Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Richard didn’t call much from Berkeley; he had moved off campus into a house with eight other people, none of whom, evidently, owned an answering machine. But he sent a letter with a copy of his grades in it, and from that it was possible to infer that he was doing fine. Molly now had a taste of what it might have been like to be an only child; her parents wanted to give her all the benefit of their attentions, but she made that difficult without really trying. She wasn’t rebellious or unkind — merely self-sufficient. When she was thirteen, this independence, this casual unconcern with their opinion, had been worrisome to the point where Roger and Kay argued with each other about who was more to blame for it; four years later, Molly was in that respect basically unchanged, yet her mother and father now congratulated themselves, seeing in her comradely disregard of them evidence that they had succeeded as parents.

“So,” Kay said unexpectedly, “there’s nobody you’re dating, no regular boyfriend?” It was a Thursday night, and Molly, who had come straight home from school that day, was emptying the dishwasher.

“No,” she said. “Nobody regular.”

Kay had stopped dyeing her hair recently; Molly thought it looked much better now, both more natural and more severe, but she never brought it up because the effects of time and age, even good ones, were understood to be an unpleasant subject. “Well, I have to say I can understand it,” her mother said in a confiding, playful voice, “sorry as I might feel for you. A beautiful, smart girl like you, with so much on the ball, the boys around here must seem like real losers. I mean, not seem — they are losers. I see them too, you know. I notice things. Let’s face it, they’re hayseeds. I haven’t met one who’s good enough for you.”

Some girls Molly knew spoke of being horrified by their mothers’ attempts to gain their confidence by intimating that they were girls once themselves; Molly, though, found the idea of her mother’s youth engrossing. “I mean, you’ve grown up here, too,” Kay went on, “same as them, but let’s face it, you’re different. And that has to come from me. You don’t belong here, any more than I do.” She smiled. “One more year and you’ll be out of here, in the wide world somewhere. You’re smart to save yourself.”

“I was talking to Mike Cavanaugh at work yesterday,” Roger said. They were at breakfast together, more or less by chance, he in a gray suit and tie, his daughter in jeans and one of his own old tennis shirts with a bleach stain on it, a shirt he could have sworn he’d thrown out. “His son is a year behind you. And he said, Roger, I have to tell you, my son Stephen is just gone on your daughter. Talks about her all the time. Thinks she’s a goddess on earth. I doubt she even knows who he is.”

“I don’t, actually,” Molly said.

Roger laughed at this as if it were a joke. “See? And Bev whatshername, you know, who runs the market? She was telling me last time I was in there, your daughter Molly has grown up to be such a fine young woman. So mature, so polite. Never mouthing off like those others her age.”

He reached out as if he was going to touch her shoulder but then pulled his hand back. He hardly ever touched her now.

“That’s what I’m proudest of,” he said. “Not that you’re so pretty, because that’s just your mother’s genes really, I can’t take any credit there. Or even that your grades are good, though I am very proud of that. But you know how to conduct yourself. The Vincents, I’m worried they’re going to steal you away from us, they adore you so much. Every time I see them they tell me how great you are. No one has a bad word to say about you. That’s what I’m proudest of.”

What unnerved her about these hagiographic speeches was not the mention of the Vincents but their strangely valedictory, summing-up quality, as if her father were preparing to die.

They hadn’t been caught, but still, something so elaborate and time-consuming as a trip to Oneonta couldn’t be attempted very often — eight or ten times in all. Sometimes a week went by when the only place they could safely be alone together was in Dennis’s car itself. Molly still kept to the same babysitting schedule at the Vincents’, so there were two or three nights a week when Dennis would take her home through the empty streets, driving too fast, pulling in behind the supermarket or down the dirt road where the train tracks had been torn up fifteen years before, turning off his lights. Undoing his safety belt but staying in his seat. His passivity, his desire for her to make the first move, was less a sexual instinct than a moral one: it let him feel that he was being acted upon. Molly leaned across to blow him if she felt for some reason they were in a hurry. There wasn’t a lot you could do in a car but once in a while she liked it with her back to him, her hands on the steering wheel, listening for his gasps, looking through the windshield into the darkness and the noisy woods. For a few minutes everything was wrenched out of its usual context.

When she was alone in the Vincents’ house with Kevin and Bethany, Molly could put it all out of her mind with a surprising ease, though sometimes the sight of a framed photograph or a glance into the darkened master bedroom would remind her of the position she was in. The Vincent children, partnered by shyness, happiest in their own home, reminded Molly more and more of herself and her brother; and they were just reaching the age at which Molly and Richard had begun to grow apart. Kevin was big for his age, and the other kids had made sport of his oversensitivity, teasing, enraging, and then running from him in well-founded fear. Molly stroked his head and told him that what other people thought or said didn’t matter, but to him this was just one more adult maxim, the logic of which fell apart when you walked out your own front door.

With one or both parents at home, though, the atmosphere became a little more dense. Dennis was usually the first one home now. In part this was because the thought of Molly and his wife talking together outside the range of his hearing was torture to him: but it also had to do with Joyce Vincent’s job. Half the people in Ulster and the neighboring towns were trying to sell their homes, and to sell them right away; for those in the real estate business it was like watching the stock market crash. No one wanted to move to the area now. The only potential buyers were longtime residents who were interested in trading up to a nicer, newer place, and those people would wait for prices to hit rock bottom — for foreclosure, ideally. Joyce was out of the house evenings, weekends, driving walkins thirty miles to look at places just so they could wrinkle their noses and say it felt too remote. Some of the people who were looking to her to save them from default were friends of hers, parents of her children’s classmates, couples whose mortgages Dennis had approved. She had never worked harder in her life. It didn’t do much good. Bull’s Head, for instance, was now thirty percent empty.

The worse things got — and the guiltier she felt for working so much — the more Joyce needed to flank herself with the two children when she came home. She’d sit on the floor without even taking her coat off and join in a game of Chinese checkers; or she’d try to pull both kids on to her lap and get them to recount their day to her in exhausting detail. Kevin, who was ten, was beginning to shy away from his mother’s affections a bit. Bethany, on the other hand, was drawing ever closer to her, even as they began to look more and more alike; the girl doted on these evenings in the circle of her mother’s protective, guilt-driven attention, a mother who always seemed to be trying to make something up to her. Molly, meanwhile, would look at the waxy mask of normalcy on her lover’s face. If his wife and children were in another room, she might fix him with a long look, or even touch his hand or his stomach. He hated it — he had not the least affection for risk. She didn’t torment Dennis for fun, but she did find his torment interesting. Though she sometimes mused that a man who, in Dennis’s situation, felt no remorse at all, who deceived and charmed and led two intersecting lives with perfect equanimity, might be interesting in his own way.