Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

She did, abruptly, looking puzzled.

Father Snow said, “Clarissa, are you all right?” for Clarissa was Mommy’s name.

“Dear?” Daddy said.

She smiled slyly and gave a little grunt. It was all so not like Mommy. She swayed and slid to the floor not at all gracefully, entangling herself in the cord of a lamp and striking her head on the lintel of the fireplace.

The girls clutched each other and cried out.

Arleen moved to cradle Clarissa’s head, and Father Snow, with surprising sureness, crouched beside them both. He had quite regained his composure, as though for the moment he had put the old dead behind him and was moving on to the requirements of the quickening new.

Cliff’s father had made all the arrangements for his own funeral and when he died his lawyer called and informed Cliff of the time and place, a small church graveyard on an island that held no associations for Cliff or, as far as he knew, his father, though the two of them had been estranged for some time.

“The stone’s not ready yet. Deer Isle marble. No name, no dates, just the words And you, what do you seek? ”

Cliff said nothing.

“It’s certainly different,” the lawyer offered. “That might be what’s taking them so long.”

It was winter then. He was twenty-eight. For a year he had been working in the city at a publishing house, one of the best, and spending the weekends with a woman and her two-year-old son in a little house in Connecticut that her grandmother had left her. Her own parents had died some time before. She had no one either. Well, she had the child.

The island lay in a frigid haze. Only two ferry runs a day were scheduled at that time of year — one left at nine in the morning and returned to the mainland immediately, and the other left the island at four in the afternoon. The crossing took forty minutes.

Cliff drove into the hold, which was brightly lit with yellow bulbs. The light made everything colder. There were two new SUVs and a truck loaded with lumber and pipe. Cliff was wearing a suit and fine shoes with thin socks; he had dressed carefully for the occasion. He had a coat and gloves but they were more formal than warm. He should have dressed more warmly. He would have brought something to read but again he thought, My father has died. He did not want to be reading. The service would be at exactly twelve o’clock and would probably last no more than fifteen minutes. He had been told there was an inn near the ferry dock that served food, but the island did not do much to accommodate the casual visitor. There was no town. There was a golf course and a Coast Guard station and the beaches were rocky and mostly private. It was an island of estates invisible down winding roads.

He tried to picture a woman at the graveside, a beautiful weeping stranger. He hoped for this, expecting some disclosure still about a life, his father’s, that was so unknown to him.

When the ferry began to move, he got out of the car and went up to the cabin. The steel of the floor was painted blue and the oak benches were highly varnished. There were four passengers and an enormous dark dog, a Newfoundland. There was a handsome elderly couple, the truck driver and, sitting with the dog, a young woman about twenty. They all looked at him briefly except for the truck driver, who was holding a paper cup of coffee but appeared to be sleeping. The girl was reading, and the jacket of the book she was holding said starkly The Poems of Yeats. After a few moments she put the book down and glanced at him.

“ ‘The Cap and Bells,’ that’s a nice one,” he said.

She smiled at him tightly and picked the book up again.

He had always liked poetry.

He sat quietly on one of the varnished benches. No one spoke but they seemed comfortable, at ease. He did not feel at ease. He thought for a moment that if they knew his situation they would be kind to him. Then he felt ashamed.

It was black outside the windows. The crossing to the island was smooth and he tried to remain aware of it.

Something struck the window. He stared, but saw nothing. The others, too, looked at the window. Even the huge dog raised its head, which looked warm and moist and trembled slightly, like something baking. When he had been a child, someone had told him that every dog’s heart was the same size, it didn’t matter how big the dog was. This had troubled him for years. He had never owned a dog himself.

He closed his eyes and not long after heard the engine slow. He rose and went outside. He could see the dock ahead, the battered boards of the cradle shining greasily beneath a single large light. He went down and sat in his car. He found the directions the pastor had given him to the church and studied them again. They were not complicated. The pastor had not known his father but was in receipt of the cremains.

A deckhand appeared and pulled the gates of the hold back. The sound of the engine rose as the ferry slowed and rocked against the boards. Cliff watched the docking procedure carefully. When the deckhand gestured to him, he realized he had been dreading this, leaving the ferry first, driving ahead of the others up the road.

The car clattered over the steel plates and plunged up the road, skidding a little. The other vehicles followed. Within a few moments he had passed the darkened inn and, a mile later, the church and its attendant graveyard. Still, they followed. He should have turned toward the church, since it was the reason he was here, after all. He felt humiliated. The road branched and he bore to the left. The others followed, as though intent on tormenting him. Finally he saw the truck turn off. Wet trees lined the road and stone walls glittered through dead vines. One car turned down a lane but one still followed. His head felt illuminated. He saw a fox in the road and slammed on the brakes. The fox vanished and the car behind him sped by, the girl at the wheel, the huge dog filling the backseat. He pulled over and paused a moment. On the shoulder lay another fox, long crushed. But it hasn’t happened after all, came the incoherent thought, and he was frightened.

—

Cliff loved his work as an editor. He loved the old offices, the ruthlessness and formality of the meetings. He didn’t have any authors of his own yet. He had worked on a few anthologies and guidebooks and had one historical novel on the fall list. During the week he stayed in a bed-and-breakfast brownstone in the West Eighties. His room was small, had a bright worn Turkish rug on the floor, and the bed was high and narrow. A Steiff animal collection filled one of the shelves, and a vacuum cleaner was stored in the closet. The only breakfast provided was English muffins and strawberry jam and he couldn’t keep any food of his own in the refrigerator. He was always hungry. On the weekends he took the train to Connecticut and stayed with Ricky and the boy, Richard. He liked the idea of having an attractive family that he had not been responsible for creating.

One of the senior editors seemed interested in his progress, a man named Franklin Woolf, but everyone called him Loup. He was erudite and viciously funny. You want to be the last to leave the room when he’s in it, one of the other junior editors warned Cliff, though he was eager to learn and knew he could learn a lot from him. Loup arranged to have him move into the midtown writing studio of one of the house’s venerable authors, who had relocated temporarily to Mexico. It was full of books and had good light and a kitchen, and the bathroom was his alone. It was a far better arrangement than the brownstone. The author was working on a “volcano” of a book but everyone knew he had stopped writing, that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody went to Mexico anymore to write books. The man was finished.