval of others was important to her. Sarah found it curious that she could have reared such a daughter when she herself had become so indifferent to the opinions of others.

It was as if a door were closing somewhere in her mind with a vaguely metallic sound.

“Tell them I’ve gone to the south of France for my health,” Sarah said. “For my grief.”

Her daughter swallowed. Sarah thought that Catherine seemed very far away. “I’m sorry,” Catherine said. “Everyone knows how devoted you were to Hal. Of course you must go on your trip now if that’s what you want to do. I was just surprised, that’s all. I know how fascinated you are by the bears. Had you discussed your going with Hal?”

A sly, probing question. Her daughter knew very well how Hal felt. He had labeled her involvement with the polar bears at the zoo as “obsessive behavior.”

When it became obvious that her mother was not going to respond, Catherine dropped her eyes to the surface of her coffee. “I think it will be good for you to get out of Boulder, in any event. These last few months can’t have been easy for you.”

How easily her daughter had suddenly turned gracious. What a social creature she was. Sarah wondered if Catherine would tell her friends that her mother had taken her grief to a warmer clime.

The next day her daughter went back to Colorado Springs, and Sarah went back to the zoo. She followed the same route automatically: the old Boulder turnpike to Denver and I-25 then south down Speer along Cherry Creek. She scarcely noticed that the lilacs along the edge of the Denver Country Club had taken a beating in the last snow, that some of them already had lost their leaves. She turned left on Colorado Boulevard and drove to the zoo, which was just off 23rd. She always went the same way, even though she knew it was not particularly the most efficient. It would do. Like a pony in a pound, she wore her way.

After her stint in the office, and lunch, she went to the polar bear pit, as was her custom. She felt she had been away for a month rather than less than a week.

Ula brought her head up and stared at Sarah across the reach of water which separated the pit from the fence. Sarah doubted the bear could recognize her from sight. Besides, she supposed she appeared to Ula much as Ula appeared to her, indistinguishable from any other polar bear of like size, nor was there any reason to believe that Ula could distinguish Sarah’s particular smell from the others milling along the edge of the fence, though she supposed the bear’s sensitive nose might have that capability. On the ice pack bears could scent prey thirty miles away. But here were many prey, and Sarah assumed that her own smell was inextricably mingled with the others. But she stood in her regular place and was shyly pleased when the bear raised its great head and probed the air in her direction. There was a moment when the bright black eyes seemed to single her out, to rest on her curiously, but she had too much humility to mistake that for recognition.

She remembered that there had been a time, early in her relationship with Hal, when she refused to believe that their attraction was mutual. It was too improbable that he would actually want her when he was everything she had always wanted. She loved the smell of him, of tobacco and wool and gin. Loved his voice, husky and deep and brimming with passion for Milton’s grandeur. The self-absorbed way he paced behind the lectern, as if so involved in the world he was describing that he would have continued talking and walking had they all stolen away, one by one. She loved his contemptuous indifference to their opinion. His arrogance. That these might have been difficult qualities to live with did not occur to her for some time.

And what had he seen in her, this mother of a five-year-old child? Sarah’s parents were dead by the time she met Hal, and her lineage had not been a particularly distinguished one. But Sarah had good, clear skin, thick dark-blond hair which was forever working itself free of pins and getting into her eyes, a tidy body, and large gray eyes that drooped ever so slightly at the outer corners like teardrops.

“Like the Queen of Hearts or a lady of the Italian Renaissance,” Hal told her. For the art of the Italian Renaissance was a passion of his. Every year he went to Florence. He wanted very much to show her Florence.

Later she would decide that it had less to do with how she looked or who she was than that he was in love with her being in love with him. He was flattered by the intensity of her passion and intoxicated by her humility. He was so centered on self that only someone willing to share that self-interest could penetrate his indifference. And he was charmed that she seemed as interested in his thoughts on the machinery of local politics or the most effective way to combat the aphids on his roses, as his pronouncements on the Areopagitica.

They had other things in common, of course. They played tennis together. Skied. Took long walks about the town with Catherine. Hal was appropriately, if not extravagantly, attentive to her young daughter. Certainly more attentive than Catherine’s natural father, who had by then started another family of his own.

The unhappiness in the early part of her marriage to Hal was all her own, as she felt more and more keenly the disparity in their respective stations. It required more than filling in the appalling gaps in her literary education. She knew she was foolishly sensitive to the condescension shown her by the other wives of the department, few of whom had any more education than she, but they had the advantage of their years, their wisdom, and the psychic battle scars suffered in their husbands’ tortured struggles to attain the recognition which Hal had already achieved and she so effortlessly shared. She could not experience the camaraderie of their shared disappointments in failed appointments and rejected publications. They were of another generation, and though she recognized that their slights and lack of cordiality arose from envy, that recognition was of little consolation. She was “Hal’s wife.” And the years which separated her from them were a gulf which she could not seem to bridge.

She learned that she could not share this hunger for acceptance with her husband. It puzzled him, then irritated him. So she devoted herself to her family. To housework and gardening and dinner parties. She filled up her days the way a nautilus built its shell, layer by layer and chamber by chamber, never mistaking an instinct to survive for delight in the complexity of design.