The next morning, I sent a note to Etna. I would call that night for Clara, and we would have a meal. She would stay the night with Nicodemus and me, and I would deliver her to school the next morning. Etna was to pack Clara a suitcase with a clean uniform and her nightclothes. I would call for my daughter at five o’clock. I would come up the driveway in the Ford, but I would not enter the cottage. If she would be so kind as to send Clara out to me, I should be very grateful. Yours sincerely, et cetera, et cetera.
Clara was, as she settled herself in the Ford, both timid and angry in equal measure — timid in the face of this rupture of routine, angry because she wanted to blame someone for the dissolution of the family. I did not try to defend myself. She was still a child, too young to know of bargains or of unrequited passion.
I parked on Wheelock Street, and we walked, as in the old days, Clara’s arm in mine, toward the college quadrangle. We spoke of her classes and of her music lessons and occasionally, now that she was growing older, of topics outside the immediate circumference of her life, such as a desire to see Yosemite, for example, of which she had heard a great deal from her new friend Rosemary. We made our way to the hotel, where I had told her we would have a meal, ending with a cup of hot chocolate for each. Gradually she thawed and remembered her love for her father, and at times we were simply a man and his daughter having a meal in the Hotel Thrupp. Who was to say that we might not return to our home on Holyoke Street only to find Etna bathing Nicky, and that life would go on as before?
Lovely thought, but below that happy agenda, I had another.
Three times in conversation, I said Phillip Asher’s name. (Dean Asher, I actually said, in case that was how he had been introduced to Clara.) After the third mention, when I could no longer bear her silence or her reticence on this subject, I asked, as casually as I was capable of, “Have you ever met the man?” And Clara, after an initial hesitation, said yes, she had. I, aware now of a sudden heat that had risen to my face, let some seconds pass, and then I asked, as if I had nearly forgotten the topic, “And where did you meet him?”
Clara answered that Professor Asher was a friend of her mother’s and sometimes came to the cottage. The dialogue proved too much for her tender sensibilities, however — this was not a subject she thought she ought to be discussing (she, too, had seen the clasped hands under the chandelier) — and she began to cry.
“Clara dear,” I said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Why are you and Mother doing this to me?” she asked, weeping like a child now, which is to say messily.
“We are not doing this to you,” I said. “It is simply that for the moment we have chosen to live apart.”
“That’s not true!” she said with the wisdom of the keen observer. “It is Mother who is doing this. You want us back; I know you do.”
“Yes,” I said. “Very much.”
“Then why did you send for Nicky and not for me?” she cried.
This, I knew, was at the heart of Clara’s resentment. “Nicky is the younger,” I said, groping for an answer.
“You love him more than me!” she accused.
“No, Clara, I do not,” I said truthfully. “I love you both the same.”
I reached across the table and took her hand in mine, unable, in that public place, easily to embrace her. The touch of my hand consoled her somewhat, so that I was reluctant to let her go. At that moment, a man who was entering the dining room — a man I had never seen before, perhaps a man simply needing a meal — passed by our table and looked at Clara.
It was a subtle glance, in the main inoffensive in its brevity. But as I turned back to Clara, I saw what he had seen. The full lips. The hint of bosom beneath the bodice of her uniform. The slender waist and delicate ankles. It was the first time I saw my daughter as men would for years see her.
“Father,” she said, having blown her nose into my handkerchief, “why are you staring at me?”
I forced myself to look away. I studied the stranger, who had sat down, oblivious of the plot he had set in motion.
A plan was unfolding. A narrative was spooling itself across the dining room.
“Clara,” I said. “I think I have a way to bring your mother back.” My daughter looked up at me, the tears still shiny saucers in her eyes.
In the morning, I delivered three letters. One to my wife. One to the president of the college. And one to the chief of police of Thrupp.
“My daughter, Clara, has brought something very disturbing to my attention,” I wrote.
The train is lulling me into a kind of stupor. It is the heat. I am told that we have crossed the border into Florida, and I can well believe this true, for it is stifling in my compartment, even with the top half of the window open (which is all that is allowed; to prevent people from jumping out, I should think). We stopped this morning in Yemassee, where we were all witness to the strange sight of Negro men carrying large bunches of bananas on their shoulders to a freight train parked next to us. They looked both exhausted and resigned in the poisonous heat.